Page 15 – Bioneers

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. “I was one of those kids who would get kicked out the back door, and we would go saddle up horses and ride into the state park all day long by ourselves without supervision. There was so much to take in all of the time.”

She says even at a young age, she really cherished being able to take that time. She loved the forest, the waters, and getting to hang out with animals. In 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 coalition seeks to build soil, biodiversity, and resilience on western working lands and has been involved in food and agriculture planning, with a focus on supporting young and beginning farmers and ranchers. In addition to its staff and board, the coalition includes numerous family ranchers and farmers, conservationists, scientists, public land managers, and dozens of volunteers.

Wentzel-Fisher discussed the coalition and its work toward resilient and regenerative agriculture in an interview with Bioneers.

BIONEERS: What is the mission of the Quivira Coalition?

SARAH: The Quivira Coalition is a nonprofit, headquartered in Santa Fe, that works throughout the Mountain West. We’ve got staff in Montana, Colorado and New Mexico, primarily. Our mission is resilience on working lands. We do that through three primary program areas. We have a ranching apprenticeship program called the New Agrarian Program. We have an education and outreach program that is focused on convening a community of practice around land stewardship in the Southwest. Then we have a carbon ranch initiative, which is a soil health initiative focused on better understanding soil health in a rangeland context in the Southwest and supporting producers to change practices so they can improve or maintain soil health.

A lot of our work is about agriculture and land restoration and how we shift culture from one that is extractive to one that is regenerative. At the end of the day, it’s about people and how we relate to each other, because I think that all of our land issues are very rooted in the way that we engage with each other and our resources as a result.

BIONEERS: How did the Quivira Coalition come together?

SARAH: Quivira was founded in 1997 by two members of the Sierra Club and a rancher in New Mexico. It was an interesting moment in the social-political landscape of public lands in the West, where there was a lot of contention about having grazers on public lands. I think that there was some real fire in the belly of the environmental movement, and part of that was about trying to get grazing off of public lands. This rancher, Jim Winder, was an early adopter of holistic management, which are the practices of Allan Savory. I think that introduced Barbara Johnson and Courtney White, who were the other two founders, to those concepts. A big light bulb went on that was like, ‘Oh, grazing is actually a conservation practice when it is done in an intentional way that really is paying attention to the economy.’ I think that that was the spark of our organization.

The organization has always also been about convening community, specifically convening community across differences. Some of the earliest things that they did were just bring people out to ranches to have dialogue and to see what was happening on the ground. That seems so simple, but when you bring people together in those types of spaces, it’s really profound what can happen.

BIONEERS: What’s an example of something profound that’s come out of those gatherings?

SARAH: I’ve been with the organization for seven-and-a-half years, and we’re an almost 30-year-old organization, so there’s a lot that I don’t know about. But one project that was still happening in my early days with the organization was restoration work on the Comanche Creek in the Carson National Forest, which is in the northeast corner of New Mexico. It’s a really beautiful place, but also a place that’d had a lot of damage because of grazing, mining, and extractive forestry practices.

I think it was 2001 or 2002. The work we were doing there was focused on keeping the Rio Grande cutthroat trout unlisted as an endangered species. Comanche Creek is a critical breeding ground for that particular fish, and I think everybody recognized that listing the fish would dramatically change the way many people use that landscape.

Bill Zeedyk, a brilliant restoration ecologist, was there. He was really passionate about doing stream restoration. He was working with Trout Unlimited — we have a really great Trout Unlimited group in New Mexico. They were working with our state environment department to get all the pieces to fall together. Because when you’re working on public lands, there are so many decision-makers. There are so many interested parties involved. I think that’s not always obvious to folks who aren’t immediately engaged. They were making some good progress, but the folks they couldn’t get to the table were the grazing association who had the grazing lease. And grazing can have a really significant impact on riparian areas if the cows aren’t managed around those streams. I think there was a lot of stigma that the cows were really causing the significant damage to the streams that were impeding the fish from breeding.

And because of the work of Courtney White and the Quivira Coalition, Bill called us and said, “Hey, would you be interested in potentially working with us to see if we can’t figure out a way to get the grazers involved in this project?” This is anecdotal because this was before my time. I think it took maybe three years, but they finally got them to come to a meeting and start to participate in the dialogue about how to make restoration work possible. How do we keep cattle out of those areas while the streams are revegetating? How can we work collaboratively on measuring the progress of this work?

As time went on, the way that we would get the work done was we’d invite these big groups of people up. So we’d have these amazing four-day work weekends where like 75 people would show up and everybody’d be moving rocks around in creeks and getting stuff done. And I think that the grazing association loved being there, and I think that they saw the profound impact that it had on all of these folks who were not there routinely. Then I think they also started to see changes in the landscape that benefitted them in terms of revegetation and they started to get excited about it. And 15 years into the project, they really were the biggest champions of that type of work and were talking about it to other grazing associations and saying how important and beneficial it was to do riparian restoration.

Then in 2018, we had one of the worst droughts ever in New Mexico. There was no snowfall that year, it was warm, things were not looking great. We went up to do our annual monitoring, and went out to one of the tributaries to the Comanche Creek. Nearly every blade of grass had been eaten. There’s this little teeny strip of green along either side of the creek because that area’s also grazed by big elk herds. We would do the monitoring right before they would put their cows out, and this was supposed to be the early summer pasture for the grazing association. But there’s no grass there. The project manager immediately called up the head of the grazing association and said, “You can’t put cows out here. Twenty years of stream restoration work is literally going to flush downstream if we put cattle out here after how much the elk have grazed.”

The president came up and assessed the situation, and he was like, “Yeah, you’re right. We can’t do this.” He and the rest of his grazing association figured out where else to put their cows for the next couple of months. They did not put them out there because they understood how all of those things were connected and how important it was to keep the cattle off of the creek that summer. To me, that is really where we’re succeeding, when they are empowered to make those decisions. It was a complicated decision, because the Forest Service, the Department of Game and Fish, and all of these folks had to be consulted. But at the end of the day, everybody was working together for the health of those stream systems.

BIONEERS: One of the concepts the coalition puts forward is the idea of a radical center. Could you talk about what that means to you and what you are trying to convey with that term?

SARAH: I think that the idea’s about a couple of things. For me, it’s about how do we convene people in dialogue intentionally across difference? So, how are we identifying folks who we know are going to think differently about a particular topic than we do, but who we know are important voices in some kind of community decision-making process? We need to commit to being in conversation, learning about those viewpoints, and figuring out a way to stay in that space together because that’s where action happens. That’s where movement happens. That’s where community building happens, and then ultimately, in the case of Quivira, where land stewardship happens.

I think the concept was first articulated in reference to cross-aisle politics in D.C., but there were a couple of groups in the Southwest, the Quivira Coalition being one and the Malpai Border Lands group being another, who were like, “This is a really interesting concept, what if we were able to engage in a similar type of dialogue and decision making but with environmental groups and ranchers, particularly on public lands.” I think that was the seed of the concept.

But I think that we use it and apply it in a lot of other circumstances now. We are trying to think about it more broadly, particularly in the Southwest. We’re a really diverse place. We have a lot of tribes. We have land-grant communities. We have a lot of issues of equity. Those are spaces where we also need to be thinking about being in a radical center, where we need to be inviting in different viewpoints, holding space for them, and really listening to one another. So I think the way that we think about the radical center has expanded and shifted, in good ways.

BIONEERS: What’s an example of where the concept of the radical center has helped to heal rifts or move forward on a project?

SARAH: Two years ago, we were in Denver for our Regenerate Conference. We invited a woman named Beth Robinette, a rancher from Washington, to talk a little bit about her experience. She chose to talk about “land back” and what that meant to her.

The idea of land back is one that is extremely touchy with ranchers, and I think evokes a lot of emotion and strong feelings and ideas. And she gave an amazing presentation, and was really able to convey how the way that she approaches that idea is about inviting people from the tribal community in her area back onto her land. As an organization, we have stepped into a space to say: How does equity show up in our work? And it’s really been a challenge to have that conversation with ranchers. I think there’s a lot of resistance. After Beth gave this talk, one of the ranchers who’s a mentor in the apprenticeship program came up and he was like, “I’m starting to get this now. I’m starting to understand why thinking about how people feel about land, what their connection to land is, how that connection may have been severed or disrupted because of colonization is important.” There was a light bulb that had gone on for him. And to me, that’s a really critical space for us to be thinking about it, and one in which the radical center really can go to work for us.

BIONEERS: Could you talk about the inspiration, founding, and growth of the New Agrarian Program?

SARAH: Our New Agrarian Apprenticeship Program was started in 2009 by Avery Anderson Sponholtz, our executive director at that time, and George Whitten and Julie Sullivan, who are ranchers in the San Luis Valley.

The inspiration was that people aren’t going back into farming and ranching. The generational succession just isn’t happening for family farms and ranches. George is a fourth or fifth-generation rancher in the San Luis Valley, brilliant guy, and really practicing ranching in a very different way from early on. There’s a great book about his ranch called, “The Last Ranch.” He has always been somebody who — through frugality and I think a really keen ecological eye — has managed his herd rotationally and in a way that is very tuned into minimal inputs into his operation.

I believe it was in the late ‘90s that Julie Sullivan was working for an experiential education program. It was a college program that involved a semester in the West. They’d bring students around to different sites and meet folks who were in some type of land stewardship. She had read this book and landed at the ranch, and she was a flag-waving vegan at the time and had the cattle free in ’93 bumper sticker on her car. She came to this ranch and fell in love with George, and so now she is a rancher.

That part of the story is really fantastic, but I think it was actually the potent combination of her being an educator and George having this particular approach to ranching. George has a couple of kids, but none of them wanted to come back to the ranch. That was sort of the seed for this program. She’s like, “Well, George, why don’t you teach what you know and why don’t we get some additional help on the ranch by bringing apprentices on and doing an exchange of work to learn?” That’s how the program started.

Initially, it was just that one ranch, and thinking through what the curriculum looked like and what was important in these relationships that actually make it work. Then three or four years after that, we brought in a couple of other operations, so we had three to five operations a year. Actually, how I got to Quivira is through this program. Eight-and-a-half years ago, one of our funders was like, “This is an amazing program that is really doing a great job of empowering people to get the education they need to step into roles managing large landscapes through agriculture. But graduating one to three people a year isn’t going to necessarily have the impact that it needs to. What do you all need to scale? We’re going to give you a planning grant to do some planning work and research around this to figure out how to scale.”

So I came in to manage some of the nuts and bolts while our program director did the research. Now, seven years later, we are working with anywhere between 18 and 25 ranches a year, from Montana to New Mexico. We’ve graduated over 120 people out of the program. Scaling up that way has been pretty profound — it’s been amazing to see how we went from a very small network of people to a much more robust network. What’s so valuable about that is that folks who have been through the program still stay connected to one another, and all of a sudden there’s a social landscape of folks who are engaged in regenerative agriculture, specifically regenerative ranching. It’s beginning to transform what’s happening on the land. We have a lot of different types of entities reaching out, being like, “Hey, can you put me in touch with the people who’ve gone through your program? (Or) We’re looking for a ranch manager. We’re looking for a speaker.”

BIONEERS: What are the challenges of introducing regenerative agriculture and ranching practices in an economy that’s built on corporate industrial food systems, such as major meatpacking and other interests?

SARAH: I feel like agriculture in general and livestock agriculture in particular is a wicked, wicked problem right now. There are three or four companies that own something like 80% of the market share of all the meat that is produced in this country. Consolidation is insane, and we can’t seem to get the federal government to really crack down and lean into antitrust rules when it comes to meat production in this country. It’s an enormous issue, and I think all producers butt up against that.

Another hat that I wear is board member of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, which is a grassroots farm organization. The Quivira Coalition doesn’t do advocacy work, but I really enjoy advocacy work, and I do that through the Farmers Union. We’ve been pushing for decades for the government to break up the monopolization of our food system, and it just seems to go nowhere. In the last couple of years, we’ve had the good fortune of being able to actually go in and meet with the Department of Justice when we do our annual fly-ins, which feels like progress. But it’s also disheartening when we go into those meeting spaces and it’s like this is brand new information to the folks who are working there, that our food system is consolidated this way. That’s hard.

But I think that there are also things that are hopeful. There are people carving out space and trying out models in spite of how challenging the situation is. In some ways, I feel like we’re at a moment of significant paradigm shift because things are so bad. It’s like when things are so broken, that’s when you start to see new, better, more resilient things emerge through the cracks. I’m hopeful that that is the type of moment that we are in right now.

BIONEERS: Are there particular obstacles you’re dealing with that you feel the general public should know about?

SARAH: I think that consolidation in the meat industry is one. I wish that people understood better how livestock production works — the really critical role that having grazing animals on the landscape has. When it comes to beef cattle, 97% of animals go into a feedlot system. Confined animal agriculture is very problematic and very challenging, but when that’s stacked up against the type of market system that we have, it really is the only option. The other dimension is the meat processing part, which is also consolidated.

So in New Mexico, for example, on any given day of the week, we have somewhere between two and five USDA-approved meat processing plants. So for folks with a cow/calf operation — in which you have a mother herd that gives birth to calves and then you raise those calves — when they get to be of a certain age, you have to make some decisions about where they’re going to go. Most people will sell them, and then they get channeled into that feedlot track. There are folks who will try to sell direct-to-consumer or find a more regional wholesale market. But one, they have to have enough grass to continue to feed those animals and have them grow. Then two, they need to have space at a USDA-approved processing plant to then be able to sell that meat. And so the amount of consolidation of every step of the value chain is what presents the barriers. I just wish people knew more of that.

So I’d say one thing is read about it, learn about it, get educated about it. The second thing is to know where your meat comes from. Know the people who grow it and produce it and understand what their practices are. Because if we’re waiting around for the federal government to break up meat consolidation, that is a battle that has been waged for over 120 years. It is not new. Consolidation was behind the whole founding of Farmers Union, and it’s a 110-year-old organization.

I think that the way that we start to shift that is through consumers. If consumers really demanded to know who’s raising these animals; where they’re coming from; that they’re not confined; if they’re being finished in a feedlot system. I should say, I don’t want to totally demonize feedlots; There are situations in which it makes the most sense to put a group of animals together and bring food to them rather than have them out on the landscape. We have to balance impact to the land with the food production piece. But know where your food comes from is the point that I’m trying to make.

BIONEERS: And it’s hard to find that out sometimes, right? People see these company names and don’t realize they’re part of a larger company.

SARAH: Absolutely. There’s so much greenwashing that could happen. I also recognize that it’s a privilege to be able to have the time and space to figure out some of those things. But for those of us who have that, if we can really advocate to have more market share for small family farmers and have the support in place for those folks to practice agriculture and to get paid fairly for the food that they’re producing, all of those things go a long way to make a big difference.

Climate Justice: Youth in the Vanguard

Young activists have emerged as the most significant and impactful voices in global movements to combat climate change and demand environmental justice. In this 2023 Bioneers panel discussion, learn from the perspectives, projects and aspirations of three outstanding young leaders. The panel features the award-winning, globally renowned activist Alexandria Villaseñor, founder of Earth Uprising; grassroots environmental justice organizer Alexia Leclercq, recipient of the 2021 Brower Youth Award and co-founder of Start: Empowerment; and Oakland-based spoken word poet and performer Aniya Butler, a Lead Circle Member of Youth vs. Apocalypse. Callie Broaddus, Founder and Executive Director of Reserva: The Youth Land Trust, moderated the panel.

The following discussion has been edited for clarity.

CALLIE BROADDUS: Today, we’re going to be talking about community organizing and movement building. Fighting for the planet and her inhabitants is incredibly hard; it takes resilient and creative people to lead that change, and I’m here with three amazing young activists who have not just led but have also helped build movements. We need to build strong communities to sustain ourselves and reverse the trends that many people would have us believe are immovable. Building community is fundamental to winning the various fights we’re all waging because, as Saru Jayaraman said this morning, none of us are going to win alone.

I started an organization called Reserva: The Youth Land Trust. I work with youth from around the world. We have 100 young people 26 and under from 30 countries working to try to save and help protect threatened biodiversity hotspots, including a reserve we helped create in Ecuador, which is an entirely youth-funded nature reserve.

It’s an enormous honor to be here with three remarkable people who have been waging, all in their own ways, incredible battles on the climate front. We’ll start with Alexia Leclercq.

ALEXIA LECLERCQ: My climate activism journey started in middle school when I first introduced recycling at my school. Later, I started working with the Youth Climate Strike movement and with Sunrise, working to elect progressive politicians and on various social justice issues, from police abolition to anti-gentrification, as well as helping translate for asylum seekers.

When I was 18, I connected with an organization called PODER, which has been around for over 30 years now. I got involved in a campaign of theirs to fight a 52-acre fuel storage facility in East Austin, Texas, which had for years and years been causing groundwater and soil contamination, dumping toxic chemicals, and nothing had been done about it. There were extremely high cancer rates in the community, which was predominantly Black and Brown, yet officials refused to acknowledge the cause of those high cancer rates. It wasn’t until the community members came together and some incredible people that I get to call my mentors led the struggle. Ultimately, six Latina women went up against some of the largest oil corporations and, within two years, won and were able to force that facility to relocate and leave East Austin. That really showed me the power of organizing.

Through PODER, I was able to learn about the deep history of racism in Austin. Even though I had spent most of my life growing up there, I was ignorant about it because it wasn’t something that was taught in school. But with PODER, I got my hands dirty doing organizing, going door-to-door in the community to understand the issues people were facing. Besides working on relocating toxic tank farms, we also fought for aggregate mining operation regulations because Texas has some of the weakest regulations in the country.

Most recently, we’ve done a lot of work around protecting the Colorado River Conservancy. Not just the health of the river but really connecting the health of the river to the health of the community. That has led us to work a lot in local government in order to create a guide for sustainable development alongside the Colorado River in East Austin, which had been an area that was just a free-for-all because the environmental regulations are extremely unequal — with the richer, whiter West Side having lots of protections and the East Side having very few. Water privatization has also been a huge issue. The city of Austin is often seen as a progressive place, but 12,000 residents there don’t have clean water. The water is quite literally brown. That is because that community is being serviced by a private water entity, so I’ve been digging into water policy a lot lately.

The last thing I want to talk about is my organization Start: Empowerment. In 2019, I attended the Wallerstein Exposition, which is a climate education conference. There were hundreds of organizations there, and they were all really cool, but every single one of them focused on the science of the climate; none of them touched on Indigenous ecologies, or the social-political dimensions, or the justice aspects of the crisis. So I and one of my close friends, Kier, came together and wrote up an Environmental Justice curriculum. I had a friend who graduated before me and was able to go back to work at her own high school, and so we pitched it to the vice principal. From there, we were able to spread it to different high schools, as other teachers and vice principals started reaching out, and from there we not only worked with public schools but started doing a lot of community-facing educational programs as well.

We realized that there was a huge lack of access, especially in grassroots communities of color, to the training and skills to be able to strengthen the organizing already happening in those places. I wanted to develop a liberatory model that would facilitate knowledge exchange and really support young people on the frontlines in organizing. I think it’s led to some incredible work and some very different campaigns and victories. From fighting the Brooklyn pipeline in New York City to fighting Enbridge’s new oil terminal — which we successfully prevented from being built in Corpus Christi — to mutual aid and Food Justice initiatives. It’s generated a lot of cool policy work as well.

I’m really honored to be able to be in this space to learn from elders and meet other organizers. I really believe in the power of community organizing, which I define as communities building collective power to enable change. And I think history doesn’t lie. We’ve seen, from the Montgomery bus boycotts in the 1950s to the United Farm Workers Union in the ‘60s, to Indigenous People winning against the Keystone pipeline, to EJ organizers, to mention only a few, that organizing really does work. I really believe that we can change the world.

CALLIE: I have one quick follow-up question. You talk about education as knowledge exchange, and I had to look up what “liberatory pedagogy” meant. How does liberation fit into education?

ALEXIA: It’s a framework that establishes that we need to have a critical understanding of the systems that we live within and an analysis of the actual levers of power in society. It’s really an exchange of information, because people learn from their lived realities, so they know what’s happening.

My professors at Harvard say certain things that my neighbors down the street who have never gone to college also know, perhaps even more clearly, but they might not have the words to express it in a scholarly manner. Communities know what they need, what they want, and how to be resilient. I think education has to be an exchange of knowledge that includes learning from people’s lived experience. When we can really work together to co-create knowledge and to combine it with action, we are headed towards liberation.

CALLIE: That’s fantastic. Our next speaker is Aniya Butler, a 16-year-old spoken word poet and organizer from Oakland, California, who works with the youth-led climate justice group Youth vs Apocalypse, where she directs the Hip Hop and Climate Justice Initiative, and coordinates the No One Is Disposable campaign.

ANIYA BUTLER: I started to write poetry when I was eight years old, and I performed my first poem when I was 10 at the annual OUSD MLK Oratorical Festival. It was an original poem titled “This World Is Upside Down” that was inspired by a mural on a wall in a high school next to my elementary school dedicated to the lives of people who had lost their lives to police violence and lynching.

From there, I just became more and more aware of what life looked like for people who looked like me, people who came from my community. I wrote that poem, and my mom pushed me to read it at that contest, and it gave me the sense that I could have a voice. Poetry gave me a way to channel my anger, to feel less lonely and to help me find a community.

I got involved with a writing center, Chapter 510, based in Oakland, and I published a book when I was 12, “This World Is Going to Change.” By that point, I was more interested in how I could use my art to get people to know more and to get involved. I continued to expand my art, to learn more about the different systems that hold us back, and to keep exploring what role I could have in changing things through my poetry. So, I continued to perform, write, educate myself, talk to different people, gain mentors, and develop a sense of community with friends and people who care about the same issues that I do, then I got involved with Youth versus Apocalypse when I was 13.

Youth versus Apocalypse (YVA) is a Bay Area-based group led by predominantly frontline youth fighting and advocating for climate justice but through an intersectional perspective. The climate crisis is often portrayed as only about science and about the natural world, but I think it’s really important to see how it connects to people, to all of us, but especially to frontline Black and Brown communities. When I first heard about the climate movement, I didn’t think it was something that I wanted to be involved with. But I went with YVA to an action in 2019, International Climate Strike Day, and there were 20,000 to 40,000 people there and the energy was really strong. YVA people spoke about not just stopping the process of climate change, but about dismantling the systems that caused it in the first place, realizing that climate change is a symptom of colonialism, capitalism, racism, white supremacy, all these systems that have been built to deprive frontline communities of liberation.

That spoke to me. Once I realized that, I realized that I needed to be in the climate justice movement, and that I needed to be organizing my peers in my community to realize their connection to the climate crisis and the important role they have. Within YVA, I wear a couple of different hats. I’m involved in the “No One Is Disposable” action planning team, which started in 2022 in the beginning of the school year. It specifically focuses on organizing direct actions around intersectional issues. For example, in Oakland in September, we led an action around keeping coal out of Oakland, to fight a plan to build a coal terminal in West Oakland.

We recognized how detrimental that would be to the health of that mainly Black, Brown and low-income community. We had an action to raise awareness about it and to hold our city council members accountable to keeping coal out of Oakland, and a lot of them agreed to do that, so that has been a big success, but that campaign is still ongoing to make sure they keep their word.

We also held an action this past November around COP27 to focus attention on the military’s role in the climate crisis. People don’t talk about that very much, and it was a new issue to many in our community, but the military is a huge consumer of fossil fuels, and its actions have enormous impact on all our lives.

My second role in YVA is to coordinate the Hip Hop and Climate Justice Initiative, which I hold so dear to my heart. We focus on engaging youth in the climate justice movement through different forms of hip hop, realizing that everybody might not want to call their senator or their local politician, but they might want to write a poem advocating for a certain policy. It has been a great way to help a bunch of our young peers find their voices, just as poetry did that for me.

We’ve produced three music videos and over 50 workshops in Oakland and San Francisco schools. That has been a very good experience for me because I’ve gotten to not only create art but help others create meaningful art. This year we’ve done some open mics in partnership with Chapter 510 to provide a space where youth can come together and be vulnerable and share their experiences, struggles and hardships, not only in what we’re fighting against but in the fight itself, because it can be very draining. It provided a great opportunity for us to showcase our resistance but also our resilience, our ability to come together as a community and to continue this fight together.

CALLIE: How do you make that overlap between joy and resilience in trying to deal with this incredibly difficult topic that is climate change and the way it impacts people unfairly?

ANIYA: I think art in general can play a big role in providing both joy and resilience, and that can enable the movement to continue to happen, because I think it definitely cannot last if a lot of people are grumpy or sad all the time. Art can give people a feeling of freedom and hope and a sense of playfulness, which can help them maintain their motivation. For me, it’s given me the freedom to tell my story and it’s helped me feel connected to a community.

CALLIE: Our final speaker is Alexandria Villaseñor, who at age 13 co-founded the U.S. Youth Climate Strike movement, which is part of the international, youth-led Fridays for Future movement. Now, at 17, she’s become an internationally recognized, award-winning activist who has founded several initiatives, including Earth Uprising International. She was also one of the child petitioners for the groundbreaking international complaint to the U..N Committee on the Rights of the Child, Children vs. Climate Crisis.

ALEXANDRIA VILLASENOR: I grew up in Northern California here, but when I was 13, my mom ended up going to New York City for a 12-month masters’ program, and I insisted she take me with her, not realizing that that would be the place where my activism would really start. So, we were living in New York City, but a lot of my family still lived in Northern California, so I found myself going back and forth. I was in my hometown when the fire in Paradise, California, happened in November of 2018, one of the worst wildfires in California’s history. I remember the entire area where I lived was just blanketed in this thick, unbreathable smoke. The air quality was over 350 AQI, which is in the hazardous category. I remember seeing people just collapsing in the street because they didn’t realize how harmful smoke inhalation was. I have asthma, so I remember being terrified, thinking that if I stepped outside for longer than 10 minutes, I could be in serious trouble.

When I got back to New York City from that trip home, I was angry, sick, upset and really stressed for my family who were still experiencing the effects of that fire. So I ended up doing reading and research around climate change and its connection to increasing wildfires, and it made me really want to do something. But I didn’t really realize what I could do until I started to see Greta Thunberg. That was right when Greta had just given her first big speech at the COP in Poland, and I remember being so inspired. Right after that, a bunch of school strikers in Australia went on a climate strike, and that also helped launch more of the global movement.

I was so inspired by these young people, so I took all the climate anxiety and grief I was feeling, and I turned it into action on December 14th, 2018, when I made two signs: one that said “COP24 failed us” and another that said “School Strike for Climate.” I went and sat in front of the United Nations headquarters every single Friday for around a year, all the way up until the beginning of the pandemic. And I started to get connected with the global climate movement and discovered that social media could be so helpful with connecting with other young people. I found myself organizing global climate strikes in 2019, on March 15, May 3, and on September 20, when we got 315,000 young people protesting in the streets of NYC.

That was really inspiring, but I realized that there were still so many more people we needed to bring into this movement if we were going to succeed, so I decided to start a nonprofit organization called Earth Uprising. Getting educated about the realities of climate change had gotten me into the movement, and it was one of the main things bringing other young people into the movement as well. But the most effective education is peer-to-peer, which is what the Fridays for Future movement was all about. When one young person talks with another young person about climate change and they educate each other, that gives them the feeling that activism is accessible to them. So, Earth Uprising started on the principle of educating young people, peer to peer, on climate, education and bringing them into the movement.

We started it on Earth Day of 2019. Since then, we’ve continued to grow, and we have a couple different focuses. Earth Uprising has a Global Youth Leadership Council that focuses on Climate Justice and making sure that voices from all around the world, from the communities most affected, are heard. Two people from every continent serve on this council for two years. That way, we’re constantly hearing new voices, new ideas, and we actually took this Global Youth Leadership Council and some of our other youth, a very diverse delegation of 20, to the Conference of Parties (i.e., “COP”) in Egypt this past November.

We also have a few different branches of the organization — Earth Uprising Law and Policy, Earth Uprising Media, and Earth Uprising Education. With Earth Uprising Law, one thing that we’re really focusing on is connecting young activists with legal representation. One thing I found with the petition that I was a part of was that using legal action to force corporations and governments to take action can be effective, but there needs to be a lot of public pressure backing up the legal effort. We plan to amplify cases and to partner with our Uprising Media to make sure that when these cases are brought, they become more widely known.

Our media work focuses on making sure that young people are having their own voices represented and are sharing their own stories from their own perspectives. Our Earth Uprising Education and Scholar program focuses on continuing to educate young people, including by getting climate curricula into schools, as well as by helping get some students from some poorer countries the resources they need to be able to go to universities to get environmental science degrees.

Another campaign we’re planning right now is called “Seat at the Table.” We think it’s so important that young people are represented in decision-making spaces, and so we are setting up a framework so we can engage companies, businesses and governments to create youth advisory councils, so we can be involved in their processes and actually be heard and bring new ideas and new initiatives.

The other main campaign we’re working on is “Mission: Finance Earth,” which focuses on getting resources to communities most affected by the climate crisis, focusing especially on disaster relief. The climate crisis affects every aspect of our lives, so the climate movement has to be a broad coalition that includes every social justice movement out there. Climate justice has to include such issues as justice for migrants and women’s reproductive rights as well as stopping ecocide and protecting species and biodiversity all around the world.

For adult allies, there are a number of ways that you can help support the youth climate movement. First, be fans of the movement and spread the word about it and help amplify young leaders’ voices in your communities. And funding is so important because very often those young activists who are able to go places and speak tend to come from more privileged backgrounds, and we need to get more young frontline voices heard. And intergenerational partnerships are really critically important as well. 350.org and Bill McKibben have been great examples of intergenerational activism, and he went on to co-found ThirdAct.org to organize seniors. In New York City, I found these two old-school activists who I refer to as my climate parents and grandparents. And the great book “All We Can Save” that I was honored to be asked to contribute to highlights a lot of great solutions and successes from leading women within the climate movement. It’s a great resource.

CALLIE: How did your parents react to your skipping school every Friday and picketing the U.N.?

ALEXANDRIA: Neither of my parents had ever really been in activism before either, so the concept of going out and protesting was something that hadn’t really been familiar in our family before. But my mom got her master’s in climate science, and I argued with her that “you scientists” study what’s happening to the planet, but if we want to have any chance of changing things for the better, we should be out making some noise. So she was supportive, but she didn’t realize how far it would go. My dad is also very supportive of my activism. He taught me how to go and listen to the birds in the forest. So, my family was very supportive of it, but we were all kind of surprised by just how much of an impact someone can have and how it took off.

CALLIE: Most people who are in their teens and early 20s are still working out what they want to do when they grow up, but the three of you have already accomplished more than most adults have and probably ever will. So how has your understanding of these intersectional crises shaped the way you think about your own futures? How has being engaged in climate activism and being so aware of this crisis shaped how you see your future, where you want to go with your future?

ALEXANDRIA: Climate change is going to affect young people’s futures because every single aspect of everyone’s life is going to have to be considered in the context of climate change. A lot of my friends are considering whether or not to have children, if they’re going to go to university, what type of career they should have, all in the light of the major impact climate change will have on all of society. It’s a lot of pressure that young people are feeling.

ANIYA: Because of YVA and my experience in organizing, I cannot imagine myself doing anything where I’m not deeply engaged with my community. Even if we do a better job bringing in clean energy and all that, there will still be a lot of social oppression to deal with because unfortunately we can’t quickly reverse the damage that has been done for centuries now, not only to our planet but to our people. So I’m really interested in helping myself but also engaging with my community about how we can work together to heal from these multigenerational traumas, how we can move forward, away from capitalism and colonialism.

ALEXIA: My mom instilled a strong sense of justice in me, and so justice, serving others, compassion and connection to the environment were things that were always very present in my consciousness. Even though I didn’t realize it, that guided my activism and now my career path. But to this day I don’t actually know what my career’s going to be. I’m graduating in May, so we’re going to find out where I’m going to end up working at, but I think community-building and organizing, fighting for liberation for our people and fighting against oppression will always be a central part of my life.

CALLIE: You’ve all spoken about myriad challenges — biodiversity loss, climate change, racial injustice, systemic oppression, but how do you decide what to focus upon on any given day? If it’s everything, everywhere, all at once, how can you focus effectively?

ANIYA: My main priority is to build youth power and to help frontline youth get involved and organized. I’m always thinking about ways to change the narrative to help youth feel that they are needed in this movement and that they have a community to back them up. That’s what my work with Hip Hop and Climate Justice and with coordinating the No One Is Disposable team is all about.

ALEXIA: For me it actually really helps, first of all, to know that everything is connected, that all the injustices are connected, so if you’re tackling injustice at any intersection, you’re doing the work. I’ve found my focus change over the past decade, but right now I’ve been honed in on the immediate issues facing the communities in Austin I’ve been working with.

ALEXANDRIA: I feel like it is kind of “everything, everywhere, all at once” because there are so many issues that can intersect with campaigns we’re working on, so one thing I try and do is if there’s a campaign that we’re planning on which we can partner with different groups in different areas working on different social justice issues, I’ll want to connect with them and make sure that we’re trying to include their actions in what we’re doing, and making sure that we’re messaging around how all these issues are related. Trying to find a way to fit everything into one campaign, when it’s possible, is one thing that I have tried to focus on.

What follows was part of the Q&A segment of the discussion:

AUDIENCE MEMBER (AM): So many people are overwhelmed and in fear and stressed about the state of everything. How do you bring them in and offer them the sense that there’s hope?

ANIYA: I’m still learning how to do that because I’m still pretty young, and sometimes I get freaked out too, but the key for me is in sharing experiences about the impact we can have and are having. There are thousands if not millions of people working on these issues around the world, millions of people who definitely care, millions of people coming together to see how we can make change and dismantle oppression. Sharing that can give people hope and the desire to be part of it.

ALEXIA: I also really like to refer people to history. I think we’ve overcome the impossible multiple times. My grandparents lived under colonization. They were not supposed to survive, but they did, and time and time again, people do; we do. We keep on fighting and we keep on going. There’s a lot we can learn from those histories.

ALEXANDRIA: I also think that one of the best remedies for climate anxiety or eco grief is action. When I go and focus on some campaign, when I’m protesting or organizing, it’s one of the things that really makes me feel better about what’s going on. And for a lot of young people who can’t vote yet, it’s the only way to have a say in our political system. I think action’s the best remedy.

AM: Alexandria, could you tell us a bit more about the legal and media work of your organization?

ALEXANDRIA: We focus on connecting young people with legal representation at the local, national and international levels, because there are many climate lawsuits with young people happening all around the world. It’s a great way to put pressure using the systems we have created. You need pressure on the inside and from the outside; they’re equally important. In the Children vs. Climate Crisis complaint that I was part of, a lot of people didn’t actually know about it. If we had had more public awareness and pressure, it would have made a big difference. But sometimes with legal cases, you can just get stuck in the nitty gritty process of it, and it’s sometimes hard to communicate to the public what’s going on. So, with young people who have current legal cases, besides connecting them with lawyers, we also want to help them amplify their message and get the word out about their cases.

In our media projects, we work on op-eds, interviews and using social media, but we want young people to write their own narratives instead of being interviewed by a journalist. We want to make sure that it’s authentic and it’s coming from young activists themselves. We also collaborate with a coalition of a bunch of media groups that have committed to reporting on climate; we work with them on making sure that youth are being represented in the media.

AM: How do you deal with attacks and negative comments and with adults not taking you seriously? And how do you cope with what must be an incredibly busy schedule combining activism and your studies?

ALEXIA: I think when you start having haters is when you know you’re having an impact, but usually the best strategy is to not pay attention to those people that are just attacking you, because that’s not a genuine conversation. When you talk to people in real life, and you listen to what they care about, especially in a community setting, if you’re able to have that sort of real conversation, I’ve been quite successful in getting people to join our campaigns, because people care about their experiences and their quality of life. But in terms of a busy schedule, I don’t quite know what the answer is there. I’m a little sleep deprived and probably drink too much coffee, to be honest…

ANIYA: Yeah. I definitely don’t have any answers about my busy schedule. I’m sort of still trying to manage it all. I’m a junior in high school. When I started with YVA shortly after the pandemic came, we were mostly just doing work on Zoom, so I just had two different screens open, one for my YVA Zoom meetings and one for my homework. But now that I have to go to school and I also want to hold myself to a certain standard when it comes to my academics, I have to balance school and the roles I hold at YVA, and it’s hard. I tell young people that I think activism is important, but I don’t think it’s worth sacrificing your childhood for it. You have to have fun, too, and I try to follow my own advice, but it’s a challenge…

In terms of dealing with the negative comments, in mainstream climate spaces I have encountered adults who only want to talk about science and don’t want to hear about or talk about the impacts on my frontline community, and that seems disrespectful, and it hurts me. But I’ve learned how to communicate that these issues need to be talked about, to just push and use my young person card to get people to listen to what I’m saying.

ALEXANDRIA: When it comes to negativity or people who don’t agree with you, it’s true that a lot of teenagers can be annoying. I know I’m annoying, but I think we can use that for the good, so I encourage young people to continue sharing your message without fear. When it comes to negativity and social media trolls, it’s important to just continue to outnumber those people, and I think that we are. I think that the message of climate action and climate justice is starting to outnumber those people, and I think just continuing to do that is important, so we can just drown them out.

And I’m also a junior in high school, and it’s definitely very difficult managing a schedule. I came here directly from school, and I have so much homework tonight and a test tomorrow. Taking naps is probably the best advice I can give: just take a nap whenever you can and try and plan ahead as much as you can, but also just expect the unexpected, because it will happen.

AM: What do you do when movements lose steam? And how do you decide if it’s worth reforming a system or if you should just work to abolish it?

ALEXANDRIA: I think that to make change happen you need pressure from outside and sympathetic people inside the system. There are times you may have to compromise, but you still have to make sure that you’re sharing the movement’s fundamental messages. I think we need some youth inside in the decision-making spaces, at the negotiation tables, and a lot of mobilized young people outside of those rooms protesting. Having both of those at the same time can be the most impactful.

ALEXIA: I want to second that. My personal kind of organizing strategy has been an inside and outside game. Sometimes I focus on a local, specific, limited goal, but I don’t forget the long-term overall goal of abolishing capitalism and colonialism.

ANIYA: I’m more of a “the whole system needs to go” kind of person. I feel that the roots of these systems of oppression are so strong that it will be very hard to achieve real liberation just by reforms around the edges and some compromises, but I’m still learning, and I’m sure there are many other approaches.

ALEXANDRIA: I think that there’s so many different ways to take action in this movement, and I hope to see you all finding your calls to action and going out and building community.

Biochar: An Ancient Method of Healing Modern Soils

Amazonia is the largest river basin in the world, covering an area greater than Europe. More than 3 million species live in the Amazon rainforest, making it one of the most diverse ecosystems and largest carbon sinks on earth. Some 20 billion tons of moisture are released daily through the transpiration of the teeming plant life there, regulating regional temperatures and affecting climates as far away as the American Midwest.

And yet, in spite of its immense size and its commanding ecological influences, the majestic Amazon stands on a fragile foundation. Paradoxically, despite supporting some of the world’s highest levels of biodiversity and greatest density of plant life, its soils are some of the poorest in the world.

In the high heat and humidity of the tropical rainforest, plant litter on the forest floor rapidly breaks down and the nutrients released from decomposition are readily taken up by the roots of the abundant flora, so the lion’s share of the nutrients are held in the trees and plants, not the soil, and the region’s heavy rains leach out even more nutrients from the very thin layer of topsoil, further contributing to its impoverishment. When an area is deforested for agriculture or cattle ranching by outsiders who don’t understand the local ecology, those soils become barren after just a year or two, leading to a vicious cycle of further clear-cutting and an alarming loss of precious rainforest.

Terra Preta

But it turns out that ancient Indigenous people in the Amazon developed methods to enrich soils so that they remained fertile for decades, and in some cases centuries. The soils they improved became known as Terra Preta (“black earth” in Portuguese). The technique goes back an estimated 2500 years.

Carbonaceous household and agricultural waste – kitchen scraps, animal manure and bones, agricultural waste, fallen tree branches and leaves, pottery, etc.—were buried in a pit in the ground and heated under low oxygen conditions (a method know as pyrolysis) that burned off volatile oils and produced charcoal with a high carbon content.

That charcoal, a very stable form of sequestered carbon, was ground into smaller particles and incorporated into the soil. Terra Preta soils, which still make up about 10 % of the Amazon Basin, are dark and fertile and in some places up to 6.5 feet deep with 3 to 18 times as much carbon as nearby untreated soils.

Biochar draws in nutrients and prevents nutrient leeching. It also creates habitat for beneficial microbes that feed on those nutrients and deliver them to the plant in a more useable form.

Biochar: What’s Old is New

Because of the degeneration of so many agricultural soils around the world due to industrial farming methods that include the heavy use of chemicals and intense plowing, agricultural soils, by some estimates, have lost 50 % of their valuable carbon stocks, which have been released into the atmosphere contributing to climate change.

*Kuikuro man at Brazil’s Indigenous Games. (Photo by Valter Campanato/ABr – http://www.agenciabrasil.gov.br/media/imagens/2007/12/02/0900VC0034a.jpg/view, CC BY 3.0 br*)

But carbon-poor degraded soils can be replenished by the appropriate use of properly produced biochar, essentially the same material used by ancient Indigenous people in the Amazon. In fact, Kuikuro farmers who live along the Xingu River in Brazil – and whose ancestors have been there for centuries – are still enriching their soils by adding a form of biochar they call eeqepe.

Making and Using Biochar

Modern methods of making biochar range from high-tech pyrolysis systems to a low-tech backyard process of placing a metal trash can inside a 55-gallon burn barrel that heats up the feedstock to high temperatures without burning it. In addition to pioneering gardeners and farmers who make their own biochar, there are about 150 commercial biochar producers in Canada and the U.S. who sell their product.

The feedstocks of biochar are typically wood from fallen branches or dead trees, but as the Indigenous people of the Amazon proved, a variety of suitable feedstocks can be used as long as they have a high carbon content. It is ecologically imperative that biochar be made from garden or agricultural waste and not from virgin material harvested solely for the purpose of making biochar. That would just make it yet another exploitive commodity and would compromise its carbon sequestration benefits, and, of course, it should never be made from contaminated materials such as treated lumber.

Biochar increases pH, buffering overly acidic soils, and it helps build a healthy soil structure, which increases water-holding capacity and reduces erosion. When wood is used as a core feedstock, it results in a biochar with an astounding amount of surface area (9000 sq ft in one gram!), and that structure provides habitat for many beneficial microbes. Also, because biochar has a strong negative charge, it draws in minerals and other nutrients for soil life to feed on.

Newly made biochar must be activated or charged with nutrients and microbes by mixing in compost, manure, urine, organic amendments, grass clippings, leaves, etc. There is a lot of leeway and variability with what you can mix in with the biochar depending upon what is available. Once you have added those amendments, the biochar mix should sit for a number of days ( if the additives are soluble fertilizers) to a number of months (if you add fresh green waste). The time allows the biochar to absorb and hold the nutrients which eventually will be released to the plants with the help of the microbes. The inoculation process is important because if the biochar is applied to the soil before it is charged, it will draw in nutrients from the soil itself and for a time reduce the amount of nutrients available to plants.

There are a number of ways to apply the biochar once it’s charged. The simplest is to apply it to the soil surface and over time it will be incorporated deeper into the soil by irrigation, rain, earthworms and microbes. It can also be mixed with compost and used the same way you would use compost. Application rate recommendations are a bit vague and vary from 10 – 20 % biochar to soil. The calculation should take into account the depth of the soil you want to treat.

Biochar’s Benefits

Research has shown that biochar is a singularly stable form of carbon that can be sequestered for hundreds of years, as the Terra Preta soils have proven. Research has also shown that biochar increases nutrient availability and earthworm and microbial populations and improves yields. Its ability to hold water can reduce irrigation costs and prevent erosion. Its strong electrical charge draws in nutrients and can harness excessive fertilizers that leech off farms and harm waterways and aquatic species. Although Biochar is not a silver bullet, with its multiple benefits it can be a valuable tool when used in concert with other regenerative practices to enhance soil health and mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon.

‘Closing the Gates to Hell’: A Global Plan to Phase Out Fossil Fuels and Accelerate a Just Transition

How do we get away from coal, oil and gas, and on to the future that we want? Learn about the call for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and how an international coalition is plotting the course for a just transition to clean energy and low-carbon solutions. In this Bioneers panel discussion, a group of civil society, government and Indigenous leaders discuss the growing momentum for a Fossil Fuel Treaty.

The panel features Osprey Orielle Lake, Founder and Executive Director of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network; Eriel Deranger, Founder and Executive Director of Indigenous Climate Action; climate and campaign strategist Michael Brune, Director of Larsen Lam Climate Change Foundation; Eduardo Martinez, longtime activist and current Mayor of Richmond, California; and Bryony Worthington, a key architect of the United Kingdom’s world-leading Climate Change Act and co-chair of Peers for the Planet. The panel was moderated by Cara Pike, Senior Communication Advisor to the Fossil Fuel Treaty and Founder and Executive Director of Climate Access.

The following discussion has been edited for clarity.

CARA PIKE: I’m Founder and Executive Director of Climate Access, and also Senior Communications Advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. I’ve been fortunate to be part of the Fossil Fuel Treaty initiative since before its launch in 2019, and it’s been a wild, wonderful ride to see the momentum now growing for an international agreement to get us away from coal, oil and gas, and on to the future that we want.

Why did we name this panel “Closing the Gates to Hell?” Well, last November, the United Nations Secretary General said that we are opening the gates to the hell of fossil fuel-driven climate impacts if we allow the production of oil, gas and coal to expand, as the naked greed of entrenched interests that are raking in billions from fossil fuels would like us to do. Despite scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency making it clear in report after report that we can’t have any more extraction, governments around the world are on track to expand to levels that would result in 110% more pollution than what we can handle to stay alive, to stay to that agreed-upon goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees. So we have a lot of work to do to turn things around.

What we’re really trying to do with this initiative is to go after the fossil fuel industry, which has long been deceiving us about its impacts on climate, human health and wellbeing, and the entire web of life. Those companies have engaged in massive greenwashing campaigns and lobbying efforts to water down the language in climate agreements, to dupe the public and to halt or slow progress to a green economy.

The growing movement for a fossil fuel treaty, which is what we’re here to discuss, seeks to foster international cooperation to end new extraction, wind down existing production, and expedite a transition to alternatives, but in a fair way, so developed countries that have benefitted the most from fossil fuels have to support the transitions of poorer countries ravaged by the legacies of colonialism.

Let’s lead off with Baroness Bryony Worthington, who has been a key figure in getting this initiative off the ground:

BRYONY WORTHINGTON: I’ve long been a fan of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty campaign because I believe in the power of laws to help us solve problems of the “Tragedy of the Commons.” You can’t deliver everything just through local action with a complicated problem such as climate change, which is a global challenge. So when I was made co-director of a new climate foundation, I was searching for ideas that we could fund that would be commensurate with the scale of the problem, some kind of a macro lever we could pull that would help us make progress.

At a chance meeting at the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Madrid, I met the treaty team, and they gave me a two-minute elevator pitch. It was the first time I’d actually heard something that met the bill. It was a big, audacious idea, but it was copying a model that had been successful in the past. We have, as a global society, risen to global challenges before. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a good example, as is the Montreal Protocol, which stopped the erosion of the ozone layer.

So, a legal approach at a global level was appealing, and I could instantly see as well that they had the right approach that could help galvanize a lot of disparate campaigns. There are many reasons the fossil fuel industry is under attack: it has loads and loads of disparate impacts on lots of communities, but there hadn’t yet emerged a really galvanizing kind of lightning-rod campaign that could unify them. The best that we had, really, was the youth movement and Greta Thunberg saying, “Follow the science,” but we needed something much more specific, and the treaty offered that. I persuaded the board of the foundation that the journey would be the destination. We didn’t need to win a treaty, just the act of calling for it could change the dynamic and put us on the front foot, so I was very happy to back it.

CARA: I want to recognize that this initiative builds on decades of efforts fighting fossil fuels, many grassroots efforts, including the work of Pacific Island nations who were first to call out the climate crisis and were first to call out the need at the international level to come together to address fossil fuels, so this is building on decades of work. Also, it’s important to note that this is a distributed campaign that’s not being led by one organization. There is an international support team, which I’m on, and an international steering committee made up of a number of organizations and leaders from all over the world, including Osprey Orielle Lake, who got involved at a very, very early point in the initiative, so let’s turn to her next.

OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE: Yeah, early on, I talked to Tzeporah Berman, who’s now the chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, about different constituencies that might be interested, in addition to countries. Due to gender inequality, women are very often impacted first and worst by climate change and environmental degradation, so we felt that the treaty would be a really important place for us to focus the attention of a lot of our women’s networks.

We at the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network have been going annually to the U.N. climate talks for well over a decade. It’s not a fun place to go. You only should go if you really need to go, but there’s really critical work being done there, not just in the negotiations but on the sidelines — a lot of advocacy work and organizing goes on there which has impacted the larger COP. Last year in Dubai, at COP28, the movement for a fossil fuel treaty was very influential in forcing the conversation amongst governments to finally talk about phasing out fossil fuels. That was not on the formal agenda, but our movements forced that to happen. Most governments, in cahoots with the fossil fuel industry, do everything they can to not have a conversation about phasing out fossil fuels.

One of the things that really moved me about being at COP28 was that several new countries came on board to back the idea of the treaty. In particular, I was really impressed with the president of Colombia because it is a fossil fuel-producing country. To publicly make that statement in that venue at the COP was tremendously powerful. He gave an incredible speech that took a lot of courage. That was a real sign of progress.

CARA: It’s important to note that the movement isn’t just coming from civil society. As we saw with nuclear non-proliferation, in which there was a nuclear-free cities movement, a similar thing is happening with our initiative. We’ve had more than 100 cities and some national governments endorse the treaty, including the City of Richmond and the State of California. Richmond, Berkeley’s neighbor just to the north, is home to a large Chevron refinery. It’s the city’s largest employer, taxpayer, and polluter. Last year, led by newly elected Mayor Eduardo Martinez, the City of Richmond joined the Fossil Fuel Treaty. Eduardo, I’m wondering if you could talk about why you made the decision to join and how it connects to your ongoing efforts to address the major polluter in your community.

EDUARDO MARTINEZ: Chevron has had a major effect on the health of our community, and it’s a cumulative effect over decades. Chevron also pollutes our elections. They spent $14 million in the past election cycle in Richmond, trying to control the narrative. We need as many different mechanisms to hold them accountable as possible, but we not only need the mechanisms, we need people who understand the science and can keep Chevron accountable to follow through with their commitments when we win lawsuits against them. We’re working really hard to hold Chevron accountable, and one of our greatest strengths in Richmond is the activism of the community. It’s an immense battle, and we need as many treaties and regulations as possible, and mechanisms to make sure that Chevron complies. (Note/update: the Richmond City Council just voted in June to add a local ballot measure in the upcoming November election which would put in place a special tax on Chevron to compensate the community for the impacts of the pollution it generates).

A just transition away from fossil fuels is absolutely necessary, but a realistic plan for that is also necessary. Our staff is doing a study right now to find out how to transition once the refinery in Richmond closes. We know that refineries, when they close, tend to close quickly with no warning. A refinery that burned in Philadelphia closed and left the city with not only an economic hole but a major liability in the cleanup. We know that workers will be out of work, so there will need to be a plan for those workers to be able to transition from the refinery to some fossil fuel-free and renewable energy-related jobs.

We also need to change our culture. We need to change the way we think about how we transport ourselves. We need to make sure that our cities are self-contained, so you can bicycle or walk to where you need to go and your food is grown close to you so you don’t have to have apples transported across the ocean from Australia or New Zealand, or some other place. We also need to create microgrids so that the energy is produced locally and used within smaller communities. There are so many different things that we need to do in order to make this change from fossil fuels to clean energy.

CARA: Thank you, Eduardo, and we’ll really look forward to continuing to watch what’s happening in Richmond. I was reading in advance of this session that Richmond’s local newspaper is owned by Chevron, so when there are massive flaring events or pipes burst and oil spills into the Bay, it doesn’t get picked up in the local paper. That’s the insidiousness of the fossil fuel industry, and they’re like that everywhere they operate. They do have an especially disproportionate impact on Black and Brown communities such as Richmond, but they also have pushed even more aggressively into many Indigenous territories globally to extract fossil fuels. That includes the tar sands of Alberta, from the home territory of Eriel Deranger, who has long been one of the main activists defending Indigenous peoples from the predations of extractive industries.

ERIEL DERANGER: My name is Eriel Tchekwie. It is a Dené or Denesųłiné name that means “Thunder Woman.” I am a visitor on these lands of the Ohlone people, and I want to acknowledge that we are guests here today.

The Tar Sands is considered the largest industrial project in the world, not only because of the massive extraction footprint but because of the incredibly gigantic infrastructure associated with that extraction, from the series of pipelines that crisscross the entire continent, as well as the tanker traffic in North American ports. My friend Clayton Thomas-Müller once said that it’s almost like fracking but on crack. The extraction of the oil from the tar sands requires massive amounts of water as they superheat and melt the bitumen and suck it through a giant series of pipelines. There are also a lot of open pit mines where they’re literally scraping the bottom of the barrel for more oil. An immense amount of boreal forest, one of the most critically important ecosystems on this planet, has been completely destroyed.

This ecosystem is also the home of my people, the Athabaska Chippewan First Nation. Our territories have been dewatered. Our water tables have been contaminated and diminished to the point that we are now experiencing one of the worst droughts in history in Alberta. This water system is part of what’s called the Peace-Athabaska Delta System. It’s one of the last inland freshwater deltas in the world, and it’s home to many species at risk, such as woodland caribou, woodland bison, and many migratory birds. For us, Dene people, these lands and territories, these animals, these river systems have been a part of our identity. So as these places are degraded and destroyed, our cosmology and cultural lifeways, our very identities are being destroyed. And, of course, we’re not just talking about the degradation of the land, but the contamination of our bodies, as we’re seeing increased rates of cancers, autoimmune diseases, respiratory illnesses, etc., etc.

For us, the Fossil Fuel Treaty is a tool in the toolshed, because it’s clear that the demands of Indigenous communities have fallen on deaf ears for 500 years. The Indigenous nations in Alberta have long asked for a moratorium on the expansion of Alberta’s tar sands, to no avail. They don’t care, and there is more under production now than there was when I was working under Michael Brune at Rainforest Action Network 15 years ago at the height of our campaigns.

We need as many tools as possible because so far all of the industry’s commitments to reduce their “emissions intensity” have been filled with loopholes that permit them to continue business as usual. What’s really interesting when you look at the original signatories to the Fossil Fuel Treaty is that they are people of color, mostly island nations and Indigenous Peoples, because we are the first and foremost to be impacted by the grotesque impacts of this industry. So of course we’re going to be the first to stand up and demand something better. But we cannot rely on Indigenous Peoples and people of color alone to do the labor to save this planet. It’s time for colonial states and high-producing countries such as the U.S. and Canada to step up and finally address the historic harms that they have done to the people and the planet if we’re ever going to actually achieve anything remotely close to climate justice.

CARA: Michael, could you share your views on how the Fossil Fuel Treaty could complement or boost other existing efforts, such as divestment campaigns?

MICHAEL BRUNE: The idea behind the treaty is super simple: it’s that supply and demand are linked. You learn that in high school if you take a basic economics class. For the last several decades, most of the attention from funders and policymakers and most of the political willingness to do anything has almost entirely focused on what’s called the demand side — the incentives to make clean energy cheaper or more affordable or more accessible; the work of entrepreneurs and scientists and innovators to make the alternatives to fossil fuel more present across the economy. Lots of progress has been made so that we can now actually plausibly say that we can have a healthy economy without fossil fuels whatsoever.

But it obviously hasn’t worked for frontline communities in the Amazon, or in the Arctic, or in Alberta, or here in Richmond. It certainly hasn’t worked from a climate change perspective. We shouldn’t have to be calling for a treaty. This should have been done decades ago, at the beginning of the climate movement. We should have said that we need to create the alternative to fossil fuels, and we have to have a rational discussion about how to phase out fossil fuels.

The idea of this treaty is to create a conversation because eventually, we will phase out of fossil fuels. Eventually, I think, we will be successful at creating a new economy that’s based on clean energy. But if there’s no fair process to organize how that transition happens, who’s going to call the shots? Do you think it’ll be frontline communities that’ll decide which countries will phase out first? Or do you think it’ll be the United States and the richest and most powerful countries in the world? We have to have a rational conversation in which people from the bottom up — grassroots community organizations, Indigenous community organizations, some of the smaller producing countries that are currently dependent on fossil fuels — have a say in who phases out first and who gets to profit while we transition away from fossil fuels. That’s the idea behind this whole treaty.

CARA: The ultimate goal is to get a binding agreement, but it is about the journey and about putting pressure on decision-makers, so we’re excited that we have now close to 2,500 groups from around the world who have endorsed the treaty. It’s a distributed network model, so these groups are all off running campaigns on their own, pushing different levels of decision-makers within their communities or regions to take action, such as the growing efforts to push for fossil fuel-free zones in the Pacific and in the Amazon. We’ve put a major emphasis on building a network with a lot of civil society organizations and leaders from the Global South, and we’ll continue to do that, but we need to start to put more pressure on the big producing countries in the Global North.

At the state level, California has endorsed. Hawaii was the first U.S. state to endorse, and Maine has as well. But we need to keep in mind that the U.S. and Canada have the most aggressive plans to expand fossil fuel extraction of any nations. So I’m wondering, Michael, since you were involved in helping to secure the California endorsement, where you think things need to go with the Fossil Fuel Treaty in the U.S.?

MICHAEL: Where do things need to go? Everywhere. One key thing we need is lots of real, local examples of communities turning away from fossil fuels. Sometimes that’ll look like what’s happening in Richmond, where there’s a ballot initiative to put a dollar-a-barrel tax on Chevron there. That isn’t a treaty; it doesn’t mean that the company will move out, but it’s a major move to hold the company accountable.

In California, across the whole state, there’s a ballot initiative about whether or not we should drill and frack within half a mile of healthcare centers, daycare centers, schools, and places of worship. So if you care about these things, get involved in that to make sure that we win. And every city in the state can take action to begin to move away from fossil fuels, either by signing the Fossil Fuel Treaty and/or suing the oil industry, as Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco and Marin County have all done. We need to hold these companies accountable for years of not just polluting our air and our water and our climate and our politics, but for lying about it the whole time.

There are lots of ways to take action, but the key is all of us taking action. If you are motivated to do something on what’s called the demand side and make clean energy more affordable and accessible, that’s great. You could also work on phasing out fossil fuels because there are millions of people who want to work with you on that.

CARA: Some treaties have been successful. Some of them have gone through existing international institutions, such as a recent agreement on plastics that came through the U.N. In other situations, groups of individual countries initiate action when achieving a veto-proof consensus (as is needed in the U.N.) is not possible. That was the case with the land mine ban, when Canada and a handful of other countries just started meeting, knowing the major powers wouldn’t agree to it.

With the Fossil Fuel Treaty, we are working within the U.N. framework, but we’re also working directly with the 12 countries that have endorsed it so far — on putting together diplomatic dialogues that they’re leading, nation-to-nation, and starting to talk about the terms of a treaty. So we’re working at both pathways. But Eriel, could you share how we got here and where you think things need to go?

ERIEL: The big climate gatherings, starting with Kyoto Accord, have for a long time produced really weak, non-binding statements that were more economic agreements than any real action on climate. Nearly all serious civil society activists and frontline countries considered them to be garbage but felt unable to affect the outcomes, but at Copenhagen in 2009, we started to see a shift. We started talking about a need to really phase out of fossil fuels and dirty energy projects. We started talking about moving away from economic agreements as a way to solve the climate crisis.

What we’ve seen since 2009, since the Paris Agreement, is civil society and Indigenous Peoples mobilizing and effectively changing the discourse and the dialogue, and the negotiations within these spaces, to include more progressive language. That includes recognition of human rights, the rights of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous knowledge systems, and human rights-based approaches to the climate crisis.

But the roots of this push had started a long time ago when Indigenous Peoples in 1992 met before the Earth Rio Summit and said we need to have agreements that look at our interrelationships with the natural world, and that called out extractive industries as dirty and harmful. So, civil society groups and Indigenous Peoples have been advocating for this for a long time, but in recent years there has been a more concerted effort to really get this on the table, and the fossil fuel interests are clearly worried.

But, if we are going to get this right, we can’t rely on nation states. We have to absolutely look at Indigenous rights and human rights beyond the colonial state levels. Those that have been asking for a phaseout of fossil fuels for far longer than anyone else are Indigenous communities, and it’s really, really nice for us to have the Fossil Fuel Treaty come and join us in this cause, but we still have so much work to do to get to the point at which COP meetings no longer wind up with weak language and countless loopholes. I don’t attend the COPs because I have faith that global leaders are going to do the right thing. I attend COPs because I want to make sure that they don’t do the worst thing.

CARA: When we launched the treaty initiative, we had a whole debate: Will we ever have a country sign? Is it just a vehicle to put on pressure or is this actually a thing? And now it’s an actual thing. The first two nations to join were Vanuatu and Tuvalu, and now 12 have joined as well as nine Indigenous nations from the Amazon. Bryony, do you have any thoughts on other key steps in the pathway forward beyond the U.N. that we should be thinking about?

BRYONY: We, the people who care, who want this planet to be a safe and sustainable place, are in the majority. We’re led to believe that we’re not by a very vocal minority on the far right that wants to make us all fight against each other and to convince us that there’s an “other,” a “them” who are causing our problems. The heart of getting to a solution on this is democracy. It’s basically standing up and electing the right people, getting the right councilors, the right mayors, the right M.P.s, the right presidents to take this forward. Because if you don’t have that, you are limited to only working at a local level, and you’re much more easily dispersed and divided. We have to re-engage in democracy and make sure we have the right people representing us.

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve done this before. We have saved the planet before, as we did with the ozone crisis. So we have examples of pathways. Of course, there are going to be bumps in the road, but ultimately understanding that we have to address this at a global level is the first step. And that’s why the treaty is so important.

You can do tons of stuff at the local level to erode the social license of the fossil fuel industry and take away demand for their products, and they’ll start to crumble, but they could crumble in a very disorderly and unfair way. The market will not make this a fair transition. It’ll be ugly and unfair, fundamentally unjust. So, it would be incredibly helpful to have a fast, fair and forever treaty that locks in a plan that we all agree is necessary and is commensurate with the scale of the problem. If we can take what we achieved at Paris and through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as a stepping stone, work till we get to the ultimate goal, which is a complete transition out of this industry. That is why I think this campaign is so important.

What follows was part of the Q&A segment of the discussion:

Audience Member (AM): When fossil fuels are phased out, what will life look like? Is there a plan to guarantee that there will be lights at night, etc.? What will the transition look like?

EDUARDO: It’s going to be different in different places, but we need to start thinking about how that transition will happen because it’s not going to happen if we don’t start thinking about it. And if we wait for it to happen, then we’ll be reacting as opposed to being proactive to create a just reality that works for everyone. In Richmond, we have a coalition of many local groups called Our Power Richmond, and they are looking at all the different aspects of what a transition will look like in our economy and culture.

OSPREY: We have to remember that it’s part of the fossil fuel industry’s tactics to make people afraid that we’re all going to have to live in caves with no jobs or lights at night. That fear is one of the ways that they have maintained a stranglehold on financial institutions and governments, so we need to dispel this fear. The fact is that renewables are coming online incredibly fast and at much cheaper rates than fossil fuels. We need to understand that we can transition. It’s not a solutionless problem. We have the solutions. We are fighting the fossil fuel industry, which is one of the biggest industries in the world, with gazillions of dollars, backed by their allies in governments and financial institutions and corporations. That’s the problem, not that we can’t all live well, all of us, after a transition.

ERIEL: There are many really great examples of communities starting to transition, but it does take courage to be able to start to take those first steps. My community is in the frickin’ heart of the tar sands, and we have a strategy to try to move towards a low carbon lifestyle. We already built the largest off-grid solar farm in the country, and we have plans to get off of diesel that the oil and gas industry has made us so reliant on to heat our homes for the last 100-plus years.

We’re also looking beyond just how we’re heating and fueling our homes and our vehicles. We’re looking at our food sources and how we can reclaim food security and our food sovereignty. Many Indigenous communities are already modeling what it means to transition off of fossil fuels. You can check out Indigenous Climate Action and our publications to look at our new Just Transition guide for more information.

AM: How will the transition affect workers and unions? There’s been a lot of resistance to getting off fossil fuels from some big labor unions.

MICHAEL: The U.S. Steelworkers Union, which represents a lot of refinery workers across the country, and a little bit overseas, put a bunch of money into studying how steel mills can be made greener using cleaner fuels. The BlueGreen Alliance is working with several different unions — laborers, electrical workers, and quite a few others — to figure out how to transition workers to jobs that are just as good paying and closer to home. And then, of course, there’s a lot of clean energy investment in the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill, that provides extra incentives for companies that are offering well-paying, high-road union jobs in the clean energy industries that are displacing fossil fuels.

An encouraging thing is that across the movement, there’s been a lot more attention to making sure that the clean energy jobs are actually good, family-sustaining, well-paying jobs, ideally unionized, so that we can argue to the labor movement and union leaders that workers can have just as good of a life, and work close to home, in a way that supports survival of life on the planet.

AM: How do we stop new fossil fuel exploration?

BRYONY: I think this is at the heart of why we need some sort of international discussion around this, because there are certain countries that could much more easily forego new drilling. Norway is a prime example, a small country with a sovereign wealth fund that has $1.5 trillion in it that they’ve amassed from their oil and gas extraction, and they are not coming off oil and gas. They’re still selling new leases in the North Sea, so one of the richest countries on Earth, per capita, is continuing with this myth that they have to keep taking the oil and gas out of the ground to have a healthy economy. If we can’t convince the Norwegians that they need to stop, we’re not going to make it.

Canada is probably the next in line in terms of the most egregious forms of extraction. It’s not just the tar sands; they also have a huge fracking enterprise in British Columbia. Canada is a rich nation. It could move to a clean electrical system. We’ve got to get real about who is going to be the country that is the first country to agree not sell all its barrels. The oil and gas industry wants us to believe that everybody has to extract every last barrel. That is their narrative, and we have to push back on it.

ERIEL: The issue in Canada is absurd. British Columbia’s right next door to us, and the gas that they are fracking there is being exported into Alberta to help them extract the tar sands. It’s insane.

One of the biggest challenges to a just transition in Canada is that there’s been a devolution of the state’s fiduciary responsibilities to provide social services to communities, and now these fossil fuel companies, through their philanthropic arms, are subsidizing social services. So all of our hospitals, schools, sports, recreation, cultural centers are all subsidized by oil and gas. If they were to leave tomorrow, our entire social structures and services would crumble.

This isn’t just about workers’ rights, it’s about the fact that quite a few countries have failed their people, and they have put us in a situation in which we have become economic hostages to an industry that is destroying the planet. Undoing this is going to be much more immense than just transitioning from one energy source to another and moving workers from one energy source to another. Our entire socio-economic frameworks will need to be reevaluated as part of the phasing out and getting off of fossil fuels.

OSPREY: One of the reasons we’re at Bioneers engaging in this systemic analysis is that it’s hard to just look at one piece of the poly-crisis. It’s all deeply connected: our economic system, Indigenous rights, feminism, what’s happening in the global geopolitical situation, etc. But the reason that we are collecting around the treaty is because it’s a vision of where we need to go, which is keeping fossil fuels in the ground and getting governments to sign on to that goal. The cold, hard, scientific fact is, whether we like it or not, we can’t really get anywhere if we don’t keep the fossil fuels in the ground.

But that absolutely doesn’t mean that the treaty is the only thing we work on. All of us also work tirelessly on one or more of the other critically important issues I mentioned that our organizations are specialized in focusing on.

AM: Could some sort of Universal Basic Income plan help workers and communities during the transition and so they’re less dependent on fossil fuel company funding?

EDUARDO: In Richmond, we’re actually considering a universal income for residents. They’ve done a trial in Fresno, and it has shown positive effects. And it’s not just for a transition away from fossil fuels, it would be a step toward a just economy. We are also thinking of creating a fund for a just transition and to provide some sort of insurance in case Chevron has a major disaster, so we in the city would have the money to cover it. Right now, fossil fuel companies self-insure, which means that when the time comes, they declare bankruptcy and leave communities holding the bag. So we need to create a mechanism in which they pay upfront as opposed “self-insuring.”

AM: How do you deal with the fear that many people feel about the enormous changes a transition requires?

OSPREY: Just to give one example, I have worked a lot on divestment campaigns trying to get banks to divest from fossil fuel companies. When you go into a room with a bunch of people at a bank, not only are they thinking a lot about numbers, they’re also afraid because we’re talking about their livelihoods and stopping the kinds of lucrative deals they make with fossil fuel companies. But what I’ve found is that face-to-face conversation is critically important. So, we’ll bring people who are being directly impacted by this industry: young people with asthma, Indigenous communities, women who have experienced generations of cancer in their families. There’s nothing like sitting people in front of other people who are saying: “We’re the people being impacted.” “This is how many cancers are in my family.” “This is how the land is being destroyed.” “We’re being harmed, but eventually you will be too, even if you’re feeling privileged over in your wealthy country or wealthy community. This will all come around.”

EDUARDO: I also think talking to people is critical. If you talk to one person, that person talks to another, and we share our stories. People relate much more to stories than they do to numbers, to facts, so if they hear your story, it becomes more real to them. But it’s also true that it doesn’t work trying to reason with unreasonable people. We have to be sure of where we’re going, and we have to be adamant about getting there.

ERIEL: One of the most important ways to overcome our fear is to stand with other people in our community and hold onto our beliefs together, but also to remember the immense power that exists in the lands and our interconnectedness and our relationships with those. I think that when you can see the immense beauty and power of this planet and remember that just the simple act of breathing connects you with the entire web of life and that with each breath you are connecting to something so big and so powerful that it has created everything on this planet, you start to see the fragility of systems of empire and colonialism and capitalism. You start to see that they are just a blip. If we can do that, our fear becomes small and our hope becomes so much bigger.

EDUARDO: The culture of fear makes us go into ourselves and makes us seek allies to protect us from others, but the culture of hope is one of imagination, and that’s what we need in order to move forward.

CARA: One way to overcome fear is to join a bigger group so that you’re not doing it alone. We encourage you to visit FossilFuelTreaty.org, endorse the treaty and contact us. We’ve got resources if you want to run campaigns or be a spokesperson. This is a distributed network. Join us. Thank you.

Researcher Discusses Broader Implications of Orangutan Using Healing Plant

After sustaining a deep wound to his face during an assumed fight with another male, a wild Sumatran orangutan named Rakus did something that astounded researchers.

First, he began feeding on a liana, a plant with potent medicinal qualities. After a time, he stopped swallowing, but continued chewing. Then for several minutes, he applied the fluid from the chewed vegetation to his wound before covering the open flesh with the plant mash. The observation was groundbreaking.

“We were very excited because this is the first time that a wild animal was observed treating his or her own wound with a healing plant,” said Isabelle Laumer, the lead author of a recently published paper about the revelation.

In the following Q&A with Bioneers, Laumer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, discusses the research team’s observations, the broader implications of Rakus’ behavior, and how the paper’s findings relate to her other research on animal cognition. The findings of the international research team, which includes researchers from the Max Planck Institute and the Universitas Nasional in Indonesia, were reported in a paper published in Scientific Reports.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Bioneers: Could you start by sharing the significance of an orangutan being observed treating his wound with a medicinal plant? What signified to you and the other researchers that this was intentional behavior?

Isabelle Laumer: Since 1994, the team has observed wild Sumatran orangutans at the Suaq Balimbing research site and the protected rainforest area that consists mainly of peat swamp forest and is home to about 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans. They are wild, not sanctuary housed, and the observations were made by the team on-site. The team noticed that Rakus had sustained a facial wound. We think he got it during a fight with a neighboring male, as he was involved in several long call battles — calls used to repel rival males — before his injury. Three days after he had sustained the facial wound, he was observed feeding on a liana. The liana is called Fibraurea tinctoria, and this liana is rarely eaten. In just 0.3% of all the 390,000 feeding scans, the orangutans in this area are actually feeding from this plant.

These photos from Scientific Reports show Fibraurea tinctoria leaves and Rakus feeding on the leaves the day after applying the plant mesh to the wound.

Then, after a while, he stopped swallowing but continued chewing. Then he put the plant fluid, that sort of chewed plant fluid, several times on his wound. The entire process lasted seven minutes. So for seven minutes, he was applying the fluid on top of his wound. And in the end, he even put the more solid plant matter on top of the wound. It was then fully covered with the green plant matter, like a wound plaster, basically. He was also observed feeding on the plant the next day. The wound healed very fast and there were no signs of wound infection. Within a short time, it was already fully closed.

Bioneers: I saw the pictures. The wound looked really good after a while.

Laumer: Yes, this process was quite fast, and then only a scar remained in the end. This plant is quite a potent healing plant. It’s used in ethnomedicine, and it’s pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory. He not only had a wound on his cheek, or his flange, but inside the mouth. We could see that because he was long calling; in the videos, you can actually see that there’s also a wound on the lip and inside the mouth. There are many studies actually that investigated the contents of this plant, and there are many other activities: it’s antibacterial, antifungal, antioxidant. It’s also used against malaria, diabetes and for wound treatment. Because of these pain-relieving substances, it could be that he felt immediate pain relief inside the mouth while chewing and feeding on it, then (made) the connection and put that on top of his wound. That’s one option. But it could also be that he accidentally touched with his finger the wound, so then felt, “Oh, yeah, this is pain-relieving,” and then he continued doing that.

This figure from Scientific Reports shows Rakus feeding on the leaves of Fibraurea tinctoria and the wound healing process.

This was the first time that the team observed it, but it does not necessarily have to be the first time that Rakus showed this behavior. It may be the 10th time — we don’t know. What also is another possibility is that Rakus learned it socially from other orangutans. He was not born in Suaq; he was born outside the area. Males in puberty disperse over wide distances to establish a new home range in another area. That’s why we know that it’s actually from outside. It could be that his mother or another orangutan in his natal population shows this behavior, and he learned it socially when he was an infant or a teenager and then later applied the behavior himself when he was wounded. That is possible as well.

We think that it’s intentional behavior because this was not just one time and that was it. It was applied for seven minutes, several times, and then in the end, he even put the more solid plant matter (on the wound). He only put it on top of his wound, and not on any other body part. This entire process took a considerable amount of time, so that’s why we think it’s an intentional behavior.

Bioneers: What was the reaction from you and other members of the team when that behavior was reported to you? What are the broader implications?

Laumer: We were very excited because this is the first time that a wild animal was observed treating his or her own wound with a healing plant. There are broader implications, in terms of evolution. There is also one chimpanzee group in Gabon that shows a form of wound treatment. They are catching little flies from the air, immobilizing them between their lips, and then putting them on their wounds. But the researchers, until this point, haven’t been able to identify the species of fly, therefore it’s unknown if this behavior is functional at all. So it could be a social behavior that this specific group shows, but it’s possible that these flies have certain medical activities in them. We don’t know, but hopefully, in the future, we will know. So we humans show wound care, chimpanzees also show some form of wound treatment, and now the Asian Great Apes, or the orangutans, also show it. Therefore, it’s possible that there exists a common underlying mechanism for the recognition and also for the application of substances with medical or functional properties to wounds. The broader implication is that it’s possible that our last common ancestor also showed similar forms of ointment behavior.

Bioneers: That’s amazing. I also wanted to touch on some of your other research. You’ve investigated tool use and problem-solving in orangutans and cockatoos. How do you see the self-medication behavior relating to or tying into some of that research? Are there any connections or potential connections?

Laumer: I think this observation, again, shows how similar we are to the great apes. There are four species of great apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos and gorillas. They are incredibly smart. For example, in my research, I was investigating whether orangutans can actually innovate a tool, a hook tool. There have been many studies conducted in the U.K. with children from different age classes, not just one study, but really a series of studies on this hook-bending problem.

The children get a vertical tube with a basket at the bottom that is filled with a sticker. In the case of an orangutan, you put a food reward in order to get them motivated to get this basket out. The only thing that they get is a straight piece of wire and a string. But the string has no function; you cannot get the basket out with a string. But if you choose the wire and then bend it at one end into a hook and put the hook in the (basket) handle, then pull it all the way up until you can grab it, then you can basically solve the problem.

This figure from Scientific Reports shows the apparatus with inserted basket at left. The pictures on the right are unbending apparatus.

Human children are able to solve this multi-step problem. It’s actually quite complicated because there are several steps included, and all of them need to be applied in order to get the basket out. If you insert it the wrong way around, you can’t get it out. Human children are only able to solve the problem on their own at the age of eight, not earlier. Younger children can do it when you show it to them, but they don’t get the idea of how to do it before. This is because there is an area in the brain that matures later in life, at around eight years of age. This brain area is for multi-step problem-solving, multitasking, things like that.

I was at (the University of Leipzig), and I think this was one of my first experiments with orangutans during my PhD. The keepers let (adult female orangutan) Padana in and she immediately solved it. I record every trial, and I’m sitting there thinking, “Okay, I hope that my cameras are really working,” because I wasn’t expecting this in this moment. I had two orangutans that, from their very first trial, were able to solve the task continuously.

I also did the same experiment with cockatoos before. Cockatoos are, in many ways, from cognitive aspects, comparable to great apes. Cockatoos are parrots, and parrots and corvids — ravens, for example — are very special in the bird world. Recent research shows that they have neural numbers similar to primates. They have such a small brain and there are lots of neurons. Imagine how fast the speed is. So a raven or a parrot is an incredibly smart animal, and the cockatoos were able to solve the task, but just two of them, and it took them a while. So when two of the orangutans immediately solved it, it was very impressive. This was my first study that I conducted with orangutans. That’s just one aspect of how incredibly smart they are.

They also have emotions that are very similar to us humans. They can feel joy, they can feel fear, pain, sadness, and many other emotions. For example, during my first postdoc, I worked with researchers from the U.S. I studied humor in all four great ape species at the University of California in Los Angeles. What we found out is that — also research that was published this year — all four species of great apes show similar forms of playful teasing, as human children show.

Bioneers: What form does that take when they playfully tease? What are they doing physically?

Laumer: Playful teasing is a provocative, one-sided behavior. It’s playful, but it also can be annoying. It’s repetitive behavior, usually. But also they elaborate their behavior. For example, they would start by poking another, then they pull on their leg. They also sometimes show elements of surprise in their teasing. For example, they would suddenly jump on the back of the target, kind of surprising the other.

Bioneers: That does sound a lot like kids.

Laumer: Yeah, it was interesting. Mostly, juveniles were showing teasing behavior. It was mostly directed towards adults in our small sample. We just analyzed one group of each species. That’s why we cannot say much about if this is really always between juveniles and adults. We had also a few adult-adult teasing events, but in our sample, it was mostly juveniles towards adults. Usually, the adults were reacting very calmly, ignoring it in the beginning, then after a while, they even moved away. We rarely observed aggression. In less than 5% of all of our teasing events, there was some element of aggression somewhere in this teasing bout, so aggression was very rare. That’s why we also think that it’s likely that apes are very good at reading others’ behavior and reacting properly to it, to not let it escalate into something serious.

Bioneers: That’s interesting. Is there anything else that you want to add or highlight?

Laumer: What is always important for me is to raise awareness of orangutans’ critically endangered status in the wild. They are close to extinction, and it would be extremely sad if such wonderful, intelligent animals — that are so close to us humans and so comparable in many ways — were to leave this world. It’s very important to support organizations that help directly where the apes live, that have sanctuaries. But it’s also very important to create more protected forest areas. Also it’s really important to have these long-term protected forest areas for research because if we were not able to do the research for a long time, no one would know that Rakus is showing this incredible behavior. And these protected forest areas are very important for species survival.

‘The Seed Was Their Most Precious Legacy’: Why Black Land Matters

In her essay “Black Land Matters,” Black farmer and food justice activist Leah Penniman tells how the ancestral grandmothers in the Dahomey region of West Africa braided seeds of okra, molokhia, and Levant cotton into their hair before being forced to board transatlantic slave ships. As expert agriculturalists, the seeds and the ecosystemic and cultural knowledge they represented were their most precious legacy. The ships brought them to a country with a food system based on the stolen land of Indigenous people and the stolen labor of African people. Penniman says by stashing these seeds in their tresses, the ancestral grandmothers believed in their Black descendants and in a future of tilling and reaping the earth. By honoring the gift of the seed, their descendants do not let the colonizers rob them of their right to belong to the land and to claim agency in the food system.

Leah Penniman (all pronouns) is a Black Kreyol farmer, mother, soil nerd, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2010 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. As Co-ED and Farm Director, Penniman is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs — including farmer training for Black & Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for communities living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system.

Penniman’s essay (below) was excerpted from “Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth,” (New Village Press, 2022) a book series by Robert Shetterly. “Portraits of Earth Justice,” the second volume in the series, includes five essays and 50 portraits and profiles of American environmental activists. Shetterly is a Maine-based visual artist, social activist, and writer. He has painted portraits of people who address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness for the “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series for the past 20 years.

Our 12,000-year history of noble, autonomous, and dignified relationship to land far surpasses the 246 years of enslavement and 75 years of sharecropping in the United States. As Black farmer Chris Bolden-Newsome explains, “The Land was the scene of the crime.” I would add, “She was never the criminal.”

Our ancestral grandmothers in the Dahomey region of West Africa braided seeds of okra, molokhia, and Levant cotton into their hair before being forced to board transatlantic slave ships. They hid sesame, black-eyed peas, rice, and melon seed in their locks. They stashed away amara, kale, gourd, sorrel, basil, tamarind, and kola seed in their tresses. The seed was their most precious legacy, and they believed against odds in a future of tilling and reaping the earth. They believed that we, their Black descendants, would exist and that we would receive and honor the gift of the seed.

With the seed, our grandmothers also braided their ecosystemic and cultural knowledge. African people, expert agriculturalists, created soil-testing systems that used taste to determine pH and touch to determine texture. Cleopatra developed the first vermicomposting systems, warning citizens that they would face harsh punishment for harming any worm. Ghanaian women created “African Dark Earths,” a compost mixture of bone char, kitchen scraps, and ash that built up over generations, capturing carbon and fertilizing crops. African farmers developed dozens of complex agroforestry systems, integrating trees with herbs, annuals, and livestock. They built terraces to prevent erosion and invented the most versatile and widely used farming tool—the hoe. Our people invented the world’s initial irrigation systems five thousand years ago and watered the Sahel with foggaras (underground water conduits) that are still in use today. They domesticated the first livestock and established rotational grazing, which created fertile ground for grain crops.

Our ancestors created sophisticated communal labor systems, cooperative credit organizations, and land-honoring ceremonies. On Turtle Island, Black agriculturalists like Whatley, Carver, Hamer, and Tubman brought us CSA (community-supported agriculture), organic/regenerative farming, cooperative farms, land trusts, and herbalism. Even as the colonizers pillaged the soil of 50 percent of its carbon in their first generation of settling, we used ancestral techniques like mounding, deep mulching, plant-based toxin extraction, and cover cropping to welcome life back into the soil. Our ancestral grandmothers braided all this wisdom and more into their hair and brought it across the Middle Passage. It is our heritage.

Of course, the project of the empire is to make us forget, to confuse us and colonize our hearts, to make us name the land “enemy” and relinquish all claims of belonging. The DNA of the food system in the United States is the stolen land of Indigenous people and the stolen labor of African people. This DNA remains intact and unrectified. Even after emancipation, the Black Codes, convict leasing, and sharecropping kept Black farmers in a state of neoslavery. When our folks fled the racial terror, the more than 4,500 lynchings and house burnings in the South, as part of the Great Migration, that labor force was replaced with “guest workers” born outside the borders, who were subject to unfair labor conditions. The Black farmers who remained in the South, attempting to hold on to their land, were subject to discrimination by the federal government and denied access to the USDA programs to which they were entitled. In the North, Black folks attempting to access land met other forms of discrimination—redlining, denial of mortgages through the GI Bill, and the persistent 16:1 white/ Black wealth gap that originated with our enslaved forebears’ ten trillion dollars of unpaid labor.

We further faced food apartheid, that system of segregation that denied access to fresh, culturally appropriate foods in our neighborhoods, and the resultant epidemic of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. The empire is pleased when we turn our backs on the earth, allowing white people to control 98 percent of the farmland in this country, consenting to their ownership of the soil, the groundwater, the minerals, and the food supply.

Yet in every generation there were Black people who remembered the gift of the seed and the legacy of belonging to the land. We pay homage to one such rememberer, Fannie Lou Hamer, who said, “When you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.” In 1969, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative on forty acres of prime Delta land. Her goal was to empower poor Black farmers and sharecroppers, who had suffered at the mercy of white landowners. She said, “The time has come now when we are going to have to get what we need ourselves. We may get a little help, here and there, but in the main we’re going to have to do it ourselves.” The co-op consisted of fifteen hundred families who planted cash crops, like soybeans and cotton, as well as mixed vegetables. They purchased another 640 acres and started a “pig bank,” which distributed livestock to Black farmers. The farm grew into a multifaceted self-help organization, providing scholarships, home-building assistance, a commercial kitchen, a garment factory, a tool bank, agricultural training, and burial fees to its members. Thank you, Mama Hamer, for keeping the seed alive.

The seed is passed to us, Black children of Black gold. If we do not figure out how to continue the legacy of our agricultural traditions, this art of living on land in a sacred manner will go extinct for our people. Then the KKK, the White Citizens’ Council, and Monsanto will be rubbing their hands together in glee, saying, “We convinced them to hate the earth, and now it’s all ours.” We will not let the colonizers rob us of our right to belong to the earth and to claim agency in the food system. We are Black gold—our melanin-rich skin the mirror of the sacred soil in all her hues. We belong here, bare feet planted firmly on the land, hands calloused with the work of sustaining and nourishing our community.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from “Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth,” by Robert Shetterly, published by New Village Press, 2022.

Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety

Western psychotherapy aims to bring clients back to baseline “normal.” But our collectively traumatized world must not be accepted as “normal” when it is, in fact, profoundly unwell. Our ways of being reflect the same unsustainable systems that erode our ecosystems, accelerate global destruction, and ultimately extract our humanity. Moving toward healing and purpose in uncertain times means evolving the way we do therapy and the way we think about mental health.

Climate, Psychology, and Change invites us to co-create a field that navigates unknown futures with skill and grace – one that helps clients build resilience and holds space for the uncertainties unfolding before us. 33 contributors from both the Global South and Global North explore decolonizing therapy, helping clients recognize and move past unhelpful responses to the climate emergency, and nurturing creativity in the face of crisis.

Holistic and intersectional, Climate, Psychology, and Change is an urgent appeal that reckons with the ways power, colonialism, and capitalism impact our myriad crises – while shaping Western psychology as we know it.

Editor and climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek works at the intersection between climate change, complexity theory, and the human psyche. She has managed national and international projects, headed up large mental health services, and worked on sociopolitical change for local and national governments, the sustainability sector, and nongovernmental organizations. She is an associate of the Climate Psychology Alliance, a Firekeeper at WorldEthicForum, and an associate of the American Psychological Association’s Climate Change Group.

The anthology’s foreword, excerpted below, was written by Thomas Hübl, PhD, a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator who works within the complexity of systems and cultural change by integrating the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Hübl has served as an advisor and guest faculty for organizations and universities and is currently a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

“The familiar is dying.”

The theme that weaves itself through this illuminating book’s opening dialogue is a stepping stone into a threshold. As the reader walks through, the dimensions of this threshold of change, dismemberment, fragmentation, and disintegration are revealed through a kaleidoscope of wisdom and professional expertise. We, as readers, are embarking on a journey that elucidates this precise cycle of death, when what falls away around us and within us are the necrotic tissues of the past—the “normal” that is actually a faint echo of a pulse, now barely perceptible to our ears.

As you read this book and enter into the communal conversation that permeates this prescient collection of essays thoughtfully edited by Steffi Bednarek, you will move through the perspectives of the individual, weave into the collective, and then return to your perspective as the individual reader. This way of reading introduces a new way of engaging in conversation around the climate—and the associated traumas—as we shape our reference points as both individuals and collectives. We move from the consulting room into the world, and we then bring the world into the consulting room. We understand the deleterious impact of colonialism on our lives as individuals, and on our planet. We navigate through our separate, enclosed spheres as individuals, then realize our interdependence with all creatures and the rest of the natural world. We come to understand the level of disembodiment that permeates our lives, then begin to learn to sense the connection to the ground below our feet. And we realize that we don’t live on the planet, but as the planet.

In this way, Climate, Psychology, and Change becomes a gateway to illuminate the practice of healing as we perceive ourselves through the lens of the planet itself. If we could see through this larger lens, what would Earth tell us about her needs for healing? When we view Earth from outer space, our perspective widens as witnesses. From this vantage point, we can see Earth’s beauty, but we also need to become receptive to the tremendous wounds and scars she holds. With our feet firmly grounded in her soil, we can see and experience the actual suffering.

We find the familiar on shaky ground, not only as our natural environment breaks down, fires and floods rage, and weather patterns disrupt and destroy, but also in the reverberating impacts on our global public health. Women, who make up the vast majority of people forcibly displaced by climate change, are exposed to greater risks for sexual violence. These seismic shifts jeopardize food security, water access, and our habitats. Oppression, racism, ableism, and other forms of polarization worsen in the face of the demise of many of the Earth’s ecosystems.

Climate disruptions are landing on fractured landscapes that have been broken apart by unresolved collective traumas of the past. We have all been born into a world shaped by trauma. For many of us, this perception of a collectively traumatized world is accepted as “normal” and “the way the world is.” I would say: this is how life is when we are hurt.

For some of us, the familiar dangles its empty promises of comfort, continuity, safety, and well-being. For others, the familiar is composed of oppression, inequality, polarization, and war. It’s easy to be magnetized by the familiar, drawn into a false dichotomy that divides our psyches into “safety” or “insecurity,” or we violently oppose it, protesting until we kill the familiar.

My work over the past twenty years has taught me that the source of any significant global crisis originates in the collectively traumatized space we currently inhabit as humanity. In this state, our modern societies have lost the ability to generate healthy feedback loops, which every living system needs to generate to maintain stability. In a living system, feedback loops facilitate a self-regulatory process, bringing the system into balance when equilibrium is threatened. This flow of information allows a system to adapt and change so it can move in relation to the larger system within which it is embedded. We see the effects of this loss of equilibrium throughout our climate crisis. This, I believe, is one way to understand the term “climate trauma.”

Modernity’s concept of the familiar is rooted in what is nonemergent and stagnant. When there is a state of trauma in the collective body, we cannot generate solutions from a place of emergence and creativity. When change is not possible, a crisis is set in motion.

Another way to understand climate trauma is to examine our mixed responses as humanity to the crisis. The disruption that has ensued manifests not only in the losses in biodiversity we observe, global warming, and the ongoing shifts in weather patterns, among other manifestations, but also as a derangement of Modernity to make impactful decisions for our planetary well-being. Those of us who are aware of the ensuing harm, including policy makers and governments, realize there is an actual urgency to form a concerted global response. However, the response of our industrialized, hegemonic leadership is fueled by hyperactivation and stress, which underlies the collective trauma, constituting the sand in the engine of our current immobilization. The first critical step is to slow down so that we may better formulate the appropriate, integrated response to this urgency. Only in slowing down—while consciously responding to the urgency—will we heal and integrate what underlies our current climate trauma. Also at play in our modern cultures are denial, numbness, and “absencing,” as Otto Scharmer refers to it—relinquishing all responsibility for and ownership of the planet as our very own nature. On the other hand, there is despair and a prevalence of climate anxiety, which especially impacts young people.

It is in this complexity that we discover the pulse of the new, the awakening of all our senses and calls to respond, the response-ability that is the call to live, the call to thrive. The strong separation that we see in the world currently diminishes our capacity for global collaboration. Moving through this threshold of change, we are embarking upon co-creating a world based not on our collective wounds but on collective well-being that is rooted in our interdependence.

“The familiar is dying.”

I believe these words represent the threshold into which we, as humanity, are walking. We might view this threshold as an opening to the Soul, a deepening of our lives, our paths, our journey, as that which is of the Soul, as psychotherapist Francis Weller beautifully elucidates in the opening conversation of this book, describing the trails that the Soul lays down in our individual, communal, cultural, and planetary lives. The familiarity of being an individual is dropping away. Only our conscious awareness can recognize the truth of this.

As we learn to see through the broken glass of trauma, we can engage in the global collaboration we need to solve this crisis.

The journey through this dying process, this initiation, is sparing no one. Through restoration, we don’t return to the familiar, to a “normal,” but to a future that is yet unknown. We begin to harvest new ways of being and new learning that we could never have imagined before. We experience the blessings of posttraumatic growth as we integrate these traumas.

When we realize that the individual and the collective are interdependent, we access the healing power inherent in that flow of intelligence. Our creativity flourishes—including the resolve to commit to viable solutions—as we experience a collective liquefaction, an unfreezing of the old, a release of the familiar. To open this door, with a client, with a group, within community, is to fulfill our collective Soul’s sacred relationship with the Earth, and with one another. As we turn the pages of Climate, Psychology, and Change, we cross into a frontier that is ripe with possibility, expansive in its vision, and rich in embodied wisdom.

The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules

A plastic box with a lightbulb attached may seem like an odd birthday present. But for ecologist Tim Blackburn, a moth trap is a captivating window into the world beyond the roof terrace of his London flat. Whether gaudy or drab, rare or common, each moth ensnared by the trap is a treasure with a story to tell. In “The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules,” Blackburn introduces these mysterious visitors, revealing how the moths he catches reflect hidden patterns governing the world around us.

With names like the Dingy Footman, Jersey Tiger, Pale Mottled Willow, and Uncertain, and at least 140,000 identified species, moths are fascinating in their own right. But no moth is an island — they are vital links in the web of life. Through the lives of these overlooked insects, Blackburn introduces a landscape of unseen ecological connections. The flapping of a moth’s wing may not cause a hurricane, but it is closely tied to the wider world, from the park down the street to climatic shifts across the globe. “The Jewel Box” shows us how the contents of one small box can illuminate the workings of all nature.

About the author: Tim Blackburn is a Professor of Invasion Biology at University College London. Previously, he was the Director of the Institute of Zoology, the research arm of the Zoological Society of London, where he still has a research affiliation. He has been awarded Honorary Professorships at the Universities of Adelaide, Birmingham and Oxford, been named an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre of Excellence in Invasion Biology, Stellenbosch, and been an invited plenary speaker at numerous international conferences. His work in the 1990s with Kevin Gaston helped to define the newly emerging field of macroecology — the study of large-scale patterns in the distribution and abundance of species.

The following is an excerpt from “The Jewel Box” by Tim Blackburn.

Chapter 6
The Silver Y: The Importance of Migrants

Come my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world! . . .
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield!
— Alfred Tennyson

July 10, 2016. After almost two years of competition between the nations of Europe, France and Portugal faced off in the final of the UEFA European Football Championship, broadcast live from the Stade de France in Paris. It would be a memorable game. Not for the quality of the soccer—it took extra time and 109 minutes for Portugal to upset the hosts and score the game’s solitary goal—but for a most unusual pitch invasion. The stadium was descended upon by hordes of moths.

This was not a few stray insects, but a true swarm. Moths were everywhere. They clung to the goalposts and nets. They dotted the corner flags. They fluttered over the players and officials. Portugal’s star striker, Cristiano Ronaldo—one of the greats of the modern game and expected to be a major influence on the outcome of the match—had to be stretchered off injured in the twenty-fifth minute. As he waited, distraught, for the medical staff to come on and treat him, one of the moths landed on his eyebrow, as if to drink his tears (some moths do do this; within minutes this one had its own Twitter account). Moths are not partisan, though, and the French players were equally bothered. Media reports from the game discussed the insects almost as much as the football. It gave an insight into what it must have been like in Medford in the 1880s when [Spongy] Moths were consuming the town.

Photographs and video from the Stade de France show that the great majority of the pitch invaders that warm July night belonged to a single species: Silver Y. These are remarkable moths.

Fresh adult Silver Ys are a subtle blend of pink and brown, but most of the ones I catch in London are a careworn gray. Even worn specimens retain the distinctive silver letter on their forewing, from which the species gets its English and scientific names. Worn specimens also keep their striking profile—a heavy fur collar sweeping up into a punkish tuft of scales on the thorax, dropping down to two more smaller tufts on its back. When the moth is at rest, the overall effect is of a kyphotic dandy in a moth-eaten fur coat.

It’s not its looks that make the Silver Y remarkable, though—it shares the essentials of these with several more strikingly patterned and colorful relatives in the noctuid subfamily Plusiinae, many autographed in similar fashion. Rather, it’s the moth’s capacity for flight. This is an insect less than an inch from nose to tail, and that tips the scales at not a hundredth of an ounce. Yet it’s capable of crossing a continent.

Silver Ys pass the winter as adults around the Mediterranean basin, in Southern Europe and North Africa. In spring, some of these moths head north, following the seasonal flush of resources. The first ones generally reach the UK in early to late May, although the main arrival occurs a few weeks later. Sometimes they appear in their millions—in such numbers that the sound of their wings can be heard as a distinct humming in the fields. They can occupy the whole country, from Kent to Shetland. They arrive hungry, and are a common daytime sight refueling on nectar like tiny hummingbirds. As a result, the Silver Y is one species of moth that is relatively familiar to the general public.

These immigrants come to breed, and they quickly get down to it. Their caterpillars can feed on—yes, you guessed it—a wide range of herbaceous plants, such as clovers, bedstraws, and nettles. They will consume crop plants like peas and beans, too, and can be considered agricultural pests. They enjoy the Northern European summer to the extent that come autumn, the spring immigrants can have quadrupled their population.

Silver Ys don’t like the British winter, though. When the nights draw in, it’s time for the new generation to head south. As many as seven hundred million of these moths stream back across the English Channel to the continent. You might think that such tiny creatures are simply being tossed on the wind, but they are not. They fly up to altitude— typically more than 100 yards above ground—and if they find the airflow there heading more or less south, they migrate. A tail wind helps, of course, but the moths are active migrants. They adjust their flight path to compensate for drift caused by winds not blowing exactly to the south, steering with an in-built compass. With the wind behind them, they can cruise at 25–30 miles per hour. They might cover more than 350 miles on a good night, and be in the Mediterranean after just three nights of travel. An insect that weighs about the same as a raindrop.

Entomologists can now track flying insects using vertical-looking radars, machines that send a narrow beam of radio waves up into the sky to detect the creatures moving through it. The numbers they record are staggering. A recent study over 27,000 square miles of southern England and Wales estimated that 3,370,000,000,000 insects—3.37 trillion—migrate over the region every year. That’s 3,200 tons of insect biomass. The great majority of these are tiny animals like aphids, but “large” insects like the Silver Y still contribute around 1.5 billion individuals to the total, or 225 tons. For context, the thirty million swallows, warblers, nightingales, and other songbirds that head south from the UK each winter tip the scales at about 415 tons. In summer, the insects are basically milling around in the air, but in spring they are generally heading north, and in autumn they are largely heading south. It’s not only Silver Ys that migrate.

Bird migration is one of the great natural spectacles, but insect migration is equally spectacular. It just largely goes unseen. There are myriad insects on the move above us at any one time. It’s only occasionally that we are confronted with the fact—like on July 10, 2016.

Exactly why moths are attracted to lights is still the subject of debate, but one reason may be that they use the moon or stars to help direct them as they migrate. The lights we put on then override these astronomical cues. A rule of thumb like “keep the moon on your right” can help to steer a more or less straight line, because the moon is very far way. Apply this rule to a street lamp, though, and the result is a flightpath that spirals into the source. The authorities at the Stade de France had left the floodlights in the stadium on overnight prior to the big game. They inadvertently created the world’s largest moth trap.

The Silver Ys added luster to what was generally agreed to be a turgid night of football. How wonderful that such swarms of insects still exist!

Interdependence: Coming Together to Fight Corporate Power, Big Tech and Unjust Debt

The story of the U.S. can be so much more than corporate rule, the dominance of big tech, increasing economic inequality, and environmental destruction. Hundreds of leaders of diverse movements are coalescing around an initiative to use the upcoming 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to tell a fuller story of U.S. history and write a new future based on what most Americans agree on. That includes fair wages, environmental protection and common-sense gun control, which an overwhelming majority of Americans support. And that is not the only common ground we share.

Hear from Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel about taking control back from corporations; explore the transformative power of solidarity and resistance against debt injustice with the Debt Collective; and learn from Stacy Mitchell, Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, about the broad alliance that is bringing long-dormant anti-monopoly laws and strategies back to life.

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Using U.S.’ 250th Anniversary to Consider Our Past and Improve Our Future

The year 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. government has an official commission for the anniversary, and we can expect to hear the usual patriotic narratives. It will be impossible to miss — God Bless America; fireworks; the red, white, and blue. But several prominent women-of-color social movement leaders are proposing something different: a truer, more forward-looking vision for the nation.

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Kenny Ausubel on Taking Control Back from Corporations

Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel says it’s no coincidence that corporations rule the world. Before the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates of corporate money and made free speech prohibitively expensive, the spending on the 2008 election was $717 million. In 2020, it topped $14 billion.

Ausubel says it’s imperative that we build the power necessary to keep making the long-term transformational change that the majority of people want — and that the world wants. Two-thirds of Americans now support antitrust laws and increased penalties for corporate malfeasance. A large majority, both left and right, hold plummeting negative views of big business at large. According to polls, about half of Americans want the U.S. to rein in and break up Big Tech. In this age of extinctions, Ausubel calls on us to extinguish corporate rule, monopolies and wealth inequality, but also environmental destruction, racism, patriarchy, misogyny, the Doctrine of Discovery – and wars too. He says our many diverse movements are really one movement, and it will take solidarity to save democracy and the world. Read an edited transcript of his 2024 Bioneers keynote address.

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Debt’s Reach: Unveiling Injustice and Collective Power with the Debt Collective

In an era where financial struggles are often framed as personal failings, conversations about debt are critical lenses into systemic injustices and collective resilience. Maddy Clifford, René Christian Moya and Frederick Bell, prominent voices from the Debt Collective, bring these discussions to the forefront. Through their work, they illuminate how debt intersects with social inequality, housing insecurity, and the lack of healthcare access, urging us to rethink our understanding of financial burdens as shared societal challenges rather than individual woes.

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Democracy vs. Big Tech: How We Can Win the Fight Against Monopoly Power

Most of us would like to live in a society accountable to people and the planet, one in which we exercise genuine agency over our lives and have a real say in the decisions that affect our communities, but the dramatic increase in corporate domination, especially the rise of giant tech companies that wield unprecedented levels of surveillance and control, is radically undermining our democracy and concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. Stacy Mitchell, who has long been at the forefront of the national movement to rein in excessive corporate power and reinvigorate local self-reliance, is here to tell us that, as powerful as these immense companies and their political allies may seem, they’ve finally met their match. A broad grassroots alliance, together with a new generation of creative government leaders, is bringing long-dormant anti-monopoly laws and strategies back to life. This promising turn of events, Mitchell says, offers hope for reclaiming our rights and assuring a far more equitable and greener future.

Hear Mitchell discuss these developments in the latest Bioneers Revolution from the Heart of Nature podcast episode and watch her 2024 Bioneers presentation below and watch her 2024 Bioneers presentation below.

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Our Beloved Blue Home Is Grieving J. Nichols’ Passing

In this remembrance, Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons writes that since Wallace J. Nichols left this life on June 10, the sea turtles, cetaceans, and all water-dwelling creatures have been mourning the loss of one of their greatest advocates and allies. After beginning his career tracking and implementing strategic plans to save sea turtles, J. went on to develop a Blue Mind movement, serving as coach and board member to many marine nonprofits. His 2014 bestselling book Blue Mind, which draws connections between neuroscience and peoples’ love of being near large, wild bodies of water, is celebrating its tenth anniversary reprinting this year. Simons recalls that “I Wish You Water” was the blessing he bestowed upon nearly everyone he met, dropping a blue marble into your palm in his deeply kind and loving way, as a reminder. Read the rest of Simons’ remembrance and look back on presentations and articles from Nichols over the years.

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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, gender equity, regenerative herbalism, and sacred activism.

MeToo to WeTogether: Transforming Gender Injustice into Beloved Community | Aug. 3 – Sept. 14 | This seven-week online course, facilitated by Gender Equity and Reconciliation International (GERI) trainers, applies principles of Truth and Reconciliation to gender and sexual injustice.
Indigenizing the Law: Tribal Sovereignty & the Rights of Nature | Aug. 13-Sept. 17 | This course examines the prominent cases, laws, and legal theories that make up “Federal Indian Law” while exploring the intersections between the movements for Native Sovereignty and the Rights of Nature.
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.
Attuning to, Aligning with & Serving the Flow of Universal Evolution | Next session Sept. 22 | Wake up to a radical reality and discover as a species who we really and truly are and who we can evolve to become.
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.

See the full catalog

The Rising Anti-Monopoly Movement: Overcoming Economic Tyranny

Today, three to five giant corporations control up to 80% of almost every industry and marketplace. These monopolies depress wages, exploit workers, and decimate small businesses. Stacy Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self Reliance has been a leader in a growing anti-monopoly movement with a broad political base. Can this emerging movement – along with bold federal antitrust action – create a force that can challenge corporate power for the first time in decades?

Featuring

Stacy Mitchell, a writer, strategist, and policy advocate whose work focuses on dismantling concentrated corporate power and building thriving communities and a healthy democracy, has played a leading role in today’s growing anti-monopoly movement. She is Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) and the author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, and co-author of the influential report: Amazon’s Stranglehold.

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

Resources

Institute for Local Self-Reliance

ILSR: Fighting Monopoly Power

ILSR: Get Involved

Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses

Amazon’s Stranglehold | ILSR Report

StacyMitchell.com

Stacy Mitchell – Democracy vs. Big Tech: How We Can Win the Fight Against Monopoly Power | Bioneers 2024 Keynote

Democracy v. Plutocracy: Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime

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

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.

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Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): In this episode, Stacy Mitchell explores a renaissance of bold federal anti-monopoly actions and popular movements. This non-profit leader, author and bane of Amazon and corporate monopolists says that – for the first time in a half-century – overcoming economic tyranny has a growing popular political base that unites Americans in the ongoing quest for a fair and democratic economy and society.

I’m Neil Harvey. This is “The Rising Anti-Monopoly Movement: Overcoming Economic Tyranny” on the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Stacy Mitchell (SM): I want to start with a paramount question of our times: How can we, as a country, find the ability to govern ourselves? How can we make decisions collectively? How can we solve our problems? How can we save ourselves before it’s too late?

I want to suggest to you today that the roots of this predicament lie in a decision made 40 years ago when leaders of both political parties agreed to abandon our anti-monopoly laws, laws that for generations had checked corporate power.

This decision was sold to us on the grounds that it would create a more efficient economy, that it would be good for consumers. It was sold to us, in other words, as having nothing at all to do with freedom and self-government.

Stacy Mitchell speaking at Bioneers 2024

Host: That’s Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For decades, she’s played a leading role in today’s growing grassroots anti-monopoly movement. Her insights about the importance of small independent business and community-oriented alternatives have shaped the thinking of a wide range of policymakers, scholars and advocates… She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as academic journals.

Astoundingly, as Stacy points out, three to five giant corporations control up to 80% of almost every industry and marketplace. These monopolies raise costs, lower quality and services, depress wages, exploit workers, and stifle innovation. They decimate small businesses and marginalized communities – AND democracy.

SM: Today, nearly everything we rely on—food, medicine, housing, credit, news, information—is controlled by a small number of corporations. We are every day subject to their arbitrary dictates and whims. We wait helplessly while the insurance company decides whether to approve a treatment. We submit to abusive employment conditions and pervasive surveillance.

Across the country, urban and rural communities alike find themselves at the mercy of distant boardrooms, their local businesses disappearing, their futures no longer theirs to control. Is it any wonder that democratic institutions are seen by many as illegitimate?

We all know that the actions of government more often reflect the priorities of corporate executives than the needs of citizens. Across this land, there is a pervasive sense of powerlessness, and powerlessness leads to terrible places. It leads to apathy and despair and withdrawal; it leads to a longing for a strong man. Powerlessness is poison in the veins of a democracy.

There is an incredible growing anti-monopoly movement across this country that is making real strides in resurrecting our antitrust laws.

News Anchor: A day of protest in New York City over the location of an Amazon headquarters in Queens. The group against the move says ‘it’s angry that the governor and mayor ponied up nearly 3 billion dollars in taxpayer paid incentives to lure the 8th biggest corporation in the country to New York City.

Protestors: Hey-hey, ho-ho, Amazon has got to go…

Protestor: We have been concerned for many many years about these secret deals that are cut and public money and public property just given away.

SM: This movement stretches from the grassroots to the highest levels of government, where leaders of key agencies are dusting off long dormant antitrust laws and using them to rein in corporate power and expand the freedom and agency of ordinary people.

Antitrust is essential to democracy’s basic design. Just as we have checks and balances to prevent any one branch of government from wielding too much power, anti-monopoly laws prevent the accumulation of economic power. The notion that economic liberty is crucial to political liberty is an idea that originated on this continent. English colonists learned this concept from the Haudenosaunee people of the Northeast whose ideas infused the American Revolution. It was understood that tyranny could arrive not only in the form of a king, but it could also manifest as a global corporation.

Host: The British East India Company was the first modern corporation, chartered in 1601 by the British monarchy. By the 1770s, it had monopolized the lion’s share of the world’s trade with Europe.

One of the corporation’s monopolies was tea, the popular beverage of choice, along with alcohol. Because smugglers supplied half the tea to the colonies and sold it cheaper, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act, enabling it to undersell the smugglers while also paying pirates to destroy their ships.

Once the British East India Company eliminated its competition, it locked in predatory pricing. Until, that is, in 1773, the famed Boston Tea party famously dumped a million dollars’ worth of corporate tea into Griffin Harbor. In other words, the Boston Tea Party was actually an anti-monopoly rebellion that would soon trigger the American Revolution.

In many ways, the story of the United States ever since has been the ongoing battle between democracy and corporate economic tyranny.

An 1882 political cartoon by G. Frederick Keller portrays the railroad industry as a monopolistic octopus, with its tentacles controlling many businesses. Source: Wikimedia Commons

SM: After the revolution, restrictions on corporate power were embedded in state laws, but that approach broke down in the 19th century when a group of men harnessed a disruptive new technology—the railroad. Control over the rails meant control over who could access markets. If you could monopolize the rails, you could monopolize every other industry.

The railroad giants also used their power as gatekeepers to impose exorbitant fees on farmers and small businesses, effectively taxing the entire economy, a form of kind of private tax.

These abuses sparked a widespread grassroots anti-monopoly movement. It led over the following decades to the passage of our first antitrust laws. The central purpose of these laws was to protect everyday people from concentrated economic power, or what Franklin Roosevelt would later call industrial dictatorship.

Indeed, it’s FDR who gets credit for fully activating our antitrust laws. He campaigned on a promise of economic freedom for the wage earner and the small business and the farmer. He launched a period of aggressive antitrust enforcement that lasted for decades. The government blocked mergers, they filed monopolization cases, and they periodically broke up companies for several decades.

Host: Following World War II, strong federal antitrust enforcement remained center stage, epitomized by the epic breakup of the nation’s biggest supermarket chain, A&P.

SM: At the time, it was the fifth largest corporation in the country. It was using a set of predatory tactics to knock competing small grocers, local grocers out of the market. And as it amassed market power, it became increasingly abusive towards its workers and to the farmers that supplied it. The government filed suit and it ultimately won that case, putting an end to A&P’s predatory tactics, and forcing the company to spin off parts of its operation.

Now A&P didn’t disappear, it continued to operate for decades, but it can no longer bully and dominate. And the results were striking. Its workers, with A&P back on its heels, its workers were finally able to form unions, farmers had more leverage and were able to negotiate better prices, and crucially, independent grocery stores flourished, accounting for more than half the market in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Host: The prosperous post-war period from 1945 to about 1970 marked a qualitative reduction in economic inequality. There was a proliferation of small businesses, rising union membership, and the emergence of a thriving middle class.

Even despite systemic racial discrimination and exclusion, the income gap between Black and white citizens narrowed significantly. Record numbers of Black Americans joined unions, while Black-owned businesses multiplied. There were more Black-owned businesses in 1969 than there are today. Those businesses played a pivotal financial and organizing role in the civil rights movement, part of the historic surge at the time of movements for justice, democracy and human rights.

And because economic power helps build political power, inevitably it was bound to provoke a plutocratic backlash.

SM: The turn came in the 1970s, amid the confusion of oil shocks and inflation, a new faction rose within the Democratic Party. It cozied up to Wall Street and distanced itself from farmers and small businesses. And then in 1978, Robert Bork—yes, that Robert Bork, who you might know as Nixon’s solicitor general and later failed Supreme Court nominee, whose shadow over our lives was cast much more profoundly by this incredibly influential book that he wrote, in which he declared that the antitrust laws had nothing at all to do with questions of power and liberty; their sole purpose was to maximize efficiency and to lower prices.

Big business saw an opening, and Bork’s followers swept into power with Ronald Reagan. What followed was something akin to a coup. There wasn’t enough support to repeal the antitrust laws. All of the laws are still on the books today. Instead, Bork’s followers worked inside the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to write new interpretations of the laws. They ignored the plain language of the statutes, they ignored the clearly expressed intentions of Congress, and they declared that antitrust had one goal, which was to lower prices. They also insisted that big companies were naturally more efficient and, therefore, we should welcome consolidation. They turned antitrust on its head.

Host: The corporate coup that Stacy Mitchell describes had actually been seeded in 1971 when the public’s view of big business was at rock bottom.

The prominent tobacco and corporate lawyer Lewis Powell penned a secret memo that sounded a call to arms for big business to roll back the gains of the New Deal and President Johnson’s Great Society programs. Its central goal was to end government regulation of business altogether.

After Powell’s memo caught fire in conservative legal and political circles, President Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1972. There, Powell unleashed a tip-of-the-spear conservative legal movement to capture the courts. A relentless national PR campaign soon followed, igniting a culture war that exalted the omniscience of the mythic “invisible hand of the market.”

Once Bork had set the table to distort the interpretation of antitrust laws, the Reagan administration upended them, along with enforcement. That corporate coup led to today’s bloated monopolies and unparalleled extremes of inequality.

SM: I came to this issue in the late 1990s, when I took a job at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the organization that I now co-lead.

One of my first assignments was to look at why local retail businesses were closing in droves. And the answer, I found, was that Walmart was using a set of underhanded tactics, very similar to those that A&P had used. It would come into a town, sell goods below cost, and then once the local competition had disappeared, it would raise prices. And as it gained market power, it began to strong-arm suppliers. It would say, you’re going to give us lower prices, better terms, more access, while you charge higher prices to the local grocer down the street.

I remember thinking, don’t we have laws against this? And so I started looking into antitrust, and, sure enough, in 1936, Congress passed a law that prohibits big retailers from exploiting their control over suppliers to undermine their smaller competitors. I found that in 1950, having witnessed how monopoly control of industry fed the rise of fascism in Germany, Congress passed the anti-merger act, a law designed to stop mergers. Reading these laws was like entering into an alternate universe. The word “efficiency” does not appear anywhere in the statutes. Instead, the concept you see over and over again is fairness.

Today, Walmart captures one of every four dollars that Americans spend on food. Walmart and other big supermarket chains, together with food conglomerates like Conagra and Tyson, have created a choke point in our food system. They are driving down the incomes of farmers and food workers while jacking up prices to consumers. It’s the same story everywhere.

Host: Yet by the early 2020’s, once again the big wheels were turning in the battle between democracy and corporate rule. When we return, how a renaissance of anti-monopoly laws and enforcement is challenging the corporate coup. I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…

Host: By 2024, a large majority of Americans harbored negative views of big business and expressed support for strong antitrust laws with increased penalties and enforcement.

Federal and state antitrust actions surged in the wake of skyrocketing inflation from the Covid pandemic’s supply chain disruptions. Yet somehow, during this dire period of severe economic contraction, the largest corporations managed to smash their all-time profit records.

It turned out that about 60% of the spiking inflation could be attributed to corporate “greedflation”. Behind it was illegal monopolistic collusion. Companies secretly coordinated by sharing proprietary pricing data in order to charge the highest prices the market would bear. This illegal practice became systemic across the economy. But for the monopolists, the societal harm they cause is just roadkill.

SM: Over the last 20 years, big hospital chains have bought and closed one-quarter of the nation’s hospitals, with dire consequences for rural, Black and Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, if you live in a metro area where the hospitals have merged, not only do prices rise, but mortality rates go up for patients. Electric utilities have been on their own merger spree and are now using their enhanced market power to thwart the spread of distributed solar. We have planes falling apart in midair, a direct consequence of allowing Boeing to its only U.S. competitor in 1996.

Extreme inequality was one spark that led to today’s anti-monopoly movement. The other was the dawning realization that concentrated corporate power is a form of tyranny. All those years we worried about big government, big business was taking over. The realization finally came with the rise of big tech.

Host: The apex predators of contemporary monopolies are the Big Tech corporations. Google, owned by Alphabet, controls 90% of the search market. Meta commands 80 percent of social media. Amazon dominates a decisive majority of the gargantuan online shopping market

The Federal Trade Commission case against Google became the first major monopoly action in 25 years. The dramatic trial revealed that Google preserved its monopoly by illegally paying Apple over $26 billion to be its default browser. Subsequent federal antitrust actions have resulted in similarly epic cases against the brazen monopolistic practices of Amazon, Apple and Meta.

According to polls, about half of Americans across the political spectrum- want to break up big tech.

SM: The tech companies have followed the exact same playbook as the railroad barons: gain control of the underlying infrastructure of commerce, use your power as a gatekeeper to privilege your own interests, crush your rivals, and siphon off the revenue rightfully earned by others.

We have half as many local newspaper reporters in this country as we had 15 years ago. It’s not that people aren’t reading the news, and it’s not that advertisers aren’t buying ad space next to those articles, it’s that Meta and Google are pocketing all of those ad dollars.

Amazon controls two-thirds of online shopping traffic. That means virtually every business that makes or sells any consumer product has two choices, and both are usually fatal. You can either decide not to sell on the online market, or you can sell on Amazon’s platform. To sell on Amazon is to be subject to the tech giants’ bullying, its tendency to copy your best-selling products, its arbitrary algorithm changes that can tank your business.

Ten years ago, small businesses selling on Amazon paid Amazon fees equal to 14% of their sales. Today, Amazon is pocketing half of every dollar sellers earn. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Amazon generated $140 billion in seller fees last year. That’s more revenue than Meta. It’s more revenue than Bank of America. When businesses push back, Amazon routinely buries them in the search results. It has the power to regulate, to punish, to tax. This is a governing power. We cannot let them have it.

Amazon is extending its tentacles in every direction. Its package delivery operation is now bigger than that of the U.S. Postal Service and threatens to supplant it. Its cloud division powers much of the Internet. It’s advancing into healthcare and finance. It’s selling surveillance and AI technologies to police and military outfits around the world.

You may recall that in 2017, Amazon launched a sweepstakes in which cities offered billions of dollars in subsidies to win the company’s second headquarters. Mayors across the country created videos in which they bowed down before Bezos. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] And when the company accepted a multi-billion dollar offer to locate in New York City, people rose up, and against the odds defeated the deal. [APPLAUSE]

It was one of the first green shoots of a budding anti-monopoly movement that quickly began gathering converts—labor leaders, small business groups, community activists, academics, members of Congress, and to the surprise of many, including me, one of those converts was Joe Biden.

A few months into his presidency, he gave a pivotal speech in which he repudiated Bork. “We’re now 40 years into an experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more power. I believe that experiment has failed,” he said. He appointed some of the movement’s key leaders to top positions—Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission; Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ’s antitrust division; Tim Wu at the National Economic Council. These cases are not about making small fixes on the margins. They aim to fundamentally restructure dangerous business models and restore our digital markets.

News Anchor: President Biden launching an assault on monopolies, he signed a massive Executive order today taking on industries like big tech, healthcare, airlines and agriculture. The White House says the goal is to promote competition.

President Biden: What we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back. Rather than competing for consumers, they are consuming their competitors. Rather than competing for workers, finding ways to gain the upper hand on labor.

SM: The FTC is now reinvigorating a long-lost responsibility it has under the law to ban “unfair methods of competition.” Its first move is a rule that would ban non-compete clauses.

News Anchor: The FTC says 30 million people, about 1 in 5 workers, are subject to a non-compete agreement. Proposed last year, supporters claimed those agreements harm workers by reducing the ability to switch jobs for higher pay. The cause spans multiple career fields, from casino workers to doctors and even journalists.

Host: By 2024, the Federal Trade Commission had challenged over 40 mega-corporate mergers. As a result, about half were abandoned entirely, while the government won numerous cases blocking others outright. The rap sheet of industries facing major antitrust prosecutions continued to grow steadily.

Stacy Mitchell testified before Congress, which cited her research in an investigation concluding that Amazon has monopoly power. Her work also informed the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. And The New York Times highlighted her report Amazon’s Stranglehold as a roadmap to rein in the ecommerce colossus.

SM: What these leaders are doing is incredibly popular. Three-quarters of both Democrats and Republicans believe that large corporations are having a negative impact. More than that, anti-monopoly has a real live political base.

Ranchers and slaughterhouse workers are urging action against meatpackers. Small business groups have joined with warehouse workers to demand a breakup of Amazon. Local grocers are pushing for a level playing field. Nurses and patients’ groups are fighting healthcare monopolies. These voices are one reason that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, try as it might, has been unable to gain any traction in Congress to try to put a stop to what these leaders are doing, to what we are doing.

Host: As encouraging as these gains are, inevitable changes in the political world assure they’re tenuous. But clearly the anti-monopoly movement has a real political base it hasn’t had in decades.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance produced an action-oriented guide called “Fighting Monopoly Power” that details actions states and local communities can take – and are taking.

Local communities as well as national groups across the country have now joined forces in a coalition called Athena that Stacy Mitchell co-founded. It’s designed to oppose Amazon from the ground up, while creating economic democracy, addressing the climate crisis, safeguarding communities from surveillance, and expanding democracy.

SM: This movement is shaking up the political map, it’s fostering new alliances between labor and small businesses. It’s doing the crucial work of defining a common enemy, a shared culprit for what ails us, and thereby helping to steer us away from the politics of scapegoating and hate.

I want to be honest with you. I don’t know if this movement can outrun the forces of authoritarianism, but I think it’s the best chance we have, which is why I’m here. We need you. We need you to join us.

Imagine if we leveled the playing field. Imagine if grocery stores like this could open across the country in places that need them. Imagine if we took our healthcare system out of the hands of monopolists. Imagine if we took the corporate boot off the neck of rural America. [APPLAUSE] Imagine if we fixed the Internet. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] This is what democracy looks like. It looks like government taking seriously its obligation to check economic power. It looks like all of us building the country, the economy, the future we want. We can win this, but we need you. We need you to tell your friends. We need you to join this fight. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

Host: This is what democracy looks like… Stacy Mitchell, “The Rising Anti-Monopoly Movement: Overcoming Economic Tyranny”.

The #Next250 Initiative: Using U.S.’ 250th Anniversary to Consider Our Past and Improve Our Future

The year 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. government has an official commission for the anniversary, and we can expect to hear the usual patriotic narratives. It will be impossible to miss — God Bless America, fireworks, the red, white, and blue. But several prominent women-of-color social movement leaders are proposing something different: a truer, more forward-looking endeavor.

Aimee Allison, Saru Jayaraman, Valarie Kaur, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour and others are co-leading an initiative with hundreds of other movement leaders to use the anniversary to assert our unity and interdependence and come together to win concrete changes for the country’s next 250 years. They seek to not only tell an inclusive, complete history of the country but create a future based on issues — such as common-sense gun control, fair wages, and environmental protection — that data shows an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on despite the constant drumbeat about today’s supposed political polarization. Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, says as Americans, we are not polarized from each other, but from the 1% and their elected officials. The initiative, which will include millions of people from across the country, is our chance to prove it. To coalesce on what we agree on as the country moves into the next 250 years.

In this excerpt from a Bioneers panel discussion, Jayaraman and Sarsour, a Brooklyn-raised Palestinian Muslim-American and multi-award-winning racial justice and civil rights activist, discuss the initiative and how we can all play a part.

SARU JAYARAMAN: Linda and I both sit on the board of the Kellogg Foundation’s initiative called SCoRE, the Solidarity Council on Racial Equity. We’ve been on the board for three or four years. It was created after Trump was elected to bring together some of the leading racial equity voices in the country.

As the two organizers in the group, we were increasingly frustrated. We had these resources and this incredible group of scholars, thinkers, and leaders, but we weren’t sure how to leverage them during the Trump years to push forward a proactive agenda. This frustration culminated during a board call the day after the Uvalde, Texas, shootings. Everyone on the call was emotional, heartbroken, and angry. We were angry because there are several issues in this country—like common-sense gun control, fair wages, and environmental protection—where data shows an overwhelming majority of Americans agree. Yet, we’re constantly told we are too polarized to do anything about these issues.

During that call, it became clear to us that we are not polarized from each other but from our elected officials, who are not listening to the majority of Americans. This realization led Linda and me to propose something forward-thinking to SCoRE and Kellogg, aiming to assert and demonstrate the collective voice and power of the majority of Americans who agree with us.

Our proposal generated excitement on the board. The pivotal moment came in June last year when the Kellogg Foundation took us to South Africa for a gathering of Kellogg grantees. Unbeknownst to us, they asked us to share the stage with Albie Sachs, the writer of the South African Constitution after apartheid. Initially, we were confused about why we were sharing the stage with someone of his stature. However, once we started sharing, it made total sense.

We are proposing to use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to write a new future for the United States, based on what most Americans agree on. The Kellogg Foundation’s decision to put us on stage with Albie Sachs was a suggestion to not think small about this initiative. This could be as significant as rewriting the South African Constitution—an opportunity to establish a new set of values for the United States as it enters the next 250 years.

The potential is immense. We have a couple of years before this 250th anniversary. We’re clearly in a moment of crisis and being told we’re polarized. But we have an opportunity to say that we, as Americans, are not polarized from each other. We are polarized from the 1% and their elected officials who are preventing us from achieving what we mostly agree on.

LINDA SARSOUR: 2026 will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s going to be everywhere—God Bless America; Happy Birthday, America; red, white, and blue; military parades; fireworks. It will be impossible to miss.

The idea of the Next 250 has four key components to help you visualize our vision. The first is retelling the story of the first 250 years. The United States government has an official commission for the 250th anniversary, and we can expect to hear the usual patriotic narratives. But we know many stories will be left out. Our goal is to intervene—not to create an alternative narrative, but to ensure inclusivity. This retelling will take many forms: crowdsourcing, reading lists, curricula, movies, films, and documentaries. We want people to understand the full scope of the first 250 years, including those often excluded.

This isn’t about making the first 250 years look bad, even though there were and are many issues. It’s about including everyone’s stories in the narrative.

The second component is co-creating a new Declaration. The original Declaration of Independence was crafted by a few white men using a powerful model of crowdsourcing ideas across different states. Our idea is to create a Declaration of Interdependence to guide us into the next 250 years.

The third piece involves organizing key policy platforms. Saru will elaborate on this because, as organizers, we love visionary ideas, but we also need concrete plans. How do we take visionary principles and values and turn them into actionable policies that improve people’s lives? That’s where the policy platforms come in.

Finally, as an organizer who loves to mobilize, I see 2026 as a perfect opportunity. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we can come together for a massive mobilization. We’ll talk more about what this will look like and represent, but the goal is to bring people together to celebrate and push for the changes we envision.

SARU: Many of us are fighting for critical issues that most people agree on. For example, I work on minimum wage, which is incredibly popular in the United States. I’ve worked in both red and blue states, and do you know that an increase in the minimum wage has never failed on any state ballot, red or blue, in over 50 years? It’s universally supported. People overwhelmingly agree that when you work, you should be paid enough to avoid needing public assistance.

The problem is that, even with such popular issues, those of us working on them—like many of you working on climate change—haven’t had the power to get these initiatives across the finish line. For me, one of the greatest outcomes of this project is to finally aggregate power across movements to win these very popular issues. Wages are one key issue, and I’m a bit biased here, but I will tell you that for 2024, the top issue for young people and people of color across every electoral poll is the rising cost of living and jobs with living wages. The affordability crisis is the number one issue in this election, even though it’s not being prominently discussed by candidates. This is what people on the ground are saying.

Economic inequality, climate change, and gun control are also universally popular. Tufts University’s Circle just did a national poll of youth voters, showing these as the top three issues: more than half said the rising cost of living and jobs with living wages were their top concerns; climate change was second; and guns were third. These are the popular issues we need to demonstrate power on, and they happen to be the top concerns for the next generation.

The idea is that after this four-year project (which we started thinking about two years ago), we will continue beyond 2026. We aim to take the power amassed through the project and push it forward to achieve federal minimum wage increases, federal climate change policies, federal gun control, and anything else we can win. We will do this by tying our policy platforms to everything we’re doing here.

LINDA: The retelling of the first 250 years is crucial for us because the resources, stories, people, and communities are already out there. The issue is that many communities of color and marginalized people lack a platform. The idea is to use the 250th anniversary, which will be a highly commercialized and branded campaign with specials on Netflix, Hulu, CNN, and other platforms, to amplify these voices. We aim to work not only through popular media but also through the education system. Partnering with city and state governments and the U.S. Department of Education, we want to ensure the curriculum is infused with the stories of the first 250 years.

This is particularly timely and important because, especially in the last year and a half, we’ve seen book bans and the erasure or reframing of Black history, the removal of queer stories, and other such actions in our education system. We see the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to intervene and center these stories in curriculums, films, and TV. Documentarians and others will also have the chance to fill in gaps where stories haven’t been told.

For example, as a Muslim American, I know that 25-30% of enslaved African people were Muslims, a fact many in the United States are unaware of. Muslims came to this country before it was even called the United States, as expeditionists—Moors and Turks. There’s a wealth of history within this small segment of the population. Similarly, we often focus on the negative aspects of Asian American history, like the Chinese Exclusion Act or Japanese internment camps, but there are also stories of resilience, art, and culture that aren’t widely known.

This retelling is not just important; it’s highly participatory. There’s so much out there, and bringing together this narrative will help create a fuller picture of what America truly is and has been over the last 250 years.

SARU: In 1776, we had a Declaration of Independence to break away from a colonial empire. In 2026, we’re in a different place as a country. We don’t need to declare independence from an empire or a colonizer; instead, we need to acknowledge that we are now the colonizer and declare our interdependence with each other and people around the world. This moment calls for a shift from the narrative of polarization to one of unity.

We’ve been told repeatedly that we are too polarized to accomplish anything. But most of us believe in our interdependence. We believe in living wages, a sustainable planet, and safe schools for our children. We believe everyone deserves a good life.

Rather than having a small group of people dictate what we need for the next 250 years, we decided to co-create a new declaration with input from as many people as possible. A Declaration of Interdependence must include everyone’s voice. We’ve already started this process, and Linda will share the first steps we’ve taken. We’ve been working with base-building groups across the country to hold listening sessions and gather feedback on our top values and what we want in a new declaration.

This collaborative effort involves co-convening, co-authoring, and preparing to launch the new declaration next year, leading up to the 250th anniversary in 2026. We kicked off this initiative with a major convening last year.

LINDA: What’s beautiful about this project is the involvement of organizers—people who bring others together. When this declaration is revealed to the world in the next year or year and a half, you’ll see who’s behind it. These are people who look like you, who feel like you, and who live the way you live. We’ve been intentional about including groups that organize others, not just individuals. For example, it’s not just a Muslim person participating, but a Muslim who organizes other Muslims. This ensures we reach entire communities.

The room included Black-led organizations from the South, statewide issue-based organizations, South Asians, Asian Americans, workers, LGBTQ organizations, youth organizations, climate activists, Jewish organizations, Sikh organizations, and more. We aimed to be as representative as possible, geographically too, so we included people from the East and West Coasts, the Deep South—like Alabama and Mississippi—the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. This way, no one can say they were left out of the process.

We held a convening in Detroit, one of my favorite cities in America. It was a beautiful experience to have all those groups together. I’ve been to many convenings, and there was something uniquely powerful about that space. It was inspirational; people were crying. The participants, all from marginalized communities or working on issues impacting these communities, are usually focused on immediate fights—abortion rights, immigrant rights, and so on. But here, we asked them to envision something for 250 years from now, even though we won’t be around then. This allowed them to think about what they want to leave behind.

When people look back at the 250th anniversary, we want them to see that a group representing millions in this country proposed a new vision. One that includes all of us and fulfills the ideals upon which this country was founded, making it truly the greatest nation on Earth. This process involves using universal language that brings us together.

We’re rejecting the intellectual left’s tendency to use jargon that not everyone understands. Instead, we’re focusing on universal values—dignity, respect, inclusion—words that resonate with everyone. This approach ensures our message reaches people with multiple degrees as well as those in our communities who may not have formal education or for whom English is a second or third language. We want the final declaration to be truly reflective of and accessible to anyone who reads it, regardless of their background.

Debt’s Reach: Unveiling Injustice and Collective Power with the Debt Collective

In an era where financial struggles are often framed as personal failings, conversations about debt are critical lenses into systemic injustices and collective resilience. Frederick Bell, Maddy Clifford, and René Christian Moya, prominent voices from the Debt Collective, bring these discussions to the forefront. Through their work, they illuminate how debt intersects with social inequality, housing insecurity, and healthcare access, urging us to rethink our understanding of financial burdens as shared societal challenges rather than individual woes.

Frederick Bell, co-founder of the Black Praxis Project (a curriculum-based political education platform created to discuss black radical texts and apply that knowledge to present-day movements), organizes campaigns aimed at canceling much of student debt. Maddy Clifford, a creative media strategist based in Oakland, employs artistry to disrupt hierarchical norms, advocating for economic disobedience and liberation within communities marginalized by debt. René Christian Moya, an organizer deeply entrenched in tenant rights and housing justice, spearheads initiatives that empower renters facing eviction amidst a housing crisis not seen since the Great Depression.

The Debt Collective, known for its pioneering efforts in debtors’ unions, amplifies the voices of those burdened by debt, advocating for structural reforms that challenge the status quo. Frederick, Maddy, and René’s narratives, shared below as edited transcripts from a panel at Bioneers 2024, reveal that debt is not merely a personal issue but a systemic tool of oppression, perpetuating cycles of inequality across generations.

MADDY CLIFFORD: So why are we talking about debt? Working-class folks are taught to think about debt as a moral failure. If good money management equals economic success, then owing student debt or being unable to pay rent is seen as a personal failure. This logic normalizes cruelty. We’re taught to see the person on the street as someone who wasn’t savvy enough to navigate the economic system. The reality is, we’re all closer to being unhoused than to being millionaires. We’re told to avoid financial landmines without asking why we’re walking on a minefield in the first place.

Debt is one of the ways neoliberal capitalism appears in our lives. Financialization—profit without producing. Our past due balances are rich people’s assets. Can’t afford an ambulance ride? Put it on a credit card. Don’t have a bank account due to former incarceration? Plenty of check-cashing companies are in your neighborhood. Need to go to college for a job with benefits? Here’s a student loan at 7% interest. Instead of taxing the rich, we pay them for public goods with interest. Unjust debt is extractive. Unjust debts worsen existing economic disparities and inadequacies.

The Debt Collective is about transforming society’s response to indebtedness by revealing the power borrowers and their allies have in solidarity. Our slogan is: “You Are Not A Loan.” The debts people carry in silence can be used collectively to demand access to public goods like housing, healthcare, and education.

So how does this work? What is a debtors union? We’re building complementary power alongside labor unions. Labor unions organize workers for higher wages and better working conditions at the site of production. Debtors unions organize at the site of social reproduction.

We’ve been demanding that the Biden administration cancel all federal student debt from day one. Our founders were part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where student debt abolition was initially seen as a fringe issue. Debt Collective has shifted this issue into mainstream discourse.

Today, debt relief is the top economic issue for those who owe student debt, ahead of other policies. It makes sense because student loan payments are coming out of people’s pockets—they need to pay for groceries, rent, and child care.

We know we can win full student debt cancellation and college for all. College was once affordable, even free, in the 1950s, although mostly for white men. The roots of the student debt crisis run parallel to the integration of colleges, the Black Power movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the Free Speech movement.

Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, campaigned on the idea that taxpayers shouldn’t subsidize intellectual curiosity. His administration cut funding for public universities, causing tuition hikes. This divestment in public education placed more burden on individual students.

Democrats also contributed to the student debt crisis. The Higher Education Act of 1965 included a federal student loan insurance program to back private lenders. As education became a commodity, colleges raised tuition and lenders increased interest rates. The rise of for-profit colleges in the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated the crisis, preying on single moms and people seeking better lives.

Today, 44 million Americans owe $1.7 trillion in student loans. To put that in perspective, if U.S. student debt were a country, it would have the 13th largest GDP in the world.

Debt worsens existing inequalities. Almost half of those burdened by student debt have debt but no degree. Forty percent of Latino student borrowers default on their loans compared to 29% of white borrowers. Women owe two-thirds of the $1.7 trillion in student debt. Black women carry more per capita, for longer, and with less help in paying back their debts. This has a catastrophic impact on the racial wealth gap. Canceling $50,000 in student loans per borrower would immediately increase Black wealth by 40%.

The federal government has the legal authority to cancel all student debt using the Higher Education Act of 1965, which allows the secretary of education to “compromise, settle, waive or release” all federal student loan debt. Despite the Supreme Court striking down Biden’s use of the Heroes Act of 2003 for student debt relief, the Higher Education Act still provides a path for cancellation.

At the Debt Collective, we’ve educated the public about this power. Biden has canceled $138 billion so far, fixing programs like Public Student Loan Forgiveness and income-driven repayment. However, we won’t stop fighting until all student debt is canceled and higher education isn’t a debt sentence.

Debt destroys dreams while cancellation activates them. To quote poet June Jordan: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

RENÉ CHRISTIAN MOYA: Starting with student debt was a great choice, as it’s what most people know the Debt Collective for. But we address more than just student debt, recognizing that debt plays a crucial role in the modern economy.

Let’s talk about where else debt is manifesting and how we’re addressing it.

I primarily work as a tenant organizer. I always clarify that I don’t organize around housing itself because houses don’t have needs or rights—people do. My focus is on tenants, especially those facing eviction. We’re currently in a severe housing crisis, the worst since the Great Depression. The majority of Americans are now rent-burdened, with two-thirds of low-income renters spending at least a third of their income on rent, and many paying half their income or more.

What’s notable about the current crisis is that middle-income individuals have seen the largest increase in rent burden over the past decade. Those earning between $30,000 and $75,000 annually have experienced the most significant rent increases. The affordable housing stock has drastically declined due to demolitions, conversions to owner-occupied units, or rent increases. For instance, California’s Costa-Hawkins Act of 1995 abolished vacancy control, allowing landlords to significantly raise rents when a unit becomes vacant, incentivizing evictions.

Nationally, we’ve lost about 6.1 million affordable units in the last decade. Although we’re seeing a boom in multi-family housing construction, the new units are often luxury apartments with rents exceeding $3,000 for a one-bedroom. This has led to a situation where 11% of renter households have rent debt, making them vulnerable to eviction. Moreover, corporate landlords and private equity firms are increasingly buying up housing stock, exacerbating the crisis.

The TL;DR is that rents have outpaced incomes for the last 10 to 20 years, evictions are soaring, and homelessness is growing rapidly. Evictions aren’t just a symptom of poverty; they’re also a cause, as highlighted by scholars like Matthew Desmond.

Globally, real estate constitutes the majority of the world’s assets, with residential real estate being the largest asset class at around $320 trillion. This creates a learned helplessness among politicians who hesitate to tackle housing issues because many benefit from the current system.

Our Tenant Power Toolkit has helped file about 8,000 eviction answers, protecting around 20,000 renters in California. It streamlines the eviction response process, providing tenants with the necessary paperwork and instructions. We’re also connecting tenants to tenant organizations and attorneys. In Los Angeles County, where only 3% of tenants have legal representation in eviction cases, we’re piloting a court support program to help tenants navigate the court system.

We’re about to launch a national rent debt survey to gather data on how rent debt is affecting people. Additionally, we’re starting to organize against large corporate landlords, recognizing that even tenants in expensive housing often struggle financially.

On the national level, we’re advocating for stronger tenant protections and rent control. We view housing as a climate issue, needing weatherized, electrified, and habitable housing to withstand the impacts of climate change.

Shifting to medical debt, over 100 million Americans struggle to pay healthcare bills, leading many to delay or forgo treatment. Nonprofit hospitals, which should provide low-cost care in exchange for tax breaks, often violate these rules, burdening patients with debt. Middle-aged adults, Black Americans, and women are disproportionately affected.

The Debt Collective is addressing this by targeting hospitals for debt relief and systemic changes. We’re conducting outreach in various states and working with partners like the L.A. County Health Department, which has declared a medical debt emergency.
To summarize, whether dealing with student, rent, or medical debt, we’re fighting for debtors against a system that disproportionately burdens the most vulnerable.

FREDERICK: I have $20,000 worth of student debt, and I just wanted to say that because we talk about naming it, and not being ashamed and identifying as a debtor. I’ve been out of undergrad, struggling to pay bills, struggling to find a job, just the same old, same old. And in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, you would think that we would have the resources to help me and other people like me not struggle.

I’m here to tell you that we do have those resources. It’s just about redistributing them. That means abolishing our prisons, liberating ourselves from meaningless and harmful work, redistributing our land, and decarbonizing our economy.

We also have to talk about unjust and just debts and stop thinking of the debts we owe creditors as legitimate. We need to focus on the real, legitimate debts that we owe each other as a society.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a famous talk in which he said, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just; any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

And that’s what I argue about unjust debts and what they do. They make you feel inferior; they make you feel like it’s an individual failing; and they trap individuals and nations in dependency cycles, serving only to deepen existing inequalities and exploit and profit off that exploitation.

Just debts, on the other hand, enhance the collective well-being of our society, and they serve to rectify the historical oppression and genocide of marginalized communities, specifically Indigenous folks and Black descendants of slavery.

This distinction between unjust and just debt is important because it goes beyond financial transactions. It touches on the moral and ethical responsibilities that we have to each other, which sounds a lot like abolition. Abolition talks about how we need to deconstruct these prisons and cages that we are putting people in bondage in, but it’s also about creating a world where we have access to healthcare, homes, and clean water.

I think that when we look at reparations as a legitimate form of just debt, we can’t look at it as a charitable gesture. It’s a moral obligation, and it’s a constructive project. Olúfémi O. Táíwò talks about how it’s deeper than “just give me a check.” It’s also about taking care of our environment, making sure that, as a society, we have empathy, and if our communities aren’t healthy, then we aren’t doing what we’re supposed to be doing.

Using U.S.’ 250th Anniversary to Consider Our Past and Improve Our Future

Kenny Ausubel on Taking Control Back from Corporations

Debt’s Reach: Unveiling Injustice and Collective Power with the Debt Collective

Democracy vs. Big Tech: How We Can Win the Fight Against Monopoly Power

Our Beloved Blue Home Is Grieving J. Nichols’ Passing

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Keep Your Finger on the Pulse