Mariel Nanasi: A Demand for a New, Renewable Energy Economy

Mariel Nanasi is a renowned civil rights and criminal defense attorney, as well as a zealous social organizer. She is the executive director and president of the New Mexico-based nonprofit, New Energy Economy, which works to protect communities from the social, economic, health, and environmental costs of extractive energy and usher in an affordable, clean, sustainable energy future.

We at Bioneers were truly honored to have Mariel Nanasi speak at the 2017 conference. Below is a video and excerpted transcript of her keynote on the significant shift toward a clean energy economy.

Mariel Nanasi:

It’s truly an honor to be here in this critical time, building the strength of our movement. I’m excited to share with you all my story and the important lessons we’ve learned in New Mexico about what it’s going to take to shift from an energy colony to an energy democracy for our state and for our nation. But first, I need to honor the vehicle of my work, the organization and team of New Energy Economy. I’d like to share a video made by my dear colleague, we call her the communications specialist at New Energy Economy, Lyla June Johnston.

As the video illustrates, we’re doing really exciting work in New Mexico, and it’s kind of crazy to find myself in the middle of it. I’ve been a civil rights lawyer for 15 years, and I worked as an attorney representing victims of police and guard violence and abuse, including death, in Chicago and New Mexico. I have no science background. I have no energy background. Up until eight years ago, if you asked me what the impact of me turning on a light was, flicking the switch, where does our electricity come from, I honestly would not have been able to tell you.

Then eight years ago I was sitting somewhere out there, in this audience, and I found myself called to a new task. It was my first Bioneers conference.

I knew about climate change but hadn’t appreciated the urgency of it. When I turned my attention and my heart to actually face it, the enormity and severity of it, I knew I had to shift my work. I thought, how can I look at my children in their eyes and know about climate change and didn’t use my talents to address it. So I decided right there, eight years ago, that I needed to shift my work, to do my part to create bold solutions to the climate challenge. And I remember thinking, that I would like to do something worthy of standing on this stage before you. And now I’m here.

It’s been a long and arduous journey, and I’ve learned a lot about naivety, corruption and courage along the way. After my Bioneers experience, I went home like each one of you will. I had a new fire burning inside me. I asked around to learn who was doing the best work in Sante Fe, and people repeatedly told me New Energy Economy. So I met with the executive director and I asked to volunteer, which I did, and three months later I asked for a job. My then boss said, I can’t pay you a lawyer salary. And I said, Just pay me what you can; I want to work with you. Note to all the young people in the audience: Volunteer and make them fall in love with you, and work your butt off, and then you can learn and make change.

I worked at New Energy Economy as a senior policy advisor. It was 2008. I learned that burning coal is the single greatest source of carbon emissions. I learned that New Mexico produces 60 percent of our energy from coal. Solar at that point just made up a mere 1 percent. I thought that perhaps the decision makers just haven’t realized the magnitude of the climate crisis. I thought, in beautiful sunny New Mexico surely we should promptly close coal and replace that energy with energy from solar and wind, of which there is an abundance in New Mexico. We even have the sun Zia on our flag.

So fast forward. The founder of New Energy Economy asked me to take over as executive director. In an enormous moment of opportunity I found myself at the table negotiating with PNM about how they were going to comply with an EPA ruling that found that their coal plant—the San Juan coal plant in the northwest part of our state in Diné country, one of the oldest and dirtiest plants in the country—needed to clean up its act. At the time the plant had 60,000 air quality violations—60,000. The ruling fell under the regional Hayes Act.

The illegal issue with the plant was not its 11 million tons of carbon pollution every year, or the $60 million in externalized healthcare costs associated with cancer and respiratory illness, lung disease and heart disease it caused, but visibility. It was impeding the view in national parks across the West, including the Grand Canyon.

We fought hard to get a seat at the negotiating table. While there we articulated an idea that I ended up literally speaking the resolution of the puzzle: how to address this demand from the federal government in a way that would cause the least economic harm. PNM and the other owners should close two units of the coal plant by the end of this year rather than install pollution controls that would extend the life of the plant. It was a huge victory.

But then, PNM announced that it was going to settle with EPA and it wouldn’t settle with us. The table was filled with all male lawyers, executives and officials. I was the only woman in the room. They announced that they were going to close half the coal plant, as we had proposed, but instead of replacing the lost energy with solar and wind, as we were demanding, they were going to purchase more coal from the remaining units being abandoned by California owners, and expand their nuclear investment in Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona. I turned to PNM’s senior vice president, raised my voice, tears fell from my eyes, and I literally said, “What about the children!”
____

Many of you know what it is like when someone close to you dies and you are so filled with grief that it’s hard to understand how the world is continuing. Everything looked sort of foggy and the sadness is overwhelming, and that’s how I felt that day, and I was just sort of walking.

The next day I came back, a sense of determination to never allow this dismissal to ever happen again. I learned something very profound from that experience, that the investor-owned utilities can accommodate environmentalists as long as we don’t actually challenge their fundamental business model.

PNM was willing to acknowledge and even afford time for our concerns, as long as it was contained within their framework. I began to more fully understand that there is a hierarchy that privileges and profits a few at the expense of many and in this equation, there are serious vested interests in maintaining things as they are. In fact, this entrenched power dynamic, in the case of energy, is perhaps the most extreme example, as fossil fuel companies are the wealthiest corporations on the planet. Energy corporations have more money than in the history of money. And energy is the foundation of our economy. In our current time, the basis of that foundation is extraction.

The economic underpinnings of the extractive economy, including the extreme emphasis on the privatization and accumulation of wealth, devastating exploitation of the land, water and air, and as Kandi Mossett said, sacrificing the people who live in close proximity to the power plant, and income, labor and power disparities. Extraction is the business model.

These are not unmanned endeavors. The project of extraction, when it comes to New Mexico and the vast majority of states in the US, is carried out by regulated monopolies—the investor-owned utilities or IOUs—who have been given power and permission to prioritize profit in their delivery of fundamental public good. These corporations have assumed state-like powers in ruling over workers, communities, and democracy itself. They have a deeply vested interest in both protecting their monopoly as well as the investments that they’ve made in giant coal and nuclear plants.

The painful lesson I learned from my naiveté during the PNM/EPA negotiation was that unless one wields power, or unless we wield power, the corporation will always default to its fiduciary obligation—dividends for shareholders, short-term earnings growth, and bonuses for senior management. My pleas for the children or persuasive arguments to address climate change made little difference. We were not going to be able to get anywhere from asking.

Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” We needed to demand, and we needed a movement to deliver that demand and hold the corporations accountable, for another thing about the energy system is that the regulators that are elected or appointed, supposedly to ensure a balancing of the private/profit motive with the public interest, are wined and dined, literally, by the very entities that they are meant to regulate.

As PNM doubled down on coal and nuclear, we doubled down on our movement-building work. Organizing is the hardest work, but also the most meaningful work. It’s about the fundamental task of engaging people, building mutually beneficial relationships and a shared vision and path to justice. So we organized. We fight in the courts. We ousted corrupt regulators. We translated this seemingly arcane energy case into the language of the people, so our people could recognize what’s at stake.

And I want to talk to you about what’s at stake.

We are at a crossroads. We either face the very real possibility of a planet on hospice, driven by an energy system that is the epitome of capitalism on steroids with extreme exploitation and racism at its core. Or a profound opportunity to shift at the very basis of our economic system that we haven’t seen since the abolition of slavery. And it’s really up to us which way we go.

Naomi Klein, a heroine of mine, has a quote in the beginning of her book, The Shock Doctrine, from Milton Friedman, about the need to have policies on the shelf to take advantage of and deploy in times of crisis. What are the policies sitting ready on our movement’s shelf? What are our ready-made demands standing by for that time in which the balance of power shifts and there’s an opening? We have been building towards this moment of destabilization. Now what? Eighty-nine percent of the people across race and class support more renewable energy. But is that enough? Do we just stop there?

I want to caution us in this critical time to not simply bank on a technological fix. To seize a much more profound opportunity than switching a corporate, monopoly-controlled, fossil fuel energy economy for a corporate, monopoly-controlled solar economy. Too often calls for a transition to carbon-free energy do not specify who will develop and control that energy, to what end, or to whose benefit. They emphasize a transition to industrial scale, carbon-free energy resources without challenging the growth of energy consumption, material consumption, rates of capital accumulation, and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

In this model, and we hear it often today, nuclear energy is being embraced as a carbon-free energy source. Even while it is now the most expensive form of energy on the market, is tied to the devastation of native lands and communities from uranium mining, and presents an unsolvable problem of waste in a mature industry of 50 years, not to mention an inordinate amount of precious water. It’s time to create energy democracy.

Energy democracy demands that renewable energy resources are used to enable a new alternative economy, a regenerative rather than extractive economy, a critical framework for addressing the economic and racial inequities that a decarbonized economic system would otherwise continue to perpetuate. It seeks to reframe energy from being a commodity that is commercially exploited to being a part of our commons, a natural resource to serve human needs but in a way that respects the Earth and the ecosystem services provided by the biosphere. As a communal resource it requires democratic ownership structures and sustainable ecological management.

The new paradigm calls for reducing the human footprint, reducing waste, and reducing energy use as a key to the ecosystem health and stewardship. How we build matters. Renewable energy needs to foster community-based development, non-exploitive forms of production, socialized capital, ecological use of natural resources, and sustainable economic relationships.

At the heart of this movement are decentralized energy projects to improve the health, local economy, and resilience of low-income communities and communities of color. And you can see in the video, linked above, that we’ve been doing that, anchoring solar energy projects in our community. The vision and movement for fundamentally different energy system and society rocks the status quo, upsetting a legacy of entrenched power, privilege, property and profits. It’s going to be harder, but it’s going to be beautiful and worth the fight. Nelson Mandela says, “Courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it.” It’s feeling the fear and walking through it.

Just like I was sitting there eight years ago, this movement needs your talents, your chutzpah, and your work.
____

I want to end by sharing this story of Camiam Woody. I took this picture of Camiam Woody, a 5-year-old native child who lives in Farmington just miles from the San Juan coal plant. He needs a pump to breathe. We placed this billboard at the most trafficked intersection in Albuquerque. I keep him in mind and in heart, whether I’m arguing in a court or speaking in a classroom or at a demonstration.

Activism is the antidote to despair. Join us in this fight to decolonize our minds, open our hearts, take care of each other, and stop this fossil fuel war against this people and Mother Earth.

Sol, not coal!

Kenny Ausubel: The Coming Age of Ecological Medicine

As CEO and co-founder of Bioneers, Kenny Ausubel has spent nearly three decades at the helm of the internationally recognized nonprofit dedicated to disseminating breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet. Additionally, Ausubel is a writer, filmmaker and media professional. He has written four books and edited several volumes of the Bioneers anthology book series, including Ecological Medicine, Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves (2004, Sierra Club Books). Ecological Medicine is a collection of writings from the world’s leading health visionaries, showing how human health is inescapably dependent on the health of our environment. Following is an excerpt from the book, written by Ausubel.

Among the many immigrants who arrived in New York City in the summer of 1999, none made a name for itself more quickly than West Nile virus. Traced to a virus spread by mosquitoes, the disease had never been seen in this country, or even in the western hemisphere. It first struck birds, then people, killing seven and sickening dozens more. The city hoped to control it by killing the mosquitoes with malathion, a pesticide chemically related to nerve gas. Though many protested, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani insisted the spraying was perfectly safe.

Within months, scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were debating just how wrong the mayor had been. The EPA was on the verge of declaring malathion a “likely” human carcinogen when its manufacturer protested. The EPA backed off, saying malathion posed no documented threat, though some in the agency continued to insist the dangers were being downplayed. More suspicion was raised upon news of a massive die-off of lobsters in Long Island Sound, near New York City. Malathion is known to kill lobsters and other marine life, but officials denied the connection.

Though no direct causal link can yet be drawn, some infectious-disease experts say anomalous outbreaks such as that of West Nile may be tied to human impacts on the environment, which have resulted in climate change and the destruction of natural habitats. Dr. Paul R. Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, has noted, “West Nile is getting veterinarians and doctors and biologists to sit down at the same table. “What they are unraveling is a complex knot linking human health and the state of the natural world.

Welcome to a preview of the health issues awaiting us in the twenty-first century. Indeed, we’re already living at a time when vast social and biological forces are interacting in complex ways—and with unpredictable results. War, famine, and ecological damage have caused great human dislocations, which in turn have transformed tuberculosis, AIDS, and other modern plagues into global pandemics. Even more disturbing, many of our efforts to fight disease today are themselves symptoms of a deeper illness. Spraying an urban area with a substance whose health effects remain unknown is one glaring example, but there are many others. Think of certain compounds used in chemotherapy that more often kill than cure. Or the 100,000 people who die in hospitals every year from drugs that are properly prescribed. Or the many IV bags and other plastic medical products that release dioxin into the air when they are burned. That last example contributes to perhaps the most heartbreaking metaphor for our environmental abuse and its unforeseen consequences— the discovery that a human mother’s milk is among the most toxic human foods, laced with dioxin, a confirmed carcinogen, and other chemical contaminants. All of these cases suggest our culture’s deep dependence on synthetic chemicals and our long refusal to acknowledge how profoundly these have disrupted our ecological systems.

There’s a widespread sense that mainstream medicine is blind to this reality and is even part of the problem. Growing disillusion over this, coupled with the fact that high-tech medicine costs too much and often doesn’t work, has led to a widespread public search for alternatives. One result is the rise of complementary medicine, which combines the best of modern health care with other approaches. Add the immense new interest in traditional healing methods, herbs, and other natural remedies, and you get a sense of how much the health care paradigm has changed over the past thirty years.

What I see happening is a deeper shift that all of these approaches are edging us toward, even if we don’t fully realize it yet. It’s a new understanding of health and illness that has begun to move away from treating only the individual. Instead, good health lies in recognizing that each of us is part of a wider web of life. When the web is healthy, we are more likely to be healthy. But the environmental illnesses we see more and more of these days—rising cancer rates spring to mind—are constant reminders that the web is not healthy. How did we reach this tragic place? And more to the point, where do we go from here?

The first step toward a healthier future, I believe, lies in ecological medicine. Pioneered by a global movement of concerned scientists, doctors, and many others, ecological medicine is a loosely shared philosophy based on advancing public health by improving the environment. Its central idea is that industrial civilization has made a basic error in acting as if humans were apart from, rather than a part of, nature. Just as the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, human and environmental health are inseparable. And in a biosphere that is rampantly toxic and woefully depleted, a mounting number of our health problems can only be understood as part of a larger pattern. Ecological medicine could well emerge as a force for dramatic cultural change. It proposes to reshape how industrial civilization operates, in part by redefining the role that the public plays in making the decisions that affect all life on earth.

Simply stated, improving human health is inextricably linked to restoring ecological well-being. The interconnectedness of all life is a fundamental biological truth. What’s more, all life is under threat. There simply is no “elsewhere” to dump the hazardous by-products of industrial society. Eliminating them from our production systems is the only real solution, and a well-informed public is absolutely crucial to realizing it. In the words of Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), a “truly holistic medicine extends beyond the mind-body connection to the human-planet whole.” Here are some basic tenets of ecological medicine:

• The first goal of medicine is to establish the conditions for health and wholeness, thus preventing disease and illness. The second goal is to cure.

• The earth is also the physician’s client. The patient under the physician’s care is one part of the earth.

• Humans are part of a local ecosystem. Following the ecopsychological insight that a disturbed ecosystem can make people mentally ill, a disturbed ecosystem can surely make people physically ill.

• Medicine should not add to the illnesses of humans or the planet. Medical practices themselves should not damage other species or the ecosystem.

The main tool for putting these ideals into practice, ecological healers say, is what they call the precautionary principle. As articulated by Raffensperger and others, the precautionary principle basically argues that science and industry must fully assess the impact of their activities before they impose them upon the public and the environment. Societies around the world have begun to incorporate some version of the principle into law, hoping to rein in bioengineering and other new technologies. That science should objectively prove the safety of its own inventions might seem like common sense, but that’s not how most science operates today.

For decades, the scientific and medical communities have operated on the principle that a certain amount of pollution and disease is the price we have to pay for modern life. This is called the risk paradigm, and it essentially means that it is society’s burden to prove that new technologies and industrial processes are harmful, usually one chemical or technology at a time. The risk paradigm assumes that there are “acceptable” levels of contamination that the earth and our bodies can assimilate. It also allows a small, self-interested elite to set these levels, undistracted by the “irrational” fears and demands of the public. The “science” behind it is driven by large commercial interests and can hardly be considered impartial or in the public interest. Viewed with any distance at all, the risk paradigms at best a high-stakes game of biological roulette with all the chambers loaded.

There is a global effort afoot today to replace the risk paradigm with the precautionary principle, which is based on a recognition that the ability of science to predict consequences and possible harm is limited. The precautionary principle acknowledges that all life is interconnected. It shifts the burden of proof (and liability) to the parties promoting potentially harmful technologies, and it limits the use of those technologies to experiments until they are proven truly safe.

The idea is not new—a version of it first appeared in U.S. law back in 1958 in the Delaney Amendment, which governed pesticide residues in food and set standards for environmental impact statements—nor is it radical. At its essence, the principle harks back to grandma’s admonitions that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and that we’re “better safe than sorry.” The model is already used, in theory, for the drug industry, which is legally bound to prove drugs safe and effective prior to their use. Critics call it anti-scientific; they say it limits trade and stifles innovation. Advocates disagree.

“The precautionary principle actually shines a bright light on science,” says Dr. Ted Schettler, science director of SEHN. “It doesn’t tell us what to do, but it does tell you what to look at.” Germany and Sweden have incorporated the principle into certain environmental policies. The United Nations Biosafety Protocol includes it in new guidelines for regulating trade in genetically modified products, its first appearance in an international treaty.

As people and their governments face ever more complex scientific decisions, the precautionary principle can serve as what some have called an insurance policy against our own ignorance. After all, we can’t predict next week’s weather or the economy a year out, much less the unfathomable complexity of living systems.

The Greek physician Hippocrates urged doctors to “do no harm,” yet our medical practices often pose serious environmental threats. In 1994, for instance, the EPA reported that medical waste incinerators were the biggest source of dioxin air pollution in the United States. Dioxin finds its way into our food and accumulates in our fat; it’s been linked to neurological damage in fetuses. Even a simple thermometer contains mercury, another potentially deadly neurotoxin.

The medical waste problem does not stop there. Along with generating radioactive waste from X rays and other treatments, the medical industry is now the source of a new peril: pharmaceutical pollution. Creatures living in lakes and rivers appear to be at special risk as antibiotics, estrogen, birth control pills, painkillers, and other drugs find their way into the waste stream. Fish are already affected; intersex mutations (in which the fish show both male and female characteristics) have been reported in various species around the world. And humans are not immune. The war on drugs may soon take on a new meaning as entire populations are subjected to constant low doses of pharmaceuticals in the water supply.

Groups like Health Care without Harm (www.noharm.org) have made it their mission to halt or curb such damaging medical practices, especially the use of mercury thermometers and the industry’s reliance on burning its waste. Health Care without Harm, with 423 member organizations in 51 countries, has made great strides in this area, in part by directly confronting companies that engage in environmentally harmful practices. Another group, Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, has published a report with the Clean Water Fund, “In Harm’s Way,” that documents the many toxic threats to child development (http://psr.igc.org/ihw.htm).

Ecological medicine suggests first doing no harm to the environment, then going further, creating a medical practice that itself minimizes harm. Like virtually all earlier healing traditions, it emphasizes prevention, strengthening the organism and the environment to avoid illness in the first place. (Ancient Chinese healers, for instance, expected compensation only if their clients remained well, not if they got sick.)

But an ecological approach to healing also looks to deeper tenets embedded in nature itself and how it operates. Again, the new vision reveals itself to be in many ways an old one. It borrows from the insights of indigenous healing traditions, many of which are now being confirmed by modern science— including the fact that nature has an extraordinary and mysterious capacity for self-repair.

However resilient the biosphere may be, it’s crucial to understand that the planet’s basic life support systems are in serious decline. From climate change to plummeting biodiversity to gargantuan quantities of toxic wastes, ecological stresses are reaching dangerous thresholds. Much of the damage can be traced to the twentieth century’s three most destructive technologies:

• Apart from helping induce potentially cataclysmic climate change, the petrochemical industry has unleashed 80,000 or so synthetic compounds that now permeate our land, water, and air, as well as our bodies. While some may be benign, the truth is that most have never been tested adequately enough to ascertain their safety—and even fewer have been measured for their cumulative effects on people and the environment or how they interact with other chemicals as they occur in real life.

• Nuclear energy use has led to the spread of radioactivity and virtually indestructible toxic-waste products into living systems worldwide. While public dread may focus on catastrophic accidents like the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, other ill effects may come from steady exposure to low levels of radiation.

• Genetic engineering is introducing biological pollution that literally has a life of its own, a gene genie that cannot be put back in the bottle.

In addition to instructing healers first to do no harm, Hippocrates counseled physicians to “revere the healing force of nature.” For years, that’s been my quest: to work with nature to help nature heal. I founded the Bioneers Conference in 1990 to bring together people exploring ways of doing this— biological pioneers from many cultures and disciplines, and from all walks of life. All had peered deep into the heart of the earth’s own living systems to understand what we can learn from 3.8 billion years of evolution. Their common purpose was to heal the earth. Their basic question: How would nature do it? They were using their knowledge of living systems to devise solutions to our most pressing environmental and societal problems. These people are modern healers too.

As their work repeatedly illustrates, many of the technologies we need to retool our industrial system already exist. Many of the Bioneers show how we can replace existing industrial practices with sustainable alternatives that run on clean, renewable energy sources and eliminate toxic emissions. Government has a role to play in this process too. Several years ago Sweden imposed a steep tax on pesticides, a measure that greatly reduced their use. Europe recently banned four antibiotics from animal feed. On the other side of the equation, governments are looking to promote tax subsidies for benign alternative technologies such as chlorine-free paper production and organic farming. (The city of Munich pays German farmers to grow organically in the watershed that supplies the city’s drinking water.)

The ecological medicine movement proposes to green the practices of the health care industry and help mainstream medicine become safer.

The ethic of preventing harm that prevails in both environmental protection and ecological medicine will continue to spread, but what about existing messes? Many treatment methods modeled on living systems have shown dramatic capacities for bioremediation—that is, for detoxifying land, air, and water, Visionary biologist John Todd’s “living machines” mimic natural ecologies by utilizing bacteria, fungi, plants, fish, and mammals to purify water and industrial wastes. The work of mycologist Paul Stamets has shown that fungi can help digest diesel spills and even chemical and biological weapons components. Similar success stories are found across many fields. By looking to the principles of ecological healing to restore the earth and ourselves, we create not only the conditions for individual health but also the basis for healthy societies and robust economies.

Biology is not rocket science. Rather, it is the superb art of relationships in the fantastically complex web of life. By mimicking nature, these approaches foster the healing that is the essence of living systems. Consider again the relationship between a nursing mother and her child. Despite the toxins that are now found in mothers’ milk, it is still the best food for babies. Children fed breastmilk are healthier because it confers immunity and unmatched nutrition. Which brings us back to the essence of ecological healing: In the wisdom of nature also lies the solution.

Alternative medicine is arguably the single largest progressive social movement of our era. As it becomes ever more mainstream, those working to advance public health are increasingly collaborating with those working to restore the earth’s ecological health. Growing public awareness of the direct links between our personal health and environmental health is arising as a potent force in global politics. As suggested by Michael Lerner, founder of Commonweal, environmental health could well emerge as the central human rights issue of our age. We all have the right to be born free—free from poisons.

As human beings, we have a remarkable ability to reinvent our societies very rapidly. Our task now is to create an earth-honoring culture founded in the sanctity of life and the sacred human-nature relationship. Along with many others, I herald for this new century a Declaration of Interdependence flowing from the simple recognition that all life is connected. At its heart is ecological medicine, teaching us that we are the land and water and air. By restoring the earth, we restore ourselves.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Ecological Medicine, edited by Kenny Ausubel, published by Sierra Club Books, 2004.

Why I Teach About Birds

BY DARRELL STEELY

This piece was originally published on the Ten Strands website. Ten Strands is working to build and strengthen the partnerships and strategies that will bring environmental literacy to all of California’s K–12 students.

“No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”
― David Attenborough

“Can you see the small gray bird on the third post in the field?” asks Audubon volunteer Paul Fenwick, as students fumble with their binoculars to spot the little gray bird. As soon as one student spots it, it flies toward us to the top of a small cottonwood tree, allowing students to observe its black mask and hooked beak. As students describe and record the sighting on their data sheets, Fenwick identifies the bird as a Loggerhead Shrike and explains how it relies on open fields to hunt. Shrikes kill and store their prey by impaling it on a small pointed branch or barbed wire. The Loggerhead Shrike was one of the 23 species of birds we documented on our forty-five minute hike around the school’s “habitat.” While spotting the Shrike was a special moment, birds in general are ubiquitous and thus are an amazing vehicle for students to learn about the interconnectedness of the environment.

I believe that students learn through experience, and outdoor experiences connect students to their physical place as well as reinforce essential classroom concepts. As a science teacher, I have witnessed the scientific process naturally unfold as students observe birds and ask questions: “What do the song sparrows eat?”, “Where do they live?”, “Where do they get water?”, and “Is the water clean?” Every observation leads to more questions! Resident and migrating birds rely on local food, shelter, and clean water. Because of this, birds provide many opportunities for students to research, observe, ask questions, make predictions, and collect data about their local environment. Humans love stories, and no matter how common, every bird has an interesting story. This year in science, I am using birds as an interwoven theme for students to learn about climate, weather, modeling, engineering, and scientific investigation. Students have already started collecting data on the birds we observe around our school’s habitat. On a typical walk outside, we record the type of bird, number seen, habitat type, weather, date, and time. Data is entered electronically, double-checked by a local Audubon member, then added to the eBird citizen science website. Using eBird adds importance to their work; our data will contribute to a global database used by scientists around the world to study issues such as climate change. The eBird database is huge, and contains years of data about bird sightings. With a little practice on eBird, middle school students can begin using citizen science data to study, question, and predict migration patterns of birds seen around our school.

On our bird walk around the habitat the students learned that Loggerhead Shrike populations are on the decline. Between 1966 and 2015 the numbers of this beautiful little bird have declined about three percent each year, culminating to almost 80%! While there is not just one thing to blame for their decline, many factors are linked to habitat loss and poor habitat health. When describing the Loggerhead Shrike situation, Fenwick sadly tells the students that this bird could disappear in their lifetime if we do not make an effort to protect its environment. News and data about the environment can be overwhelming, however, as a parent and a teacher I have hope for future generations. There is momentum for change, and there are many opportunities and resources for teachers at all levels to incorporate environmental literacy into the classroom. In 2015, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson released a Blueprint for Environmental Literacy that promotes environmental literacy for all students in California. The Next Generation Science Standards, Environmental Principles and Concepts, and the History–Social Science Framework provide teachers with many options to integrate environmental literacy into the curriculum. Finally, the CREEC Network connects teachers with many local organizations and resources that provide high-quality curriculum and instruction.

I am lucky that my school district supports environmental literacy. I am also fortunate to work with local organizations like MEarth and the Monterey Audubon with outdoor lessons. With the help of the MEarth staff, our students have many opportunities to learn about native plants and animals, gardening, and animal tracking. The curriculum and ideas put out by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology motivate me to get my classes outside. Lastly, I am continually inspired by all the great things that are happening in Green Ribbon and Ocean Guardian Schools. I teach about birds because they allow students to connect with, learn, and care about their environment. I teach about birds because, like humans, they are dependent on a clean, healthy environment. I teach about birds because there is a wealth of resources and support that allow students to experience top-notch lessons. Finally, I teach about birds because I believe that students can make a difference.

It is not all doom and gloom for the Loggerhead Shrike. These birds have a relatively high reproductive rate and can bounce back if we make an effort to conserve their habitat. How will the Loggerhead Shrike’s story end? I believe that our students can and will make the effort to protect the environment for the birds, for the plants, for the ocean, and for future generations of humans.

This piece was originally published on the Ten Strands website. Ten Strands is working to build and strengthen the partnerships and strategies that will bring environmental literacy to all of California’s K–12 students.

Thomas Van Dyck: Divesting from Fossil Fuels for a Clean Energy Revolution

Thomas Van Dyck, CIMA®, a Managing Director/Financial Advisor with the SRI Wealth Management Group at the World Bank of Canada, has been a leader in socially responsible investing for more than 30 years. He consults on institutional and individual client assets, incorporating environmental, social and governance factors in investment decisions. Van Dyck also founded the shareholder advocacy As You Sow Foundation in 1992 and is active in the “Divest Invest” movement. Last year, Bioneers spoke with him about fossil fuel divestment and the clean energy revolution.

Bioneers was honored to host Thomas Van Dyck at the 2017 conference. Below is a video and transcript of his keynote on the divest/invest movement and the power of the clean energy revolution.

Thomas Van Dyck:

It’s wonderful to be with you here in the republic of California. Before I moved here 34 years ago, I was a no-nukes activist back East. I worked for the Fund for Secure Energy, and we raised money to do media to close down your local nuclear power plant. How many of you were no-nukes activists back in the day? Excellent. My campaign was Indian Point, which was located 30 miles upriver from Manhattan. Now a few years earlier, Three Mile Island had its meltdown, so they required people to evacuate from 10-mile zones, 20-mile zones, and 30-mile zones around their nukes. In the case of Indian Point, there were millions of people located within 30 miles of Indian Point.

The Shoreham nuclear power plant was actually completed, loaded with rods—It wasi on Long Island—but because you couldn’t evacuate Long Island, it never started.

Do you all remember what the industry experts said about nuclear power back then? Remember what they said? What did they say? Too cheap to be metered. Right? Nuclear power was to be too cheap to be metered.

In fact, nuclear power is the most dangerous and expensive way to boil water on the planet. The industry experts used to say to me, “Okay, hotshot, so if you’re going to grow an economy, how are you going to do it without growing your power source? How are you going to do it without nuclear power?” This was their line. They said this is how much power you need to grow an economy. And I said, Well, do you know who this young man is? Who all know who this is? Let’s hear it. Who is it? Amory Lovins. Absolutely. It’s a Bioneers crowd. Of course you know who he is.

Amory wrote a paper in 1976 that said in fact, he didn’t think you needed to grow your energy source to grow your economy. Using soft technologies, which was energy efficiency and renewable energy, you actually could still grow your economy and not expand your energy base. Who was right? It’s a loaded question for Bioneers. Amory was right, as it turns out.

Now the reason I tell you this story is because industry experts consistently underestimate the power of disruption and how quickly it can take place. They make very bad predictions, like the time that McKinsey and AT&T in 1985 predicted there would be 900,000 cell phone subscribers by the year 2000. Industry experts. What was the actual number? 109 million. They were off by a factor of 120. Think about that.

In addition, when technology disrupts an industry it happens much quicker than what they expect. Like the time the horse and buggy and the car came into place. This is a picture of Manhattan in 1900 on Fifth Avenue on Easter morning. On the left-hand side, the circle is the car, the red circle. Horses and buggies are everywhere else. A mere 13 years later you can’t find a horse on Fifth Avenue on Easter morning. Think of how fast that took place.

Or the time with digital imaging entering the film era. Remember Eastman Kodak? Eastman Kodak used to be a Dow-Jones industrial company with a $30 billion market cap for decades. The digital camera came into place, then the smartphone. Now Eastman Kodak is down 94 percent. It’s a small company in Rochester, New York. How long did that take? Nine years. Nine years.

Also cell phone versus smartphone. Nokia and Blackberry, where are they today? It’s Apple and Samsung. How long? Eight years. Speed of disruption.

This is an index of all the coal companies over the last nine years. It’s down 70 percent in nine years. Not a very good investment if you’re looking at investing in coal.

When the divestment movement started with people like Ellen Dorsey at Wallace Global, who is here today, by the way, and who will be presenting later this afternoon and talking about some of the work they’re doing with the Dakota Sioux in putting wind farms in where they were building the Dakota Access pipeline. But when Ellen Dorsey and Wallace Global, and her grantees 350.org, Carbon Tracker, The Park Foundation, University of Dayton, the Educational Foundation of America and Rockefeller, launched divest/invest, it was $50 billion, as Kenny was mentioning, in September of 2014. And today there’s over $5 trillion of assets that have divested. How many of you were part of that divest movement in their college campuses and universities? Excellent. Keep doing it!

See, here’s some of the arguments that we used to point out to people who own carbon in their portfolio, the risk of owning fossil fuels. First is stranded asset risk. This is the great carbon tracker paper that Bill McKibben made famous in his Rolling Stone articles. Carbon Tracker, by the way, is a group based in London, all ex-oil analysts. And they said that you have to keep 80 percent of the reserves that are reflected on the balance sheets of the oil companies today in the ground in order to keep the temperature of the planet below the 2 degree Celsius level that everyone in Paris agreed that we have to achieve.

So the battle that’s taking place is are the oil companies going to be allowed to burn that 80 percent and transfer those costs on to who? Us, the taxpayer, or are they going to stay in the ground? Something’s gotta give. That’s the battle that’s taking place right now, and that reserve is priced into their stock today. and that’s a risk.

Litigation risk. You’re here in Marin County. You may not know it, Marin, San Mateo, Imperial County, San Francisco and Oakland have all filed suit against the oil companies for climate damages. And I’m sure that Sonoma and Napa will join them after the fires. But those suits were just filed in the last month. Where are they going to go? Are they going to go the way of tobacco? That’s a huge liability if you own fossil fuels.

Carbon pricing risk. Here in California we have something called cap and trade that puts the price of carbon at about $15 to $16 a ton, today. We know we need carbon prices at about $50 a ton in order to create innovation. Since we’re cutting everyone’s taxes, the government actually needs a revenue stream to come in. So it might not be a bad idea to put a carbon tax on at $50, increase it $10 a ton for the next 20 years, so that everyone knows where it’s going to be priced and they can allocate capital accordingly.

Regulatory risk. Now we know that Pruitt has trumped the regulatory situation because he’s gutting the EPA. Right? But it’s nice to know that regulatory cannot stop technology innovation. It can slow it down. It can speed it up, but it can’t stop technology’s disruption from taking place.

Peak demand versus peak supply for oil. The oil companies think they’re going to keep looking for supply until 2050. They don’t think peak demands going to happen. Personally, we think peak demand for oil is going to happen when we move to electric cars.

Technology risk. We’re going to go into some detail here, because technology risk is the biggest disrupter to the fossil fuel industry today, and then investment risk. This is a busy chart. In the upper lefthand corner it shows solar, but it shows that solar has gone from $3.80 a watt to 40 cents a watt in price in less than 10 years. Massive adaptation has happened as a result.

Wind power’s blow 3 cents a kilowatt hour. All externalities priced in. LED lights have dropped over 85 to 90 percent. And battery storage, the Holy Grail, has dropped almost 85 percent. Why is that so important? Because when the sun and wind are not shining, if you can store that electron in a battery, you can release it during those times when the sun and wind aren’t shining. You need to get the price of battery storage below $200 a kilowatt hour, and this is according to Jim Rogers, who is the former CEO of Duke Energy, the big North Carolina utility, in order to make it utility scalable. Well, when Elon finishes the plant in Nevada next year, the price for battery storage is below $180 a kilowatt hour. When the Chinese and the Koreans finish their gigaplants, by 2020 the price will be below $100 a kilowatt hour. Think about that from the idea of scalability.

Now, let’s look at the arguments for the invest side, as Kenny mentioned, because that’s a disrupter. And let’s frame it in a way that the other side can hear it, because these are the arguments they make.

National security. Microgrids are much safer than centralized grids in two ways. The CIA and FBI worry extensively about the centralized grid structure in United States. Why? Because it’s easily hacked. Microgrids are much more difficult to hack. In addition, centralized grids, you can have accidents, climate disasters—look at Maria taking out Puerto Rico or look at that tree that fell across the power line in Ohio about 15 years ago, took out the whole East Coast and almost melted down a nuclear power plant, by accident, not by design. So microgrids, from a national security perspective, are much safer.

Immigration. Access to affordable, clean, sustainable energy is a human right. There are a billion people on this planet that do not have access to power. If we improve the standard of living where people live, that is a right they’re entitled to have.

Jobs. Let’s talk about jobs. Solar jobs are over 200,000 in United States and they increased by over 25 percent in the last year. Wind jobs, almost 100,000, increased by 16 percent. Coal jobs contracted by about 15 percent. What’s the beautiful thing about solar jobs? They’re in every single Congressional district. Right? You don’t need an oil reserve or a carbon reserve to go mine it. They are in urban areas; they’re in rural areas; they’re in red states; they’re in blue states. It’s every single district, and we need to be putting solar on every single rooftop, whether it’s commercial or housing or in the fields. These are high-paying jobs. They’ll be around for 20 or 30 years. So the job creation is much better on the renewable side.

Let’s look at healthcare costs. We as the US taxpayer give the oil industry $25 billion in subsidies to go drill off our coasts, in depletion allowances every year. In return they give us over $200 billion of healthcare costs.

If you go to a town in Fontana, in California, and you ask the gradeschool kids there how many of their family members have been to the hospital in the last year because of respiratory problems, because Fontana’s between two fossil fuel plants, and they breathe the air every single day that we’ve been breathing here in Sonoma and Napa, and Marin and San Francisco for the last two weeks. They breathe it every single day. If you ask that elementary school kid how many have been there, every one of them will raise their hand. Clean renewable energy will solve that problem because those externalities will not be landing on our balance sheets and in their lungs and killing them.

Now let’s look at what the market’s doing. Because businesses who have electricity as their second highest cost are saying, Well, Mr. CEO of solar company, can we go ahead and lock in the price of energy for the next 20 or 25 years by getting a power purchase agreement at 6 cents a kilowatt hour? Solar CEO says, Absolutely, lock in your cost. Done. Wind, 3 cents. Done. You go to a CEO of a natural gas company or a coal company and say, Can we lock in a price? They say, Absolutely not. Why? Because the commodity goes up and down. You can’t predict that.

Now if you’re a large company, like a Salesforce or Apple or Microsoft, where you have huge server farms, you want to manage that second largest cost of human capital on your balance sheet. And the best way to manage that is to lock in that price so you can then allocate capital more efficiently over the next 20 years to other parts of your business. Why wouldn’t you want to do that? It’s the best way to run a business. It’s the best economic way to run a business. In addition, you get the benefit of trying to help solve climate change. It benefits your employees and benefits your shareholders. So you’re seeing hundreds and hundreds of businesses, regardless of regulations, moving to solar and wind because it’s the best business decision that they can make. The economics are driving their decisions.

This transition is not just going to be in the solar and wind space. It’s going to affect every single element of our economy. It’s going to be in the water area where we do infrastructure in pumping technology. It’s going to be in the area of energy, as we just talked about with grid optimization and microgrids, battery storage. Transportation. We need to view the car as a mobile computer. That’s what’s going to happen. Think about that. Also, in areas of building, LED lighting, HVAC systems, waste reduction, agriculture, it’s going to be across the entire economy.

Let’s talk about investments because the experts would say to you, when we started the divestment campaign, you can’t wipe out an entire sector of the S&P 500. You’ll lose diversity, you’ll increase your risk and you’ll lower your return. Right? How many times have you heard that? Countless times. Well let’s just look at what happened over the last five years.

These are all the sectors of the S&P up here. Energy, by the way—Oh, by the way, energy—there’s not a single renewable energy company in the S&P 500 energy sector. It’s 100 percent carbon. Oil and gas companies only. Alright?

Look at the return for this year, down 12 percent through June. Not too good with the S&P up. By the way, energy’s a part of the S&P. Up 27 in 2016. That’s pretty good. Down 21 percent in 2015. Wow, that’s volatility. Up down, up down. How’s it done over the last five years? 1.6 percent. How have the other sectors down? Quite a bit better.

In fact, energy is the worst performing sector in the S&P 500 over the last five years. It’s just done a little bit better than bonds, which is at the bottom with a lot more volatility. So if you’re about investing, you’re about risk and return, you’re getting huge risk with no return in energy. This has been a tail wind for everyone who divested over five years ago. It’s helped the return.

Now this is a very, very busy slide but what this shows—well, that’s five years, let’s take it back 10 years. Okay. Let’s go back to the peak of the market in 2007. How has energy done? 9.7 percent total return, not annualized, total return over the last decade—9.7 percent. The S&P has almost doubled over that same time frame, with energy as part of the component.

In addition to it not performing well, it’s the most overpriced sector, which is the circle in the green, in the S&P 500 today, based on four percentage ratios. Not only has it not performed, but it’s also the most overvalued sector today. So, if you haven’t divested from fossil fuels, my question for you is: What is inspiring you to underperform? Right? What’s inspiring you to not keep pace with the benchmarks?

And for all those—I’m sure everyone here has divested, but for those who haven’t, go to FossilFreeFunds.org, or the As You Sow website, look up your mutual fund, find a five badge fund that’s fossil fuel free, integrates environment, social governance factors, and join the divestment movement and get out of fossil fuels. It’s not helping your return or retirement at all.

Now one thing we haven’t really talked about directly are the costs of climate change—droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes. Just in the last year, these are all the climate disasters with a billion dollars or more in damages in the United States, only in the first nine months of this year. It doesn’t even have Nate on it or the Sonoma fires. In fact, if it had that on it, we would have 17 $1 billion climate disasters—17.

If you look at this line, look at in the last five to 10 years. How many billion dollar climate disasters have we had happening? The cost estimated for this year with Irma, Maria, Sonoma is about $170 billion in unbudgeted expenses. It’s no wonder FEMA’s broke. Now not all that lands on the US taxpayer’s balance sheets, but a big chunk of it does. Unbudgeted expenses. The discretionary part of the US budget is $1.1 trillion, so if you’re having on average $100 billion hitting unexpectedly every year, that’s more than we spend on education and environment.

Now Jay Inslee said, he’s the governor of Washington State, he said, you know, we’re the first generation to understand the risks of climate change and we’re the last generation to be able to do anything about it.

Remember when I mentioned what those industry experts said in their predictions earlier? So, the WEO, it’s the World Energy Office. It’s part of the International Energy Association. In the lower lines there, in the kind of Dutch orange and yellow, show in 2002 and 2006 where they predicted solar would be. The red line is actually what happened. Same thing with wind. Now the dotted line is like what will be our reality. What will be our reality?

This is electrical cars. The oil companies are all the lower lines there—Exxon, BP, OPEC. In fact, OPEC just doubled their line in the last couple of months. It was way down before. Bloomberg actually shows a little bit more of a real ramp, but what is going to be our reality when it comes to the red line?

In fact, you are the red line. You are what makes the red line a reality. You are the people who install solar panels on your house. You are the people who buy LED lights and energy-efficient appliances. You are the people who drive electrical cars and put battery storage on garages. You are the people investing in clean tech and divesting from fossil fuels. You are the people that believe investment is the economic expression of your thinking and your values. You are the people that vote for progressive politicians that are going to get us out of this mess and are going to take it to the streets and the public utilities commission. You are the people that make the red line happen.

Collectively, collectively. Collectively. Let us do what Bioneers teaches us, to use what nature provides us to make our reality carbon free with power that will truly be too cheap to be metered. And in the theme of this year’s Bioneers, let’s rise up and make the red line a reality for the seven generations that follow us.

Amy Goodman: Taking Back Independent Media to Fight Climate Change

Amy Goodman, host and Executive Producer of Democracy Now!, has won countless prestigious awards, including an I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award and the Right Livelihood Award (the first journalist to receive that major honor). She has co-authored six bestsellers, including, most recently Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (Bioneers recently published an excerpt from the book).

We at Bioneers were pleased to host Amy Goodman, once again, at the 2017 conference. What follows is a video and transcript of her keynote about the importance of truth in media, climate change, and why independent media is essential for a democratic society.

Amy Goodman:

I want to go back to the beginning of September. The beginning of September when Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston, inundated the petro metro, the heart of the fossil fuel industry in this country, and millions of people who live there, a number of them along the fenceline communities, people like Bryan Parras of t.e.j.a.s. took Democracy Now! on that Labor Day weekend on a toxic tour of those communities.

They don’t call them frontline communities but fenceline, living on the fenceline of—well, for example, in Baytown, ExxonMobil refinery, the second largest refinery in this country, the Latino community that lives along the fence. When the companies shut down and the company reopens, the most dangerous times for people living there because of the toxins that are released. Who knows what was released. Companies taking advantage of these chaotic, catastrophic moments.

So Hurricane Harvey had made landfall, inundated a major American city, and hurricane Irma was decimating the Caribbean, moving in for landfall in the United States. In between these two moments on September 6, 2017, President Trump took a stand.

In Mandan, North Dakota, in front of an oil refinery there, boasting that he had pulled the United States out of the US Paris Climate Accord, the UN Climate Accord, and further boasting that he had green-lighted the Keystone XL pipeline, killed years before by activists all over this country and Canada and Latin America, deeply concerned about a sustainable world and building that. And he said he green-lighted the Dakota Access Pipeline. That was his statement on September 6th in between these two hurricanes, in Mandan, North Dakota, just down the road from the Mandan jail where so many hundreds of Native Americans had been jailed for sending out smoke signals to all of us about the danger of reliance on these pipelines crisscrossing this country as they protested the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
—-

I want to go back more than one year ago to this remarkable, historic gathering that took place in North Dakota—the standoff at Standing Rock, April 1st, 2016, the unofficial historian of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard. She opens up her property along the Cannonball River to the resistance. The resistance? To the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline that would—Well, they call it the black snake, snake its way from North Dakota through South Dakota, taking fracked oil from the Bakken oil fields from North Dakota to South Dakota, through Iowa, Illinois, then hook up with a pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico. And the Standing Rock Sioux said no.

I mean, they weren’t alone. The people of Bismarck and the capital had said no, and their wishes were respected. The people of Mandan, where the jail and the courthouse is, had said no. Their wishes were respected. But the Standing Rock Sioux were not so lucky. And so they took their stand.

When that first resistance camp, called Sacred Stone Camp, was opened, scores of people came. Then hundreds of people. Then thousands of people. Soon more and more resistance camps were set up, like the Red Warrior Camp, and it became the largest unification of Native American tribes in decades in our country. Native Americans from Latin America, from the United States, the First Nations of Canada, gathering to fight for all of us, deeply disturbed that the pipeline would go under the Missouri River, the longest river in North America, and endanger the clean water of 17 million people downstream.

The people did not call themselves protesters. They called themselves water protectors.

Now let’s talk this period—April 2016, May, June, July. This is the presidential election year. This is the time when the critical issues of the day are discussed and debated in town halls, on television, everywhere. We went to North Dakota Labor Day weekend of 2016, a year before President Trump stood in front of the Mandan oil refinery. Now, we were even late to it. We were covering it before, but from afar. And we went to cover these remarkable gatherings. The protests there were astounding.

You had people gathered on these rural back roads. They’d start with a water ceremony, holding glasses of water, and they would, you know, Native American women elders and children, they would be met by a fully militarized sheriff’s department. The back roads of North Dakota. They had MRAPs, they had tanks, they had missile launchers, they had automatic weapons. It was truly astounding.

I mean, you have come to be familiar with these scenes. Right? Remember Ferguson. The horror of Ferguson. August 9th, 2014, a young African American man, Michael Brown, is gunned down by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, and his corpse is left to bake in the hot August sun hour after hour after hour. The people rise up in the community, and this uprising is met by fully militarized police departments from all through the greater St. Louis area.

This is recycling in America today? You take the weapons from Afghanistan and Iraq, and you give them to the police departments of the United States? I mean, there are a number of even top police officials who are raising deep concern about what we are doing to—what the police departments of our country are becoming.

So let’s go back to that scene in North Dakota.

People walking through the streets, demanding a sustainable economy. Sometimes they would say—and we would be recording all of this—to the police that were facing off with them, “You’re protecting the Dakota Access Pipeline, but what about us, your neighbors?”

On September 3rd, 2016, Saturday of Labor Day weekend, we went to cover Native Americans about to plant their tribal flags, an area they called their sacred burial ground. And this was a disputed area. A judge was going to rule the next week on the tribe, and he said if you say this is your sacred ground, prove it, make a map. And they did. And they gave it to the judge and he gave it to Energy Transfer Partners which owns the Dakota Access Pipeline, as judges do.

And when the people walked up on this property, they thought that the Dakota Access Pipeline—it was a holiday weekend—that it wouldn’t be being built that weekend, but they saw the bulldozers operating at full tilt, to their horror, excavating the very land they had designated on the map. And they wondered—I mean, that’s not where the bulldozers were before. Did they use the map that the Standing Rock Sioux had made for the judge, leapfrog from where they were to actually change the facts on the ground before the judge rules, making it a moot point? They were furious. And they went up in front of the bulldozers. And it is a terrifying and unbelievably brave act to do. Older Native women, girls, boys, teenagers, standing in front of these massive machines that are churning the earth.

As we were filming, I was thinking about March 16th, 2003, three days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, another part of the Middle East, Gaza, and a young American woman from Evergreen College in Washington. Her name was Rachel Corrie. She had gone to Gaza as part of the international solidarity movement. And she had befriended a Palestinian pharmacist’s family. And Israeli military bulldozers were about to demolish his home. And she and other activists stood in front of it. They donned those orange construction vests, the fluorescent ones, and they stood in front of the bulldozers made by Caterpillar here in the United States, and Rachel was crushed to death.

Back to North Dakota.

The women and the girls standing in front of these bulldozers. Unbelievable bravery, but this time they prevailed. The bulldozers started to pull back. One, two, three, four, five, six of them, pulling back. And more and more people came from the resistance camps as they heard what was happening, and people were moving up on the land. And that was when the Dakota Access Pipeline guards unleashed the attack dogs on the Native Americans.

We were filming this. We filmed a dog with its mouth and nose dripping with blood. They were biting the Native Americans’ horses, they were biting the Native Americans. We were interviewing people who were just bitten. The people were maced, they were beaten, they were bitten, but they prevailed, and the guards moved back into their pickup trucks, cars. The bulldozers pulled back, at an unbelievably high price, but they won that day.

We posted this video online that night, and within 24-48 hours there were oh, something like 14 million views. 14 million!

Now, I want to go back to the fact that this is the presidential election year. Why wasn’t the media raising the questions about climate change, let alone the standoff at Standing Rock? Just last week I was on a panel that was moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS Evening News. He just recently retired. And I raised this question with him. You know, in the general presidential debates, there was not one question asked about climate change. Not one. Bob Schieffer said, “We were wrong. We should have raised the question of climate change.” Now the corporate executives, you know, on these networks, they’re looking for eyeballs and they say, climate change, the eyeballs go away. People aren’t interested. This gives the lie to that—14 million views. Any corporate network executive would have drooled for that kind of response. Okay.

We go back to New York and we’re continuing to cover it from New York. The judge is going to rule on Friday. On Thursday, the governor of North Dakota calls out the National Guard. It doesn’t look good for the tribe. Oh, and the authorities also quietly issued an arrest warrant for me. I didn’t know that at the time, so on Friday we do our show, and we head off to Toronto, to Canada. I wasn’t fleeing. We were invited to speak at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The judge ruled that night a routing of the tribe, a terrible decision of the tribe. And then 15 minutes later something unprecedented happened.

President Obama had been in Asia that week and his final stop was Laos, the first sitting president to go to Laos, and he held a democracy forum to teach young people around Asia about democracy. And young people came from all over Asia. Last question, a young woman from Malaysia raised her hand and said, “President Obama, what about the Dakota Access Pipeline?” She asked the question of the president that no journalist dared to ask him, and he held forth on the oppression of Native Americans over centuries, held forth eloquently, but when it came to the Dakota Access Pipeline he said, I have to get back to you on that; I have to consult my team.

He came back to Washington and he reportedly consulted his team, and he reportedly saw the video of the dogs, and it wasn’t lost on the first African-American president of this country. There’s significance. And, you know, on the day of the dogs, we interviewed Winona LaDuke of the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota, and she said, addressing the governor of North Dakota, “You are not George Wallace. This is not Alabama. This is not 1965. We are through.”

So the judge rules for Obama’s justice department against the tribe, but then 15 minutes later—I mean, the tribe was now suffering from whiplash—a three-agency letter is issued, unprecedented, from Justice, the ones who beat the tribe, Army Corps of Engineers and Interior saying they’re going to pull back; they’re going to evaluate: Was an environmental impact statement done? Were the Native Americans consulted? Terrible decision, then amazing moment, and the tribe doesn’t know what hit them, but they know they have made this moment happen.

So, we’re in Canada, right. We’re at the Toronto International Film Festival to speak after a film that was made about IF Stone, the great muckraking journalist, who said to young journalists and students, “If you can remember two words, remember governments lie. If you can remember three words,” he said, “remember all governments lie.” And that’s the name of the film. And they also, in addition to talking about his life, talk about the journalistic organizations that are following in this muckraker’s footsteps, Isi Stone. And so, Matt Taibbi was there with Rolling Stone, and Nermeen Shaikh and I were there from Democracy Now! And I felt it was important to be there to talk about what we just witnessed in North Dakota, because people in Canada care about First Nations.

And the next day we’re at the University of Toronto. Hundreds of people are there to speak. And as I’m giving my speech, I get a text on my phone, and it says you’re under arrest. Actually it said something like—It said like there’s an arrest warrant for you. And I didn’t know. Is this some kind of scam? Did someone send this to me from the audience? But I’m thinking fast and I’m speaking in a very different way, and I’m trying to think: I should not say this right now, out loud, because if it’s true, I’m not going to get arrested on the stage, but if I have interaction with police, FBI, or border guards, if the arrest warrant is in the system, I will be taken, and I was in Canada and I had to get over the border. So I just simply said, Could someone call me a cab?

I raced to the airport and I actually made it back into the United States. And when I got back to New York, you know, I didn’t take this arrest warrant personally. I felt it was a message to all journalists: Do not come to North Dakota, which is exactly why we all had to be there.

And also so critical for young journalists to know. You know, they don’t have the institutional backing or the resources but they want to cover this historic gathering of Native Americans, they should know they don’t have to wind up in jail. You should not have to get a record when you put things on the record.

Now, we went back a year ago this week in October of 2016, and as we landed in Bismarck, North Dakota, the prosecutors announced they were dropping the charges against me, quashing the arrest warrant, which was a good thing. But they announced they would bring more serious charges against me, charges of riot. Riot? Like I’m a one-woman riot?

I called my North Dakota lawyer, not that I had one before, and I said, I don’t understand, what does this mean? And he said—I mean, I said, What do I face?

And he said, I mean the worst scenario, he says, a year in jail. I said, a year in jail?

I said, How much time do I have? And he said, Well, you’ll be arraigned Monday at 1:30 in the afternoon.

And I said, Is this a done deal? Absolutely, the judge signs off and this rubber stamps over the weekend, and then you’ll be arraigned. I said, Judge? When I hear the word judge, I hear the word discretion. And he said, No, no, no. It doesn’t work like that. Rubber stamp on these charges but then they use their discretion after. I said, Well, what’s the name of the judge?

And that weekend we put a press release out. We named the judge, and we said, you know, he would be making a decision by Monday whether I would be arraigned. And we continued to cover. He said, two and a half days before the arraignment, we could then continue to cover the protests that weekend. And on Monday morning, well, the show must go on. Democracy Now! airs 8 in the morning Eastern Standard Time in New York, and so that would be 7 in the morning North Dakota time. And so my colleague, Dennis Moynihan, got a satellite truck up from Minnesota, and we broadcast in front of the Mandan courthouse and jail, where I would have to turn myself in. That was our backdrop. The courthouse, the jail, and the 10 Commandments in between.

So we interviewed the chair of the Standing Rock Sioux at the time—Dave Archambault, the 45th chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux. I said to him, Have you ever been arrested? Yes. He had been arrested for civil disobedience, a low-level misdemeanor. I said, What happened to you? He said, I was stripped searched, I was put in an orange jumpsuit, I was jailed.

Interviewed Dr. Sara Jumping Eagle, the pediatrician of the tribe. Of course she was one of the first to be arrested concerned about the health of the kids. I said, What happened to you? Low-level misdemeanor, strip searched, put in an orange jumpsuit and jailed. How much humiliation can a people take?

And so, we did the show, and now so much of the media was paying attention in the way they hadn’t before. The New York Times was covering this, the Los Angeles Times. It was on the BBC International home page. Al Jazeera was covering this. Vogue magazine was covering this protest.

Now, hundreds of Native Americans had come to express solidarity, and right before the 1:30 arraignment, we got word that the judge would not sign off on the charges. In addition to that for me, that Native Americans who were facing felony and misdemeanor charges that day, a number of them had their charges dropped.

This is what happens when the media shines a spotlight in the right direction. This is the kind of reality TV that we must all support.

Now, I only have a couple of minutes before my time is up, but I want to talk about this issue of climate change. You know that the media has become fiercely critical of the president. I’m not talking about FOX, but MSNBC and CNN. And if you take encouragement from that—I mean, I really do feel it’s because he’s directly attacking them. You know, failing New York Times, fake news CNN. And so they’re defending themselves. But don’t feel that encouraged. I mean, they should be defending themselves. They sound sometimes like Democracy Now!, right? The media is essential to the functioning of a Democratic society.

But when you look at the coverage of these climate catastrophes, from Hurricane Harvey to Irma to Maria that has devastated Puerto Rico, and the thought that President Trump, in the midst of their catastrophe, goes after the Puerto Rican Mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, who you came to know in the media as the woman who’s standing in chest-high water with a bullhorn trying to save and evacuate people, trying to save their lives. He goes after her and says, Puerto Ricans want other people to do things for them, calling these officials lazy. He eventually goes to Puerto Rico and he starts hurling rolls of paper towels at the hurricane survivors.

Yes, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz has called President Trump the Hater-in-Chief. And when he just made this remarkable statement in a tweet: We cannot keep FEMA, the military, and the first responders in PR forever. She responded: Trump is threatening to condemn us to a slow death of non-drinkable water, lack of food, lack of medicine. The mayor appealed to the United Nations, UNICEF, the world to “stand with the people of Puerto Rico, stop the genocide that will result from the lack of appropriate action of a president that just does not get it because he’s been incapable of looking in our eyes and seeing the pride that burns fiercely in our hearts and our souls.”

The people of Puerto Rico—One month ago, Maria made landfall. More than 80 percent of them don’t have electricity from the grid, a third of them don’t have drinkable water. This is a climate catastrophe. President Trump has promised a fortune to Florida and Texas. Both states voted for him. The people of Puerto Rico can’t vote for the President of the United States, and he hasn’t come to Northern California where the fires have raged. Maybe is it because the people of Northern California did not vote for him either?

But it is absolutely critical that the media express the truth about what connects seemingly disparate climate events from the floods, the hurricanes, to these fierce, uncontrollable wildfires in the north of California. We need a media that makes those connections, meteorologists that do their jobs.

There’s 24 hours a day of coverage of the hurricanes, except for when it comes to Puerto Rico. But they almost never—I’m not talking FOX, I’m talking MSNBC and CNN—they flash the words severe weather, extreme weather, what about another two words? Global warming and climate change and climate chaos so that you know there is something you can do something about.

So that is the issue of climate change. And as Robert Jay Lifton, the great psychiatrist, talks about the twin—the twin apocalypses—climate change and nuclear war.

We have a president that just asked his generals on July 20th, If we have nuclear weapons why don’t we use them? Something like three times in an hour. NBC reported it was then that Rex Tillerson, the former head of ExxonMobil, the largest oil company in the world, now our secretary of state, it was then that he called him an f’ing moron. Now we don’t know if that’s true. NBC reported it, but what we do know is that Rex Tillerson has now been asked repeatedly about it and he will not confirm or deny.

But, why is this so terribly serious, as he imperils the Iran nuclear deal and goes after North Korea? Why is this so terrible, escalating these threats? Because—and this is where I don’t understand what Trump is doing…If he just stopped attacking the media for a week—I don’t even want to say this publicly, but I really do believe this—they would wrap themselves around him. Why? Because the establishment media tends to embrace the establishment. We still see it on climate change. And if, you know, you have to ask in this case, if we had state media, how would they do it any differently? And that comes to war as well.

And the proof of it is a few weeks into President Trump’s presidency, when he bombed the Syrian airfield with, what was it, 59 tomahawk cruise missiles, I came home, I turn on MSNBC. Brian Williams, the host, is saying, “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two US Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen, I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.” And he said, “And they’re beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is for them a brief flight over to this airfield.”

The next day Fareed Zakaria on CNN talked about Donald Trump becoming president that night. And then Trump drops the largest non-nuclear bomb in the history of the world on Afghanistan, inexplicably. And the same is said—the Moab, what the Pentagon calls the mother of all bombs.

What could he do next? Actually though he occupies the most powerful position on Earth, there is a force more powerful, and it is all of you. Everywhere from this room all over this country, united with people around the world. And I just want to end with this.

You know, I come from Pacifica Radio. All of our beloved KPFA in Berkeley. I want to give a shout out to Robin Pressman, who used to run, the program director at KRCB, whose home was burned to the ground in Santa Rosa, and to all those who have suffered. I know this place was a place of hundreds of evacuees just a few days ago.

But I want to just end with this thought. Pacifica, five stations, KPFT in Houston, was blown up twice by the Ku Klux Klan, only station in the country. I can’t remember if it was the grand dragon or the exalted cyclops, I often confuse their titles. But he said it was his proudest act because he understood how dangerous independent media can be. Dangerous because it allows people to speak for themselves.

And whether it’s a Palestinian child or an Israeli grandmother, a Native elder from Standing Rock Sioux, or an uncle in Afghanistan, or Somalia or Niger, when you hear someone speaking from their own experience, it breaks down the barriers, the caricatures, the stereotypes that fuel the hate groups. I’m not saying you’ll agree with what you hear. How often do we even agree with our family members? But you begin to understand where they’re coming from. It makes it much less likely that you will want to destroy someone.

I think that understanding is the beginning of peace. I think the media can be the greatest force for peace on Earth. Instead all too often it’s wielded as a weapon of war, which is why we have to take the media back.

As I just told you the story in 1970 of the klan attacking KPFT. How is it possible—that was decades ago—that we’re talking about the Ku Klux Klan today? How is it possible the Charlottesville violent rally that ended in the death of a beautiful young woman, Heather Heyer, who on her Facebook page said, “If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” And President Trump talks about the very fine people among the klan and the white supremacists and the self-proclaimed fascists. And then when there’s a second rally doesn’t say a word about them, goes after the black athletes who are taking a knee. Who, as Reverend Barbara said it, reminds her of Dr. Martin Luther King in that form of prayer, showing the highest form of patriotism. Dissent is what will make this country great.

I just want to end, as we talk about the Nazis back in that time with a brother and sister in Nazi Germany who were not Jewish. They were German Christians but they thought, What can we do in the face of the Nazi atrocity? Hans and Sophie Scholl. He was a medical student at the University of Munich. She was an undergrad. And together with their professor, Kurt Huber, and other students and workers, they formed the White Rose Collective, and they thought, What can we do in the face of the Nazi atrocity? Put out pamphlets so the Germans will never be able to say we didn’t know. And on one of those pamphlets were written the words: We will not be silent. Those pamphlets they distributed everywhere under cover of night in alleyways, in school yards, in marketplaces, and then they were captured by the Nazis, by the Gestapo. They were charged, they were tried, they were convicted, and they were beheaded.

But that philosophy, that motto, should be the Hippocratic oath of the media today, should be the Hippocratic oath of us all today. We will not be silent. Democracy Now!

Climate Cuisine: Food Choices Impact Climate Change

What influences your food choices-taste, convenience, health, cravings, availability, economics, advertising?

What’s missing from the list may be the most important consideration of all, climate.

When we talk about the food system’s impact on climate change we are not just tinkering around the edges of the problem; 24-33 % of all greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to food production, distribution, consumption and waste.

Ben Houlton, of UC Davis, studies the greenhouse gas emissions of food production. According to Houlton’s climate models, a vegan diet reduces your carbon footprint more than any other dietary choice, and a Mediterranean diet, which many health practitioners promote as a heart healthy diet that lowers risk for a variety of diseases, is almost as climate friendly. Turns out what’s good for the planet is also good for the body. That makes sense, but most people don’t make the connection. As a people, we have lost our way; we operate under the illusion that our personal wellbeing is independent from the health of the planet.

The dominant culture imposes an anthropocentric view of the superiority of human existence that assigns value to all other life forms and ecosystems only as far as they are useful to human ambitions. But Indigenous people know that the river is alive. That eco-centric worldview recognizes the intrinsic value of all life and respects the rights of nature. “Rather than treating nature as property under the law, the rights of nature acknowledges that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Acting from an eco-centric worldview just may be the saving grace that can help moderate a wildly disharmonious climate, but where do we start? The prominent American food writer MFK Fisher said, “First we eat, then we do everything else.”

Ben Houlton makes a compelling point on food’s impact on climate. “Our studies are showing that the Mediterranean diet-which is rich in nuts and beans and has a lot of fish, maybe chicken once a week, maybe red meat only once a month-if everyone were to move toward it, it’s the equivalent of taking about a billion or more cars of pollution out of the planet every year.” A billion cars, not incidentally, is roughly all the cars currently on the road worldwide.

What is it about the vegan and Mediterranean diet that helps reduce our personal impact on climate change? Primarily, it’s the reduced consumption of meat. Most meat comes from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and the environmental statistics of CAFOs are hard to swallow. Livestock globally emit 18 % of all greenhouse gases (more than transportation); one third of global grain goes to feed livestock; in North America half of all synthetic fertilizers are used to grow grains; nitrogen fertilizers emit 75 % of agricultural nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more damaging to the climate than carbon; and half the energy used by agriculture is used to feed livestock.

When cows convert protein from grains to protein of meat there is a 7:1 (some studies show up to 16:1) loss in that process. The toxic byproducts of CAFOs are extremely damaging to the environment and CAFOs inefficiencies in protein production are an extravagance the climate cannot afford.

There are many ways that CAFO meat exacerbates climate change, but not all meat is equal. And this is what, for the most part the very good documentary, Cowspiracy missed. The climate equation of grass fed livestock can be very different when looking at the entire system. Grass fed cows still burp and fart emitting methane (a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon), but at a rate 40% less than CAFO cattle and when cattle are managed holistically using carbon farming practice like pulse-grazing (highly managed grazing with attention towards duration and intensity) with a keen eye towards environmental impact and managing the pasture to promote deep rooted perennial grasses, there can be a net climate benefit as the system captures carbon and holds it in the soil. People will argue that grass fed beef is much more expensive than feedlot beef. That’s true, but this is where ecology, economy and personal health merge. People, due to grass fed beef’s expense, will buy and eat less, which is healthier for people and the planet.

Ariel Greenwood formerly managed pastured livestock on a 3000 acer preserve in Sonoma, CA. Her primary goal was ecological restoration with healthy meat production coming as a result of ecosystem considerations like “how does this [area] need to be grazed and am I able to pull that off. Some hillsides need a lot more restorative, sensitive grazing, others can take a lot more impact. Time of year matters significantly in that respect. How dry is the ground? How wet is the ground? All of these questions in anticipation of moving 120,000 pounds of animal across the area.”

That’s how an eco-centric rancher plans her day, with keen observation, listening to and learning from the land, and working in symbiotic relationship with nature’s wondrous complexity.

 

 

Brower Youth Awardee Anthony Torres: Inspiring Communities to Demand Climate Action

Since 2000, the Brower Youth Award has recognized outstanding youth leaders who are making strides in the environmental movement. Each year, six young people based in North America are awarded the Brower Youth Award prize, joining a growing movement of youth leaders who are publicly recognized for their sustainable projects, innovative ideas, and informed analyses. This profile was originally published on the Brower Youth Awards website.

Anthony Torres
BABYLON, NY

As a community organizer in Washington, D.C., Anthony Torres brings together thousands of volunteers to put pressure on members of Congress to act in the best interest of people and the environment, with a particular focus on the climate justice movement, fossil fuel dependency resistance, and bucking the environmental trends of the Trump administration. He has organized everything from a dance party protest outside of the home of Presidential Advisor Ivanka Trump, to a vigil for victims of Hurricane Harvey outside of the house of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to a sit-in at the office of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. In all his work, Anthony attempts to build an accessible narrative story that speaks to our shared humanity, while acknowledging race, class, and gender disparities.

Torres is also the campaign representative for the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program, which is pushing for an equitable NAFTA agreement that supports the environment, workers, and healthy communities, and is a trustee for the Progressive Workers Union, which represents Sierra Club employees.

Anthony Torres’s Brower Youth Profile Film

Anthony Torres’s 2017 Brower Youth Awards Speech

When Black Farmers Took on the USDA, Bioneers Raised the Profile of the Largest Civil Settlement in History

“Thousands of acres of black farmland have been recaptured from bankruptcy. Government foreclosures against black farmers were stopped virtually everywhere. Thousands of destitute black farm families have a new lease on life and a newfound self respect. Bioneers, I think it is fair to say that poor African American farmers have struck a real blow for liberty. And our nation is better off because of it.”

J.L. Chestnut’s two keynote addresses, in 2000 and 2001, at Bioneers reported on the astounding success of a major—yet largely unknown by the masses—class action lawsuit. The success was the result of a story that began more than 100 years prior.

Post-Slavery Land Ownership

For freed slaves in the U.S., the promise of land to own and farm was the promise of true freedom—the ability to be self-sufficient, vote and pay taxes. General William T. Sherman’s “Forty Acres and a Mule” was, on its face, just such a promise. In early 1865, 40,000 former slaves moved onto their own land on the east coast. The promise was short-lived, however. With President Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson became President, and the program was reversed.

Still, many former slaves were able to secure their own land, where farming became their ticket to a new, better life. Often having worked on farms as slaves, these new land owners were skilled and determined.

In 1920, nearly 1 million black farmers tended land in the U.S. But by the 2000s, those numbers had dwindled to around 18,000.

USDA Discrimination Tramples Black Farmers

Fear and outright discrimination can be blamed for the bulk of that dwindling number. The USDA and local programs established to assist farmers were far from accepting of black-farmer progress. Black farmers’ requests for assistance were largely ignored, and white farmers reaped the benefits of available resources.

Inability to receive loans from the government was a tough enough burden to bear. But stories of threats and fear tactics (a noose hanging in an agency office, for example) are also told, giving credence to black farmers’ movement away from tending land or seeking assistance of any kind.

Bioneers Meets J.L. Chestnut

In the 1990s, Bioneers Director of Restorative Food, Arty Mangan, began working with black farmers in the south through the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, providing organic-farming and medicinal-herb training as well as assisting with farmers’-market setup.

Mangan became familiar with what was being called the “Black Farmers Lawsuit,” formally known as Pigford v. Glickman. He learned that, during the 1980s, the entire Civil Rights division of the USDA had been secretly shuttered as a cost-saving measure. “So black farmers are sending in these discrimination claims, and they’re being stored unopened in the warehouse in D.C.” says Mangan.

Enter J.L. Chestnut. The first black attorney in Selma, Alabama, and a colleague of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, Chestnut was a powerful orator. Tough as nails and, at the time, in his 70s, Chestnut—the lead attorney on the Black Farmers Lawsuit—spoke at a Federation of Southern Cooperatives event that Mangan attended.

Inspired by Chestnut’s mission and outraged by the events that led up to the lawsuit, Mangan invited Chestnut to speak at an upcoming Bioneers event. “We talk about environmental justice, but we want to talk about social justice too,” says Mangan. “That’s the core and heart of Bioneers’ work. So it was very profound for us to hear this major Civil Rights leader acknowledge that.”

Big Steps in the Right Direction

Not only was Chestnut’s presence at Bioneers a powerful opportunity to reach a largely in-the-dark West-coast audience during a time when the lawsuit was still underway, it presented networking opportunities as well. Chestnut was introduced to Danny Glover, an actor and activist, who agreed to attend the next Federation of Southern Cooperatives fundraiser.

At that event, Glover read a Langston Hughes poem for the audience. His presence allowed the organization to raise $100,000 that night.

The Black Farmers Lawsuit lawsuit was settled in 1999. The USDA was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to black farmers who were denied government assistance based on the color of their skin. The payouts are still ongoing to this day, and the case lead to similar successful class action lawsuits against the USDA on behalf of women, Hispanic and Native American farmers.

Chestnut passed away in 2008, but his legacy lives on in a big way. Recent reports show numbers of black farmers on the rise. The 2012 census reported a 12 percent increase since 2007.

Bioneers is honored to have played a small part in the story of this major lawsuit and the rebound of an entire, essential population of farmers.

Kandi Mossett: Standing Against Big Oil to Defend the Earth, Water and Indigenous Communities

Kandi Mosset is a mother and member of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara nation of North Dakota. She is known worldwide for her involvement on the frontlines of the protests at Standing Rock.

With a Masters in Environmental Management, Mosset joined the Bioneers Indigenous Forum in 2014. Joined by fellow water protectors, Mosset returned to the 2016 Bioneers Conference to provide an update on Standing Rock that reached millions. She currently works with the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) as Lead Organizer of the Extreme Energy and Just Transition Campaign, and she previously served as the IEN’s Tribal Campus Climate Challenge Coordinator.

Mosset is passionate about bringing visibility to the impacts of climate change and environmental injustice, specifically those affecting Indigenous communities throughout the world.

Bioneers was thrilled to have Kandi Mosset return for the 2017 conference. Below is the video and transcript of her keynote speech on defending indigenous lands and communities from the negative impacts of the fossil fuel industry.

Kandi Mossett:

The Mandan Hidatsa Arikara nation is in North Dakota, which is made of three separate and distinct tribes that were put together on the same reservation in 1860 by this federal government, because we were similar enough, and because many of us were decimated by smallpox that we were really small in numbers by the time that happened. But we have our separate languages and cultures and traditions.

We’re earth-lodge dwelling tribes. It’s not like the Western movies where you see teepees and horses and buffalo and that’s it. We had those things for sure, but we were farming tribes. We grew corn, squash, beans, tobacco, and as such always lived along the waterways and the bottom lands of the Missouri River for a really, really, really long time.

One of the first threats after the reservation in 1860 was something called the Flood Control Act of 1944, also known as the Pick Sloan Act, where they came up with the brilliant idea to build this series of dams along the Missouri River. Incidentally, every single one is below a reservation — flooded us, and that dam, the Garrison Dam, created our reservoir of Lake Sakakawea, which we have come to embrace as our waterway, as our life blood, but we also had a moment where we were forced into a cash economy as a result.

My grandma says it’s like we were forced through a door and could never look back again. We had to go to the toplands because that dam flooded all of our Class 1 and Class 2 agricultural lands on the bottom lands, and all of the towns and villages that we had to come to accept, that were forced upon us by the federal government.

When our chairman, at the time, George Gillette, signed onto that deal, he cried because they were already $60 million into building the project by the time we “agreed” to do it.

So then North Dakota was like, “Oh, well we have this lignite coal here. It’s a beautiful thing.” But it’s not. Lignite coal is the dirtiest coal that you could possibly imagine that comes from North Dakota. Seven coal-fired power plants, several mines that we have impacting our air. That has been happening for a very long time.

I remember going to the coal plants in seventh grade. Our whole class fit into the back of a shovel, one shovel that they used to dig it up. And they were telling us about how great it was. How we could get jobs in the coal industry, and it was going to be a wonderful thing. I remember, I was like: I’m too cool to wear these goggles that they gave us, so I took them off, and I was like, Oh crap, there’s all these particles going into my eyes. So I put them back on.

But they didn’t tell us about what it was doing to our watersheds. They didn’t tell us that every single bit of our over 11,000 miles of rivers, lakes, and streams in North Dakota would eventually be contaminated with mercury as a result of that industry. That is before the fracking you may have heard of. This is all before we have the nation’s only commercial scale coal gasification plant. We have uranium mining. We have over 8,000 acres of underground nuclear warheads stored in North Dakota. Okay? And then enter fracking and the Bakken shale formation that exists where I’m from.

They call my reservation the sweet spot because at least one-fifth of the oil that comes out of there comes from under our feet. So instead of seeing fields, we started seeing these popping up all over the place. Rigs everywhere. On my reservation there’s no setbacks. Zero. They’re right behind apartment buildings where children ride their bikes and play. So we see these things that say for sale, industrial zoned, leased to the industry.

North Dakota is full of sunflowers, as my daughter is showing you here. We have wheat, canola, corn, barley, oats. We’re known as the breadbasket of the country. And yet, this is what the wheat fields are starting to look like. This one was four years ago, and it’s still not cleaned up because this spill was so toxic in this wheat field, which this farming family hopes to be able to put into production again.

We started seeing truck traffic coming into my community and just tearing up our roads. Roads that actually used to be roads are now just gravel. And nobody is fixing them. State of North Dakota’s not because we’re sovereign nations.

These trucks take liberties. They fill up their frack trucks with pristine water where our families used to fill up their cisterns, families that have to haul water. So the next person that comes along has no idea whatever flow back was in that truck.

This is Main Street, Newtown, North Dakota, little tiny town where I grew up – 1,500 people in my community until the oil boom. Boom, all of a sudden 5,000 people, probably three times as many trucks. They dump those frack fluids — toxic, never again used for human, animal, any consumption — right onto the roads because they can get away with it in Indian country. Whenever there’s an accident, traffic gets backed up for miles and miles, and hopefully people aren’t hurt. But sometimes…

This is my uncle’s truck. He was moving my cousin. Him and my brother were riding. A semi decided they were going to take over the whole road, and they either had to hit the ditch or have a head-on collision with a semi. They hit the ditch and they were okay. They had cuts, bruises, scrapes. Not everybody is always so lucky.

In 2008, when I really started fighting back against this industry it was because I had a friend who was killed by those semis, and she was 23 years old. Literally crushing her. Nothing was ever done. Since that time over 40 people in my community have died just running on the road, taking their kids to school.

That is some of the social. What about environmental?

This spill in 2014 still hasn’t been cleaned up. We live in the Badlands of North Dakota. It’s not all flat, like some people might think. We have beautiful areas called the Badlands, and they tell us time and again that it’s not getting into the water when spills happen. Don’t worry about that frack water. When it touches stuff, it’s not that toxic. They said — the EPA and others — that this is clean. There’s still heavy mercury, heavy metals, heavy toxins, arsenic sitting on top of this soil, from 2014, and it’s “cleaned up.” They tell us don’t worry when there’s a spill because we’re going to have these sand bags here that are going to take care of everything. It’s not going to get into Lake Sakakawea.

Well, this was taken out of Lake Sakakawea when my sister was swimming. This water came out of the lake, so I took it to the North Dakota State Health Department, charged $200 out of my own pocket to see what the heck this was. They’re like, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s a blue-green algae bloom.” I was like, “Okay. What does that mean?”

It’s toxic. You’re not supposed to be swimming in it. You’re not supposed to drink it. This was taken one mile from the water intake plant for our community.

In addition to the water, our air is being polluted. How many have you been to North Dakota? Raise your hands. How many big, huge cities like New York have you seen in North Dakota? None. Because there aren’t any.

This circle you’re looking at is not from the lights like you see in the eastern part of the country. It’s from the flares. You can literally stand in one area and do a 360 and feel like you’re in a war zone. I can’t tell you how hard it is to be home with my daughter in the back seat, and I don’t even want us to have to breathe, but we don’t have a choice. So we thought.

We’re going to fight back against this industry because look at this…Just a few years ago, you could see for miles and see the buttes, all of the compounds that are in there. All I wanted you to notice about this was where the little red arrows are because those are carcinogenic, which means cancer-causing. As a cancer survivor, who shouldn’t be standing here today because I was diagnosed with a Stage IV sarcoma tumor when I was 20 years old, this is really triggering to me. And this is just 652 of the 2,000 possible chemicals that can be in that frack water, and every single one of those is of concern.

They don’t care where they put these things. My grandmother used to fast here. She used to go out and collect juneberries, ground-berries, chokecherries, turnips, and now signs say, do not enter; you cannot be here.

And then came the man camps. Did you know that in the past nine months alone there were close to 100 people rescued from the sex trafficking industry, the youngest one was 3 months old?

Crime came with the industry. It’s inevitable. These are just headlines I took from my local papers that you’re not going to see in mainstream media. Every single one of these has a story. I don’t have enough time to share with you today. But imagine, the worst thing that used to happen when I was little was that the bad kids — us — used to egg our teachers’ houses on Halloween. That was the crime in our community. And now this.

With that came drugs, came heroin, something we never had in our community before, and when people got addicted to heroin, the industry, the police, “Oh, they’re just druggies.” There were no services for the people.

So when people like Ashley got addicted to heroin there was nowhere for her to turn. She laid in a hospital bed for three days while her hands and her feet turned black, while her internal organs shut down before she died at 28. In the last year we buried Lisa, same thing. No one to turn to because she was just a druggy. No, she was a person that left behind five children.

My cousin Daniel went missing in 2013. We knew that he was with MS-13, a known organized crime gang, that originated out of Venezuela. We knew the night he went missing, he was with those kind of people. We searched and searched for Daniel for months, and we found him — in Lake Sakakawea, under the bridge. And because of there were no stab wounds, there were no gunshot wounds, it was open and shut. We never knew, and we’ll probably never know who killed Daniel. And that happens all the time as a result of the oil industry.

And what do we get? What’s our thanks for allowing these people to come into our communities? Written on our dumpsters for our kids to find? Racism, as if it’s our fault that they’re there.

We fought against the semis. We fought against the trains. Because then that bright idea was to bring these bomb trains and send them out all over the country. And it hurt every time one of those blew up, because they came from my community. In Canada, 47 people were killed, including two kids under the age of 5 when ones of these trains blew up. Then, what was the next brainchild? Pipelines.

You’ve probably heard of the Dakota Access Pipeline. You might know how it ended at the time. Yeah, we were forced out by gunpoint from our US military for trying to protect our water. When we say the frontlines, people get triggered because they say, “Oh, that connotes war.” Well, if you don’t think we’re at war then you’re sorely mistaken and you need to wake up, because we are on the frontlines.

We stood there with our sage and our sweetgrass and our medicine against armed military — to protect water and tell people water is life. It doesn’t matter that the camp was physically forced out because they can never take away the fires that are burning in our hearts from that, and we’re never going to quit. We are going to continue to fight, because it’s not just about one pipeline.

Raise your hand if you heard of Dakota Access. Okay, now, raise your hand if you heard of Sakakawea Pipeline. Hmm…That one quietly went under the water at the same time. You see, it’s not just about the symptoms. It’s about stopping it at the source. And I want to show this video of what we’re continuing to do at home.

So 3 years ago that we have have gotten our Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations elders and representatives together in 20 years, to work together and do a water blessing.

You know, these industries, they won’t return here, they are only here for the money, they want to extract as fast as they can.

We have a lot that is at stake here, there’s a big battle going on right now and we’re in the battlefield.

What we’re doing here is bringing folks from all over the United States and making sure that people understand that the legacy here, the legacy of extraction, ultimately goes downstream towards other communities in the United States, especially in the South.

So making those connections from the extraction point through the pipelines, you know, all the processinging and refinement, and how we’re all in this struggle together. I think it’s just really important to bring people together and understand we’re not alone when it comes to these extractive industries and how they’re impacting us. And the whole message of the day is, “Just keep it in the ground. Stop it at the source.” Then, all of the negative symptoms that negatively impact everybody else won’t have to happen.

Right? It seems like common sense to me. Just because you don’t see us in the media fighting at Standing Rock doesn’t mean we went away, or that we’re not going to continue to fight in the Bakken. You can bet that we’re in our communities fighting and pushing back.

We’re making those truck drivers feel uncomfortable when we put our up signs telling them that we don’t want them there. We’re going to continue to bring people to North Dakota and have these toxic tours, just like the one we just had this past August to show that the symptom — the pipeline is still there — but we’re going to fight to stop it there, because fracking is a problem in this country. It’s also a problem worldwide, and that’s just one of the problems of the fossil fuel industry that threatens life.

Mni Wiconi is so much more than just a slogan or a saying. Water of life is literally when we’re pregnant, we carry our babies in that water. In that moment, that moment when you understand what that means is so powerful. And I like to share it with people. Because we have a responsibility to protect that life, to show them that they can be the future power shifters, and to get them ready to do it because these things take a really long time. But we’re strong and we’re smart, and we know that we can do things like decolonize our own minds. Yes, you can.

Look up Dr. Michael Yellow Bird. I don’t have time to go into the whole thing right now, but neurodecolonization through mindfulness, you watch one of his things, pow! Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s what we can do as individuals if we want to right the wrongs in the world.

Sure, renewable energy is great. It is good to have those things. It is good to transition. But that’s not what’s going to save us. We have to get to the very heart of the problem, of this broken system, which is capitalism and colonization. We need to do it and we can.

You can get the book if you’re not indigenous. I don’t know how much sense it’ll make, but it’s pretty good. It explains what that means. Don’t be afraid of decolonization. It can be as simple as planting a garden, honestly. Start there.

Our little kids, our children should be allowed to continue our culture and practice our way of life.

This is one of our Earth Lodges in a modern-day spin that we’re building in our community right now. Because our country, our world, is addicted to oil. We have to admit it. We have to admit the foundation that we’re built on is a bad foundation, and it has to crumble so that we can rebuild it.

If we have to go to DC and leave our communities and march and say, “Hey, No. 45, you’re insane, and we’re going to do everything we can to get you out,” then we will! Yes! Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid and don’t sit on your couch and wait for somebody else to decolonize your own mind because you’re the only one that can decolonize your own mind. I’m sorry. But you have to do some homework.

Please support the Dakota Resource Council, who supports our local Ft. Berthold power group. Please don’t forget about the people on the ground. Dakota Resource Council is in North Dakota trying to do good things, and they need support. And please support us at the Indigenous Environmental Network because it’s for the next seven generations.

If not us, who? If not now, when? We can do this, people. We can do it together.

john a. powell: Celebrating Diversity to Create an Inclusive Society

john a. powell is a professor of law and African-American and Ethnic Studies at the University of California Berkeley, where he is also the Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.

Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, john was the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State, and founded the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He has previously served as the Director of Legal Services in Miami, Florida, and National Legal Director of the ACLU.

He currently serves on the board of a number of philanthropic nonprofits, including Bioneers, and is the author of several books, including Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

Bioneers recently spoke with powell about his long, mutually beneficial relationship with our organization. We were lucky to host him as a returning keynote speaker in 2017. The video and an excerpted transcript of that keynote follow.

john a. powell:

My talk is about co-creating an alternative space to heal. So where’s that alternative space to heal? I think it’s called the Earth.

So the Earth belongs to all of us. We have to respect it. It supports us. And if healing is going take place it has to be on the whole Earth, not just a corner someplace, not a place just to hide. We have to make the Earth a safe place for life.

And I am, because you are. We are profoundly, profoundly interconnected. We don’t always live that way. We don’t always acknowledge it, but if we’re going to heal, we have to live it, experience it and create institutions that celebrate it.

Instead we’re in a situation where the country and the world is more divided. We’re seeing right-wing ethnic nationalism blow up all around the world. We’re seeing every day, every week, crazy things coming out of the White House. I mean like, crazy. And by most accounts we’re more divided as a country than we’ve been since the Civil War. That’s the bad news.

Let me give you some good news: There are more people who oppose white supremacy than any time in U.S. history.

So we’re in a battle. And it’s a battle of those who believe in love and life, and those who think that’s only for a narrow few.

These are two authors. On the left is Samuel Huntington, who wrote a book called Clash of Civilizations, which really is an attack on most of the world who are not white and Christian. And he worries that the United States is becoming too diverse, that there are too many people coming here who are not white and Christian. And he suggests that we need to go back to some glorious past when America was white again or great again or whatever they’re saying. Of course, there was never such a time when America was white. They sort of skipped over the fact that the country was occupied when they got here, but Huntington, despite being a noted scholar sort of skips over that. But he actually looks at the past. So people who are afraid of what’s happening in the world are constantly trying to take us back to some imaginary past.

And then, there’s Jeff Chang, who looks at the changing world, the change in diversity, and he’s written a book called, Who We Be. He looks at an imaginary future, a future where all of us belong, where the world is very diverse, where there is no supremacy. And that’s the battle that we’re in right now. Do we actually embrace Jeff Chang or do we embrace Samuel Huntington?

The country itself has been fighting this since its very beginning. The Declaration of Independence, “we the people.” But then again, we the people, who are the we? Who constitute the we in we the people?

Of course, at the beginning of the Constitution, black people weren’t in that we. Women weren’t in that we. Native Americans weren’t in that we. White people without property were not in that we. So even though it had this glorious-sounding term, it then defined this we very narrowly.

So, to some extent, that’s still the battle we’re in. Can we define the we so it’s inclusive and not exclusive?

—

So I talk about this in the context of “othering and belonging.” And it takes on all different types of forms. And I hope many of you will actually come to our conference on othering and belonging. And othering is a wonky word, so I got this technical definition to help you out. So one person says, Stop othering me. What’s othering? Well, your kind wouldn’t understand.

So othering happens at all different kinds of levels. And this cartoon suggests an interpersonal level, and that’s bad enough. We’ve all had experience of going someplace and feeling like this is not my place, these are not my peeps. But what happens when the country, when the government, when the police say you don’t belong. It takes on a much more pernicious and dangerous form. What happens when the President of the United States, we call him “45” in my house, What happens when 45 says that these people don’t belong? That’s a very dangerous space. And we have to reject that space.

And most liberals, and I would dare say that many of you are probably at least liberal, if not progressive, and most people who embrace some concept of spirituality, my guess would be many of you do, would actually reject the notion of othering. And unfortunately though, many liberals, when they reject othering, they actually adopt something called saming. That is, they say we’re all exactly the same. There is no difference. But the opposite of othering is not saming. It’s belonging. And belonging actually embraces differences and learns from them. It’s not afraid of difference, and yet it doesn’t make those differences infinite.

As the United States grows in diversity, and it’s growing in diversity across a number of important axes, the country becomes more nervous, becomes more anxious. And this is not just the United States. It’s all around the world. So you see, all of these ethnic national movements are organized against, around some imagined identity. They might be Muslims. They might be people of a different language. They might be Latinos. They might be gays and lesbians. They might be transgender. But there’s always this fear of the other.

And again, the liberal’s response to that is to try to address that fear just by saying they’re just like us. And both of those are problematic.

—

So there’s two major responses to this anxiety, and change produces anxiety. That’s the natural human phenomena. If you were to get married, move your residency, and change your job within a two-year period, your chances of having a heart attack goes up about 50%. If you are one of those unfortunate people who marries someone you don’t like, it goes up to 75%. So even when positive things are happening, the human organism can only process so much change over a short period of time.

But there’s two major ways to sort of deal with this change. One is called bridging and the other one’s called breaking. And bridging, actually, it’s about connecting to the other. The other is always imaginary. There’s no natural other. There’s no natural community. We are constituting these constantly. But bridging actually invites a sense of empathy, deep listening, and connection.

Breaking sees the other as a threat, sees the other with fear, as somehow attacking who we are. And most of the stories, most of the practices that we engage in in our society, even in progressive communities, are breaking. We’re constantly defining ourselves in opposition to the other. We’re constantly defining the “we” in a narrow way.

And so again, that’s the big fight, not just in the United States, but throughout the world. Do we bridge or do we break?

Now, for of those of you who are bridgers—and I hope before the day is out, if not already, you’re all bridgers—I have a word of caution for you from my good friend, bell hooks. She says, “Bridges are made to walk on. So when you first become a bridge between two communities that see themselves in opposition, you will be walked on and occasionally, hopefully not too often, you will be stomped on.” But I say this, “If the world is not bridged, if we do not have more bridges in the world, if we continue to break, we won’t have a world.” So your work as bridgers, even though sometimes you’ll be walked on, occasionally stomped on, is critical for the survival of a planet.

—

And we see the rise of hate in the United States. And there’s another slide I didn’t include. We also see the rise of love. Both things happening at the same time. There’s in fact a book by a friend of mine, Sheryll Cashin called Loving, about it’s about the Loving family from 1967.

Othering in America, it’s not just done by people. It’s done by corporations. It’s done by the religious right, and it’s done by the “alt right.” Now, it’s actually interesting, when I say the religious right, who was the religious right that engaged in othering? When you think of evangelical Christians, there was one of the most powerful groups that supported Trump, but actually that’s not quite right. The evangelicals that supported Trump were white. Black evangelicals, Latino evangelicals, Native American evangelicals did not support Trump. So it’s, again, it’s defined largely about this fear of the racial other.

Now, this may—You may wonder why am I dwelling on this. So, some of you remember the one-drop rule. Remember the one-drop rule? The one-drop rule is that if white blood gets mixed with one drop of black blood, it’s destroyed. I mean, black blood is powerful stuff. Well, maybe it’s not so powerful. Maybe the thing is white blood is really fragile.

Of course, I’m not talking about blood at all. We’re really talking about the ideology of exclusive whiteness. That’s what’s fragile. Not white people. White people are heterogeneous just like any people, and some of them are bridgers and some of them are breakers, but it’s the fragility of this white purity that Bannon and others represent that’s fragile. Any time you’re talking about something that’s pure, you’re also talking about something that’s fragile.

The world is not pure. Diversity is not pure. The biology, the environment is not pure. It’s constantly engaged with other parts of itself and that’s what makes us strong.

—

Now, I don’t know. My father’s a Christian minister. I’m not going to show him this slide. He would be very confused. How did Trump and Jesus end up in the same…I’ll just let you dwell on that for a while.

So again, part of thing that we have is that the left is actually afraid of difference. And so in that sense, the left engages in saming. And I would argue to you that saming is a weak version of breaking.

There’s a wonderful book by James Baldwin called The Price of a Ticket. When James Baldwin was at the height of his literary career, the white establishment finally said, “Okay this Negro can write,” and they invited him to join all these literary clubs, and they said, “But don’t remind us that you’re gay, and don’t actually bring any of your black friends with you.” And James Baldwin said, “No thanks. He said the price of the ticket, leave who you are and you can be like us.” So saming is not really that good.

Now it’s better than the right wing, which actually believes that the other has to be destroyed or is in some way inferior. But let me suggest this, that when we worry on the left about identity politics, we say that the things that’s actually messing up creating a progressive movement in this country is that people are focused on gender, they’re focused on their sexual orientation, they’re focused on their race. They should focus on something that’s universal, that we all share, like the white working class.

The problem with identity politics is not the identity and it’s not the politics. The problem with identity politics, when it’s a problem, is that it’s actually breaking. It’s not identity politics that’s the problem, it’s breaking that’s the problem. But we can actually focus on gender. We can focus on LGBTQ. We can focus on Black Lives Matters in ways that bridge. But the liberals haven’t learned that. And so they say to those groups stay away; we’re going to focus on real issues like the working class, which really means white. And people find that offensive. So we have to actually move beyond breaking and realize that again the opposite of othering is not saming.

—

So who’s in the circle of human concern?

And being here at Bioneers, I’m sure you will catch this and correct me, it’s why are we only concerned about humans? We’re not. We’re concerned about life.

And this is a tricky thing because I’m going to talk a little bit about narrative in the little time I have left. The stories we tell matter. We’re all multiple selves. We’re all fluid people. So when we talk about intersectionality, when we talk about the other, the other is actually inside of us. There’s a part of us that we haven’t claimed. There’s a part of us we haven’t celebrated. How do we begin to claim that? And narratives help with that.

But in a story, in a narrative—and Jonathan and I were talking about this yesterday—there always needs to be, or people say we need a villain. Can we create a “we” where no one is on the outside of it?

Maybe except one or two people. No, I’m just joking.

So, that’s not Trump’s “we.” His “we” is very small and getting smaller all the time.

So how do we bridge? We bridge by deeply listening. We bridge by suffering with others, listening to others suffering. We bridge by engaging. We bridge by organizing. And we bridge by love. It’s not easy. It’s hard stuff. But it’s rewarding stuff. And so as we bridge, we move from an exclusive society to an integrated society, to an inclusive society, to a belonging society.

Now notice that in a belonging society the structure itself actually changed. So when we talk about belonging we’re not talking about belonging into something that’s structurally exclusive and misogynistic. We’re talking about changing the structures themselves. So belonging is not just how do we treat each other, belonging is how do we actually organize our economy, our structures, our schools, our faiths so that everyone belongs, and recognizing we still have differences. Where do we find such a space? Well, Bioneers is starting to lean into that space. Bioneers is about belonging.

And yet, as important as it is to recognize each other, just recognizing each other is not enough. As I said, we have to think about those structures, too. So we focus on empathy. Empathy is actually just another way of talking about love. Focus on recognizing that we are deeply related already. But then how do we actually acknowledge that, not just interpersonal stuff but also in our communities?

Grace Lee Boggs, a fellow Detroiter, and she reminds us even if the people of our respective communities or our countries are acting in ways that we believe are unworthy of human beings, we must still have enough—we must still care enough for them so their lives are in ours. Their question and ours become inseparable.

It’s not easy to do. But no one said life was going to be easy.

So we have examples of efforts to create an inclusive society, to create a belonging society, and we have to deepen those examples. We have to celebrate them. We have to talk about them.

—

You’ve heard about Standing Rock, and everybody that I know who had any engagements with Standing Rock was talking about not only was this something important led by indigenous people in our society but it was belonging. Everybody that went there came back talking about love, talking about this sort of “rainbow effect.” So it’s a wonderful example that belonging already happens in our society. We just have to punch it up.

And finally, as our friend Naomi Klein reminds us, “No is not enough.” It’s not enough just to be against something. We have to be clear what is it we’re for. And Connie Heller, which you’ll hear from later today, has this on her website, “fear less, love more.” Fear less, love more. And, yes, we have to get to “yes.” Thank you.

A Guide for Authentic Leadership Toward Sustainability

Dana Pearlman—co-founder of the Global Leadership Lab—is dedicated to designing and facilitating conversations and participatory processes to unearth deeper wisdom at the individual and collective levels. The guidebook she co-authored along with Christopher Baan and Phil Long is called The Lotus: A Practice Guide For Authentic Leadership Toward Sustainability. In this excerpt from the Guide, find practical tips and tools to foster authentic leadership within yourself and others.

Cultivating Your Authentic Self

In order to address the complex sustainability challenge facing society today, leaders must cultivate their own authenticity and presence. We understand authenticity as being true, open and honest with who you are. The more adaptable and developed a leader becomes, the greater they are able to steer through complex, participatory planning processes. Through their personal development, facilitators and leaders are more able to utilize hindsight, hold multiple worldviews and perspectives, and sit with current reality while simultaneously aiming toward a desired future. The adaptability achieved by facilitators and leaders honing these capacities lends itself to enhancing collaborative group processes and outcomes in Strategic Sustainable Development.

This is a continuous path toward using more and more of your authentic self in facilitation processes. This path helps facilitators and leaders improve the quality of relationships in a team while engaging people cognitively, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Facilitators and leaders bringing their authentic selves into the facilitation process are more likely to guide a team towards successful, lasting and sustainable results that have ownership among the stakeholders. Authentic leaders and facilitators that hold the ‘container’ for collaborative processes more personally, are better able to engage people in multi-dimensional ways, resulting in more embodied and empowered outcomes. The developed sense of awareness inherent in personal leadership capacities can be critically valuable in enabling facilitators and leaders to know when and what to do during a group process by ‘sensing’ what is happening with the group in the present moment. In this practice guide we present 9 personal capacities that leaders find essential in their work to facilitate complex and transformational change towards sustainability. These personal capacities by their very nature cannot be learnt only on a cognitive level; they must be embodied.

Our research has shown that one important path to the embodiment of these capacities is through personal and collective practice. The implication of this is clear; as one expert put it, “no real transformation can take place without personal and collective practice”. The simplest dictionary definition of practice is “to do repeatedly to acquire or polish a skill” (Szpakowski 2010). We distinguish here between personal (individual) and collective practices. An example of a collective practice is dialogue or Aikido, something you do in a group of people where interaction is key. In addition to the personal capacities identified in our research we found conditions for success for developing your capacities through practice:

Conditions of success for developing your personal leadership capacities

• A combination of personal and collective practice is a pathway to the development of your leadership capacities;
• A combination of contemplative, physical and spiritual practice helps you align body, mind, spirit and shadow, in order to maximize personal development;
• The integration of practices both in your personal and professional life helps you take the learning from the practice back into the facilitation process.

Conditions of success for choosing a practice

• The practice must have a mirroring quality, to help the participants observe themselves and enhance self-awareness;
• The practice has to provide ‘a container you can’t manipulate’ with structures that are adhered to;
• The quality of your attention in the practice is more important than the type of practice performed;
• The practice must be something you are willing to do repetitively and consistently.

The continuous mastery of personal capacities not only improves your leadership performance; it also helps you get in touch with your own authenticity. When you are more in touch with your authentic self, your actions are easier to embed in your life and thus lead to stronger follow-through in a facilitated engagement process. The literature on leadership development highlights the importance of self-mastery in leaders and through “increased self-awareness, self-regulation and positive modelling, authentic leaders foster the development of authenticity in followers” (Avolio et al. 2005). Authenticity is about “owning one’s personal experiences, be they thoughts, emotions, needs, wants, preferences, or beliefs, processes captured by the injunction to ‘know oneself’ and further implies that one acts in accord with the true self, expressing oneself in ways that are consistent with inner thoughts and feelings” (Harter 2002, 382; in Avolio et al. 2005). Leaders modelling awareness and authenticity invite participants to do likewise, and if one is engaged on an authentic level, engagement processes are likely to result in more desirable outcomes.

Authentic leadership development offers facilitators and leaders a foundation from which to engage groups beyond the cognitive level. It includes the emotional, physical and spiritual dimensions to increase congruence between outcomes created collaboratively with participants’ authentic selves, resulting in stronger and more successful outcomes. Facilitators and leaders bringing their authentic selves into an engagement process benefit outcomes. However, it is not enough in order to successfully address the sustainability challenge. One must have the ability to plan in a strategic manner within the confines of the Earth’s carrying capacity. The sustainability principles introduced previously define such boundary conditions. Combining an authentic and holistic leadership approach along with knowledge and skills in Strategic Sustainable Development, we contend, will benefit collaborative engagement processes and outcomes that help move organizations and society toward sustainability.

Whole Self-Awareness

What is it? Whole Self-Awareness is the continual, lifelong process of paying attention to knowing one’s self; it involves consciously and intentionally observing various dimensions of the self (including the physical, mental, shadow, emotional and spiritual realms). It is the capacity to observe how one is thinking, relating, feeling, sensing, and judging. Whole Self-Awareness includes perceptions beyond the rational mind, such as intuition.

Principles: Pay attention to all the dimensions of yourself (physical, emotional, spiritual, shadow and mental dimensions). Your body is not a transporter for your head, you are a whole system.

Self-reflection questions

• How would others describe you? What do you tell yourself about yourself?
• Think of someone you admire, what do you admire about them? What does this tell you about your values? What can you learn about yourself from this admiration?
• Think of someone that irritates you, why do they irritate you? What does this tell you about your values? What can you learn about yourself from this irritation?
• When something is physically challenging to you, how do you respond?
• Are you aware of how you are feeling throughout the day?
• What emotions are acceptable, what emotions are not acceptable?
• How do you feel physically, emotional, spiritually, energetically and mentally right now?

Reflection questions during facilitation

• What reactions are you having with this group that need to be explored or shared now or later?
• What do you perceive to be occurring within this group beyond your cognition?
• How can you invite the group to be engaged beyond cognition? How are you inviting the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of this group to participate?
• Is your whole self (body, mind, spirit, emotion, and shadow) in alignment? Is your head agreeing to do something and another dimension of yourself not in agreement?

Practices for developing your Whole Self-Awareness

Concentration meditation practice. These practices focus your thoughts on a particular object (such as the chakra system or visualizing white light moving through the body) to shut out the outside world and prevent the mind from wandering. For example, focus upon the inhale and the exhale breath. On the inhale breath your posture elevates and on the exhale breath your posture settles. Repeat for a few minutes and extend this time with practice. This helps calm the parasympathetic nervous system to help you relax. Once calm from the concentration breathing, an awareness meditation practice like Mindfulness (See Being Present Practices) helps you see the nature of your mind. With compassion move toward embracing all of yourself and seeing the patterns of thinking including judging, planning, yearning and fearing that show up. This enables you to begin to discern between unconscious material surfacing in your thoughts from the past and accurately receiving information in the present moment.

‘Core Qualities’ practice (by Frank Heckman). Tell a story to a peer or mentor about a time when you were doing something challenging in which you persevered by stepping up and being courageous. Have the other person listen to your story and take note of the qualities you displayed in that situation to feedback to you. These qualities are your core qualities of personal strength you embody in your life. Repeat with another story. This practice also helps you become aware of your Personal Power.

Giving and receiving feedback. Intentionally ask others (peers, co-workers, mentors, family members) for feedback on your behavior to see areas for your growth in order to increase the quality of your work, relationships and self-understanding. Being open to feedback and listening is key. Start this process with someone you trust most. Notice if and when you feel defensive, refrain from responding, and explore how receiving feedback impacts you. Use specific examples and reflect back to the person what you think you heard them say for accuracy and clarity. Use an actual experience. Ask the person giving feedback to focus upon:

• What behaviors they observed you doing?
• What was the outcome of the situation and how did it impact them?
• What feelings did they feel?
• Now ask yourself, what future opportunities for new actions are available to you now given the feedback? And remember to have compassion with yourself.

A physical practice such as yoga, Thai Chi, martial arts to integrate a holistic approach and address more dimensions of yourself.

Shadow work. Facilitators work with all kinds of people and situations and are bound to be irritated or triggered sometimes. If you focus your energy on the ‘outer’ trigger, you are missing the gem in the lesson from self-reflection; by being angry at the person triggering you, you are really just shooting the messenger. When in process, try to notice when an irritant or trigger or dislike arises and write it down, suspend it temporarily and return to it for exploration when appropriate. Describe the event, how you felt, what reaction you normally would have had if you had not suspended your reaction, and how that situation may represent a repressed part of yourself from long ago. Seeing irritations as shadows that need to be explored helps you gain acceptance, compassion and awareness of yourself and others, it teaches you to suspend when an irritation occurs.

Whole Self-Awareness: Resources for further exploring, practice, and reading

• The Johari Window: mapping personality awareness: http://kevan.org/johari.
• Goleman, Daniel. 1996. Emotional Intelligence.
• Goleman, Daniel; Richard E Boyatzis; Anne McKee. 2004. Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence.
• Self assessment tools such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Enneagram Test, Temperament Assessments, Emotional Intelligence Tests, Action-Logic Assessment, or Spiral Dynamics Value Meme.

Personal Power

What is it? Personal Power is the ability to use energy and drive to manifest wise actions in the world for the greater good, while being aware of one’s influences on a situation.

Principles: Step up, be courageous, acknowledge your influence in this system, and know when to give space for others to step up.

Self-reflection questions

• Imagine a time when you felt powerful/powerless/afraid and ask yourself how did you respond/feel/ act in that situation?
• Have you ever agreed to do something you did not want to do? Did you ever compromise your own ideas/plans when someone else had a different plan, or vice versa?
• Are you willing to take risks and do things others may not approve of? Who do you try to get approval from?

Reflection questions during facilitation

• How much power do you have in this situation or with this group? Are you okay with having this amount of power? If not, what do you need to do?
• What powerful mentors, images or experiences can you call upon to support you in this facilitation process?
• How is power manifesting within this group? Who has power? Who does not have power? What power shifts are possible within this group for the greater good for all?
• What steps do you need to take to empower this group, so they can continue their work after you are done, without depending on you as an external intervener?

Practices for developing your Personal Power

Aikido or other martial arts. Using simulations eliciting fear or feelings of power or powerlessness helps you gain self-awareness of your relationship to power and how you respond to these types of experiences. For instance, by practicing Aikido you are confronted with moments of being ‘attacked’ and dealing with personal reactions to aggression. The practice helps participants see their responses, helps them suspend them and be mindful about how to proceed. When facilitating collaboration, facilitators oftentimes must confront fear and power within groups.

Use mentors or archetypes. To embody the power and support needed during facilitation work. One example includes calling upon the wisdom of the Dalai Lama to come through your mind, the love of Mother Theresa to come through your heart and the courage of Martin Luther King, Jr. to come through your gut. Imagine their energy, determination and personal power being channelled through you to support your work. See for more information: ConsciousEmbodiment.com (Wendy Palmer).

“If you want to work with power in the world you have to work with your own power, however you perceive power to be, either in hierarchies or in the hearts of people, probably both… Meditation has given me the realisation that I have a fundamental mistrust of power. I have consistently seen power abused in my life, by people in schools as I grew up. I have rarely seen power held with integrity, so the story I live in and how I relate to the world, that’s where I am trying to put power back in the hands of people most affected by it.” (Anon. 2011)

Personal Power: Resources for further exploring, practice, and reading

• Kahane, A. 2010. Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
• Nhat Hanh, T. 2008. The Art of Power. HarperSanFrancisco
• Palmer, W. 2001. The Practice of Freedom: Aikido Principles as a Spiritual Guide. Rodmell Press.
• Palmer, W. 2008. The Intuitive Body: Discovering the Wisdom of Conscious Embodiment and Aikido. Blue Snake Books.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from The Lotus: A Practice Guide for Authentic Leadership Toward Sustainability by Christopher Baan, Phil Long and Dana Pearlman.

When we fight, we win

This piece was originally published on the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) website. The CELDF is building a movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature to advance democratic, economic, social, and environmental rights – building upward from the grassroots to the state, federal, and international level.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in 1995

In the 1990’s, CELDF was a conventional environmental law firm. We believed that if only there were more environmental lawyers willing to work for free for communities fighting to stop harmful projects, then justice would get done. We did that work for a number of years.

In the process, we found that the environmental law system is rigged against communities and against the environment. It is a “permitting” system, after all, designed to permit environmental harms rather than prohibit them. It is a regulatory law system, but the only thing it really regulates is how the people try to defend ourselves from the corporate state.1

The Roots of a Rigged System

So we went deeper. We worked with others who were trying to expose the roots of this rigged legal system and understand why it works for corporations rather than for the people. We identified several deeply entrenched legal doctrines that stop people from protecting their health and safety from corporate harms because they prevent community self-government. Those key doctrines are:

  • Ceiling preemption2
  • Dillon’s Rule3
  • Corporate constitutional “rights”4
  • Dormant Commerce Clause5
  • Contracts Clause protection for corporations6
  • Nature as property7

There are other deep seated legal constructs that keep the system in place. Some are buried in impenetrable legal codes, while others are hiding in plain sight. We decided to start with these.

Importantly, all of these legal rules are created and expanded upon by judges.8 Part of our work with communities to defend their rights has been to share this with judges so they understand the system they built. In understanding it, they can voluntarily dismantle it.

Changing the System

As we educated people about how the system works, people asked us to help them change it. Communities who had reached the end of their ability to get any remedy from the regulatory environmental law system asked for our help in creating new law. They wanted to prefigure a more democratic legal system whereby human rights and ecological rights are superior to corporate interests.

CELDF has helped many communities do this.

From the Corporate State Ignoring Communities…to Fighting Them

In most of these communities, there was a proposed harmful project spurring them to action. However, when the corporation that sought to harm the community saw the organized opposition – including a local law – the corporation walked away.

[The Community Rights movement] is the beginning of a social movement that is greater than just the oil and gas industry, it is a potential game changer for all of corporate America.
— The Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico

But over the course of a decade, some corporate actors came to see the threat that this growing movement posed to the corporate state. The Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico saw the threat. That organization published an article in its newsletter attacking the Community Rights movement, and CELDF in particular. The authors ended with this prophetic sentence:

“While industry, the media and the public might ignore all the commotion created about the hydraulic fracturing discussion, this issue is the beginning of a social movement that is greater than just the oil and gas industry, it is a potential game changer for all of corporate America.”9

By this point, we were no longer being ignored, nor merely laughed at. The fight was on. Corporate lawyers, particularly those working for clients in the oil and gas industry and in industrial agriculture, organized to challenge in court every new law that communities put forward to dismantle the corporate state.

The Oil and Gas Industry Strikes Back

In Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association (PIOGA) decided to go directly after CELDF, in an erroneous belief that they could stop this social movement by destroying our organization.10 This isn’t hyperbole. A lawyer for PIOGA said to the media that he wants to bankrupt us.11

One of PIOGA’s tactics is to get a judge to award attorney fees against CELDF for defending Grant Township against Pennsylvania General Energy Company’s (PGE) proposed frack waste injection well. That means that PIOGA and PGE want us to pay for their litigation costs because we are defending Grant Township from PGE’s toxic and radioactive frack waste.

The Judiciary as a Weapon Against People’s and Nature’s Rights

On January 5, 2018, Magistrate Judge Susan Paradise Baxter obliged the oil and gas industry by granting PGE’s sanctions motion, holding two attorneys representing Grant Township liable for $52,000 – ten percent of PGE’s attorney fees.

There are a lot of problems with Judge Baxter’s ruling, but for our purposes here, we need to understand her ruling as part of an attempt by extraction corporations to stop the democracy movement of which CELDF is a part.

The Gist of Judge Baxter’s Ruling

Judge Baxter ruled that these attorneys were on notice that certain arguments are “legal implausabilit[ies].” Namely, they cannot argue that:

  • corporate claimed “rights” are invalid,
  • a regulated corporation is created by the state and is thereby a “state actor”12
  • the right to local community self-government is elevated above long-standing constitutional rights, federal and state laws, and regulations that allow unwanted harms into communities, and that
  • “Dillon’s Rule” is invalid “to the extent it applies to limit a municipality’s ability to enact ordinances in conflict with state and federal law.”13

Judge Baxter basically told the two attorneys that these arguments are frivolous, and they can’t challenge in court, on behalf of their client, the building blocks of the corporate state. They can’t advocate for a more democratic legal system. If they do, she’ll fine them.

[The sanctions are] a win for the Community Rights movement, revealing the seriousness of the threat we pose to the corporate state.

The Buck Stops Here

Judge Baxter’s opinion also makes clear where the buck stops with maintaining the corporate state. Remember, judges built this system. They created the legal structures that Judge Baxter sanctioned these attorneys for arguing against. Over the last 200 years, judges recognized corporate “rights,” narrowly prescribed the “state actor” doctrine, abolished the right of local community self-government, and created Dillon’s Rule. Judges made this system (for corporations). Judge Baxter shows us that not only will judges maintain this system, but they will now fine lawyers who represent clients who question its legitimacy.

The sanctions appear as a huge win for the corporate actors who identified this social movement as “a potential game changer for all of corporate America.” In fact, it’s just the opposite – it’s a win for the Community Rights movement, revealing the seriousness of the threat we pose to the corporate state. Industry is willing to go to great lengths to try and dispose of this democracy movement.

The Next Step

The next step is ours. Not CELDF’s; but ours as a social movement.

In the face of catastrophic climate change, now is not the time to hunker down for our personal security. Instead, it is the time to accelerate our work beyond addressing climate change, to addressing fundamental system change.

Black Panther Rally 1970 by Winston Vargas, Flickr Creative Commons

Black Panther Rally 1970 by Winston Vargas, Flickr Creative Commons

In the face of expanding inequality and corporatism, now is not the time to cower. Instead, it is the time to step into bold local action for people power, and against the corporate state.

In the face of a federal judicial system that itself created many of the doctrines upon which the corporate state depends, now is not the time to shy away from politicizing their actions. Instead, it is time to call out – loud and clear – that we will continue to fight to dismantle the legal structures that subordinate human rights and ecological rights to the interests of corporations.

As many of the new social movements today have found: when we fight, we win. We won’t back down now just because the corporate state has taken its gloves off.

This piece was originally published on the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) website. The CELDF is building a movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature to advance democratic, economic, social, and environmental rights – building upward from the grassroots to the state, federal, and international level.

1 See, e.g., Jane Anne Morris, Help, I’ve Been Colonized and I Can’t Get Up (1998) (“What Regulatory Law regulates is citizen input, not corporate behavior. So when we cooperate in regulatory law proceedings, we are following the script that corporation representatives wrote for us. We’re either colonized, or we’re collaborators.”), available at http://democracythemepark.org/help-ive-been-colonized-and-i-cant-get-up/.

2 “Ceiling preemption” is when state law (or federal law) sets a “ceiling” on environmental or human rights protections. For example, a state Oil and Gas Act that permits frack waste injection wells “conflicts” with a local law that prohibits frack waste injection wells. Under the judge-made rules of ceiling preemption, this “conflict” makes the local law invalid. Instead of ceiling preemption, we need a legal system that recognizes local governments can protect people’s health, safety, and welfare by prohibiting harmful corporate activities, and that these local laws can be more protective of human rights and environmental protections.

3 Named after the 19th century judge John Dillon, “Dillon’s Rule” is judge-made law that says local governments are mere “creatures of the state,” entirely subordinate to the state, and capable of doing only the things the state authorizes them to do. Dillon’s Rule won out over the right to local self-government. The people rebelled against Dillon’s Rule, enacting “home rule” provisions in their state constitutions at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. However, the courts constricted the meaning of “home rule” to re-subordinate local governments.

4 The courts claim that corporations are protected by the federal Bill of Rights, namely the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Instead, we need to remember that corporations are creatures of the state, created by the state (ostensibly) for the public good, and they should be controllable by law.

5 The Dormant Commerce Clause is another judge-made law. The courts interpret the U.S. Constitution’s authorization of Congressional lawmaking over interstate commerce to also have an “inverse” or “dormant” meaning, such that when Congress has not acted to regulate an area of “commerce” (interpreted very broadly), then state and local governments are prohibited from enacting laws in that area that burden interstate commerce. It is constitutional protection for laissez-faire economic policies.

6 In 1819, the U.S. Supreme Court said in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward that corporate charters had constitutional protection under the U.S. Constitution’s Contracts Clause. This made corporations co-equals with states, rather than subordinates to governments.

7 In our legal system, a property owner has the right to destroy their property. Our legal system treats earth, ecosystems, and nature, as property. That means it can be destroyed. Instead, earth, ecosystems, and nature should have rights unto themselves. For example, the right to exist.

8 Judges didn’t write the U.S. Constitution, but they chose to interpret the Contracts Clause, Commerce Clause, 14th Amendment, and other provisions, in order to grant immense power and rights to corporations, thereby subordinating the people’s rights to corporate interests.

9 Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, Why Corporate America Needs to Pay Attention, in Energy New Mexico 2014, page 16, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20140626093851/http://www.ipanm.org/images/library/File/Energy%20New%20Mexico%202014.pdf.

10 CELDF represents Grant Township PA, which is targeted for a toxic frack waste injection well.

11 See Laura Legere, ‘No is no is no’: A tiny township’s fight against oil and gas waste disposal, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,(Nov. 13, 2017) (“’We’d rather bankrupt CELDF, to be honest,’” he said, referring to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.), available at http://www.post-gazette.com/powersource/policy-powersource/2017/11/13/Grant-Township-Indiana-County-Pennsylvania-fight-oil-gas-waste-disposal-underground-shale-fracking/stories/201711120039.

12 The “state actor” doctrine in law says that corporations don’t have to respect people’s constitutional rights, except under certain circumstances (like when a corporation takes on a government function, like running a prison).

13 Magistrate Judge Susan Paradise Baxter, Opinion and Order in Pennsylvania General Energy Company, LLC v. Grant Township, C.A. No. 14-209ERIE, Western District of Pennsylvania US District Court, Case 1:14-cv-00209-SPB, Dkt. 290, page 22 (filed Jan. 5, 2018).