Trump: Climate Change Not A National Security Threat. Wrong Again.

As summarized in this Huffington Post article, the Trump Administration today managed to dispense with decades of evidence and analysis about the dangers of a changing climate coming from within the Defense Department – not necessarily a paragon of liberal policy analysis. The current administration’s position couldn’t be further from the truth. As Bioneers speakers have outlined for many years, Climate Change ought to be seen as an existential threat to society in general and, as a logical and specific result, a threat to the national security of most nations, the United States included.

To be sure, there’s much to disagree with as far as the Defense Department and US National Security policies and actions are concerned, presently and historically. But on climate change, they really have been out in front in many ways. As we’ve mentioned before on this blog, “The military has to be reality-based—it’s charged with operationalizing the security of the country. And it’s way out in front of the rest of the nation on clean energy, zero waste, getting off oil, and spawning tomorrow’s clean technologies and industries.”

Learn about the connections between national security and climate change by listening to “Security by Design”, an episode from the Bioneers Radio series featuring global energy strategist Amory Lovins and Oberlin College Professor David Orr outlining the strategic imperative and foundation for a new national security narrative.

For more background on this topic, it’s worth re-reading the 2015 Rolling Stone article, The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk. The only good news to come out of the recent announcement is the reality that it may not matter. From the HuffPo article above, “David W. Titley, a retired rear admiral in the Navy, said there is “nothing in this document that precludes the Department of Defense from continuing to do what it’s doing. “I really don’t see this document as some sort of declaration of war on climate or anything like that,” Titley, now a meteorology professor at Pennsylvania State University, told HuffPost by phone. “In that sense, I’m actually kind of happy. It could have been much worse.” That’s what passes as good news these days, but, for the moment, we’ll take it.

Forked: Saru Jayaraman’s Advice for a Broken American Restaurant Industry

Speaking about the slavery-based history of the American restaurant industry and its resultant pay structure, activist and organizer Saru Jayaraman draws connections between the popularity of dining out in the U.S. and national racial tensions, gender injustices, and economic disparity. Speaking at a Bioneers Conference, Jayaraman concluded her impassioned keynote address by explaining why, in her eyes, people should care about this when there are currently so many global crises to thwart.

“Ultimately, we can’t survive—there will be no organic products or sustainable products of any kind—if people can’t consume,” said Jayaraman, discussing rampant low wages within America’s second-largest sector. “And fundamentally, these people are not just consumers, they are humans, and so are you, and I know you care not just about the Earth, but about equity. Fundamentally, you want us not just to survive through climate catastrophe, but thrive, live.”

In 2016, Jayaraman put these ideas (and many more) to paper in Forked (Oxford University Press). The following is excerpted from the book’s introduction.

People know me as the co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, a national social-movement organization dedicated to raising wages and working conditions in the nation’s restaurant industry. I have dedicated my life to serving as an organizer, advocate, and spokesperson for raising standards for restaurant workers.

What almost no one knows about me is that I don’t come from a line of restaurant workers; I come from a family of restaurant owners. And the family restaurant did not pay its workers well.

In the early 1900s, my great-great grandfather, a policeman named Sundara, opened a large restaurant in the tiny town of Karur, India. Motivated in part by his disdain for working for others (a sentiment shared today by his descendant), Sundara decided to open his own place, and call it Sundara Villas. Since the proprietor was an Indian Brahmin, Sundara Villas was forbidden by caste from serving meat. The cuisine was South Indian vegetarian, served communal-style on washed banana leaves to guests seated at long marble tables.

In those days, the general rule—and preference—was to eat at home, specifically a meal cooked by a wife or mother. Men only ate in restaurants if they were traveling, or a bachelor, or if their wives were sick or traveling. Gender norms forbade women from eating out or mixing with men in such public spaces, and thus the restaurant was almost an entirely male affair, with the exception of the proprietor’s daughters and granddaughters, who would run around playing in the restaurant.

Sundara brought his sons to work in the restaurant, but also hired young men from Karur and the neighboring villages. These workers were paid meager monthly wages, and many slept in the restaurant itself.

My great-grandfather, Venkataramanaswamy (try that ten times!), took over the restaurant when Sundara died. He also brought his sons to work in the restaurant. At this point there were young men who had worked at the restaurant for a lifetime, literally. And although wages were meager, there was most definitely a sense of family. Workers who fell ill were neither asked to work nor docked pay. Servers and cooks became lifelong family members. The longest-lasting server, a man named Sundaram, volunteered to cook at my parents’ wedding and attended every family wedding and function after that; my great-grandfather paid for Sundaram’s son’s coming-of-age ceremony. Another cook worked both in the restaurant and in the house, washing the children’s clothes.

There is no way I could call my great-grandfather a “high road” employer, which is the label we at ROC give to employers who provide their employees with livable wages and working conditions. The sense of family that my parents used to describe the restaurant is the same word almost every restaurateur in America uses to describe their employees—generally without cause and as a justification for paying low wages. We at ROC always respond by saying that being a family, although wonderful, is not enough; a family that keeps some of its relatives in poverty is a family that can do better, both for the sake of the workers and ultimately for the benefit of employers and consumers.

My restaurant-owning grandfathers were small business owners who followed the norms, customs, and culture of their day; today, these surrounding factors have changed and evolved. One hundred years later, their granddaughter is leading a movement to improve wages and working conditions for the workers they employed.

I love and respect my great-grandfather. He was a kind and extremely generous man who took care of his large family, his brothers’ families, and even the families of his employees. Certainly, through his eyes, I can understand the plight of the small restaurateurs in America struggling to understand how they would go against the norm of low pay and poor benefits in this industry and still succeed. However, the employers profiled in this book show that norms and standards can evolve in ways that help workers, employers, and consumers to thrive collectively. Times are changing, and the industry—and society—certainly can do better.

How We Are Forked

Right now, more than eleven million Americans work in restaurants. Unfortunately, the people who prepare, cook, and serve our food are also twice as likely as other Americans to be on food stamps. The restaurant industry—the industry that feeds us!—is also starving its workforce, both economically and as a civil society that values its citizens. However, this book sets out to describe a different path, which some employers are already on, to resolve these challenges.

Workers, consumers, and even employers have been gouged—“forked”—by low standards for employee treatment that have been set by the largest companies in this industry. But in another sense, the industry is also at a fork in the road: much of the industry is following the “low road” to profitability that has been modeled by a majority of large corporate restaurant chains, whereas a small but growing group of employers have shown that taking the “high road” to profitability results in better payoffs in the long run. In fact, a 2014 study conducted by Cornell University researchers in partnership with ROC shows that employers can cut costly employee turnover almost in half by providing higher wages and better working conditions, a tremendous gift to an industry that suffers from one of the highest employee turnover rates of any sector. This book will profile people and companies taking both paths, and show how we can get where we need to go by taking the “high road” at the fork in the road.

This book is a guide for anyone who eats out and anyone who wants to eat out better and more ethically. It is a tool to help us understand how restaurants fare on issues of worker wages, benefits, and promotions. Most importantly, this book (along with ROC’s smart phone application—more on this later) gives consumers the tools they need to communicate their values every time they eat out.

This book includes both ratings of well-known restaurant companies and more in-depth profiles of companies that rate well and others that do not. This book is not intended to condemn any companies, organizations, or individuals; on the contrary, the book is meant to show both the challenges at hand and that change is possible anywhere and everywhere, and that change is completely within our power as consumers to effect within our lifetimes.

Why This Book?

In 2013, I wrote a book called Behind the Kitchen Door, about working conditions in the restaurant industry, then proceeded to take my seven-month-old daughter with me on an insane book tour across the country. We stopped in big and small cities, and I spoke in churches, libraries, bookstores, restaurants, and anyplace that would have us. Sometimes I’d take my daughter with me up to the podium, and other times she’d be crawling around in the back of the audience while I pounded the podium with my fist and described the poverty-level wages and abysmal working conditions faced by the millions of restaurant workers in this country. I would talk about the work of ROC, the national movement that I co-founded and co-direct, and our work over the last twelve years to bring workers, responsible employers, and consumers together to change the industry.

In too many instances, women would approach me at the end of the book talk and share horrific stories of sexual harassment and assault while working as servers in restaurants. These stories dramatically changed the course of ROC’s work, as I’ll describe later.

Either way, everywhere I spoke, anytime I spoke, people would always ask, “So what can we do?” “Where can we eat?” And someone, almost every single time, would come up with the idea that everyone felt they had discovered for the first time—the idea of a diners’ guide, something tangible to tell eaters which restaurants fare well on issues of wages and working conditions for restaurant workers. And I would always say, “Yes, we have an app for that.”

The first ROC Diners’ Guide to Ethical Eating was created for New York City in 2007, and it was a simple booklet to highlight restaurant owners who were providing livable wages and working conditions to their employees. We grew into a national organization that same year, and in 2012, published our first national version of the guide online and as a smartphone app. The guide and app rated the 100 most popular restaurant chains and also provided awards to approximately 75 of our responsible restaurant employer partners.

We never created the guide to tell people where to eat and where not to eat. If every ethical eater in America only frequented the 100 or so restaurants around the country that have been given awards for responsible employment in our app, we would eat in restaurants much less. Instead, we sought to provide a tool for consumers to speak up wherever and whenever they ate out—to say to managers and owners, “I loved the food, loved the service, and I’d love to keep coming back here. I just wanted to let you know that how a restaurant fares in this app on worker wages, benefits, and promotions practices are important to me as a consumer.”

This book represents the next step in that process. The book includes the same ratings of employers’ wages, benefits, and promotions practices, but it also includes profiles of restaurants that rate highly and others that rate poorly in specific food and labor categories. It especially tells the stories of outstanding restaurant employers—we call them “high-road” employers because they take the high road to profitability—who are growing and profitable because they pay and treat their workers well, not din of their above-average wages and working conditions. In particular, we focus on how these employers have managed to excel in the categories listed in this book.

We also profile employers who currently take the “low road” to profitability, but all of them have great potential to move over to the high road with some encouragement and pressure from all of us. In creating the Diners’ Guide, we sought to find a way to create simple, straightforward categories with which to rate restaurants, and realized that we needed to prioritize the key issues that restaurant workers have told us were their most important challenges during the last decade.

What Are the Key Issues This Book Rates?

This book is not an exhaustive examination of all the merits or demerits of various restaurant companies’ employment practices. Instead, it is a tool for consumers to begin to think about what to look for in a restaurant with regard to how it treats its workers. The key issues that workers have prioritized—and thus the ones we discuss in this book—are the same key policies that the Cornell researchers found are key to reducing employee turnover and thus increasing retention, productivity, and customer satisfaction: wages, benefits, and internal mobility, regardless of workers’ race or gender.

1. Wages

With almost eleven million workers, the restaurant industry is currently the second-largest and one of the fastest-growing employer sectors in the United States. Nearly one in twelve working Americans works in the restaurant industry right now. The restaurant industry is one of the only sectors to grow amid the economic crisis of the last decade. We have continued to eat out as a nation in ever-increasing numbers, even when we are unemployed.

Unfortunately, while it is one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of the United States economy, it is also the absolute lowest-paying employer in the United States. Every year the U.S. Department of Labor releases a list of all occupations in the United States, including their hourly wages, and every year the restaurant industry wins the prize for having the lowest-paying occupations in the United States. Every year at least six to seven of the ten lowest-paying occupations are restaurant occupations, with only one or two of those occupations being fast-food jobs. Currently, restaurant workers occupy seven of the ten lowest-paid occupations reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics; at least four of these are in full-service restaurants.

So how is it that one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy—clearly a successful sector—is proliferating the nation’s lowest-paying jobs? Our analysis is that much of this persisting, extraordinary imbalance can be traced to the power of a trade lobbying group called the National Restaurant Association, which we at ROC call the Other NRA. The Other NRA, led by the nation’s Fortune 500 restaurant chains, has been named among Congress’s most powerful lobbying groups by Fortune Magazine. The NRA has lobbied extensively to keep the minimum wage as low as possible; not surprisingly, the restaurant industry is the largest employer of minimum-wage workers in the United States. As a result, the median hourly wage for all restaurant workers in the United States is a paltry $9.20.

Many people assume that low wages in the restaurant industry are concentrated in the fast-food segment of the industry. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Workers in all segments of the industry, in all positions and of all racial and gender backgrounds work and live in poverty in the restaurant industry. Wages for kitchen workers are abysmal, and, unbeknownst to many, income for workers serving customers on the dining floor—workers who earn tips—is no better.

In Chapter 2 of this book, I describe a brief history of tipping and the minimum wage for tipped workers over the last 150 years, and how the current system of allowing the restaurant industry to exempt itself from paying its own workers because they earn tips is a legacy of slavery. Over the last century, the restaurant industry has continuously lobbied for tipping to be entrenched in American restaurant culture and for resultant exemptions from minimum wage laws for restaurant employers. This history climaxed in 1996, when the CEO of the NRA was Herman Cain, a former business analyst for Pillsbury who made his name working for brands such as Burger King and Godfather’s Pizza. (Cain would later pursue the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and a 2004 Georgia senatorial nomination, losing in the primaries for both.) In his time at the NRA Cain struck a deal with Congress: the NRA would not oppose a modest increase in the overall minimum wage as long as the minimum wage for tipped workers would in turn stay frozen forever. The argument of the NRA was that since these workers earned tips, they should never actually receive a wage increase. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers has thus remained frozen at $2.13 an hour for almost 25 years. The Other NRA thus succeeded in convincing Congress and the American people that it should be the only industry on earth to win an extraordinary exemption for itself, saying that they should not have to pay their own workers’ wages but, instead, customers should.

Similar deals have been struck countless times over the last decade in at least forty-four states across the country. Seven states—California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Alaska, Nevada, and Minnesota—have had the same wages for tipped and non-tipped workers for decades. Although the NRA argues that paying tipped and non-tipped workers the same minimum wage would put them out of business, eliminate server positions, or reduce customer tipping, none of these predictions has been borne out in the seven states with no mandated lower wage for tipped workers. These seven states actually have faster restaurant-industry job-growth rates, higher job-growth rates (specifically in server occupations), and higher restaurant sales per capita than the forty-three states with lower wages for tipped workers. Tipping averages are the same in these states, and, in fact, Alaska has the highest tipping average of any state in the United States—and is a state with the same wage for tipped and non-tipped workers.

So, then, how and why has the Other NRA gotten away with this extraordinary exemption? They’ve gotten away with it by painting the picture of a young man who works at a fine dining restaurant, earning $18 an hour in tips and living the high life. In reality, two-thirds of tipped workers in America are women, and they largely work at casual restaurants like the Olive Garden, Applebee’s, IHOP, and Denny’s. Their median wage, including tips, is $8.77 per hour in states with a tipped minimum wage. These women suffer three times the poverty rate of the rest of the United States workforce and use food stamps at double the rate.

As a result of the same deal having been struck between the NRA and state legislators in states across the country, wages for tipped workers in America range between $2.13 and about $5 in forty-one states nationwide. When you are a tipped worker who receives between $2.13 and $5 an hour, you don’t actually receive a wage; your wage is so small it goes entirely to taxes, and you get a paystub with $0 that says, “THIS IS NOT A PAYCHECK.” As a result, the vast majority of tipped workers in America live completely off their tips, which creates extraordinary economic instability. These workers never know how much they are going to earn from week to week, day to day, or month to month. Although their bills and rent do not fluctuate, their income does.

During my 2013 book tour, women approached me at the end of book talks and shared stories that illustrated how our nation’s system of requiring certain workers to live off tips is not simply a matter of economic instability; it’s a matter of human indecency. Women related stories of having to objectify themselves to earn enough tips to survive—and since the customer was paying their wages, rather than their employer, the customer was always right. This meant that these women had to tolerate whatever a customer might do to them—however they might touch, treat, or talk to them—because, again, the customer was always right.

This dynamic was eloquently summarized by a restaurant server member of ROC, Amber, who spoke at a Senate press conference in Washington, DC, in 2013. She testified, “Senators, imagine if your income depended on the happiness of the people you serve. Because my income depends on the happiness of the people I serve, I have to put up with a guy groping my butt every day to feed my four-year-old son at night.”

Forcing women to live off tips also means that these women have to objectify themselves to get their tips. I’ve heard countless stories of women being told by their supervisors to “go home and dress more sexy, show more cleavage!” in order to sell more food and make more money in tips. This practice exposes women to sexual harassment not only from customers but also from co-workers and managers. In fact, the restaurant industry is the single largest source of sexual-harassment complaints to the EEOC of any industry in the United States. Seven percent of American women work in restaurants, but 37 percent of all sexual harassment complaints to the EEOC come from the restaurant industry.

One woman, speaking from the audience at a talk I was giving, related a horrific story of having worked as a server as a young woman. Her manager had taken her into a walk-in freezer, held her at knifepoint, and raped her brutally. She felt she had no choice but to comply, and was forced to finish out her shift afterward.

One of the most personally saddening parts of the stories women were sharing with me was that many had moved on to other professions, but their experiences in the restaurant industry impacted their careers. Multiple women repeated more or less the same story: I’m a corporate lawyer/ executive/ professional. I’ve been sexually harassed recently on the job, but never did anything about it because it was never as bad as it was when I was a young woman working in restaurants. These stories led us to understand that besides the six million women who must put up with this system daily as restaurant workers, there are millions more women who work in the restaurant industry as their first job in high school, college, or graduate school. In fact, restaurants pride themselves on offering first jobs for most young people. For young women, however, most of them working as tipped workers, having their first jobs in the restaurant industry means that they are introduced into the world of work in a situation in which they are encouraged to sell themselves and their bodies to earn their income. It is the industry through which they learn what is tolerable and acceptable in the workplace—an industry in which they must tolerate the most extremely inappropriate behavior from customers, co-workers, and managers—in order to be able to feed their families.

For all these reasons, over the last few years, ROC has led a campaign to eliminate the lower wage for tipped workers, called One Fair Wage. To be clear, our campaign is to eliminate the lower wage for tipped workers, not tipping altogether; unless and until employers can provide a professional, livable income to their workers, tips are absolutely necessary on top of a full base wage to get workers closer to a wage that will allow them to support their families. Some restaurants have chosen to eliminate tipping altogether; we applaud them if they do so in a transparent manner and ultimately pay their workers a full base wage that is equivalent to what they would have earned through tips.

In this book, we give a restaurant a point if it provides non-tipped workers with at least $10 as a starting wage, and another point if it provides tipped workers with more than their state’s tipped minimum wage. We also especially commend restaurants moving toward One Fair Wage—eliminating the lower wage for tipped workers altogether.

2. Paid Sick Days

Ninety percent of restaurant workers nationwide report not having paid sick days, and two-thirds report cooking, preparing, and serving our food when they are sick—with everything from H1N1 to Hepatitis A. Restaurant workers not having paid sick days means that they are forced to come to work while sick or risk losing their job. Workers report that they are told that they will be fired if they do not come to work, even if they are sick. Even among those workers who are not told they will be fired, without receiving pay when they are sick, the vast majority of workers prefer to work when sick rather than cutting into an already too-paltry income. As mentioned earlier, too many of these workers live completely off tips, which can only be obtained by physically coming to work.

Of course, the issue is also a public health concern. Sick restaurant workers infect co-workers and, of course, customers. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that 50– 90 percent of all norovirus (stomach flu) outbreaks can be traced back to sick restaurant workers.

Recent efforts across a broad coalition of organizations have pushed paid sick days legislation in states and cities across the country, with tremendous success: seventeen cities, including Washington, DC, and the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California have passed paid sick-days laws. Of course, these victories have not been achieved without intense opposition from the Other NRA, which argues that restaurants will be forced to close, shed jobs, or not grow as quickly if they must provide paid sick days. In fact, in 2013 the Other NRA joined forces with Darden, the world’s largest full-service restaurant company and owner of the Olive Garden, Capital Grille Steakhouse, and Long Horn Steakhouse, among other brands. Darden helped write the preemption legislation in Florida, and the Other NRA, where Darden plays a leading role, pushed preemption bills around the country prohibiting any localities in those states from passing local paid-sick-days ordinances. Such preemptive legislation was passed in eight of the fourteen states in which it was introduced, undermining citizens’ ability to pass local paid-sick-days legislation even if it was democratically approved by a majority or even a unanimity of voters in a particular locality. The current count of preemption states is eleven, with eight having been passed in the last two years.

Nonetheless, the fight to expand paid-sick-days legislation to more cities and states—and thus protect the public health—continues. Many restaurant employer partners and others around the country have implemented paid sick days and found the policy to have enormous benefits in terms of worker productivity and retention. Several are profiled in this book. In this book, we denote restaurants that provide even a single sick day with a thermometer icon.

3. Internal Mobility

Two-thirds of restaurant workers surveyed nationally reported never receiving a promotion to a higher-paying position, and even fewer reported ever being offered training necessary to move up the ladder to higher-level positions. Although there is a myth of mobility in the industry—the idea that a dishwasher could one day open her own restaurant—the reality is that the vast majority of workers see very little advancement in their careers.

Such lack of advancement has serious racial implications, because the restaurant industry is highly racially segregated. Workers of color are segregated into lower-level segments—fast-food and casual restaurants as opposed to fine dining—and even lower-level positions—kitchen and busser positions rather than server and bartending positions—especially in fine dining restaurants. This results in workers of color earning $4 less per hour than white workers in the U.S. restaurant industry overall.

ROC research shows that although 80 percent of restaurant worker occupations provide poverty-level wages, up to 20 percent of the jobs in the industry can provide a livable wage. These are largely server and bartender positions in fine dining restaurants. As mentioned earlier, the majority of servers in America do not work in fine dining restaurants and suffer from three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce. However, servers and bartenders in fine dining restaurants can earn a livable wage; unfortunately, these jobs are held in vast majority by white men. Workers of color face significant barriers in attempting to advance either from lower-level positions in fine dining restaurants or from fast-food or casual restaurants into fine dining.

With so little mobility in the industry, most servers in fine dining restaurants are hired from outside the restaurant, and most are white. In 2014, ROC released a series of matched-pairs audit-testing studies, having sent into fine dining restaurants hundreds of pairs of white and people of color applicants with identical resumes, personalities, and size and height characteristics to see who would be hired as servers. We found that white applicants had twice the chance of a person of color of getting hired as a fine dining server.

In the alternative scenario, several responsible restaurant employers—including several profiled in this book—have chosen to invest in their own workforce by training and promoting workers from within the company to the highest-paying positions in the company. Zingerman’s, an Ann Arbor mainstay featured in the “sandwich” chapter of this book, even goes so far as to train and promote workers all the way up to the ownership level.

In this book, we provide a notation for any restaurant that has provided a raise or a promotion to a higher-paying position to at least 50 percent of its current staff within the last year. This is a decent measure of mobility, but not a complete measure of racial discrimination and segregation, which requires ongoing study and investigation. Consumers can be a part of observing, documenting, and changing patterns of racial segregation in the restaurant industry using ROC’s smartphone application, as described in greater detail in this book’s conclusion.

Local Versus National

As mentioned earlier, this book rates restaurants in various food categories—casual and family-style restaurants, fine dining restaurants, Mexican fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, sandwich restaurants, burgers, and diners. Each chapter of this book focuses on a different food category, and in each chapter we provide an in-depth story of a restaurant company that receives a high rating in the category, and another that receives a low rating.

It will not be surprising to some that most of the restaurants receiving high marks in this book are not national chains, and that all the restaurants receiving low marks are national chains. (In-N-Out Burger and Chipotle provide the exception.) Foodies might be relieved to not see their favorite fine dining restaurant receive a negative rating in this book; it might be easier for some to condemn chain restaurants.

However, poverty wages, lack of benefits such as paid sick days, and a lack of upward mobility are certainly not unique to national restaurant chains. Unfortunately, these conditions are vastly pervasive throughout the industry, regardless of geography, ownership structure, or size. We still need to talk to and encourage most of our favorite local restaurants, because statistics show they are likely following the same low-road standards set by the chains. Nevertheless, all the restaurants receiving low marks in this book are restaurant chains for two reasons. First, it would have been impossible to rate all restaurants in America, and thus we chose to focus on the most popular restaurants in each category, in addition to those willing to provide the information requested. Non-chain restaurants willing to provide the information tended to be responsible restaurant owner partners of ROC. Second, and perhaps more important, America’s largest chain restaurants lead the National Restaurant Association and lobby to set minimum wage and paid sick days standards in this country. They also set standards with regard to training and mobility. As the restaurant companies that set standards for the industry, they bear the responsibility of additional scrutiny. After all, they could just as well set a higher employment standard for the industry—a standard that most other restaurants in America could follow. It is our hope that they soon will.

Of course, this dichotomy might lead some to question the comparisons. If most of the higher-rated companies are small and local, and most of the lower-rated companies are large and national, couldn’t the lower employment standards be related to size and geography? Perhaps, some might say, it is impossible for larger companies to provide higher wages and benefits as they grow. Even if it is not impossible, how can smaller companies provide lessons on doing things differently to larger companies; in other words, can the high employment standards of the smaller companies featured in this book be taken to scale?

I offer a few key responses to these questions. First, In-N-Out Burger and Chipotle rule out the notion that it is impossible to take higher employment standards to scale. Second, smaller companies have fewer advantages than larger companies, not greater. Larger companies have larger profit margins, more liquid cash, and countless economies of scale that would allow them to increase standards more easily than a smaller company with smaller profit margins. If the small companies featured in this book were able to implement higher wage and benefit standards and still survive, even thrive, then, so too, should large national companies be able to follow.

But what about the local versus national question? Several of the high-road employers profiled in this book—Vimala of Vimala’s Curryblossom Café in North Carolina, Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, and Andy Shallal, owner of Busboys and Poets and Eatonville—argue that there is an inherent advantage to remaining a local company. All argue that local companies are invested in and integral to local communities and local economies in ways that national companies are not. Fortunately, although the companies that lead the National Restaurant Association in setting industry-wide standards are all national chains, the majority of restaurant companies in America are still smaller local companies that have the potential to be rooted in local communities. This would suggest that our fight must be to ensure that wages and working conditions improve across all different types of restaurants and that local restaurants continue to grow and thrive in spite of the growth of national restaurant chains. It would also suggest that local restaurant owners share something with restaurant workers nationwide, in all kinds of restaurants—namely, the need to move the restaurant chains that lead the National Restaurant Association to set different standards for the industry, respecting both workers and their neighbors in local communities.

How You Can Use This Book

1. Download and share the ROC Diners’ Guide app. Download our smartphone app here (rocunited.org/dinersguide) and share it with your friends to help them eat ethically as well. This nifty app uses geo locators to map out ROC Diners Guide awarded restaurants around the country. You can also let employers know that you care about how they treat their workers—it’s quick and easy on Twitter and Yelp, and you will help to shift industry standards on things like the racial makeup of people in the highest paid positions.

2. Talk to restaurateurs about your values. Use this book and the ROC Diners’ Guide app to start a conversation about your values when you eat out, especially with restaurants that rank poorly in the Guide or aren’t included yet. I like to say to owners at the end of my meal, “I loved the food. I loved the service. I’d love to keep coming here, but I want you to know that the criteria in this app are important to me. It’s important to me to know that your workers are paid a living wage, provided paid sick days, and provided lots of opportunities to move up the ladder, regardless of their race or gender.”

3. Eat ethically at a high-road restaurant! Whenever possible, support the award-winning restaurants in this book. Let them know you support them for their great employment practices. And if you know of a restaurant not listed in the guide that you think might be committed to the high road, let them know about ROC’s high-road employer association RAISE (raisewithroc.org), which offers a place for restaurateurs to support one another on that path.

4. Let your elected officials know that we need to eliminate the two-tiered system of a separate, lower wage for tipped workers in favor of One Fair Wage. You can visit www.rocunited.org to send a letter to your representatives letting them know we also need paid sick days for all workers in America so we won’t have to worry about our cooks or servers working when they are sick.

5. Hold low-road employers accountable. You can help by supporting workers pursuing claims against restaurant employers who have been charged with violating the law. When you know that workers have complained, as in the case of the Darden Restaurant Group, which owns the Olive Garden and Capital Grille Steakhouse, you can call the company to let them know that you won’t support such questionable practices.

6. Join ROC! We have created an ethical diners’ association called Diners United, mobilizing restaurant-goers in support of livable wages and working conditions for the nation’s eleven million restaurant workers. Join the growing network of people who care about the food they eat and the people behind it. Visit dinersunited.com, and join us!

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Forked by Saru Jayaraman, published by Oxford University Press, 2016.

We’re All In For Food Justice – Join Us

Food is a basic human right. A number of countries take food security seriously enough to have enshrined the right to food in their constitutions. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that “food is a fundamental human right” and that “hunger is both a violation of human dignity and an obstacle to social, political and economic progress.”

Food security is an important aspect of food justice, a more comprehensive concept that claims the right of local communities to grow and sell food that is fresh, nutritious, affordable, culturally-appropriate, and produced with environmentally friendly practices while promoting the well-being of the land, workers and animals.

The monopolized industrial food system has other priorities that have little to do with health or justice. But the good news is the increasing availability of organic and local food and nutritional information to help make healthy choices, if one has the financial resources.

Unfortunately, not everyone does. Often inner cities, as well as some rural areas, are barren of healthy food choices, and have been designated by the USDA as food deserts. These food deserts are typically in low income areas and lack supermarkets, but are loaded with fast food joints and convenience stores.

With that in mind, about ten years ago, I organized Just Us for Food Justice (JU4FJ), a Bioneers initiative that brings together youth who are involved in food and farming projects in their communities, many of which are food deserts, to bolster the human right of access to healthy food. JU4FJ, day-long intensive workshops, helps develop an understanding of the food system, how it works, who it works for and how people can participate to take back control of their source of nourishment.

The program introduces young activists from Bay Area organizations to each other, and helps raise awareness of their role in the global food justice movement. We work with groups from Sebastopol to Salinas to build a network to share local food system knowledge.

Often the program involves making a meal together as we did at The Ceres Project, a youth empowerment program that makes healthy meals for people with serious illness. Permaculturist Pandora Thomas facilitated the morning session on Social Permaculture to help raise social intelligence and put an ecological perspective on how to design community projects and make positive changes in one’s personal life.

We also work with Gerardo Marin of Rooted in Community. Gera is a gifted cultural educator who teaches youth skills to strengthen their spiritual and emotional resilience and cultivate a deeper understanding and a grounded approach to food justice work. Verenice Farias Portela, also of Rooted in Community, brings an artistic connection to the work by integrating music and the arts with food justice themes using rap poetry and hip hop dance as relevant methods to ignite youth activism to build a local food system that is equitable, healthy and transparent. Verenice shares what food justice means to her in this short video.

JUFJ honors young activists who contribute to the social good in their communities. The program weaves together the elements of self-love, mindfulness, food sovereignty, culture and skill-building activities.

The work that the youth are doing in their communities, under very challenging circumstances, is critically important and inspiring. Bioneers wants to support and elevate their efforts as much as possible by expanding the JU4FJ program. Please stand up for the fundamental human right of access to healthy food and help us foster food justice where it is needed most.

Sincerely,

Arty Mangan
Director – Restorative Food Systems

The World Is Upside Down

In The Culture of Possibility (Waterlight Press, 2013), Arlene Goldbard — writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality — uses first-person stories, drawing on both history and headlines, embracing new knowledge from education, medicine, cognitive science, spirituality, politics, and other realms to show why, how, and where art and artists can build a bridge to a sustainable future.

Most nice afternoons when I’m not on the road, I walk along a stretch of the San Francisco Bay Trail near my apartment in Richmond. I enjoy the changing cast of birds and beasts, the play of light on water, the warm sun on my shoulders, the breeze tickling my ears. If I’m alone, I almost always listen to an audiobook or to my most recent music playlist. Often, on another channel in my mind, I turn over a question or re-examine an experience that earlier captured my attention. My walk makes a refreshing break in a long day at the computer. Almost always, I return home feeling better than when I left.

I usually smile at the people strolling or speeding by on their bicycles, and many of them smile back. “How ya doin’?” “Enjoy your walk!” African American and Southeast Asian men fish from the harbor steps or the beach as their children play nearby. More men each month: unemployment, I assume. Most are young and able-bodied: how else do they have so many hours to fish on a weekday afternoon? They can’t all be working the night-shift. As they hold up their catch, I hope they’ve read the boldface signs posted along the way: bright-colored pictures of fish are labeled “Eat This: Less Chemicals” or “Don’t Eat This: More Chemicals.” (The California Water Quality Monitoring Council lists the following “contaminants of concern” in local fish: mercury, PCBs, dieldrin, DDT, chlordane, and dioxin.)

The route I take most often loops around the inner harbor, then down the coast, returning via a meandering path along a creek. At certain times of year, a Great Blue Heron hangs out where the creek makes a turn. I think it’s the same bird depicted in the series of photos I’ve taken with my phone, but I suppose they could be siblings or just lookalikes. On the harbor across from my place, Night Herons stand motionless for hours. They resemble overstuffed bluebirds; I always want to reach out and stroke their downy backs.

My neighborhood is built on land that used to be part of the Kaiser Shipyards where Liberty Ships were made during World War II. A big piece of this land is still unfit for building on account of industrial waste buried far beneath the surface. Nowadays, with the factories gone, the surface is landscaped and lovely. There are rocky slopes leading down to the bay. Wallflowers, Clarkia, poppies, and other blooms line the walk. Once I counted a flock of more than 90 pelicans flying past. I love the slow way they flap their dinosaur wings, the big plop! when they drop into the water.

There are small monuments and signposts every so often, bearing photographs and testimonies from the mostly African American and Latino workers whose northward migration to work in the shipyards and factories changed Richmond from white and rural to highly diverse and urban. The newcomers were invited here to be part of the wartime workforce, but many of their testimonies speak of Jim Crow practices encountered in local businesses and housing, taking the shine off a promised welcome.

A special focus is “Rosie The Riveter,” paying homage to the women whose first good jobs—for some of them, their last good jobs—were in the war industry. Back in those days, Richmond had a thriving downtown, with shops, clubs, and restaurants. Now it often seems immune to economic development, enduring successive failed schemes to incubate local business in the central-city ghost town. When new acquaintances hear that I live in Richmond, they always ask if it is safe. One central neighborhood has the region’s highest murder rate. There’s a changing population of new immigrants in the surrounding streets: mostly Central American and Southeast Asian now, rubbing up against longtime African American streets, generating the friction that marks every place where the dispossessed and displaced are tumbled together. The higher up into the hills you go, the larger the houses and gardens, the whiter the neighborhood.

On most of my walks I see a pale red-haired woman who appears to be in her eighties pushing an ancient little dog in a pram. When the weather is cool, the dog is tucked up under blankets. Other dog-walkers stop to visit with her: a tall African American woman in her thirties with an even taller hairdo and a tiny Yorkshire Terrier; a Japanese-American couple with two Scotties; an Indian man who never smiles and his Golden Retriever, who seems friendly enough; a middle-aged white guy whose hair matches one of his otherwise identical dogs, Standard Poodles in white and chocolate brown.

Almost all the houses and apartments in this neighborhood were built at the same time: developers were given permission to build in return for remediating the coastline, so it all looks fairly uniform and oddly suburban for the context. It is diverse (more than 40 percent of residents speak something other than English at home) in part because in a region where housing values tend to be sky-high, Richmond is relatively cheap, so people can settle here who might not be able to afford nearby Berkeley. The big family groups I see while walking are mostly Latino, many from the very different neighborhood on the other side of the freeway, full of single-family houses with small yards, but without parks and playgrounds. They come on summer Sunday evenings to picnic on a little stretch of beach; and many times each month to play soccer on a large flat lawn which seems to be the only workable soccer-field in the vicinity.

Families low on the slope toward upward mobility surely recognize that Richmond’s public schools and other amenities are perceived to be substandard. It appears that most of those seeking a place to live around here accept as given that there are good and bad public schools, and you must purchase the privilege of sending your children to the good ones. They understand that homebuyers expect to pay a premium to be near good schools, and if they can’t afford the premium, they live with the second-rate.

This is a defining question for the future of life in the United States: how to build a bridge from the mesmerizing comfort and diversion still possible in private life to facing overwhelming collective challenges? In the personal space of so many lives (including mine), there is scope for pleasure, for beauty and delight, for connection and freedom. Yet right beneath the surface, the evidence of distress simmers and bubbles. It is hard to encompass both realities in a single awareness, but if there is any hope of a livable future, it is necessary.

How can it be done? My answer is that the matrix in which both private and public reality are suspended is culture; the way we comprehend and link both realms is through culture; and the arena for our interventions is culture.

Not everyone knows this yet. I meet people all the time who have lost their way to the bridge between realities, who find themselves perpetually circling one domain like planes that can’t land. I met a man whose life is focused on bees, a profession that brings him into constant contact with environmental threats created and exacerbated by human beings: climate change, the rapid spread of viruses and parasites to a population weakened by pollution. Any conversation-opener—“Seen any good movies lately?”—will cycle back to the same despairing question: we are destroying the life of this planet, and why does no one do anything about it? In some sense, the pleasure of living has been foreclosed: his field of vision is fully occupied by reasons to despair, and without really wanting to, he is filtering out a great deal that might lift him out of melancholy into joy. What he sees is true, but not the whole truth.

I met a woman for whom the little world of friends and family is everything: she ferries her children to lessons and play-dates; shops, cooks, and cleans; relaxes in front of the TV; has Sunday dinner with her siblings and their children, midweek lunch with friends, and most of the time left over is for things like eating and sleeping. When I asked whether the summer’s extreme weather had affected her garden, she said, “Do we have to talk about politics all the time?” The small, happy world of her family begins to feel unbearably fragile as soon as she is asked to see it in a larger context. True citizenship has been foreclosed by the narrow privatization of experience; her refusal to face what lurks beneath the glossy surface of private life makes her an island rather than a citizen. What she sees is true, but not the whole truth.

Pioneering sociologist (and sixties activist) C. Wright Mills wrote of the American proclivity to treat public issues as private troubles. Shame attaches to unemployment or illness, easing our slide into the groove of self-blame. “What did I do to deserve this?” easily turns into blaming others: “What did they do to deserve this?” Meanwhile the larger truth—that fates and deserts are seldom linked by controllable causes—is ignored. The workers who migrated from the deep South to Richmond for jobs building Liberty Ships owed their livelihood to the suffering of war, to industrial expansion, and to the social ferment of the 1930s that produced the North’s somewhat greater willingness to receive people of color. None of their individual shortcomings caused the jobs to go away. But the pain when work disappeared was borne by individuals and their families, and very often regarded as evidence of personal failure. Collectively, Americans seem remarkably committed to the primacy of private life, to keeping a tight enough focus on the little world that many of the ways the big world impinges are blurred into peripheral invisibility.

The brokenness to be read between the lines of my beloved afternoon walk doesn’t lessen its beauty, nor does it obliterate the pleasure my neighbors and I take in the experience. But it points to a common cause, which is the consistent privileging of profit over other values—individual and community well-being, a flourishing ecosystem, access to social goods such as education, decent livelihood, and so on—and a pervasive acceptance that this is just the way things are.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from The Culture of Possibility by Arlene Goldbard, published by Waterlight Press, 2013.

Why Food Waste Can Only Remedy—Not Solve—America’s Hunger Problem

By Lisa Elaine Held


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

Critiquing charity work is a tricky business, especially when said charities are feeding hungry families.

But in his new book, Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups, food security expert Andrew Fisher argues that it’s time to take a deeper look at what the anti-hunger movement is really achieving in the U.S.

While American food banks were originally envisioned as way to provide relief during emergency situations (like during severe economic downturns and natural disasters), they’ve become massive operations over the last few decades.

Funded by corporate donors like Walmart and Target, most organizations (with some exceptions) pull at potential donors’ heart strings using stories of “hunger,” while largely ignoring the underlying conditions that cause food insecurity in America, like low wages and lack of adequate health benefits. Many of those conditions are created by the same companies that are making large donations to anti-hunger groups, which masks the fact that their own employees are the ones struggling to put food on the table and prevents charities from delving into those issues, lest they lose funding. Hence, the existence of what Fisher calls the “hunger industrial complex.”

“By not coupling short-term hunger relief with structural reform, anti-hunger leaders have reinforced the false notion that hunger can be solved through charity, while diminishing our collective ability to make the deeper reforms,” Fisher writes.

And food waste is an integral part of the bigger picture Fisher paints in his critique. While giving out food waste to the poor has long been used as a solution to food insecurity, Fisher says the moral imperative around reducing waste has also contributed to the never-ending nature of the problem.

“The charitable food system exists at the intersection of waste and want,” he explains. “Driven by inefficiencies in the supply chain, it was invented as a morally preferable alternative to throwing away ‘perfectly good food.’”

We caught up with him to talk more about the complicated connection between food waste and anti-hunger efforts.

Food Tank (FT): How important is the food waste issue to your overall argument about the problems with the current anti-hunger movement?

Andrew Fisher (AF): To me, it’s an indicator of the degree to which food banks are adapting to the industrial food system. That’s the importance and significance of it really, and it’s also an in indignity issue. It’s an indicator of the way we think about and deal with hunger in this country. If we’re going to give people food waste in whatever form it might be, healthy or not, I do think it’s not the most dignified of solutions, and it points to the way we think about the hunger problem in a very downstream kind of way.

FT: I’d imagine people argue that worrying about dignity is not as important as getting food to hungry people.

AF: Yes, we have this concept of hunger in this country, and I run into this idea all the time: “Well, if they’re hungry, they should eat anything.” It’s not that people are starving in America; it’s not that people are dying of famine. That’s not the issue. The issue is chronic food insecurity, a chronic lack of enough money to buy healthy food. The issue is that people run out of food at the end of the month. Obviously there are gradations and there are people in more severe conditions than others, but you know, by and large, it’s not Ethiopia in the 1970s. It’s not a one-time thing. For many people, it’s a chronic in-and-out situation. They flow in and out depending on their employment situation.

FT: How do you think the concept of hunger needs to change?

AF: One thing is that nearly every country in the world except the U.S. has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESR) that says food is a human right. If food is a human right, that means that people deserve it. They deserve to get it and acquire it in a dignified way. Charity is inherently undignified and inherently unsustainable. If we want food to be a human right, people can’t be getting it through charity. They have to be getting it through entitlements, through the money that they acquire through work, or government programs, or other kinds of transfers. The charity piece is anathema to a human rights framework.

FT: Speaking of frameworks, it struck me that the food waste movement tends to focus on “rescuing” food, and your argument seems to speak to the fact that we need to stop thinking about ending hunger as a rescue mission. Do you see a parallel in that the same mentality points away from more systemic solutions in both realms?

AF: The rescuing people from hunger is a very top-down approach that isn’t about building people’s political power. It isn’t about helping people achieve goals themselves. It’s about what we can do for people, not with people. Rescuing food is just a bizarre concept. To me, ultimately it’s an environmental argument; it’s about food going into the landfill. That’s what you’re rescuing it from, the garbage. The value of doing that is that you’re saving it from rotting in the landfill and giving it a higher purpose. That higher purpose allegedly is giving it to people. And certainly, giving food to people is better than it going in the garbage. It’s a hard thing to argue. But I think the question is: How is that food being used? What’s the best use of that rescued food? Could it be used for economic development? To use recovered food in that context [for economic development] makes more sense to me, for other social goods and other purposes that may still be going towards poor people, yes, but it’s also creating social value other than just giving it to people in a box.

FT: In the book, you lay out a vision for dismantling the hunger industrial complex. Are there recommendations you give for getting at the hunger problem in a more systemic way that overlap with reducing food waste?

AF: Food banks need to fundamentally transform the way they do business so that in a certain amount of time—20 years is what I said—they’re no longer just distributing food in a transactional way. It’s no longer just boxes and boxes and boxes of food to people. The aid goes to social service agencies and it goes to homeless shelters, etc., and that food is distributed for natural disasters, like Harvey, when it’s truly needed.

And you know, part of what’s driven the emergency food system, to date, has been waste in the system. The fact that there’s wasted food drives the moral imperative to distribute it. So, in some ways, you think, well, maybe the way to fundamentally transform food banks is to eliminate that waste.

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

Diverse Backgrounds and Ideas Bring Value to Bioneers in Partnership With john a. powell

For john a. powell, understanding—and speaking about—how several moving parts create a complex whole is a passion as well as a career. As the Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at U.C. Berkeley, powell’s mission is to work toward a more just, equitable world by pulling together diverse minds and groups. It’s a mission he shares with the leaders of Bioneers.

powell is one of hundreds of changemakers with whom Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons have connected throughout Bioneers’ 28-year lifespan. A few years ago, Ausubel invited powell to speak at Bioneers. He brought to the stage the concepts of otherness and interbeing: the idea that every thing that exists on Earth depends on every other thing in some way. While corporate entities often play upon human beings’ natural tendency to fear the “other,” said powell, our understanding and appreciation of that “other” is how we will progress and survive and thrive.

That first engagement with Bioneers led to a valuable relationship between powell, the organization’s founders, and the larger Bioneers community.

A Wider Lens

Born in Detroit, powell’s formal education wove through distinct-yet-complementary fields: law, psychology and philosophy. He studied at a handful of universities and worked as a law clerk and attorney before his professional work took him outside the U.S. powell has lived and worked in Africa and India, serving as a consultant to the government of Mozambique and an instructor in southern India.

Once back in the States, powell held several positions in academia, working as a professor and fellow at some of the nation’s best universities, from Columbia to Harvard. His academic work has spanned myriad concentrations, but generally touched on law and American studies. powell is also a published author. His most recent book, Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society, is about the state of race relations in the U.S. today and how race plays into a democratic society.

Having traveled extensively and held so many positions throughout the world, powell has been exposed to a wealth of personalities and ideas, a process he knows is essential in widening his lens. His relationship with Bioneers was complimentary in the more recent part of that process.

Since powell’s first speaking engagement at Bioneers, he’s been invited back a handful of times and is now a member of the Bioneers Board of Directors.

powell says that over the course of his relationship with Bioneers, he’s been impressed by the organization’s proactivity in lifting up diverse voices and perspectives. In fact, he believes his inclusion in Bioneers’ events and planning was a move by Ausubel to invite expertise in inclusivity into the organization.

As powell has watched Bioneers progress, his thinking has progressed as well. “I think any deep relationships changes you,” he says, “and so I think knowing Kenny and Nina has certainly helped me think certain things through and clarify them within myself.”

Progress Based on Leaning in to Tension

powell and Bioneers continue to work side-by-side, finding new and better ways to solve world problems by way of radical inclusion.

Bioneers’ co-founders are quick to acknowledge that it’s through the brilliant, diverse minds of their community that progress within their organization—and society, as a result—has been realized. The symbiosis between Bioneers and some of the greatest thought leaders of today continues to create exciting ripples throughout a nation and world in desperate need of inclusive, positive progress.

powell recognizes that, in much the same way he’s spent his career getting to know diverse groups of people in order to understand how they can work together, Bioneers has forged indispensable relationships between people and groups who might otherwise not have met.

“Sometimes there are implicit and explicit tensions in that process, and I don’t think that’s bad,” says powell. “In fact, I think some of it is good. They are starting to wrestle with bringing these diverse communities together that have serious differences. That’s really a complicated process that none of us have quite figured out. They do it with spirit, tenacity, humility and love, which is an interesting combination. They don’t always get it exactly right, but the fact that they lean into it is actually quite remarkable.”

Mary Gonzales: The Environment and Its Relationship to Equity and the Economy

Mary Gonzales is a legendary community organizer and California Director for Gamaliel Foundation, an international institute building faith-based organizing (a young Barack Obama was one of their as community organizer trainees). According to Mary, a Mexican-American Chicago native,”Environmentalists are tree huggers and people concerned with the extinction of birds. We are not trees or birds” is a statement that might be heard from people of color, poor or working class people, young people or immigrants –  yet their immediate life experience and issues they’re confronting have everything to do with the environment: transportation, housing, jobs, and education, to name a few. In this essential talk, Mary Gonzales addresses how we can connect the dots.

This speech was given at the 2010 Bioneers National Conference.

 

New Lives for Old Mines: A Method for Developing Renewable Energy at Closed Mine Sites

By Tegan Campia

This article originally appeared on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s website. The Rocky Mountain Institute transforms global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future.

Working in partnership with multinational mining company BHP, Rocky Mountain Institute’s Sunshine for Mines team has uncovered an opportunity to turn closed mine sites, or legacy mines, into independent power plants, storage facilities, or value-added grid-service providers, presenting the opportunity for a second useful life through renewable energy development. Innovative renewable energy and storage applications can establish new and alternative revenue streams for sites that are no longer active mines. The Sunshine for Mines (SfM) program has developed a dynamic, turnkey methodology for evaluating the greatest-value assets for redevelopment in a portfolio of sites, highlighting optimal locations and technologies, and working collaboratively to develop innovative solutions. This methodology is presented in RMI’s recently published insight brief A Second Life for Legacy Mining Sites.

Traditionally, once revenue-generating assets are no longer profitable, they become liabilities because mine operators retain long-term responsibility for their maintenance. Productive uses on legacy mines are limited due to contamination from previous mining activities. Lack of awareness surrounding the possibilities of renewables and storage development on legacy mine sites may lead to the belief that renewables are not profitable in the long run. The reality, though, is that innovative renewable energy and storage solutions can establish a sustainable revenue stream, transforming legacy sites from liabilities into assets.

Determining Site Potential

The SfM team of experts conducts a multifaceted site analysis to assess the complete renewable energy potential for each legacy mine site within a portfolio. The analysis consists of evaluating environmental, permitting, and regulatory considerations; energy production; net present value; and innovative alternatives designed to maximize value for the mine owner. Conditions of legacy mine sites may require various types of remediation, and are frequently subject to local, state, or federal regulations regarding land use and environmental impact. Using these regulations, SfM creates an exhaustive environmental, permitting, and regulatory scorecard, and then suggests innovative construction to reduce impacts on resources. Each site is screened for solar, wind, and alternative resources involving site characterization, resource mapping, and preliminary performance and levelized cost of energy (LCOE) calculations. The sites identified as having high renewable energy resources are then evaluated with regard to their reserves.

After this extensive site analysis, SfM undertakes the last step, a financial analysis, by calculating the net present value (NPV) of a renewable energy generation scenario. NPV is calculated from synthesized estimates of capital cost, operating cost, LCOE, social and environmental economic impacts, transmission costs, wheeling costs (if necessary), and market offtake value. The SfM team also fosters conversations about integrative site prioritization, value capture, and creative financing, and then makes these developments attractive to investors, developers, and mining companies.

As with all renewable energy projects, developing renewable energy solutions for a legacy mine requires a high capital expenditure at the beginning of the project and part of the way through due to maintenance, after which the operating expenditure is very low compared with that of any other form of electricity generation. Revenue from electricity sales can take different forms depending on the contractual arrangements. SfM’s analysis accounts for all location-specific commercial options, including the best theoretical offtake option. Additionally, SfM appraises various innovative storage opportunities that add value through load balancing or production in saturated energy markets.

Solar Plus Storage for BHP

While working with BHP, a leader in the decarbonization of the mining sector, on several of its legacy sites, SfM identified a cumulative potential of over 0.5 GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind energy capacity. The team explored several different renewable energy technologies and storage applications. The team suggested solar PV with a few storage applications for most locations because of site topography, geography, and resource mapping. The team then ranked opportunities based on their overall value to help promote action on the most attractive opportunities.

The SfM methodology for developing renewable energy resources on legacy mine sites is a comprehensive, tailor-made approach to repurposing inactive mines into facilities that will reduce the carbon intensity of the grid they will connect to and transforming costly sites into sites that can again generate shareholder value.

Download the insight brief A Second Life for Legacy Mine Sites.

This article originally appeared on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s website. The Rocky Mountain Institute transforms global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future.

The Meaning of the Buffalo to Our People

By Karlene Hunter, CEO of Native American Natural Foods

This article was originally published in B the Change, which exists to inform and inspire people who have a passion for using business as a force for good in the world.

The ceremony was almost complete. My granddaughter and grandson had been so solemn and patient standing in the hot sun in the beautiful traditional clothing that their mother, my daughter Stephanie, had labored over so carefully. Now, they were starting to shift a little.

But there were a few final rituals before Fallen and Jake would be free to run and play with the other children. The guests lined up and servers passed by with bowls filled with wasna. Each guest took a little and ate it quickly. A few more songs and prayers, and the ceremony was over. And yet again, we Oglala Lakota had celebrated another important event with the help of our sister nation, the Buffalo.

Wasna, a pounded mix of dried buffalo meat and berries, has long been a mainstay in our culture. Loosely translated in Lakota, wasna means “all mixed up.” No one knows the name of the first Lakota to make wasna, but the basics of preparing the dish have been passed down, generation to generation. Warriors and hunters would pack wasna into a buffalo horn, which they could take on the trail for weeks at a time.

In 2006, when my business partner, Mark Tilsen, and I decided to create the Tanka Bar, a real-food bar based on this most natural of recipes, we didn’t fully grasp the challenge of turning a traditional food into a consumer product without additives or preservatives. Armed with questions, we sought out the experts on wasna in our community on the Pine Ridge Reservation. What we discovered was a recipe with simple ingredients but an exacting process.

Expert Advice

According to Kay Red Hail, an elder known as Auntie Kay, a title of respect, the secret to wasna is that it preserves itself. “The first time I remember tasting wasna, I was 3 or 4 years old,” she said. “My grandma told me it is special food. That you have to eat it. It is not just something to throw away.

“When I was older — 5 or 6 — my other grandma said it was considered sacred because it was used for naming and our sacred ceremonies. That’s why when a medicine man goes to sacred sites, they bring wasna as an offering.”

Auntie Kay said the best wasna comes from choke cherries beaten with a special stone, which gives them a special flavor, and made into dried patties. The patties are then mixed with “bapa,” or dried buffalo, and a small amount of buffalo kidney fat.

“The only place I know of to get the stones you need to make wasna is in the Wind River (Wyoming),” she said. “We went with the Arapahoes and they showed me which stones were the best. Granite stones were the best. They don’t chip and after being in the water so long, they smooth out. You try and find the roundest ones. You find one that is rounded on one side and flat on the other and find another stone that will fit with that one.”

To prepare the meat, Auntie Kay warned that the one thing you don’t do is wet the meat that you want to dry. “It causes mold or it won’t dry like it’s supposed to,” she said. “You get a big piece of meat and cut it open, like you’re unrolling it in layers. My mother would hang her bapa out on the clothesline to dry, then proceed to fight the crows. She would run out there with her mop. We actually laughed at her doing that.”

After the bapa is thoroughly dry, it’s mixed with the cherry patties and a little buffalo kidney fat. She said that to make a couple of pounds of wasna, you add about a tablespoon of kidney fat and some cherry juice.

“You have to develop an eye for it depending on the texture of the bapa,” she said. “Some bapa is really dry so you have to add more fat.”

Auntie Kay said using buffalo fat was essential to the recipe because using beef fat makes the mixture gel up and can lead to spoiling. “If you were to make wasna in modern days now with cow fat, there is no way any warriors would take it with them for two or three weeks. It would be pretty ripe by then.”

Importance of the Buffalo

The fact that buffalo is so intrinsic to wasna is an illustration of its importance to my “oyate,” my people. The history of the Buffalo Nation and the Lakota Nation is so intertwined as to almost be indistinguishable.

According to my good friend, Richard B. Williams, president of the American Indian College Fund and an expert in Native history, this shared journey is essential to who the Lakota are today.

In his article, “History of the Relationship of the Buffalo and the Indian,” Williams, an Oglala Lakota, said the Indian’s economic dependence on the buffalo had a very important part in developing the interactive and cooperative economic relationships:

The American Indian was dependent on the buffalo for survival. With the demise of the buffalo, the American Indian’s life evolved into economic dependence on the U.S. government with cycles of severe poverty. The cooperative economic relationships of tribal societies that evolved with the buffalo culture became outdated in the competitive world of the white man.

This conflict of economic values is well documented by analyzing the economic development projects that have been successful on reservations. With few exceptions, most have not been successful primarily because of the reliance on the competitive economic model that is universally accepted in America. Capitalism, by its very nature, promotes individualism, which also conflicts with tribalism.

This is not a condemnation of the competitive nature of Americans. It is a result of the misunderstanding of cultural values and the dynamics related to personal, family and tribal relationships. These factors change the dynamics of economic competition. Positive interactive family and tribal relationships have a higher value in Indian society than economic competitiveness.

The Indian’s economic dependence on the buffalo had a very important part in developing the interactive and cooperative economic relationships. The buffalo is a giving animal. It gave its life so Indians could live. The buffalo’s generosity provided Indians with food and shelter. Indian people modeled the buffalos generosity, and it became fundamental to the economy of the American Indian. Like the buffalo, the American Indian people are generous.

The American Indian and the buffalo coexisted in a rare balance between nature and man. The American Indian developed a close, spiritual relationship with the buffalo. The sacred buffalo became an integral part of the religion of the Plains Indian. Furthermore, the diet of primarily buffalo created a unique physiological relationship. The adage “You are what you eat” was never more applicable than in the symbiotic relationship between the buffalo and the Plains Indian. The Plains Indian culture was intrinsic with the buffalo culture. The two cultures could not be separated without mutual devastation.

Many of our Indian ancestors’ visions included prophesies about the future of the buffalo and Indian. Red Cloud in his last public address to the Oglala people said, “We told them that the supernatural powers, Taku Wakan, had given to the Lakota the buffalo for food and clothing. We told them that where the buffalo ranged, that was our country. We told them the country of the buffalo was the country of the Lakota We told them that the buffalo must have their country and the Lakota must have the buffalo (1903).”

A new relationship among the buffalo, the American Indian and the United States government has been developing. The buffalo has been given new freedom in certain areas, such as Yellowstone Park. In the park, the buffalo has been allowed to renew the migration patterns that characterized their pattern of existence for many thousands of years. Their numbers have grown significantly over the years and they are no longer an endangered species.

The same is true of the American Indian, his numbers have increased significantly and the policies and practices of the Federal Government have given the Indian new freedom. It is in this freedom that the future of the buffalo and American Indian have come back together. It is in these simple historical similarities that the future of the Indian and the buffalo are intertwined in destiny.

Black Elk, the revered visionary predicted that the Sacred Hoop would be mended again, but as part of that process, the buffalo would return. Indian people believed in this vision. They waited for many generations for this miracle to happen. It was a vision of the buffalo suddenly appearing out of the lakes and reinhabiting the northern and southern plains. The buffalo reappearing in mountains, coming from the Sacred Blue Lake to help the Pueblo People, renewing the life of the Comanche on the southern Plains, gracing the quiet woodlands of the east. This was the dream and, in this dream ,there is a reality. The buffalo are coming back. And it is something of a miracle, Indian people of all tribes organizing to make this dream become a reality.

Without the buffalo, it is unlikely that the Indian could have survived the harsh rigors of the Plains. With them, they achieved a rich and colorful life.

To eat buffalo meat is a spiritual ritual. The buffalo represents a spiritual essence that developed through a co-existence for over 30,000 years. To re-establish healthy buffalo populations on tribal lands is to re-establish life itself for Indian people. The beneficial aspects of buffalo meat when compared to beef have been well-documented. Buffalo meat is low in cholesterol and fat. The reintroduction of the buffalo to the American Indian diet would be extremely beneficial to the health of the people.

“In a lot of ways, the Indian people’s stock market was the buffalo,” Williams said, as he discussed his research and this symbiotic relationship between animal and human. “If today, buffalo was our stock market, we could eat our investments, wear our investments and we could even live in our investments.”

In spite of the odds that the buffalo and Native Americans have faced since the late 1800s, Williams’ article cites Lakota leader Black Elk, who predicted that the Sacred Hoop would be mended again. As part of that process, Black Elk said the buffalo would return.

Williams said if we knew where to look today, we could probably go out on a plain and find a food cache. “It would probably be good to eat,” he said. “They would dry meat, fruits, and vegetables and pack them in a way to preserve them. Then they would dig a hole in the ground and cover them up. Then they would go back later when they needed food and dig up the cache. They thought about the future.”

Looking to the Future

The future is where we were looking when we founded Native American Natural Foods. Diabetes and obesity are at epic levels among my people, and our leadership and health professionals are working hard to reverse those trends. Our decision to create a buffalo-based product was no accident. Buffalo are raised on open grassland, and there are no low-level antibiotics, no hormones, no drug residues, and no preservatives in buffalo. It also has less fat and cholesterol than chicken, according to the USDA.

Our use of cranberries, also used in early versions of wasna, instead of choke cherries, which are not readily available in large quantities, adds even more benefits. A study published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry says that cranberries contain more antioxidant phenols than 19 commonly eaten fruits, as well as ellagic acid, a cancer-fighting phytochemical. Cranberries and choke cherries are both indigenous to North America and both have acids that help to naturally preserve buffalo meat.

Guided by our elders’ advice and omitting the kidney fat of the original wasna recipe, Tanka Bars are 100 percent natural, only 70 calories, with no trans fat and no added sugar or nitrites.

Achieving the formula wasn’t easy. It took us nearly two years to develop a recipe that was faithful to the traditional dish, was shelf stable, and that tasted good. Because of the sweet flavor of the cranberries, the children on our reservation call it “buffalo candy.”

“I’m shocked when I look around our communities,” Williams said. “We’re outside our cultural norm. When we were eating buffalo and berries, we were strong people. We had the spirit of the plants and animals we were eating and we were stronger for it.

“Those are the kinds of things that are coming back today. The Tanka Bar is important. It is bridging a hundred years of a lost way by recapturing some of our traditions. I think that’s important. When you look at Indian people, the things we did 150 years ago still have value for us today.”

Karlene Hunter is CEO and co-founder of Native American Natural Foods, a Native-owned company based on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. A member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Hunter serves on the Board of Directors of the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development. She has also served on the Board of Directors for the Native American Rights Fund; the National Indian Business Association; and the Pine Ridge Area Chamber of Commerce. Ms. Hunter, who holds an MBA from Oglala Lakota College, has received numerous awards, including the 2007 SBA Minority Business Person of the Year for South Dakota.

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

The Native American Prophecy of the Black Snake

Frontline Water Protector Dallas Goldtooth explains the prophecy of the black snake, as manifested by the Dakota Access Pipeline and pipelines built across North America.

This presentation took place in the Indigenous Forum at the 2016 National Bioneers Conference.

Julia Butterfly Hill

Seventeen years ago, Julia Butterfly Hill was a young courageous activist protesting the clear-cutting of old growth forests by living on a plywood platform 180 feet high in a redwood tree for two years.

From her perch via cell phone, she electrified the Bioneers audience as she described life in the canopy and reflected on her experience as a 25 -year old activist.

The next year after Julia descended Luna and keynoted in person, she saw a need to expand the presence of youth at Bioneers and organized an impromptu session on the lawn with about 30 young people. This was the genesis of the Youth Leadership Program.

Julia challenged and inspired Bioneers to bring more youth to the conference and helped get theYouth Leadership Program off the ground. She recorded this video message.

Worth More Alive

This guest blog is by Asher Jay, a designer, artist, and Creative Conservationist. In 2012 Ms. Jay was named a USNC United Nations Women Design Star, and in 2014 she was designated an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. In 2013 she created a large animated digital billboard for March For Elephants – the work was viewed by over 1.5 million people in New York’s Times Square. Ms. Jay has contributed work to Faberge’s The Big Egg Hunt with the proceeds supporting anti-poaching efforts in Africa. She also created Garbagea, an online parody project where users interact in and experience the United Flotsam of Garbagea.

 

The first question I am compelled to ask in these extreme controversial debates about trophy hunting is, “Why now?” I asked this of various NGOs (Non-governmental Organizations), scientists, and policy makers when Obama passed the ban against the importation of endangered big game trophies from African nations. I posed the query to the same roster of individuals last week when Trump tried to lift the ban, and I pondered over it again, a few days later when he reversed his position on the matter.

The ban drafted by the Obama administration in 2014, has not been in place long enough to help ameliorate the status quo of the endangered species it intended to protect for future generations. The reasons the ban had to be enforced three years ago are still valid today. The animal counts are still far too impoverished for further loss to be the only way to ensure their survival. Hunting as a stand-alone, heavily regulated recourse, does not compromise the animals, but we have to be cognizant of the cumulative pressures faced by these highly threatened animals.

Deep Rooted Truths by Asher Jay

They are subject to the following simultaneous and compounding impacts:

  1. Poaching (for the billion dollar illicit market for wildlife contraband)
  2. Pet trade
  3. Habitat loss
  4. Human-wildlife conflicts spurred by unsustainable growth and land acquisitions
  5. Zoonotic disease outbreaks and most precipitously
  6. Climate change (i.e. the erratic shifts in local weather and the consequent resource scarcities it results in.)

I would argue that it would do more damage to lift the ban now, because the United States paved the way for several other countries to assume a strong position against all importation of ivory, even China has finally committed to an ivory ban. Simply put, it is neither the time nor the place for this ban to be reversed in the United States.

Throughout this piece, when I refer to “hunters” I am not speaking of subsistence hunters or those hunting for food, but specifically trophy hunters. The dated argument of these hunters as noble conservationists no longer holds any credibility. Economically, an animal is worth more alive, over the course of it’s entire lifetime. Its intrinsic value as an expression of life is utterly overlooked by our species, so let us discuss this in monetary terms. A species not only offers critical, priceless ecosystem services by being extant but it also generates revenue through photo tourism and ecotourism. An elephant is worth 76 times more alive for instance, as it fetches $1.6 Million over the course of its lifetime, versus the $21,000- $23,000 it fetches as body parts or a plaque in a room.

Animals are not here for our taking, they play vital roles in ecological niches; it is this extractive mentality that has brought their numbers to the brink of extinction, and yet we continue to model around it. We are losing countless species daily to this myopic way of thinking. Most people do not discuss giraffes in the same light as lions and elephants, when their population sizes have been utterly decimated over the years by trophy hunters and poachers alike.

Most species are reproductively viable and contribute to the genetic diversity of their surviving gene pool until their death. Green-washing campaigns spun by hunters and big game safari clubs have helped rebrand hunting as a visionary pursuit, embraced by those who care for local communities, who out of a profound need to perform a service for all life on earth, go to Africa’s last wild spaces with their guns to weed out the sick, weakened, dying, or reproductively unviable specimens out of a given wild game population. This whole narrative is categorically untrue. Hunters do not act in the best interest of nature or the communities living alongside nature preserves. Hunters do not act on behalf of nature, while this is another argument they pose, I will qualify they do not offer the necessary checks and balances to maintain the health of an ecosystem. They want to play god and say they do so, but truly if they hadn’t wiped out all of the apex predators the prey species would not need to be culled, but the only way to ensure that quota is by killing off all the predators.

Wonderful catch 22 isn’t it? Trophy hunters masquerading as conservationists? Death fronting as the only way to preserve life? Stop the chain of slaughter. If you stop killing apex predators, prey species will have the chance to be maintained naturally within a completely self contained ecosystem.

Don’t Let Me Vanish – Asher Jay

Trophy hunters don’t hunt for anyone but to satiate their own selfish agendas. Big game hunters skew wild game populations by usually targeting alphas with iconic markings, or pronounced physical attributes. They want the lion with the biggest mane, the elephant with the largest tusks, the rhino with the biggest horn. They want majestic animals, mostly male, that will make for striking conversation when the animal is stuffed and mounted for their private viewing pleasure. This has also skewed the gender ratios in most megafauna species in Africa and the world. Male lions are far less common than female; we have around 20,000 or so lions left in the wild, of which barely 3,000 are male. Hunters also take what is a public asset, that can be seen in its element, for years on end, and privatize it. They place a claim, acquire the permit and own it. We, the vast majority, have allowed this to happen, because so many of us have yet to realize that each animal killed once belonged to us all when it was alive. In death, it has become the sole property of one at the cost of us all. This is best described as the tragedy of the commons. Hunting deprives not just the current generation of humanity but also every generation to come.

Monetizing death to protect life was never a well-conceived conservation paradigm, but given the census counts for each iconic species these days, it is a completely ignorant proposition. The communities these hunters maintain they feed and cater to, do not receive the profits generated by the permits they purchased. More often than not corruption bleeds the money transacted during such high profile hunts into privileged bureaucratic hands, and safari club operators. If it barely reaches the local communities, then you can imagine just how much of it gets funneled back into the deceased animal’s next of kin. When a hunter shoots a lion, lions barely see the benefits of this business deal, in fact it is often detrimental to the pride, as the male that replaces the slain lion kills all the predecessor’s offspring, so the females in the pride go into estrus again. What this means for the overall lion population is that with each hunt, their overall genetic diversity gets smaller, more incestuous and less healthy. This makes them more susceptible to the outbreak of a potential zoonotic disease, like feline distemper from proximal association with feral domestic pets residing in human settlements. We make each species less resilient to natural calamities, infections and diseases by hunting and poaching them.

Aim For Their Future – Asher Jay

I want to end this piece examining the premise that animals do not experience pain, which was tragically underscored by the Tory government across the pond. Having served on the board of Thinking Animals United and sat through numerous lectures and conferences on animal ethology and cognition, I am compelled to state that all science begs to differ with this oblivious declaration. Policies that are promulgated to appease self-serving special interest groups at the cost of the collective do not serve the people. Instead they commoditize the global commons at cost of public welfare and seed a monetary model in ecological debt. To the lay person, it is obvious, through the simple application of common sense that when a dog whimpers it is expressing pain, but clearly such basic signs of intelligence is not the currency humanity is banking on politically, socially or economically in the 21st century.