Page 112 – Bioneers

Why America Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

In the early hours of June 5, 2015, Gary Bravo was leaving Sammy T’s in downtown Huntsville, Alabama. The club was hosting a gay night because the last of the city’s few gay bars had closed and some downtown bars were picking up the slack.

As Bravo walked out with two co-workers, they encountered a group of young men. One grabbed Bravo’s friend, and Bravo intervened. The next thing he remembers, someone spun him around, and he was on the ground being punched and kicked while his attackers shouted homophobic slurs. Faggot. Cocksucker.

“A couple more hits and I would have ended up being brain dead,” he recalled.

Bravo suffered extensive injuries from the attack. His right eye was bloodied and swollen, and he couldn’t see from it for weeks. His eye socket had to be reconstructed.

Despite his attackers’ words during the beating, police did not investigate it as a hate crime, or report it to state or federal authorities as one.

Bravo’s case is just one of thousands lost each year to a deeply flawed system for collecting hate crime data, one that has left the U.S. with unreliable, incomplete official counts and little handle on the true scope of bias-motivated violence.

Under a federal law passed in 1990, the FBI is required to track and tabulate crimes in which there was “manifest evidence of prejudice” against a host of protected groups, including homosexuals, regardless of differences in how state laws define who’s protected. The FBI, in turn, relies on local law enforcement agencies to collect and submit this data, but can’t compel them to do so.

The evidence suggests that many police agencies across the country are not working very hard to count hate crimes. Thousands of them opt not to participate in the FBI’s hate crime program at all. Among the 15,000 that do, some 88 percent reported they had no hate crimes. According to federal records, the Huntsville Police Department has never reported a hate crime.

Local law enforcement agencies reported a total of 6,121 hate crimes in 2016 to the FBI, but estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the federal government, pin the number of potential hate crimes at almost 250,000 a year — one indication of the inadequacy of the FBI’s data.

“The current statistics are a complete and utter joke,” said Roy Austin, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. Austin also worked at the White House on data and civil rights and helped develop an open data plan for police data.

It’s true that many hate crime cases fall away before they start because about half the victims never report them to authorities.

But to understand why so many cases that are reported to authorities still fall through the cracks, ProPublica requested incident reports or aggregate data from more than 350 law enforcement agencies in 48 states, including the 50 largest agencies nationwide, on the bias-motivated crimes they had investigated since 2010.

More than 280 agencies responded, but in many cases only to say they hadn’t investigated any such incidents, or had no records, or that their records were bad. When we followed up with agency public information officers, they acknowledged that investigators frequently did not mark down incidents as motivated by bias, even if there was evidence suggesting this was so — a spray-painted swastika, for example, might be classified simply as vandalism and not also as a hate crime.

The FBI and some larger agencies champion a two-tiered process in which incidents classified by the first responding officer as potentially bias-motivated are re-evaluated by a second investigator, who determines if the incident should be counted officially as a hate crime. Few of the agencies that responded to our records request appeared to follow this procedure.

In most states, local law enforcement agencies send their hate crime data to the state, which is then supposed to submit it to the FBI, but we found several instances in which this chain broke down. The Orlando Police Department, for example, told us it had reported five hate crimes for 2015 to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, but the FBI data shows no hate crimes investigated by Orlando that year. Orlando police say FDLE acknowledged the city’s data hadn’t been sent to the FBI “due to a system error,” but an FDLE spokesperson told ProPublica the Orlando police hadn’t submitted the information on time.

Variations in how states define hate crimes also cause confusion that contributes to the undercount. That appears to be one factor in what happened with the Huntsville case.

Alabama has a hate-crime statute, but it only applies to acts of bias based arising from “race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, or physical or mental disability,” not sexual orientation. A prosecutor on Bravo’s case acknowledged Bravo’s sexual orientation clearly played a role in his attack, but a spokesman for the Huntsville police said the assault couldn’t be reported as a hate crime because gay people aren’t protected under the state’s law.

The 1990 federal law, however, includes crimes against gay people among those it tracks and asks agencies to report such cases even if no hate crime charge was prosecuted.

Jack McDevitt, a longtime hate crimes researcher and the director of Northeastern’s Institute on Race and Justice, has reviewed police incident reports to check if investigators missed indicators that assaults or vandalism were actually hate crimes.

“We’ve found quite a bit of misclassification or missed cases that could have been investigated,” he said. “You’ve got police officers who aren’t trained to ask the right questions.”

It might not seem like being left out of the official hate crime count would rank high among Bravo’s concerns, but he said it did. Not being counted made him feel as though he and victims like him are being erased — and that there’s no accountability for the bias that motivates their attackers.

“If it happens to someone else, they’re going to be treated the same exact way, and it’s going to be unfair,” he said.

When we asked local law enforcement agencies across the country for their hate-crime reports and data, it quickly became clear that this was an area of substantial uncertainty and discomfort for many of them.

In Omaha, Nebraska, Deputy City Attorney Bernard J. in den Bosch said he couldn’t release older hate crime records in response to ProPublica’s request because the police department suspected that former employees had classified such crimes incorrectly in reporting them to the FBI.

“The Omaha Police Department does not feel comfortable providing the numbers since they are concerned about their accuracy,” in den Bosch said, adding that it was difficult to identify hate crimes properly and that the employees entrusted to do so had done a job the department was now “leery of.”

A spokesman for the Madison, Wisconsin, police department acknowledged its officers weren’t trained in identifying bias-motivated incidents and had not been submitting reports properly as a result.

For one thing, officers weren’t sure if an incident had to be prosecuted as a hate crime to be counted (it doesn’t). After receiving ProPublica’s information request, department officials said they altered their policies on reporting such crimes to the FBI and reclassified dozens of incidents.

In several cases, the information agencies sent ProPublica about hate crime investigations since 2010 was at odds with what they had submitted to the federal government.

According to FBI data, the Anne Arundel County Police in Maryland, which polices half a million people between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., reported no hate crimes between 2012 and 2015. But the department sent us 68 pages of reports for the past 5 years, showing that county police responded to well over 100 incidents, including many in which there was evidence of crimes motivated by bias.

In one case, a woman brought her new boyfriend, a black man, to the home of her ex-boyfriend. He allegedly swung a hammer at the visitor, saying “I don’t want any niggers in my house, get this nigger out of my house.” According to another report, someone scratched the same word into the side of a black man’s car and stole from it.

Officials with the Maryland State Police said many of these cases weren’t reported to the FBI because the Anne Arundel County Police — unsure if they were hate crimes — had flagged them as “inconclusive” in paperwork. Lt. Ryan Frashure, a spokesman for the county police, said the agency has started marking more of its reports as conclusive if they have the appearance of a bias motivation. Indeed, in the 2016 FBI hate crime report, the most recent available, the Anne Arundel County Police reported 16 hate crimes.

Officials at some police departments acknowledged that their officers were simply not in the habit of classifying incidents as possible hate crimes, even when there was evidence that this was the case.

The Miami-Dade Police Department, Florida’s largest law enforcement agency, reported just two hate crimes to the state since 2010. Records officials told us they could not find any reports from that period in which investigating officers noted that a crime had a bias motivation.

“I was on the road for 9 years, but when I wrote a report, I don’t ever remember titling it a hate crime,” said Detective Argemis Colome, a spokesman for the department. “If they would have done graffiti on a wall, it would have been titled a vandalism.”

After speaking with ProPublica, the department’s director ordered an audit to see whether the department had failed to identify hate crimes properly and, thus, to report them to the state and the FBI.

In general, police departments nationwide have embraced data in the last 20 years, using an ever-more sophisticated array of it to track where crimes are happening, to allocate resources, and to hold commanders accountable for results. The New York Police Department’s CompStat initiative is among the most prominent of such efforts and has been credited with playing a role in broad, lasting reductions in violent crime in what was once considered an ungovernable city.

Yet, for many law enforcement agencies, collecting and using data on hate crimes has remained a stubborn exception. According to Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer who studies hate crimes, some law enforcement agencies lack a commitment from the top to properly investigate such incidents and collect data on them.

“You have to have a combination of training, executive leadership, and some kind of infrastructure that is sustained and continuing,” Levin said.

Myesha Braden, a former civil rights prosecutor in the Department of Justice, said police departments often miss opportunities early on to communicate to officers that hate crimes are a priority. “If an officer knows coming into the police academy that hate crime is one of the important crimes they’ll be investigating, at least the seed is planted,” she said.

A recent ProPublica review of training academy standards found that only 12 states have laws requiring police to learn how to identify and investigate hate crimes at that stage; few agencies provide such training once officers leave the academy.

Officers at several police departments told ProPublica they thought it was up to prosecutors to decide if an incident was a hate crime, or that they needed a suspect in custody to categorize an offense as a hate crime in their reports.

Such misconceptions stop officers from classifying hate crimes as they should, said Michael Lieberman, the Anti-Defamation League’s counsel in Washington, D.C.

“To say that there’s not enough to prosecute it, that’s not the question. The question is what happened at the scene of the crime,” he said. It wouldn’t take much to encourage better reporting, he added — for starters, more police departments could add a field to incident report forms allowing officers to mark that a crime had a bias motivation.

“What’s on the form is what’s important,” Lieberman said. “You have to have a dropdown box that says ‘hate crime.’”

The Boston Police Department is frequently held up as a model because it has a dedicated civil rights unit that handles hate-crime investigations. Officers in the unit train BPD recruits to identify bias motivations when they fill out crime reports, and the unit serves as secondary investigators on every potential hate crime, Sgt. Det. Carmen Curry, a supervisor in the unit, said in an email. On top of that, officers in the civil rights unit search through police reports daily for terms like “gay,” so that potential hate crimes don’t get missed.

BPD has reported 996 hate crimes to the FBI since 2010, averaging about 142 a year. “It’s a very difficult thing to maintain trust in law enforcement right now,” Curry said. “The fact that the BPD goes out front and has a unit to respond to these types of incidents sends an important message.”

Momentum to pass a federal law to count hate crimes started to build in the late-1980s, spurred in part by a notorious case in New York.

In 1986, Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old black man, was killed by a car in Howard Beach, Queens, while running in terror from four white men who hurled epithets as they chased him from their neighborhood. Ed Koch, then the mayor of New York, called it a “modern-day lynching.”

When the House debated a bill in 1989, Democratic Rep. Barbara Kennelly called Griffith’s death an example of why crimes motivated by bias needed to be distinguished from other crimes, tracked and counted separately.

“These crimes of prejudice must be recorded as such if we are to come up with informed ways to prevent them in the future,” she said. “The basic idea behind hate crime legislation is simple: The more we know about these crimes of hate, the better chance we have to prevent them. Accurate data on when, where and how often these crimes occur will help.”

Legislation to collect hate crime statistics encountered stiff resistance from the Justice Department, which said requiring police to divine criminals’ intentions would “discredit” the agency’s overall data efforts, and from the White House, which said it would “impose unnecessary burdens” on police. There were also those who opposed including crimes against gay people in the count.

“In my opinion, our society should not enshrine homosexuality on a pedestal alongside race and religion as the primary focus of our civil rights laws,” Rep. William Dannemeyer, R-Calif., said before a debate on the bill. “Do not let the sexual revolutionaries hijack the freedom train.”

Ultimately, the Hate Crime Statistics Act that passed in 1990 directed the attorney general to keep track of crimes motivated not only by race, color, religion or national origin — the groups protected by the federal hate crime statute at the time — but also those based on sexual orientation.

The Justice Department assigned the task to the FBI, which asked local law enforcement agencies to submit detailed information — including the bias motivation, offender’s race, type of offense and date of each possible hate crime — as an addendum to the information they submitted to the Uniform Crime Reporting Program on a variety of crimes, from burglary to homicide.

To help police understand what to do, the FBI organized training sessions and put together two large gray books packed with information on investigating hate crimes. By 1996, the FBI had held 61 regional conferences, training more than 3,600 law enforcement officers from nearly 1,200 agencies. The conferences covered “investigation, identification, reporting and appropriate handling” of hate crimes, according to congressional records from that period.

The first hate crime data released by the FBI in 1991 had information from 2,771 law enforcement agencies in 32 states. By the next year, that jumped to 6,181 agencies in 41 states and the District of Columbia. By 1999, the number had nearly doubled to 12,122 agencies. In the latest release, 2016, the FBI reported that 15,254 agencies participated. Still, participation just means agencies submitted information of any kind — even if it’s only the form that says they had no hate crimes. The percentage of agencies reporting zero hate crimes has grown from 73 percent in 1991 to 88 percent in 2016.

Today, the government does little to help local law enforcement to collect accurate and complete hate crime statistics.

The Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, once sent hate crimes specialists around the country to work with state and local cops, but no longer does so.

While the FBI still does technical training on how to send data to the UCR program, “the UCR trainers do not provide training regarding the investigation of hate crimes,” according to Stephen Fischer, a spokesperson for the division that used to run hate-crime-specific training. Fischer said the agency is working with local police to modernize their computer systems, which is designed to facilitate all reporting.

Cynthia Deitle, the chief of the FBI’s Civil Rights Unit from 2008 to 2011, is now program director for the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which has sponsored a handful of hate crime conferences for police similar to those she used to organize at the FBI. In October, she held one at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis that was attended by about 50 people, some in law enforcement, others from community groups like OUTMemphis, a local LGBT group.

Six officers came from the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, in part because the state noticed the agency’s hate crime statistics were wrong. According to Chief Deputy Floyd Bonner, the sheriff’s office had wrongly classified several incidents as hate crimes, but further review revealed they were not. For example, he said, when two African-American kids got into a fight at school, the reporting officer checked off the box for a hate crime “for some reason.” Those incorrectly categorized crimes amounted to more than half of the hate crimes the agency reported for the year, a problem Bonner attributed to a lack of training.

“Time and time again reporting issues come up. So it’s about teaching officers what to recognize,” he said. “We all think that hate crime is on the rise because of the news. But it’s still very important because we should know exactly.”

Dennis and Judy Shepard gave the keynote address at the conference, telling attendees about their son, Matthew, who died in 1998 after being beaten and tortured by two men because he was gay, and how they had worked for a decade to push for legislation that expanded the federal hate crime law to cover crimes motivated by a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The Shepard/Byrd Act passed in 2009.

After their speech, they spoke with me about their frustration that attacks like the one that took their son’s life continue not to be reported as, or labeled, hate crimes, even since the new law took effect. When communities don’t know the full toll that bigotry exacts, they have no way to defend themselves, they said. They said the 1990 hate crime statistics statute should have made it mandatory for law enforcement agencies to report to the FBI, not voluntary.

“The one real flaw of the law is not requiring reporting,” Dennis Shepard said. “If they don’t mark it, then they can’t prosecute it.”

Four months after Gary Bravo’s June 2015 assault, the Huntsville Police Department quietly made a single arrest in the case, charging a southern Alabama man with second-degree assault. They said their investigation had led to only one assailant. Since the man was 18 at the time of the attack and had no prior felonies, he cut a plea deal under Alabama’s youthful offender statute, receiving up to three years of probation. His criminal record remains sealed.

Publicly, the outcome of the case drew almost no attention. The police and prosecutors had not labeled it a hate crime and dispensed with it as they would any routine street fight.

The incident did prompt Marianne Landers to open Deja Vieux, a new gay bar — and now the oldest operating one in the city — in a cavernous, windowless space just across a highway from the Huntsville Police Department. Landers said she felt compelled to open a place for gay people after she read about Bravo’s beating and filed paperwork to form a company just 24 days after the attack. She said she thought of her nephew, who doesn’t live in Huntsville, but is also gay.

Still, the bar’s operator, Cecil Gordon, insisted Bravo’s attack couldn’t have been a hate crime. He said local law enforcement agencies were always good to leaders of the gay community and surely would have given Bravo’s case more attention and been tougher on the perpetrators if they knew Bravo was attacked because he was gay.

“You can’t fall back on the gay card,” Gordon said of Bravo’s story.

On an October visit to Deja Vieux, the talk turned to the attack on Bravo. Several of the men who had come for drinks said they did not know if Bravo had been the victim of a hate crime or agreed with Gordon that he wasn’t.

This is what happens when bias crimes aren’t counted and publicly called out as acts of hate, said James Robinson, the CEO of Free2Be, a statewide LGBT advocacy group that does counseling in Huntsville.

Robinson tried to publicize the attack on Bravo and helped raise funds for his recovery. He understood the assault couldn’t be prosecuted as a hate crime under Alabama law, but nonetheless thought the police should acknowledge that anti-gay bias had motivated the attack. Otherwise, how would anyone know the violence was aimed not only at Bravo, but at the larger community to which he belonged?

“Words have power in two kinds of ways: They have power when you speak them and power when you don’t,” Robinson said. “The words need to be said. This community needs to be recognized.”

MuckRock a nonprofit public records tracking tool and news site, assisted with public-records requests for this report.

We All Rely on Soil — But We Treat It Like Dirt

By Sara Newmark, Vice President of Social Impact for Foodstate

This article was originally 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.

You’ve likely seen the bumper-sticker and t-shirt slogan, “No farms, no food.” In truth, it only tells part of the story. A more accurate bumper-sticker slogan would be less catchy. It would reflect the interdependence of all of us with the soil, water, climate and farmers we depend upon for the nourishment for life.

The business community, especially those directly profiting from farmer’s labors and selling food products, has a responsibility to support our farmers, who provide us the nourishment for life, in a way that creates shared value. And because our food system depends upon the health of our environment and will be greatly impacted by the effects of climate change, the business community has a responsibility to protect the environment on which it relies.

Frankly, we’re not sharing well now. The current structure of business disproportionately favors packaged-food companies and disfavors those who engage in the surprisingly risky business of growing healthy food. Many, if not most, packaged-food companies are far removed from the men and women who grow food for them. This distance makes it easier to undervalue their work and it makes it harder for consumers to know whether farmers are well-compensated and following best practices. And it makes it nearly impossible for all of us who eat to recognize the relationship between farming and climate change.

I recently joined Foodstate (makers of MegaFood and Innate Response) as their new Vice President of Social Impact. While I was drawn to the company’s deserved reputation for high-quality vitamins and whole-food supplements, what really attracted me was Foodstate’s commitment to nourishing people by sourcing directly from small, independent family farms.

Part of my new work is to help people see the connection between farmers and health and to do it in a way to make sure we all prosper. Foodstate has a mission to cure nutritional poverty. A key part of that is helping solve the root cause of nutrient deficiency. A recent study published in ACRES magazine found 27 vegetables had an average 47 percent decline of their calcium levels from 1940 to 1991. While this decline is linked to many potential causes, declining soil health is among the top likely suspects.

No Healthy Soil, No Food

Around the planet, we have lost between 30 and 70 percent of all topsoil. At the same time, several hundred billion tons of soil CO2 have been transferred from topsoils to the atmosphere or the oceans because of the global destruction of soil organic matter. In other words, 25 to 40 percent of the current excess of CO2 in the atmosphere resulted from the destruction of soils and their organic matter.

As a consequence, the United Nations estimates that the world has 60 global harvests left. That’s 60 more times the world, if it stays on it current trajectory, will be able to grow and harvest food.

How did we get to this point? We killed and tilled. The model of conventional agriculture — using high levels of synthetic nitrogen, herbicides, GMOs, monoculture plantings and deep, regular tilling — has devastated soils and damaged ecosystems worldwide. Instead of drawing down carbon via photosynthesis, as ecologically sound methods of food production have always done, this highly industrialized and destructive growing method actually pumps carbon into the atmosphere, where it drives climate change.

But can we grow more food; enjoy greater resilience in the face of drought and climate extremes; and, at the same time, grow food that is more plentiful, nutritious, and inexpensive?

Believe it or not, the answer to all the above is a resounding “Yes!” But it’s all based on healthy soil.

A Regenerative, Interdependent Solution

“Regenerative agriculture” is defined by The Carbon Underground and Cal State/Chico “as farming and grazing practices that, among other benefits, reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity — resulting in both carbon drawdown and improved water cycle.”

Specifically, regenerative agriculture is a holistic land-management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle and build soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density. It is an agricultural model that recognizes, respects and contributes to the interdependence between all human life, business, food and the soil and climate on which they depend.

By increasing water-holding capacity and sequestering carbon at greater depths, regenerative agriculture increasing biodiversity of soil-building organisms and the plants grown in that soil. And it draws down climate-damaging levels of atmospheric CO2 and improves soil structure to reverse civilization-threatening soil loss. Regenerative agriculture reverses our current trajectory to build for the future.

Farmers can’t be expected to reverse the damage all by themselves. We are all interconnected and we share the responsibility to change this destructive system.

We need to act quickly and deliberately. Remember, we only have 60 harvests left. Let’s act in a way that lifts all of us up and leaves no one behind.

Here’s how.

If you are a business that relies on agriculture, investigate your supply chain. Peel back the layers and get to know the farmers who support you. Think about creative ways to encourage and co-share economic rewards, such as long-term contracts, incentive programs, in-setting or other ways to protect and uplift everyone in your supply network.

If you are a farmer, learn more about the tools, standards and programs that are being worked on (even as you read this article) to support you in this mission. We need your expertise and input to make sure we are all on the same page.

If you are a consumer who eats food, wears clothes or drinks clean water (all of us!), demand this from all companies from which you purchase goods.

Everyone reading this, I want you to take a hard look around you. We face an almost certain collapse of the planetary ecology we require for our continued existence. And we have a “shovel-ready” answer that rebuilds livelihoods, builds community, increases profits, fosters business resiliency and turns the carbon arrow back, healing the planet.

And it can start happening immediately. We all have a role to play in this.

Who’s in?

Foodstate is part of the community of Certified B Corporations. Read more stories of people using business as a force for good in B the Change, or sign up to receive the B the Change Weekly newsletter for more stories like the one above, delivered straight to your inbox.

Heather McGhee: A New ‘We the People’ for a Sustainable Future

“I don’t know about you, but I need to find a way to love this country.”

In her 2017 keynote, Heather McGhee touched on a sentiment that resonated with many if not most of the Bioneers audience members. In our current U.S. political, economic and social environment, how do we find ways to come together and to believe in a better future?

As the president of Demos — “a public policy organization working for an America where we all have an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy” — McGhee is an award-winning thought leader on the national stage whose writing and research appear in numerous outlets, including The New York Times and The Nation. In 2009, she helped shape key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and currently serves on several boards and councils, including for the Center for Working Families and Consumer Reports.

Following is Heather McGhee’s keynote (video and transcription below), titled “A New ‘We the People’ for a Sustainable Future.”

Heather McGhee:

Demos is the Greek word for the people of a nation, and it’s the root word of democracy. Demos’ mission, as Nina said, is to work for an equal say and an equal chance for all. We address the intersection of political, social, and economic inequality because we know that the inequality of voice in setting the rules drives the inequality in economic outcomes, and we know that inequality has always been built on a scaffolding of racial and gender hierarchy. When we began advancing climate change solutions at Demos a few years ago, we wanted to do it with that understanding in mind. Climate change is the result of social, economic and political inequality.

We experience every day the one-two punch of climate change, where our extractive predatory economy has stripped wealth and resources from communities of color and poor communities around the world, and is now leading to climate change impacts that disproportionately impact those same communities. The mere fact that a crisis of this magnitude is being allowed to mount in full view for over a generation is as clear a sign as any that we do not have a functioning democracy where the public interest can prevail. Only in a broken democracy can big fossil fuel companies continue to put their next quarter’s profits ahead of the survival of the next generation.

At Demos, we are hopeful, though, that just as these interlinked inequalities have driven us to this place, if we abandon the dynamics of power that plague us, progress against one form of inequality will yield progress on others. That’s why we see an opportunity out of the crisis of climate change to use the economic transformation that we know is necessary, not just to reduce emissions but to reduce inequality, not just to increase energy efficiency, but to increase wealth in families and communities of color where households have less than a dime in wealth today for every dollar held by white households because of explicitly racist policies that prevented families of color from owning property throughout our history.

We at Demos are starting in our own backyard in New York. Demos is proud to be on the steering committee of New York Renews, a climate-equity campaign with a goal of eliminating 100% of human-caused carbon pollution by 2050 and 50% by 2030. That’s right. And most importantly, a goal of directing at least 40% of all the revenue from carbon pricing and other measures to the lowest wealth and most polluted communities in the state.

It’s upending the normal power structure in the state by bringing together a broad-based coalition of civil and human rights, environmental justice, small business, labor and democracy reform organizations, partners like the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, UPROSE, Working Families Party, Environmental Advocates of New York, the Service Employees International Union, 32BJ, and many others in a coalition of 120 groups that is guided by a vision. We see similar examples across the country, such as Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington state, and here in California. Another way is possible.

But it’s important that even as we move forward with policy solutions, we understand also the root causes of the sickness in our economy, our society and our democracy. We have to face the fact that a political movement is in power and has been for the past 40 to 50 years throughout administrations of both parties that is stopping us from seeing one another as a Demos, as one people, and stopping us from taking collective action to save our collective home, health and well-being.

We know that today, capitalism is writing the rules for democracy instead of the other way around. We know that these rules allow dozens of the most successful U.S. businesses to spend more on lobbying and CEO bonuses every year than they contribute to their country in taxes. We know that while the rules allow a small sliver of people to amass and keep unprecedented wealth, the rules haven’t evolved with the changing times in ways that would have given more families a leg up. Like responding to the premium on higher education with more college grants, not fewer, or responding to the necessity of both parents working, or the rise of single parents with guaranteed childcare, or portable real pensions, or a more generous unemployment insurance system in an era of easy layoffs and downsizing.

How is it that the feedback loop just isn’t working? That life is getting harder for most Americans over the past couple of generations, and our representatives haven’t responded? Well the answer is, that what’s happened in our democracy is that our democracy has become as unequal as our economy. Over the course of my lifetime an entire new industry has appeared, that of corporate lobbyists, for which there are now 24 for every member of Congress. The legalized bribery that is big money campaign contributions has increased by over 600% just since I turned 18 to over $2 trillion a year. Members of Congress now spend one out of every three minutes that they’re in office talking to rich people, asking them for money.

Combine that with the gerrymandering and a voting system that seemed hardwired to discourage registration and voting, a system that in fact was set up that way during reconstruction from the Civil War. And after progress with the Voting Rights Act is now getting worse, and you have a system that is democracy in name only.

Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels has found that: “The preferences of people in the bottom third of the income distribution appear to have no apparent impact on the behavior of their elected officials.” None. But something else has happened in our culture. Why did it somehow become publicly acceptable to evade taxes as if companies and rich people owe nothing to their neighbors or the country they live in? How did it become completely okay to assert that any kind of public help from healthcare to unemployment insurance, to solar subsidies, is unfair redistribution from worthy job creators to undeserving freeloaders? How did it become acceptable to demonize the class of people, who in different eras were known as the little guy, the little guy you root for. This, I believe, is where the increasing role of unconscious bias comes into our public culture in ways that are eroding opportunity and prosperity for all of us.

Since the Civil Rights Era we have had a deep and growing anxiety in this country about who is an American. Now why do I say since the Civil Rights Era? It seems almost counterintuitive. Well, two things happened at once in the mid-1960s: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally decreed that the law could not segregate or discriminate based on color, upsetting the social order, and the Immigration Act of 1965 liberalized our immigration laws. Do you know that until 1965, the United States had racial limits on who could legally immigrate into the country? There was a strict limit to the number of Asians and Africans, for example, and even a limit on southern and eastern Europeans. The Italians, Poles, and Greeks were considered too ethnic to become citizens. Northern European countries had no limit whatsoever. Think about how that. Think about how that shaped immigration.

So when that finally changed in the mid-1960s, the next 50 years saw an amazing transformation in the physical appearance of who is an American, and all of that exponential demographic change really began after the Civil Rights movement faded. So why does this new diversity matter to a political movement that relies on American’s feelings about public solutions to common problems, about economic fairness, public investment, taxes, jobs, and collective bargaining? Why does diversity matter? Why is it that no Democratic candidate for president has won the majority of the white vote since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act? Is it because we are all, like Gary, racist? Well, not quite. But not no either.

The human brain naturally puts objects and peoples and ideas into categories. It’s actually part of our great intelligence. And it takes shortcuts to do these categorizations. That red round thing on the table over there is an apple and apples are apples, whether they’re Fiji, Macintosh or not. That orange round there on the table over there is an orange, whether it’s mandarin, navel or not. Apples we know are sweet. Oranges are tart. I can quickly make these categorizations as I’m walking through a room.

Our brain categorizes people by their physical characteristics as well. People. And to go beyond that, it finds shortcuts to give meaningful attributes to those categories. And most of these shortcuts and meaning-makings are going on subconsciously without our conscious awareness.

Now the problem is that our society has been so hierarchical along these lines of race, gender, age, and sexuality that the shortcuts that we are constantly primed to make have unequal consequences. I’m sure you’re all aware of the studies out of Harvard University of implicit bias where you’re asked to quickly associate words with faces. And those studies demonstrate that we are nearly universally less able to quickly associate darker faces with positive words. Though white respondents find it more difficult than people of color.

I want to pause there for a minute to ask, why do we take for granted, as part of our history, why it is that American society adopted this belief in a hierarchy of human value, that people with white skin are better than others? Racism is not inevitable. In fact, the very idea of racial categories didn’t take root until the 17th century. It’s important to remember — because so much of this history has been suppressed — just how essential to the creation of the American economy slavery was. And slave labor on plantation land expropriated from Native Americans. That is our economy.

The historian Edward Baptist, in his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, calculates that by 1860, slave labor produced 80% of the gross national product. Even in the north, our systems of finance and capitalization, our industrial textile mills, all sprang out of and fed into a slave-driven economy. Black lives were the original currency of America.

At our founding, those in power chose to make American slavery different from other forms, not just indentured labor but hereditary, inexorable, and they did it alongside these proclamations of equality and liberty that we now hold dear as our American creed, that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, that all men are entitled to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s a heart-stopping contradiction. The only way for men to write those words while owning other human beings was to create a belief system in which those people were not human beings.

So for our first centuries, African Americans were property. For the subsequent ones, and up until the late 1980s, in fact, explicitly racist laws conspired to deny African Americans of property. We live on one of most biologically and ecologically diverse lands on the planet. We have rainforests and deserts, this treasure that we sing about from sea to shining sea, and yet it is not ours. It has never been ours. We stole it, we killed for it, and we have not made amends.

It’s hard to admit all of that, to hold all of that, while at the same time holding a vision of we the people, and of a country and a population that is worth fighting for and creating solidarity amongst. You know, we have this myth of American innocence. I really commend to you a new book called Hitler’s American Model, which goes right to the heart of puncturing that myth. World War II, is it not, is our shining example of when America saved the world, when America, the good guys, went and defeated the bad guys, the Nazis.

Even today, when Nazis are marching down our streets, it’s become very easy for a bipartisan consensus to say, well at least not that. We know that the Nazis are the bad guys. That’s what we know. If one thing we know for sure it’s that the Nazis are the bad guys.

My friends, why is it not common knowledge to us that when Hitler and his regime looked for a model of a way to create a society where citizenship and humanity was cabined only to whites in every single legal policy, economic piece of infrastructure, they looked only to us as the model. So how is it possible that we can say with a straight face that we are the good guys and the Nazis are the bad guys?

And yet, I’m an American. And yet, I, the descendant of enslaved peoples, am proud of my fellow people. How do we hold that? Because if we can’t hold a vision of an America worth saving, we won’t. And if we don’t hold a vision of an America worth saving, if we don’t both admit the truth of our racist, sexist, hyper-capitalist past and present, while also reconnecting on a human level with our neighbors and our families, then we will continue as a nation to fall prey to a political ploy that keeps a right wing in power and rapes our planet.

Now, this political ploy is powerful, and the strategy took its modern form in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, when President Lyndon Johnson signed that Civil Right Act, integrating public accommodations and in so doing, in his own words, gave away the South. And I want to repeat it again, because most people don’t know it, and I hope it’s a paradigm shift for us all: No Democrat has won the majority of white voters since that day.

Now, I could tell the story of what has shifted in our economic rules to create this current era of unprecedented inequality without talking about race, and many do, but when we acknowledge that government investment is essential to a strong middle class, to prosperity, to the possibility of shaping our economy in the public interest, we have to ask why, since the Civil Rights Era, has the US retreated from the public supports that made our levels of mobility and security the envy of the world?

In a way, what’s happened to our entire economy since the end of the Civil Rights Era is what happened across the American South, after integration when white towns drained their public swimming pools rather than integrate them, destroying a public good they once enjoyed. For three generations now politicians have stoked white anxiety about who the public is, successfully linking government to undeserving minorities and gaining support among white voters for cutbacks in public spending and regulation, for withdrawal from public solutions and collective bargaining. My friends, we need a we to survive, and that is exactly what racism destroys.

So now, we have to admit that we are in a moment of racial panic. But it is challenging us to shed the self-imposed color-blindness of our movements and engage forcefully in this question: Who is an American? What are we to one another? We have to admit that this question is harder for us than it is for most other countries because we are the world’s most radical experiment in democracy. A nation of ancestral strangers met here with the audacious promise that out of many we could become one. Everything depends on the answer to this question: Who is an American, and what are we to one another?

Politics right now is offering two visions of why all of peoples of the world have met here on this land. One in which we are nothing more than competitors, and another in which perhaps, just perhaps, the proximity of so much difference will finally force us to admit our common humanity.

I don’t know about you, but I need to find a way to love this country. And one of the things that helps me do that is because of the beauty of who we are becoming, the fact that by the time I am, goddess willing, nurturing my grandchildren, there will be no racial majority in this country. The fact that here today, there is someone in this country claiming citizenship who has a tie to every single community on the globe —that is the we the people that I can believe in.

The other side is saying the demographic changes are the unmaking of America. We must proclaim that they’re the fulfillment of it. We must declare that what they say is a threat is, in fact, our country’s salvation. For when a nation founded on a belief in racial hierarchy truly rejects that belief, then, and only then, will we have made a new world. I believe that that is our destiny, if we have one. To make it manifest, we must challenge ourselves to live our lives in solidarity across color, origin, and class. We must change rules that disrupt the very notion that those who have more money are worth more in our democracy and our economy. In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom and make it our task to finally knit together a Demos, one people, out of this nation of many.

We’re entering a new, transformative era — together

Dear Bioneer,

I am thankful to have the opportunity to write to you again as I complete my fourth year as Executive Director of Bioneers. What a journey the past few years have been for people and planet.

Most of all, I want to thank each of you, the members of the Bioneers community, faculty and staff for making each of these years possible with the tapestry of support you provide.

Bioneers have been gathering for 28 years, ever since Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons launched this remarkable event, this “movement of movements” and “network of networks,” and the guiding principle was to reveal to world the most promising solutions to humanity’s most pressing crises and to help propel those solutions forward.

We Bioneers enter into 2018 against the backdrop of a great deal of uncertainty and upheaval all around us, marked not only by ever more unprecedented climatic events but by more global political turbulence than we have seen in generations.

But this era has provided the potential for deep positive transformation, for a new era based on clean energy, social justice and awakened compassion. And that era is ready to be born out of this seeming chaos.

I mentioned at Bioneers this past October that I had the great honor of being hosted by several members of the Navajo and Hopi Nations on the rim of the Grand Canyon in the Four Corners region as part of the Bioneers Kinship Circle — a trip organized by the Bioneers Indigeneity Program in partnership with the Colorado Plateau Intertribal Conversations Group.

In these front line communities that have often born the brunt of the worst racism and injustice our society could throw at them, there is, at least among the elders I met, an inner core of extraordinary calm, centered resilience.

Their people survived an attempted genocide and have lived under brutal oppression for hundreds of years, and they have, as a result, developed a very long, broad view of the sweep of history.

These elders made it clear to me by their living example that we must never forget to love the Earth, the land and its bounty, and the glorious magic of life as often as we can even in the midst of crisis.

I take this lesson with me as we turn the Gregorian Calendar page into 2018. I hope you will join me in staying anchored by this inner resilience.

Thank you for being such a vital part of the Bioneers community, and especially for your support and investment and partnership in making Bioneers a vibrant, healthy organization.

Sincerely,

Joshua Fouts
Executive Director, Bioneers

Bioneers Respond to 2017 #GOPTaxScam

Earlier this week in an unfortunate turn of events, the Republican-led Congress voted to approve a $1.5 trillion tax bill that dramatically increases economic inequality in the U.S will while opening up Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling and threatening the future of community health and renewable energy. It can be difficult to remain hopeful in the face of constant and continued violation. It is in times like these that we turn to our powerful Bioneers faculty and community for the inspiration and heart to continue.

Indigenous Environmental Network:

“In the strongest terms, we condemn the actions of the United States Congress for this direct assault upon the Gwich’in and Inupiat people of Alaska and Canada. The Indigenous Environmental Network has stood with the Gwich’in Steering Committee for over 25 years in the fight to protect their sacred lands and ways of life from oil development. We denounce this Tax Bill and its ANWR provision for what it is, a pandered legislation to big corporations and fossil fuel interests. We call upon Congress to stop this attack on Indigenous Rights. Stand with the Gwich’in Nation and help us keep fossil fuels in the ground!” Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director

Sierra Club:

“This is a truly awful piece of legislation, but it can’t stop the work of environmental advocates to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the places we play. We will vigorously challenge cuts and rollbacks that threaten American families and indigenous rights, even as we join with the Gwich’in Nation to see the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge permanently protected.” Michael Brune, Executive Director

Sister Simone Campbell:

“Urgent emergencies that need real legislation– CHIP, DACA, and disaster relief – have been cast aside in this rush to serve the interests of the affluent. This Christmas season, it is critical to remember that Jesus was born to parents who experienced poverty, did not have healthcare, and could not find shelter for the birth of their child. In Bethlehem, Jesus and his parents were turned away by the wealthiest. Later in the Gospels, Jesus reminds us, ‘whatever you did for one of the least of my brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ The House and the Senate Republicans caused great harm to our nation by passing this tax bill.” (Watch her Bioneers Keynote on Healing for the 21st Century)

Democracy Now!:

Amy Goodman spoke to Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson (a network of worker cooperatives) in Jackson, Mississippi on the struggle for Economic Democracy:

350.org:

“This bill is a shameful giveaway to to the donor class and a cold-hearted sellout of the climate, Indigenous people and the public. Generations will look back at this moment with deep remorse. But this dirty deal is not law just yet. We will continue to fight this callous agenda from the grassroots to the beltway.” May Boeve, Executive Director

Demos:

“The GOP Tax Scam stands as the strongest argument yet for getting big money out of politics, so ‘we the people’ have a chance of making our voices heard above the demands of wealthy donors. In a democracy, the size of your wallet should not determine how much access and influence you have with your elected officials. Yet this shameful tax plan proves that this is exactly how the current Congress operates.

Demos will continue to advocate for a strong democracy in which everyone has an equal say, and a tax code that lowers economic inequality, fully funds our infrastructure, safety net and educational needs, and ensures the richest 1 percent of Americans pay their fair share.” Heather McGhee, President

Heather McGhee:

President of Demos Action, talks about what comes next after the tax bill on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show:

Ai-Jen Poo:

No one is talking about this, but this is going to cripple a lot of organizations who would help the most vulnerable survive the impact of the #GOPTaxScam. They are just pushing the limits of cruelty. (Watch her Bioneers Keynote about the Caring Economy)

National Domestic Worker’s Alliance:

Dear Congress, the #TaxPlan you just passed is a blatant attack on immigrants, women of color, and low-wage workers. But understand this: we are organized. We are powerful. And we are not going away until we build a caring democracy for us all.

227 members of Congress just showed us who they really are by voting on a #TaxBill that will hurt all of our families. Now it’s our turn to show them what democracy looks like.

Natural Resource Defense Council:

“This is a shameful betrayal and a fraud on the American people. The purpose of setting a sanctuary aside is to keep it safe from exactly this kind of industrial—and permanent—ruin. The last thing the country needs is more fossil fuel development in a pristine and ecologically vital area.” Rhea Suh, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council dives deeper into the bill here »

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Discovering Shared Vision with the Goi Peace Foundation in Japan

Kenny and I recently accepted the Goi Peace Award in Tokyo for Bioneers’ “pioneering work to promote nature-inspired innovations for restoring the Earth and our human community.”

It was an enormous honor, as past recipients have included Mikhail Gorbachev, James Lovelock, Hafsat Abiola-Costello, Lynn Twist and Bill Strickland, (among others). We felt we received the award on behalf of you – the extensive community of diverse change-makers whose leadership we’ve served over these past 27 years.

After a much-needed day of rest after arriving, we were treated by the Saionjis to an extraordinary (Thanksgiving, for us) feast, of about 15 traditional courses, exquisitely prepared and dazzlingly presented. We got to know each other over a three-hour meal that was deeply engaging and inspiring, and we realized how closely our organizational goals and visions are aligned.

Like Bioneers, the Goi Peace Foundation seeks to heal our relations through finding our way toward peace and reciprocal, reverent relationships – within ourselves, among each other and with the Earth.

An exhilarating highlight for me was our luncheon with the circle who’ve collectively created a project called Soul of WoMen. An outgrowth of their Fuji Declaration, which we are now signatories to, Masami Saionji (who is an innovator and visionary in leadership of the Goi Foundation, in partnership with her husband Hiroo) brought together a group of eighteen accomplished and powerful women leaders from all walks of life to consider what they might see together as remedies for root causes of violence and destruction in the world.

Nina Simons and Kenny Ausubel speaking with the Soul of WoMan luncheon.

Together, they created a declaration, which advocates for the return of feminine values into balance with the masculine within ourselves, our institutions and governance, to achieve balance in our human ecosystem. As they put it, they seek “to transform the love of power toward the power of love.” I was so thankful I’d spoken of my passion for women’s leadership in my acceptance speech.

Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite author/futurists, wrote recently about the imbalance of the yin and yang in our world, echoing the Soul of WoMen’s proclamation.

As you might imagine, for me this was like finding sisters-in-vision from halfway ‘round the globe. Though our time together was brief, seeds were planted, I believe for some form of future collaboration, and we were inspired to discover how deeply aligned our visions are. In this time of so much emphasis on women in leadership, there is so much emphasis on behavior and quotas, withouy nearly as much awareness of the internalized beliefs and biases that I believe create the foundation for our existing imbalances.

So many women are leading as they’ve seen modeled, from their masculine sides, and so many institutions and policies are imbalanced in their perspectives and orientations.

Relatively few efforts seem to be focused upon the interior conditioning, or archetypal values, which guide our choices and behavior.

While there has been extensive research proving that as the equity, leadership and inclusion of women’s voices in decision-making improves, so too does the health, profitability and security of companies, communities and nations, there has been relatively little attention paid to the underlying human psychological biases that I believe help to inform, perpetuate and reify the imbalances we face.

It helped me to understand our societal emphasis on the externalities when I learned that Carl Jung, a founder of modern psychology, attributed the interior of our psyches to the anima, or feminine within us all, and the outer to the animus, or masculine.

For me, this has been a priority focus since I felt called to explore a gender-related inquiry into leadership in the mid-90s, and began programming about it within Bioneers. Without addressing the inner changes that are needed, I believe, our progress toward gender equity and peace will continue to be far slower than is needed to help shift our course. It was so exciting, therefore, to discover these women of a similar mindset coming from Japan!

At the award ceremony, which had a theme of …other honorees included the two young winners of their International Essay Contest for Young People, which was synchronistically themed Learning From Nature. The first prize winners were a 12-year old from Bosnia and Herzegovina whose essay spoke to what we have to learn from wolves, and a 22-year old woman from India whose transformational experience healing from depression with help from a Mulberry tree has translated into her activism in support of others grappling with depression and trauma.

Following our acceptance speeches, there was what they called a “Talk Session” which included a slide show and talk by a Japanese journalist and activist, Nao Suzuki, who’d attended Bioneers annual conference for three years, previously. When asked what he had been inspired to do upon returning to Japan after Bioneers, Nao replied that he’s

Started an online magazine to share stories of Bioneers-inspired solutions in Japan, called jp.
Developed a Community Supported Agriculture hub in his home community.
Started an alternative currency, a time-bank, to help knit his community closer together and localize relationships of mutuality and support.

As we interviewed with Nao before leaving Tokyo, he told us that his transformative revelation had been when he realized he was so busy creating change in his home community that he’d been neglecting his wife, his home and his inner life. He calls it the “donut syndrome,” and noted that his emphasis on the external to the detriment and malnourishment of his heart, hearth and home was what he realized had to change, to rebalance his life for personal sustainability. He said that when he shares that story in Japan, it resonates deeply. I imagine it might prove to be useful medicine or guidance for some in this country, too.

Animal Behavior: How Porcupines Mourn Their Dead

J.P. Harpignies is a long-time Brooklyn resident and has been working with Bioneers since 1990. He served as the associate editor of several Bioneers titles, including Ecological Medicine and Nature’s Operating Instructions, and has spoken at a number of Bioneers National Conferences throughout the years. J.P was previously the director at the New York Open Center and founder of the Eco-Metropolis conference.

In Animal Encounters (Cool Grove Press, 2014), J.P. Harpignies illustrates how much contact we have with non-human animals, both domesticated and wild, even as largely urban citizens of the 21st Century. The book describes Harpignies’s personal run-ins with animals in the wild, and how these encounters have helped to shape him, over the decades.

The excerpt that follows recounts two incidents with porcupines in upstate New York.

I’ve seen just a few porcupines in my life, in the woods in upstate New York, and, for obvious reasons I gave them a wide berth. I’ve also seen a half dozen or more dead ones that had been run over by cars, and I knew at one time a family of Chinese artists who lived in Woodstock who on a couple of occasions removed the quills from road-killed porcupines they found to use in calligraphy and artwork. The parents, both from rural China, had apparently been taught how to do this in their homeland. But on two occasions, one humiliating and one heartbreaking, I had more charged encounters with porcupines.

The first was during a canoe and camping trip on Long Lake in the Adirondacks region of New York. There were four of us on the expedition, and that day we were a bit disorganized and had gotten a late start. Night was falling, and it had taken us a while to find a suitable place to come ashore and put up our tents in that very densely forested area, so we were fumbling with our gear with almost no light, as we hadn’t yet started a fire. Suddenly an animal was right among us, making very aggressive sounds. Of course, our first thought was that it was a bear and we panicked and jumped back and reached for our flashlights, and it turned out, to our relief (at least initially), to be a porcupine. We figured multiple flashlights in its face and four much bigger mammals yelling at it would drive it away. No such luck. At first it just stared us down and growled and hissed. When we made shooing sounds and movements, it charged toward whomever had made a threatening gesture, and we would leap away trying to get up higher on any rocks or logs we could find. This lasted a good ten minutes. It eventually left, ambling away slowly, taking its own sweet time, and, after a while, we chuckled about it, but it’s a bit hard to savor the feeling of proudly returning to the wild woods like one’s primal, archaic ancestors, when you’ve been intimidated and basically chased up a tree by a rodent.

The other incident dramatically changed my feelings about porcupines. During a roughly twenty-year period during which I spent parts of every summer in the Catskills, I spent a lot of time in probably my favorite place on Earth, a steep, heavily forested canyon (as they’re called in that region, a “clove”—probably a derivation of an old Dutch term for a cleft in the mountains), carved out over the millennia by a marvelously gushing stream with a great variety of waterfalls and swimming holes. I still go there a few times a year on a pilgrimage of sorts. The first few years after I discovered the place, I almost never ran into any other humans up there. One had to trespass a bit and discreetly cross some private property to get into the state land, and other than a few local kids who occasionally went swimming in one of the first few deep and wide pools or the very rare fly fisherman, it was virtually unvisited. I had heard that some of the local old-timers feared the place because every once in a while someone died, slipping off one of the steep rocky slopes, and because there were old stories about copperheads living up there. I went to that canyon a lot and explored, swam, and meditated under waterfalls, etc., and fell in love with the place, more than I have with any other spot on Earth.

Unfortunately, some sociopathic locals used the canyon as a dump of sorts. They would, at night, drive their pick-up trucks filled with garbage up the very steep road that wound up one side of the “clove” and dump their trash over the edge of the cliffs so they wouldn’t have to pay dump fees. People even sent cars over the edge to claim insurance money saying their vehicle was stolen or just to get rid of old cars. Some of the trash would, over time, despite the dense tree cover, drift down to the bottom of the clove, so, in this very wild and stunningly beautiful, almost Edenic wilderness, one of the most rugged parts of the East Coast, one would occasionally run across tires or even the occasional old refrigerator or washing machine, not to mention various bits of household garbage. And, over the years, sadly for me, the area got “discovered” and it became much more popular and some campsites got pretty badly trashed. I had developed a proprietary or at least a caretaker’s mindset about the place, so I, along with a few other people, organized some efforts to clean out the worst trash, to appeal to visitors to be conscious, and to pressure the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to monitor it a little bit. Today the situation has improved somewhat, and it’s still a stunning place where one can find real solitude at certain times of the year, but, like so much of the natural world, it’s at risk.

But I have digressed: back to porcupines. In those early years of going into the clove, I had seen porcupines back up in the canyon a couple of times. I had also begun jogging up (and then back down) the aforementioned steep road at sunset every other day or so. These were the years of my prime fitness. That road is probably among the steepest in the Northeast, though only for some 2 miles, and I ran it slowly. Still, I can’t imagine doing that now. One reason I had begun running up the road, besides the challenge and the spectacular views it afforded, was that at that point I was obsessed with protecting this canyon, and I was hoping that I might catch someone dumping garbage and get their license plate number. I knew the two or three preferred spots to dump. I never did catch anyone, but one evening, as I was approaching the biggest bend in the road about halfway up the incline, the one that afforded the most sweeping view of the surrounding mountains and the Hudson River Valley below, and that also happened to be a prime trash-dumping site, I saw the mangled body of a porcupine in the middle of the road; it had obviously been hit by a car. Then I saw another porcupine by the side of the road, very agitated, pacing back and forth and in circles, making noises that sounded to me to be the equivalent of human wailing. I assumed it was the dead porcupine’s mate, and I was deeply saddened and moved. The mourning porcupine was still there when I came back down the road a half hour or so later. Two evenings later I ran up the road again, and to my astonishment the porcupine was still nearby, this time part of the way up a tree near the side of the road, continuing its display of grief. It had stayed near the body of its mate for 48 hours at least. The tenacity and intensity of its emotions were gut wrenching. No one who witnessed what I did could ever believe, as Descartes did, that animals are mere machines. The older I get the less I understand, but one thing I know unequivocally is that porcupines mourn their dead.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Animal Encounters by J.P. Harpignies, published by Cool Grove Press, 2014.

Dr. Victor Pineda: Radical Inclusion Addresses the Vulnerabilities of Every Person

Many conversations about diversity and inclusivity begin with racial and gender equity. They’re important considerations, to be sure, but true inclusivity delves deeper. It considers qualities such as socioeconomic status, sexual identity, and myriad abilities and disabilities.

Dr. Victor Pineda is addressing how to create a more inclusive world for people with disabilities through advocacy as well as academia. A Senior Research Fellow at U.C. Berkeley, Pineda has dedicated his career to figuring out what the world would look like if it was accessible to everyone. He is the President of World Enabled and of The Global Alliance on Accessible Technologies and Environments (GAATES), the leading international organization dedicated to the promotion of accessibility of the built and virtual environments. He is also a presidential appointee serving the U.S. Access Board.

At Bioneers 2017, Pineda delivered a keynote address about his life and working toward radical inclusion. You can watch his full talk and read an excerpted transcript below.

Dr. Victor Pineda:

I believe that there are no problems that are impossible if we have an imagination to look beyond what is apparent and we imagine a new future. You see, that was something that was instilled into me by this incredible woman — my grandmother, Nada. Babi is the rock that raised me. She was the one that gave me the strength to imagine my place in the world and reimagine what I could do.

My mother came to this country in search of opportunities because every time she took me to a school in Venezuela, the principals and the teachers said to my mother, “Keep your kid at home; he’ll be teased in school. It’s better that he doesn’t go to school. Plus, we don’t know what to do with a kid that can’t walk. We can’t really educate him. He’s not going to be able to get a job, he’s not going to be able to have a career. Just keep him at home; it will be easier for everybody.”

But my mother realized that those were just people that lacked imagination. And my grandma really raised us because my mother was a single mother. We came to the United States when I was 7. I stopped walking around that time because my muscles weren’t strong enough to hold me up. But you know who was strong enough was my brothers. They were strong enough to carry me up the tree so I could get a good view and give my grandmother a heart attack. They were strong enough to help me learn to defend myself from bullies in school.

My big brother, Francisco, in junior high, said, “You know, Victor, who’s this guy that’s teasing you? I want to beat him up.”

And I said, “It’s that guy.”

He said, “You know what? Maybe it’s better that I don’t beat him up; maybe it’s better that you figure out a way that you can defend yourself.”

It was that idea that I could actually stand up for myself, and that I could assert my rights with dignity, that allowed me to gain the self-confidence that I needed to tackle the challenges that life would throw before me.

—

I think family, love, support, being able to think about what’s possible beyond other people’s expectations, was critical. And that’s what my family did. That’s also what instilled in me the desire to go beyond what even I thought was possible.

So I came to the United States. I ended up excelling at school. The United States has passed the ADA – Americans with Disabilities Act. Huge victory for 54 million Americans, and something that supported my education in a way that I did not feel different than Robbie’s red freckles or Sally’s glasses. I just had a wheelchair. It was part of diversity. It was part of the class, but it was also part of my own story because I ended up going to U.C. Berkeley, getting a degree in political economy, business administration, then a master’s in regional economic development, and a PhD from UCLA in urban planning. Now I teach at some of the world’s most prestigious universities. Not bad for a kid that wasn’t going to get an education, right?

—

You see, inclusion really is not about just who’s in or who’s out. Inclusion is about understanding the diversity of all of our lifestyles and all of our preferences. It’s not about whether you can see or you can’t see; it’s about a spectrum of abilities. It’s not about whether you can walk or can’t walk, but how you’d prefer to move around. There are one billion people in the world that live with a disability. That’s one in seven. And that rises dramatically with aging. After 60 years old, the percentage of people with disabilities is about 45 percent, and after 80, it’s about 75 percent who experience some disability, some challenge, and encounter some way that they want the world to be a little bit more inclusive, a little more accessible.

—

So what do we do? What do we do to tackle the issue of inclusion? How do we create a world in which you can live with fewer barriers? How do we understand disability not as a medical perspective, but rather as an experience of human life that anyone can fall into at any time? And how do we create those bridges that allow us to realize our potential?

I think we could each do something. We could each think about what it means to be human, and we could each understand that being human is not about being just part of the same species. Google says it’s also about weakness. It’s about understanding that we’re not all perfect. It’s understanding that we each have vulnerabilities. And it’s those vulnerabilities that can unlock strengths within each one of us. It’s those places where we’re uncomfortable where we can we re-imagine what’s possible.

—

I am really honored that my colleague James and I are working on this initiative called Smart Cities for All because we’re seeing a huge convergence of technology in urban development, and it’s really that convergence that allows us to think about what’s possible, and have new imaginations about the world that we’re creating. You see, we don’t want to just be sustainable. We want to be responsive to the needs of the world and all our people. We don’t want to be just regenerative but also inclusive, meaning: Let’s get a world where love and imagination can create new opportunities and good times and a better future for us all.

How to Start Composting to Reduce Food Waste

Deborah Eden Tull has 18 years of experience as a sustainability coach and meditation teacher, and she’s also the founder of Mindful Living Revolution. Her approach to sustainable living is a unique combination of peace and environmentalism that emphasizes the interconnection between personal and planetary well-being. Deborah was also a guest speaker at the 2017 Bioneers Conference.

In The Natural Kitchen (Process Media, 2010), Deborah Eden Tull lends her expertise as an organic farmer and chef to the Process Self-Reliance Series by offering simple, life-changing ways for urban dwellers to create a more mindful relationship with their food and the environment. The following excerpt, of Chapter 3, covers how to begin reducing food waste in your kitchen and putting any scraps to use with composting.

I once worked at a school in Massachusetts where the students were being raised with an inspiring degree of eco-awareness. Some of the kids came up with the idea of posting signs on all of the school’s trash cans that said “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AWAY.” Consider the impact such signs could have in your own house! What might you do differently in your kitchen and home with this daily reminder? How would we relate differently to the food we cook and consume with this daily reminder?

The key elements in bringing the practice of zero waste in cooking are:

• Shopping responsibly.
• Making it a habit to cook with the whole vegetable.
• Preparing vegetables and fruit mindfully, using techniques that create less waste.
• Turning all the food waste we do create into useful nutrients (as in stock or compost).

Shopping Responsibly

Reduce food waste by shopping responsibly. Always check out dates on what you purchase, store food by placing the newest food at the back of your pantry and the oldest at the front, store food appropriately regarding temperature and sun/ shade needs and clean out your pantry and refrigerator weekly.

Here are more tips for how to reduce food waste in your kitchen, starting with your shopping trip:

• Buy food for just one week at a time.
• Follow conscious menu planning and the recycling of leftovers into meals as discussed in Chapter Six.
• Choose to eat what needs to be eaten over “what I want to eat right now,” if reducing waste is truly a priority.
• Pay attention and keep an eye on your inventory.
• Instead of putting produce scraps into the compost, consider making stock when you have time.
• For families, consider the value of teaching your kids this attitude of mind to train them to be stewards of sustainability

Using the Whole Vegetable

Years ago, I spent time in a macrobiotic community where I was taught to appreciate and use the whole of every vegetable I consumed. In the practice of macrobiotics, it is acknowledged that different parts of a vegetable—for example, the turnip root and the turnip stem—offer different nutrients and forms of energy.

This awareness is honored by cooking with every part of every vegetable—rather than using just the florets of broccoli, for instance—and tossing the rest. This practice ultimately provides the base for creating zero waste in cooking.
Using the whole vegetable requires creativity and might include using carrot tops for stock or decorative garnish, using broccoli stalks to peel and steam with your dinner, or saving lemon and orange peel to use as zest for salad dressings and baking (orange and lemon peel bring a special zing to so many recipes).

Consider that if you currently tend to buy bagged, pre-prepped vegetables, such as broccoli florets, it may be time to give up this habit. What happens to the stalk from the broccoli that gets pre-prepped and bagged? If we are serious about sustainability, it is a necessity to address this waste.

Follow these suggestions for preparing vegetables:

BROCCOLI—Peel the stalks carefully with a peeler, slice or chop the stalk and serve it raw, steamed, or in a soup. Chop the leaves and sauté them just like chard or kale. Prepare the florets for steaming or serving raw. Odd-shaped pieces of broccoli can be set aside for a blended soup or to chop up into a salad. You might also cook all parts of the broccoli into a creamy blended soup.

CAULIFLOWER—Follow the idea for broccoli and cook both the leaves and head.

CHARD or other greens—Prepare the leaves by washing and chopping them, then separately, finely chop the stems and steam or sauté them either with the greens or separately. The greens can even be served surrounded by the edible and colorful garnish of the stems.

BEETS (roots and greens)—Wash and prepare the roots and greens separately. Either gently peel the roots or scrub them well and leave the skin on. You can also boil the root, with the skin on, to soften it and peel it off by hand. The stems and greens can be finely chopped and steamed or sautéed. Consider serving the beet roots on a bed of greens.

TURNIPS—Follow the suggestion for beets and prepare both roots and greens. There is no need to peel turnips if you scrub them well.

CARROTS—Wash and prepare the roots and tops separately and either add the carrot tops to soup or stew or serve them as a garnish. Consider, for the dish you are preparing, is it necessary to peel the carrots?
After you have prepared your vegetables, there are also many reuses for food scraps before they get composted. These range from making stock to creating garden amendments to making homemade paper. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Creative Uses for Food Scraps

• Egg shells and coffee grounds are great in the garden to deter pests.
• Orange and lemon peels are good for deodorizing your countertops and cutting boards.
• Lemon, lime and orange strips can be used as decorations in drinks (or grated and used for cooking and baking).
• Potato and avocado peelings can be used to reduce eye puffiness.
• Beet ends make amazing ink stamps for kids (and adults) to use for art projects.
• Daikon root can be prepared for dinner, while their tops are used to turn your bathtub into a natural cleansing spa. (This is one of my favorite things. Visit Mina Dobic’s website to learn how to do this.)

To Make Stock:

I like to keep a bag of scraps for stock in my fridge, where the scraps will stay fresh (just a few days at a time) until I can make stock. I include garlic/onion peels, veggie scraps and seeds from squash/pumpkins I have cooked (seeds make a delicious nutty-flavored stock!). I leave anything that is particularly dirty or aging for the compost. Wash all of the scraps, place them in a large pot and fill it with purified water until the scraps are covered, cover the brew with a lid and bring it to a boil. After it boils, simply turn it down to simmer, gently lift the lid a bit and let the stock cook for the next hour. When finished, let it cool a bit, strain it, compost the scraps and use the stock to make soups, cook rice, veggies, stews, etc. You can store the stock in glass jars in the fridge for up to four days.

Mashed Vegetable Medley

I like to collect scraps such as broccoli stalks, the leaves of cauliflower and other vegetable scraps I need a use for, then cook them up in a little water and simmer for about 10 minutes with garlic and herbs. After, they should sit covered for a few extra minutes. Sometimes I add one chopped potato or root vegetable for a more creamy consistency and I then blend the mixture up into a soft colorful mashed potato alternative, adding a little sea salt and olive oil, coconut oil, or butter if desired. This is a delightful, nourishing and nurturing treat and an easy way to use all of the vegetable. It has the softness and savor of mashed potatoes, with even more flavor and more vitamins.

The Final Stage: Composting

Once we have used the whole vegetable, brought attention to how we prepared the vegetable and brought awareness to creative uses for scraps, we can take the final step and compost our food waste. As a fourth grader discovered at a composting workshop the other day, “Wow! We can turn our trash into something useful! I want to do that!” Yes and beyond that, we can turn our waste into something beautiful, practical and nourishing.

Why Compost?

Composting is a fundamental part of radical recycling and the ultimate “giving back.” Composting is easy, free and the reward is phenomenal… a reduction in your trash output by 50–75% and beautiful, rich, organic matter for your soil and plants. Compost feeds the soil vital nutrients, aids in water retention and encourages earthworms in your soil.

How Does the Compost Ecosystem Work?

Composting creates a mixed balance of nitrogen, carbon, air and water, which forms a decomposition process that feeds new life. How wonderful that we can take our old food and waste scraps and use them to feed new food! All we need to do as the composter is to follow simple steps to keep these elements of nitrogen, carbon, air and water in balance and to monitor the decomposition process. Here is an in-depth explanation of how to compost:

What Can I Put in My Compost?

If you set up a conventional compost system (either an outdoor hot pile, an underground pile, or an actual compost bin), you can put in everything from vegetable and fruit scraps, grains, dairy and pretty much all foods except for meats and heavy oils. If you have a worm bin, you can put in fruit and vegetable scraps (except for a few kinds I will mention later) and if you use the bokashi system, which I describe below, you can actually compost meat scraps as well.

What Makes a Good Compost Bin?

A good compost bin has proper aeration, is well-protected, is easy to turn and easy to harvest from. I personally like the Garden Gourmet for an urban/suburban household first-time compost bin, because it is easy to put together, easy to use, and is made of recycled materials. At the time of this book’s writing, the city of Los Angeles offers a compost bin for half the price (about $20) but I tend to choose products made of recycled material whenever it is an option.

Other designs you can consider are a barrel composter, which has a bar that turns the compost, rather than having to use a pitchfork to stir things up. You might also build your own compost bin. My favorite is a three-tiered bin with one section for throwing in scraps for the first part of composting, a second section for transferring the partially composted material when the first bin is full, and a third section to transfer it into again, with a special sifter to perfect the final product. This kind of bin is ideal if you have a larger amount of food scrap to compost.

How Do I Get Started?

First, decide what kind of system is best for you. For a four-person family that cooks regularly, I recommend a simple standing bin, along with a worm bin, or perhaps a hand-made three-tiered bin if you have a large backyard. The most important features for a standing bin to have are sufficient air flow, a sturdy cover to protect the bin from animals, and an easy design for attending to the compost process, aerating and collecting the finished product.

For someone living in a small apartment alone, I recommend a worm bin that can fit in your kitchen or on your balcony. For anyone who eats meat, I recommend a Happy Farmer. The Happy Farmer is a system similar to composting that can be used indoors and can process all food scraps—meat included—through an anaerobic fermentation process, which is different than the conventional composting process. This system is called bokashi, which is a Japanese term meaning “fermented organic matter.”

If you are a meat eater who cooks a lot, you may need to also have a hot pile or bin that sits in your backyard. I also recommend a Happy Farmer if you are the “neat and tidy” type who finds the idea of composting repelling.

If you have a large backyard or a plot of land, then you can compost the old-fashioned way and build a hot pile and simply build more piles as needed for the amount of food waste you have. A hot pile is an intentional heap of compostable materials created outdoors in such a manner that generates all of the heat required for the process of composting. There is an appropriate composting system for every situation and new designs make it easy for everyone to compost today, whether you live in a tiny apartment or on a large homestead.

Composting As a Daily Practice

For me, composting is a daily practice of compassionate self-discipline. I’ve been composting for almost 20 years and, even though I love the composting process, still, every now and then, when I’m in a hurry, I hear a voice say, “but I don’t want to take that extra step… I have no time.” I hear that voice and use it as a flag to check in with myself. Am I really about to choose laziness (face it, that’s all it is) over making a conscious choice to take care of the world in which I live? Becoming aware always energizes me. Rather than letting laziness control me, I remember that I have another choice, and that is to remain true to my commitment to be an earth steward. And, the reality is, it only takes a second!

What Do I Need To Begin?

• A compost bin!
• A sunny spot for a conventional bin or a shady spot for a worm bin
• A pitchfork
• A starter, such as already-made compost (from another batch of compost you have made or that you buy at the store) or Compost Inoculant (i.e. Dr. Earth compost starter). Manure, such as chicken droppings or bat guano, as well as green comfrey leaves, also serve as compost starter. Note that while starter is not a necessity, I have found that it improves the process and is especially helpful for the first month of the composting process.
• A scissors or pair of shears
• A closed container to store kitchen scraps in before delivering them to the compost, which can be placed on your kitchen counter, in a drawer, or in the fridge
• A source of “greens” or nitrogen and a source of “browns” or carbon. (It is smart to have a space set aside next to your bin for collecting carbonaceous materials.)

“Greens” or Nitrogen includes:

• Veggies, fruit, grains, dairy, all food scraps other than heavy oils and meat… so adding a little oil is OK but if you are a heavy fryer, don’t dump huge amounts of oil into your compost. Leftover lasagna, soup, salad, bread, all of it can go into your compost.
• Coffee grounds (include the filter if you use unbleached)
• Tea bags (without the tag unless it’s eco-friendly)
• Grass clippings
“Browns” or Carbon includes:
• Napkins and paper towels that are unbleached and not dyed
• Leaves (disease-free only)
• Branches
• Stems
• Shredded newspaper
• Weeds (but watch for seeds)
• Wood chips (use sparingly, high carbon)
• Sawdust (use sparingly, high carbon)

Neutral

Things which go into your compost and can be added to your food bucket, but are neither “greens” nor “browns.”

• Eggshells
• Laundry lint

What Else Can I Add?

• Dr. Earth Compost Inoculant
• Bat guano, rabbit droppings, chicken manure
• Manure
• Ready-made compost
• Seaweed

More on Coffee Grounds:

Coffee grounds can be an excellent addition to a compost pile. The grounds are relatively rich in nitrogen, providing bacteria the energy they need to turn organic matter into compost. Used coffee grounds, approximately 2% nitrogen by volume, can be a safe substitute for nitrogen-rich manure in the compost pile.

What Cannot Go In:

• Anything that takes longer to decompose, e.g., coconuts. Put these in your green bin.
• Large seeds like avocado seeds. How about planting them instead?
• Any kind of meat
• Dog or cat droppings
• Food peels containing pesticides

For a Worm Bin, What Do I Need?

• All fruits and vegetables (including citrus and other high-acid foods)
• Vegetable and fruit peels and ends
• Coffee grounds and filters
• Tea bags (even those with high tannin levels)
• Grains such as bread, crackers and cereal (including moldy and stale)
• Eggshells (rinsed off )
• Leaves and grass clippings (not sprayed with pesticides)

All You Need to Do:

All you need to do is to lay a few inches of carbonaceous bedding, such as dried leaves, at the bottom of your compost bin. Then each time you dump your “greens” or food scraps in the bin, you add a sprinkle of inoculant or ready-made compost, you cover the greens with an equal amount of browns, so they are well protected, you turn your compost with your pitchfork to aerate it, and you monitor. Every now and then check your compost to to see if it needs moisture. It should ideally feel slightly damp like a wrung-out sponge.

The Ideal Balance:

The ideal balance that creates fertile, sweet-smelling compost has a C:N ratio somewhere around 25 to 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen, or 25–30:1. If the C:N ratio is too high (excess carbon), decomposition slows down and you might notice your pile drying up or “just sitting.” If the C:N ratio is too low (excess nitrogen) you can end up with a stinky pile.

Different ingredients we put into the compost bin have different C:N ratios. Our job is to pay attention and adjust what we are adding to keep things in balance. For example, adding manure or grass clippings may lower high C:N ratios. Adding wood chips, dry leaves, or paper may raise Low C:N ratios.

Below are the average C:N ratios for some common organic materials found in the compost bin. For our purposes, the materials containing high amounts of carbon are considered “browns,” and materials containing high amounts of nitrogen are considered “greens.”

Estimated Carbon-to-Nitrogen Ratios

Browns = High Carbon C:N

Ashes, wood* 25:1
Cardboard, shredded 350:1
Corn stalks 75:1
Fruit waste 35:1
Leaves 60:1
Newspaper, shredded 175:1
Peanut shells 35:1
Pine needles 80:1
Sawdust 325:1
Straw 75:1
Wood chips 400:1

Greens = High Nitrogen C:N

Alfalfa 12:1
Clover 23:1
Coffee grounds 20:1
Food waste 20:1
Garden waste 30:1
Grass clippings 20:1
Hay 25:1
Manures 15:1
Seaweed 19:1
Vegetable scraps 25:1
Weeds 30:1

*Please note that ash is not helpful for acidic soil, so be aware of the pH of the soil you are working with before applying this to your compost in large amounts.

How Long Will My Compost Pile Take?

While the amount of time it takes to make compost varies, depending on the balance (of nitrogen, carbon, air and water) in your pile, in my experience regular composting can take from 3–6 months to produce a finished product. A worm bin may take 1–2 months to fill and then 3–5 months to fully compost. The bokashi fermentation system takes two weeks for the initial breakdown and then at least two more weeks to be compost.

Do I Need to Add Water?

Ideally your compost will have an equal mix of nitrogen additions which provide moisture and carbon materials that are dry, so that it will be a nice crumbly consistency. If it’s not, you can add water as needed. An easy way to do this is to use the leftover water from rinsing out your food scrap bucket.

What’s the problem if my compost smells?

Too much nitrogen and not enough air will make the compost too acidic and this results in a foul smell. In this case, just add carbon and aerate your compost.

What Do I Need to Know to Create a Healthy Worm Bin?

To get started, you will need about 500 g. of worms or 2000 worms. They can be purchased online or through an organic gardening source and typically cost from $40–$50. Worms like a diet of veggies and fruit, plus 30% carbon (shredded newspaper, paper towels, envelopes, etc.) Worms don’t like bread, onions, garlic, meat, dairy, or large amounts of grass or leaves. If you take on worm composting, it is your job to take care of the vermiculture ecosystem in order for the worms to thrive. I have suggested books and websites on vermiculture on the Resource List, and I recommend that you read up for more information.

Here is some advice from my own experience: If you notice fruit flies forming around your worm bin, add a nice sprinkling of lime and wait a day or two. Additional carbon (shredded newspaper, paper towels, envelopes, etc.) can be helpful too. A handful of lime of gypsum once a month also assists the decomposition process.

Worm tea is so potent that it can actually be harmful if not diluted. Dilute it about 1:10. Worm castings don’t have to be diluted. They can be mixed with potting soil or applied directly to soil and plants as you would apply regular compost.

But I Don’t Have a Garden. What Will I Do With My Compost?

Feed it to your indoor plants. Feed it to your trees. Give it to your neighbors. There is never a shortage of uses for good compost. As we will discuss in Chapter Four, our soil is desperate for nutrition. Creating compost out of food scraps is one way of giving back to the soil, reducing trash and creating more of a closed system on the land you live on.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from The Natural Kitchen by Deborah Eden Tull, published by Process Media, 2010.

A Karmic Moment: Why Men Must Step Up Now to End Rape Culture

In October 2016, before Trump was elected, Eve Ensler gave a visionary call at the Bioneers conference for men to put ending rape culture front and center in their lives and work.

Candidate Trump, said Eve, is a phenomenon – something larger than the person – because he’s channeling the unprocessed darkness in the environment and swirling it into ever-greater darkness. He’s carrying our collective karma, and we can change that.

Since then, serial scandals have continued to escalate until the dam burst with the Weinstein wake-up-call and the cultural tsunami of the #metoo movement. It’s a watershed moment, but little will actually change, says Eve, unless and until men step up to dismantle the patriarchy, transforming themselves in the process of ending this vicious system that destroys men’s souls as well.

The gender wound may be the deepest social wound of all. At this epic moment of seismic cultural change, what we do now will determine the future for decades to come. This is the moment to begin healing the gender wound once and for all. Please let us know what Eve’s words mean to you.

-Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers co-founder

Below: Eve Ensler speaks on rape culture. Listen to the audio or read her remarks below.

Eve Ensler:

I have actually had contempt for Donald Trump for at least 30 years, like it’s been a long-term passionate contemptuous relationship. And Trump is a phenomena. Phenomenas sweep and swirl in spiral darkness; they collect the darkness that has not been processed in the environment, and they swirl it into more darkness.

It feels like it’s almost mythical on the level of the patriarchal father, this kind of idea of this abuser, charming to some people – not to me – charismatic to some people – not to me. This dominating, billionaire, fantasy, TV figure who is carrying in, really, our karma. He’s carrying in our karma.

It’s manifested years of metastasized racism in this country. It’s manifested sexual violence, which is rampant – 1 out of 3 women and girls will be beaten and raped in her lifetime. It’s manifesting a complete disregard for Mother Earth and its environment, and an understanding that climate change is the most pressing concern of our time. And yet we’re still dealing with it on this very prosaic, barbaric, he-said/she-said, right? As opposed to going to what is underlying what is happening in this country right now.

Having been somebody who’s worked to stop violence against women now for the last 20 years, I have to say this: It’s not that I don’t think we’ve had victories, it’s not that I don’t think we’ve had our voices and we’ve broken the silence and many more people are speaking up, and that we’ve kept rape — you know, shelters open and hotlines — but really, have we changed the core of rape culture? Absolutely not.

Trump is not just Trump. Trump is the manifestation of rape culture. And for me, rape culture is this kind of bubble that we are contained within. It has to do with normalizing sexual violence, it has to do with how we treat the Earth and the occupation and the domination and objectification of it, not seeing it as a living, breathing life force. It’s an understanding that some people don’t matter and some people do, and when they don’t matter, you can absolutely do whatever you want, that you don’t ask permission, that you don’t listen to somebody wanting to invite you in or not inviting you in. I mean, I think everything about our world is this dynamic and projection and trajectory of a rape culture.

I have struggled with this for many years. I know it has to do with how we bring up boys from the beginning. I know it has to do with sexuality and the fact that we don’t teach people how to have good sex and what good sex is, and what intimacy is, and what beautiful touch is, and what sensuality is. And everyone’s so messed up sexually from the get-go, and it just gets worse and worse as they go along. So I think that’s deeply connected.

But I also know until men make this issue theirs, and make it as important as football, for example, make it as important as anything in their lives, I don’t know how we get out of this. Honestly.

What can men do to catalyze this and encourage this so that men awaken? Look, it’s not that there are not plenty of good men. There are plenty of good men. Look at all the great men who came out over the last weeks…the sports guys and fathers. But here’s the problem: They don’t make this a centerpiece of their life. They don’t understand that they’re not just doing this for their daughters and their mothers and their sisters, they’re doing this for themselves. To live in a rape culture denigrates your soul day after day after day. To resist it means you want to live in a beautiful soul. You’re not doing it to protect your mother or protect your daughters. I hear this so often. No. You’re doing this because it feels bad to rape women; it feels bad to degrade women; it feels bad to denigrate women; it feels bad to harass women. And I don’t understand what goes on in men. I tried. I have tried and tried. I don’t get it.

So I am putting out this call to the beautiful, caring, loving men who are many: What will catalyze you? What will ignite you to fight for this as much as you fight for the land, as much as you fight for everything that you fight for?

I think what’s happening right now is amazing, because I have never heard discourse on sexual violence on every single news station in the country. I’ve never heard so many women breaking their silence and coming out and saying, “This happened to me, this happened to me, this happened to me.” I’ve never heard this many people linking racism and sexual violence. And I’ve never heard so many people talking about how we treat the Earth and how we treat women’s bodies as a single wrapped issue.

I actually am feeling strangely optimistic. I think we are at a point where the window has been opened and now we have got to rise up, every single one of us, in our strongest, boldest, angriest, most visionary selves, and make sure that this window never closes again. Because I think we have that potential at this moment.

Capitalism: The Elephant in the Room

By Thomas Linzey

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.

While I shouldn’t be surprised anymore when someone at a conference asks why CELDF’s community organizing doesn’t take on capitalism directly, the question still startles me. The intimation is that our work nibbles around the edges, rather than being focused on directly changing the underlying economic system that rewards community-destroying behavior. Therefore, the question suggests, CELDF’s work is destined to fail.

Not only does the question reflect a misunderstanding of our work, it also buys into the myth of how systems change.

Critiquing Capitalism

For decades now, liberal academics and activists have decried the way our economic system works. They’ve picked our system apart piece by piece, while doing various post-mortems on the ways that capitalism has responded to everything from the Great Depression to environmentalism. They’ve written enough books to fill a library, given enough speeches for everyone to have grown tired of hearing them, and taken up enough of the public space so that the contours of the elephant in the room have now been fully dissected ad nauseum.

From one vantage point, they’ve done yeoman’s work: Fashioning a comprehensive critique of capitalism has not been an easy task. This is particularly true in the face of the rabid “free market” functionaries who march in lockstep across every television and newspaper. But from another vantage point, that critique has birthed a litmus test for activism that is impossible to achieve. It says that unless you’re proposing a wholly packaged system of replacement, and the means for that wholesale replacement, then the work you’re doing doesn’t have a prayer of changing anything.

Is wholesale replacement necessary? Perhaps, but the economic models drawn up in lecture halls likely aren’t the substitutes. Those are generally mired in the “old left” way of thinking – placing trust in government rather than in private market actors. One could argue, however, that both systems have equally tortured Earth on the rack, the only difference being whether private corporations or governments are at the wheel.

Back to Basics

So, we need to start with the fundamentals. As historian Richard Grossman once declared, the bedrock functioning of all current economic systems requires control over Earth’s resources, and the labor necessary to extract them. For that purpose, those economic systems create centralized authorities that either control natural resources and labor themselves, or create the conditions for private entities to do so.

In the United States, our federal and state legal systems fall into the latter category – serving to protect, insulate, and enhance the authority of private entities to run the show.

This is why ecosystems and nature are considered “property” in the eyes of the law. It’s why the owner of those ecosystems has the legal authority to destroy them. It’s why workers lack constitutional rights in the workplace against their employers, why oil and gas can be legally taken from landowners without their permission under “forced pooling” laws, and why people within their own cities, towns, villages, and countries are prohibited from banning corporate factory farms, genetically modified organisms, oil and gas extraction, and a litany of other harmful corporate projects.

Prerequisite to Change

Those wishing to change that system must come to grips with the fact that people do not embrace wholesale change immediately. First, a corporate hog farm sites next door to them, or pesticide spraying threatens their organic garden. Logically, their focus is on stopping those activities that are threatening to harm them.

When they learn that the current system of law forces them to endure those harms, they begin to understand that what is happening in their community is not an isolated example. Instead, their problem is structural, and not easily fixed. Without the community’s firsthand experience, and the guidance of those who have seen it before, a critique of the system at the outset simply finds no purchase.

Changing the System by Seizing It

CELDF’s work offers a frame through which to understand that world. It works with those people on the receiving end of the system, to become the ones who change it.

They begin changing it by seizing their municipal governments to free themselves from the controlling legal doctrines of the past: corporate constitutional “rights,” which guarantee that corporate decisions override community decision-making; the authority of state government and the federal government to protect business entities by preempting the community from adopting laws that interfere with corporate proposals; and the legal doctrines that require the state government’s pre-approval for lawmaking by the community.

By forcing a recognition of their own right to govern themselves, and using that right to stop that which is harming them, they seek to put capitalism in a box. It is a box in which projects that violate the rights of communities and nature are prohibited. Those projects that do not violate rights, are not prohibited.

The work seeks nothing less than to remove centralized control over nature and people by building a bulwark of rights for human and natural communities. With those forced changes to the system, is it still capitalism? Would anyone care if it was?

Through those exigencies of the moment, it is time to create a new economic and political system piece by piece – one that has, perhaps, never been seen before. The newness of the moment, far from giving us pause, should instead validate our belief that it’s the only work worth doing.

2017 Bioneers Conference: Uprising! | Bioneers

The Bioneers conference is a kaleidoscope of diverse experts, speakers, and activists working together to exchange knowledge, amplify stories, and gather together to share and spread practical solutions to our most pressing social and environmental challenges. This mini-documentary brings to life the Bioneers 2017 gathering.

Produced by Bioneers
Shot and Edited by the Understory

No Healthy Soil, No Food

A Regenerative, Interdependent Solution

Dear Bioneer,

Indigenous Environmental Network:

Sierra Club:

Sister Simone Campbell:

Democracy Now!:

350.org:

Demos:

Heather McGhee:

Ai-Jen Poo:

National Domestic Worker’s Alliance:

Natural Resource Defense Council:

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Shopping Responsibly

Using the Whole Vegetable

The Final Stage: Composting

Composting As a Daily Practice

Critiquing Capitalism

Back to Basics

Prerequisite to Change

Changing the System by Seizing It

Keep Your Finger on the Pulse