Of Kathleen Harrison’s essay “Women, Plants, and Culture,” Nina Simons remarks, “Somewhere deep in our bones, or in our lineages, we understood how to commune with the plants, how to read their signals, and how to live in mutuality with them. As an ethnobotanist, Kat Harrison has lived and studied with many cultures, relearning how to bridge the languages of people and plants in time-honored, wise, and sensitive ways that will hopefully inform us as we move forward. As an artist, Kat has learned the great value of stillness and observation, which her leadership style embodies. Her quiet dignity and gentle nature reflect a strength through a softness that’s accessible to us all.”
Kathleen (Kat) Harrison is an ethnobotanist, artist, and writer who researches the relationship between plants and people, with a focus on myth, ritual, and spirituality. She teaches for the California School of Herbal Studies, Arizona State University, and the University of Minnesota, specializing in tropical field courses. She has done recurrent fieldwork in Latin America for the past thirty-five years. As co-founder and director of Botanical Dimensions — a nonprofit foundation devoted to preserving medicinal and shamanic plant knowledge from the Amazon and tropics around the world — Harrison has helped support indigenous projects in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Costa Rica.
Harrison’s essay (below) was excerpted from the book “Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart,” edited by Bioneers president and cofounder Nina Simons with Anneke Campbell. “Moonrise” contains more than 30 essays exploring the flourishing, passionate forms of leadership emerging from trailblazing women on behalf of the earth and community.
I have worked many years in the realm of people, plants, and plant medicines. In the 1970s, I spent quite a while in the Peruvian Amazon working with healers who used a spectrum of plants from the most subtle to the most powerful. Then I came back into my life in California and worked on many other botanical projects while raising a family. It was only in 1993, when I went back to the Amazon, that I completely got the idea of plant spirit. In fact, it was no longer an idea; it became a reality and got under my skin and changed my life substantially.
Since 1995, I’ve been able to spend time most years with a traditional healer’s extended family of Mazatec Indians in the mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico. I’ve also been able to learn more about the indigenous Native Californian relationship to nature and plants. I see wonderful parallels in these nature-based societies in which everything is viewed as animate, and every species is a being. I think we too need to develop an intrinsic perception of this hidden reality to make the medicine that we grow, are given, or even that we buy more effective. Our culture has become extremely reductionist and materialistic in its worldview, so we need to learn from models that can help us understand spirit in nature and spirit in medicine.
The word spirit comes from the Latin for breath, so what we’re talking about when we say a plant or a species has a spirit is that it draws energy from the universe and expresses it in a particular form. An ancient notion of many indigenous cultures around the world is that there were primordial beings on Earth before we came along. They interacted and had relationships, love affairs, conflicts, and exchanges of all sorts, and each of those beings became a species.
According to those creation stories, we humans, as complex and differentiated as we may seem, are one being, and each of the plant species that we use as medicine is also one being. I’ve learned from my native friends to talk to the spirits of those plant species. Whether you’re ingesting a plant or growing it in your garden or passing it in the forest, you learn to speak to it as though it were a being you are meeting for the first time, or greeting it in such a way that indicates you know each other already. In its genes and in its form the individual plant carries a constellation of qualities, actions, and ways of interacting with us that we need to speak to. To know about it is a step, but to speak to it and listen to it is really what makes the medicine work, because then we are creating a relationship.
That’s why in many parts of the world it is women who carry the knowledge of plants and who gather the medicines. Women are good at relationship. Like all female mammals, and most particularly female primates, one of our roles is to be nurturers and doorways for life. When children come through us, they are not ready to be in the world, of course, by themselves. In some species they are, but not in mammals, so we have to give them a deep level of attention and read their needs in a way that goes far beyond the verbal to help them survive and grow and thrive. We women have to be able to sense on all levels the needs of the beings around us.
We have this innate ability, no matter what or who we apply it to. These skills translate well into gathering plants. We can look back through the entire history of hominids and see that we survived and thrived by using our senses of taste, smell, touch, and sight to make clear distinctions between one plant and the next, between safety and danger, between all the different ways that the elements present themselves to us, and it was mostly women who perfected these skills.
I think it’s important for women that we recognize and appreciate the inborn skills we have at paying attention to the natural world. These are the skills that allow us to call nature in through our hands to be food, to be medicine, to be magic, to be whatever the many forms of partnership are between the plant world and human women. Language itself can be an obstacle in this quest. It can be a sort of screen we get trapped behind, separating us from the multileveled reality on the other side of it.
I love words, but our culture has bought into the idea that there’s an objective reality, and it’s important to remember that this very objectivity is, in many ways, a cultural construct. I think we’re becoming braver about showing what we know and not being held back by the inner judge that says, “Objectively speaking, that sounds crazy.” Women are often more willing to trust their subjective experiences, dreams, and intuitions and are therefore more able to develop a relationship to the plant world that is spontaneous and deeply authentic.
I’m encouraged by what I’ve been seeing as a teacher. For years I’ve spoken at herbal conferences and taught at herb schools and in college classes focused on ethnobotany. Perhaps three quarters of the attendees and students are young women who are studying to be herbalists or who are called to work with plants in some way, often seeking a way to heal themselves or others. These young women give me heart because they’re starting farther along than many of my generation who had to work through old cultural baggage just to begin to trust our instincts, to begin to know nature, to begin to rediscover that our roots were in the Earth too. Now I see many women coming in with the assumption that they have the ability to be healers. I want to encourage this new generation to learn to listen to the ancestors and to the voices of all the species around us, however humble and subtle.
I’m a champion of subtlety. The subtler something is, the more you have to pay attention, and that’s a good thing. Remember, it’s not always the big, loud species that are the best teachers. Sometimes it’s the little, quiet, humble ones.
Plants have the ability to transmit energy. Plants draw in and transform earth and water and nutrients and light and make their bodies out of them. The plant beings are manifestations of these forces being woven together, and we humans have relied on them to sustain us from the beginning of our evolution. In cultures that are close to the Earth I see a recognition of the power of plants to hold and draw energy in a situation and to move it along, thereby changing it in a healing way. The plant world is constantly whispering to us, if we can hear it. There’s been a long partnership between plants and, significantly, women around the world, who know how to take plants with offerings and with prayers, and to use them to move energy. This is part of all our ancient traditions, and we’re gradually returning to these ways.
These concepts are rooted in the way that native people—worldwide, those who are still close to the Earth—live daily. In relating to the natural world, one of the most basic principles that they abide by is reciprocity. When, for instance, you meet a plant and you wish to take some of its body for medicine, you ask its permission and you explain why you need it, and then you give it something back. On this continent the ritual has long been to give tobacco, the most sacred traditional spiritual plant of the Americas, domesticated thousands of years ago by indigenous early Americans. I’ve thought about what is most valuable to people in our contemporary culture, and I think it’s time.
Time is the thing that we feel we have the least of, that we value, so we can offer a plant our time if we want to ask something of it. The way we can offer it time is to learn about it, sit with it, and maybe grow it. But even if you’re just purchasing some of it, try to learn about that plant’s world—where it grows naturally, what it looks like, what it’s related to. When we use a plant, we’re communicating with the entire chain of experience of that species through its evolution.
Medicine, in the traditions I’ve worked in, is not just about chemistry. It’s about that which heals. Many cultures talk about the songs that come through the plants. If you listen well to a plant that you have solicited as medicine, they say that you can learn its song, and that its song will be as effective a medicine as the plant material itself. That’s when you’ve taken that plant in as your deep ally: when you can invoke its medicine without even necessarily touching or finding the plant. At that point you have access to the spirit of the medicine.
It has been part of my work to go to cultures that use sacred visionary plants in Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru and learn their mythology and sometimes their ceremonies. These traditions and these sacred plants have to be met with total respect. I ache when I think of any of these sacred plants becoming mere commodities in our culture. The commodification of spirit is really dangerous territory. We’re generally not wise enough and openhearted enough to take that type of medicine on our own, for casual use, without a teacher or a healer who can show us how it really is medicine. But I can certainly grow a beautiful little peyote plant, and it can be a teacher to me, even if I just watch it flower and act as its guardian. A tiny little delicate plant can have a very powerful spirit.
Our culture still has a strange relationship to plants. For example, it’s interesting that finally, after a very long period of denouncing cannabis, we’ve opened the dialogue enough to talk about it again as medicine, as it has been for thousands of years to many people, and little by little money has come forth to do studies. Formal studies have validated thousands of personal anecdotes in concluding that it actually relieves pain. There are so many receptors in the human brain for the active principles in cannabis that it is uncanny. When used with intention and gratitude and awareness, it can be a multifaceted medicine. It is our sister and ally in many ways.
I try to keep my eye on the big picture and observe how cultures vacillate in their appreciation and rejection of powerful plants and how fear and denunciation cycle around again to an appreciation of these plants. We’re in a time of such fierce denunciation of tobacco right now that we find it very hard to talk about its holy and sacramental properties. A plant is in itself not evil or good. Its effect depends upon how we use it and how conscious we are, and that’s true of all medicine. Unconscious use of anything is damaging, and conscious use of anything can make it medicine, and this goes for food and all the other substances that we love and hate. Still and all, we seem to go through periods of demonizing aspects of nature that we don’t understand.
Chocolate is another fascinating psychoactive plant. Chocolate pods are filled with beans that have been used as offerings; in Mexico they still are. People give them and other plants and seeds to the Virgin Mary or to the spirit of a mountain or the local gods. They give them things that they know will please them, and how could chocolate not please them? Some plants they burn as incense, and some they just lay in sacred places where water wells up out of the ground. They don’t necessarily bring flowers or spectacular-looking things but often more subtle gifts. You bring nature to nature because it shows that you have paid attention and understand reciprocity. You don’t take without giving something, and then you’re always grateful for what you get. That’s medicine.
While we must radically transform our economic system to move away from fossil fuels and destructive extractive practices, for this transition to occur fairly the priorities and needs of frontline communities must be centered. Communities of color, people with low incomes and many immigrant groups are most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change. A just transition that transforms our skewed structures of wealth and power is needed for these and all communities to thrive.
Learn about climate justice organizer Colette Pichon Battle’s vision for radical democratic climate action; the inspiring work of young climate justice activists; the call for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty; and a network of lawyers working to support Black-, Brown-, and Indigenous-led frontline movements for climate justice. A just transition will take these efforts and more — and all of us contributing to and supporting these movements.
Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.
“Let’s Get Behind the Frontlines” with Colette Pichon Battle
Award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon Battle shares her bold vision for Taproot Earth, a new bioregional frontline organizing project designed to model radical democratic climate action. She shares what inspired her to become a lawyer, how her legal work is rooted in her community and her traditions, and how the law is limited when it comes to justice. You can also watch Colette’s keynote talk at the 2024 conference here.
Taproot Earth is Building a Just Transition Lawyering Network
Taproot Earth is building a network of lawyers working to support Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities and movements leading us toward climate justice and a just transition from an extractive to a living economy and democracy. The Just Transition Lawyering Network seeks to build power, shift resources, and engage in systemic change for climate justice and a just transition by building the infrastructure for a values-aligned community of attorneys and scholars who are committed to Black-, Brown-, and Indigenous-led frontline movements.
Young activists have emerged as the most significant and impactful voices in global movements to combat climate change and demand environmental justice. In this conversation, learn from the perspectives, projects and aspirations of three outstanding young leaders. The discussion 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.
‘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 conversation, a group of civil society, government and Indigenous leaders discuss the growing momentum for a Fossil Fuel Treaty.
The discussion 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 discussion was moderated by Cara Pike, Senior Communication Advisor to the Fossil Fuel Treaty and founder and Executive Director of Climate Access.
Cultivating Personal and Collective Healing with Deborah Eden Tull & Nina Simons
Embark on a profound journey with Deborah Eden Tull, engaged Buddhist teacher, spiritual activist and author; and Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers. This transformative retreat goes beyond conventional notions of activism and the sacred, fostering relational mindfulness, evolving leadership, and compassionate action. Join a supportive community to cultivate meaningful connections, harmonize self-care with global stewardship, and uncover newfound resilience and hope.
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.
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.
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.
Award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon Battle shares her bold vision for Taproot Earth, a new bioregional frontline organizing project designed to model radical democratic climate action. She shares what inspired her to become a lawyer, how her legal work is rooted in her community and her traditions, and how the law is limited when it comes to justice.
Colette spoke with Bioneers Senior Producer Stephanie Welch about her work at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.
Music: “Watching Pieces Move” – Nagamo
Transcript
For some people, the climate justice work is a career choice. For others of us, this is about our life, our livelihood, and for me it’s about my traditions and the communities that I come from.
I was my grandmother’s caregiver, and so I was always around a lot of old people, I was always around them. You know, my job was to read a lot. I had to read the scriptures out loud or read the instructions out loud. There was an understanding of your role and how respect could be shown through service, not servitude, right, but service; how listening was more important than talking. And these are things that I learned very, very young, mostly because traditionally that is the role of the child, right, to definitely be in the room but not necessarily to be the main voice.
And I have to say I was also in rooms where if I ever wanted to voice my opinion, I was allowed to. But wisdom was the response. Right? So if I have something to contribute, I also have to be ready to receive what wisdom has to give back to you. Right? So it’s not “Let me make a point,” it’s “Let me make a contribution,” and if my contribution isn’t yet mature, let me receive what wisdom has to offer. I think about that all the time.
I was just talking earlier today about, you know, me and my attitude, and I always had an opinion, and enough for your community to say, “You should be a lawyer,” as opposed to “be quiet and sit down, little girl.” You know? They see you, and they see that you’ve come with something. Right? God has given you something—courage, a voice, a quick mind. We know what to use that for. You should be a lawyer. And I think many people in my community would tell you, yeah, she’s been that the whole time.
But there were two lawyers that stood out for me. One was Thurgood Marshall. So as I learned about the Civil Rights movement, as I learned about people fighting for their rights, and I learned about who was a lawyer in the Civil Rights movement, it’s Thurgood Marshall. It’s a Supreme Court justice. It’s rising to this occasion. It’s standing up and articulating and advocating for our community to have equal rights under the law. And that felt right. It felt noble. It felt good. And I was like, yes, I want to be that; I can do that.
The other person that stands out is Clair Huxtable. So you have to know that—I remember, it was a really big deal with The Cosby Show came to primetime. I’m in that generation where like on Thursdays at 7:00, everybody got around the TV to watch The Cosby Show. And there was this beautiful Black woman who had children, a family, joy. She was smart, she was so beautiful to me. And she was a lawyer. And I said, oh, well, you know, she’s cuter than Thurgood Marshall, for sure, so that’s clearly what I am—I’m a Thurgood Marshall/Clair Huxtable wannabe.
And so, for me, it was—I want to be everything that I know I can be—a Black woman with an education and a family that they love, and someone who’s fighting for our society and for us to have equal rights. That feels good; I’ll go there.
And that’s what I had in my head. And, of course, when you go to law school, especially as a Black person from the South, the opportunity is that you’ve made it to a professional class. You must now go earn a six-figure salary, work for a corporation, and it doesn’t matter who you defend or fight for so long as you can say you work at a firm, wear a nice suit, have a good house, and have a nice car. And that wasn’t enough. I was disenchanted with the law the first year of law school, and realized this has nothing to do with justice. In fact, I remember understanding law as a very formulaic and methodical practice. And like I said, it’ll teach you; it’s a great teacher. There’s a formula to law. That’s how a judge can say yes or no to a thing. You know? A B = C. If it’s not A or B, then it doesn’t equal C, like it is that formulaic. I should be—It is. It’s taught that way. But that’s rarely justice. Justice is in between those. Justice is invisible sometimes. Justice is unspoken or unproven, but it doesn’t make it untrue, and it doesn’t make it unreal.
And so fighting for this broader notion, not just of what man has thought to write down, but to understand inherent laws, and natural laws. You know? That’s what I love about Bioneers. This is the first place I really heard people leaning into the rights of nature.
So my understanding of the laws has grown. And now I think about how to be the type of lawyer that is rooted in poetry and mystical understanding of invisible things, and faith, and belief in the best parts of humanity, and hope. These are not things you learn in law school. These are things you learn organizing at the community level. These are things you learn, can’t possibly have been written down. You can’t possibly write down the rights you have in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Nobody can imagine that. But we had rights in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and they weren’t articulated anywhere, because they never had to be. The law is necessarily reactive to something that we’ve experienced. It’s rarely, you know, pro-actively ready for what we haven’t gotten. We’re seeing that now with AI and climate. The laws are way behind. Right?
So you realize law follows the human experience, and you have to really engage in the human experience to understand your role as a lawyer, to ensure that the structures and laws that come from it allow justice to continue to grow, allow for things to be addressed, yes, but for justice to grow, and perhaps even repair.
The beginning of this work was so full of sadness and anger, and disbelief, and confusion. And all I had at that time was my law degree, my legal background, my very school-based understanding of what the law and the government and governance was supposed to be, and so it was just a really limited way of thinking about the world and the responses to a disaster like Katrina. And it was one dimensional. Effective, but one dimensional.
I think over the years, and we’re at 19 years since Katrina this year—it’ll be 19 years—I think over the years it has come to be multi-dimensional. Emotionally, anger is not—it’s not a sustainable emotion. It’ll hurt you or someone else if you try to just move in that. And I don’t come from anger. I come from joy. I come from the Bayou community that’s really full of joy and life and livelihood. And so to evolve out of anger into more joy, gratitude, possibility, abundance, resistance, that has been a place where I think I’ve evolved, at least in my approach.
New Orleans, 2006 – an aid distribution center set up by Common Ground Relief, a local community organization. Photo by Robert Kaufmann/FEMA
And the legal work is not the beginning. It’s not the top. It’s not the tip of the spear, it’s wind for wings that are much broader than just a legal approach. The legal approach is a tactic, but organizing and building power at the community level is the win, and that’s what I’ve really learned.
So I think my growth has been to understand that, at best, we are learning one-dimensional ways of living on the planet and advancing our profession. Coming into movement work, you learn there are many dimensions of being, and many ways of intersecting on purpose, and if you can shift from anger into something a lot more regenerative, like love and abundance, you can start to create inside of these moments of resistance. Right? You don’t just have to tear down. You can actually get to some of the answers that we’re all looking for.
So it’s been a tough trajectory. You know, you don’t just move to that place. You have to get to that place, but I’m really grateful to be in a more steady, stable place, rooted in love that I come from, rooted in joy that I come from, but still very committed to advancing a resistance toward a broader liberation for everyone.
I’m so proud to talk about Taproot Earth. It is a new organization, and it began last year in 2023, with a seven-year time horizon. So we are moving until 2030. And we’re moving until 2030 as an organization, because 2030 is the point of no return, so says the International Climate Scientists. Once we get to 2030, if we haven’t made significant reductions in greenhouse gases, the way we live on the planet will be dramatically changed—mass migrations, because it’ll be too hot or too cold somewhere; extreme weather events at a rate that no one can really respond to. This is what’s going to happen if we don’t reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
Taproot came on the scene specifically to be an actor inside of that timeline. 1) we want to be a weapon for the climate justice movement. But 2) we want to actually experiment and show the possibility of impermanence.
You know, sometimes we take these sort of colonized ways of being— Institution-building is necessary but not for everybody. Some of us need to be able to move around and dissipate. Right? Some of us need to be able to do hard things and then go to the next level.
And so Taproot Earth is such an organization. We’re strange. I am the partner for vision and initiatives. My strategy partner is Anthony Giancatarino, and he and I have been working together for over a decade, really thinking through this climate crisis.
Photo courtesy of Taproot Earth
So our work is really to build formations that can govern themselves, and to build those formations from the frontlines upward. We focus on the Gulf South, which is Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Puerto Rico. We share a water, and so that is how we—we use, some might call it a bioregion, we call it watershed organizing. Take off those borders and think about the natural systems that we share. We share that gulf. We share those waters. We share the realities of a particular history in the South.
We also focus on Appalachia, which brings us into not just the Ohio River Valley but into the sort of Appalachia mountain chain, but all the states that touch that—the Carolinas, some of the Georgia south, of course, Kentucky, Pennsylvania—it takes us into Pennsylvania—West Virginia. And, again, we’re working in these areas that are the energy sources for this country. So oil and gas and coal is the Gulf South and Appalachia.
And we also work in the Black diaspora, and we define the Black diaspora as any place where Africans were and were taken from and brought in the Transatlantic slave trade. And so we work absolutely on the African continent, but also in the U.K., Canada, the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America, South America. These are places where Black folks are, and that’s where we want to do our work.
And so building formations, both domestically in the U.S., but also globally. We have our global Black climate leaders network. It’s called Taproot Noir, and it is all Black from the Black diaspora.
We have a Gulf South to Appalachia formation that runs those 17 states, and it’s all frontline people who are coming together to say we understand what’s happening and we have solutions. We’re not an organization focused on, you know, tearing down or dismantling the system, although we are in deep solidarity and support for those organizations whose job that is. We want to be ready with some solutions, and we want to be ready with not just ideas, but actually piloted projects, [LAUGHS] that come from the frontline, so that when someone has the audacity to tell us that they understand what we’re saying but there’s no proof that we can make change, we say we have the proof. And we are starting to really show that in the world. And I’m really excited about that.
We are pushing a billion-dollar refund by 2030, to get a billion dollars to the ground to the Black diaspora, governed by the frontlines. And we’re really hoping that folks will join us, not just to make individual donations, which we love and we want, and thank you, but to hold some of the largest systems accountable—the Church, the Crown, the corporations who are responsible for so many of these imbalances that we’re seeing.
And so we’re going big. The vision is large. It’s taking a lot of courage. We’re building a team. Our team is global, and I’m really excited about it. But at the end of the day, we are headquartered in the great state of Louisiana. We have a role to play in a global conversation. And we’re taking on the fossil fuel industry as a main culprit in this fight. And we have a responsibility to the world to hold this industry accountable.
So we’ve got a just transition lawyering network, and that lawyering network works in the U.S., and it’s specifically to flank the climate frontlines. It’s lawyers who know we ought to be doing something. They know there’s something that we can offer in our legal system, but they just don’t know what to do. And the answer is not to let the lawyers lead, the answer is to connect the lawyers to the community and get behind what the community wants to do. So the just transition lawyering network is doing that.
We’re building these formations that govern themselves. And in seven years, when we finish, they will stand on their own. You know, Lord willing, they will stand on their own. And maybe they won’t. You know? We’re trying things. We’re having some courage. We’re trying new ways of being, but we’re putting some solutions out there so that folks can stop saying we understand but we don’t know what to do; we understand but there’s nothing we can change. Taproot Earth wants to be able to say: Here are the models, and they’re coming from the frontlines. And they always were. And they always can. So let’s put our investment, our time, our energy there, and let’s get behind the frontlines.
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 Southwestand 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 forestand 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Editorandclimate 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.
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!
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.
Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.
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.
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. In this excerpt from a Bioneers panel discussion, Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, 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 in advancing its goals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
