Xiuhtezcatl Martinez: A New Chapter in My Life

As brilliant thinkers and leaders work to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity today, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez has been making sure that young people are represented in moving toward a more equitable tomorrow. An influential and outspoken teenager, Martinez has been speaking to audiences about environmental justice and youth activism since he was 6. Presently, he is the youth director of Earth Guardians, a “tribe of young activists, artists, and musicians from across the globe stepping up as leaders to co-create the future we know is possible.”

Martinez’s new book, We Rise (Rodale Books, 2017), is an empowering call to activists—young and old—to fight to restore our planet. The following is an excerpt from the book’s prologue.

Attend the 2017 Bioneers Conference in October to see Xiuhtezcatl Martinez speak in person, and read to the end of this post to watch a video of his talk at a previous conference.

There are moments in our lives that help shape the way we see our world. They shift our perspectives and help us understand our immense potential to define our future. The first 17 years of my life have led me to believe that everything happens for a reason. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel at all phased as I looked out into the audience of world leaders from more than 100 nations. I’d been given a stage at a pivotal moment in history, and I saw the world needed fresh perspectives if we wanted to make real progress on climate solutions. We’ve spent the last 20 years pointing the finger and passing off responsibility. We are in a place where we can’t afford to wait for others to solve this problem for us. We have all the tools we need…the only thing missing is the will to help us get there.

My name is Xiuhtezcatl (pronounced ‘Shoe-Tez-Caht’). I am 17 years old, and I’m doing everything I can to fight for change in a collapsing world. In 2015, I had just finished middle school, and the state of the climate was descending into chaos. That year, global temperatures were the hottest in recorded history, sea levels had reached an all-time high, and greenhouse gases had never been more present in our atmosphere. Climate scientists worldwide were alarmed by how much faster the ice caps were melting than previously projected.

In response, world leaders were preparing to meet in Paris for the most important conversation on climate in our history. This was the COP 21 United Nations Climate Change Conference, and we weren’t about to let our voices be excluded from this pivotal moment in history. In the climate movement, we talk a lot about tipping points, and we know that we’re running out of time to act before climate change becomes irreversible.

Earlier that year, on Earth Day, I was featured in a short film called Kid Warrior. This was a documentary telling the story of my life and my work as the Youth Director for Earth Guardians, a global movement working to empower the younger generation to use our voices and create positive solutions. The film was meant to inspire other young people to get involved, connect, and engage in climate action and other important social issues of our time. I also wanted to show the world that my story is more than just activism . . . that I’m just a regular kid chasing big dreams in a crazy world.

After the Kid Warrior short hit the Internet, e-mails from young people flooded Earth Guardians, asking how they could get involved and start Earth Guardian crews of their own. I was swamped with interviews, speaking invitations, and media opportunities. One of those invites came from Susan Alzner, head of the United Nations Non-Government Liaison Service and by far my favorite person working at the UN. She’s helping build bridges to connect the UN General Assembly and voices of the people, by identifying civil society attendees and speakers for high-level events, conferences, and summits. One of her topics of interest was climate change, and she got wind of Kid Warrior and the Earth Guardians movement, leading to me.

While I was kind of surprised that the UN heard about me through social media, it was pretty remarkable to get an invite to address the general assembly. My intention was to plant the seeds and lay the foundation of hope for the upcoming Paris climate change conference, while representing the many youth voices that won’t be heard by the UN. I was only the second nongovernment person to address the general assembly.

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner was first. She addressed the United Nations in 2014. At the time, she was a 26-year-old woman from the Marshall Islands, a small island nation that sits about 6 feet above sea level and is already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Rising sea levels and severe storms have come extremely close to destroying these beautiful islands.

In her speech, Kathy indicated that, no matter how hard it might be, we have to solve the issue of climate change. In a truly emotional and beautiful moment, she recited a poem to her infant daughter, promising the little girl that she would do everything she could to protect her from rising seas. She entitled the poem “Dear Matefele Peinam,” and here are the first few verses:

dear matafele peinam,
you are a seven month old sunrise of gummy smiles
you are bald as an egg and bald as the buddha
you are thunder thighs and lightning shrieks so excited for bananas, hugs and
our morning walks past the lagoon

dear matafele peinam,
i want to tell you about that lagoon that lucid, sleepy lagoon lounging
against the sunrise
some men say that one day that lagoon will devour you

they say it will gnaw at the shoreline
chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees
gulp down rows of your seawalls
and crunch your island’s shattered bones

they say you, your daughter
and your granddaughter, too
will wander rootless
with only a passport to call home

dear matafele peinam,
don’t cry
mommy promises you
no one
will come and devour you
no greedy whale of a company
sharking through political seas
no backwater bullying of businesses with broken morals no blindfolded
bureaucracies gonna push
this mother ocean over the edge …

She concluded to a standing ovation, leaving many attendees in tears. The beauty of her poem is that it wasn’t just about facts and figures, it told a relatable story about a mother’s love for her child and an unwavering will to protect her in the face of big challenges. I knew I had big shoes to fill after learning about her speech and just how deeply she touched the world leaders in attendance. I was excited to be the second person and youngest ever to address the United Nations General Assembly. The voices of the people needed to be heard, and I was up for the challenge.

It seems like the majority of people are disconnected from what actually occurs at the UN. With more than 20 years of world leaders talking to each other about climate change, nothing had been solved. For the UN, climate change is topic of bureaucratic debate, whereas for many communities, it’s a life-or-death situation. I felt like I had the opportunity to offer my perspective from the front lines of watching climate change decimate our planet. Whether it was feeling the tremendous impact of fracking on the water and air in my hometown of Boulder, or traveling to North Dakota to stand in solidarity at Standing Rock, or protesting against the Keystone XL Pipeline, or visiting damaged rain forests, oceans, and glacier melting sites, I have learned about the impact of climate change one powerful experience at a time.

Looking back, I now know that that speech was the culmination of an incredible period of growth in my life. My voice had just dropped, I was sprouting up, and I was taking my fight to a much bigger stage. I usually don’t memorize speeches; most of the time, I just speak from the heart. But, this was no ordinary speech. The UN wanted me to write out every word I was going to say. I have always viewed the words on the page as more of a road map to the places I might go.

The night before I boarded the flight to New York, I finished a draft of the speech. My badass mom, Tamara Rose, came with me on this journey. She’s endlessly supportive and my partner in crime in this movement. She does a great job of keeping the pressure out of it, always looking out for my best interests. I know she is proud of me, but she doesn’t add any expectations to the moment. She did want me to memorize the speech while I was on the plane though. As we began our ascent into the clouds, I reviewed my speech a few times, but after about 30 minutes or so, I figured I should just relax. I fell asleep, and I didn’t wake up until the captain came over the intercom system, indicating our initial descent into New York City.

As we got off the plane, my friend Vanessa Black, who made Kid Warrior, and her camera crew were there to film my journey to the UN. Vanessa took us directly to Manhattan, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and to this small suit tailor in the city. It was a pretty funky place. A tailor met me and started taking my measurements. That was the first time in my life that I had ever put on a suit. The tailor shuffled jackets on and off of me and fit me for a shirt and shoes to match my suit. To that point, most of my activism was very grass roots, community-driven, and localized for the most part. This was an entirely different kind of thing than I was used to.

I was both pretty tired and hungry at this point, and I wanted to enjoy some of NYC’s best eats. My mom was stressing a little that I didn’t have my speech memorized, and I could appreciate her concern, but I was just chilling, knowing that I was ready for the moment. I think my exact words to her were, “Mom, don’t worry. I got this.” I can only imagine how reassuring that might sound coming from a 15-year-old kid who had just put on his first button-down shirt that wasn’t plaid.

June 29, 2015, arrived. As we approached the front entrance to the UN, there was a ridiculous amount of security. We were issued a number of clearance badges, and were eventually connected with Susan Alzner, who greeted us and showed us around. We took our seats in the audience, and I remember sitting through a number of different speakers who took the stage before me. It wasn’t engaging at all—the room was lifeless. I tried to sit up straight, so as to not wrinkle my suit or mess up my long hair. I was a little nervous; this was bigger than anything I’d done before.

About 20 minutes before I was scheduled to speak, we were ushered to the side of the stage. We continued to wait, and I surveyed the room filled with chairs, each with a different little placard in front of it, designating the country represented by that seat. The room went silent, and I heard a UN representative start to introduce me. He wasn’t the first to mess up the pronunciation of my name. To his credit, he tried a couple of times, but it just wasn’t happening for him. As I approached the podium, I looked out into the audience. The atmosphere still felt stale and stuffy. I knew I needed to bring some life into the room.

I unrolled my written speech, took a deep breath, and started off with a prayer in my native language. As you can imagine, not everyone in the room spoke the same language, so there was a booth set up with translators repeating everything for the diplomats in various dialects. Because my prayer was in Nahuatl and it isn’t a spoken language, it totally threw everyone off. I could just imagine what the interpreters were saying. Probably something like, “What the hell is happening right now? Nobody recognizes this language.” The UN required strict preparation for its speakers, and, in the first 30 seconds, I was already breaking the rules and going off script. Classic.

It only took the audience a few moments to realize that a 15-yearold kid was standing in front of them. I had their attention now—all eyes were on me.

I left the written words behind and spoke what I needed to say from my heart. I used the speech as an outline to freestyle the content. Looking out at the audience and recognizing the importance of this moment, I knew I had an opportunity to say more than what was on the page. By the end, I was totally off- script, and I was flowing with it. It felt perfect. My friend Paul Basis tells me that the power in your words is in the space between them. I took my time so people could feel everything I said. By the time I said what I came there to say, I had gone 3 minutes over the time I was given.

Getting off the stage after you speak to a bunch of people in suits is always a strange feeling. I felt like I said what I Xiuhtezcatl at the United Nations wanted to. Besides, the people in that room weren’t the ones I was really speaking to. Speeches don’t change the world, movements do, but the words and the messages that come through can spark a flame to ignite a movement.

Following the speech I felt the tremendous potential of what this moment could be. While this felt like a powerful culmination of 10 years of passion and dedication, I knew it was just the beginning of a nextlevel journey—to fulfill the promise of my words would take many more years of hard work. So often people compromise themselves in order to accomplish their political objectives. The goal of my speech was to defy that. I don’t ever want to have to be something that I’m not to make a difference in the world. I gave that speech because I wanted to show the world that a kid with a passion and a voice could make a difference, regardless of who he is or where he comes from.

I was able to show up in a fully authentic way, in a place where such blunt honesty is rare. Whether or not my words sunk into the people in the room, my message would resonate to those frustrated by a bureaucracy that had failed to meet the needs of the people. In my speech, I told the audience: “Don’t be afraid to dream big.” The failure of global leaders to solve this crisis is direct result of their lack of imagination. If we want a sane climate policy, we the people have to push them beyond what they see as politically possible.

Sadly, the UN didn’t dream big enough with the Paris Climate Conference that followed my speech several months later. Their efforts fell short of the concrete actions needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions substantially. What progress was made in Paris many fear will be thwarted by a Trump administration, which says they plan to cancel the agreement.

For many of us, waking up on November 9th felt as if we were entering a national nightmare. But I’ve learned that big dreams often come from total nightmares. The UN was formed in response to the tragedies that occurred during World War II. So I can only imagine that we are primed and ready for something larger than previously imagined. I know that change occurs through each of us. It is the manifestation of our collective efforts. This book is a resource to transform a broken system and build a new one in its place. It will help to paint the picture, demonstrate the struggle, and then outline a solution.

We’re up against a lot, but together we’ve got this. Movements can begin with one idea, one spark of inspiration, and one action. They catch fire when we unite around them. Each of us has a part to play, no matter how small. The solutions we create in our communities are the foundation for something bigger than us all.

Every generation leaves a legacy. The tools to create one are in your hands. Think of this book as a map to help you find your way when you get lost. The ending remains unwritten, because the actions we take will shape the world that the next generation inherits. This book is for the frontline fighters, the people who won’t take no for an answer, and for those who believe in change and are seeking guidance to create it. This book is for the straight-A students, the high-school dropouts, the single moms, the rebels, the farmers, the architects, the healers, the poets, the entrepreneurs, the leaders, and those who have not yet found their voice. My faith lies in the amazing people I’ve met along this journey who won’t stop fighting for what we believe in. Another world is possible.

Together we can do this if we just put boots on the ground and pool our time and energy to heal the world one leaf on one tree in one forest in one city in one state in one country at a time. It isn’t going to happen overnight, but it can happen if we make the most of each day. Every little bit helps. Local efforts can create global waves. Throughout this book, you’ll find helpful conversations about the most important social issues of our time. At the end of the conversations, I will outline steps and resources you can take and use to join in and make a difference.

So keep this book by your side as you navigate the road ahead. Keep it in your backpack, near your bed stand, or in your hybrid. Write in it, highlight it, even rip out the pages and give them to your friends. Please pass it around, and share the guidance and suggestions in the pages ahead. I want you to love reading this book as much as I loved writing it. This is my way of spreading the word as quickly as possible. This book is just the beginning of the movement for change, but I know there are difference-making resources in the words to come. It means the world to me that I have the opportunity to outline my plan to save the Earth that has given so much to each of us. I am one of the many. And so are you. I look at you as my teammate and partner in this battle. We got this if we just work together.

So with that said, please dream big and read on.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from We Rise by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, published by Rodale Books, 2017.

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez speaks at the 2016 Bioneers Conference:

Celebrity Chef Jose Andrés Is Feeding More Than 5,000 Victims of Hurricane Maria

By Michael Peñuelas

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.

Celebrity chef Jose Andrés, best known for his restaurants Jaleo, minibar, and Zaytinya, is working alongside local Puerto Rican chefs to feed more than 5,000 Puerto Ricans per day in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

Andrés and his team at the World Central Kitchen (WCK) are coordinating a large network of volunteer chefs and food service workers to collect donations from around the country, transport them daily to Puerto Rico, and prepare thousands of meals in borrowed kitchens and food trucks on the island.

In addition to feeding some of most vulnerable residents of Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, the WCK network is making a concentrated effort to feed the staff of hospitals and elderly homes, who are working long hours in increasingly desperate conditions, according to WCK Communication Director Kevin Holst.

Dubbed “Operation #ChefsForPuertoRico,” the campaign seeks to draw attention and resources to the plight of the island’s 3.4 million residents, most of whom are citizens of the United States and remain without water, electricity, or food, according to the Pentagon. Hurricane Maria was the strongest storm to hit Puerto Rico in more than 80 years.

In addition to wiping out power to the entire island and disabling 90 percent of cellphone towers, the storm also decimated Puerto Rico’s food systems. Before the hurricane, Puerto Rico already imported about 85 percent of its food, though the island’s agricultural industry had been growing steadily, according to Carlos Flores Ortega, Puerto Rico’s secretary of the Department of Agriculture. In a matter of hours, Ortega reports, the hurricane destroyed more than 80 percent of the island’s existing crop value. Residents will now be forced to rely almost exclusively on imports until they are able to rebuild their food systems, a process which will take years.

WCK’s response follows the network’s recent work in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which impacted the region surrounding the city of Houston, Texas in August of 2017. After Harvey, the WCK network coordinated donations of over 1 million pounds of food and served 20,000 meals for Houston residents.

Follow Jose Andrés’ Twitter feed for further updates.

Click here to donate to ongoing relief efforts by Jose Andrés and the World Central Kitchen.

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.

Sex in the Sea: How Sex-Changing Fish Are Biologically Advantaged

As our society becomes more accustomed to conversations about sex and gender—in terms of biology, psychology, and justice—it is becoming clear just how complex and nuanced these topics can be. While we strive to understand the details of human sexuality, many of us don’t stop to consider the bigger picture: Gender and sexual fluidity isn’t a human-specific concept. Species that walk, swim, and fly about the Earth have fascinating sex lives, some of which we’re just beginning to understand.

Dr. Marah Hardt’s research is bringing us closer to understanding the bigger picture, specifically in relation to sea life. The research director of Future of Fish—a nonprofit incubator working to solve oceanic challenges—Hardt is currently engaging with organizations to find solutions to global overfishing problems. Having spent much of her career studying life among coral reefs, she became an expert in the sex lives of certain fish and ocean creatures, eventually writing the book Sex in the Sea (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), a humorous and captivating examination of the underwater mating rituals most of us have never seen. The following excerpt dives into the world of sex-changing fish, and is from the book’s chapter “Flex Your Sex: Sex Change in the Sea.”

…

Once Upon a Time there was a King and Queen who ruled over a peaceful kingdom. The peace came from order, and that order was imposed through fierce intimidation. No one dared rise up to challenge their reign. Beautiful and standing a full foot taller than the King, it was no secret that the Queen was in command. It was even rumored that she bullied her King, just as he bullied his court.

Then, one night, the Queen died. Within moments, a strange new force began to swirl within the castle walls. As if released from some spell the King felt a change deep within himself, a blossoming of something new, something different, something . . . feminine. For the next few weeks this inner transformation progressed until finally he stepped forth as a new and powerful Queen, equally as beautiful, fertile, and commanding as the former had been.

The King-now-Queen took as her mate a spirited youth who had, under the same spell, developed into a strapping, virile male. Under the new Queen’s hard-hearted watch, the new King embraced his role and began a new reign of intimidation—and the two lived and laid many successful clutches of eggs, Happily Ever After.

The End.

Or so a fairy tale might go, had the Brothers Grimm known anything about clownfish. Yes, clownfish. Sorry folks, but Pixar got it wrong. Way wrong.

When it comes to relationship dynamics of clownfish, the true adventure tale reads more like the Greek tragedy Oedipus than it does Finding Nemo. As Nature writes the story, by the time Nemo hatched out of the egg, his dad, Marlin, an unpartnered male head of household, would have already morphed into Marlene. For clownfish, when the leading lady dies, the top dog promotes to bitch.

Rather than chasing after a kidnapped Nemo, Marlin-now-Marlene would stay at home and welcome the next largest male around to join her as her chosen mate inside her spacious anemone abode. A mature, ready, and waiting female occupying a decent anemone would not remain lonely. Nemo, if he ever did escape and make it back home, would find the anemone filled with other male clownfish. He would have to wait his turn to meet (and mate with) his father-turned-mother, delaying the happy reunion of son-as-lover with mother-who-was-father.

Though lacking the sharks, jellyfish forest, and surfing sea turtles, when it comes to personal growth and triumph sagas, the real Nemo story offers a far more colorful tale that hinges on the ability of a clownfish to change sex during its lifetime. It’s a strategy deployed by many species of fish and invertebrates—species that never have to wonder what shagging is like for the opposite sex . . . they know.

A Brief Sojourn into Sex-Change Strategies

Under the sea, the boundary between male and female is far more fluid than on land. A little midlife sex swapping is part of the natural lifecycle of everyone from Nemo to the shrimp in your shrimp cocktail. In fact, start naming all the sex-changing animals in the sea, and the list looks like a recipe for bouillabaisse: mussels, clams, shrimp, and a whole slew of fish. There are others, too, such as worms and some sea stars (formerly known as starfish), that don’t lend themselves as readily to a chowder but do exhibit some serious flex in their sex.

Though energy intensive, the ability to alter one’s sex is a strategic way to boost babies per reproductive bonk. Here’s why: in some situations, one sex will make more babies when they are bigger (or older) than when smaller. In human terms, a woman’s fertility peaks in her twenties and declines later in life. But the same doesn’t go for a guy. Instead, he can continue to make babies by hooking up with younger women far into his fifties, sixties, and beyond.

Now imagine that younger guys, with their overeager sex drive and lack of experience, weren’t likely to get much action from discerning females who wished to have their babes sired by only the strongest, wisest, best providers. Under these circumstances, if people wanted to maximize the number of children they could produce, and if we could change sex, it would make sense to start life as a female, making babies by reproducing with older men while you are young and fit. Then, as conception and baby carrying success diminished around thirty-five years old, you would switch to being a male, and kick up your offspring output by finding a pretty young thing to mate with. Voila! You’ve just increased your human production potential.

Of course, you also would have to endure the pangs of puberty twice. In reality, human biology is too prudishly rigid to allow for this kind of flexibility with our sex. The same holds for other mammals, including species such as elephant seals, which would certainly benefit from that kind of flexible strategy: all those small males kicked off the beach by the big alphas could instead start off as females and then morph to males when big and ready to do battle. Alas, it is not an option for most vertebrates.

Fish are an exception. Along with many invertebrates, they aren’t nearly so limited. For them, the cost of sex change is a small price to pay in return for some serious reproductive advantage.

Li l’ Males and Big Ol’ Fat Fecund Female Fish: Protandrous Hermaphrodites

To understand why the real Nemo story reads more like Greek legend than it does Pixar, first you need to wrap your head around the fact the bigger a female fish grows, the more eggs she can make. This “bigger equals more eggs” concept is completely foreign to humans. Our females are born with roughly the same number of eggs—about one million. No matter her height, weight, ethnicity, et cetera, a woman has all the eggs she will ever have before she is born—by about twelve weeks in utero. As she ages, the number of eggs she carries goes down. By the time she hits puberty, only about half of her lifetime egg pool remains (most of these never fully develop and are reabsorbed into the body—only about three hundred to five hundred eggs ever fully mature).

This is not the case in fish (and many other marine species, too). For them, eggs are produced over the course of their female lives, and size matters. The bigger a female is, the more eggs she can fit, and as long as she is healthy, the more eggs she can make. For example, a fourteen-inch-long vermillion snapper will make about 150,000 eggs. A twenty-two-inch female of the same species will make 1,700,000 eggs. That’s over ten times more eggs before the fish doubles in size. So big, old, fat, fecund female fish (affectionately known as “BOFFFFs”) can pump out far more eggs than their younger sisters a few notches down the size scale.

There may be other advantages to BOFFFFs besides sheer increases in number too. Older (and wiser?) females may release eggs over a longer spawning period and more diverse spawning habitats than younger females. This helps them hedge their bets in terms of hitting favorable conditions for larval survival. These factors indicate that BOFFFFs are disproportionately beneficial and perhaps even critical to long-term survival of populations.

That bigger females can carry more eggs is not a trick specific to sex changers. Any large female fish—whether she was born female and stayed that way or started as a male and transitioned to female—contributes significantly more to future generations than a smaller female. But this feature becomes something sex-changing species can exploit, especially for those species that engage in the abnormal behavior of pairing up one-on-one for the season. Such is the case with clownfish, male-to-female sex changers that join seahorses in the minority club of species forming monogamous couples.

As a candy-colored bite-sized fish on a predator-filled reef, clownfish (also known as anemonefish) tend to stick within the confines and safety of their anemone homes. Distant cousins of jellyfish, anemones have a soft body surrounded by rings of stinging tentacles that present a perfect fortress of protection for clownfish, which hide within their waving tendrils. But a good anemone can be hard to find. If you’re an adult clownfish who decides to go looking for a new home, other clownfish will likely chase you away from their already-occupied abodes. No room at the inn for you. But as a juvenile, you’re pretty innocent and pose no competition to the ruling adults, so unless an anemone is particularly crowded, odds are you can stick around. So, young clownfish use their sense of smell to find their way to a good anemone, and once allowed to join a group, they stay.

Confined to an anemone, these fish are stuck with whoever else lives there. It’s kind of like being forced to date only the girl or boy next door. But although there may be four to six individuals living around one anemone, only the two largest individuals will mate: the one and only female with the largest male. And here’s where being a BOFFFF comes in handy. Generally speaking, even a small male has enough sperm to fertilize all of a female’s eggs. The more eggs the female can make, then, the more offspring the couple can produce. So a bigger female benefits them both. By starting off as a male, an individual that hooks up with a big female can produce lots of offspring when small, and then, when his older, bigger partner dies, he can then grow into the female role, get a new mate, and continue the high-level offspring output. This is what clownfish do, and this is why the real Nemo tale doesn’t look anything like the movie.

The trick to an individual clownfish’s sexual success, though, isn’t sex change as much as preventing other adult clownfish from sneaking sex with their mate. Both the top-ranking male and the female engage in some psychological warfare, bullying the other resident clownfish and stressing them out so much that their sexual development ceases. It’s a delicate art form, really. The female torments the largest male just enough to keep him from growing too big (and risk turning into a competing female) but not too much intimidation, so as to which would suppress his manliness. Whipped as he is by the female, the male then takes out his aggression on the next largest individual, but he goes all the way, intimidating that male into suspended maturation. The intimidated then becomes the intimidator, turning to dominate the next biggest, and so on down the line, ensuring that each individual knows his place in the pecking order and remains in pre-pubescent limbo.

Life may not be easy for young, stunted clownfish, but there are advantages to all that torment. When the female dies, the ranking male can quickly convert to female and reap the reproductive rewards: the next juvenile in line simply rises up, grows a pair, and the new couple gets on with the show. Nobody has to venture outside the green zone of the anemone to find a mate.

Clownfish are not alone in their protandrous lifestyle; many oysters also know sex—in the biblical sense—from both sides of the bed. The most popularly consumed species, including those Bluepoints and Belons, Sweetwaters and Wellfleets, Kumamotos and Pemaquids, in all their wondrous, buttery, salty, smoky, earthy, fruity merroir—all have the potential to morph from male to female. Such a talent is also beneficial when you’re an animal that’s stuck in the muck for life.

Glued together as a living rock wall, oyster reefs or “beds” are made up of generations of individual oysters that, as tiny free-swimming larvae, sink down from the surface to attach and grow on the backs of their ancestors. During a season of summer lovin’, oysters contract the two halves of their shelled house, forcefully ejecting enormous numbers of sperm or eggs into the water, where they mix with the gametes of other neighboring oysters. As we will discuss in a few chapters, animals such as oysters that can’t move instead set their gametes free in the open blue to find their complement and fuse. To help increase the odds that fertilization will occur, these animals pump out spectacular numbers of eggs and sperm. Bigger females are advantageous because they can significantly up their egg output—just like BOFFFFs. An adult female oyster may release over a million eggs in one go, and they often have multiple spawning events in a year. Smaller males, with fewer energy reserves, can still make lots of cheap sperm, but it is difficult to make lots of fat-rich eggs and still have energy left over to grow. So, protandry makes sense, with bigger oysters able to divert more energy to female reproduction, which helps everyone.

While size does matter, it is not the only factor controlling sex change. Social cues are also important. As Dr. Juliana Harding, an oyster expert at Coastal Carolina University, notes, “What’s the point of spawning as a male if everyone around you is a male?” Or equally important: why bother changing sex if your neighbor already has? Harding explains that oysters use chemical cues to determine who else is around and of what sex in order to calculate when and if sex change makes sense. “Both size and social cues influence the end product.”

Actual sex change happens after spawning, when the overflowing gonads are finally spent. But in contrast to many sex changers that can make the leap from male to female (or vice versa) in a manner of days, oysters take a bit more time in swapping sex. Harding explains: “It is like phasing out one set of equipment and bringing a new set on line and testing it before getting rid of the old. From an evolutionary standpoint, you always want to be able to spawn as something so as to not miss opportunities to contribute to future generations.” This is also why oysters “trickle spawn,” releasing some eggs or sperm over an extended time frame.

Not all individual oysters change sex, though. In some species, oysters born male stay male while others born male will transition to female after a few years. The difference in the two paths seems to be mostly genetic, with some environmental influence. In the Pacific oyster, for example, it is likely that males born with a genotype MF are true males (similar to male human XY genotype); those oysters with an FF combination (similar to female human XX genotype), however, are protandrous—born male, they may sex-change into female after one or two years. There isn’t a hard deadline for when sex change occurs. Instead both age and the environment can influence the timing: if food supplies are low, or the conditions otherwise harsh, an individual may delay the switch. On the other hand, disease or fishing pressure that targets older and larger individuals may trigger an earlier transition to female—to ensure they pump out a few rounds of eggs before being knocked off. This kind of variable sex change is one example of how external forces can fundamentally affect the sex lives of a species.

The male-to-female transformation is but the tip of the sex-change iceberg, however. The far more dominant strategy (at least in marine fish) for boosting sexual success via sex swapping is the female-to-male route— that’s the pathway of choice for species where big males can effectively rule the school.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Sex in the Sea by Marah J. Hardt, published by St. Martin’s Press, 2016.

Rethinking the ‘Infrastructure’ Discussion Amid a Blitz of Hurricanes

 

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Written by Andrew Revkin.

The wonky words infrastructure and resilience have circulated widely of late, particularly since Hurricanes Harvey and Irma struck paralyzing, costly blows in two of America’s fastest-growing states.

Resilience is a property traditionally defined as the ability to bounce back. A host of engineers and urban planners have long warned this trait is sorely lacking in America’s brittle infrastructure.

Many such experts say the disasters in the sprawling suburban and petro-industrial landscape around Houston and along the crowded coasts of Florida reinforce the urgent idea that resilient infrastructure is needed more than ever, particularly as human-driven climate change helps drive extreme weather.

The challenge in prompting change — broadening the classic definition of “infrastructure,” and investing in initiatives aimed at adapting to a turbulent planet — is heightened by partisan divisions over climate policy and development.

Of course, there’s also the question of money. The country’s infrastructure is ailing already. A national civil engineering group has surveyed the nation’s bridges, roads, dams, transit systems and more and awarded a string of D or D+ grades since 1998. The same group has estimated that the country will be several trillion dollars short of what’s needed to harden and rebuild and modernize our infrastructure over the next decade.

For fresh or underappreciated ideas, ProPublica reached out to a handful of engineers, economists and policy analysts focused on reducing risk on a fast-changing planet.

Alice Hill, who directed resilience policy for the National Security Council in the Obama administration, said the wider debate over cutting climate-warming emissions may have distracted people from promptly pursuing ways to reduce risks and economic and societal costs from natural disasters.

She and several other experts said a first step is getting past the old definition of resilience as bouncing back from a hit, which presumes a community needs simply to recover.

“I don’t think of resilience in the traditional sense, in cutting how long it takes to turn the lights back on,” said Brian Bledsoe, the director of the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems at the University of Georgia. “Resilience is seizing an opportunity to move into a state of greater adaptability and preparedness — not just going back to the status quo.”

In thinking about improving the country’s infrastructure, and provoking real action, Bledsoe and others say, language matters.

Bledsoe, for instance, is exploring new ways to communicate flood risk in words and maps. His institute is testing replacements for the tired language of 1-in-100 or 1-in-500-year floods. A 100-year flood has a 1 in 4 chance of occurring in the 30-year span of a typical home mortgage, he said, adding that’s the kind of time scale that gets people’s attention.

Visual cues matter, too, he said. On conventional maps, simple lines marking a floodplain boundary often are interpreted as separating safe zones and those at risk, Bledsoe said. But existing models of water flows don’t provide the full range of possible outcomes: “A 50-year rain can produce a 100-year flood if it falls on a watershed that’s already soaked or on snowpack or if it coincides with a storm surge.”

“The bright line on a map is an illusion,” he said, particularly in flat places like Houston, where a slight change in flood waters can result in far more widespread inundation. Risk maps should reflect that uncertainty, and wider threat.

Nicholas Pinter, a University of California, Davis, geoscientist who studies flood risk and water management, said that Florida is well-situated to build more wisely after this disaster because it already has a statewide post-disaster redevelopment plan and requires coastal communities to have their own.

It’s more typical to have short-term recovery plans — for digging out and getting the lights back on, as 20,000 utility workers are scurrying to do right now.

The advantage of having an established protocol for redevelopment, he said, is it trims delays.

“Draw up plans when the skies are blue and pull them off the shelf,” he said of how having rebuilding protocols in place can limit repeating mistakes. “That fast response cuts down on the horrible lag time in which people typically rebuild in place.”

In a warming climate, scientists see increasing potential for epic deluges like the one that swamped Houston and last year’s devastating rains around Baton Rouge, Louisiana. How can the federal government more responsibly manage such environmental threats?

Many people point to the National Flood Insurance Program, which was created to boost financial resilience in flood zones, but has been criticized from just about every political and technical vantage point as too often working to subsidize, instead of mitigate, vulnerability.

As has happened periodically before, pressure is building on Congress to get serious about fixing the program (a reauthorization deadline was just pushed from this month toward the end of the year).

How this debate plays out will have an important impact on infrastructure resilience, said Pinter of the University of California, Davis. If incentives remain skewed in favor of dangerous and sprawling development, he said, that just expands where roads, wires, pipelines and other connecting systems have to be built. “Public infrastructure is there in service of populations,” he said.

He also said the lack of federal guidance has led to deeply uneven enforcement of floodplain building at the state level, with enormous disparities around the country resulting in more resilient states, in essence, subsidizing disaster-prone development in others.

“Why should California, Wyoming or Utah be paying the price for Houston, Mississippi or Alabama failing to enforce the National Flood Insurance Program? ” he said.

Bledsoe, at the University of Georgia, said there’s no need to wait for big changes in the program to start making progress. He said the National Flood Insurance Program has a longstanding division, the Community Rating System, that could swiftly be expanded, cutting both flood risk and budget-breaking payouts. It’s a voluntary program that reduces flood insurance rates for communities that take additional efforts beyond minimum standards to reduce flood damage to insurable property.

Despite the clear benefits, he said, only one municipality, Roseville, California, has achieved the top level of nine rankings and gotten the biggest insurance savings — 45 percent. Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fort Collins, Colorado, King County, Washington, and Pierce County, Washington, are at the second ranking and get a 40 percent rate cut. Hundreds of other municipalities are at much lower levels of preparedness.

“Boosting participation is low-hanging fruit,” Bledsoe said.

Some see signs that the recent blitz of hurricanes is reshaping strategies in the Trump White House. President Donald Trump’s infrastructure agenda, unveiled on August 15, centered on rescinding Obama-era plans to require consideration of flood risk and climate change in any federal spending for infrastructure or housing and the like. The argument was built around limiting perceived red tape.

After the flooding of Houston less than two weeks later, Trump appointees, including Tom Bossert, the president’s homeland security adviser, said a new plan was being developed to insure federal money would not increase flood risks.

On Monday, as Irma weakened over Georgia, Bossert used a White House briefing to offer more hints of an emerging climate resilience policy, while notably avoiding accepting climate change science: “What President Trump is committed to is making sure that federal dollars aren’t used to rebuild things that will be in harm’s way later or that won’t be hardened against the future predictable floods that we see. And that has to do with engineering analysis and changing conditions along eroding shorelines but also in inland water and flood-control projects.”

Robert R.M. Verchick, a Loyola University law professor who worked on climate change adaptation policy at the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama, said federal leadership is essential.

If Federal Emergency Management Agency flood maps incorporated future climate conditions, that move would send a ripple effect into real estate and insurance markets, forcing people to pay attention, he said. If the federal government required projected climate conditions to be considered when spending on infrastructure in flood-prone areas, construction practices would change, he added, noting the same pressures would drive chemical plants or other industries to have a wider margin of safety.

“None of these things will change without some form of government intervention. That’s because those who make decisions on the front end (buying property, building bridges) do not bear all the costs when things go wrong on the back end,” he wrote in an email. “And on top of that, human beings tend to discount small but important risks when it seems advantageous in the short-run.”

After a terrible storm, he said, most Americans are willing to cheer a government that helps communities recuperate. But people should also embrace the side of government that establishes rules to avoid risk and make us safer. That’s harder, he said, because such edicts can be perceived by some as impinging on personal freedom.

“But viewed correctly, sensible safeguards are part of freedom, not a retreat from it,” he said. “Freedom is having a home you can return to after the storm. Freedom is having a bridge high enough to get you to the hospital across the river. Freedom is not having your house surrounded by contaminated mud because the berm at the neighboring chemical plant failed overnight.”

Thaddeus R. Miller, an Arizona State University scientist who helps lead a national research network focused on “Urban Resilience to Extreme Events,” said in an email that boosting the capacity of cities to stay safe and prosperous in a turbulent climate requires a culture shift as much as hardening physical systems:

“Fundamentally, we must abandon the idea that there is a specific standard to which we can control nature and instead understand that we are creating complex and increasingly difficult-to-control systems that are part social, part ecological and part technological. These mean not just redesigning the infrastructure, but redesigning institutions and their knowledge systems.”

After the destruction and disruption from Hurricane Sandy, New York City didn’t just upgrade its power substations and subway entrances, Miller said in a subsequent phone call. The city also rebooted its agencies’ protocols and even job descriptions. “Every time a maintenance crew opens a sewer cover, fixes or installs a pipe, whether new or retrofitting, you’re thinking how to enhance its resilience,” Miller said.

Miller said another key to progress, particularly when federal action is limited or stalled, is cooperation between cities or regions. Heat was not an issue in Oregon historically, Miller said, but it’s becoming one. The light rail system around Portland was designed to work with a few 90-degree days a year, he said. “The last couple of summers have seen 20-plus 90-degree days,” he said, causing copper wires carrying power for the trains to sag and steel rails to expand in ways that have disrupted train schedules. Similar rail systems in the Southwest deal with such heat routinely, said Miller, who has worked in both regions. The more crosstalk, the better the outcome, he said.

“At the broadest level, we need to think about risks and how infrastructure is built to withstand them at a landscape level,” Miller added. “We can longer commit to evaluating the impacts and risks of a single project in isolation against a retrospective, stationary understanding of risk (e.g., the 100-year flood we’ve been hearing so much about.)”

He said that an emerging alternative, “safe-to-fail” design, is more suited to situations where factors contributing to extreme floods or other storm impacts can’t be fully anticipated. “Safe-to-fail infrastructure might allow flooding, but in ways that are designed for,” he said.

(With an Arizona State colleague, Mikhail Chester, Miller offered more details in a commentary published last week by The Conversation website, laying out “six rules for rebuilding infrastructure in an era of ‘unprecedented’ weather events.”)

Deborah Brosnan, an environmental and disaster risk consultant, said the challenge in making a shift to integrating changing risks into planning and investments is enormous, even when a community has a devastating shock such as a hurricane or flood or both:

“It requires a radical shift in how we incorporate variability in our planning and regulations,” she said. “This can and will be politically difficult. New regulations like California fire and earthquake codes and Florida’s building codes are typically enacted after an event, and from a reactive ‘make sure this doesn’t happen again’ perspective. The past event creates a ‘standard’ against which to regulate. Regulations and codes require a standard that can be upheld, otherwise decisions can be arbitrary and capricious. For climate change, non-stationarity would involve creating regulations that take account of many different factors and where variability has to be included. Variability (uncertainy) is the big challenge for these kinds of approaches.”

Stephane Hallegatte, the lead economist at the Word Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, has written or co-written a host of reports on strategies for limiting impacts of climate change and disasters, particularly on the poor. When asked in an email exchange what success would look like, he said the World Bank, in various recent reports, has stressed the importance of managing disaster risks along two tracks: both designing and investing to limit the most frequent hard knocks and then making sure the tools and services are available to help communities recover when a worst-case disaster strikes.

He added: “Facing a problem, people tend to do one thing to manage it, and then forget about it. (‘I face floods; I build a dike; I’m safe.’) We are trying to work against this, by having risk prevention and contingent planning done together.”

This piece was originally published by ProPublica.

On Winning in Turtle Conservation

By Wallace J. Nichols

This article first appeared in The State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) Report, Vol. 9, published by Oceanic Society in April 2014.

Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

— Vince Lombardi

I am not a very competitive person when it comes to sports. Neither are my daughters, which suggests the possibility of a genetic basis for such things. We prefer the personal enjoyment of athletic activities without the confines of “winners,” “losers,” speed records, or scoreboards. As spectators, we like a good game as much as we care about our team winning. That is not to say we do not strive to improve our skills and endeavor toward self-improvement. But process usually trumps outcome. We relish mistakes and learning for the sake of improving.

My philosophy is different when it comes to my chosen work—protecting oceans and restoring sea turtles: I like to win, and I know you do too. In the conservation game, losing means extinction. And although the phrase has become cliché, extinction is forever. Losing sea turtles is just not an option. We have devoted our lives to winning this game.

Some of our colleagues have been at this for over half a century. I have more than 20 years of work for sea turtles under my belt. Some among us are just getting started. What seems clear is that when you commit to fighting for sea turtles, you are in it for the long haul. This is a game of slow-motion chess, not downhill skiing or even four quarters of football.

A quick web search for “sea turtle success stories” produces tens of thousands of results. But the query “Have we won?” has a more elusive response. For those engaging in sea turtle work, right off the mark things often get worse—sometimes much worse—before they get better. My sense is that the most interesting and useful information about winning comes from those low points, when our backs have been against the wall and the odds and the best science are against us. It is a fuzzy topic, winning, but here are five thoughts:

  1. Science and policy are far from enough. Over and over again, we have seen the science pile up alongside poetically written laws and policies, international agreements, and treaties. Although we need science and policy, alone they certainly are not enough, especially when resources for enforcement are thin or nonexistent.
  2. Winning is tenacity to the point of fanaticism. Someone must take the guidelines provided by scientists and policymakers and put them into play. That would be us, the turtle-hugging, fanatical, ocean-loving members of this tribe of tortugueros. No one else cares enough to do what we do. Who else would stay up all night in the rain—with millions of mosquitoes—waiting to move some eggs? No one, that’s who.
  3. Winning is not the end, it is a process. The honest truth—perhaps good news for those who love this game—is that there is no end for the foreseeable future. Even if you could define the ultimate win, emergent threats like climate change and plastic pollution lie just beyond those threats we are addressing now—bycatch and beach development.
  4. Winning is a state of mind. There are plenty of signs that things are getting better. First, the sheer numbers of people of all kinds, grassroots organizations, and research institutions working for sea turtles globally are staggering. Second, over the past 20 years sea turtles have become much more popular, even cool. That really was not the case a few decades ago. Third, as you will read throughout this issue, at many locations around the globe the number of sea turtles is way up, and people are now dealing with new questions related to legal use of turtle products and negative impacts of “too many turtles” (be still my heart). Neuroscience suggests that staying in a positive state of mind is a very useful, powerful tool.
  5. Winning is a feeling. You have been there in the trenches, in the chaotic mix, and felt that what you were doing was right, good, and working. You could never quite put your finger on it, but your years of experience and study told you to “keep pushing right there.” So you did, and things continued to get better. That was your brain working together with other brains the way it has evolved to do so elegantly.

Sea turtle conservation is not a game, a campaign, or a battle. Sadly there are no starting guns, time clocks, or final whistles and no finish line, goalpost, or winner’s circle. Having more live turtles is better than having fewer, we know, but what metrics truly define success? Across a playing field or a chessboard, those questions are well defined. Across the globe’s coasts and oceans, they are less so.

One thing I know with certainty is that global sea turtle conservation has the best team: smart, innovative, tireless, and passionate. What we sometimes lack in funding resources we make up for in tenacity, grit, and camaraderie. Through relentless collaboration and sharing, world-class science, and creative communication, we are indeed driving down the field and keeping sea turtle extinctions at bay.

We are all part of a process that includes times for teamwork, times for fighting, times for loving, and no clear ending. And we have some remarkable stories and some deeply experienced conservationists among us to consult with as we proceed. The answers are elusive and, frankly, well beyond the scope of this essay, but the articles in this SWOT Report Special Feature offer a handful of ideas from different perspectives within our discipline—they mark a step toward defining how we know we have won.

Download a free copy of The State of the World’s Sea Turtles—SWOT Report, Vol. IX, including this article by Wallace J. Nichols and many more, at www.seaturtlestatus.org.

Author: Wallace J. Nichols is a scientist, wild water advocate, community organizer, dad, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, Blue Mind. Learn more about J’s work at www.wallacejnichols.org.

Divided: In the Body of the World

Eve Ensler—best known for her award-winning play The Vagina Monologues—is an activist and vocal advocate for widespread education about violence toward women. As founder of the movement V-Day, her advocacy has spurred thousands of events and raised upwards of $100 million to build campaigns and programs centered around anti-violence. The author of an impressive collection of plays and other media, Ensler continually returns to concepts of womanhood, women’s rights and female embodiment. In 2016, she performed a moving monologue at the Bioneers Conference called Coconut.

In the Body of the World (Picador, 2014) is a memoir in which Ensler recounts her experience as a cancer patient, becoming a body, an experiment, and a scene of destruction. The following is an excerpt from the book’s first chapter.

A mother’s body against a child’s body makes a place. It says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother. Or miss a place or know something called home. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life.

I have been exiled from my body. I was ejected at a very young age and I got lost. I did not have a baby. I have been afraid of trees. I have felt the Earth as my enemy. I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the Earth. I aggrandized my alien identity and wore black and felt superior. My body was a burden. I saw it as something that unfortunately had to be maintained. I had little patience for its needs.

The absence of a body against my body made attachment abstract. Made my own body dislocated and unable to rest or settle. A body pressed against your body is the beginning of nest. I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence that led to a life of constant movement, of leaving and falling. It is why at one point I couldn’t stop drinking and fucking. Why I needed people to touch me all the time. It had less to do with sex than location. When you press against me, or put yourself inside me. When you hold me down or lift me up, when you lie on top of me and I can feel your weight, I exist. I am here.

For years I have been trying to find my way back to my body, and to the Earth. I guess you could say it has been a preoccupation. Although I have felt pleasure in both the Earth and my body, it has been more as a visitor than as an inhabitant. I have tried various routes to get back. Promiscuity, anorexia, performance art. I have spent time by the Adriatic and in the green Vermont mountains, but always I have felt estranged, just as I was estranged from my own mother. I was in awe of her beauty but could not find my way in. Her breasts were not the breasts that fed me. Everyone admired my mother in her tight tops and leggings, with her hair in a French twist, as she drove through our small rich town in her yellow convertible. One gawked at my mother. One desired my mother. And so I gawked and desired the Earth and my mother, and I despised my own body, which was not her body. My body that I had been forced to evacuate when my father invaded and then violated me. And so I lived as a breathless, rapacious machine programmed for striving and accomplishment. Because I did not, could not, inhabit my body or the Earth, I could not feel or know their pain. I could not intuit their unwillingness or refusals, and I most certainly never knew the boundaries of enough. I was driven. I called it working hard, being busy, on top of it, making things happen. But in fact, I could not stop. Stopping would mean experiencing separation, loss, tumbling into a suicidal dislocation.

As I had no reference point for my body, I began to ask other women about their bodies, in particular their vaginas (as I sensed vaginas were important). This led me to writing The Vagina Monologues, which then led me to talking incessantly and obsessively about vaginas. I did this in front of many strangers. As a result of me talking so much about vaginas, women started telling me stories about their bodies. I crisscrossed the Earth in planes, trains, and jeeps. I was hungry for the stories of other women who had experienced violence and suffering. These women and girls had also become exiled from their bodies and they, too, were desperate for a way home. I went to over sixty countries. I heard about women being molested in their beds, flogged in their burqas, acid-burned in their kitchens, left for dead in parking lots. I went to Jalalabad, Sarajevo, Alabama, Port-au-Prince, Peshawar, Pristina. I spent time in refugee camps, in burned-out buildings and backyards, in dark rooms where women whispered their stories by flashlight. Women showed me their ankle lashes and melted faces, the scars on their bodies from knives and burning cigarettes. Some could no longer walk or have sex. Some became quiet and disappeared. Others became driven machines like me.

Then I went somewhere else. I went outside what I thought I knew. I went to the Congo and I heard stories that shattered all the other stories. In 2007 I landed in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. I heard stories that got inside my body. I heard about a little girl who couldn’t stop peeing on herself because huge men had shoved themselves inside her. I heard about an eighty-year-old woman whose legs were broken and torn out of their sockets when the soldiers pulled them over her head and raped her. There were thousands of these stories. The stories saturated my cells and nerves. I stopped sleeping. All the stories began to bleed together. The raping of the Earth. The pillaging of minerals. The destruction of vaginas. They were not separate from each other or from me.

In the Congo there has been a war raging for almost thirteen years. Nearly eight million people have died and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and tortured. It is an economic war fought over minerals that belong to the Congolese but are pillaged by the world. There are local and foreign militias from Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. They enter villages and they murder. They rape wives in front of their husbands. They force the husbands and sons to rape their daughters and sisters. They shame and destroy families and take over the villages and the mines. The minerals are abundant in the Congo—tin, copper, gold, and coltain, which are used in our iPhones and PlayStations and computers.

Of course by the time I got to the Congo, I had witnessed the epidemic of violence toward women that scoured the planet, but the Congo was where I witnessed the end of the body, the end of humanity, the end of the world. Femicide, the systematic rape, torture, and destruction of women and girls, was being employed as a military/corporate tactic to secure minerals. Thousands and thousands of women were not only exiled from their bodies, but their bodies and the functions and futures of their bodies were rendered obsolete: wombs and vaginas permanently destroyed.

The Congo and the individual horror stories of her women consumed me. Here I began to see the future— a monstrous vision of global disassociation and greed that not only allowed but encouraged the eradication of the female species in pursuit of minerals and wealth. But I found something else here as well. Inside these stories of unspeakable violence, inside the women of the Congo, was a determination and a life force I had never witnessed. There was grace and gratitude, fierceness and readiness. Inside this world of atrocities and horror was a red-hot energy on the verge of being born. The women had hunger and dreams, demands and a vision. They conceived of a place, a concept, called City of Joy. It would be their sanctuary. It would be a place of safety, of healing, of gathering strength, of coming together, of releasing their pain and trauma. A place where they would declare their joy and power. A place where they would rise as leaders. I, along with my team and the board at V-Day, were committed to finding the resources and energy to help them build it. We would work with UNICEF to do the construction and then, after V-Day, would find the way to support it. The process of building was arduous and seemingly impossible—delayed by rain and lack of roads and electricity, corrupt building managers, poor oversight by UNICEF, and rising prices. We were scheduled to open in May, but on March 17, 2010, they discovered a huge tumor in my uterus.

Cancer threw me through the window of my disassociation into the center of my body’s crisis. The Congo threw me deep into the crisis of the world, and these two experiences merged as I faced the disease and what I felt was the beginning of the end.

Suddenly the cancer in me was the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live downstream from chemical plants, the cancer inside the lungs of coal miners. The cancer from the stress of not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma. The cancer that lives in caged chickens and oil-drenched fish. The cancer of carelessness. The cancer in fast-paced must-make-it-have-it-smoke-it-own-it formaldehydeasbestos-pesticideshairdyecigarettescellphonesnow. My body was no longer an abstraction. There were men cutting into it and tubes coming out of it and bags and catheters draining it and needles bruising it and making it bleed. I was blood and poop and pee and puss. I was burning and nauseous and feverish and weak. I was of the body, in the body. I was body. Body. Body. Body. Cancer, a disease of pathologically dividing cells, burned away the walls of my separateness and landed me in my body, just as the Congo landed me in the body of the world.

Cancer was an alchemist, an agent of change. Don’t get me wrong. I am no apologist for cancer. I am fully aware of the agony of this disease. I appreciate every medical advance that has enabled me to be alive right now. I wake up every day and run my hand over my torso-length scar and am in awe that I had doctors and surgeons who were able to remove the disease from my body. I am humbled that I got to live where there are CAT scan machines and chemotherapy and that I had the money to pay for them through insurance. Absolutely none of these things are givens for most people in the world. I am particularly grateful for the women of the Congo whose strength, beauty, and joy in the midst of horror insisted I rise above my self-pity. I know their ongoing prayers also saved my life. I am in awe that it happens to be 2012, not twenty years ago even. I am gratefully aware that at just about any other point in history I would have been dead at fifty- seven.

In his book, The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee says, “Science is often described as an interactive and cumulative process, a puzzle solved piece by piece with each piece contributing a few hazy pixels to a much larger picture.” Science, then, is not unlike a CAT scan, a three-dimensional magnetic electronic beam that captures images as it rotates around the body. Each image is separate but somehow the machine makes them seem like one.

This book is like a CAT scan—a roving examination—capturing images, experiences, ideas, and memories, all of which began in my body. Scanning is somehow the only way I could tell this story. Being cut open, catheterized, chemofied, drugged, pricked, punctured, probed, and ported made a traditional narrative impossible. Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether. It all happened fast. Seven months. Impressions. Scenes. Light beams. Scans.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler, published by Picador, 2014.

Eriel Deranger: Indigenous Communities Are Leading the Environmental Justice Movement

There’s a prophecy that says that at this time in Earth’s history, the eagle and the condor will rejoin, remembering they are one. They will reconnect and remember their common origin and share knowledge and wisdom and save each other. The eagle and the condor will fly together and the world will come into balance at a point of near extinction. We are at that point now.

This important moment in time is at the heart of Eriel Deranger’s inspirational 2015 Bioneers presentation. Not only is humanity at an environmental tipping point, she says, but Indigenous People—who have historically cared for and revered Mother Earth—are leading the way toward a cleaner, healthier ecological future.

Deranger has been an important voice within the environmental justice movement for the better part of a decade. She is currently the director of Indigenous Climate Action, an Indigenous-led organization formed in 2015 to inspire action for climate justice while supporting Indigenous communities to build power and drive climate solutions.

Watch Deranger’s 2015 presentation and read excerpts from the transcript below. See more from our Indigeneity Program here.

Eriel Deranger:

We still struggle for the recognition of our humanity and our rights as Indigenous People. It’s time that we abandon the patriarchal and colonial ideologies rooted in things like the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius. We have always been here, and we were never discovered.

Today, we are facing a global crisis—climate change. Indigenous People are not only threatened by colonial policies to eradicate our rights, our cultures and identities that are intrinsically linked to our places of origin. We are now threatened by manmade climate change. Coastlines are rising, weather patterns are changing, and we’re experiencing floods, droughts, out-of-control forest fires, and species disappearing. It’s Indigenous Peoples and land-based peoples that feel it first and most adversely.

So, who am I? I’m an Indigenous person. And like many Indigenous People who work and walk within the environmental movement, I’ve never actually considered myself an environmentalist. First and foremost, I’m a proud member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the “people of the willow,” a reference to the Delta where my people have lived since time immemorial.

My people’s rights and culture are in the crosshairs of the largest project on Earth, the tar sands. The legacy of this project is one of contamination and out-of-control pollution that puts us all at risk. It consists of toxic lakes that cover 240 square kilometers, seeping contaminants into the river systems that my people rely on. It creates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all of the vehicles in Canada combined. And if left unchecked, it could double, if not triple. It’s out of control.

And yet with all these facts and stats, I’m still just that little Indigenous girl. I’m an Indigenous woman working to ensure that my children and the generations to come have an ability to understand our culture, our identity, and our connections to our places of being.

I have found allies and kinship within the environmental movement, and I’ve begun to find hope. I’ve begun to believe that we can stop this destruction and start the process of healing and reconciliation, and decolonization, and challenging the status quo of the blind acceptance and the marginalization of Indigenous Peoples.

. . .

There has been a dramatic shift in the recognition of the unique rights of Indigenous People, from truth and reconciliation in South Africa, the united declaration on the rights of Indigenous People, truth and reconciliation in Canada and the countless court victories recognizing and affirming Indigenous People’s rights. We are shaping the future.

These founders have allowed me to stand here today, and they have created this merging of movements. But it hasn’t come without its challenges. It’s easy to forget that Indigenous communities have faced centuries of systemic oppression that has robbed us our ability to easily enter local, national and international forums where policies and decisions are being made that ultimately affect our rights and our cultural survival. As we attempt to merge these movements it’s imperative that we work together to find ways to address the roots of oppression and not get lost in surface issues like simply protecting a piece of land, as was commonly done by early inceptions of the environmental movement. It’s become imperative that we work together to address colonialism, racism, sexism, and the continued marginalization of those who have been deemed less worthy.

. . .

A new way forward is emerging and Indigenous Peoples are leading the way, from the Beaver Lake in Northern Alberta, who have set a legal precedent by launching litigation highlighting the tens of thousands of treaty violations created from tar sands extraction; to the Unist’ot’en, who have set up blockades stopping the construction of gas, oil and tar sands pipelines through their territory in Northern British Columbia; to the Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick, fighting the fracking of shale oil on their sacred lands, sparking an anti-fracking movement in Canada; to communities here in the United States like the Hidatsa, Arikara, and Mandan in North Dakota, challenging the development of the Bakken oil fields. And in the north, the Indigenous Inupiat communities have stood up en masse, challenging off-shore drilling in the Arctic, and it’s resulted in Shell pulling their application to drill.

As we continue to the South, the Nahuatl and the Otomi people of Mexico are rising up against the exploitation in their traditional territories, working alongside groups like the Zapatistas. The Awajun in Peru are challenging illegal exploration and exploitation in the Peruvian Amazon, and the Kichwa people of the Sarayaku in Ecuador are fighting oil and gas exploitation in their traditional territories in Ecuador.

Our people are becoming the face of the environmental movement, and this hasn’t happened by accident. It’s been our people having the legal and moral authority to stand up and challenge these systems of oppression that has brought us to where we are today. In addition, we have a deep spiritual connection to this place we call Mother Earth. Indigenous People of the global north and the global south have been utilizing a platform created by our ancestors—the foundations of our culture—to safeguard our river systems, our food systems, our culture, our identity and our land base.

There’s a prophecy that says that at this time in Earth’s history, the eagle and the condor will rejoin, remembering they are one. They will reconnect and remember their common origin and share knowledge and wisdom and save each other. The eagle and the condor will fly together and the world will come into balance at a point of near extinction. We are at that point now.

If we do not work together, we will not survive. A new consciousness is emerging. Indigenous People globally are demanding recognition of who we are, and there’s an undeniable resurgence of indigeneity and Indigenous People reclaiming their places and spaces in society. This couldn’t be more true than what we are witnessing in the environmental movement. We have a future worth fighting for.

Make Guerrilla Beauty by Meeting With Friends at Wounded Places

As we walk through our day-to-day lives, many of us regularly step past places that have been damaged, either by humans or by natural events. Trebbe Johnson—the founder and director of Radical Joy for Hard Times—calls these “wounded places,” and she is dedicated to creating a global network devoted to finding and making beauty in those places. It’s her way of connecting with, and giving thanks to, the places that surround us. Johnson’s book 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2017) is centered on this concept, giving readers practical advice for how to recognize and appreciate oft-overlooked spaces. The following is an excerpt from the chapter “Meet With Friends at a Wounded Place.”

Trebbe Johnson will be joining us at the 2017 Bioneers Conference in October to speak about leading with nature’s guidance.

The first step of an Earth Exchange is to go to the wounded place. Being there in person, on the land or by the water, grounding yourself in the place that has fallen on hard times is very important. It’s fine to meditate on a hurt place from afar, but that’s not an Earth Exchange. Focusing on the place in your mind—or even in your heart—just maintains your separation from it. And of course, all too often, distancing is exactly the response so many of us revert to when a place is damaged or destroyed. It’s no longer what it used to be or what we wish it were, so we ignore it. It becomes, in the words of Middlebury College professor and author Adrian Ivakhiv, “taboo.” It’s off limits, officially or in the minds of people or both.

So the point of the Earth Exchange is to move out of our comfort zone and actually make a visit to this place. Think of it as a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey made with a mission. Your mission on this Earth Exchange pilgrimage is to become reacquainted with a place that is being neglected, ignored, forgotten. You go there to find out how it’s doing in its current state and also to be open to how you’re doing. You don’t have to fix anything. You don’t have to convert anyone. Your mission is not to heal either the place or the people. You’re simply there to find and make a little beauty.

Don’t worry if you feel anxiety or trepidation before you set out. Whatever you feel when you begin is likely to change into something else. You will be surprised. You will notice things you did not expect to notice and feel things you did not expect to feel.

Although this step says to “meet with friends,” it’s also fine if you go to a wounded place alone. A big part of why the Earth Exchange works is that any person can do it at any time in any place. You can plan weeks ahead for your event or you can do it on the spur of the moment whenever the need of a place and your own inclination seize you.

No matter where you go or with how many people, it is essential that you insure the health and safety of yourself and everyone else. Avoid places where the land is unstable, such as the sites of explosions, earthquakes, or rock slides. Do not expose yourself and your group to toxic waste or pollution. Don’t break laws or trespass.

The following suggestions will guide you into your first few moments of being at a wounded place.

When you come to a wounded place that makes you feel sad, don’t just walk or drive on. Risk the encounter! If you’re driving, get out of the car. If you’re walking, pause. Face the place and take it in. Note the details. What are the boundaries of this wounded place? Is there an epicenter, where the situation looks and feels worse than in other places? Note how you are feeling about witnessing what has happened or is happening. Acknowledge that your feelings confirm your connection with this place. Even if you pause for just a moment or two, you have begun to bridge the gap between a place that has fallen on hard times and the humans who can care for it.

When you are ready to enter your wounded place, step over a “threshold.” Before you and those who are with you step onto the grounds of the place you’ve chosen, make a simple threshold. It can be a line drawn in the soil, a stick, a row of stones, a branch, or other clear boundary line. Stepping mindfully over a demarcation between the world you typically inhabit and this place that has become separate from other, healthier places transforms your presence there from a mere visit into an event filled with meaning and import. The place becomes what the Greeks called a temenos, a space set aside from common use and dedicated to sacred activities. Stepping over a threshold also enables you to regard your own presence there as sacred and meaningful.

When your Earth Exchange is complete, step back over the threshold.

Move more slowly than you think you need to. When you first arrive at this wounded place, you may be tempted to proceed quickly through the steps of the Earth Exchange in order to get it over with quickly, so you can leave. Acknowledge this impulse—and then do your best to resist it. You are here to visit this place as if it were a sick friend (which it is), get to know it, and let it get to know you. So, instead of hurrying, try moving with exaggerated slowness.

Don’t run away—from the place or yourself. Whatever you feel, it will shift in a moment. Your feelings won’t destroy you. What usually happens, in fact, is that opening up to them has just the opposite effect: after a moment of intensity, the first burst of feeling passes and shifts into something else. You may even feel a sense of relief. You have faced what you did not want to face, and now you are available to new feelings such as compassion, courage, and a greater sense of connection to all life.

Practice balance. If you find that conflicting emotions are swirling within you, don’t try to choose between them. Acknowledge these opposites. They may be sorrow and fascination, anger and admiration, delight and despair, anger and hopelessness, or anything else. Imagine that you can hold these emotions gently in each of your hands. Recognizing that both are true for you in this instant means that you are able to open up to the widest possible state of presence within yourself.

Have fun. The place, the community, the nation, the world— there is plenty of sadness all around. Making a gift of beauty for a place you love and getting reacquainted with it in the process ought to provide some joy. Stephen Duncombe, founder of Creative Activism and author of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, writes: “If progressives hope to appeal to anyone outside of a small group of self-flagellants and the terminally self-righteous, we need to cultivate and articulate positive associations with progressive politics.” So let yourself have fun.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty by Trebbe Johnson, published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2017.

It Takes a Village to Survive When You’re a Superorganism

Ants, termites, honeybees, wasps—they may make our skin crawl, but they operate in ingenious, cooperative ways that humans have yet to be able to replicate. These are examples of superorganisms: societies that operate as collectives rather than as individuals with varied interests. Do humans have the ability to join forces and act as a superorganism? Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker thinks we do.

Woolley-Barker is an evolutionary biologist, primatologist, and biomimicry pioneer with an extensive background in leadership, innovation, and sustainability. Her book Teeming: How Superorganisms Work to Build Infinite Wealth in a Finite World (White Cloud Press, 2017) tells the story of organism networks, drawing parallels between their potential and the collaborative potential of humans. The following is an excerpt is from the book.

Like any good backyard biologist, I scrabbled around in the dirt a lot as a kid, watching ants. They seemed to speak in a chemical code—food’s over here! Hey, who moved our cheese? I scratched out their invisible trails and tricked them into following the wrong ones. Each one cruised in dopey circles, but together they always figured it out. They were good at their work, industrious and easy-going, running in endless, cheerful loops.

One day, my mom took me along to visit her friend, ten minutes east to the dry, planned-housing frontier—along the edge of the wild chaparral. I hotfooted it on their ill-conceived black slate patio, seeking a patch of shade where I could sooth my raw feet. I cooled them off with the hose, inspiring a teeming mass of furious red ants to stream from a crack in the pavers, straight up my leg. Like the peaceful little black ants back home, there was no stopping these hot-pepper red ones either. I shrieked and stamped, rubbing my legs in frenzied agony until my mom whisked me to safety and hosed me down. Wow! I was filled with respect for those angry red soldiers, and happy they didn’t live at my house.

I never saw those red ants again—San Diego’s native Southern fire ants are gone from our chaparral hills, wiped out by the mellow little black ants. How could that be? The black ants were descendants of banana boat stowaways from Argentina, disembarked many decades before. They were sisters, bearing the same chemical fingerprint, and warfare among themselves no longer interests them. Today, their vast supercolony sprawls across California, pushing out the natives as it goes. The black ants simply have more friends.

There are at least 14,000 species of ants around the world, maybe twice that many, and all live as superorganisms—amoeba-like societies whose members fundamentally depend on one other to survive. No one can do everything, but together, the colony is much greater than the sum of its parts. If it takes a village to survive, that’s a superorganism.

All these ants, tied together in a sack, would weigh about the same as all humankind. The global population of termites, which share a similar superorganism social structure, weighs twenty-seven times that much—there’s a cow’s worth of them for every one of us. Social insects like the ants, termites, honeybees, and wasps make up a quarter of the animal biomass in the Amazon Basin, and 80% of the total insect biomass in the world. This way of life is wildly successful, and ancient. The ants have lived this way for 150 million years, the termites a quarter of a billion. Even the great biologist EO Wilson takes “great pleasure to think that they stung or sprayed formic acid on many a dinosaur that carelessly trampled their nests.” The superorganism way of life persists, even as the world changes.

And believe it or not, there are societies even more successful and ubiquitous than these. Beneath the soil you walk on lies a half-billion year old pulsing nutrient superhighway of fungus—a dense fuzzy network of genetically distinct individuals on the hunt for matter to digest, minerals and water to absorb. If a meal is there, they will find it, and when they do, it will flow throughout the system, shuttling wherever it is needed most—because the fungi are fused into one. Each fungal cell gets more as a member of the network than it could on its own. Together, these fungal patches thrive—making up a quarter of all terrestrial biomass.

I’ve studied the evolution of social systems my whole life—everything from baboons and bonobos to orcas and insects—even slime molds and fungal networks. How do they cooperate, and why? What does working as a superorganism mean for individuality, personal freedom, and creativity? How does the fractal, ebb-and-flow math of collaboration and competition contribute to evolutionary change and complexity? And, how do these most ancient societies work to compound their value from one generation to the next? Superorganisms are everywhere, just like we are, and their footprint on the land isn’t small. And yet, we don’t see them choking on smog or stuck in traffic. The fungi aren’t counting carbon credits or worrying about the Pacific Garbage Patch, and termites and honeybees don’t have slums. These colonies have the same kind of metabolic requirements we do, yet they survive and thrive, sustainably—regeneratively—for hundreds of millions of years, through radical waves of change that turned other populations into fossils. Can we do the same?

After nearly thirty years of studying every kind of social structure, my conclusion is that we can. I know that, because it‘s been done before. The math is simple and universal. Botanical philosopher Michael Pollan says it well: “our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum…as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.” Other superorganisms have done it, and they can show us the way.

As an evolutionary biologist and primatologist, I’ve come to see humanity’s special niche as a social one: we’ve combined the political and problem-solving abilities of a chimpanzee with the collaborative teamwork of an ant society. Our ancestors were the first ant-like apes, and in many ways we have more in common with the termites and honeybees and even fungus than with our powerfully individualistic ape brethren. We are Pan superorganismus! I’m in good company with this line of thinking: eminently respectable evolutionary biologists like EO Wilson and Bernard Crespi agree.

As humans, everything we do requires collaboration—who among us makes all the clothes on their back? Like ants, we even expect strangers to coordinate with us, and reasonably politely as well. We drive on one side of the street, stop at the signs, stay in our lane (in some places better than others). We wait patiently for our latté, hold the door for others, say please and thank you, how do you do and excuse me. But if, for one second, you remember—as I always do—that we are 98% chimpanzee, you start to find these good manners extraordinary.

Yes, we’re apes—political and self-serving, affectionate and imaginative. But also we are responsible honeybees, filled with obligation and civic duty; industrious ants, moving earth and tending gardens; DIY paper wasps, driven by the urge to make; and densely networked fungi, pulsing through our digital webs supporting all kinds of teeming ecosystems together.

We are superorganisms, with all the ingredients we need to work together sustainably at scale. If we can embrace the ant and the ape at work in us, I think we can evolve the adaptive, resilient, regenerative global society we require, and design and realize the future we’d like to see.

Here is the simple difference between ancient superorganism abundance and our own increasing scarcity: they compound their wealth by building with virtually infinite things—sunlight and atmospheric carbon, diffuse specks of moisture and nutrients, trust and transparency, and the complexity, diversity, and interconnectedness of networks. There are always more of these things. These organizations are no pyramid schemes—they have virtually no hierarchy or top-down management, and no one tells anyone what to do. Information and resources flow among them, and teams grow from the edges out, in modular, self-managed units that form and dissolve around opportunity and risk when and where it occurs.

This approach maximally leverages diverse individual talents and experiences, and allows these organizations to reap the exponential rewards of collective intelligence and swarm creativity. Optimizing these things lets them accomplish the same kinds of complex tasks we require, with minimal processing power and maximal personal freedom. And these colonies work the same at any scale—no restructuring requires, they just fission or fuse on the fly.

This may seem like a radically new way to live, but I don’t think it is actually that hard. We are superorganisms too, after all, and this way of working feels natural to us. We already work this way in our families and communities—it’s the way we work best. We needn’t fight our nature to get there; just eliminate the obstacles that keep us from it. Superorganism logic is vital for our evolutionary success. These ancient societies offer a new and deeply biological way to do business—a new way to organize our entire global society as we do the hard work of adapting to a finite Earth. This is not a recipe for despair, scraping by, or doing less harm while delaying the inevitable death spiral, nor does it require us to become an army of faceless automaton clone ants or assimilate into the Borg. Quite the contrary—this is a recipe for unbounded optimism, abundance, individuality, personal freedom, and creativity.

These creatures make more each generation without poisoning their world through a set of surprisingly simple deep patterns. They gather diverse scraps of experience, talent, style, and resources, to yield powerful collective intelligence and swarm creativity. They share a compelling purpose, distributing leadership to find the sweet spot between order and chaos, top-down vision and bottom-up productivity. They protect collective value by distributing mechanisms for maintaining trust, and insisting on transparency and accountability. And, perhaps most importantly, they spill this value out into the larger ecosystems they inhabit, feeding the life that feeds them. They have to: it’s the only way to compound that value for the future.

Superorganism logic is proven, and feels right—our biology prevails where our governance fails. Collective value endures, and the simple principles needed to create and maintain it can change the world. They already have—many times in the history of Earth. They can do it again.

Superorganisms are all around us—nimble and adaptive, resilient and regenerative, dramatically outlasting the dinosaurs. The opportunities to borrow their collaborative logic are endless, with proven and enduring results. Our future is uncertain, but countless others have solved these problems before us—some with no brains at all. It can be done. With the right leverage points, any system can flip on a dime. Revolutions and tipping points surprise us. And we are not alone—we have millions of teeming mentors to learn from. Reach out and introduce yourself, because life “did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.” Watch and learn from them. If we do, I’m certain that we—and all the life that we touch—can survive and thrive as they do, far into the future.

Excerpted from TEEMING: How Superorganisms Work to Build Infinite Wealth in a Finite World, © 2017, Tamsin Woolley-Barker. Published by White Cloud Press. This excerpt used with permission of the publisher.

The Art of Empathy: Welcoming Those Who Have Been Exiled

What does an empathetic person look like? Is an empathetic person generally a woman? Can an empathetic person be on the autism spectrum?

Social science researcher and educator Karla McLaren thinks society has drawn too hard a line between those who empathize and those who supposedly do not. It’s an important issue, as the ways in which we raise our children are sometimes affected by our preconceived notions about their inherent abilities. And the development of empathetic skills can change the face of our relationships—at work and in our personal lives.

In The Art of Empathy (Sounds True, 2013), McLaren provides insights into what empathy is, who has it, and how best to make use of this powerful ability. The following excerpt is from the book’s second chapter, “Defining and Redefining Empathy.”

Bioneers is excited to welcome Karla McLaren to the 2017 Bioneers Conference, where she will speak on a panel with Arlie Russell Hochschild about the emotional underpinnings of the divides we’re experiencing in our nation – and how exploring them might help us to heal.

An unfortunate offshoot of all of this intense interest in empathy is that there’s been a facile and frankly unempathic quest to exclude entire categories of humans from the empathic community. As an empath, I challenge these exclusions wholeheartedly, and I absolutely won’t perpetuate them. Certainly, in popular culture, there’s a deeply sexist notion that empathy is a female skill and that males are constitutionally less empathic or less emotive than females are. This terrible idea has created untold suffering for boys and men, who are often not taught much about emotions and are not treated as fully emotive and sensitive beings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given talks and had men come up to me afterward and whisper, as if they don’t even have the right to say it, “I think I’m an empath.” What? Of course men are empaths!

Certainly, many males have been excluded from an understanding of emotions and empathy, and sexist ideas about men are absolutely commonplace, but they’re not true. So let’s look at our definition of empathy again, specifically in terms of men and boys:

Empathy is a social and emotional skill that helps us feel and understand the emotions, circumstances, intentions, thoughts, and needs of others, such that we can offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support.

This definition does not exclude men or boys, and it doesn’t suggest that feeling or understanding emotions is a female skill. Males can easily understand the feelings, circumstances, thoughts, and needs of others. Males can also offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support. Empathy is not a gendered skill — it’s a human skill! The alleged problem of male empathy doesn’t come from inside the male body; there is no male-specific defect of empathy or emotional awareness; and there are no male-specific differences in early emotional development. Little boys love cuddling and love and emotions and empathy. So do men.

But tragically, we don’t tend to raise boys (or men) as if they’re fully empathic and fully emotive beings. As a direct result, males in our heavily gendered society may experience emotions more intensely than females do. However, because they’ve been socialized to view themselves as unemotional, many males may believe that their normal human emotions are strange or out of place. In general, males are not socially permitted to express a full range of emotions or to chat with friends about those emotions (as females are socially allowed to do), which leaves males with very few healthy or fully conscious outlets for their emotions. In our social training and our social myth making, we’ve created an appallingly unempathic environment for most males.

I wrote a piece on my website about this in connection to the wonderful book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, by neurologist Lise Eliot. She busts sexist myths about boys and girls, and in her book, she points out that the differences between the brains of males and females are actually quite small at birth and throughout childhood. Eliot focuses on socialization — on how we approach gender roles and how we treat boys and girls so wildly differently — as the chief contributing factor in the later differences between males and females in terms of their emotional, social, and verbal skills. Eliot also notes that although there are some early, sex-based differences in verbal abilities (girls are sometimes more verbal than boys, but not always), as well as some differences in activity levels (boys are sometimes more active than girls, but not always), there is not as much difference as we’ve been led to believe. In fact, there is more difference between girls in these traits and between boys in these traits than there is between the sexes. However, parents tend to support these gender-linked behaviors very early. For example, they may respond positively to baby girls’ vocalizations while subtly ignoring their activity levels (and vice versa for boys).

In numerous disguised-gender studies, people describe identical behavior differently depending on whether they think a baby is a boy or a girl. A pink-attired sleeping baby will be called delicate and darling, while the same sleeping baby attired in blue will be called strong and dynamic. What? It’s the same baby! But in a heavily gendered world such as ours, it’s not the same baby at all. We actually attribute different (and sometimes opposite) emotional and empathic qualities to identical behaviors in boys and girls. We enforce gender so strongly and so incessantly that we don’t even notice we’re doing it; it’s the air we breathe and the ground we walk on.

Most of our valenced ideas about gender roles for males and females are socially created; they’re not biologically or objectively true, and they can’t be found in the brains of infants. But because so few people understand the difference between objective reality and socially constructed reality, these myths and falsehoods gain the status of concrete truth. Accordingly, many little girls are encouraged to become relatively inactive people who love to talk about defining and redefining empathy emotions and social relationships (but hate math), while little boys are urged to stop crying at a certain age, even when they’ve been hurt deeply. Boys are given guns and trucks and told to man up, stop crying, there’s nothing to be afraid of, stop being girly, stop talking about feelings, and basically stop being fully alive. When we enforce gender stereotypes, we actually reduce the intelligence, the emotional capacity, the empathic skills, and the very humanity of little boys and little girls. We also throw most of the emotional awareness tasks in heterosexual relationships onto women, which might seem helpful but which actually further reduces males’ emotional skills.

Enforced gender stereotypes can certainly interfere with the emotional and social development of human beings. And yet we all have the capacity for emotional and empathic awareness. All of us — males, females, and everyone in between — can intentionally learn how to identify and work with emotions and empathy at any age and from any position on the gender continuum. Empathy is a human skill; it’s not gender specific.

As we grow up, our brains do change, and adult women often have different emotional skills and neurological profiles from adult men. But the brain is a highly plastic organ, and it will change in response to any strong training. For instance, the brains of highly trained musicians or people who speak many languages look and behave differently from the brains of nonmusical people or speakers of only one language. But this doesn’t mean that music and language are forbidden to you if you weren’t trained early; your brain is plastic, and you can learn new things at any age. There may be some discernible differences in the brains of adult males and adult females, but the old myth about men being less emotional or less able to feel emotions has no basis in neurology. Even the idea that men have smaller corpora callosa than women (the corpus callosum carries information between the left and right hemispheres of the brain) was based on a study of just fourteen brains and has since been disconfirmed, as Eliot points out. But people hold onto this sexist idea, repeat it constantly, and write books and make whole careers around it, while males suffer silently (or act out) the emotions they clearly feel but aren’t invited (or allowed) to understand.

Even so, males have always found ways to feel deeply, to become highly skilled in the social world, to create great art, to parent lovingly, to care for animals, to heal the sick, to fight for social justice, to love fully, to dance and sing and act, to communicate meaningfully, and to be profoundly emotive beings. So let me state this right out loud: males have all the human emotions, males can feel and understand all emotions, males have empathy, males can display empathy, and males are natural empaths. I enthusiastically welcome men and boys into the empathic community.

Another group of people who are tragically and unfairly excluded from the empathic community are people on the autism spectrum, whom I and others have identified as hyperempathic rather than unempathic. In some areas of empathy research, the multiple hypersensitivities that many autistic people experience are not clearly understood, which has led to the mistaken assumption that because many autistic people have difficulty deciphering social cues, they must therefore lack the capacity for empathy. (When I describe people as autistic, I’m using “identity first” language very intentionally; please see the endnote.) This deeply unempathic assumption creates continual misery for autistic people, such that many otherwise caring people will blithely refer to autistics as being cold and incapable of meaningful relationships or even love. This is not only thoroughly and demonstrably wrong, but it’s also insensitive, discriminatory, and ableist. It also has terrible effects on the way autistic people are viewed, taught, portrayed, and treated in the larger community. Some researchers in the area of autism are becoming more awake to the humanity and dignity of autistic people, but there’s still a very, very long way to go.

In our work as empaths, however, we’ll enthusiastically welcome autistic people as fellow empaths — and often hyperempaths — who have unique sensitivities and immeasurable capacities for deep relationships, social interactions, and love. Let’s state this right out loud: autistic people have all the human emotions — autistics can feel and understand all emotions, autistics have empathy, autistics can display empathy, and autistic people are natural empaths.

The deeply mistaken exclusion of boys, men, and autistic people from the world of fully realized empathy tells us that the study of empathy is a very active and tumultuous (and, in some cases, very backward) undertaking. Clearly, the story of empathy is still being written.

There is yet another category of humans who are excluded from the realm of empathy; these people are variously called psychopaths, sociopaths (though this term is considered dated), narcissists, borderlines, or antisocial personalities. There is a great deal of interplay among these definitions, and diagnostic defining and redefining empathy criteria shift (as do the diagnostic titles). However, each condition includes assumptions of a pathological lack of empathy. As a survivor of predatory abuse (I’ll explain what I mean by that, gently, at the end of this chapter), I’ve had a lifelong interest in the dark side of human nature: of criminals and victims, abusers and manipulators, and our many shifting conceptualizations of human evil. Right now, one approach is to attribute all human evil to a lack of empathy, but I find that explanation to be too pat and too simplistic. I’m also very concerned sociopolitically about the fact that early research on psychopathy was conducted on imprisoned people, who are a socially created category rather than a truly different type of person. Although there are certainly people who victimize others intentionally, attributing this abusive and predatory tendency merely to a lack of empathy displays an incomplete understanding of empathy, emotions, the nature of conflict, a sociologically grounded approach to crime and social control methods, and the many ways in which empathy development in early childhood can go awry.

As we move into a deeper study of empathy, beginning with a short history of the concept, we’ll revisit abusers and predatory people not as ominously inhuman specimens with terrifying empathy deficits, but rather in a more empathic way altogether.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren, published by Sounds True, 2013.

Listen to McLaren speak on empathy at the 2015 Bioneers Conference on Soundcloud.

Robin Wall Kimmerer: ‘Take What Is Given to You’

What happened to the world I knew?

Robin Kimmerer, Potawatomi Indigenous ecologist, author, and professor, asks this question as she ponders the fleeting existence of our sister species—species such as the passenger pigeon, who became extinct a century ago. She asks this question as she tells the stories of Native American displacement, which forever changed the lives of her ancestors. And she asks this question as she bears witness to global climate change, the disturbance of natural habitats, and the destruction of native lands.

In her presentation at the 2014 Bioneers Conference, Kimmerer brings to life the heartbreak inherent in the commoditization of nature and human development without reverence for Mother Earth. Listen to her story by watching the video below or reading the transcript that follows.

I want to say at the outset that I will not tell you anything today that you don’t already know, but we forget, we human people … our elders have told us that our job is to remember. To remember. That’s where the stories come in, because once upon a time, the skies over the Potawatomi homelands carried flocks of birds so vast they darkened the sky. They could take days to pass by overhead; flocks so large that their collective weight in roosting broke off the limbs of trees.

It was 100 years ago this fall on September 1, 1914, that the last passenger pigeon passed from this Earth. She was known as Martha, and she lived all alone in the Cincinnati Zoo. In this time of accelerating species loss, this centennial commemoration of her death has really weighed very heavily on my shoulders. So I dedicate this talk today to her.

I was surprised to find that while I knew a fair bit about the extinction of the passenger pigeon, I knew relatively little of their lives. So I started reading. I read about their communal nesting, all wing to wing, the way they cherish their single egg, how they shape the forest with their feasting on oaks, and how they came like a distant wind and settled by the thousands to roost, conversing with one another — mothers, children, relatives of all kinds — in the voices which linger in the name that our people bestowed upon them. We called them “omimi.

I was also fascinated to learn about how the lives of omimi intercepted with the lives of my Potawatomi ancestors … how many of our people understood the great flocks as flocks of departed souls, and how today we wear bird clan regalia of red and blue in their honor. And that one of the early chroniclers of the abundance of omimi was none other than Simon Pokagon, a Potawatomi leader, who described them, as it was proverbial among our fathers, that if the great spirit in his wisdom could have created a more elegant bird in plumage, form and movement, he never did. Among Simon Pokagon’s people up there on the St. Joseph River was a leader who had a daughter named Shinoda, “the wind blowing through,” and she was my great, great, many greats grandmother.

Like omimi, they moved about the landscape together too, making their lives in the oak forest where they, too, feasted on acorns, set their lodges in communal circles, and relatives of all kinds, wing to wing, cherishing their single offspring. They gathered around the fire at night to tell stories.

But someone else wanted those forests for farms, and the birds became a threat to the crops. And so, 1838 was a year in which passenger pigeons were killed by the thousands in traps, with shotguns, in nests, packed in salt and sent by trainloads back to the East. The birds became fewer, and so our people became fewer.

Our Potawatomi people were canoe people. Our lodges were built on cold, blue lakes under the birches and the pines, lakes that rang with the voices of loons. Our Potawatomi people were canoe people until they made us walk, until someone else wanted that forest, and we were marched away at gunpoint from all that we knew … marched from Michigan to Kansas in what became known as the Trail of Death. I imagine my grandma Shinoda’s hand just trailing over her beloved medicine plants as she walked away from them, saying a silent farewell to maples.

I was also fascinated to learn about how the lives of omimi intercepted with the lives of my Potawatomi ancestors … how many of our people understood the great flocks as flocks of departed souls, and how today we wear bird clan regalia of red and blue in their honor. And that one of the early chroniclers of the abundance of omimi was none other than Simon Pokagon, a Potawatomi leader, who described them, as it was proverbial among our fathers, that if the great spirit in his wisdom could have created a more elegant bird in plumage, form and movement, he never did. Among Simon Pokagon’s people up there on the St. Joseph River was a leader who had a daughter named Shinoda, “the wind blowing through,” and she was my great, great, many greats grandmother.

Like omimi, they moved about the landscape together too, making their lives in the oak forest where they, too, feasted on acorns, set their lodges in communal circles, and relatives of all kinds, wing to wing, cherishing their single offspring. They gathered around the fire at night to tell stories.

But someone else wanted those forests for farms, and the birds became a threat to the crops. And so, 1838 was a year in which passenger pigeons were killed by the thousands in traps, with shotguns, in nests, packed in salt and sent by trainloads back to the East. The birds became fewer, and so our people became fewer.

Our Potawatomi people were canoe people. Our lodges were built on cold, blue lakes under the birches and the pines, lakes that rang with the voices of loons. Our Potawatomi people were canoe people until they made us walk, until someone else wanted that forest, and we were marched away at gunpoint from all that we knew … marched from Michigan to Kansas in what became known as the Trail of Death. I imagine my grandma, Shinoda’s hand just trailing over her beloved medicine plants as she walked away from them, saying a silent farewell to maples.

We should ask them about climate change. In a single season, they lived it. What is it like to exchange a cool, lush forest for a hot, dusty grassland? Lakes for dry riverbeds? Baskets of wild rice for sacks of weevily flour? Loons for — well, there is no replacement for loons.

When I found the photograph of Martha, I felt in her gaze a lament. How could something so beautiful, so ancient, so prolific simply vanish? What happened to the sound of their wings and where did everybody go? What happened to the world I knew?

And you know what? Every time I looked at that photograph, I felt my great grandmother’s voice tugging at my sleeve. Born on the shores of Lake Michigan and buried on the Kansas prairie, she probably said it too. How could something so beautiful, so ancient, so prolific just go away? What happened to the world I used to know?

Climate change is a major driver of species extinction. On average, we lose 200 species every day. Every day. Shouldn’t we be looking over our shoulder and saying goodbye as well? Because the stories of our people and the stories of omimi converge, for both were swept away by the same wind, and we know what happens when two winds, two weather fronts collide—great turbulence and often suffering for the ones below. Two winds, two worldviews, met on this continent … worldviews which color our relations with the living land, which shape our answer to the question of: What does land mean? A worldview in which land was understood as sacred, as our sustainer, our pharmacy, our identity, our home, our library, the place where we play out our moral responsibility in return for our very lives, peopled with our non-human relatives.

This is a way of being in which the tar sands are unthinkable. This view of the Earth suddenly encountered another view, a kind of climate change in values. The whole notion of land as a set of relationships and moral responsibilities was replaced by the notion of land as rights, rights to land as property, and what our people called the gifts of the land suddenly became natural resources, ecosystem services and capital. Nature as family became nature as machine, and our non-human relatives, our teachers, became mere objects for consumption. This is a way of being that invites us to the tar sands.

This is the same question that has us teetering on the precipice of unparalleled extinction and climate chaos. Is the land a source of belongings or a source of belonging?

You should know that the story of Martha and my grandmother, Shinoda, are foretold in the Anishinaabe teachings, the people of the Seventh Fire. It’s an ancient teaching which could not be more urgent, for unlike our sister species, omimi, we are still here—with teachings that enable survival and resilience, teachings that the Earth asks for today.

In the teachings of the Seventh Fire are the history of our people, and I’ll share just a tiny fragment of it today, each fire refers to an era in the history of our people. It’s the story of our origins, our migration, and of our great teachers who warned of the changes that were to come.

The teachings told about a time when the people would become separated from their homelands and from each other, forbidden by law to practice our religions, speak our own languages. A whole way of knowing was threatened with extinction. It was said that there would come a time when you could no longer dip your cup into a stream and drink, when the air would become too thick to breathe, and when even the plants and animals will begin to turn their faces away from us. This, too, we know has come to pass.

But it’s a story of hope as well, because the Seventh Fire teachings spoke of a time when all of the world’s people would come to a fork in the road and stand there together with a choice to make. In my imagination, one path is soft and green, all grassy and spangled with dew and you want to walk barefoot there. But the other path is burnt, and it’s black and it’s all cinders; it would cut your feet. Prophecy has become history, for at this time when the world as we know it hangs in the balance, we know we are at that crossroads.

The prophecies of the Seventh Fire tell us that if we want to choose that green path, we first have to turn back along the path that our ancestors left for us and pick up the teachings that they gave us, to retrieve the language, the ceremonies, our spiritual ways, and only when we have picked those up can we then walk that green path to light the eighth and final fire.

We are the people of the seventh fire, marching toward the lighting of that eighth fire, all of us. It is the people—the wisdom that we reclaim—that will allow us to renew the world. The indigenous peoples and the newcomers, we are all part of this story.

If I could choose just a single element of the traditional teachings that we’re called to pick up, it would be the teachings of the honorable harvest, which were taught us by the plants who give us everything that we need. We are destined by our biology to take lives in order to sustain our own, aren’t we? And that utter dependence upon the lives of others sets up certain responsibilities which are simultaneously practical and spiritual. This is known as the honorable harvest. They are rules of sorts for our taking. It’s a covenant of reciprocity between humans and the living world, a very sophisticated, ethical protocol. One of the first steps of the honorable harvest is to understand that the lives that we are taking are the lives of generous beings, of sovereign beings, and in order to accept their gift, we owe them at least our attention. To care for them we must know what they need. And at the very minimum, we should know their names, especially this one, whose name is “heal all.”

It’s a sign of respect and connection to learn the name of someone else, a sign of disrespect to ignore it. Yet the average American can name over 100 corporate logos and 10 plants. Is it a surprise that we have accepted a political system that grants personhood to corporations and no status at all for wild rice and redwoods? Learning the names of plants and animals is a powerful act of support for them. When we learn their names and their gifts it opens the door to reciprocity.

These guidelines of the honorable harvest were taught to me by generous teachers as I was learning to pick medicines and berries. But it also applies to every single exchange between the people and the Earth, from catching a fish to fossil fuel extraction. The protocols for the honorable harvest are not really written down, but if they were it would look something like this: When you get to the woods, you don’t just start grabbing everything in sight. We’re taught never to take the first plant that you see, and that means you’ll never take the last. This is a prescription with inherent conservation value.

Then, if we encounter another plant, we ask permission. I’ve always been taught to address that plant, to introduce myself and tell it what it is that I have come for. If you’re going to take a life, you have to be personally accountable for it. I know there are places where if you talk to a plant, they’d think you were crazy. But in our way, it’s just good manners.

It’s a two-way conversation, though. If you’re going to ask, you have to listen for the answer. You can listen in different ways—pragmatically, intuitively. Look around. See whether those plants have enough to share. And if the answer is no, you go home, for we remember that they don’t belong to us, and taking without permission is also known as stealing. If you are granted permission, then take only what you need and not a bit more. This is a difficult step in our materialist society, where the difference between wants and needs are so blurred.

The honorable harvest counsels that we also take in such a way that does the least harm, and in a way that benefits the growth of the plant. Don’t use a shovel when a digging stick will do. Use everything that you take. It’s disrespectful of the life that’s given to waste it, and we have forgotten that the easiest way to have everything that you need is not to waste what you have.

Be grateful. Give thanks for what you have received. And in an economy which urges us to always want more, the practice of gratitude is truly a radical act. Thankfulness for all that is given makes you feel rich beyond measure. It reminds us that we’re just one member of the democracy of species; it reminds us that the Earth does not belong to us.

The next tenet of the honorable harvest is to share it with others, human and non. The Earth has shared generously with us, so we have to model that behavior in return. And a culture of sharing, we know, is a culture of resilience.

Reciprocate the gift. We know that in order for balance to occur, we can never take without also giving back. Plant gatherers often leave a spiritual gift behind, but it can also be a material gift—weeding, caretaking, spreading seeds, helping those plants to flourish. We give songs. We give ceremony. We give our respect. We give fertilizer. The ways to reciprocate are many.

What if the precepts of the honorable harvest was the law of the land? What would the world look like if a developer poised to convert a meadow into a shopping mall had to ask the permission first of the goldenrod and the meadowlarks, and had to abide by the answer?

Can we extend the concept of the honorable harvest to address the causes of climate change and extreme energy development? You bet we can. I’m told that there is a teaching even older than take only what you need, and it is take only that which is given to you. It’s a pretty challenging idea to be able to discern what it is that is given as opposed to what we simply take, and I’ve really wrestled with this idea. I’m not sure I fully understand it yet, but I’m pretty sure that coal from mountaintop removal is not given to us. Tar sands oil is not given to us. But the sun’s energy is given to us everyday. Every day the wind blows. The surf rolls. They’re given to us freely and without limit. Had we taken only that which was given to us, perhaps today we would not be afraid of our own atmosphere.

For a time my research as an ecologist was in the field of restoration ecology, but I came to understand that it’s not the land which is broken, it’s our relationship to land which is broken. Our work must be to heal that relationship. The honorable harvest is a small part of that healing.

We need acts of restoration for polluted lakes, for degraded lands, yes, but we also need a restoration of our own honor, honor in the way that we live, so that when we walk through the world we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of our plants and animal relatives. We can look them in the eye in return. And the reward is not just a feel-good sense. It may save us all.

Our challenge as scientists, as citizens, as leaders, as designers, planners and dancers, as students and artists and dreamers in the Bioneers community is to ask how can the effect of the honorable harvest be realized on the land and in our communities? For if we had adopted the wisdom of the honorable harvest instead of marching it away to whither in the dry lands of Kansas, we might this very spring have looked up to see flocks of omimi flying overhead in what Aldo Leopold called a living wind.

If we sustain the ones who sustain us, the Earth will last forever.

Lunch with Paul at the Apocalypse Café

By Mary Ellen Hannibal

The café is actually called Bytes, and it’s Paul Ehrlich’s lunchtime hangout. As it abuts Stanford’s Electrical Engineering Department, most of the crowd exudes practical optimism. Not so much Dr.
Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies and president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford. A persistent mystery concerns his good cheer, pretty much unfailing even as he describes the soon to be scorched earth. A favorite topic: the imminent collapse of industrial civilization.

“We aren’t going to be able to build it all back up again either,” he told me one day.

“Don’t candy coat it Paul.”

“’My plan is to avoid the whole thing by dying,” he said (he is 86). “We’ve already depleted all the precious metals and so forth that are easy to get, close to the surface,” he went on. “So if we want to
remake computers, we aren’t going to be able to get to the necessary materials without electricity for hydraulic drills. Of course all of that will be down.”

Ehrlich has specialized in dire since he first attained popular notoriety in the 1970s, publishing The Population Bomb with his wife Anne Ehrlich. The book propelled him into a limelight that rarely shines on scientists. Back in the day, he appeared on the Johnny Carson Show scores of times. Handsome, hyper-articulate, with a fast hearty laugh, the young Ehrlich was a cross between Carl Sagan and James Bond.

I met Ehrlich about four years ago while researching my book Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction. One of the book’s threads is an investigation into some of the reasons why plants and animals are disappearing at a rate and magnitude equaling that which took out the dinosaurs. One of Ehrlich’s most lasting contributions to science concerns co-evolution. The concept describes how species evolve in relationship with other species – and these relationships are being torn asunder by climate change and habitat loss, leading to accelerated extinctions.

Co-evolution was intuited by Darwin but not proved by him. With botanist Peter Raven, today president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden and an author of the Pope’s encyclical on climate change, Ehrlich comprehensively documented the step-wise process by which species develop traits in tandem.

Working with plants and butterflies, Raven and Ehrlich showed that as plants develop defense mechanisms against predation by butterfly larvae, the butterflies develop ways to survive them.

Raven and Ehrlich were able to quantify the process of co-evolution because for hundreds of years, avid butterfly collectors have documented the relationship between species and their host plants. “People raised butterflies because they wanted perfect specimens. When they figured out the host plant, they sent in a little notice or paper to a journal, and now we have this unparalleled database,” Ehrlich told me.

Similarly large databases have essentially been accumulated by amateur naturalists – citizen scientists – who have also documented birds, weather, and phenology, or the timing of natural events including spring bloom times, also for hundreds of years. Ecological relationships are discernable in the resulting patterns, and so is change over time. Today’s citizen science is turbo-charged by computing power, satellite technology, statistical analysis, and smartphones. Millions of observations made every year by citizen scientists contributing to eBird and iNaturalist (check it out – they’re free!). Right now they are helping to explode our understanding of how nature works, and what we need to do to protect it.

“One of the things were doing with climate change is tearing apart long-evolved co-evolutionary relationships and doing it at a rate which is higher than we have seen over most of history, but not
entirely,” Ehrlich told me. “Things have happened fast before. One of the problems though is that we’re having this extremely rapid evolutionary change for the first time since we’ve had an over- populated, resource-short civilization trying to do it.”

Ehrlich has been among a handful of scientists pointing out that absolute extinction rates are bad enough, but we are confronting an even worse loss of overall biodiversity – we are losing vast numbers of bodies of plants and animals, even those that are not yet in danger of completely blinking out. In just the past 40 years, wild species populations have shrunk in alarming numbers: 39% of marine wildlife and 76% of freshwater wildlife are gone. In 1970, a billion more birds flew over the Earth than do so today.

“We’re going to have to get into triage,” Ehrlich told me.

“Like bringing back the wooly mammoth and the passenger pigeon?” I asked. Stuart Brand, who spearheads an effort called “de-extinction,” was once a student of Ehrlich’s.

“Smart guy,” Ehrlich said. “Completely nuts.”

“They’re pretty far along with some aspects of it,” I said.

“No they’re not. They’re not even started.”

The professor of population biology patiently explained. “If you’re going to reestablish the passenger pigeon, first of all, you’d have to recreate about a million of them because they are predator saturators. They went extinct when there were still many thousands of them left. The way they survived was by having gigantic breeding colonies in random places so that predators could never catch up with them. Additionally, their biggest food sources were acorns from the great forests of northern and eastern North America – most of those are gone now, fragmented, and they don’t produce enough food for passenger pigeons anymore.”

“What are we going to do?”

“You know I never like to give my opinion on anything.”

“That’s why you’re a terrible interview.”

“We have to assign an intrinsic value to nature, show why it’s important to human beings. We can’t avoid the problem of biodiversity loss and just hope we can find some sort of palliative. If people tell themselves we don’t have to worry about extinction because we can bring animals back, that’s moral hazard. The solution to our problems is to rescale society. We have to lower our population and our rate of consumption, particularly among the rich.”

“But our instincts tell us to get more and more, to build our coffers and increase our genetic success.”

“Do you have more than 30 children?”

“Two.”

“The instinct we know is engraved in our DNA tells us to out-reproduce our buddies. So you are fighting your instincts and doing a good job of it, because your physical capacity would be about 30 births. You and millions of other women have suppressed your instincts using pills, condoms, and so on. In ancient
Egypt women used crocodile dung suppositories as contraceptives.”

“How effective was that?”

“I’ve tried to get some graduate students to study this, but they refused.”

“So if it isn’t instinctive, then we aren’t we stopping ourselves from destroying our own world?”

“If I throw a rock at your head, you do a whole series of differential equations in one millionth of a second and duck. You see the rock coming at you against a constant background. Our constant background is changing gradually and we don’t see it. Gradual accumulation of greenhouse gases, nuclear weapons, toxins, population. We aren’t designed to see and respond to the ethereal.”

But today, we have a way to visualize and so confront the ethereal – or at least patterns in nature that are hard to discern in the short time frame. Raven and Ehrlich discerned co-evolution from historical citizen science records of butterflies – other scientists have used the same data to show how butterflies are changing their distributions in response to temperature and precipitation change brought on by greenhouse gas warming. When we see where the butterflies are moving, we can target our conservation efforts to help them adapt. Citizen science is a tool for grappling with change – hopefully, before it hits us in the head.

 

Mary Ellen Hannibal is a long-time journalist living in San Francisco who has focused on natural history and literature. Her most recent book, Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction, was one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s 2016’s best non-fiction books. She is a recipient of the National Association of Science Writer’s Science and Society Award.