It’s that time of year again. The leaves have turned and the air is frosty in the homelands of the Wampanoag Peoples, who first welcomed the Pilgrims. As Thanksgiving approaches, some people think of it as a holiday to express gratitude, and others think of it as a day of mourning.
Over the years we have produced several articles and created original curriculum to help people understand the complexity of Thanksgiving. We invite you to explore our Decolonizing Thanksgiving collection to learn more and gain some ideas about how you might celebrate (or not) Thanksgiving this year.
The descendants of the Wampanoag who shared the fateful feast in 1621 with the Pilgrims are still here. They still eat their traditional foods and practice their cultures. They have protected — and continue to protect — their lands and waters for at least 12,000 years. The Indigeneity Program has been partnering with the Mashpee Wampanoag since 2021, invited by Tribal citizen Danielle Greendeer, and lead author of Keepunumuk Weeachumun’s Thanksgiving Story with Alexis Bunten, Co-Director of the Indigeneity Program.
N8hkumuhs, Maple and Quill, featured in, “Keepunumuk:Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story
Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal citizens wanted to learn more about how the Rights of Nature can be a tool to continue to steward their homelands and hosted our team to present a Rights of Nature workshop. This workshop led to the establishment of a youth group who call themselves, “Native Environmental Ambassadors.” Through a series of meetings and intertribal convenings, these youth wrote a resolution to protect “the Rights of Herring,” a keystone species in the Eastern seaboard. The Resolution was unanimously passed by their Tribal Council.
Since then, the Native Environmental Ambassadors have presented their story, inspiring others to know that anyone can organize to protect nature. You can learn more about their story by watching their presentation at Bioneers’ first Rights of Nature Intertribal gathering in 2023. To directly support the Mashpee NEA’s organizing efforts, you can donate here.
Bioneers has championed the Indigenous Rights of Nature campaign since 2017. We’ve conducted legal research, created guides, and presented at countless events across Indian Country to provide Tribes with information and capacity building skills to pass Rights of Nature laws.
Over the past 11 months, the Native Youth Ambassadors presented their story in the Indigenous Forum; we launched an online “Indigenize the Law” course via the Bioneers Learning platform; and we scaled the Youth Ambassador program to serve four additional Indigenous Youth groups with mini-grants, educational materials, personnel support, and travel scholarships to the 2025 Bioneers conference.
You can learn more about the Indigenous Rights of Nature movement by checking out these resources:
What better way to bring truth and reconciliation to this time of year than to decolonize your Thanksgiving and support the Indigenous Rights of Nature Movement? If you feel inspired by our work to share cutting-edge ideas and champion a revolutionary movement for nature, please donate to support this programming. For more information about our Rights of Nature Initiative, you can email rightsofnature@bioneers.org.
This year, we are so grateful to you for being a part of the Bioneers community.
—The Bioneers Indigeneity Team
Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses
We’re so excited to share this new season of Bioneers Learning courses! We’ve designed this season of both live and asynchronous courses for leaders like you — those who seek empathetic, intersectional conversations with leading activists and experts on the issues you are passionate about. Together, we will reimagine philanthropy, learn to harness nature’s timeless strategies to drive social transformation and build emotional resilience for frontline activism.
Thicket: Navigating Emotional Resilience in the Face of Climate Change | Jan. 13-March 3, 2025 | Presented by the Climate Emotional Resilience Institute, this eight-week experiential program provides practical tools, emotional resilience training, and community support to help those on the frontlines of climate work stay grounded and engaged.
Decolonizing Philanthropic Practice | Jan. 30-March 6, 2025 | In this transformative journey to reimagine philanthropy, explore how your relationship with money and inherited belief systems shape the ways you give back.
Reweaving the Dream of Our Future: How to Tell Powerful Stories to Change the World | April 10-May 1, 2025 | This course is designed for those who feel called to harness the power of storytelling to inspire personal and collective change. Together, we will explore how to be effective storytellers and how to communicate a vision of what’s possible.
EveryWoman’s Leadership: Cultivating Ourselves for Full-Spectrum Flourishing | April 16-May 7, 2025 | Guided by Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, this four-week experiential program invites women, female-identifying individuals, and allies into a transformative space to cultivate inner awareness, relational intelligence, and clarity of purpose.
Biomimicry for Social Innovation: Nature’s Lessons for Movement Leaders | May 13-June 3, 2025 | This four-week experiential course reveals how biomimicry—a practice that draws on the genius of ecosystems—can inform leadership, partnership building, and decision-making for lasting, regenerative change.
The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.
Highlights from the recent course “Indigenizing the Law: Tribal Sovereignty & the Rights of Nature”, hosted by Britt Gondolfi, featuring Casey Camp-Horinek, Frank Bibeau, Samuel Genshaw III, Juliette Jackson, Thomas Linzey, Raynell Morris and Samantha Skenandore.
Tribal Sovereignty has been under attack by the Federal government, the court system, and the States since the country’s inception. Every year, new cases threaten the legal status of Tribes and their right to self-govern. In addition to the attacks on sovereignty, persistent ecological threats and undesirable developments are encroaching on Indian Country. Our current laws and legal precedents put Tribal Nations in a constant defensive position, protecting the natural world and their right to self-determination. Between these two battles, for sovereignty and the planet, the Rights of Nature movement presents an opportunity and strategy to take an affirmative stance for both. This course examines the prominent cases, laws, and legal theories that make up “Federal Indian Law” while exploring the intersections between the movements for Native Sovereignty and the Rights of Nature. It covers the legal history that brought us to the mess we are in while positing what might happen if Tribes across the country asserted their rights to self-determination and the Rights of Nature.
Visit bioneerslearning.org to browse future courses.
The Mashpee Wampanoag have had a relationship with the Herring for time immemorial. Due to development, runoff, and water management systems, the Herring are in trouble, with only 5% of the ancestral population still alive. The Mashpee youth took note and then took action. They formed a cohort, Native Environmental Ambassadors, to advocate for the Rights of Herring in their community. They drafted a Rights of Herring Resolution acknowledging the Herring’s crisis and identified several contributing factors: motor boats, pollution, and “fish ladders.” The resolution passed unanimously, and the youth hosted a Declaration Day, inviting local municipal and state officials. The youth continued to galvanize their community to indigenize the law and speak for the Herring through community events, social media, and their Rights of Herring Resolution.
This event took place in the Fall of 2023. Featuring: Jyrzie Alves, Amaya Balbuena, Talia Landry, Ciara Oakley Robbins, Isaiah Peters, Jacelle Steiding. Moderated by Britt Gondolfi, Rights of Nature Program Coordinator. To learn more about the Rights of Nature movement, visit https://bioneers.org/rights-of-nature/
Why pay attention to baby animals? From egg to tadpole, chick to fledgling, they offer scientists a window into questions of immense importance: How do genes influence health? Which environmental factors support ― or obstruct ― life? Entire ecosystems rest on the survival of animal babies. At any given moment, babies represent the majority of animal life on Earth.
In her book “Nursery Earth,” marine biologist and researcher Danna Staaf explores what scientists know about these tiny, hidden lives, revealing some of nature’s strangest workings: A salamander embryo breathes with the help of algae inside its cells. The young grub of a Goliath beetle dwarfs its parents. The spotted beak of a parasitic baby bird tricks adults of other species into feeding it.
In a conversation with Bioneers, Staaf said she was motivated to write “Nursery Earth” in part because she wanted people to realize that baby animals are not just miniature versions of their full-grown counterparts but instead their own, distinct creatures.
“I wanted people to see that babies are not just incomplete adults,” Staaf said. “They’re adapted to doing different things, to thriving in their own environment.”
Caterpillars, the larval stage of butterflies and moths, offer an obvious example. But even before their dramatic metamorphosis, these insects are changing and adapting. In this excerpt from “Nursery Earth,” learn about the amazing capabilities — from mimicking bird droppings and snakes to shooting their feces 40 times the length of their bodies — that caterpillars employ to survive this precarious stage in their life.
Staaf has a doctoral degree in biology from Stanford University, where she studied baby squid. She is the author of several books, including “The Lives of Octopuses and Their Relatives: A Natural History of Cephalopods,” “Monarchs of the Sea,” “The Lady and the Octopus” and “Nursery Earth.” Hear more from Staaf about what shapes and motivates her work in this Q&A with Bioneers.
The following is an excerpt from “Nursery Earth” by Danna Staaf (The Experiment, June 2023).
The bizarre behavioral and developmental adaptations of caterpillars
“It’s not easy being a caterpillar,” says the ecologist Martha Weiss of Georgetown University. “Lots of people want to eat you, and lots of people want to lay their eggs inside of your body.”
If you’re thinking the latter part of that statement sounds like a reference to parasitoid wasps, then you are absolutely correct. After decades of studying caterpillars, Weiss says she isn’t surprised if half the ones she collects in the wild turn out to be parasitized by wasps or flies. When they pupate, “instead of one butterfly, you get a thousand wasps.” It’s even possible for the parasitoids to parasitize each other inside the caterpillar. “It’s a turducken of larval development happening at once,” Weiss tells me, rather gleefully.
Although caterpillars are insects and technically have a hard exoskeleton, it’s so thin and flexible it doesn’t offer much protection from predators. However, some caterpillars have adapted it into an unusual defense. They have to molt as they grow, shedding the old skin (each molt marks a new instar, or phase of larval development). Many insect larvae hold on to their old molts in order to deter predators, and I agree it is quite a deterrent. I would not eat a mad hatterpillar, which stacks its old heads atop its current one, no more than I would eat a golden tortoise beetle larva, which carries its feces as well as its old skins on a structure called an anal fork.
I would not eat a mad hatterpillar, which stacks its old heads atop its current one, no more than I would eat a golden tortoise beetle larva, which carries its feces as well as its old skins on a structure called an anal fork.
Other larvae cycle through a variety of predator-repelling tactics as they grow. The caterpillars of two swallowtail species at first resemble bird droppings, in mottled white and brown. After a couple of molts, they switch to mimicking snakes, vivid green with large imitation eyes. “You can’t be bird poop if you’re three inches long, but you can be a nice snake if you’re three inches long,” explains Weiss. These fake snakes even change their behavior, puffing up their shoulders and flicking out a pretend “snake tongue” to really sell the disguise.
Although Weiss is well versed in the world’s diversity of caterpillars, she has devoted her career to one species in particular: the silver-spotted skipper. With characteristic dry humor, she says, “Nobody knows more about silver-spotted skippers than I do. Not many people know or care about silver-spotted skippers, so I’m not giving myself too great an accolade there.”
Weiss’s work on this species has revealed fascinating adaptive characteristics. It is one of a few caterpillars that engineer shelters for itself from both the surrounding foliage and its own extruded silk. At each instar, a skipper caterpillar produces the same precise leaf shelter as other caterpillars in the same instar. They make the same cuts, the same folds, the same stitches with silk to hold the shelter’s shape. They spend most of their time resting in this shelter, periodically emerging to eat and to expel their feces. And they don’t just poop on the leaf or hang their butt over the edge and poop on the ground. No, they shoot their poop with incredible force over a distance that can be forty times their own length. This defensive maneuver avoids bringing their little house to the attention of predators who might see or smell an accumulation of waste nearby.
After studying silver-spotted skippers for twenty years, Weiss is always ready to help new students learn to identify the five instars of caterpillar development. But she found these entomologists-in-training repeatedly coming to her with one particular problem: how to determine if certain caterpillars were in the third or fourth instar. “It always made me feel kind of incompetent when I would look at these, and I couldn’t really tell what was going on,” she says.
Finally, one of the scientists in the lab who was tracking the individual development of caterpillars day by day discovered the existence of an extra instar. Some of these caterpillars were going through a “third-and-a-half” instar, bigger than the third but smaller than the fourth. This extra instar only shows up in stressful conditions, when food or weather aren’t optimal. But just because it’s conditional doesn’t mean it’s uncommon—there are times when over half the caterpillars on a given plant will exhibit the extra growth stage.
Weiss takes this experience as a crucial reminder that we limit our understanding when we hold on too tightly to what we think we know.
Weiss takes this experience as a crucial reminder that we limit our understanding when we hold on too tightly to what we think we know. Textbooks and published papers had all described five instars in silver-spotted skippers, so when Weiss and her students saw caterpillars in the extra instar, they kept “trying to mash them into one box or another.” Many aspects of this caterpillar’s biology are precise, rigid, and predictable. Each leaf-and-silk shelter is produced in narrow tolerances as though on an assembly line; each propulsive poo travels farther from the shelter the older and larger the larva becomes. These adaptations help protect skipper caterpillars from predators. The flexibility of their development is a different kind of adaptation, a baked-in capacity to cope with other kinds of environmental stress. It reminds us that adaptation isn’t something that happened in the past and is now finished—adaptation can be flexible and ongoing.
How can we truly conceptualize air, an invisible mixture of gases that is at once nothing and everything? In his essay, “On the Poetics and Mathematics of Air,” transdisciplinary artist and scholar Andrew S. Yang reflects on both the intangible and physical characteristics of the air that makes up Earth’s atmosphere. “Air is at once distantly external and intimately internal — an extended vault of atmosphere above us and just as equally a quiet sigh within us,” Yang writes. Through words and numbers, Yang attempts to take a true measure of the air that surrounds and sustains us and what it means for our world when it is polluted.
Andrew S. Yang works across the visual arts and natural sciences to explore our ecological entanglements at a time of profound planetary change. He received his B.S. in Chemistry/Molecular Biology from Juniata College, an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the Lesley University College of Art and Design, and a Ph.D. in Biology from Duke University. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. His research and writing can be found in publications such as Leonardo, Art Journal, Biological Theory and Current Biology.
The essay, “On the Poetics and Mathematics of Air,” is an excerpt from volume two, “Air,” of the five-volume anthology series “Elementals.” From the Center for Humans & Nature, publisher of the award-winning anthology series “Kinship,” “Elementals” brings together essays, poetry, and stories that illuminate the dynamic relationships between people and place, human and nonhuman life, mind and the material world, and the living energies that make all life possible. Inspired by the four material elements, the “Elementals” series asks: What can the vital forces of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world?
On the Poetics and Mathematics of Air
Air is equivocal. It quavers between the significantly ethereal and elusively substantial. Air is really there, but not really there—it is physical but more or less intangible. When air is recognized as something, it is almost always as a medium in which other things happen like clouds, pollen, contagion, or music. Consider Bashō—
Spring air— woven moon and plum scent1
The air is the aroma that it carries forth and the moon that it suspends like a bright round button. The air is an invisible vehicle and substrate.
This past summer, the air stung. Doing yard work outdoors made me hoarse; I coughed a little, then coughed more. The noon sky was dusky and the sun oddly orange, akin to a persimmon on a gray blanket. Micron-sized soot was traveling by air across thousands of miles, coming from the wildfires that seared Canadian forests in conflagration. Consider Issa—
forming the year’s first sky… tea smoke2
He reminds us that fire does more than inhabit air—and in fact builds it. The air’s oxygen feeds the flames, and those flames transform black spruce and fir into hundreds of millions of tons of carbon that remake an ever-hotter atmosphere.
•••
It is graduation day at Harvard University, and students in caps and gowns walk with aplomb. A person stops a few of them and hands each a seed:
Interviewer: Hold on to that for a second. Imagine that I planted that in the ground and a tree grew. And here is a piece of that tree [the graduate is then handed a heavy log]. Now, where did all that stuff come from?
The graduates offer a variety of answers—water, soil, minerals, and nutrients from the ground.
Interviewer: Now, what would you say to someone who said to you that most of the weight of a tree came from the carbon dioxide in the air?
Graduate A: I would say I have no idea, I would have to think about that.
Graduate B: I would say that is very disturbing, and wonder how that could happen.
Graduate A: That would be hard to believe because carbon dioxide is, well, it’s a gas, and it doesn’t seem intuitive that you can take on mass by taking in a gas.
“It is a very strange idea,” reflects the narrator, “that somehow the air which they view as nothing, as weightless, as insubstantial somehow makes a tree, a giant tree, that weighs several tons.”3
Every breath these graduates exhaled was carbon dioxide, from which the Canadian spruce and fir grew their big, flammable bodies. This is a puzzle for aesthetics—how to conjure sensation and comprehensibility from an invisible that is everywhere. The air is heavy with our aspirations, but more and more it feels like we are earthlings without an Earth. How can the intangible everything become more than nothing?
•••
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, …I am mad for it to be in contact with me. The smoke of my own breath, …My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself4
There is no air without Earth. The Cambridge and the Oxford dictionaries converge on almost identical definitions of air: the mixture of gases that surrounds the earth and that we breathe.5 But in capturing air as both a geophysical phenomenon (that we recognize as sky or space) and an embodied engagement (that we experience as breath), a duality emerges. Air is at once distantly external and intimately internal—an extended vault of atmosphere above us and just as equally a quiet sigh within us. It isn’t obvious how to make sense of the Janus-faced disjunct of an air that is here and there but somehow nowhere in between.
Add to this the fact that at this moment you are likely inhaling a molecule of Walt Whitman’s last breath, taken on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey. It is as preposterous and unnerving as it is true.6 Poetry can have that quality, as can physics; there is a seductive wonder in sharing the smoke of Whitman’s own breath across a century, just as there is a sublimity to one among his last 25 sextillion molecules of respiration circulating in the troposphere for generations, only to enter your body right now.7
It feels impossible to make full sense of Whitman’s physical breath becoming our own, just as we are unable to properly reckon the continuum of the air teeming between the edge of outer space and our nostrils (much less the innumerable bubbles roiling in the oceans or trapped miles deep in Antarctic ice). One might think of air as a hyperobject—something that the literary scholar Timothy Morton has proposed to describe entities that are “massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity” and evade direct sensation.8 However, if we take the earthliness of air seriously—how it is held tight to the planet by its gravity, disappearing at an altitude of some one hundred kilometers—it turns out to be quite local, the thin skin of a blue marble.9
Air may be less a hyperobject and more a basis for what Immanuel Kant called the mathematical sublime. The sublime emerges when nature’s raw power and scale exceed comprehension by our senses or our imagination. The mathematical sublime, in contrast, is generated through our intellectual abilities, which, through math and measurement, can tame overwhelming magnitudes by representing them numerically.10 In this way, our “super-sensible faculty” of reason can subdue the fathomless and unify phenomena that appear to be in disparate contradiction otherwise. The false dichotomy of sky and breath can dissolve into a seamless atmosphere, while 25 sextillion molecules of air transfigure from an insensible plentitude into a conceivable magnitude. We can even conclude that there are more molecules of air in a single breath than breaths of air held within Earth’s atmosphere. What is both exceedingly small and extremely numerous becomes comprehensible, and maybe even more bewildering in that sublimity.11
The false dichotomy of sky and breath can dissolve into a seamless atmosphere, while 25 sextillion molecules of air transfigure from an insensible plentitude into a conceivable magnitude.
Consider how for every million molecules of air in the atmosphere right now, only 416 of them are carbon dioxide—in scientific parlance, 416 parts per million (ppm). This minute and closely monitored quantity is a measure of our climate past and future, its continuous increase over the past 250 years a consequence of our unremitting combustion of wood, coal, and oil. If we can conjure calculations to represent any magnitude that nature has to offer, then the pleasure of the mathematical sublime arises from subduing the insensible vastness of scale through reason, creating domesticated versions of unruly realities. As a consequence, parts per million has become the underwhelming currency of potential climate catastrophe, a minuscule measurement that highlights the enormous potency of carbon dioxide in one sense while diminishing it in another.
Whether it is viral pandemics or dark matter or global warming, we wrestle with the paradox that phenomenal immensities are generated by the diffuse, diminutive, and often imperceptible. Perhaps 416 parts per million represents a kind of enigmatic sublime, as persistently unassuming as it is profound. Our aesthetics struggle, understandings wobble.
We do so much with an air of unknowing. The atmosphere is not a perfume, but neither is it arithmetic. What is left but to try to catch our breath?
notes 1. Lucien Stryk, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 31. 2. David G. Lanoue, “Haiku of Kobayashi Issa,” http://haikuguy.com/issa/search.php. 3. Annenberg Learner, “Lessons from Thin Air,” 1997, https://www.learner.org/series/minds-of-our-own/2-lessons-from-thin-air/. 4. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ” (1892 version), Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version. 5. Cambridge Dictionary Online, s.v. “air,” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/air. 6. The calculation and conclusion are based on a classic physics example often called Caesar’s last breath. It is an example of a Fermi problem, named after the physicist Enrico Fermi, who frequently used mathematics to quickly estimate complex questions. The physical principles and calculations just as easily apply to Walt Whitman or any number of people, and not just last breaths. An explanation of the calculation can be found here: “Only a Breath Away aka ‘Caesar’s Last Breath,’” A View from the Back of the Envelope (blog), http://www.vendian.org/envelope/dir2/ breath.html. 7. James Lloyd, “Are We Really Breathing Caesar’s Last Breath?” BBC Science Focus, July 12, 2017, https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/are-we-really-breathing-caesars-last-breath. 8. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 130. 9. “The blue marble” refers to a photograph of Earth that was taken on December 7, 1972, twenty-one thousand miles from the surface, by the crew of Apollo 17 on their mission to the moon. In it, Earth is photographed in its totality, “floating” in the darkness of space and offering a profound sense of locality to the Earth and everything upon it. 10. Kant describes the mathematical sublime starting off as “a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude,” which then turns into a sense of sublime satisfaction that “awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us.” See James Creed Meredith, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 33; and Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134. 11. Kant argued that “the sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small” and thus “absolutely great.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 87. The absolutely great is most often thought of in terms of three-dimensional size; however, we should consider size as a matter of abundance as well, since the key for the mathematical sublime would appear to be the estimation of any magnitude that is otherwise insensible to our aesthetic capacities, be that large, small, or numerous.
This essay by Andrew S. Yang has been reprinted with permission from “Air,” volume two of the five-volume anthology “Elementals,” published by the Center for Humans and Nature, 2024.
We are in for a long haul. The election results and their implications for our collective work and societal values do not come as a complete surprise, but the reality of what we are facing is challenging to comprehend. Many of us have been preparing, in a variety of ways, for this moment, and it will take tremendous fortitude and collective resilience to continue pushing back against the reactive forces currently at the political helm.
The work you all do is what drives Bioneers as an organization. Moving forward, we will continue to endeavor to reflect the grit, brilliance, and innovation of this community back to itself through these newsletters. As Sarah Crowell, co-founder of the legendary Destiny Arts Center, said from the Bioneers stage, “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it—together.”
Learning how to reflect, regroup and reconnect in times of crisis may, to activists, seem secondary to taking action, but without maintaining our inner balance and remaining connected to our communities and the natural world (the very reasons we do this work in the first place), we will be far less effective. This week, we look to actual leaders for inspiration, exploring how exemplary contemporary activists honor their personal well-being and draw strength from nature and their communities.
Krista Tippett, the host of the poignant and popular podcast “On Being” is interviewed by her friend, philanthropist/activist Azita Ardakani, in an intimate and fascinating conversation. Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons reflects on how we can find healing and strength together even in the face of today’s pressing crises. And activists Claudia Peña and Erin Matariki Carr discuss the power of creative expression in helping us reconnect to the Earth and to each other.
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How, Then, Might We Live? On Being—An Intimate Interview with Krista Tippett
After accomplished stints as a journalist, author and diplomat, and studying theology at Yale Divinity School, Krista Tippett was struck by a significant gap in the media landscape—a lack of deep, intelligent conversations to explore the spiritual, ethical and moral aspects of human life. What began as a national public radio show in 2003 evolved into the multiple award-winning podcast “On Being,” described as “wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive.”
Gifted with insatiable curiosity, profound relational intelligence, a poetic sensibility, and an ability to unearth revelatory ideas to live by, Krista creates spaces where wisdom can emerge. She has hosted luminaries as disparate as Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hahn, Isabel Wilkerson and Desmond Tutu, among many more. In this rare intimate conversation with her friend, strategist, philanthropist and activist Azita Ardakani, they delve deeply into the core themes that have been Krista’s guiding passions.
Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, author of “Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership,” acknowledges the unusually intense anguish and pain underlying the pressing crises we currently face. Amid an avalanche of asks, needs and calls to action, she admits to often experiencing grief, frustration and despair, but she shares how she has been able to find healing and hope in cultivating diverse relationships, in community engagement and in opening her senses to the wider web of life. “Conservation biologists tell us that ecosystems with the largest diversity of species have the greatest resilience to regenerate after trauma,” Simons says. “That has been a guiding value at the heart of Bioneers since it began: that the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.” Watch Simons’ talk from the 2024 Bioneers conference below or read the transcript.
Claudia Peña and Erin Matariki Carr on Reconnecting with the Earth and Each Other
Under the weight of colonization, hyper-capitalism and unaddressed trauma, many of us have forgotten how to play our part in the orchestra of the natural world. Watch a conversation between two remarkable activists and legal practitioners from different continents, working in different communities, but who happen to share a belief in the power of creative expression to help us reconnect to the entire web of life. Claudia Peña, Executive Director of the artist collective For Freedoms and Co-Director of the Center for Justice at UCLA, and Erin Matariki Carr, a leading Indigenous legal scholar and Rights of Nature activist in Aotearoa (New Zealand), offer ways we can all reconnect deeply to the natural world.
10 Ways to Be Prepared and Grounded Now That Trump Has Won
From Waging Nonviolence
In the face of Trump’s recent win, grounding ourselves to avoid fear, isolation, and burnout will be crucial. This article, written by Daniel Hunter, Global Trainings Manager for 350.org, shares practical steps to counter authoritarianism’s chaos, including building inner resilience, nurturing trusted connections, and embracing strategic resistance. Rather than yielding to anger or despair, it encourages constructive paths—like finding supportive communities, focusing on impactful actions, and envisioning positive alternatives.
SPECIAL COURSE OFFER — Cultivating Inner Resilience: Embrace the Power of Emotions
Emotions are often misunderstood—seen as obstacles rather than profound sources of insight, healing, and energy. But emotions hold the keys to sharper thinking, deeper empathy, and a truer connection to ourselves and others. Bioneers Learning is offering a 50% discount on our upcoming course, “Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem,” led by renowned emotions and empathy expert Karla McLaren. Join us for a journey that reveals how embracing our emotional landscape can guide us through these complex times with greater strength and wisdom. Use the link below to get your discount.
After accomplished stints as a journalist, author and diplomat, and studying theology at Yale Divinity School, Krista Tippett was struck by a significant gap in the media landscape—a lack of deep, intelligent conversations to explore the spiritual, ethical and moral aspects of human life. What began as a national public radio show in 2003 evolved into the multiple award-winning podcast “On Being” (“wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive.”)
Gifted with insatiable curiosity, profound relational intelligence, a poetic sensibility, and an ability to unearth revelatory ideas to live by, Krista creates spaces where wisdom can emerge. With her interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral whole systems overview, she’s hosted luminaries as disparate as Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hahn, Isabel Wilkerson and Desmond Tutu, among many more. Join us for a rare intimate, live interview with her friend, insightful strategist, philanthropist and activist Azita Ardakani.
This conversation took place at the 2024 Bioneers conference.
Krista Tippett, a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, bestselling author, and former journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin, later studied theology at Yale Divinity School and eventually launched Speaking of Faith, which became On Being, a weekly national public radio show in 2003, that grew to over 400 stations across the U.S. and has received the highest honors in broadcasting, the Internet, and podcasting. In 2011, she created the Civil Conversations Project, and then The On Being Project. Among her many honors, she is a prestigious National Humanities Medalist, has received a Four Freedoms Medal of the Roosevelt Institute, holds honorary doctorates including from Yale and Middlebury College, and has published three books: Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living; Einstein’s God; and Speaking of Faith.
Azita Ardakani is a serial entrepreneur, social activist and human centered communication expert. Azita created Lovesocial in 2010, an award winning creative agency which developed human driven campaigns and strategies mapping organizational community behavior. In 2016 she launched Honeycomb Portfolio, an experimental investment vehicle. Honeycomb is driven by nature’s intelligence and is looking to bridge our entrepreneurial, social and emotional economic frame by deferring to nature.
Visionary urban planners and community organizers recognize that effectively addressing the climate crisis requires drawing down carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it back where it belongs in natural systems. Urban forestry is a nature-based solution that simultaneously addresses the parallel crises of climate change and wealth inequality. With Brett KenCairn, Boulder city Senior Advisor and Samira Malone, Urban Forestry Program Manager at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network.
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Featuring
Brett KenCairn is Boulder Colorado’s Senior Policy Advisor for Climate Action and Director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions (CRS)—an initiative to expand natural climate solutions nationally that is co-sponsored by the Urban Sustainability Directors Network.
Samira Malone is the National Urban Forestry Portfolio Lead at USDN managing an initiative at the forefront of urban forestry development. Previously, Samira served as the Executive Director of the Cleveland Tree Coalition.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel and Teo Grossman
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
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Transcript
Host: In this program, we delve into how visionary urban planners and community organizers recognized that effectively addressing the climate crisis requires actually drawing down carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it back where it belongs in natural systems. Urban forestry is a nature-based solution that simultaneously addresses the parallel crises of climate change and wealth inequality. We hear from Brett KenCairn, Boulder city Senior Advisor and Samira Malone, Urban Forestry Program Manager at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network.
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Urban Forests: A Nature-Based Solution to Climate Breakdown and Inequality”.
In the 1960s, NASA asked scientific researcher James Lovelock to design experiments for the Viking space mission to determine if there was ever life on Mars. He began to ponder what makes life different from non-life. Outer space brought him down to earth.
With the famed microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis. It’s the idea that Earth is a kind of superorganism where the entire symphony of living things self-regulates Earth’s conditions to create a physical environment hospitable for the entire web of life. It’s also an ancient Indigenous perspective.
At this existential moment when humanity is destroying the conditions conducive to life on a global scale, what if the solutions to climate breakdown are hiding in plain sight in nature’s time-tested processes and principles that have allowed life to flourish and evolve for over 3.8 billion years?
That driving question led a small network of urban planners, public servants and community organizers to launch a visionary national initiative to scale up urban forests.
Brett KenCairn(BK): For many, many years – generations almost – of people who have lived in cities, if we’ve been aware of the urban forest at all, it’s just this kind of almost two-dimensional backdrop to the world that we’re living in, and oh, it’s so nice; there’s a few trees.
I think one of the emerging understandings is that we shouldn’t think about trees as trees individually. They are part of communities too. And they need a whole complement of community to be able to support the cascade of relationships that are all a part of how they process carbon, how they capture and store water, how they move nutrients not only within themselves but to others around them.
And so I think we’re starting to finally realize first that they’re a life-support infrastructure that provides critical water cleaning, air cleaning, shade and heat modulation, extreme weather event buffering. These are actually critical infrastructure.
Host: Brett KenCairn is Founding Director of Center for Regenerative Solutions, and Senior Manager for Nature-based Climate Solutions in the City of Boulder, Colorado.
As global heating escalates radically, he suggests that urban forests are in fact “critical life-support infrastructure.” Cities experience what’s called the “heat island effect” as a result of paving over and covering most of the landscape. To offset this heat sink, mature tree canopies can cool the air temperature by up to 20 degrees, which can be the difference between life and death during a heatwave.
In addition to heat mitigation, increased tree canopy cover in cities leads to significant improvements in air quality, water quality, stormwater management, urban biodiversity, and outdoor recreation.
Expanding urban forests leads to major public health benefits, such as reductions in asthma and respiratory disease, as well as important improvements in mental health. Last, but certainly not least, trees sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
Here, the plot thickens. We’ve been breaking the kinds of records you don’t want to break: it’s the hottest it’s been in at least 125,000 years.
The summers are hotter in 84% of U.S. cities than ever before. In 2024, Phoenix, Arizona smashed all records with a broiling 113 straight days of temperatures over 100 degrees. Contact with pavement caused third-degree burns. The heat is moving beyond the boundaries of human survival.
Clearly, building urban climate resilience is imperative, but how?
BK: Climate change is fundamentally oriented around this issue of carbon, and carbon framed as the problem: CO2 goes into the atmosphere, it contributes to global warming. So the issue then is how we stop that. This is the classic smoking gun sort of causation slide, which is that the atmospheric CO2, around the late 1800s, as the Industrial Revolution is starting up, it starts to take off. And that seems to match quite perfectly to the increased use of fossil fuels. And so there you have it. See these curves? They match so beautifully, therefore, we have it here. This is the cause of climate change. It’s burning fossil fuels. And so CO2 is fundamentally that issue.
And so our solution is fundamentally a technological solution. So it’s the machines that we’re using to create energy that are burning fossil fuels, and so what we really need to do to solve climate change is just create a whole new set of machines. We just need more solar panels and we need more wind turbines, then we need more electric cars, and oh yes, we need some heat pumps. And if we do all that, we’ll solve climate change.
Well, I don’t know if you’ve been tracking the sort of science of this, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out about three years ago with their first kind of major bummer report, which said, remember what we were telling you about how we were going to solve climate change by reducing emissions? Well, all the things we were telling you to do, you need to do even faster, but it’s actually not going to be enough. We’ve now emitted too much CO2 and therefore, we’re going to have to ramp up the removal of CO2 if we’re going actually be able to stabilize climate.
So within that sort of context and our understanding that the way you solve climate change is build machines, then we just need to build a new set of machines. We’re going to build machines that suck carbon out of the air. And if you haven’t been following the news you’ll be hearing this more and more, like we have a machine for you. The problem is, it’s not working.
Host: Carbon itself isn’t the problem – the carbon element is the essential building block of all life.
The ground truth is that we’ve whacked the Earth’s regulatory systems wildly out of balance. Burning fossil fuels has shifted enormous quantities of carbon into the atmosphere from safely buried, otherwise harmless reserves of ancient plant matter.
But meanwhile, we’ve also been transforming landscapes across vast scales, releasing enormous amounts of carbon from soils and forests.
Scientists estimate that at least a third of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere is the result of removing these essential carbon sinks from natural life-support systems.
This radical transformation also coincides with the displacement of Indigenous and traditional peoples, who had been managing landscapes in mostly very sustainable ways for millennia.
A Gaian perspective calls for a whole-systems approach.
BK: Climate change is not happening because of some simple geochemical machine equation of CO2 in, CO2 out. The atmosphere is actually a biologically mediated dynamic – and it’s the extent to which we have degraded the living world that we have been disrupting climate. Yes, we’ve been tipping the balance because of fossil fuel combustion and we must change our energy systems, but it’s actually the regeneration of the living world that is the true hope of us being able to solve both climate change and a whole series of other existential challenges that we face. So let’s talk about what the foundation for a life-centered – not a technology-centered – solution to climate change might look like.
When we start to actually work with living systems, we can actually start to engage other hugely valuable and powerful cycles like the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the terrestrial energy cycle – and this is, by the way, why biodiversity is so important. Biodiversity is that integrator. We need all these different members of our community, who are not necessarily human, who all have very important jobs, to be integrating those cycles, and when that happens, remarkable and miraculous healing can take place. And oh by the way, we’re essential to that.
Plains States Forestry Project poster created by the WPA (1940), Wikimedia Commons
That all may sound like not such good news because that’s even bigger than what we were told we had to do, but we have done this before. We have regenerated landscapes at scale, in our own country in the ‘30s. The ecological catastrophe that the Dust Bowl represented is absolutely remarkable. It was huge. But we decided as a society that we were going to mobilize millions of people and we were going to put a significant amount of our resources towards it, and we were going to plant literally billions of trees, and we reversed what could have been an absolute ecological catastrophe.
Host: A majority of us now live in cities, and projectionsforecast that by 2050 urban centers will be home to more than two-thirds of humanity. In the US, urban dwellers are expected to comprise 90%. As climate disruption bears down, it’s the heat that kills and hospitalizes more people than any other extreme weather event.
In Boulder, where Brett KenCairn works in City government, the community sees itself as a laboratory for innovative policy making. As one of the first cities in the country with a sustainability department, Boulder recently reviewed its climate plans and came to the realization that they simply weren’t up to the job.
BK: Boulder was an early advocate for the kind of communities movement in climate action when the federal government, for example, didn’t sign onto the Kyoto Climate Accords internationally. Boulder said, well, we’re going to step forward and do it, and they were a part of a small cohort that rapidly grew of communities saying we’re going to sign onto these nation-level goals for emissions reduction.
Well, as it turns out, one of the things that we didn’t recognize at that time was, yes, fossil fuels and emissions reductions are an important part of stabilizing climate, but the climate scientists are now really clear, that’s not enough. Although, if you look out in the popular press right now, it still says that mantra. It’s like, oh, we just have to change our energy systems. Well, no, it’s not actually true, because as it turns out, the atmosphere is a biologically mediated dynamic. It’s not a geochemical machine that simply operates on CO2 in and CO2 out. It’s actually the byproduct of the respiratory process of the entire planet, and therefore, the fact that we have been degrading the living world for 12,000 years has actually contributed almost as much carbon into the atmosphere from that land degradation as burning fossil fuels, and it’s actually the mechanism that could have otherwise buffered all those changes.
So we started to realize that we really actually needed to take seriously that the living world was a critical part of our climate action strategy. So after a lot of, frankly, internal debate and trying to make the case, we actually formed a new climate action unit within our climate team around nature-based solutions. And now that’s a part of the work that we do, in addition to changing energy systems, in addition to circular economy work, we now have a nature-based climate solutions team. Our work in that team spans both urban landscapes and natural and working lands context.
Host: Given the reality of what a healthy urban forest can do to help mitigate public health and safety impacts from climate change, the real question is why every city isn’t already investing in this eminently do-able and sensible solution? More on that when we return.
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature…
Host: Research has shown in many U.S. cities, a current map of healthy and thriving urban tree canopy almost precisely matches up with a map of wealth and income. Tree canopy cover in affluent neighborhoods generally ranges from 5-10 times more than coverage in historically marginalized communities.
Predictably, neighborhoods with the worst heat and least tree cover correspond with historical redlining. This long-term racist practice of underinvesting in communities of color and low-income communities by declining home loans has shaped and reinforced the social, physical and economic infrastructure of most American cities today.
But the heat is on and change is in the air. Enter Samira Malone, Urban Forestry Program Manager at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network.
Samira Malone (SM): The City of Cleveland has the largest percent of Black residents within the region. Cleveland itself has 33 distinct neighborhoods, and of those neighborhoods, as you guessed it, the Black and Brown neighborhoods have the lowest tree canopy. Although the City of Cleveland has a tree canopy percentage of 18%, it can vary between 6.5% to 30% across the various neighborhoods. And so one of the things that we do is we work very critically on the ground with those distinct neighborhoods to help them not only get funding to plant trees, but also thinking holistically about what inventorying and planning looks like.
So one of the things that I like to elevate when I talk about the work that we’re doing with trees, it’s not just about restorative and regenerative practices within our natural environment, but this really is an act of racial restorative justice because these are neighborhoods that have been disproportionately, historically disinvested in for decades.
Host: At its founding in 1796, the City of Cleveland had nearly 90% tree canopy. Its nickname was “The Forest City.” Now that the canopy has shrunk to 18% and is very unequally distributed, addressing environmental justice is on the table. In her previous role as Director of the Cleveland Tree Coalition, Samira Malone and her team worked with a 52-member network of local community organizations to increase Cleveland’s tree canopy to 30% by 2040.
Although it’s way easier said than done, urban forestry got a huge boost in 2022 with national funding from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, known as the IRA.
SM: Our organization not only functions as a coalition, but as I mentioned, we also provide funding to our partners in order for them to do any types of plantings. We’re looking to expand to maintenance and preservation, but as it stands right now, our organizations are planting anywhere between 2,000 to 5,000 trees in the ground per year on an annual basis, which is great, but we still have a significant way to go. In order for us to reach that very robust goal of 30% tree canopy by 2040, we need to be planting 28,000 trees in the ground per year. That doesn’t even take into account the work that we need to be doing in preservation and maintenance of our existing tree canopy.
So as you see, there’s still a lot of room to grow, but even in that, I’m extremely optimistic and hopeful because we are seeing a historic investment in urban forestry. So we’re really excited about being able to expand and scale up the model that we have in Cleveland.
Host: In fact, the game-changing federal investment didn’t happen out of the blue. Beginning in 2020, a small visionary group of city planners, public servants and environmental, climate and justice organizers had formed a coalition to advocate for a major investment in urban forestry as part of the nation’s investment in critical infrastructure.
Fast forward to 2023. Again, Brett KenCairn…
BK: To make a long story short, after a lot of work, about a billion and a half dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act was actually allocated towards urban forestry in the United States. That’s about 100 times more money than the federal government would typically have been putting into urban forestry. But that was actually corresponding to the sudden arising of extreme heat events that were happening all over the country over the last few years in which we suddenly started to realize, oh my god, these trees are actually really, really important to us. In fact, one of the most valuable assets we have in trying to temper these extreme events is urban forests.
So I think that there’s been this sudden sort of explosion of awareness about the importance of forests, but then as we’ve stepped back saying, oh gosh, these are really important, we’ve started to realize how underfunded they are, how little we actually know about them; we actually don’t have very good data systems in our cities about where we have trees and where we don’t, how they’re changing. And then the best management systems. So, for example, when we started to actually say, okay, yes, trees are actually important for trying to mitigate extreme heat, but how much? How specifically much can I get out of planting trees versus something else? Because of course, in cities with public budgets, it’s always a tradeoff. There literally hasn’t been any mechanism by which we could say: If we plant this number of trees in this location, we can achieve this kind of temperature reduction.
So those are the kinds of tools and resources that we’re building now in collaboration with this whole cohort that we’re calling the Vanguard Cities, of places that are really trying to take the lead, not only by the way in this sort of notion of the sort of technique of urban forestry, but in the how do we implement it in an equity-centered, community-based way.
Host: The Vanguard Cities movement was born out of an imperative to connect leaders in urban forestry across the country to demonstrate its myriad benefits, and to gather data as to what works and what’s really needed to address the magnitude of the crisis.
Vanguard Cities has steadily built out a network of leading practitioners from city governments, organizers from community organizations, and world-class researchers from institutions around the country.
A billion and half dollars sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not even a rounding error in massive federal budgets. It’s more like a long overdue down payment.
Nevertheless, this federal seed funding is making a game-changing difference to organizations like the Cleveland Tree Coalition and its goal to plant 30,000 trees annually. Where it becomes truly transformative is by centering equity and restorative justice for communities long suffering from the burdens of history, such as Cleveland.
SM: It’s a rust belt city. We’ve been experiencing significant economic decline over the last several decades, a decrease in our tax base, population decline. And so trees have experienced that disinvestment as well, and oftentimes in a lot of neighborhoods, a lot of those redlined neighborhoods have more of a negative relationship to trees because of the lack of maintenance and care and investment put in them. So a huge part of our work is not only the implementation and increasing equity, doing so intentionally, but also shifting public sentiment.
We can talk all day about the value of trees and environmental value of trees, the public health benefits of trees, the economic benefits of trees, the benefits are endless, but if we don’t tie that tangibly to how that relates to people’s sustainability of self, people are tasked with the responsibility of surviving every single day – if we’re not tying the work that we’re doing to how you feel sustained and then how your family can feel sustained, and then how your community can feel sustained, then we’re doing the work in vain.
Host: Regenerating urban forests has the capacity to revitalize communities and local economies. Yet how do we overcome the insidious trap of gentrification that follows when greening neighborhoods makes them targets for developers who force out the residents?
It’s complicated, says Brett KenCairn…
BK: I think this is one of these places where it’s easy to oversimplify things. If we go in and we plant trees in an under-resourced community, we actually have just imposed a liability on them that isn’t going to provide any significant benefit perhaps for a whole generation. And it has to be kept alive in order for it to be able to get to the place that it provides those benefits. If we just plant that tree and turn and walk away, then we’ve basically really done more harm than good, because the other thing that will happen is that tree will probably die, and then people will say, see, I told you; we shouldn’t have trusted them in the first place.
We have to acknowledge that this is a community effort, and that if we are really going to do this in a way that’s going to be effective, we have to engage communities from the outside. And that means we actually have to budget for the process of working with communities.
We had this conversation once with a prominent national organization around trees, and we said, “Well, how much do you think it costs to plant a tree?” So there’s a number. It’s like $323 per tree, and that’s like for the tree and for the planting crew and for the amendments. We said, “Well, what about for the community engagement and for the ongoing maintenance?” And, oh, and workforce development. “Oh, well, we’ll just double it.” So there was just no sense of what it truly costs.
Many of these communities now, are often also the places where development is looking for opportunities to expand. And so there are many instances in which historically under-served neighborhoods don’t want additional trees planted because they see it as the first step of gentrifying their neighborhoods and then losing the access and control of those neighborhoods to gentrification.
So I think that as we start to think about strategies to significantly expand urban forests, they have to go hand in hand with anti-displacement policies and strategies, and with these kinds of community development and economic development opportunities. Because the reality is there are a lot of opportunities in this regeneration of green infrastructure, but they don’t necessarily immediately flow to the places that they should go. So we need to think about and really demand that our policies and strategies for implementing these kinds of changes serve multiple objectives like that.
Host: For leading smaller Vanguard Cities such as Boulder and other larger ones including Cleveland, Portland, Chicago, Denver, Albuquerque and Philadelphia, urban forests are in fact a bridge to the larger goals of both reversing climate disruption through carbon drawdown using nature’s solutions, while creating equity for communities. We’re at an existential fork in the road, says Brett KenCairn.
BK: What we’re doing at this point in the historical process is really piloting. And we are working at a scale that’s maybe 1/50th, maybe 1/100th of what it has to be done at scale to be truly achieving these levels of community protection, community regeneration and revitalization. And the only way we’re going to go from this very important, exciting piloting scale to that level where it truly has the impact that it has to have is that we have to restructure and reprioritize what the economy values, because right now the economy values a whole bunch of things which are actually directly destructive to living systems. And even when we just stop that, there’s still many more resources needed for the workforce development, for the community preparation, for the maintenance and the ongoing work. This is decadal work that we have to do.
And that’s not just going to happen because the secret hand of the market comes in and makes it happen. It happens because markets operate on the basis of the rules that we create for them, and the rules that we have to create through public policy have to start saying investing in and sustaining living systems is now one of our most important priorities, and we’re going to structure it so that that’s where people make long-term asset building living wage livelihoods.
We are on the cusp of spending hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars on technological solutions that won’t work, when what we should be doing is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into hundreds of millions of people in tens of thousands of communities, all over the planet, doing that land regeneration work, which if we do that, not only solves climate, but it solves a whole bunch of other related problems and makes our communities healthier. Gee, which one should we choose?
And it’s not exactly a complete this or that, but it’s certainly a lot more to this than it is to that.
Host: Brett KenCairn and Samira Malone… Urban Forests: A Nature-Based Solution to Climate Breakdown and Inequality.
Imagine meeting a creature that feels both familiar and alien — one that observes you as intently as you do it. When marine biologist Danna Staaf first locked eyes with an octopus at age 10, she was spellbound. This creature, with its shape-shifting body and expressive gaze, sparked a lifelong fascination with cephalopods, the group of marine beings that includes octopuses, squid and their relatives.
Years later, Staaf has dedicated her career to exploring their secrets. She went on to earn a doctoral degree in biology from Stanford University, where she studied baby squid, and authored “The Lives of Octopuses and Their Relatives: A Natural History of Cephalopods,” “Monarchs of the Sea,” “The Lady and the Octopus” and “Nursery Earth.” In this conversation with Bioneers, Staaf shares insights on how her early encounter shaped her work and discusses the captivating characteristics of cephalopods that continue to motivate her research and writing.
Bioneers: We read that you first became interested in octopuses around age 10. What fascinated you about these creatures initially, and what compels you to continue studying cephalopods as an adult?
Danna Staaf: I grew up in L.A., and my family did a road trip where we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, among other places. I saw a live octopus in person for the first time, and it made such a huge impression on me. It was and continues to be this incredible combination of the familiar and the alien. This is an animal with two eyes that are very sophisticated. Like ours, they’re image-forming, and they take in what’s around them, so when you look at an octopus, it looks back at you. They are animals that demonstrate curiosity and behavioral responses to their environment. We know that they’re capable of seeing and recognizing humans, so when it looks at you, it’s like meeting somebody. But at the same time, those eyes and that brain have a totally different evolutionary history. They’re embedded in this body that is the result of that history — that has no bones, almost no structure. It’s completely malleable, both in skin color and texture and the shape of the body itself. I think it hits that sweet point of being relatable and different, and things have stayed that way for me ever since. They keep being interesting the more researchers study and discover about them.
I saw a live octopus in person for the first time, and it made such a huge impression on me. It was and continues to be this incredible combination of the familiar and the alien.
For instance, when I was a kid and first started reading about them, octopuses were understood as solitary creatures. I kept a pet octopus, and we only put one in the tank because it was thought they’d eat each other. Then in the intervening years, there have been these incredible discoveries of social octopus behavior in the wild. There’s a place that got called Octopolis off the coast of Australia, where there’s a group of octopuses living in close quarters, and they have a social dynamic with different roles and relationships with one another. Then on the other side of the world, off the coast of Panama, there’s a different species of octopus that’s been found to actually share dens as a mated pair, which is unheard of. They mate without cannibalizing each other. They just keep being amazing, and so I keep reading and writing about them.
Bioneers: Your latest book is “The Lives of Octopuses and Their Relatives: A Natural History of Cephalopods.” Is there an aspect about the lives of octopuses that you feel particularly demonstrates their intelligence?
Staaf: For me, that tends to come back to their capacity to learn, which I think is the most admirable and useful. Like with humans, the skill is not any innate talent or intelligence, but our ability to try new things, to learn about our environment and to adapt to a new environment. We know octopuses make spatial maps of their environment so they can navigate around. They can adapt to new prey items and new environments. They can learn from day to day what’s available. They’ll learn in captivity to identify different people and distinguish between them based on their behavior and the interactions they have. There was a great example of this learning in a recent documentary called “Secrets of the Octopus,” which follows biologist Alex Schnell as she dives and follows different octopuses around. There’s one octopus in particular that she spends a lot of time with underwater, until it’s acclimated to her presence and just goes about its daily life. She saw it hunting with other species. Octopuses will, in some cases, actually form these collaborative hunting partnerships where fish will point out food to them, and they’ll use their arms to flush it out from under rocks. Dr. Schnell wondered if the octopus would pick up signals from her. And it did. So this human, a weird-looking underwater diver, pointed out where prey was, and the octopus understood.
Octopuses are easier to study because they’re benthic, so they walk around mostly on the sea floor, they keep a den. You can give them a puzzle or a maze to solve. But a squid that swims in the open ocean needs a lot of space. They may have a lot of the same skills, but it’s harder to study their intelligence.
I want to mention that I often talk about octopuses because they are, in some ways, the cephalopods that are most like us and the easiest to study. Their relatives — squid, cuttlefish and even nautiluses — have some abilities to learn as well, but they’re more difficult to study. Octopuses are easier to study because they’re benthic, so they walk around mostly on the sea floor, they keep a den. You can give them a puzzle or a maze to solve. But a squid that swims in the open ocean needs a lot of space. They may have a lot of the same skills, but it’s harder to study their intelligence.
Bioneers: Your book “Monarchs of the Sea” explores the 500-million-year history of cephalopods. How has the evolution of these ancient species shaped the ecosystems we see today in our oceans?
Staaf: It’s hard to get our mind around how long their ancestors have been around — it’s twice as long as dinosaurs. So when Stegosaurus and Diplodocus were walking around on land, there were ancestors of octopuses and squid in the ocean. And even before there was anything on land, when there were no animals on land at all, there were ancestors of octopuses and squid in the ocean. It’s really fascinating to think about how long they’ve been present and changing, evolving, adapting. They didn’t look like the modern giant Pacific octopus. And over and over again, they’ve become present right at the center of ocean ecosystems. They’re not usually the biggest animals around, and they’re definitely not the smallest animals around. The way their bodies and presence have evolved puts them right in the middle.
It’s hard to get our mind around how long their ancestors have been around — it’s twice as long as dinosaurs.
For the most part, they’re generalist predators, and so they’ll eat most things smaller than them — little fish, shrimp, crabs and each other. They’re also a really great food source for anything bigger than them. Larger cephalopods, larger fish, sea birds, marine mammals and marine reptiles all eat them, so they’re literally at the center of the food web. They’re taking in all this energy from the smaller stuff and packaging it for the bigger stuff. Though many things are eating them, they’re able to sustain that and not go extinct because they also have, on average, a really fast life cycle and quick generational turnover. Many species grow up to maturity in less than a year. They make lots of babies, thousands or tens of thousands, so it really fuels and shapes the ecosystem. For instance, sperm whales, the biggest toothed whales on the planet, live almost exclusively off squid. We don’t see a lot of giant squid; they don’t live in a place where we spend a lot of time and tend to only wash up on shore after they’re sick or dying, but scientists have calculated that there are masses of giant squid in the ocean because they’re what’s sustaining all of the sperm whales.
Bioneers: You’ve also written fiction and created art that features octopuses, squid and other cephalopods. What gap do you hope your creative pursuits bridge between marine biology and the public? What motivates you?
Staaf: One is an intrinsic motivation based on my own amazement in cephalopods. But I also need to share it — if I think it’s amazing or funny or would make other people happy, I want to share it. I think there are a lot of people who think they’re not really a science person or don’t find science really interesting, who might not gravitate to a shelf of science books at a library. I think that can be for a lot of reasons. Maybe they never really had a science teacher who connected with them growing up, or they just had to memorize facts without ever getting that sense of wonder. Science itself, as amazing as I think it is, isn’t always a universal draw. People think they like science or they don’t like science. But I think telling stories or drawing comics tend to have broad appeal. Everybody likes to laugh, everybody likes a good story. Those are very deep human interests, and in my experience, science is full of stories and jokes. It’s just as universal, but it’s not always presented or learned that way.
Everybody likes to laugh, everybody likes a good story. Those are very deep human interests, and in my experience, science is full of stories and jokes. It’s just as universal, but it’s not always presented or learned that way.
I volunteer as a science teacher and do a lot of outreach in schools. I always tell kids, you are already a scientist. It’s not something you have to memorize a bunch of facts to become. It’s not something you have to train to become. You don’t even have to memorize one single scientific method, because science follows a lot of methods. It’s all about curiosity and making observations, which we’re all great at from the time we’re born. We’re always noticing what’s around us and learning from it. We’re taking in all this information, and we develop hypotheses about how things work way before we learn the word hypothesis. When I make comics or write fiction inspired by science, my goal is to embrace my nerdiness and not ever hide that, but also to show people that they can be part of everything.
Bioneers: What’s on the horizon for you? Any ongoing or upcoming projects you’d like to share about?
Staaf: I just signed a contract with Greystone to write and illustrate a children’s book, which I’m very excited about. It’s about this deep evolutionary history — like a dinosaur book for kids but with cephalopods instead of dinosaurs, and hopefully playing off all those same natural interests that we have towards ancient life, extinctions and what used to be. I’m having a lot of fun doing deep dives into the research, so I can really paint for the young reader, say, what it would be like to scuba dive in the Jurassic or the Permian and see these early life forms.
Given the dire state of the world on many fronts, retaining hope can feel like a constant struggle. But, as Vaclav Havel, the legendary Czech poet, playwright, dissident and eventual president (an inspiring trajectory if there ever was one), described it, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
It is this understanding of hope that keeps visionary and practical leaders engaged and working toward the change they know is needed in the world. Knowing that the work needs to be done, regardless of how monumental the challenge, takes a certain amount of will, self-belief and confidence. It takes real bravery and courage, terms that tend to be overused as gauzy platitudes. But as Bioneers celebrates 35 years, we are certain that these essential values represent a throughline across the thousands of brilliant activists and leaders who we have highlighted and worked with over three and a half decades. They are doing some of the most important work on the planet today.
This week, we feature four fearless innovators speaking truth to power in distinct ways. Wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant is breaking barriers and working towards the integration of social justice within the biological sciences. Civil liberties attorney Cindy Cohn’s work supports the digital infrastructure and rights that we all use in our work on behalf of people and planet. And two brilliant ecologists, Suzanne Simard and Monica Gagliano, share their experiences of being professionally attacked for simply following the evidence that humans may not be the only “intelligent” species on earth.
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Rae Wynn-Grant – Wild Life: How Personal Journeys are Essential to Sustainable Leadership in Environmental Science
Growing up in the diverse and bustling California Bay Area, renowned wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant always felt worlds away from the white male adventurers she watched explore the wilderness on TV. As Wynn-Grant set off on her own journey in the wild, finding her way in a profession where there were few scientists who looked like her, she saw nature’s delicate balance in a new light. Hers is a story about a career in the wild spanning nearly two decades, carving a niche for herself as one of the very few Black female scientists in her field. Today, Wynn-Grant is a Research Fellow with the National Geographic Society, serves on The North Face’s Explore Fund Council, co-hosts Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild on NBC, and hosts the podcast “Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant,” produced by PBS. Her book “Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World” came out this year. In this talk, Wynn-Grant shares some of her experiences as she embarked on a quest to study the ever-shifting relationship between humans, animals, and place.
With climate advocates subject to surveillance and censorship and giant companies controlling the ways information and knowledge flow around the world, the fight to save our climate is now inextricably intertwined with our digital rights. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has long been at the forefront of protecting those rights, has helped environmental activists protect their emails from Chevron, understand the surveillance they are under and develop “Security Self-Defense” practices to protect themselves. Cindy Cohn, EFF’s Executive Director, one of the nation’s leading civil liberties attorneys specializing in Internet law, explains why EFF’s push for open access to scientific information, net neutrality, open-source patents, “creative commons” licenses, and more, are critical in the fight to prevent climatic unraveling.
As Recognition of Intelligent Forest Systems Grows, So Has Pushback
University of British Columbia Professor of Forest Ecology and bestselling author Suzanne Simard has been at the forefront of research on plant communication and intelligence. Simard is globally renowned for her work on how trees interact and communicate using below-ground fungal networks and has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed articles as well as the bestselling book “Finding the Mother Tree,” but with this recognition has come some intense pushback from sectors of the forestry establishment that feel profoundly threatened by the paradigm-shifting implications of her research. Simard discusses this resistance to her work in this excerpt from an interview with Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies.
Plant Intelligence and Why Imagination Is the Key to Understanding the Natural World
Monica Gagliano believes she was born to be a scientist. She grew up in the city with parents who thought nature was something to be kept outside, but Gagliano thought otherwise. She started a journal tracking the growth of her bean plant and created her first data-set at age nine. Now, Gagliano is a research associate professor in evolutionary ecology at the University of Western Australia and a research affiliate at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Gagliano has blazed the trail for a brand new field called plant bioacoustics, showing that plants respond to and make sounds. Her studies have led her to author numerous groundbreaking scientific articles and to co-edit “The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World” and “The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, and Literature.” View her full Bioneers presentation here, and read an excerpt below.
We’re excited to announce that our new season of Bioneers Learning is online, and registration is open! You can register for our first-ever self-paced courses, along with courses covering topics such as the visionary self, sacred activism and decolonizing philanthropic practice.
A Course on The Imaginal: Cultivating the Visionary Self | Oct. 26-March 16 | This course will explore and exercise our creative muscle to strengthen our visionary selves. When we encounter and encourage the wild dance of the artist within, the creative self becomes part of the visionary collective needed for these times.
Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem | Nov. 12-Dec. 3 | In this four-week course, you can join author, researcher, and emotions-and-empathy expert Karla McLaren, M.Ed., for a grounded and surprising exploration of the healing genius in your emotional realm.
Decolonizing Philanthropic Practice | Jan. 30-March 6, 2025 | This course will explore our relationships with money, the belief systems we have inherited, and our philanthropic practices.
The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.
By affording rights to its iconic waves, a Brazilian city is paving a new path to marine protection. Linhares, Brazil, a world-renowned surf destination, has legally recognized its prized waves as living beings, granting them the inherent right to exist, continue to form naturally and be restored. Learn about this significant news for ocean ecosystems in the following article written by Isabella Kaminski for Hakai Magazine.
This article has been reposted with permission from Hakai Magazine, which brings its readers independent journalism focused on coastal science and societies. Check out other important news from Hakai Magazine on its website.
The Brazilian city of Linhares has legally recognized its waves as living beings, marking the first known time part of the ocean has been granted legal personhood.
In early August 2024, the coastal municipality passed a new law that gives the waves at the mouth of the Doce River, which runs to Brazil’s Atlantic coast, the intrinsic right to existence, regeneration, and restoration. This means the waves should continue to form naturally and their water must be clean.
In early August 2024, the coastal municipality passed a new law that gives the waves at the mouth of the Doce River, which runs to Brazil’s Atlantic coast, the intrinsic right to existence, regeneration, and restoration. This means the waves should continue to form naturally and their water must be clean.
The new law requires the city to protect the physical shape of the river, the ecological cycles that make the waves unique, and the water’s finely balanced chemical makeup through public policies and funding. It also codifies respect for the waves’ cultural and economic role in the community, explains Vanessa Hasson, an environmental lawyer and executive director of the Brazilian NGO Mapas, which advocates for the country’s nascent rights-of-nature movement.
Linhares has also appointed guardians to watch over the waves and act as their representatives in public decision-making. City officials selected Hauley Silva Valim, a surfer and cofounder of the Doce River Alliance, and two others with special relationships with the waves: a representative from the local Indigenous community and a member of the city council’s environment committee.
The prized waves are long and tubular—qualities sought out by surfers—and famous worldwide. But about eight years ago, the tight-knit local surf community began noticing changes, and two of the waves eventually stopped breaking altogether.
Valim explains that the waves at the Doce River mouth were damaged when the Mariana dam collapsed, which devastated the region—killing 19 people, flooding villages, and making headlines around the world. The dam held back waste from an iron ore mine near the inland city of Mariana, Brazil. When the dam failed, it sent a rush of mud and mining waste down the Doce River, which built up over time, shifting the river’s flow, reducing its power, and eventually weakening the waves at its mouth. It was only after a major flood in 2022 that these waves returned.
The waves weren’t the only casualty. The toxic brown sludge that spilled from the dam contaminated fishes, plants, and microscopic aquatic life for several kilometers from the river’s mouth.
From fishing to tourism, “every way of life has been impacted,” says Flavia Freitas Ramos, who cofounded Doce River Alliance with Valim. A group of about 720,000 affected residents is pursuing a class action lawsuit against the owners of the mine.
After the dam spill, Ramos, Hasson, and Valim worked with local Indigenous representatives and other stakeholders to meet with residents of Linhares over several years and build the fight for the rights of the beloved waves.
Hasson says the new law’s main goal is to change mindsets and shift public policies relating to matters such as water quality and resource extraction. It builds on a previous rights-of-nature rule passed in 2017 by Bonito, a town in northeastern Brazil, which led to the development of an agroecological plan that Hasson says has improved the soil quality, water management, and local economy.
Around the world, governments are increasingly recognizing that the natural world has an intrinsic right to exist and be defended in court. In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation to adopt a so-called rights-of-nature law into its national constitution.
Over the past decade, other countries have followed suit. Bangladesh granted legal personhood to the Turāg river, while New Zealand has safeguarded a forest, river, and extinct volcano. Recently, a salt lagoon on the Spanish coast called Mar Menor became the first European ecosystem to be granted legal rights.
Valim notes that while the dam disaster prompted the local government to protect the waves at the mouth of the Doce River, Linhares’s new law was written in a way that safeguards against other threats as well. “We are continually under pressure from port developments, oil spills, the expansion of agricultural activities, and the drastic presence of plastic and glass pollution dumped into the [river] by the cities and industries,” he says.
In addition to changing policies, rights-of-nature legislation can have legal teeth. In July 2024, Ecuador’s law resulted in a court ruling that concluded that the rights of a river running through the capital city had been violated by pollution. The new Linhares law could also theoretically be used to prosecute anyone involved in breaching the waves’ rights.
And since Linhares’s law states that the protections pertain to the entire system the waves belong to, including connected bodies of water, it could even be applied to destruction that occurs upstream, as with the Mariana dam collapse. Although, that could be difficult to enforce.
This language protecting connected waterbodies means the law also safeguards the ocean, making this the first step toward recognizing rights for the world’s oceans.
This language protecting connected waterbodies means the law also safeguards the ocean, making this the first step toward recognizing rights for the world’s oceans. A global campaign is building to do just that. “When you recognize a little bit of space of the ocean, like these waves, you are reaching the whole ocean,” Hasson says.
Instead of the notion that humans are the dominant environmental force on Earth, bio-scientist Predrag B. Slijepčević has another story to tell — one that puts microbes at the center. In his book, “Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life,” Slijepčević writes that as organisms with far greater evolutionary experience than us, microbes, fungi, plants and other animals can teach us valuable lessons. Life, after all, existed without humans for more than 99.99% of the Earth’s existence. Take humans out of the equation, and the biosphere’s natural trajectory would continue. But take microbes out, and the whole thing would collapse. “It is a constant reminder that humans are non-essential by-products of what mostly amounts to microbial evolutionary games,” Slijepčević writes. He notes that microbes, for their part, are virtually everywhere — deep in the oceans, high on mountain peaks, amongst tropospheric clouds, in every kind of forest and even in our bodies. In this excerpt from chapter one of “Biocivilisations,” Slijepčević describes the basic elements of microbial biocivilization – language, mind and memory – and shows how almost all elements of human civilization have precursors in the bacterial world.
Predrag B. Slijepčević is a senior lecturer in the Department of Life Sciences at Brunel University London. He is a bio-scientist interested in the philosophy of biology and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals. In particular, Slijepčević investigates how biological systems, from bacteria to animals and beyond, perceive and process environmental stimuli (that is, biological information) and how this processing, which is a form of natural learning, affects the organism–environment interactions. “Biocivilisations,” his first book, is a 2024 Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal Winner: Restorative Earth Practices.
Microbial Language
Ever since life emerged on Earth, there has been constant communication amongst organisms. But this communication is deceptive. These are no talking heads, but the communication is not unlike our language. Instead, organisms communicate through exchanging biological signals and semiotic signs – chemical messages, electrical impulses, scents, body movements, etc.
Bacteria were the first organisms to speak up. Unfortunately, we are deaf to their conversations. Bacteria ‘talk’ to each other, and to all other organisms on the planet. For example, bacteria from our microbiome – the collection of bacteria, viruses, archaea and fungi inside and on the surface of our bodies – talk to us behind our backs. They bypass the conscious part of our intellect and talk to the unconscious. Scientists have discovered ‘conversations’ between bacteria living in our guts and cells in our brains. This type of talk is called the gut-brain axis. Bacteria from our guts direct our brain cells to secrete serotonin, which improves mood.21 Gut bacteria drug our nervous systems without us even being aware that it’s happening.
Bacteria from our microbiome – the collection of bacteria, viruses, archaea and fungi inside and on the surface of our bodies – talk to us behind our backs. They bypass the conscious part of our intellect and talk to the unconscious.
Language is a set of symbols that convey meaning. Every linguistic sign reflects the superiority of mind over matter. When we utter a word, we launch a non-material abstraction full of meaning into the semiotic stratosphere. There, our symbols mix with bacterial, viral, plant and animal symbols in true Tower of Babel fashion, with the crucial difference that the number of languages in the semiotic stratosphere is far greater than in the biblical story. This fascinating biosemiotic construction intrigued the celebrated writer Umberto Eco, who was once impressed by the thought of a biosemiotician friend: ‘instead of thinking whether cells speak like us, the question should be asked whether we speak like cells’.22
How do bacteria talk to each other? James Shapiro discovered their semiotic symbols – i.e. the ‘words’ of bacterial language. He identified a large group of chemicals that bacteria exchange in communication with each other.23 There are linguistic chemicals used in the communication of bacteria of the same species. There are also linguistic chemicals exchanged between bacteria of different species, in the manner of constructed international languages such as Esperanto or the true global language, English.
The most successful communicators, including cross-kingdom communicators, are bacteria – true biological polyglots.
Conversations between bacteria and people, or bacteria and plants, are conducted in a language that scientists call cross-kingdom communication. The most successful communicators, including cross-kingdom communicators, are bacteria – true biological polyglots. Bacteria speak and understand all the languages of the world, from their own mother tongues, to plant and animal languages, to cross-kingdom communication that reverberates with the biosphere in the most complex music the universe has ever known. Bacteria also talk to viruses, semi-living biogenic structures, by detecting the words of a viral language – only recently discovered – based on arbitrium, which consists of a peptide composed of six amino acids.24 Thus, mostly thanks to bacteria, the biosphere becomes the semiosphere – a compendium of biological signs and the domination of mind over matter.
The Microbial Mind
We know from experience that words don’t make sense without the mind to decode and interpret them. The mind unites spoken words into sentences, then into stories, or perhaps into algorithms (if words are replaced by mathematical symbols). Without the mind, there is no storytelling, and this is also true of the biosphere and the Gaian mind. In other words, if bacteria have no mind, their talk is pointless; it represents little more than a form of mindless chatter. Mainstream biology, in a true Cartesian manner, does not allow for the existence of a bacterial mind. Even when leading scientists are willing to get into details of bacterial language, the idea of a bacterial mind controlling bacterial language is considered off-limits.25
Non-conventional scientists such as Eshel Ben-Jacob, Gregory Bateson and Lynn Margulis, however, have argued against the short-sightedness of mainstream biology, and especially against the prejudices that scientists cultivate towards non-human organisms – a kind of evolution-based anthropic racism rooted in modern culture. Ben-Jacob developed the concept of the ‘bacterial brain’, which is complete only when combined with Bateson’s concept of the natural mind.
Ben-Jacob argued, similarly to Shapiro, that bacteria are multicellular communities (or colonies), with a typical colony consisting of 109-1012 individual organisms, and with the entire bacterial population connected into a global bacterial superorganism or bacteriosphere. Bacterial colonies are constantly using language to solve the problems presented by their environments. A colony will assess a problem – for example, food shortages – through the collective examination of the environment and collective gathering of information using bacterial language. Once the nature of the problem is determined, bacterial colonies use information about past problems, stored in the colony’s collective memory. In this manner, the colony begins distributed information processing to solve the emerging problem. The problem-solving process transforms the colony into a structure most similar to the human brain. Bacterial colonies become ‘super-brains’ that perform acts of natural computation.26 When we look from this perspective at the planetary bacteriosphere, in which bacterial colonies are connected through bacterial language – a living equivalent of the internet – we see glimpses of a planetwide bacterial brain that has maintained biogeochemical balance for billions of years.
When we look from this perspective at the planetary bacteriosphere, in which bacterial colonies are connected through bacterial language – a living equivalent of the internet – we see glimpses of a planetwide bacterial brain that has maintained biogeochemical balance for billions of years.
Gregory Bateson would probably agree that a bacterial colony constitutes a form of the natural mind. Bateson often reminded his audience that the mind exists in nature in many more places than just inside our heads. To assess whether a biogenic structure meets the requirements of the natural mind, Bateson applied six criteria27 :
1. The mind is the unity of the parts that communicate with each other; 2. The mental process creates feedback; 3. Communication between parts is driven by the ‘difference that makes a difference’ or biological information; 4. The mental process requires energy; 5. Biological information directs changes in the physical environment; 6. Biological hierarchy is constrained by both bottom-up (cells to ecosystem) and top-down (ecosystem to cells) forces.
Bacterial colonies and the planetary bacteriosphere meet all of Bateson’s criteria of the natural mind. More than a century prior, Darwin stated the following about the mind: ‘The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.’28 Bateson, however, was much more radical. For Bateson: ‘Mind is the essence of being alive.’ Interestingly, Bateson considered Lamarck to be the greatest biologist in history, not Darwin. Presumably because, amongst other things, Lamarck sensed the intelligence of bacteria.
Microbial Memory
The collective memory of microbes goes back almost four billion years to the moment when these tiny and invisible organisms emerged on Earth. How is this possible? The first line of memory is the microbial genome that stores blueprints for the oldest protein constructs. This is no exaggeration but simply a consequence of the biological postulate of vertical gene transfer. Since bacteria and archaea were the first organisms in the history of life, all organisms that evolved from them, including humans, share their four-billion-year genetic heritage.29
The first line of memory is the microbial genome that stores blueprints for the oldest protein constructs.
But genes are only one line of memory. The other line of memory is much more important: the organism as a biological construct that incorporates genes. Genes are important, but they are secondary. The emblem of neo-Darwinism – ‘the selfish gene’ – is becoming an obsolete concept. How can a gene be selfish when it lacks a self? This is a question Lynn Margulis asked Richard Dawkins at a meeting. No one has yet come up with a convincing answer.
Margulis argued that the basic unit of life, and therefore of memory, can only be the simplest cell – a microbe such as a bacterium or an archaeon. Each bacterium is an open thermodynamic system that exchanges matter, energy and information with its environment. Each bacterium has an instinctive sense of its own body in the context of the external environment. It has perception, memory and the ability to make decisions, plan the future and communicate. These characteristics are to be expected from a biological system that has a sense of its own body.
A gene or a piece of a DNA molecule, on the other hand, is a simple biological code that serves the bacterium as an aid in the transmission of biological information, and in the process exchanges matter and energy with the environment. This code is meaningless without the context of the bacterial ‘body’ as an open thermodynamic system. The DNA code is a form of bacterial ‘thought’ – a hypothesis subjected to an evolutionary test.
Interestingly, the source of genes, which are biological ‘thought’ material, is not only bacterial or archaeal genomes, but viruses, plasmids, naked genes and other DNA pieces involved in horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Some scientists argue that viruses may be a precursor to life – a position supported by the fact that bacteria, the most dominant form of life in the biosphere, cannot exist without viruses.30 The bacteriosphere needs an auxiliary biogenic structure. Scientists call this structure the virosphere. The virosphere and the bacteriosphere are the foundations of life. The most numerous viruses in the virosphere are those that infect bacteria (although bacteria developed a system of defence against unwanted viruses, or, metaphorically, unwanted ‘thoughts’, so that they can preserve their own ‘common sense’).31
Genetically stored information only serves to trigger more complex collective information-processing abilities, which then create new knowledge that bacteria need to learn about new conditions in the environment. Thanks to this memory, the bacterial colony turns into a brain-like entity capable of natural learning, and thus becomes a form of Bateson’s natural mind.
Eshel Ben-Jacob defines the nature of bacterial memory as follows: a combination of (a) internally stored information in the genome of each bacterium and (b) information that the bacterial society, which makes up the colony, collects from its environment and stores in the structure of the colony. In other words, genetic memory by itself is not enough for the process of wiring bacteria to the environment. Genetically stored information only serves to trigger more complex collective information-processing abilities, which then create new knowledge that bacteria need to learn about new conditions in the environment. Thanks to this memory, the bacterial colony turns into a brain-like entity capable of natural learning, and thus becomes a form of Bateson’s natural mind. The conclusion is self-evident: the ability of bacterial colonies to remember past events transforms the planetary bacteriosphere into the collective memory of the biosphere.
No matter how much Homo sapiens might deny the dominance of microbes on Earth, and artificially impose human dominance, reality refutes us. The Covid-19 pandemic is one example amongst many that ruthlessly revealed the holes in our understanding of biological reality. The bacteriosphere and virosphere are the basis of life (see Chapter 2). Although we can’t deny the usefulness of the term in revealing the destructiveness of human impact, the Anthropocene is little more than an anti-Copernican delusion of modern civilisation.
21. Ohad Lewin-Epstein, Ranit Aharonov and Lilach Hadany, ‘Microbes can help explain the evolution of host altruism,’ Nature Communications 8 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14040.
22. Kalevi Kull, ‘Umberto Eco on the biosemiotics of Giorgio Prodi,’ Sign Systems Studies 46 (2018): 352–364.
23. Details of bacterial communication, known as quorum sensing, can be found in these papers: James A. Shapiro, ‘Thinking about bacterial populations as multicellular organisms,’ Annual Review of Microbiology 52 (1889): 81–104; James A. Shapiro, ‘Bacteria as multicellular organisms’, Scientific American June (1988): 82–89.
24. Zohar Erez et al., ‘Communication between viruses guides lysis-lysogeny decisions,’ Nature 541 (2017): 488–493.
25. Interpreting bacterial communication without a coordinating activity of mind, as an emergent phenomenon in a social group, is reflected in the term ‘small talk’, used to describe bacterial language in the following paper: Bonnie L. Bassler, ‘Small talk: Cell-to-cell communication in bacteria,’ Cell 109 (2002): 421–424.
26. Ben-Jacob, ‘Bacterial wisdom, Gödel’s theorem,’ Physica A.
27. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 92.
28. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man: Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889), 126.
29. This is the consequence of vertical gene transfer or the evolutionary tree of life.
31. Karin Moelling and Felix Broecker, ‘Viruses and evolution – viruses first? A personal perspective,’ Frontiers in Microbiology 10 (2019), https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2019.00523.
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