Nina Simons: Cultivating Diversity, Intuition and Attention for Resilience

This was Co-Founder Nina Simon’s morning address to the 2017 Bioneers gathering. View the video of her talk here.

It doesn’t seem to matter how long any of us may have anticipated this – this time of cataclysmic climate chaos, escalating violence and infrastructure collapse.

After so many years of learning from brilliant Bioneers colleagues, how much of our civilization needed reinventing to avoid catastrophe, and recognizing the disastrous effects climate chaos would bring, and knowing ecological, economic, political and cultural systems would be under great stress – I have to admit, I still wasn’t ready.

You see, I had imagined it mostly in my mind. And I am increasingly called to notice where my intellect – much as I am thankful for it – without being flanked by my other ways of knowing, is simply not adequate to meeting the new realities we face.

On one level, I believe we were each born for this time, called to accelerate our learning.

But these times of upheaval, loss and uncertainty are causing me to re-assess my own inner resilience, and to question the readiness of my own capacities.

The serial, escalating threats have my heart racing, awakening within me a heightened awareness of my own mortality – but also an acute sense of awakened aliveness each day, seasoned with searing flashes of outrage. All of this seems to be calling me to meet this tidal wave of violence, destruction and uncertainty with a deepening resolve and fierce dedication – to co-create a world where Mother Earth is honored as primary and sacred, and where gender, racial and economic equity and restorative justice are the norm.

I’m also finding a deeper understanding about the primacy of our interdependence.

As I see it, our survival depends on reorienting our daily lives around mutualism, reciprocity and respect in relation to ourselves, each other, all of life’s creatures and elements, and the places where we live and love.

As we face these serial disasters, people often respond with a great desire to help each other.

When people are in shock or grief and trauma-stricken, perhaps we’re better able to feel the truth of our relatedness, of our innate kinship with each other. That experience of inter-being that reminds us that our fates are bound together.

How might we elicit that “golden rule” behavior, and transform our habits, laws and policies to reinforce it, not just when we’re in crises, but on an everyday basis?

Faced with ever more wildfires and floods, mudslides, earthquakes and hurricanes, and immigrants, refugees and evacuees fleeing with terror and trauma in so many places – while five men own as much wealth as all the rest of the billions of the world’s people combined – my animal body simultaneously cringes and recoils in fear, and is filled with a burning desire to take action.

I am trying to learn how to address trauma and increase resilience in myself, in those I care most deeply about, and in the communities I feel called to serve.

I’m realizing that nothing is going to be more important for us than this capacity for resilience. We need to build our ability to bounce back after disruption, and remain centered and resourceful after shocking events, because these events are increasing in frequency and scale.

As I’ve been attempting to develop my own resilience in community with the people I feel tied to and have felt called to work with, there are a few key pieces I’ve learned I need to cultivate:

1. Trusting my body, emotions and intuition;

2. Valuing diversity; and

3. Learning how to place my attention.

An ecological study showed that ecosystems with the greatest diversity of species are the fastest to recover after disruption, while monocultures, or areas with fewer kinds of species take much longer to rebound towards health.

I am convinced that the same holds true for us humans as well.

As a social species, any collective that combines multiple perspectives, orientations and ways of perceiving improves the group’s problem-solving abilities. Within ourselves, if we listen for guidance from our bodies and hearts’ emotions, as well as from our ancestors, intuition, nature and dreams, we may bring greater wisdom, context and flexibility to our interactions than if we’re guided solely by our mind’s planning and imagining.

In nature, the places of greatest fertility, innovation and invention are the places where two or more ecosystems meet.

Where differences collide, newness is born. And if we were ever in need of birthing a new world, now would be the time.

And the diversity we need to cultivate is not only about the colors of our skin, but reaches to the furthest starry edges of our human galaxy – it includes people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, abilities, backgrounds, disciplines and faiths.

It also includes people at all levels of financial well-being – as john powell recently noted: “there is one group that we systematically other today – with hugely damaging consequences – while hardly even realizing we are doing it. People living in poverty.”

In studies intended to surface peoples’ views about often-stereotyped groups, Americans consistently revealed a deep and distinct bias against poor people, considering them both unfriendly and incompetent. Turns out, as a unique subset of our culture, we often offer them neither our empathy nor our respect.

And yet, having been shaken out of the moneyed world, and forced to turn toward a relationship economy, where connections to community and the land and elements are the only safety net they may rely upon, some may have real wisdom to offer to us all.

These ecological and human-enhanced disasters know no pigeonholing, stereotypes or categorization, living in gated, monocultural communities won’t afford protection in the long term. I’m feeling called toward an ever-deepening commitment to standing together for justice, to the public face of love.

We are all in this together. An injury to one is an injury to all. We all have the same hearts, connective tissue and spines.

Our ultimate and inherent interdependence is palpable through our physical bodies, which are gifted with immense wisdom – to sense, to repair, to celebrate, to love and to discern.

As we fill our lungs and bodies with each others’ exhalations, since the Earth is a closed loop, and recirculates everything, the cup of tea we drink today may once have been Cleopatra’s bathwater.

My wise mother taught me that when I listen closely to my body, it never lies.

Sometimes, upon hearing a comment in a group that might offend or hurt someone,Though I may not be able to pinpoint what was ‘off’ about it with my ears or mind, I can feel it in the pit of my belly. I’m learning to say “My stomach just clenched. I wonder whether anyone may have feelings or concerns about what was just said?”

My body also and thankfully lets me know when it’s had enough of perpetual activity, of responding to others’ needs without checking in with my own, although I’ve become deeply patterned to override it.

Since turning 60, and entering my young elderhood, I’m learning to listen (better at least) when it calls me to rest.

The poet, David Whyte, describes this so well. He says:

REST is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also psychologically and physically. Rested, we are ready for the world…rested we care again for the right things…and the right people…in the right way. In rest we re-establish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too.

To move through this tumultuous time, I believe we must co-create safe spaces for our selves and each other to express the truths of what’s moving in our hearts…

Women have long been ridiculed and derided for being ruled by our emotions, but emotions are central to all human life.

If we learn to heed their messages, they can be our best guides. Without their wisdom, we’d have a dry and soul-less world.

We forsake feelings at our peril. As we become increasingly emotionally illiterate and relationally hobbled, we not only become lonesome and depressed, we forget to prioritize connection, organizing and coalition-building, and we lose our political struggles.

Even anger can be a positive force. It can be negative or corrupted as aggression, violence or rage, but in her brilliant book The Language of Emotions, Karla McLaren notes that in its purest form, anger is actually the body’s way of informing us that a boundary has been trespassed.

Unexpressed or stifled, emotions become toxic to our psyches.

Meant to surface so as to wash and purify us, they’re intended to circulate through their movement and expression our bodies’ real-time response to upsetting, exciting or stimulating events.

As the poet Nayyirah Waheed so elegantly says:

“Expect sadness

Like

You expect rain

Both

Cleanse you.”

And also:

“grieve, so that you can be free to feel something else.”

When I locate an opportunity to express how much anger and grief resides within me, (perhaps surrounded by trusted friends, in ritual, in a drum circle or alone in the woods), I am astounded at the volume and ferocity of sounds that emerge from within me.

Sometimes, when I realize I haven’t cried for some time, I’ll watch a soppy movie so that I feel permission to sit in the dark and weep. I feel cleaner, afterward, with more energy circulating throughout my body, and readier to face what comes.

I’m also learning to listen more attentively to the guidance that comes unbidden, sometimes from a dream, or as I awaken. Other times, a wild creature will visit my path, a rainbow will appear when I need reassurance, or a flash of inspiration whose source I do not know. I’m learning to ask for guidance from my ancestors, and to listen patiently for however they might respond.

My third key has been about exploring attention – choosing more intentionally where and how I invest it. Since energy follows attention, it’s my most valuable resource.  

The evening news and opining pundits have become more intriguing than most fiction, as the details and cast of characters in the seemingly limitless greed of the kleptocracy are revealed.

I notice my tendency to get mesmerized, to give over my attention to tracking this detective story. I’ve been trying to rein that hypnotic impulse in, select carefully where to direct my focus and spend more precious time protecting and cultivating my psyche’s well-being.

Lynn Twist suggests – in her Fundraising from the Heart seminar that what we appreciate, appreciates, and I’ve found it to be true, in nearly every area of my life.

Perhaps it’s a basic principle of relationships, that we might all do well to practice, as we all long to feel valued, attended to, and appreciated for the uniqueness that we bring.

And then there’s meditation, the practice of attending within. Long a reluctant, impatient and poor practitioner, I’m discovering the value of regularly and deeply turning my attention inward, to just listen, to check in with my multiple ways of knowing and see if anyone in the Council of Ninas has anything I need to listen for.

A writer and teacher of Relational Mindfulness, Deborah Eden Tull suggests that giving our selves the gift of our full attention is the subtlest form of self-love.

I’m finding that a few minutes, a couple of times a day is making a real difference. Strengthening my centeredness when I’m navigating choppy waters, deepening my capacity to listen and discern, and to receive guidance. As I walk this time when distraction and urgency seem to come at me from every direction,

and there’s so much more need than I can possibly address, the stillness that I am tending within me is aiding me in discerning what’s mine to do.

There is a gentle sense of self-acceptance – that’s causing me to feel kinder towards others, as I’m practicing it towards myself.

Somehow, intimate though it seems, it seems to me a key part of cultivating my own resilience, toward becoming a better change agent and co-creator of positive change. So I offer it humbly, in case it might prove useful to you.

This is my prayer:

May we cultivate resilience by listening

for the wolves’, owls’ and whales’ songs,

For the wind’s whispers and the waters’ ebbs and flows.

For the rustling leaves of aspen trees,

Who weather storms by holding each other, underground.

May will encounter each other anew, as sparks of stars,

  Each glowing with a particular radiance and light.

May we heed our bodies’ calls for cycles

Of listening for guidance and learning what’s needed,

Followed by engaged, purposeful and collaborative action.

And may we support each other in exquisite tending and self care.

May we develop our relational intelligence,

and kindle our kindness,

Giving the wild horses of our hearts

rein to lead,

As we remember the Earth who we were born from,

And that everyone – and all of life – is sacred, and relatives.

Again, Nayyirah Waheed, who suggests this:

1. rub honey into the night’s back.

2. make sure the moon is fed.

3. bathe the ocean.

4. warm sing the trees.

And she signs it:

–tend

Thank you.

Turdulent Times: A Hero’s Journey

This was Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel’s morning address to the 2017 Bioneers gathering. 

A friend once counseled me that any truly transformative experience is preceded by dread. We’re living in dreadful times indeed. The big wheels are turning. An old order is dying –  a new one is being born.

This moment of cataclysmic breakdown is shattering open a space for transformational breakthrough. Although the outcome is deeply uncertain, there’s as much cause for hope as for horror.

We’re taking a collective hero’s journey — a descent through the crucible of the underworld to transform human civilization and ourselves. As cultural historian Richard Tarnas puts it, “We’re in a race between initiation and catastrophe.”

The classic hero’s journey begins with separation from the community — from wholeness and home. There follow a dark night of the soul, a deconstruction of the old identity, and a crisis of meaning.

The hero encounters mortal danger. A hovering shadow seems to darken the whole world, an encroaching peril. The hero goes through a deep inner descent, wrestling with the shadows of the darkness within.

There’s great suffering, the crucial point of transformation. The hero has to clean out the stables of the psyche and surrender the old identity. Only then can the hero discover the hidden potential within to become a person of world historical moment. Now the hero can re-enter the larger community — humbled, reborn — bearing the treasure of new vision and purpose.

Today, modern civilization and the entire species are going through a collective hero’s journey. But in this endgame at the outer limits of Western civilization, we’ve separated ourselves from the entire community of life. As a species, we face mortal danger. We’re compelled to confront our fallibility, our mistakes, our mortality. Very often what’s dying is more apparent than what’s being born.

It’s a crisis of worldviews – because, as Tarnas puts it, “Worldviews create worlds. Our celebrated civilization and rational intelligence have produced so much that is precious to us.  Yet that luminosity has come with an enormous shadow where we see ourselves as the sovereign supreme intelligence in the known universe.

“It has produced a spiritual crisis, as well as an ecological catastrophe that comes from objectifying nature as if it’s just there for our benefit.

“Near-death experiences have tremendous power to reconfigure moral values. You see life differently. You see yourself differently. You develop new values – the importance of relationships, the importance of love, rather than of amassing an enormous bank account.”

As Tarnas concludes, “As a species, as a civilization, as individuals, we can go through a profound inner transformation to be reborn into a new relationship to the Earth community. That’s the measure of whether we’re going to survive and flourish.”

Today a new worldview is emerging that’s also very ancient — the spreading consciousness that we’re part of a much vaster web of life in a cosmos imbued with order and genius beyond our comprehension.

This awareness is rising up spontaneously everywhere. Some of the largest global movements in history are converging in the recognition that’s it’s all connected and we’re all connected. The twin crises of climate disruption and extreme inequality reflect the biggest political failure in history, and they’ve catalyzed a five-alarm political immune response.

But the bigger the light, the longer the shadow. Indeed, we’re living in turdulent times. We’re swamping the drain.

As Hurricane Harvey engulfed the Gulf and steeped Houston’s petro-metro in a toxic soup, Irma previewed Florida’s climate future as a deep blue state. Global weirding is upon us everywhere. It speaks in the fierce language of nature: floods, droughts, fires, hypercanes, mass extinctions. Finally that voice is being heard. Robert Jay Lifton calls this mass awakening in the US the “climate swerve.” Denial is over. Better late than never.

Meanwhile the corruption saturating the republic is escalating the chaos by stoking the darkest shadows of the human psyche: the authoritarian will to power – the hungry ghost of greed – the trolls of racism, bigotry, and misogyny. For this job, we need Ghostbusters.

The Joker has taken over Gotham City. As Russia-gate sucks the gangsters and warlords of Trumpistan into what appears to be the greatest scandal in American history, Typhoid Donald’s contagion could lead to a succession crisis and a political clear-cut. Watergate pales in comparison. It’s usually the rot within empires that topples them.

We’re heading for complete political chaos. The empire has no clothes.

As Alexandra Stevenson reported from the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum, summit of the financial masters of the universe:

“The world order has been upended… The religion of the global elite — free trade and open markets — is under attack… The biggest concern? Finding a way to make the people who are driving populist movements feel like they are part of the global economic pie that Davos participants have created and largely own.”

In other words, make feudalism great again. Talk about a marketing challenge.

Try selling that to a world where five billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s people. Where 737 interlocking financial networks control 80% of global corporate economic activity. Where what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism” profits mightily from catastrophe and capitalizes on chaos to inflict radical fiscal and social policies that concentrate wealth and power even more.

What could possibly go wrong?

The global dark money rabbit hole is where Russia-gate is inexorably leading. Money laundering. Secret offshore accounts. Shell companies. Tax havens. Impeccably buried treasures stashed in the system’s subterranean architecture. Everything the global elites really do not want you to see.

Most of it of course is legal. The system is the crime. Resistance is anything but futile.

Democracy movements are erupting everywhere, confronting corruption — challenging austerity schemes and plutocracy. People are taking to the streets and corridors of power in numbers not seen since the ‘60s — with youth often at the forefront.

In truth, we’re poised to make a quantum leap – to leapfrog into an entirely different way of doing things. In fact, nothing less will do. This Age of Nature calls for a new social contract of interdependence. Taking care of nature means taking care of people — and taking care of people means taking care of nature.

Around the world in diverse fields of endeavor, social and scientific innovators such as the bioneers have been developing and demonstrating far better technological, economic, social, cultural and political models.

They’re inspired by the wisdom of the natural world, and guided by values of social equity, inclusion, cooperation and compassion.

But paradigms die hard, and empires die harder. Progressive movements succeed most when there’s a split in the corporate class. Those fault lines are widening.

The clean energy revolution is now unstoppable. In 2015, twice as much investment globally went into renewables as into fossil fuels. Apple already uses 96% clean energy worldwide. Twenty-three Fortune 500 companies have pledged to reach 100% clean energy. The business case is irrefutable and the worm has turned.

California, the world’s sixth largest economy, has already shown it’s possible and profitable to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions, while also addressing environmental justice and racial equity. The Golden State has set the goal of 65% clean energy by 2030. It already has more clean energy jobs than all coal jobs in the US.

Globally there are over 8,000,000 jobs in renewable energy, versus about 3,000,000 in fossil fuels.

Cities, which account for 2/3 of US emissions, are taking the lead. China and India are on the move in big ways. Germany is the world’s first major renewable energy economy. Denmark produced 56% of its electricity from renewables in 2015. The list goes on – and on.

Clean tech is upending the fossil infrastructure across the board. As Tony Seba, an instructor at Stanford University, wrote in his book, “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation”:

“We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruption of transportation in history. What the cost curve says is that by 2025 all new vehicles will be electric, globally.”

Seba projects that by 2030:

• All new energy will be provided by solar or wind.

• Gasoline, natural gas and coal will be obsolete. Nuclear is already obsolete. Billions of dollars of oil will become stranded.

The imperative now is to fast-forward the transition to 100% clean energy, keep the oil in the ground, and, as Paul Hawken is showing, sequester carbon back where it belongs in a drawdown to 350 ppm, which is completely do-able with what we already know and have. Full stop.

Culture change usually precedes political change, and we’re also on the front lines of cultural revolution.

In the US, multi-cultural society is here to stay. Five states and 50 metro areas are already majority–minority. By 2019, minority children will be the majority nationally. The entire country is projected to become majority–minority in about 25 years.

17% of new marriages and 20% of cohabiting relationships are interracial or interethnic.

91% of respondents to a Pew Research survey said: “Interracial marriage is a change for the better, or made no difference at all.”

Millennials are the most diverse and largest generation in American history. According to a USA Today/Rock the Vote Millennials poll, almost 60% of them have a positive view of Black Lives Matter.

The massive public blowback against Trumpistan’s racist and xenophobic policies has shown how radically out of step this retrograde regime is with the arc of today’s diverse, interdependent world. Very large sectors of the business community are pushing back, even if it’s for self-interested reasons.

Trumpistan’s immigrant bashing is awakening the Latino political sleeping giant, along with big business and a majority of citizens. The Dreamers are inspiring the nation to make America grateful again.

We’re also surfing the next wave of feminism and gender justice. The post-inaugural Women’s March was the biggest demonstration in American history. With women of color at the forefront, it’s a shining expression of the Inclusivity Revolution. It’s making visible a spreading collective understanding: The power and creativity of our diversity grows exponentially at the crossroads where disparate issues and diverse peoples intersect.

As the book “Sex and World Peace” documents, “States that have improved the status of women are as a rule healthier, wealthier, less corrupt, more democratic, and more powerful on the world stage in the early 21st century.” They’re also less likely to engage in conflict both domestically and globally.

As Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden note: “The true clash of civilizations in the future will [be] along the fault lines between civilizations that treat women as equal members of the human species, and civilizations that cannot or will not do so.”

Our entire idea of gender is expanding. California is about to join five other states in making non-binary gender presentations available on driver’s licenses. Culturally there’s no turning back.

Meanwhile, Standing Rock has rocked the world, bringing Indigenous rights and worldviews into mainstream awareness.

It’s seeding a genuine shift in consciousness, especially among young people. Native Peoples are showing the world what it means to come together not as protestors, but as protectors – peaceful guardians of the sacred sources of life and of justice. Indigenous peoples worldwide are linking networks to build power, and engage millions more non-Native allies. This has not happened before.

It’s a movement moment. The crossroads are getting crowded.

But make no mistake: The ecological debt we’ve incurred is dire. The cultural wounds are deep, and divide-and-conquer remains the preferred playbook. We’re in for some very tough sledding across the melting snow.

Fortunately nature has a deep capacity for healing, and people are profoundly resilient. Resilience is the grail, both ecological and social — enhancing our ability to adapt to dramatic changes, while bringing about social healing and reconciliation.

If we act boldly now, we can still dodge complete climate chaos. It requires that we actually change the system, which requires that we build broad-based political power.

But it has to be about much more than that. It’s about a transformation of what power means. We’re moving away from “power over” to “power to” and “power with” – power to create an ecologically vital and socially just world – power with each other to create beloved community.

 That’s an epochal shift in worldview. Why does this consciousness seem to be arising spontaneously around the world all at once?

Our scientific understanding of consciousness is in its infancy. The psychologist Carl Jung deeply pondered this mystery of consciousness. While developing his theory of the collective unconscious, he identified what he called the “governing principles of the psyche” – the recurring archetypal myths, symbols and stories that seem to be universally shared across cultures and geographies.

Jung began paying attention to another mystery: frequent instances in which a person’s inner state would be matched by an external event that seemed perfectly orchestrated to speak precisely to it, like some kind of spooky dialogue with an invisible ubiquity. Although these occurrences couldn’t be connected by cause, they were unmistakably connected by meaning. Jung called these meaningful coincidences “synchronicities.”

But how could such anomalies be explained in a materialist, Newtonian cause-and-effect machine of a cosmos? It’s the kind of question David Bohm studied deeply. As a leading quantum physicist who worked with Einstein, he also pursued his quest with leading spiritual masters such as Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama, whose worldviews he sought to reconcile with science.

After 40 years of research, Bohm proposed that the nature of reality is what he called a Holomovement.

He hypothesized that the cosmos is a single unbroken wholeness in flowing movement in which each part of the flow contains the entire flow.

Bohm believed this holomovement has two aspects: the implicate order and the explicate order. The explicate order is the subset that’s directly perceptible to the human senses and the mind: what we consider the physical universe.

The implicate order is everything else: all that’s beyond our five senses plus the intangibles of life.

Naturally we assume the explicate order is the fundamental reality. Bohm argued the opposite.

His analogy was that the explicate order is like the foam on the waves of the ocean. The implicate order is the ocean itself.

The foam is like the nature of the physical universe.

It arises and it passes away in the endless creation and destruction of matter. Bohm found this understanding of physics consistent with both quantum theory and spiritual teachings down through the ages.

His pathfinding original research showed the electron in quantum physics behaves as if it somehow possessed an awareness of the rest of the universe. In some sense, he said, the electron is functioning as a conscious being  — or it can’t be distinguished from functioning as a conscious being.

Bohm proposed that, along with energy and matter, there’s a third irreducible component of the fabric of the cosmos: consciousness, or meaning. He said each contains the other two.

Carl Jung ultimately came to a parallel conclusion. He came to believe the collective unconscious supersedes human consciousness. It appears to pervade nature and the cosmos itself.

Just imagine a cosmos made of energy, matter and meaning. How would that change our way of living?

Here’s how the late Iroquois historian, scholar and longtime bioneer John Mohawk saw it from an Indigenous perspective.

“The culture that I come from saw the universe as the fountain of everything, including consciousness. It’s not only the human who the consciousness; it’s also the plant, the tree, the birds and all the other living things.

When you address that plant, you’re addressing its consciousness in time and space. You’re part of whatever it is that brought the plant into being. You’re related in this way.

“In our culture we’re scolded for being arrogant if we think that we’re smart. An individual is not smart, according to our culture. Individuals are merely lucky that they are a part of a system that has intelligence that happens to reside in them.

“In other words, be humble about this always. The real intelligence isn’t the property of an individual or a corporation — the real intelligence is the property of the universe itself.

“That’s the old spirituality. Acquire that consciousness, and it becomes extremely difficult to rationalize pollution. Acquire that consciousness and it becomes very difficult to rationalize cutting down trees to make board feet-worth of dollars out of them.

“I propose to you,” Mohawk concluded, “that spirituality is the highest form of political consciousness.”

That’s the consciousness that’s arising before our eyes. That’s the real treasure of this hero’s journey.

It’s all alive. It’s all connected. It’s all intelligent. It’s all relatives.

This is the revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart.

And as Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn, organize.”

 

An Altered American Dream and Defining the ‘New Better Off’

What does it mean to be “well off”? Is it financial achievement, the amassing of nice things, successfully raising a family? Courtney Martin, the author of The New Better Off (Seal Press, 2016), examines the concepts of success and personal happiness for future generations, who are likely to be less wealthy—at least in the traditional sense—than their parents.

Martin is an accomplished writer and speaker who explores topics related to feminism and social justice. She is the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, Valenti Martin Media and FRESH Speakers Bureau. Martin is also Editor Emeritus at Feministing.com, a weekly columnist for On Being, and author or editor of six books. Her work appears frequently in national publications including The New York Times and Washington Post.

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of The New Better Off.

Courtney Martin spoke on a panel about racism and patriarchy at the  2017 Bioneers conference.

For the first time in history, nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe that the next generation will be “better off” than their parents are—an opinion shared by men and women, rich and poor alike.

To some, that may sound sad. To me, it sounds like a provocation. Better off? Based on whose standards?

To be sure, people need jobs. They need housing. They need healthcare. When these basic needs aren’t met—and for too many Americans they aren’t—we are legitimately not better off.

But for many of us, the concept of “better off” is far more abstract than just putting food on the table. Is “better off” a fancy job title, a bank account with more zeros, a manicured lawn? It turns out that none of those things automatically makes you safe or happy, as evidenced by the Great Recession, when the ground underneath so many Americans’ feet shifted overnight. And, what’s more, some of the things we have historically associated with success actually endanger your health. Underneath the appearance of uplift, a complex story weighs us down. This could play out in any number of ways, like when people decide to erase their ethnic last names; or they set aside authentic—albeit nontraditional—career ambitions in favor of more lucrative paths; or when a father knows his colleagues better than he does his own kids; or a mother who leans in so hard she falls flat on her face. Pressure and debt, missed get-togethers, living for the weekends, living someone else’s dream. “Better off,” left uninterrogated, can be fucking dangerous.

For me, this is not just a societally important matter, but one with personal significance. I was just minding my own business—sweating on subway platforms at 2:00 am and getting weepy over rejection emails from editors and losing track of time while laying on blankets with dear friends in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and dreaming about the person I would one day be, and then—all the sudden—I was that person. Otherwise known as an adult. I had a husband (something I never thought I’d have). I had a daughter (something I always thought I’d have). I had a job. Well, actually, a lot of jobs. I had a car payment. I had no small amount of frustration when the kid next door played his music too loud on a weeknight (to be fair, it was pretty awful music).

And I had a problem. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to become a responsible person. I’ve always been sort of an old soul—watching Oprah with a bag of Ruffles potato chips after middle school so I could try on all the grown-up emotions of her guests. Commitment doesn’t send me scurrying like it does some people. I like feeling needed. I like being accountable. I believe in sensible shoes.

The problem was that I didn’t want to become an adult if it meant falling in line. I didn’t want to get golden handcuffs or check my email every two seconds because I was so “important.” I didn’t want to laugh with my girlfriends about how sexless my marriage was over wine at book group—or stay married for the kids. I didn’t want to let myself off the hook because activism is for young people, or utter that familiar, ugly phrase: “do as I say, not as I do.” I didn’t want to stop having euphoric experiences or long, wandering philosophical conversations. I didn’t want to get a good job, a house with a white picket fence, have 2.5 kids, and then just . . . go . . . to . . . sleep.

And as it turned out, the white picket fence was beyond my reach anyway—as it is beyond the reach of so many people. When the economy plummeted in 2007, it robbed so many Americans, especially the young, of some of the experiences that—up until that point—were widely considered the cornerstones of a successful adult life. Suddenly, owning a home and having a nine-to-five job were stripped of their former glimmer, revealed to be more complicated and maybe even less satisfying than we’d been told. People put off getting married, in part, because they felt like they were supposed to be somebody else when they did it—somebody more financially secure, more established, more sure.

In other words, when the economy crashed, the air was let out of the overinflated ego of the so-called American Dream. I had been scared of what adulthood might do to the state of my soul; I feared chasing symbols of success rather than creating conditions for meaning and joy and justice. But—as fate would have it—the symbols were outrunning everyone.

Since then, so many people continue to reevaluate, turning away from job opportunities that are prestigious but not courageous, making families out of friends and neighbors, buying less, giving away more, sharing and renting rather than owning, reinventing rituals and ritualizing reinvention. So many people are looking compassionately and critically at their own parents’ lives and choosing to do things differently, sometimes even reclaiming edifying, abandoned, elements of their grandparents’ lives.

When I was in my early twenties, my mom gave me a copy of Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life. In it Bateson, the daughter of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, writes profiles of five, diverse women with the goal of turning their lives inside out, showing what it really takes to put a day together when you are a passionate person with only twenty-four hours. I devoured it, writing in the margins and putting sticky notes in places where Bateson took my breath away. And then all of my girlfriends read it, each one passing it on to the next.

As I look back, I realize that it took such hold of us because it was the only book we’d ever encountered that described the nitty-gritty of real, somewhat contemporary lives (at that point, 2002, the portraits were over a decade old). To these women, even structural problems—like the sexist workplace—weren’t inevitably crushing, but fodder for subterfuge and rebellion. And Composing a Life was written from a place of deep delight in the capacity of ordinary people to pursue meaning and joy in challenging circumstances. In Bateson’s telling, that we are made even more determined, even more creative by those kinds of circumstances. The book treats “composing a life” as a creative, ongoing opportunity, not a test to be passed. Bateson writes:

I believe that our aesthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has overfocused on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist’s vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and different bodies.

The phrase “new better off” is the shorthand I’ve created for this bourgeoning shift in Americans’ ideas about the good life. It’s the patchwork quilt version of the American Dream, not the (phallic) sculpture reaching high into the sky. It’s about our quest to use our current precarity as the inspiration to return to some of the most basic, “beginner’s mind” questions: What is enough money? How do we want to spend our finite energy and attention? What makes us feel accountable and witnessed? It’s about creating a life you can be genuinely proud of, an “examined life” (in the words of dead Greek guys), a life that you are challenged by, a life that makes you giddy, that sometimes surprises you, a life that you love.

It’s leaving a job that pays well but makes you feel like a cog for a freelance life that makes you feel like a creator—the financial highs and lows be damned. It’s sharing a car with a few friends and learning how to repair your favorite pair of jeans. It’s moving in with your grandmother because she needs someone to reach the highest shelf in the kitchen and you need someone who helps you keep our turbulent times in perspective. It’s putting your cell phone in a drawer on Saturday afternoon and having the best conversation of your life that night. It’s starting a group for new dads where you admit how powerful and confusing it is to raise a tiny human.

But lest I fall into the same trap of all those who idealize bootstraps, the New Better Off mentality is not solely about the individual. It’s also about the collective. Playwright Tony Kushner writes: “The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.”

So, yes, this book is about the brave individual choices people are making, but it’s also about the movements, formal and informal, that are coalescing around the New Better Off mindset—about how people are reinventing the social safety net, and reforming the laws that have prevented us from sharing and reclaiming communal rituals. A surprising coalition of people—from labor organizers to start-up entrepreneurs to legislators—are coming together to push for portable health benefits. A small but growing group of lawyers are agitating for laws that make it easier to start co-op businesses and create communally owned homes. All over the country groups of young people who are grieving the loss of parents are gathering for dinner, to talk about grief as well as about what is being born in them through their loss. Essentially, this book’s message can be conveyed in one phrase: community is everything.

The New Better Off mindset compels you to be wise, to be vulnerable enough to admit that you have limitations, and to surround yourself with people who will take care of you and vice versa. But it’s not just about need. It’s also about fun—unscripted relationships that evolve over years and years; spontaneous, gut-busting laughter; bread and dogma broken with debates around a dinner table. Communities are joy. There’s an almost giddy energy when something as simple as a book club gathers in someone’s living room. Sure, wine flows as people are discussing the text, but it’s not just that; they’re also following the arc of one another’s lives. One of the things that has thrilled me to no end while working on this book is meeting so many impatient, innovative people who are actively figuring out how to reclaim community.

We may be artists of our own lives, as Bateson tells it, but we are not self-made men and women. We live in communities, and beyond that, we live in polities. Part of the New Better Off mindset is also about structural transformation. Systems thinkers and agitators and designers are asking: what would an America look like where all people’s basic needs are met—where more people have the luxury of making choices about the kind of work they do, the kind of homes they live in, the kinds of families they create?

To be sure, the “creating a beautiful life” portion of the New Better Off mindset is about our personal choices, but it’s also about the neighborhood and city and state and nation that we live in, and what their policies say about our rights and responsibilities. One of the sicknesses of privilege is the mistaken belief that we are all islands—when really we are archipelagos. Technology that makes it easier for young, white guys to order a tuna melt is not an example of living the New Better Off life; it’s just a business venture. But technology that makes it easier for everyone to find affordable, high-quality healthcare? That is the New Better Off.

We don’t create this little life in a finite moment in time. We create our lives informed by our parents and our grandparents and all the decisions they made in the America (or the Mexico or the Iran or the Ethiopia) that they came of age in. Or, as author Paul Elie puts it, “We enter the story in the middle.” In this manner, while the New Better Off mentality is about the continuous exploration of what is in front of us, it’s also a fascination and sober reckoning with what lies behind us. Who has lived in these neighborhoods? Who has worshipped in these halls? What worked about the way they built community? Can it be recaptured, maybe even made more effective with modern tools or notions? What was alienating and even discriminatory in these communities? Are there opportunities for reconciliation?

We used to answer these questions within formal institutions— churches, rotary clubs, Junior Leagues, unions—but many of these groups have lost the centrifugal pull they once enjoyed. Many of the authorities we used to rely on to guide us toward the good life no longer exist. Many of the straightforward paths have been bulldozed, or are overgrown with weeds. Many of the institutions have crumbled, destroyed by their own stubborn insistence on doing things as they’ve always been done. The safety net has been torn—and the ladder to success has fallen down.

The demographic makeup of this country is shifting in profound ways. Women now constitute a full half of the professional workforce. By 2044, whites—the majority source of our most dominant and toxic narratives about achievement—will have become a racial minority. And the percentage of Americans that doesn’t identify with any particular religion has grown sharply in recent years.5 The demography “rule book” is written in the language of another era.

If you feel like a failure, it might be that you’re considering yourself against standards that just don’t hold water anymore. Sure, many consider it a sign of success to own a home, but that yardstick got its best traction when the average middle-class man’s salary could support an entire family—something we all know no longer applies. The good news is that you might just be a success based on New Better Off standards, which perhaps you’ve had a hard time articulating but have been bravely grappling toward. Maybe you’re a mediocre earner but a masterful father. Or maybe you can’t afford your dream home but you throw legendary neighborhood parties.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from The New Better Off by Courtney Martin, published by Seal Press, 2016.

Free the Seed: An Open Source Approach to Food Crop Seed

By Irwin Goldman, Jack Kloppenburg, & Claire Luby

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

We Americans value the freedom to do what we want with our property. These days, our freedom of action in regard to what we own is increasingly being eroded and constrained by the expansion of corporate power and the evolving legal dimensions of ownership.

Nowhere has this tendency to limit freedom to operate come into sharper focus than in farming. A farmer may buy a John Deere tractor, but ownership of the copyrighted software—without which the tractor cannot run and cannot be repaired—is retained by the company. According to Deere, the farmer has “an implied lease” to operate the tractor but is prohibited from making any repair or change involving use of the copyrighted code.

For farmers who are planting patented seed, the lease is not even implied, it is literal. Farmers cannot acquire patented corn, soybean, cotton, canola, alfalfa, or sugar beet seed without signing highly restrictive limited use licenses. These agreements permit the farmer to use seed solely for planting a single commercial crop. Any other use—saving, replanting, sharing, transferring, selling, or breeding with the seed—is expressly prohibited. Farmers aren’t buying seed, they are renting a one-time use of a combination of genes that they never own.

The position of the farmer with reference to farm inputs and equipment is much the same as for any of us in regard to Apple or SONY or Microsoft or General Motors. Many of the technologies we buy so avidly and use so ubiquitously are not entirely ours. We implicitly agree to licenses restricting our ability to access and alter embedded code when we open shrink-wrapped software or music CDs, and when we purchase phones, tablets, and automobiles.

Such licenses are supported by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which governs the ways purchasers can gain access to a product’s software and what they are permitted to do with it. Like previous patent and copyright legislation, the DMCA’s limitations on consumers’ access and use were supposed to spur innovation and prevent piracy. Instead, they have become tools for enhancing market power through the creation of barriers to repair and reuse. The DMCA impedes both creative hacking and the entry of independent diagnostic and service enterprises.

Retention of ownership over embedded code—digital and genetic—is especially problematic for farmers. Without access to software, farmers cannot fix their own equipment or arrange for it to be serviced by anyone but a licensed dealer, at whatever price the vendor dictates. Many farming operations are highly time-critical and the cost of transporting a downed piece of machinery to distant dealers can be large.

Patent and license restrictions on the use of seeds are damaging not only to farmers, but to society as a whole. Prevented from saving and replanting use-restricted seed, farmers have been subjected to a doubling of seed prices since 2007 as the seed industry has rapidly consolidated. The prohibition on saving and sharing seed also undermines and constrains the vibrant and creative “freelance” plant breeders who are a resurgent force in the farm community.

What is to be done? Happily, a wide variety of individuals, advocates, and groups have recognized that a just and sustainable society is likely to be founded more on the principle of sharing rather than on that of exclusion. Organizations such as Creative Commons, the Open Society Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, and the Open Source Initiative are acting to free our technologies from overbearing restrictions.

In 2012, a variety of stakeholders—public sector agricultural scientists, universities as well as freelance plant breeders, small seed company owners, and seed-rights activists—came together to “take back the seed,” or free the seed from corporate dominance. We formed the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) to create a means for ensuring that at least some seed and some of the genes cannot be locked away from use by patents and other restrictive arrangements.

The core strategy for achieving that goal is the dissemination and propagation of the OSSI Pledge along with the seed: “You have the freedom to use these OSSI-Pledged seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this Pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives.” This “copyleft” commitment ensures that the four open source seed freedoms are preserved:

  1. The freedom to save or grow seed for replanting or for any other purpose.
  2. The freedom to share, trade, or sell seed to others.
  3. The freedom to trial and study seed and to share or publish information about it.
  4. The freedom to select or adapt the seed, make crosses with it, or use it to breed new lines and varieties.
  5. Seed of some 377 OSSI-Pledged crop varieties, bred by 37 OSSI Plant Breeders, are now available from 48 OSSI Seed Company Partners. Visit the OSSI website or Facebook page to learn more and to find how you can obtain “freed seed” for your garden!

Powerful interests are at work to enact the sort of future that Thoreau warned us against: that men will become the tools of their tools. Instead, let’s put in place a framework that allows our tools to do the good work to which we can aspire. Free the Seed! Speed the plow!

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

Thomas Van Dyck on Fossil Fuel Divestment and the Logical Clean Energy Revolution

“It’s coming,” insists Thomas Van Dyck. “You can see it coming as you could with Polaroid and Kodak, with the transition to digital. You can see the inevitability of what’s happening.”

He’s referring to the global—and U.S.—trend toward sustainability and renewable energy. Not only are scientists, economists, and politicians more aware than ever that this shift is necessary to avoid total climate catastrophe, he says, but supporting renewables is by far the most financially viable choice—for investors as well as consumers.

Van Dyck has the right qualifications to make claims about financial viability. As managing director and financial advisor with the SRI Wealth Management Group at RBC Wealth Management, he has been a leader in socially responsible investing for 30+ years. Van Dyck consults on $1.8 billion in institutional and individual client assets, incorporating environmental, social and governance factors in investment decisions. Tom also founded the shareholder advocacy As You Sow Foundation in 1992 and is active in the “Divest Invest” movement.

Bioneers talked to Van Dyck about on how investors, businesses, and social leaders can make decisions that open doors to a more sustainable, equitable future.

We’re excited to welcome Thomas Van Dyck to the Bioneers Conference at the end of this month, where he’ll be speaking about the clean energy revolution.

Tom Van Dyck

What’s the number one thing regular people can do to make sure their investments are in line with their morals?

They can make sure that they’re not owning companies that are destroying the climate and exploiting workers. Generally, they can do it by understanding what they own. A good way to do that is to go to fossilfreefunds.org, where they can put in the ticker of their mutual funds and see what companies may be in them that violate their environmental leanings. If they own things that they find counter to their life’s purpose or political beliefs, then they should change their investments to reflect their values.

A good thing to know is that for the last ten years, the carbon-based energy sector of the S&P 500 was the worst-performing sector in terms of giving money back to shareholders. So if you’re an investor, don’t mix up this ESG sector with bad returns. If you’re investing the old-fashioned way, which is risk-and-return, you shouldn’t be investing in the fossil fuel industry. The return doesn’t warrant the risk. Today, it’s also the most overpriced industry. If you haven’t divested from fossil fuels, the next question would be: What’s inspiring you to underperform?

What’s the number one thing business leaders can do to help turn the tides of corporate economic corruption?

Business leaders can actually do a lot. They can make sure the energy they use is 100 percent renewable, as many corporations—and not just the tech guys—have done already. Second, every company should push to be carbon-neutral through their scope 1 and 2, if not carbon-negative by 2030. They should shoot for carbon neutrality within their businesses but also in who they do business with.

Businesses have a lot of control when there is a political environment like we have now, where science isn’t respected. They know the economic advantage as well as the brand advantage of being green and using renewable energy. Businesses can act independently—and collectively, they become more powerful than the government.

What’s the number one thing politicians can do to make economic stability accessible for as many people as possible?

Politicians can accelerate the transition from burning the carbon molecule to run our electrical system and transportation to using renewable sources. They can use the tools available to them to accelerate what is already happening economically. Politicians should be leading that transition, whether it’s passing renewable portfolio standards on all states through the utilities or encouraging more solar and wind development.

Hurricane Harvey is a classic example of why we need to do that immediately. The taxpayer picks up the consequences of the disaster, just like they do with tobacco and health care. The taxpayer picks up the consequences of burning too much carbon. It’s not borne by the companies that are producing the pollution.

Local governments, specifically, have a lot of power. California is a classic example. For every dollar of GDP we produce in California, we do so with half the carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions of the rest of the country. Our economy is growing faster than the U.S. economy. We’re the sixth largest economy in the world, and we continue to grow. This idea of regulating pollution as having an economic cost is folly.

If every state did what California’s doing, who cares about the Fed? All politics is local. So go take over the utility commissions. Go take over your state and local governments. Because in moving in this direction, you save more taxpayer money. It’s like nature’s already shown us what we should be doing, you just have to be smart enough to see it.

If moving toward and supporting renewables is so logical, why are politicians so slow to support them?

That comes down to the other problem in our society: We need to get money out of politics. When a politician makes a decision that isn’t based in logic, we know they’re being bought by an industry that’s trying to lengthen its existence in the face of an economic deluge that’s going to swamp it. It’s like putting your finger in a dyke. It’s not going to stop the economic reality that’s going to take place with many industries in our economy. They’re merely temporarily trying to stop the inevitable. We need to rapidly continue to push for an energy revolution.

But it’s coming. You can see it coming as you could with Polaroid and Kodak, with the transition to digital. You can see the inevitability of what’s happening. We need to get involved in our local governments so that people who have economic interests in maintaining dying industries are not disproportionately represented.

What’s the number one thing the media can do to shine a light on economic and corporate corruption within the U.S.?

The media has a responsibility to tell the truth. It needs to present facts of both sides. There’s no “both sides” in climate change. What you have with certain members of the media is a disinformation campaign that is not dissimilar to what occurred during Nazi Germany and other parts of the dark history of mankind. We have to be very careful here with media because in many ways, they’re a reflection of protecting an industry and a point of view that is not based on economics, not based on science, but merely based on an interest in protecting a wealthy elite—an elite that, in this case, is exploitative of the commons rather than additive. We need to get that changed. The way to do that is to take money out of politics and take over your state.

Climate change is the most obvious thing that we should be prepared to deal with. This problem should be handled. This is not a complicated issue. Ignoring climate change is against science, nature and economics. So what’s taking so long? This is industries fighting to survive. And they won’t survive. The question is, how quickly will the tides turn?

Find out more about Thomas Van Dyck and how you can engage with his campaigns and efforts by visiting the SRI Wealth Management Group at RBC.

Starhawk: Lessons From The Fires

(This article is reposted with permission from Starhawk.org)

Sacred fire, that shapes this land,
Summer teacher, winter friend.
Protect us as we learn anew,
To work, to heal, to live with you.

This is the chant we sing each summer as part of the fire protection ritual we do on my land in Western Sonoma County. As the fires rage, as I worry for our land and ache for our neighbors who have lost homes and even lives, I want to honor fire for the great teacher she is. Those of us who live in places where wildfire is a constant summer threat learn some deep lessons—the very lessons we all need to navigate a world where climate change has intensified the dryness and the winds.

Nature is more powerful than we are. If you doubt it, look at the pictures of the devastated neighborhoods of Santa Rosa, or for that matter, the flattened towns of the Caribbean or the flooded neighborhoods of Houston. We are part of nature, but we exist within her constraints, and we ignore them to our peril.

The indigenous people of California understood fire. They regularly burned the land to keep the underbrush down and reduce pests and diseases. The fires remained low and relatively cool, the forests open and parklike, perfect habitat for game. But conditions are so different today, and human settlement so much more dense, we find it hard to apply those lessons.

There are many things we can do to reduce the threat of fire—and we do them! Thinning, grazing, keeping a defensible perimeter around our structures, cleaning up, trimming the grass. But in the end, in a firestorm like we’ve just seen, none of that may avail. Nature is more powerful than we are.

Possessions are impermanent. We may enjoy them, even cherish them, but we cannot be defined by them. In fire country we know that they are on loan. If they go, we will mourn, but we will not be surprised. Lives are more important.

We survive by the grace of our neighbors. Our homes are protected by those brave and honorable folks who join the volunteer fire department. They go through hours and hours of training—which also require long hours of driving, and meetings, and more and more trainings. In fire season they are on call day and night, responding also to medical emergencies, and do their best to save homes and lives without judging. We are dependent on their generosity and courage.

Even more than that, we are dependent on our neighbors’ vigilance, their care of their land, their caution with candles and cigarettes, their alertness to report smoke or the glow of fire. We depend on their help in times of emergency, and their company in times of celebration.

Anyone who thinks they are entirely self-reliant does not live in fire country. Fire does not discriminate—it will not spare you because of your skin color or your prosperity or your affiliation for power, or even because of your virtue. Loss comes to those that deserve better, and luck comes to the undeserving.

Hope lies in the good will, the courage, skills and selflessness of your neighbors, and the sheer common sense of strangers to guard their cigarette butts. We are all in this together, and the conditions of life here demand that we recognize that truth and help one another.

If the land goes up in flames, there are many possessions I will miss. I will mourn the loss of structures we have built and money we’ve invested. But the greatest loss—once lives are safe—will be the trees we’ve planted, the food forests, the hedgerows of lavender and rosemary, the hours and hours of work gone into the land. We know, when we plant, that everything we do is on sufferance, yet we plant anyway. In that lies our faith—that there is value in the planting, the work, the vision.

After destruction comes regeneration.

Redwoods push out new needles; Doug fir seeds sprout. Bees return, and wildflowers bloom. Fire is the destroyer, but also the great renewer. What comes after will be different, but it may thrive in a new way.

In an impermanent world, I remain grateful for what I have, for each day when the land remains green, for each drop of rain that falls, for the help and stalwart courage of the firefighters and the devotion of the medics, for the friendship of those that surround me. I remain grateful to fire, our comfort in winter, our harsh teacher in these dry and windy autumn days. Despite the worry, the losses, the fear in these lessons, I am grateful to live in a web of relationships forged by fire.

This article is reposted with permission from Starhawk.org. To learn more about her work, visit her website and join the conversation on the post.

Tutwiler: “Agrobiodiversity holds the key to future food security”

By Brian Frederick

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

Bioversity International released a new report analyzing how agrobiodiversity, or the biological diversity of food, can improve food system resilience, sustainability, and nutrition. Titled “Mainstreaming Agrobiodiversity in Sustainable Food Systems,” the 200-page report outlines how biodiversity can help us produce foods that are both nutritious and sustainable.

“Agrobiodiversity—the edible plant and animal species that feed each and every one of us—holds the key to future food security,” said Ann Tutwiler, Director General of Bioversity International, “But we are failing to protect it, and tap into its potential to transform our food system for the better.”

Bioversity International is a research-for-development organization focused on preserving agricultural and tree biodiversity as a means of improving nutrition security, promoting sustainable agriculture, and adapting to climate change. They are a CGIAR Research Center, part of a global food security research partnership. Bioversity works with partners in low-income countries to disseminate scientific evidence, management practices, and policies that protect biodiversity. The report focuses on healthy diets (nutrition), production (sustainability), seed systems (food security), and conservation (resilience).

Food Tank had the opportunity to discuss the report and agrobiodiversity with Ann Tutwiler, Director General of Bioversity International.

Food Tank (FT): What has led to a global decrease in agrobiodiversity?

Ann Tutwiler (AT): Many factors. From the production side, a focus on ‘feeding the world’ rather than ‘nourishing the world’ has led to a focus on a handful of starchy staples that has contributed to an increase in land planted with maize, wheat, and rice from 66 percent to 79 percent of all cereal area between 1961 and 2013.

On the consumption side, there is a growing global tendency towards Western diets and processed convenience foods. Diets are based more and more on major cereals, plus sugar and oil. So these now dominate our agricultural production. Of the 30,000-ish plant species that can be used as food, today only three—rice, wheat, and maize—provide half the world’s plant-derived calories and intakes of pulses, fruits, and vegetables are low.

At the same time, the same pressures that are driving the sixth mass extinction of wild biodiversity are also affecting agricultural biodiversity—habitat transformation, deforestation, invasive species, and climate change. They also lead to disruption in pollinators and natural pest control. Loss of wild biodiversity can lead to erosion of genetic diversity (like the wild relatives of crops, which are a valuable source of traits for breeding), which reduces options for breeding new plant varieties better adapted to climate change.

Factor in the policy environment in some countries. When farmers are not allowed to trade local seeds, it also suppresses demand for these seeds. And when farmers and other natural resource managers stop using local materials, we also lose the local knowledge about those species and varieties. Once that knowledge is lost, a vicious cycle of loss is started as the seeds and breeds cannot be optimally used.

Policies for conserving seeds in genebanks and making them available for breeding programmes have tended to focus on staple cereals. Only two percent of global collections are of crop wild relatives and less well-known species.

We should point out though that there is no way yet to accurately measure the decrease in agricultural biodiversity. It is notoriously difficult to measure the exact status of crop and animal genetic diversity. A study in 2014 classified 58 percent of domesticated animal breeds as of unknown risk status. Also for crops, there are huge data gaps—number and distribution of species and their genetic diversity—so it is difficult to determine genetic erosion. One challenge is the richness of the diversity—even if we consider only the 150 to 200 crops commercially cultivated, it is hard to identify, monitor, and conserve it all.

This is one reason why Bioversity is working on an Agrobiodiversity Index and suggests ways to measure the agricultural biodiversity on plates and in markets, in fields, the wild, and genebanks worldwide and track changes in it.

FT: There is a global paradox, where millions go hungry while billions are obese and both groups can suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. What has led to this paradox and how can agrobiodiversity address it?

AT: One of the main drivers of malnutrition is poor diet. Diet-related factors are now the number-one risk factor of morbidity and mortality globally, more than tobacco smoke and air pollution. If people ate more plants, in line with standard dietary guidelines, it would have a positive effect on diets and on the environment, reducing global mortality by 6 to 10 percent and food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29 to 70 percent.

Tapping into the planetary wealth of diverse fruits, vegetables, pulses, and grains, particularly nutrient-dense varieties, can address both overweight and micronutrient deficiencies. We eat food, not micronutrients! For example:

  • More healthy options within food groups—expanding the range of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, pulses. Biodiversity is recognized as a fundamental principle in recent dietary guidelines like the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid, the Nordic guidelines, and the Brazilian guidelines.
  • Important and significant nutritional differences between species. For example, in Bangladesh, although people started eating more fish, their nutritional intake decreased from eating exotic farmed fish rather than nutrient-dense local fish. Then there are species many people have never heard of—Gac, for example, is a fruit from South East Asia with extremely high levels of beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A.
  • Important and significant nutritional differences within species. For example, some bananas are orange and contain very high levels of beta-carotene; others are white and contain none. Different varieties of potato can contain between 6 mg and 37 mg of vitamin C.
  • Since many less well-known plants, fish, animal, and trees are well adapted to local environments, they can be more tolerant to low inputs or climate fluctuations and so can be selected to provide a portfolio of nutritious foods all year round, integrating small animals, green vegetables, and fruit trees.
  • Food has to be accessible, affordable, acceptable, and available. Food biodiversity is often all four.

To address it, food, health, and agriculture policies need to be linked to one another. Policies for food and seeds need to expand the focus on maximizing yield and profit to also include considerations of diets and nutrition. Brazil is a great example of this. Brazil has recently targeted several policies to promote local and indigenous biodiversity for food and nutrition as part of its Zero Hunger campaign. Actions taken in Brazil include promoting diverse, healthy native foods in dietary guidelines, supporting production of food biodiversity through public procurement strategies (e.g. for food in schools), and prioritizing food biodiversity in relevant national strategies, action plans, agriculture, and nutrition policies.

FT: Increasing agrobiodiversity, for instance growing more varieties of wheat, would seem difficult to implement in places like the United States that rely on mass agricultural production and distribution. What can be done to encourage agrobiodiversity in these types of systems?

AT: The general rule is that larger farms are more specialist and this is consistent with the way that intensified, industrial farming has gone over the last 50 years in much of the Western world. There will always be a need for large-scale farms that produce commodities for massive consumption, this is also a part of food security. But there is a risk that using a single variety across vast areas leaves such crops open to attacks by pests and diseases. To counter this, the industry and farmer response is often to use large quantities of pesticides, fungicides, and so on, which is expensive as an input, has a negative impact on environmental factors such as water quality and (wild) biodiversity, and has high fossil fuel inputs. Moving to a more diverse system (and this could be different crops in different seasons, not necessarily different crops in different physical areas) can reduce risks of total loss and reduce risk of pest and disease damage. This can then lead to reduced input costs, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced environmental impacts.

Now, how does this happen in these kinds of systems? A great deal would need to happen in order to allow this to happen, not least in the increase in extension services (agroecology tends to be knowledge-intensive). To do so would potentially kick-start a revolution in agricultural employment in rich countries. What might drive this? A demand for greater diversity in diets from the public, increased concern over food safety and environmental health, and a general rise in what is being termed ‘sustainable intensification’ (increasing production whilst reducing environmental impacts, in its most simplistic definition). Such approaches might be ideal for incentivization through farmer payments, preferential markets, and tax incentives, for instance.

Twenty or so years ago, approaches like organic agriculture were considered a bit whacky, but now supermarkets are embracing organic, and consumers are asking for more diversity in supermarkets, school lunches, and retail outlets. People want to know more about where their food comes from, lowering food miles, local farmers’ markets, heritage varieties, and so on.

For businesses, diversity makes sense as a strategy to reduce risk. Left unchecked, degraded agrobiodiversity can cause direct production losses that might even be catastrophic. The Irish potato blight, which decimated the two dominant potato varieties in the mid-1800s, is one example. In the 1970s, U.S. maize crop was severely threatened by corn blight, which destroyed almost US$1 billion worth of maize and reduced yields by up to 50 percent in 1978. The crisis was addressed by using blight-resistant genes from wild types of Mexican maize.

Even in and around mass agricultural production, there are many ways to encourage agrobiodiversity, such as encouraging pollinators, natural pest predators, soil biodiversity, and green manure. In Californian rice production near Sacromento, a change to flooding stubble instead of burning it ended up doubling winter wetland habitat at the peak of waterfowl migration. These fields now provide habitat resources for 203 species of wildlife and 9 million migratory waterfowl, with no drop in rice yields.

The USDA Conservation Reserve Program is an example of practices that can work with mass agricultural production. For example, using buffer strips to encourage wild–cultivated interactions on farms, or adding copses of trees within cropping systems.

FT: You bring up quinoa in one of your examples. According to the Whole Grains Council, there are more than 100 types of quinoa, but only three have been commercialized, leading to a loss of biodiversity. In a global market, how can this type of trend be reversed? How can all strains be commercialized and preserved?

AT: Actually, there are thousands, not hundreds! Those that have been commercialized so far tend to satisfy a market for pearly white grains (Quinoa Real). And there are perhaps 15 to 20 varieties that one finds in the national and international markets (not three).

How can the trend be reversed? In Bioversity’s research we use a kind of triage—categorizing grains as marketable, potentially marketable, and non-marketable. The first category takes care of itself. The second category needs market development, and we can explore other product options besides just grains, like the experience we have had making and marketing a milk from a hardy quinoa variety called ‘chullpi.’ For the third category, we have had success with an approach called Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services (PACS), which is based on the Payments for Ecosystem Services approach. Farmers receive a non-monetary reward for conserving varieties that are disappearing from farms. Rewards can be things like agricultural inputs, machinery, school buildings, and materials. The communities themselves decide which priority species or varieties they are interested in, the conditions for their participation, and how they will share the rewards within the group and among other community members.

Certainly not all kinds can be commercialized, which is why other mechanisms (like PACS) are needed to preserve them. In order to decide which varieties to invite communities to preserve, we use prioritization methodologies, based on genetic analyses and mathematical models, so as to make sure that for a given budget the widest possible genetic diversity is conserved.

A complementary way to preserve species and varieties that don’t have a clear commercial value in the present, is to collect them in genebanks, some of which can be seedbanks managed at the community level or community seedbanks.

FT: How does intercropping, growing multiple types of crops in close proximity, effect harvest efficiency? Can it be implemented at a large scale and how?

AT: The first thing to be aware of is that intercropping is a pretty broad church. It can take many forms and occurs in a multitude of production systems. For instance, systems can include annual cropping, perennial crops, agroforestry, and aquaculture. Approaches to intercropping can be very diverse, from legumes and green manure (offering a very direct nitrogen application to the soil and other crops, as well as nutrition through the intercropped species, to pollination through habitat provision for pollinators), to mixed polycultures such as rice-fish systems (increased nutrition, natural pest control, organic fertilizer).

In terms of harvesting, if we are talking about different crops in different seasons, then this is unlikely to present a physical or technological obstacle. If they are in the same field, then you have to have a different structure, tall plants and short plants for example. Or they can be in adjacent fields. Bioversity’s research into using bean diversity to reduce pest damage found that having different varieties of bean in adjacent fields reduced pest damage, and of course would be easy to harvest.

So, yes it can be implemented at scale. It’s a question of choosing the right intercropping form that works for what you need.

FT: What is the Agrobiodiversity Index and how do you hope it will make a difference?

AT: World hunger is on the rise again. There is likely to be an understandable push towards increasing food production, but we cannot afford a ‘produce at all costs’ mentality. We need to grow food in ways that are sustainable—lower pesticide and fertilizer use, rebuilding soils, providing habitat for pollinators and pest predators. Also we need to make sure that the ‘Produce More’ mentality doesn’t just churn out more empty carbs. We are already in the midst of a malnutrition epidemic.

Solutions are needed that combine consideration of producing more nutritious foods, while reducing environmental impacts, and conserving our natural resources. Food is the connector. Current food systems drive environmental degradation and obesity, so changes in them could drive environmental good health and human health.

The Index is unique because it looks across consumption and production and conservation. The book pulls together the science behind the index, not looking at diets or production or conservation but diets and production and conservation, which is why we refer to the triple win. Many indicators have been developed in each of the domains of agrobiodiversity—measuring diet diversity, on-farm diversity, supply diversity, and so on—but they usually remain separate and so the potential synergies and trade-offs are invisible.

Starting from the scientific evidence base in the four dimensions described in this book, the Agrobiodiversity Index will bring together agrobiodiversity data in innovative ways to give novel insights, which can help countries and companies identify policy and business levers, and guide public and private investments. It will be launched in mid-2018.

To learn more about the Agrobiodiversity Index, please click here. To read the report ‘Mainstreaming Agrobiodiversity in Sustainable Food Systems,’ please click here.

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

Bioneers Statement on North Bay Fires

 

As the annual Bioneers conference fast approaches, we’ll be gathering in the shadow of the calamitous California fires. The Bay Area is Bioneers headquarters, and our roots are deep and wide with so many of you in the region. Our hearts mourn for the loss that’s happening so rapidly and painfully to loved ones, and communities,  throughout Northern California. As so many of us have beloved family and friends in the evacuated or damaged areas, this crisis is hitting home for us all, deeply. We send love and light to all of you.

To pitch in, either in person or financially, a list of organizations, funds and opportunities to support those impacted by the fires is here.

Sadly, it will take more than love and light to make the region and the world whole again. This is the living truth of what the climate crisis looks like. It’s exactly the reason we gather each fall at Bioneers to fast-forward the solutions coming from our Bioneers Community to co-create a habitable, just and joyous world.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton recently coined the phrase “climate swerve” to describe the massive climate awakening that’s finally happening here in the US. These kinds of tragedies across the nation and world are creating unprecedented receptivity as people search for solutions. Now is our time to reach more people than ever and actually build the political power to change the current systems, which are intrinsically a “strategy of tragedy,” as architect Bill McDonough calls it.

Although we can be highly adaptable, we are reeling from the impacts of fires that are wreaking havoc on the land, on homes, farms and animals, and on life itself. There is so much loss and upheaval  happening so fast, so frighteningly – The Caribbean, Houston, Florida, Mexico, Las Vegas, the ongoing devastation in Puerto Rico (and that’s strictly a short list from the US and our immediate neighbors).

As the annual Bioneers conference approaches next weekend, we need each other now more than ever. We need to remember that we are defined by our relationships and all our relations. Our true wealth lies in our circle of loved ones, and in our capacity to show up in caring generosity to support each other through difficult times. Painful as it is that so many homes and so much life, land and beauty is going up in flames, we need the comfort and vision of each other now more than ever. We need to hold it, together.

This is about nothing less than fundamentally changing our way of living on Earth and with each other. It’s about building resilience for a predictably unpredictable future of shocks and disaster preparedness.

Communities that get through crises are ones where people build strong relationships, hold shared values across difference and keep coming back to the table to get the job done for the sake of the common good. That’s just what the Bioneers community has been practicing and doing for nearly 30 years.

This disaster is still unfolding on an hourly basis and the impact of these fires will be felt for months and years. This region is our home base and Bioneers will be involved for the long haul as our community collectively rebuilds.

At this now-more-than-ever moment, we look forward to hosting this community at the upcoming Bioneers Conference to hold and comfort each other and to be inspired by the clear visions of the future that we’re collectively building towards. They say the best way to predict the future is to create it. That’s what we’ll be doing together.

With All Our Love, Compassion and Gratitude –

Kenny Ausubel, Nina Simons, Joshua Fouts and All of Us at Bioneers

A Glimpse Through the Eye of the Albatross

While the albatross has achieved fame through literature—perhaps most notably as a majestic and tragic character in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—the species has been a veritable mystery to scientists throughout much of human history. Capable of covering incredible distances and living mostly at sea, albatross tracking and study present obvious challenges.

Amelia is one such hard-to-track albatross. By joining a research team that attached a transmitter to her feathers, Carl Safina was able to take part in following and recording her adventures. In the introduction to his book about the experience, Eye of the Albatross (Holt Paperbacks, 2003), Safina writes:

“Amelia’s transmitter battery eventually died, so we don’t know where Amelia is now. That
matters less to her than it does to us. She doesn’t need us in order to be an albatross; albatrosses knew what they were doing millions of years before people appeared. But because people were born into a world that included albatrosses, we need them—to prove to ourselves that we can be fully human.”

The following is an excerpt from Eye of the Albatross.

Bioneers is thrilled to welcome Carl Safina to the 2017 Bioneers conference where he’ll speak about how humans can learn from the natural world.

The breeze in my bedroom is the first sign that this morning is different. After prior days of dead calm, newly moving air has passed its kinetic energy along to the heat-stressed birds. You can feel their excitement in their increased activity.

Patty is doing the day’s first round of her nest checks, looking for any mates of transmittered albatrosses that may have arrived and switched incubation duties. We walk among the incubating birds like grape growers among vineyards. So far all the incubating birds in the study area are the same; Amelia and the others. No new arrivals. But one premature departure, probably forced by the just-ended heat-wave; its abandoned egg now cool to the touch.

Patty, several yards ahead, suddenly calls and waves.

Has one of the transmittered adults departed? No. But when we walk up, Patty gestures to a Black-footed Albatross standing over an eggshell with a gaping hole at one end and a downy chick beside it. Karen arrives eagerly, and immediately volunteers to guard the chick as we give its parent a transmitter.

She gushes, “Oh my God. It’s so cute!” Its head is wobbly. Its little black decurved bill seems proportionally larger than an adult’s. The little wing stubs offer scant hint of the flying power that may come. The chick’s black down, frosted light-gray at the tips, is so thick and long and matted that the nestling looks rather oddly like a large fluffy pine cone. It probably weighs about seven ounces. “Oh my gosh, look at its fat little legs!”

The chick stands shakily and stretches its wings, pulling all heart strings within ten meters. Before the mind had a name for beauty, the heart had a response. The chick instinctively starts digging a scrape for itself with its back legs. When it yawns a teetering little yawn. Karen’s hand goes to her face in delight and astonishment. To the chick she says, “I’ll take care of you anytime.”

Her job right now—a tough job if ever there was one—is protecting this chick from possible frigatebird attack and the sun. Karen is concerned the chick is too exposed. “It’s not used to being out in the sun,” she says. I offer her my hat to shade it, but she’s transfixed.

The chick begins preening, nibbling at it’s down. The effort seems to tire it and it rests its head and closes its eyes. When the chick begins to shiver, Karen takes off her sweatshirt and lightly covers it, saying tenderly, “It’s a rough life.”

That, it is. But with luck and all odds vanquished, this unsteady little new life may go forward—and outlive us.

A Laysan Albatross walks by like a pedestrian, pausing to stare at the chick like an admiring passerby. A nearby nester stands up, looks at its own egg, and starts talking to it. As hatching nears, parents commonly vocalize to their upcoming offspring. And as soon as a chick holes or “pips” the egg, it begins talking back. As Dr. Seuss might summarize: Horton finally hears a Who. Parent and child keep the conversation going through the hole in the eggshell during the many hours it takes for the chick inside to painstakingly chisel out.

When our crew has affixed the transmitter, we take the adult back toward Karen and its chick. We place the bird near its nest. It stands there until the chick begins calling, then suddenly runs to it. Laura turns to Karen and says, “Well, Karen, anytime you’d like to help out—.”

With what might be termed enthusiasm, Karen interrupts, “I would love to help.”

By our fourth day, ten albatrosses wear transmitters. Now, oddly, the field work is largely done, and most of the data accrual will happen almost passively as technology takes over, reporting the birds’ positions. (So far the data are less than interesting, because none of the birds has moved.) Now, we ourselves will also wait faithfully like Horton the Elephant, attached by effort and scientific curiosity to the patiently sitting birds. Each day we check.

Each day, the faithful birds at their nests remain.

<•)>< <•)>< <•)><

Patty is excited. Halfway through a new day’s morning nest check, she’s just discovered the mate of one of our birds sitting on the nest. The transmitter-bearing bird is gone!

Dave comes riding up slowly on his bicycle. Even though it arrived just last night from weeks at sea, the new bird sits here as though nothing is unusual. Amelia and her neighbors, sitting as always, appear equally indifferent.

But Patty is stoked. “Now,” Patty says, “we’ll be getting some data.” Somewhere between the vast Pacific and outer space, albatross, satellites, and Dave’s North Carolina laboratory are already corresponding. Each day the satellites will interrogate the transmitter, and the bird’s location will be beamed to Earth.

Amelia couldn’t care less; she’s still here on her nest near the porch, still broody and dozing.

Patty and Dave set up a laptop computer on a picnic table on the barracks’ back porch, and using a solar panel to power it, they link to a communications satellite to download e-mail. With noddies lined up on the porch rail and the computer set up near the laundry lines, information flows into the laptop from outer space. The transmitter data has already been beamed via another satellite to a facility in France, then sent from France to Dave’s North Carolina lab, and a student has e-mailed it. Result: we discover that our outbound bird is sixty miles north of Tern Island.

Dave, munching from a bowl of cereal, says, “It’s nice to see everything working. It’s really remarkable how all this technology is being coordinated to solve this question of where they go.”

And while most university research data is eventually published years later only in obscurely specialized technical journals, Dave’s approach to this albatross work is very different. Every morning when the satellite data from traveling albatrosses arrives, Dave will e-mail it to over 500 teachers in classrooms in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Estonia, Japan, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere who have subscribed to Dave’s Albatross Project. Students will map the albatrosses’ travel tracks as they unfold. “I realized early on,” Dave says, “that kids from kindergarten through high school could be discovering what’s happening with the birds at the very same time we ourselves are discovering it.” He adds, “I’m trying to find ways to communicate effectively about science.” Dave believes freedom and democracy require a public that can think critically. “If a scientist has a new idea, his or her first task is to challenge it against everything else that’s known, seeing whether it can be disproved. In most other endeavors, everyone is pushing their own ideas and their own narrow interests. I think that when you teach science, you’re teaching people a way of thinking that can help them stay free.”

During the night of January 17-18 another transmittered albatross has left Tern Island. But the albatross I call Amelia resides, remains, and rests upon her nest next to the porch steps. We pause. She waits. We watch. She stands, talks in low tones to her egg, flares her brood patch and sits back down. For now, that has to count as action.

By the following day, two more of the birds are outbound over the ocean. Things are happening. Patty and Dave are departing too, headed home. Patty will leave her birds and begin the hard work of her Master’s project in earnest from thousands of miles away.

Getting here has been neither likely nor easy for any of us, biologist or bird. The planning, the traveling, the personal and professional toil, the resolute routes and sheer luck that have led us here—the convergence is quite an improbable one. All of us differ in every detail. All have one thing in common: whether seeking to succeed or striving to breed, we’ve arrived here as survivors of earlier struggles. Hoping our efforts will meet continued luck, we now stand poised for payoff, ready to see our labors produce.

Mark is checking to make sure the cargo and passengers don’t exceed the plane’s weight limits. He weighs all the bags, then calls across the room, “Patty, how much do you weigh?” Patty yells back “One thirty-four,” then says to me, “Now everybody knows.”

I say our time has shot by. Dave looks at his watch to remind himself what month it is.

Waving, waving, waving, they are gone. They leave over the ocean, like everything else.

<•)>< <•)>< <•)><

When Amelia stands for her next nest-check, her egg is gone. Between her massive webbed feet sits a gray ball of spiky fluff. By this time, the sixth of February, many of the other albatross nests already harbor chicks.

Amelia broods her baby three days, providing shade and shelter from heat and high winds. When her mate arrives to relieve her in the early morning of February 9, Dad immediately feeds the little chick. Or tries to.

He crouches so far forward toward the chicklet that his breast is touching the nest’s low rim. The hungry chick is eager, pecking shakily at its parent’s bill, peeping a shrill call that sounds like, “Me, me, me.” Dad is trying so hard to begin regurgitating that the effort seems to force his wings partly open. At the same time, he is trying to make contact with the chick’s little bill, but the uncoordinated hatchling keeps swinging away at the critical moment.

Eventually, with the kind of persistence that precedes all earned rewards, the male practically swallows the chick’s head. In the cavern of its father’s gape, the chick opens its wobbly little bill. Dad squirts a concentrated stream of gooey, nutritious, liquefied oil into the chick’s throat. Unlike most other birds, albatrosses and their tube-nosed relatives store oil extracted from their food. Albatross stomach oil is so energy rich its mean caloric value rates just below that of commercial diesel oil.

After wiping its beak, the chick half-stands and waves it’s little wings, then sits back down contentedly. For the moment, all’s right with the world.

And so a new phase kicks in. Amelia and her mate must now no longer simply share incubation shifts; the chick’s arrival begins a period of increasing strain in an already strenuous life. Bodily reserves will be taxed to the max. Now, food is the issue.

Somewhere out on the sea, these birds are finding a food supply that is not at all obvious when you look at the surface of that vast ocean. But find it they do. All together, the seabirds of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands require an estimated 800 million pounds of prey annually, largely fishes, crustaceans, and squids—perhaps two-fifths of the annual production of those animals in the ocean region. Of the amount consumed, Albatrosses take probably half. Laysan and Black-footed Albatrosses eat mostly various species of squid, fishes, fish eggs, crustaceans, and anything else living or formerly living that they can hook their bills into. Albatrosses in general eat everything from small fishes to dead seabirds to squid to krill to gelatinous drifting tunicates to jellyfish (including the famously sting-infested Portuguese Man-o’-war). If they find a dead whale, their diet will include whale meat. Sometimes they feed on scraps of skin and blubber of whales killed by Killer Whales, or by people. What they eat depends on where they happen to be and what they find. Many albatrosses follow ships because even kitchen scraps can make an albatross happy. They are inveterate scavengers and opportunists. When it comes to eating, albatrosses’ motto seems to be, “Better full than fussy.”

But in practice almost all albatrosses almost everywhere eat mostly squid. It’s even been suggested that albatross evolution and radiation around the world has corresponded to squid evolution as the birds became skilled squid finders. Squids are highly evolved, unusually successful predators in their own right. The Cretaceous mass extinction wiped away not only dinosaurs but also many kinds of marine life that had flourished for an enormity of time. As disappearance of dinosaurs opened the land to opportunities for birds and mammals, extinction of marine faunas opened the seas to the radiation and proliferation of modern-style fishes and squids, with new monarchies of predators. The rapidly spreading new jet-propulsion-bodied animals we know as squids evolved complex behavior, excellent eyesight, and surprising smarts (they have been called “the soft intelligence” and “honorary vertebrates”). Squids have proliferated into over 700 species moving throughout the world’s seas, from sunlit reefs to the black abyss, from the size of your little finger to the Giant Squid measuring almost sixty feet.

Enter albatrosses. Albatrosses eat about 70 species of squid. At times the birds catch them live and vigorous. But they also exploit the fact that many kinds of squid die en masse after spawning. About a day after dying in the chilly deep, the carcasses of many species of squid float to the surface, buoyed by increasing ammonia resulting from chemical changes in their livers. Albatrosses rely heavily on this phenomenon to make deep food available. In the western Tasman Sea off New South Wales, Australia, a spectacular post-nuptial appearance of dead and dying 10-pound Giant Cuttlefish prompts a remarkable convergence of albatrosses. Birds from half a world away—from the South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and New Zealand—find it worth their while each year to come for the funeral feast. In sum: Albatrosses eat a lot of squid. People also eat a lot of squid, and fishing boats remove enormous quantities of food albatrosses have for millennia relied on. In much of the world, squid fishing is done at night, using bright lights to attract squid to the boat as moths are attracted to porch lights. So great is the fishing pressure now that the lights of squid fishing fleets are visible to astronauts in space, appearing like cities in the sea.

With Dad now nest-bound, it’s Amelia’s turn to face the vicissitudes of the ocean, but she’s an experienced pro. So far, she has survived all trials of weather, threats of starvation, and hazards of humanity. She launches herself from the runway and strikes immediately northward.

Amelia sails past the island’s shore, skims across the lagoon, and rises above the towering breakers beyond the reef, setting her course upon an open ocean, striking out into the wide trance of the sea.

Belly to the sideways breeze, catching the wind for levitation, she climbs. Then turning her back to that same breeze, she uses the wind differently—and adds gravity—to accelerate her forward and downward toward the surface of the ocean. She brushes the water and shifts her body again, transferring the downward momentum to help lift her; exploiting the force of gravity to take her upward. Having used the wind to take her up, she uses it to take her down; having used gravity to take her down, she uses it to take her up. This gives her a smoothly undulating, rocking flight; each wing alternately pointing skyward, then pointing toward the water’s surface, showing you now her dark back, now her bright belly. Wings fixed, she seems magically propelled.

Only as you watch her nearing the vanishing point—only then—do you begin seeing and feeling that these birds muster all their distance-eating achievement with their own effort and the skillful exploitation of their exquisite design. Keep watching as she shrinks to a pinpoint, swooping up and down, swiveling side to side, bounding onward into the boundless Pacific. Just this way, she starts steadily accumulating the great span of a great ocean, mile after mile after mile.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Eye of the Albatross by Carl Safina, published by Holt Paperbacks, 2003.

Read an excerpt from another Carl Safina book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.

Celebrate Autumn’s Harvest With Food Tank’s Fall Reading List

By Sean Alexander

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

For fall, Food Tank has compiled a list of 17 books we hope will educate, inform, and inspire. As the weather cools and we turn to more savory foods, learn about the history of butter, duck season in France, and the life of Patience Gray, the visionary behind the modern slow food culture. For reflecting during the turning of the seasons, read about how antibiotics changed our food, how to combat a hot and hungry planet, and the food truck movement. Or, in the spirit of the fall harvest, learn about migrant workers in California. There is something for all tastes, so take advantage of the lengthening nights to read a few.

  1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
    The conventional teaching is that, in order to create civilization, humans moved from hunting and gathering toward sedentary communities that cultivated cereal grains and domesticated livestock. In his newest work, James C. Scott, Professor and co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, challenges that narrative. In Against the Grain, Scott argues that the transition to sedentary livelihoods was born not of a need for secure living, but a desire to control reproduction in several spheres of human life.
  2. The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth about Healthy Eating (available now in the UK; forthcoming January 4, 2018) by Anthony Warner
    Each year, new diets and food fads become popular—some have value while others fall short, or may even be harmful. So why do consumers buy them in the first place? In The Angry Chef: Bad Science and The Truth About Healthy Eating, Anthony Warner, with other experts, explains why intelligent people bite on the latest food fads. By the end, Warner hopes readers will have the tools necessary to set healthier food habits and a course for a healthier life.
  3. Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna
    Each day, what we choose to eat affects ourselves and the world around us: that is the core idea that drives Maryn McKenna’s new book, Big Chicken. One part history and one part investigative journalism, Big Chicken traces the history of modern chicken production and antibiotics in agriculture, and how this history fits into a larger narrative about our food habits. Drawing on the tradition set by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, McKenna’s Big Chicken aims to encourage better food consumers through a more holistic view of modern agriculture and the issues embedded within it.
  4. Butter: A Rich History (re-issue forthcoming October 17, 2017) by Elaine Khosrova
    In her cultural and culinary history, former pastry chef and acclaimed food writer Elaine Khosrova tells the story of a modern staple: butter. Tracing butter’s history across three continents, Khosrova’s work carries the reader into a deeper understanding of the role of butter in political economy, nutrition, and art. As an added benefit, Khosrova includes a few butter recipes taken from her travels. One part history, one part cookbook, Khosrova aims to give meaning to an overlooked culinary staple.
  5. This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of An American Family Farm (forthcoming September 19, 2017) by Ted Genoways
    In his new book, This Blessed Earth, Ted Genoways explores the history and future of America’s family farm. Situated at the crossroad of isolation and change, the modern family farm is valued through the past and faced with challenges in the future. Living with the Hammond family of York County, Nebraska, from harvest to harvest, Genoways maps the changing landscape that surrounds the family farm. In doing so, This Blessed Earth hopes to convey an intimate portrait of an American experience.
  6. Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture by Gabriel Thompson
    In 1939, John Steinbeck released The Grapes of Wrath, a realist novel that follows the Joad family out of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and to California. The book aimed to make the public more attuned to the conditions of Californian migrant farmers. In the 1970s and 80s, Cesar Chavez and the Salad Bowl strike affected the public in much the same way. Drawing on—and combining—these traditions, Gabriel Thompson’s Chasing the Harvest seeks to give voice to the nearly 800,000 people working on California’s farms and the conditions they face.
  7. Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are by Sophie Egan
    Sophie Egan’s Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are reflects on how the food emerging from traditional American values makes for a simultaneously unhealthy and trailblazing food culture. Blending the non-fiction traditions of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Freakonomics, Egan’s work is an in-depth analysis of the nature and effects of American food habits.
  8. Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony—France’s Last Best Place by David McAninch
    For nearly eight months, David McAninch lived as a Gascon of Gascony, a rural region in southwestern France and famous for its influence on French cuisine. As a Gascon, McAninch worked to change the way he thought about food: herding sheep, harvesting grapes, and eating—a lot. Exploring a local culture through agricultural and cooking traditions, Duck Season describes McAninch’s transformation as a result of this journey, providing a few recipes to try at home, as well.
  9. Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray (forthcoming September 6, 2017) by Adam Federman
    When Patience Gray passed away in 2005, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) called her an “almost forgotten culinary star.” Gray lead a life of relative isolation in an impoverished region of southern Italy, without electricity or telephone. And yet, Federman argues, contemporary food movements like Slow Food, committed to regional cuisine, can trace their foundational missions to Grey’s writing and life. Recognizing her importance to modern food culture, Fasting and Feasting aims to change the common conception—or lack thereof—of Patience Gray, celebrating her life and her legacy.
  10. Fishing: How Sea Fed Civilization by Brian Fagan
    In his new book, Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization, Brian Fagan presents the history of aquaculture as an important and often overlooked topic. Drawing on archaeological information, Fagan argues that—in contrast to the land-bound practices of agriculture—the technologies and cuisine that fishing enabled helped to empower humans to explore the globe, both as conquering armies and recreational travelers. Conveying the histories of archaeological sites from across the oceans, Fagan’s Fishing endeavors to explain how fishing fits into the larger human narrative.
  11. Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love edited by Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews, and Hannah Sobel
    In cities across America, food trucks are gaining popularity; but do food trucks help or hinder other societal goals? Examining the food truck phenomena in North America through the lens of social justice, the contributors in Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice investigate the topics ranging from discrimination, gentrification, and community development. The editors hope that everyone interested in food trucks, be it their criminalization in Los Angeles or celebration in Vancouver, will learn something new from this unique anthology.
  12. Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by Michael Ruhlman
    Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America takes a deeper look at a routine task: grocery shopping. Ruhlman takes readers from the family-operated Heinen’s grocery chain in the Midwest to the opaque structure of modern supermarkets. Between the stories and insights, readers will also learn of Ruhlman’s ideas to renew the modern food shopping experience: a few tips intended to help readers consume food more wisely.
  13. Give a Girl a Knife: A Memoir by Amy Thielen
    After a career as a chef in New York City, Amy Thielen moved back to Minnesota and into a cabin deep in the woods, rediscovering her culinary and personal roots. Recounting this experience in Give a Girl a Knife, Thielen conveys a coming-of-age story that connects her rural upbringing to life in kitchens of New York’s most famous chefs.
  14. Hot, Hungry Planet: The Fight to Stop a Global Food Crisis in the Face of Climate Change by Lisa Palmer
    By the year 2050, the United Nations projects that the world population will reach nearly 9.8 billion people. Meanwhile, increasingly extreme weather patterns are affecting vulnerable societies around the globe. Following these two trends, Lisa Palmer’s journalistic career has focused on how our global food system can do right by future generations both in terms of food security and climate policy. In her new book, Hot, Hungry Planet, Palmer outlines three policy levers that can play a part in our global response.
  15. Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression by David Leite
    In Notes on a Banana, celebrated food writer David Leite describes the role that food and family played in his struggle with sexual identity and mental illness. Tracing his own life from Fall River, Massachusetts, to his present life as a James Beard Foundation Award-winning food writer, Leite’s Notes on a Banana is a reminder that beneath the surface, what we eat is both a reflection of who we are and something that shapes us.
  16. A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression (re-issue) by Andrew Cole and Jane Ziegelman
    The Great Depression affected America’s political and economic institutions, but how did it transform American cuisine? In their James Beard Foundation Award-winning book, A Square Meal (a re-issue), Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe explore how the Great Depression shifted American perceptions of government-sponsored food charity, nutritional guidelines, the dinner time menu itself, and more. A Square Meal considers the impact of economic and environmental disasters on how Americans ate, and how we eat today.
  17. What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro
    Although what we choose to eat is an important part of our lives, it is seldom thought of as a central element of biography. But in What She Ate, Lauren Shapiro tells the stories of six prominent women—Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym, and Helen Gurley Brown—and their food. In doing so, Shapiro’s What She Ate tries to nuance readers’ understanding of six extraordinary lives.

Continue with good food reads every month through Real Food Media’s Book Club, or download the monthly book club podcast to listen on your commute.

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

Bioneers Recognizes Indigenous Peoples Day

In recent years, I have been thrilled to witness more and more cities ban Columbus Day. To see how widespread this movement has become, check out this awesome interactive map created by the Zinn Education Project has made an. At Bioneers, we honor Indigenous Peoples Day. Our San Francisco Office is closed today, and many of us are thinking about those who have fought for Indigenous rights and a more inclusive America. Now, more than ever, it is critical that we bring our voices together to speak out against the parts of American society that condone and promote intolerance against North America’s First peoples.

Cities, States and Institutions that have banned Columbus Day.

It wasn’t that long ago that our relatives were forced into Indian Boarding Schools. Program Director, Cara Romero and I both grew up with grandmothers who were sent off to them as young girls, and our families have been personally affected by the trauma of this experience.

When my mother was born in Alaska, the territory exercised “Jim Crowe” policies against Native Alaskans. Just like the deep south, Natives were not permitted to ride in the front of the bus, sit in the front of the movie theater, or dine in white establishments.

The girls at Chemawa Indian Boarding School in my grandmother’s time.

So for me, growing up in a society that celebrates the genocidal foundation of the United States of America, has always been beyond hurtful. Columbus Day is essentially state-sanctioned bigotry. However, I also recognize that many Americans are not exposed to the truth through the public education system or mainstream media. That’s why we are committed to providing programming and educational materials to help the public to understand the truth in America.

For Indigenous Peoples Day, I’ll be thinking about some of my heroes in my adopted home of California, people like Sage LaPena (Northern Wintu), who is keeping traditional plant knowledge alive for the healing of all peoples; Chiitaanibah Johnson (Maidu/Diné) who spoke out against her racist history professor at Sacramento State University, and Valentin Lopez, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, all of whom are speaking at the 2017 Annual Bioneers Conference.

Indigenous Peoples Day is a good day to get involved.

When we celebrate Columbus Day, we actively take part in a world that condones genocide. So to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, my plan is to get involved and to do something about the ongoing destruction of Indigenous homelands that was begun in 1492.

Chances are, right now there is something in your backyard that you can support. For me, it is protecting Juristaic, a holy place for the Amah Mutsun people, the descendants of the Central California California Indians who survived the Missions San Juan Bautista and Santa Cruz. I was surprised and shocked to learn a few months ago about the Sargeant Quarry “Project,” a proposed sand and gravel mine on 320 acres at Juristaic (four miles south of Gilroy, California, at a place now called Sargeant Ranch), a spiritually significant site for the Amah Mutsun tribal people from Central California (to understand the importance of Juristaic, tribal members describe it akin to Jerusalem for Jews, Christians and Muslims). In addition to irreparable harm to the tribe’s religious and spiritual integrity, the 30 years of proposed mining will cause significant adverse environmental impacts to the water, wildlife, plants, and other natural and cultural resources in the area forever.

It was my honor and privilege to learn about the significance of village sites and traditional lifeways from Amah Mutsun Tribal Chairperson, Val Lopez, a few weeks ago. To witness the reclamation of traditional ecological knowledge alongside the restoration of these sites within the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, only strengthened my commitment to help protect this special place for generations to come.

I have only lived in Monterey, CA for seven years, but it is my responsibility to help protect this region for future generations. I felt even more connected to this resolve after I had the special opportunity to visit the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, a few miles north of Santa Cruz a few weeks ago, where I learned about the amazing collaborations between the Amah Mutsun Tribe, UC Santa Cruz and other institutions to reclaim the Indigenous knowledge of the very site where Europeans first encountered California’s central coast peoples.

The Sargeant Ranch Program is my region’s “Standing Rock” and it seems like nobody knows about it. So today, I’ll be drafting letters in opposition to the Sargeant Ranch project. You can learn more about the proposed mine threatening this sacred site here or here.

Other things you might do today, this week, or going forward might be to 1) learn about the Indigenous Peoples where you live; 2) get involved with environmental threats to the place you live (because odds are, if you are living in America, you live on occupied Indigenous territory); and, 3) connect with your ancestors. Learn where they came from, and the tides of history that displaced them.

At the annual Bioneers Conference coming up October 20-22, you will have many opportunities to learn about California Indian history, and how to get involved with several other Indigenous-led and other initiatives in California and around the world to take care of our planet. Check out this blog I wrote a few months ago about our amazing Indigenous Forum line up.

Sincerely,

The Bioneers Indigeneity Team,

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Program Director

Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik), Program Manager

 

Updates From The First Biomimicry Accelerator Team Cohort

From Bioneers to boardrooms, these biomimicry entrepreneurs are getting ever closer to bringing their food system solutions to market.

A year ago this October, Camila Hernandez and Camila Gratacós stood in front of 2,000 people on the National Bioneers Conference main stage and accepted the first-ever Ray of Hope Prize® for their nature-inspired soil restoration solution called BioPatch. The BioPatch, inspired by hardy “nurse” plants that survive in harsh conditions and pave the way for new plant species to grow, was created as a way to grow and protect new plants while restoring health back to the soil.

With the $100,000 grand prize in hand, the team got the chance to make their goals for BioPatch a reality. Today, they and the rest of their team are working hard to bring their design to market, engaging manufacturing and sourcing partners, rigorously testing prototypes, and linking up with business networks that promote circular economy business models. “Daring to participate in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge was the first step to lose the fear of starting something new and start to believe that our ideas could be realized,” said BioPatch co-founder Camila Hernandez. “Life can be full of problems or full of solutions, depending on your point of view. This experience has helped me declare my love for solutions that are friendly to the environment and society.”

The six other teams who were part of the inaugural Biomimicry Accelerator cohort are also forging ahead with their nature-inspired food system solutions. From winning prestigious spots in international business incubators to speaking at conferences around the world to scoring additional funding, it’s been a busy year for these biomimicry entrepreneurs. Read on to find out what they’ve been up to and where they are now. Oasis Aquaponic Food Production System Shortly after winning second place funding in the Biomimicry Accelerator for their aquaponic

Oasis Aquaponic Food Production System

Shortly after winning second place funding in the Biomimicry Accelerator for their aquaponic growing system, Team Oasis was one of ten winning teams in the Blue Economy Challenge, a program that funds sustainable aquaculture innovations. With this combined funding, the team was able to rent a manufacturing space, purchase equipment, and travel to Uganda and Tanzania to establish community organization partners to test the Oasis design. They have manufactured and shipped 13 demo systems to East Africa for these partner organizations to test for six months. At the same time, the team is working on honing their design by improving the aesthetics of the Oasis and making manufacturing more efficient.

Shortly after winning second place funding in the Biomimicry Accelerator for their aquaponic growing system, Team Oasis was one of ten winning teams in the Blue Economy Challenge, a program that funds sustainable aquaculture innovations. With this combined funding, the team was able to rent a manufacturing space, purchase equipment, and travel to Uganda and Tanzania to establish community organization partners to test the Oasis design. They have manufactured and shipped 13 demo systems to East Africa for these partner organizations to test for six months. At the same time, the team is working on honing their design by improving the aesthetics of the Oasis and making manufacturing more efficient.

Jube

This team, with members from Thailand and the U.S., developed a bio-inspired chamber for capturing edible insects, a more earth-friendly source of edible protein. After winning third-place funding in the Biomimicry Accelerator, they created and shipped their first prototypes to the U.S. in April. They are planning on hosting their own biomimicry challenge in Thailand, asking the public to help improve on the existing Jube concept. Jube team leader Pat Pataranutaporn was invited to give a TEDx talk at Arizona State University where he is currently a student and spent the summer interning for IBM’s Watson group in New York City. Pat is looking forward to combining what he learned during his internship to develop biomimetic algorithms to apply to various software development solutions.

Hexagro

Over the past year, this international team has won multiple awards and coveted spots in start-up programs worldwide. Hexagro Urban Farming’s Living Farming Tree is a modular aeroponic growing system that enables people to grow healthy, fresh food in urban areas. After forming a for-benefit corporation in Italy, Hexagro won the Switch to Product contest sponsored by the Politecnico di Milano and earned a spot in the school’s startup incubator. They have also displayed their designs at conferences all over the world, including at a technology display in Lyon, Milan Design Week, Seeds and Chips in Milan (where Barack Obama gave the keynote address), Tech Open Air in Berlin, and at universities in Costa Rica and Slovenia. They were one of 20 teams chosen to attend the Thought for Food Summit in Amsterdam. They also participated in the Katana Bootcamp in Stuttgart, Germany, where they were selected as the #1 pitch out of 100 teams participating in the bootcamp. Most recently, the team was invited to be part of the Kickstart Accelerator program in Switzerland, where they will compete for a $25k prize. They have also been selected as a semi-finalist for the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan competition in Singapore this fall.\

Mangrove Still

This Italian team created the Mangrove Still, a desalinating still inspired by how coastal plants process seawater that costs five times less than traditional solar stills. The Mangrove Still teamhas been busy expanding their design from individual units to a complete system that is adaptable to regional climates and locally available materials. Their goal is to develop communities of practice that will incorporate the Mangrove Still design into their local context. They were awarded a grant from Dubai Expo 2020 and are using those funds to run a design hackathon to hone the Mangrove Still system and test the system in Egypt, India, Namibia, Cape Verde, and Cyprus. The team is also working on setting up a crowdfunding campaign and has been presenting their design at conferences, including the European Biomimicry Summit in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Living Filtration System

The Living Filtration System team developed a biomimetic drainage system that keeps nutrients in the soil rather than leaving the field in runoff and was inspired by earthworms and the human digestive system. Members of this University of Oregon team have graduated and are currently pursuing careers. They are all actively working to incorporate biomimicry into their career plans.

BioCultivator

The BioCultivator team from Slovakia developed its lizard-inspired, self-sustaining growing system to encourage more urban dwellers to grow fresh food. The team was invited to take part in Startup Awards Slovakia’s bootcamp and was chosen as a finalist in the Art and Design category. This award event was broadcast on national television and was attended by Andrej Kiska, the President of the Slovak Republic. The team was also invited to be part of a mission of Slovak businesses to the Republic of Croatia this past June, was selected to be part of the Women in Tech Forum at PIONEERS 2017 in Austria, and participated at the first CEE Founders’ Summit in December. The team has manufactured 11 prototypes to date and is looking to finish a proof-of- concept in late fall 2017. Team members are working to make connections with potential investors and business partners in order to create BioCultivator 2.0, based on lessons learned from the first round of prototype testing.

 

The second Biomimicry Accelerator cohort will be coming to Bioneers on October 21, 2017, for the second annual Ray of Hope Prize® award event. Stay tuned to find out which of these
teams will win the Ray C. Anderson Foundation’s $100,000 prize to take their biomimetic innovations to the next level.You can get a sneak peek at the second cohort’s innovations ahead of the big Ray of Hope

You can get a sneak peek at the second cohort’s innovations ahead of the big Ray of Hope Prize announcement at the Biomimicry Pitch Event and Technology Showcase on October 20, 2017 at the Autodesk Atrium. Watch as the six teams from the 2016-17 Biomimicry Accelerator take the stage to pitch their innovations to a VIP panel, including Biomimicry Institute co-founder Janine Benyus, Green Biz Executive Editor Joel Makower, venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, and Singularity University’s Robert Suarez.

Plus, a brand-new round of the Challenge—along with the chance to join the fourth cohort of the Biomimicry Accelerator—will open this fall. To learn more, go to challenge.biomimicry.org.