Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina exposed the fault lines of American society: racial injustice, environmental neglect, economic abandonment, and government failure. It wasn’t just a natural disaster. It was a political one. And for many in the Gulf South, the aftermath never ended.
The hard truth is, the vulnerabilities Katrina revealed have never gone away. Recent cuts to FEMA, alongside the rising frequency and severity of climate-driven disasters, show how easily the failures of 2005 could be repeated. Without real investment in preparedness and equity, the next crisis will leave the same communities to bear the heaviest burdens.
But from the devastation of Katrina, a movement took root. One grounded in resistance, reclamation, and the radical act of staying—of returning, rebuilding, and reimagining what justice can look like in the face of ongoing crisis. In this issue, we reflect on the legacy of Katrina and uplift the organizers, leaders, and communities still fighting for a future defined not by survival alone, but by dignity, self-determination, and repair. From Colette Pichon Battle’s call for expansive climate justice to on-the-ground actions led by a coalition of local leaders and organizations, this anniversary is not just a moment of remembrance—it’s a renewed call to mobilize.
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Colette Pichon Battle on the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina Reflecting on the Past, Mobilizing for the Future
In the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf South, environmental justice leader Colette Pichon Battle has remained a fierce advocate for the communities it left behind. Born and raised in Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, Colette speaks powerfully to the racism, systemic neglect, and environmental mismanagement Katrina exposed—and the hard-earned lessons it continues to teach.
As the anniversary approaches, Colette calls for a more expansive, intersectional movement that recognizes the deep links between climate, gender, migration, and human rights. Only by addressing the root causes of injustice, she argues, can we reimagine a just and sustainable future.
Two decades later, the movement sparked by Hurricane Katrina is still growing, The Katrina 20 Week of Action (Aug. 24–31) is a chance to deepen our solidarity, uplift frontline voices, and take meaningful steps toward climate justice. Led by Taproot Earth and partners across the Gulf South, this year’s commemoration is rooted in resistance, repair, and the right to remain, return, and thrive.
Here’s how you can take action:
Ride in Solidarity: Join the Katrina 20: Impact Ride from anywhere by walking, biking, kayaking, or rolling 7 miles in solidarity with Gulf South communities. This symbolic distance reflects the storm’s 144-mile path divided by 20. #RideTheStorm
More Resources: Resilience, Policy, and Local Action
For those looking to dig deeper into how communities are building resilience and advancing climate justice in the face of systemic challenges, these resources offer in-depth analysis and actionable strategies:
New Orleans, 20 Years After Katrina: A research series from Brookings Metro and The Data Center explores how New Orleans has changed since Katrina—and what work still lies ahead. Topics include housing, civic engagement, infrastructure, environmental justice, and more.
These resources are especially valuable for policymakers, planners, advocates, and funders working to align local action with long-term climate justice goals.
Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse
How can we create change that heals, not harms? In this four-week live course, activist and author Kazu Haga brings together nonviolent action, trauma healing, and spiritual practice to help us transform social movements from the inside out. Learn tools for building connection-based activism and responding to injustice with both courage and care.
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin grew up in extreme poverty in the northern rainforest of Guatemala during Guatemala’s brutal decades-long civil war. Shaped by those experiences, he has committed his life to alleviating the conditions that cause suffering by employing his entrepreneurial spirit and regenerative vision to restructure the food system. His vision of regeneration goes beyond merely following a set of practices; it expands the way we view the role of farmers and how we design livestock systems so they are humane and harmonious with the essence of animals’ intrinsic natures.
Reginaldo is the founder of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance and co-founder and CEO of Tree-Range Farms where he has designed a regenerative poultry operation based on the environmental conditions that poultry had evolved in prior to domestication. In 2018, he was awarded a lifetime Ashoka Fellowship for his work, and he is the author of “In the Shadow of Green Man: My Journey from Poverty and Hunger to Food Security and Hope.”
This article is an edited version of the transcript of a Bioneers Conference presentation by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin.
REGINALDO HASLETT-MARROQUIN: I grew up in extreme poverty, but up to now, my only source of true wealth has come from those conditions that others called poverty. I have always felt like one of the wealthiest people on the planet, not in the way we typically understand wealth, but from the perspective that I am living to the optimal potential that the evolutionary blueprint of the Earth gave me to live with. All the money in the world won’t do that for you. It can only be done from within.
I was raised to think beyond immediate concerns. One of the fascinating things that that does to your mind is that you learn to see things as a whole and think about systems, so I’m not thinking just about a farm or raising chickens. Those are not systems.
The Concentration of the Global Food System
The global food system’s annual sales are somewhere around 10 trillion dollars. At the top there are a small number of corporations that have a controlling share of their sector. Tyson Foods alone controls 75 percent of the poultry sales in this country. Four companies control 75%-90 % of global grain sales. How the heck did we get here? We got here because we gave up ownership, control, and governance of the most important things in our planetary survival system—food and water.
Leaving Guatemala and coming to the U.S., I encountered a massive-scale food system. I studied it thoroughly and looked at every sector: meat in general–beef, pork, poultry– grain, fruits, vegetables, etc. They all exist within a very large pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is a mass accumulation of ownership and control. If you’re going to change a system like that, you have to go back many thousands of years of human history to understand what has worked and what hasn’t. We have to start by going back to the planet’s biophysical and chemical processes that for billions of years have been regenerating and developing life.
Regeneration is How the Planet Operates
It wasn’t Robert Rodale or anyone else who came up with the idea of regeneration. Regeneration is the natural condition of the planet. It’s not merely about practices on the land; it has to do with the whole planet and its ecosystems and micro-climates. To understand regeneration, we need to develop a deep relationship with life and living systems. We have to understand that we don’t just work with nature, we are part of nature. We’re living creatures made out of the elements of the Earth. We are indigenous to the Earth.
There is no one who is not Indigenous to the planet. In saying that, I am making a distinction between being native to a territory and being indigenous to planet Earth.
That is the starting point for regenerative systems thinking. We don’t start with practices on how to farm or raise chickens, though my story happens to be centered on the chicken which are the descendants of jungle fowl. How did I approach raising chickens through the lens of nature’s processes? I placed photosynthesis at the center of the design. Photosynthesis is the primary process of life on our planet in which cosmic energy is turned into very complicated outputs, most importantly glucose, which is considered the molecule of life. Out of that come hundreds and hundreds of carbon-based chains. Life on the planet is made of carbon. That’s the way we should understand carbon, not as a commodity that is traded and offset. Commodifying carbon is actually a form of colonization.
Decoding Nature’s Processes into Farming Practices
The outputs of the photosynthetic process are grasses, leaves, twigs, fruits, vegetables, etc. that are in turn ingested by animals which includes people. That collective chewing process and digestion by animals can be understood as the planet’s digestive tract. The analogy is that each individual is equivalent to one of the trillions of bacteria in our guts.
Energy transformation takes place in three basic layers. First, photosynthesis builds the structure of vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, etc. Then, animals are nourished by those outputs of photosynthesis; that’s the second layer of the mass-scale transformation of energy. The third layer occurs when animal waste breaks down and feeds the microbiological systems. Those are three places that we can codify the processes of regeneration that have been ongoing for billions of years.
Understanding that permits us to start codifying those processes of nature into farming practices. That understanding is critical to, in our case, producing chickens regeneratively, but I want to be clear: there is no such thing as a regenerative product; there is only the regeneration of systems that deliver energy in expressions and forms assembled in a way that we can harvest as food. But we don’t produce them. We merely take care of a process by which energy went from non-edible to something we can harvest, trade, market and eat.
This is how we approach the process. Of all of the options for animal operations, I believe that we have found one that has the most social and economic alignment with the small global farmers who, according to the U.N., grow 70 percent of the world’s food. There are over 700 million farms that operate with less than 25 hectares. Every one of them can raise poultry. Most of them can’t raise other animals in a way that regenerates ecosystems. That’s why we picked chickens.
If you want to do something regeneratively, ask the species. Ask the oats, ask the trees, ask the chickens. Ask and listen and learn so you can acquire the right knowledge to do things with the Indigenous intellect as opposed to what we have been forced to memorize during the process of domestication that we call education. We have to un-domesticate ourselves and decolonize our minds and our methodology.
We looked to the jungle fowl–ancestors of the domesticated chicken. Jungle fowl and their chicken descendants don’t like to be out in the open where they are vulnerable to predators and where there is too much sun. They are naturally drawn to trees for shade and protection, so if my goal is to use that ancestral blueprint to design a system that will optimize energy transformation, then I have to plant trees. I live in Minnesota, where, as in many other regions in the US,hazelnuts, elderberry, and other similar species thrive.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, chickens and hazelnut trees had a gathering, and discussed their symbiotic relationship. Hazelnut said: “I need a lot of nitrogen to produce nuts.” And the chicken said: “When the hawks and eagles come around, I need a place for protection,” so the hazelnut said: “Unlike our European cousins that created trunks and became trees, we are going to grow like shrubs. We’ll be multi-layered so that we can create 100 percent cover and nothing can see you.”
Hazelnut trees can take up 350 to 400 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Their roots can travel seven-and-a-half feet in every direction. They grow 12-feet high and 12-feet wide, creating a mass-scale network for capturing energy and transforming it into superb nutrient-dense food.
We now have layers of energy transformation. We are learning from the species. We know how to take that information and codify it into agronomical processes, protocols and specifications such as the right density of animals on the land we have. We can figure out how much nitrogen will concentrate in certain areas and then determine how we can spread out the chickens to distribute the nitrogen more evenly so there is no excess runoff and contamination of the groundwater.
We are harvesting the energy–hazelnuts, elderberries, meat, eggs, timber, and non-timber forest products such as mushrooms. Some of the energy, such as the manure and chicken feathers, is not edible. We put those through a process of bio-decomposition that makes super fertilizers that go back into the grain, vegetable, medicinal herb, and agroforestry productions in a circular system.
Building a Model to Scale up for Systems Change
Using an energy-based formula to calculate that circularity, we estimate that on average, we only harvest between 30 to 40 percent of the total energy of the system. The other 60 to 70 percent accumulates in the ecosystem. We call that the regenerative factor. But building just one farm unit, or what we refer to as a “poultry-centered regenerative system,” is not sufficient. If you want to achieve a system level outcome, you’ve got to start thinking bigger than that, so we launched a nonprofit called the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance. We are developing curriculum, coordinating training, and developing teams to do research. All of that allows us to share the model and to contribute to building a regenerative, equitable, and socially just agriculture sector. We are focused on scaling up a systems-level regenerative poultry solution that restores ecological balance, produces nourishing food, and puts money back into the hands of farmers and food chain workers.
And with the nonprofit in place, we were able to buy a poultry processing facility in Iowa and to launch the Tree-Range Chicken brand, which you can now buy anywhere in the country. We also launched a transportation company that takes the chickens from the farms to the processing plant, and we are about to make a decision on whether to build our own freezing facility. We have entered into partnership with the state. They will finance the development of the concept for an industrial park.
With all of these components, we can start playing a little bit of music and directing the orchestra. As more chickens are produced and consumed under this regenerative system based on the ancestral blueprint of the habitat and lifeways of jungle fowl, more farmers on more acreage get involved, more of this regenerative ecosystem is formed, and change is happening faster. We are beginning to take back ownership, control and governance of at least one agricultural sector.
We don’t have to create profit in the way that the colonizing, extractive mind understands it, in which someone gains and someone loses. In the context of the Indigenous way of thinking, profit includes quality of life and regeneration, being part of a community, and having good food and shelter that was paid for as part of the process. That’s how we decolonize profit and change the system. We call that way of thinking an intellectual insurgency.
Photo by Jason Halley, California State University, Chico
by Cynthia Daley, Ph.D.
Cynthia Daley, and co-founder and Director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture & Resilient Systems at California State University, Chico, is a nationally recognized leader in regenerative agriculture. In 2006, she established the Regenerative/Organic Dairy Program in collaboration with leaders in the organic dairy industry, creating one of the first programs of its kind in the western United States. Dr. Daley has been involved in dozens of research projects and mentor networks with farmers across California and the country.
Research is establishing how critically important soil health is to the long-term success of agriculture and how effective regenerative soil health practices (minimizing soil disturbance, keeping the soil covered as much as possible, and maximizing crop diversity) can be at sequestering carbon and other greenhouse gases, and increasing fertility and water storage, and this is true for all production practices, management styles, soil types, and ecoregions.
The best way to keep soil covered is to maintain living roots in the ground because they feed the soil with carbon. Living plants use photosynthesis to create carbohydrates to feed themselves and also to discharge carbon into the soil to feed soil microbes. Healthy soils have a very diverse microbiome. Diversity in the soil is just as important as it is in the human microbiome.
But crop diversity is difficult for many growers to grasp because for the last five decades they have been told to specialize, to do one thing—grow corn, for example, fence-row to fence-row, and as a matter of fact, take out the fence rows; you don’t need those anymore because you’re not going to raise livestock.
We are now finding that was a huge mistake. Monocrops are far more vulnerable to diseases and pest infestations. We need to diversify farming operations with cropping systems that are layered so we can spread out the risk. If farmers only grow one crop and it fails or the price is low that year, they will have big problems. When a farmer grows a diverse mix of crops and cover-crops, those plant roots secrete a mix of exudates that feed a whole host of diverse biology that build resilience and fertility in the soil.
And we need to bring the livestock back because they perform important functions in the regenerative system. They can eat down and terminate a cover-crop and leave behind manure and urine that are beneficial to soil health.
Changing the Farming Culture
As effective as these principles are, it’s not easy to get farmers to change the way they do things, so, when I work with farmers, we first discus context. What is their process of production? Why are they on that land? How did they get there? What are their goals and aspirations? These are the kinds of things we need to know before we can design an appropriate conservation plan for their farm that can result in a meaningful change in their practices.
This approach is part of the nine-step process for the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS). We ask why they’re in the business of farming. You would not believe how often that is a difficult question for some growers to answer. We want to know who needs to be at the table and who makes the decisions. Those are important aspects of context. We work with them to understand their future resource base, and sometimes that can take weeks to answer because farmers are so busy solving urgent problems and farming that they aren’t thinking about those things.
There is no question that conventional agriculture is contributing to the environmental and climate crises, but that’s a difficult conversation to have because no growers want to think they’re doing things wrong and creating problems, so that’s not a topic I tend to discuss with them because they will tune me out. I might as well go home. The conversation’s over.
However, when thinking critically about a farming operation, the biggest resource concern is water. Water quality and supply are critical issues and clearly agriculture is a big part of the nation’s water problems. There’s no doubt about that and ignoring it has been a real challenge because you have to acknowledge you have a problem before you can fix it.
So, when I talk with growers, initially, it’s not about climate or carbon, but when they begin to understand how carbon is linked to water–higher levels of soil carbon increase water holding capacity in soil and reduce erosion–that’s an easier conversation to have.
How we talk to farmers is so important if we want to work effectively with them to change the way they farm. We first want to understand how they are feeling about certain issues. If they are reacting negatively with anger or angst, it’s an indication that we need to sort that out first before we can make any real progress. There needs to be a revelation on their part to buy in. There’s a lot of psychology involved in helping farmers change the way they produce food, and that’s not how I’m trained, but boy does it have an impact on what I’m doing, so I’ve had to figure it out.
We need to meet them where they are. Bottom line economics, water, livelihood, longevity, and legacy are the main issues.“I don’t want to lose the family farm. I want my kids to be able to farm.” That’s their context, and it’s an important one, so once we help them establish that and work through some of those decisions, then the rest becomes a little easier. We can then start talking about how to farm through a carbon lens if what they really want to do is build a legacy on their farm that they can hand off to the next generation.
Building Healthy Soil Makes Farms Resilient
We’ve got lots of tools in the toolbox: no till, multi-species cover-crops, Integrated Pest Management, managed rotational grazing, etc. How we apply those tools depends on the context and the direction that farmers want their farming operation to go in. If you are an orchardist who wants to produce regenerative almonds, I will choose different tools than I would for a farmer growing a variety of row-crop vegetables that are rotating among several different fields. That’s a different context that requires different tools, but the same soil health principles apply. We need to minimize disturbance and keep the soil covered either with cover crops or by maintaining an armored layer of mulch on the soil.
The foundation for changing to a regenerative way of farming is soil management. I use the acronym BTS for degraded soil; it stands for “beat-to-shit soil.” (Obviously, I don t use the term when I’m talking directly to farmers). BTS soil has been overworked and abused. It looks like powder. There’s no tilth. You pick it up and it blows in the wind. BTS soil has no air space so it compacts when rain hits it, and water runs off instead of infiltrating and becoming available to the plants.
There’s an awful lot of farm land with BTS soil. You can see it on farms where the wind is whipping up clouds of dust. There are times during almond harvest during which you cannot cross the road because visibility is so poor. Farmers acknowledge this is a problem and are open to discussing how to fix it.
Park the Tractor
As I mentioned, one of the key soil health principles is to minimize disturbance. The number one way that farmers disturb the soil is with tillage or plowing. Many farmers engage in what I call recreational tillage. When they invest 100 grand in a tractor, they want to drive it. My sister is a full-time farmer. Her tractor probably cost more than my house. It has GPS and she rides in the tractor knitting away for the grandkids while the tractor is plowing. The only thing she has to do is stop knitting long enough to turn the tractor around and engage the GPS again, and away she goes down the field.
Farmers really enjoy running their tractors. They like a nice, clean tilled filled. To them that’s beautiful. But is bare soil really beautiful? There’s nothing living in it. They are abusing and degrading the soil with tillage by releasing carbon into the atmosphere and creating erosion of valuable top soil. Tillage also destroys important soil species such as mycorrhizal fungi which attach to the plant root and gather water and nutrients for the plant.
The way we try to make farmers understand the consequences of tillage is to involve them as co-investigators in the research projects that we conduct on their farms. Doing that has dramatically changed attitudes and converted farmers to evangelists for soil health. The way we will make real change and scale up regenerative practices is by having farmers talking to other farmers and sharing what they have learned and implemented successfully on their farms.
Dale Tyson of Heyday Farms is a grower in Palo Verde, California. When we started working with him, he had some of the worst soil I’ve ever seen. It was like a sandbox. In two years, we turned that soil around; it’s now accumulating carbon. No more greenhouse gas emissions; instead he is drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil where it’s a benefit. You should hear Dale talk now. He’s got 4H and Future Farmers of America kids coming to his farm, and he’s teaching them what he has learned.
The neighbors are wondering what the hell Dale is doing. How is he able to produce that much hay when he is not out there tilling? His plow is now a lawn ornament and a testimony to the fact that he’s given it up. He’s really proud of that and has become an effective advocate. We believe if we empower the farmers, they will help the transition, and that is the best way to scale up these practices. It will take people like Dale Tyson to go against the cultural norms and try something new when the old practices have failed.
Another such pioneer is Danny Unruh, a Mennonite walnut grower just outside of Chico, California. Danny may be facing skepticism and ridicule at the local coffee shop about the weeds in his field, but he is more concerned about the biology in his 200 acres of walnuts. As a result of adopting healthy soil practices, his input costs are only $800 dollars an acre compared to his neighbors’ which are about $2200 because heathy soil does not need expensive inputs. That saves farmers money and makes their operations more profitable.
Kicking Bad Habits Creates New Possibilities
40% of any fertilizer application is lost to leaching and to volatilization, releasing nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. The challenge is to convince farmers to break their fertilizer and pesticide addictions and to open them up to the possibilities that regenerative practices offer by building the farm as a self-sustaining ecosystem in which those inputs are not needed. The paradigm shift is to get growers to see that a field of cover crops is beautiful and that having bare soil is an undesirable and counterproductive way of growing food.
Farming can absolutely be a way to help mitigate the climate crisis. These practices are ready to implement now. It’s not a future technology. We can do this, but it will take changing a farming culture that is deeply ingrained. Albert Einstein purportedly said, “We cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Scaling up means elevating early adopters who have skin in the game, who have been successful and profitable, and who have something to show other growers. We host field days and provide breakfast burritos and hot coffee (it’s always helpful to have good food). Danny Unrue’s wife makes sweet rolls that are amazing. People come out just for the sweet rolls and tolerate everything else. Field days elevate the best regenerative growers and expose conventional farmers to proven soil health practices.
Our goal is to educate, educate, educate. Climate-smart farming needs to taught in every agricultural college across the country. That’s going to be critical.
The beloved Buddhist teacher and intellectual Joanna Macy died on July 19, 2025. A profound teacher, author, and activist, Joanna was a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology. As the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, she created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change that brought a new way of seeing the world as a wider global community. Her many books include Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power; World as Lover, World as Self; Widening Circles, A Memoir;Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects; and many more. Joanna was a deeply influential figure to those of us at Bioneers and to the wider community, and we are so grateful for her presence and impact on our collective endeavors over the years.
Across the globe, the same forces driving ecological collapse—extractivism, patriarchy, and unchecked capitalism—are also fueling the erosion of women’s rights. It’s no accident. As the ecofeminist movement gains momentum, more women are naming the connection between environmental degradation and gender injustice, not just as parallel crises, but as deeply intertwined expressions of the same broken systems.
But this isn’t just a story of harm. It’s also a story of power. In the face of compounding threats, women are leading some of the most effective, grounded, and visionary responses to the climate crisis, often without recognition or adequate resources. From land defense and reforestation to community resilience and governance, they’re reshaping what climate leadership looks like from the ground up.
In this issue, we hear from women leaders on the frontlines—activists, organizers, and advocates whose work challenges dominant systems and builds new ones rooted in care, equity, and collective power. Their stories offer not only resistance, but a radically hopeful blueprint for what comes next.
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Women’s Earth Alliance: Collective Power for a Resilient Planet
What happens when women rise together to protect the Earth? In this inspiring talk, Amira Diamond, Melinda Kramer, and Kahea Pacheco, the visionary co-directors of Women’s Earth Alliance, share stories from a global network of grassroots women leaders confronting the world’s most urgent ecological and social challenges. From defending land and water to advancing climate resilience, they reveal how shared leadership, deep collaboration, and community-based solutions are transforming the future one region, one relationship, and one ripple at a time.
WEA: Women’s Climate Leadership Is Democracy in Action
Across the globe, grassroots women leaders are reshaping what climate action and democracy look like on the ground. In this powerful article from Women’s Earth Alliance, discover how investing in women’s leadership strengthens civic participation, builds more inclusive policies, and creates lasting environmental solutions. From Kenya to Indonesia to the U.S., these stories show how local leadership can drive global change—and why supporting women on the frontlines is one of the most impactful moves we can make right now.
Intersectional Environmental Justice: Empowering Women on the Frontlines
In this powerful conversation, four visionary women leaders explore the intersection of climate justice, gender equity, and grassroots action. While the dialogue took place a couple of years ago, the insights remain deeply relevant—especially as climate emergencies escalate and democratic systems continue to falter. Featuring Osprey Orielle Lake (WECAN), Leila Salazar Lopez (Amazon Watch), Amira Diamond (WEA), and moderated by Zainab Salbi (Daughters for Earth), the conversation is a call to shift power, amplify frontline women’s leadership, and listen—really listen—to those shaping the solutions we need.
Leading from the Feminine: Exploring the Heart of Transformative Leadership
As women rise to the forefront of climate action, many are doing so by drawing on values long dismissed by dominant systems: empathy, emotional wisdom, relational intelligence, and care. Leading from the Feminine, a twice-monthly newsletter from Bioneers’ Nina Simons and Anneke Campbell, explores how these feminine-rooted approaches are helping reshape leadership, community, and culture. With reflections on everything from mothering as leadership to art as activism, the newsletter offers grounding and inspiration for anyone seeking to meet this moment with integrity and heart.
Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — Sacred Activism: Meeting Our Challenges as Gateways for Embodying Interconnection
What if our greatest challenges were invitations to lead with more compassion, presence, and wholeness? In this four-week live course (Nov. 13 – Dec. 11), Nina Simons and Deborah Eden Tull guide participants through the practice of sacred activism—a path that integrates inner transformation with meaningful, life-affirming action. Designed for changemakers, caregivers, spiritual seekers, and anyone longing to serve from a place of connection and resilience, the course offers tools for navigating adversity, cultivating relational leadership, and embodying a deeper sense of purpose in these turbulent times.
Is a river a being? Can it suffer, heal, or speak — if not in words, then in water’s own fluent language?
Robert Macfarlane
These are the questions at the heart of Is a River Alive?, the bestselling new book by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane (Underland, The Old Ways). Part travelogue, part ecological inquiry, the book explores a powerful idea whose time has come: that rivers are not just resources, but living entities deserving of recognition and rights. With journeys through Ecuador, India, and Canada — each place facing its own battle for the future of its waters — Macfarlane builds a compelling case for a world where rivers are understood not only scientifically and legally, but relationally and spiritually.
In the following excerpt from the book’s first section, Macfarlane travels deep into Ecuador’s Los Cedros cloud forest, a haven of astonishing biodiversity and the site of a groundbreaking legal victory for the Rights of Nature. He’s joined by a small group of defenders: Ecuadorian ecologist Agustín Bravo, biologist and fungal advocate Giuliana Furci, legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito, and a local guide named Ramiro. As they reach a hidden waterfall on the Río Los Cedros, joy turns to reflection — and a deeper reckoning with what it means to say a river is alive.
Excerpted from Is a River Alive?. Copyright (c) 2025 by Robert Macfarlane. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
We do not knowingly enter the cloud. It moves up from below us or gathers from around us; I cannot tell which. But we are in it, it is on us.
Fog numbs sound; mist sparkles on skin and cloth.
It is peaceful to be in that cloud of unknowing. I feel ignorant in the first, and at ease with my ignorance. Any questing after facet and reason is overwhelmed by profusion and difference.
The path thins towards nothing. We begin to criss-cross the Río Los Cedros more often, working slowly upbill, following the water’s path back into the higher forest. A white noise becomes audible at the edge of things, then fills the gaps between them, rising slowly to a roar. We turn a corner. Silver surges through green.
A wide white veil of waterfall is above and ahead of us — thirty feet or more high and twenty feet or so across — crashing into the wide pool it has hollowed from the bedrock over thousands of years. This is the biggest waterfall on the Río Los Cedros. Spray-mis floats and dances, rainbowed where the sun finds it.
The invitation is not to be refused. I strip to my shorts and wade in, boulders slippery underfoot, my arms out for balance like a funambulist’s, feeling steel manacles of cold slide up my legs from ankles to knees to thighs — and then I just launch myself, huffing with the shock, and strike out across the pool towards the waterfall.
Others follow me in: first Giuliana and César, then Ramiro, who yells so loudly he sets the forest echoing and startles birds from the trees. Then Agustín, who peers moleishly without his spectacles and is tentative on the greasy rocks.
I swim back across the pool and wade out to help Agustín. He reaches out both hands for support. I take them and guide him in: him stepping forwards and me backwards. We move like eighteenth-century dance partners hesitantly working out a quadrille.
‘This is the river you helped save, in the forest you helped save,’ I shout to him over the sound of the waterfall.
‘I was only one among very many,’ says Agustín. ‘And the forest . . . spoke for itself, spoke to us all.’
We embrace. I am touched. When we reach the deeper water, Agustín releases my hands and leans forwards into the river, feels it take his weight, support him, then he swims in neat breaststroke across to the base of the waterfall.
I watch in surprise as Agustín first stands up, then backs into the white veil of water so that it’s pummeling his head and his shoulders. He lifts his head back, closes his eyes, flings his arms out wide and stands there, cruciform, with an expression on his face partway between joy and agony.
‘Happy birthday, Agustín!’ I shout, but he can’t hear me.
Then I realize that the water pouring over the lip of the waterfall is running rust-red, stained by silt and cyanide from the forest’s felling, from the mountain’s mining, from the river’s poisoning — and that red is pouring over Agustín’s head and shoulders and is filling the pool itself with old blood . . . and then I blink and the mining has not yet happened and may never happen, and the forest is still unfelled, the mountain whole and the river clear.
A few minutes later I swim over to the waterfall. As Agustín had done, I find my footing on the bed of the pool, then lean back into the shifting, turbulent veil of water. A thousand little fists punch my shoulders, a thousand cold wasps sting my skin.
I close my eyes, feel skin and scalp and spirit ringing and singing. It elates me. This river has an aura into which we have passed, I think, and which is changing our being, enlivening us. Would a dying river do this?
It seems clear to me then, in that strange, bright water, that to say a river is alive is not an anthropomorphic claim. A river is not a human person, nor vice versa. Each withholds from the other in different ways. To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’, and in so doing — how had George Eliot put it? — ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’.
“To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’…”
But then I’m counterstruck by the sheer, incorrigible weirdness of this white water, by the profoundly alien presence of the river — and all that I’ve just thought feels too easy, too pat. Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants — well, where would you even start with that process? Surely all our attempts to bend the law round so that it recognizes the rights of rivers or forests will only end up with human proxies, jockeying for their own positions and speaking in incorrigibly human voices — ventriloquizing ‘river’ and ‘forest’ in a kind of cos-play animism.
We could call it the ‘Solaris Problem’ — the question of how on earth to open a plausible line of communications with a river — after Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 SF novel Solaris, about a planet whose ocean behaves in ways that perplex the usual mechanistic reductions of water to matter. In ways, in fact, which seem to human observers to be intentional, sentient . . . alive. Entire institutes become dedicated to the study of ‘solaristics’: theoretical attempts to comprehend the ocean’s properties and ontology, and practical attempts to establish contact with it. All methodologies, however, prove futile.
Standing there with the water clattering my skull — as I clumsily, hopelessly probe the River of the Cedars for legibility, for utterance — a line from Lem’s novel bounces into my brain: How can you hope to communicate with the ocean if you can’t even understand one another?
I notice Giuliana has swum to a corner of the pool and is floating there quietly, looking downstream, facing away from the rest of us.
I think that it’s unlike her not to be whooping, not to be at the centre of the party.
I wonder if she is dreaming or remembering.
Then I see that she is crying, adding her tears to the river’s flow.
Beneath the surface of the ocean, a secret choreography unfolds—timed not by clocks or calendars, but by the silver light of the Moon. Coral reefs, sea worms, and even tiny sand-dwelling crustaceans all keep time with lunar precision, releasing eggs, changing color, and rising to mate in breathtaking synchrony. The Moon, it turns out, isn’t just a passive backdrop in the night sky—it’s a living metronome for life on Earth.
In “Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are,” science journalist Rebecca Boyle expands our view far beyond tides and phases. She explores the Moon’s role in everything from the evolution of complex life to ancient religion, scientific discovery, and even future space politics. The result is a sweeping, deeply researched, and utterly enchanting account of how our oldest companion has quietly shaped nearly every facet of life.
In the excerpt below, Boyle explores the Moon’s surprising influence on marine biology and animal behavior—where its light continues to guide the rhythms of reproduction, survival, and timekeeping, even in the absence of eyes.
On reefs around the world, from the Great Barrier Reef to the middle of the Red Sea, corals time their mating dance according to the full Moon’s appearance. Only after the full Moon has shone upon them will they release their pearlescent sperm and eggs, in a midnight phantasmagoria that biologist Oren Levy describes as “the greatest orgy on Earth.”
Levy is an Israeli coral researcher who grows corals in tanks in his lab at Bar-Ilan University to study their spawning behavior and how it changes in response to light pollution, which interferes with the Moon’s beacon. When he is not raising corals by hand, Levy snorkels to a reef in the Red Sea, near the Israeli resort town of Eilat on the Israel-Jordan border. It is the world’s northernmost tropical reef, and corals there have been exposed to development, pollution, and artificial light for millennia. And yet they still use the Moon as their guide.
“We are talking about an organism that doesn’t have any eyes. And it can still synchronize this behavior to the Moon’s cycles,” he told me.
The corals, which are tiny animals, produce parcels that wait like deliveries on a doorstep, near the threshold where their tiny bodies meet the sea. Then in an instant, in one of the most stunningly synchronous events on this planet, every coral releases its sperm and eggs. All at once, a pink blizzard of uncountable seeds floats up toward the light of the Moon. Many seeds will end their journeys as food for fish and other larger animals. But some coral sperm and eggs will combine, producing new coral larvae, which will bob with the tide until they can find a hard surface to anchor on and build a new city.
The seas’ temperature, wind, and sunlight intensity set the month of spawning. But the Moon and its light set the day and the hour. Corals must release their packets at the same time to have any chance of forming new corals. This Moon-mediated mating dance may be more important than ever as corals worldwide succumb to mass bleaching events and other ravages of a changing climate. New generations of corals will need the Moon to colonize the reefs built by their ancestors. The next time you walk outside under a full Moon, witnessing the milky glow it casts over the trees and the grass and the buildings, think about what is happening, that very night, within this planet’s oceans. How many organisms are being born, guided by the light of the silver pendulum in the sky.
For many organisms the Moon is a vital “zeitgeber” (a word borrowed from German because there was no English equivalent that means something like “time giver”) just as much as the Sun is. But only very recently have chronobiologists started to unravel how this works. The ability to tell time by the Moon has genetic underpinnings, which probably date to the origin of genes, which is to say the origin of life.
In 2013, chronobiologists found in a marine worm and a sea louse the first evidence for a genetic “Moon clock” as distinct from a circadian clock. The speckled sea louse, Eurydice pulchra, is a tiny crustacean one-third of an inch across and in the same taxon as crabs and lobsters. It lives in the intertidal zone and burrows into the sand when the tide goes out, turning itself black for protection against the Sun. It does this using chromatophores, a special type of cell that contains color; the same cells allow cephalopods like octopuses to produce camouflage. The sea lice can sense light, including the spectral illumination provided by the Moon, just as readily as your eyes can. The lice are known to have two types of internal schedules, one governed by the Sun and one that is apparently linked to the tide. But until recently, scientists were unsure whether the tidal clock was derived from the circadian clock—simply by cutting it in half, for instance, with a tidal timekeeper that runs every 12.4 hours. But it turns out the lice have a distinct tidal clock, which runs separately from any Sun-derived rhythm. It is far more complex than simply slicing the day in two.
Scientists in the United Kingdom collected lice from their home beach on a Welsh island, and measured their activity in a tank where they were exposed to either constant darkness or constant light. The researchers then focused on knocking out or suppressing genes known to play a role in the circadian rhythm. The creatures still swam every 12.4 hours, for several days in a row. Suppressing the circadian rhythm did not shut off the lunar rhythm, showing it is an independent system. In the next few years, marine biologists found similar molecular tidal clocks in animals like oysters, curly crustaceans called comma shrimp, and a mangrove cricket.
Using new sequencing techniques, biologists like Kristin Tessmar-Raible are beginning to understand how animals are pulling this off. Tessmar-Raible studies a marine bristle worm, Platynereis dumerilii, which might have one of the most advanced lunar clocks studied so far. The worms follow the Sun for their feeding rhythms, emerging at night to eat. But their spawning cycle follows the Moon alone. The worms use two methods to modulate this lunar clock. They have light-sensitive neurons in their brains, as well as a set of clock genes, related to the same genes found in vertebrates, including you. But the worms’ genetic clock also runs on Moon time.
“When we make an appointment, we don’t tell someone just what time it is; we also, hopefully, give them the date. We intermingle two timing systems, and that is basically what these organisms are also doing,” Tessmar-Raible told me. “There is no voodoo behind it. We have an inner circadian clock. Why shouldn’t animals, or other organisms, also have a calendar system?”
Early in her career, Tessmar-Raible read about previous German biologists who studied these biological rhythms and recalls being shocked that anyone could detect a lunar cadence to an animal’s daily life, and moreover, that it could be controlled in a lab. Then she attended a marine ecology conference and mentioned it to some marine biologists who just looked at her, she recalled. “They were like, ‘Yes, of course. You don’t know about the famous coral example? This happens everywhere.’”
Ancient people knew it, too, though for different reasons. Aristotle knew the sea urchins would swell with the Moon because fishermen had learned that mussels, urchins, and some crustaceans are larger—and worth more money—when their gonads are swollen, ready for reproduction. If you cut open a fresh-caught crab, its reproductive organs will be larger or smaller depending on the Moon’s phase.
The animals have their own practical reasons for this calendar keeping. A marine gnat called Clunio marinus lives along the Atlantic coast of Europe, where scientists have studied its chronobiology for many years. The gnats mate like other insects, with males fertilizing eggs the females laid previously. Because the gnats must wait for an extremely low tide to keep their eggs safe, they evolved the ability to notice the Moon’s phases so they could predict when the tide would flow and ebb. Females will lay their eggs in the lowest levels of the intertidal zone when the tide is at its feeblest, during new Moon or full Moon. Corals do this, too. Levy and his colleagues found that corals have light-sensing neurons that allow them to perceive moonlight on the water. They even have genes that activate in sync with the Moon’s cycles of waxing and waning.
AI is rapidly embedding itself into nearly every sector of society, from agriculture and education to health care, infrastructure, and national security. It’s often framed as an inevitable step forward, offering efficiency, insight, and even hope. But behind the headlines and marketing buzz lies a more troubling reality: the expansion of AI is deepening inequality, accelerating environmental destruction, and entrenching systems of surveillance and control.
This four-part series—adapted from a 2025 Bioneers Conference panel—dives into the lesser-told stories of AI’s rise. From the erosion of food sovereignty to the energy demands of data centers and the legal frameworks that prioritize corporate power, these essays challenge us to look more closely at what’s really being built in AI’s name and who gets left out.
You’ll hear from journalist and activist Koohan Paik-Mander, tech critic Paris Marx, environmental lawyer Claire Cummings, and anthropologist and farmer Soledad Vogliano. Each brings a distinct lens, from environmental law to food systems and digital rights, but they share a deep commitment to equity, accountability, and the protection of life in all its forms.
At Bioneers, our role isn’t to endorse a single viewpoint, but to open space for critical inquiry and diverse perspectives. The thinkers featured here are longtime activists and technology watchdogs who offer urgently needed context and critique. Their insights help illuminate not just what AI is, but what kind of future we’re allowing it to shape.
Whether you’re cautiously curious or deeply concerned, we hope this series offers new angles, sharper questions, and a deeper understanding of the stakes at hand.
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Part 1: Progress at Any Cost? The False Promises of AI
Far from a neutral tool, artificial intelligence is reinforcing the very systems it claims to disrupt. Journalist and activist Koohan Paik-Mander dismantles the narrative of AI as progress, revealing how it deepens inequality, fuels mass surveillance, and locks us deeper into extractive systems. From data centers powered by fossil fuels to algorithms used for political manipulation and drone warfare, she exposes AI as the latest frontier of late-stage capitalism and makes a powerful case for questioning the real price of so-called innovation.
Part 2: The True Cost of AI: Water, Energy, and a Warming Planet
In desert towns and rural communities, entire ecosystems are being reshaped to keep AI running. Tech critic Paris Marx turns our attention to the staggering environmental footprint of AI’s infrastructure—hyper-scale data centers that consume millions of gallons of water and enough electricity to rival entire nations. With urgency and clarity, he challenges the unchecked expansion of a technology whose benefits remain speculative while its harms grow increasingly tangible.
Part 3: The Illusion of Control: Deregulation, Legal Loopholes, and the Rise of AI
Drawing on decades of work at the intersection of law and activism, Claire Cummings traces a direct line from the deregulation of GMOs to today’s AI free-for-all. She reveals how artificial intelligence is advancing under familiar patterns: minimal oversight, voluntary compliance, and legal frameworks designed to serve private power. But she also makes space for possibility, calling on us to resist with clarity and care, and to recommit to community in the face of automation.
Part 4: Farming in the Dark: The Black Box of AI and the Erosion of Food Sovereignty
As AI becomes more embedded in global food systems, it’s not just changing how we farm; it’s redefining who holds power over knowledge, land, and livelihoods. Anthropologist and activist Soledad Vogliano reveals how corporate-built algorithms are displacing traditional ecological wisdom and tightening the grip of agribusiness. With vivid insight, she frames AI in agriculture not as a neutral tool but as a political force with far-reaching implications for communities, ecosystems, and food sovereignty.
Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — From Reactivity to Resilience: Responsive Leadership and Fractals of Healing
Unlock your capacity for authentic, grounded leadership in From Reactivity to Resilience: Responsive Leadership and Fractals of Healing, a live online course with therapist and ReParentive® Therapy founder Pamela Rosin. Over six transformative Saturdays (Sept 13–Oct 18), you’ll explore how personal and collective trauma shape your patterns—and how to shift them. Through nervous system tools, embodied practices, and dynamic discussion, you’ll learn to move from reactive cycles into empowered presence. Ideal for therapists, activists, and changemakers ready to lead with clarity, compassion, and resilience.
As artificial intelligence rapidly embeds itself into nearly every sector of society, its unchecked expansion is triggering urgent questions about power, accountability, environmental cost, and the future of life on Earth. While some applications of AI may offer meaningful insights or tools, our new four-part series—adapted from the 2025 Bioneers Conference panel AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley—focuses on the darker undercurrents: corporate overreach, surveillance, digital colonialism, environmental exploitation, and the erosion of sovereignty.
While Bioneers is not an advocacy organization with a singular platform, one of our core missions is to provide a dynamic forum for diverse, life-affirming ideas. The thinkers and changemakers we feature don’t always agree on every issue—and that’s by design. Because AI is such a complex and rapidly evolving topic, we want to be clear: the views expressed in this series are those of the authors, as is always the case with Bioneers content.
Some in our community see potential in AI’s selective use, such as its role in decoding whale communication, recently featured at our conference, and various other applications. But the broader context cannot be ignored. The explosive growth of AI, fueled by corporate ambition and massive investment, carries sweeping risks across every sphere of life. The four long-time activists and technology watchdogs featured in this series bring urgently needed perspectives to a conversation often dominated by hype. Their insights help us ask better questions about the world AI is shaping—and who it’s leaving behind.
The Series
Essay 1: Progress at Any Cost? The False Promises of AI By Koohan Paik-Mander
A sweeping critique of AI as a force multiplier for climate collapse, authoritarianism, and capitalist control. Paik-Mander draws connections between militarization, planetary destruction, and the seductive myth of techno-salvation.
Essay 2: The True Cost of AI: Water, Energy, and a Warming Planet By Paris Marx
A look under the hood of AI’s infrastructure, revealing the massive and often hidden environmental toll of data centers, energy use, and water consumption fueling the tech industry’s AI ambitions.
Essay 3: The Illusion of Control: Deregulation, Legal Loopholes, and the Rise of AI By Claire Cummings
Legal scholar Claire Cummings explores how weak regulatory frameworks, corporate lobbying, and familiar patterns of industry capture are shaping the AI frontier, often to the detriment of democracy and human rights.
Essay 4: Farming in the Dark: The Black Box of AI and the Erosion of Food Sovereignty By Soledad Vogliano
Anthropologist and agroecology educator Soledad Vogliano unpacks how AI is quietly infiltrating food and biodiversity systems. Her piece explores the dangers of opaque algorithms, digital colonialism, and corporate consolidation in agriculture, and makes a compelling case for bottom-up resistance.
Decades ago, prior to the Human Microbiome Project, the brilliant, iconoclastic, eco-farmer, Bob Cannard, stood up in public and made the seemingly outrageous announcement that the human body was, in fact, an amalgamation of microbes. The skepticism in the room was palpable and the derision was audible.
But now science has confirmed that microbes in and on our bodies outnumber human cells by estimates ranging from 3-1 to 10–1. And that microbial community, now known as the human microbiome, plays vital life-supporting roles in many of our bodily functions, including digestion, immunity, and hormone and blood sugar regulation.
As a farmer, Canard works diligently to optimize what he refers to as the “digestive capacity of the soil.” When I first heard him make that reference, I thought it was an enigmatic and imprecise metaphor for soil fertility, but, in fact, it’s an insightful and scientifically accurate way to describe the interactions within the soil food web, in which microscopic organisms play an outsized role in decomposition, nutrient cycling and plant health. Diverse species of microbes digest and break down organic matter making it more digestible for the next level of the soil food web, ultimately converting it into a form able to nourish plants. Microbes are also architects: they create soil structures that increase the water retention capacity of the soil and enhance carbon storage.
Whether it be fertility-enhancing activities in soil, or the critical functions of fighting disease and regulating metabolic functions in the bodies of humans, it turns out that our lives are highly reliant on the skillful, mutualistic activities of invisible organisms.
The Astonishing Microbes
Though invisible to the naked eye, microbes make up almost 25 % of the weight of all life on Earth. There are hundreds of millions to trillions of species of microorganisms (more than 99% of them undiscovered!) that perform vital functions sustaining life. The cyanobacteria that live on the oceans’ surfaces generate oxygen and help regulate atmospheric CO2. Several types of bacteria and fungi help control the nitrogen cycle in the atmosphere and in soil. As the oldest life forms, microorganisms have an astounding ability to adapt to most all of life’s extremes. Some actually have evolved to thrive in ponds of nuclear waste.
Their ubiquity is also impressive: they colonize virtually all natural surfaces, so it should come as no surprise that microorganisms have evolved symbiotically with humans and inhabit heathy soils in abundance. Microbiomes found in different ecosystems from land to sea, or on and in the bodies of people, animals and plants, could be considered sophisticated civilizations, without which much of life would be severely degraded, if not cease to exist.
The Human Gut Microbiome: An Ancient Community of Allies
Microorganisms, the oldest life forms on earth, have been around more than 3.5 billion years, and over the last 6 million years, they have used humans as an opportune host with which to establish a complex, symbiotic relationship in which each entity has grown to depend on the other to survive and thrive.
But it wasn’t until 350 years ago–a relatively fleeting interval of time compared to the billions of years of microbial life and the two or so million years since early humans first appeared–that the first crude microscope enabled the human eye to view these minute life forms.
150 years after the advent of the microscope, the 19th century French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered that microorganisms are the cause of infectious diseases. That discovery became known as the germ theory, and it ultimately led to the development of wonder drugs to fight infections. But the germ theory is only part of the story of the relationship between humans and microbes. It was not until relatively recently that the health-regulating functions of microorganisms in the human body became known, and the failure to understand the positive role of microbes and the critical importance of the microbiome as an essential aspect our immune system has led to some unintended consequences.
Unfortunately, it has become widespread practice to use antibiotics in livestock on a massive scale as a strategy to prevent disease rather than limiting them to the more judicious use for curing infections. Also, doctors, over the years, have overprescribed antibiotics in people when they were not necessary. Both these misguided practices have contributed to the dangerous crisis of rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as these dynamic organisms adapt and become immune to medications. Microbes are some of life’s most dynamic “shapeshifters.” They have an average lifespan of 12 hours, which gives them countless generations to evolve and become resistant to many of the formerly life-saving drugs.
Overprescription of antibiotics also leads to a reduction in both the number and the species of the beneficial microorganisms in the gut. Many antibiotics don’t differentiate between infectious and benign organisms. Those misguided practices arose out of an overemphasis of the germ theory and a lack of understanding of the microbiomes of humans and animals.
Good Health is Dependent on a Healthy Microbiome
Although there were some isolated discoveries of the healthful benefits of good bacteria going back to the late 1800s, those ideas were carried forward mainly on the fringes by traditional cultures and modern aficionados of probiotic health foods such as kimchi, miso, yogurt, kefir, etc. It wasn’t until the Human Microbiome Project in 2007 that science fully accepted the critically important role of the microbiome.
Before that, the colon was viewed as nothing more than a cesspool for housing undesirable microbes and temporarily storing metabolic waste. But more and more, science has been discovering how important a role the microbiota in our gastrointestinal tracts play in the regulation our health. The vast majority of our microbiome reside in the colon where a significant portion of our immune system is also located.
Two-way communication between microbes and our human cells and organs takes place via the immune, endocrine and nervous systems that form an intricate network that regulates our metabolic functions. The science is not exact, but of the trillions of microbes that make up the human biome, only about 1400 are considered potentially pathogenic, so wiping out good bacteria unnecessarily with antibiotics can take a serious toll on a person’s long-term health.
The relationship between our bodies and our microbiome is so intimate that bacteria even share genes with us in a process known as horizontal gene transfer, a kind of intercellular sex sometimes referred to as “jumping genes.” And that transfer is not trivial, it happens among millions of genes. The gut microbiome plays a crucial role in metabolism, immunity, maintaining a balance in our intestines between fighting pathogens while regulating inflammation, and even influences brain function and behavior.
A disruption of the makeup of the microbial community by poor diet, exposure to toxins, lack of exercise, etc. can lead to disease. One example is obesity, which creates a favorable environment in the gut for a specific strain of bacteria to flourish and produce endotoxins that leak into the bloodstream and trigger a chronic state of inflammation. Research has shown that chronic inflammation can result in a cascading suite of misery: diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and many other chronic degenerative diseases. Even some psychiatric disorders are now being linked to poor gut health. Approximately 60% of those who suffer from gastrointestinal disorders suffer from one of several psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety.
Perhaps Bob Canard’s assertion that we are essentially an amalgamation of microbes was a bit overstated, but not by much. It’s now well established that our bodies are an ecosystem rife with complex, mutualistic relationships with microorganisms that have co-evolved with humans to support robust health.
Another critical microbiome, not just for people, but also for animals, plants and ecosystems is the microbiome of the soil.
What Cannard refers to as “soil digestion” actually begins one level above the microbiome with the soil macro fauna–those organisms that can be seen–such as earthworms, sow bugs, beetles, ants, etc. Those two communities taken together are referred to as the “soil food web.”
The macro fauna, along with fungi–an important part of the microbiome–initiate the first cycle of decomposition breaking down carbonaceous material, leaving behind a metabolic biproduct (their waste) that microorganisms feed on. Bacteria and other microbes ultimately solubilize the nutrients, converting them into a form that plant roots can take in.
Plants uptake nutrients in a few different ways. To a limited extent, they reach out into the soil and intercept nutrients that have been solubilized by microorganisms. Nutrients can also be carried by water in the soil to the root zone known as the rhizosphere. And plants also get fed with the assistance of mycorrhizal fungi that attach to plant roots, extend out into the soil and harvest water and nutrients and deliver them to the plant.
Plants have the extraordinary ability to take carbon from the air, hydrogen from water molecules, and, by using sunlight as an energy source via photosynthesis, to produce food in the form of carbohydrates that feed not only themselves but also their microscopic allies in the root zone. About 30 % of that food is pushed out into the soil through their roots to feed beneficial soil microbes.
Recent research has revealed just how intimate a relationship plants have with their microbiome. Dr. James White of Rutgers University has discovered a process called the rhizophagy cycle, a fascinating process in which plants actually draw microbes into their roots and circulate them until they break down into nutritional components the plant can absorb. If the process stopped there it would seem a bit exploitive and ungrateful by the plant toward its crucial partners, but it doesn’t stop there. Not all of the microbes taken into the plant are broken down and consumed. The survivors are pushed back out into the rhizosphere to repopulate their community, and in a gesture of gratitude the plant sends a renewed supply of food to those microbes to ensure they can, in biblical terms, “Go forth and multiply” and renew the cycle. The drama of life, death and renewal even occurs at a microscopic level.
All of these ways in which plants get food are directly or indirectly associated with microbes. Photosynthesis provides plants with the macro nutrient of carbohydrates, but for the critical micronutrients that play an essential role in their health and immunity–and subsequently for the well-being of those who eat the plants–they rely on the services of the soil microbiome.
And, as in the human microbiome, those services are comprehensive: communication with cells, turning genes on and off, warding off pathogens by opposing them directly or by stimulating the plant’s innate immune response, etc. And that’s just a partial list, in fact, we still don’t have a complete understanding of all the interactions of plants and microbes. We haven’t even identified the majority of species in the soil microbiome. What we do have is a better understanding of the highly elegant and cooperative system that has stood the test of time to the tune of millions of years by refining its ability to create a steady-state fertility cycle.
As soil microbiologist Dr. Kris Nichols said in an interview that I conducted with her, “Mycorrhizal fungi have been associated with plants for over 400 million years, so they have been able to figure out how to optimize the system and are able to do it at the highest level of efficiency… Humans can’t do it better.”
Misguided Progress
In contrast, the Green Revolution, for which its founder Norman Borlaug won a Nobel Prize, is less than 100 years old. Its celebrated contribution was high-yielding seeds for food crops that came with a promise to feed the world, but the caveat is those hybrid seeds require high amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Most people are at least somewhat aware of pesticides’ profound “side-effects” on human and ecosystem health, but they’re generally not as aware of the negative impacts of chemical fertilizers.
The routine over use of high amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous causes those fertilizers to runoff off farms and leach into waterways that ultimately create “dead zones” in seas all over the world. As they runoff from farms when it rains, the fertilizers leach into waterways that make their way to rivers that drain into the oceans. The Mississippi River, for example, is estimated to carry 1.7 million tons of those chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico each year, resulting in giant dead zones in that body of water. That is a serious consequence at the macro level, but how do chemical fertilizers affect the soil microbiome?
Commercial chemical fertilizers contain abundant amounts of macro-nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but for the most part they lack the valuable micro-nutrients that are also essential for heathy plants, animals, and people. Once applied to the root zone those highly soluble fertilizers are readily taken up by the plant roots. Plants get bigger but often have lower nutrient density. The intervention of adding highly stimulating inputs disrupts a natural cycle and is damaging to the microbiome in two ways. First, the flush of nitrogen pushes the microbes into an overstimulated reproductive and feeding frenzy that ultimately causes the microbial community to crash. The second is a direct disruption of the millions of years of coevolution and symbiosis between plants and microbes. When plants are fed with chemical fertilizers, they turn their back on their traditional community and ultimately decide not to expend the energy to feed the soil microbiota, further degrading the highly efficient, mutualistic system of self-sustaining fertility. At that point, the only way to keep producing crops is to keep pumping them up with more overstimulating fertilizers that increasingly impoverish the soil, degrade the nutritional vitality of the plants, and toxify the global environment.
As David Montgomery and Anne Biklé wrote in their fascinating book The Hidden Half of Nature, on the topics of soil and human microbiomes,“The more farmers rely on synthetic inputs instead of beneficial soil life, the more they need the former and lose the latter.”
Regenerative agricultural is emerging as the response to the degradation of soil health caused by chemically-driven industrial agriculture. By farming in a way that mimics natural systems, regenerative farmers prioritize soil health rather than agrochemical inputs to create a thriving, productive farm for the long term. The first step in accomplishing that is by learning how best to work with the invisible microbial partners in the soil and learn to be a good ally rather than an antagonist. That is the prudent and most scientifically practical way to maintain agricultural soil health and productivity and ensure long-term food security.
The Relationship Between Soil and Human Microbiomes
Science is in the process of an ongoing exploration of the enormous importance of these two fascinating microbiomes. We now know that we are vitally dependent on healthy microbiomes for human and ecosystem health, but less is known about how, or if, these microbiomes are related.
Soil, for billions of years, has been the greatest reservoir of microbial richness while the human microbiome is at best a few million years old. Over those millions of years, humans evolved predominately in rural environments in which they were very much integrated in nature. It would seem logical, under those circumstances, that the soil microbiome would be a significant influence on the human microbiome, but even though functional parallels between the two microbiomes clearly exist, a direct relationship has not yet been determined.
How then does our microbiome develop in each of us? Not surprisingly, we receive our first microbial inoculation from our mothers as we pass through the birth canal, have skin-to-skin contact, and are breastfed. Lacking any one of those leaves a new born with a less vigorous microbiome to start life with. As children grow, the environment plays a big role in the further development of their microbiome. Locale, ecosystem, diet, lifestyle, etc. all have a direct influence in the makeup of our microbiota. In fact, each person’s microbiome is so individualized that it is sometimes compared to the distinctiveness of fingerprints.
Microbial life is highly dynamic and adaptable. In hunter gather cultures, for example, when a deer or other animal was hunted down, it was carried back to the village to share with family and community. Carrying, butchering, and cooking the meat all involved lots of physical contact with the animal. Some of the animal’s microbes were inevitably transferred to the people involved in those activities.
Conceivably, if the conditions were right, those microbes could become part of that person’s microbiome. Similarly, a transfer of microbes from nature to people could occur with early farmers and even small farmers today who have regular physical contact with their environment. That kind of contact, with our hypersensitivity to “germs,” could raise alarms of contracting disease from animals or soil, etc. But remember, the vast majority of microbes are not just harmless but are life-supporting and protective against disease.
Multiple studies in Europe and North America have shown that kids who grow up on farms or in rural areas and have regular contact with soil and animals have fewer allergies, asthma and auto immune diseases. Even in households with pets, kids have better immunity than those who don’t live with a four-legged companion.
As a research article from the University of British Columbia, “Linking the Gut Microbial Ecosystem with the Environment,” states: “Reduced exposure to pathogenic microorganisms, largely as a result of modern hygienic practices, can also result in defective immunoregulation.”
This speaks to the overuse of antibiotics when not necessary and the over-sterilization of non-medical environments. A microbiome rich in diversity can protect against disease, and when stimulated by pathogens, it can learn how to defend against that specific disease. Of course, there are times when medical interventions such as antibiotics are absolutely necessary, but our first line of defense is a strong immune system developed by interaction with nature and a healthy diet and lifestyle.
The analogy in regards to the soil is the disruption of the microbiome by chemical inputs that degenerate the health of the entire food chain from soil to plant to person or animal.
In The Hidden Half of Nature, Montgomery and Biklé wrote: “Pesticides and herbicides have also altered soil microbiota in ways we do not fully understand. Some studies, however, point to the effects that echo the basic problem with the Western diet–like overconsuming refined carbohydrates, excessive use of agrochemicals feeds the bad actors and starves the good ones.”
A highly diverse, well-balanced community of predominately beneficial microbes is the key to both personal and soil health. A core tenet in seeking to preserve an ecosystem’s biodiversity is to maintain, not only a large number of organisms, but a wide array of species. That combination is the foundation for establishing resilient health in the soil as well as the human microbiome.
Our connection to nature is often overlooked or undervalued. As we degrade biodiversity in nature, it could well come at a cost to human health. In the aforementioned article “Linking the Gut Microbial Ecosystem with the Environment,” the authors hypothesize that: “Urban development leading to the loss of local habitats and biodiversity may be detrimental to human health by depleting or otherwise altering the reservoirs of environmental microbes.”
Hopefully, we can now agree that the unintended and indiscriminate depletion and destruction of microorganisms is just not a good idea. We could be eliminating lifeforms that have been our indispensable allies for eons. Modern science is just scratching the surface of our understanding of these sophisticated, invisible civilizations that we have evolved with and depend on. And as Bob Cannard implied, those microscopic life forms are much more an intimate part of who we are than we previously could have imagined.
If you haven’t tuned in to the Young & Indigenous Podcast series, you’re in for a treat. Bioneers is honored to have collaborated with the team at YAI to record a remarkable series of 16 podcast interviews with visionary leaders and movement makers. These interviews were recorded at the 2025 Bioneers Conference with speakers from the Indigenous Forum as guests. Bioneers provided the space and opportunity, legendary recordist and producer Ray Day recorded the audio, and YAI provided the talent, vision, and people power. You can hear the first two episodes and subscribe below so you get alerts when the rest are released!
This special crossover episode marks the launch of our Young and Indigenous at Bioneers series and continues the ongoing conversations from Healing Women Heals Mother Earth. Co-hosts Haley and Santana speak with Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok attorney and activist, about the historic removal of the Klamath River dams. Recorded live at the 2025 Bioneers Conference, the conversation explores how restoring the river is inseparable from cultural survival and personal healing. Amy shares powerful reflections on health, justice, and what it means to fight for the future of your people — and the planet — one foot in front of the other.
In this mic drop of an episode, Raven and Santana sit down with Emmy-nominated host, writer and public speaker Baratunde Thurston. In this conversation they discuss healthy masculinity, storytelling as resistance, and maintaining Indigenous values in the age of AI. Together, they explore what it means to carry and protect information in an era of knowledge erasure, and how humor, creativity, and active participation can help us build pathways of resistance. This pivotal conversation dives deep into urgent questions: Is democracy dying? How do we keep knowledge alive? What does it mean to be a citizen? And how can men truly support women? Recorded live at the Bioneers Conference, this episode invites us to look inwards and outwards — at who we are, and how we can live in good relation with those around us. You’re going to want to listen to this more than once.
The Young & Indigenous Podcast amplifies the voices, stories, and experiences of Indigenous people in all walks of life, creating a platform that fosters empowerment and meaningful conversations. Through storytelling, they uplift the spirits of Native youth, strengthen community, and celebrate indigeneity.
In the race to digitize every aspect of life, artificial intelligence is rapidly gaining ground in agriculture, quietly reshaping how we grow food, manage ecosystems and make decisions about land and livelihoods. Framed as a tool for efficiency and sustainability, AI is increasingly embedded in systems that claim to address climate change and food insecurity, but beneath the promises lie deeper questions: Who controls these technologies? Whose knowledge do they prioritize? And what happens when decisions about nature are outsourced to opaque, corporate-built algorithms?
In this essay, Soledad Vogliano, an anthropologist, farmer, and Program Manager at the ETC Group, unpacks the expanding role of AI in food systems. Drawing on her work supporting Indigenous and peasant movements and her leadership on digitalization at ETC, Soledad makes the case that AI in agriculture is not just a technical issue, it’s a political one.
Adapted from the Bioneers 2025 panel AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley, this piece is the fourth installment in our four-part series examining some of the hidden impacts of artificial intelligence. Read to the end to access the other essays in the series.
SOLEDAD VOGLIANO: Artificial intelligence is quietly but profoundly reshaping the way we grow food and manage biodiversity. While it’s often promoted as a high-tech fix for some of our biggest global challenges, from climate change to hunger, its growing presence in agriculture raises unsettling questions: Who’s really in control of these tools? And whose interests are they designed to serve?
Let’s start with what I consider the elephant in the room: the black box.
The “black box” refers to the opaque nature of many AI systems, especially those built using machine learning. These models can generate highly accurate predictions, but how they arrive at those decisions is often unclear, even to the experts who design them. We can observe what goes in and what comes out, but the inner workings remain hidden. That lack of transparency is one of AI’s most dangerous features—and one of its most overlooked.
Those mysterious algorithms making decisions about everything from crop protection to biodiversity conservation are, in practice, about as transparent as a brick wall.
Imagine a farmer—let’s call him John—standing in his field, facing a pest outbreak. He consults an AI system developed by a far-off tech company for guidance. The system gives him a recommendation. But here’s the problem: John has no idea how that decision was made. Was it based on the latest agronomic data? Was it tailored to his region’s climate or soil? Was it simply designed to push a product? He can’t tell, and there’s no way for him to find out.
That’s the danger of the black box. When AI systems operate without transparency, their decisions may be flawed, biased, or harmful, and users are left in the dark. If John applies a pesticide that degrades his soil or plants a crop unsuited to his land, he may not even know what went wrong, let alone how to fix it.
The black box doesn’t just obscure technical processes; it raises serious ethical questions. In high-stakes fields such as agriculture, healthcare, finance, and criminal justice, this opacity threatens fairness, accountability, and human agency.
This brings us to a second and equally urgent concern: accountability. What happens when decisions that shape lives and livelihoods are made by invisible algorithms that answer to no one? It may sound dystopian, but this is increasingly the world we live in as AI systems are integrated into the foundations of agriculture, health care, finance, and more.
Consider a scenario: an AI system recommends a pesticide that ends up destroying beneficial insects or encourages a crop choice that later crashes in value. Who is responsible? The farmer who followed the advice? The corporation that built the model? The algorithm itself—a piece of software with no awareness or agency?
This is where accountability breaks down. Without transparency, there’s no clear line of responsibility. Tech companies can shrug off failures, claiming the system, not the company, made the decision. Meanwhile, it’s the farmers, ecosystems, and communities who suffer the consequences. It’s like receiving a harmful medical diagnosis, only to be told afterward that “the AI said it was fine.” How can that possibly be acceptable?
The lack of accountability in black box AI isn’t just a technical oversight; it’s a systemic failure. One that protects corporate interests at the expense of human and environmental well-being.
So, who’s really in control of AI in agriculture? The answer probably won’t surprise you. Many of the same corporate giants that dominate agrochemicals and industrial farming—companies such as Bayer, Syngenta, and Corteva—are now at the forefront of AI integration, often in collaboration with major tech firms. Together, they are shaping the digital future of agriculture.
These companies are using AI to steer decisions about what gets planted, how crops are managed, and which inputs are used. Their systems are powered by data they often control, collected from farms across the globe. And they’re embedding themselves deeper into agriculture by layering digital decision-making on top of the same extractive models they’ve long promoted—models reliant on genetically modified seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides.
The result is a consolidation of power. AI becomes a tool not for democratizing knowledge or supporting sustainability, but for reinforcing the dominance of firms already shaping global food systems. The technologies remain opaque, their logic inaccessible to farmers and the public. What looks like innovation is often a digital power grab that risks locking farmers into systems they can neither fully understand nor easily escape.
And it doesn’t stop there.
When AI systems are built on appropriated data and biased assumptions, they don’t just miss the mark, they perpetuate inequality, erode sovereignty, and turn culture itself into a commodity.
Even when AI systems appear neutral, they are not. Algorithmic bias is a growing concern that we ignore at our peril. These systems are trained on data that reflects the values, assumptions, and interests of those who create and control them. In farming, this often means data drawn from industrial agricultural practices, leading to recommendations that prioritize yield and profit over soil health, biodiversity, or local needs, overlooking the ecological and cultural realities of small, diverse, or Indigenous-managed farms.
When corporate interests shape the data, they shape the outcomes, and when those outcomes are flawed or biased, it’s communities and ecosystems that pay the price.
This leads to harmful mismatches. AI may suggest fertilizers or pesticides based on monoculture norms, ignoring local soils, biodiversity, and traditional knowledge that has sustained communities for generations. Yet these outputs are often framed as objective, scientifically validated truths, despite being based on biased inputs.
Which brings us to another critical issue: data ownership, or more precisely, the lack of it. In the world of AI, whoever controls the data holds the power. And right now, that power lies almost exclusively with corporations. Data is often extracted from farmers, frequently without clear consent, and fed into AI models that go on to shape the tools, policies, and economic systems those very farmers must navigate.
This is a form of digital colonialism. Local and Indigenous communities that have long been the stewards of biodiversity and traditional ecological knowledge are seeing their insights extracted, repackaged, and monetized by distant actors. Their knowledge is treated not as a living inheritance, but as raw material to be mined for corporate gain. All of this is buried beneath layers of technical complexity, making it nearly impossible to recognize, let alone resist, the exploitation.
When AI systems are built on appropriated data and biased assumptions, they don’t just miss the mark, they perpetuate inequality, erode sovereignty, and turn culture itself into a commodity.
And then there’s the hype: the narrative that AI is the future, whether or not it actually works. One of the most troubling aspects of AI’s rapid rise is the overwhelming optimism surrounding it. The excitement—amplified by corporate marketing, media headlines, and government endorsements—has triggered a wave of massive investments, often based more on speculative promise than proven performance.
This rush to adopt AI has created artificial demand in sectors such as agriculture, even when the technologies in question remain opaque, unreliable, or misaligned with real-world needs. The more corporations can frame AI as revolutionary, the more funding, influence, and market share they can secure, even if the tools themselves haven’t delivered on their promises and rarely acknowledge their limitations.
Mainstream media often reinforces this narrative, presenting AI as an inevitable solution to pressing global challenges: climate change, food insecurity, and ecological collapse. In doing so, it pushes critical questions to the margins: How effective is AI really? What are its social and environmental consequences? Who benefits, and who bears the cost?
In this environment, the deployment of AI technologies often outpaces our understanding of their impacts, leaving little room for democratic oversight or ethical reflection. That’s why we need to shift the narrative from top-down innovation to bottom-up assessment.
Bottom-up technology assessments are essential if we want AI to serve the public good rather than corporate interests. These approaches center community voices, lived experience, and local knowledge. They prioritize inclusion and transparency and ensure that those most affected by new technologies have a meaningful say in how they are developed, implemented, and evaluated.
Corporate-led evaluations often sideline Indigenous and local communities, undermining their rights to self-determination. In contrast, bottom-up approaches center those voices, allowing assessments to reflect cultural values, ecological knowledge, and sustainability priorities.
But effective bottom-up assessments must go beyond surface-level consultation. They should support community organizing and help local groups build and share their own narratives. These communities offer essential insights into how technologies affect ecosystems, livelihoods, and futures. When they are empowered to define resources and benefits on their own terms, the resulting assessments are far more likely to align with shared values and aspirations.
To conclude, the growing reliance on AI in agriculture and beyond raises serious concerns about transparency, accountability, bias, and power. The opacity of these systems, often referred to as the “black box,” combined with corporate control over both the tools and the data, risks exacerbating inequality and displacing local knowledge.
What we need instead is clear: greater transparency, better data, and inclusive, bottom-up assessments that ensure AI technologies serve all communities, not just corporate interests.
This series—adapted from the Bioneers 2025 session AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley—offers critical perspectives on the systems driving the AI boom and the broader impacts of techno-solutionism.
