Bioneers 2018 Presenter Preview: Author & Medical Historian Victoria Sweet, M.D., Ph.D.

Victoria Sweet, M.D., Ph.D., recognizes the benefit in taking her time. An Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF and a prize-winning medical historian, her more than 20 years of practicing medicine at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco have given her amazing insight into how the medical field has changed over the years—for better and for worse. Sweet recently published her second, highly acclaimed, book Slow Medicine: A Way to Healing, which discusses those changes, including incredible advances in technology, and the most important thing we often push aside when dealing with health: the time it takes to find effective treatment.

Victoria Sweet, M.D., Ph.D.

Sweet will take the stage at Bioneers 2018 alongside Rupa Marya, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF, for their talk, Revisioning Healing and Public Health in the 21st Century. Both extraordinary physicians will deliver radical critiques of the current medical paradigm and share their strategies and visions of what an effective, equitable, truly compassionate medical system would look like around the world.

In advance of the conference, Sweet shared with us some of things on her mind, including what she sees as our biggest reason to hope right now, and how we can all benefit from slowing down.

What she’s most excited for within the next year: “Getting to spread the word about Slow in general and Slow Medicine in specific.”

Her biggest reason to have hope right now: “The new generation coming up is an amazingly open, respectful group of people, of all kinds and natures.”

Our biggest challenge to overcome right now: “The seductive power of pessimism. Looked at historically we are living in an amazing time. There are no World Wars going on. No major worldwide plagues. Our biggest medical problem regarding food is not starvation but obesity, and this even in third world countries.”

The number one thing individuals can do to have a big impact on the world in a positive way: “Slow Down. Focus. Be digital and do one thing at a time. As Dante wrote almost a thousand years ago, ‘Haste mars the dignity of every action.’ Every action has a dignity, and falling into the trap of multitasking destroys the present moment.”

The Bioneers 2018 talk she’s most excited to see: “Rebecca Moore’s Using Big Data to Map Solutions and From the Ground to the Cloud: New Solutions and Mapping Tools. She is changing the world.”

The two books she recommends to our audience:

Decolonizing Wealth: On Kinship

By Edgar Villanueva

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Decolonizing Wealth (release date October 16, 2018 with Berrett-Koehler Publishers). The book offers not just a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance, but also a potential road to transformation guided by Indigenous wisdom: Seven Steps to Healing. I hope this little appetizer makes you hungry for the book.

My central metaphor for the subject of colonization is the body, because we each instinctively understand our body’s sense of sovereignty and the sense of violation. Unfortunately, almost every one of us alive on earth has experienced some kind of trauma. So chances are you know what I am talking about.

The initial phase of colonization—the conquest— is like a rape, causing the first wave of trauma. Later—when the colonizers set down roots and become settlers—colonization becomes more like a virus that every human institution and system as well as every human being carries inside. The collective body—the nation and culture of settlers and surviving colonized people—adapts, passing down these adaptations in their genes over generations. Yet the adaptations don’t constitute healing. The virus remains: the original seeds of separation—fear of the Other—that lead to ongoing acts of control and exploitation.

The colonizer virus inside culture and institutions is especially dangerous. Our education system reflects the colonizer virus. So does our agriculture and food system. So does our foreign policy. So does our environmental policy. So does the field of design. And, the subject of this book, the realms of wealth: investment, finance, and philanthropy.

There is no quick fix for the complexity of colonization: decolonization is a process with roles for everyone involved, whether you’re rich or poor, funder or recipient, victim or perpetrator.

All my relations—Mitakuye oyasin, as the Lakota say, meaning: we are all related, connected, not only to each other humans, but to all the other living things and inanimate things and the planet, and also the Creator. The principle of All My Relations means that everyone is at home here. Everyone has a responsibility in making things right. Everyone has a role in the process of healing, regardless of whether they caused or received more harm. All our suffering is mutual. All our healing is mutual. All our thriving is mutual.

Author Bio

An enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, Edgar Villanueva has directed the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars for over a decade as a philanthropy professional. In his new book, he diagnoses the dysfunction in the institutions, systems and people that deal with money: it’s 21st century colonialism. Integrating traditional indigenous wisdom with savvy financial experience, Villanueva explains how money can be used to facilitate relationships, to help us thrive, and to bring things back into balance.

Launch of the Youth Leadership Crowdfunding Campaign!

Greetings Fellow Bioneers!

The Bioneers Youth Leadership Program is thrilled to announce the launch of the Youth Leadership Crowdfunding Campaign! This program inspires and nurtures the next generation of visionary leaders through skill-building, mentoring and networking. The Bioneers Youth Leadership Program (YLP) offers over 400 young leaders and activists the opportunity to listen, create, express themselves, ask hard questions and get real answers in an open-hearted, brave space. If you’ve been to Bioneers, you know first hand how powerful and passionate our youth participants are!

Photo by Jan Mangan

This year we are offering an inspiring set of programs for youth including conversations about restorative justice, queer identities and immigration policy, as well as workshops on storytelling through spoken word and embodied drama performance! It’s going to be a powerful experience for the youth who attend. Learn more about this year’s program.

Bioneers is committed to making our conference accessible to young people from all backgrounds. We recognize that communities who are on the frontlines of environmental crises must be included and centralized in building solutions to climate change and social injustices. It is our intention to make the Youth Leadership Program accessible to young climate leaders and activists, many of whom have limited resources, which is why we are asking for your help!

We invite you to contribute to developing leadership in our youth so they can help guide a graceful transition into our shared futures. You can support our campaign in a number of ways!

  1. Contribute to our campaign on our crowdfunding page
  2. Ask close friends and family members to also contribute!
  3. Share the campaign with your own personal networks via email and social media.
  4. If you’ve had a first hand experience with the Youth Leadership Program, share a testimonial — written or video — about why it was powerful to you.

Please partner with us and help young leaders connect with the information, networks and inspiration that will support their activism.

Creating a Carbon-based Local Economy

by Rebecca Burgess

How can local economies value carbon farming practices in finished consumer goods? Fibershed represents a 160-member producer community, spanning from the Oregon border to San Luis Obispo and from the Pacific Ocean to the Sierra foothills, that is managing working landscapes strategically to sequester carbon. Burgess gave this talk, transcribed and edited below, as part of the Bioneers Carbon Farming Series.

How do basic human needs – food, fuel, flora, fiber – get met within an economically and ecologically strategic geography?

There are 25 million hectares of rangelands in California and a key question is whether we can manage them to help lower Earth’s temperature. Most rangeland systems have very low amounts of carbon. California has lost around 40% of its carbon in its rangelands due to the loss of perennials. These soils are in a massive carbon debt.

Fibershed is organizing place-based economies around carbon. As Carbon Farming practices become implemented, it becomes apparent how heterogeneous soils are. Organizing your farming system for carbon is specific to place.

You can look at local places through the lens of carbon, through the lens of watershed health, through the lens of fiber systems, and food systems. Pick your immediate organizing principle and you can start to focus on the restoration of your community.

I wore clothing for one year–underwear, bathing suits, socks– everything was made from animal fibers and plant fibers, including the dyes, that came from 150 miles from my front door. I used myself as a guinea pig to find out if I could I live in a fibershed. Could I be comfortable physically and socially? The reality was an affirmative yes. There was nothing more visceral then getting rid of everything I owned and boxing it up to experience the necessity of clothing.

We can’t go many days without water, we can’t go many days without food, but how many of us would even survive a night or two in the winter outdoors without any form of shelter? Its function is so fundamental, just as the necessity of clothing is so vital to our ability to survive. So fibersheds are about survival, but they are also about thriving. Fibershed’s intention is to have a thriving, regional and regenerative fiber system.

Connecting Urban Consumers to Rural Working Landscapes

The principle I based the local wardrobe on is about connecting urban communities with rural communities. Part of how we’re going to see carbon farming take hold on the landscape is by generating conscious urban communities that know how to compost, that care about the fate of their materials, and care about what they’re consuming from working lands. Are they consuming from regenerating and restored landscapes? Is the material that they consume going back to these landscapes at the end of use?

Are food scraps going back to the landscapes? Can you compost your clothes and return that compost to the landscape? We are looking at all of these questions about the cycle of carbon systems. The urban connection is so critical. You need the cooperation of urban and rural communities to make these place-based economies work.

Fibershed works with one hundred sixty producers who are land managers, contract grazers, farmers both in annual and perennial systems. They are artisans who actually metabolize the materials coming off of these farms and ranches. They are small manufacturers. All these people networked together can produce clothing.

Everything that we are growing in this fiber system is on farms and ranches that are primarily making their money from food. 99% of the income for a sheep rancher is the meat and, in today’s economy, the wool is considered a by-product. Even in the cotton industry, 20% of the farmer’s income is from the seed. Cotton seeds go into the feed for dairy cattle and make cottonseed oil that goes into fast food. These systems are intertwined. We have to consider a whole vision of agriculture as we’re rebuilding these local economies.

Agriculture is a food, fiber, fuel and flora system. As we re-envision local economies, let’s not discount the capability that working lands have for generating biosphere-based economies. They’re very much designed to do so and if we’re going to re-envision, we need to stack a lot of functions within these working lands.

Wool and the Carbon Cycle

Managing grasslands for carbon requires adaptive managed grazing, planting windbreaks, and developing silvopasture. A lot of the people who are going to be doing the work to sequester carbon are the people who manage flocks of sheep. We have to build a bridge between the science and the people on the ground.

The grass that sheep eat is approximately 40% carbon by weight. That’s carbon dioxide that grass turned into a carbohydrate. Sheep are able to metabolize the carbohydrate, and turn it into a protein. That’s a protein you wear.

We conducted an analysis that quantitatively and qualitatively mapped all of California’s wool – the first analysis of this type in the US. We learned that California has quite a lot of wool that’s not being utilized at all and about a third of it is highly underutilized. All the sheep are on grass systems and therefore wool is a grass-fed and finished fiber. The sheep are often integrated onto crop stubble. They’re in pear orchards. They’re in vineyards. They’re part of an integrated crop system. Without having to change very much, sheep already fit into this contract-grazing system very nicely. A lot of young people are able to get into agriculture by having flocks of sheep that they contract-graze into perennial systems. Sheep already fit into a positive agricultural narrative in California.

Sheep’s wool cycles through the carbon pools very nicely. Have you ever had a wool sweater that goes back to the soil by way of moths or some other kind of deterioration? I cleaned out a storage bin recently and moths had gotten into pretty much all of my historic wool pieces. But that’s a beautiful thing. That wool is temporal. It doesn’t last. We need to think about our material culture as not being impenetrable. We’ve been trying to create material culture that lasts forever and it’s actually what’s killing us. We need things that decompose back into the cycle. People ask me, “Do natural dyes last as long as synthetic dyes?” My answer is “No, and that’s in your best interest.”

Re-Localizing the Economy

The model that we’re working with is a soil-to-soil model, meaning we’re thinking a lot about the whole system. Who are the rangeland managers? Who are the farmers? How are we going to get carbon farming implemented? How are we going to build these regional economies that support these land managers to revalue the materials coming off their farms and ranches?

We can wear nettle, we can wear hemp, we can wear ramie, we can wear flax. We can blend these with sheep’s wool to take the scratch out of the wool. We can do an incredible amount with biodynamic organic cotton.

Fibershed focuses on fiber and dye processing. We do economic feasibility studies because since 1994, NAFTA and CAFTA and FTAA, all those fun trade agreements, have left our country bereft of manufacturing. California produces 3.1 million pounds of wool, but how many people wear a California wool-based layer? California grows 200 million pounds of cotton, but how many people wear a California cotton T-shirt? How many people wear leather boots that came from a grass-fed and finished operation?

There is a lot of work being done on access to food, but not much of a focus on access to fiber. Part of the reason is that the capital costs of bringing manufacturing back are real and present, just like when people tried to reform the food system and bring back abattoirs and slaughterhouses. The dirty, messy stuff that’s between the farm and your plate is something a lot of people have a hard time investing in. It doesn’t have to remain that way, but historically manufacturing is a difficult thing to bring back.

The other segments we work with are designers and makers. This is the urban sector. How do we get young people in the making culture focused on local materials? We spend a lot of time with fashion students to figure out how they can work with a farmer.

Garments are where you come in as the wearer. We need you to start wearing compostable clothing, we need you to buy local when you can, we need you to buy less and higher quality. We need you to think about your clothes as a necessity and not just a statement. Public consciousness is the hinge for all these other pieces to be implemented.

Investors and philanthropists can drive the value-chain by giving farmers and ranchers low-interest loans and investments to help build carbon in their soil. Investors and philanthropists can invest in the mills where they make local clothing, places where the farmers can send their goods for a higher value. Consumers buy it because of the higher value, and the money cycles through the local economy.

It will take about $100 million to revitalize fiber systems in California. It’s a one-time investment that could last for many hundreds of years. The Schmidt Family Foundation helped with a public-related investment to the first weaving mill in California since 1892. This mill opened its doors in May 2017. The Foundation wrote into the loan contract that the mill had to work with climate beneficial wool and organic cotton.

We are working with a Carbon Farm Plan for a 40,000-acre ranch. This ranch can sequester enough carbon to offset the emissions of the wool production, so every pound of wool represents nine pounds of carbon sunk into the ground. If we implement the practices of the Carbon Farm Plan, we can have climate beneficial clothing production with a net-negative carbon impact.

We can do this. We can wear clothing that has a net-negative impact on the climate and we can also support our local producers in the process.

California Indian Genocide and Resilience

California Indians have survived some of the most extreme acts of genocide committed against Native Americans. Prior the ongoing genocide under Spanish and American colonizations, California Indians were the most linguistically diverse and population dense First Peoples in the United States. In this historic panel, four California Indian leaders share the stories of kidnappings, mass murders, and slavery that took place under Spanish, Mexican and American colonizations — and how today’s generation is dealing with the contemporary implications.

This presentation took place in the Indigeneity Forum at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.

See more from our Indigeneity Program >>

Rupa Marya: Decolonizing Medicine for Healthcare that Serves All

Rupa Marya, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF, Faculty Director of the Do No Harm Coalition and a leading figure at the intersection of medicine and social justice, investigates the health effects of police violence on communities through The Justice Study and is helping set up the Mni Wiconi free community clinic under Lakota leadership at Standing Rock. She is also the leader of the internationally touring band Rupa and the April Fishes.

Following is a transcript from Marya’s presentation at Bioneers 2017, where she discussed her work to understand how societal influences impact the health of communities and what medicine and medical practitioners can do to take those influences into account.

Watch Rupa Marya’s 2018 Bioneers keynote talk on health and justice.

My work in hospital medicine, I believe, has exposed me to the frontlines of the diseases of our society. Disease is a great democratizer. Everyone gets sick. Everyone gets ill. And I’ve seen my position in the hospital as a very privileged space to be able to witness the leading edge of society’s problems, from how undocumented people are affected by pesticide application in the Central Valley and the diseases we see coming out of there, to people not seeking healthcare because they’re undocumented, to issues around racism and state violence.

So I started organizing with the Do No Harm coalition. I started organizing with a group of medical students when we were taking care of a group of five people who were protesting police violence in San Francisco: the “Frisco Five.” They went on hunger strike and sat out in front of the Mission Police Department protesting the killing of black and brown and mentally ill people in San Francisco by the San Francisco Police Department with no accountability, no transparency in the investigation, and basically no justice for the killings.

We started organizing around this idea that police violence is a public health issue, and that racism and state violence are public health issues. They not only affect the bodies of our patients and the people who are left behind, but also, when there is no accountability for this violence, it erodes the very civic fabric that we rely on: the trust between governance and individuals. As a society right now, we’re seeing so much distrust between different communities and the state institutions.

…

We’re working on articulating what happens when there are disparities in health because of race. How can we look at the issue not as an intrinsic quality to a person’s body? Being black doesn’t make you somehow biologically inferior with a worse life expectancy, higher rates of diabetes, higher rates of heart disease, and higher rates of infant mortality. The social structure around it is what is causing these dysfunctions. Race isn’t the issue that we need to look at, it’s the racism. It’s the social structures that are creating the underlying diseases and the disease differences that we’re seeing.

We’re starting to articulate a language around this. Then we use this language in the hospitals as we’re seeing patients and also out in the communities that we serve.

…

One of the things we’re doing is providing medical support for community groups that are engaging in direct actions, confronting racism and state violence. … We’re also advocating for greater transparency and accountability, and currently we’re also helping to develop a free clinic at Standing Rock for the practice of decolonized medicine. …

I went out to Standing Rock, and what I experienced there as a healthcare provider was striking, because it gets at the heart of what I’m interested in in medicine: the intersection of society and the human body and our health, and how we can see social structures directly leading to poor health outcomes for different groups. I had always known about the genocide of Native people growing up in this land. I was born in Ohlone territory. But it wasn’t until I was at Standing Rock, witnessing the violence of the police, that I understood how this is actually an ongoing process. Genocide is continuing, and it has these very deep ramifications, not just for Native people who are experiencing it after several centuries, but also for those of us who are standing with them. And also for the perpetrators of the violence.

Through this work at Standing Rock and meeting with different Lakota/Dakota health leaders, we started to ask questions about how to heal from this legacy of genocide; how can we create structures; how can we create systems that can help improve health outcomes for Native American people?

…

For two years, a website run by a group of journalists in the UK was the only way we here in the U.S. could get real-time data on how many people were being killed by the police. They did that in 2015, in 2016, and then they stopped. And they made a statement that due to our excellent work, now the FBI and the federal government wants to be doing a better job with counting. But right now, this is my area of active research, and we have no data. We have no data for 2017. We don’t know how many people have been killed in the U.S. by cops.

What was great about The Counted website is it gives a photo of every person killed. It talks about their race, it talks about the circumstance: were they mentally ill; were they armed; were they unarmed. In 2016, of the almost 1,100 people that were killed, Native Americans were targeted disproportionately. For being 2% of the U.S. population, the group that was killed at the highest rate was Native Americans followed by blacks and Latinos.

The state violence toward Native people is ongoing. Near many of the man camps that grow up around placing these pipelines or being involved in these extractive industries, many women have gone missing. For many of the women who are missing, the local law enforcement doesn’t really go investigate.

The Standing Rock people, the Lakota/Dakota people, are broken up into several different reservations. If we compare their life expectancy and health outcomes to everybody else in the U.S., we can find that they have the lowest life expectancy anywhere in the United States. It is interesting to me to think about the health and disease of the Lakota/Dakota people in relation to the fact that these were the last Indigenous people in the U.S. to go into reservation status. They were the fiercest fighters of colonization in the U.S. The largest mass execution in the United States was the Dakota 38 ordered by Abraham Lincoln. I do think that these things are related.

…

Young Native people are twice as likely to die in a suicide attempt as other people here in the United States. Studies have shown that Amazonian tribes that have been contacted within the last 50 years and colonized within the last 50 years, their rates of suicide go through the roof. There’s an experience of colonization that is actually somehow directly tied to suicide.

I also think of the farmers in India after the Green Revolution, with Monsanto going into these farms and developing relationships with farmers whereby they lose their ancestral lands within two or three cycles of crop rotation. A lot of these farmers have drunk the pesticides and committed suicide. Hundreds of thousands of farmers have enacted suicide like this. There’s a very interesting social experience that we’re witnessing of loss of self and identity to Earth placement, that triggers a suicidal impulse.

So we were asking: What can we do to confront this legacy of genocide? What can we do to give resilience to our people? And in meeting with health leaders and community leaders there, we’ve decided that we would like to create a partnership to create a clinic and farm. Our mission is to support the Lakota and Dakota people in decolonizing medicine and diet to improve their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. For me, this clinic is the greatest example of social medicine, because I believe that we cannot move forward as a society until we address our primary violence, which is against the Native people.

…

The clinic will be based in Fort Yates, which is in the Standing Rock reservation, and it will serve all the Plains people. It will be a free clinic. The site that we have donated to use is a 3.5 acre parcel, and it’s surrounded by water. This is an island that is in the middle of the Missouri River.

In order to decolonize medicine in this space, we absolutely want to have a kitchen, traditional round structures, a waiting area. There will be a pharmacy that will have a formulary that’s developed by Tyson Walker, who’s a white Mountain Apache UCSF pharmacy student. It will be the first formulary of its kind.

Interestingly, they wanted to have private exam rooms big enough to fit a family. The concept of privacy is very different in Lakota culture. They want everyone in the exam room having the dialogue with them. Because illness is often seen as a system issue, they want to have a spiritual and ceremonial space integrated, not as a side offshoot but in central to the way this physical space will be. They also want a children’s area and an elder’s area. These are things we don’t commonly think of in a clinic. They would like to have a birthing center eventually. They want to have classrooms. They want to have housing. They want to be off the grid. They want to have water recycling. They really see that this clinic could be a vision for how they could be building and how they could be taking care of themselves.

Our role from UCSF will be in witnessing and in serving. For us, decolonizing medicine doesn’t mean putting the doctor in the center of the doctor/patient interaction. It’s allowing the Lakota practitioners, the Lakota cosmology of understanding and health, to dominate, and to be present to witness, to learn, and to support as needed and when needed, which is very, very unusual for doctors.

We’ll also be putting our values of diversity and dignity into action, contemplating our roles as healthcare workers. What does it mean to serve Indigenous communities, especially ones where doctors have been the agents of genocide? And then bringing home those lessons here to UCSF and thinking about how we can serve our Indigenous communities and underserved communities here.

Right now, we are developing an educational curriculum around decolonized medicine together with the Naha students, and we’ll be providing a launchpad for careers in healthcare to the under-represented minorities who are there. We’ll be partnering with Sitting Bull College, which is there on campus, right across from where the health campus will be, and giving those students who want to volunteer in the clinic UCSF credit for their participation in learning about how to run a clinic.

I want to briefly explain how we’re formulating this concept of decolonizing medicine. In traditional medicine, we have what I think of as the paternalistic approach to healthcare, where the doctor is bigger, smarter and knows more, and you are the little patient. The doctor tells you what health is. Or maybe they won’t tell you and they’ll just do a procedure and not really clearly explain it.

Now we’re in an era of the patient-centered approach, where you have a doctor and patient and they’re equal. They’re in a partnership, and health is something they discuss together. Then you have all these things around the social history. You might incorporate some herbal medicine. You have nurses, you have some acupuncture. Still in the center, it’s dominated by the Western medical perspective.

With decolonizing medicine, at the center of the interaction is that person’s concept of health. That’s something that the patient and the doctor come together to understand. And it’s influenced by the socio-political environment. It’s influenced by your family and your community, by your diet, your access to healthy foods. It’s influenced by traditional healers and spiritual practices. If you’re living in a place where they’re putting a pipeline through your clean drinking water, that’s going to have an effect on your health, whether it’s an effect on your spiritual health, your sense of your sovereignty, your autonomy, your dignity, or your sense that genocide is still an ongoing thing. These elements all impact the concept of health. At the Mni Wiconi clinic, this is how—this is how we’re conceptualizing everyone’s involvement.

Bioneers 2018 Presenter Preview: Ecologist Jason Turner

With more than three decades of experience in wildlife conservation management and research, Jason A. Turner, MSc, has become a world renowned lion ecologist. Based in South Africa, Turner is Director of Ecology for the Global White Lion Protection Trust, which he established alongside conservationist Linda Tucker in 2002. Turner, who is also Chairman of the Wilderness Security and Anti-poaching Forum, has led groundbreaking studies on white lions, including the impact of lion predation on South Africa’s large herbivore population and an effort to rewild and study an integrated pride of white and tawny lions in the country’s Greater Timbavati Region.

At this year’s Bioneers Conference, Turner will join Tucker on stage for their presentation, What We Can Learn from South Africa’s Legendary White Lions. The duo will explain how this rare species has helped bring together cutting-edge modern ecology with Indigenous ancestral wisdom to help heal ecosystems and divides of race, tribe, gender and culture, and they’ll also share what these extraordinary creatures can teach us about our own capacity for leadership.

Bioneers 2018 speaker Jason Turner

In advance of the 2018 conference, Turner shared with Bioneers a few of the things that are on his mind, from the challenges our planet is currently facing to the top three books he recommends reading.

What he’s most excited for within the next year: “First, collaboration for the 1st time by several other conservation and animal welfare organizations to motivate the South African Government to stop unethical hunting and trade in lion body parts to save lions, and particularly white lions, from going extinct. Second, progressing my Ph.D. and doctoral study on the ecological importance of the white lion as a flagship and capstone animal in the UNESCO declared Kruger to Canyon Biosphere in South Africa.”

His biggest reason to have hope right now: “The level of collaboration by other like-minded organizations, and the integration of different disciplines—science and indigenous knowledge, for example.”

Our biggest challenge to overcome right now: “Stopping the global exploitation of nature, its inhabitants (human and nonhuman; tangible and intangible; fauna and flora) and all that comprises the Earth.”

The number one thing individuals can do to have a big impact on the world in a positive way: “If every individual recognizes that they can make a difference, and do their part to stop the exploitation of the Earth, no matter how seemingly small—like recycling in their kitchen at home or stop buying straws—irrespective of age, career path, or social standing. Every individual has a voice and a right to say how the planet is treated, and collectively we have the ability to effect change.”

The Bioneers 2018 talk he’s most excited to see: Monica Gagliano & Michael Pollan: Plant Intelligence and Human Consciousness – Into the Mystery

The three books he recommends to our audience:

Bioneers 2018 Award Recipients

Every year Bioneers hosts a special evening on the Saturday night of the conference during which awards are given to a small handful of environmental and social leaders whose work we especially admire or consider particularly relevant. The recipients vary widely in age, ethnicity and fields of action. Some awardees are especially promising young activists just beginning their trajectories but already demonstrating outstanding leadership potential; others are Bioneers allies with decades of experience, long renowned in their fields. Some are well known public figures; others less known to the mainstream but doing vitally important work. Some are U.S.-based; others come to us from around the world.

Bioneers hosts this event because we feel the need to acknowledge in a more festive and intimate way some of the extraordinary leaders from a broad swath of communities, movements and areas of interest who grace us with their participation in the conference, and who are all, in their own ways, working for the common good and to help birth a new, far greener, fairer and more compassionate society. To be clear, this description fits practically all speakers (and many attendees) at the Bioneers Conference, but we annually try to recognize a select few for their contributions and work.

We honored these true Bioneers sheroes and heroes in 2018 at a rousing celebration with fresh and food provided by local conscious companies.

Patrisse Cullors
Artist, exemplary activist/organizer, co-founder of Black Lives Matter.


Jacqueline Garcel
CEO of the Latino Community Foundation, a groundbreaking leader in the movement to mobilize Latino political power and rethink philanthropy


Gar Alperovitz
Renowned economist, historian, activist and visionary thinker on transforming our economic system


Ecuador’s Indigenous Ceibo Alliance leaders
Emergildo Criollo, Hernan Payaguaje, Alicia Salazar and Norma Nenquimo, uniting to fight for their collective land and human rights along with ally and partner, Mitch Anderson, founder of Amazon Frontlines


Kevin Powell
Author, major voice in “conscious” hip-hop culture, groundbreaking leader in the movement to end violence against women and transform masculinity


Edna Chavez
The remarkable Los Angeles teenage organizer and anti-gun violence activist who burst into national attention with her passionate talk at the March for Our Lives

In the midst of a weekend filled with intense talks, deep emotional responses and vibrant cogitation and debate, it is important to be able to let our hair down a bit while gathering and celebrating with old and new friends, supporters and allies as we honor shining exemplars of the types of solutions we will need to generate and scale up if we are going to have any hope of nudging human civilization away from its current destructive trajectory and onto a saner, more equitable, inclusive and loving path.

This Chair Rocks: Ashton Applewhite’s Manifesto Against Ageism

In our youth obsessed culture, we’re bombarded by media images and messages about the despairs and declines of our later years. Beauty and pharmaceutical companies work overtime to convince people to purchase products that will retain their youthful appearance and vitality. Wrinkles are embarrassing. Gray hair should be colored and bald heads covered with implants. Older minds and bodies are too frail to keep up with the pace of the modern working world and olders should just step aside for the new generation.

Ashton Applewhite once held these beliefs too until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, her book This Chair Rocks (Celadon Books, 2019) traces her journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. The following is an excerpt from This Chair Rocks.

Ashton Applewhite spoke on ageism at Bioneers 2018, watch her keynote address here.

I’ve learned that most of what I thought I knew about the aging process was wrong. That staying in the dark serves powerful commercial and political interests that don’t serve mine. And that seeing clearly is healthier and happier. Yet, despite the twentieth century’s unprecedented longevity boom, age bias has yet to bleep onto the cultural radar—it’s the last socially sanctioned prejudice. We know that diversity means including people of different races, genders, abilities, and sexual orientation; why is age typically omitted? Racist and sexist comments no longer get a pass, but who even blinks when older people are described as worthless? Or incompetent, or “out of it,” or boring, or even repulsive?

Suppose we could see these hurtful stereotypes for what they are—not to mention the external policies and procedures that put the “ism” after “age.” Suppose we could step off the treadmill of age denial and begin to see how ageism segregates and diminishes our prospects. Catch our breath, then start challenging the discriminatory structures and erroneous beliefs that attempt to shape our aging. Until then, ageism will pit us against each other; it will rob society of an immense accrual of knowledge and experience; and it will poison our futures by framing longer, healthier lives as problems instead of the remarkable achievements and opportunities they represent.

A good place to start is by jettisoning some language. “The elderly”? Yuck, partly because I’ve never heard anyone use the word to describe themselves. Also because “elderly” comes paired with “the,” which implies membership in some homogenous group. “Seniors”? Ugh. “Elders” works in some cultures but feels alien to me, and I don’t like the way it implies that people deserve respect simply by virtue of their age; children, too, deserve respect. Since the only unobjectionable term used to describe older people is “older people,” I’ve shortened the term to “olders” and use it, along with “youngers,” as a noun. It’s clear and value-neutral, and it emphasizes that age is a continuum. There is no old/young divide. We’re always older than some people and younger than others. Since no one on the planet is getting any younger, let’s stop using “aging” as a pejorative—“aging boomers,” for example, as though it were yet another bit of self-indulgence on the part of that pesky generation, or “aging entertainers,” as though their fans were cryogenically preserved.

It always drove me nuts when some clown called me “young lady” and expected me to feel complimented, but I didn’t know why until I started thinking deeply about it. Made to our face, comments like these are disguised as praise. We tend to ignore them because the reference to being no-longer-young is embarrassing. And it’s embarrassing to be called out as older until we quit being embarrassed about it. Well, I’m not anymore. When someone says, “You look great for your age,” I no longer mutter an awkward thanks. I say brightly, “You look great for your age too!” When it dawned on me that one of the reasons older women are invisible is because so many dye their hair to cover their gray, I bleached mine white to see what it was like. When my back hurts, instead of automatically blaming it on my osteo-you-name-it, I stop to think whether shoveling or weeding could be to blame. I started a Q&A blog called Yo, Is This Ageist? where people can ask me whether something they’ve seen or heard or done is offensive or not. And I wrote this book.

Although we age in different ways and at different rates, everyone wakes up a day older. Aging is difficult, but few of us opt out, and the passage of time confers very real benefits upon us. By blinding us to those benefits and heightening our fears, ageism makes growing older in America far harder than it has to be. That’s why I’ve embarked on a crusade to overturn American culture’s dumb and destructive obsession with youth, and challenge the way people at both ends of the age spectrum are devalued and disrespected.

As I’ve gone on this journey from the personal to the political, it’s become clear that ageism is woven deeply into our capitalist system, and that upending it will involve social and political upheaval. Ageism, unlike aging, is not inevitable. In the twentieth century, the civil rights and women’s movements woke mainstream America up to entrenched systems of racism and sexism. More recently, disability rights and gay rights and trans rights activists have brought ableism and homophobia and transphobia to the streets and the courts of law. It is high time to add ageism to the roster, to include age in our criteria for diversity, and to mobilize against discrimination on the basis of age. It’s as unacceptable as discrimination on the basis of any aspect of ourselves other than our characters.

If marriage equality is here to stay, why not age equality? If gay pride has gone mainstream, and millions of Americans now proudly identify as disabled, why not age pride? The only reason that idea sounds outlandish is because this is the first time you’ve encountered it. It won’t be the last. Longevity is here to stay. Everyone is aging. Ending ageism benefits us all.

Why add another “ism” to the list when so many, racism in particular, call out for action? Here’s the thing: We don’t have to choose. When we make the world a better place to grow old in, we make it a better place in which to be from somewhere else, to have a disability or be queer or non-white or non-rich. Just as different forms of op- pression reinforce and compound each other—that’s intersectionality, a term coined by feminist and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw—so do different forms of activism, because they chip away at the fear and ignorance that all prejudice relies upon. Ageism is the perfect target for compound advocacy because everyone experiences it. And when we show up at all ages for whatever cause tugs at our sleeve—save the whales, the clinic, the democracy—we not only make that e ort more effective, we dismantle ageism in the process.

This book is a call to wake up to the ageism in and around us, embrace a more nuanced and accurate view of growing older, cheer up, and push back. What ideas about aging have each of us internalized without even realizing it? Where have those ideas come from, and what purpose do they serve? How do they play out across our lives, from office to bedroom, in muscle and memory, and what changes inside us once we perceive these destructive forces at work? What might an age-friendly world—friendly to all ages, that is—look like? What can we do, individually and collectively, to provoke the necessary shift in consciousness, and catalyze a radical age movement to make it happen?

Let’s find out.

Excerpted from Ashton Applewhite’s This Chair Rocks (Celadon Books, 2019).

Bioneers at the Global Climate Action Summit

The Global Climate Action Summit is descending on the Bay Area during the middle of September. Conceived of and hosted by California Governor Jerry Brown, the official event is designed to be a momentum builder towards 2020, a major milestone for the Paris Climate Commitment. Of course, since Paris in 2015 much has changed. The election of Trump and the subsequent withdrawal of the US from the Paris agreement has made other entities all the more important in the quest to take immediate action on climate. Subnational action on climate change by states, cities, regions and businesses is more essential than ever — and citizen mobilization at all scales continues to be among the most important drivers of action. Without being held to account, the most ambitious of intentions are at risk of remaining just that: ambitious intentions. We are all needed. The world is full of ambiguity but one thing that we can be absolutely certain of is that there is no place for unrealized ambition when it comes to climate change.

The week of events in the Bay Area will be an important opportunity to push for effective and immediate action. While the “Official Summit” is a credentialed event taking place Sept 12-14, the entire region and calendar will literally be bursting at the seams with vibrant and important actions, events and conversations. We’ve highlighted a number of key events and resources below. If you’re in the area, come out, show up and make a difference. And then join us at the Bioneers Conference in October to continue the conversation.

September 8: Global Day of Action & Climate March: RISE FOR CLIMATE

If you do one thing this week, hit the streets with thousands and thousands more to demand action on climate change. The climate movement would not be where it is today without citizen action and, for better or worse, it’s needed now more than ever.

Comprehensive Event Listings:

Bioneers Sponsored/Partnered Events:

  • Sept 12 & 14: Invoking the Pause and The Climate Solutions Group: Climate Action Summit Speaker Series. A two-day event featuring many Bioneers speakers including Joshua Fouts, Brock Dolman, Erin Axelrod, Calla Rose Ostrander, Dr.Jeff Creque, Frijtof Capra, Janaki Jagannath and more.
  • Sept 12: Ten Strands: Education: Key to Long-Term Climate Action Success
    A full day event focusing on the vital but frequently overlooked role of education in successful climate action featuring a number of Bioneers allies and coordinated by Ten Strands along with a number of key partners.
  • Sept 13: USF: Climate Change, Extractive Industries, and Indigenous Land Rights: An Emerging Discussion
    An evening event co-sponsored by Bioneers featuring Corinna Gould, Valentin Lopez and others in an essential conversation about Indigenous Land Rights.
  • Sept 14: Pathway to Paris Concert
    Bioneers is thrilled to partner with Patti Smith, Bob Weir, Flea and many other artists for a Climate Action celebration and benefit concert for 350.org and UNDP.

Events Featuring Bioneers Allies and Speakers:

Forgive us (and let us know!) if we’ve missed some.

How to Unleash Our Collective Genius: Appreciative Inquiry

Something is trying to be born. We can feel it. The old ways of the industrial growth society are crumbling, and the new ways of a life-sustaining civilization are emerging like grass through cracks in the concrete.

Everything we need is already here.

Kate Sutherland’s latest book, We Can Do This! 10 Tools to Unleash Our Collective Genius, is about unleashing our immense potential by harnessing the power of “group work” through tried-and-true frameworks for working together better.

Following is an excerpt from the book’s first chapter.

See Kate Sutherland speak at Bioneers 2018, where she’ll discuss Navigating Emergence: Perspectives and Practices for Responding in Real Time.

I love each of the frameworks in this book, so it has been like planning a delicious meal for much loved friends to choose which “dish” to serve first. I have picked Appreciative Inquiry because it offers a brilliant entry point to virtually every context, and because it is simple and stunningly transformational. I also welcome how it infuses everything with a joyous sweetness. When we appreciate something, not only does it help us amplify what we have appreciated, we, the appreciators, are uplifted and energized and connected to our wisdom and passion.

At the core of Appreciative Inquiry’s transformational power is one of the most fundamental inner shifts we can make: from seeing problems to seeing possibilities.

Most of us, and most groups, tend to focus on what is wrong. We relish cataloguing what is not working and we glory in analyzing root causes and how things might get worse.

The same is true for the voices in our heads. “You didn’t do that very well.” “Don’t be so stupid.” “Who do you think you are?” Seldom does our self-talk affirm our strengths or honor our accomplishments.

All this negative focus is debilitating. The bigger the problems we face and the more overwhelmed we are by the weight of what is wrong, the more important it is that we shift our focus to seeing what is right.

Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to life and to working in groups that turns our default setting on its head. Instead of fixating on problems, the focus is on what is life-giving. The shift is that simple, and the implications are profound – for morale, innovation, creativity, getting things done, and more. See the following Bright Spots sidebar for one vivid example.
…

Appreciative lens

Appreciative Inquiry focuses on the “positive core” – the factors and characteristics that are present when an individual, group, organization, or community is at its best.

By asking, “what do you value?,” or “what works well here?” – even in the most toxic of communities, workplaces, or teams – the conversation changes in profound ways. The appreciative focus surfaces people’s wisdom and goodwill. In place of negativity, despair, and overwhelm, people’s latent decency, wisdom, and engagement are unleashed. Authentic appreciation, and its close cousin, gratitude, shift the energy. For both individuals and groups, that energy shift is like wind in the sails for positive change.

Energized by having discovered something to appreciate, the next questions become, “What are the conditions that supported this wonderful thing to happen? How can we have more of what is working? Can we translate what is working here to help us over there?”

Inquiry helps us understand how the “bright spots” came to be, and points the way to having many more.

What conditions, for example, contributed to the best meet- ing you have ever had with your team or board or staff? Was the agenda framed in a positive and inspiring way? Was everyone comfortable to say what was real, thanks to a high level of trust? Was there a dynamic cross-section of people participating? Did it start on an upbeat note?

Looking back at times when your company or organization was performing at its best, was there excellent information flow between sub-groups, or a compelling sense of shared purpose, or people supported to try new things?

If your goal is to help team members to be more punctual, or better informed, or more engaged, get curious about the people who are already punctual, informed, and engaged. Or ask team members to reflect on their best experiences of whatever you want to cultivate. The wisdom on how to have more will be in the group, and when people come up with their own solutions, they are far more likely to implement them.

At the personal level

Over time, working appreciatively becomes a way of being. We change our default setting from focusing on what is wrong to seeing what is right. The more we do this in our personal lives, the better we are able we to respond appreciatively in our relationships, groups, and organizations.
In our personal lives, an appreciative focus can include how we see:

• ourselves;
• our parents and siblings;
• our children;
• our neighbours;
• our circumstances;
• our potential;
• and so on.

Take a moment right now to reflect briefly on some aspect of your personal life from an appreciative perspective. Pick something that is challenging or difficult, and let yourself “rip” with complaining, blaming, or negativity. Then choose to shift from seeing problems to seeing possibilities. Do you notice a shift in your energy and outlook? For example, I recently shifted feeling overwhelmed by my workload into feeling excited by and grateful for emerging possibilities and all that I am learning.

Similarly, in the group and organizational aspects of our lives, bringing an appreciative lens has profound impact. Consider framing issues appreciatively when:

• defining the agenda for a meeting, workshop, conference or social movement;
• conducting a performance review;
• setting strategic goals;
• building capacity in teams and organizations;
• creating collaborations and partnerships;
• dealing with crises.

The list of potential applications is endless because focusing on what is life-giving is a stance we take toward all of life. It is a way of being as much as it is a way of doing. As such, we can bring an appreciative lens to virtually everything!

Since most of us are conditioned by the prevailing negativity and problem focus in society, it takes a bit of practice to strengthen the appreciative “muscle.” If you want to be more focused on what is life-giving, you might ask for help from your spouse or a workmate, or you could put a note in your daytimer to explore using the appreciative lens on a daily or weekly basis until you have formed a positive habit.

______________________
Excerpt from Chapter 1 (Appreciative Inquiry), We Can Do This! 10 Tools to Unleash Our Collective Genius by Kate Sutherland. Other chapters introduce nine other similarly potent frameworks including Theory U, Process Oriented Psychology, and Integral Theory. For more info, see www.wecandothistools.com

Agriculture Can Help Meet Climate Action Targets in San Diego

By Elly Brown and Puja Batra, PhD

In 2016, San Diego County began developing a climate action plan consisting of a set of legal commitments to reduce greenhouse gases with specific targets, ultimately adopted in 2018. The same year Elly Brown, Director of San Diego Food System Alliance and Dr. Puja Batra of Batra Ecological Strategies first met at the Montado Ranch in San Diego where the Marin Carbon Project was putting in a test plot to see how compost applications on Southern California soils could sequester carbon from the atmosphere. At the Montado Ranch, Elly and Puja began a conversation about the opportunity for agriculture to play a significant role in meeting county climate action targets. That conversation developed into a partnership to develop a strategy linking climate action to Carbon Farming. Brown and Batra gave this talk, transcribed and edited below, as part of the Bioneers Carbon Farming Series.

Agriculture is one of the largest industries in San Diego County, a unique agricultural region with the highest number of organic farms of any county in the nation as well as a large number of conventional farms. The San Diego Food System Alliance (SDFSA) views Carbon Farming as an opportunity to support the small farms in the region because, like many other communities, development pressure, cost of water, cost of land and disconnected consumers are all driving small farmers out of business. The vision is to include the agricultural community as part of the climate change solution and to support the long-term sustainability of farming in San Diego County.

Puja Batra and Elly Brown (photo by Jan Mangan

Carbon Farming at the community level requires collaboration. We were able to bring together stakeholders from different organizations that can play a role in support of Carbon Farming from the financial perspective as well as the ecological perspective. We brought together county agencies – agriculture, solid waste, watershed protection planning, public health, regulators, air pollution control district – as well as the Farm Bureau, resource conservation districts, financing agencies, farmers and ranchers, private sector parties engaged in sustainable sourcing and others.

The ultimate goal is to catalyze a coordinated and comprehensive Carbon Farming program in our region that is embedded within our existing government institutions and supported by the nonprofit partners in the community. SDFSA, with support from ecological strategist, Puja Batra, is developing a road map for carbon farming in the region.

The Marin Carbon Project put a test plot in at Montado Farms, in San Diego County, to look at the effects of rangeland compost application in Southern California soils. At about the same time the County of San Diego was starting to develop a climate action plan, which is a set of legal commitments that the County makes outlining how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Agriculture presents a big opportunity for the county to meet some of its climate action targets with respect to reducing greenhouse gases, but also with respect to building resilience, because in addition to needing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we’re facing a lot of climate resilience challenges that are already happening and we have to start addressing them. Carbon Farming is one of the few tools available that addresses both mitigation and adaptation to climate change. SDFSA developed strategies to highlight the fact that farmers and ranchers have a big role to play by employing Carbon Farming practices, providing a service to the rest of us.

The resilience value of Carbon Farming brings in synergies among different players and different government agencies and other organizations and may open up some new resource and funding possibilities. By putting our heads together, getting more people at the table and finding new ways to pool resources, we can, hopefully, begin to develop some incentives for farmers and ranchers to employ the practices and then scale them up.

The San Diego Foundation funded SDFSA to ask a few questions: Just how big a carbon sink is soil? How much can our soils help us with our greenhouse gas emissions problems? Where do some of those local and state policy and program synergies exist? How can we find ways to creatively come up with resources to develop incentives to scale up the practices?

In seeking answers, it is important to understand the existing nature of agriculture in San Diego and what challenges and opportunities exist. The median size farm in San Diego County is four acres. The average age of a farmer in San Diego is sixty-two, which is consistent with the rest of the country. This, of course, poses some troubling uncertainty about the future of agriculture in our country. Incoming farmers are often first-time, first generation farmers. That presents both some challenges and some opportunities. Some of the barriers to entry are access to capital and education and training. How can we use this as an opportunity over the next decade to make a wholesale transition from conventional farming to farming practices that are necessary and relevant for the challenges of future decades? Can we make a wholesale transition to carbon sequestering practices, and do that by addressing some of these barriers?

We made a general recommendation that the county focus on training and facilitating the new generation of farmers to succeed in regenerative agricultural practices.

Agricultural Carbon Storage and Sequestration in San Diego

Having the largest number of organic farms per county in the nation gives us some baseline knowledge on how important it is to build soils. The return per acre for ranching is low and is declining. We have very few full-time ranchers. Almost 70% of local agriculture is in orchards, so there’s already a lot of carbon sequestration going on. It’s not perfect, but it’s a very solid foundation. We need to recognize these strengths and understand how we can make improvements while recognizing our farmers and ranchers for their contributions.

The nursery and cut flower industry is the second largest type of agriculture in San Diego. This industry presents some challenges in terms of carbon sequestration. Much of that growing is done in containers and very often the containers are filled with non-soil media. We don’t know what the sequestration value of that approach is, but nurseries are a growing part of our agricultural system because they are, economically, a little more viable than growing food. On the one hand, it’s not contributing to food production or contributing to carbon sequestration, but it is holding a space for agriculture and helping us keep down the rate of sprawl. We don’t have very much row crop agriculture, with only 7% of San Diego agriculture in vegetables. This implies a relatively low amount of tilling, a farming practice that releases greenhouse gases. All this taken together provides a solid foundation for discussing Carbon Farming moving forward.

San Diego has lost about 25% of its orchards over the last ten years. The loss of these orchards can be thought of in terms of the loss of the molecules of stored carbon in those trees as well as the lost sequestration potential that never happened because of the removal of those trees. Summed up, this amounts to over 300,000 metric tons of CO­2 over the last decade. This attrition rate is quite high; 25% in ten years is significant.

That number isn’t accounted for in the way that climate action plans estimate current baseline emissions. The fact that we lost all that sequestration is invisible. We had to point that out to the County climate action team so they would recognize that if you don’t count it in the baseline, you are ignoring the net higher emissions that result from agricultural land being converted to any other land use. There’s almost no other land use that’s going to be lower emissions than an orchard with one hundred trees per acre. Even if you let it convert back to natural habitat, it’s not going to have that kind of sequestration rate initially.

Pointing that out to the County resulted in a recommendation to conserve the existing carbon storage and future sequestration by addressing the root drivers behind orchard loss, which is the price of water along with some fire-related loss. The price of water is a huge problem in our area. We made recommendations about the use of recycled water in the county for agriculture. We are talking to the County climate action team about this to make the point that investments in water are not just investments in resilience, they are also investments in mitigation.

Food Waste

SDFSA is focused on many different issues in the food system and food waste is one of them. The aim is not only to reduce food waste, but also to develop a system in which food waste can be directed to benefit the whole social and environmental hierarchy: people, animals and soil. By looking for connections between different issues, we realized that food waste can be used to make compost to support Carbon Farming.

The Department of Public Works solid waste management team has developed plans for reducing the amount of organic waste and food waste that goes into landfills. They estimated how much is being thrown away that could be composted, and how much compost it could produce. We posed the question, “If all of that compost were used on farms and rangelands, how much carbon could it sequester?” Estimates were made using the online Compost Planner and COMET Planner tools that California’s Healthy Soils program has been involved in developing. We feel the county will be comfortable with the numbers that we came up with because those models are state sanctioned tools. The question is how can we get the people that deal with these problems at the table to find ways to promote those specific practices that build synergies with other departments, and really make this a multi-agency effort?

Looking at the Whole System

Our last recommendation was to convene a taskforce to start looking at these questions in a very detailed way, and make sure that we develop a Carbon Farming program that can be absorbed by existing institutions in the county, government and non-government. There are many players that are engaged in some way in agriculture and we want them to adopt the science, the philosophy, the economics of local needs and to institutionalize Carbon Farming as an essential standard operating practice.

The role of the taskforce will be to build a Carbon Farming program that is grounded in science, economic needs, regulation and the needs of the region, and to catalyze a coordinated program within the existing institutional matrix. We hope that over the next decade, we’ll transition to a situation in which San Diego’s agricultural community is a key partner in developing a resilient and climate-friendly region.