In November 2018, you received us and members of the Ceibo Alliance on the eve of a major battle we fought against the incursion of oil companies into Waorani territory in 2019. We won that battle, protecting a half million acres and setting a precedent to protect millions more, and we are grateful for your commitment then. Now, as we should only be celebrating the joy of our book release and sharing Nemonte’s story with you all, we are bracing to face the renewed threats to Indigenous territories across the Amazon.
Ecuador’s young banana scion president has made clear his intention to ignore the 2019 court ruling and auction off Indigenous territories in the Amazon to oil companies around the world. We will not stand back and watch this happen. We will fight again, and as long as it takes. We are again grateful to Bioneers for sharing an excerpt of our book here with you. We need to stay connected. What happens in the Amazon matters everywhere.
—Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson
Excerpt from We Will Be Jaguars: The Oil Helicopter
We Will Be Jaguars is available here. Excerpt courtesy of Abrams Press.
My favorite days were those when Mom was too busy in the morning to notice us. It was on those days – when she was breastfeeding my newborn brother, Emontay, fanning the fire with turkey feathers, shooing the monkeys away from the meat smoking on the grill – that, instead of setting off for school, we would go into the woods with Dad.
Dad knew all the trails, and all the trails held stories. Sometimes, we would spend the day tracking a pack of peccary through morete palm swamps and over high hills. The swamps were easy tracking and we children were allowed to lead. But on the hard, dry ground of the hills, Dad took over. We always returned to the village with good things: baskets of fruits, game meat, palm leaves to make hammocks, cords of bitter lianas for hunting poisons.
On this morning, not very far from the village, we stood on a fallen log in a muddy stretch of forest at the foot of a canyon, staring at a lifeless giant anaconda. She had swallowed too much. Waited, flickered her tongue, lured the mesmerized deer close. Wrapped her and sucked her inside.
But the snake had made a terrible mistake. It had been lying in deep shade, where the mud was cool, when it took the deer. Maybe it was too young to know that it should slither into a sunny spot before eating a sinewy old deer. In the cold, Dad explained, the red brocket deer’s legs will straighten as it dies, and the colder the snake the stiffer the legs. This deer’s hooves had poked right through the snake’s muscles and burst open its shiny, oily skin. Her prey had killed her. Now she was surrounded by a maze of animal prints. Ocelots, pumas, anteaters, capybaras. A lone tortoise was gnawing at the rotting flesh.
“Look! A condor!” Víctor exclaimed, pointing up through the canopy.
“All the animals of the forest will come to pay their respects to the anaconda,” Dad said. “That condor has flown from the mountains, very far away, to pay tribute, to gorge on the powerful energy of the snake’s flesh.”
As I gazed into the sparkling light of the canopy, searching for little glimpses of the circling condor, I heard a faint whipping, chopping sound in the sky.
“Ebo, ebo, ebo!” I exclaimed.
Dad tilted his head, then lifted his hand, demanding silence.
“No, it’s not a plane,” he said. “It’s a helicopter. An oil company helicopter.”
When we got back to the village, my big brothers, Opi and Ñamé, were crouching with other kids in the shade of the helicopter, touching its big, bumblebee belly. Down the runway, villagers were milling about outside Rachel Saint’s house. Some of my friends, dressed in their blue and white school uniforms, were playing up in the branches of the miwagos. We followed Dad past the church and stood in the shade of a grapefruit tree.
“Cowori from the company have come!” Paa, one of the Waorani pastors, told us. “They are inside talking with Rachel and Dayuma.”
“Víctor, let’s crawl under the house,” I whispered.
I knew the entire floor plan of Rachel’s house. I knew where she slept, where she kept all the toys and the dresses and other gifts, where the sugar, rice, and noodles were stored. Sometimes we would sneak right under the room where she scribbled in her book as she whispered questions in a serious voice to Dayuma. Questions about the best way to say things in our language, Wao Tededo, things we had no words for: heaven and hell, sheep and oxen, forgiveness and faith. I knew that the scribbling sound was the sound of “God’s carvings,” the project they were working on together, but I didn’t understand what it meant.
We crawled on our knees on the damp earth. Through the slats in the floorboards I could see there were several white men now sitting around a table. They were laughing with Rachel in their own language. She looked very old and tired. She coughed a lot too. The white men were different from the other cowori that visited the village. They wore strange-looking hats – white, hard, and shiny – and orange uniforms.
Dayuma was sitting at the table, along with her husband, Komé. He had the biggest hands in the entire village and was always chasing us kids down and whipping us with stinging nettles for misbehaving. I was afraid of him. Both Dayuma and Komé were smiling and laughing, but I knew they couldn’t understand because they didn’t speak the cowori language. Dayuma had taught Rachel our language but Rachel had taught Dayuma only about God.
“How many of our men will go with the company?” Dayuma asked Rachel in Wao Tededo.
“Very many will go,” Rachel said.
“Will they go far away flying or will they be close walking?”
Rachel spoke with the white men and then turned to Dayuma. “If it goes well, then the men will go everywhere across the forest. Flying and walking.”
“Will they be gone long?” Dayuma asked. I knew she was asking so that she could report back to all the villagers.
“Many moons.”
Soon the cowori with the hard hats stepped out of Rachel’s house. Víctor and I scrambled away so no one would see us. Rachel pointed to the House of God, and to the school, and the men nodded.
Villagers were following them, asking questions.
“We are busy now,” Rachel said in a stern voice. “We will talk later.”
The white men carried black boxes with little handles. When they got to the helicopter, they shook Rachel’s hand and nodded their heads and looked right into each other’s eyes. Then they waved to all of us and said something that no one understood. The helicopter began to roar, making more wind than an ebo. I felt scared until I saw my older brothers, their arms outstretched, leaning into the wind and yelping with delight. I closed my eyes and leaned into the wind too. My hair blew in all directions. As the helicopter lifted off the ground, I saw my dad among the crowd. His mouth was wide open.
Amidst the storm and racket the helicopter made, a stillness came over me, a quiet aching thought: Those men are going to take my father away.
That night, there were no stars. A wet, cold draft blew into the oko. Dad was huddled by the fire, feet outstretched, toes wiggling just out of reach of the flames. Mom was kneeling over a pot of tortoise stew, squinting her eyes in the smoke.
“Your father must have eaten a lot of tortoise hearts when he was a little boy,” she said to all of us.
“That’s why he has no direction. Just like the tortoise, he goes wherever!”
She laughed. Her laughter was unkind. Only my brother Ñamé chuckled.
I didn’t like Mom being hard on Dad. He always took it though, staying silent, never rising to the bait. That made Mom even madder.
“Nemonte, did you know your dad was gone with the company for the entire time you were in my womb? He didn’t even let me know! He just got in the helicopter and was gone. He almost missed your birth.”
I was crouching in the corner of the oko, feeding bits of grilled plantain to our pet coatis, little creatures a bit like raccoons. Opi was sitting next to me, whittling a piece of balsa wood with Dad’s knife. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want my parents to get into an argument.
“Dad, tell us about the Tagëiri and the Taromenane people that you saw when you were with the company,” said Ñamé. “Tell us about all the cowori they killed!”
I walked over to the fire and pulled out a piece of half-charred manioc. I knew by the way that Dad sat up in the hammock that he was going to tell a story now.
“When your mom was first pregnant with Nemonte, white men arrived in a helicopter. Just like today. They worked for the company. They talked with Rachel in her house. Rachel stood in the doorway and called my name, along with several others. She said: ‘Tiri, I need you to go with these men! Your uncontacted relatives are behaving badly. Over the last moon, they’ve spear-killed several company men. God wants you to go with the company and tell your relatives that killing is the devil’s work.’”
I chewed the manioc and leaned forward, watching Dad’s face in the firelight.
“I didn’t know how long I would be gone. I got in the helicopter with those men and we flew over the forest. I didn’t bring anything with me! I was barefoot and shirtless—”
Mom interrupted: “He left just like a hunting dog would! Following the cowori without a thought in the world.”
Dad muttered something under his breath and then continued: “When we got close to the Toroboro River, I saw the hills where we used to live when I was a boy. I saw peach palms that my grandpa had planted. We flew over a big road that went right through our old lands. There were many cowori living there now. They had cut down the forest, and there were cattle everywhere. Then we landed in the town of Coca.
“A man was waiting for us. He was the boss of the company. ‘Texaco,’ he kept saying. ‘Texaco.’ He gave us clothes and boots and hats and machetes and files. We were happy about that. We didn’t stay in Coca for very long. Although I wanted to see if the mighty warrior Nihua was buried there.”
“Nihua?” asked Opi. We knew the name from fireside stories. He was not our blood relative but he had close ties with our clan.
“The soldiers shot him and then cut off his head when I was a boy. That’s when all the trouble started within our clan. But there was no time to find out where he was buried; the helicopter soon took us away.
“We flew with the bearded boss into a small clearing in the forest. They called it a camp. There was a plastic tarp for shelter. The boss liked everything orderly. He barked instructions at the men. He said that anything we wanted must be given to us. We liked that very much.
“Then, before he left, he showed us pictures. In one picture, there were two spears crossed on the trail. We could tell they were the spears of the Tagëiri clan, our relatives who had decided to stay behind in the old lands, the ones who didn’t want anything to do with the white people. Their spears were just like ours. They were adorned with feathers of war, red macaw feathers. And little bits of red plastic that the Tagëiri must have found in the river.
“I think the boss wanted to know what it meant: two spears crossed on the trail. We didn’t say anything. Everyone should know what that means. Then he showed us pictures of a white man the company called ‘the cook.’ He had spears through his chest and neck. He was lying in the creek next to pots and pans that he had been washing.
“We didn’t know what we were supposed to do. The next morning, the workers started cutting down the forest. They had chainsaws. We had never seen anything like it! How fast they could cut through hardwoods! It would have taken days to cut through trees like those with a stone axe. We ventured off into the woods, but the chainsaws had scared all the animals away. That’s why the Tagëiri were unhappy. The cowori were making too much noise and scaring away all the animals.
“One night, while most men were sleeping, I heard the snapping of twigs on the forest floor. I stood up. I listened . . .”
Dad had walked over to crouch beside the fire but now he stood up, showing us how he had listened.
“I could sense that the Tagëiri were nearby. I told one of the cowori men to be quiet. But he got crazy-eyed. He walked to the edge of the forest and started shooting his pistol into the darkness. After that came silence.
“The next time I heard the Tagëiri, I didn’t tell anyone. It was daytime. They were making birdcalls to each other. I took several machetes and axes from the camp and walked into the woods. I called to my cousins and uncles: ‘I am Tiri, son of Piyemo, grandson of Nenkemo. We are living with the cowori now. We wear their clothes and eat their food. They do not kill us. I am leaving machetes and axes here for you. With these you will live well. You will make many gardens and have many children. I am Tiri, son of Piyemo. Who are you?’
“I knew they were there. I could hear them breathing. Later, I returned to the spot where I’d left the machetes and axes. They were gone.”
There was silence for a moment. Ñamé broke it.
“When I’m older, I’m going to go find the Tagëiri and live with them!” “Don’t talk nonsense!” Opi muttered. “They would spear you in a second.”
“Dad,” I said, “why were the cowori cutting down the forest?”
“We didn’t know why! They cut big trails. Straight lines in the forest. It didn’t matter if there was a huge tree in their way, or a morete swamp. They cut from dawn until dusk, and then fell hard asleep. They all smoked cigarettes and snored like peccary at night. The boss came back every couple of days. He brought orange cables, thick like lianas, and bundles of what they called dynamite. They made holes in the ground and dropped the bundles deep into the earth.”
“Will you go with the company again?” I asked.
“If he goes,” Mom said, “he’d better bring something back with him. Our kids don’t even have shoes for school, or a change of clothes. And look at our pots! Last time, your father was gone for seven moons and all he brought back was a bunch of stories!”
Dad didn’t say anything. He just looked down at his feet by the fire and wiggled his toes.
Nemonte Nenquimo is a Waorani woman, mother and climate leader, who has dedicated her life to the defense of Indigenous ancestral territory and cultural survival in the Amazon rainforest. She is the co-founder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organization Ceibo Alliance and Amazon Frontlines. As the first female president of the Waorani organization of Pastaza province, Nemonte led her people to a historic legal victory against the Ecuadorian government, which protected over half a million acres of primary rainforest in the Amazon from oil drilling and set a precedent for Indigenous rights across the region. She is the winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize for Central and South America 2020 and was named a TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World in the same year.
Mitch Anderson is an environmental justice activist, human rights defender, writer, photographer, and father. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of Amazon Frontlines, a non-profit organization based in the Upper Amazon, which defends Indigenous peoples’ rights to land, life, and cultural survival. For nearly two decades, he has worked and lived in Central and South America, fighting alongside Indigenous peoples for clean water and the rights to their ancestral lands. In 2011, he moved to Ecuador’s northern Amazon to start a grassroots clean water project with Indigenous communities living downriver from contaminating oil operations. Through building more than 1,000 water systems in over 80 Indigenous villages, Mitch supported the founding of the Indigenous-led Ceibo Alliance that won the prestigious UN Equator Prize and whose victories for the Amazon.
Join Bioneers for an event celebrating the intersection of art and activism! An immersive art experience featuring musical and circus performances, socially engaged art, tarot readings, a cacao lounge and an epic DJ dance party by the B-Side Brujas. Enter a raffle with valuable prizes, including a 3-day pass to the Bioneers Conference and more!
Doors open at 6:30pm, enjoy our Cacao lounge, Tarot readings, and arts & activism fair. Variety show at 8pm, followed by dancing.
Where: Spire, the Church 825 Athens Ave Oakland, CA Spire is a 20 minute walk from the 19th street BART station, among other options.
Attention! Parking is limited. Carpool, walk with friends from your car, Lyft or public transit, and plan accordingly. Spire is a 20 minute walk from the 19th street BART station, among other options.
Spire Church is located in a residential neighborhood. Building trust and mutual support in our community is of paramount importance! Any disrespect to our neighbors will exclude you to this and future events.
Spire does not sell alcohol. This is an ALL AGES event.
Four hundred years ago, the U.S. contained 1,023 million acres of forests — the tree coverage spanning nearly half of the total land area. More than 250,000 rivers flowed freely through the land. Since then, more than 250 million acres of forests have been cut down, the vast majority in the second half of the 19th century, when an average of 13 square miles of forest were cleared every day for 50 years. There are more than 90,000 registered dams, meaning that, on average, the U.S. has built one large dam every day since the Declaration of Independence. These concrete and steel barriers disrupt the flow of about 20% of the country’s rivers.
Similar practices have caused ecological disruption and damage across the world, contributing to increasingly severe and frequent floods, droughts and wildfires. Forests that have been clear-cut once helped channel and retain water, wetlands that have been eliminated once helped control flooding, and ecologically balanced forests that have been destabilized once helped deter massive wildfires. To restore the natural systems we’ve disrupted, we must turn away from more “gray infrastructure” — dams, levees, concrete channels — and toward nature-based solutions. We must accept that we cannot build our way out of this mess. Hear from journalist Erica Gies, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, water policy expert Felicia Marcus and environmental advocate Laura Tam about the groundbreaking initiatives working to restore land and water and move beyond the arrogant attempts to subdue and dominate nature that have brought the massive challenges we now face.
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Bridging the Gap Between Nature and Infrastructure: Insights from Leading Experts on Nature-Based Solutions
While increasing environmental crises reveal the limitations of traditional infrastructure, the conversation around nature-based solutions (NbS) is gaining critical momentum. These solutions, which harness natural processes to address ecological and societal challenges, are emerging in many cases as promising alternatives to conventional approaches. This shift is not just a response to the inadequacies of gray infrastructure, but a recognition of the profound interconnections between human systems and natural ecosystems.
In this discussion, four leading experts shed light on how nature-based solutions can restore balance and resilience to our environments. Erica Gies, journalist and National Geographic Explorer, has dedicated her career to covering the intricate relationships between water, climate change, and the natural world. Suzanne Simard, a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of Finding the Mother Tree, is renowned for her pioneering research on plant communication and forest resilience. Felicia Marcus, a prominent figure in California water policy and currently a fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program, brings a wealth of experience in integrating nature-based solutions into water management and policy. Laura Tam, a Senior Program Officer at Resources Legacy Fund, leverages her extensive background in environmental policy to advocate for climate resilience and community adaptation.
Before and after images of Copco, Beaver Creek, dating from February 2024 and May 2024. Images courtesy of RES, which is helping lead the Klamath River restoration project.
The Slow Water Movement: How to Thrive in an Age of Drought and Deluge
Journalist and National Geographic Explorer Erica Gies says we must reevaluate our relationship to water in the face of increasingly severe and frequent droughts and floods. She says in Euro-North American culture, water is considered either a threat or a commodity, leading to an urge to try to control it. Centering human needs, communities build levees and dams. But this is not the only way. While researching her book, “Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge,” Gies traveled around the world and met many people who have a different culture around water. These communities demonstrate that water can simply be seen, first and foremost, as a source of life. In this presentation, Gies shares both ancient and cutting-edge approaches to water management being implemented around the world.
Suzanne Simard: Dealing with Backlash Against Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change
For decades, scientists have warned about the consequences of deforestation and fossil fuel burning that have led to today’s climate and biodiversity crises. They have also conducted careful research that has helped inform development of nature-based solutions. Despite the urgency of the interdependent crises and the agency we have in helping address them, efforts abound to discredit much of that peer-reviewed climate change science. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of the bestselling book “Finding the Mother Tree,” delves into the recent backlash she’s experienced regarding her scientific work informing climate solutions for the forests of western North America.
Bioneers is excited for art to play a vital, celebratory and transformational role at its 36th annual conference. The conference will take place March 27-29, 2025, in Berkeley, California, across several different locations. Bioneers is accepting applications for outdoor performances, indoor installations and sculptures as part of its mission to program the conference with captivating and compelling art. Applications are due November 1, 2024, by 11:59 p.m. PST.
“Squirrels on Earth and Stars Above”: The Remarkable Legacy of Peter Warshall | Conservation biologist, humanist anthropologist and eco-tinkerer Peter Warshall was a great friend and ally of Bioneers, collaborating on multiple projects. Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies shares this remembrance, accompanied by a selection of excerpts from “Squirrels on Earth and Stars Above,” the first published collection of Warshall’s essays and lectures.
The Spark of a Green Chemistry Education Grassroots Movement Ignites at Bioneers | In 2010, Dr. Amy Cannon, the world’s first Ph.D. in the nascent field of green chemistry, was invited to speak at a Bioneers Conference on a panel about fostering eco-literacy in education. While onstage, Cannon was hit with an idea. Read about the impact that moment has had on the global community of green chemistry leaders.
Earthlings Issue #21: Reconsidering the World’s Deadliest Animal | Up to one million people die annually from mosquito-borne diseases, and humans have long used their ingenuity to try to eradicate these “pests.” But what if we’re going about it all wrong? In this excerpt from her new book, “Love, Nature, Magic,” author, activist, and garden expert Maria Rodale reconsiders the mosquito in two thought-provoking journeys into altered consciousness.
Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses
We’re excited to announce that our new season of Bioneers Learning is online, and registration is open! You can register for our first-ever self-paced courses, along with courses covering topics such as the Rights of Nature movement, regenerative herbalism, and sacred activism.
“What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” Book Club | Oct. 1-22 | The Bioneers Learning Book Club is thrilled to offer you a rare chance to delve into Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s brand new book, “What If We Get It Right?” — the highly anticipated sequel to her best-selling book, “All We Can Save.”
A Course on The Imaginal: Cultivating the Visionary Self | Oct. 26-March 16 | This course will explore and exercise our creative muscle to strengthen our visionary selves. When we encounter and encourage the wild dance of the artist within, the creative self becomes part of the visionary collective needed for these times.
Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem | Nov. 12-Dec. 3 | In this four-week course, you can join author, researcher, and emotions-and-empathy expert Karla McLaren, M.Ed., for a grounded and surprising exploration of the healing genius in your emotional realm.
The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.
While increasing environmental crises reveal the limitations of traditional infrastructure, the conversation around nature-based solutions (NbS) is gaining critical momentum. These solutions, which harness natural processes to address ecological and societal challenges, are emerging as a promising alternative to conventional approaches. This shift is not just a response to the inadequacies of gray infrastructure, but a recognition of the profound interconnections between human systems and natural ecosystems.
In this discussion, four leading experts shed light on how nature-based solutions can restore balance and resilience to our environments. Erica Gies, an independent journalist and National Geographic Explorer, has dedicated her career to covering the intricate relationships between water, climate change, and the natural world. Suzanne Simard, a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of Finding the Mother Tree, is renowned for her pioneering research on plant communication and forest resilience. Felicia Marcus, a prominent figure in California water policy and currently a fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program, brings a wealth of experience in integrating nature-based solutions into water management and policy. Laura Tam, a Senior Program Officer at Resources Legacy Fund, leverages her extensive background in environmental policy to advocate for climate resilience and community adaptation.
Together, these voices explore how nature-based solutions, such as the restoration of forests and wetlands, can provide scalable and effective strategies for mitigating climate change, enhancing water management, and fostering ecological balance. Their insights reflect a growing recognition that addressing our environmental challenges requires more than just technological fixes—it demands a deep, systemic shift toward working in harmony with nature. As we delve into their perspectives, we gain a clearer understanding of how nature-based solutions can bridge the gap between human needs and ecological health, offering a pathway toward a more resilient and sustainable future.
Erica Gies, Journalist: I’ve spent years reporting on water, and one key takeaway is how our culture’s focus on extraction separates us from nature. This mindset, along with the myth of perpetual growth, is breaking down as we face mounting environmental crises. In response, nature-based solutions, like slow-water systems and restoration efforts, are gaining traction. While gray infrastructure has a 150-year head start, there’s growing evidence that nature-based solutions can be effective on a large scale. These approaches are scalable and cumulative, and every bit helps restore the natural systems we’ve disrupted.
There’s growing evidence that nature-based solutions can be effective on a large scale. These approaches are scalable and cumulative, and every bit helps restore the natural systems we’ve disrupted.
Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology: Our work is based in the forests of British Columbia, where over 80% of Canada’s freshwater originates. Water here is closely tied to forests and snow. Forests moderate water flow, controlling how snow melts and is distributed through ecosystems. Picture a snowy rainforest: as snow or light rain falls, it filters through the old-growth canopy. The needles and surfaces capture the water, which slowly moves down the trees. Some of it evaporates before even reaching the ground, and the rest is gradually absorbed into the soil. This slow filtration supports the soil organisms—the mycorrhizas and bacteria—that are adapted to this process.
But modern forestry, which came with colonialism, has severely disrupted these systems. Timber rights were licensed to commercial interests, and forests were logged as fast as possible, with little regard for long-term consequences. There were rules limiting clear-cutting to 30% of a watershed to protect water systems, but that limit was ignored. Now, in many coastal ecosystems, up to 80% has been clear-cut, which has dramatically affected water regimes.
We see the results today: large snowfalls in clear-cut areas lead to sudden melts, causing floods. Then, in the summer, the lack of forest cover causes droughts, which increase the risk of wildfires. These problems are interconnected.
However, we are not powerless. Through the Mother Tree Network, we’re working with nations to restore these ecosystems, converting plantations back into diverse forests. One major issue we’ve found is that clear-cut logging destroys about 60% of the forest floor carbon due to the heavy machinery compacting the soil. Without that organic matter, water from snowmelt can’t be absorbed properly. To fix this, we need to restore plant communities, which will photosynthesize and rebuild healthy soil.
Though the task is massive, we’ve begun partnering with coastal nations to restore these areas. It’s still early days, but we are making progress. Foresters once thought there was nothing wrong with these plantations, but we’re finding there’s a lot that needs to be repaired.
Laura Tam, Senior Program Officer at Resources Legacy Fund: For over 20 years, I’ve worked with various institutions—governments, nonprofits, and coalitions—on improving the future for both people and nature. Much of my work has focused not just on stopping the impact of climate change, but also on managing its effects on us and our altered environment. As Suzanne discussed in the context of British Columbia’s forests, we’re seeing similar impacts in California, particularly on the shoreline of San Francisco Bay.
About five years ago, while working at an urban planning think tank, we partnered with another group focused on water quality and watershed science to tackle the threat of sea-level rise. Over 80% of the Bay’s wetlands have been lost since colonial times, and the water won’t respect the boundaries we’ve imposed with levees and infrastructure. It will flood marshes, cross into cities, and threaten vulnerable communities.
We need to adapt to these changes by restoring ecosystems and ensuring that people are protected. Our solution was the San Francisco Bay Shoreline Adaptation Atlas, which maps out areas where nature-based solutions can be implemented to manage sea-level rise. These ‘opportunity maps’ show where natural landscapes can be restored, accounting for factors like slope, soil types, and the types of communities nearby—whether industrial or densely populated.
The Atlas is available online for free, and it’s designed to provide a practical guide for institutions to make informed decisions. By mapping out where actions will have the most impact, we can help restore ecosystems and protect communities from flooding. This tool is meant to foster collaboration and lead to meaningful changes working with nature.
Felicia Marcus, Stanford University’s Water in the West Program Fellow: Nature-based solutions have incredible potential—not just to restore land and water, but also to reconnect us with nature. So much of this work is about relearning what people knew for thousands of years but have forgotten in the last century. Indigenous communities have always known this, and they keep reminding us.
It’s not just that nature-based solutions are cool—they’re the smarter thing to do. For years, sustainability was the goal: learning to live within our means. But with climate change, resilience has become even more critical. We’re seeing weather extremes we can’t build our way out of, like those 100- or 200-year storms. What we need are systems that can recover faster, and many of those are nature-based solutions.
Globally, we’ve reached a point where we have to address land-based emissions, as the IPCC’s 2019 report highlighted. Mismanagement of forests—whether overgrown or clear-cut—has caused massive wildfires that emit more carbon than fossil fuels. But there’s hope: billions of dollars are being invested in ecological forest management. It’s crucial that this funding, from initiatives like the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, is used to restore forests to their natural state, rather than continuing harmful practices like tree plantations and fire suppression.
Yes, there are challenges. We’re still dealing with siloed thinking and a lack of vision, but people are listening now. The potential for managing every drop of water from the headwaters to our taps has never been greater, and we need to seize this moment. It’s going to take hard work, but we have the opportunity to make lasting, meaningful changes on the ground.
So much of this work is about relearning what people knew for thousands of years but have forgotten in the last century. Indigenous communities have always known this, and they keep reminding us.
Erica: Laura, with your experience at Resources Legacy Foundation, you’ve worked with many different entities. What insights can you share?
Laura: I also focus extensively on fire issues. One important point that Felicia’s comments reminded me of is that decision-makers often need more information. For instance, the fires in 2020 released more carbon in California than all of the emissions reductions achieved through state policies since 2002. This fact underscores the critical role of multi-benefit solutions. Investing in nature-based solutions is essential not only for carbon sequestration but also for the many other benefits, such as biodiversity, fungal networks, water supply, and meadow ecosystems.
Additionally, it’s vital to remember that having a good idea or fact is just the beginning. We need to use that information to educate others, create compelling narratives, build campaigns, and drive action. The best science and information are crucial, but they must be used to influence decision-makers and shape policies effectively.
Having a good idea or fact is just the beginning. We need to use that information to educate others, create compelling narratives, build campaigns, and drive action. The best science and information are crucial, but they must be used to influence decision-makers and shape policies effectively.
Erica: We’ve been focusing a lot on the U.S., so let’s shift to Canada, where I also spend part of my time. As a journalist, I’ve been following the reconciliation process, where Indigenous people share their stories with broader Canadian society. There have been numerous court cases over the years acknowledging Indigenous rights, especially in British Columbia, where many lands were taken after the treaty era. Now, while the Canadian government has signed onto the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, there’s often a gap between commitment and action. How does the Mother Tree project fit into this, and what are you observing in terms of the relationship between the governments of British Columbia and Canada and Indigenous communities?
Suzanne: Canada, including British Columbia, did eventually sign onto the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2017, though it was one of the last countries to do so. This was largely due to concerns over resource rights, given Canada’s history as a resource-extraction country.
In 2021, British Columbia introduced the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. This legislation emphasizes the need for meaningful consultation and collaboration with Indigenous communities, which is transforming how these relationships are managed. However, there’s a lag as governments grapple with their own laws, though court cases are likely to accelerate this understanding.
Indigenous people might find the progress too slow, and that’s a valid concern. Nonetheless, we are moving in the right direction.
On the ground, the Mother Tree Network supports this transformation by promoting the duty to consult and the Land Back movement. Our work focuses on studying forest responses to devastation and recovery, providing data that supports the fight for land rights.
It’s crucial to recognize that forest management has historically been approached with a one-size-fits-all mentality, ignoring local ecological contexts. This universal approach has proven ineffective.
It’s crucial to recognize that forest management has historically been approached with a one-size-fits-all mentality, ignoring local ecological contexts. This universal approach has proven ineffective. Indigenous knowledge, developed over thousands of years, offers valuable insights into local ecosystems.
The Mother Tree Network aims to support and uplift Indigenous practices and rights, ensuring that their deep ecological knowledge and technologies can be applied in ways that honor and protect nature.
Erica: In a story I wrote for Popular Science about Southwestern Arizona, I covered a severely degraded land that had been deforested and overgrazed. During the monsoon, water would rush through and vanish quickly. Ranchers in the area began using a traditional Indigenous practice of placing small rocks across the water to slow it down. Within a few seasons, this dry wash had become a permanent stream with wetlands. A local scientist discovered that it was actually increasing water supply by 28%. This illustrates how taking care of the environment can lead to greater abundance.
In Kenya, I noticed different approaches to water management. For example, during droughts, Kenya employs a water-sharing system where everyone experiences a reduction, rather than just the senior water rights holders receiving all the water. Community water user groups are also in place, emphasizing local management of water resources. However, challenges like corruption and mismanagement remain. Still, these alternative approaches to water management and local empowerment are inspiring, despite the execution challenges.
Laura, with your extensive experience in various global projects, can you share an example of a unique and well-executed project you’ve encountered?
Laura: One example that comes to mind is the “30 by ’30” initiative. We started working on this concept with California’s Natural Resources Agency around 2021. The goal is to protect 30% of California’s landscapes by 2030 for both people and nature, with an emphasis on equity and biodiversity.
To ground this initiative in community needs, we raised funds to support a year-long public engagement process. This involved thousands of people participating in regional workshops to express their values, concerns, and priorities. The feedback informed the development of the “Pathways to 30 by ’30” plan, which outlines strategies for protecting agriculture, restoring streams, managing forests, and more.
The State then adopted this initiative into law, marking a significant shift. The legislation committed California to this ambitious goal, which was almost unheard of a few years ago. This approach, starting with community engagement and leading to legislative action, sets a new precedent for how we tackle conservation challenges.
While there’s still a lot of work to be done—such as expanding parkland and ensuring equitable access—the “Pathways to 30 by ’30” provides a clear roadmap for progress. It’s an exciting development that positions California at the forefront of global conservation efforts.
Erica: Suzanne, I know that during your early work in the forestry industry, you faced significant pushback regarding your findings and recommendations. Now that you’re in academia, what do you see as the barriers to implementing your work in the forests of British Columbia?
Suzanne: You know, I’ve discussed a lot of the barriers already, but I want to focus on the successes.
Erica: Yes, please!
Suzanne: There have been numerous successes, particularly in recent years. When I started, I was focused on advocating against herbicides in forestry. While herbicide use in Canada isn’t as extensive as it is here, it’s still quite prevalent. For about ten years, I worked tirelessly to emphasize the importance of natural succession and the need to preserve plants within our ecosystems.
I managed to push for some policy changes during my time in government. I was told that my efforts contributed to a reduction in herbicide use by about half. That was a significant achievement.
However, herbicide use has crept back up, and it continues to be an issue, particularly in Indigenous territories. The fight is ongoing, and maintaining constant pressure and storytelling is crucial.
Now, with the Mother Tree Network, and thanks to our organization’s efforts, philanthropic support, and engagement with government officials—including our premier, who is akin to a governor—we’re seeing progress. Over the past year, there’s been a significant development: discussions are underway about banning clear-cutting in British Columbia. This is a monumental success. It’s the result of the combined efforts of many individuals and groups.
Another exciting development is the planned reduction in the rate of cutting by about half over the next year. This, too, is a major success.
This conversation took place at the 2024 Bioneers Conference. The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
In this moving personal essay, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes a visit to the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, where we explore the rich afterlife of a fallen cedar, contemplating what its gradual return to the soil means for the forest and all who walk among the trees. The essay, “Becoming Earth: Experimental Theology,” is an excerpt from volume one, “Earth,” of the five-volume anthology series “Elementals.” Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is a botanist, distinguished professor, and bestselling author of “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.”
From the Center for Humans & Nature, publisher of the award-winning anthology series “Kinship,” “Elementals” brings together essays, poetry, and stories that illuminate the dynamic relationships between people and place, human and nonhuman life, mind and the material world, and the living energies that make all life possible. Inspired by the four material elements, the “Elementals” series asks: What can the vital forces of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world?
Just before my turn to the research forest, I pass a little church beneath a circle of spruce, with a line of cars in a parking lot that is more dirt than gravel. Out front, block letters on the white worship sign spell out
Blue River Gospel Church “In heaven we are released from death” Bible Study 7 pm
Around the coffee urn inside, I imagine Pastor Ford and a dozen or so parishioners are deep in conversation. “You see,” he says “none of us can know for sure what heaven will be like, but we are promised that in heaven there is no time. When death is conquered, time just stops and turns to life everlasting.” Old Edna Crosby raises her hand next. “Pastor, when we rise to heaven, what body do you suppose we will be in. This old thing here, or maybe whatever age we want?” The others smile. “Would Roger still recognize me?” Pastor Ford takes her veined old hand between his own. “Oh, Roger will know you all right. When we leave our earthly body, we are transformed.”
•••
Just down the highway, at the Andrews Experimental Forest, a cadre of scientists are wondering the same thing.
Trees fall. We know that. But we don’t expect to be there, to stand beneath with open mouth to see the lean begin. Down it comes like a slow-motion hammer stroke. In a rush of swooshing branches, the tunnel of darkness closes in and the roar settles to silence. Such peace. I have stumbled into someone else’s heaven: the afterlife of cedars, the paradise of firs.
So, this is what it’s like to pass through that door, across the threshold of being. The pearly gates are framed by moss-draped firs. I am surrounded by the pillars of ancient trunks backlit by overwhelming radiance. I listen to celestial harps and hear thrushes singing and the music of a distant brook. I see no angels but the moss is a pillow of green cloud.
I assumed there was a bright line between the living and the dead, a boundary we cross but twice, once on our way into life and once on our way out. But here the line is blurred. In the afterlife of cedars, nothing is ever dead.
If I gave it any thought at all, I assumed there was a bright line between the living and the dead, a boundary we cross but twice, once on our way into life and once on our way out. But here the line is blurred. In the afterlife of cedars, nothing is ever dead.
Raindrops glisten from the branch tips and like tiny prisms scatter rainbows through the air. I walk through gardens of forms unknown to flowers, the flora of the dead. Fingers of golden yellow, wrinkled blue toadstools, and fairy rings of translucent gray, a host of flared goblets the color of pumpkins, spiky coral fungi, dabs of jelly fungus, tawny boletes, fluted white bowls of chanterelles, and tiny red cups splattered like blood drops on the moss.
All around me lie waist-high logs draped by blankets of moss. They lie in neat cemetery rows, biers uniform in shape and size. It is as if a great hand had laid them gently on the beds of moss and garnished them with clumps of funeral parlor ferns. They are surrounded by their towering kin, looking glumly down at their fallen relatives in repose.
They say that at the threshold, when life veers toward death, that the story of one’s life unfolds before one’s eyes. The human brain stores memory we do not fully understand, but the memory of trees is clear. The whole history of each tree is written in the rings. Where the trunk has snapped on the fallen fir, the break is clean and sharp. My thumbnail moves from ridge to ridge, counting off the seasons. Here a wide ring when rains were plentiful, and then three more to mark the years of drought. This distorted black wave is a memory of fire, the thin red band—a year of bark beetles. Fires, windstorms, times of plenty, and times of poor are written here, from the wide rings of youth to the slowing growth of old age.
Does the tree hold some memory of the bear that slept beneath it? It does. Not in a visible ring, but in the body of the cells. Every exhalation of that bear, or the chattering squirrel—or the kneeling scientist with a clipboard—released carbon dioxide into the misty air. Which was absorbed by the open stomates of the fir needle, where it became a building block for the cells my fingers run across.
The log itself is breathing. The carbon dioxide emanating from the microbes in the log is almost instantly absorbed by the pellucid leaves of mosses, who are interlaced with fungi that only moments ago exhaled that same carbon from the log. It’s a dizzying circle of inhale and exhale, reciprocity between living and dead.
The very air vibrates with its intake and exhale. There is a deeper sound, a certain hum beneath the silence. I’ve heard that the planet makes a sound, a vibrating chord in C♯ minor. Could it be the hum of life being made and unmade, composed and decomposed? If we listen very hard, can we hear the soaring sunlit chords of photosynthesis, the countermelody of decay? The quiet is so intense, it is as if I can hear the small suck of carbon dioxide entering a leaf, the prick as a fungal strand breaks through the wall of cedar tracheid.
As inert as the logs seem, there is a ferment of activity inside, like dreams moving inside the head of a sleeper. Fungal mycelia follow the shape of neurons and burrowing beetles unearth memory. Its invisible from the outside, but as a visitor to the afterlife of cedars, I can easily see inside.
Fungi are not alone in their feasting upon logs. Bark beetles, grubs, and carpenter ants riddle the log and open it up to others all too eager to colonize. Bacteria, algae, mites, and spiders—whole food webs develop within the weakening log. When the tree was alive, most all of the cells in the trunk of the tree were dead. They were just empty tubes designed to hold up the tree and to transport water. But now that the tree is dead, it is more alive than ever before. Chipmunks, skunks, and slugs live within. Moss drapes the outside like a shaggy green afghan and ferns sprout from the ends. What was once dead tissue is now a garden, on its way to becoming soil.
Through the misty woods a figure approaches, a slender, gray-haired man in khaki pants and work boots with many miles upon them and an auger in his hand. I’m not surprised at all. This is a man you’d meet in heaven.
The felicitously named Dr. Francis D. Hole was a soils professor at the University of Wisconsin. We were not allowed to use the word dirt in his class. Filth had nothing in common with soil so clean and nourishing you could eat it.
“Do you feel that?” he asked, bouncing a little on his toes. “That sponginess underfoot? The humus here is extraordinary— millennia of decay. Imagine the rain of organic matter; needles, spores, twigs, and bugs building the soil from the top down. Photosynthesis—now isn’t that a pure wonder, how light and air can end up as soil?” He liked to remind us that the genus Homo is derived from the Latin word for “humus” and for “humility.” He was a humble man, a man of the soil who signed his name not with PhD appended, but as Francis D. Hole, TNS. It always drew the question.
Dr. Hole passed away many years ago, but a field trip to tree heaven would be heaven for him as well. Field trips with him were legendary, as he introduced us to the art and science of soil horizons, to hardpans, gley layers, and podzols. Known as the “poet laureate of soil,” he was fond of quoting Whitman’s line “the press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.” His affection left behind generations of soil scientists and a folio of soil songs, including ditties like “Oh give me a home, on a deep mellow loam.” A gifted teacher, he played his violin in class so that Bach could tell us stories of soil that words could not.
We stroll among the logs, arm in arm. I stop to stroke the silky mosses on a log, and the palm of my hand is arrested by a sharp metal edge, just beneath the carpet, where an aluminum tag is anchored to the log. A ten-digit number is pressed into the metal. Further down the path, I see orange survey flags rising out the duff. Here, the logs support more than a blanket of moss. Clear plastic tubing emerges from the end of one log. Cylinders of bright PVC pipe are driven into others. Clearly, we are not the first to stumble into forest heaven. The path is well worn by other scientists, who trek to this site to participate in an experiment designed to last two hundred years.
At the time that this experiment was established, the cutting of ancient forests was at its peak. Loaded log trucks careened down the highway in this valley in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon at a rate of one per minute. At the same time that these forests were disappearing, our knowledge of their importance was growing. When a forest was valued only as a commodity, old forests were deemed unproductive, fallen timber, a liability. But forest ecologists at the Andrews Experimental Forest envisioned something vital in ancient forests, essential to the biogeochemical cycles of the earth. So, despite resistance, they initiated long-term ecological research to understand the contributions of old growth and decomposition to the flourishing of air, soil, water, and life—before it was too late. Studying the long process of decay of old growth logs is a doorway to understanding the ties between the elements of earth, air, fire, and water that converge to clothe these mountains in ancient forest.
Studying the long process of decay of old growth logs is a doorway to understanding the ties between the elements of earth, air, fire, and water that converge to clothe these mountains in ancient forest.
Dr. Hole breathed in the fecund fragrance of fungi as he swept his arm all around the whole bouquet of color and reminded me that the mushroom garden is only a tiny fraction of the fungal whole. The ground itself, acres wide and feet deep, is woven together with hyphae, the threads of the fungal fabric.
“Come here,” he said. We knelt in the duff, and he gently brushed away the needles, exposing the black soil. “Look, you can easily see the mycelium.” We saw fans of white threads, rubbery black cords, and tangled webs of yellow lace, all binding together the humus.
A log is a great warehouse of carbon stored away for the long haul. He breaks off a piece of old wood and hands me a magnifying glass. The wood is light in my hand and as full of tiny pores as a sponge. Wood is a mass of hollow vessels, empty spaces that used to conduct water but have become a maze of tunnels for fungal hyphae surrounded on all sides by potential food. But cellulose is far too large a molecule to pass through the cell membrane of the fungus. It simply won’t fit. Fungi can’t eat trees any more than we can swallow an entire watermelon in one bite. We must cut it into manageable slices. Fungi process their food by secreting digestive enzymes upon it. The molecular equivalent of forks and knives, the enzymes cut the cell wall, cleaving the chemical bonds to reduce the rigid architecture to a syrup of its constituents. Lacking orifices of any kind, fungi absorb their food through the entire surface of the mycelium. It would be as if we ate by lying naked in a bowl of pasta to absorb it through our skin.
I imagine the hum of bacteria in the rotting wood. They roll like seals, plump and sleek with the sweetened moisture of dissolving cells.
All of this disassembly of wood burns a great deal of energy. Log carbon is transformed to mycelial carbon and in the breath of the fungus is exhaled as carbon dioxide. So, too, the beetles and mites and wavy-legged centipedes are exuding carbon dioxide with every morsel of decay.
That puff of liberated carbon dioxide, newly released on the breeze, resided in the tree for five hundred years before it fell. But where did it alight before that? What was its previous life story? And the one before that? Did it live in the body of a Pacific Giant Salamander? A Trillium blossom? Or was it released on the song of a Nez Perce woman picking red huckleberries on this very hilltop?
Released from the weight of wood, into the afterlife of cedars, there is no boundary between the sacred and the mundane.
I like to imagine the moment of liberation for a molecule of carbon dioxide. Imagine being held tight for centuries in the embrace of an ancient tree, locked up in lignin until… the gasp of a fungus-eating beetle sets you free to become a free-floating molecule, a thing of the air, a part of something vast and fluid. Is that how the spirit leaves the body? Released from the weight of wood, into the afterlife of cedars, there is no boundary between the sacred and the mundane.
Dr. Hole sits down on a log and appreciatively examines the carbon dioxide sampling ports inserted in it. He asks me, “When does a tree become a log?” I’m anticipating a riddle of some kind but the answer seems straightforward. A tree becomes a log when it falls to the ground. “Fine,” he says, nodding, “so when does a log become a tree?”
I can see the answer right on the log that is dampening our bums as we sit, a line of tiny hemlock seedlings fully rooted in the softened log, forming what is known as a “nurse log.” The decaying log provides ideal germination conditions for small hemlock seeds. Atop the log, they are less likely to be grazed and are already closer to the sunlight. The mossy blanket keeps their roots moist during the summer drought. In old forests, massive hemlocks often stand in straight lines—revealing their shared origins on a now long-decayed nurse log. Trees become logs and logs become trees. In the afterlife of cedars, death is just transition, a rearrangement of carbon from one species to the next.
Dr. Hole sometimes referred to trees as “extensions of soil.” They stand as mediators or bridges along the continuum of mineral, humus, water, air, and living beings that make a living soil. Every being is an extension of soil, I suppose. What a wondrous thing. We humans emerge, walk around as if we were one thing, willingly oblivious to our true nature, and then we dissolve in order to emerge again in a wholly different form. Dissolution and reunification, forever and ever, amen.
It is, as I understand it, a tenet of most religions—including the ones adhered to at the little gospel church on the highway—that there is some kind of life after death. To this premise, the logs say yes. Logs, dead trees, are more animate when dead than when alive.
In the afterlife of cedars, death is just transition, a rearrangement of carbon from one species to the next.
We scientists insist that the province of science is not to study the existence of the afterlife. The research plan is designed to measure nutrient flux and changing densities of microbial populations. They will chart the transitions of cellulose to air, of lignin to humus. The goal is to track the fate of all the logs’ carbon as it disseminates into the broader ecosystem, to follow the nitrogen from its source in the log to its incorporation to soil, to beetles, to thrushes. The forty-nine-page decomposition study plan is to evaluate the “internal transformation of coarse woody debris” of the log, through its stages of leaching, fragmentation, transport, collapse, and settling. The data sheets are already prepared for the scientists who will follow and complete these measurements long after the designers of the experiment are humus themselves. This is clearly ecological science and not theology. And yet, the end of this experiment will be, I think, experimental theology. It seems to me an act of faith to set up an experiment that will take two hundred years.
And yet—have they not discovered the nature of the afterlife? Perhaps ecology is also experimental theology. Call it internal transformation, call it rot, or call it transcendence. In the afterlife of cedars, nothing is ever dead.
Perhaps ecology is also experimental theology. Call it internal transformation, call it rot, or call it transcendence. In the afterlife of cedars, nothing is ever dead.
In his long-ago classes, Dr. Hole’s teaching stretched our rudimentary understanding of soil, from an inert growth medium to a vibrant convergence of the primal elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The living soil is both the cradle and the grave.
I look up from my examination of a fir seedling and see that Dr. Hole is fading away, or more accurately circling around—his carbon, his minerals, on their way to be with someone else, to live another life. I wave goodbye but I know he’ll be back. I catch a line of one of his songs as he goes:
In myself are entwined flesh and spirit, well inclined. Dust I am with gift of breath I feel safe with life and death.
He always signed his name Dr. Francis D. Hole, TNS, waiting for the question and giving his answer with a twinkle in his eye. Francis D. Hole, Temporarily Not Soil.
The fluffy comforter of moss invites me to lie down, to nestle in the curve of a buttressed root, of a tree not yet a log. The humus conforms to my shape. I could easily stay here. I want to. The moss feathers around my head and brushes my cheek. I turn over with nose to tiny fronds and breathe warm and wet into the moss. So close, I can see my moisture condense on the cool leaf in luminous drops. Chlorophyll beckons with lovers’ embrace and my carbon dioxide falls into its arms, woman becoming moss. At the very same moment, the leaf’s green sigh of oxygen goes straight to my blood. Red answers green in the dance of chlorophyll and hemoglobin. Plant breath becomes animal breath, animal becomes plant, plant becomes fungus, fungus becomes plant, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation that fulfills our deepest longing for union with the earth.
This essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer has been reprinted with permission from “Earth,” volume one of the five-volume anthology “Elementals,” published by the Center for Humans and Nature, 2024.
During WWII, labor shortages led the United States to launch a migrant worker program, bringing Mexican laborers, known as braceros, to farms and railroads across much of the country. In 1948, a plane carrying 28 laborers — some at the end of their contracts and others undocumented workers being deported — crashed near Los Gatos Canyon, California, killing everyone on board. While the white victims were returned to their hometowns for burial, the rest were buried unnamed in a mass grave. When folksinger Woody Guthrie heard a scant report listing only the four names of the white flight crew, it inspired him to write a poem that decried the dehumanization of these workers that continues to resonate today. The poem reads, in part: “Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, ‘They are just deportees.’”
In this excerpt from his new book “Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance,” (University of New Mexico Press, October 2024) cultural ecologist and environmental historian Gary Paul Nabhan draws a throughline from the poem to today, highlighting the profound way that writer and poet Tim Z. Hernandez has addressed the lament of Guthie’s words.
Back when Woody was barely nineteen, he spent time in the desert with some Spanish-speaking vaqueros on their way back to Mexico through the twin border towns of Presidio, Texas, and Ojinaga, Chihuahua. It seems that he wrote of this memorable encounter with migrants in his notebook at the time:
“Rosalita called out first to the cowboy and his horse, ‘Adios, Jesus!’ Carlos was louder, ‘Jesus, amigo, adios!’”
Seventeen years later, the names of his Mexican compañeros who had headed back across the border must have stirred in his memory as he read a ninety-word dispatch released on January 28, 1948. It carried the headline “32 Are Killed in California Plane Crash.”
Woody read on, trying to imagine the disaster in palpable, personal terms. Of the thirty-two killed in Los Gatos Canyon in western Fresno County, twenty-eight were Mexican deportees whose charred bodies “were mangled beyond recognition.” They were undocumented workers being flown back to the Mexican border. Although the Anglo flight crew members were named, mourned, and buried in separate graves in their hometowns, none of the names of the farmworkers killed in the crash were included in any English-speaking newspapers covering “the worst aviation accident in California history.”
Woody was shocked to read a short newspaper account that revealed only the names of four Anglo Americans who had died in a terrible plane crash in Fresno County, California, without mentioning a single name of the twenty-eight Mexican farmworkers who were killed while being deported on that same plane:
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, ‘They are just deportees.’
When he tried to evoke some possible Spanish names to fill in the blanks, Jesus and Rosalita from down by Presidio along the Big Bend must have popped into his head:
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria, You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane All they will call you will be deportees.
•••
Woody’s handwritten poem stayed in a shoe box for years until it was included in a volume of lyrics of American “protest music,” even though Guthrie himself had never offered a tune to any of his friends to go with the lyrics.
Instead, a young folk singer from Arizona named Martin Hoffman came up with a melody for Woody’s “Deportee” poem years later. Martin had the chance to sing it to Woody’s close friend Pete Seeger, who loved it. When Seeger’s version was recorded — attributing it to the team of Guthrie and Hoffman — dozens of other artists began to sing it, first in English, then in Spanish as well.
By 1966, brothers Luis and Danny Valdez began to sing their Spanish translation of Woody’s poem to crowds of farmworkers rallied together by Dolores Huerta and César Chávez. The Valdez brothers’ Banda Calavera sang for their Teatro Campesino, recording just one of forty-some versions of “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)” that have reached the American airwaves.
The short poem that Woody never personally recited nor sang anywhere in public somehow became the most popular song of lament for Spanish-speaking farmworkers ever to emerge from the American earth.
The short poem that Woody never personally recited nor sang anywhere in public somehow became the most popular song of lament for Spanish-speaking farmworkers ever to emerge from the American earth. It is perhaps his most widely covered song, with versions by bestselling artists such as Byrds, Dolly Parton, Johnny Rodriguez, Odetta, Nana Mouskouri, and Joni Mitchell. It was probably the last great song Woody would write during his career.
But within a year of the Valdez brothers taking the Spanish translation on the road to give voice to migrant farmworkers’ lucha, Woody’s own capacity for speaking and singing had dramatically deteriorated.
•••
The very degenerative disease that had crippled and killed his own mother had begun to disrupt Woody’s own behavior as early as 1952. It had gotten completely out of control by the mid-1960s, for he would forget where he lived and disappear for days before someone recognized him sleeping in a park or a Skid Row alley.
The timing of the onset of his illness was ironic, for it hit him hard just as a resurgence of interest in his artistic and political work began to surge. By the time Woody was belatedly diagnosed with an incurable, inheritable malady called Huntington’s disease, the psychoneurotic consequences from it were immense.
Woody — the insatiable drifter, incurable rambler, and restless radical — would spend the last third of his life bedridden, hospitalized, and increasingly unable to sing his way completely through any of his own tunes. He died of his prolonged illness in 1967 at the age of fifty-five, leaving more than a thousand unnervingly poignant songs behind him.
Despite the acclaim that “Deportee” continued to receive after his death, Woody would never glimpse the impact it had generated and would never know the real names of those who were scattered like dry leaves.
•••
Those near-forgotten Spanish names continued to remain hidden from view for decades longer. At some point, it was simply assumed that anyone who had personally known those killed in Los Gatos Canyon had also passed, leaving little or no glowing embers to rekindle.
That assumption was faulty, as poet and oral historian Tim Z. Hernandez soon confirmed. Tim took on years of work to crack the code of this mystery and daylight the names of those who had been forgotten by history.
Hernandez found a way to take a one-sided story of a tragic event that had devastated dozens of families on both sides of the border and make the narrative whole. His work generated a kind of belated healing for many of the survivors of those who had been scattered like dry leaves.
Hernandez found a way to take a one-sided story of a tragic event that had devastated dozens of families on both sides of the border and make the narrative whole. His work generated a kind of belated healing for many of the survivors of those who had been scattered like dry leaves.
Over the decades since Woody’s illness and death, many have tried to pair his work with the likes of Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, or even that of Arlo, Woody’s son. But in Woody’s wake, only Tim Z. Hernandez was tenacious, courageous, and compassionate enough to let the dust from the 1948 plane wreck settle so that families could at last see what had been kept out of view for decades.
Tim Z. Hernandez understood dust. He grew up in it, swallowed it, cleaned it out of nostrils and ears, and wrote poems about it. Tim’s debut novel was entitled “Breathing, In Dust.”
Tim is the grandson of a Dust Bowl–era farmworker not all that unlike those who died in that devastating crash at Los Gatos Canyon. As he mourned in his poem, “Variations on This Land,”
This land is my grandfather’s land whipped to suffer his color in the cumin air, to erase that he ever loved, the way only a brown boy can love Brownsville, beneath oil derricks and sugarcane horizons, and fields of afterthought, a cluster of cancerous lovers in the wake of red dust . . .
In talking with Tim on one of his trips through the desert from El Paso to Tucson, I realized that much of his work as a poet, novelist, and oral archivist gravitated toward revealing the hidden side of some stories that had been told in a one-sided way for decades.
In doing so, Hernandez had found a way to move those affected by physical tragedies and racist behaviors toward places of pride and dignity about their families’ contributions to American history. When told carefully and considerately, those full-bodied stories could help close wounds that had been festering for years.
When you hear Tim himself tell how he tracked down so many dry leaves that had scattered over the decades, you inevitably wish that Woody could have heard the answers that Tim found to Guthrie’s nagging question.
Tim’s poetics and ethics, his craft as performance artist, and his uncanny luck on wild goose chases have forever changed how people will hear Woody’s second most popular song.
It was Tim who brought the widows and descendants of those twenty-eight “once nameless” farmworkers together to affirm the names that were finally placed on a memorial in Fresno County Holy Cross Cemetery. And it is Tim who continues to record the stories from those who had been lost as a gesture of healing.
At last, a kind of spiritual and social justice has emerged from bringing together the two sides of that unspeakable tragedy. What Woody began, Tim has brought closure to in a manner just as poetic, empathetic, and prophetic.
In doing so, Tim Z. Hernandez deserves the same stature as a national treasure as that which Americans of all races have given to Woody, the Folkiest of the Folksingers, the Rowdiest of the Rounders, and the Dustiest of the Dust Bowlers. Maybe someday, Tim Z. Hernandez will be remembered as the most Resonant of Razafirme Poets, the Dustiest of the Atzlán Descendants, the Cheekiest of Chicano Activists, the most Open-Eared of Latinx Oral Historians, and the Two-Sidedest of all Desert Borderland Storytellers.
Not only does Woody live on in Tim’s work but so do the lives and loves of twenty-eight Mexican farmworkers who might have otherwise been lost to history.
At this discouraging backlash moment, it’s heartening to listen to four powerful activists engage in a discussion about their innovative work to counter the effects of abortion bans but also the much larger lack of access to reproductive health care, even before the Dobbs decision. Each shares their unique perspective and their organizations’ work, ranging from exciting and effective campaigns to change misogynistic corporate culture, to radically inclusive community health care, to pioneering legal strategies to protect women and expand their reproductive health care options.
Since Eveline Shen’s leadership began in 1999, Forward Together has become widely recognized for its innovative role in the Reproductive Justice Movement; working with grassroots communities; providing thought leadership; developing effective tools and resources for evaluation, training, and documentation; and organizing for long-term systemic change. She has served as Principal Investigator for two National Institutes of Health grants that explore the intersection between environmental justice and reproductive justice. Women’s eNews named Eveline one of their 21 Leaders for the 21st Century. She was a 2009 Gerbode Fellow and holds a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley in Community Health Education. She received the 2015 Community Leadership Award from the San Francisco Foundation.
Elisa Batista is the Content Director and a Campaign Director with UltraViolet. She conceives and implements campaigns to end violence against women, increase economic security for women and families, and ensure that all women have access to full and affordable healthcare services. Prior to her position at UltraViolet, she was a Campaign Director for MomsRising.org, a million-volunteer grassroots organization advocating for policies related to family economic security and child health and well-being. She helped spearhead the organization’s immigration campaign and launch MamásConPoder.org, a community of civically engaged Spanish-speaking and bilingual mothers.
Cynthia Gutierrez, an Oakland-based, award winning first-generation Indigenous Nicaraguan/Salvadoran reproductive justice organizer, full spectrum doula, cultural strategist and writer is currently Program Manager for the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Hub of Positive Reproductive and Sexual Health (HIVE) and Team Lily programs, as well as an abortion storyteller with We Testify. Cynthia also serves on the boards for ACCESS Reproductive Justice, SisterSong, and Ineedana; and her work at the intersection of reproductive, disability and environmental justice has been featured in many leading media, including: The New York Times, The Lily, Elle Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Rewire News Group, etc.
Transcript:
EVELINE: I think that for many of us, abortion rights sits at the center and part of the nexus of human rights. And many international human rights bodies view access to safe abortion, includes it in the constellation of rights, a right to equality, right to safety, right to life, to liberty, to have the freedom from cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. And so abortion access is a right that all people should have, and it’s connected to their agency and their engagement in our society.
So, we know that we live intersectional lives. We don’t wake up on Monday and experience climate change, right, and then on Tuesday we experience lack of affordable housing, Wednesday, lack of affordable healthcare. No one lives like that. Right? And so we need comprehensive solutions that address how these issues intersect. And for communities of color, for marginalized communities, they’re the ones who are feeling the disproportionate burden.
So when you have communities that are living in neighborhoods which are in the most toxic environments, or are being displaced due to extreme weather changes from climate change, these are also the same communities that don’t have access to healthcare, that don’t have access to reproductive healthcare. So these conditions synergistically impact these communities so that it increases infant mortality, kind of morbidity.
Post-Dobbs, the landscape continues to change, the conditions get tougher. We now have total abortion bans in 14 states, 7 states have partial bans. People’s lives, health and futures are at grave risk because of these attacks. More people are being criminalized, including health providers and patients, and the Supreme Court, of course, is hearing, as we speak, arguments on whether they should ban Mifepristone.
And we have three amazing panelists who are going to share their perspectives in service provision, in organizing, in policy change, and legal advocacy. And so this is a real critical opportunity to hear from these folks who are working behind the scenes with grassroots communities, and you’re going to have a chance to pull back kind of the layer of what you hear on the news and to really hear from them what is going on on the ground, and what are the challenges communities are facing, and where are there opportunities that we can all support. So I want to welcome these three incredible folks. So we’re going to start off…
Next to me is Cynthia Gutierrez. She is an award-winning first generation Nicaraguan/Salvadoran reproductive justice organizer, doula, and cultural strategist, and badass. She is passionate about the intersection of reproductive justice, disability justice, and dismantling the criminal injustice system. She is currently the program manager for the University of California San Francisco’s Hub of Positive Reproductive and Sexual Health, and Team Lily programs. And she is on the board of directors for ACCESS Reproductive Justice, and the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom. Cynthia has over a decade of social justice work experience within the Bay Area, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Lily News, Elle magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Rewire News Groups. So, Cynthia.
CYNTHIA: For me, the personal has always been political. I have relatives that have experienced incarceration. I am someone who’s had an abortion. I’m very unapologetic about that, as an abortion storyteller, and really building community with other folks that have had abortions. I’m also someone who had to advocate tirelessly to have a birth and post-partum experience that was filled with dignity and respect during a global pandemic. And so to give you the math, that means I have a 3-year-old, and had to birth during a global pandemic, and try to seek post-partum care during that time.
I’m also someone who lives in deep East Oakland and experiences some of the worst toxic air in the city of Oakland. And that often means that I am looking at things, like you said, every day from an intersectional lens. I am looking at things as a mother, as a person in my community, as someone who’s organizing locally and throughout the country. And, you know, for me, when we talk about why I got into this work, it’s because this work directly impacts me every day, like it’s so personal to me. I can’t sit here and tell you there’s a campaign with X amount of people, and this is what happened to them, like because that would not be genuine, because the people this most impacts is not only me but it’s folks who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color, young folks, disabled folks, the people that I see just walking around my neighborhood. And that’s important for me to share.
And as someone who’s done reproductive justice work now for over 10 years, I feel so incredibly grateful that I am really looking at things from a disability justice lens, from an environmental justice lens. My community is surrounded by liquor stores and trash, and the fact that it takes 20 minutes by driving to get to the closest grocery store is unacceptable; the fact that my community is constantly plagued by air that is impacting me as a disabled person who lives with chronic illnesses and has to figure out how to breathe and live and protect my child. And so all these issues are connected. It’s not just about abortion on a Thursday and clean air on Friday, because I need to be able to have clean air to be able to live and survive and create safe and sustainable communities for my child and your children as well.
In the community that I’m sharing—that I’m telling you, my neighborhood, there’s two elementary schools on that block. So we’re all trying to survive. Right? We’re all trying to thrive.
One thing I’d like to talk about in the time that I have left is my experience as an abortion doula. That’s something that I have so much pride in. I’m actually a full-spectrum doula, but for this panel, I talk about abortion doula work. And as you can imagine, with Dobbs happening and Roe v Wade being overturned, even in California, people are so unclear on what do I have access to; what is legal; where is my local clinic. And you would think in the time of Google, that we could just do these things. But unfortunately, with pregnancy crisis centers, with misinformation online, with people not knowing the correct things, people are often really scrambling to get some of that basic care.
I’ll be quite honest, with the abortion doula work that I do, I don’t quite hear people talk about climate and environment. I mean, folks are just trying to figure out how many weeks am I; how many weeks along am I in this pregnancy; do I want to do a medication abortion; do I want to go in and get a procedure; do I want to try herbs; how can my abortion doula provide me resources that help me not only releasing this pregnancy but any sort of emotional support I’ll need afterwards.
Quickly, some of the changes I’ve seen since post-Dobbs, just really the spread of panic and misinformation. The fact that in deep East Oakland I can show you that there is—what do you call it—a billboard where there is language around Save the Babies: a heartbeat is felt in 18 days, with some precious baby on there. Right? And so the fact that these billboards exist, the fact that people believe this—what I call propaganda that is inaccurate is horrific. Right? And so that’s what people are feeling.
As you all know, people are still seeking abortions. And as they’re seeking it, they’re very unclear, even in the state of California, if them seeking an abortion will criminalize them or anyone that supports them. And so I will pass it on, because other folks here can elaborate on that, and I’m sure we’ll keep talking about it.
EVELINE: Elisa Batista is the content director and campaign director with UltraViolet. She conceives and implements campaigns to end violence against women, increase economic security for women and families, and ensure that all women have access to full and affordable healthcare services. Elisa is a very experienced campaigner, working as a previous campaign director for MomsRising, and she’s also a bilingual journalist, an award-winning digital influencer, and her writing has appeared in San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, FOX News, La Opinión, and WiredNews.
Okay, Elisa, can you please take a few minutes to tell us how you got involved and kind of what you’re seeing post Dobbs in your work?
ELISA: So I am a campaign director with UltraViolet. I’ve been here four years. We are a 12-year-old grassroots organization with a million members across the country and DC, and we’re probably best known for tipping off The New York Times to Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse, and it was captured in the movie She Said.
While Survivor Justice is clearly a big campaign for us, we cover or advocate on many issues that fall under the umbrella of gender justice, and that includes reproductive justice and, as Cynthia had pointed out, disinformation, mal-information, fighting misogynistic disinformation online put out by the so-called manisphere, as well as that put out by anti-abortion extremists, crises pregnancy centers. Yeah, it’s, in California, a little known fact is that crises pregnancy centers actually outnumber abortion clinics in California. Huge, huge problem.
So we have many campaigns holding them, as well as other corporations—and as I will discuss later on, just how big this issue is and everybody from big tech to our social media platforms, bad players behind disinformation have contributed to what is frankly a very fascist and undemocratic thing that is going on right now.
So how did I come to this work? I’m actually a trained journalist who worked for years as a reporter at Wired News in San Francisco. And something earth-shattering happened to me at 26. I had a baby. And I did what all new moms did in the early 2000s in Berkeley, California, I started a mommy blog. And my blog, “Mother Talkers”, I found myself writing a lot about the intersection between politics and motherhood, and Ms. magazine had voted it a favorite mom blog. And from there, an organization called MomsRising, which also started here in Berkeley, California, had reached out to me and gave me my first organizing job.
That is where I I learned all the nuts and bolts of organizing and campaign work, and this concept of intersectionality. And it’s so true what Cynthia just said—to raise a child in here, right here in Berkeley, in our country, in this world is incredibly complicated, and there is no one solution to all of our problems. So I advocated for everything from getting flame retardants out of baby products, to health school lunches, to paid family leave, to investments in early childhood education, and, yes, reproductive freedom, including access to contraceptives.
Okay, so how has my work shifted post Dobbs? I have to say that anyone who cares about women, children, and, yes, babies, should be very concerned about what’s going on. The anti-abortion minority, if there is anything that I want you to walk away with today is that they are, indeed, a fringe minority, filed these lawsuits but also have been passing legislation that is now criminalizing women like Brittany Watts out in Ohio—she’s the Ohio woman who had miscarried at home and was charged with abusing a corpse. And thankfully, her charge was overturned, but the same was not true for Jessica Burgess, the Nebraska mother, who provided her 17-year-old with abortion pills and is now serving a two-year prison sentence. By the way, the evidence that was used against her came from Facebook Messenger, and we did have a campaign, and Facebook has said that they would now offer end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger, and they have not done that yet, so we continue to pressure them there.
But what we can expect in the post-Dobbs world is basically women, including moms, continue to die from ectopic pregnancies, and pregnancy complications. Obstetricians are leaving states like Texas and Idaho, creating shortages in care, which also put moms and babies at risk.
So UltraViolet is unique in that we have a c3, we have a c4 and a political action committee, a PAC, so we can actually make candidate endorsements. And I actually wrote down, because for each of those, we’ve taken like a multiprong and very strategic approach on how we have responded. On the C3 front, we’ve been holding corporations like Walgreens accountable to consumers by pressuring them to dispense the pill Mifepristone. We were first out of the gate when we found out that Walgreens had written a letter to the attorney general out in Kansas saying that, you know, basically they weren’t going to dispense the pill there even though abortion is legal—the voters upheld that right. And since then, we drove tens of thousands of actions—emails, phone calls, signatures, social media messages. We hounded them by their headquarters in Deerfield, Chicago with a highway sign calling them out. We also showed up at the pharmacist industry trade show out in Phoenix, Arizona with a billboard. We showed up, by the way, for Kacsmaryk. We had a billboard targeting him in Amarillo, Texas.
But going back to Walgreens, we know of hundreds of members who wrote to us, telling us that they were boycotting and pulling their prescriptions, and calling. And their stock did take a nose dive. And most recently, they, along with CVS, announced that they were going to start dispensing Mifepristone.
Through our PAC work, in 2022—again, I want to like just press on you all that abortion on the ballot not only wins some of the time, most of the time, it wins all the time, every time. Okay? So next time you’re at the Thanksgiving dinner with your MAGA Republican Uncle Bob, please talk about this issue, because it’s killing them. We just turned over a seat in Alabama and in the statehouse there, and also like through our PAC, we had a successful texting campaign. We sent over a million text messages to voters. We would get together, UltraViolet members on Zoom, and text these voters in these swing states and all states that had the abortion ballot measures, like Michigan and Kentucky. And we won every single one of them. And then I’m going to stop there. But it’s a lot. Anyway, yes, post-Dobbs world is scary, but I am also hopeful moving forward.
EVELINE: Thank you. So on my far left, Mariko Miki is the interim soon-to-be co-executive director of If/When/How. And since joining If/When/How in 2010, Mariko has held many roles, including designing, launching and directing the Reproductive Justice Fellowship Program, and establishing the innovative Repro Legal Defense Fund, which she’ll talk more about.
Mariko has served on the advisory board of Training in Early Abortion for Comprehensive Healthcare (TEACH), and on the board of directors for Exhale Pro-Voice. And in law school, Mariko co-led the Harvard Law School—Law Students for Choice chapter and served as an executive editor for the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberty Law Review.
Mariko, can you share how you got involved and what are some of the things on the legal front that you and If/When/How are dealing with post Dobbs?
MARIKO: Absolutely. So a little bit about If/When/How first. We are a legal services and advocacy organization that helps people who are in crisis reshape the law. And we’re also building the next generation of lawyers who are fighting for reproductive justice. And we believe that every person should have the power to decide if, when and how to have a child, and to be able to parent the children that they have in safety and with dignity.
Well, let me stop there first and go a little bit into why I got into this. I’ve been with If/When/How for 14 years. When I joined the organization, it was called Law Students for Reproductive Justice. And so it really felt like the right career path for me since I had gone to law school to work in abortion advocacy.
I’m originally from Tokyo, Japan—but I grew up in the Deep South in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, and I think I was radicalized in various ways, probably first serving on a committee for my county. I was the student advisor for the sex-ed community—or committee in Cobb County, Georgia, and you can probably imagine what that was like. And so by the time I was in college, I was pretty sure that I really wanted to focus on reproductive freedom and reproductive rights.
And so eventually, I went to law school, and then I found Law Students for Reproductive Justice. We became If/When/How in 2016. And then in 2019, we merged with another organization and started really focusing on direct services and impact litigation work, as well as policy advocacy. And at that time, in 2019, our focus really was around spreading awareness about self-managed abortion.
You may have read about self-managed abortion these days, but back then, it really wasn’t a household term. And we actually had to do a lot of education, even within our movement, with some of our partner organizations. It was met with some skepticism at first, right, the idea of being able to manage your abortion on your own really scared people. It felt scary. It felt potentially unsafe. But I’m here to tell you today that it is very safe and that the risk that you run really is legal.
And so because we were focused on self-managed abortion, we developed our Repro Legal Helpline, and that was setup so that people who were scared about being prosecuted for self-managing or helping someone self-manage could call and understand what their legal rights were. And then we also setup our Repro Legal Defense Fund because we knew that in some cases, people needed funding, they needed resources. And so the fund was setup so that we’d be able to bail people out of jail if they were arrested for self-managing their abortion or helping someone do so, and that we’d also be able to fund a strong legal defense for them.
And much has changed, I think, since the Dobbs decision, but some things have remained the same. You know, as Eveline noted earlier, communities have not had access to abortion for a long time. And also the criminalization of pregnancy loss has been going on well before the overturning of Roe.
We have a research paper that came out this past December where we looked back over a 20-year period, from 2000 to 2020. We found 62 cases of people who were criminalized, prosecuted for ending their own abortion [pregnancy]. And those were all pre Dobbs.
Then, post-Dobbs, we’re seeing an increase of the criminalization, and what’s interesting is that there’s only one state at this point, Nevada, that explicitly makes it a crime to self-manage your abortion. And yet we are seeing people criminalized for this in many, many other states.
The way this is happening is through a misapplication of the law. Overzealous prosecutors are basically throwing any charge that they can against someone and seeing what sticks. And so, for instance, the case in Ohio, right, the Brittany Watts case. She was charged with abuse of a corpse. That’s one we see frequently. We’ve also seen charges of homicide, manslaughter, chemical endangerment, sometimes child abuse. We’ve also seen the use of statutes that are actually meant to protect the pregnant person and their fetus from a third party who might be causing them violence.
So, we really try to fight these where we can, and we really offer strategies either in support of the counsel that people already have, or sometimes we will, you know, take on the representation ourselves, or we will co-counsel with them. And then through the Legal Defense Fund, we will actually provide the financial resources. So I’ve personally actually bailed multiple people out in the past couple years, which is not something I necessarily thought I would be doing when I went to law school. Working with bonds people in various states is an interesting experience that I can share more about.
But what I will say is that in the post-Dobbs world, there is a heightened risk of criminalization, and that’s because abortion has become more stigmatized. There is an aura of criminality. Right? Like if something goes wrong in your pregnancy, well, you must have done something; you must have committed a crime. And that’s what we’re seeing more of.
But I do think that this is likely going to continue and likely get worse. And I think that we provide a really unique resource through our helpline and our fund. And our website also has very easy-to-understand, accessible information about what the abortion law is in every state. And we also work with and help people, young people, who are trying to figure out how they’re going to get an abortion because they face even more hurdles than adults do.
EVELINE: Thank you. It’s a very comprehensive picture of what’s happening post-Dobbs. So let’s dig in a little bit as folks, you are all three talking about how this is impacting communities, communities of color, low-income communities in various ways. We’re going to dig into the kind of connection between kind of these restrictions, and people’s ability to have autonomy, not only over their bodies but just be able to engage in every day lives and be part of a democracy.
So, Mariko, you talked about the increased surveillance and criminalization, how do you see, from your point of view as a legal advocate, how this is kind of connected, inherently connected to folks being able to kind of live their lives with agency and liberty, and be able to kind of function beyond protecting reproductive health, but in other ways?
MARIKO: Yeah. And I think that there is an increase in surveillance, but it’s also that the people who I think are most vulnerable are the people who have already been most vulnerable. Right? They’re the people who are already marginalized in our society, and so they are folks who are living in poverty, they’re folks who are incarcerated, people—young people who are living in foster care, often communities of color. And so those are the people who are already likely enmeshed in the criminal legal system, and they’re the ones who are most likely to be criminalized for their reproductive decisions.
I do see it as far-reaching. Right? Like a lot of our clients that we see come through our helpline, they might have been arrested for a pregnancy loss but it’s frequent that we see that they then have—they then—their immigration status is then jeopardized. Or in many cases, the family policing, so CPS, gets involved and takes away the kids that they already have. And so these people, I think, are already experiencing a lot of state control and state violence, and the reproductive decisions are only one piece of it.
One thing that we’ve seen in our research and through our helpline is that often it’s healthcare providers who are often the ones who call law enforcement, which is troubling. And so a lot of our work has actually been to research mandated reporting laws in every state, and to present and educate to medical providers about what is their duty to inform police about a suspected crime or in some cases, if someone is suspected of using substances during their pregnancy, is there a duty to report in that case. And we say no, that there is no duty, and in fact, they’re doing a real disservice to their patient by doing so. It might be in violation of HIPPA.
So I think that what we’re seeing is that reproductive decision-making and the ability to decide whether or not to have a child is just part of a spectrum, and it’s part of—the restrictions on that are part of this kind of larger agenda to have the state control people, particular kinds of people, right, especially, and that it can implicate these others pieces of your lives, being able to raise the children that you already have, being able to stay in this country, being able to get away from an intimate partner violence situation, all of these things are implicated in pretty much all of the cases that we see.
EVELINE: Thank you. That’s a pretty intense image, right, of healthcare providers being the component of state control.
Cynthia, the Gumacher[?] Institute reports that there’s actually—abortion rates are higher than ever, actually, in the last decade. And so even though with the bans and, you know, with the attacks on—the restrictions, and—but they…point to the “extraordinary efforts of clinics and abortion funds” like Reproductive Justice Access in California, the extraordinary efforts that you all – you’re the board chair – Reproductive Justice Access have gone to be able to provide resources for folks who need abortions. So could you talk about kind of what you’re seeing in regards to reproductive justice access in California. What are some of the ways that you all are providing funds and resources for folks in terms of helping them increase their agency in their lives?
CYNTHIA: Thank you for that question. Before I jump into that, I just really want to speak to what you just said. I love these panels having more of a conversation instead of us just talking at you, but I wear many hats, and what my day job—often people forget that I have a day job because I’m involved in so many things—but I actually work at UCSF in the Department of OBGYN, and manage two clinics. And one of our clinics is called Team Lily, and we support pregnant people who are using substances, who are experiencing homelessness, who have been formerly incarcerated, experiencing mental illness, all these things at once in San Francisco, so right over the bridge.
And as you were talking about that topic, I was thinking about how working in this hospital, our patients have to interact with labor and delivery, and social workers, and all these things, and one of the things that our team is often trying to educate our colleagues about is the family regulation system, also known as CPS—Dorothy Roberts, an incredible scholar, talks about this—And what we are discovering is that not only is the local county hospital but many hospitals in the area are reporting patients who are perceived to be “harming their children” to CPS. And often we’re having to untangle a lot of our part of this, a lot of the harm that healthcare does, social workers and nurses and all of that, and how we like funnel that. And so I just want to say that this isn’t just like a report that an organization wrote, like this is happening in real life where we’re having case meetings, we’re having huddles where we’re literally discussing—I was on a huddle this week, we’re like, do we call CPS on this birthing person who has a substance use disorder. It’s happening right here in the Bay Area.
And so there’s a lot of power that our healthcare professionals have, and it sometimes will make birthing people, especially those who are most marginalized, very vulnerable. So just wanted to say that real quick.
But in terms of ACCESS Reproductive Justice, for those of you that don’t know, this is the only abortion fund in California. And this is a huge state, so as you can imagine, a lot of the work is focused here in the Bay Area, but what we know is that there are a lot of people who are not able to access care to their abortions, particularly in the Central Valley, particularly in very, very Northern California, we’re talking way past Sacramento. And although California is perceived as a “safe haven” state, barriers still exist for people seeking abortions, whether being able to access—or be able to go to a local clinic to even confirm a pregnancy. I like to give the example of if someone is trying to get an abortion—and I put myself in those shoes, because I self-managed my own abortion; so I didn’t have to necessarily go to get a procedure—but what a person, for those of you who don’t know—have to consider, you first have to confirm that you’re pregnant, you’re not just having symptoms and you wish, and you kind of know. You literally have to confirm a pregnancy. And some folks don’t know if a pregnancy test is enough; they want to go into a clinic and have that true confirmation for themselves.
And so things that people have to keep in mind is, 1) Can I take time off work? Will my employer let me take time off work? Do I even have PTO? Do I even have vacation time? A lot of working class poor folks do not. Right? If I take a day off work, will I get fired? So that is like a big—like as we think about labor rights and workers’ rights, one issue.
Then it’s like, okay, I take the time off work. I have other children, do I have childcare? If I don’t, do I have extra money to hire someone to watch my children as I go to 1) just confirm the pregnancy; we’re not even talking about any additional healthcare appointments. From there: Do I have a car? Am I able to even drive to this appointment? Ubers and Lyft, since the pandemic, have increased their surge prices. So it’s like does someone have to take an Uber or Lyft?
Then someone has to think: Is there a bus nearby? Do I have to take several buses, BART, to get to my destination? So, you know, these are just some of the things that folks are having to think of when even confirming a pregnancy, getting procedures done, all the things that are needed.
And for ACCESS Reproductive Justice, we provide three main forms of support. We’re talking about procedural, practical and emotional support. Procedural funding, so we actually give people money for them to get the abortion they need. We trust that if you’re telling us you need $500 to get this procedure done, we trust that you’re not lying about it; this is your healthcare needs and we’ll give you the money to do that. You know, we also have support in terms of practical support. And so we are thinking about transportation. We have incredible volunteers that will literally take someone to their appointment.
Pre-pandemic, our volunteers would also provide housing. So obviously, we vet our volunteers for that person to be able to stay in their home. But for other folks, we’re paying for a hotel, we’re paying for lodging. Like if you’re going to be in San Francisco for a procedure that takes three days, a week, we are covering the cost of where you’re staying. We’re providing food stipends, transportation. And then emotional support. You know, if you want someone to be there for you, we can provide that. We have abortion doulas.
And so, you know, in terms of even within our last fiscal year, the majority of our callers—because we also have a healthline. So as you can imagine, with everything that’s happened the last couple of years, our numbers have increased in the number of people wanting to know what services do you provide; can you help me get this abortion. And we’ve discovered that the majority of our callers for whom we have data, identified as Black, Indigenous or people of color, have identified as female or women who are in their 20s, spoke English, called us in the first trimester of pregnancy, reported having no income, and were from California.
However, now, we have seen an increase of over 150% since the overturning of Roe v Wade. And so more callers are traveling from outside of the state of California. So now we have to take into consideration we’re not just getting you an Uber, a bus ride, a friend to be with you, we’re flying people in. Our data is showing that we’re flying people in from Arizona, from Texas, from almost every state, and we’re actually even getting callers from outside of the country. And so, you can imagine, we can’t necessarily fly people internationally, but we can provide all the services through our healthline to give them as much information, try to help them navigate services that are closer to them.
It’s getting harder, right, because we’re getting more callers, we’re getting more people wanting to come to California, and we don’t want to turn people away. Right? And so trying to find that continuous funding for our practical support to be able to provide those services is our top priority.
EVELINE: Thank you, Cynthia for breaking it down in terms of all the things that are necessary. And also just, you know, thinking that person in Central Valley, it’s just a good reminder to us that many people live in counties—even if you’re a blue state—where there are no abortion providers. And then my takeaway is to donate, right, to ACCESS Reproductive Justice because these are the folks that are getting the resources out to the folks who really need to get their abortion. Thank you.
Alright. Elisa, so you mentioned in your opening remarks about kind of the hope that you’re seeing in the electoral process, in ballot initiatives, that—across the country. Can you share a little bit more about kind of the landscape, what you’re seeing in terms of the positive, and also challenges and the lessons you’re taking?
ELISA: There’s a lot of opportunities here. And first of all, yes, yes. Please donate to your abortion funds. I know that was one popular fundraiser we had with our grassroots base, to help people travel from places like Texas to California.
So where are the opportunities? I mean, we’re constantly identifying them, you know, from the PAC strategy, absolutely, direct democracy, those abortion ballot measures helping elect. We did phone banking too, or texting, on behalf of Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, and Catherine Masto Cortez [Cortez Masto] out in Nevada, our pro-abortion champions. So there’s the electoral.
But there’s so much that we can do when we follow the money. One is the corporate accountability. We have multiple campaigns running there. One is, of course, the pharmacies, to dispense Mifepristone. The other is insurance companies to cover the whole—including Medicaid—the whole suite of reproductive freedoms, you know, from the abor—from the birth control pill to the abortion pill, you know, or an abortion, and now IVF.
One thing that we have been working on, there’s actually a bill in California to mandate insurance companies to cover IVF. I mean, if we really want to be the beacon of reproductive freedom, let’s go for it, California. Let’s cover the whole suite.
The other area is—that we have long funded—that we have worked and we’re about to launch is defunding the abortion movement and their leadership. For example, we did have a campaign pressuring state legislators in blue states to stop funding CPCs. The most recent was of Pennsylvania finally stopped offering state funding to these sham crises pregnancy centers. These are lower—low-lift opportunities that we can absolutely take on and win.
So the latest campaign that we’re about to launch is called—we’re calling it internally MAGA RAGA. And what it is, is that the Republication Association of Attorney Generals, you know, they may seem like this innocuous group, but they have done so much damage in anti-trans legislation and also going after abortion seekers. And it turns out that many of them have received funding from—follow the money—companies like T-Mobile and—Yeah, I know, I was so bummed; I use T-Mobile. And I was like, why are you giving to MAGA RAGA? But they do. And so we’re about to launch a website MAGA RAGA, that people will be able to check out and look at all their favorite companies so that consumers can make an informed choice as to whether or not we are going to continue to spend our money there, if they’re funding MAGA RAGA. There’s just so much that we can do there. Definitely check that out. I mean, we saw the power of this kind of campaign work with the Walgreens campaign. We had no idea it was going to blow up the way that it did.
And we have the power. That’s the thing. It doesn’t matter that, you know, Donald Trump is—Well, it does matter that Donald Trump is the president, but…we can starve them of resources here. We have that power.
EVELINE: Thank you. Yes. UltraViolet has done so much in so many different ways, and I love the MAGA-RAGA—Thank you.
Cynthia, what do you see as opportunities in terms of how people can get involved to support the tax on reproductive justice and freedom? Where are you seeing opportunities?
CYNTHIA: I’m a proud abortion storyteller with We Testify, and this is an organization that does a lot of culture shift change, a lot of media work. We actually like work—the executive director Renee has worked in like film and media to even change the storylines that we see in TV shows and films, because that’s the kind of information we’re consuming, right, and we want to make sure that when there are storylines about abortion, they’re accurate, they’re sensitive, they’re real. And she says this beautiful thing, and it’s in the back of my sweater. It’s everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion. And I really hope that like when y’all hear that, it really sits with you, because what I’ve learned doing reproductive justice work is that there’s so many more people that have had abortions than we know, and the more that I’ve been unapologetic about mine, and talked about it, and like shared information about it, so many people feel comfortable to come up to me and say I’ve had one too, and you’re the first person I’ve told. And so that, to me, is that kind of like culture shift where we’re not ashamed. We don’t have guilt, we don’t have shame, we’re just ourselves. Right?
Another thing I’d love to talk about is provide financial resources for the people leading this work. And so—Not just nonprofits but there’s people who are—whether they’re abortion doulas or birth doulas, like there are folks in this day in, day out, and in the Bay Area, we’re just trying to survive, you know, with the high cost of living and trying to afford groceries. Like how do we continue to compensate people for their work and lived experience?
You know, of course, please donate to your California abortion fund, ACCESS Reproductive Justice, and that’s your local one; let’s be very clear about that. I also—I’m on the board of Sister Song, which is a national reproductive justice organization, and folks that are just really leading that work, and I always encourage folks to donate there, to get involved. Our conference, Let’s Talk about Sex happening in August in DC, would love to see y’all out there. We’re talking strategy, we’re talking presentations, just like really dive into this work in this movement.
I’m also on the board of I Need an A, which is an incredible website. It’s INeedAnA.org, and if you go on it right now, you are able to see where you can get an abortion anywhere in this country. It gives you how far it is, your clinic, your information. It has stories. It can mail you resources that you need. And so I really just want to uplift these organizations and these causes, because these are folks that are super committed that use a reproductive justice lens.
And I tell people, go to places, go to spaces where people are pro-abortion. I’m not just talking about reproductive freedom. I want people to say, “I’m pro abortion; I’m pro do-what-you-want; I’m pro getting the birth control; I want the IVF,” whatever it is, like, go there, right, and just be unapologetic about it.
EVELINE: Thank you, Cynthia. Mariko, can you tell us where you see opportunities?
MARIKO: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot more that blue states can do to be more welcoming of abortion access and abortion seekers. I think that there’s proactive measures that they can take. For instance, I think California has done a great job so far, but we could do more to limit surveillance, for instance.
There was a bill that we partnered with the ACLU of Northern California on last year that didn’t make it out of the general assembly, but it was a bill that tried to limit law enforcement from being able to get geofence reverse word search warrants from tech companies like Google, and although that bill didn’t pass, it actually did lead to Google changing their policies around how they would provide certain kinds of data to police. Right? And so we think this is a win, and I think that advocates can certainly do similar things like this to really try to get at the problem of criminalization from all sides, and surveillance is one of them.
Another thing I think we can do is blue states like Michigan, for instance, they still have forced parental involvement laws. So if you’re not familiar with those, that’s where if you are under 18, you have to either get your parents’ permission in some states or you have to at least notify them in order to get an abortion. And if you don’t have a parent that you can notify, or if you feel like you can’t for safety or other reasons, then your option is to go before a judge and to have a judicial bypass. So…you know, I’m 45 years old, going before a judge is very scary; I can only imagine how someone who is 15 might feel, and it’s just not something that we think a state like Michigan should still have on its books. So we are actually working with advocates on the ground there to try to repeal that law.
And then there are other states that are passing or working on passing what we called Shield laws. These are laws that would protect abortion providers from being prosecuted by other states for trying to provide medication/abortion to folks in other states or perhaps in their own state, and then someone goes back to a ban state.
So I think that there’s a lot that can be done sort of creatively and proactively in states that we have more influence in. And then, you know, something that we’ve tried to do is—kind of in terms of what Cynthia was saying about changing the narrative around abortion, and particularly self-managed abortion. We’re trying to get the word out there that this is very safe; it’s medically safe, but it can be legally risky, and so you need to know your rights. And we are also trying to—in that, we’re trying to work with the media and make sure that they are reporting stories ethically and that they’re not reharming or retraumatizing people who find themselves criminalized. Right? It’s already life-changing often when you are arrested; your name gets in the paper, and especially if you come from more conservative communities, that can destroy your life. And as much as we believe that these stories need to be told and that people need to understand what’s happening, I think that there is an ethical way that the media can tell these stories, and that there are things that they shouldn’t do.
And so, we do trainings for journalists, and we try to make sure that no one is endangered when journalists are reporting about where people are sourcing pills, for instance. Right? So I think that there’s a lot of work that can be done on those fronts.
In the vital world of Indigenous activism, Jade Begay stands out as a beacon of change, seamlessly intertwining narratives of environmental justice and Indigenous rights. A member of Tesuque Pueblo with Diné and Southern Ute lineage, Jade’s remarkable trajectory underscores the potency of grassroots initiatives and strategic alliances. Bioneers has been honored to play a crucial role in Jade’s evolution as a formidable climate justice advocate.
After earning her master’s degree in Environmental Leadership from Naropa University in 2015, Jade found her footing as an invited participant in the Bioneers Native Youth Program. When reflecting on the experience years later as a keynote Bioneers speaker, Jade said:
“Eight years ago, I was a recipient of the Bioneers Indigenous Youth Scholarship. You all are witnessing a true full-circle moment. That was my first time at Bioneers. I was fresh out of grad school and beginning my career as a campaigner and strategist. And now I’m here talking to you all. This really does feel like a huge milestone. I feel really honored and grateful to people like [Bioneers Indigeneity Program Directors] Cara and Alexis and the entire Bioneers team who understand what it means to invest in Indigenous youth and Indigenous leadership and to platform us.”
Watch a clip of Jade speaking at Bioneers here:
As part of the Native Youth Program in 2015, Jade was given the opportunity to participate in the annual Bioneers Conference and Indigenous Forum and find a vital space for networking, mentorship, and empowerment. Over the past two decades of Bioneers Youth Scholarship Programs, thousands and thousands of young activists and leaders have attended Bioneers Conferences, meeting heroes and mentors while making connections with peers who have the potential to change the course of their lives.
During her time at Bioneers, Jade’s path intersected with Tom Goldtooth, the renowned founder of the Indigenous Environmental Network. Their friendship led her to the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Indigenous Rising Media Program, where she honed her storytelling skills, shedding light on the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock.
In 2021, Jade assumed a pivotal role as a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, marking a historic moment in which grassroots activists’ insights were sought for addressing environmental injustices. Recognizing her impact, Grist Magazine acknowledged her as one of its 50 influential “Fixers” in 2022, appreciating her unwavering commitment to equitable solutions.
Jade Begay’s story is truly inspiring, evidence of a born leader emerging in real-time within the nascent climate justice movement. In many ways, Bioneers exists to highlight and support movement leaders like Jade. The programs and events Bioneers produces are designed, on purpose, to create conditions conducive to leadership development and movement building. Jade’s specific path is unique to her, but her larger story is an echo of the thousands of youth who have experienced Bioneers over the years. And with your support, we can provide these key experiences to thousands more.
$950 allows us to provide full 3-day Bioneers Conference registration and three healthy meals for one Native Youth Scholar, perhaps the next Jade…
$1,200 supports distributing Bioneers Radio, including Indigeneity Conversations, for a month to our network of nearly 200 radio stations that receive it for free.
The Living Building Challenge is a dynamic program that pushes the boundaries of sustainable building practices, requiring projects to achieve self-sufficiency in water, energy, and waste processing while being culturally relevant and respectful. Pushing the envelope of green building, the Challenge is designed to force innovation in order to catalyze a transformative shift in how the built environment interacts with the natural world.
When Tom and Barbara learned about the Living Building Challenge from this episode of Bioneers Radio, they knew instantly that they wanted to get involved – and the result was a world-changing building they call Desert Rain.
In Eastern Oregon’s arid high-desert region, Desert Rain, the world’s first certified residential living building, set a new standard for the built environment. This pioneering residential complex defies the challenges of scarce rainfall with innovative solutions, including rainwater harvesting, onsite water treatment, and efficient waste management. It boasts a powerful solar array and a solar thermal system, ensuring net-zero energy consumption.
But Desert Rain is not just a private oasis; it’s a symbol of community engagement and harmonious design. Thousands have visited the home over the years, as part of its mission to serve as an educational beacon, showcasing how regenerative living can thrive.
Bioneers Radio, which was instrumental in connecting Tom Elliott and the Living Building Challenge, is supported by the Bioneers community — people like you. We create our shows specifically to inform and inspire listeners to take action in the world. Our award-winning, international radio and podcast series is free to everyone, providing listeners access to in-depth interviews with leading social and scientific innovators. It highlights diverse voices of grassroots leaders and voices that are often marginalized or excluded by corporate media.
Producing Bioneers Radio requires significant resources and a world-class team of audio professionals. Your support today helps hundreds of radio stations around the country air this valuable show for free every week, along with thousands and thousands of podcast listeners.
In 2010, Dr. Amy Cannon, the world’s first Ph.D. in the nascent field of green chemistry, was invited to speak at a Bioneers Conference on a panel about fostering eco-literacy in education. Speaking to an audience of hundreds of educators and activists, Amy was joined by educational trailblazers, including Dr. Anthony Cortese, Founder of Second Nature, one of the first organizations in the country dedicated to supporting sustainability and climate goals in higher education.
At the time, Amy’s green chemistry education nonprofit, Beyond Benign, was only a few years old. She was on a mission to change how chemistry was taught in educational institutions, resulting in a total reimagining of the way products are made as well as their health and safety for humans and the environment.
Historically, the chemical industry has created products and compounds without thought to their consequences on human health or the environment. These chemicals may be able to do the job they were intended for, but often leave toxic devastation in their wake. Toxicity has been seen as an unfortunate but necessary side effect, with the resulting impact on biodiversity, human health, and the larger environment left for others to deal with. Green chemistry principles transform this way of thinking, creating a framework where the final goalpost is “do-no-harm,” and the job of the chemist isn’t done unless the compound in question is proven to not be harmful. It invests in the true innovative skill required in chemistry, pointing out that toxic chemicals are, basically, unfinished chemistry experiments – the responsible parties didn’t finish the job.
Throughout her career, Amy watched green chemistry education’s strongest leaders operate in silos within their institutions and the broader chemistry community. She knew that breaking down walls and uniting these leaders was essential.
Back at the Bioneers conference, Amy listened as her co-panelist, Anthony Cortese, discussed the success of the higher education focused Presidents’ Climate Leadership Commitments. Incentivized by the promise of a higher education support network, the heads of hundreds of universities had voluntarily committed to ambitious climate goals. It was a brilliant way to leverage institutional interest in being on the leading edge and skip the wait for government regulations, putting power directly in the hands of the people.
“It was very action-oriented,” says Amy of Cortese’s project. “The idea was: ‘We’re going to do this now, regardless of future mandates. We have a role to play in this.’”
After their panel, Amy and Anthony connected one-on-one. A vision of how to apply this model to her own work was seeded, which crystallized in Amy’s head as she sat on the cross-country flight home. Beyond Benign established the Green Chemistry Commitment in 2013, inviting higher education institutions to join a global community of green chemistry leaders and receive support in bringing greener practices to their chemistry programs.
“The Green Chemistry Commitment was very much inspired by that Conference and by Tony’s program,” says Amy.
Today, more than 130 colleges and universities worldwide have signed the Green Chemistry Commitment, and that number is rapidly increasing. Thanks in large part to the Green Chemistry Commitment, nearly 2,500 chemistry degrees have been awarded to graduates versed in green chemistry since 2013. In 2023, about 11% of new chemistry graduates were green-chemistry educated – a number that has been steadily growing since 2013. Stakeholders within committing institutions – which include the University of Michigan, UC Davis, and the University of Minnesota – credit Beyond Benign with providing essential support and motivation. Industry leaders are excited to support Amy and Beyond Benign as they catalyze the shift toward a sustainability-minded chemical workforce.
At Bioneers, remarkable stories like Amy’s emerge from every conference, driven by connections that transform lives and movements. We rely on your support to make that possible. Your contributions underwrite every single thing we do, from covering essential expenses like travel and world-class event production to funding our small but mighty team. While ticket sales help, they don’t come close to covering costs, as we aim to keep our prices affordable and offer ample scholarships.
Bioneers is deeply grateful for your support. But this is not just about us. Bioneers is a launchpad, a hub of connections and relationships – we exist to support and highlight the work of revolutionary people and projects. Your partnership is an investment in the movements and projects that are transforming how we live on this planet. Without being invited to attend and speak at the 2010 Bioneers Conference, Amy Cannon and Beyond Benign may not have conceived of one of their most successful ideas, and green chemistry education would be in a very different place than it is today.
We invite you to join us in turning the visions emerging at Bioneers into reality. Become part of an innovative, transformative network in service of healing our relationship with the web of life. Thank you for your support.
The fashion system as we know it is broken. As we get dressed each day, we are all a part of this system, whether we like it or not.
With a growing dependence on fossil fuel-derived fibers and a relentless drive toward overconsumption, fashion and clothing behemoths have created a take-make-waste model that harms communities and ecosystems at every step. This system’s disconnection from nature’s cycles has placed us on a dangerous path.
The reality of our fast-fashion world is staggering: 60% of all materials in the industry come from plastic, derived from fossil fuels. Every year, 500,000 tons of microfibers — equivalent to 50 billion plastic bottles — are released into our oceans from washing clothes. The fashion sector accounts for up to 8% of global carbon emissions, and without change, that could rise to 26% by 2050. Add to this the fact that fashion is responsible for 20% of industrial wastewater worldwide and that millions of textile workers, primarily women, are paid unlivable wages for exhausting work, and the depth of the problem becomes clear.
All of this harm, and yet our clothes barely last. In the U.S. alone, 11.3 million tons of textiles are discarded every year, equating to 81.5 pounds per person. These garments, many of which are barely worn, are flooding our landfills at an alarming rate.
Despite this bleak picture, there’s hope. Across the globe, leaders and innovators are working to repair the fashion system — and they’re seeing real results. From regenerative agriculture to circular design, these changemakers are proving that a different way is not only possible, but already underway. By prioritizing natural fibers and supporting the farmers and ranchers who grow them, they are transforming soils into carbon sinks, restoring ecosystems, and ensuring the future of both agriculture and fashion.
Transforming the fashion system requires a unified, cross-industry effort. In this newsletter, in collaboration with our friends at Fibershed, we delve into just a few of the vital conversations and innovations leading us toward a more regenerative fashion future.
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What If Everything Goes Right? Rebecca Burgess Envisions a Brighter Textile Future
Rebecca Burgess, the Executive Director of Fibershed, is a leading voice advocating for a shift in our approach to clothing consumption and production. Her vision for a fiber future centers on quality materials, cultural reverence, and a deeper connection between textiles and the ecosystems they stem from. In this interview, Burgess shares her thoughts on the challenges and opportunities within the textile industry, emphasizing the importance of consumer behavior, policy changes, and innovative agricultural practices in paving the way for a more sustainable future. Photo by Paige Green, Courtesy of Fibershed
Weaving Past and Future: McCormack Ranch’s Journey in Regenerative Farming
In the sprawling landscapes of Northern and Central California, a quiet revolution is taking place. It’s a movement rooted in the soil, nurtured by the hands of dedicated farmers, artisans, and craftspeople who are redefining what it means to create a sustainable and resilient textile economy. Agricultural producers are the foundation of the textile supply chain, responsible for nurturing the raw materials that will eventually be spun, woven, and dyed into fabric. Read the story of McCormack Ranch, a historic operation in Rio Vista, California, where time-honored practices meet forward-thinking stewardship. Photo by Paige Green, Courtesy of Fibershed
Liz Ricketts of the Or Foundation Sheds Light on Clothing Waste in Ghana
In Accra, Ghana, the journey of donated clothing often ends in environmental distress. While charity shops in the U.S. only manage to sell 20% of donations, the unsold items are bundled into bales and sold to for-profit aggregators. Ghana, the world’s largest importer of used clothing, sees these bales flood into the Kantamanto market. Nearly half of each bale is unusable leading to one hundred tons of waste entering a barely regulated waste stream every single day.
In several powerful accounts, Liz Ricketts, cofounder of the Or Foundation, chronicles the stories of people in Ghana who haul, sort, clean and process second-hand clothing, showing the far-reaching impact of the fashion industry’s waste crisis. Our thanks to the inspiring publication Atmos.earth, which has been covering the work of the Or Foundation by way of a stellar series of articles about the situation on the ground in Ghana and beyond.
Learn about the impacts of imported second-hand clothing in Accra, Ghana, as Ricketts follows used clothing retailer Abena through her workday. Abena buys bales of second-hand clothing, known locally as “dead white man’s clothes,” aiming to resell the best pieces for a profit.
Ricketts chronicles 10 days in the lives of women and girls known as kayayei — a Ga and Hausa term meaning “she who carries the burden” — who transport 120-pound bales of donated clothing on their heads.
In an open letter to the fashion industry, Ricketts insists there can be no sustainability revolution without justice throughout the global supply chain.
Your Next Steps: How to Support a More Just and Regenerative Fashion Industry
Each small action contributes to a larger movement toward positive change. Your involvement is crucial, from participating in challenges to advocating for policy reform. Dive in and discover how you can help drive the transformation toward a fashion system that values people and the planet.
Join Fibershed’s Slow Fashion Challenge: Take the next step toward a more conscious wardrobe. Sign up for this 7-day challenge to receive daily action items that will help you make ethical, sustainable choices.
Support The Or Foundation: Follow and support The Or Foundation as they work toward a justice-led circular economy. Operating at the intersection of environmental justice, education, and fashion, they’re leading the charge to create alternatives to the harmful systems that dominate the fashion industry.
Find Local Regenerative Textile Producers: Explore Fibershed’s Producer Directory to discover farmers, ranchers, and artisans in your area who are leading the way in regenerative textile production. From natural dyers to weavers and ranchers, this network connects you to makers working in harmony with the land.
End U.S. Sweatshops – Sign the FABRIC Act Petition: The FABRIC Act aims to protect American garment workers from wage theft, exploitation, and unsafe working conditions while boosting domestic manufacturing. By holding fashion brands accountable and supporting a fair wage system, this bill is a critical step toward a more just and responsible fashion industry.
Share the Knowledge – Spread the Word: Education is a powerful tool for change. Share this newsletter and your favorite resources about sustainable fashion with your network and community. By raising awareness and sparking conversations, you help drive collective action toward a more regenerative fashion system.
Call for Artists for 2025 Bioneers Conference
Bioneers is excited for art to play a vital, celebratory and transformational role at its 36th annual conference. The conference will take place March 27-29, 2025, in Berkeley, California, across several different locations. Bioneers is accepting applications for outdoor performances, indoor installations and sculptures as part of its mission to program the conference with captivating and compelling art. Applications are due November 1, 2024, by 11:59 p.m. PST.
We’re excited to announce that our new season of Bioneers Learning is online, and registration is open! You can register for our first-ever self-paced courses, along with courses covering topics such as the Rights of Nature movement, regenerative herbalism, and sacred activism.
Regenerative Herbalism: The Healing Power of Plants | Sept. 18-Oct. 23 | Explore the magical realm of herbal wisdom with this 6-session online course led by renowned herbalists Penny Livingston and Rosemary Gladstar.
“What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” Book Club | Oct. 1-22 | The Bioneers Learning Book Club is thrilled to offer you a rare chance to delve into Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s brand new book, “What If We Get It Right?” — the highly anticipated sequel to her best-selling book, “All We Can Save.”
A Course on The Imaginal: Cultivating the Visionary Self | Oct. 26-March 16 | This course will explore and exercise our creative muscle to strengthen our visionary selves. When we encounter and encourage the wild dance of the artist within, the creative self becomes part of the visionary collective needed for these times.
Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem | Nov. 12-Dec. 3 | In this four-week course, you can join author, researcher, and emotions-and-empathy expert Karla McLaren, M.Ed., for a grounded and surprising exploration of the healing genius in your emotional realm.
The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.
Alarming numbers of college students, even at some of the most prestigious universities across the country, struggle financially, affecting their access to housing and food. Those personal crises make it difficult for students to succeed academically. Research has shown that students who don’t get enough to eat have lower grades and lower graduation rates. The Basic Needs programs on the ten University of California campuses provide a suite of services to support students in need.
Francis Ge, the Basic Needs Coordinator with the Center for Agroecology, UC Santa Cruz, was an assistant manager of a farm in Virginia, did research for the NY State Department of Agriculture on connecting urban farmers to communities in need, and worked for the New York City Farm to School program. In addition to her work with the Basic Needs program, Francis is the Assistant Farm Manager at UCSC, the first organic farm on a college campus in the US. Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed Francis Ge about how she is addressing the problem of student hunger.
ARTY MANGAN: Since you’ve been working with the Basic Needs program, what have you learned about student hunger?
FRANCIS GE: It’s way more prevalent than I would have believed before I got here. If you go on the Basic Needs dashboard at the UC Office of the President website, it has all the data from all ten UCs, and it’s broken down by demographic and class year, etc. Even though UC is one of the best and wealthiest university systems and obviously located in California, which has food in abundance, the rate of food insecurity on campus at the UCs is anywhere from 35 to 45%, which is just astronomical.
I think the rate of food insecurity in the U.S. is close to 13%, and higher in children. College students struggle to pay the bills — food, rent, books, etc. There is a trope of college students being really poor and only eating pizza and Ramen, but people don’t realize that having good nutritious food and not being stressed about access to food or when you’re going to get your next meal has a huge impact on students’ academic performance and on their persistence and graduation rates. We are finding that after Basic Needs programs are implemented, the students who are using them and who then report higher food security also have higher grades and are graduating at higher rates.
ARTY: When I saw the statistics, it was alarming to me that college students are experiencing food insecurity at such high rates. I assumed that if you’re going to go to college, you’re going to have your meals taken care of one way or another, but obviously that is not the case.
FRANCIS: I feel that public institutions should be able to take care of the people who physically live on their campuses. It shouldn’t be so hard for students to meet their basic needs.
ARTY: In a 2021 report by the organization Feeding America entitled “Addressing Teen Hunger,” one of the key findings was that teens feel a stigma around hunger and actively hide it as much as they can.
FRANCIS: We do find this is true. Basic Needs has been around for about 10 years now, and especially at the beginning, food insecurity and hunger were highly stigmatized. A lot of our work is about making our programs open to everybody so there are no eligibility requirements. You don’t have to prove you’re hungry or poor in order to get food from us.
We also make our spaces really welcoming and our communication really accessible and de-stigmatizing. That is a big part of our work, but now that we’re getting generations of college students who already know that our programs exist before they get on campus, they think it’s more normal for food to be free or really low cost and for healthy food from the farm to be available to them when they need it, so we’re seeing a culture shift in which students are taking each other on dates to our non-transactional coffee shop/café, and we’re like, “hey you guys, this is for students who don’t have meal plans who need to get some food or a snack to get through the day.” It’s become such a popular hangout spot that we cannot keep up with demand, so the culture is shifting, and we’re doing that intentionally.
Our students are really great ambassadors for this. A lot of the students we hire personally have experienced food insecurity, or they’ve applied for CalFresh (California’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). Every student who has an on-campus job now qualifies for CalFresh, if they’re a citizen, so lots of our students have CalFresh and are really open about talking about it. Students tell each other that it’s cool to apply for these benefits. CalFresh does more than what we can for their food security because it gets money in their pocket every month during the year, while most of our programs only run during the school year and not on breaks and holidays.
Francis Ge and students at the UC Santa Cruz harvest festival
ARTY: Going back to the Feeding America report addressing teen hunger, another finding was that teens have a lot of opinions about school meal programs and ideas about how to strengthen them. How much agency do students have in shaping your program?
FRANCIS: Students have a lot of say in shaping the Basic Needs programming. Students who work for Basic Needs at the farm, at the Cowell Coffee Shop, at the free market and produce pop-ups contribute directly to Basic Needs programming. We also get a lot of feedback from the people who use the services, and we try to incorporate that. We even get feedback on which crops they want to see in the coffee shop and free market. We try to grow based on what the students are asking for.
So, students have a lot of say in the details in day-to-day operations, even what music is playing to make it more welcoming, but that’s not the case with the dining halls, which are the biggest food security apparatus on campus. They feed something like 9,000 people a day.
I also supervise the student team that does research into more sustainable sourcing for dining hall procurement, so we are working on improving that, but I don’t know how much direct feedback the dining hall takes.
ARTY: Could you describe the whole system of support that addresses food insecurity on campus. You talked about a produce pop-up stand and non-transactional café. What are some of the other aspects of the program? How does it all work together?
FRANCIS: The food side of the Basic Needs programming at UCSC includes distribution sites. One is the Cowell Coffee Shop, the non-transactional café. It is the culinary aspect of the program, in which students are cooking, and there’s also a downstairs café area where they prepare and serve the food. Students just swipe in with their student ID, and then they can take what they need from the coffee shop at no charge. There’s usually coffee there every day as well as bagels, salads and whatever fun stuff the students in the kitchen are cooking up.
Student cooking at the Cowell Coffee Shop
There’s also a more traditional pantry called the Redwood Free Market that has dry goods and shelf stable food, as well as fresh produce to take home. We partner with the Second Harvest Food Bank to provide those dry goods.
The Redwood Market also has a diaper program for parenting students and a fill station for soaps and shampoos and stuff like that, and they have a little kitchen in there too, so that’s a place to go to get all sorts of groceries.
The produce pop-up is a twice-weekly farm stand that happens on campus, with food directly from the farm and from the farmer’s market. When we can’t source as much from the farm in the winter, we source from local farmers, so we are supporting farmers in our community as well.
The farm on campus produces a lot of food for Basic Needs too. A lot of the funding goes towards infrastructure, such as getting new irrigation, buying seeds, paying the students and the managers at the farm, etc. Those are the programs funded by Basic Needs.
A really important part of our food security program that doesn’t involve physically giving people food is the CalFresh Outreach Program. Students can get up to $280 a month just on their EBT card if they apply. There’s an outreach program that helps students apply and get through their interview and get all their paperwork together, with student outreach ambassadors available to help them do that.
Basic Needs also assists students with housing. If students are in crisis because they got kicked out at home or they can’t afford the rent deposit, etc. they can go to Slug Support (which helps student navigate difficult circumstances and find solutions to keep them out of crisis). We know that food insecurity, housing insecurity, being able to pay for your tuition, technology, transportation to campus, childcare, dependent care, those are all related. Generally, if people don’t have enough money to pay for food, it’s because they’re struggling to pay for housing or tuition. Slug Support can help students in those multi-faceted crises situations. It’s holistic support.
But all of this is at the crisis response level; they are stop-gap measures. What we do on a daily basis doesn’t solve structural food insecurity or poverty or the problem of super high rental prices in Santa Cruz. If students are hungry, we feed them. The medium-term project is teaching students how to farm, how to cook and how to make healthy food for themselves. For long term policy and legislation, Tim Galarneau, Co-Director of Education and Training for UC Essential Needs Consortium works on that.
Produce Popup Team
ARTY: It’s an impressive array of offerings to help mitigate and solve the problems. Do students who aren’t food insecure abuse the program, or do you just not worry about that? I think it would be really tempting to walk by the non-transactional café for a student to say, hey, I’m going to go and grab something to eat and I don’t have to pay for it.
FRANCIS: We do get students who are on the meal plan but still come to our sites, but I don’t think I would call it abusing the programs because almost no students live on campus all four years. Then they will need to pay rent and buy pots and pans and maybe even a refrigerator, so it’s good that all the students know about our resources and feel comfortable coming to them because Basic Needs is non-linear. At any given point, students can suddenly find themselves in a situation in which they become food insecure.
We serve about 7,000 unique students over the course of the year across all of our programs which is more than a third of the population, so that is obviously a lot of students, but it’s not as high as the rate of food insecurity reported on campus, which is over 40 %.
ARTY: Feeding 7,000 students is no small accomplishment, and yet there are still many students being underserved. Why is that?
FRANCIS: Not everybody will know about our sites or feel comfortable coming to them. About one quarter of students graduate every year, and then new students come in who are also facing food insecurity. There has to be constant messaging and outreach to each new population of students.
We encourage students to use the resources before they’re really in crisis. We encourage them to use our resources the way they would use a gym or a library—they’re there for everyone, in order to support their success at school. We don’t get lots of students who return every single day or every single week. We find that students will come and use us if they’re in a pinch, or if they’re walking by that day, or if we happen to see them and reach out and talk to them, but our services are not really designed to be able to provide everybody’s groceries every week while they’re in school, so there’s a mix of how people use our programs.
ARTY: Would you like to share a success story about students who’ve been affected by your program?
FRANCIS: I think our biggest success stories are our student staff and managers. We often hire students, and we don’t know or ask about their personal food security or housing security situation when we hire them, but sometimes it’ll come out later that they were housing and/or food insecure, and they applied for CalFresh with this program. We had a crop of students who were online interns with our programs during the pandemic, and when they got to campus, we hired them to work on the farm. They worked for a little while they increased in both their competence and their emotional investment in the farm and their desire to see the farm do well. We promoted them to student managers, so they would each take on an area of the farm, such as harvest, the farm stand, or irrigation, or propagation, and manage an aspect of the farm with us. As their competence increased, so did their responsibility. They’re actually growing the food to feed themselves and their peers. They’re teaching the interns that are coming after them.
Students who came to us right after the pandemic have all graduated now. One of them is working at the Center for Agroecology. Another is working for Food What?! One of them is working at Fifth Crow Farm. One of the Cowell Coffee Shop student managers is now a line cook at a really nice local restaurant. A good deal of the students who get experience working with our Basic Needs programming translate the technical, leadership and teamwork skills that they learned here into getting jobs in the food system and are making an impact in the larger society.
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