Ericka Huggins, the renowned former Black Panther, political prisoner, human rights activist – and educator, poet, and professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Merritt College in Oakland – has for 35 advocated for “restorative justice” and the role of spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting social change. Grounded in her belief in the greatness of the human heart, Ericka says each one of us has the ability to look there for the answers to questions about the future of our world. Personal transformation is necessary to achieve social transformation.
This speech was given at the 2016 National Bioneers Conference.
There are a few things that I believe are human universals, or the aspects of being human that are present across all cultures, no matter where we come from. Among them are showing gratitude, sharing food, and making meaning together through storytelling. These things are why I love Thanksgiving.
But let’s be real. Thanksgiving is a problematic holiday built on deliberate lies and the ongoing genocide of millions of Native American peoples. Until last year, I was always bothered by the fake history underpinning one of America’s most cherished holidays—you know, the story about how the Pilgrims invited the Indians to share a harvest feast. Trust me, you’ll never hear a Native American say, “You know what I love about this time of year? The heartwarming Thanksgiving story I learned in grade school.”
Let’s deconstruct the The First Thanksgiving painting above: I see a half-naked Indian man wearing a plains Indian-style headdress, sitting on the floor with the dogs, being fed by a a fully clothed settler woman, while the white men stand up in a domineering semi-circle around the Natives. What is the message this painting conveys?
So, in today’s blog, I’d like to share some ideas for how we can transform Thanksgiving, and how we can “Indigenize” it, no matter who we are, in ways that are culturally respectful to Native Americans. This will be a longish blog, but I promise to keep it interesting.
If you don’t want to read any further, check out what I recommended in last year’s blog, 3 Ways to Decolonize Thanksgiving, which are to:
Invite in new friends from outside your usual circle.
This year, I’ve been thinking about how I can build upon this framework, to make Thanksgiving even more of a recognition of the real relationships between Native Americans, recent immigrants, and descendants of earlier settlers in a specific place—in short, how to Indigenize Thanksgiving.
How NOT to “Indigenize” Thanksgiving
Why I wanted to Indigenize Thanksgiving
Read all the way through this blog to learn about 3 ways to Indigenize Thanksgiving. To preview, they are:
Acknowledge First Peoples
Eat Indigenous Foods
Learn Local History
Last Sunday, I hosted the Second Annual “Decolonize” or “Indigenous Thanksgiving” feast. Before I get into how my co-hosts and I Indigenized Thanksgiving this year, I want to share the origins of this new tradition in my life.
For me, Thanksgiving always triggered thoughts of the genocide of millions of Native peoples, which is important to remember, but also psychologically damaging when it feels like the majority of Americans celebrate a holiday, unaware that Thanksgiving is a day of mourning for many Native Americans. (Check out the awesome video below of Native people reacting to the word “Thanksgiving” to better understand the complicated and fraught relationship Native peoples have with Thanksgiving.)
I am no longer bothered by the fake history. Instead, since the Bioneers Indigeneity Program co-hosted the first annual “Decolonize Thanksgiving” feast in New York City with incredibly talented puppet artist and environmental educator Heather Henson, I’ve felt empowered to change it.
Psst: Indigenous scholars Waziyatawin and Michael Yellow Bird define Colonization as “the process that is perpetuated after the initial control over Indigenous Peoples is achieved through invasion and conquest.” So, decolonization is “the meaningful and active resistance to the forces of colonialism that perpetuate the subjugation and/or exploitation of our minds, bodies, and lands.” To me, “decolonization” is the process of undoing the structures of oppression that have been used to subjugate Indigenous Peoples. For example, if we have been coerced by the food commodities programs to eat processed foods, we “decolonize” by eating a more traditional, healthy diet. If we have been forced to hate our languages and identities due to the generations of assimilative boarding schools, to “decolonize” would be to re-learn our languages and to be proud of who we are. For more, check out this great scholarly work, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang)
Along with our guests, Heather and I “decolonized” Thanksgiving by honoring the true history of the Wampanoag territory/Plymouth, Massachusetts, eating foods indigenous to North America, and engaging in honest dialogue around the truth of America’s treatment of Native peoples. I now know that many other people from all different backgrounds have the same problem with the Thanksgiving Myth and want to incorporate new traditions to fix what’s wrong with the holiday.
Decolonize Thanksgiving 2016 was such an incredible experience that I wanted to bring it to where I live in Monterey, California, close to Bioneers’ headquarters in San Francisco. Along with Patricia Hamilton, who helps people record their life stories through “Keepers of Our Culture,” the Bioneers Indigeneity Program hosted the second annual “Decolonize Thanksgiving” feast on Sunday, November 19, at the Youth Center in Pacific Grove, California. We invited friends of Bioneers and locals to join us in this year’s celebration.
In planning the Second Annual Decolonize Thanksgiving, I wanted to keep all the elements that made last year’s event such a success, and build on them. I wanted to open the event with objects and activities that would connect guests to place and local Native cultures.
I wanted to eat not just foods Indigenous to North America, but also those made of the same ingredients that the Ohlone peoples would have eaten.
I also longed to know the real story of what happened during the California Indian genocide—in the place I am grateful to live now—from the descendants of the people who survived it.
Finally, I wanted this event to be a family affair, just like feasts and potlucks I grew up with in Alaska, with children present to make this a part of their future traditions.
Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone) and Kouslaa Kessler Mata (Northern Chumash and Yokut) smile at snacking kids while the Ohlone ingredients are prepared into a modern-day feast at Decolonize Thanksgiving 2017.
Rooting Thanksgiving in Place
Admittedly, part of my reasoning for hosting the event on the Monterey Peninsula was selfish. When I moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 2010, I was struck by how much it reminded me of coastal Alaska, where I spent all my summers from my childhood well into my twenties. I immediately noticed the same humpback whales, harbor seals, and otters that I grew up with on the ocean. In the Pacific Grove, I saw the ghosts of unknown Aleut ancestors of mine, paddling skin kayaks through the misty coastal waters.
I grew up with stories of the Russians colonizing the Aleuts, forcing them to go as far away as California to hunt sea otters, which they sold to China to fund their empire over a hundred years before the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Russians used to refer to sea otter pelts as “black gold” because they were worth more than their weight in gold in 18th century trading prices. That colonial history connected me to this place.
The most powerful way to begin to decolonize a place is to acknowledge the living descendants of the first peoples. When I moved to Monterey, it seemed to be conspicuously missing an outwardly visible, living Native American population. I knew that the California mission system killed the vast majority of the Peninsula’s original inhabitants. I recently read an estimation that up to 80% of those who entered the missions died in them under the forced-labor and disease-ridden conditions. But, I also knew there are survivors among us. Some of the descendants who weren’t killed or removed probably had to move elsewhere due to expensive housing prices here. Others may simply live a private life.
I often take walks in Fort Ord, behind my house. I look at the vegetation, see the quail and wild turkeys, signs of mountain lions and coyote scat, and I think about the people who used to live among the plants and animals. I wonder what they ate, and think about how much knowledge they must have had about the healing and medicinal qualities of the sages and other indigenous plants. I feel guilty for not knowing the names of the plants, and which ones are edible or medicinal, as I do up North.
Step 1 to Indigenizing Thanksgiving: Acknowledge First Peoples
I wanted to know the original peoples of this beautiful and abundant place. It took a little research and asking around, but I finally learned who the Indigenous People of Monterey Peninsula are. They are the Rumsen, within a larger linguistic and cultural group called Ohlone. Beyond books, beyond archaeology and museums, I wanted to meet the living descendants of the Rumsen Ohlone People and invite them as the most important guests to the Second Annual Decolonize Thanksgiving.
It was equally important to me to invite 5th-generation settler Californians and recent newcomers to our dinner, so that we could engage in dialogue and learn from each other. Our attendees included first-generation immigrants, settler-descendents, and Native peoples representing ten different tribes, seven of them California Indian tribes.
Unless you are already a part of this group, I’m not suggesting that Indigenizing Thanksgiving means that you have to find and invite members of your local Native American community to your dinner. In fact, please don’t do this. It’s called “tokenism,” which is a form of racism.
Instead, you should learn the name of the Native Peoples of the place you live, and acknowledge that you are in their ancestral territory. In your opening words to the Thanksgiving meal, you might make it a new tradition to say something like the following:
“We are thankful to live on the Monterey Peninsula, the ancestral territory of the Rumsen Ohlone peoples.”
Step 2 to Indigenizing Thanksgiving: Eat Indigenous Foods
I recently met an incredibly inspiring Rumsen Ohlone man at the Bioneers Conference, Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone). Louis and his partner, Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone) recently founded mak-‘amham, an Ohlone catering company, which means “Our Food” in the Chochenyo Language. Together, Louis and Vincent have reconnected with their ancestral foods for healing and spiritual well-being.
Of course, I had to invite Louis and Vincent to cater our meal, and they delivered tremendously, serving up sweet and savory food combinations from simple pairings of six ingredients or less that make up the signature, pre-contact Ohlone palate. We ate:
himmen (first): Pureed native dandilio, bisque cooked in a savory duck broth with bay laurel
‘uṭṭin (second): crispy duck breast cooked with bay laurel and light honey glaze served with blackberry dipping sauce cooked with locally gathered herbs and honey; rich amaranth seed “stuffing” slowly cooked with local mushrooms and walnuts in a mushroom broth; sautéed local mushrooms – chanterelles + oyster mushrooms cooked with bay laurel + sea salt; sorrel, purslane and watercress salad with huckleberries, blackberries, walnuts, pine nuts, popped amaranth seeds served with an elderberry + walnut oil dressing
kaphan (third): acorn flour brownies topped with walnuts and sea salt
Mouthwatering sorrel, purslane and watercress salad with huckleberries, blackberries, walnuts, pine nuts, popped amaranth seeds served with an elderberry + walnut oil dressing.
Our meal was just as delicious as it looks, deeply connecting us all to the message carried through their food:
“…It is our hope to create beautiful Ohlone cuisine that allows us to be a little closer to those before us, and to honor the legacy we inherit from them. Our primary goal is always the wellness and decolonization of our Ohlone communities. We also hope to educate non-Indian people about who we are, as the Indigenous people of the East Bay and Carmel Valley. We hope to dispel negative stereotypes through actively demonstrating the vibrancy and beauty of Ohlone culture, and especially the deep + living connections we have to our homelands. We hope to raise awareness to people who are not indigenous to California what the true culture and cuisine of this beautiful and ancient place really is.”
I recognize that serving foods Indigenous to where you live can be a daunting research task. However, there are some foods that are Indigenous to North America, such as turkey and “the 3 sisters” that you will probably be serving anyway. You can learn about the significance of the 3 sisters to Native Americans in this presentation by Kiowa chef, Lois Ellen Frank, given at the Bioneers Conference. I guarantee that knowing the cultural significance and meaning of these foods to place will increase your enjoyment, fulfillment and well-being connected to the Thanksgiving meal.
Step 3 to Indigenizing Thanksgiving: Learn Local History
The final step to Indigenizing Thanksgiving is to learn the real story of the place that you live. If you live in America, this inevitably means learning about the processes of genocide and colonization. This knowledge can be painful to learn, but it is critically important to know true history so that it cannot be repeated. At Bioneers, we have taken on this responsibility for 28 years. In 2008, we organized a panel on the topic of California Indian Genocide: Truth and Recognition, as part of our responsibility to ensure that all Californians know the history of the state where our headquarters are located.
Val Lopes, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, discusses the three waves of genocide and colonization by the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans California Indians suffered.
We showcased a preview of the video of this panel at Decolonize Thanksgiving 2017, and had a deep and meaningful conversation about what we learned, lead by our California Indian guests, who bravely volunteered to share the difficult truths that have deeply and personally affected their families. This video will be released by the new year, but until then, please visit the Bioneers Indigeneity Playlist for videos of speeches by Native American leaders that cannot be found anywhere else.
I also asked Louis Trevino, as a member of the local Rumsen Tribe, to offer a historical reading about the history of Monterey. He shared the words of Isabel Meadows, the last fluent speaker of the Rumsen language, who worked tirelessly to preserve her cultural traditions despite surviving what is probably the worst holocaust among all Native American groups.
Here’s an excerpt of Isabel Meadow’s words as shared by Louis Trevino:
“When the Americans came, Sargent ran them off when he bought the land there. And they had to leave, and from there they were piled up along the river encamped, and from there the Indian people scattered… And so they were thrown out among the other people only to seek out a life as the poorest, and they were exposed then to all kinds of vices and to drinking… Some died of sadness, and others went out, they scattered wherever… many died from smallpox, and from measles as well, not knowing how to take care of those diseases… They drank from sadness because they were thrown out… And many people died as a result of drinking whiskey and wine, dying faster as a result of drunkenness and the sorrow that they had been thrown out despite being the first people of Carmel… And now there are almost no pure people of Carmel, neither our language, because of so much that has been suffered, compounded by the forces of the Mexicans and then the whites. I hope that one of the rich people of Carmel will buy for them a good piece of land even just to live, to put the Rancheria like before, to revive the language, and to make story again in the world.”
We were all deeply moved by Isabel’s words first spoken 80 years ago, and a moving discussion followed. Honoring what really happened in Monterey made us sad, but at the same time, we felt hopeful that Louis and Vincent, as young tribal knowledge bearers and future leaders, have dedicated themselves to keeping their languages, foods and traditions alive. And many of the guests publicly acknowledged and thanked them.
Of equal importance, Decolonize Thanksgiving ignited important conversations on the Monterey Peninsula around the erasure of the real history of this place. We closed the event inspired to share Native American stories of Pacific Grove more widely with present-day residents who, according to census data, identify as 78% white, and 0.3% Native American.
What’s Next for Decolonize Thanksgiving
Our co-host, Patricia Hamilton, and I committed to collaborating with our California Indian guests to share their stories in the second edition of the volume, Life in Pacific Grove, of which we will publish a sister-book about the oral histories of Monterey Native Peoples. All stories will be told and vetted by local California Indians, and shared respectfully and appropriately according to tribal protocols to serve as an important resource for future generations of descendants of the First Peoples of this place, and Pacific Grove residents.
This historical event was made possible by Bioneers, friends and donors to the Bioneers Indigeneity Program, Vincent and Louis of mak-‘amham, Keepers of Our Culture, and our incredible guests, with an extra special thank you to Cornelia Holden of Mindful Warrior. We can’t wait to do it again next year!
Life is complicated. But the source of life is rather simple—sunlight. We can thank the brilliant evolution of the plant kingdom for being uniquely able to turn sunlight into nutrition for its own sustenance, to feed the symbiotic soil microfauna and ultimately to sacrifice themselves to feed animals and people.
There is a magnificent and logical dynamic to nature as is expressed in this Aldo Leopold quote, “Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.” From a biomimicry perspective, humanity’s efforts would be better focused on understanding the way of nature and designing how we can mimic such brilliance to meet the needs of society without sacrificing the future.
It is astounding how the industrial food system has ignored nature’s evolved wisdom and pushed ecological harmony to the brink, driven by greed, control, and a disregard for other species. The immune response to that pathology comes in the form of ecological agriculture and local food systems. People are making the connection between what they put in their mouths and how that promotes or degenerates human health. But to take it one important step further, we need to understand how what we eat affects our most precious inheritance, the natural environment. Can we eat in a way that can help restore the resources—air, water, soil, biodiversity—that agriculture is dependent on?
That is the question that the Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Program (RFS) works to answer by promoting exemplary models of ecological agriculture and showing how creative visionary people have rolled up their sleeves and put into operation food systems that are ecologically regenerative, equitable and healthy.
Restorative Food Systems at Bioneers 2017
At the 2017 Bioneers conference a number of creative visionaries shared their work and breakthrough ideas on how to restructure the dominant exploitive food system to one that is healthy, climate and environmentally friendly, and serves people over profits.
In the International Agroecology workshop, Florence Reed, founder of Sustainable Harvest International (SHI), shared how SHI transitions slash and burn farmers in Central America to organic and agroecology methods. 200–500 million mostly-poor farmers worldwide practice slash and burn agriculture, which has been used for thousands of years and is associated with greenhouse gas emissions and air and water pollution. SHI has helped farmers heal local ecosystems, increase biodiversity and has given subsistence farmers a significant boost in income.
The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver—the poorest zip code in Canada, rife with prostitution, rampant drug abuse, AIDS and mental illness—is where master farmer Michael Ableman has developed the largest urban farm in North America, a total of thirteen acres, including a one-acre mixed orchard, that supplies top Vancouver restaurants while providing honorable work for down-and-out people trying to overcome severe challenges. Michael’s mix of social entrepreneurship teaches homeless folks the skills to grow gourmet organic vegetables while he maintains a level of compassion. If a worker doesn’t show up for a week due to their addiction, the question when they return is not “where were you” but rather “how are you?”
I’ve long been an admirer of permaculture, but had been unable to find a scaled-up permaculture agricultural production model until I met Mark Shephard. Mark has “redesigned agriculture in nature’s image” by developing silvo-pasture and a perennial polyculture agro-forest that creates fertility, sequesters carbon and ecologically restores his 106 acres and the surrounding ecosystem.
The generosity of plants is evident by their abundant reproductive gift of seeds, which have been stewarded for millennia by small farmers and placed into the public domain to benefit all humanity. But the leviathans of agribusiness want to monopolize the essence of life and treat it mechanistically by altering its genes in risky ways.
The Seed Exchange at Bioneers brings together hundreds of grass-root seed savers to promote the tradition of seed stewardship and sharing, and to respect the fact that, as Seed Exchange host Emigdio Ballon, Director of the Tesuque Tribal Farm, says, “Seeds are alive.”
Seed Exchange at Bioneers 2017 Gathering. Photo by Republic of Light
What do seeds sunshine, plants and photosynthesis have in common? Many things actually, but one critical cohort is carbon. Carbon is the building block of life and yet, due to modern western culture’s hubris, it has been perilously mismanaged presenting humanity’s most epic challenge—how can we stabilize a dangerously out-of-whack climate? As permaculturists like to say, the problem is the solution.
John Wick and Calla Rose Ostrander of The Marin Carbon Project, at a Bioneers keynote presentation, shared how they, with the help of local ranchers and UC Berkeley researchers, are learning about the enormous potential to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, where it is creating climate chaos, and store it the soil where it has multiple benefits—like water retention for drought resistance, increased fertility and better yields. The math is favorable, soil, which has lost enormous quantities of carbon due to industrial farming practices, has a carbon deficit and therefore an immense capacity to sequester and hold carbon and if done on a massive global scale could help turn the clock back on climate change.
This is so profound that the RFS program produced a one-day intensive focused on carbon farming at the Stemple Creek Ranch in Marin where a carbon farming plan is being implemented. We heard from ranchers, food system activists, policy advocates and researchers on the latest findings and best practices of using carbon as an organizing principle to produce food, restore local ecosystems and mitigate global climate change.
These are some of the inspiring, practical examples of how creatively working with nature can build a restorative food system that can nourish people and create a healthy and ecologically harmonious environment.
In order to keep Bioneers’ Restorative Food Systems Program alive and thriving, we rely on the generous support of our community. Please consider helping us get a jump start on the new year.
This article originally appeared on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s website. The Rocky Mountain Institute transforms global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future.
Almost 30 years ago, seven organic farmers from the U.S. Midwest, unhappy with the state of American agriculture, decided to band together and form a cooperative to continue farming sustainably. Today, the Organic Valley agricultural cooperative, headquartered in La Farge, Wisconsin, is made up of over 2,000 farmers in 36 states. And the cooperative just became part of a unique community-solar partnership that will allow it to become the largest food company in the world to source 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy.
Organic Valley is a founding member of the Climate Collaborative, a group of 133 natural and organic food companies committed to reversing climate change. At the Climate Collaborative’s Climate Day event in March 2017, Organic Valley committed to procure 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2019.
Renewable energy is not new to Organic Valley. In 2012, the company invested in the installation of a 5 megawatt (MW) wind farm next to its distribution center in Cashton, Wisconsin. Organic Valley also has rooftop solar arrays on many of its buildings. However, with the growth of the company over the past few years, these installations only covered about 50 percent of its energy needs. To get to 100 percent, Organic Valley initially set out to build a 1 to 5 MW solar array with a power purchase agreement (PPA) as a pilot project. However, Wisconsin is a regulated market, making a PPA more difficult. According to Stanley Minnick, energy services manager at Organic Valley, “Once we realized how difficult it would be to have a direct power purchase agreement, we knew we would need to scale up and partner with more communities to achieve our goal. It was important for us to see new installations near our facilities and many of our farmers in the Midwest.”
A Unique Partnership
That’s when the company reached out to OneEnergy Renewables, a developer of community- and utility-scale solar energy projects and a member of Rocky Mountain Institute’s Business Renewables Center. “Since Wisconsin is a regulated utility market, it became pretty clear early on that this was going to need to be a creative partnership,” said Eric Udelhofen, director of Midwest development at OneEnergy. So, OneEnergy started outreach to the Upper Midwest Municipal Energy Group (UMMEG)—a municipal joint action agency that provides a range of services to its 15 municipal members in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota—and the three companies created a community solar partnership. The Organic Valley–UMMEG partnership will develop roughly 12 MW of solar for Organic Valley facilities, and will support the addition of more solar in other nearby communities, bringing the total of new solar installations to about 29 MW. Not only will it allow Organic Valley to reach its 100 percent renewably powered goal, but it will also increase solar energy use in the state by 15 percent.
OneEnergy located the project sites within Organic Valley’s member communities, all of which are within 100 miles of their Cashton facilities. By working with its local utilities in a community solar approach, Organic Valley fulfilled its 100 percent commitment with 12 MW of solar projects, and the partnership has allowed for 17 MW of additional solar to be built out—the equivalent of powering roughly 3,000 homes.
It took only 13 months to get all the systems under contract. OneEnergy had such success in garnering local support so quickly because of the trust between the communities and the local business. According to Rachit Kansal, an associate in RMI’s Business Renewables Center, “Organic Valley is a grassroots organization, with deep roots in the local community. This gives them a significant amount of trust and thus, when they brought something to the table that they thought would benefit the community, the community listened.”
Organic Valley has agreed to purchase all the renewable energy certificates (RECs) from those systems for the life of the projects. “We’re not just doing a year-to-year contract,” according to Minnick. “We’re making a long-term commitment.” UMMEG has a 25-year power purchase agreement with the project, and Organic Valley will continue to buy electricity from the utilities as it has in the past.
Community Benefits
This unique partnership is bringing benefits beyond clean energy to the local communities. “The rural communities in which the projects will be located are not only hedging against a rise in energy prices, but will see utility bill savings from day one,” says Udelhofen.
The projects also create economic activity and show a commitment to sustainability. “These communities like the idea of attracting young people and appealing to the next generation of folks who are thinking about where their energy and food come from,” says Minnick. “The communities look to these projects and hope they’ll bring in more people who want to call these rural towns home.”
The fact that the arrays are smaller and spread out throughout different communities in which Organic Valley members farm is important on many levels. “Community-scale solar is the right size for municipal utilities that want to capture the benefits of local solar on their distribution grids where interconnection capacity is limited,” according to Joseph Goodman, manager of RMI’s Shine™ community-scale solar program. “Such small utilities often operate electric grids in rural areas where community-scale solar can now provide economic value and enhance resiliency while meeting member demand.”
Jonathan Reinbold, head of sustainability at Organic Valley, stresses the importance of the local aspect of the solar projects. “Organic Valley is catalyzing new solar in the region. We’re fulfilling the expectations that our consumers have in sustainable energy and food production. It’s not only good for us and our consumers, but also good for the communities, good for the residents, and good for the utilities.”
Pollinator-friendly Solar
Organic Valley’s commitment to animals and the planet also led them to adopt pollinator-friendly solar standards. Just this year, the bumblebee was declared an endangered species. To combat the bumblebee decline, Minnesota became the first state to establish a solar standard that encourages developers to plant wildflowers and native plants next to the solar arrays to make them more appealing to pollinators. The flowering plants and grasses next to the solar arrays producing electricity for Organic Valley will create as much bee and butterfly habitat as if 30,000 families were to each plant six-by-twelve-foot pollinator gardens. “By providing pollinator-friendly habitat with our solar arrays we’re taking local to the next level,” says Bill Eddie, CEO of OneEnergy.
Cooperation Is Key
The partnership between the customer (Organic Valley), a project developer (OneEnergy), and the utilities themselves (UMMEG) was key to helping Organic Valley reach its 100 percent renewable electricity goal. “This is a great example of what can be done when a large customer works closely with its utility to complete its goals,” says Eddie. “Instead of going around their utility through onsite projects or large complicated wholesale transactions, more businesses are trying to figure out what they can do with their local utilities, and municipal utilities have more latitude in what they can do to meet customer demands.”
Minnick agrees and believes they are lucky to work with such forward-thinking utilities. “The municipal utilities in Wisconsin have a lot of flexibility that an investor-owned utility does not. At the end of the day, they’re always going to be looking out for their customers. Municipal utilities should look at this not just as a feel-good story, but also as a way to save money for their rate payers and constituents.”
This article originally appeared on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s website. The Rocky Mountain Institute transforms global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future.
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.
Unprecedented wildfires broke out in California’s Napa Valley early last month. One of the fires has been considered among the deadliest in the state’s history. Raging for more than a week and reaching 90-percent containment two weeks after ignition, the fires collectively destroyed a reported 8,400 structures and burned 220,000 acres in California wine country.
The long-term implications for agriculture are uncertain, but experts and government officials report that smoke-taint, job loss, and elevated housing prices for seasonal and other agricultural workers are among the immediate concerns.
With long-term drought having recently ended and the dry summer season coming to a close, Cal Fire director Ken Pimlott told the Los Angeles Times in an interview that vegetation was ready to burn. Strong winds, with gusts up to 70 miles per hour, are credited with downing power lines and accelerating the spread of the fires once they had begun.
As several vineyards sustained damage, the fires may have long-term effects on wine production. The Napa Valley, with 45,000 acres of land cultivated for grape production, represents 0.4 percent of the world’s wine production, according to the nonprofit trade association Napa Valley Vintners. It also employs 100,000 workers.
Renata Brillinger, Executive Director of the California Climate and Agriculture Network, reported on initial estimates from early media reports of agricultural damage in Sonoma County, where she lives. She notes that livestock—which values about US$245 million in Sonoma County—took an immediate hit from the fires, with ranchers “facing challenges with evacuating animals and in some cases losses of herds.”
Brillinger calls the area’s grasslands “well-adapted to cycles of fires like these,” noting that the productivity of rangeland could rebound this winter, the fires having burned away built-up thatch and allowing for new growth. She worries, however, of the potential of heavy rainfall to cause significant erosion, resulting in loss of nutrients in the soil and subsequent decline in grass production on grazing land.
The Napa Valley Vintners, as well as Brillinger, reported that 90 percent of Napa County’s grapes were picked and processed before the fire broke out. As of October 12, a report by The University of California Agricultural Issues Center (AIC) stated that fire had “mainly burned grass land and wooded area, especially on the hillsides with little vineyard acreage.” Vineyard land was somewhat protected because it is often at the floor of the valleys, researcher James Lapsley and Professor Daniel Sumner write in the report. Because of their relative safety, fire fighting crews even use vineyards strategically as “rally points.”
Lapsley and Sumner also expect that much of what remains of this year’s grape harvest will be picked, although at reduced value due to smoke taint, meaning that work opportunity for harvest workers will not disappear. However, seasonal workers have struggled while the fires burned and in the aftermath, with road closures making access to the vineyards difficult. Some of these workers were turned away from previously scheduled work during the fires because of dangerous conditions and limited accessibility of vineyards, resulting in a week or more without income.
“A bigger problem for farm workers is that the fires have exacerbated an already difficult and expensive housing situation,” Lapsley and Sumner explain, who are concerned that any rent increase in the area will cause difficulty for farmworkers.
One vineyard worker, Marisol Paniagua, told NPR that she questions whether her family will be able to afford staying in the area. Workers and grape growers alike worry that “the lack of jobs and the destruction of affordable homes due to the fires could force people to move elsewhere.”
The destruction of affordable housing and subsequent rising housing prices will be detrimental particularly for the immigrant labor force, which accounts for most of wine country’s workforce. It will also be costly to winemakers. California has suffered a shortage of agricultural workers for several years. Labor economist Philip Martin says the shortage of labor due to high—and escalating—living costs in the region will also slow rebuilding.
Federal assistance is available for workers who substantially lost work hours or lost jobs due to the fire. Undocumented workers, however, are not eligible to receive these Disaster Unemployment Assistance funds.
The fire also hit the emerging cannabis industry hard. Sonoma and Mendocino counties, with as many as 9,000 marijuana farms, have experienced “likely hundreds of millions of dollars in crop damage and loss,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in the days after the fire erupted. Parts of Santa Rosa, referred to as “the epicenter of the modern legal pot economy in California” by chair of Sonoma County Growers Alliance Tawnie Logan, were leveled by fire.
Logan noted in an interview with the Chronicle that growers, who have difficulty getting crop and fire insurance, will be unable “to recover the millions in anticipated revenue they just lost.” Cannabis producers are not eligible for assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that may be available to some vineyards and winemakers.
Climate scientist Daniel Swain of University of California, Los Angeles, says a wet winter and “this summer’s record-breaking heat” contributed to the fires’ quick ignition and spread. The wet winter allowed for brush and grass to grow enormously, and the hot summer temperatures had a drying effect. Swain added that “we know there’s a long-term trend toward warmer and hotter summers.”
This year’s wildfires to date have burned about 90 percent as much acreage as the record acreage burned in 2015 across the U.S., and the fires have already broken a record for government spending on wildfire fighting. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue says, “Forest Service spending on fire suppression in recent years has gone from 15 percent of the budget to 55 percent—or maybe even more.” Perdue emphasized that limited funding requires that the Forest Service borrow money from other programs, like forest maintenance and fire prevention programs, to use for fire suppression, making it difficult to “get ahead of the curve on fighting fires.”
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 exponential market growth of clean energy and the concurrent decline of fossil fuels foretell a radically different energy future. It’s much closer than most people realize. Thomas Van Dyck, acclaimed socially responsible investment pathfinder and activist co-founder of the Divest-Invest movement, shows how the clean energy transformation is gaining inexorable momentum with big business and governments worldwide. While technological advances have already made clean energy cost-competitive, Thomas shows how we can accelerate the transition and overcome the desperate last stand of the fossil fuel political-industrial complex.
Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and founder.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference. To learn more about Thomas Van Dyck visit As You Sow. To learn more about Divestmnet, visit Go Fossil Free
Before the 2016 election, workers were already rising up all over the country and have continued to do so even more now, joining the campaign for “One Fair Wage,” demanding higher wages and the elimination of lower wages for tipped workers. The movement helped torpedo Trump’s first Secretary of Labor nominee and is ramping up the fight for a $15/hour national minimum wage. Innovative, award-winning labor leader Saru Jayaraman says that, if we join together, we can end economic inequality in America. Director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, Saru co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which has more than 25,000 worker members, 200 employer partners, and thousands of consumer members in a dozen states nationwide.
Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers Co-Founder.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference. To learn more about Saru Jayaraman and to get involved in her campaigns, visit Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.
Truly one-of-a-kind, Denver-based “conscious” emcee, father of Eco-HipHop, vegan chef, organic gardener, educator, food justice and eco activist, graffiti artist, and male midwife Ietef, aka DJ Cavem shares his vision of nurturing vibrant health and heightened awareness in our inner cities and beyond.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
Does my dog really love me? Carl Safina, the world-renowned ecologist, author and expert on animal consciousness, reveals that we’re discovering many non-human minds are far more similar to ours than previously thought. They possess self-awareness, empathy and communication skills. They imitate, teach, and grieve; they know who their friends (and enemies) are. They seek status. Their lives may follow the arc of a career. Relationships define them, as relationships define us. This intimate journey into the heart of nature inspires us, even more, to protect wildlife habitats and assure the animals’ survival.
Introduction by Joshua Fouts, Bioneers Executive Director.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
Heather McGhee, Distinguished Senior Fellow at 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, depicts how deep democracy is the only solution to the crises of inequality and climate change, and how the changing demos — people — of America can rise to meet this moment. A thought leader on the national stage, Heather, among her many accomplishments, helped shape key provisions of the now threatened Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers Co-Founder.
This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
Learn more about Heather McGhee and her work at Demos by visiting www.demos.org.
The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (DAYPC), a program of Destiny Arts Center, an Oakland-based violence prevention/arts education nonprofit, is a multicultural group of teens that creates original performance art combining hip-hop, dance, theater, martial arts, song, and rap. The company has performed locally and nationally since 1993 and has been the subject of two documentary films. DAYPC’s artistic directors are Sarah Crowell & Rashidi Omari.
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