Page 13 – Bioneers

The Dark Secret of Student Hunger: An Interview of Tim Galarneau of the University of California

For students from low income or marginalized communities entering college (often the first in their family to do so) can be a source of pride and expanded opportunity, but for those who don’t have the finances to pay for increasing tuition and high housing and food costs, it can be, according to Tim Galarneau, “a gauntlet and a crisis rather that a rite of passage.” One critical way that students suffer from lack of funds is going without meals or eating cheap, empty-calorie, junk food. Food insecurity among college students is alarmingly high even at some of the most prestigious universities. At its worst in some community colleges, it can be as astronomical—as high as 70%.

Lack of resources leading to hunger can result in feelings of shame and social stigma making some students reluctant to seek assistance. Tim Galarneau, when he was a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), was an activist working for equity, justice and sustainability within the university food purchasing system. He now serves as a Specialist with the Center for Agroecology and serves as the Co-Director for Education and Training at the Center for Economic Justice and Action. When student hunger was brought to his attention some ten years ago, he helped set up an informal crisis response on one campus to help mitigate the problem, and since then he has been at the center of creating structural change to feed food insecure students without stigma, an effort that has grown in scope to include over 100 campuses of public universities and community colleges throughout California. Tim was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.

ARTY MANGAN: You are one of the chief architects and champions of the University of California’s (UC) sustainable food movement, which you’ve been active in since you were a student. Your work in the food system space around issues of food justice, local food procurement and hunger and housing has helped students and the university as an institution understand how local and organic food, health, wellness, justice, and sustainability are all connected. Could you talk about some of the initiatives you have been involved in over time that have led to your current work providing essential needs to students?

TIM GALARNEAU: The energy of students in an institution pushes the growth edge of the moral compass of that institution. When I was a student, there was a lot of emergent food movement work around re-envisioning food and farm policies that put a focus on people. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and their Fair Food campaign elevated the voices and agency of farm workers who have been historically vulnerable and marginalized. Students joined in through the Student Farmworker Alliance and learned how to align with those farm workers to help try to shape markets.

There was also growing student engagement in the international fair-trade movement around chocolate, sugar, and coffee with United Students for Fair Trade, and Greenpeace had begun leveraging student activism through the California Student Sustainability Coalition, and there was also a lot of student activism happening around the state concerning green building and green energy, so, for me, coming to UC Santa Cruz around 2002 was a very exciting time.

While there are a lot of broken things about how the food system is operating, it’s working really well for concentration and agribusiness, but not for communities, workers, producers and smaller enterprises. Efforts such as the emergence of the National Organic Program did build greater validity for developing an “ecosystem adaptive” approach to agriculture in order to steward land and the health of those working on it and eating from it. It was a time where issues of GMOs were also a significant topic for activists and organizers. While alternatives to conventional agriculture grew with market connections and consumer awareness around issues uplifting sustainable food and agriculture, student activists wanted to build on that clarity
and build momentum. We started to think about the role of the institution we were part of and how we could build a commitment by the university with key third party certifications and policy pillars that would operationalize purchasing commitments and a value chain in the food system that would uplift sustainability, equity and justice.

All this was at a time when Al Gore produced the film The Inconvenient Truth about climate change, but he left the food system out of the equation. Even so, climate and food began to get connected. For me it was a really exciting time to work on these issues first on the UCSC campus and then at the UC system-wide level by organizing with the California Community College and the California State University systems. From there, we elevated it to a national conversation helping to launch the national Real Food Challenge with partners across the country from The Food Project in Boston and the Community Food Security Coalition to our team in the California Student Sustainability Coalition.

Within four-and-a-half years, we went from a campus to a segment of the UC to statewide, and then to a national framework that brought on 400 colleges and universities, and student groups planning strategic convergences, and leveraging other gatherings, such as Eco Farm, and the Kellogg Food & Society Conferences, to think about how to mobilize young people. We even brought it to Bioneers, around 2008, with Michael Pollan curating a youth food movement panel. And then, in 2008, as far as Terra Madre with the International Slow Food Conference, where we had, I believe, over 1100 youth. That was a gathering which had people from 113 countries who were starting to share tools and models internationally.

ARTY: It’s interesting how an issue rises and spreads into public consciousness, in this case the responsibility of the university to contribute to a healthy and just food system. It’s not surprising that students played a role in elevating that issue. You certainly have been in the midst of the action. 10 to 15 years ago, Mother Jones magazine called you “the Alice Waters of a burgeoning movement of campus foodies.” What’s your impression of that characterization?

TIM: Alice is a legendary and iconic chef, entrepreneur, and movement voice. At that time for student organizers and myself the association around the term foodies didn’t entirely rub me the right way. The journalist had been interviewing folks around Slow Food Nation and had just interviewed Alice Waters. Then he wanted to include a higher-ed food piece, but in the Real Food Challenge, we were driving a little bit deeper than just the seasonal, beautiful aesthetic and pleasure of food. We were drilling down to the core essentials of justice, of ecological stability, and challenging concentrated corporate food business structures. We were trying to help lift student voices across the country and reshape supply chains that were dysfunctional in regards to justice and economic resiliency for small farmers and enterprises here and abroad. We were trying to make a healthy food system accessible and affordable by re-envisioning how it can function.

The journalist noted his stories for the issue are based on individuals versus groups so in that sense it lacked the “we” in the work. We did want to celebrate beauty and seasonality, but we were very focused on elements of justice and transformative possibility. To that extent, Alice Waters has now extended her vision to include almost all the issues we’ve worked on since we were students and perhaps the season is upon us where we are more deeply aligned in doing the collective work together.

ARTY: Let’s talk about your present work with the Basic Needs program. You’re up against a lot of structural problems. In a paper you authored there was a quote from Peter Hinrichs, a Senior Research Economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He said that back in the 1960s and 70s, a student could work 10 hours a week during the school year and 35 hours a week during summer and earn enough to pay tuition and room and board at the average public university, but today, due to increased costs and lower minimum wages (in inflation adjusted terms), all that work would only cover about 1/3 of those costs. What are some of the other structural conditions that lead to student hunger?

TIM: Around 2010, 2011, financial aid officers on our campus at UCSC came to me and said: “Tim, we know you work for the farm on campus. We have students that don’t have meal plans and don’t have enough money to eat or pay their rent. Is there any way we could get some free, organic food from the farm?” So, we informally set up 80 small student farm boxes that went to the undocumented student services program and partners from financial aid. These informal relationships addressed the hard experiences students were facing. It wasn’t a structural response, but we tried to connect the dots because our hearts were so connected to the issues.

That began to raise questions about the many students who, after their first year, opt out of the dining meal plan and are suddenly trying to navigate living off campus, putting down a huge security deposit and managing their expenses as young adults and decision makers that they didn’t have experience doing. There are no home economics or financial literacy requirements in secondary education and high school, so, for too many students, entering college becomes a gauntlet, not a celebration and a rite of passage.

In a 2013, the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) found that 48% of the undergraduates responded that they were frequently skipping meals because they couldn’t afford to eat three meals a day, but it was an anecdotal question. In 2014, we began to look more critically and thoughtfully into the issue. My colleague Dr. Suzanna Martinez from UCSF co-led a study with the Nutrition Policy Institute releasing a survey in the UC system called “Got Food?” to a random sampling of about 7,000 students. We cross-referenced the results with USDA and other research and confirmed that between 43 and 49% of students were indeed food insecure, categorized as “low” and “very low” food secure. Very low is when you can’t get enough calories each day. Low is poor nutritional quality of the food, eating cheaper empty calories because that’s all they can afford. The very low group was over 17% of students on any one campus. That was the largest survey at that time for four-year institutions, and it indicated that student food insecurity rates were more than double the national family averages based on USDA data.

That affirmed the magnitude of the issue. The idea that students can get by on Ramen noodles doesn’t work. We’re diversifying higher education and celebrating that, as UC is this year, having the most diverse class of accepted students in history. The landscape of who’s coming to college—first generation, non-traditional, undocumented, international students, a range of cross-sections of identities, former foster youth, underground scholars—is changing. To assume that they all come in with financial literacy and an understanding of nutrition with an ability to navigate multiple complex systems and to take care of themselves is not reasonable.

Our Basic Needs movement came about to move forward structurally to destigmatize the invisible suffering of a substantial number of students and to indicate that this was not an individual issue.With the emergent movement passion and energy and the hearts of student advocates, professional staff, and aligned partners, we thought about how to build a framework to address the problem. We held focus groups around the state, meeting on campuses with students, staff, professionals and administrators to have them better understand the scope of the issue and to hear what their ideas were. We also had to challenge the denial that students are hungry by many with privileged positions in the institution. There are assumptions that students are just making bad choices, buying a nice pair of shoes or a big TV with their financial aid check, but the funny thing about being human is that we’re not perfect. All humans make mistakes in their choices, and this issue wasn’t about individual bad choices, it was structural and systemic. Rather than blaming people, we need to figure out how we collectively can support impacted students across our
institution.

Our Basic Needs program started as a grassroots movement advocating within the UC system and then at the state level as well as establishing federal engagement in Washington D.C. to build awareness around these issues. To date, we have established funding across all three segments in California from the state legislature. The California Community College system went from no funding to about a hundred million dollars plus thirty million their first year of ongoing funding to jump start Basic Needs across the state. UC got $18.5 million for housing and food, and the California State Universities got $23.5 million and some additional funding to account for staffing and costs going up. This was all prior to the pandemic we didn’t know was right around the corner.

If we hadn’t had the organization around rapidly responding to food and housing crises and creating support and care structures before the pandemic hit, it would have been so much worse for our students. I’m really grateful that we had been able to build programs years ahead of that pandemic so that we were ready to respond. Our Basic Needs staff were frontline responders, digitally and on campuses for those students—international students, former foster youth, etc.— who didn’t have homes to go back to. Basic Needs staff were there to support them while they were trying to navigate the most difficult, unexpected period in their lives.

ARTY: As you said, the number of food-insecure students at UC campuses is, alarmingly, in the 40 % range, but the problem exists on college campuses throughout the country. A report on the NIH webpage refers to it to it as the “dark secret” of student hunger.

TIM: Some community college campuses are as high as 70%, but activating the research and the data is fundamental to this work, because it’s not only about using the shock of the scale of the problem to attract attention, it’s about what we can actually do about it that will make a real difference. That’s where our village is really shining right now in the UC. We’re in our tenth year together as a community practice, and data from the office of the president confirmed that after several years of implementation of the Basic Needs program, interventions of students with insecurities noticeably improved their GPA, degree persistence, and completion. Graduate students, on average, completed their degrees three months earlier, so it’s really a sort of Head Start Program for higher education. If you house and feed and nourish someone and remove some of the social and emotional stress and stigma of food insecurity, it gives that person the capacity to learn and grow.

ARTY: What are some of the strategies that have been put in place to serve the needs of students?

TIM: There are distribution sites where students can get free organic produce, dried goods and culturally relevant seasonal prepared food for free. We are training students to grow organic food on the UCSC farm so that food isn’t the chronic stress point in their day or week. It doesn’t matter what’s in your pocket or what resident status you hold, we’re here for you. When we start to build a society around those kinds of values of care and connection, it looks a lot different. Last year, we serviced over 79,000 students across UC campuses’ Basic Needs centers.

We have a range of brick-and-mortar and satellite distribution facilities on campus to meet students where they’re at. We partner with the California Association of Food Banks, local vendors, and even the dining contractors. I’ve worked with dining on the farm-to-college Real Food work so that in the contracts with Sysco and produce companies there are clauses concerning food recovery and food diversion, so that instead of wasting food, they can distribute palettes of food into the Basic Needs channels on campuses. We have redirected food diversion and food waste into food recovery to supply our Basic Needs sites.

The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in California is CalFresh, and we do outreach and enrollment work to help qualify eligible students for that program. We’ve advocated at both the state and federal levels and backed over seven different bills that have been passed and signed by the governor to create access and ease for CalFresh benefits for students in higher ed. To date, we’ve enrolled over four million students in CalFresh. Something like $2.1 billion has come to the state through EBT and CalFresh because of our movement work in higher ed. That money then circulates through local food economies. For undocumented and international students, we have CalFresh equivalent support services. We can provide financial awards directly into their accounts for those students who don’t qualify for CalFresh, so they can have supplemental food assistance and be able to shop and get the food they need.

Along those lines, there’s been a movement with Swipe Out Hunger, founded in UCLA by Rachel Sumekh and her team. Swipe Out works with dining halls. It enables students to donate their extra meals to a food meal swipe bank, and then we can redistribute those to students who don’t have meal plans, and it shows up right on their student ID card, so they’re not stigmatized with a different voucher, and they can swipe as if they have a meal plan and get some prepared meals. At UCSC, it’s called “Swipe for Slugs,” and currently I think we have over 7,000 meals in our bank that our case managers can distribute up to ten at a time to students.

And, also at UCSC, at our non-transactional café, Cowell Coffee Shop, we’re serving close to 7800 visits and over 3,000 unique students during the academic year. Students can come into the café, order a cup of fair-trade coffee, get a plate of food, and it’s all free. They just have to swipe their ID. The smile on their faces and the joy that they were just given something they didn’t have to pay for transforms the moment. We’re building the idea of the gift as a transformative act within market capitalism to change the experience of humans in the system. It’s pretty profound when you actually see it in motion. You can sit with someone and eat together, and it’s not just for students in need. This is how we address food insecurity without a stigma. We want to make it accessible so anyone can sit down with anyone else and have a meal together, regardless of what’s in their wallet.

If you look at the intersectionality of student identities such as LGBTQ+ folks, various students of color, undocumented students, underground scholars, all these students are coming into these systems that weren’t designed to hold them. Basic Needs re-envisions how the institution operates with new structures that can be responsive to all these non-traditional students. Students are afraid to take out loans. Their parents are often under water, and they don’t want to add more stress, so they’ll choose to skip meals; they’ll choose to not be on a lease; they’ll choose to sleep in an attic just because they care so much about not wanting to be a burden. We need to remove that mindset and structurally alleviate that sort of suffering. Many people are hurting, and we want to be intentional about what we are designing, so it can be a container that can transform that suffering into genuine opportunity.

From Scarcity to Abundance: How Collective Governance Can Transform the Climate Crisis

In this episode, award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon Battle lays out a bold vision for a new organizing project designed to model bioregional democratic climate action. The aim is to transform the Gulf South and Appalachia away from the lethal matrix of fossil fuel extraction and extractive economics. Instead, the regional vision is for a regenerative future of clean energy democracy, and an equitable, inclusive economy.

Featuring

Colette Pichon Battle, a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, is an award-winning lawyer and prominent climate justice organizer. After 17 years leading the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, she co-founded Taproot Earth to create connections and power across issues, movements, and geographies.

Credits

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
Producer: Teo Grossman
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Songs in this Episode: ‘Good Morning New Orleans’ by Kermit Ruffins; ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’ by Rebirth Brass Band, provided by Basin Street Records in New Orleans, Louisiana

Resources

Colette Pichon Battle – Expanding Our Movements for Climate Justice | Bioneers 2024 Keynote

“Let’s Get Behind the Frontlines” with Colette Pichon Battle | Audio Excerpt

From Climate Crisis to Climate Justice | Bioneers Newsletter

Taproot Earth

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): In this program, award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon-Battle lays out a bold vision for a new organizing project designed to model bioregional democratic climate action. The aim is to transform the Gulf South and Appalachia away from the lethal matrix of fossil fuel extraction and extractive economics. Instead, the regional vision is for a regenerative future of clean energy democracy, and an equitable, inclusive economy.

I’m Neil Harvey. This is “From Scarcity to Abundance: How Collective Governance Can Transform the Climate Crisis”on the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Host: In August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, it was the 4th most intense Atlantic Hurricane ever to wallop the contiguous United States. Mother Nature stopped knocking and simply blew the doors off any doubts about the ferocious onset of climate disruption.

The message was crystal clear. When we fight nature, we lose.

There was also a cruel poetic justice in play. Katrina’s ill winds souped up on fossil fuels struck right at the pumping technological heart of the Gulf South’s petrochemical industry. Katrina further unmasked the injustice that poisons society as surely as the torrent of crippling pollution did.

It’s an open secret that poor people and people of color are relegated to live amid the worst environmental hazards of industrial civilization.

While an inept, cynical federal government staged damage-control press conferences, compassionate person-to-person daisy chains surged into action. They showed that true social security depends on community.

But Katrina was just a coming attraction of the new world disorder: escalating climate disruption and the clash between the state of nature and the nature of the state.

Behind this disorder lurks a purposeful ideology: “disaster capitalism.” Capitalize on the chaos of disasters and exploit it to further concentrate wealth and power.

But today, nearly 20 years after Katrina, the ground truth is that a uniquely diverse and widespread resistance is arising from the frontlines to address the climate crisis and to challenge the corporate race to the bottom to loot the commons.

At the forefront of that resistance is the award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer, Colette Pichon-Battle.

Colette Pichon-Battle (CPB): There are several things from Hurricane Katrina that people still don’t get. The first, most obvious, thing is our continued extractive of fossil fuels is accelerating more extreme weather, and we have not reduced our extraction, we’ve increased it. We have not reduced our greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve increased it. And this is since Katrina, this is knowing what can happen, this is knowing what’s going to happen. There cannot be any more drilling of fossil fuels.

So I think that’s the biggest thing, that folks don’t understand Katrina as an extreme weather event accelerated by the extraction of fossil fuels from the planet. The oil companies knew it. The oil companies hid it. That has all been uncovered. It is clear, it is the basis of lawsuits everywhere. This is just like tobacco. They knew it was going to kill us, and they did it anyway.

Colette Pichon-Battle speaking at Bioneers 2024

I think the other thing that people don’t understand is that extreme weather events like Katrina are happening everywhere.

If a regular person, blue or red, heard the truth about what was happening globally, this would not be a difficult discussion on climate change. They know it. They know it and they see it, and it would be empirical data that they would add to what they are seeing in their own backyards.

The rain is not coming at the right time in Louisiana, or it’s coming too much, when it’s not expected. The Mississippi River’s at an all-time low, an all-time low to where saltwater intrusion is coming up the river and threatening drinking water in South Louisiana where we’re losing land at one of the fastest rates on the planet. Come on! This is not a red or a blue conversation. Something is happening, and we’ve got to do something about it, and it is not only important when it hits the coast of Louisiana. It is important everywhere, every day.

And it is our extraction. It is our consumption. It is the American consumer, and the American companies that press and market consumption that’s causing the imbalance. And the rest of the world is waiting for us to wake up to that. Katrina was supposed to be a wake-up call. Unfortunately, 19 years later, folks have gone back to sleep.

Host: In the long tail of Katrina, not only were devastated Black and Indigenous communities left out of federal recovery programs – hundreds of thousands of residents had to flee the area as climate refugees in what amounted to a new diaspora. In response, Colette Pichon-Battle abandoned her private legal practice to create the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy. For the next seventeen years, she would work to provide relief and legal assistance to her beloved Gulf South community and the lands she loved.

Over time, she saw that much larger political-economic systems were at work. Colette spoke at a Bioneers conference.

CPB: Here’s what I know to be true. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, everything broke. Everything. The governance system went all the way down from the top to the bottom. There was no system of governance. And at that point you realize how military control happens. You realize how chaos happens. We weren’t under an official state of emergency that allowed for chaos, but it was pretty chaotic.

And on top of all of that for the two to three years that followed, there were many elections. And what was interesting was that we had hundreds of thousands of people in over 50 states who needed to vote in local elections, and we had to figure out a process of literally getting people back home to vote, and that we had to do that when there was no place for them to live or be.

This was the moment where I realized the climate crisis – which was much bigger than a disaster, a storm – this thing is going to knock out all systems of governance. This is where tyranny can take hold. This is where the bad things can really root themselves.

I often listen to folks making five-year plans about the legislation we’re going to pass, about the folks we’re going to get elected, and I try to just keep my face straight and not say the words that I actually believe in my heart to be true, which is: this system will go down and what do we have in place, ready?

Host: As the iconic climate scientist James Hansen has summed it up, “It’s very hard to see us fixing the climate until we fix our democracy.”

Indeed, Colette witnessed first-hand the traumatic effects of the economic shock doctrine that transformed the Gulf South after Katrina. Colette witnessed first-hand the traumatic effects of the economic shock doctrine that transformed the Gulf South after Katrina.

CPB: The big picture 19 years later after Katrina is, you know, a lot of the children impacted by Katrina are now young parents. I’m watching all of them suffer with a level of mental health challenges—PTSD, anxiety, depression—at levels that if you know anything, and you just look at who we’re talking about, you know that this is what happens to children in that trauma. They’re not functional. Many of them are coming for jobs now. They’re really struggling.

You know, the truth is that while the populations of New Orleans and places where I live, Slidell, just outside New Orleans on the Mississippi border, Biloxi, those population numbers have come back but they’re not the same people. The culture of those places have changed significantly because the people who held the culture aren’t there anymore, and the culture that was held by those folks was held in a collective. So even though those folks exist in other places, they don’t exist in their network anymore. And so the culture that made Louisiana so rich, so deep is just changing.

Host: The chaos, desperation and fear provoked by disasters provide perfect political cover to deploy extreme, top-down social and economic policies that are wildly unpopular.

Disaster capitalism seized its golden Gulf South opportunity. Along with the cultural clear-cut that Katrina allowed, there followed a fire sale on distressed real estate, which would soon result in gentrification.

Big money flooded the zone to elect and appoint corrupt crony politicians to hijack democratic governance. They moved quickly to extract wealth for the few and guarantee business as usual for the fossil fuel industry.

This unnatural disaster left people dazed and stranded – trying to survive amid enforced government austerity, radical instability and a dire lack of infrastructure and services. The Gulf South would come to resemble a failed state.

CPB: We lost our entire teacher class. It was almost all Black teachers. They fired all the teachers after Katrina and forced them to retirement, and then replaced them with Teach for America folks who came from all over. And so what was a Black woman-dominated field is now a sort of experimental place for folks from all over to come teach in New Orleans for a little while, you know, and like, get your experience, like a Peace Corps. They took down the public school system. There is no public school left in New Orleans, they’re all charter.

Public monies are going to charter schools that literally last, I think, an average of two years, and then they switch schools. Yeah, so, what kind of education do you think these kids are getting? It’s terrible. If you thought it was bad before, it’s bad now. There’s no accountability system.

The public health system is gone in the whole state of Louisiana. Bobby Jindal did that, our former governor. And now public monies that should have gone to a public health system that allowed people to have the care they need now go to a public/private partnership of Catholic hospitals that can refuse care based on Catholic teachings, if you get my meaning, especially for women. Think about that.

These are public systems meant to help the poorest people, and the poorest people in the South aren’t just Black. The only thing they have more than poor Black people in the South is poor white people in the South. And those systems are down.

And I think it’s fueling the rage. The poor white people don’t know why things aren’t working, and they’re being told to blame the Brown and the Black people.

Host: The real issue has never been about dismantling so-called “big government.” The battle is always about whose interests government serves: In this case, the care and feeding of giant corporations and the politicians who serve them…

Colette Pichon-Battle came to understand climate chaos as the result of this political crisis. She turned to community organizing. She looked to the communities themselves, who were actively working to devise real solutions to meet people’s real needs. It starts with recognizing that either we stand together, or we fall apart.

New Orleans, 2006 – an aid distribution center set up by Common Ground Relief, a local community organization. Photo by Robert Kaufmann/FEMA

CPB: And I’m going to tell you, you’ve got to go through a climate crisis, you have to go through a disaster to understand what will break down and what will not last and what’s not real, even.

And let me tell you, in Katrina, money wasn’t real. The banks were closed. There was nothing you could use your money for. If you didn’t know how to fish, you were in trouble. If you didn’t know where that water, where the aquifers were, you were in trouble. Everything was down. And these are the moments you realize that half of this stuff is made up, right?

In order for the capitalist system to work, scarcity is a fundamental understanding of that system. If we break out of scarcity into abundance, we necessarily have to change an economic system that’s meant to just extract value for the few. And this system is something that we’ve all got to be able to challenge. Now, how do you challenge a system that you’re maintaining? This is not going to be easy. This is going to make a lot of people who understand security as the number of dollars in their bank account to understand security as something much different – a collective of community that people who show up for each other.

But what if we don’t know each other? What if we don’t trust each other? How do you make that shift? We can’t really fathom what it is to be in a collective, what it is to not have. But to have someone bring a plate to your house and say, here’s your dinner. There are communities and groups of people who live like that, who believe if you are in the community, you shouldn’t be hungry. If you’re in a community, you shouldn’t be without a place to dwell.

What kind of society do we live in where we think it’s okay for people and children to be hungry with this kind of wealth? This is going to take not just an abundance of courage, but an abundance of love and humanity for us to get back to our own balance so we can balance the planet.

Host: For Colette, that balance was deeply woven into her own upbringing.

CPB: There’s a really short moment in climate disaster where we all come to remember that very basic principle, which is that we need each other. And we do.

And individualism makes us believe that there’s such a thing as individual success. You know, you got your A on your test. You got your scholarship. You got your diploma. You did it alone. No way. No way.

And I come from a community that will absolutely not let you think like that. My mom will tell you in a second, “We did it! We got a diploma! We got our law degree, we’re barred!” And when I was barred, my entire community came. I had 30-something people from the Bayou at the Supreme Court in Louisiana watching me get sworn in. They contributed to me, and I contribute to a whole, and we’re all together surviving, and that’s the only way we can.

Host: When we return, how Colette Pichon-Battle is changing the terms of engagement by creating a bioregional, solutions-based, collective network of frontline communities. They believe overcoming the climate crisis requires creating genuine democracy. I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…

Host: Studies of resilient communities that rebound from disaster show that government works best when it’s closest to the people it serves.

In that light, in 2022 Colette Pichon-Battle co-founded the nonprofit network called Taproot Earth. The goal is to surface solutions from the ground up and to build power across a bioregional network of communities and movements.

Colette launched a series of convenings to hear from the communities themselves and to connect them with each other. They decided their shared goal was to transform systems of governance. That meant moving away from propping up extractive corporate and fossil fuel economies and moving toward democratic self-determination for the greater public good of people and nature. They expanded the map beyond the Gulf South to include Appalachia, and are now working to create a global stance.

CPB: Our work is really to build formations that can govern themselves, and to build those formations from the frontlines upward. We focus on the Gulf South, which is Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Puerto Rico. We share a water, and so that is how we—we use, some might call it a bioregion, we call it watershed organizing. Take off those borders and think about the natural systems that we share. We share that gulf. We share those waters. We share the realities of a particular history in the South.

We also focus on Appalachia, which brings us into not just the Ohio River Valley but into the sort of Appalachia Mountain chain, but all the states that touch that—the Carolinas, some of the Georgia south, of course, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia. And, again, we’re working in these areas that are the energy sources for this country. So oil and gas and coal is the Gulf South and Appalachia.

I’m learning more about the impacts of the climate crisis and the fossil fuel industry in particular in Appalachia. And this has been really interesting to me because Appalachia is where we find very large numbers of poor white people. Right? Because some folks can’t hear…they don’t want to have a conversation about what Black people deserve and how marginalized Black people are. They just turn off to race. And so if you go to a place where the mainstream aversion to race can be avoided, you go to Appalachia, and these are poor white folks who are, you know, beholden to the industry that is killing them.

But what I’ve been watching, especially with mountaintop removal and coal extraction, is how much freshwater is being lost, and how many trees are being lost. And when you watch the floods in Kentucky that happened a couple years ago, you didn’t just see flooding, you saw a terrain that had been so changed that the flooding was uncontrollable.

And that’s not to mention that the water that’s going downstream is now poisoned, because the byproducts of coal extraction, you know, the water flows over that, and they can’t even have access to water.

So, you know, I think Appalachia’s a place to look. And if you think about the Gulf South and Appalachia, you get to this nation’s energy regions. We are oil and gas, and coal and gas. We are the poorest, least educated people in this nation. And in those places, extraction is not regulated, not enforced, and the industries that are in charge there control the governance, the finance, the education system, the health, they control the whole thing. It is in these places you see an absolute alignment of both corporation and state.

Host: But for Colette, addressing these kinds of burdens of history also requires a global perspective. That map shows the heavy footprints of colonialism and slavery.

CPB: And we also work in the Black diaspora, and we define the Black diaspora as any place where Africans were and were taken from and brought in the Transatlantic slave trade. And so we work absolutely on the African continent, but also in the U.K., Canada, the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America, South America. These are places where Black folks are, and that’s where we want to do our work.

And so building formations, both domestically in the U.S., but also globally. We have our Global Black Climate Leaders network. It’s called Taproot Noir, and it is all Black from the Black diaspora.

We have a Gulf South to Appalachia formation that runs those 17 states, and it’s all frontline people who are coming together to say we understand what’s happening and we have solutions. We’re not an organization focused on, you know, tearing down or dismantling the system, although we are in deep solidarity and support for those organizations whose job that is. We want to be ready with some solutions, and we want to be ready with not just ideas, but actually piloted projects that come from the frontline, so that when someone has the audacity to tell us that they understand what we’re saying but there’s no proof that we can make change, we say we have the proof. And we are starting to really show that in the world. And I’m really excited about that.

Host: Following the series of dynamic Taproot Earth convenings, the communities translated their focus on transforming current systems of governance. The network identified six “pillars of climate justice” which include: water, energy, land, labor, economy and democracy.

The network went on to identify an initial set of specific interventions that can be replicated at local, state and regional levels:

Make the energy grid reliable, sustainable and publicly accountable;
Restore the land and repair legacies of harm;
Ensure equitable residential access to clean energy and water;
End prison labor exploitation;
And fund community-led climate planning and ensure fair disaster response.

The goals for Taproot Earth’s Liberation Horizon are:

to replace disposability with sustainability, authoritarianism with collective governance and privatization with stewardship.
to leverage these replicable models into region-wide transformation by 2030;
and to build internal infrastructure for leadership development.

CPB: And so we’re going big. The vision is large. It’s taking a lot of courage. We’re building a team. We’ve got a just transition lawyering network, and that lawyering network works in the U.S., and it’s specifically to flank the climate frontlines. We’re building these formations that govern themselves. And in seven years, when we finish, they will stand on their own. You know, Taproot Earth wants to be able to say: Here are the models, and they’re coming from the frontlines. And they always were. And they always can. So let’s put our investment, our time, our energy there, and let’s get behind the frontlines.

Host: Colette says these frontline, localized and regional models represent a much bigger enterprise.

CPB: And there’s got to be something much deeper that we’re fighting for, a deep engagement, which is you have to press a button every four years and the day after you press a button, you got to go to the council meeting and the day after the council meeting, you have to sit with your neighbors and talk to them and ask what’s going on. And the day after that, you’ve got to keep being in conversation and relationship because democracy and engagement is not once every four years pressing a button for someone you don’t know. It’s something much deeper than that. It’s like a floor that has to be constantly swept, right? It’s like a thing you have to constantly engage in.

We have the opportunity in this climate crisis to re-envision what a democracy could be. And I think we’ve got to do that relatively quickly and we’ve got to have, I think a real acknowledgement that to vision, to live and to manage a democracy is work. And we’re pretty lazy. We’re pretty lazy. This representative government that we got, it feels good to us because you sort of like, I don’t really have to care. I don’t really want to talk about it today. But that’s not what this is. If we want to be in a unified struggle for a really good life where we all thrive, then we’re going to have to put in equal work to manage, to envision and then manage a new democracy.

Host: Colette Pichon-Battle is clear-eyed about the daunting odds of taking on the corporate state and centuries-old burdens of history.

CPB: And you could really get a place of nihilism and defeat. You could really get a place of just, why bother? And I get that question all the time. Colette, if you know your community is going to be lost no matter what, why are you fighting? And, you know, I say to them the struggle that I’m fighting inside of did not begin in 2005. There’s a Black liberation struggle that has been going on for a very long time. I think it’s true of so many people. We’ve been fighting the whole time. I did not find—begin a fight in 2005, I joined a long-term struggle for liberation for all people.

We think that we can catalyze people into being the best that they can be, into trying things that they would never try; into reaching levels of courage that they never thought they would have to reach, for the benefit of others, and for people they were never told to value. I think we can reach that…

There’s a liberation horizon, it’s 2030, and that’s where Taproot Earth really wants to help shift the social understanding. We don’t have to give into this. We can choose to fight. We can choose to create. We can choose to love. We can choose to move from scarcity and fear to love and abundance, and that’s what 19 years of Katrina has taught me. That’s where we need to go. And we want to invite everyone to join us toward that liberation horizon, 2030. Taproot Earth.

Host: Colette Pichon Battle… “From Scarcity to Abundance: How Collective Governance Can Transform the Climate Crisis”

“Love, Nature, Magic” | What Mosquitoes Teach Us About Living in Balance with Nature

In her book “Love, Nature, Magic,” author, activist, and garden expert Maria Rodale reflects on her surprising conversations with the spirits of the familiar plants and animals around us — and the knowledge they share with us. Rodale combines her love of nature and gardening with her journeys into altered consciousness, embarking on an epic adventure to learn from plants, animals, and insects — including some of the most misunderstood beings in nature. She asks them their purpose and listens as they show and declare what they want us humans to know. From thistles to snakes, poison ivy to mosquitoes, these beings convey messages that are relevant to every human, showing us how to live in balance and harmony on this Earth.

In the below excerpt from “Love, Nature, Magic,” (Chelsea Green, 2024) read about Rodale’s perspective-shifting journeys to visit one of the most detested “pests” of nature, the mosquito, and what these journeys made her realize about the insects and ourselves.

Mosquito
When we kill others, we kill ourselves.
First Journey: September 9, 2021 | Second Journey: October 28, 2021

The truth is, even though I have lots of resident bats, there are still some mosquitoes around my yard every summer. And of course they annoy me. They come out after big rains, and at those times I am never far from a tube of anti-itch cream, especially toward the end of summer. The waning of hungry late-summer mosquitoes is one of the only reasons I look forward to fall.

I am constantly traipsing about my garden looking for pots or toys that might contain standing water where mosquitoes could lay eggs. The worst culprit is old tires. It never ceases to amaze me how many old tires I can find in the woods that surround my house and garden. Over the past two decades I’ve found and removed at least a hundred. And new ones keep appearing. Like mushrooms (and mosquitoes) after a rain. I recently discovered a pile of about fifteen partially covered with moss. It’s my spring project to dig them out and send them off to wherever old tires are supposed to go, wherever that mysterious place may be. Old tires are NOT supposed to be dumped into the woods on the side of the road. People, stop doing it! Old tires are mosquito breeding factories.

Apparently, the deadliest being on planet Earth is not the wolf, the grizzly, the great white shark, or even the human (he comes in second). It’s the teeny-tiny buzzing annoying mosquito. When it bites you, it first injects an anticoagulant into your body so it doesn’t choke on blood clots as it sucks out your blood. The anticoagulant is what makes you itch. As it feeds, it also injects its saliva into your bloodstream, and that saliva can carry organisms that cause potentially fatal diseases. That’s what makes it so dangerous: mosquito spit.

I confess, I was nervous to visit with mosquitoes in a journey, but they were on my list to talk to because they are so annoying (and deadly) to so many people. I can’t say I was looking forward to the encounter, but I wanted to ask mosquitoes why they exist. It was hard for me to imagine a good reason why, and yet I was pretty sure there must be a good reason. So I just dove in . . . literally.

* * *

It’s not unusual for me to have a mental image of walking or jumping into water at the beginning of a journey. Basically, I go wherever my mind’s eye leads me. As I entered this journey, I was in a tropical jungle, and a dark murky pool lay before me. Believe me, I did not want to go in there. But rationally, I knew I would be fine—I wouldn’t wake up from my journey wet and mucky. After all, I was safe on my sofa. This pool of water is what had appeared before me as the place to go, and in I went.

As soon as I dove in, I transformed into a squirmy mosquito larva. Then I floated to the surface, emerged from the water, and flew. Somehow, I homed in on the back of a sweaty human male and drank his blood. It was delicious. Warm. I mated. Laid eggs. And died.

I was dead, and nothing was happening.

Ummm . . . hello? Hello?! Nothing seemed to be happening. Into the void I called out, “Take me to your leader!” Weirdly, I found myself transported to what I can only describe as a spaceship command center, and a giant mosquito was before me.

“We’ve been at war with humans ever since you arrived,” it said.

“But don’t you need us to eat?” I asked.

“We tend to kill what we love.”

“Huh?”

“We tend to kill what we love. There are too many people anyway. Do your homework and come back to me. But why should I help you? So you can eradicate us?”

This was turning into a really strange journey, and I felt unwelcome. As I turned to go, Mosquito stuck its proboscis into my head and injected something into my brain (probably spit). It repeated: “Come back after you’ve done your homework. We tend to kill what we love.”

* * *

I came out of the journey, and I had to admit that it was a fair criticism. I had not done my homework; I really knew almost nothing about mosquitoes other than that they were quite annoying and potentially deadly. I thought about the statement “we tend to kill what we love” and found myself wondering: Aren’t many human murders due to domestic violence — fits of rage, jealousy, honor killings? We tend to kill what we love. But how did that relate to mosquitoes?

I started reading, and one of the first things I learned is that mosquitoes are old. Like at least 236 million years old. That’s a lot older than humans.

Only the infected female Anopheles mosquito causes malaria. In fact, among virtually all mosquitoes (and there are more than three thousand species), only the females bite. And it’s not just malaria they spread. It’s West Nile fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, Zika fever, and dengue. These diseases are responsible for about 5 percent of annual deaths of humans worldwide — almost a million a year. (Although antibiotic-resistant diseases are rapidly gaining in power to kill due to the misuse of antibiotics to fatten up livestock.)

In truth, the human death rate due to murder is close to the death rate due to malaria. And as I write this manuscript, the annual death rate due to COVID-19 is way higher than deaths due to mosquito borne diseases and murder combined. We live in a deadly world. And mosquitoes are just one tiny reminder of it.

In the warm areas of the northern hemisphere, mosquitoes have been primarily a nuisance, not a threat to human life. But as global travel and trade have increased, average temperatures continue to rise, and humans create even more habitats where mosquitoes thrive, tropical diseases are spreading rapidly.

All this is interesting, but I kept returning to this: Only the female mosquitoes bite. They don’t have enough iron or protein to make their eggs, so they need to get them from an outside source — blood. (This, ironically, is also believed to be one of the reasons humans started eating meat — because we females needed the extra iron and protein to create our own babies.) Your blood goes right into a mosquito’s stomach, gets digested, and is turned into eggs. In mosquitoes, only females who have already had one batch of eggs spread disease. Think about it for a minute . . . mosquitoes by themselves don’t carry diseases, they pick them up from their sources of blood (us or other animals). And the only way they spread a disease is if they are going back to the “well” for the second time. In her lifetime, a female mosquito can’t really lay more than three batches of eggs (up to five hundred eggs in total). So it’s really a relatively small number of mosquitoes that cause disease. It’s the older ladies, in fact. (This leads me to wonder if historically the male obsession with purity in women has to do with a fear of getting diseases. Perhaps. And yet males having multiple partners is most likely how human sexual diseases spread. But I digress . . . )

Taking a break from reading about mosquitoes, I decided to watch TV. Nerd that I am, my favorite TV streaming choices are almost always documentaries. I scrolled through the listings. Hmmm. I had never watched the PBS documentary about Rachel Carson. I had read Silent Spring, which many environmentalists I respect cite as the trigger for their awakening. Also I had received the Rachel Carson Award from the Audubon Society many years ago. I was surprised I hadn’t watched this documentary before.

Welcome back to the magic of the Trail of Books (which is also the Trail of Movies and Documentaries). It’s the magic that happens when I follow my instinct in choosing what to read or watch, and it turns out to be exactly what I need to learn about.

Yes, I remembered that Rachel Carson had written about DDT. But what a book doesn’t capture that a documentary can are the actual sights and sounds from the times in which the author was writing. Including the deep, authoritative, WASP-y male voice proclaiming that through the miracle of chemistry and DDT, man has now won the war against the mosquito and will ERADICATE it from Earth, accompanied by black-and-white footage of a truck spraying clouds of white powder over kids eating sandwiches at a picnic table, and airplanes squirting white dust over fields and suburban neighborhoods while kids play outside. The HUBRIS is embarrassing to watch. Sure, mankind has eradicated a lot of species, mostly by accident or for the pleasure of blood sport — like the passenger pigeon, poor thing. That bird never bit, infected, or threatened anyone. In fact, it helped people by carrying messages from one place to another on our behalf. And was delicious to eat, reportedly. So how did we thank it? Kapow. Dead.

It’s normal for many people to want to be a hero, to want to save the day. Humans strive to eliminate enemies and control the world in order to protect their progeny from disease and death, and even more importantly, to protect and expand their wealth. But killing things (other people, pests, alleged enemies) doesn’t solve our problems. As illustrated in the documentary and a thousand scientific studies, when we try to kill things like insects or weeds or viruses and bacteria at a grand scale, they develop resistance and rise up even stronger than before, requiring even greater interventions and stronger chemicals to ramp up the fight. As a by-product of our attempts at insecticidal and bactericidal genocide, we also kill many other things that we need and love, like butterflies and bees, birds, good bacteria essential to our health, and all the amphibians. This leads to a chemical, genetic, or military escalation in which we end up killing . . . ourselves. We end up killing that which we LOVE.

Ahh. Now I get it.

Mosquitoes are an integral part to a much greater food chain. Male mosquitoes don’t bite and suck blood but eat plant nectar; they are pollinators. Mosquito larvae are food for dragonflies, fish, birds, some toads and frogs, turtles, spiders, and ants. Those water-dwelling babies (larvae) also eat algae and bacteria, which helps keep water clean. They keep our water clean. That’s important!

What, then, is the answer to the “problem” of mosquitoes and diseases? Well, as my grandfather liked to say, prevention. On a small scale, preventing mosquito breeding is about reducing standing water such as in old tires, pots, and even the nooks of plants like the bromeliads. On a larger scale, in places like Africa and South America where fatal mosquito-borne diseases are serious threats, especially for children, it’s about installing plumbing and providing clean water, secure housing, window screens, and medical assistance, including vaccines. Mosquito netting over beds is nice, but it turns out that most mosquito bites occur during the day. We need to find ways to prevent and heal the mosquito-borne diseases already inside us so that a female mosquito bite does not result in her getting infected.

Genetically modified mosquitoes (sterile male mosquitoes) have been released into the wild in Florida. This is not an optimal solution. If this technique successfully eliminates mosquito populations, the results would be catastrophic for insects, birds, and animals that feed on mosquitoes, and water quality would drastically decline.

Humans must commit to creating an environment in balance with nature, where nature’s food chain is allowed to proceed naturally. How do we do that? I think about this question a lot. It can’t be done by eliminating populations of “pests.”

Some people have argued that we need to limit human population growth in order to live in balance with nature. In the past, humans have come up with horrible methods to “control the population” of “unwanted groups.” Proponents of eugenics murdered, imprisoned, and secretly sterilized the groups they deemed undesirable, leading to horrid traumas and terrible suffering. There is absolutely no situation where this sort of behavior is acceptable, even though it still happens today.

What’s a more productive way to create balance? Education. Especially the education of girls and women. When girls and women are educated, they understand how their bodies work. If they live in a culture that allows it, they can decide for themselves how many children they want to have, and then care for those children with a greater amount of attention and ability to support them. They are also more likely to take on leadership roles in government and businesses that protect and nurture the healthy development of future children (which is why education for girls is so threatening in highly patriarchal cultures). But the education of boys and men is essential, too. Especially teaching them to learn how to communicate and connect with others in positive, constructive ways — in particular with girls and women, who are vital to their survival. The global human population could decline naturally over time, providing more breathing space for humans and nature to live in harmony with each other.

Now, before the capitalists among you freak out about population decline because capitalism is a system that requires continual growth (I’m not naming names, but you know who you are), read on. These changes need to be accompanied by a new economic model that doesn’t rely on endless growth and the domestication (aka servitude) of women to do all the household duties. This would require not just education but radical culture change — in almost every culture around the world. Men will have to pull their domestic weight — or pay real money for others to do it for them. In my view, it’s fear of this kind of change that is fueling a backlash against feminism right now, everywhere from Texas to South Korea.

Some men I know fear population decline because of the potential loss of our civilization, or human consciousness. But the more I journey, the more I realize that consciousness cannot be destroyed. It exists with or without our bodies. And every civilization and culture evolves and changes over time. It’s only natural!

People need to learn how to live in balance with nature. We also need to learn to live in balance with each other. When men and women (and everyone else) are truly free, educated, and loved, we are all better able to take care of the world around us — and enjoy it more!

It’s very possible that we don’t need to reduce our population to live in harmony with nature. But in that case education is even more essential because we must learn to create, invent, and innovate new ways of living on this very special Earth.

If we humans don’t commit to being good stewards of the environment around us — even if we don’t like what that demands of us — nature will take care of the environment in its own way. And the mosquito will be just fine. Fabulous, in fact. Meanwhile, we humans will be decimated by more and more diseases, spread not by just mosquitoes, but by our own ignorance.

After watching the Rachel Carson documentary, I found the courage to watch another one, this one aptly called Mosquito (because, obviously). It was a depressing experience, and afterward I realized I needed to go back and talk to Mosquito again, and to Bat too. After all, bats and mosquitoes are partners — predator and prey.

I decided I would journey the next morning. In the middle of the night, I woke up with these words in my head: “It’s not really the mosquito that’s the vector of disease, it’s us. Our travels. Our trash. Our toxins. Our tragic belief that killing something will make it go away.” I emailed that message to myself and went back to sleep.

One of the most depressing stories from the mosquito documentary was about mosquitoes breeding in abandoned tires. What I didn’t know before watching Mosquito is that old tires are shipped all around the world. If mosquitoes lay eggs in water trapped in a tire, and then that water dries up, those mosquito eggs are still capable of hatching once they get wet again. Even if the tire has been moved to a different continent in the meantime. The deadliest of the mosquitoes are spreading everywhere in junk tires. And because climate change is causing overall warming, mosquitoes can survive farther north, and their range of influence is spreading more and more. Car tires. Fucking car tires.

The next morning, I began my return journey.

* * *

I immediately entered the mosquito mothership and apologized for my ignorance on my previous visit.

“How can we learn to peacefully coexist with each other?” I asked.

“Ahh, now you are asking the right question,” Mosquito said. “You must heal the diseases within you. Stop killing our natural predators. Take care of your own people. Lift them out of poverty. Clean up the squalor. And stop heating up the planet. If that continues, mosquitoes will be the least of your worries.”

This time she spoke with kindness. I felt humbled and grateful to her. We even hugged. It was awkward, but still. It was a hug.

“Now, go talk to Bat.” She dismissed me.

I went back to the bat cave and the cavewoman was there. “Oh, not you again!” I said. The last time I had seen her, she had murdered me and eaten my heart. She ignored my comment and handed me the same leaf mixture I had eaten on my previous visit. I ate it, and I found myself with Bat. I had to wake her up.

“I’m sorry I didn’t ask you before, but what is your job and your purpose?”

“Our job is to keep nature in balance.”

“How can I help you?” I asked.

“Tell people to leave us alone — even the scientists and researchers! They need to respect our homes. We wouldn’t do to them what they do to us. Tell them to get their heads out of their goddamned test tubes. You can’t understand anything unless you look at the whole thing. The web of life is real.”

I thanked her. The drum was still drumming, and I wasn’t sure what to do next. Then I found myself on the electrical grid or web that I had flown through during my previous bat journey. I started jumping on the web as if it were a trampoline. I was having a bit of fun, but suddenly a bat swooped in and ate me. Now what? I asked myself. Before you know it, she pooped me out right on my side porch, where all the other bat poop is. She had brought me home. The journey was over.

* * *

Thinking about this journey, I begin to realize that once I journey to speak with a being that I am initially afraid of, I start to feel genuine affection and love for them. And that happens because we learn to trust and know each other. What was once an annoyance becomes a real friend. What I once wanted to eliminate, I learn to appreciate — I realize these beings really aren’t so bad after all. They are not my enemy. They have feelings too. Indeed, the feeling I carry out of a journey is love. I feel my heart softening and warming in ways I never could have made happen through an intellectual analysis of a creature’s role in nature — or even from watching a documentary.

And this, my friends, is why journeying is such a valuable tool. Doing research doesn’t shift my heart. It is only through a personal relationship of trust that I can learn to love those things that once were just annoyances. I can assure you, these experiences have changed how I behave in my day-to-day life, too, for which I am grateful. If anything, journeying makes me want to learn even more about these creatures — but not through the kind of research that stomps into a bat cave without regard for the feelings and rights of whatever lives in there. We must learn to respect each other’s homes and families. We must stop killing what we ourselves love. And we must even stop killing the things we don’t love. Because somebody somewhere loves them.

I have no doubt that 236 million years from now mosquitoes will still be here on Earth. Us? Probably not. I mean, how many tires will there be on Earth in 236 million years if we don’t change our way of living? A lot. (I have since learned that particle pollution from car tires is thousands of times worse than car exhaust emissions. Someone really needs to invent a new way to get around. Please.) And no, sending them out into space, like Jeff Bezos thinks we should, won’t solve our problem. Neither will sending them to Mars. The web of life is out there too. We just haven’t learned to see it yet.

I think I’m going to leave my moss-covered pile of tires exactly where it is as a reminder that all our actions have consequences. And that to stop killing what we love, we have to stop trying to eliminate those things we don’t easily like.

Thank goodness for anti-itch creams!

Thank you, Mosquito. And again, thank you, Bat.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from “Love, Nature, Magic” by Maria Rodale, published by Chelsea Green, 2024.

“Squirrels on Earth and Stars Above”: The Remarkable Legacy of Peter Warshall

Peter Warshall was a great friend and ally of Bioneers with whom we collaborated on several initiatives, most notably the “Dreaming New Mexico” project. Peter was a genius in a number of fields and very, very far ahead of his time, but his legacy hasn’t been as widely recognized as it deserves to be, so we are thrilled that a new book about Peter has just been published, one that compiles a large selection of his essays and lectures as well as fascinating material from his archive to give a sense of the remarkable brilliance and dedication of this extraordinary human being.

His accomplishments ranged from studying with the legendary anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris to being one of the most influential editors of those bibles of the counterculture, the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review; to doing early, pioneering research on watersheds and septic and grey-water systems; to serving as Mayor of Bolinas, California; to groundbreaking work in Sonoran desert and Great Basin “sky island” conservation biology; to passionate activism on behalf of Indigenous land rights and wildlife protection in both the U.S. and in Africa, including vital work on creating wildlife corridors for the Northern Jaguar; to brilliantly original talks and writings on poetry, art, light and color…

Peter’s range of interests was astoundingly vast, but he was no dilettante: He was in several instances among the world’s leading experts in the fields he explored. There will never be another Peter Warshall, and it was a great privilege for us to have been able to know him, work with him and learn from him, so we are delighted to be able to present a few selected excerpts of this brand new, remarkable book that capture just some of his many facets and insights and the inimitable verve and passion of his style of thought and communication.

— J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer

The following excerpts are from “Peter Warshall: Squirrels on Earth and Stars Above.” (Edition Hors-Sujet, in collaboration with CMP Projects, Harvard University, 2024).

Peter Warshall (1943–2013) was a species of vertebrate who defied easy classification. In photographs, he is often either looking into a notebook or at some minute specimen cupped gently in the palms of his hands. Usually, there is a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck. Nick-named “Dr. Watershed” and the “Infrastructure Freak,” he referred to himself proudly as a member of the Maniacal Naturalist Society. A conservation biologist, humanist anthropologist, eco-tinkerer, and “biogladiator,” his pioneering contributions to ecology, public science, and what is now called “sustainability,” despite their significance, remain overlooked in mainstream histories of the environmental movement.

•••

When he passed away in 2013 from cancer, Peter had been at work for over a decade on a 3.8-billion-year history of the coevolution of solar radiation, photo-sensitive life, and color. The paintings of Cézanne, Klee, and others inspired many of his reflections on how shadows, tricks of optical perspective, and contrast figure centrally in the evolution of both human and nonhuman discerning awareness. In a letter to another human mentor, Frederic Jameson, he described the project as concerning nothing less than “the evolution of aesthetic zeal on this planet,” a history of “how the first pigments came to be,” of “light as solar radiance, filtered biospheric light, volumes of color space in various niches such as coral reefs and forest floors, light harvesting apparati of living creatures and the creation of the visual ‘imagination’ in the myriad ways patches of color turn into patterns.”

•••

Dził Nchaa Sí’an, also known as Mount Graham, is the tallest peak in the Madrean Sky Island Archipelago, about seventy miles north of Tucson, Arizona, a sacred site for the San Carlos Apache and also the home range of the endemic Mount Graham red squirrel. Throughout the 1990s and into the present, a long and bitter conflict over the construction of telescopes on the mountain has pitted environmental groups, various Native American nations, archaeologists, and scientists against one another over the summit’s fate. In 1986, Peter started working as a research scientist for the proposed astronomical observatory site in the Sky Islands—unique, vertically differentiated ecologies in Arizona and New Mexico. He became a significant player in what he called a “literal conflict between the heavens and the Earth,” spending several years fighting for the rights of a species that, previously thought to be extinct, he had helped rediscover in the 1970s. An affiliated research scientist at the University of Arizona during the controversy, he became the faculty’s most outspoken critic of the project and later the president of the 250-member Scientists for the Preservation of Mount Graham.

•••

[From a talk by Peter about the Great Basin’s “Sky Island” ecosystems]

These mountains are like the Galapagos, except instead of being surrounded by ocean, they’re surrounded by desert. And since the glaciers have receded up into the North, these mountains have become isolated. As the glaciers receded, the deserts advanced. And you should think about how special this is—there are very few places on the planet where you have isolated populations of the same animals, of the same creatures, all going along in their own beatnik, eccentric condition, all going out and being experimental, both with their language, with their culture. All trying in very separate but similar cradles of evolution to evolve in new directions. And at some point, should the glaciers come back, should the deserts recede, should the grasslands and the juniper forests come back to the floor of the canyons and the valleys, all these creatures will meet again as they are able to come down. Then you’ll have a really interesting poetry festival in the Great Basin, where all those languages would have to meet.

•••

…the sky island (Mount Graham) is important because it’s the southernmost place of the spruce fir forest. It has the (Mount Graham) squirrel, the glacial features, it’s a relic Pleistocene Forest. A relic from 11,000 years ago. It has retreated to the top of the mountain, because that’s as close to Canada as it can get. It’s a relic forest, and that’s why it’s a cradle of evolution. There are nine plants up there known in no other place in the world; three species of mammals known in no other place in the world; two snails that have been isolated inside the rockslides that have been there since the Cretaceous seas receded. There are five to ten insects that we found in six weeks that no one has ever identified. Yet this is the forest that is about to be cut.

•••

The Mt. Graham squirrel’s special quality, or special kind of character, or ego, if you want to call it that, is its shapeliness. It’s the smallest squirrel of its kind in North America. It has a different tail size relative to its head. But what it really has is something that’s very old in North America, which is its need to keep on gnawing. If it doesn’t gnaw at something, then its bottom teeth will grow into its upper skull. If it has a wayward tooth, it can’t close its mouth because the tooth will not stop growing. This incredible persistence of its teeth to keep on growing, no matter what means it has to keep on chewing and gnawing and ripping and stripping, ad infinitum. This started 200 million years ago. This started in North America, in the Great Basin, where the first rodents and squirrels evolved and then covered the Earth. So, what we have here is a pretty amazing animal….its heart rate is 175 times what you’d expect for its size, which is about half a pound. It’s like a hummingbird, in a sense. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to a hummingbird, but if you ever catch a hummingbird, hold it up to your ear. It goes, “brrrrrrr,” and that’s the heartbeat.

•••

[On light]

So, this is where we start. We start outdoors with the Sun. We’re all embedded in radiance. Everything on the planet is embedded in radiance. If we could see it, we’d be here among the sunlight, which is really starlight, it’s just a close star—and sometimes reflected moonlight. And we would feel around us a vibrational field going past us at all moments. This vibrational field would be very similar to the vibrational field of sound that we hear when our eardrums start to vibrate. There’s a single solar emitter in our world, the Sun. It sends out select groups of photons spiraling into space. As they spiral into space, they’re modified, both by their travel through space and by the biosphere, the layers of the atmosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere that surround this planet. Finally, all these vibrational fields get through the atmosphere, and they encounter Earth matter. And that is what we are, Earth matter. They enter our eye and our mind. There are 100 million cells just in your eyeball. Besides the brain, the eye is the organ with the most cells in the body. The whole of our lives are really attuned to this particular photon flux…

…Each photon has a personality in the way it spirals. Some spiral in long loops, and some spiral little loops. And that personality we call color. That’s why we use words like “tones” or “notes” of light. If we have an emptiness of photons on the Earth, or lack of photons, or lack of vibrations, we call that shadow and darkness. This is the vibrational field you’re living in every time, every day, from dawn, noon, dusk. The mind, even with its eyes closed, can create brightness and color without the Sun….There is a meditation, tonglen, where you inhale darkness and exhale light. We see our dreams in color, we see them in brightness. And if you have ever taken peyote, then you know that you can get incredible color patterns without having to look at the Sun or the Moon…

•••

Symbiosis literally means “together living.” Other ways of translating it would be biological companionship, or living embracing lives, or in-contact beings, or inside-each-other creatures, or, in Buddhist lingo, codependent-co-arising sentient existence. It’s the story of the evolution of interdependence. If any one of the two forms that live together disappears, the other disappears. Existential interdependence. It’s not a functional event like most marriages, where you can leave it and find another husband or wife, or another partner. In symbiosis, if one of you separates, both are gone. It’s a bit of a rock-and-roll romance. Symbiosis is like courtship and mating (as opposed to marriage) because it brings previously evolved beings together in new partnerships. Existential interdependence.

In short, symbiosis is perhaps the most self-propelling version of the creativity of life on this planet. Two disparate beings come together, and a kind of creativity is unleashed that propels life further and further….Life, first and foremost, is a very local phenomenon in that potential multiverse.

Both astronomers and Walt Whitman are sure that life is made of starstuff. About 4.6 billion years ago, a supernova blew up, and the pieces of that supernova became the materials of all living flesh. We are the cytoplasmic remnants of the supernova.

These excerpts have been reprinted with permission from “Peter Warshall: Squirrels on Earth and Stars Above,” edited by Parker Hatley in collaboration with Gregor Huber, Noha Mokhtar, Harris Bauer, and Diana Hadley, published by Edition Hors-Sujet, in collaboration with CMP Projects, Harvard University, March 2024. Assembled from his personal archive, the book showcases Peter’s innovative thinking on science, poetics, environmental citizenship, and the relationship between our species and the living planet.

For more information about the “Dreaming New Mexico” project, see project page 40 of the Bioneers’ 25th Anniversary brochure. See here for a detailed obituary of Peter Warshall.

Weaving Past and Future: McCormack Ranch’s Journey in Regenerative Farming

In the sprawling landscapes of Northern and Central California, a quiet revolution is taking place. It’s a movement rooted in the soil, nurtured by the hands of dedicated farmers, artisans, and craftspeople who are redefining what it means to create a sustainable and resilient textile economy. These individuals are trailblazers, forging a new path that marries traditional craftsmanship with modern ecological practices, all while supporting local economies and preserving the environment.

At the heart of this movement are those who have chosen to work within the natural rhythms of their bioregion. They cultivate fiber and dye plants, raise sheep and alpacas, and practice time-honored crafts, all within the rich and diverse ecosystems of Northern California. Their work is more than just the creation of textiles; it is an act of stewardship, a commitment to the land, and a dedication to the communities that depend on it.

Among these trailblazers, the farmers and ranchers play an especially crucial role. These agricultural producers are the foundation of the textile supply chain, responsible for nurturing the raw materials that will eventually be spun, woven, and dyed into fabric. Their commitment to regenerative farming practices not only ensures the health of their soil and animals but also contributes to the broader goal of carbon sequestration, making agriculture a key ally in the fight against climate change. By prioritizing ecological balance and animal welfare, these farmers and ranchers are cultivating more than just crops and livestock—they’re cultivating a future where agriculture and sustainability go hand in hand.

It is within this context that the Fibershed Producer Program thrives. This membership-based network unites these agricultural producers with artisans, designers, and textile workers who share a vision for a localized and environmentally conscious textile economy. By sourcing all fiber, dye, and labor from within Northern California, Fibershed Producers are creating a system that not only reduces the carbon footprint of their goods but also strengthens the local economy and fosters a deeper connection between communities and the land. Their collective efforts are a testament to the power of collaboration and the potential for regenerative practices to transform entire industries.

McCormack Ranch, a Fibershed Producer Member, is a historic operation in Rio Vista, California, where time-honored practices meet forward-thinking stewardship. Managed by Kelsey Nichols, McCormack Ranch is not only preserving its legacy of sustainable farming but also pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in regenerative agriculture.

Read McCormack’s story, originally published by Fibershed and written by Stephany Wilkes, below. All photographs by Paige Green.

Kelsey Nichols is the Ranch Manager and Shepherd at McCormack Ranch in Rio Vista, California. Owned by Jeanne McCormack and her husband, Al Medvitz, the Ranch has provided natural, nutrient-dense meat and grain since 1896 – as long as the Ranch has practiced sustainable farming. Today, the Ranch raises and manages South African Meat Merino (SAMM) sheep that produce food and fine wool and play an important role in pasture management and implementation of the Ranch’s Carbon Farm Plan, created with the help of Fibershed and the Solano County Resource Conservation District (RCD).

“McCormack Ranch has always been a very holistic system,” Kelsey says. “Small grain farming and sheep fit really well together. The sheep cleaned up the fields to help control the weeds and, at the end of grain harvest, cleaned up the seeds. After harvest, the sheep went back on to control the weeds and stayed into the next year, when it’s pasture again. And then the Ranch had the meat from lambs and bread from the grain. It hasn’t changed too much since then.”

But change is afoot within this consistent pattern of conservation, in terms of grazing practices, dryland alfalfa experimentation, and ecologically-minded reduction of invasive species.

“We do a three-year rotational system, but I have been transitioning some of the ground to more permanent pasture,” Kelsey says. “Not to be grazed permanently, but to get away from destroying the ground.”

She explains that some of McCormack Ranch’s six square miles is leased to neighbors as grain ground. They fallow it in summer, when the sheep control the weeds, and then disc the ground in preparation for fall planting. The discing is what Kelsey wants to change, because it can damage soil structure and health over time.

“I want to improve the soil structure and get it to where we’re not turning up this ground and turning seeds – bad seeds – up,” Kelsey says. “We have done a fair bit of experimentation with dryland alfalfa, and the alfalfa mixed with the annuals makes a really great pasture mix.”

Improved forage for animals means less ground can support more animals, important for the Ranch’s overall efficiency and long-term sustainability, as well as local food security.

Alfalfa has a bad rap. It is one of California’s two most vilified “thirsty crops,” almonds being the other. Before the rainy winter of 2022-2023, the media periodically asked whether almonds and alfalfa should be grown at all. Dryland alfalfa, however, is not irrigated. It is a very drought-tolerant, perennial legume with deep tap roots.

“It likes our clay soil that holds the water deep,” Kelsey says. “We got a crop planted last January, a year and a half ago, and we had maybe an inch of rain after that. I thought it failed. I thought it all had died, because it all germinated and then was gone. But it all came back. You drive up the road, and it’s green, and to have green feed in the summer in California, not irrigated, is pretty incredible. It’s really exciting.”

As a legume, dryland alfalfa plays a part in the restoration of diverse ecological systems and habitat. Along with well-managed sheep, it supports the re-establishment of native perennial grasses, which reduces the use of herbicide sprays and fuel-powered mowing.

“If we can get these permanent pastures going, where we have the alfalfa for protein – for the sheep in the summer – along with whatever annuals come up, I actually think we’ll be able to decrease the weeds, and we will not have to do so many sprays. We want to get good grasses and legumes established that will help outcompete the invasives.”

Here, “invasive” means “more harmful than beneficial.” At McCormack Ranch, those invasive weeds include yellow starthistle, foxtails, black mustard, and pepperweed. They create monocultures by out-competing native grasses. Yellow starthistle is poisonous to horses, has a deep tap root (over three feet deep by late spring, on average) and, Kelsey says, “very high seed output and wind spread. And its seeds remain viable in soil for more than three years.”

All of this enables yellow starthistle to take hold over more shallow-rooted, annual species during California’s drier summer months, when surface moisture availability is limited due to seasonal lack of rainfall.

“This is why yellow starthistle survives so far into the summer, why I still see so much of it out here even after other annuals have dried up,” Kelsey says.

Healthy grasslands, by contrast, host and nourish native plants that sequester carbon deep in the soil and provide high-quality, diverse wildlife habitat. Healthy soils promote water infiltration, storing moisture during dry seasons and preventing run-off and erosion in increasingly severe rain storms. Unfortunately, at a time when we most need them, 97% of California’s native grasslands have been replaced by housing, non-native annual grasslands, and intensive forms of agriculture.

“I feel like there’s a growing number of people who think farmers are kind of evil,” Kelsey says. “That eating meat is bad for the environment, and shearing is harmful to sheep. And that’s just so, so out of touch with reality. There are a lot of pesticides used to grow your vegetables, and a lot of bugs that have died to feed you. That intensive style of crop agriculture has destroyed grassland and habitat for so many species. We want to reduce the use of pesticides and mowing as much as possible, which is where the sheep come in.”

Managing invasive species in an ecological way is difficult – logistically, financially, and due to the nature of the weeds themselves. Effective pasture management depends on the nuanced application of timing and sheep pressure. Grazing must be carefully managed with knowledge of the sort Kelsey has developed over the years.

“Overgrazing and rapid mowing can actually help invasives gain ground,” Kelsey explains. “Yellow starthistle can regrow after its top is removed by mowing or grazing. You want to time the grazing to reduce seed production. Unfortunately, the starthistle all bolts at once, and it is hard to target graze the starthistle this time of year, with so much annual grass that is more palatable.”

At the plant stage Kelsey describes, yellow starthistle has enough protein to meet the sheep’s basic nutritional needs.

“So we’re doing more intensive grazing in May and June, using larger numbers of animals for a short duration to get that weed height and seed production down, but without overgrazing. We don’t want more than half the grass forage to be removed, because that hurts the grasses’ recovery rate, and we need it to come back and shade out the starthistle. It loves light.”

Kelsey knows that re-establishing grasses and legumes will take years of diligent attention and work, but she’s up for the challenge – and excited about it. “It won’t be a single treatment or in a single year,” she says. “We have to suppress seed production while reestablishing competitors, and perennial grasses are slow to establish.” Once they are, though, properly timed grazing, mowing, and burning work more effectively.

Kelsey is quick to point out that “We can’t spray our way out of this. If we sprayed everything that we needed to, with the number of invasive species that are taking over, we would be bankrupt. I’m exaggerating, but these invasive species are that severe. And we just can’t get enough sheep on it. I would probably need to stock 100,000 sheep on this place for a month, and we don’t have the sheep numbers to be able to do that. And with the way starthistle seed blows in, everybody out there would need that treatment, too. We could do a lot more mowing but, again, that’s diesel and labor. Sprays are probably cheaper. That’s why people use them. It’s a really hard thing to balance, what’s environmentally friendly and what’s financially possible. Pasture improvement is a major way to address it, though.”

In addition to these efforts, McCormack Ranch has established a Fibershed-funded hedgerow and Kelsey is exploring how compost application might best support and enhance existing soil carbon-sequestration efforts. Whatever the particular stewardship technique, Kelsey Nichols will be there, astutely observing the plant mix and soil, understanding what is and is not working over time, and timing breeding and lambing to ensure feed availability and safety from winter storms, her keen eyes seeing how so much life responds.

Redefining Fashion’s Future: Rebecca Burgess Envisions Tomorrow’s Textile Landscape

This article was originally published on Fibershed’s website.

Rebecca Burgess, the Executive Director of Fibershed, is a leading voice advocating for a shift in our approach to clothing consumption and production. Her vision for a fiber future centers on quality materials, cultural reverence, and a deeper connection between textiles and the ecosystems they stem from.

In this interview, Burgess addresses the question, “What if everything goes right?” She shares her thoughts on the challenges and opportunities within the textile industry, emphasizing the importance of consumer behavior, policy changes, and innovative agricultural practices in paving the way for a more sustainable future.

When you envision your ideal fiber future, what do you see?

Rebecca: My ideal fiber future would be one centered in an ethos of quality-over-quantity. We’ve been on a slippery slope ever since we started considering fashion highly consumable, which is abnormal. I’d like to see a suite of cultural practices take shape that supports people in understanding the depth of experience and meaning behind their second skin.

The opportunity in my ideal fiber future is that our clothing contributes to the experience of building a true sense of belonging to place. That’s what textiles used to do — textile culture, food culture, music, storytelling, all these things are hardwired to remind us of where we come from and our relationship with landscapes and the things that allow us to exist in these bodies. I think textiles could become a decent, if not a perfect, reminder of our relationship to ecosystems.

That future requires less consumption, but that’s so easy because we’re only wearing about 20% of what we own, at least in Western Europe and the U.S.

It sounds like you’re advocating for a lifestyle shift.

Rebecca: Cultural shifts can and do affect policy, and policy can and does affect culture. Policy is only as good as our minds, hearts, and ability to organize allow it to be. Ideally, culture starts to transform our ways of being, which then brings us towards consensus and/or a majority tipping point that shifts governance.

When it comes to policy, we need to start regulating volume. We’d like to see brands have to declare the units of production they produce per year and also quantify the unsold inventory. Policies that incentivize and/or penalize brands to find solutions for “waste products” are essential. Modulating incentives and penalties based on what kinds of raw materials they are using is also critical.

How might a regular consumer’s life look different in your ideal fiber future?

Rebecca: People are wearing textile and clothing whose fibers are grown on landscapes that the wearer has a personal relationship with. A wearer would meet the land, four-leggeds, plants, ranchers, and the farmers who are generating the raw materials. I’d like to see a future for wearers that provides them opportunities to see the fiber plants growing. A future where we are wearing known landscapes.

I’m starting to see that happen, and I’m seeing it happen across socio-economic strata.

For all of this work to generalize within our wearer experience long term, we need to have an economic system that supports people to stay in business, scale (just enough), and be solvent without perpetuating our current phase of economics that is mostly tied to consistent compounded growth.

Where are you seeing evidence that we’re heading in the right direction?

Rebecca: I see some really beautiful sparks. I’ve seen consortiums of brands work together to scaffold minimums at mills. It’s been really fun to watch companies from a range of sizes start to tap into farming and milling systems as a collective to ensure traceability and farm-level connectivity.

On the policy front, the California Extended Producer Responsibility legislation that’s emerging and the federal level FABRIC Act are both examples of domestic policy aiming to stimulate eco-social sanity within the fashion system.

How does agriculture play into all of this?

Rebecca: Within the existing land that’s already managed for pasture and cropland, we would incentivize growers to build soils that hold more water in drought cycles and create as much climate resilience in our farming systems as we can through natural means and carbon farming. I see no need to grow our annual natural fiber production. I would just like to see growers fairly compensated for what they currently produce. We have a ways to go to support growers to increase their climate adaptive and mitigating strategies, and we have a ways to go to make use of all the existing fibers that are harvested within each annual agricultural cycle.

We have all of these important levers in front of us: agriculture, policy, education, industry … is there one that you think we should pull first or hardest to spark massive change?

Rebecca: My answer changes depending on how I see the world going week to week. But I would say high on the list is that we have to institute a natural capital incentivizing tax code that gets us to an instituted and economy-wide triple bottom line (People, Planet, Profit). That strategy is essential if we’re going to continue to assume that modifying the current economic system is ‘enough’ of a solution.

Right now, a company looks at its spreadsheets, and all it sees is a profit and loss based on one indicator, which is U.S. dollars or whatever your currency is. It doesn’t have to equally put importance on its emissions, its waste, its biodiversity metrics, its water metrics. If we can’t weight these other things on equal terms, we can’t do this work in perpetuity. We will continue to have what we have.

We need natural accounting.

Do you think your ideal fiber future is attainable?

Rebecca: Yes. The efforts we have to make are both increasing our eco-efficiency and plateauing our growth. Many people’s brains explode when you say that.

I appreciate Ursula K Le Guin’s quote: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

It does feel somewhat hard to imagine.

Rebecca: But there are some interesting indicators that show me where it’s already happening.

When you put the regulatory kibosh on biodiversity-smashing CO2e pumping growth, you then leave room for new things to emerge.

What would it feel like to be part of the future you envision?

Rebecca: It will feel healthy and whole. No opaque details that we suppress because of how exploitative and harsh they are. Your clothing will come from a system that is much fairer, clear, and connected, and you will feel a part of that system.

It feels like you’re contributing to something that’s reciprocal. I inject my energy, my money, my time into the system, and it actually creates a really positive eco-social feedback loop. And I understand that feedback loop. I know who’s involved in it, and it feels good.

I don’t think we’re that far off from actually creating those systems in textiles. It’s not that hard; we already know how to do it.

–
Images by Paige Green

Fibershed: Transforming Fiber Systems for a Healthier World and a Better Fiber Future

Our friends at the nonprofit organization Fibershed are helping lead efforts in regenerative textiles. Fibershed develops regional fiber systems that build ecosystem and community health, expanding opportunities to implement climate-benefitting agriculture, rebuild regional manufacturing, and connect end-users to the source of our fiber through education. Fibershed transforms the economic systems behind the production of material culture to mitigate climate change, improve health, and contribute to racial and economic equity.

Commodity or Human Right? How Community Wealth Building Can Address the Housing Crisis

Housing is a human right, or so says the International Declaration of Human Rights. But could we organize our economies with that in mind? Across the country, communities have land and properties and people who need homes. What’s stopping us bringing them together in a way that increases community wealth and wellbeing for everyone? That’s the question we explore in this episode of our special series on community wealth building, produced in collaboration with the radio and tv show, Laura Flanders & Friends. Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Writer; Saoirse Gowan, Policy Associate with the Democracy Collaborative; Noni D. Session, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative

This is the final episode of a 4-part series exploring how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing their assets, anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance. Explore the full series here.

Guest Host

Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, which airs on PBS stations nationwide. She is an Izzy-Award winning independent journalist, a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center.

Credits

This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends
Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel
Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
Producer: Teo Grossman
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Resources

Democracy Collaborative

East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Our Economic Future: Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas | Bioneers Reader

Housing Is A Human Right

Uncut Interview: Keeana-Yamahtta Taylor

Collective Real Estate: Land Without Landlords?

Full Conversation- Collective Real Estate: Land Without Landlords?

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Housing is a human right –– or at least, that’s what international human rights law says. Could we reorganize our economies with that principle in mind? Across the country, people need homes. And in those communities, land and properties are available. So what’s stopping us from bringing them together, and increasing community wealth and wellbeing for everyone?

That’s the question we explore in this episode of our special series on community wealth building, produced in collaboration with Laura Flanders & Friends, a public TV and radio show that reports on social change experiments.

We hear from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who’s a historian and writer; Saoirse Gowan, Policy Associate with the Democracy Collaborative; and Noni D. Session, Co-founder and Executive Director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative.

This is “Commodity or Human Right? How Community Wealth Building Can Address the Housing Crisis” with guest Host Laura Flanders on The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Laura Flanders (LF): Your home: what is it to you? Is it a shelter, a place of safety, a place that nourishes your being and your sense of belonging; perhaps a place where you feel your ancestors, imagine your future and those who come after you? Or is it an investment, a tradeable commodity? And if it’s an investment, whose? What’s your home for?

Different cultures and economies consider homes and land in different ways. Under globalized corporate capitalism, our system more or less, the value of a property or a place is typically set by the market: which is to say, the price a house or apartment or piece of land can be bought or sold for, or at what rate it can be rented or taxed. Under this system, a home can have value in a company or a city’s investment portfolio whether or not anyone is living or working on it at all. In fact, sometimes property’s worth more when it’s empty, or emptied of certain people, as writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has observed.

Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor lives in Philadelphia where she has watched city policies displace Black and Brown people in an effort to increase profits. Philadelphia’s not unique, in this respect. Call it slum clearance, urban renewal or simply urban development, neighborhoods like hers have been worn down for decades, as communities of people are broken up and families are forced to move – especially out of gentrifying urban centers. People of color and low income people have ended up concentrated in smaller and smaller areas, on shrinking plots of land with few services and little political power. Marginalized physically, they become marginal politically – which makes it even easier to cut services, cause desperation and vilify the residents even more. It’s a vicious cycle that has long roots, writes Taylor. Black vulnerability, in effect, was engineered.

Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor. Photo by Don Usner.

Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor (KYT): There has been a consistent shortage of safe, sound and affordable housing in the United States over the entirety of the 20th century and now into the 21st century. And this is by design. If we think about the way that our government has left the production and development of housing almost exclusively to the private sector. And so why is there no affordable housing? Because it’s not profitable. It’s that simple. And you can see it in terms of the building priorities and cities across this country. In Philly, the main housing that is being built are million dollar condos. That’s the housing that is being built, because that is where the profit is.

LF: Taylor is the author of “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership”. A regular contributor to the New York Times op-ed page, she is currently a professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Northwestern University.

I spoke with Keeanga Yamahttaa Taylor in 2021 as an uprising against gentrification was happening in her city. How land and property are owned and managed are key features of any local economy, she said, because property ownership is tightly tied to political power – and it all makes for a toxic brew, especially in a country with a history like ours. Here’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

KYT: Well, I mean this is the long history of African-American experience, moving from a mostly rural population to an urban population. When the federal government begins to take new policy initiatives, they call on the private sector for its, quote unquote, “expertise”. Well, in the real estate industry, this expertise had everything to do with how to segregate African-Americans, for whom it had determined, had a deleterious impact on property values.

But those practices, which began very early in the 20th century are then used to influence policy making decisions about where black people should live and should black people have access to the same kinds of programs that really created a middle-class white population in the U.S. after World War II, where white GIs, and ordinary white people in general, were given access to government-backed home loans that allowed them to purchase houses in suburban areas that became, of course, the cornerstone to the American dream. Black people were excluded from this endeavor really until the 1960s and the urban rebellions forced the federal government to relent and finally create home ownership programs that were directed at them.

So this is a really insidious practice that happens in cities across the country, where you have public housing authorities – organizations that are established by the federal government whose purpose is to actually provide housing to low income and poor families – well, now that they find themselves in the position of lording over public housing properties, so properties that are owned by housing authorities. And instead of rehabilitating these properties, instead of fixing them and housing people who need them, a lot of these housing authorities are waiting to– what we would describe as the peak of the market– to then flip the houses to developers for profit.

LF: In 2021, as Philadelphia was just emerging from pandemic related lock-down, a massive housing fight broke out. At issue was UC Townhomes, a subsidized housing complex near the center of town. Near quality schools, hospitals and good food and transport, UC Townhomes was an attractive spot for gentrification. But the complex was operated under a subsidy contract with the federal government, meaning that low income tenants could stay there and pay no more than 30 percent of their income on rent. In July of 2021, with demand for upscale housing rising, the owners of UC Townhomes declared that they intended to cancel their so-called Section 8 housing contract with the federal government and sell the property to private developers who could charge what they like. All the roughly 70 families currently in the townhomes would have to move.

The Philadelphia Inquirer | Philly’s affordable housing struggle is part of a history of displacement

The tenants were having none of it. UC Townhomes wasn’t alone. Lots of housing subsidy contracts were on the verge of expiring in the Philadelphia area – at least 2,000 units in at least 37 complexes were within five years of ending their contracts, according to local activists. There weren’t many places left for low-income renters to go. Given those options, the residents rebelled. They organized, protested, sued the city, and eventually after a long bitter fight that involved even camping in the streets, they won a partial victory. In a settlement, the owners of UC Townhomes won the right to develop most of their three-acre site. But half an acre they had to donate to the city to be used to build affordable housing, at least 70 units. In addition, from the sale, the owners of UC Townhomes had to give $3.5 million dollars to support the displaced residents themselves. This fight, and the community mobilization that drove it, has implications far beyond the City of Philadelphia itself.

KYT: This kind of housing owned by public housing authorities that they are just sitting on, exists in many cities across the country. And so I think that that model of taking over and occupying that space can exist everywhere in this country.

I think what is important to say about how to go about doing that has to do with the level of organizing, organizations that have been involved in local housing struggles over period of time, who know literally the physical terrain of the city and where the housing is located and available, but also most importantly, how do you utilize your networks to call upon people to do eviction defense when the city inevitably tries to move in and take those properties. And so there’s a kind of informal network of eviction defense tenant-rights organizations forming across the country so that people are in touch with each other.

But I think as long as we are in what I would describe as an acute housing crisis, where you have mass unemployment, where you have people, millions of people being pushed into poverty, millions of people experiencing the anxiety of housing insecurity, millions of people facing eviction. And at the same time, millions of empty properties where either public officials or developers are just waiting to turn a profit on these properties, that all of the ingredients for both a confrontation, and occupation of these properties in the name of actually being able to provide people decent places to live is on the table.

LF: In the 20th century, the primary shapers of our housing market have been, racial segregation, anti-black racism, and the neoliberal economic myths that getting government out of the market would trickle down wealth to everyone. It just hasn’t happened. In fact, what’s happened is the reverse. Today, private equity firms have vacuumed up entire neighborhoods of homes for their investors – driving rents up while investing as little as possible, in order to secure maximum gains, not for residents but for far-off investors, or investment companies. At the same time, Airbnb and similar short term, for profit private rental platforms have knocked millions of units out of the long term housing market, causing further scarcity and driving prices impossibly high for most people.

In 2019, Saoirse Gowan co-authored a report on public housing for the People’s Policy Project, a think tank focused on social, economic, and political equality in America. And she also led the social and public housing sector of the Home Guarantee Campaign during the 2020 presidential race. Gowan spoke on the Democracy Collaborative’s Next System podcast in 2019.

Saoirse Gowan (SG): What we’re trying to get at is that the function of housing in this country and what it has been for a very long time is as a commodity, something for people to make profit on, not something that people need to live in. So when you have significant hardship, whether that’s because of poor conditions in housing, unaffordable housing, homelessness, and criminalization of being homeless, skyrocketing rents, predatory foreclosures by banks after loans made on predatory terms. All of this sort of has at its root this idea that housing is a commodity and not a place to live in.

LF: The Homes Guarantee campaign would have policy makers move away from seeing housing as a commodity, and require that they focus instead on getting all Americans housed in safe, affordable and stable ways. Again, Gowan.

SG: So what we try to do with the Homes Guarantee and sort of core policy proposals about it is first that we need to start moving away from this profit orientation and stabilize people who are already in place. For some people, like public housing tenants, that means a lot of public investment in renovating their places, in making the homes fit for habitation and turning them into green resiliency centers so that they’re fit for the future under climate change.

Decarbonizing places and putting in new low-energy appliances that cost people less money in the winter. And, for people who are already in the private rental sector who are often suffering from skyrocketing rent increases, we want to have a national rent control standard that is truly universal and applies to everyone who’s renting from a landlord in the country. That, combined with a just-cause eviction law, gives tenants more ability to organize because they can’t be threatened with eviction just for organizing as tenants and it also gives them a measure of stability.

Then we also have a forward-looking policy which is that we want to construct 12 million new units of social housing that would be permanently affordable and off the private market. There are multiple models that those could be built through, whether that be municipal ownership or ownership through housing authorities, limited equity cooperative ownership, community land trusts. But really what we want to see is millions and millions of new social homes that are permanently off the private market.

Now, obviously, there are people at the moment who have a lot of wealth that’s tied up in their homes. We think that it’s important that when we are moving away from the speculative market that we don’t let any working-class people who are genuinely vulnerable who are in negative equity to their banks or whatever are left behind.

But it is important for us to recognize that the goal of providing safe, stable, truly affordable housing to everyone is, in a certain sense, incompatible with people making millions and millions of dollars off the housing market as a good investment.

Then what we also want to see, that the damage that’s already been done by this, which has been heavily racialized, to start being repaired.

LF: Author/activist Saoirse Gowan says this system we have now can’t be tweaked by helping a few more people buy a few more homes. That won’t solve the supply problem or the environmental one. What we need now is a new, non-market-driven approach to housing.

Is it possible for government policy to approach housing differently? Absolutely. In the years after World War One, socialists in Vienna, Austria, built enough new housing to rehouse one-tenth of the city’s population, and set rents at 3.5 percent of the average semi-skilled worker’s income, just enough to cover the property’s maintenance and operation costs.

A century on, 80 percent of residents in Vienna still qualify for that kind of public housing, and their contracts last for life, even if they get richer. So that today, the city’s social housing complexes are home to a mix of residents with no stigma attached and a certain amount of political power. Could the same happen in racialized America?… Well we’ll talk about another model for housing after the break.

I’m your host Laura Flanders and you’re listening to the Bioneers.

LF: In 2008, the whole world saw what can happen in a hyper-speculative housing market. Unregulated trading in housing debts on the stock market was not only risky, but catastrophic. Cheap credit and weak lending rules caused a housing bubble that burst on real people. While Wall Street traders and their firms were able to recover, millions of mortgage owners were left “under water” – that means owing more than their houses were actually worth.

The 2008 financial crisis showed how the American Dream of individual home ownership could become a nightmare. Incentivized by their firms to issue as many contracts as possible, brokers encouraged poor families to take on impossible levels of debt. And families were desperate, not only because governments had done so little to regulate housing markets – or rein in predatory lenders – but because they’d also done next to nothing to support housing alternatives. Among those possible alternatives – publicly or collectively held land trusts or cooperative housing.

Noni D. Session is Co-Founder and Executive director of The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in Oakland, California. I spoke with her in 2022 about how the co-op model works. And she explained how, in a co-op, members buy, own and manage property collectively, thus pooling resources, risk and responsibility and building some power in the process. Here’s Session.

Noni D. Session (NS): Every person who is a member of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative – the staff owners, the investor owners, the community owners and the resident owners have a collective right to that property through a set of bylaws and covenants that we make with our community owners. So we are the owner of record. We do that particularly to do things like hold risk for communities that are often deemed, before they even step across the threshold, high-risk folks. So we do that to build a financial identity, to offer the technical assistance and really to wrap around services for folks that typically wouldn’t be able to engage in any point in the arc because of the absence of those resources.

LF: The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, or EBPREC, helps people – especially Black, Indigenous and other people of color to finance, purchase, and occupy land and housing in a way that’s then collectively owned by the community. They do that through pooling risk, but also through pooling relationships, and using the assets they hold collectively to guarantee loans in a strategic, mission-based way. It’s strength in numbers.

NS: Our technical work is guided by three ethical principles that we actually refer to as our mission pillars. And the first is Land Without Landlords, which really understands that one of our critical work is to decommodify land and housing. Not only to extract it from this really damaging conversation around what housing is for, what land is for, but it transforms it then into having the potential to be a cultural asset where people can find permanence, they can find the time they need to build a base for themselves over generations. And they have a place to return to because of the permanence of removing it from the speculative market.

Our second mission pillar is Restorative Economics and restorative economics really recognizes that communities have been dispossessed of more than just the tangible asset of land and housing, but all of the intangibles that really constitute wealth – education, inclusion, and conversations, awareness of techniques and strategies, presence in the flows of movement of politics and money. So the people we serve are not just our resident owners who live and work in our acquisitions, but actually are community owners who we include in planning conversations, strategy conversations, so that they understand the landscape and their access to tools where EBPREC is not the bottleneck, but rather the fomenter of their empowerment.

And our third mission pillar, Heal People Power, is really about rejecting these entrenched Western hierarchical practices inside of our own organizational practices, which is what makes Black and Brown organizations quite fragile. So each of our technical interventions are informed by a deeper need to heal interpersonal, intercommunal relationships, so that our access to capital is not so short lived as it has been in the past, right?

LF: Not owing high rates of interest makes resources available to invest in community culture. In Oakland, EBPREC’s investment fund helped local artists start a cafe and a community center. Community Development Corporations, or CDCs, which grew out of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, are nonprofit organizations intended to do much the same thing, through institutionalizing democratic control over the development process. Land can be used for racial justice, as in EBPREC’s case, or for green transition as in the Dakotas, where indigenous communities are developing a wind farm on tribal land that will generate revenue for the Standing Rock Nation.

But there’s no action for transformative change if people in communities don’t act. As Noni Session put it, waiting for leaders to lead is a fool’s errand. Cooperation is a place to start.

NS: Two of our residential acquisitions are fully homed with their owners. Our first one is a multi-unit building in North Oakland with teachers and activists and gardeners. Our second is a single family home in Berkeley with a detached dance studio where incidentally, they’re now launching a business plan for working Black women artists. Our third acquisition is Esther’s Orbit Room where we have closed escrow, we’ve hired a local firm, Sobi Design Build. We have done lots of community engagement and actually brought jazz back to this historical venue for the first time in 10 years. And now we’re on a search for our artists and businesses who we will support in being grounded and launching from inside of the Esther’s Orbit Room venue.

And so Esther’s Orbit Room functions as kind of a cultural artifact for West Oakland, where we’re leveraging the meaningfulness of it to gather kind of a customer base and a community base around it as a pilot model, that then we’re planning to duplicate along the 7th Street corridor.

If we continue to wait for our city leaders to restart our communities, we’re going to wait because the formula isn’t there. The formula is in cooperative economics.

LF: The word “economy” comes from the Greek word “oikonomos,” which means household management, more or less. The word “ecology” has the same root, as in management of the Earth household. Global corporate capitalism could hardly be further from that way of making the world. To the contrary, it is single-focused on the concentration of wealth, which results in a whole lot of poverty – a world of have-nots and have-a-lots. Ironically, its ecological consequence may well be a world that is uninhabitable – a homeless planet.

So what can be done? The reality is that all the great American fortunes were made mostly as a result of government policies – by the rules that govern the economy and the decisions that governments make. As we’ve seen in these examples of community wealth building, government can serve the people through its use of land and property to create affordable public housing – through policies that support tenant-rights, rent control and eviction defense – or through social housing that’s off the private market permanently – and ultimately through making affordable housing a human right. Maybe we can even start thinking about homes and our planet as places to live and tend for ourselves and the future, rather than flippable commodities for somebody’s short term profit.

American philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said, “I have faith in a seed.” And today’s experiments in community wealth building are like those seeds –they’ve been sprouting around the world, largely without much help. Where government policy, power and culture shift, they’re ready to grow and take root.

But what if we put economics back at the center of our decision making as pertains to the good life? Much of what we’ve talked about in this series isn’t new. But it is what communities and people all around the world believe we urgently need now, which is new thinking, new radical thinking – as radical as the changes that are coming to our homes and our lives and our Earth. Are we thinking radically enough for these times?

For The Bioneers, I’m Laura Flanders. Thanks for joining me.

Solidarity Economics: Taking It to the Bank to Build Community Wealth

In this episode on community wealth building, we look at how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing the assets that exist in their place. It’s the Kryptonite to the corporate model that extracts wealth from communities. Instead, they’re anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance.

We hear from Nicole Ndumele from the Center for American Progress; Mike Strode, from the Kola Nut Collaborative; and Deyanira del Río of the New Economy Project.

This episode is part 3 of a 4-part series exploring how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing their assets, anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance. Explore the full series here.

Guest Host

Credits

This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends
Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel
Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
Producer: Teo Grossman
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Resources

Center for American Progress

New Economy Project

O pen Collective Foundation

The Kola Nut Collaborative

Our Economic Future: Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas | Bioneers Reader

Do Black Lives Matter to Big Banks?

Kola Nut Timebank: Building Community, One Hour at a Time

Full Conversation- Kola Nut Timebank: Building Community, One Hour at a Time

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Today a global financial super-elite has attained unprecedented heights of inequality – a world of have-nots and have-a-lots. This obscene wealth inequality is also antithetical to democracy. So how do we break the vicious cycle and democratize the economy?

In this episode, we look at how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing the assets that exist in their place. It’s the Kryptonite to the corporate model that extracts wealth from communities. Instead, they’re anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance.

We hear from Nicole Ndumele from the Center for American Progress; Mike Strode, from the Kola Nut Collaborative; and Deyanira del Río of the New Economy Project.

This special series was produced in collaboration with Laura Flanders & Friends, the public TV and radio program that reports on social change experiments every week on PBS and online.

This is “The Solidarity Economy: Taking it to the Bank to Build Community Wealth” with guest host Laura Flanders on the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Laura Flanders (LF): Wealth matters. As distinct from income, it’s the money, property, investments and assets that a person or a community has beyond what they need day-to-day to survive. Whoever has wealth tends to be able to accumulate ever more of it through speculating, saving, or investing – in businesses – or in influencing policy. After all, most great American fortunes are also the result of government policy. It’s the Golden Rule: Who has the gold makes the rules.

Wealth doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from some fairly specific places. In the US for example, Indigenous lands were seized and claimed by colonizers with the help of government forces. Women were barred from owning property, and were property themselves under law. African people were kidnapped and treated as personal, tradeable property and coerced to make wealth for others – wealth in which they did not share. None of that should have been legal. It certainly wasn’t moral, but it was sanctioned and assisted by governments and courts and banks; and those institutions were dominated – you guessed it – by the very people who had the most influence and wealth.

Nicole Ndumele is the Center for American Progress’ first senior vice president of Rights and Justice. In this position at that progressive think tank, she leads the organization’s work in promoting policy solutions that address human rights, justice, and equity, and at the center of all that is the exponentially expanding problem of wealth inequality. One dimension of that is racialized capitalism.

Nicole Ndumele

Nicole Ndumele (NN): There’s actually a very clear through line from the beginning of the country until now that there have been systemic institutional racist policies within the government and within the financial industry that have gotten us to the wealth gap we experience today.

What it means is that wealth in America is highly unevenly distributed by race. And some dollars and cents to that is that Black families have 12 cents of wealth for every dollar of a white family. So what does that mean, really? It means that in 2019, white families had an average of $188,000 in wealth compared to just $24,000 is the average for Black families. So that’s where you can see the huge difference in how Black and white Americans experience wealth in this country.

LF: The policies and practices and laws that powerful institutions devise determine how money flows and to whom and where. Over generations, thanks to interest rates and inheritance laws – and now dark money tax havens – all that wealth piles up in certain, disproportionately white and male hands.

And so at the beginning of the 21st century, we find ourselves here: in a massively unequal world – and one that was engineered to be that way. The question is if it was engineered to be like this, could it be engineered differently?

In this series, we’re looking at what people and communities are doing, not to correct or reform or repair the worst of the abuses of the current way of doing things, but to design their economies differently, so as to produce better results for people and the planet as a matter of course. In this, no matter is more important, or more tricky, than the question of who has access to money, loans, finance, capital, wealth. And what is that money used for?

NN: Another really startling way of looking at this is that white college dropouts have more wealth than Black college graduates. That just really gets to the high level of disparity and the systemic nature of it. It started with slavery. It continued through Jim Crow segregation and occupational segregation of African-Americans in this country. It continues through financial markets today in various ways.

It has to do with lending. Who gets loans from banks? At what rates do they get those loans? Who is able to have a home and a mortgage, which is one of the major generators of wealth in America. The numbers for Black and white Americans in terms of home ownership, home mortgages, and the rates they pay are very different.

Similar to who is able to live out the American dream of having a small business, small businesses there are far fewer Black Americans who are able to get the capital they need from the financial industry to start those businesses and live out those dreams. So those are some concrete ways.

There’s other ways in which where banks are located and what products they provide and whether they’re meeting the needs of communities contribute to the wealth gap in significant ways. So if there’s no banks in your communities, that means you are relying on payday lenders and loans and other financial services that give you less and cost you more. All of those things are some of the key reasons that the financial industry is still contributing to the racial wealth gap today.

LF: Studies show that Black-owned banks approve a higher percentage of loans to Black applicants than other banks, but their impact is limited by their low numbers in the country and their often precarious financial situations themselves. In an effort to promote and support more minority-owned banks, in 2008, the board of directors of the U.S. Federal Reserve created a Partnership for Progress, which worked with minority bankers to assess their needs and provide them with new tools and skills.

The program tried to build capacity among minority bankers and raise their visibility nationwide. Still, between 2010 and 2021, the United States closed over 15,500 banks, with the majority of them located in Black communities that already had few alternatives. The problems weren’t personal or professional, they were systemic and they were the same problems that affected the residents. Racial segregation, limited access to capital and loans, and having few real relationships with people in power made it hard for Black business owners to establish, expand, and thrive. And the same problems faced their bankers.

The 2008 financial crash, which stripped billions of dollars of property wealth out of Black communities, was cataclysmic. Black and Latino households lost 48 and 44 percent of their wealth, respectively, while white households lost just 26 percent of theirs. The Covid 19 pandemic just made things worse. Black businesses closed at twice the rate of white ones in the early days of Covid. 41% of black businesses shut down permanently. Meanwhile, in a feat of disaster capitalism, the financial elites engineered perhaps the biggest wealth transfer in history into their coffers.

So what can be done? A community wealth building approach looks at the entire financial ecosystem, from lending, investment and ownership to day-to-day banking. What if it were designed and operated specifically to make an entire community more stable and more equal? If that sounds like an old school local bank of the sort movies have been made about, it is. But it could also be a mission-driven community development financial institution, or CDFI, or a cooperatively-owned bank or credit union, or a public bank charged specifically with advancing racial justice.

Again, Nicole Ndumele of the Center for American Progress.

NN: There’s not gonna be a silver bullet to one policy solution or one model that’s gonna solve the racial wealth gap. It’s gonna require an entire whole of government approach. How do we make it possible for more people of color to be able to buy homes? What do we need to do in the financial industry to allow more people of color to be able to start their own businesses? Are there ways that we can expand the current range of banking products that exist; including are there other types of banking options that are out there like postal banking, but every community has a post office, if we allowed banking services to be in post offices, more communities of color could have low cost, high service banking options.

We can expand community development financial institutions, because their goal is really to get financial services to those who are most in need. Banks can open more branches in Black and brown communities. Banks can offer more services that are tailored to the needs of those communities so that the current numbers of Black and brown people who are underbanked or completely unbanked will go away. So that Black and brown people can have a bank, a local banker in their community. They can have savings accounts that allow them to build wealth. They can open businesses, they can buy homes, do all of the things that allow for wealth in the way that exists in many white communities in America.

There are a lot of bite-sized solutions that when pieced together and layered can really help to overcome what is 400 years of history. It’s not gonna happen today, it is not gonna happen in a year or two years. It’s gonna require a sustained commitment to address the long history that’s led us to where we are.

LF: Banks could do a lot of good. With trillions of dollars in assets, they could invest in redistributive, creative, and environmentally healthy ways. But mostly they don’t – being private and generally large with lots of interests and far-off investors, they prioritize pumping up profits. And yet billions of public dollars are invested in private banks every day. What if we redirected those public dollars into a public bank?

A coalition in New York – the Public Bank NYC Coalition – wants the city’s government to do just that. $100 billion in public city money is handled by private banks in New York every year. That’s money from taxes and revenues and grants and New York worker pension funds. And those private banks are free to do what they want with that money, some of it in the public interest, and much of it not – like investing in fossil fuels and private prisons and buying up real estate for speculation in a way that causes a housing crisis.

The Public Bank NYC Coalition wants to create a city-owned and operated public bank that would act as the city’s public banker. That way the interest from those investments could go back to public coffers and those public dollars could be used for public purposes, not private gain. Advocating for a public bank is part of the social and racial justice mission of Deyanira del Río, the Co-Director of New York’s New Economy Project.

Deyanira del Río (DdR): Right now, we literally have billions of public dollars that the city has collected – and that instead of being reinvested back in our local economy, back in local communities are being siphoned out by these banks and invested outside of New York City and in very destructive kinds of projects and so what we’re pushing for through this coalition Public Bank NYC is for a really bold vision for what a city-owned, public municipal bank could do if the city peeled off even some of those billions of dollars to put in a bank that it creates for the public good.

LF: Deyanira del Río advocates for financial institutions that are more accessible and equitable for low income Americans, immigrants and people of color. A public bank could provide basic high-quality banking services to the hundreds of thousands of New York families who remain unbanked or underbanked, and create new opportunities to support existing community development financial institutions in underserved communities.

DdR: Our vision in New York City is that a municipal public bank could be chartered specifically to reinvest public dollars, back into real economic needs that so many low income neighborhoods and communities of color in New York City are struggling with, needs that the banks are not meeting.

Some of those examples include cooperative, democratically controlled institutions right now that are really taking root in neighborhoods of color around the city in very exciting ways and creating safe, well paying jobs for immigrants and others who are routinely exploited in the private job market. We’re talking about financial cooperatives like community development credit unions that are actually mobilizing neighborhood deposits and investing in permanently affordable housing in local businesses and much more.

We’re talking about community land trusts, now that are on the rise in New York City, to say the least. There’s tremendous momentum now. There’s more than a dozen of these models that are being formed in different neighborhoods throughout the city, and what they’re doing is actually pretty radical in a sense, although from a different point of view it’s common sense. They are taking land out of the private market, saying this is not something that should be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Land belongs to everyone, and there should be a way to manage land that is in the public interest.

LF: After cities, come states, and the North Dakota Public Bank is a famous testament to the fact that public banking models can work at the state level, too. For over a century, this public bank has prioritized serving North Dakotan farms and businesses. And it’s done that because it’s written into its charter. Instead of solely focusing on maximizing profit, the bank is required to invest in the residents of the state. Most of its lending is done in partnership with local banks and credit unions, too.

The system has helped many small businesses survive. At the start of the Covid pandemic, for example, the North Dakota Public Bank helped North Dakota small-business owners secure more paycheck protection loans, or PPP loans, from the government than those in any other state.

But at the same time, the bank has also invested heavily in fossil fuels and it loaned almost $10 million to law enforcement efforts to break up the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation. And that’s a reminder that public institutions are only as good as the people who govern them.

Back in New York in 2022, Public Bank NYC demanded that the City cut ties with Wells Fargo in response to reports that that bank discriminated against Black homeowners. Two weeks later, the Mayor and Comptroller did exactly that – they cut off relations with Wells Fargo and announced new measures to hold the banks that hold city money “more accountable”.

A few months after that, however, in May of 2023, in a first-ever public hearing before the NYC Banking Commission about the designation of which banks could be eligible to hold public money, the City approved all the banks that applied, including scandal-ridden Wells Fargo. So, members of the Public Bank NYC Coalition and the New Economy Project reiterated their view that the best way to ensure that public money is reinvested locally in ways that advance the public interest is for the City to establish a public bank with racial and social justice written into its charter.

When we return, you’ll hear more about rooting money locally, and Mike Strode, of the Kola Nut Collaborative in Chicago, will remind us that money isn’t the only sort of wealth there is. I’m Laura Flanders and you’re listening to The Bioneers.

LF: We’ve been hearing from Deyanira del Río of the New Economy Project about public banking and the push for a publicly owned bank in New York. New York City’s not alone in wanting a public bank and there are lots of reasons to go public. I spoke with Deyanira del Rio about that movement.

DdR: There are certainly more cities that are looking at public banking and largely sort of the growing movement for divestment is creating a new urgency for public banking. We’ve heard from cities all over the country that say they want to divest from certain banks because of their investments in pipelines, in fossil fuels, in private prisons. Progressive city councils don’t want public money to be supporting the caging of human beings and our ecological destruction.

We want to make sure that the vision for a public bank isn’t just a publicly-owned bank for its own sake. We want to have a really strong progressive vision so that this bank can be a force. We have no illusions that this is going to be an easy battle, we know what is ahead. Here in New York, the banking lobby pretty much comes out swinging for even the very basic kind of demands that they are more transparent in disclosing the kinds of investments they make.

We think building a broad coalition very deliberately is going to be really key to our success. So we have labor groups, we have community organizations, we have divestment focused organizations, we have community development lenders, and also the growing landscape of cooperatives in the city that are really excited about this idea that there could be a public institution that supports them. So right now we have worker co-ops growing around the city, the city of New York itself has invested in them. We have strong community development credit unions, like the lower east side. But they’re operating as a kind of oasis in this broader system of capitalism and exploitation. And so the idea that there could be a public bank putting public dollars safely, right, into these institutions, investing in proven successful models is something that’s really exciting.

LF: Coalition building has been working. In 2014, after organizing by a wide array of local groups, including the New Economy Project, New York City appropriated $1.2 million to fund the development of worker cooperatives – the largest such investment by a city government at that time. Since then, that appropriation has grown, and other cities have followed suit. Could a public bank also be in the city’s future? In the meantime, many public advocates point to credit unions as an alternative to the big, for-profit private banks.

Credit unions operate like member-owned financial cooperatives, serving their members who can be a designated group, such as government employees or union members, or residents of a certain geographic area. Since they don’t have highly paid CEOs and shareholders, credit unions return their earnings to their members, typically through lower interest rates on loans, higher rates on savings, or other services.

According to the Credit Union National Association, there were roughly 119 million credit union memberships at the beginning of 2019, and some 5,500 credit unions. More than 19% of U.S. households use a credit union as their primary financial institution today.

They can be a great alternative to commercial banks and invest in what communities need. And some, like Community Development Credit Unions, are established to do just that. But what if we looked at local assets and value in a different way altogether? Some community needs can actually be met without money at all.

Mike Strode (MS): Timebanking is essentially this very low-level form of collaboration, cooperation, that allows people to build towards more complex collaboration and cooperation. So what I see timebanking as doing at its most basic form is mapping assets in communities, developing reciprocal networks of support and care and communities, and network weaving within communities.

LF: Mike Strode is a Program Officer for the Open Collective Foundation and is the founder of The Kola Nut Collaborative, the first Timebank in Chicago.

MS: Timebanking at its essence is using time as a type of currency. So using an hour of my time that I might spend providing a bike riding lesson to a child in the neighborhood, or teaching a neighbor how to use their computer. So using an hour of my time as a type of currency, I go and support someone with the skill that I have named in the timebank. I earn an hour in the timebank, and then I’m able to spend that hour on something that I need. Perhaps it’s massage services at a local business, or perhaps it’s some other exchange that I might need within the timebank. But ultimately it’s me being able to use my time as the currency of exchange that we use to meet our needs and to access things.

Every hour is the same. And that’s really important, because we want to drive home the idea within timebanking that every skill, every type of work, is necessary and useful. In fact, redefining work is the core value of timebanking. So ultimately everybody in a community is meaningful and everybody does valuable work.

Timebanking allows us to say, here are the things that I have as skills and capacities and gifts that I’d like to offer inside of the community. And then it also encourages people to name their needs, name the things that they need to show up more fully in community and be able to match-make between those things. So it becomes this sort of nugget of more complex collaboration and cooperation to come.

LF: Timebanking reminds us that what we value changes as our needs change. In the Covid Pandemic, for example, no one was more needed or more valued than the person who delivered healthcare or food to people’s homes. And yet, those so-called “essential workers” were typically paid very little and, as measured in money, hardly valued at all. Centering human needs, the time banking model changes how we think about value, our own and other people’s. In a country as big as this one, says Strode, a one-size fits all set of values, like a financial balance sheet, doesn’t suit all, at all. Again, Mike Strode:

MS: We have all the disparities, I think, but what people have finally begun to acknowledge since 2020 that a lot of us have been fighting for decades is that understanding the root causes of every issue is tied to systemic and institutional racism. I mean, we talk about wealth building, we talk about building equity, we talk about disinvestment, but then we have to look at the policies, the practices that have plagued the red lining in our communities that have caused this decades and decades. And now we’re trying to swim our way out of.

It’s really about community self-determination. So communities want to be self-determining. They want to have some political control over what happens in their community, some social control, and some level of economic autonomy or economic independence. And so the combination of those things along with sort of this larger community stewardship, how we steward things together collectively, these are the sort of elements of the solidarity economy.

And solidarity economy is grounded in a few values that, you know, that we like to make sure that we name, which deals with solidarity, equity in all dimensions, participatory democracy, ecological stewardship, and pluralism, right? We want to make sure that everyone feels that they can show up in the solidarity economy.

And so ultimately we are still in capitalism. It’s an evolving framework, an evolving system. And so until we rest ourselves from capitalism, we will continue to be very far from the solidarity economy. But what we do have is communities that already exhibit these values of solidarity, cooperation, mutualism, participatory democracies, equity. We already have social movements that have these values at the core. And so ultimately it’s just about continuing to foster collaboration between those social movements, continuing to push in the political spaces where resistance is happening, continuing to push in societal spaces where resistance is happening and moving slowly along. It’s about the solidarity that we have with each other. And it’s about the fact that recognizing that we are all in the community trying to meet our needs, trying to engage with our political officials to get those needs met. And so those are things that show us the way towards the solidarity economy.

LF: In today’s economy, most of our relationships are mediated through money and money holds a unique value because of what it enables us to do. The idea that we could collaborate with each other directly and operate in what Strode calls a solidarity economy may seem far out, or at least far off. But experiments are happening, and many are working.

Is it easier to leave economic decision making to other people? Often it is. But if we want better, more democratic outcomes, more people are going to have to get involved in how we structure our economies. The first step is realizing that there is more than one way it can be done.

For the Bioneers, I’m Laura Flanders.

From Wealth Supremacy to Community Wealth Building: Models for Democratizing the Economy

Today’s corporate, capitalist economy is radically unequal, ecologically unsustainable, and embedded in recurring boom-and-bust cycles of crisis. Not surprisingly, people are looking for alternatives. What if, instead of tweaking the system to reduce the damage, we reorganized entirely so that both local and national economies produced better outcomes for people, communities and the planet in the first place?

That’s the essence of community wealth building, the focus of this episode with guest host Laura Flanders, featuring Democracy Collaborative Distinguished Senior Fellow, Marjorie Kelly; Preston City Council Member, Matthew Brown in the UK; and community wealth building adviser to the Scottish Government, Neil McInroy.

This episode is part 2 of a 4-part series exploring how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing their assets, anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance. Explore the full series here.

Guest Host

Credits

This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends
Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel
Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
Producer: Teo Grossman
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Resources

Democracy Collaborative

Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and The Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises

Action Guide for Advancing Community Wealth Building in the United States | Democracy Collaborative

Gar Alperovitz – Replacing Corporate Capitalism: Why We Need a Next System | Bioneers 2018 Keynote

Our Economic Future: Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas | Bioneers Reader

Catastrophic Capitalism: Marjorie Kelly & Edgar Villanueva on “Wealth Supremacy”

Full Conversation- Catastrophic Capitalism: Marjorie Kelly & Edgar Villanueva on “Wealth Supremacy”

Marjorie Kelly on the Capitalism Crisis: “Wealth Supremacy” is Killing Us

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Today’s corporate, capitalist economy is radically unequal, ecologically unsustainable, and embedded in recurring boom-and-bust cycles of crisis. Not surprisingly, people are looking for alternatives. What if, instead of tweaking the system to reduce the damage, we reorganized entirely so that both local and national economies produced better outcomes for people, communities and the planet in the first place?

That’s the essence of Community Wealth Building. In this episode, we hear from Democracy Collaborative Distinguished Senior Fellow, Marjorie Kelly; Preston City Council Member, Matthew Brown in the UK; and community wealth building adviser to the Scottish Government, Neil McInroy.

This special series is produced in collaboration with Laura Flanders & Friends, which reports on systems change experiments every week on PBS TV stations and online.

This is “From Wealth Supremacy to Community Wealth Building: Models for Democratizing the Economy” with guest host Laura Flanders… on the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Laura Flanders (LF): The way we talk about the economy makes it sound as if there’s only one, and it’s a bit like the weather, a naturally – or semi-naturally – occurring phenomenon. But over time, humans have organized society and their economies in lots of different ways. From agricultural societies, with peasants and lords, we moved to industrial ones with robber barons and bosses against workers and unions. From monarchies we moved towards democracies where leaders were chosen, not ordained by birth or divine right.

And along the way, we’ve set all sorts of different priorities. Given the resources we have – people, land, capital, the public purse, is the priority to pay an army to protect us from invaders? Or is it to invest in healthcare, or roads or science in schools? The economy, as we call it, is just a reflection of our priorities – it’s the way we move money around to achieve them. And that’s a matter of human choices.

Today we have an economy with a fundamental systems error. Business observer Marjorie Kelly calls it “wealth supremacy”.

Marjorie Kelly (MK): Wealth supremacy is both a culture and institutions that favor the wealthy. It’s a form of bias. Wealth has the power to influence government, influence philanthropy to control corporations. We live with wealth supremacy in a largely invisible way. We have a sense it’s there, but what I’m trying to do is name it and help us see it.

LF: How did we get here? For the past fifty years, one approach called “neoliberalism” has dominated economic policy making in the West. Neoliberalism is driven by the idea that if people and companies are free to make as much money as they can, that will benefit everyone thanks to the so-called invisible hand of the market.

Under neoliberalism, say these market fundamentalists, we don’t need government to take taxes from the rich in order to help and give services to the poor. We don’t need to regulate working conditions or environmental impacts. Neoliberals believe that the rich will employ more people, buy more things, share their profits and generally do the right thing, if only they are left free to do it. Wealth, in other words, will trickle down like rain.

Except that’s not what’s happened. Instead of money moving around, it’s piled up. And no matter how much tweaking governments have tried to do to make inequality less painful or less extreme, it hasn’t change things. Marjorie Kelly.

MK: Why are things getting worse and not better? And the reason is we failed to touch the essence of the system. We failed to challenge the idea that you can maximize returns to shareholders and maximize gains to our portfolios. And that’s the problem.

LF: In her book, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and The Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises, Kelly decided to look, not at the effects, but at the very essence of the system we have today. And what she found was an economy that looked very different from the one she’d grown up with. Instead of trickling down to workers and makers, wealth was swirling around in the stock market. Vast profits were being made, but not through producing things or making things. The financialization of the economy was like a casino – money making money off money – and the house almost always wins. I had a chance to talk with Kelly about all of this soon after her book came out in September of 2023.

MK: We’re talking about financial assets. When I was a kid in the 1950s, financial assets, and that’s you know equities and bonds and other forms of debt. Those were roughly equal in the US to GDP. Right? Which is flows of income and spending the

LF: The Gross domestic product.

MK: Right. Gross domestic product. Now, financial assets are five times GDP, but we don’t even count that as inflationary. We think this can grow infinitely forever to any size, and we don’t even view it as a problem. But it is.

LF: Why, I mean, isn’t it good to have more wealth in the world?

MK: Sure. Just like it’s great to drive our cars where we want and to put our thermostats high. I mean, it seems like a good thing, but in the aggregate what happens is it’s extracting too much from the rest of us. I mean, look at, for example, when the big tech firms hit a bump in the road on their share price, the first thing they did was throw thousands of workers out of jobs. There’s a very direct correlation between share price and cutting costs, which generally means cutting labor. Debt is another form of it, families are swimming in debt. We very rarely ask ourselves, who owns that debt? Who’s receiving those payments? And it’s a financial elite and it’s big institutional investors. And so there’s an extraction going on and it’s sapping the resilience of our society.

When you financialize mortgages, basically it’s no longer just a person taking out a loan so that you can pay off your house. You’re bundling them, turning them into derivatives, selling them to investors, and lo and behold, it almost brought down the global economy. Since then, American families have lost more than $7 trillion in equity in their homes. There’s been a lot of foreclosures, but guess who’s buying up those foreclosed homes? It’s big capital. They’re stepping in and now they’re financializing houses, and so they’re bundling houses for investors. And how do they increase their profits? They neglect maintenance, they raise the rents and they pursue aggressive evictions.

LF: In the old days when I studied economics, it was understood that a business as opposed to a farm or something, but it could be a farm, but moving from agrarian economies to industrial ones, from sort of peasants and lords to workers and bosses, we were told that the bosses would have to raise a certain amount of capital. They did that from their friends and relations, they called them stocks and shares. And that capital went into expanding the business, hiring more people, investing in machines, perhaps even, who knows, maybe raising wages. Why doesn’t that happen now? And what’s changed?

MK: You know, we’re not in the economy of the 1950s anymore, and we act as though we are; that finance is this productive force and it’s building wealth. Well, for the most part, it’s not. They’ve become an extractive force. And a big piece of this is that we’re not really distinguishing between productive investments and speculative investments when we’re investing in the stock market. We’re mostly just hoping that the value of those shares will rise. That money is not actually reaching companies and being used in productive ways.

We can see it with private equity too, that they’ll buy newspapers, for example, old age homes or rural hospitals and they’ll cut services and layer debt onto these companies and then write themselves a big check at the private equity firm. So that’s extraction, that’s not building wealth, that’s siphoning off wealth, and we don’t talk about investing that way, but it’s something new that has risen in our time. There’s way too much financial wealth and too little wealth reaching the rest of us. And so we need to turn and look at the design of the system.

LF: Where others had looked at the effects of our economic system, Kelly took that deep look at the design, and she found that not unlike the old “divine right of kings”, today’s economics is built on a series of myths based on a kind of divine right of capital.

MK: I take apart the operating system of capitalism, and I look at seven myths, really, that really drive it. You know, for example, the myth of maximization, the idea that no amount of wealth is ever enough. Bill Gates had $10 billion, which is more money than any of us can even conceive of. What did he do? He invested it. Now he has more than $300 billion. There’s something kind of absurd about that. So much wealth in the hands of one person.

There’s the principle, the myth of the income statement which says gains to capital, which we call profit – this lovely word – have to be always increased and gains to labor, which we call this horrid name expense, have to always be decreased. Well, that’s built into the income statement that every corporation uses. So it’s this tautology of what I call capital bias. That capital is what matters. We’re aiming for more capital and nothing else really matters. That’s the operating system of the economy.

Capitalism is, it’s an ism. It’s like racism and sexism. It’s a bias toward, toward capital. We can still have companies, we can still have investments, but we need to remove capital bias from that system and say, no, this system exists to serve life, people and planet. That’s why it exists. And you can do that.

LF: So what would the economy look like if we organized our priorities differently? For an answer to that question, look at Spain. Often dire conditions produce breakthrough innovations and that’s what happened there in the middle of the 20th century after the Spanish Civil War.

It was under the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in the Basque region of Northwest Spain, when the region was occupied, and its language, culture and people repressed, that the Mondragon Cooperatives saw their start. A young Catholic priest, called Arizmendiarrieta, came as a kind of missionary – he had a vision for social change based on human dignity and solidarity as a way for meeting human needs, and using the economy as a vehicle for social justice.

The Mondragon Federation of Cooperatives that he helped to start, was founded in 1956 with just a few businesses and a few hundred worker-owners – mostly people who had nothing – neither jobs, nor savings, nor insurance, nor schools. Today, the federation is Spain’s 10th largest business, with well over 80,000 members of staff, as well as its own technical university and a community bank.

I had a chance to visit Mondragon, where I met with factory worker-owners and the people behind a local media co-op that shares Basque-language reporting and news across the region. As Aitor Lagoma, a journalist, and one of the worker owners at GOEINA cooperative, explained, they’ve helped to revive a language that was banned and become a successful business, through cooperation.

Aitor Lagoma (AL): So my name is Aitor and we are in Mondragon, in GOEINA, and we produce a magazine, a newspaper, and even a digital magazine and TV

We started in 70s or before, and this was Franco that was a dictator and the Basque language was banned. So, when Franco dies in the 80s, we needed the Basque language in medias and production and all the things, because we don’t have anything. We just have TV, national TV, but we don’t have anything else like magazines for the people in Basque.

So we are a cooperative working with associations working for Basque language. Many people from here own part of the cooperative and each one owns part of the business. Also to have more power and we work better and we can maybe be stronger.

The people who are living in the towns and even in the cities, it’s more personal. They know what’s happening around them. Good things, bad things, but they have the information. And they take it in Basque. That, for us, is so important.

LF: The Mondragon co-ops didn’t just employ people and give them a stake in the businesses where they worked. The coops created a new, networked system, a regional federation, and a new culture based on a distinct set of values. What’s the difference between our sort of priorities in the U.S. and theirs?

Well, in the U.S., capital sits in first place over labor. But in their system, it’s the other way around.

What that means in practice is that in 2008, for example, after the financial crash, when U.S. businesses were doing everything they could to lay off workers so as to preserve profits for shareholders, the Mondragon coops were doing everything they could to keep people employed. Businesses that were doing better absorbed workers from those that were doing less well. The social safety net, if you will, was actually social. And that was no surprise, because as the people of Mondragon told me when I visited, the purpose of the Basque economy, as far as they’re concerned, isn’t to generate maximum shareholder value for others, it’s to provide decent, ongoing, secure work for one another. And that’s a very fundamental difference.

As the Basque people discovered, even under dictatorship they actually could meet their needs. The same is true of most places. There’s no lack of resources, per se, they just need to be reorganized. First and foremost, wealth needs to stop leaking out of a place.

When we return, we’ll visit a town in Lancashire, England, where residents are committed to a promising experiment in community wealth building inspired in part by Mondragon.

I’m guest host Laura Flanders. You’re listening to the Bioneers.

LF: Preston is a post-industrial skeleton of a city of 150,000 people in the midlands of the UK in Lancashire, and by 2012 it was in full-blown crisis. Years of neoliberal economics had led to manufacturing declining and jobs becoming scarce. The biggest spenders left in town were public institutions – a university, a hospital, the local housing authority, the police department and the city government itself.

Matthew Brown, a city councilor in Preston, England, started thinking about his own town’s policy options and its priorities and wondering whether they could do things differently. He was inspired in part by reading about Mondragon and the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio. Here’s Brown.

Matthew Brown (MB): I was quite inspired by what’s happening in Mondragon, which is in Spain, where they’d organized themselves in work around businesses. I was inspired by what happened in places like Italy, where in Bologna, they’d organized themselves in cooperatives there. But I was also inspired by Cleveland and the work they’ve done there to actually get the local public sector to purchase locally and get a living wage, and get other social and environmental benefits. The Preston model, it’s a collaborative approach, but its key features is we want a democratic economy, and we want to capture wealth, and create wealth, within the Preston-Lancashire community.

LF: After a failed attempt to stimulate private industry in Preston by attracting a major shopping chain to a new mall, Brown persuaded his colleagues to try the Community Wealth Building approach.

Instead of looking outside for rescue, they started looking within. They began by taking an inventory of how much money their locally rooted, so-called “anchor institutions” were actually spending and whom they were buying from.

Then they set about getting some of those spenders to commit to shifting more of their contracts to local contractors and paying a living wage. In 2018, I visited Brown in Preston to see how their new approach was working.

MB: In 2016/17 within Preston, there was 75 million pounds we’ve redirected to Preston-based suppliers. Across Lancashire there was 200 million. But there’s also the cumulative effect, which we haven’t really measured. We’ve been at this since 2012/13, so obviously we didn’t get to that amount straight away, we had to go bit by bit. You’re probably talking about 150 million in Preston that’s been redirected. But also job density, as I said, the amount of jobs available per working age person. That is one of the best in Lancashire as well, in the Northwest.

LF: In just its first ten years, the Preston project has registered 6 new worker-owned cooperatives. They include the UK’s first labor union co-op, a Cooperative Education Centre, and the first Community Land Trust in Central Lancashire. It also includes the Leighton Street Cooperative, which is owned and run on public land by the local Roma, or “traveler”, community. The number of real living wage jobs is up, increasing from 76% to 88% of all jobs from 2015 to 2022.

Preston has built the largest number of affordable housing units in all of Lancashire, and reduced child poverty. It’s not happened by chance. It’s been intentional, using government as the driver of change. Again, Brown

MB: We’ve still got huge inequality, and when you go up to the north of England that is amplified. We’re heading towards an American situation in which you’ve got a small few hundred of people who tend to have about 30 or 40% of the wealth of the economy, and I don’t believe you can have a democratic society if there’s that wealth inequality, because they tend to have a lot of influence over politics..

After the Preston model, what’s happened, there’s been a real push and real culture change to actually buy from local suppliers, support local businesses especially, get a real living wage, get apprentices, get environmental benefits. And there’s this collaboration across the majority of the local public sector which is really fascinating, and it’s bringing about results.

LF: Matthew Brown says the job is far from done, but the culture is shifting. He’s won re-election time and again, even in election cycles when his Party – the UK Labour Party – did terribly. Also, he’s no longer an outlier.

Neil McInroy is a Scotsman with a thick Scottish brogue and he’s Community Wealth Building Adviser to the Scottish government – the first government to have a position of that kind. He’s worked for years with politicians like Brown in Preston to democratize local economies, build local assets and create locally embedded wealth and living wage jobs.

Now, Neil’s working for the government of a country – his own, Scotland – on the biggest project yet. At the forefront is North Ayrshire, a region of some 130,000 people on Scotland’s west coast: a former hub of ship building that for the last few years has been particularly hard up. For a while, politicians here looked to tourism to address their problems. But that wasn’t working. Community wealth building offered a different paradigm.

Neil McInroy (NM): North Ayrshire is a very typical sort of post industrial location on the west coast of Scotland and it suffered under two main problems that community wealth building addresses. The traditional regeneration, or revitalization as you call it in the U.S., that payments to poor people to solve their issues. That didn’t seem to really dig right into the problems that those people were facing. The problems of economic development, this trickle down economics, let’s get the factories in, let’s get the investment in and then we’ll have a land of milk and honey.

So both revitalization was failing, but also the traditional economic development model. And through enlightened leadership in North Ayrshire, we’ve seen comprehensive strategies to develop community wealth building across many fronts in terms of public spending, in terms of workforce and workplace advancements, in terms of land and property and ownership of land and property, in terms of different forms of finance and how we use them effectively in the new ecosystem. And also in terms of the progressive procurement and spending of public sector resources in that locality – a suite of activities which seek to address this enduring problem of wealth and the extraction of wealth.

LF: McInroy worked with the people of Ayrshire to study where government money was being spent, and how local land and buildings were being used. Was local government using local financial institutions and banks? Was it supporting democratic, unionized, or worker-owned businesses? Was it expanding green infrastructure? And were local people involved in decision-making beyond voting for politicians every few years?

To advance real community wealth building requires real community involvement, after all. That takes different forms in different places. In the Basque region of Spain where we began, after 60-70 years, local cooperation is pretty much baked into the culture.

In Scotland, something called the Economic Development Association ran a series of workshops all over the country, which led to all the local councils now developing Community Wealth Building plans of their own.

In Preston, it’s taken years for Matthew Brown to reach the point where regular residents are aware of the model that their city is getting famous for, but the Covid pandemic revealed just how important all the relationship-building they’ve been doing had been. Compared to workers elsewhere, a university study revealed that the government employees of Preston adapted far faster to working remotely under COVID and proved to be particularly resilient and connected and creative. And that’s no surprise. Again, Neil McInroy.

NM: Because there’s in many areas, including Preston, because there’s a high percentage of the economy is relational and cooperatives, and those other democratic enterprises. When COVID hit, there was an affinity to the place, to the people. And also there was not the huge extraction of profits that come from shareholder dividends in some of those enterprises. So in a sense they were more resilient to that particular shock.

And I think there’s lessons there, you know, that the type of economy we’re talking about is one that is in tune more with the people, in tune with the problems they face. And it doesn’t make the short term shareholder profit decisions, it makes interest for the longer term. So there’s something quite powerful about that community wealth building in terms of the spirit of what an economy is. And of course the word economy comes from the Greek word, oikonomos, keeper of the household. It’s something that should be close to our hearts, close to our homes. The economy, at the end of day, it’s a social construction, and we can construct it anyway we want. And we were just talking here about making an economy that works for us.

In fact, we need to go faster, for sure, because we’ve got a huge climate crisis, as well as the whole other series of injustices that are taking place, but we need to seize the moment. And I think what’s exciting about what’s happening is that we’re seeing administrations starting to pick up on this. As soon as we get that mainstream state apparatus supporting this, then we can go faster. So I think we’re at the beginning, but we’re just about to take off. That’s my hope.

LF: Neil McInroy is right. You’ll see references to building “Community wealth” popping up all over, even across the Biden-Harris administration in Washington D.C. The term’s been used by the Economic Development Administration, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or HUD. And the idea has surfaced in federal legislation, like the CHIPS Act, which makes it easier for community-owned or democratically-owned businesses to get federal contracts.

Can we even imagine what our communities would look like if the trillions of dollars that the U.S. government spends every year were actually spent the community wealth building way?

Stay tuned. For The Bioneers, I’m Laura Flanders.

Community Wealth Building: Democratizing the Economy

In this special episode of the Bioneers, guest host Laura Flanders explores “Community Wealth Building,” a model that democratizes the economy, creates more cooperative businesses, better care for communities, and builds wealth for the many, not just the few. This episode features American political economist, historian, and author Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, along with India Pierce Lee about her work with the Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio; and John McMicken, Executive Director of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperative Corporation.

This special Bioneers series is produced in collaboration with the Laura Flanders Show. For roughly a decade, Laura Flanders, a long time reporter on economic and social change, has been looking for alternatives. A new economic model that’s different from either state socialism or the kind of capitalism we’ve come to know. She found some serious experiments in what many are calling community wealth building from the U.S. to the U.K, the Netherlands and Australia. These economic models are also laboratories of democracy, because, of course, wealth is power.

This episode is part 1 of a 4-part series exploring how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing their assets, anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance. Explore the full series here.

Guest Host

Credits

This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends
Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel
Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
Producer: Teo Grossman
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Resources

Democracy Collaborative

Evergreen Cooperatives

How to Make a Democratic Economy | Laura Flanders & Friends

Action Guide for Advancing Community Wealth Building in the United States | Democracy Collaborative

Gar Alperovitz – Replacing Corporate Capitalism: Why We Need a Next System | Bioneers 2018 Keynote

Our Economic Future: Achieving a More Equitable Society by Radically Rethinking Our Guiding Economic Ideas | Bioneers Reader

How to Make a Democratic Economy

Community Wealth Building: An Economic Reset

Full Conversation- Community Wealth Building: An Economic Reset

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Today’s economy is radically unequal, always in crisis, and destroying ecological systems we depend on. That’s no surprise, being that it’s organized to prioritize the interests of power, money and capital. How do we design a next economic system that centers the wellbeing, health and rights of people, communities and nature?

For roughly a decade, Laura Flanders, a long time reporter on economic and social change, has been looking for alternatives – new economic models that are different from either state socialism or the kind of capitalism we’ve come to know. She found some serious experiments in what many are calling “community wealth building” that are also laboratories of democracy, because, of course, wealth is power.

This special Bioneers series is produced in collaboration with Laura Flanders and Friends, the public TV and radio program that reports on social change experiments every week on PBS and online.

In this episode, we hear from American political economist, historian, and author Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, along with India Pierce Lee about her work with the Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio; and John McMicken, Executive Director of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperative Corporation.

This is “Community Wealth Building: Democratizing the Economy”, with guest host Laura Flanders, on the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Laura Flanders (LF): You don’t have to be an expert to know that the economy isn’t working for most people. Most of us are falling behind, running in place or working more than one job and a whole lot of us just aren’t happy.

The fight for $15 – ‘I’m tired all the time’ | Guardian Features | Film by Tom Pietrasik

When economists measure wealth – the U.S. is the top, or one of the top two wealthiest nations in the world, and has been for over 60 years. But measure happiness by looking at health, education, good governance, ecological diversity, or the ability to make really consequential choices in life – and this super rich nation isn’t even in the top ten.

So what’s the problem? Behind most social and ecological harms lurks an economic motive. So could there be a way to change those motivations by restructuring the economy, so as to put the health and happiness and rights of people, places and the natural world at the center?

One such approach is called “Community Wealth Building.” It’s a way to democratize the economy, create more cooperative and worker-owned businesses, care for our communities, and build wealth for the many in a way that’s good for us and the planet. One of the early thinkers behind this approach was political scientist and author/activist, Gar Alperovitz.

Gar Alperovitz (GA): Everybody knows we live in something called corporate capitalism. Now, that means there’s extreme concentration of wealth ownership. But the systemic problem is how you organize an advanced system so that you can reverse these trends with the institutions moving with you rather than against you.

LF: Gar Alperovitz has spent his entire life, coming up with ways to organize people, property and wealth differently – so as to serve society and the planet better than the way we do it now. As a young person, he worked in government on programs like the War on Poverty. He also worked with outside advocacy groups like the Institute for Policy Studies, which he helped to found, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Over and again, he saw how getting good politicians elected, and even good government programs enacted wasn’t enough. The way the economy worked simply skewed things in favor of the rich and powerful. Here’s Gar at a Bioneers conference back in 2012.

GA: One of the central issues is the distribution of income. There’s been a 30 year kind of flattening out of people working and not gaining at all. Most of the gains of—this is incredible, actually—most of the gains of the economic system over the last 30 years have gone to the upper top 1 to 2%. It’s extraordinary. That’s new in history.

And it tells you it’s a systemic problem, something deeply anchored in the nature of the system, not simply a political problem and not simply a policy problem, but something in the basement of the system is grinding out these kinds of long trends.

Other trends are also there, in terms of global warming, that one way or another the system is producing more climate changing gases, and they’re long trends of increase. We’re not altering them through the political system or the economic system. And it tells you that it’s a deep problem that has to be looked at in a different way than the usual political problem or the usual economic problem.

LF: In 2012, when Gar was speaking, 400 Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50% of us. By 2019, just 7 years later, three billionaires – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos – had more combined wealth than the bottom half of the population – that’s 160 million Americans.

During the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis years between 2020 and 2023, that trend just got worse. Almost two-thirds of all new wealth created in those years – a whopping $26 trillion dollars – went to the richest 1%. And it’s not as if they gave back.

Between 1980 and 2018, the Institute for Policy Studies reported the taxes paid by America’s billionaires measured as a percentage of their wealth went down, decreasing 79 percent.

GA: It’s not only inequitable, that is there’s inequality in that, and obviously we know a lot about how that feels and what it means—but it’s politically very powerful. Most economic systems – whether it be Medieval systems or capitalist systems, socialist systems – who owns wealth often determines who has power.

Now, it’s common sense, but when you think about these numbers, it’s very difficult to have a democratic system because so much power goes along with that level of money.

It’s hard to adjust that politically because the roots of the power system are anchored in the very wealth that you’re trying to deal with. So it’s intractable. It’s systemic. It’s sort of built into the architecture of the political, economic system. Very difficult.

LF: So the problem isn’t shallow, it’s structural, discovered Gar. Not the bad actions of a few greedy individuals, but an entire system designed to benefit those who are already wealthy. And that made it hard to fix.

Without a more fundamental overhaul, wealth and power would keep concentrating, and militarism and environmental extraction would keep society and our planet on a devastating track. What was needed wasn’t a tweak – a bigger trickle of money, say, from the top to the bottom through charity or taxes or short-lived government programs that are always on the chopping block, but a healthier way to build wealth in the first place, a way that thinks more about consequence, for people and the planet and spread resources and power more evenly around.

But all that would require a next system. The good news is, many of the elements of that system are already in place…

GA: If you look at that concentration of wealth, what would be the alternative to it that was more democratic?

What do we know about democratic ownership of wealth in practical, American terms that might give us examples but also kind of the elements of a vision that might begin to point us towards a new direction? So, let me give you an example.

There are 130 million Americans who are members of co-ops and co-op credit unions. Now, that’s one person, one vote ownership of wealth, that’s democratic ownership of wealth. So that’s a very common American thing. People don’t even think about it when they go to the credit union or they buy at a co-op store or there’s REI and other places like that, that’s a different form of ownership. Not concentrated, it’s democratic.

Another one you might think about is—and the press doesn’t cover this very well – but there are 10,000 worker-owned companies in the United States – 10,000. There are about 10 million people working in companies owned by the workers, and it’s another form of democratic ownership, very common, very conventional. They’re much more productive, as you might expect when people have a stake in what they’re doing. On balance, they’re more productive, particularly when you have good training programs to go along with it, but there they are. It’s another illustration of democratization.

Gar Alperovitz speaking at a Bioneers conference

Municipal ownership is very common. People don’t quite realize this. Municipal utilities, for instance. Twenty-five percent of American electricity is produced “Socialist”—that is municipal owned electricity, plus co-ops, produce a quarter of all of American electricity now. There it is, kind of ordinary, conventional, often in very conservative parts of the South. So it’s another form of democratizing ownership of wealth.

There’s land trusts, which are another form of nonprofit ownership of land in order to do socially good things with it—housing and developing land. There are just dozens of these around, and they’re very American, and they begin to suggest a pluralist vision, very diverse, of different ways that we can begin to look at the ownership of wealth in a more democratic form, which not only may change the economics of it, but again, changing the power relationships because so much power goes along with who owns the wealth and trying to democratize power as well as democratizing wealth is the name of the game.

LF: From indigenous hunts and harvests, to collective colonial barn raisings, community based ways of getting things done should be as much part of the American story as the fictitious go-it-alone Horatio Alger myth. Under slavery, for example, Africans pooled funds to buy people’s freedom and Mutual aid societies paid for emergencies like ill health and burials.

Later, organized labor groups, such as the Knights of Labor and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, promoted worker-owned cooperatives as a way to keep resources and money in workers’ hands. And during the Great Depression, people came together in co-ops as a way to pool assets and cut costs to survive. In the 1960s, solidarity economics was a way to build Black, Indigenous and Chicano independence and power.

So too, today, coming together in cooperatives is bringing down the price of food, loans, equipment, and all of the things individuals have a hard time affording alone. Consumer coops like the well known Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, New York, enable members to buy groceries at lower bulk prices in exchange for contributing hours of volunteer labor.

Worker co-ops such as the Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx enable typically low-income home-health aides to negotiate contracts collectively and create training programs designed and led by fellow home care workers. Adria Powell serves as President and CEO.

Adria Powell (AP): So Cooperative Home Care Associates is a worker-owned cooperative, which means that anyone who works for the cooperative can also be an owner, but you’re not required to be an owner. We each are allowed to buy one share, which entitles us to one vote. So it’s completely democratic participation.

When you are a worker owner, you have the right to run for the board, and the board of directors here at Cooperative Home Care is made up of eight elected worker owners, which are home care workers. And so when we are profitable, all worker owners have the right to share in that profit on an equal basis. So there is the opportunity to vote for one’s own financial interest.

It also builds a sense of community. It empowers workers, worker owners to be more committed to the organization. There’s a sense of pride in terms of the work that they’re doing and wanting to see Cooperative Home Care be successful.

It’s not just about profits. It’s also a way to invest in our local economy. Our workers come from the areas that we serve. You know, our clients they live in the same areas in the Bronx, in Manhattan, what are traditionally low income areas.

And so by being a for-profit, we’re investing back into our community. When people are earning wages, collecting dividends, it’s going to stay within our community.

LF: In a cooperative, every member has one vote. Together they own the business, come up with the rules, and set the wages and share in its success. Cooperatives also commit to helping one another.

So it was in 2020, when the Covid pandemic hit, Opportunity Threads, a sewing cooperative in South Carolina, organized with the Carolina Textile District to re-tool their production in order to sew masks. That pivot enabled them to keep Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx supplied with Personal Protective equipment, when there were few masks to go around for healthcare workers on the front lines.

Cooperation, and putting community interests first, are core concepts to Community Wealth Building. To counter corporate globalization, which extracts wealth from a place, community wealth building approach, relocalizes wealth. To reverse the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, community wealth building strategies work to distribute assets and wealth widely, and democratize business structures so as to share decision making and value labor and land. In contrast to counting on short term profits, community wealth building takes the long view about what is best for a healthy economy, people and planet.

So where do we go from here? Again, Gar Alperovitz.

GA: So the system problem, not only how do we get from here to there – what is the nature of the design that you would actually want to live in? Who would own things? Where would the power come from? Would it be an expansionary system? Corporations have to expand. They’ve got to keep reporting more profits, and that has environmental implications for big corporations. So what is the nature of the design? This is our problem. What would it look like in the ideal? And then how do we get from here to there? And what kind of models can we experiment with?

LF: To advance the practical work, in 2000 Alperovitz founded the Democracy Collaborative with his colleague Ted Howard. They call it a “think-and-do tank”. Theory is useful they say, but experiments making transformation visible are even more important.

One of the game-changing experiments The Democracy Collaborative has been part of is the Evergreen Cooperatives Project in Cleveland, Ohio.

GA: This is in a very poor neighborhood, 40,000 people, mostly black, average unemployment 20%, family income average $20,000. Very poor neighborhood. In the middle of that neighborhood is the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and university hospitals. All three of those institutions – Medicare, Medicaid, education money – have a lot of taxpayer dollars in them. They buy a lot of things just to exist, and they can’t move. They are so-called anchored, because they are a huge investment of capital in those buildings and all that facility. This is a technical term these days – anchor institutions.

So one of the designs that we’ve developed, and this is one of many – there are a lot of people experimenting with this – is could we use the purchasing power of these big institutions, focus it on this community, establish a community-wide nonprofit corporation to benefit and reflect the community as a whole’s interest, and attach to it worker-owned companies. That is a systemic design in miniature.

LF: When we return, we’ll hear from one of the Democracy Collaborative’s key collaborators in the Evergreen Project, India Pierce Lee, who was then at the Cleveland Foundation. And from John McMicken, the executive director of Evergreen, on how the company helps its employees buy homes.

I’m guest host Laura Flanders. You’re listening to the Bioneers…

LF: Anchor institutions, deeply rooted in place, such as universities and hospitals, are key to community wealth building.

Starting in 2008, the Democracy Collaborative partnered with several of Cleveland’s most prestigious anchor institutions in order to develop a Community Wealth Building approach to buying stuff. Instead of contracting with a far-off, non-union laundry service, for example, the Cleveland Clinic agreed to contract with Evergreen, a cooperative laundry owned and run by its employees, the vast majority of whom are African-Americans living nearby.

Cleveland at the time was anything but evergreen. Having once been one of the great U.S. industrial cities, attracting workers from around the world and across the country, Cleveland’s boom began to slow in the 1960s and over the next three decades, the city lost 24 percent of its population.

By 1975, Cleveland ranked in the nation’s highest 20 percent in terms of poverty, unemployment, dilapidated housing, municipal debt and violent crime. As the century drew to a close, globalization, white flight and years of budget cuts only made things worse. And it wasn’t arbitrary who was left behind. Here’s India Pierce Lee.

India Pierce Lee (IPL): We have all the disparities, I think, but what people have finally begun to acknowledge since 2020 that a lot of us have been fighting for decades is that understanding the root causes of every issue is tied to systemic and institutional racism. I mean, we talk about wealth building, we talk about building equity, we talk about disinvestment, but then we have to look at the policies, the practices that have plagued the red lining in our communities that have caused this decades and decades. And now we’re trying to swim our way out of.

LF: India Pierce Lee worked on community development for a community foundation, the Cleveland Foundation for 16 years, starting in 2006. Community wealth building, she says, provided a way to address historic wrongs, methodically, through policy, as methodically as the wrongs of systemic racism were committed in the first place.

I spoke with India Pierce Lee in 2022.

IPL: So we’ve been at this work now about 17 years. And over time we have continued to evolve, add new partners, but then getting people to acknowledge that you have to pay people what they’re worth, right, to create the kind of wealth. You know, we have this glut now people leaving jobs and not coming back. We need to acknowledge that people need the same basic human needs. It’s not about a right. It should be that’s everything for everyone, healthcare, good housing, you know, good school systems. But really looking at how we democratize and educate our community, so that they have ownership in the community. And we’re doing some of those things on a small scale, but it’s starting to take hold not only here, but across the country, creating land trusts.

We have a Black Futures Fund that we created to support small, non-profit, Black-led organizations doing great work in the community, touching the people where they are, but it also means that we have to change the way we do business. We have to figure out how we build and share power, and co-create with the individuals we’re working with to make the kind of changes that benefits them and not us telling them what they need.

LF: By putting community wealth building at the center of their concerns, the Evergreen Project was able to do more than just create jobs. The project prioritized hiring the most vulnerable – including people returning from prison and jail – and used the assets of the business and its relationships with other institutions to help people find and keep housing, so as to build wealth of their own. I had a chance to talk with the Executive Director of the Evergreen Cooperative Corporation, John McMicken, about the company’s accomplishments thus far.

John McMicken (JM): So you have employee-owners, frontline production workers, if you will, who are serving on our boards, and advising the company as to larger decisions that need to be made. You know, from there, we have a couple of other very unique programs that we’ve been working on over the past several years. One is a very successful home buying program. And so we’re giving worker-owners access to the financial literacy training, the credit building necessary to actually buy a home. And we’ve been able to structure those financially so that their mortgage payments can be payroll deducted if they so choose. And most importantly, the transactions are built in such a way that the employee-owner is able to pay the mortgage off in full within five years. So it’s a really, really special and in many cases life-changing program.

Everything we do we do to serve the neighborhoods in and around Cleveland, Ohio, specifically what’s referred to as the Greater University Circle Initiative. We’ve partnered with our anchor institutions there, our hospitals and universities to incubate new businesses at scale. So these are larger, commercially viable businesses that then begin to provide goods and services back to not only those larger institutions, but any other customers that we develop along the way. But again, in doing so we are structuring them so that no less than 80% of the equity of these companies is held by the employees and will always be held by the employees.

So there’s some very neat mechanisms put in place to ensure that there’s no change to that structure, there’s no dilution to that structure over time. So 50 years from now, hopefully these three cooperatives and more are still in business. And if they are, they will still be at least 80% owned by the full-time employees.

LF: Since Evergreen launched its first cooperative business in 2009, the company has overcome growing pains, attracted multiple contracts and expanded its staff to nearly 200 people. Today Evergreen is not just a laundry service, it’s a parent company responsible for launching other new employee-owned businesses and helping privately owned small family businesses convert to employee ownership with its own dedicated loan fund.

Now several states are advancing employee ownership legislation that would make it easier for worker-owned businesses to get loans and technical assistance and government contracts. Many of these are also green businesses, another core tenet of community wealth building.

Evergreen Cooperative Laundry employees. Photo courtesy of Evergreen Cooperatives.

Can all these democratic experiments be woven together to create a “next system” – one that creates wealth that’s deeply rooted, widely shared and in the hands of local, forward-looking residents committed to a liveable planet and thriving local economies into the future? That’s the essence of community wealth building. It won’t be easy, but it’s the work of our times, believes author, activist Gar Alperovitz.

GA: What is it I can do tomorrow to change the system? Or more specifically, to lay down an irreversible foundation in projects, in organizing, in politics, etc., that establishes the basis for a transformation. That’s not saying tomorrow I will change the system. My heroes are the Civil Rights workers in Mississippi in the 1930s. We don’t know many of their names. They laid the foundation for the 1960s. That is where I think we are and to see ourselves in that role, I think is empowering, and we’re seeing a lot going on.

LF: The Democracy Collaborative produced a Community Wealth Building Handbook recently, a kind of field guide for policymakers, advocates and engaged citizens. We’ll post a link on this episode page. Go to Bioneers.org/radio.

These laboratories of economic democracy are spreading, maturing and reaching critical mass. For The Bioneers, I’m Laura Flanders.

Stories of Food Sovereignty and Resilient Agriculture

As it becomes clearer and clearer to many that the current system of industrial agriculture is failing both our communities and the environment, brave and innovative leaders are taking matters into their own hands. From restoring and maintaining traditional Alaskan fisheries in Arctic waters to training the next generation of holistic land managers in the high deserts of the Southwest to radical urban farming and political education projects in Berkeley and Oakland, transformative food systems projects are burgeoning around the country. While the scale of these projects ranges from engaging ranchers across the entire western U.S., collectively responsible for managing millions of acres to a one-acre plot between busy urban streets, the impetus behind them is similar: a profound desire to take action in support of a food system that works for all.

Read on to explore initiatives championing food sovereignty and economic equity in BIPOC communities and how a coalition of ranchers, farmers and conservationists are fostering resilient working lands.

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Young Leaders Champion Food Sovereignty and Economic Equity in BIPOC Communities

BIPOC communities, from the Arctic to Oakland, face systemic economic and social marginalization, denying them basic needs like food security, healthcare, housing, and education. Inspired by movements like the Black Panthers and ancestral Indigenous knowledge, young leaders are advancing food sovereignty, economic equity, and cultural revival. This conversation features two such leaders making tangible differences in their communities. Deenaalee Hodgdon is the executive director of On the Land Media, which elevates Indigenous voices, and co-founder of The Smokehouse Collective. ab banks is an urban farmer and garden lead for People’s Programs at UC Berkeley, supporting food autonomy and wellness for the East Bay Black community.

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How a Coalition of Ranchers, Farmers and Conservationists Foster Resilient Working Lands

Sarah Wentzel-Fisher grew up in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, in and around the small town of Custer. That Custer State Park was essentially her backyard and a National Grassland also nearby was extremely formative for her. “I was outside every single day,” she says. “…There was so much to take in all of the time.” In some ways, it seems her life has always been about the land. Now, Wentzel-Fisher, a farmer herself, serves on the boards of the Southwest Grass-fed Livestock Alliance, the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, and is the Executive Director of Santa Fe, New Mexico-based nonprofit The Quivira Coalition. The Quivira Coalition seeks to build soil, biodiversity, and resilience on western working lands. Wentzel-Fisher discussed the Coalition and its work toward resilient and regenerative agriculture in an interview with Bioneers.

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New Agrarian Program: Supporting apprenticeship and mentorship in agriculture

The Quivira Coalition’s New Agrarian Program partners with skilled ranchers and farmers to offer annual apprenticeships in regenerative agriculture. Apprentices learn from expert practitioners in full-immersion professional settings. This program specifically targets first-career professionals with a sincere commitment to life at the intersection of conservation and regenerative agriculture. The program also seek mentors who are dedicated stewards of the land; practice intentional, regenerative methods of food or fiber production; provide excellent animal care; and are skilled and enthusiastic teachers. Learn more about the New Agrarian Program below and check out the Quivira Coalition’s two podcasts to listen to stories about the future of food and working lands.

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Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses

We’re excited to announce that our new season of Bioneers Learning is online, and registration is open! You can register for our first-ever self-paced courses, along with courses covering topics such as the Rights of Nature movement, regenerative herbalism, and sacred activism.

Regenerative Herbalism: The Healing Power of Plants | Sept. 18-Oct. 23 | Explore the magical realm of herbal wisdom with this 6-session online course led by renowned herbalists Penny Livingston and Rosemary Gladstar.
“What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” Book Club | Oct. 1-22 | The Bioneers Learning Book Club is thrilled to offer you a rare chance to delve into Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s brand new book, “What If We Get It Right?” — the highly anticipated sequel to her best-selling book, “All We Can Save.”
The Rights of Nature: Drafting, Adopting, and Enforcing Rights of Nature Laws in Cities, Towns, and Counties | Oct. 3-24 | This course will provide attendees a full background on the emerging “rights of nature” movement in the United States and internationally; prepare them to engage in their own communities to develop, adopt, and enforce local rights of nature laws; and address frequently asked questions.
A Course on The Imaginal: Cultivating the Visionary Self | Oct. 12-March 16 | This course will explore and exercise our creative muscle to strengthen our visionary selves. When we encounter and encourage the wild dance of the artist within, the creative self becomes part of the visionary collective needed for these times.
Sacred Activism: Meeting our Challenges as Gateways for Cultivating Relational Leadership | Oct. 30-Dec. 4 | Join us to explore sacred activism and relational leadership. Celebrating the learning that happens through your own lived experience and discoveries, this workshop will offer you new practices and orientations to life.
Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem | Nov. 12-Dec. 3 | In this four-week course, you can join author, researcher, and emotions-and-empathy expert Karla McLaren, M.Ed., for a grounded and surprising exploration of the healing genius in your emotional realm.
The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.

Learn more

A Vision of Plant Souls: How Rachael Petersen is ‘Re-Weirding the Western Canon’

The desire that compelled Rachael Petersen to pivot from environmental policy to studying the intricate lives of plants sounds simple on its face: to know plants on their own terms. What it prompted was not just a career shift, but a change in mindset that led Petersen to pursue a master’s of divinity at Harvard University, where she would bring attention to another scientist who — 175 years earlier — underwent a similar transformation.

Petersen now leads the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, an 18-month initiative that seeks to enhance interdisciplinary cooperation between biology, ecology and the humanities in plant cognition. It is, in many respects, a far cry from the environmental policy work she pursued for a decade.

She said that since her adolescence, she’d been dedicated to protecting and alleviating the suffering of other beings, including non-human beings. As an undergraduate, she earned bachelor’s degrees from Rice University in environmental policy and anthropology, with a minor in poverty, justice and human capabilities. As an environmentalist, she conducted fieldwork in the Amazon, Borneo and Arctic Canada. When she ultimately got a position working in Washington, D.C., at Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute, she felt extremely fortunate.

“I wanted to dedicate myself to protecting forests,” Petersen said. “So I was really fortunate to land this job working with this new initiative, where we were monitoring deforestation in real time from space using satellite imagery, so taking pictures of trees and then using A.I. to detect where they were being cut down.”

As deputy director of Global Forest Watch, she worked with governments, companies and Indigenous communities to use these new technologies to reduce deforestation. She described it as the highlight of her career; however, as she sought to protect forests using the wealth of sophisticated data at her fingertips, her grief was mounting.

“I experienced a lot of despair and, increasingly, depression,” Petersen said. “At parties, I would joke that my job was to watch the world die in real-time from space. I realized that I was spending all this time fighting and grieving for these landscapes without really getting to know them on their own terms.”

A 19th-Century Perspective “On the Soul-Life of Plants”

This realization is how Petersen’s path would converge with the relatively unknown 19th-century German physicist-turned-plant-scientist Gustav Fechner, who championed the idea that plants have souls. In 2021, Petersen left her work in environmental policy behind and entered the master’s program at Harvard’s Divinity School, where for her thesis she translated Fechner’s 1848 book “Nanna: Or on the Soul-Life of Plants” (Nanna being the Norse goddess of flowers) and provided an introduction to his thought. Fechner later expanded on these ideas, positing that this awareness extended to the natural world and the universe more broadly.

Fechner’s life is remarkable not just for his work, but the turn of events that inspired his own change in trajectory. As Petersen recently chronicled in Aeon, Fechner diverged from physics following a period of temporary blindness and an episode of what we might today characterize as depression, neurotic obsession and mania. After damaging his vision when conducting experiments into after-images by staring at the sun through tinted glasses, he retreated to a dark room and emerged only with his eyes covered, first with a cloth blindfold and then custom-crafted goggles. He slowly healed, his transformation occurring when, after three years of living in darkness, he stepped outside for the first time without his eye coverings. It was then that he caught what he described as “a beautiful glimpse beyond the boundary of human experience.”

“Every flower shone towards me with a peculiar clarity, as if it were throwing its inner light outwards,” he would later write. “One must only open one’s eyes afresh to see nature, once stale, alive again.”

In Aeon, Petersen writes that this transfiguration would inspire Fechner to give his first lecture in six years and to write “Nanna,” where he argues that plants are conscious beings with feelings and desires. In the book, Fechner often uses the word for soul and mind interchangeably as belonging to a being that experiences feelings, including internal urges and external stimuli; intuition and emotion. Cast in modern terms, Petersen writes, we might simply say a soul is the capacity for subjective experience, or what some cognitive scientists call primary or phenomenal consciousness. She writes that Fechner anticipated many claims of the contemporary plant neurobiology movement and would spend his whole life “trying to heal the divide between mind and matter, and the commensurate split between philosophy and science.”

Though Fechner’s breakdown was more dramatic than hers, Petersen nevertheless recognizes the parallels between their academic transitions. Even when Fechner was engaged in physics, she said he was “a secret Romantic,” reading philosophy from the German Romantics such as Schelling, Schiller and Goethe. Petersen said when working in D.C., she also had a deeply poetic, romantic and spiritual streak that she had trouble finding a place for at the office. Fechner’s experience, including his breakdown and reinvigoration, resonates with her.

“He was a scientist, and he basically also went through a period of burnout,” she said. “He went blind, in this case, for three years, and then one day he took off his blindfold, he saw the souls of plants, and he healed. So I was very drawn in by that experience, kind of as an analogy and a parallel to my own life.”

Fechner would go on to write the three-volume work “Zend-Avesta,” where he extends his thinking to celestial bodies. In many ways, Petersen argues, Fechner was a pantheist or a panpsychist, subscribing to the ancient theory that all things have a mind or mind-like quality — but plants were the entry point for him.

The context of Fechner’s work also resonated with Petersen. She points out that he was living at a time when scientists increasingly wanted to explain everything in mathematical and physical terms. She said he was “holding down the fort of soul,” which was becoming increasingly unpopular to talk about. Now, 175 years later, what Petersen wants to talk about can feel similarly unpopular, as plant scientists who endorse the possibility of plant sentience can face significant criticism from the broader academic community.

Re-weirding the Western Canon

The Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative delves into plant cognition and other fundamental questions. As part of its exploration into how plants and fungi help us rethink the nature of mind and matter, the Initiative engages questions arising from academic scholarship and traditional wisdom, including: what is “intelligence,” where does it extend, and how? What is matter, and what does it mean to label it “animate” or “inanimate”? How can we broaden practices of “care” to include other forms of life? How does the study of plants enrich or complicate our understanding of humans’ place relative to other beings?

Petersen thinks an interdisciplinary approach that relies on more than just empirical science is needed to accomplish what set her on this course to begin with — to understand plants on their own terms. She said because plants are so different from humans and non-human animals in their structure, function, and life, they demand that we “marry the empirical with the imaginal.” That means bringing in tools such as philosophy; anthropological or historical perspective; and learning from the countless Indigenous, animist, and pagan traditions that have long regarded plants as sentient or as persons with whom we must cultivate reciprocity.

“Plant neurobiologists say that plants have all five senses that humans do and 15 more,” she said. “Fifteen more senses that are not ones that humans have might require methods that are a bit more imaginative than empirical observation. We need all the tools in our disciplinary toolkit, I think, to imagine them fully.”

In a way, Petersen sees her role as reckoning with the fact that Western culture has long attempted to edge out more holistic understandings of reality. She said Fechner’s work represents an element of the so-called Western canon that was dismissed at the time of its publication. She wants to bring attention to Fechner and other similarly forgotten thinkers who challenge the anthropocentric views that have dominated Western thought going back to Aristotle, who, in “De Anima,” deemed plants the lowest form of life, construing them as defective animals. She said she wants those who grew up under the confining shadow of Aristotelian ideas to know that the framework of plant personhood was something that many cultures have recognized and more common to humanity than some may realize.

“People are looking for philosophical frameworks to hold their relationships with plants, and oftentimes, I think there’s a risk of appropriating other cultures that do have the framework,” Petersen said. “But those of us living with our Aristotelian hangover don’t. I want to see more research in the humanities in what might be called re-weirding the Western canon, so finding those forgotten ancestors, such as Fechner, who did actually believe in plant personhood.”

By enhancing interdisciplinary cooperation between biology, ecology, and the humanities, the Initiative seeks to nurture current and future leaders in plant studies and “demonstrate how nature’s intelligence can inspire new models of cooperation, flourishing, and coexistence.” Personally, Petersen said she sees her work as revitalizing the vision of Goethe and other German Romantics who saw science as incomplete without elements such as poetry and philosophy. As she describes it, the Initiative is, above all, an invitation.

“It’s not that I’m trying to dethrone science at all; research is a vital part of the puzzle,” Petersen said. “But I’m inviting us into a more holistic understanding of reality through additional modes of understanding and other modes of experience that do not lend themselves to empirical observation.”

The 18-month Initiative will culminate with a conference May 15-17 at Harvard, which will bring together scholars from different fields around the world. Petersen said there will be guest speakers, blog posts, and academic articles leading up to the conference.

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When you envision your ideal fiber future, what do you see?

It sounds like you’re advocating for a lifestyle shift.

How might a regular consumer’s life look different in your ideal fiber future?

Where are you seeing evidence that we’re heading in the right direction?

How does agriculture play into all of this?

We have all of these important levers in front of us: agriculture, policy, education, industry … is there one that you think we should pull first or hardest to spark massive change?

Do you think your ideal fiber future is attainable?

It does feel somewhat hard to imagine.

What would it feel like to be part of the future you envision?

Fibershed: Transforming Fiber Systems for a Healthier World and a Better Fiber Future

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Guest Host

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Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

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