A New Hampshire Resident & Legislator Exchange Words on Community Rights

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

Recently, New Hampshire Representative Ellen Read sponsored CACR19, a state constitutional amendment that guarantees local communities the right to make the decisions affecting the places where they live – including recognizing Community Rights over corporate claimed “rights.” The New Hampshire Community Rights Network (NHCRN) and local residents drafted the measure with support from CELDF. Several co-sponsors have signed on, creating a bi-partisan coalition.

It sounds simple enough: the right to local community self-government. But it has many New Hampshire legislators in a tizzy. One of them says that the people do not, and should not, govern themselves. Check out one resident’s powerful exchange with a legislator here, in response to a Letter-to-the-Editor supporting the amendment.

From Representative Brian Stone:

NOV 14 • The concept of ‘home rule’ isn’t synonymous with the liberty we all enjoy in New Hampshire. Home rule permits municipalities to make as many ordinances and laws that apply to their municipalities as they see fit. More laws, regulations, ordinances… Does this sound like freedom to anyone? The State of NH protects our freedoms by setting out what municipalities are permitted to do in regards to these realms. If you think home rule is so wonderful, all you have to do is visit Massachusetts. I’ll let you be the judge of which state has more freedom. Revolutionaries didn’t fight to live in a state where the law changes from town to town, and their freedoms could be highly restricted merely because of the municipal boundaries they live in.

Furthermore, the freedoms in the NH Constitution are the law of the land, and are enforced.

The people that seem to push ‘home rule’ in NH that I have seen in my House Cmte. that regularly sees these types of bills are usually from extremely liberal towns that want to restrict the freedom of their citizens, but can’t because we live in a state without ‘home rule’, so they have to ask the Legislature.

I’ll continue to stand against ‘home rule’ and ensure that NH citizens have liberties anywhere in NH they go knowing that when they cross borders between towns they aren’t subjecting themselves to more regulations, ordinances, and laws…

On another important note, towns frequently want to do something that is not in the best interest of the State and its citizens as a whole. Home rule would permit a town to have veto power on any important plans such as infrastructure projects that benefit the rest of the State.

I also just wanted to add the following on what the NH Constitution talks about:

It grants no direct power to towns or cities. The only constitutional power that is granted is Part I, art. 39, which prohibits the legislature from changing the form of government of a town or city without the approval of the voters. Other than that single instance, the New Hampshire Constitution grants power to the legislature, which in turn may grant power to municipalities if it wishes to through statutes. The legislature may also take those powers back again by changing or repealing the laws. This concept has been firmly stated by the New Hampshire Supreme Court: “…towns are but subdivisions of the State and have only the powers the State grants to them.” Piper v. Meredith, 110 N.H. 291 (1970). Further, “[u]nder our State Constitution ‘(t)he supreme legislative power…(is) vested in the senate and house of representatives ….’ N.H. Const. pt. II, art. 2. See also N.H. Const., pt. I, art. 29. For these reasons, we have held that the towns only have ‘such powers as are expressly granted to them by the legislature and such as are necessarily implied or incidental thereto.’” Girard v. Allenstown, 121 N.H. 268, 270‐71 (1981).

From Monica Christofili:

NOV 16 • Representative Stone, your comments show thoughtful mindfulness of our NH Constitution and your constituents’ freedoms. However, the proposed State Amendment is not about home rule. (The editors used “home rule” in the title, not the letter writers.) Instead, the amendment is about recognizing, securing, & protecting NH citizens’ right to self-government. In other words, it’s about community rights affirmed in our Declaration of Independence & NH’s Constitution. Namely, Part 1, Art. 1 of NH’s Constitution declares that government of right originates from the people and is founded in consent. Art. 2 declares we have natural, essential, and inherent rights.

This said, you’re correct. NH state law determines what happens in our communities. Yet this often means the state denies communities the authority to protect themselves. Therein, Art. 10 of NH’s Constitution declares that when government no longer protects its people, the people have a right and a duty to reform the old or establish new government: “The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”

In other words, the amendment is about inalienable rights, about town residents determining whether projects benefitting the state “over-all” will affect the health, safety, & welfare of themselves and nature. How do we figure this “over-all” sum to begin with? Consider an energy project that brings jobs but also threatens residents and ecosystem. The project is no longer benefiting the state over-all because it creates a sacrifice zone of a town’s residents and ecosystems. Is this town worth less than the state as a whole? How do we justify that viewpoint to town inhabitants when they cannot say no to a project hurting them? You mention that community rights supporters who want to say no to such projects are usually from liberal towns that want to limit rights of citizens. You might be interested in this study about the community rights movement transcending political party, age, and gender: https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/water-concerns.

You also state, “More laws, regulations, ordinances. Does this sound like freedom to anyone?” But does it sound like freedom when we can’t say no to corporate projects depleting our aquifers, drilling through our estuaries, poisoning our water? It doesn’t to me, my husband, or to our 5 year old son, who asks us if his friends who were poisoned with contaminated water at Pease AFB are going to die and if the contamination is in our water supply. We don’t know how to answer him since Pease contamination has reached the Great Bay Estuary, right next to our water supply. We’d like to be able to say to our son that if a project ever comes near us that the state is allowing even though it is going to poison our water, we’ll be able to exercise our freedom to say no to the project and yes to his inalienable right to clean water.

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

Food Policy Action’s 2017 Congressional Scorecard Shows Lack of Action

By Michael Peñuelas

This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

Food Policy Action (FPA) has released its 2017 National Food Policy Scorecard to help the public track actions taken by lawmakers in the United States (U.S.) Congress.

FPA reports that the scores are down significantly this year because neither the House nor the Senate spent much time on food issues, leaving FPA with little to grade. Senators were graded on 1 vote and their co-sponsorship of 10 bills, while Representatives were graded on 5 votes and 11 bills.

Any U.S. citizen can view the grades assigned to their Senators and Congresspeople by FPA via an online scorecard tool.

Ken Cook, a co-founder of FPA and the President of the Environmental Working Group, explains that the scorecard highlights a “frustrating lack of bipartisanship on food policy votes.” According to Cook, “food policy is not a partisan issue. Congress should prioritize a more balanced, healthy and sustainable food system. With this year’s report showing great room for improvement…voters need a clearer sense of where their legislators stand.”

FPA designs the scorecard to capture the full spectrum of policies impacting the food system in an attempt to demonstrate the connections between them. “We believe this annual overall snapshot will help break down silos in the food movement so that the members themselves, and the public, recognize the multiplicity of issues impacting food, they write.

This year, while 220 members of Congress received perfect scores of 100 percent,130 members were given scores of 0 percent, the lowest possible.

“We deserve better,” said Tom Colicchio, another co-founder of FPA. “Congress has allowed the political dysfunction of a new Administration to not only prevent positive food bills from moving forward but to roll back basic critical protections that keep our food system safe. FPA will continue to hold members of Congress accountable for the votes they cast – or I should say lack of votes this year – that impact food and our food system,” said Colicchio.

The scorecard did grade a handful of bills and votes positively. “We applaud those in Congress who broke through the noise to raise their voice for the good food movement,” said FPA Executive Director Monica Mills. “Their efforts did not go unnoticed.”

Positively-rated efforts included bills proposed by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), as well as by representatives Susan Davis (D-CA-53), Alma Adams (D-NC-12), John Faso (R- NY-19), Jared Huffman (D-CA-02), and Elizabeth Esty (D-CT- 05).

Mills also suggested that the scorecard should have a direct bearing on the 2018 midterm elections. It will assist FPA and other organizations working in the food movement to determine their strategy moving into 2018 and help voters decide which lawmakers’ food policy records should earn their votes. According to a poll published by FPA, food issues are highly persuasive among likely swing voters.

“While this year’s Scorecard shows a weak Congressional agenda on food policy, this is only a midterm score,” said Mills. “Congress has a huge opportunity to show leadership on these issues as we move into discussions ahead of the 2018 Farm Bill. It is our job to hold them accountable during the next election cycle.”

This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.

The Far-Reaching Environmental Impacts of Oil Spills

Carl Safina is an ecologist and award-winning author who writes about oceans, animals, and the human relationship with the natural world. A long-time advocate for ocean preservation, Safina was the inaugural holder of the Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook, and President of The Safina Center. He recently shared his experience with nature’s intelligence with Bioneers, and he was a keynote speaker at the National Bioneers Conference 2017.

In A Sea in Flames (Crown Publishers, 2011), Safina shares his account of a months-long, manmade disaster that shook the U.S. As he travels across the Gulf, Safina attempts to deconstruct a series of misjudgments that led to the now-infamous Deepwater Horizon explosion. The excerpt that follows, a selection from “Part Two: A Season of Anguish,” explores the broader impacts that oil spills have on the environment and its inhabitants.

“My name’s Dicky Toups,” says the pilot before he starts the engine of the seaplane I’m climbing into. “But they call me Captain Coon-ass.”

We overfly the emerald maze of the vast Mississippi Delta. Captain Coon-ass points, saying, “There’s a big ole gator.”

To the far points of view, America’s greatest marshes lie dissected, bisected, and trisected, diced by long, straight artificial channels and man-angled meanders, all aids to access and shipping. For the vast multimillion-acre emerald marshes, they are death by a thousand cuts.

The sign had said, “Welcome to Louisiana—America’s Wetland.” Pride and prejudice. People here depend on nature or the control of nature—or both. Keep an eye on nature; it can kill you here. But people can kill the place itself.

Since the 1930s, oil and gas companies have dug about 10,000 miles of canals through the oak and cypress forests, black mangrove swamps, and green marshes. Lined up, they could go straight through Earth with a couple thousand miles to spare. The salt water they brought killed coastal forests and subjected our greatest wetlands to steady erosion. Upstream, dams and levees hold back the sediment that could have helped heal some of that erosion. Starved on one end, eaten at the other. How to kill America’s wetlands. Long after this oil crisis is over, this chronic disease will continue doing far more damage than the oil.

All these Delta-slicing channels cause banks to dissolve, swapping wetlands for open water. Those channels also roll out red carpets for hurricanes. Incredibly, this has all cost Louisiana’s coast about 2,300 square miles of wetlands. Marshland continues to disintegrate at a rate of about 25 square miles a year. The rise in sea level due to global warming is also helping drown watery borderlands. Oil leak or no leak, these things, all ongoing, constitute the most devastating human-made disaster that’s ever hit the Gulf. Bar none.

Only slowly does the muddy Mississippi lose itself to the oceanic blue of the open Gulf, a melting of identities, a meeting of watery minds. And also the drain for sediments, agricultural fertilizers, and deadzone-generating pollutants from the entire Midwest and most of the plains. Even before the oil blowout, this was a troubled place—a troubled place whose troubles have now escalated to a whole new level.

Two boats are tending booms around an island densely dotted with nesting pelicans. As I’ve noticed from the ground—but it’s even more striking from up here, at 3,500 feet—most of the coast is bare of booms and undefended. Where booms have been placed along the outer beach, many have already washed up onshore, already useless.

The sea-surface breeze pattern is interrupted by a marbling of slicks. Often such a pattern is perfectly natural, so I look carefully. It’s brown.

“Oil,” says Captain Coon-ass.

One of those slicks has nuzzled against the shore. There’s a boat there and some people are walking along the beach, inspecting a long boom that the wind has washed ashore.

The nearshore waters and beyond are dotted with drilling rigs for oil and gas, some abandoned. Like bringing coals to Newcastle, many of the rigs stand surrounded by floating oil.

Offshore, longer slicks ribbon their way out across the blue Gulf. As we follow them, the light slicks thicken with dark streaks that look from the air like wind-driven orange fingers, then like chocolate pudding. An ocean streaked with chocolate pudding.

A few miles out, the streaks grow darker still. Yet there remains far more open water than oil slick.

That changes. Blue water turned shiny purple. A bruise from a battering. The sea swollen with oil.

As the water darkens and the slicks widen, Captain Coon-ass points to a small plane below us, saying it’s on a scouting run for the C-130s that will follow to spray dispersants. More chemicals on a sea of chemicals.

Yet plenty of the oil—and I mean plenty—is not dissolved. Blue water turned brown.

“This is some pretty thick stuff right here,” Captain Coon-ass says. The crude is now drifting in broad bands that stretch to the horizon. “We’re lookin’ at twenty miles of oil right here.”

We’re directly over the source of the blowout. Below, two ships are drilling the relief wells that we’ve been told will take months. A dozen ships drift nearby, most with helicopter landing pads on them. What they’re all doing, heaven knows.

A fresh breeze puts whitecaps on the nonoiled patches of the black-and-blue sea. As the C-130 comes out, we turn northeast.

We’re headed toward the Chandeleurs, the line of sandy islands that have been much in the news for their at-risk bird rookeries. Soon we’re over Breton Sound, where a couple of days ago, from a boat, I saw no oil.

But now there is plenty of oil, moving in between the main coast and the islands.

Out to intercept the oil is a fleet of shrimp boats towing booms from the outriggers that would normally tow their nets. The idea appears to be that they will catch the oil at the surface, the way they catch shrimp at the seafloor.

Dozens of boats tow booms through the oil, but as they do, water and oil simply flow over them. Far from corralling it, they’re barely stirring it. As they pass, the oil—seemingly all of it—remains.

Louisiana lives by oil and by seafood. But oil rules. Fishing has nothing like the cash, the lobbyists, the destructive sophistication of the pusher to whose junk we’re all addicted. But Florida lives largely by the whiteness of its sand. It has long eschewed oil. And the difference in what politicians will and won’t say about oil is stark.

Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist returns from a little airtime over the Gulf. His message: “It’s the last thing in the world I would want to see happen in our beautiful state.” He adds, “Until you actually see it, I don’t know how you can comprehend and appreciate the sheer magnitude of that thing. It’s frightening. . . . It’s everywhere. It’s absolutely unbelievable.” Where oil money rules, governors are not at liberty to disclose such impressions. They’re probably not at liberty even to think them.

“The president is frustrated with everything, the president is frustrated with everybody, in the sense that we still have an oil leak,” says a White House spokesman.

But we’ve only just begun.

When Obama announced that he was opening up large new areas for offshore drilling, he said, “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” That’s exactly right. Leaks, spills, and blowouts are never expected. Yet we know they happen. That should make us thorough in preparedness. But the human mind lets down its guard if big danger seems rare and remote.

And so we did. In 2009, the Interior Department exempted BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling operations from a detailed environmental impact analysis after three reviews concluded that a massive oil spill was “unlikely.” Oil rig operators usually must submit a plan for how they’ll cope with a blowout. But in 2008, the Bush administration relaxed the rules. In 2009, the Obama administration said BP didn’t need to file a plan for how it would handle a blowout at the Deepwater Horizon. Now a BP spokesman insists, “We have a plan that has sufficient detail in it to deal with a blowout.”

Obviously, they don’t. Obviously, they aren’t.

“I’m of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster,” says Congressman Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “That, in my opinion, is what happened.” Bush and Cheney’s ties to big oil and their destruction of Interior oversight are infamous. But Obama’s Interior secretary’s ties to big energy also make environmentalists uneasy. As a senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar accepted some of BP’s ubiquitous campaign contributions. In 2005, Senator Salazar voted against increasing fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, and voted against an amendment to repeal tax breaks for ExxonMobil and other major petroleum companies. In 2006, he voted to expand Gulf of Mexico drilling. And then as Interior secretary, he pushed for more offshore drilling. The Interior secretary now says there have been well more than 30,000 wells drilled into the Gulf of Mexico, “and so this is a very, very rare event.” The oil from those offshore rigs accounts for 30 percent of the nation’s domestic oil production, he notes, adding. “And so for us to turn off those spigots would have a very, very huge impact on America’s economy right now.”

Probability, however, tells us that the spill’s a very, very inevitable event. Especially with 30,000 wells drilled and roughly 4,000 wells currently producing oil in the region. In 2007, the federal Minerals Management Service examined 39 rig blowouts that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico between 1992 and 2006. So, a blowout every four and a half months. I guess most are quickly controlled. Why aren’t we ready for one that isn’t? A car accident is a rare event, but we use our seat belts and we like to know we have air bags.

Rather than plan for the worst, Big Petroleum has indulged in—and been indulged by—a policy of waving away risks. In a 2009 exploration plan, BP strongly discounted the possibility of a catastrophic accident. A Shell analysis for drilling off Alaska asserts that a “large liquid hydrocarbon spill [hydrocarbon meaning oil and gas] . . . is regarded as too remote and speculative to be considered a reasonably foreseeable impacting event.”

Foresee this: if you think it’s difficult to clean up oil in the warm, calm Gulf of Mexico, imagine trying to do it in Arctic waters with icebergs, frozen seas, and twenty hours of darkness.

Speaking of the cold and the dark, “Drill, baby, drill” queen Sarah Palin just has to say something about all this. So she says we shouldn’t trust “foreign” oil companies such as BP. She says, “Don’t naively trust—verify.” Verified: her husband worked for BP for eighteen years. Palin blames “extreme environmentalists” (c’mon, Sarah, is there any other kind?) for causing this blowout because they’ve lobbied hard to prevent new drilling in Alaska. If you follow what she has in place of logic, it could seem she’d rather that this had happened in her home state.

In and out of the comedy of horrors strides BP CEO and court jester Tony Hayward. “I think I have said all along that the company will be judged not on the basis of an accident that, you know, frankly was not our accident.” That’s what he actually says. Highlighting the failed blowout preventer, Hayward says, “That is a piece of equipment owned and operated by Transocean, maintained by Transocean; they are absolutely accountable for its safety and reliability.”

Transocean’s president and CEO says drilling projects “begin and end with the operator: in this case, BP.”

Take that.

He says that Transocean finished drilling three days before the explosion. And he says there’s “no reason to believe” that the blowout preventor’s mechanics failed. That’s what he actually says.

Halliburton’s spokesman says his company followed BP’s drilling plan, federal regulations, and standard industry practices.

In sum, BP has blamed drilling contractor Transocean, which owned the rig. Transocean says BP was responsible for the well’s design and pretty much everything else, and that oil-field services contractor Halliburton was responsible for cementing the well shut. Halliburton says its workers were just following BP’s orders, but that Transocean was responsible for maintaining the rig’s blowout preventer. And the Baby Bear said, “Somebody’s been lying in my bed.”

By the end of the first week of May, a heavy smell of oil coming ashore along parts of Louisiana’s coast begins prompting dozens of complaints about headaches, burning eyes, and nausea.

Meanwhile, I hear on the radio that in an effort to do something, “People from around the world have been giving the hair off their heads, the fur off their pets’ backs, and the tights off their legs to make booms and mats to mop up the oily mess spewing out of the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico.” Whether any of this stuff was ever actually used, I can’t say. I never saw any; that I can say.

By May’s second week, heavy machinery, civilian and military dump trucks, Army jeeps, front-end loaders, backhoes, and National Guard helicopters are pushing up and dropping down sand to keep an impending invasion of oil from reaching the marshes in and around Grand Isle, at the tip of Louisiana. Much of the mobilization falls to the Marine Spill Response Corporation, formed in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster and maintained largely by fees from the biggest oil firms. Its vice president of marine spill response says that most of its equipment, including booms and skimmers, was bought in 1990. She says, “The technology hasn’t changed that much since then.”

“This is the largest, most comprehensive spill response mounted in the history of the United States and the oil and gas industry,” crows BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, sounding proud when he ought to be aghast and horrified by the scale of the mess and the upheaval.

Workers farther inland are diverting fresh water from the Mississippi River into the marshlands, hoping the added flow will help push back any oily water that comes knocking. “We’re trying to save thousands of acres of marsh here, where the shrimp grow, where the fin-fish lay their eggs, where the crabs come in and out,” says the director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission. Enough Mississippi River water to fill the Empire State Building is now rushing into southeastern Louisiana wetlands every half hour. “We have opened every diversion structure we control on the state and parish level to try to limit the oil approaching our coasts,” says the assistant director of the Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration, “nearly 165,000 gallons every second.”

“It can’t hurt,” says a wetlands ecology professor at Ohio State University and an authority on the Mississippi’s interaction with the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, but it can.

***

New fear factor: hurricane season. The image: hurricanes that could “churn up towering black waves and blast beaches and crowded cities with oil-soaked gusts.” The news stories carry attributions such as “experts warned.” And precise-sounding imprecision like: “As hurricane season officially starts Tuesday . . .” and “Last month, forecasters who issue a closely watched Colorado State University seasonal forecast said there was a 44 percent chance a hurricane would enter the Gulf of Mexico in the next few months, far greater than the 30 percent historic average.”

To the ambiguity and imprecision, add unnecessary intonations of worrisome complexity: “The high winds may distribute oil over a wide area,” says a National Hurricane Center meteorologist, adding, “It’s a complex problem that really needs to be looked at in great detail to try to understand what the oceanic response is when you have an oil layer at the sea surface.”

To most normal people faced with the real event of an out-of-control mess, especially people who’ve survived hurricanes, that kind of noninformation stokes anxiety, provokes fear—and gives no one a clear clue about what to do. Does one make decisions based on the difference between 30 and 44 percent? News you can use, it isn’t. It’s news that can help ruin your health.

Insult to injury: “Safety first,” says a BP spokesman. “We build in hurricane preparedness, and that requires us to take the necessary precautions.”

By mid-May, something like 10,000 people are Being Paid for cleanup eff orts around the Gulf. BP has little choice. Anything less, there’d be riots. Most are fishermen riding around looking for oil, dragging booms that don’t collect much oil, or putting out booms that can work only on oil that hasn’t been dissolved by dispersants. About a million and a half feet—roughly 300 miles—of boom is already out along the coast. Other people are out picking oil off beaches with shovels.

How much oil are we dealing with? This gets good: Purdue professor Steve Wereley performs computer analyses on the video of the leaking oil to see how far and how fast particles are moving (a technique called particle image velocimetry). His conclusion: the well is leaking between 56,000 and 84,000 barrels daily. His other conclusion: “It’s definitely not 5,000 barrels a day.”

Just a few days ago, during congressional testimony, officials from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton estimated a “worst-case” scenario maximum flow of 60,000 barrels a day. Yet a BP spokesman says the company stands by its estimate of 5,000 barrels per day. There’s “no way to calculate a definite amount,” he says, adding coyly, “We are focused on stopping the leak and not measuring it.”

That’s Bull Poop. As the director of the Texas A&M University’s geochemical and environmental research group points out: “If you don’t know the flow, it is awfully hard to design the thing that is going to work.”

Killing the well is proving difficult. Killing public confidence is easier. The fact that the real flow will turn out to be sixty times what BP was first saying, and twelve times the Coast Guard’s most oft-repeated estimate, does the trick handily.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout by Carl Safina, published by Crown Publishers, 2011.

Bioneers in the News: November/December 2017

Searching for the perfect news round-up? Look no further! We’ll keep you savvy with all the Bioneers creativity and inspiration you need in your life. Follow the Bioneers Blog for our bi-weekly news roundup:

“Over the last five years, intersectionality has become a buzzword and an accountability standard for social change organizations and leaders…Two patterns especially trouble me – conflating the word ‘intersectional’ with the word ‘identity,’ and applying intersectional analysis inconsistently. There are lots of great examples of intersectional organizing for us to learn from, and the pay off can be profound when we get it right.” Rinku Sen writes on Intersectionality (a term created by Kimberlé Crenshaw)

Malkia A. Cyril and Dallas Goldtooth are on Full Color Future’s #FullColor50, “showcasing leaders — in tech, media, commerce, and advocacy — who are building a new narrative through their work.”

“Coal doesn’t make financial sense and New Energy Economy has prevailed at the Commission level in proving our case.” Mariel Nanasi celebrates the power of the people in this latest victory from New Mexico

“DRM law has the power to do untold harm. Because it affords corporations the power to control the use of their products after sale, the power to decide who can compete with them and under what circumstances, and even who gets to warn people about defective products, DRM laws represent a powerful temptation.” Cory Doctorow for his Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) »

Eriel Deranger’s Indigenous Climate Action rejects award to move Aviva to “step up and show real leadership to adopt policies that result in substantive change. This moment could move Aviva, and the divestment conversation, forward to recognize Indigenous rights and cease all underwriting of tar sands corporations and full divestment from fossil fuels.”

Ai-Jen Poo joins Pop Culture Collab’s #WONDERLAND podcast to chat pop culture and social change.

“It poses a risk to the Indigenous rights of tribal nations all along the route and it’s a complete disregard for free prior and informed consent as guaranteed on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” Dallas Goldtooth speaks to CBC News on campaigns fighting against the Keystone pipeline’s construction.

Tara Houska sets the “Thanksgiving” record straight for Mic in this viral video.

The regulations are “not just about sharing tips with the back-of-the-house staff — that part would be okay — but employers would have the right to decide what to do with the tips.” Saru Jayaraman in the Washington Post and in Business Insider

Talking about climate change with friends and family can be intimidating. #BioneersYouth Alliance for Climate Education can help!

“There is now a broad consensus among forest scientists that we have considerably less fire in our forests today compared to the natural levels that occurred prior to fire-suppression policies.” Chad Hanson for Sierra Magazine »

Is LA’s infrastructure prepared to cope with our new normal of extreme weather and the droughts, wildfires and mud slides that come with it? Andy Lipkis speaks to KPCC’s Take Two on the city’s resilience

“Working within communities to make them stronger, healthier, and better—nothing the Sierra Club does today is more important. We, too, are in construction: It’s a cleaner, better future we’re building.” Michael Brune for Sierra Magazine

Van Jones tells Vulture his 10 favorite books – we see some fellow Bioneers on the list!

“Now a financial advisor for RBC Wealth Management where he advises on more than $2 billion in environmentally sustainable investments, Thomas Van Dyck shared insights that were also drawn from more than four years of work with the Divest/Invest movement. The organization urges investors to ‘join the global investor movement accelerating the sustainable energy transition’ by divesting their fossil fuel assets.” HuffPost covers Tom Van Dyck at #Bioneers2017

Joan Blades talks Living Room Conversations on the TEDWomen stage:

“Net Neutrality isn’t hard to understand, except when someone makes it so, because muddying issues is often a profitable endeavour – expensively-sown confusion is a mainstay of climate denial and a tactic that goes all the way back to the tobacco industry’s work to obscure the link between smoking and cancer.” Cory Doctorow for the New Internationalist

“If you give it a chance, nature will be much kinder than we deserve.” David Suzuki speaks to the youth, hope, and nature’s brilliance in this CBC piece.

Jeremy Kagan’s film, SHOT, is now available on iTunes and Amazon.

“With sexual harassment and assault revealed to be prevalent in public workplaces, imagine what is happening to workers who labor behind closed doors in homes around the country.” Ai-Jen Poo in the Washington Post

Billy Parish (Mosaic) and Bren Smith (GreenWave) have been named in Rolling Stone’s “25 People Shaping the Future”

Joel Solomon is featured on Caroline Casey’s KPFA Radio show, The Visionary Activist this week.

Rinku Sen responds to a reader who asks what to do when people close to her say racist things at social events. The perfect guide to navigate the holiday season!

“Early next year, this slip of land, a little more than half an acre in all, will become the first physical piece of the Sogorea Te Land Trust, a project they’ve been working on since 2014 to return indigenous land — specifically Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone land — to indigenous stewardship.” Corrina Gould speaks truth in the San Francisco Chronicle

Inspired by John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project, The Perennial in San Francisco celebrates #WorldSoilDay every day. Diana Donlon of the Center for Food Safety interviewed co-owners Karen Leibowitz and Anthony Myint for Civil Eats.

Naomi Klein at the 2014 Bioneers Conference“What gives me more hope than ever is the increased energy people are putting into solutions. People are increasingly becoming clear that they have to be the leaders that they have been waiting for — and stepping into that role of leadership.” Vien Truong offers reason to be hopeful in 2018

From the TED Archives, a previously unpublished piece by Janine Benyus on the bio-industrial revolution.

“It is always assumed that people will be able to return to their place of origin’ once the disaster passes. That’s a distinctly unrealistic assumption in our age of drowning island nations and vanishing coastlines.” Naomi Klein on the U.S.’s Temporary Protected Status program for the The Intercept

Board Member and #BioneersYouth Xiuhtezcatl Martinez profiled in Upworthy

“Perhaps no outsider—no visiting expert, no dispassionate observer, certainly no outside investor—will notice the inherent weakness and cruelty of a one-product economy in a region or a country. But the adverse effects will certainly be visible and acutely feelable to the resident insiders.” Wendell Berry’s new work, The Art of Loading Brush, in Sierra Magazine

“Nobody has ever explored these deep waters, and no one on the team knows what we’ll find.” James Nestor for bioGraphic »

“The Center for Media Justice will join dozens of other digital rights champions to take Ajit Pai’s FCC to court to win back our digital voice. We’ll take action in the street if we have to, and do whatever is necessary to preserve the right of communication for communities of color, and all those with voices at the margins who, now more than ever, need to be heard.” Malkia A. Cyril on the #NetNeutrality repeal

Paul Hawken, Wendell Berry, and other brilliant folks of our time covered in Civil Eats Food and Farming Books of the Year.

Two brilliant #Bioneers2017 keynote speakers, Heather McGhee and Amy Goodman, united on Democracy Now! to discuss patriarchy and the abuses of power in media and government.

“What the storm also did is show that we can’t wait for the government to address social and environmental problems. We can’t just sit here.” Jason Mark reports from Puerto Rico for Sierra Magazine

Tom Goldtooth speaks to Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! at #COP23 on the #KXL oil spill and the Indigenous Environmental Network’s new report on Carbon Pricing and Community Resistance.

“But something big is starting to shift. After years of effort from activists, there are signs that the world’s financial community is finally rousing itself in the fight against global warming.” The latest from Bill Mckibben in The New York Times

The evolution of Biomimicry from an idea to practice? Janine Benyus in L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science

“For me, Jones’ story helped bring into focus how our systems of social dominance—capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—require winners and losers. We’re all steeped in these systems. The win-lose paradigm plays out daily in the subtle and not-so-subtle details of our lives, at work, in the kitchen, in our bank accounts. And the one system with the potential to equalize us—democracy—is kept caged by the winners who want to stay on top.” Executive Director of YES! Magazine, Christine Hanna on Van Jones

Citizen Science featured in the The Economist! Shannon Dosemagen and the groundbreaking work of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science highlighted in this beautiful piece

Ai-Jen Poo (National Domestic Workers Alliance, Caring Across Generations) talks the insurance market and universal long-term care in the The New York Times »

“Jayaraman said it is sad to see the restaurant race-wage gap so high in the #BayArea, a place that is hailed as a center for progressive thought and ideals. She said that, like income inequality and housing affordability, the restaurant race-wage gap is one more example of the gulf between those in the Bay Area with privilege and those without.” Saru Jayaraman for KQED News »

Mary Anne Hitt of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign debriefs #COP23 in her latest piece for the HuffPost.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date on the latest Bioneers news in real time.

Why America Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics

By Ken Schwencke

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.