More Layers of Life Per Acre: Creating a Rich Farm Ecology by Paul Muller

By Paul Muller

Paul Muller, a partner at Full Belly Farm in California’s Capay Valley, has been farming organically for 33 years. Full Belly Farm is designed to maximize the layers of life per acre–plant, soil microbes, insects, and animals–while harvesting as much sunlight as possible and growing over 70 different fruit and vegetable crops. Paul explains how Full Belly Farm is working to sequester soil carbon as part of Bioneers Carbon Farming series.

California’s environment is incredibly complex, with a great variety of agricultural expressions. When thinking about carbon, there’s a set of solutions that may have a common feel in grasslands. However, in irrigated agricultural or orchard systems, or growing corn and soy in the Midwest, your approach to carbon ends up being very different. We know from the work of the permaculturists that rainfall, temperature, everything that influences the soil all determine how you manage your environment to sequester more carbon.

I’ve been practicing organic farming for 33 years and some of the knowledge that we now know about soil systems–how plants take in CO2 through photosynthesis to build their own plant tissue, as well as how they deliver carbohydrate exudates into the soil to feed micro life– are all new ways to look at what we are doing during our tenure on this planet and how we manage the vegetation on it. I think the arc of the universe is moving, inevitably, toward the understanding that we can not violate nature for very much longer

Most landscapes have been degraded by human use. We must now try to keep as much energy in the system as possible. In the last 150 years in this country, the knowledge of managing systems in a way that is scale appropriate to human beings who were intimately tied to a place has been diminished, and that has destroyed rural America. Who is going to manage carbon on the farm? The human component of that kind of management system has to be regenerated.

In the changing landscape of California agriculture, increasingly there are people who don’t actually farm the land, who are landlords and who hire someone else to farm. Oprah Winfrey owns a good deal of land in the Dixon area where she’s farming almonds. It’s doubtful that she does a lot of almond farming herself. TIAA-CREF is a large institutional retirement fund who is growing 25-30,000 acres of almonds. People like that need to develop the tools and the consciousness of stewardship. But they only see it as an investment. There are hundreds of thousands of acres being farmed by people who are only trying to maximize their return. Carbon doesn’t fit in that equation. What fits in that equation is how many nuts or how many tons of hay or whatever crop you are harvesting off of that piece of ground.

Modern farming systems are based on the plough. All the science and tools came from the notion that to turn the soil was the way you made agriculture productive, and that the best way to manage land is to keep it bare. The opportunity being missed is that bare land does not harvest sunlight. The bare field is not taking CO2 out of the air, the soil micro life is not being fed, life is not being supported in the soil. We have a lot of work to do to convince farmers that they’re losing money if the rainfall that hits bare ground doesn’t infiltrate because of poor soil structure due to lack of microbial life. Agriculture is a fairly violent form of livelihood, if you don’t think about all the life in the farming environment. We have to think about solving for a different pattern. We have to think about how we value carbon, how we measure it, how we begin to put that into the economic equation.

Agriculture can come to the rescue and be part of solving the problem of how we deal with carbon in the atmosphere. How we structure that in terms of policy is very important, because the food system contributes approximately 30% of the annual greenhouse gas emissions.

We’re going to need new thinking about how we create and defend the biological depth and richness with farmers who are dedicated to place; people who are noble. As a farmer for 33 years, I am tied intimately to my land even in a physiological way. My very gut bacteria are tied to the processes that I’m doing on my soil, and everything that I eat from it. That’s true for every person who is eating product from my farm. They are tied to me in an intimate way. We continually give customers the information about how they’re helping us defend the biological richness of our farm, how they too are responsible for the activities on the farm.

At Full Belly Farm, our primary goal is to is grow soil. I’m not a scientist, but I see a lot of life in the soil, there’s flocculation of the system. Through observation, I find that soil fungus and bacteria have a certain smell. So in a very visceral way, I understand what soil looks like when my farming practices are are treating the land well.

We look at our farm in terms of layers, we always try to have something blooming. When thinking about the complexity of the farm, we keep in mind the carbon accumulators that serve other forms of life. Carbon accumulators can be mustards and arugula plants growing to seed. All the bee life and the avian life and other living things need pollen and nectar to thrive. We design our system so that carbon sequestration feeds other life forms on the farm.

The place I learn the most from is the bench below our farm where you can look at native soils. We live in oak woodland. Underneath that oak woodland is an understory of all the duff and leaves and things that accumulate under those trees. If you scrape that away, there are layers of decomposition occurring. There are macro-digester, earthworms, beetles, and other things in one layer. There are different levels of microbes all the way through. By understanding a little bit about how nature organizes itself, we can begin to manage our farm and our cultivation to grow crops where we’re going to do some tillage, but do the least amount of damage.

We know why we should till soil less. Tillage releases CO2, so soil structure is generally improved when you don’t till. You have better water-holding capacity, better rain infiltration and a steady release of water in the soil, especially important when we get climate fluxes. Soil organic matter is more stable, fungal populations and other micro life in the soil can be managed and they can be less disrupted. There will be less evaporation, greater soil stability and less erosion. There are lots of benefits to not tilling, but it’s hard to grow carrots without tilling. It’s hard to grow radishes without tilling. We’re still trying to figure that out.

We grow cover crops as a primary piece of our rotation. Every bit of ground will have at least one cover crop, sometimes two cover crops a year, along with the food crop. A winter cover crop of vetch, oats, barley and different cultivars that have different root systems. A summer cover of Sudan grass with cowpeas and buckwheat. The buckwheat flowers attract pollinators and beneficial insects, the cowpeas for nitrogen, the Sudan Grass for carbon. We experiment with different forms of cover crops to see what will work with our roll-down no till system.

We mow down some cover crops to get in that field earlier. We till lightly, and then have a seedbed that has had the benefit of nitrogen fixation, carbon accumulation, and all the pieces that we need for building fertility with what’s indigenous to the farm.

We can also flail mow, but when you flail mow you’re chopping things up pretty fine that digests really quickly in our environment. So flail mowing is not the best tool for keeping carbon in the ground.

If we mowed flowers in bloom, all the beneficial insects would disappear. So we use sheep to browse and move them around gently. They are defecating and peeing, which helps accumulate carbon.

At Full Belly Farm, we grow some tree crops and a wide variety of vegetables year-round. We plant for insect diversity. We’re trying to create a rich ecology on the farm by having as many forms of life and as many layers of life as we can, and still pay the bills and have a farm that’s productive and grows high-quality food.

We think about more layers of life per acre. What we’re trying to do in those layers is grow understory plants for harvest, while harvesting as much sunlight as possible. We’re working to have insect life and soil micro life all thriving in the system.

As part of our multiple-layered systems, we have livestock on the farm, which is a biodynamic concept. They inoculate the soil with their defecation, and they move themselves. You don’t have to get a spreader out, they spread themselves. They work without any workman’s comp and they eat 24 hours a day and they provide inputs just about as often. They are wonderful components in our system. They become part of the farm soil’s digestion process, and they’re creating a stable form of carbon, as opposed to carbon that’s a nutrient that may move more quickly through the system. They’re probably doing a little bit of both depending on how we manage them.

Every day we want to harvest the maximum amount of sunlight. We do that by growing more layers on the farm. In the springtime, there’ll be flowers blooming that will be an incredible hive of insect activity that can exist in an understory of an orchard, provide nutrients for the orchard, and allow rain to infiltrate.

In the end, we want to create more vibrant places where people are inoculated with the very nature of the farm, and that includes our customers. We want to grow places that are beautiful. That’s part of the solution in thinking about carbon, that we’re going to rethink beauty. And we’re going to seduce the next generation with good food.

Can Soil Carbon Sequestration Affect Global Temperatures

By Dr. Whendee Silver

Dr. Whendee Silver is Professor of Ecosystem Ecology in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. She is researching the biogeochemical effects of climate change and human impacts on the environment, and the potential for mitigating these effects. Dr. Silver is conducting research for The Marin Carbon Project.

It’s getting warmer and we know why. It’s warming because carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases that we emit through our everyday activities are collecting in the atmosphere and re-radiating heat down to the planet. They’re trapping heat and creating the greenhouse effect.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their 2014 report stated that we need to figure out a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in addition to reducing emissions. You have to do both.

The IPCC 2014 report said that a large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale. We’ve already passed a threshold, except in the case of a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period. So emissions reduction isn’t enough. We have to couple it with carbon uptake from the atmosphere.

Soil carbon holds tremendous potential to take some of that excess carbon out of the atmosphere and put it in a place where it could be stored, not just stored, but also do some good because when we manage soils for increased carbon content, we’re also increasing soil organic matter.

Organic matter is the vehicle to move carbon from plants into soils. Carbon is part of that organic material. When we increase the carbon and organic content of soils, we increase the fertility, the water-holding capacity, and the stability, because organic matter is sticky and keeps soils from eroding. All of these things contribute to sustainability and productivity, so increasing soil organic matter is good management.

Our research is trying to understand the potential of increased organic matter. We want to understand whether or not it is an activity that is not only good management of ranches, but also good for climate change mitigation. Our goal was to answer the question, “Can soil carbon sequestration actually affect global temperatures?”

We found that theoretically and technically, current management could sequester enough carbon to reduce temperatures by .3 degrees Celsius, which was three times more than the baseline target that we were aiming for by 2100. Using all of the possible management practices that exist, the maximum we could reach is almost 2 petagrams of carbon that we could get into the soil per year [1 petagram = 1 billion tonnes].

The analysis we looked at included grazing, changing from tillage to no till, ands some irrigation practices. It didn’t include soil amendments, because there was no global scale assessment of that. I actually hope to do such an assessment over the next year, because it’s really needed.

What lands are available for this? We picked grasslands because they hold a lot of potential. The majority of grasslands are heavily degraded and are very widely distributed. They cover a third of the U.S. land area, a third of the global land surface, and 23 million hectares of grasslands in California make up almost 40% of the state’s land area. It was locally relevant for me, being at U.C. Berkeley, and it was nationally and globally relevant. These ecosystems have tremendous potential to sequester carbon because grasses are looking for water.

All grasslands occur in places where there’s a drought during some part of the year. The plants are pre-programmed via evolution to put a lot of carbon down into roots, and any time there is root growth, you increase the potential to store carbon in that soil.

We found that amendments of livestock manure, which is a very common practice in California, increase carbon dramatically–50 metric tons of carbon per hectare.

This sounds exciting except that cattle manure is a really big source of greenhouse gas, especially when it’s stored in piles or in slurry ponds. In fact, EPA data shows that manure management is equivalent to coal mining in terms of methane emissions. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and manure greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to mobile combustion emissions of nitrous oxide out of your tail pipes. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent per molecule as CO2 over 100 years.

We did additional field sampling on dairies and used computer simulation models to assess whether or not future emissions from livestock management would be balanced by soil carbon sequestration.

Grazing alone and the manure that’s deposited via grazing produce some nitrous oxide emissions. That’s just background condition. Cows emit methane. These are things that we can’t avoid in a grazing system. But when you apply manure, you actually get a lot more emissions of nitrous oxide, a super potent greenhouse gas. Over time, the soil carbon sequestration begins to stabilize, and the net effect is really high emissions, primarily nitrous oxide emissions from the manured system.

That’s why we turned to compost, because composting that material actually decreases emissions. Now we’re measuring greenhouse gas emissions from the composting process, and it appears that it leads to relatively low emissions if done well.

If you were to let manure decay normally it might decay to CO2, but you might also increase methane emissions, so if you can put it in a compost pile and turn that compost pile weekly, it results in relatively low methane emissions and very low, undetectable nitrous oxide. Leaving that material in place would produce nitrous oxide, but putting manure in a well-managed compost system decreases the nitrous oxide emissions.

When we apply the compost on the field, we find very low greenhouse gas emissions. That was a surprise. Compost is hard for microbes to break down, but it does leak a little bit out over time, and increases plant growth. In fact, from a one-time application, it increased plant growth for many years.

With a one-time compost application in 2008, right after the rains came, we saw that the compost sites were greening up faster than the other sites. That compost appears to be staying in the soil.

We see an increase in soil carbon, which is not a big surprise until you realize that we sorted the compost fragments out of the soil samples before we analyzed them. So most of this is likely to be new carbon from plant photosynthesis. We see the increase in growth that leads to an increase in soil carbon, and when we add it all up, we get about 3 metric tons of carbon per hectare over 3 years, or about a metric ton of carbon per hectare per year.

Through collaboration and funding from the State of California, we have now added another component to look at how stable this carbon will be and what the impacts will be with future climate change predictions. We’re using climate models now with our biogeochemical model.

The first sites that we’ve modeled are in Mendocino and Santa Barbara. Mendocino is a wetter site and Santa Barbara is the drier site. What we found is a one-time application of compost in both the optimistic emissions-reduction scenario and the realistic emissions-reduction scenario shows that by 2100 we are still sequestering carbon in those grasslands, in the dry site and in the wet site.

All carbon sequestration has the potential to contribute to climate change mitigation at a global scale. Compost application holds considerable promise as a carbon sequestration approach with many co-benefits. This is good management. This approach is scalable and increases resilience of ecosystems in the face of climate change. This is what our ranchers and farmers really need, so we should be doing it for that reason alone.

We’re finishing the sample analysis and modeling for the NRCS [National Resource Conservation Service] field trials, and I hope to come up with a snapshot of the State of California that other states and maybe even other countries can use to start promoting these practices. We’re really interested in food waste composting and land application, because this is a free carbon source that’s not being fully utilized, and right now is a high-emitting source. If we can get food waste out of the landfills and into compost, we could potentially do even better.

We’re doing life cycle assessment modeling, which may answer the questions: What about alternative uses of that waste? How does anaerobic biodigestion compare with aerobic composting?

We’re also looking into what happens if that waste goes into energy production.

Hungry for solutions? Here are eight bold new ideas, inspired by nature.

This article was originally published by the Biomimicry Institute. Bioneers 2018 will host the presentation of the $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize to one of these innovators in October.

Not everyone looks at a jellyfish and sees a renewable energy solution. But for a team of Georgia Tech students, the jellyfish’s bell-shaped body gave them insight for how to make their tidal energy harvesting design more efficient and effective. Farther north, a team from Cornell University found clues for how to prevent mosquito-borne diseases in the structure of carnivorous plants. For a team from China, the kingfisher’s eyelid provided a whole new way to think about preventing soil erosion. In Taiwan, a team is ensuring that their community can breathe easier by mimicking the Saharan silver ant.

Game-changing ideas begin by seeing the possibilities for a sustainable world reflected in the living systems that surround us. That’s what we celebrate each year in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge—a competition that asks innovators to create radically sustainable human designs inspired by the natural world.

There are a lot of solutions to celebrate. Eight teams from around the world have been chosen as winners in the 2018 Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. In addition to cash prizes, these teams will be invited to join the Biomimicry Launchpad, an accelerator program for early-stage biomimetic start-ups, to work to bring their innovations to market. At the end of the Launchpad program, one team will win the $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize®, sponsored by the Ray C. Anderson Foundation.

Read on to learn more about how each winning team is working to develop a more sustainable world, using nature as a guide:

FULL CIRCLE
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

This team from Georgia Tech wanted to find a more resilient way to harvest renewable energy, so they created a nature-inspired energy generator that produces clean renewable electricity from underwater sea currents. The design was informed by the bell-shaped body of jellyfish, how schools of fish position themselves, how heart valves move liquid, and how kelp blades are adapted to rapidly flowing water and maximize photosynthesis. Their goal is to create a more efficient way to generate power, decreasing cost, and making this approach available to areas vulnerable to electricity shortage.

HABARI
Utrecht, The Netherlands

This University of Utrecht-based team created an automated, open-source design to protect tea plants from frost damage. Climate change has resulted in more unpredictable night frosts in Kenya, which damages tea plantations and leads to economic losses and unstable incomes for farmers. Inspired by the giant groundsel (Dendrosenecio kilimanjari) and giant lobelia (Lobelia deckenii) plants, both native to Kenya, the team developed HABARI to automatically deploy a mesh where frost deposits, covering the plants and preventing the frost from settling on the leaves. HABARI increases farmers’ resilience to weather conditions, and connects the farms with the local community by using local and sustainable products.

MIST GENERATION + PACE
Taichung City, Taiwan

Graduate students at the Tung Hai University developed the Psephurus Air Cleaner Equipment (PACE) to improve air quality in urban environments. Residents of densely populated cities are at greater risk for health issues due to fine particulate matter in the air. In order to make the air quality in outdoor public spaces better, this team created an air-cleaning device that is incorporated into signage on city buildings. These solar-powered signs have filtering mechanisms inspired by marine creatures like salpidae, paddlefish, and peacock worms, and derived their energy strategy from prairie dog burrows, the Saharan silver ant’s light-reflecting capabilities and more.

ECONCRETE
Tel-Aviv, Israel

This team of marine biologists, engineers, designers, and geologists wanted to develop a better way to create resilience in coastal zones most at risk for climate change-related issues. Current coastal defense systems such as breakwaters, seawalls and revetments, replace natural habitats, creating tremendous pressure on the fragile marine and coastal ecosystems. This team studied natural tide pools, rocky shores and oyster beds to develop a fully functional and constructive coastal defense unit which encourages growth of diverse plants and animals native to the project’s environment.

SOIL EROSION BY NATURE
Chonquing, China

This team worked to develop a way to combat soil erosion problems resulting from the Three Gorges Dam in China—the world’s largest hydropower station. Yearly water fluctuation means that there is a constant erosion problem. The SSE team developed an approach inspired by the kingfisher’s “third eyelid”—a protective, retractable layer that covers the bird’s eyes while it plunges into water. Their device is a mesh structure that covers soil while it is submerged and flushed with water. The device can be retracted after the water level is lowered, ensuring that it will not affect plant growth and damage the ecosystem.

GEN-RAIL
Long Beach, California, U.S.

This California State University at Long Beach team developed Genrail to harness wind generated on urban freeways and convert it into energy, essentially creating a wind farm in an urban environment. This system was developed with Los Angeles in mind but is adaptable to all high-speed roadways. The team replicated the compressible elasticity of the cockroach to create safe impact zones, mimicked the California condor’s wing shape to help create energy harnessing fans, and gathered inspiration from the structure of the desert snail shell to create a system of vacuums aided by the venturi effect propelling the wind forward and providing extra power for the city. Genrail is designed to have a small footprint, be highly efficient, and be easy to produce and implement in cities worldwide.

UPOD
Ithaca, New York, U.S.

This Cornell University team created the UPod, a mosquito-control device inspired by the mechanism of the carnivorous Utricularia vulgaris plant. Higher average temperatures and increased precipitation events due to climate change are contributing to the expanding threat of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, malaria, and chikungunya. Current mosquito-control strategies can be harmful to people and the environment, so this team developed the UPod to be an environmentally friendly, self-sustaining, reusable and affordable solution. Similar to how the Utricularia vulgaris plant traps prey, the UPod is a solar-powered device that pulls water and larvae into a tightly-sealed water chamber by means of a trap door that functions through a smart sensor mechanism. Larvae are suffocated in the water chamber, and then pumped out as new water and larvae are pulled in. UPod can help individuals, communities and nations take control of larvae populations and prevent the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.

PHALANX INSULATION
Long Beach, California, U.S.

This team, also from California State University at Long Beach, developed a biomimicry-inspired insulation grid meant to be applied to exterior walls of existing buildings. Intended to be used in urban coastal regions like Southern California, this system is designed to reduce interior temperatures of buildings passively without the need for electricity. The system includes three layers. The shade-grid layer has a wavy patterns and reflective surface inspired by the cactus and Saharan silver ant. The air channel layer, inspired by cathedral termites, directs hot air up and out of the system. The capillary layer was inspired by the Saharan camel and wheat, and can collect the morning dew from the air or pull up gray water from an underlying trough. Phalanx requires no electricity, has no moving parts, can be assembled on existing architecture, makes use of otherwise wasted water, and ultimately saves money while it cools.

HONORABLE MENTION:

BUBA – Mexico City, Mexico

The Avian Smog Mask – Toledo, Ohio, USA

Opening – Taichung, Taiwan

This article was originally published by the Biomimicry Institute. Bioneers 2018 will host the presentation of the $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize to one of these innovators in October.

A Primal Scream: Taking Action Against an Illegitimate Regime

As a boy, he threw rocks at babies. He’s doing it again.

After the other parents all finally barred the boy from playing with their kids, Daddy Trump, the abuser-in-chief, shipped Donald the Menace off to military boarding school. He never went home again.

Tony Schwartz, who actually wrote The Art of the Deal because Trump had such extreme ADHD that he literally could not focus for more than 3-4 minutes, has said flatly: “He’s mentally ill. Inside the man is a black hole.”

Now from the mighty White House, he’s jailing babies and savaging desperate families, the casualties washing back on the shores of the American policy and corporate globalization that have driven them here. And make no mistake: These are already the first waves of climate refugees in many cases, and it’s going to get a whole lot worse as the people of the South flee the mayhem that the North’s fossil economy has caused.

I don’t know how to put a primal scream into words. This is not a policy – it’s a psychosis. No, I really don’t think the Founding Fathers envisioned a psychopath in the White House illegitimately elected through election meddling by a hostile foreign authoritarian regime and partisan exploitation of an archaic system rotting from the inside out.

In 2017 Noam Chomsky floated a hypothesis: The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. Check. We also know Putin’s a Republican and the Russian hackathon of the upcoming election is the Republicans’ best shot of holding on to power and perhaps avoiding impeachment, disgrace and lengthy jail terms.

This is the moment of truth in this Age of Disinformation. All people of good will and good heart need to break through the political pavement and grow a new politics. We need to do a lot more than change elected officials, although that will help at this fateful time when holding the center is a life-and-death issue for countless people. We also need to change the system, and we need a change of heart.

We forget that the Nazis arose from the nation considered the most advanced and cultured in the world. It’s easy to see right now how the “good Germans” came to be. Indeed, silence is complicity, but complicity is also complicity.

Are we really going to accept an illegitimate regime that’s carrying out a coup d’etat in slow motion? Are we really going to give this gangster cartel any other name? Are we really going to let him throw enough rocks at babies to make a wall?

Please help kids and their families reunite and survive while we change these systems once and for all – yes, for all.

We asked around the Bioneers community for some of the very best people and groups working on the front lines of crisis with asylum seekers, refugees and related issues. Please help however you can.

Resources for Helping Migrant Families at the Border

We asked around the Bioneers community for some of the very best people and groups working on the front lines of crisis with asylum seekers, refugees and related issues. Please help however you can.

Attend Events

Saturday, June 30 – Families Belong Together
Scheduled Nationwide

An update from the event’s website: “A federal judge ruled against Trump’s family separation policy—but we know the administration will fight back. We have momentum and we cannot slow down now since the the court ruling along isn’t enough and could be overturned. Our mobilization, in over 600 locations around the country and still growing, is critical to showing the widespread public demand for just immigration policies—because families belong together … and free!”

Support Groups Providing Direct Services

Women’s Refugee Commission

The Women’s Refugee Commission improves the lives and protects the rights of women, children and youth displaced by conflict and crisis.

Cara Family Detention Pro Bono Project

Represents women and children in immigration detention.

Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services (DMRS)

The only full-service immigration legal aid clinic serving low-income immigrants and refugees residing in the southwestern United States.

Las Americas

Provides legal services to the asylum-seeking parents separated from their families. The organization needs donations as well as volunteer attorneys. For the latter, contact Linda Rivas

Annunciation House

Provides life-saving refuge and nourishment to migrants.

Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee

Helps pay immigration bonds to get detained people free, thus calling them to reunite with family, avoid bail bond lenders and improve their chances in immigration court.

Fianza Fund

The Fianza Fund works with families to assist them in coming up with the bond amount and going through the long and sometimes confusing processes for bonding someone out.

RAICES Fund

The largest immigration legal services provider in Texas. RAICES directly funds bonds to allow parents to unite with their detained children. They will ensure legal representation for every separated family and every unaccompanied child in Texas’ immigration courts and work to get these children and parents the psychological care they will need after this experience.

Videos

Echoes of the Past

Identity Erasure

Historical and Other References

A Primal Scream: Taking Action Against an Illegitimate Regime

An editorial on our current political system and government, written by Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel.

Barbaric: America’s Cruel History of Separating Children from their Parents

The Trump administration’s policy of separating parents and children who cross the border illegally has roots in slave and Native American families being ripped apart.

Trump has turned words into weapons. And he’s winning the linguistic war

From ‘spygate’ to ‘fake news’, Trump is using language to frame – and win – debates. And the press operate like his marketing agency.

Special thanks to the Latino Community Foundation, Haas Center, Sachi Yoshii from East Bay Community Foundation who is working at the border, and Dan Skaff at Radical Impact Partners for helping us create this collection.

Why Psychedelics?

The use of psychedelics as therapeutic agents is a topic that had been garnering public interest and press coverage in recent years as more and more credible research is beginning to unveil their potential curative properties for a number of major psychological ailments. Michael Pollan’s brand new book about the subject (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence) has now propelled the subject even further into prominence. This represents a major shift as these substances were demonized and viewed as dangerous drugs with no possible redeeming features by the authorities and mainstream cultural gatekeepers for many decades until quite recently (and they are of course still mostly illegal outside of a few officially sanctioned studies.)

Bioneers has included the use of psychedelics as a topic worthy of discussion at our conference since its inception some 30 years ago. While it was just one subject among many we paid attention to, we got quite a bit of pushback from some members of our audience and outside observers. Given the severity of the environmental crisis, of social injustices and geopolitical conundrums, why include such a controversial and tangential topic, bound to alienate everyone but the most countercultural members of our potential audience?

Explore our Visionary Plant Consciousness & Psychedelics media collection >>

This is a question we pondered seriously because, while we are unapologetically “eco” and “progressive” in our overarching worldview, we have always wanted to have a big tent that welcomed a very diverse, wide range of groups, often with differing perspectives: green entrepreneurs and anti-capitalists; vegans and organic cattle-ranchers; people of faith and secular rationalists; communitarians and libertarians; etc. Why take the risk of losing credibility by delving into this contentious domain and perhaps driving away potential allies for more important causes? After serious consideration, we decided that we would not be being true to ourselves if we failed to include the subject. Here’s why:

First, while it is not often discussed, it is an undeniable fact that quite a few of the most dedicated environmental activists of our era were deeply affected by their experiences with psychoactive substances. In many cases these often urban or suburban young people’s encounters in their formative years with psychedelics in natural settings either triggered or enhanced powerful “biophilic” feelings, spiritual bonds with the natural world that set a tone for the rest of their lives, often helping shape both their political and spiritual perspectives. And, of course, though no one in the mainstream likes to acknowledge it very much, the influence of these substances on our culture’s music, literature, art, fashions, mores and even technology (the cyber revolution’s origins are awash in LSD…), while far from uniformly positive or free of silly excess, was and is powerful and long-lasting. To ignore these vision-inducing substances, whatever our ultimate view of them, is to ignore and distort our own recent history.

And it’s not just our recent history in which these substances played a noteworthy role: vision-inducing plants seem to have played significant functions in some of humanity’s greatest foundational civilizations. The mystery teachings at Eleusis in ancient Greece, among the most important spiritual institutions of that era which lasted nearly a millennium and were a rite of passage for nearly every major Greek intellectual figure, included the ingestion of a mysterious vision-inducing drink, a variant of the ancient Kykeon, a barley-based beverage, as a central sacrament (which Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman and others speculated may have included ergot mold, from whence sprung LSD). The equally mysterious use of a vision-inducing substance called “soma” is mentioned very frequently in the planet’s oldest spiritual texts, ancient India’s Vedas.

More immediately relevant, some of the Indigenous groups in the Americas who are most known for the depth of their botanical knowledge and the sophistication of their ecological awareness have long used sacred visionary plants as central tools in understanding their environments. We modern industrialized folks, who have failed so dramatically in finding a sustainable, harmonious balance with our environments and other species, have a great deal to learn from the practices and worldviews of these long-lived (and now often highly threatened) cultures. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily appropriate for us to emulate their practices or adopt their beliefs, but it would certainly behoove us to forgo our long-standing cultural arrogance and to try to open our minds to their ways of seeing the world. Learning from Indigenous worldviews has been one of the core components of our approach to the environmental crisis since Bioneers was launched three decades ago.

Finally, we felt that to ignore the incredible socio-economic and personal damage and the underlying racism of the “War on Drugs” would be inexcusable, so we felt that as part of our exploration of the larger topic of the use of consciousness-modulating substances, we had to include confronting and exposing our society’s full range of responses to these substances, and to advocate for far more compassionate and open-minded approaches.

All that said, let us be crystal clear: our interest in the use of these fascinating substances is by no means an exhortation to their mass consumption. These are potent medicines that are, at best, not made for casual use by the unprepared. The widespread use of vision-inducing molecules, while nowhere as cumulatively socially harmful and costly as the use of tobacco or alcohol or hard drugs, has definitely posed real problems at times, and on occasion individuals using them without proper guidance have come to serious harm, even death in a handful of cases. Some people with certain types of underlying medical and psychiatric conditions should never take them, and even those who could benefit from them should only do them in the ideal “set and setting.” It is to be hoped the growing acceptance of their potential benefits might lead in the future to a world in which expert guidance and proper screening and preparation would be provided to those wishing to explore the inner dimensions these molecules seem to help provide access to.

It is in that spirit that we have gone through our three decades of archives of the most interesting presentations and discussions held on these topics at Bioneers and polished and re-mixed their sound and video, so that a new generation can now have access to this remarkable material, some of it totally unique and not to be found anywhere else. An impressive array of very diverse, highly accomplished experts from a wide range of backgrounds and fields, from ethno-botany to medical research to anthropology to spiritual leadership to drug reform advocacy, most of them years in advance of their time, devoted their lives with great courage and passion to exploring many aspects of these tricky plants and substances and came to Bioneers and presented their stories and wisdom over the years. We certainly don’t all need to imbibe psychedelics, but it’s at least worth it for many of us to listen to those who have tried to explore what the use of these plants and molecules might be able to contribute to lessening human suffering and perhaps even to helping a bit in awakening our own civilization from its current ecocidal trajectory.

Seed Librarians Are Fighting To Protect The U.S.’s Resilient And Diverse Food System

This blog post and all media within were re-posted with permission from Mark Schapiro. For the original article Visit: Pacific Standard

Stories arising from reporting by Mark Schapiro for his new book, SEEDS OF RESISTANCE: The Fight for our Food Supply, to be published by Skyhorse Publishing/Hotbooks in September 2018.

Break open a seed and you unravel a genetic story.

Inside every seed is a narrative told by chromosomes, a tale that reveals how the plant absorbs nutrients and responds to threats from pests and weeds and to changes in climate and weather.

Inside every seed library — and there are more than 400 of them now — is another tale. Here are seeds that have been locally cultivated, saved, and passed along from farmer to farmer. They are repositories of genetic information that have been quietly spreading across America during the last decade. They tell the story of how, at a time of unprecedented climatic stress on our food supply, people are fighting to expand their range of crop choices to respond to changing climate conditions.

As one company after another is purchased by the giants that now dominate the seed trade — most notably Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, and DuPont-Pioneer, which together have purchased hundreds of locally based seed companies over the past 20 years — the libraries are defying efforts to homogenize the seeds.

The United States Department of Agriculture points to climate change as a significantly disruptive force on America’s capacity to grow food, and recommends a more diverse array of crops as a major step toward developing greater resilience. At the same time, numerous studies (including a major 30-year side-by-side comparison of the yields from organic versus conventional agriculture) suggest that farm fields with greater diversity are just as productive as the mono-cropped farms that rely on heavy applications of agricultural chemicals, and they come with far less collateral damage to the environment and public health.

Today, most of America’s seed is produced by multinational chemical companies with a seed division. The companies have been steadily eliminating local varieties that are genetically adapted to the specific ecosystems of American farm country — differences that are reflected in their performance in environments ranging from mountain valleys to the flat plains, wetlands to low desert. Instead, they mass-produce seeds bred to be planted over vast swaths of farmland, augmented with chemical boosters to compensate for what’s lacking from generations of local adaptation.

The variety of seed available to farmers is dwindling: 80 percent of the corn and 70 percent of the soybeans grown in the U.S., for example, come from just four companies. In 2015, a team of USDA-funded researchers from Kansas State University and North Dakota State University reported the first county-by-county assessment of crop diversity. They reviewed 34 years of USDA census data on every recorded crop species grown in every contiguous U.S. county and found that, from 1978 to 2012, there’s been a steady decline in diversity in almost every food-growing part of the country. They expressed concern that the narrower genetic base has increased vulnerability to “the highly variable weather resulting from climate change,” as well as to pests or diseases that can spread rapidly through fields of identical plants.

As the industry consolidates, seed libraries are emerging like a parallel universe, offering local varieties for farmers and gardeners to test out, replant, and evaluate for other local users. Many are hosted by public lending libraries — adding a new sort of story to the many already on the shelves. The seeds are often housed in small packets inside old-fashioned card catalogs rescued from storage bins when libraries went digital. These small-scale seed sanctuaries are at the forefront of efforts to sustain and nourish a diverse seed supply. The libraries operate according to basic farmer principles, almost nostalgic by now: Those who test the seeds out in their fields are expected to return the following season with a sampling of the results and notes on their performance that might be helpful to the next user.

The average age of American farmers is rising, and now stands at 58 years, while the number of farms is falling — from 2.2 million in 2007, according to the USDA, to 2.07 million in 2015.

While there are abundant studies about the importance of diversity to a thriving agriculture, there are few about the relatively recent role of seed libraries. One of those, in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences by Nurcan Helicke, an assistant professor of environmental studies and sciences at Skidmore College, suggests that the libraries and other forms of open seed-sharing enhance farmers’ knowledge of seeds’ performance in local conditions and provide a hedge against the loss of precious genetic information to a homogenizing industry.

This double-pronged approach comes at a time when the pool of experienced farmers in the U.S. is contracting: The average age of American farmers is rising, and now stands at 58 years, while the number of farms is falling — from 2.2 million in 2007, according to the USDA, to 2.07 million in 2015.

The seed libraries provide an important store of knowledge that might otherwise be lost, Helicke writes, documenting and protecting such information from disappearing. Farmers’ ability to exchange and distribute saved seeds, she concludes, helps to minimize their dependence on commercial suppliers. Seed libraries are becoming repositories for our increasingly endangered genetic resources — publicly accessible and independent from the agriculture conglomerates that are becoming ever more detached from the fields where farmers plant their crops.

Open a drawer, as I did last spring at the seed library in Richmond, California, and instead of an indexed listing of books, you may find seeds for chili peppers, chard, bok choy, kale, fava beans, and locally bred peas, each accompanied by scrawled notationsof their performance in the local conditions (for example: morning fog; often indirect sun; limited water over the last three years). “We see this as a positive response to our growing knowledge of what we need to hold onto for climate resilience,” says Rebecca Newburn, an ardent gardener, middle-school science teacher, and co-founder of the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, housed in a corner near the magazine racks in the Richmond Public Library. “In a world in which more than half of the seeds for major crops are controlled by three companies, we’re trying to relocalize our resources.”

Even at this small scale, asserting independence from the commercial industry has put the libraries on a collision course with the powerful regimes that govern the seed trade: On June 12th, 2014, the two clashed when the Simpson Public Library in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, received a notice from the Bureau of Plant Industry in the state Department of Agriculture. “It has come to my attention … that you plan to offer your patrons the option to participate in a Seed Library,” wrote the state’s seed control official. “My understanding is that patrons will be able to ‘check out’ seeds, take them home and plant them, harvest any resulting fruits, collect seeds, and return the collected seed to the ‘Seed Library’ for planting in the following season…. I believe there are some issues of seed distribution that you may not be aware of….” The letter then went on to list several statutes that the library could be violating, including the dissemination of unregistered and untested seeds and seeds that had not been officially assessed for their germination capacities.

Neil Thapar, a staff attorney at the center, said that the Pennsylvania threat was a wake-up call for them too. The seed libraries were indeed in a legal gray zone: They were disseminating seeds not authorized or tested by the states, which do so to protect consumers from seeds that might deliver a different plant than promised. But they were also not quite illegal, since they were not distributing patented seed varieties, which had gotten farmers in trouble in the past. A public pressure campaign convinced the newly elected Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, to change course in Mechanicsburg. Thapar and his colleagues went on to work with local groups to get laws passed in the Minnesota and Nebraska legislatures exempting the libraries from seed-registration laws, essentially affirming their legal status.

Seed libraries and seed exchanges may be the most important thing we’re doing for agriculture in the 21st century.

In February of 2016, the action came to a head when the Seed Exchange Democracy Act was introduced into the state legislature in California, which is home to roughly 60 seed libraries of varying size. This was the big battle, with national implications. It drew in the California Seed Association, the industry trade group, which made a vigorous effort to cripple the legislation and limit its power. But the association met resistance from a coalition of sustainable-farming advocates and farmers, including the California Climate and Agriculture Network and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, a hub of organic-farming experimentation.

After multiple hearings, and a last-minute standoff when the seed industry tried to narrow the bill’s scope by requiring that libraries state publicly that they would not share patented seeds — which librarians feared could scare off users, without protecting the libraries from legal liability — the bill was signed by Governor Jerry Brown last September. It took effect in January of 2017, and promises to provide a model for similar initiatives in other states. The act affirms the legal status of seed libraries and exchanges, and exempts them from registration and labeling rules governing the commercial seed trade.

According to Thapar, the bill not only gets farmers and gardeners off the hook for exchanging seeds, but, at its core, affirms an expanded definition of farmers’ relationship with their seeds. “We’re trying to redefine farmers using seed libraries. They’re not ‘consumers’ requiring consumer protection. They’re active and engaged participants in giving and using and testing the seeds.” In other words, they’re not just passive recipients of seeds from the seed companies, but are intertwined with the very process of nurturance and evolution that has been at the core of seed breeding since humans invented agriculture.

This shift in sensibility has become especially important in the face of disruptions in farm country caused by climate change — increasing temperatures; rain coming at unusual times, or not at all; diminishing fog; earlier springs; later winters. “The hottest topic among farmers now is how to position yourself knowing that you could have any kind of thing happening in any season — too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold, all in one season,” says Michael Sligh, a program director at the Rural Advancement Foundation International, which has been promoting seed diversity as a way to strengthen local farm economies.

Syria Holds the Secret to Our Species’ Survival

This blog post and all media within were re-posted with permission from Mark Schapiro. For the original article Visit: Mother Jones

Stories arising from reporting by Mark Schapiro for his new book, SEEDS OF RESISTANCE: The Fight for our Food Supply, to be published by Skyhorse Publishing/Hotbooks in September 2018.

is story was originally published by Food and Environment Reporting Network.

Salvatore Ceccarelli knew he was engaging in a subversive act when, in 2010, he took two 20 kilo sacks of bread and durum wheat seeds from a seed bank outside of Aleppo, Syria and brought them to Italy during a visit back to his home country. Now, seven years later, those seeds from the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of domesticated agriculture, with thousands of years of evolution behind them, are poised to challenge the system of plant patenting in Europe, and, soon enough perhaps, the United States.

eccarelli, one of the world’s foremost seed scholars and practitioners and an honorary research fellow at Bioversity International, has consulted with governments on policies to encourage biodiversity. He has also been a leading advocate of participatory plant breeding—which, as he describes it, means engaging farmers in the process of breeding new crop varieties, rather than leaving that to the rapidly consolidating group of global seed companies.

Ceccarelli arrived in Syria in 1984 and stayed for the next quarter-century as a senior breeder and researcher at the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), one of nine UN specialized agencies founded to protect regionally evolved seeds. His specialty is wheat, barley and other cereals, bred for dry and hot climates—precisely the conditions that many of the earth’s food-growing lands now face as climate change raises the temperature and disrupts precipitation patterns.

ICARDA was based in Tal Hadya, a town about 20 miles outside of Aleppo, until it was finally abandoned last year when the city became a focus of the Assad government’s brutal counter-offensive against Syrian rebels, including the Islamic State. Ceccarelli was gone by the time the last Syrian scientists were forced to evacuate, but he had ensured that at least a part of the seed bank’s legacy lives on in Italy. (ICARDA’s work continues in Morocco and Lebanon and a collection of its seeds is stored at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway).

“Within four growing seasons, the two populations growing in different parts of Italy showed significantly different characteristics, a live illustration of the adaptation process.”

n each one of those sacks Ceccarelli took from Syria were dozens of different wheat varieties. Working with a Tuscany-based NGO, the Rural Seed Network (Reto Semali Rurali, RSR) Ceccarelli arranged to have the seeds planted with a farmer in Sicily and another in Tuscany.

The RSR and a coalition of environmental NGOs from the UK, Germany, Austria, Denmark, and France went to work lobbying in Brussels, to convince the European Council of Ministers – the EU’s executive body—to amend a key provision which requires that all seeds sold in Europe be registered as single seeds with uniform, distinct and stable characteristics. In other words, each seed remains uniform and distinct from other varieties year after year, a registration requirement that is also a key precursor to what is often the next step—patenting. But this uniformity, the coalition argued, makes them uniquely unsuited to the extreme volatility in growing conditions being wrought by climate change—a hot-button question in Italy and throughout much of Europe, which has been facing record-breaking temperatures and, in some regions including Italy, a multi-year drought.

In 2014, the coalition succeeded. The EU agreed to waive those registration requirements on four crops for what it described as “a temporary experiment … for the marketing of populations of the plant species wheat, barley, maize and oats.” For the first time, populations of seeds, evolving and changing and sharing genes in the ways that plants do naturally, could be registered for sale.

The Syrian seeds have already provided a lesson in ‘Evolution 101′ on the Italian farms. Within four growing seasons, the two populations growing in different parts of Italy showed significantly different characteristics, a live illustration of the adaptation process, Ceccarelli said.

In Sicily, which receives a fraction of the rainfall of Tuscany, the wheat is maturing several weeks earlier, and is as many as two to four inches shorter than the Tuscan varieties, which, in the more moderate and moist climate, mature later and deliver more protein per plant.

“Compare the two in the same environment,” says Ceccarelli, “and it’s day and night.” Ceccarelli argues that its their diversity which gives the fields the ability to adapt to new conditions. “Explain to me how a crop that is uniform and stable responds to climate change?” he says. “Today if you are a dynamic seed company you are working on varieties for 2025. For which sort of climate? How many more degrees hotter will it be? Do they know what pests and diseases will come with the new conditions? These population mixtures are extremely dynamic, the cheapest and most dynamic way to cope with climate change.”

The experience of field inspecting a diverse population was a first for the seed inspectors in from Rome, recalled Riccardo Franciolini of the RSR. “It was interesting to see their response,” he said from the group’s headquarters near Florence. “We asked them to do the opposite of what they’re used to doing. They’re used to seeing a single variety, all the same in a field. But the idea of a ‘population’ changes the vision in a profound way.”

In June, the Italian Agriculture Ministry authorized the farmer in Sicily, Giuseppe li Rosi to sell up to two tons per year of the seeds cultivated there; the Tuscan farmer, Rosario Floriddia, could sell up to three tons per year of the seeds he had grown. The difference reflects the different yields of each of the two distinct populations, which of course had been just one single population back in Tel Hadya, Syria. At least 100 farmers are now growing the wheat from those seeds in Italy, according to Ceccarelli. The yields may not match bushel for bushel the yields of neighboring farms — many of which require intensive synthetic chemical inputs. But, he says, they’re showing “high rates of yield stability, year in and year out, which is what farmers care about.” And the bread and pastas made with their wheat are finding a budding market.

The movement is now bigger than the fields Ceccarelli seeded. The EU directive gives each member-state the right to authorize seed populations in the four designated crops. At least 20 such ‘cross-composite populations’—the technical term for them—have also received authorization from national seed authorities in the UK, Germany, Denmark and France, representing a total of about 300 to 400 tons of seed, according to Klaus Rapf, a Board Member and Adviser to Arche Noah (Noah’s Ark), a seed-saving and research institution in Austria that was part of the coalition fighting for the change. More exact totals won’t be known until next year, said Rapf, when the EU compiles all the registrations held by national authorities, in their respective languages, and releases the Europe-wide figures to the public. The registrations come after years of research throughout Europe comparing the performance and resilience of diverse versus single seed populations, including by Ceccarelli and other scientists.

The fields are now a long-running fuse that could present the first major challenge to the plant-patenting system in either Europe or the U.S., proponents believe. When the first phase of the experiment is completed, at the end of 2018, there will be an assessment of its success. The program could be expanded to other crops, sustained, or stopped.

If it continues beyond 2018, the global dimensions of the seed business suggest it would not take long for the principles to make their way into the United States, where similar research is underway. The experiment could force a reassessment of existing rules, which prioritize individual varieties. You can’t ‘patent’ a population, or at least in ways that patents are currently defined. Populations are dynamic, changing in response to changing conditions—unlike hybrids or genetically engineered seeds, the patenting of which has been the foundation for the companies that now dominate the global seed trade, and which rely on standardized regulations to export their seeds.

“What’s at stake is the very concept of ‘variety’,” said Klaus Rupf of Arche Noah. “Defining something as a ‘variety’ is an abstract concept created to defend turning a seed into a protected intellectual property, based on the notion of very high uniformity.”

Or, as Ceccarelli puts it, “We are registering and certifying something that is evolving—next year will be different. You start with one thing and you end up with another thing totally different … Yes, it is a little radical,” he said.

How Seeds from War-Torn Syria Could Help Save American Wheat

This blog post and all media within were re-posted with permission from Mark Schapiro. For the original article Visit: e360.yale.edu

Stories arising from reporting by Mark Schapiro for his new book, SEEDS OF RESISTANCE: The Fight for our Food Supply, to be published by Skyhorse Publishing/Hotbooks in September 2018.

As temperatures rise, pests and diseases are moving north into the U.S. heartland, killing crops and diminishing yields. To combat this, researchers are turning to a wild grass variety whose seeds were smuggled out of Syria as the bombs fell.

When a team of researchers set loose a buzzing horde of Hessian flies on 20,000 seedlings in a Kansas greenhouse, they made a discovery that continues to ripple from Midwestern wheat fields to the rolling hills that surround the battered Syrian city of Aleppo. The seeds once stored in a seed bank outside of that now largely destroyed city could end up saving United States wheat from the disruptions triggered by climate change — and look likely to, soon enough, make their way into the foods that Americans eat.

According to the National Climatic Data Center, from 2000 to 2015, average temperatures in the Midwest rose from 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit above what had been the 20th-century average. Periods of time between rainfalls are lengthening, according to a 2016 assessment by the EPA. In other words, conditions in some areas of the Midwest are starting to resemble conditions in the Mideast.

Rising temperatures are already leading to drops in Midwestern crop yields that could, under current medium and high emissions scenarios, lead to further drops of as much as 4 percent per year. In the heart of U.S. cereal and grain country, new pests and diseases are following the hot and dry conditions northward — and frequently overwhelming the ability of agricultural chemicals to battle them off. In response, scientists are seeking sources of natural resistance — and finding them in Syria, in the heart of the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of domesticated agriculture.

As Aleppo was being bombed, U.S. researchers were receiving reports from Midwestern farmers of crops damaged by the Hessian fly.

One of the world’s most important seed banks used to be located in Syria, about 25 miles west of Aleppo in the town of Tal Hadya, and was run by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). That UN-affiliated center specializes in preserving and researching seeds in hot, dry areas — conditions now being faced by many of the earth’s food-growing regions.

It’s also the place of origin of today’s domesticated wheat, and thus the seeds that were stored there benefit from germplasm embedded with survival strategies developed over thousands of years of changing conditions and evolving pathogens. Now, diseases and pests long familiar to Middle and Near Eastern farmers are moving north from the southern U.S. and Mexico and are surging across Kansas and surrounding states — Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and Nebraska and in some instances up to Illinois and the Dakotas.

The Hessian fly has been around for more than two centuries — since, in fact, the birth of the U.S.. It’s thought by entomologists to have come to North America with the straw bedding of Hessian mercenaries who fought on behalf of the British during the Revolutionary War, hence the name. It’s been a menace ever since, but mostly in warmer climates in the South.

Even as forces supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were bombing Aleppo in the spring of 2016, researchers at Kansas State University (KSU) in Manhattan, Kansas, were receiving increasingly urgent reports from U.S. Midwestern wheat farmers of devastating attacks by the Hessian fly, leading to an average 10 percent yield loss per year, according to the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics at KSU. That’s a significant bite out of the earnings of farms already operating on shaky margins, and it’s just one among several mounting threats to the vast, monochromatic fields of Midwestern wheat.

Ming-Shun Chen, a professor of molecular entomology at KSU, explained that the flies’ larvae used to be killed off by the cold of winter. But that cold is coming later in the season, and the larvae survive to turn into flies. Their devouring of wheat seems drawn from science fiction: The flies don’t have teeth, so they inject a protein-based substance into the plant which transforms it into a kind of nutritious slurry they can suck up and digest. “They transform the leaf into something they can eat,” explained Chen. The substance has the effect of stunting the plant’s growth and accelerating the metabolization of chlorophyll — an infested plant becomes more green, a surefire sign of the presence of the fly. “The plant’s metabolic pathway is changed,” said Chen. “It no longer produces nutrients for its own growth, but produces nutrients for the insects.” Darkening green in a field of golden wheat is now a scary color in Kansas.

From November through April, Chen collaborated with plant scientist Jesse Poland, director of the Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics, to run a sequence of experiments that unfolded in the university’s greenhouses with brutal Darwinian efficiency: They planted commercial U.S. wheat seedlings from Kansas and surrounding states along with an assortment of wild wheat-related grasses obtained from the seed vault in Syria, as well as random other assorted plantings. The seedlings grew for two to three weeks, and then the flies were unleashed to attack. The results were clear: A wild relative of wheat, known as Aegilops tauschii, a common grass in Syria, was the sole variety that could withstand the Hessian fly onslaught to any significant degree.

Wheat has the most complex genome of any of the world’s major crops, one of the reasons efforts to genetically engineer wheat traits have thus far not succeeded, as they have with corn, soybeans and other crops. It also means it has multiple genetic relatives. Those so-called ‘crop wild relatives’ are turning out to be critical tools for breeders as food-growing areas around the world face an unprecedented spectrum of new conditions.

“Wheat’s relatives are closely related to what was domesticated,” says Jesse Poland. “The difference is that domestication selected for genes and traits that increase productivity, but during that process they lost qualities of resistance to diseases and insects.” Those hyper-productive varieties, dependent on agrichemical boosters, are showing their weakness in the face of new diseases and pests. So breeders are reaching deep into the history of wheat, as they are for other crops, to bring back some of those lost characteristics.

“Wild [crop] relatives are by definition hardier,” says one scientist. “They’ve survived on the margins of our pampering.”

“Wild relatives are by definition hardier. They’ve survived on the margins of our pampering,” comments Maywa Montenegro, a recently minted PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, who has devoted years of study to wild relatives of crops. “On a farm, the farmer does everything to favor his crops, he pulls out competitor plants, weeds, gives water. But the wild relatives haven’t been getting assistance for thousands of years. They’re dealing with drought and flooding and salt. By definition these are hardy species.” She said that indigenous farmers have for millennia encouraged wild species to grow along the edges of their farms in order to encourage inter-breeding between the wild and domesticated species to confer those strengths — a practice that has been long-neglected on massive industrial farms, for which wild species look simply like tangles of unnecessary plants.

One of those plants is the indomitable ancient grass Aegilops tauschii, which grows wild in Syria in the hills surrounding Tal Hadya and Aleppo, and all the way up to the Caucasus — the breadth of the Fertile Crescent, and the birthplace of wheat. Poland cites a litany of diseases to which the grass is resistant, with names like a lineup of underground rock bands: barley yellow dwarf, mosaic virus, wheat rust. A further list of pest-resistance traits published last year by a collaborative team of scientists from the Institute of Crop Germplasm and Biotechnology in China and the Land Institute, which has been conducting long-term research on resilient grasses and cereals in Kansas, concluded that tauschii shows resistance traits to more than half a dozen common insect pests, including the cereal leaf beetle, the root lesion nematode, stem rust, yellow rust, and, as the team at Kansas State also discovered, the Hessian fly. Seventy percent of the Syrian Aegopolis tauschii, said Chen, resisted the fly attacks, and no pesticide was needed to do the job. “It seems to have the ability,” he said, “to detect one of the components of the substance injected by the fly and mount a defense. The fly is unable to get nutrients from the plant, and so it starves to death.”

The tauschii and thousands of other seed varieties once stored at ICARDA’s Tal Hadya seed bank have a dramatic recent history, intertwined with the Syrian civil war. The area around Aleppo was a rebel stronghold until 2016. The rebel commander in Tal Hadya, according to one of the veteran scientists who used to work at the ICARDA facility, was himself a farmer and understood the importance of the seed bank. The scientists and the rebels struck a deal: The rebels protected the seed bank and, equally important, ensured that the generator kept running to keep the stored seeds cool — in return for the scientists providing the rebels with food grown from the center’s experimental fields. That lasted until the spring of 2016, when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military started bombarding Aleppo and the surroundings towns, including Tal Hadya. The remaining scientists loaded up the seeds in a truck and raced across the Lebanese frontier, where Ahmed Amri, director of genetic resources at ICARDA, was waiting on the other end to receive them.

“You know you don’t need a big truck for seeds, they’re small,” recalled Amri, on a Skype call from Beirut. “Nine boxes, 6,000 accessions, on one small truck.” Small, but each box was loaded with the potential to help the world navigate the tumultuous times ahead. Amri now oversees growing some of the Syrian seeds in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, as well as at an ICARDA center on the outskirts of his home city of Rabat, Morocco. “We’re trying to reconstruct those Syrian and Iraqi varieties before they disappear,” he said. Amri received his PhD decades ago from KSU, which is now planting seeds — many of them obtained before 2016 — that he once oversaw at Tal Hadya in Syria.

A U.S. study found diversity in seed varieties has dropped in almost every region of the country, most dramatically in the Midwest.

Other seeds emanating from Syria are helping farmers contend with climatic changes elsewhere in the Midwest. In Illinois and the Dakotas, for example, the combination of increasing temperatures with brief but intense rainfalls is leading to the proliferation of a virulent fungus, Fusarium head blight, which thrives in hot, moist conditions and destroys wheat plants by attaching itself to roots and stems. “The modern wheat varieties are not doing well with climate change and our crazy rain events,” said Bill Davison, who has been working to devise responses to the accelerating spectrum of environmental stresses faced by Illinois farmers at the University of Illinois Extension Service in Bloomington. Once again, Syrian seeds seem to be performing strongly in the Midwest’s stressed circumstances. “The Fertile Crescent varieties are withstanding these conditions well,” he said. Similarly, efforts are underway at the University of North Dakota, Bismarck, to introduce Syrian germplasm, showing high resistance to the Fusarium fungus, into the breeding stock.

Such varieties promise to be increasingly valuable “as climate stresses create increasing environmental instability,” says Charlie Brummer, who runs the Center for Plant Breeding at the University of California, Davis, and has overseen many breeding experiments with wild relatives of crops. “As those stresses recur more frequently and become more prevalent, I think that wild relatives like tauschii will be increasingly important to deal with the problems induced by climate change.”

An ironic twist to the saga of wheat’s wild relations is that the agriculture they’re intended to save could be partially responsible for destroying entire communities of wild relatives that are critical to their future and that of other crops in the turbulent times ahead. “If Midwestern monoculture farming practices are ever adopted in Syria, Iraq, or wherever in the Fertile Crescent,” says Brummer, “that will push more of those wild relatives off the land. Then we have a problem. Another source of variation, and all the traits of selective advantage, will be lost… Germplasm banks are just a sampling of the wild. If the wild goes away, we can’t go back and get another sample.”

The U.S. has been losing diversity at an alarming rate for more than three decades: An assessment by scientists at Kansas State and North Dakota State, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, found that after three decades of consolidation in the seed industry, and the steadily expanding size of farms, diversity in seed varieties has dropped in almost every region of the country, most dramatically in the lower Midwest. Globally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has declared that three-quarters of all the world’s crop varieties that were around in the early 1900s had become extinct by 2015. “You may be using wild crop relatives to boost industrial agriculture, while industrial agriculture itself is one of the greatest pressures on their existence,” commented Maywa Montenegro. “They’re threatened from the usual pressures — pollution, land-cover changes — but also from turning diverse fields into monoculture plantations.”

Poland says that the latest round of Hessian fly experiments, completed in early April, affirmed KSU’s plan to incorporate the tough survivors of the fly onslaught into the breeding of commercial American wheat varieties. After undergoing formal certification and USDA approval, the Aegilops tauschii will be dispersed to U.S. breeders to make their way into the besieged fields of the Midwest.

This article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a non-profit investigative journalism organization.

Earth Day author conversation: Radical Joy for Hard Times

This blog post and all media within were re-posted with permission from Trebbe Johnson and North Atlantic Books. you can find the original article here. For More from North Atlantic Books Visit: www.northatlanticbooks.com

by Julia Sadowski

As we approach Earth Day 2018, many of us here at NAB have environmental issues on the brain and are in the midst of planning our own Earth Day agendas. Whether picking up trash at a beach, volunteering at a local farm or even visiting a place affected by climate change, there are so many ways to show up for the environment. Writer and activist Trebbe Johnson, author of the upcoming book Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken Places, took a moment to talk about her work using art and ritual to honor Earth’s wounded places.

What is your definition of a “wounded place” and why do you think it is so important that we spend time with them?

A wounded place is any place we feel attached to and that is now damaged or endangered. A wounded place might be a wilderness trail you hiked once that was littered with trash, or it might be the ash tree in your own backyard that had to be cut down because it was infested with the emerald ash borer. It might be a farm that’s been industrialized by the gas fracking industry or an urban community where a hazardous waste incinerator is about to be built. We have a deep emotional connection to the places in our lives. As the Australian philosopher Freya Mathews writes, these places “hold” us. When something happens to them, we feel grief, outrage, fear, stress. Often, the tendency is to hide those feelings, because, “Is it even appropriate to cry over a place?” Or we begin to ignore them. Deep down, we feel that this beloved place has abandoned us, and so we, in turn, abandon it. But a deep emotional connection remains with this place, and by actually going to visit it, as we would to a sick friend—which is what the places we love are—we discover that—surprise!—we strengthen the connection in a new, more creative way. Giving attention and beauty to wounded places is especially important now, when we are all dealing with both local ecological assaults and the huge threat of climate change. There are many ways of resisting and of working to develop important, sustainable ways of living under these challenges. But ultimately, what better way is there to assure not only our survival, but what I like to call our thrival, than to cultivate new relationships with these places that have given so much to us, as well as with ourselves and one another, than by giving back to them our creativity, attention, and sense of play and adventure?

When people think about a decimated forest or a former zinc smelter, “beauty” is often not what comes to mind. How do people create beauty in a devastated place that is so different from the place they originally fell in love with?

In my new book, I talk about different kinds of beauty. And, actually, the quest to find beauty in devastated places is a whole new kind of practice, a whole new discipline. Often, our judgment gets in the way of our ability to see beauty, like: “This is an old-growth clear-cut forest! What’s wrong with me that I am finding the silvery color of the stumps beautiful?” Sometimes, too, the damage itself is weirdly lovely, for example the luminous colors of the toxic water in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill in 2010. Sometimes we see humans or animals doing their touching best to thrive under difficult conditions, and that is beautiful. And when we actually make beauty for the place—that’s when we feel truly uplifted and, yes, joyful.

You discuss the importance of accepting places how they are now, not just remembering them for what they once were. Why is this acceptance so crucial to your work and in what way is it radical?

This question of acceptance has been a controversial aspect of the work! Some people claim that to accept a damaged place for what it is is to take a passive stance in the face of all that’s happening in the world. But really, it’s just the opposite. You have to accept the reality of any situation before you can truly be in a vital, engaged relationship with it—or act to change it. That’s true of accepting a scary medical diagnosis or the end of a love affair or the decreased beauty and vitality of the place you love. When I accept a place as it is, looking for the beauty it holds even now, and then express my consolation or gratitude by giving back some physical token of appreciation, several things happen. I realize what I can change and what I can’t change. I see the place for what it is, not what I wish it were or how I remember it. And, to go back again to the comparison with a sick friend—when your friend is ill, you don’t (hopefully you don’t) turn away from her. You go and sit with her, find out what her life is like now, and tell her about your life, hold her hand, just be with her. We can do the same kind of thing for places that are ailing. This approach is radical because it’s such a departure from how much of modern culture has been dealing with environmental damage over the past 50 years. We’ve concentrated on cleaning up the messes and staving off even worse situations, and we have not been attentive to the living places among us and our living relationships with them. Even as we work to change our current circumstances into something better, we can always find and make beauty in the here and now.

In the book you talk about holding Earth Exchanges. Can you explain what these are? Who can hold them?

An Earth Exchange is a simple way of exchanging gifts with a place. The place reveals itself to us in its current state—clearcut, polluted, overdeveloped—and we give back to it through sharing our stories with friends while we’re there and creating a simple gift for the place. The great thing about an Earth Exchange is that you can do it alone or with a large group. You can do it spontaneously or plan it for weeks in advance. You don’t need any kind of expertise, and you don’t have to haul in a lot of equipment. Plus, the place itself provides all the materials you need for your gift: sticks, stones, flowers, sand, driftwood. Many people make beauty out of trash which they then remove from the site. As I mentioned earlier, on June 16, we’ll have our annual Global Earth Exchange, when people all over the world do this practice, each in their own way. In Kabul, Afghanistan, a group of young peace activists take care of their permaculture garden. In Bali, members of a mountain village do a road clean-up or hold a traditional ceremony. In Oregon a group visits a clear-cut forest, in Missouri they make a mural for a town that was damaged by floods, in Texas a woman makes beauty for a neighborhood bordered by a lot of refineries. It’s a very inspiring, empowering event.

You lead workshops internationally. Is there a particular “wounded place” that inspires your work?

Our organization empowers and encourages others to go to the hurt places they love and give them gifts of spontaneous creativity. I myself live in a rural, conservative county in northeastern Pennsylvania, where there is a lot of gas drilling activity. But I am constantly noticing wounded places wherever I go, and my heart always goes out to them. And I find that, when I pause long enough to give them even the least little bit of attention and some simple offering, that I fall in love with the place. People all over the world—people with very diverse backgrounds, religions, cultures—have written us the same thing, that they tend to love their place even more when they’ve attended to it a bit. Every year in June—this year it’s June 16—we hold the Global Earth Exchange, a day when people around the world go to places that have fallen on hard times and make simple gifts of beauty for them. We put the stories and photos on the website and social media, and there’s a tremendous sense of camaraderie among all these diverse people who have taken some time to express their love for a place in fun, collaborative ways. There’s more information on our website—radicaljoyforhardtimes.org.

Do you think your work mourning environmentally devastated places is aligned with the broader environmental activism movement? Radical Joy for Hard Times is not directly about fighting carbon emissions, per se, but are the efforts at all interrelated?

Well, I want to emphasize that mourning is only part of what we do, and that may not even be a response for every person or in every circumstance. What we’re focused on is getting reacquainted with these loved, hurt places, spending time with them without busily trying to fix them, listening to them and to our own responses to them. The human relationship with nature is very rich, textured, ever unfolding. It’s emotional and physical and spiritual and practical. Radical Joy for Hard Times takes into account all these many aspects of our relationship to places. Personally, I think that all efforts to protect, love, and serve the Earth are aligned. I also think it’s possible to practice finding and making beauty for a place no matter what your particular focus or approach is. A large demonstration at an open-pit coal mine, for example, could include all the participants joining together in a song for the land or working together to create a mandala out of natural objects.

How are you celebrating Earth Day 2018?

This year I’ll be participating in Stephen Blackmer’s Earth Day service at his Church of the Woods in Canterbury, New Hampshire. Stephen was named “Priest of the Trees” in an article in Harper’s a couple of years ago. His congregation meets not in a building but in the woods and wetlands, the natural places that were the very first temples of all our ancestors and that continue to evoke awe and a sense of interconnectedness for so many of us. I’ve written about the link between spirituality and nature in the past, so I’m very excited about this opportunity to do a service with Stephen’s congregation. For the past few Earth Days, we’ve been having a clean-up in my little village of just under 300 people, so we’ll probably keep up that good tradition sometime during the week before the official Earth Day.

Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken Places by Trebbe Johnson, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2018 by Trebbe Johnson. Pre-order your copy here.

This article was written by Julia Sadowski

Julia is a Massachusetts native who thoroughly enjoys living on the west coast. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College with a BA in Politics, she spent time living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she supported in a third grade classroom as an AmeriCorps member. She eventually made her way to California, and before joining NAB, was the Event Coordinator at Books Inc in Berkeley. She loves working at NAB, and in particular enjoys helping to spread the word about new and exciting books! She also enjoys practicing yoga, reading advance copies of books long after their publication dates, and eating all of the delicious food Berkeley has to offer.

California’s Champions: Remarks by Terry Tamminen, CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation

This blog post and all media within were re-posted with permission from Ten Strands. you can find the original article here. For More from Ten Strands Visit: Tenstrands.org/news

The following are excerpts from the keynote address Terry Tamminen, CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, gave at the California Science Teachers Association 2017 Conference in Sacramento on Friday, October 13, 2017.

BY TERRY TAMMINEN

The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) is working around the globe on species protection and conservation issues, climate change, and empowering indigenous and local activists. But nothing we do is more important than advancing the cause of ecoliteracy.

All of the environmental challenges we face have one thing in common: they are caused by environmental illiteracy. But I also believe that these problems can be fought with a secret weapon: all of you!

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, governments and non-governmental organizations have spent countless hours and billions of dollars to try to educate the public via the news media and other information channels, field trips outside of the classroom, documentaries, and museum exhibits. Yet so far, this investment has made very little difference in slowing down the march of devastating climate change impacts and the loss of natural habitat and species. In part this is because up to now great environmental education efforts and programs have been very well researched, documented, and scientifically sound, but overall remain uncoordinated.

To get lasting and large-scale change, we need to turn the tide in America and beyond. We need to combine these programs—like so many oars rowing the boat in the same direction to make it go faster and not just in circles—and take them directly to the decision-makers of the future: our students in public schools. There are no shortcuts.

That’s why LDF has chosen to invest in organizations working with the State of California, because we believe California has unique tools to assist teachers in teaching science using the environment for context and we know that environmental literacy and science are inextricably intertwined. Moreover, science teachers in California have influence beyond their classrooms and even beyond their state. I have seen first-hand how California is an environmental leader in the US and around the world. As you know, California is the sixth-largest economy in the world with the largest population of any US state—over 12% of the entire country lives here—and the biggest school system with over 6 million public school students, producing about 400,000 graduates each year who go out into the world and begin to influence others.

We believe, as I’m sure you do, students who are environmentally literate will make informed decisions as consumers and voters, be better stewards of their own environment, and will be equipped to take advantage of green STEM-related job opportunities.

One example of this is Leonardo DiCaprio. He was inspired as a young boy by the things he learned about nature in science class at school in Los Angeles. He credits his childhood teachers with helping instill in him a passion to protect the environment (oh yes, and to go into acting).

And my connection to science education and environmental literacy in California is also personal. Supporting the implementation of former Senator Fran Pavley’s Education and the Environment Initiative law is how I met my wife Leslie, one of the architects of that law!

The importance of environmental literacy may best be illustrated by the level of illiteracy that exists around climate change, and the very real impacts to the planet and economy that result. California teachers are especially critical in helping students understand climate change and to fundamentally alter this dynamic. Today only 45% of American adults think climate change is a “very serious problem” and in China, which is the world’s top greenhouse gas polluter after the US, barely 18% classify climate change as an issue.

But who can blame people who have not been educated about how these issues relate to them and their families—and if they are motivated to take action how to be good stewards of the environment, how to make informed choices, or how to elect leaders who understand science and will base their policies on facts?

I need not tell you that climate scientists warned us for decades that increased warming of the planet caused by our carbon emissions would result by the early 21stcentury in things such as more severe and damaging storms, longer-lasting droughts, and year-round wildfires. Indeed, 2017 will set new records for all of those predictions and the breathtaking toll on human life ecosystems and the economy—all because we failed to heed the science and take action sooner.

Which raises the question of why? In addition to a general lack of climate science taught in schools or to decision-makers in all walks of life, we are also up against the climate-denial industry that is pouring millions of dollars into the education system in states across the country—a denial industry that is emboldened by the Trump administration which is empowering people and policies that openly question the truth and urgency of climate science predictions.

It’s therefore more important than ever that California continues to lead the nation in its commitment to having a science, civics, and environmentally literate population, especially as coordinated anti-science policy across the country is a growing threat which is the result of a very simple three-part strategy by climate deniers: Money + Media = Laws.

  • Money: A 2013 study by Drexel University found that 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate-denial organizations from 2003 to 2010. I recommend you read Dark Money by Jane Mayer for much more information on the resources lined up against science and common sense.
  • Media: Money is pumped into conservative-leaning news media like Breitbart and National Review to question the consensus science of climate change.
  • Laws: And that combination of deep, dark pockets plus misleading media leads to voters and lawmakers who are fooled or emboldened to take the nation backwards. For example, the fossil-fuel funded American Legislative Exchange Commission, better known as ALEC, has been drafting anti-science bills for decades—such as the dubiously named “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act.” Language from these sample pieces of legislation has been used by biased lawmakers around the country.

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the laws drafted from these examples is their vagueness. The language of bills in Oklahoma, Indiana, Alabama, Idaho, and Texas includes terms like “academic freedom” and “controversial subjects” to disguise the true purpose of these laws, which is to give educators permission to stray from established peer-reviewed science on climate change and evolution toward theories that align more with their personal ideologies but are not based in science. If passed, these types of laws undo much of the hard work being done in states to get the Next Generation Science Standards adopted.

And lest you think that legislative templates don’t become actual laws let me give you just two examples.

  • Last May the Alabama Senate voted to adopt House Joint Resolution 78 which empowers state and local education authorities to promote the “academic freedom” of science teachers in the state’s public schools to say that “Biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” are considered “controversial.”
  • And New Mexico’s Public Education Department recently unveiled a proposed replacement to its statewide science standards, including guidelines to minimize teaching of the rise in global temperatures, remove references to human activity as the primary driver of climate change, remove or weaken the mere mention of evolution, and remove references to the actual age of the Earth as being 4.6 billion years.And now this blending of money and media has gone in another direction even more direct and insidious. This year the climate misinformation movement is directly contacting teachers. Here’s a recent mailing by the Heartland Institute, its report entitled, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming,” sent to 200,000 teachers across the US. Of course there is no real disagreement when the world’s scientists under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have concluded with more than 99% certainty that climate change is real and humans are the primary cause. In fact it’s hard to find almost any other scientific endeavor that has more consensus around those facts except perhaps that the world is no longer thought to be flat!It’s worth spending a few moments on the disinformation campaign of the Heartland Institute because you need to recognize the difference between propaganda and valuable supplemental materials you might receive. The Heartland Institute is spending an estimated $3 million to $6 million on a direct-mail marketing campaignto get this professionally-produced junk science publication into the hands of public school teachers who teach science in the US. The look and feel of this bogus report is very similar to the front covers of science instructional materials, even California’s own Education and the Environment Initiative Curriculum.But while I’m sure you are all too smart for that, unfortunately many of your peers in other states are led astray. An independent report commissioned by Scholastic on the preferences of teachers in using supplemental education materials states that a whopping 8 out of 10 teachers will open and evaluate unsolicited teaching materials. A report last year in Science showed that just barely half of US science teachers teach that humans are responsible for climate change, and at least a third give mixed messages to students suggesting that scientists believe that natural factors are responsible.Why? Well, one answer might be found in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science which says that religious and political beliefs override education when it comes to accepting the mainstream science of climate change.Given all this, what can we do? What can you do to teach science in the face of such well-funded misinformation? There are many reasons for hope in California:
    • The National Science Teachers Association encourages science teachers to send them the unsolicited propaganda from the Heartland Institute and they will recycle it! In return teachers will receive free access to their ebook, Ocean’s Effect on Weather and Climate. And, we commend CSTA for its position on Climate Change.
    • To further combat misinformation, the Alliance for Climate Education has resources and plans to roll out lesson plans and in-class activities to accompany new video resources to support teachers in this area, as well as a “rapid response” curriculum to support teachers to teach climate in areas of the country that were recently hit by hurricanes and other climate-related events as they unfold.
    • And even more significantly, California’s Next Generation Science Standards (CA-NGSS) support climate change education, and this position is further reinforced by the presence of California’s Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs) in the new Science Framework. This means that as educators you do not need to hold back on teaching students about how human activities affect global warming, and that decisions to reduce the impacts of global warming depend on understanding climate science, engineering capabilities, and social dynamics.
  • These EP&Cs are unique to California and were created as a result of the 2003 passage of California’s Education and the Environment Initiative Law. They examine the interdependence of human societies and natural systems and appreciate systems thinking and the connection and interdependence between humans and their environment.
  • These EP&Cs have been integrated into the 2016 Science Framework and 2016 History–Social Science Framework, and will significantly be integrated into the science and history–social science instructional materials during the next adoption. The California Department of Education also engaged a multiyear, multistakeholder process to develop California’s Blueprint for Environmental Literacy.

Superintendent Tom Torlakson appointed the Environmental Literacy Steering Committee to implement the Blueprint statewide. LDF knows that EP&Cs, committees, and you educators won’t accomplish the goal of ecoliteracy alone, so that’s why we are proud to work with non-government organizations like Ten Strands, TreePeople, and others who are partnering with state agencies and state public schools.

It’s also why we have committed $3 million over three years to help all of you achieve the vision for true, widespread environmental literacy. Those funds support teaching science in the context of the environment by providing professional development focusing on school districts as the unit of change, linking nonformal providers of environmental education and green employers to schools, and helping districts access funding.

Does this approach work? Take for example Katherin Konomi (4th Grade Teacher), from the Burlingame School District, who said, “My biggest accomplishment as a teacher was learning how to take students outside of the classroom to work on science. It is the biggest learning experience you can offer your students. I was able to comprehend that you don’t need a big and elaborate lesson to take students outside. Taking students into their environment to observe dirt and rocks can have such a huge impact on fostering the relationship of your students to the world of science.”

Or Jose Flores, a high school teacher at Brawley Unified School District, who reports how students might use this education: “Students can truly have a voice, and express that voice by attending school board and city council meetings to engage in civil discourse with their elected officials to enact positive change in their community in addressing social and environmental issues.”

Those testimonials are validation of both the California Common Core State Standards and the CA-NGSS which emphasize the importance of student-centered instruction, hands-on learning, and real-world learning experiences. Environment-based science and history–social science education using engaging local contexts offer a powerful entry point for such experiences that students never forget.

In sum, we know this is hard work even without the misinformation campaigns working against us or the fact that we’re starting all of this too late to educate the last generation of voters, consumers, educators, and activists who might have prevented some of the impacts of climate change and species extinction that we are already witnessing. There are no shortcuts, but California and LDF have given you tools, and we hope you will use them.

Shakespeare wrote, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” I pose to you that we are upon such a sea at this moment and it is only ecoliteracy that can help everyone understand this tide and shape our future…before it shapes us. And I believe that you are our champions who will teach the next generation to do just that. Thank you!

This article was written by Terry Tamminen

From his youth in Australia to career experiences in Europe, Africa, China, and across the United States, Terry has developed expertise in business, farming, education, non-profit, the environment, the arts, and government. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and later Cabinet Secretary, the Chief Policy Advisor to the Governor, where Terry was the architect of many groundbreaking sustainability policies, including California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, the Hydrogen Highway Network, and the Million Solar Roofs initiative. In 2010 Terry co-founded the R20 Regions of Climate Action, a new public-private partnership, bringing together sub-national governments, businesses, financial markets, NGOs, and academia to implement measurable, large-scale, low-carbon and climate resilient economic development projects that can simultaneously solve the climate crisis and build a sustainable global economy. Since 2007 he has provided advice to Pegasus Capital Advisors and numerous global businesses on sustainability and “green” investing. In 2016, Terry joined the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation as CEO. An accomplished author, Terry’s books include “Cracking the Carbon Code: The Keys to Sustainable Profits in the New Economy” (Palgrave Macmillan). In 2011, Terry was one of six finalists for the Zayed Future Energy Prize and The Guardian ranked Terry No. 1 in its “Top 50 People Who Can Save the Planet.”

Lyla June: Warrior for Peace

Lyla June is a Native American (Dine´/ Cheyenne) poet, peacemaker, musician and activist dedicated to revitalizing spiritual relationships with Mother Earth and cultivating forgiveness and reconciliation. We’re pleased to be hosting her on the main stage at the 2018 Bioneers Conference for a keynote address this fall. However, this year will not be Lyla’s first appearance at Bioneers…

In 2011, I organized the first annual Poetry Slam at the Bioneers Conference Youth Unity Center, which has evolved into a brave space where youth challenge the system, reveal personal trauma in search of healing and articulate their aspirations for a better world.

My original vision was a much smaller one, a competition among poets with audience members deciding who would advance to the next round with one winner emerging from the final round.

The Thursday before that first poetry slam, I met Lyla June at Just Us for Food Justice (JU4FJ), a one-day Bioneers event where young food justice activists meet, build the movement, learn inner resilience skills and share stories. Gerardo Marin, whose big heart and clear thinking make him a close ally to many Bay Area front line activists, invited Lyla to lead the spoken word session at JU4FJ. Lyla kicked off the session with a poem she wrote called Dawn that begins with:

“It’s dawn

the sun is conquering the sky

and my grandmother and I

are heaving prayers at the horizon”

The poem interprets the complex meaning of the word “hozho” from her Native Dine´ language, and is an awe-inspiring blend of traumatic history, sacred worldview and transformation. The power and beauty of Lyla’s words blew me away. I immediately invited her to the Poetry Slam.

Two days later at the Slam, not surprisingly, Lila was chosen as the winner. When she was being presented the $75 prize money, she said, “Screw winning, screw hierarchy!” and she began to share the money with all the other poets. This spontaneous act of revolt against the competitive structure ignited the audience. Without any prompting, audience members dug into their pockets to contribute to the purse, swelling the prize money to more than double its original amount, which was equitably distributed among all the poets.

I was delighted to see my original idea dismantled to have something much more elegant, respectful, and acknowledging take its place. Now at the Slam, it is common for seasoned poets, as well as first time poets, to rip open people’s hearts with their raw emotion and authenticity. It is a dynamic spontaneous place of celebration, hard truths, and healing.

On the Writing for Peace website Lyla wrote, “Writing for peace means: Praying before each line is written that the Great Spirit’s message comes through. The root word of genius is, ‘genie,’ or spirit. And so, the true genius does not take credit for her/his work. Rather s/he celebrates the fact that they were able to move out of the way enough for Spirit’s masterpiece to flow through them.” Lyla’s poetry is one way she expresses her dedication to forgiveness and fuels her passion as a non-violent warrior for peace.

At the 2017 Geography of Hope conference, Lyla spoke about the power of forgiveness, recalling her time as a Water Protector at Standing Rock when police fired rubber bullets; threw tear gas grenades; sprayed mace; attacked with dogs; and, in 20 degree temperatures, used fire hoses against non-violent protesters who were trying to protect the water supply and cultural artifacts of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe from the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

She described how she participated in a circle of forgiveness at the Morton County Jail where other Water Protectors were being held and where women were being strip searched. A thousand people surrounded the jail and “sang songs of forgiveness, of life, and beauty and healing.”

Lyla said, “We must forgive… but forgiveness does not mean you stop fighting for what is right. On the contrary, forgiveness allows you to fight more effectively for what is right and it cleanses you of the same hatred you are fighting against.”

We are excited and honored that Lyla June will be giving a keynote presentation at the 2018 Bioneers Conference, October 19-21.