Jeremy Narby describes his quest around the globe to chronicle how leading-edge scientists are studying intelligence in nature and how nature learns. He uncovers a universal thread of highly intelligent behavior within the natural world, and asks the question: What can humanity learn from nature’s economy and knowingness? Weaving together issues of animal cognition, evolutionary biology and psychology, he challenges contemporary scientific concepts and reveals a much deeper view of the nature of intelligence and of our kinship with all life.
In the book Nature’s Operating Instructions, Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel writes of Janine Benyus:
If nonhuman nature could speak with a human voice, she’d sound a lot like Janine Benyus. Of course, human beings are a part of nature, not apart from it, and that has long been Janine’s most essential message. Her work as an ardent naturalist eventually led her to get under nature’s skin sufficiently to ask what is perhaps the most basic question people need to address to live sustainably on the land: What would nature do here? That deceptively simple query resulted in her momentous exploration of an emerging revolutionary approach to science and design chronicled in her landmark book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.
Janine is an educator and life sciences writer who has degrees in forestry, natural resource management, and English literature. She combines a deep appreciation of science with an abiding love of the natural world. And she is no armchair naturalist: she has written three great regional field guides and a sly animal behavior guide, Beastly Behaviors. She’s been a backpacking guide and is active in protecting wildlands in her home state of Montana.
In the following excerpt from Nature’s Operating Instructions (Sierra Club Books, 2004), Benyus writes about why humans should learn from nature rather than merely about it—taking cues from complex systems that have developed over millions of years and applying these lessons to manmade systems.
Watch a video of Janine Benyus’ 2016 Bioneers keynote at the bottom of this article.
It has been a wonderful fall in the Rockies, with cottonwoods and aspens more brilliant than I’ve seen them in years. When you duck into the groves, the air itself is golden. Quaking aspen has a great name: Populus tremuloides. It describes on the tongue what the aspen does, which is to tremble in the slightest breeze, with a sound like bones rattling.
My Native American friends say the trembling started because the Great Spirit asked all organisms to bow their heads in humility, and the aspen refused. “From now on,” said the Great Spirit to the aspen, “you will quake whenever the wind blows.”
My scientist friends have another explanation. The stalk of the aspen leaf is flat, so that when the wind hits it, the leaf tilts, spilling the wind like a sail. It doesn’t build a rigid structure. It yields to the wind, and this yielding allows it to live on absurdly steep slopes where winds would pick other broad-leaved trees clean.
Both stories are about humility and adaptation, about yielding when it’s good to yield.
There’s something else going on in the Rockies these days, and it’s similar to what happens here each year in October at the Bioneers Conference. It’s called interspecies flocking. It’s fall, and a tough winter is coming. Everybody needs to put on a nice layer of fat, so birds that normally would not associate with one another—different species, such as chickadees and warblers and woodpeckers—flock together and fly in ensemble through the canyons.
They lay down their arms and hook up in their diversity, in their difference. They hook up because they know that the berries are scattered and together they can spread out and find more than one bird could alone. If you think of berries as ideas, that’s what we’re like. Different people get together and say, “I’ve found an idea over here that may lead to sustainability,” and we that idea. We’re a mixed-species flock and winter is coming. One of the ideas in that mosaic is biomimicry.
Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature, looking to nature as a teacher. One language caveat: Inherent in the phrase “looking to nature” is the lonely idea that we are not nature—that we’re peering in from the outside. But that’s not what I believe. I see us as biological organisms, and that means we are nature. There’s no separation. So forgive the awkward rhetoric, but when I say “nature,” I’m referring to what writer David Abrams calls “more than- human” nature—our biological elders who have been here much longer than we have. Compared to them, we just arrived and have everything to learn about how to live gracefully on this planet. If the age of the earth were a calendar year beginning on January 1, and today were a breath before midnight on December 31, it would mean that Homo sapiens sapiens got here fifteen minutes ago and all of recorded history blinked by in the last sixty seconds. It’s an eyelash on that timeline.
Bacteria bootstrapped themselves up out of the chaos in March of that theoretical year, and in the 3.8 billion years since, life has learned to do some amazing things—to fly, circumnavigate the globe, live at the top of mountains and the bottom of the ocean, lasso solar energy, light up the night, and make miracle materials like skin, horns, hair, and brains. In fact, organisms have done everything we humans want to do but without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future. So yes, we are part of nature, but we’re a very young species still trying to get it right. When I look at technology these days, I don’t say “yes” or “no.” I ask how well adapted a particular technology is. How well adapted is that product, that process, that policy to life on earth over the long haul? That’s the key question. Ninety-nine percent of species that have been on earth are now extinct because their products or their processes were not well adapted.
Together, life’s adaptations spell out a pattern language for survival. Think of the wood frog that can freeze solid in winter and hop away unharmed in the spring. Or the much maligned garden snail that builds its own highway of slime, a lubricant that absorbs 1,500 times its weight in water almost instantly, allowing the snail to climb up and over a thorny branch without hurting itself. Banana slugs can do the same thing. We humans don’t have anything close to that in terms of an effective lubricant. Rhino horn surprises us by healing when cracked, even though the horn has no living cells in it. We don’t know how it manages to do that, but what a great model for self-healing materials that wouldn’t have to be thrown away.
Up on the northern California coast is the western hemlock, a denizen of our northwestern rain forests, each tree with sixty million needles that tilt like Venetian blinds to catch the sun and then comb moisture out of the fog, so that 30 percent more moisture lands on the ground around a western hemlock than anywhere else in the forest. The breathing pores of those needles are deeply embedded, tucked away in the wax, so the wind can’t wick their water vapor away.
Now why is it that a tree that receives up to a hundred inches of rainfall a year has all those adaptations for drought? It’s because there are two glorious rain-free months in summer, and that’s a long, dry time if you’re a tree. So well-adapted species have done the obvious—they’ve acknowledged the limits and evolved adaptations for drought, even though they’re in a rain forest.
Another of my favorite examples is the hummingbird, an organism about the size of my thumb. It flies up to 35 miles an hour (faster than you can get around most cities in a cab) and migrates about 2,000 miles a year. Those journeying down the eastern flyway reach the lip of the Gulf of Mexico and then pause for a while, fueling up on 1,000 blossoms a day. Finally, they burst across 600 miles of open water without stopping, on a whopping 2.1 grams of fuel. And that’s not jet fuel: it’s nectar.
But here’s what amazes me even more. In the process of fueling up, the hummingbird manages to pollinate its energy source, ensuring that there will be nectar next year—for itself, for its offspring, or for completely unrelated species of nectar feeders. Imagine doing that at your gas station. And of course, when it dies, its body decays and nurtures the roots not only of flowers, but of mushrooms, grasses, trees, and shrubs. There’s nothing special about it; no government regulations are behind it, it’s simply part of the system that keeps us all alive. In the process of meeting their needs, organisms manage to fertilize the soil, clean the air, clean the water, and mix the right cocktail of atmospheric gases that life needs to live.
What life in ensemble has learned to do is to create conditions conducive to life. And that’s what we have to learn. Luckily, we don’t need to make it up. We need only step outside and ask the local geniuses that surround us. The key question for a biomimic is “What would nature do here?” And that’s a rare question, even for ecological designers. We tend to puzzle instead over how to tweak our conventional solutions. For instance, when we want to clean a surface, we get hung up on questions such as “What’s the least toxic detergent to use?” or “How can I reduce the energy involved in sandblasting?” A more helpful question might be “How does nature stay clean?” Other organisms don’t use detergent or sandblasters at all, and yet many of them depend on staying clean for their survival.
A leaf, for instance, has to stay dirt-free so it can breathe and gather sunlight. Botanists in Germany looked to the lotus, a symbol of purity in Asia because it rises from muddy swamps yet remains dry and pristine. Under a microscope, they saw that instead of being smooth, for easy cleaning, the leaf surface is incredibly mountainous. Dirt particles teeter on the peaks instead of adhering strongly, and raindrops ball up instead of spreading out. As the drops roll, they lift the loose dirt particles, like a snowball lifting leaves from your lawn. And it’s not just lotus; many leaves are like this, it turns out. The question then becomes not which detergent to use but how to keep things from getting dirty in the first place. A German company called ispo makes a building façade paint called Lotusan based on the lotus effect. The dried paint has the structure of the lotus leaf, and rainwater cleans the building. The deep design principle is that life surfs for free. Plants use the kinetic or motion energy in falling rain to keep themselves clean. Simple. Wondrous.
And how does nature power itself? Obviously, not the way we do. Of course we all rely on photosynthesis, on sunlight captured by plants. But in our case, it’s ancient sunlight trapped 65 million years ago by plants that we now dig up and ignite in a huge bonfire. We burn 100,000 years of ancient plant growth every year. That’s not a normal decay pattern. It’s like taking all the furniture in your house, piling it up, closing your windows, and lighting a match. We’re fueling our bonfire with ancient sunlight. What we need to do is learn how to tap into the current sunlight streaming down all day long. So at last we’re turning to the masters of sunlight capture—green plants— and asking them, “How are you powering yourself?”
A leaf has tens of thousands of tiny photosynthetic reaction centers. They’re like molecular-scale solar batteries operating at 93 percent quantum efficiency, which means that for every hundred particles of light that strike the leaf, ninety-three are turned into sugars. That’s stellar in terms of effectiveness. The best part is that these solar cells are manufactured silently, in water, and without toxins. So plant biologists and engineers are finally looking to leaves to help them make a smaller, better solar cell.
One of the many gifts of biomimicry is that you enter into deep conversation with organisms, and this student-elder dialogue absolutely fills you with awe. Seeing nature as model, measure, and mentor changes the very way you view and value the natural world. Instead of seeing nature as warehouse, you begin to see her as teacher. Instead of valuing what you can extract from her, you value what you can learn from her. And this changes everything. As Land Institute founder Wes Jackson says, “When we begin to see nature as mentor, gratitude tempers greed and the notion of resources becomes obscene.” My fondest hope is that this gratitude will blossom into an ardent desire to protect the wellsprings of locally evolved wisdom. When we finally realize that unencumbered evolution is more precious than any vein of oil, the rationale for protecting wild places will become self-evident.
A lot of the research in biomimicry is years and years from fruition, but it is a path, an approach. It requires us to visit wild places and keep asking, How does nature teach? How does nature learn? How does nature heal? How does nature communicate? Quieting human cleverness is the first step in biomimicry. Next comes listening, then trying to echo what we hear. This emulating is hard and humbling work. When what we learn improves how we live, we grow grateful, and that leads to the last step in the path: stewardship and caretaking, a practical thanksgiving for what we’ve learned.
The practice of biomimicry requires community, not just with other organisms, but with people in other disciplines. We need to bring together fields of study that have been kept separate. As it stands now, we educate biologists to learn how life lives, how life has managed to find out what works and what lasts here on the earth. We educate a different set of people to find out how we should feed ourselves, power ourselves, make our materials, and run our businesses. I’ll call these people the engineers, for want of a better word: people who design human systems. So we have the biologists and the engineers, and, very sadly, few people get to work in the fertile crescent between those two intellectual habitats. Yet the rest of nature revels in these in-between places. In fact, abrupt boundaries are rare in nature, and some of the most fertile habitats are commingled edges—like estuaries, where freshwater and salt water come together. I’ve been on a quest to find people who are living in that fertile commingling place, the estuary between biology and human systems design.
I’ve long had fantasies of gathering experts from many fields who rarely interact to see what they could learn from one another. An agricultural engineer might put forth the first problem: “With our industrial agriculture, we grow annuals in a monoculture, but we have to dig up the soils each year. When we do that they lose fertility and bleed off into the rivers, so we have to feed them with nitrogen fertilizers, a petroleum product. And because we have one species for miles, it’s sort of an all-you-can-eat restaurant for pests, so we have to use pesticides (also a petroleum product), and it’s gotten to the point where we’re using ten kilocalories of oil to grow one kilocalorie of food on our industrial farms.” A prairie ecologist might chime in, “Let me tell you how the prairie did it in the Midwest. The original pre-Columbian prairie was composed of 99.9 percent perennial plants, hundreds of species in four categories: cool-season grasses, warm-season grasses, legumes, and composites. They held the soil, so not only didn’t it bleed away, it was actually enriched over the years, and because the prairie was a mixture of species, it resisted pest attacks.” And the agricultural engineer might then think, “Wouldn’t it be wild if we could redesign our agriculture in the prairie’s image in this part of the world, and then look at other parts of the world and see what grows there naturally and follow that wisdom?”
In another scenario a materials scientist might complain, “We make materials the ‘heat, beat, and treat’ way. For instance, we take petroleum products, heat them at high temperatures, subject them to high pressures, and then treat them in chemical baths—a very toxic and expensive way to do things. It’s also excessive: after using a plastic fork for fifteen minutes, we toss it in a landfill, where it endures for thousands of years.” An arachnologist might offer some help: “A spider makes silk (they make six kinds, and I’m talking about dragline silk that frames the web) that is five times stronger, ounce for ounce, than steel. It’s resilient and tough—a true miracle fiber. Even more incredible, a spider uses flies and crickets as raw material and creates the fiber at body temperature (a life-friendly temperature), because the manufacturing plant is the spider’s body. Furthermore, the fiber is biodegradable so the spider can eat the web to make more web.” This gets the materials engineer thinking: “We make Kevlar, our strongest material, by taking petroleum, boiling it in sulfuric acid at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, and drawing it out under enormous pressure, and when we’re done, we have flak jackets that will repel bullets and microbes for thousands of years. What if we could emulate spiders and figure out how to take carbon-based, abundant raw materials and allow them to self-assemble in a silent manufacturing process that operates in water at room temperature and produces a biodegradable fiber?”
In another of my fantasy meetings of the minds, an engineer from the energy industry could sit down with a plant biologist and admit, “We’ve been burning a finite fossil resource, and we know we can’t go on.” His companion replies, “Every fern frond, grass blade, and leaf out there right now is producing energy more effectively than we do, with benign solar collectors, and we’re beginning to understand how the process works. Within each leaf, a wishbone-shaped reaction center absorbs the sun’s energy, sending a negative charge to one side of a membrane and a positive charge to the other side; it’s essentially a tiny battery. Wouldn’t it be great if we could mimic that molecular battery to split water and make storable hydrogen?”
A pharmaceutical researcher knows that plants are chock-full of medically important compounds and worries that by conservative estimates, four species go extinct with each passing hour. She wonders if there’s a more sensible way to screen plants for potentially useful medicines or foods. A primate researcher might tell her about animals that are thought to self-medicate in sophisticated ways. For instance, chimpanzees with intestinal problem swill leave the troop and travel to find a particular plant, swallow a few choice leaves, and recover within twenty-four hours. It turns out that animals are selecting plants to treat illness, influence their own fertility, and even prevent illnesses. Plants chemists find secondary compounds in these plants that have antibacterial and antiparasitic qualities, and some even show activity against human cancer tumors. So what if we actually followed animals and took notes about what they have found to be useful in the pharmacies of the jungle?
Well, here’s the surprise. The hypothetical cross-disciplinary encounters I just described have already occurred, and more are happening every day in field after field. Cell biologists, for example, now realize that every cell in our body is, in a sense, a sophisticated computer, responding appropriately to signals and information from enzymes, antibodies, antigens, and so on, that attract or repel one another, that scan one another and then hook together and self-assemble. Computer scientists are starting to take note of this, and it may lead to a whole new paradigm for computing, because what our computers can’t do very well right now is pattern recognition, and what three-dimensional molecules do so well is pattern recognition, adapting, and learning.
On the broader, macroeconomic level, some leading-edge planners, industrialists, and entrepreneurs, concerned about the prodigious waste generated by our economy, are starting to look at ecosystems where densely interconnected species fill every niche you can possibly imagine and eat every crumb before it even falls off the table. They are trying to envision how we could shift our economy from a linear, throughput kind of model to a closed-loop, diverse, highly interconnected system in which only solar energy is coming in, all the “nutrients” are juggled forever in a loop, and very little waste results. The discipline has a name that I hope will someday not be such an oxymoron: industrial ecology.
It’s important news that this type of work is actually happening, that some bench scientists are starting to move into that estuary between biology and engineering. I’ve traveled and gone to their labs and spent time with them. They’re trying to pulp wood like a fungus, adhere like a gecko, create color like a peacock, grow ceramics like an abalone, cool a building like a termite, make green plastics like a bacterium, and wick water from air like a desert beetle. It’s very exciting to see the fruits of these cross-pollinations.
It’s also gratifying to see metaphors from biology flowing in the direction of human technology, instead of the other way around. For too long we’ve been trying to understand our bodies and our world as if they were machines and studying them in a reductionist way, as if the parts could tell us everything about the whole. Several centuries later, we’re discovering that cogs and gears aren’t adequate to explain the real world. Lo and behold, industrial PCBs somehow wound up in the Antarctic because it’s not Newton’s mechanical machine world—it’s a web. In order to deal with that kind of complexity, we need to start paying attention to how organisms live in context. We need to throw a party where people who are asking, “How does life operate in a way that enhances place?” can get together with people who are asking, “How shall we live?”
In writing books about adaptive organisms, I often ask myself what adaptive traits humans have. One thing that seems to make us different from other creatures, as far as we know, is our ability to act collectively—as a whole species—on our understanding. We can decide as a culture to listen to life, to echo what we hear, to not be a cancer on the earth. Having this will and the inventive brain to back it up, we can make the conscious choice to follow nature’s lead in living our lives. The good news is that we have plenty of help. We’re surrounded by geniuses. They are everywhere with us, breathing the same air, drinking the same water, moving on limbs built from blood and bone. Learning from them will take some stillness on our part, so we can hear their symphony of good sense. What biomimicry offers us, in learning from nature instead of just about nature, is the opportunity to feel a part of, rather than apart from, this genius that surrounds us.
I do want to sound a note of caution. Biomimicry can’t just be about clever design. We are extremely aware now that we are a single species on a single planet, watershed earth. The earth is abundant and resilient, but she is not endlessly abundant nor endlessly resilient. Our most important work right now is to figure out how to share our global commons equitably, and how to treat it with infinite justice and care. We must learn to lighten our footfall. We in the United States take up about thirty acres of bioproductive land and sea per capita right now, and there are only five acres per person available globally. Our ecological footprint is a clown’s shoe compared to that of the rest of humankind. I believe that by consciously emulating life’s genius, we can start to reduce that footprint and live in better-adapted ways.
So mimicking natural form is only the first part of becoming better adapted. We can mimic the self-opening and -closing hooks on an owl feather, say, to get a backpack that opens anywhere without the need for a metal zipper. But if we make that backpack out of petroleum-based nylon, and we make it in a sweatshop, and we put it on a cross-continental truck spewing diesel fumes, what’s the point? Mimicking natural form is a start, but really learning from nature means remembering that the feather is part of an owl that self-assembles on that owl through nature’s chemistry. A deeper mimicry has to do with mimicking not just form, but also nature’s processes and ecosystem strategies.
That owl is fit because it fits its context. It’s part of the forest, which is part of a watershed, which is part of a biome, and it follows rules that are consistent at each level of that nested system. Until we create products that, in their manufacturing, use, disposal, and marketing, are part of an economy that mimics a living system rather than a machine, we haven’t reached the full extent of biomimicry.
I’m going to end with a biomimicry story, an episode that brought some of my most exciting fantasies of cross-disciplinary explorations to life. After attending a workshop I gave at the 2000 Bioneers Conference, a woman named Mary Hansel, who works for a conventional wastewater treatment and water purification firm, proposed that we take the company’s lead engineers to the Galapagos Islands to see if biomimicry could stimulate them to think in new ways. A boat trip to Darwin’s islands was a dream come true for me as a biologist—they were at the top of my life list of places to go. And the Galapagos are extraordinary. This series of islands came up out of the sea 600 miles west of Ecuador as completely uninhabited lava cones, until critters started to raft in on the twelve ocean currents that converge there. Critters who showed up exhausted on the shore woke up the next morning to a whole new world. The landmass was smaller than many of these animals were used to, there was different food, if food at all, and most important, there were many different critters there that they weren’t used to. But eventually, over a long period of evolution, they knitted together a society. They tuned themselves to place and placed themselves in community. And most amazingly, they built soil, cleaned the water, filtered the air, and sweetened the Galapagos; they created conditions conducive to life, as life does.
When we got there on the boat, I asked the engineers, “Why don’t you tell me what it is that’s keeping you from purifying water in a sustainable way, and then we’ll go snorkeling to find organisms that are solving those same problems.” Initially, I got blank stares and an arms-folded-across-the-chest kind of resistance. The first day was a cacophony of whirring cameras, because they were attempting to take nature’s face home; nature was scenery. But then there was a shift, and after that we could hardly get them to come back to the boat. They stayed underwater for hours and crawled through the mud on their hands and knees, cameras forgotten. They kept calling me over, marveling at how creatures were doing what they, the engineers, had been trying to do for years.
Here we were, surrounded by filter-feeding organisms with membrane gills, barnacles and mussels secreting underwater glues, and mangroves desalinating water with the sun as their only energy source. Every fish that swam by had the kind of streamlined fluid dynamics they dream of in pipe design. We looked at leaves that were cleaning themselves with microscopic bumps the way the lotus does, and the engineers thought about how that would improve the inside of pipes, where sewage buildups now require flushing with toxins.
Another problem these engineers deal with is scaling, the buildup of minerals like calcium carbonate, which they remove with harsh chemicals. To find a better way, we went walking on a beach with thousands of calcium-carbonate shells. I described the intricate shell-making process: “Organisms release proteins into seawater. These proteins self-assemble into scaffolds that attract floating minerals, which land in particular spots on the scaffold and crystallize into shells. “Then they asked the obvious question: “But why aren’t shells huge—why don’t they just keep mineralizing?” You could have heard a pin drop. I told them that shelled organisms know how to release “stop proteins” that adhere to the surfaces of the growing crystal and stop the growth. They actually stop the scaling without toxic chemicals. Now that got their attention.
Suddenly they realized that these organisms were no different than they are—engineers trying to solve problems in ways that are life-friendly. The only difference is that these organisms have had about 400 million years of R&D. Could a mimicked version of such stop proteins be used to end calcium accumulation in pipes without toxic chemicals or excessive energy use? they wondered. That’s when I told them about the shell biologist and the engineer who have already created a bio-inspired product that will do what they hoped.
This was a whole new way for them to think about living things. For once, they weren’t thinking about how they could use the organisms—they wouldn’t be farming bacteria, or harvesting the barnacles for their glues, or planting the mangroves to filter water. Instead they would be borrowing the barnacle’s recipe and trying to mimic the mangrove’s root membrane design to make a solar desalination device. The change came when they realized that their design challenges—things like better filters, membranes, sealants, and adhesives—had already been solved, in ingenious ways, by other life forms. In a few short days, their stance toward nature changed from that of voyeuristic conqueror to that of admiring, respectful student.
Once they got the hang of it, they were positively exuberant and at the same time increasingly respectful of the organisms around them. The change of heart that I saw take place on that boat is what’s really important about this work, even more important than the eco-friendly technologies that might come from it.
When they went home, the engineers starting hiring biologists to join their design teams. We are seeing this more and more—companies and local governments inviting biologists to the design table when creating buildings, transportation systems, products, manufacturing processes, and so on. If you are involved in any kind of design, whether of a product, a process, or a policy, go to your university or your natural history museum and ask for a biologist, someone who has broad knowledge of the natural world, amoeba through zebra. (If you think this whole discussion is simply an advertisement for the importance of fusty, old-fashioned natural historians and zoologists— you’re right. Folks with this breadth of knowledge are usually driving taxis nowadays and would love to come to the design table and talk about the smartest problem-solvers they know, which are plants and animals, fungi and microbes.)
One project we’ve been working on is creating a huge web-based database of nature’s solutions that will be catalogued by engineering and design search terms, so that people can type in questions such as “How does nature thermoregulate?” or “How does nature package?” and find thousands of biological research papers, pictures, and experts. We want to put this out in the public domain, so that nature’s ideas are never patented. We also hope to create university courses in which people can study biology functionally. Right now, many engineering, architecture, and design students take no biology classes, so this would be a welcome change.
Of course, don’t forget that the wellspring of good ideas is readily available to all of us. We’re all designers and we all have an innate knowledge of the biological world. So when you are designing something and you want to ask, “How would nature do this?” go right ahead: Turn the doorknob, step outside, and enjoy the quaking golden light of the aspen grove.
After all, it’s not a new gadget that’s going to make us more sustainable as a culture; it’s a change of heart and a new set of eyes, a new way of viewing and valuing the world in which we are embedded and on which we depend. We’re a young species, but we’re very adaptable, and we’re uncanny mimics. With the help of our ten to thirty million planet-mates, I believe we can learn to do what other organisms have done, which is to make of this place an Eden, a home that is ours but not ours alone.
This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Nature’s Operating Instructions, edited by Kenny Ausubel with J.P. Harpignies, published by Sierra Club Books, 2004.
“It can be difficult, especially for young people, to find positive and regenerative examples of people resisting and overcoming such challenging circumstances,” wrote Bioneers’ Ernesto Reyes in a 2017 blog post. “There are, however, examples of youth who are leading the charge toward justice, inclusivity, empowerment, and the right to simply be recognized. Naelyn Pike is one shining example.”
Naelyn Pike (Chiricahua Apache), is a 17-year-old high school senior from San Carlos, Arizona. Passionate about her culture, identity, and tribal sovereignty, Pike has become an internationally renowned Indigenous Rights and environmental leader. She co-leads (with her grandfather Wedsler Nosie Sr. and mother, Vanessa Nosie) the Apache Stronghold, which is fighting to stop a mining project that would desecrate Oak Flat, an Apache sacred site.
At Bioneers 2017, Pike addressed a keynote explaining why young people must take up the fight against racial and environmental injustice. Watch her impassioned presentation and read excerpts from the transcript below.
Naelyn Pike:
Hello, my name is Naelyn Pike. I am enrolled in the San Carlos Apache tribe, but I’m Chiricahua Apache.
I’m going to tell you my story and where I come from and who I am. I’m fighting to protect our sacred lands. Those lands are my homes. Those lands are who I am and where I come from. The place where I can feel free, as being Nde, as being Apache. That was taken away from me and the generations before me. That freedom to believe in anything, that freedom to be who we are, that freedom to pray, to sing the songs, to live on the land and to be who we are. That right was taken away.
And that’s what I’m fighting against. That’s what we’re doing here today. That’s what this generation is doing here today — we’re fighting against these dirty politicians and these corporations that want to desecrate our sacred land, that want to desecrate who we are and strip our identity away. That’s the generational fight. My great grandmother was told she couldn’t be who she was, and she was stripped of her identity because that was “savage.” “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
My grandfather grew up fighting and contemplating the idea of why someone would want to take away who he was. And my mom stood behind him. And now it’s my turn to stand up too. It’s my turn to take on this fight and to understand and to teach my little sisters, my little cousins, to teach my future children that who we are is powerful, is resilient, is strong, because we are a beautiful people.
We have the right to go back to these places because San Carlos is where we were placed as prisoners of war after the Apache wars in the 1800s. That’s not my home. It’s a place called “Hell 40 Acres” because it was a place where no human beings could live. That’s why I’m fighting for my home, Oak Flat and Mount Graham, because those places — you can be born there, you can live there, take the medicinal plants, eat the food and drink the water, and be free, and live that essence of life of who we are, that God-given gift our creator has given us. They want to destroy that. A block cave mining corporation wants to destroy that land — wants to take it and use the money and put it in their pockets.
But I’m saying no! And many people, millions of people in this world, are saying no! We have so many sacred lands that are going to be desecrated, so many fights to protect Chaco Canyon, to protect Bears Ears, to protect Indigenous land, food, water, the right to live, our identity. We’re fighting against so many pipelines. And the thing is that these generations behind us had told us this prophecy.
But there’s another prophecy: That the youth is going to stand. And that’s us today. That’s us here and now.
…
I cannot let this world be gone, and I cannot be a bystander because I’m afraid or I don’t want to talk about the truth or I don’t understand. In order to create change and make change for the people, we must unify. True unity is accepting one another’s diversity, because each and every one of you in this room is beautiful. We all have a story. I have my own story. My mom has her story. But as long as we understand each other’s stories and we accept that beautiful diversity in all people, because we are human beings in this world, the one thing we can understand is that we all have one issue on which we can relate. And that’s that we need to protect this Earth.
…
It is up to us to make that stand now, here, today — to stand up and take that path because you can stand up, but it’s if you walk it every single day of your life. If you walk that life, if you take that action. After this conference, that’s what is important: what you’re going to do next. You may go to all these vendors and you may go and look at the panels and you may watch me now, but it’s what is in your heart, that fire lit inside you, and that fire is rising in the youth. You can feel it. You can feel it in the ground. You can hear it in the trees. You can feel it in the air as you breathe it. Because this change is here and now and it’s up to you to make that change too. To stand with us because it is important that we unify. It is important that we help and support one another. It is important that we protect this Earth and our right to be human being and believe in anything that we want to believe in. It’s up to us here and now. It’s up to you.
By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, and Marina Affo and Derek Kravitz, ProPublica
This article is a collaboration with The New York Times.
More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Donald Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.
Of the employees who have quit, retired or taken a buyout package since the beginning of the year, more than 200 are scientists. An additional 96 are environmental protection specialists, a broad category that includes scientists as well as others experienced in investigating and analyzing pollution levels. Nine department directors have departed the agency as well as dozens of attorneys and program managers. Most of the employees who have left are not being replaced.
The departures reflect poor morale and a sense of grievance at the agency, which has been criticized by Trump and top Republicans in Congress as bloated and guilty of regulatory overreach. That unease is likely to deepen following revelations that Republican campaign operatives were using the Freedom of Information Act to request copies of emails from EPA officials suspected of opposing Trump and his agenda.
The cuts deepen a downward trend at the agency that began under the Obama administration in response to Republican-led budget constraints that left the agency with about 15,000 employees at the end of his term. The reductions have accelerated under Trump, who campaigned on a promise to dramatically scale back the EPA, leaving only what he called “little tidbits” in place. Current and former employees say unlike during the Obama years, the agency has no plans to replace workers, and they expect deeper cuts to come.
“The reason EPA went down to 15,000 employees under Obama is because of pressure from Republicans. This is the effort of the Republicans under the Obama administration on steroids,” said John O’Grady, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, a union representing EPA employees.
ProPublica and The New York Times analyzed the comings and goings from the EPA through the end of September, the latest data that has been compiled, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The figures and interviews with current and former EPA officials show the administration is well on its way to achieving its goal of cutting 3,200 positions from the EPA, about 20 percent of the agency’s work force.
Jahan Wilcox, a spokesman for the EPA, said the agency was running more efficiently. “With only 10 months on the job, Administrator Pruitt is unequivocally doing more with less to hold polluters accountable and to protect our environment,” he said.
Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.
“Research has been on a starvation budget for years,” said Robert Kavlock, who served as acting assistant administrator for the Office of Research and Development before retiring in November. Under earlier buyouts, Kavlock said, the agency later hired nearly 100 postdoctoral candidates to help continue critical agency work.
“There wasn’t a reinvestment this time around,” he said. “There’s a hard freeze.”
Hardest Hit Departments
These EPA departments had the highest departure-to-hire ratios from January to September 2017. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)
Scientists, for the most part, are also not being replaced. Of the 129 people hired this year at the EPA, just seven are scientists. Another 15 are student trainee scientists. Political appointees, however, are on the rise. The office of Scott Pruitt, the agency administrator, is the only unit that saw more hires than departures this year.
In addition to losing scientists themselves, the offices at the EPA that deal most directly with science were drained of other workers this year. The Office of Research and Development — which has three national laboratories and four national centers with expertise on science and technology issues — lost 69 people, while hiring three. At the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, responsible for regulating toxic chemicals and pesticides, 54 people left and seven were hired. And in the office that ensures safe drinking water, one person was hired, while 26 departed.
By contrast, Pruitt’s office hired 73 people to replace the 53 who left.
“I think it’s important to focus on what the agency is all about, and what it means to lose expertise, particularly on the science and public health side,” said Thomas Burke, who served as the agency’s science adviser under Obama. “The mission of the agency is the protection of public health. Clearly there’s been a departure in the mission.”
Wilcox disputed that assessment and said the agency remained an attractive workplace for scientists. “People from across EPA were eligible to retire early with full benefits,” he said in an emailed statement. “We currently have over 1,600 scientists at EPA and less than 200 chose to retire with full benefits.”
The impact of losing so many scientists may not be felt for months or years. But science permeates every part of the agency’s work, from assessing the health risks of chemical explosions like the one in Houston during Hurricane Harvey to determining when groundwater is safe to drink after a spill. Several employees said they feared the departures with few replacements in sight would put critical duties like responding to disasters and testing water for toxic chemicals in jeopardy.
As of Dec. 6, there were 14,188 full-time employees at the EPA By comparison, there were 17,558 workers at the end of the first year of the George W. Bush administration and 17,049 by the end of the first year of President Obama’s term. The EPA offered two major buyouts during the Obama administration, losing 900 employees in 2013 and an additional 465 the following year. Hundreds of other workers left through attrition and were not replaced.
Pruitt’s office has described the current buyout process as a continuation of Obama administration efforts to ensure that payroll expenses do not overtake funding for environmental programs.
Agency staff said they believed the Trump administration was purposely draining the EPA of expertise and morale.
Ronnie Levin spent 37 years at the EPA researching policies to address lead exposure from paint, gasoline and drinking water, most recently working as a lead inspector at the agency’s regional office overseeing New England. She retired in November after what she described as months of low morale at the agency. And with the lead enforcement office targeted for elimination as part of Trump’s proposed budget, she said, “It was hard to get your enthusiasm up” for the job.
“This is exactly what they wanted, which is my biggest misgiving about leaving,” Levin said. “They want the people there to be more docile and nervous and less invested in the agency.”
Lynda Deschambault, a chemist and physical scientist who left the EPA at the end of August after 26 years, said her office in Region 9, based in San Francisco, had been hollowed out. The office saw 21 departures this year and no hires. “The office was a morgue,” she said.
Conservatives who helped lead the Trump administration’s transition and prepared for eliminating vast parts of the agency said scientists’ worries were misplaced.
“To me it’s not necessarily a sign of catastrophe,” said David Kreutzer, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation who advised Trump on the EPA during the transition. He said the agency under President Obama was engaged in “phenomenal overreach” and that the Trump administration’s efforts were aimed at correcting that.
In proposing this year to slash the EPA’s budget by 31 percent, Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, called the effort part of Trump’s plan to eliminate entrenched government workers. “You can’t drain the swamp and leave all the people in it,” Mulvaney said. “So, I guess the first place that comes to mind will be the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Jan Nation, who works in EPA’s Region 3, based in Philadelphia, where 46 people either retired or took a buyout this year, lamented the administration’s approach to federal workers. “We are not the swamp. The swamp are all the people who don’t have a specific function to make our government work,” Nation said. “If you have a swamp to drain, I know people in the Army Corps of Engineers who can do it.”
Talia Buford and Lisa Song contributed reporting to this article.
In 2006, John Mohawk — Seneca author, historian, and professor — spoke on a Bioneers panel about traditional Indian knowledge and nutrition. Before Columbus, said Mohawk, Indian nations made choices about their food crops not based on profit potential, but on sustainability and nutrition. Often inhabiting the same locations for hundreds of years, these Indigenous Peoples became experts in the medicinal qualities and nutritional potential of native plants. Among the most important of these was corn.
The corn that Indian nations ate pre-1492 wasn’t the same as the corn we buy at grocery stores today. Because it was intended to be as nutritionally fulfilling as possible — rather than as easy to propagate as possible — the corn grown by Mohawk’s ancestors was dense in nutrients, protein, and fiber. Moreover, the corn was slow to digest, making it particularly filling, and it was a low-glycemic index food, making it a smart staple food for preventing diabetes. In practically every way, the corn grown and consumed by Indigenous Peoples was superior to most modern, widely consumed varieties found in stores and restaurants today.
“When you look at Indigenous foods, the food value in heritage foods is far greater than the food value in commercial food,” said Mohawk. “The food value in commercial food is weighed in dollars, and the food value in heritage foods is weighed in something we might call life force. Subsequently, you could live on heritage foods and thrive on heritage foods, actually eating quite a bit less vegetable matter than you needed to have the same life if you’re going to have on the commercial foods.”
Colonization and Declining Nutrition
Among the many terrible effects of the European colonization of North America was the gradual degradation of Native agricultural practices. Vast stretches of Native farming lands were destroyed by white colonists, who were threatened by the potential market competition of Indigenous corn. Seeds and stores of corn were destroyed, too, making any future farming — and, in fact, living — extremely challenging for the people who once owned and inhabited North America.
The European colonization slowly but dramatically changed the way Indigenous Peoples interacted with food. Unable to grow their own crops, their relationship with and understanding of the plants they once cultivated began to dwindle. European farming practices optimized agriculture for financial gain, prioritizing yields over nutrition. The type of high-quality crops once prevalent in North America became hard to find.
The development of processed convenience foods in the 20th century took an additional toll on Native communities. Diabetes rates sky-rocketed. Government agents convinced Indigenous people that traditional farming practices and native crops that sustained them for centuries were inferior, and that they could trust industrially produced food.
Though Native diets and environments had changed, Mohawk was determined not to give up on tradition. “People left stories, and they left records about how they did things, what they did, what they ate, how they prepared their food and where they got their food from,” he said. “How they used medicine and everything, it’s available to us. It’s not lost, it’s just not used.”
The Creation of the Iroquois White Corn Project
In 1997, Mohawk sowed the seeds of what would become known as the Iroquois White Corn Project in the Cattaraugus Reservation in Irving, New York. Mohawk, along with his wife, Yvonne Dion-Buffalo, began cultivating and harvesting the Iroquois White Corn his ancestors grew and processing it using traditional techniques.
Bioneers’ Arty Mangan, Director of the organization’s Restorative Food Systems program, began working closely with Mohawk and Dion-Buffalo to make large-scale cultivation of the crop possible. Together, they turned Mohawk’s parents’ cabin into a processing facility, producing cornmeal, roasted cornmeal and hominy.
Mangan headed up the task of creating a large market for the White Corn. By connecting Mohawk with well-known names in the restaurant industry, Mangan helped Iroquois White Corn reach new, discerning customers. Eventually, Mohawk’s corn was being served at Chicago’s Charlie Trotter’s, a two-star Michelin restaurant; Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill in New York; Judy Wick’s White Dog Café in Philadelphia; and even once at the Environmental Media Awards celebration. The project itself received significant press, and after Gourmet Magazine described “the rich, toasty flavor” of Iroquois White Corn flour, more than 100 readers called to order 10-pound bags for the holidays.
Both Mohawk and Dion-Buffalo passed away more than ten years ago, but their work with the Iroquois White Corn Project lives on. The Project no longer focuses on selling crops to high-end customers. Instead, White Corn products are produced for sale locally and online. Bioneers raised the funds needed to work with Mohawk to streamline the Iroquois White Corn Project in such a way that it could be easily turned over to Native employees.
The Iroquois White Corn, sometimes referred to as “Tuscarora White,” grown by Mohawk and his ancestors has been added to Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste, “a living catalog of delicious and distinctive foods facing extinction,” which aims to keep endangered, historical foods in production.
Watch a video of John Mohawk speaking at Bioneers 2006 below:
Behind the daily distractions of Trump’s fitful presidency, his administration is wielding power and making radical changes and it is nowhere more evident than in the regulatory agencies: FDA, EPA, Department of Energy, USDA, etc. It should be said that even before Trump, these agencies had many deficiencies in their often-weak efforts to fulfill their mission of protecting the public’s interest, but now any ability to serve that mission is under full frontal assault.
Even organic agriculture is not safe from the administration’s destructive overreach. The USDA wants to withdraw the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices rule (OLPP), which was unanimously approved by the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), widely supported by the organic industry and gained the approval of over 99% of the 47,000 responses from the public.
The rule is meant to distinguish organic animal husbandry practices from the gross inhumane way that livestock are treated in conventional concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where thousands of animals are crammed into confined space, living in their own waste, and eating an unnatural diet.
The innovative Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, who has pioneered the gold standard of animal welfare on Polyface Farm, said that a chicken has a right to express its “chickeness.” In other words, animals produced for food still have a right to express their instinctual habits and fulfill their biological destiny. Cows graze in pastures, chickens should have room to peck, scratch and roam in the sunshine, and when allowed to express their indigenous behavior in a proper environment free from industrial distress, animals grow to be vigorous, content, fulfilled beings that provide healthier food and also perform ecosystem services like enhancing soil fertility.
But as the OLPP tries to codify some life-promoting practices, the USDA prefers to favor the degenerative inhumane practices of the worst players who regard living sentient animals as nothing more than machines while economically disadvantaging producers who treat their animals with respect and compassion.
Mark Lipson, Senior Policy and Program Specialist for the Organic Farming Research Foundation was the Sustainable and Organic Agriculture Policy Advisor at the USDA under the Obama administration. According to Lipson, there are a few very large and influential organic egg producers who are taking advantage of some of the vague aspects of the organic standards on animal welfare by running huge animal confinement operations; they do not want to operate under a stronger more humane rule. Ironically, these entities are joined in their opposition by some non-organic producers who oppose any constraint on the CAFO system; so, the arguments against the new rule are based, in part, by companies that aren’t even organic.
Lipson said, “The withdrawal of the rule is probably illegal and an abuse of power by USDA and the Secretary of Agriculture. It’s not the end of organic, but it is problematic in terms of the efforts of the organic industry’s consensus to raise the bar on animal care and welfare. The Organic Trade Association (OTA) is suing the USDA. The court case will be crucial and people should be grateful that OTA has the resources and the commitment to take this to court. The comment period goes for a week from today, there should be a massive public response to say no to the withdrawal of what is one of the most strenuously worked on rules in the history of organic. It’s probably not perfect, but it does codify the best practices that many producers are using now, whether it’s the rule or not.”
Don’t let the Trump administration ignore the public’s interest and compromise organic standards. The organic industry has worked hard to create a healthy alternative to industrial practices that disregard the earth, people’s health and the welfare of animals. Make your voice heard, protect organic standards. The deadline is Jan 16.
This article was published in B the Change, which exists to inform and inspire people who have a passion for using business as a force for good in the world.
A version of this article was originally published onForbes.com.
Ten years ago, a small group of business leaders stood together to make a “declaration of interdependence.” They declared the simple truth that business should work for everyone.
They weren’t leaders of big businesses. Few, if any, of these businesses were — or are — household names. They were leaders of the kinds of small businesses that make up the vast majority of businesses in the world.
What these business leaders declared wasn’t especially controversial. They declared that they cared about the people who worked for them, the communities in which they did business, and the environment they would leave for their grandkids. They declared they wanted their businesses, and business as a whole, to work for more than just themselves and their shareholders — they declared that business should work for everyone.
While what these business leaders declared wasn’t anything special, what these business leaders did, however, was — they backed up their talk with action. They were the Founding B Corporations.
Here are just a few examples of what it looks like when business works for everyone:
A business that works for everyone looks like Rhino Foods, whose income-advance program helps employees like Paul Phillips who live paycheck to paycheck manage unexpected expenses. Did you know that 63 percent of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency? Ted Castle from Rhino Foods knows, and that is why he is working to help other businesses across the country replicate Rhino’s income-advance program.
A business the works for everyone looks like Greyston Bakery, whose open-hiring program gives returning citizens like Dion Drew and other hard-to-employ workers a chance to build their futures with a quality job that offers them dignity, respect and a pathway to a securer life. Did you know that 70 million Americans — that’s one in three adults in the United States — have criminal records? Mike Brady from Greyston Bakery knows, and that is why he has offered to teach other leaders how to build an open-hiring model into their business.
A business that works for everyone looks like My Strong Home, whose innovative financing and construction business helps families from New Orleans to Alabama to South Carolina afford the basic roofing upgrades that can prevent storms from displacing and devastating families. It also saves them money on their insurance premiums. Did you know that more than 10 million Americans living in coastal communities are threatened by increasingly frequent and powerful storms like those we’ve seen recently in Houston, Florida, and Puerto Rico? Margot Brandenburg* from My Strong Home knows, and she knows that prevention is less costly for communities and taxpayers. That is why My Strong Home is working to secure growth capital so their needed services can reach more families before they are in desperate need.
It may surprise you that there already more than 2,000 B Corporations across 130 industries and 50 countries. It may surprise you even more that there are already another 20,000 businesses are following their lead to conduct business as if people mattered. These businesses are using free tools like the B Impact Assessment to manage their positive impact on workers, communities, and the environment with as much rigor as their profits. These leaders are redefining success in business by competing not only to be best in the world, but to be best for the world.
It doesn’t surprise me.
It doesn’t surprise me because a growing number of people recognize the simple truth that if business doesn’t work for everyone, eventually it’s bad for business. And, not incidentally and more importantly, it’s bad for society. It’s not just B Corps, Harvard professors and foundation presidents who agree; increasingly, we’re hearing the same from global economists and some of the biggest investors in the world.
B Corp Declaration of Interdependence
We envision a global economy that uses business as a force for good.
This economy comprises a new type of corporation — the B Corporation — which is purpose-driven and creates benefit for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.
As B Corporations and leaders of this emerging economy, we believe:
That we must be the change we seek in the world.
That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.
That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.
To do so requires that we act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another and thus responsible for each other and future generations.
More than 200 years ago, a Declaration of Independence was made to declare the simple truth that all humans are created equal. Living into that simple truth catalyzed the spread of freedom as never before. Ten years ago, a Declaration of Interdependence was made to declare the simple truth that all humans are connected. Living into that simple truth will catalyze the spread of prosperity and security as never before.
As business leaders, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Earlier this year, in the face of rising insecurity, fear, hate speech and violence, and in the absence of trust in our economic and political systems, the B Corp community issued a call to all business leaders to join us in building a more inclusive economy that will create a more shared and durable prosperity for all.
To lead by example, the B Corp community launched an Inclusive Economy Challenge that resulted in nearly 300 concrete, measurable actions being taken to move us 300 steps closer towards an inclusive economy. Some businesses replicated Rhino’s income-advance program; some businesses increased the diversity of their teams, management and boards; some businesses created more inclusive supply chains; some businesses created worker-ownership opportunities.
In early October 2017, the B Corp community gathered in Toronto for their annual gathering under the banner of Interdependence and redoubled their efforts for Year 2 of the Inclusive Economy Challenge. And they’ve created all kinds of resources for any business who shares their vision of an inclusive economy to join them.
A shared and durable prosperity for all is the unfulfilled promise of capitalism, but the current economic system isn’t yet delivering on that promise. Only by recognizing the fundamental truth of our interdependence — and taking concrete, measurable action to build an inclusive economy — can we put out the fires of populism that threaten our political and economic systems.
It’s simple really. We need business that works for everyone.
If you caught the Golden Globes last night, you may have seen that there were a few Bioneers faculty in the audience. On Sunday Meryl Streep and Amy Poehler took, as their plus-ones, Bioneers speakers Ai-Jen Poo and Saru Jayaraman.
Along with Poehler and Streep, several other actresses including Emma Watson, Laura Dern, Susan Sarandon and Emma Stone were accompanied by female activists at the awards show. The activists included Tarana Burke, the founder of the “me too” movement and
This is a watershed moment, a golden opportunity to help leverage increased visibility into movement for change.
Help amplify the issues and campaigns that Saru Jayaraman and Ai-Jen Poo are engaged in; movements for workers rights, equal pay and against sexual harassment by sharing their work widely with your network and taking action. Links to their campaigns, along with their Bioneers talks, podcasts and articles are below. Make Meryl Streep and Amy Poehler’s actions matter by getting engaged today.
Saru Jayaraman was a keynote speaker at this year’s Bioneers gathering, touching on wage equality, the history of tips, and fighting harassment in the service industry. Her work with ROC United is to ensure all people who work in restaurants can achieve financial independence and improve their quality of life by engaging people who work in the industry, employers and consumers. You too can take action through their #1FairWage campaign. Saru has also been featured on Bioneers radio:
A new generation of visionary change-makers is reframing the race conversation, and designing new tools to transform our unconscious biases and create justice. With: Racial justice pathfinders Rinku Sen, Saru Jarayaman and Malkia Cyril.
Ai-Jen Poo offers a view into the ways in which we are all increasingly connected at Bioneers Women’s Leadership and Economics, which was hosted by the Bioneers Everywoman’s Leadership program as a supplement to the Bioneers 2012 Annual Conference.
Please be sure to help amplify the work of these inspiring women through your network by joining their campaigns and sharing the videos and pieces that resonate with you.
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.
Recently, New Hampshire Representative Ellen Read sponsored CACR19, a state constitutional amendment that guarantees local communities the right to make the decisions affecting the places where they live – including recognizing Community Rights over corporate claimed “rights.” The New Hampshire Community Rights Network (NHCRN) and local residents drafted the measure with support from CELDF. Several co-sponsors have signed on, creating a bi-partisan coalition.
It sounds simple enough: the right to local community self-government. But it has many New Hampshire legislators in a tizzy. One of them says that the people do not, and should not, govern themselves. Check out one resident’s powerful exchange with a legislator here, in response to a Letter-to-the-Editor supporting the amendment.
From Representative Brian Stone:
NOV 14 • The concept of ‘home rule’ isn’t synonymous with the liberty we all enjoy in New Hampshire. Home rule permits municipalities to make as many ordinances and laws that apply to their municipalities as they see fit. More laws, regulations, ordinances… Does this sound like freedom to anyone? The State of NH protects our freedoms by setting out what municipalities are permitted to do in regards to these realms. If you think home rule is so wonderful, all you have to do is visit Massachusetts. I’ll let you be the judge of which state has more freedom. Revolutionaries didn’t fight to live in a state where the law changes from town to town, and their freedoms could be highly restricted merely because of the municipal boundaries they live in.
Furthermore, the freedoms in the NH Constitution are the law of the land, and are enforced.
The people that seem to push ‘home rule’ in NH that I have seen in my House Cmte. that regularly sees these types of bills are usually from extremely liberal towns that want to restrict the freedom of their citizens, but can’t because we live in a state without ‘home rule’, so they have to ask the Legislature.
I’ll continue to stand against ‘home rule’ and ensure that NH citizens have liberties anywhere in NH they go knowing that when they cross borders between towns they aren’t subjecting themselves to more regulations, ordinances, and laws…
On another important note, towns frequently want to do something that is not in the best interest of the State and its citizens as a whole. Home rule would permit a town to have veto power on any important plans such as infrastructure projects that benefit the rest of the State.
I also just wanted to add the following on what the NH Constitution talks about:
It grants no direct power to towns or cities. The only constitutional power that is granted is Part I, art. 39, which prohibits the legislature from changing the form of government of a town or city without the approval of the voters. Other than that single instance, the New Hampshire Constitution grants power to the legislature, which in turn may grant power to municipalities if it wishes to through statutes. The legislature may also take those powers back again by changing or repealing the laws. This concept has been firmly stated by the New Hampshire Supreme Court: “…towns are but subdivisions of the State and have only the powers the State grants to them.” Piper v. Meredith, 110 N.H. 291 (1970). Further, “[u]nder our State Constitution ‘(t)he supreme legislative power…(is) vested in the senate and house of representatives ….’ N.H. Const. pt. II, art. 2. See also N.H. Const., pt. I, art. 29. For these reasons, we have held that the towns only have ‘such powers as are expressly granted to them by the legislature and such as are necessarily implied or incidental thereto.’” Girard v. Allenstown, 121 N.H. 268, 270‐71 (1981).
From Monica Christofili:
NOV 16 • Representative Stone, your comments show thoughtful mindfulness of our NH Constitution and your constituents’ freedoms. However, the proposed State Amendment is not about home rule. (The editors used “home rule” in the title, not the letter writers.) Instead, the amendment is about recognizing, securing, & protecting NH citizens’ right to self-government. In other words, it’s about community rights affirmed in our Declaration of Independence & NH’s Constitution. Namely, Part 1, Art. 1 of NH’s Constitution declares that government of right originates from the people and is founded in consent. Art. 2 declares we have natural, essential, and inherent rights.
This said, you’re correct. NH state law determines what happens in our communities. Yet this often means the state denies communities the authority to protect themselves. Therein, Art. 10 of NH’s Constitution declares that when government no longer protects its people, the people have a right and a duty to reform the old or establish new government: “The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”
In other words, the amendment is about inalienable rights, about town residents determining whether projects benefitting the state “over-all” will affect the health, safety, & welfare of themselves and nature. How do we figure this “over-all” sum to begin with? Consider an energy project that brings jobs but also threatens residents and ecosystem. The project is no longer benefiting the state over-all because it creates a sacrifice zone of a town’s residents and ecosystems. Is this town worth less than the state as a whole? How do we justify that viewpoint to town inhabitants when they cannot say no to a project hurting them? You mention that community rights supporters who want to say no to such projects are usually from liberal towns that want to limit rights of citizens. You might be interested in this study about the community rights movement transcending political party, age, and gender: https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/water-concerns.
You also state, “More laws, regulations, ordinances. Does this sound like freedom to anyone?” But does it sound like freedom when we can’t say no to corporate projects depleting our aquifers, drilling through our estuaries, poisoning our water? It doesn’t to me, my husband, or to our 5 year old son, who asks us if his friends who were poisoned with contaminated water at Pease AFB are going to die and if the contamination is in our water supply. We don’t know how to answer him since Pease contamination has reached the Great Bay Estuary, right next to our water supply. We’d like to be able to say to our son that if a project ever comes near us that the state is allowing even though it is going to poison our water, we’ll be able to exercise our freedom to say no to the project and yes to his inalienable right to clean water.
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.
This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.
FPA reports that the scores are down significantly this year because neither the House nor the Senate spent much time on food issues, leaving FPA with little to grade. Senators were graded on 1 vote and their co-sponsorship of 10 bills, while Representatives were graded on 5 votes and 11 bills.
Any U.S. citizen can view the grades assigned to their Senators and Congresspeople by FPA via an online scorecard tool.
Ken Cook, a co-founder of FPA and the President of the Environmental Working Group, explains that the scorecard highlights a “frustrating lack of bipartisanship on food policy votes.” According to Cook, “food policy is not a partisan issue. Congress should prioritize a more balanced, healthy and sustainable food system. With this year’s report showing great room for improvement…voters need a clearer sense of where their legislators stand.”
FPA designs the scorecard to capture the full spectrum of policies impacting the food system in an attempt to demonstrate the connections between them. “We believe this annual overall snapshot will help break down silos in the food movement so that the members themselves, and the public, recognize the multiplicity of issues impacting food, they write.
This year, while 220 members of Congress received perfect scores of 100 percent,130 members were given scores of 0 percent, the lowest possible.
“We deserve better,” said Tom Colicchio, another co-founder of FPA. “Congress has allowed the political dysfunction of a new Administration to not only prevent positive food bills from moving forward but to roll back basic critical protections that keep our food system safe. FPA will continue to hold members of Congress accountable for the votes they cast – or I should say lack of votes this year – that impact food and our food system,” said Colicchio.
The scorecard did grade a handful of bills and votes positively. “We applaud those in Congress who broke through the noise to raise their voice for the good food movement,” said FPA Executive Director Monica Mills. “Their efforts did not go unnoticed.”
Positively-rated efforts included bills proposed by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), as well as by representatives Susan Davis (D-CA-53), Alma Adams (D-NC-12), John Faso (R- NY-19), Jared Huffman (D-CA-02), and Elizabeth Esty (D-CT- 05).
Mills also suggested that the scorecard should have a direct bearing on the 2018 midterm elections. It will assist FPA and other organizations working in the food movement to determine their strategy moving into 2018 and help voters decide which lawmakers’ food policy records should earn their votes. According to a poll published by FPA, food issues are highly persuasive among likely swing voters.
“While this year’s Scorecard shows a weak Congressional agenda on food policy, this is only a midterm score,” said Mills. “Congress has a huge opportunity to show leadership on these issues as we move into discussions ahead of the 2018 Farm Bill. It is our job to hold them accountable during the next election cycle.”
This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.
Carl Safina is an ecologist and award-winning author who writes about oceans, animals, and the human relationship with the natural world. A long-time advocate for ocean preservation, Safina was the inaugural holder of the Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook, and President of The Safina Center. He recently shared his experience with nature’s intelligence with Bioneers, and he was a keynote speaker at the National Bioneers Conference 2017.
In A Sea in Flames (Crown Publishers, 2011), Safina shares his account of a months-long, manmade disaster that shook the U.S. As he travels across the Gulf, Safina attempts to deconstruct a series of misjudgments that led to the now-infamous Deepwater Horizon explosion. The excerpt that follows, a selection from “Part Two: A Season of Anguish,” explores the broader impacts that oil spills have on the environment and its inhabitants.
“My name’s Dicky Toups,” says the pilot before he starts the engine of the seaplane I’m climbing into. “But they call me Captain Coon-ass.”
We overfly the emerald maze of the vast Mississippi Delta. Captain Coon-ass points, saying, “There’s a big ole gator.”
To the far points of view, America’s greatest marshes lie dissected, bisected, and trisected, diced by long, straight artificial channels and man-angled meanders, all aids to access and shipping. For the vast multimillion-acre emerald marshes, they are death by a thousand cuts.
The sign had said, “Welcome to Louisiana—America’s Wetland.” Pride and prejudice. People here depend on nature or the control of nature—or both. Keep an eye on nature; it can kill you here. But people can kill the place itself.
Since the 1930s, oil and gas companies have dug about 10,000 miles of canals through the oak and cypress forests, black mangrove swamps, and green marshes. Lined up, they could go straight through Earth with a couple thousand miles to spare. The salt water they brought killed coastal forests and subjected our greatest wetlands to steady erosion. Upstream, dams and levees hold back the sediment that could have helped heal some of that erosion. Starved on one end, eaten at the other. How to kill America’s wetlands. Long after this oil crisis is over, this chronic disease will continue doing far more damage than the oil.
All these Delta-slicing channels cause banks to dissolve, swapping wetlands for open water. Those channels also roll out red carpets for hurricanes. Incredibly, this has all cost Louisiana’s coast about 2,300 square miles of wetlands. Marshland continues to disintegrate at a rate of about 25 square miles a year. The rise in sea level due to global warming is also helping drown watery borderlands. Oil leak or no leak, these things, all ongoing, constitute the most devastating human-made disaster that’s ever hit the Gulf. Bar none.
Only slowly does the muddy Mississippi lose itself to the oceanic blue of the open Gulf, a melting of identities, a meeting of watery minds. And also the drain for sediments, agricultural fertilizers, and deadzone-generating pollutants from the entire Midwest and most of the plains. Even before the oil blowout, this was a troubled place—a troubled place whose troubles have now escalated to a whole new level.
Two boats are tending booms around an island densely dotted with nesting pelicans. As I’ve noticed from the ground—but it’s even more striking from up here, at 3,500 feet—most of the coast is bare of booms and undefended. Where booms have been placed along the outer beach, many have already washed up onshore, already useless.
The sea-surface breeze pattern is interrupted by a marbling of slicks. Often such a pattern is perfectly natural, so I look carefully. It’s brown.
“Oil,” says Captain Coon-ass.
One of those slicks has nuzzled against the shore. There’s a boat there and some people are walking along the beach, inspecting a long boom that the wind has washed ashore.
The nearshore waters and beyond are dotted with drilling rigs for oil and gas, some abandoned. Like bringing coals to Newcastle, many of the rigs stand surrounded by floating oil.
Offshore, longer slicks ribbon their way out across the blue Gulf. As we follow them, the light slicks thicken with dark streaks that look from the air like wind-driven orange fingers, then like chocolate pudding. An ocean streaked with chocolate pudding.
A few miles out, the streaks grow darker still. Yet there remains far more open water than oil slick.
That changes. Blue water turned shiny purple. A bruise from a battering. The sea swollen with oil.
As the water darkens and the slicks widen, Captain Coon-ass points to a small plane below us, saying it’s on a scouting run for the C-130s that will follow to spray dispersants. More chemicals on a sea of chemicals.
Yet plenty of the oil—and I mean plenty—is not dissolved. Blue water turned brown.
“This is some pretty thick stuff right here,” Captain Coon-ass says. The crude is now drifting in broad bands that stretch to the horizon. “We’re lookin’ at twenty miles of oil right here.”
We’re directly over the source of the blowout. Below, two ships are drilling the relief wells that we’ve been told will take months. A dozen ships drift nearby, most with helicopter landing pads on them. What they’re all doing, heaven knows.
A fresh breeze puts whitecaps on the nonoiled patches of the black-and-blue sea. As the C-130 comes out, we turn northeast.
We’re headed toward the Chandeleurs, the line of sandy islands that have been much in the news for their at-risk bird rookeries. Soon we’re over Breton Sound, where a couple of days ago, from a boat, I saw no oil.
But now there is plenty of oil, moving in between the main coast and the islands.
Out to intercept the oil is a fleet of shrimp boats towing booms from the outriggers that would normally tow their nets. The idea appears to be that they will catch the oil at the surface, the way they catch shrimp at the seafloor.
Dozens of boats tow booms through the oil, but as they do, water and oil simply flow over them. Far from corralling it, they’re barely stirring it. As they pass, the oil—seemingly all of it—remains.
Louisiana lives by oil and by seafood. But oil rules. Fishing has nothing like the cash, the lobbyists, the destructive sophistication of the pusher to whose junk we’re all addicted. But Florida lives largely by the whiteness of its sand. It has long eschewed oil. And the difference in what politicians will and won’t say about oil is stark.
Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist returns from a little airtime over the Gulf. His message: “It’s the last thing in the world I would want to see happen in our beautiful state.” He adds, “Until you actually see it, I don’t know how you can comprehend and appreciate the sheer magnitude of that thing. It’s frightening. . . . It’s everywhere. It’s absolutely unbelievable.” Where oil money rules, governors are not at liberty to disclose such impressions. They’re probably not at liberty even to think them.
“The president is frustrated with everything, the president is frustrated with everybody, in the sense that we still have an oil leak,” says a White House spokesman.
But we’ve only just begun.
When Obama announced that he was opening up large new areas for offshore drilling, he said, “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” That’s exactly right. Leaks, spills, and blowouts are never expected. Yet we know they happen. That should make us thorough in preparedness. But the human mind lets down its guard if big danger seems rare and remote.
And so we did. In 2009, the Interior Department exempted BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling operations from a detailed environmental impact analysis after three reviews concluded that a massive oil spill was “unlikely.” Oil rig operators usually must submit a plan for how they’ll cope with a blowout. But in 2008, the Bush administration relaxed the rules. In 2009, the Obama administration said BP didn’t need to file a plan for how it would handle a blowout at the Deepwater Horizon. Now a BP spokesman insists, “We have a plan that has sufficient detail in it to deal with a blowout.”
Obviously, they don’t. Obviously, they aren’t.
“I’m of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster,” says Congressman Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “That, in my opinion, is what happened.” Bush and Cheney’s ties to big oil and their destruction of Interior oversight are infamous. But Obama’s Interior secretary’s ties to big energy also make environmentalists uneasy. As a senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar accepted some of BP’s ubiquitous campaign contributions. In 2005, Senator Salazar voted against increasing fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, and voted against an amendment to repeal tax breaks for ExxonMobil and other major petroleum companies. In 2006, he voted to expand Gulf of Mexico drilling. And then as Interior secretary, he pushed for more offshore drilling. The Interior secretary now says there have been well more than 30,000 wells drilled into the Gulf of Mexico, “and so this is a very, very rare event.” The oil from those offshore rigs accounts for 30 percent of the nation’s domestic oil production, he notes, adding. “And so for us to turn off those spigots would have a very, very huge impact on America’s economy right now.”
Probability, however, tells us that the spill’s a very, very inevitable event. Especially with 30,000 wells drilled and roughly 4,000 wells currently producing oil in the region. In 2007, the federal Minerals Management Service examined 39 rig blowouts that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico between 1992 and 2006. So, a blowout every four and a half months. I guess most are quickly controlled. Why aren’t we ready for one that isn’t? A car accident is a rare event, but we use our seat belts and we like to know we have air bags.
Rather than plan for the worst, Big Petroleum has indulged in—and been indulged by—a policy of waving away risks. In a 2009 exploration plan, BP strongly discounted the possibility of a catastrophic accident. A Shell analysis for drilling off Alaska asserts that a “large liquid hydrocarbon spill [hydrocarbon meaning oil and gas] . . . is regarded as too remote and speculative to be considered a reasonably foreseeable impacting event.”
Foresee this: if you think it’s difficult to clean up oil in the warm, calm Gulf of Mexico, imagine trying to do it in Arctic waters with icebergs, frozen seas, and twenty hours of darkness.
Speaking of the cold and the dark, “Drill, baby, drill” queen Sarah Palin just has to say something about all this. So she says we shouldn’t trust “foreign” oil companies such as BP. She says, “Don’t naively trust—verify.” Verified: her husband worked for BP for eighteen years. Palin blames “extreme environmentalists” (c’mon, Sarah, is there any other kind?) for causing this blowout because they’ve lobbied hard to prevent new drilling in Alaska. If you follow what she has in place of logic, it could seem she’d rather that this had happened in her home state.
In and out of the comedy of horrors strides BP CEO and court jester Tony Hayward. “I think I have said all along that the company will be judged not on the basis of an accident that, you know, frankly was not our accident.” That’s what he actually says. Highlighting the failed blowout preventer, Hayward says, “That is a piece of equipment owned and operated by Transocean, maintained by Transocean; they are absolutely accountable for its safety and reliability.”
Transocean’s president and CEO says drilling projects “begin and end with the operator: in this case, BP.”
Take that.
He says that Transocean finished drilling three days before the explosion. And he says there’s “no reason to believe” that the blowout preventor’s mechanics failed. That’s what he actually says.
Halliburton’s spokesman says his company followed BP’s drilling plan, federal regulations, and standard industry practices.
In sum, BP has blamed drilling contractor Transocean, which owned the rig. Transocean says BP was responsible for the well’s design and pretty much everything else, and that oil-field services contractor Halliburton was responsible for cementing the well shut. Halliburton says its workers were just following BP’s orders, but that Transocean was responsible for maintaining the rig’s blowout preventer. And the Baby Bear said, “Somebody’s been lying in my bed.”
By the end of the first week of May, a heavy smell of oil coming ashore along parts of Louisiana’s coast begins prompting dozens of complaints about headaches, burning eyes, and nausea.
Meanwhile, I hear on the radio that in an effort to do something, “People from around the world have been giving the hair off their heads, the fur off their pets’ backs, and the tights off their legs to make booms and mats to mop up the oily mess spewing out of the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico.” Whether any of this stuff was ever actually used, I can’t say. I never saw any; that I can say.
By May’s second week, heavy machinery, civilian and military dump trucks, Army jeeps, front-end loaders, backhoes, and National Guard helicopters are pushing up and dropping down sand to keep an impending invasion of oil from reaching the marshes in and around Grand Isle, at the tip of Louisiana. Much of the mobilization falls to the Marine Spill Response Corporation, formed in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster and maintained largely by fees from the biggest oil firms. Its vice president of marine spill response says that most of its equipment, including booms and skimmers, was bought in 1990. She says, “The technology hasn’t changed that much since then.”
“This is the largest, most comprehensive spill response mounted in the history of the United States and the oil and gas industry,” crows BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, sounding proud when he ought to be aghast and horrified by the scale of the mess and the upheaval.
Workers farther inland are diverting fresh water from the Mississippi River into the marshlands, hoping the added flow will help push back any oily water that comes knocking. “We’re trying to save thousands of acres of marsh here, where the shrimp grow, where the fin-fish lay their eggs, where the crabs come in and out,” says the director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission. Enough Mississippi River water to fill the Empire State Building is now rushing into southeastern Louisiana wetlands every half hour. “We have opened every diversion structure we control on the state and parish level to try to limit the oil approaching our coasts,” says the assistant director of the Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration, “nearly 165,000 gallons every second.”
“It can’t hurt,” says a wetlands ecology professor at Ohio State University and an authority on the Mississippi’s interaction with the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, but it can.
***
New fear factor: hurricane season. The image: hurricanes that could “churn up towering black waves and blast beaches and crowded cities with oil-soaked gusts.” The news stories carry attributions such as “experts warned.” And precise-sounding imprecision like: “As hurricane season officially starts Tuesday . . .” and “Last month, forecasters who issue a closely watched Colorado State University seasonal forecast said there was a 44 percent chance a hurricane would enter the Gulf of Mexico in the next few months, far greater than the 30 percent historic average.”
To the ambiguity and imprecision, add unnecessary intonations of worrisome complexity: “The high winds may distribute oil over a wide area,” says a National Hurricane Center meteorologist, adding, “It’s a complex problem that really needs to be looked at in great detail to try to understand what the oceanic response is when you have an oil layer at the sea surface.”
To most normal people faced with the real event of an out-of-control mess, especially people who’ve survived hurricanes, that kind of noninformation stokes anxiety, provokes fear—and gives no one a clear clue about what to do. Does one make decisions based on the difference between 30 and 44 percent? News you can use, it isn’t. It’s news that can help ruin your health.
Insult to injury: “Safety first,” says a BP spokesman. “We build in hurricane preparedness, and that requires us to take the necessary precautions.”
By mid-May, something like 10,000 people are Being Paid for cleanup eff orts around the Gulf. BP has little choice. Anything less, there’d be riots. Most are fishermen riding around looking for oil, dragging booms that don’t collect much oil, or putting out booms that can work only on oil that hasn’t been dissolved by dispersants. About a million and a half feet—roughly 300 miles—of boom is already out along the coast. Other people are out picking oil off beaches with shovels.
How much oil are we dealing with? This gets good: Purdue professor Steve Wereley performs computer analyses on the video of the leaking oil to see how far and how fast particles are moving (a technique called particle image velocimetry). His conclusion: the well is leaking between 56,000 and 84,000 barrels daily. His other conclusion: “It’s definitely not 5,000 barrels a day.”
Just a few days ago, during congressional testimony, officials from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton estimated a “worst-case” scenario maximum flow of 60,000 barrels a day. Yet a BP spokesman says the company stands by its estimate of 5,000 barrels per day. There’s “no way to calculate a definite amount,” he says, adding coyly, “We are focused on stopping the leak and not measuring it.”
That’s Bull Poop. As the director of the Texas A&M University’s geochemical and environmental research group points out: “If you don’t know the flow, it is awfully hard to design the thing that is going to work.”
Killing the well is proving difficult. Killing public confidence is easier. The fact that the real flow will turn out to be sixty times what BP was first saying, and twelve times the Coast Guard’s most oft-repeated estimate, does the trick handily.
Searching for the perfect news round-up? Look no further! We’ll keep you savvy with all the Bioneers creativity and inspiration you need in your life. Follow the Bioneers Blog for our bi-weekly news roundup:
“Over the last five years, intersectionality has become a buzzword and an accountability standard for social change organizations and leaders…Two patterns especially trouble me – conflating the word ‘intersectional’ with the word ‘identity,’ and applying intersectional analysis inconsistently. There are lots of great examples of intersectional organizing for us to learn from, and the pay off can be profound when we get it right.” Rinku Sen writes on Intersectionality (a term created by Kimberlé Crenshaw)
Malkia A. Cyril and Dallas Goldtooth are on Full Color Future’s #FullColor50, “showcasing leaders — in tech, media, commerce, and advocacy — who are building a new narrative through their work.”
“Coal doesn’t make financial sense and New Energy Economy has prevailed at the Commission level in proving our case.” Mariel Nanasi celebrates the power of the people in this latest victory from New Mexico
“DRM law has the power to do untold harm. Because it affords corporations the power to control the use of their products after sale, the power to decide who can compete with them and under what circumstances, and even who gets to warn people about defective products, DRM laws represent a powerful temptation.” Cory Doctorow for his Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) »
Eriel Deranger’s Indigenous Climate Action rejects award to move Aviva to “step up and show real leadership to adopt policies that result in substantive change. This moment could move Aviva, and the divestment conversation, forward to recognize Indigenous rights and cease all underwriting of tar sands corporations and full divestment from fossil fuels.”
“It poses a risk to the Indigenous rights of tribal nations all along the route and it’s a complete disregard for free prior and informed consent as guaranteed on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” Dallas Goldtooth speaks to CBC News on campaigns fighting against the Keystone pipeline’s construction.
Tara Houska sets the “Thanksgiving” record straight for Mic in this viral video.
The regulations are “not just about sharing tips with the back-of-the-house staff — that part would be okay — but employers would have the right to decide what to do with the tips.” Saru Jayaraman in the Washington Post and in Business Insider
“There is now a broad consensus among forest scientists that we have considerably less fire in our forests today compared to the natural levels that occurred prior to fire-suppression policies.” Chad Hanson for Sierra Magazine »
“Working within communities to make them stronger, healthier, and better—nothing the Sierra Club does today is more important. We, too, are in construction: It’s a cleaner, better future we’re building.” Michael Brune for Sierra Magazine
“Now a financial advisor for RBC Wealth Management where he advises on more than $2 billion in environmentally sustainable investments, Thomas Van Dyck shared insights that were also drawn from more than four years of work with the Divest/Invest movement. The organization urges investors to ‘join the global investor movement accelerating the sustainable energy transition’ by divesting their fossil fuel assets.” HuffPost covers Tom Van Dyck at #Bioneers2017
Joan Blades talks Living Room Conversations on the TEDWomen stage:
“Net Neutrality isn’t hard to understand, except when someone makes it so, because muddying issues is often a profitable endeavour – expensively-sown confusion is a mainstay of climate denial and a tactic that goes all the way back to the tobacco industry’s work to obscure the link between smoking and cancer.” Cory Doctorow for the New Internationalist
“If you give it a chance, nature will be much kinder than we deserve.” David Suzuki speaks to the youth, hope, and nature’s brilliance in this CBC piece.
Jeremy Kagan’s film, SHOT, is now available on iTunes and Amazon.
“With sexual harassment and assault revealed to be prevalent in public workplaces, imagine what is happening to workers who labor behind closed doors in homes around the country.” Ai-Jen Poo in the Washington Post
“Early next year, this slip of land, a little more than half an acre in all, will become the first physical piece of the Sogorea Te Land Trust, a project they’ve been working on since 2014 to return indigenous land — specifically Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone land — to indigenous stewardship.” Corrina Gould speaks truth in the San Francisco Chronicle
“What gives me more hope than ever is the increased energy people are putting into solutions. People are increasingly becoming clear that they have to be the leaders that they have been waiting for — and stepping into that role of leadership.” Vien Truong offers reason to be hopeful in 2018
“It is always assumed that people will be able to return to their place of origin’ once the disaster passes. That’s a distinctly unrealistic assumption in our age of drowning island nations and vanishing coastlines.” Naomi Klein on the U.S.’s Temporary Protected Status program for the The Intercept
“Perhaps no outsider—no visiting expert, no dispassionate observer, certainly no outside investor—will notice the inherent weakness and cruelty of a one-product economy in a region or a country. But the adverse effects will certainly be visible and acutely feelable to the resident insiders.” Wendell Berry’s new work, The Art of Loading Brush, in Sierra Magazine
“Nobody has ever explored these deep waters, and no one on the team knows what we’ll find.” James Nestor for bioGraphic »
“The Center for Media Justice will join dozens of other digital rights champions to take Ajit Pai’s FCC to court to win back our digital voice. We’ll take action in the street if we have to, and do whatever is necessary to preserve the right of communication for communities of color, and all those with voices at the margins who, now more than ever, need to be heard.” Malkia A. Cyril on the #NetNeutrality repeal
“What the storm also did is show that we can’t wait for the government to address social and environmental problems. We can’t just sit here.” Jason Mark reports from Puerto Rico for Sierra Magazine
“But something big is starting to shift. After years of effort from activists, there are signs that the world’s financial community is finally rousing itself in the fight against global warming.” The latest from Bill Mckibben in The New York Times
“For me, Jones’ story helped bring into focus how our systems of social dominance—capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—require winners and losers. We’re all steeped in these systems. The win-lose paradigm plays out daily in the subtle and not-so-subtle details of our lives, at work, in the kitchen, in our bank accounts. And the one system with the potential to equalize us—democracy—is kept caged by the winners who want to stay on top.” Executive Director of YES! Magazine, Christine Hanna on Van Jones
Citizen Science featured in the The Economist! Shannon Dosemagen and the groundbreaking work of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science highlighted in this beautiful piece
“Jayaraman said it is sad to see the restaurant race-wage gap so high in the #BayArea, a place that is hailed as a center for progressive thought and ideals. She said that, like income inequality and housing affordability, the restaurant race-wage gap is one more example of the gulf between those in the Bay Area with privilege and those without.” Saru Jayaraman for KQED News »
It has been a wonderful fall in the Rockies, with cottonwoods and aspens more brilliant than I’ve seen them in years. When you duck into the groves, the air itself is golden. Quaking aspen has a great name: Populus tremuloides. It describes on the tongue what the aspen does, which is to tremble in the slightest breeze, with a sound like bones rattling.
“My name’s Dicky Toups,” says the pilot before he starts the engine of the seaplane I’m climbing into. “But they call me Captain Coon-ass.”
