Alaskan Native Looks to Tradition to Deal with Contemporary Problems

Alaskan Native Looks to Tradition to Deal with Contemporary Problems

Deenaalee Hodgdon (who uses the pronouns they/them) is a Native Alaskan and the Executive Director of On The Land, an Indigenous media and consulting business that elevates the voices of Indigenous Peoples. Hodgdon has seven years of commercial fishing experience and has been a raft and cultural guide in Denali National Park.

They work with the Arctic Athabaskan Council and represent the AAC on the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation among the Arctic states, Arctic Indigenous Peoples and other Arctic inhabitants.

Deenaalee also works on developing sustainable management of salmon fisheries, and building just economies in Bristol Bay, along the Yukon, and in the larger Arctic region. They are the co-founder and co-director of The Smokehouse Collective, an Alaskan mutual aid network that works to build the resilience of Native people.

ARTY MANGAN: You are an experienced fisher, do you fish on rivers and at sea?

DEENAALEE HODGDON: When I was younger, I mostly fished on the river. In the last six years, I’ve been fishing out in Bristol Bay. I fish in Nushagak Bay, which people also call a river too, but its mouth is so massive that you could be in the middle of the river and it feels like you’re kind of on the ocean or open water.

ARTY: What is it like to spend so much time on the water? How does it affect you emotionally and spiritually?

DEENAALEE: I like that question because you led in with how you both fish on the river and on the open water, and I’ve been a raft guide and I also used to row crew. I come from a people who developed the original kayaks. For me, being on the water is like a process in trust and letting go of control because the water is going to do whatever the water wants to do. There are things a person can do to make themselves safer, like knowing how to read the water, knowing how to read the weather, and having as much knowledge and tools as you can in order to survive while being on the water. But at the end of the day, the water’s going to do what the water wants to do.

When I’m on the water fishing, for example on the drift boats, I appreciate that time in my life because you’re out there day and night, sometimes not getting any rest when you’re fishing around the clock. You have to step up and into a place between instinct and survival skills, as well as utilizing the knowledge that you’ve gained from people who have come before you, whether they’re fishermen in the commercial industry — your captain and crew mates — or it’s ancestral knowledge that comes through your bloodline.

ARTY: South of Alaska, from British Columbia to California, most salmon fisheries are in decline. Are there rivers in Alaska where the fisheries are thriving or at least stable?

DEENAALEE: It’s been amazing to see what the tribes have done on the Columbia River in terms of bringing salmon back. It’s really heartening, and I get excited to think about the work that those tribes have been doing bringing back salmon that have been lost or whose numbers have been diminished.

In Alaska, it really depends on the stock of the species. I would say Bristol Bay is one of the last truly great safe havens for salmon in the world.

The management of the returns of salmon—while not being as good as it could be—has done a better job of ensuring that fish are returning and that the stocks are healthy. That being said, climate change science predicts that there’s going to be species that are winners and losers along the continuum of climate change. Right now, there are two species of salmon that we’re seeing that are winners in climate change in Alaska—pink salmon are thriving in Southeast Alaska and are also thriving in another area of the Arctic.

 The other is Sockeye salmon,  the main fishery for Bristol Bay,  which have been thriving for the last five years. The expected number of return of salmon has declined for this upcoming season. But it’s still higher than expected returns that I saw as a young person growing up in Bristol Bay.

Unfortunately, Chinook or king salmon, the large salmon that are the literal backbone of salmon peoples, are suffering from climate change. The Nushagak River, which flows into Bristol Bay, is one of the last strongholds of king salmon in the world, and they are currently being considered a potential stock of concern. During last year’s Alaska’s Board of Fisheries meetings, the tribes of the Nushagak River were advocating for the sockeye salmon fishery to be adjusted to protect the run of the kings, which usually will run up the river returning home first.

So, it’s a balancing act. Right now, within that entire context, we’re trying to balance the health and well-being of ecosystems and the concerns of the salmon, and halibut, and all these other fish that peoples are reliant upon, alongside an economy that has been extraction based and has been used to the abundance of large returns for the last five years, and that’s the commercial industry—the fishermen, processors, wholesale buyers and the consumers of fish at large across the world.

ARTY: What are some of the climate adaptive strategies that are being implemented in your region?

DEENAALEE: There are a lot of communities right now that are having to go through something called relocation/manage/retreat/protect in place. A lot of communities in Southwest Alaska, like the communities of Quinhagak and Kwigillingok, Noatak, and others up north are having to face questions of how do we ensure that our communities aren’t disappearing when facing things like coastal erosion, flooding, loss of sea ice, etc.

There are relocation programs that move villages from Point A to Point B. And there’s a protect-in-place program that reinforces infrastructure to make it more resilient to the stresses of climate change.

ARTY:  What do Native Alaskans have to do to build food sovereignty in the face of climate change?

DEENAALEE: In the Arctic, we are hunter/gatherer societies who are at pivot point with climate change.  We are losing ice and permafrost; the very structure of the tundra is thawing. In the context of food sovereignty,  we need to use traditional gathering spaces to have conversations about what seeds we need to be planting to nourish our soil as it changes.

Where are our old stories to guide us? The Inupiaq people have stories about when there used to be palm trees in Alaska. How do we bring those stories to the surface so that they can guide the work that we’re doing right now?

There is a future-looking orientation that I’m trying to root into with food sovereignty within the context of climate change. How long do we have and how can we build a fertile soil while doing the deep grieving work of losing our permafrost and losing our boreal forests?  And while that shift is happening, we are advocating to ensure that our people have the time and the space to go out and harvest on the land because we know that when we do not have the ability to participate in those harvests, death happens. Our communities are dying when we are not rooted in our traditional harvesting practices.

Food sovereignty for Native Alaskans is to bring that back. It is a work of transition and translation, being able to grieve and have the medicines that we need and the conversations to hold the deep work of being in advocacy spaces to ensure that we support one another to take the time to participate in those practices while we are on the frontlines.

One of the strategies that I’m looking into more is: How do we make adaptations around our food systems and our economies within those food systems, and our relationships that are needed to build a resilient, reliable, ecologically sound and responsive system? To me, that looks like being able to localize where we are getting our food. By local, it would be great if every community had community gardens and had their own co-ops, but that’s probably not going to be the case anytime soon.  

How can a region be more food secure in growing and providing for the community? Within the whole of Alaska, how can we make sure that Alaska isn’t just dependent on a three-day supply that comes from the lower 48, but that we have the transportation networks in place and food caches in place so that there is a supply and it’s accessible by community members and isn’t being run by the cash economy?

ARTY: Alaska has unique vulnerabilities in regards to climate change which require location-specific adaptations.

On the personal level, as an Indigenous, queer person, have you experienced resistance or even racism in your work, in your activism or other parts of your life?

DEENAALEE: Yes and no. Yes, we continue to face racism through the system. A lot of times, within the Board of Fisheries or the Alaska Board of Game process, our voices as Indigenous Peoples are not valued; traditional knowledge is not valued. It is starting to gain a little bit more traction, as non-Native scientists are stepping up as allies and giving a stamp of approval that what the elders are saying is validated by science.

Within this world, I’m pretty privileged. Yes, I’m Native, yes, I’m queer. However, I’m light-skinned; very tall, so I have a presence; I’m well-spoken because I’ve been trained in a Western academic institution at an Ivy League college. As soon as I say I went to Brown University, in certain situations, in certain circles, I automatically gain an ear more than, I would say, the average Native person or average BIPOC person. So I would say that I really do function within a lot of systems of privilege while carrying my identity.

I have felt the loneliness of being one of the only Native people within my radio group and my fishing group up until about two summers ago when we had a couple more Native people who were hired on in my fishing group. But advocating for subsistence and Indigenous rights within my own fishing group has been like pulling teeth; it has not been easy, and that oftentimes is because the fishermen coming to Alaska and who are excelling as fishermen have been coming here for the last 30 years and have close relationships with the region and they’re okay with maintaining the status quo. So when you pushback and say, “Hey, would you be willing to step in and change X, Y, Z in order to benefit a more vibrant ecosystem,” a lot of the time there’s pushback.

Those folks aren’t taking the time — and maybe they don’t fully care — to help to create change, because at the end of the day, they’re able to take their catch and the money from that catch and leave the state. They don’t see the bigger picture of the repercussions of their actions.

ARTY: As an activist, how do you keep your body, mind and spirit strong?

DEENAALEE: I think I’ve been labeled activist, but I don’t necessarily consider myself an activist—like I do and I don’t. I think that word has a lot of political weight to it. I just define myself as a community or tribal member who cares and is working to maintain, uphold and assert our sovereign rights, to make our lands and waters sovereign according to our original instructions.

I appreciate the question about keeping yourself balanced and centered — I’m still learning how to do that. I have recently been reminded that if you do this work and you’re not grounded and centered, you get sick. Then you’re not fully able to do the work that you are called to step up into, whether you’re being asked by people or a higher power, or whatever you want to chalk it up to.

I’ve been learning to build and maintain more of a practice around my self-care. Basic things like drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, and eating the foods from the land. That food from the land is not only vital to my physical health, but also to my spiritual, mental and emotional well-being. I can’t really process gluten very well; I can’t process dairy very well. Those are two foods that are non-native to these lands. I am thriving and I’m so much more mentally clear when I’m eating beaver, fish, moose, when I’m eating these foods that haven’t been so GMO’d that they don’t even know what they are. 

I also require a lot of sleep. That’s pretty integral to my functioning. And I have to get outside. It’s unfortunate, because the first thing that often doesn’t happen when I’m facing a lot of deadlines and need to be in a lot of meetings is taking the time to get outside. But it’s essential for me to be outside on the land and to participate in subsistence activities. I have also adopted skiing and climbing and biking, more recreational-based activities. If I’m moving my body, I’m in a good place, and that at the end of the day is the most important. I have to move my body and breathe fresh air, and if I can do that, I’m pretty well grounded.

I recently picked up my beadwork again. Keeping my hands busy is important. In the summertime I do that by picking fish and flaying and putting away the fish, or picking berries, putting away food, doing the things necessary at that time of year. But in the wintertime, it’s picking up sewing and beading or tanning and working on moose and caribou hides.

I was just thinking about how it’s time for me to start making some bone tools, because I haven’t scraped hides as much as I wanted to this winter. Those are pretty necessary.

I also do yoga and pull Tarot cards, and keep my mind active.

ARTY: I heard you use the phrase “pleasure activism.” You resisted the label of activist, but you engage in pleasure activism?

DEENAALEE: Yeah. Pleasure activism is a term that was coined by adrienne maree brown in her book titled Pleasure Activism. It’s something that resonates with me. Western Christian-based societies, like the United States, are built on religious rigidity. I was raised with some of that rigidity that denied some of the pleasures of the world like dancing and feasting and having joy and true connection. Through adrienne maree brown’s work and pleasure activism, I’ve been reintroduced and given the word “toolkit” to describe an ethic and an ethos that I would like to live by. Within the world of this work things can be so disheartening and dark. They can feel like how will we ever win against the pressures of climate change and extractive industry. It’s a constant struggle. For example, tonight, I’ll be going to another public hearing for another land grab that is happening in Alaska, in which eight million acres of land are being up for evaluation on whether or not it should be open for mineral and mining, and oil and gas leasing, or whether no action should be taken and those lands will remain with their protections. It gets tiring.

So I think there are things within life, like dancing, feasting with one another–especially around the foods that we harvest together–playing music, singing, stretching, really playing. I started playing volleyball again, which is one of my first loves in life, and it’s integral to keeping that balance. I think in order to do good, we have to feel good, otherwise, we’re just reifying the systems that keep us feeling bogged down.

I’ve done work when I’ve been depressed. I’ve done work when I’ve been angry. I’ve done work when I’ve been sad. Was it my best work? Was it work that I think connected with people in an authentic way? No, not at all. Was I “doing the work?” Yeah. Did it make a difference? Maybe. Was it filled with the love and longevity that it could have been if I was in a good place—not saying I have to be in a good place all the time—but no.

That’s why I am turning away from policy work because in the policy world you have to go through a long and cumbersome process that often doesn’t take time to connect with people before putting together policies that impact their everyday lives.

I’m trying to re-root back into digging my hands in the earth because I love to play in dirt. As a little kid, I dug holes in the garden and made mud pies, and played on the banks of the river. I was more action-oriented. Being in my body — whether that’s fishing or gardening or playing volleyball – enables me to connect with people in my community. Those are the things that are going to weave together our connections in a much more pleasurable way so that we can continue doing the work in the long run.

Urban Farming, Community Care and Self-Love

ab banks, an urban farmer whose work is grounded in agroecology, wellness and Black food autonomy, is the Garden Lead for People’s Programs at the Oxford Tract at UC Berkley, which grows food and seeks to advance food autonomy for Oakland’s Black population and to ensure that healthy produce is available to under-resourced community members, including the unhoused. Peoples Program is a Black-led organization founded by Black youth to empower the community of Oakland.

Previously a Just Leader Fellow with the Cooperative Food Empowerment Collective, which seeks to build a cooperative food economy powered by the visionary leadership of Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, ab also started the (Free) Community Health Clinic, and is the Agroecology and Wellness Coordinator at the Berkeley Food Institute. Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed ab banks.

ARTY MANGAN: One of the many positions you hold is the Garden Lead for the People’s Programs in the East Bay. Can you describe the community that you work in and how the program serves that community?

ab banks: Initially a friend of mine developed an urban garden on a quarter-acre of abandoned land on Campbell Street in West Oakland, but we recently transitioned off that land to the UC Berkeley Oxford Tract. The produce that was harvested from that land in West Oakland went to local families. We started an informal CSA grocery program for local families that has expanded and now serves about 150 people. We don’t actually farm in that neighborhood anymore because­ the land is going to be developed with housing, but we still serve the same people that we started the CSA with.

ARTY: That is a big challenge of urban farming. I’ve heard many times from urban farmers who had established farms and gardens but eventually had to move because the city or the landlord wanted to develop the land. It makes it challenging. Michael Ableman, an urban farmer I know well, works in a very underserved part of Vancouver, BC, and most of his workers are unhoused people who have a variety different challenges in their lives. He farms in the parking lot of a major sports arena and knows that eventually he may have to move, so he created a one-acre orchard composed of 30 to 40 different varieties of fruit trees, but all of the trees are planted in 4X4 planter boxes, three-feet high, so, if he has to move, he can just forklift them onto a truck and move them to a different location. Michael wrote a book about the project: Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs and Hope on the Urban Frontier

ab: That’s amazing!

ARTY: You also started the Free Community Health Clinic. Can you tell me a little bit about how that started?

ab:  in 2017, when People’s Programs started passing out food, it was evident even then that there was a big need for some type of public medical care. People would come to pick up food and some of them would have injuries and wounds and ask us for Ibuprofen and things like that. We had started with providing food and then extended it to passing out clothes, but we felt the next obvious step was to provide free accessible healthcare, so we raised funds and were able to buy a mobile clinic—a clinic on wheels. Now, along with hot meals, we provide access to free healthcare, as much as you can do in a mobile clinic. And for anything that we can’t do, we send people to a referral to get the medical care they need.

That’s how it started, and it’s still expanding. We want to be a resource for what the community needs; we don’t want to limit it. If another need is asked for and we can help, we’re going to build a program around that and offer that as well. When I think about the populations I serve, these folks have the answers; they know exactly what they need. They’re not in need of a savior to come in and do all these things for them. What people need is a viable local economy, self-determination, and the ability to set their own destiny, whatever that means for them. When I talk to students of color, they know exactly what they want to do and need—they just need the resources to get it done.

Photo by Marco Alexander

Julius Nyerere, a highly influential former president of Tanzania, wrote a book called Ujamaa about how important it is for farms to be in the hands of local farmers who care for the people around them and know what they want to eat, and how that creates a sense of community. When we started the farm in West Oakland, it drew in the community members around us, and they gave us feedback. When your food isn’t local, you can’t make decisions about how food is grown. Urban farms are important because city folk need food and should have autonomy over the food that’s grown, and they should know how to grow their own food.

ARTY: How does farming in the city affect the urban ecosystem?

ab: It totally changes ecosystems, and in my opinion, for the better. It just breaks up cement jungles, as a lot of folks call them, and creates more green spaces. There’s a lot of research about what green spaces do for mental, spiritual, and emotional health, and there is a biological benefit when people eat food that is grown where they’re from. A while back, I spoke to a nutritionist about the importance of eating eat food from your culture and eating locally grown food. If you don’t eat local food, you won’t have the correct microbiome to fight diseases that are prevalent where you live.

ARTY: That’s consistent with the Macrobiotic principle of eating food in season. Locally-grown food is food in season for that locale, so, for example, no pineapples in December…

ab: Exactly right.

ARTY: Let’s talk about your work as a Just Leader Fellow with Cooperative Food Empowerment Collective. Is your breakfast program inspired by the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program in the ‘60s?

ab: Yes. Definitely. What we do is called “Decolonization Programs and Projects.” We think of it as being an evolution from a survival program. Everything that we’re doing is an attempt at decolonization. We pass out food because people are starving. We give free access to healthcare because people need healthcare. Some people with diabetes have wounds that escalate to infection and even amputation because they don’t have basic healthcare.  We provide basic needs directly in line with how the Panthers rolled.

They realized that a crucially important population in their community was students. Schoolchildren weren’t getting fed adequately, so when they went to school, they couldn’t focus because they were hungry. To a lot of people, it always feels like a complex issue—we need to get the funding, etc. No. We’re just going to go out there and set up tables and feed the children. Obviously, it takes a lot of logistical work to get that done, but if it needs to get done, we’re going to do it. That’s kind of the fervor that we carry when we’re building programs and projects.

We feed 300 to 400 people every other Sunday. During COVID, we went out three times a week because folks weren’t getting fed by anyone. Many in the homeless community depend on people leaving a restaurant giving them a dollar or leftovers. During COVID, that wasn’t happening, so we increased the number of days we provided food. We serve people in West Oakland near St. Vincent’s Shelter, and we also have a driving crew of folks who serve around 15 to 20 encampments, and that’s 300 to 400 meals.

ARTY: When the Panthers were feeding kids in Oakland and other cities in the ‘60s, they were harassed, jailed, even murdered by the FBI. How is your program perceived by those in power?

ab: I’d say we haven’t really been perceived by the government. In my opinion, if folks really cared about what we were doing, then we would have an endless supply of money, but we never see funds at all. I haven’t really experienced any harassment. There have been times, of course, where people have said, “Oh, you need a food handler’s permit” or have tried to put obstacles in our way, but it’s only made us better because if we get a critique, we’re going to definitely shift our feet and make sure we’re grounded and do the right thing in how our operations roll.

ARTY: Have the socioeconomic conditions improved in communities of color in recent years?

ab: No. It’s getting worse. Homelessness is up 22 percent since 2017. If people say it’s getting better, I point them in the direction of the homelessness rate. It’s clear in the data, and it’s obvious in the streets. The reason we focus on homelessness is because this is the community that we feel encompasses all the communities of the Bay Area. No one’s exempt from being homeless in terms of race and class. We see all different types of people, but still, the homeless in our region are majority Black.

ARTY: I ‘d like to ask you about what motivates you, what your vision is. I listened to an interview with you on KQED, and you said you’re creating sovereignty from an intersectional standpoint, pushing folks who are last to go first, and letting love lead the way.

ab: What motivates me is that I want all the people I know to have the ability to lead their own destiny and to be sovereign. I think folks often shy away from understanding that because it seems like a lot of work to be in charge of your own destiny, but I have 100 percent faith in the community that I serve, that one day we’ll be able to achieve our own liberation and be completely autonomous over our lives. That’s my motivation.

Just thinking about the work that we do, it’s really sad. It’s really sad to see people starve. It’s really sad to see people deal with substance abuse when there are real solutions that I don’t feel are taken seriously by the people in power. I want to continue to draw a line of demarcation and say, ‘Hey, listen, there’s stuff that can be done, and if the government can’t figure it out, let the people figure it out.’ Obviously, the people who are closest to the problems are closest to the solutions as well, so let those folks lead the way.

I’m motivated by the history and legacy that has been left behind for me by the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and all the African anti-colonial freedom fighters—Thomas Sankara, Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, etc. All of those people inspire me, and all the revolutionary movements that have happened inspire me to keep going and to keep understanding and not backing down from what I know to be true, which is we are our own liberators.

ARTY: On that KQED interview, you also talked about radical forms of self-love. How do you reconcile the concept self-love with working to overcome injustice and suffering in your community?

ab: When there are people on the streets starving or people in your family struggling with substance abuse, that must be addressed first in order to actually feel that there’s promise in the future. If you want to develop love for yourself, there’s work that needs to be done to make sure your community is safe and good. That’s partly why I do the work at People’s Programs

I could shut myself off from the community, get a massage, do some yoga, go to the gym—which are all things that I do—but I need to help feed my people, read to gain knowledge, and talk to people and see if I can give them what they need, because without that, I’m going to feel the pain of the exploitation of capitalism without having any answer for it.

ARTY: As a frontline activist covering many bases in terms of serving community needs, there’s a high risk of burnout. You mentioned how you take care of yourself, but do you have any recommendations, things you’ve learned about how to avoid burnout?

ab: I think it’s important to analyze particularly where the burnout is coming from. I can feel when it’s happening before I get tired. When I start to feel burnout, I feel a dissociation, but I also have a slight pushback on this. There are people who don’t do any direct service work but still experience burnout. It’s an emotional feeling because of all of the really messed up, nasty stuff going on in the world. My answer to that is what I was alluding to in the last question. When you’re doing all of these self-care things, but they’re not working, it’s often because you are part of a broken system, and you’re feeling hopelessness because you’re trying to fix something on the personal level without actually contributing to a wider solution.

We’re experiencing pain and grief for something we feel helpless in, but actually there’s a bunch of things you can do to contribute to the revolution, so that’s my first thing. The second thing is for people who are on the frontlines doing direct-action work—my advice is build a team, a solid team of folks you can be honest with, who can hold you accountable, who know your triggers and know what’s going on in your life. It’s not as simple as just saying, ‘Oh, you should journal,’ or ‘Oh, you should go for a walk.’ I think it’s much more complex than that. The only real advice I have is to have comrades and community members who are in your corner and are keeping it real with you; keeping it real when you mess up; keeping it real when you’re doing good; keeping it real when you need a break. If you don’t have people on your side, and you’re trying to do everything you can for the revolution all at once, then you are going to burn out.

Doing this work is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. You have to able to delegate something to a comrade and say: ‘Hey, listen, I can’t do this right now.’ And they trust you because they know how much you are putting into the work. It might seem from the outside that I’m doing a lot, but I’m doing exactly what I’m passionate about, and I’m not doing more than I’m supposed to be doing. I’m delegating when I need to. I help run the clinic and the farm, but I don’t run the clinic or the farm by myself. I do what I can, and I’m honest and truthful about what I can do. And I can prevent my comrades’ burnouts by stepping in when they need a break, but if we’re all kind of dragging our feet, then we’re all going to burn out.

I was telling one of my elders how tired I was. I had to work the farm that day and the clinic the next day. I was working seven days a week. She looked at me and said, “ab, you’re not going to fuck up the revolution with one day of rest.” It’s important to note that when you’re going real hard, you need to listen, so you know when you’re going past your limit and you need a break, and you know when you need to keep going.

ARTY: You cited that expression: “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” It usually takes a long time to understand that. It’s usually folks who are older than you who figure that out, and, too often, by the time they figure it out, they have seriously burnt out. Everything is so urgent right now, and yet this is a multi-generational struggle. Yes, we’re looking for as much success and progress as possible right away, but at the same time, we’re trying to build something solid that other folks can stand on and build on in the future.

The Farmlink Project: Reducing Hunger by Reducing Food Waste

When the Covid pandemic hit and disrupted so many of our social and economic systems, a crisis within the crisis exploded: the number of people who were facing hunger grew catastrophically. News footage showed miles-long lines of cars at food banks with many of those people being turned away due to a lack of food. At the same time, quite a few farmers were dumping their crops because many of their major markets, such as restaurants, were closed.

The urgency of the crisis caused a small group of college students in Southern California to feel they had to do something. Their initial, modest goal of providing food to one local food bank grew astonishingly quickly, and became the Farmlink Project, a national operation redirecting millions of pounds of food to feed the hungry while highlighting the food system’s twin failures of food insecurity and food waste.

One of the students who co-founded the project is Owen Dubek, now its Creative Director. An avid surfer and documentary filmmaker, Owen captured the whole story in his inspiring, award-winning film: Abundance: The Farmlink Story.

In this interview, Arty Mangan of Bioneers discussed this extraordinary initiative with Owen and with Farmlink’s Director of Sustainability, Julia DeSantis.  

ARTY MANGAN: The pandemic was obviously the crisis that awakened your activism and the activism of your colleagues, but what were the specific conditions that inspired you to act?

OWEN DUBEK: In the beginning of the pandemic, we were seeing billions of pounds of food going to waste on farms. It became front and center as a national news story. Right in our backyard in L.A. at some of the food banks near us, we were seeing mile-long lines. At the same time, many of us were being sent home from college. I had just graduated and had my first job, but work had really slowed down, and a few of us asked ourselves: What can we do to help?

 So, we talked to the West Side Food Bank and a few others in our area. They said that they needed more food. With a few friends, we scraped a couple hundred dollars together, rented a U-Haul truck, and drove our first truckload of food from a local farm to that food bank. We didn’t set out to build an organization; we were just looking for one small way we could help. Julia joined us a little bit later, but during the pandemic she was working on an initiative that was getting groceries to older folks in her area. It turned out that there was a huge wave of young people who were privileged enough to have the time to volunteer who had the spirit and motivation to make a difference.

ARTY: What did you learn from taking action in that crisis? And what is your message to young people who are discouraged by the world’s seemingly intractable problems and feel powerless to address them?

OWEN: We’ve shown the film in a bunch of schools. That’s what I’m focused on because I think a lot of people, especially younger people, are a little cynical about the future and don’t know how to take the first step. They don’t know where to start. What we’ve learned is that— and it sounds like a cliché—but the power of collective hope is the reason that Farmlink exists. It’s the reason we were able to move 100 million pounds of food. Hundreds of people went to work every day doing the most that they could do to get as much food on people’s tables as possible. There was a deep sense of hope that drove people to drop out of school, quit their jobs and give it everything they had to get food to communities that were facing hunger.

There’s an interesting angle here too. Looking at the analytics of our videos that we put online, when we dwell on the negative, when we dwell on the crisis and emphasize how bad things are, we see people click away within five to seven seconds. They do not watch the video, and they’re definitely not inspired to take action. But when we root it in hope and highlight faces of young people who are hopeful, it really inspires people to do something about it. I think people are sick of hearing how negative things are, and they’re looking for ways to take action. 

JULIA DeSANTIS: I studied Climate Communications at school because I went through that emotional cycle, when you learn about a problem and then you’re either overcome with paralysis or you develop a deep connection to the issue. I wanted to learn how to find a way to activate positive impulses, to imbue hope and the will to take action in many more people.

What Farmlink can be a demonstration of is that we were all kids that just got started somehow but were able to get a lot done. We were not a group of experts, but we were willing to support one another by taking action together. Especially with communicating about the climate, we don’t need to bludgeon people with the truth anymore. We need to catalyze people’s energy into a sustainable creative force – the problem-solving force of people who are excited to break a problem or a system down, delegate tasks, and try again tomorrow. I think that’s what gets momentum. Farmlink uniquely captured the spirit of students wanting to get out there with no prior expectation of how they should operate in the world. It’s the spirit of creative problem-solving combined with the joy of being able to learn together. I think that’s also something the climate challenge offers to everyone: we know the beauties of this planet and we want to continue to create a healthy life on it.

ARTY: A big part of your mission is to empower the next generation of changemakers. You responded to a crisis out of your instinctive altruism, but now, looking back at the successes you’ve had and the impact that you’ve made, have you developed a theory of change?

OWEN: We knew nothing about the agricultural space, and we were not experts in the charitable food space, but we knew what questions we wanted to ask and were not afraid to call industry leaders and other people in these domains, and ask them, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing, what do you think? Are we on the right path? You said we’re doing this wrong, how do we do it right?” And without that advice, counseling, consulting, none of this would have happened. Eden, who’s one of our founding members, said on a panel: “You’re going to fail along the way, but you need to set it up so that when you fail, you can bounce right back and build it stronger.”

 Another thing that was really crucial—and I think a lot of companies and movements in their early stages can get this wrong—is that everyone had ownership over the project. It didn’t matter if you were the first person or the 500th person to join the project, it felt like it was yours. You can see that in our early news coverage. The same person never went on the news twice. It was always a different person because it was everyone’s project, and that made everyone work so much harder.

ARTY: So, it was a spontaneous startup enterprise, but entrepreneurial startups can be exhausting, exhilarating and challenging in regards to effective management. How did the internal systems develop in a way that was organizationally effective?

OWEN: In the beginning, it was literally just call up your friends. Hey, this guy knows how to build a website. This guy knows how to make videos. This person’s down to cold call 500 farmers in a day and has no shame or fear or rejection. It just ballooned into having 100, 120 people. We started looking for advisers, asking each other: “Does anyone have a parent who started a business?” And the advisers we found said things like, “You need a fundraising team; you need a food program team, etc.” So, we broke our work into four different pillars, and it was able to naturally grow through that.

 There was a key transition point where all of these kids were going back to college. We had to figure out a hybrid model. We hired full-time a mix of industry experts and the student leaders who had started Farmlink while also making sure that there was a fellowship program that could usher in the next generation of change-makers. Right now, we have 26 full-time employees. Some of those are people who have left other large nonprofits because they were inspired to come work with us, feeling they could drive their vision for the future more readily at Farmlink. Some of them are the founders you see in the documentary, and we have a fellowship program with 50 to 60 students who play a major role in moving food, fundraising, storytelling, policy, all the things we’re working on.

ARTY: Things grew pretty fast. What were some of the obstacles you encountered? And what are the opportunities that opened up?

OWEN: The first major obstacle was we received all of our funding as a result of news stories. We were on ABC News World Tonight; we were in the New York Times, and we were on NBC. Tens of thousands of people in a twenty-minute burst were donating $10, $20 at a time, just everyday Americans coming together to support this project. But that model was not sustainable. There’s a limit to how many times you’ll get major media coverage, so we had to pivot to find corporate partnerships and different fundraising opportunities. That was a major challenge.

Another difficulty was figuring out where there are major surplus opportunities. You can see in the film that we called 100 farms that first day and no one had surplus food. We weren’t looking in the right places. Eventually, we found bigger farms, larger commercial farms that were wasting a lot of food, but it took us a while to find them. Now we’re at the point where we’re able to anticipate three, four months in advance when a major harvest might go to waste.

 In the fall, we rescued 36 million apples that were going to go to waste. Due to the pandemic, contracts had been cut with farmers in an entire region of West Virginia. We were able to anticipate that far enough in advance to send hundreds of trucks to divert that food to hundreds of different communities. The biggest challenge in the beginning was finding food and getting there fast enough to collect it, and it feels like we’re getting a lot better at that.

ARTY: It sounds like there’s a lot of flexibility into your system.

OWEN: Totally, because I think that was the thing that wasn’t working with other organizations during the pandemic—they weren’t agile. They’d been doing things the same way for many years, but all of a sudden, we’re in this global pandemic and the supply chain looks nothing like it did yesterday, and they weren’t necessarily adapting as fast as our new organization of young people with no preconceived ideas could. That’s a big thing we need to be conscious of going forward. It would be very easy for us to grow and become an organization that’s kind of rigid, so we’re really trying hard to bake it into our DNA that we want to continue to be agile, especially as challenges with climate change come forward.

JULIA: I lead our sustainability team, and it’s really important how we respond to the existing system that is designed to over-produce, that has bubbles of surplus that need to be recovered and redistributed away from landfills to people who could really benefit from having access to that food.

 At the same time, there are many different ways to approach growing food globally at scale, so part of what I really have our team focus on now is how we can explore ways that food can be grown more resourcefully and distributed more efficiently. I think there’s plenty for Farmlink to continue to learn to be able to be part of adaptive solutions that make sure that food is distributed in the most sustainable and humane way.

ARTY: You started out wanting to help one local food bank, and now you have the capacity “to feed millions of people with dignity.” What does it mean to feed people with dignity?

OWEN: Let me lead with a stat that fifty percent of people who are food insecure and know where their local food bank is, will not go there because of the stigma associated with it. That tells us that there’s a crisis in how we are delivering food to people. Waiting in line for hours in your car and being handed a bag of food that sometimes isn’t culturally appropriate and isn’t necessarily what you wanted can be a shame-inducing experience. We truly believe it should not be that way, so we try to prioritize sending food to organizations that are giving people choice in their food, where there aren’t patronizing processes or paperwork, where people can actually access the food bank easily, for example, in a community center. We love community organizations where food is built into everyday life.

In the documentary you can see a community center in Oklahoma, in the Cherokee Nation, where people go to for live music, dancing, and they can get fresh produce there as well. That’s so important that it’s baked into everyday life, and it removes that stigma a little bit, and in turn you’re reaching more people. So that’s what dignity means to us.

ARTY: Are there policies, either economic or political, that actually restrain what you’re trying to do?

OWEN: Yeah. The first low-hanging fruit, no pun intended, right off the bat, is that there are states where you can get a tax deduction for donating food to us, and then there are states where you don’t get a tax deduction. If those states did have tax deductions, farmers would donate hundreds of millions of pounds more food.

And we’re trying to get reimbursed for some of our transportation costs. If an entire harvest of food is about to go to waste in a state, sometimes the Department of Agriculture of that state will pay farmers for their work so that dozens of farms that have been there for a hundred years don’t go belly up. A lot of times, there is a requirement to donate the food in order to get paid, but there isn’t an easy pathway for them to donate the food. We’re trying to bake it into policy that when this happens, the state also reimburses the transportation, so that we can coordinate with the farmers in an ongoing, sustainable way.

ARTY: Let’s talk about overproduction. In one of your videos, Chef Nick DiGiovanni shows three tomatoes and explains why they’d been thrown away. One had a minor blemish; one was slightly overripe; and in the last case, a buyer had just pulled out of a purchasing commitment. DiGiovanni said that our current system is designed to throw away roughly 30 percent of the food we produce. Do you agree that the system’s actually designed that way?

OWEN: I don’t think there was a conscious decision to create a system that throws away 30 percent, but it’s the world we’ve built together. It’s not that people are evil or unjust and want to throw away food, but these are what the existing incentives are driving people to do.

 As a large-scale conventional farmer, you need to be delivering a perfect-looking product that meets certain criteria dictated by the market. Your potatoes have to be just right, not too big or too small, with uniform color and no spots, etc. As a result, there are going to be a lot of potatoes that the farmer can’t sell, but a huge amount of food needs to be harvested just to find the 70 percent of it that will be saleable. In Mexico we saw 25 million tons of bananas that were perfectly edible go to waste because the supplier pulled out of the contract. There had been a cold front that swept through, and that had created a lot of little brown spots on the bananas. They were perfectly edible. I flew down there to film a video and ate a bunch of them, and they were great, but they didn’t look like what the market wants a banana to look like, so they all went to waste.

ARTY: Talk a little bit about the process of making the film at the same time you were running at high speed to try to build an organization to help feed people.

OWEN: I showed up on the first day to take some photos of my friends driving a U-Haul truck with some food to their local food bank thinking, hey, maybe we’ll get on the local news, maybe we’ll make an Instagram post out of this, or something like that. There was never an intention of making a documentary or starting an organization, but it quickly became clear in the first couple of days that footage and photos documenting what we were doing were going to be really important. You see a lot of it in the documentary—three months after I took those photos, ABC World News wanted the images of how we were trying to feed people and showed them to tens of millions of people.

After that, I began to think that maybe there’s a documentary here, but I wasn’t sure. I was filming in the background on important events, visiting farms just to continue to tell stories and send stuff to the news, but kids started dropping out of school and people starting quitting their jobs, calling their bosses and saying: “Hey, I’m working on something that’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” When that was happening, I realized that there was something truly special happening that went well beyond connecting farms to food banks. It was a surge of collective hope and empowerment during the biggest crisis in our generation’s life that made this topic worthy of a documentary.

ARTY: The crisis of the pandemic certainly shed more light on the food system’s systemic failures of hunger and of food waste.

OWEN: These problems had existed for a very long time, but the pandemic brought them front and center into the national conversation. A lot of people thought that when the pandemic was over, there probably wouldn’t be any more surplus food, but that’s completely wrong. There’s more surplus food than ever; this is the system we’ve been handed.

 We definitely don’t want Farmlink to continue forever. We joke that we want to put ourselves out of business, but we are quite serious about wanting to help create real solutions that would make this project unnecessary. As long as there’s surplus food and there are hungry people, though, we’re going to do this for as long as we can.

ARTY: How has your experience with Farmlink changed you?

OWEN: It’s given me my best friends. I’ve been able to work on something that I feel is so important, dedicate all my time to it and become so close to the people around me. It’s given me a community that I never had before. It’s also connected me to a deeper sense of purpose. I drove around the country with a group of friends, visiting all the communities we had served, and that trip changed me in a lot of ways. We worked a twelve-hour day in a parking lot at a food bank, and at noon we saw nurses lining up, waiting an hour in line during their lunch break, to get food. I feel like that single moment changed me in how I look at the economics of the United States and the importance of bringing justice to this issue.

This included the time I spent with Anne Lopez, who’s running the somewhat secret network of food banks for undocumented people who don’t feel comfortable going to a food bank because they could be risking deportation. I felt like all of these experiences brought me from a person who makes social impact documentaries because I generally care about the world, to someone who now has a very deep personal connection to these issues and feels the injustices in my bones, and I think that deeper capacity for empathy will find its way into my film projects going forward.

JULIA: Farmlink has given me the opportunity to work with other people on a shared challenge we all care passionately about. It’s a defining opportunity that will mark us deeply and stay with us throughout our lives. Farmlink gave me the voice to articulate what I believe and to be able to work with brilliant, dedicated, resourceful, hilarious, beautiful, young energy to try and try again on something that we know without any doubts is worth our time. Farmlink was started by young people but is now made up of a diverse group of people across age groups who have a shared “if-not-now-when” energy. Whether you’re young or old, you’re constantly reminded that this is our time.

 We are living in critically important times, so let’s get after it and do something cool with it and share the joy. We get to create something with a team to improve conditions that we are born into. That is a massive opportunity that I have been gifted and that I get to come back to every single day when I show up to work. It’s such a fun thing that I’ve been able to grow into radically, as someone who can think, research, test, and trial again. It’s such a gift to make mistakes and learn with a team. That has dramatically improved my problem-solving skills and my respect for other people’s opinions. I’ve learned that an expansion of creativity is possible when you give yourself permission to dare. I think those are just some of the many, many gifts that Farmlink has given me.

The Underground Networks Crucial to Life on Earth

Research is catching up to the fact that fungi play an absolutely fundamental role in the very existence of our ecosystems and in the lives of plants, animals and other organisms. Vast underground fungal networks exchange nutrients, form relationships with microbes and plants, and funnel billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the soil and biosphere. Yet we know astonishingly little about the ecological extent and distribution, as well as the biological characteristics, of this under-recognized kingdom of life. If we are to address the climate and biodiversity crises, we cannot neglect to look underground. 

Explore what some of the most intrepid scientists and researchers in this emerging field are learning about the ancient relationships between fungi, plants and animals — and why they are critical for the health and resilience of the web of life. Below, Merlin Sheldrake discusses the ancient library of solutions fungi have developed in their co-evolution with plants; Sheldrake and Toby Kiers, a leading evolutionary biologist, explain the work of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) to build a global database of underground fungal networks; Paul Stamets shares how a mycelium-derived treatment could help endangered bee species; and Suzanne Simard talks about her breakthrough discoveries regarding plant communication via underground mycelial networks.

Learn about the thriving world under our feet and help us spread the word about its foundational role in life on earth. 

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‘An Ancient Library of Solutions:’ The Effort to Save the Mycorrhizal Fungi Vital to Life on Earth

Before plants evolved their own root systems, fungi provided the connection to the soil that enabled plants to move from water onto land. These underground networks remain crucial to plants’ survival, exchanging nutrients, forming relationships with microbes, and funneling billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the soil. But these vast underground networks represent a global blindspot, with 90% of mycorrhizal fungal hotspots currently falling outside protected areas. This is a problem not only for the fungi but all the organisms and ecosystems that depend on them. In this edited transcript of a Bioneers keynote address, biologist and bestselling author Merlin Sheldrake talks about the vital work of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) to map and protect these fungal networks and preserve this “ancient library of solutions.”

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Mapping, Protecting and Harnessing the Mycorrhizal Networks that Sustain Life on Earth

Merlin Sheldrake and Toby Kiers are two of the world’s leading researchers seeking to understand the critically important but long-overlooked and understudied role of fungal networks in supporting life. Join them as they discuss their work with the groundbreaking, visionary Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), which Kiers co-founded. Together with GlobalFungi, Global Soil Mycobiome Consortium, the Crowther Lab, and researchers, SPUN is building a global database of mycorrhizal diversity that will allow researchers to quantify biodiversity hot-spots and identify underground ecosystems of high conservation priority.

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Solutions Underfoot: How Mushrooms May Help Save the Bees

Old-growth forests are libraries of ancestral knowledge, with fungi being the biological network that connects it all. Visionary researcher Paul Stamets has spent more than 40 years studying mycelium, its ability to recycle nutrients, and its role in sustaining life from the ground up. He’s now using those restorative properties to help protect endangered bees. Read about the potential benefits of a mycelium-derived treatment and what it could mean for the health of bee populations. 

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How Underground Mycelial Networks Communicate

As a doctoral student, Suzanne Simard discovered something about the forest that radically upset the status quo and challenged the dominant idea that the relentless competition for resources was invariably the primary driver underlying the behavior of all species. Her breakthrough scientific discovery, dubbed the “Wood Wide Web” by Nature magazine upon publication, revealed the symbiotic biological exchanges and the communication between forest species via underground mycelial networks. Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of “Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest,” discusses her work in this interview with Bioneers. 

Read the conversation

Mapping Earth’s Hidden Allies: SPUN’s Mission to Protect Mycorrhizal Fungi and Combat Climate Change

The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) is tackling the urgent need to map and protect mycorrhizal fungi, crucial for ecosystem health and carbon transport. Despite their importance, only 0.01% of Earth’s surface has been sampled for these fungi. SPUN’s Underground Explorers Program accelerates sampling by supporting local scientists with grants to document mycorrhizal fungi in underexplored regions. With climate change intensifying, SPUN’s mission to create high-resolution biodiversity maps using machine learning is critical. Learn more about SPUN’s work and how you can help. Photo credit: Mateo Barrenengoa

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Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses 

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

See the full catalog

Mapping Earth’s Hidden Allies: SPUN’s Mission to Protect Mycorrhizal Fungi and Combat Climate Change

Written by The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN)

Mycorrhizal fungi, the network-forming fungi that form symbiotic relationships with plant roots, have underpinned life on Earth for over 450 million years. Scientists know that mycorrhizal fungi are critical to maintain ecosystem health, and that they transport massive amounts of carbon fixed by plants – making them an untapped resource in our fight against climate change.

However, only 0.01% of Earth’s surface has been sampled for mycorrhizal biodiversity. As a result, these underground ecosystem engineers have been left out of conservation agendas and environmental assessments.

In response to the gap in global concern for mycorrhizal fungi, The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) launched in 2021. SPUN is carrying out large-scale research to map and protect the mycorrhizal networks that regulate Earth’s climate and ecosystems. 

There’s a tremendous amount of ground to cover. As the planet’s warming accelerates, we need to gather as much information about climate-regulating underground fungi as possible. In an effort to accelerate sampling efforts and decentralize their research methods, SPUN developed the Underground Explorers Program, supporting local scientists with grants to sample and document mycorrhizal fungi in the world’s most underexplored regions.

SPUN and their collaborators need resources and funding to help compile fungal data from across the world into high-resolution maps that use machine learning to project mycorrhizal biodiversity and threats to underground ecosystems, so fungi in the greatest peril can be identified and conserved. Reach out to SPUN on the contact page if you have ideas for resources, funding or collaborations. You can learn more by watching the videos of their expeditions.

Profiles of all Underground Explorers are available on their web page. Here are a few profiles of past recipients of the awards.

Dr. Jessica Duchicela – Ecuador – Dr. Duchicela is tracing 19th-century German explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s route through Ecuador. “While his scientific contributions were remarkable, it is important for Ecuadorian research teams to critically engage with his legacy, acknowledging the power dynamics and biases inherent in colonial scientific endeavors, while leveraging his methodology and findings to advance our own indigenous knowledge systems.”

Dr. Nicole Hynson – Hawai’i  –  Dr. Hynson’s project aims to understand which mycorrhizal fungi are partnered with Hawai’i’s endemic plants. The islands’ native flora are facing exceptionally high rates of extinction, and Hynson hopes that understanding their mycorrhizal communities could aid in future restoration efforts.

Dr. Nahuel Policelli – Patagonia –  Patagonia’s steppe grasslands are extremely understudied. These ecosystems are being threatened by an invasive willow shrub that is quickly dominating the landscape. Policelli is working to learn whether non-native plants are “borrowing” mycorrhizal fungi as a mechanism to facilitate their invasion. 

Dr. Nourou Yorou – Ivory Coast –  Ivory Coast has lost 85% of its forests since 1960, driven in large part to cocoa production. Yourou is studying the underground effects of forest conversion to cocoa plantations, comparing forested belowground biodiversity to conventional and organic cocoa plantations.

Using Storytelling to Change the Narrative on Mass Incarceration 

When Claudia Peña brought the show “Lyrics from Lockdown” to Houston, she saw that the crowd was mostly older white people and worried there could be some walkouts. She even positioned herself in a chair by the door so she could talk to anybody who walked out about why they had done so. But it turns out there was no need. Not only did no one walk out, but the crowd was energized. In this excerpt from an interview with Bioneers, Peña talks about the power of stories to change hearts and minds and why she stopped relying on statistics to discuss incarceration and prison abolition.

Peña is the executive director of For Freedoms, an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation. She serves on the faculty at the UCLA School of Law and is the founding co-director of the UCLA Center for Justice. The Center runs the Prison Education Program, which creates innovative courses that enable faculty and students to learn from and alongside currently incarcerated participants.

BIONEERS: What are some examples of the art and media you’ve created around the issues of incarceration in prisons? 

CLAUDIA: I’ve been working on the issue of prison abolition since the late ‘90s. I used to be really committed to numbers and data and statistics, because they were so obvious and overwhelming. I was convinced all anybody needed to see was these numbers. They needed to know how much we were spending on prisons in comparison to universities. They needed to know how much we were spending on keeping somebody in prison — which is $132,000 in California — and know that it would cost half that amount to send somebody to the most expensive private university in California. I thought those numbers would make them agree with me. But I was wrong. 

Stats are actually not that convincing to people. Or they might be in the moment, but they don’t really motivate people to do something. I realized that storytelling, where you can reach people’s hearts and minds — which is the oldest way we’ve ever shared knowledge and wisdom in the existence of humanity — is the thing that really can get people to move in particular ways.

The most recent and actually one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on is a show called “Lyrics from Lockdown.” It is a show that uses comedy and hip hop, calypso, spoken word — all sorts of different styles of music and poetry — to tell two parallel stories of men who were wrongfully incarcerated. One man was incarcerated while he was a student at Harvard Law, and the other one still sits in a prison in Texas now, 30 years after being locked up at the age of 17 for a crime he didn’t commit. The show has been written by Bryonn Bain and workshopped in prisons and jails all over the country for over a decade. It’s an incredible show, and it’s actually going to be going to Broadway this year. 

We did a southern tour of it last year. We went to Houston, Birmingham, Atlanta. And I have to tell you something funny about what happened in Houston. I’m not that familiar with Texas, but everybody I know from Houston in my own network is Black. So when we went to Houston, I had just assumed we were going to have a Black crowd. I think the time we had done it before then in its fullness was at the Apollo Theatre, and it was an incredible crowd. We got a standing ovation and an incredibly enthusiastic response. We got to Houston, and I sort of assumed it was going to be the same thing, and when I looked out at the audience, it was pretty white and pretty old. I went back to Bryonn and the three musicians, and I was like, “Okay, we have a very different audience out there; prepare yourselves; I don’t know what it’s going to be like.” The man who we’d worked with at that venue said they get walkouts from some shows, so we should be prepared; some people might walk out; don’t take it personally. 

So I decided to sit in the audience right next to the door so I could have a sense of walkouts and the demographics. And I thought, maybe I’ll walk out with them and ask them why they’re leaving, just to understand. Not only were there no walkouts, but there was, again, a rousing standing ovation, an incredibly enthusiastic response. I’ll admit that I had assumed it would not be the case, because I had made my own assumptions about the audience. It was just great to see that the story is universal enough. 

The writing is unparalleled, and Bryonn’s performance is incredible. But the story is universal because it touches on family and love, friendship and resilience, and challenges. And, of course, it touches on the criminal legal system and the injustice and the horrors of being in prison, but it does it in a way that, for some reason at the end of the show, you leave feeling pumped up. You want to go do something. That’s the energy I’m looking for; that’s the response that I want. All my little charts and statistics from the late ‘90s and the early aughts didn’t quite do it, but a show that’s headed to Broadway is nailing it. 

BIONEERS: When there was this rousing response, and people were ready to go take action, where were you all directing them? Where were you telling them to go?

CLAUDIA: I’m so glad you asked this question. Everywhere we do a show, we work with local community organizations to be in the lobbies, so they’re ready to gather all of that energy and galvanize. Whether it’s just signing up for a listserv or getting people to come to your next event, or being able to educate people on the local political issues. 

We’ve had voter registration tables at some of the shows. We plan to do the same exact thing on Broadway, in a way that Broadway has never seen. We’re connected to over a hundred community organizations that will be in the lobby. We’ll have artwork from formerly incarcerated folks, maybe even currently incarcerated folks in the lobby as well. In our talkbacks after the show, we’ll feature advocates, formerly incarcerated people, perhaps even some well-known names that really care about these issues in order to continue to direct people on exactly what to do. Right now, while you feel this way, sitting in this seat, what you need to do next is X. It may be to vote on a local policy, it may be everybody’s gotta go storm a particular governmental agency. Perhaps for many people in the audience, the way that they participate is they fund things, and so perhaps they will donate to the community organizations. There are a lot of different directions people can take their participation, and every single one of them is needed.

BIONEERS: How do you respond to people who are concerned about the concept of abolition of prisons?

CLAUDIA: There are a few ways to take that. When people say, “I can’t imagine the abolition of prisons; what are we going to do with all the murderers and the rapists?” First: You can’t end violence with violence, and the prison industrial complex is an incredibly violent institution. Second: I want people to understand that for those who cause harm, it’s a result of harm they’ve experienced that’s been left unaddressed. We would do much better by providing resources for people to heal — to do the work so they can reconnect to their own humanity. Our society would benefit more from people having a healthier mental and spiritual state than it would from sending people into these cages where, generally speaking, they become even more dehumanized. The experience of dehumanization as a result of being someone incarcerated — oftentimes there’s a lot of violence and scarcity in these spaces — and it affects people’s ability to show up in a more humanized way.

I also like to point out that this way of addressing harm using punishment on the scale of mass incarceration, in the way that it exists in this country, is very new. It has not been the reality for most of human existence, and it certainly wasn’t the case on these lands since the beginning of time. Mass incarceration on this level has really only existed for the last 40 years. Incarceration in the way that we know it in the United States has existed for maybe even less than 100 years. If something has not existed for that long, it’s not a foregone conclusion that this is what’s needed or that this is even working. 

There’s also a lot of literature showing that being incarcerated doesn’t necessarily help you get to a better space before you get released. Programming does. Access to therapy, access to group, access to education. All of those things do help, and those things can exist outside of carceral facilities. You don’t need to access those programs by going to prison or jail; they can just exist in the community. Those are the things, along with education, that help people get to a place where they can see that there are different paths, different opportunities, and different responsibilities for them. 

With education, it’s wild what we have seen with recidivism rates. The average recidivism rate in this country is 65%. People who go to prison have about a 65% chance of going back, which is a terrible failure rate. But that’s exactly what the system is set up for, so in that way, it’s a great success rate. Go them. But with each type of education that you get, the recidivism rate drops significantly. Getting vocational education, and then getting an AA. Once you get your BA, it drops to 6%. And, of course, with a Master’s degree, it’s zero percent. So if people want folks who have been incarcerated to not end up back there, education is the best thing, not more incarceration. 

I also want to note the reasons why people go to prison and who is being put in prison. There are a lot of people in prison for use of drugs. The use of drugs is usually self-medication for trauma that people have experienced. Overwhelmingly, the folks who are in prison for using drugs are Indigenous and Black people and poor white folks. But the people who do the kind of harm that affects thousands, potentially millions of people, like financial fraud, white collar crime, poisoning our rivers. Those are real crimes. They’re crimes against the land, crimes against humanity. They are awful things that will have an effect on thousands, millions, for a long time. Those folks are not being incarcerated. Now I’m an abolitionist, so I am not advocating that those people should go to prison. I am advocating for people to look more closely because there are a lot of folks out there who think people in prison deserve to be there. You should be asking yourself: why do you have that perspective?

‘An Ancient Library of Solutions:’ The Effort to Save the Mycorrhizal Fungi Vital to Life on Earth

Before plants evolved their own root systems, fungi provided the connection to the soil that enabled plants to move from water onto land. These underground networks remain crucial to plants’ survival, exchanging nutrients, forming relationships with microbes, and funneling billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the soil. They are also vast, with the mycorrhizal fungal mycelium in the top 10 centimeters of soil extending more than 450 quadrillion kilometers. Despite this, they represent a global blindspot. Because they are underground and unseen, 90% of mycorrhizal fungal hotspots currently fall outside protected areas. This is a problem not only for the fungi but all the organisms and ecosystems that depend on them. In the following edited transcript of a Bioneers keynote address, biologist and bestselling author Merlin Sheldrake talks about the vital work of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) to map and protect these fungal networks and preserve this “ancient library of solutions.”

I’m going to talk about fungi. Fungi are ecosystem engineers that underwrite the regenerative capacity of the living world. There are lots of ways to be a fungus. I’m going to talk about a specific group of fungi called mycorrhizal fungi.

Mycorrhizal fungi form intimate and ancient relationships with plants. I’m going to ask how we can nourish generative relationships with mycorrhizal fungi to support the flourishing of life on Earth and help address the coupled crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Almost all plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi, and these are fungi that form mycelial networks — which are branching, fusing networks of tubular cells. These fungi are brilliant. They’re chemical wizards. They’re brilliant navigators in the wild, wet world of the soil. They’re able to grow and remodel their bodies and forage using their chemical ingenuity for nutrients — nutrients that plants need, like nitrogen and phosphorous. They acquire these nutrients, and they supply them to their plant partners. The plant partners, in exchange, provide the fungi with things that the fungi need to grow — energy-containing carbon compounds like sugars and fats that the plants have made in photosynthesis.

This relationship is one of the living world’s great intimacies. It is an astonishing way that organisms can come together, extend their reach, and make things possible that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. These are really the roots of life on land. Plants can only make it out of water onto the land with the help of their fungal associates, who have behaved as their root systems for tens of millions of years until plants could evolve their own roots.

These are sophisticated relationships. At any one moment, a mycorrhizal fungus will be remodeling itself to explore the soil, one of the most complex habitats on the planet. It will be doing crazy things with its metabolism to forage and acquire nutrients. It will be forming relationships with crowds of microbes across its network. It will be diverting nutrients around its networks, circulating them in just the right way to enable it to trade with its plant partners. It must be integrating information across an immense number of nodes, which at any one moment can be strung between multiple plants and sprawled over meters.

The influence of these quadrillions of trading decisions spills out over land masses and continents. A recent study that Toby [Kiers, Ph.D., Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Executive Director and Chief Scientist at SPUN] and I are part of found that mycorrhizal fungi funnel around 13 billion tons of CO2 into the soil every year. That’s as much as a third of the total CO2 emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels every year. It’s a significant amount of carbon. They stabilize this carbon in the soil and power soil food webs, which contain over half of all species on the planet.

Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal fungal mycelium in the top ten centimeters of soil is more than 450 quadrillion kilometers, which is over half the width of the galaxy. These organisms are stationed at a vital point in global carbon and nutrient cycles, and they make up one of the planet’s circulatory systems, an ancient life support system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world.

However, despite their roles in supporting plant biodiversity and regulating the Earth’s nutrient cycles and climates, mycorrhizal fungi are a global blind spot. They are largely absent from climate change agendas, conservation strategies, restoration strategies, agriculture, and forestry. This is a problem.

It’s a problem first because mycorrhizal fungi lie at the base of the food web that sustains much of life on Earth and is a key lever in planetary ecology. Yet hardly anyone touches this lever. It would be like trying to perform life-saving surgery without considering our bodies’ circulatory systems.

It’s a problem for another reason. What we are blind to, we tend to destroy. The destruction of underground ecosystems accelerates climate change by causing diversity loss. What’s more, when we disrupt these communities, we destroy an ancient library of solutions that fungi have evolved. We have no idea how many of these solutions might prove vital to life on Earth moving forward. When mycorrhizal fungi suffer, so do the organisms and ecosystems that depend on them.

So, back to this question: How can we nourish generative relationships with these ancient life support systems to support the flourishing of life on Earth, and respond to climate and biodiversity crises? I’m going to describe two projects that I work on with Toby.

The first is this grand, very big, zoomed-out perspective. It’s the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN. SPUN is trying to answer this question by taking a global perspective, using huge datasets to map the planet’s mycorrhizal communities and advocate for their protection.

The second approach zooms all the way in. We use advanced microscopy, robotics, and machine learning tools to look inside mycorrhizal fungi to try to decode the flows and behavioral dialects of these living, sensing networks. In both of these projects, we are seeking partners and funders, collaborators, and resources, so if you feel moved, please do get in touch. You can find a place to do it on my website.

There are many threats to underground ecosystems, despite the fact that we think about them less than we should—deforestation, desertification, over-application of industrial agricultural chemicals like fungicides and fertilizers, over-plowing—the list goes on. The result of all of this combination is that, based on current trends, 90% of the Earth’s soils will be degraded by 2050.

SPUN is an organization working to map and protect mycorrhizal fungal communities, and in doing so, find ways to harness their power to help mitigate and adapt to climate and biodiversity crises. Why map? One of the reasons is that we know very, very little about who lives where underground. We have maps of ocean currents, we have maps of global vegetation, we have maps of global climate. We don’t have maps of mycorrhizal fungal communities. This limits our ability to monitor and protect these key underground ecosystems. It limits our ability to work out which are the most important underground ecosystems to monitor and protect.

SPUN is working to make reliable maps that can inform decision-makers and support legal actions to protect land from ecocidal exploitation. To do so, we are supporting the creation of a decentralized network of scientists around the world and funding researchers in local communities to answer mycorrhizal questions in their places, in their homes, and in the ecosystems that they care about. All of this data comes back to feed the very big models that we’re making to build the global maps.

We have so many wildly enthusiastic mycorrhizal researchers coming out of the woodwork. We’re building capacity for mycorrhizal research all over the world, especially in places where this research has happened much less. There are researchers in the Ivory Coast studying cacao plantations, and researchers in Mexico using these mycorrhizal diversity maps to engage local politicians to protect water sources. There are people comparing the communities in humid and dry forests in Madagascar. It’s hugely exciting. We are inundated with enthusiasm and requests, and actually really struggling to keep up. This is hugely gratifying.

Usually, if you were to make a map of global biodiversity, you would just look at the organisms living above ground, and you would find diversity was concentrated around the tropical regions and fades out as you move toward the poles. But that’s not the case here. There are mismatches between biodiversity above ground and below ground, and this is one of the reasons why it’s so important to take these below-ground communities into account as we try to work out who lives where and what everyone’s doing. Building these maps of mycorrhizal fungal communities can help us to approach aboveground life from the perspective of belowground organisms.

Why does this matter? We think that these maps can help inform climate change strategies, restoration practices, land management, and legal actions. These maps reveal that over 90% of mycorrhizal fungal hotspots are currently falling outside protected areas, which means that they’re at immediate risk. We’re trying to quantify these threats.

We have a map that shows what we call an integrated threat index, combining different kinds of threats to mycorrhizal fungal ecosystems, mycorrhizal fungal communities, and underground ecosystems. We can integrate the threat to mycorrhizal fungal communities with mycorrhizal fungal diversity. This kind of map can empower decision-makers and form the basis for tools to support mycorrhizal fungal life and the processes that they oversee.

One project that I’m really excited about right now is a collaboration to test the application of this kind of fungal dataset in legal actions. We’re working together with the More Than Human Rights Collective, the Fungi Foundation, and the Sarayaku people of Amazonian Ecuador. With the Sarayaku people, we’re going to visit the territory to map the mycorrhizal communities and provide them with these datasets, which they can then use in their ongoing legal battles with the Ecuadorian government to make sure that the underground communities are protected. So many of the threats that these ecosystems face are from mining, which explicitly destroys the underground.

We’re really thrilled at how this is unfolding. We’re thrilled about these coalitions that we’re building and where this can go.

Watch a full video of Merlin Sheldrake’s keynote at Bioneers 2024 here.

Unraveling the Secrets of Salmon: An Indigenous Exploration of Forest Ecology and Nature’s Intelligence

Teresa Ryan, also known as Smhayetsk, from the Gitlan tribe of the Tsimshian Nation, carries the wisdom of her Ganhada clan and her mother, Loa Ryan. Her career in forestry and conservation sciences intertwines scientific rigor with Indigenous knowledge, creating a bridge between ancestral wisdom and modern ecological understanding.

As a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry, Teresa’s work delves into the complexities of forest ecology and the profound relationship between Chinook salmon and the lands they traverse. Her insights into ancient Indigenous practices and their relevance in contemporary conservation shed light on the intricate balance within these ecosystems.

In this conversation with Bioneers, Teresa’s narrative offers glimpses into the interconnectedness of diverse species, the intelligence of forest systems, and the imperative of honoring Indigenous stewardship practices in land management strategies. Her approach is not solely academic but emphasizes the enduring bond between humans and the natural world, rooted in millennia of Indigenous care for the land.

BIONEERS: Can you tell us about your research?

TERESA: I work with the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia in forest and conservation sciences. I’m an Indigenous Knowledge and Natural Science lecturer. 

I did my post-doc at the Faculty of Forestry. It was the first aboriginal post-doc there, a decade ago, and I’m still there.

I entered into a forestry program because the work that I had been doing was related to Chinook salmon. I’m a salmon scientist. I’m a fisheries aquatic ecologist working in forest ecology. We had come across this situation in which there was an observed increase in Chinook abundance in a particular area that had been ravaged by pine beetle infestations, which I thought was odd. 

The regulatory authorities didn’t have the funds or even the personnel to investigate that type of question, so I suggested that I enter a forestry program and build a research program based on this relationship between salmon and forests. As an Indigenous person, I have a different understanding than most other researchers. I have a science background, but I also have an Indigenous knowledge base that I can draw from at all times. 

I wrote my dissertation for two audiences—of course, my committee was one, but I also wrote it for Indigenous communities on the coast. They were surprised by colonialism when it landed on their doorstep 150 years ago. We’ve been tortured trying to figure out why we can’t maintain our stewardship practices. 

Whatever goes on in the watersheds, such as forestry, agricultural activity, or mining, goes right into the streams and affects salmon. Indigenous people in areas where salmon occur have observed enormous changes in salmon runs over the last 150 years. 

We have to figure out how to get back to expressing our stewardship traditions to protect salmon, to manage our resources better than the way this colonial system has managed them because what we have been doing is counting fish that are going extinct. If we can change the way we are attending to the salmon consistent with our Indigenous knowledge, belief systems, technologies, and strategies, we will probably see a difference in the abundance of fish. 

There are ways to do that. I’ll give you one example.

We have a traditional method of fishing that allows the largest fish to go up to the spawning grounds to escape. We do this from a scientific perspective. Those larger fish have higher fecundity, which means the female fish have more eggs. If we allow the largest males to go up and spawn with the largest females, then we have this progeny of larger fish and more of them, which is amazing. 

This is something that is kin to the principles of generosity and reciprocity from an Indigenous worldview. Indigenous knowledge tends to apply these types of principles, allowing the biggest to flourish, which provides for future generations.

This is accomplished through an important salmon-management technology that has been documented to exist for at least 5,000 years, known as tidal stone traps, which are massive walls in the intertidal area. The tide goes up and down, and when water comes in and inundates the enclosure created by the rock wall, the fish don’t see it, and they head up to their spawning stream. Then the tide goes out, and the fish aren’t going to spend all of their energy fighting that tide, they’re going to just hang out. When the tide comes back in, the next group will head upriver.

During the lowest tide, the fish get entrained in a pool area, and you can walk in and pick out the fish you want. You can also leave the fish that are going to go up and escape. So instead of managing the fishery using a modern stock assessment bell curve that gives you days of a week and timing of the peak run, this traditional practice manages human use, not the fish. The fish aren’t being managed. It is the human use that is being managed according to the tide schedule, which matches a lunar cycle. 

BIONEERS: These technologies, techniques, and practices have co-evolved over thousands of years, as you say, and they’re in tune with the complexity of this entire system. How do the salmon fit into this whole forest-river network?

TERESA: These are beautiful systems that are interconnected. 

Salmon coming from the ocean bring marine-derived nutrients into the river system. When they swim into the rivers, they’re feeding many predators. The one most people think of is bears. It turns out that bears are picky eaters. They’ll catch a salmon and take it to the riparian area alongside the river, and sometimes even a little farther inland. They’ll go up to their favorite spot and eat their favorite parts, and then they’ll leave the carcass and go catch another fish. Depending on location and species, some bears might catch up to 150 salmon per day. 

An amazing thing happens when the carcass decomposes into the soil. Other critters like birds and insects come along and nibble on it too. Once it starts decomposing into the soil, organisms in the soil also feast on it. It’s this annual abundance of food that just shows up on their doorstep.

These nutrients are carried along mycorrhizal networks in the forest, which are fungi associated with tree roots. A student in our salmon forest project, Dr. Allen Larocque, demonstrated that marine-derived nitrogen can be found above waterfalls. Salmon can’t actually get to those spots, which shows us that this marine-derived nitrogen is transmitted below-ground in these vast networks of root systems.

We know that these nutrients are being dissipated throughout the forest, and it isn’t just nitrogen. Nutrients originating with salmon are everywhere in the forest, and that’s pretty amazing when you think about the size of our trees. Salmon play an important role in their life cycle. 

It’s a feedback mechanism. It’s simultaneously balancing and reinforcing the health and success of the forest, and it’s also beneficial for the salmon. The forests provide the shade, the canopy cover, to keep the streams cool. They also modulate the precipitation that comes in off the Pacific Ocean. When the forests receive the precipitation, some of it evaporates and creates a beneficial vapor. Cloud forests are known for that vapor. 

When the precipitation reaches the ground, it permeates the soil. The forest and its roots help modulate the flows. 

So there is a reciprocal relationship between the forest and the salmon. This is something that is known in the Indigenous knowledge systems. It’s recited, it’s repeated, it’s a story. We have this knowledge in our stories and in our histories, and our identities have histories, but the expression of this knowledge has been limited in the last 150 years as a result of colonialism. 

BIONEERS: Do you see these forest systems as intelligent?

TERESA: You could say there’s sentience there, but “being” might be a good word. Everything that is living has spirit—everything. So yes, I would say that also means intelligence, but I don’t know how salmon figured out how to go out to sea. I’m sure the glaciers kind of forced them into that. But it’s having this spirit…

The way that we think about these beings has an impact on how we adjust our management and how we behave as stewards. For example, if there is a geological slide that increases sedimentation in a salmon stream, we might take cedar branches into a spawning bed area to sweep the sediment away so it doesn’t suffocate eggs.

We don’t want to offend those spirits. We don’t want to offend those beings, because they’ll know, and they may not return. 

When we think about intelligence in the forest, from a scientific perspective, we are seeing responses from beings in the forest, particularly through the work on mycorrhizal networks. We can actually demonstrate that we’re seeing responses. It’s a work in progress, but it’s come such a long way in helping us to understand these relationships.

They’re probably smarter than us. And they’re probably having a good laugh at us.

Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World

We all yearn for connection and community, but we live in a time of pervasive calls for further division along the well-wrought lines of religion, race, ethnicity, caste, and sexuality. This ubiquitous yet elusive problem feeds on fears — created, inherited — of the “other.” While the much-touted diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are undeniably failing, and activists narrowly focus on specific and sometimes conflicting communities, “Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World” (Stanford University Press, 2024) prescribes a new approach that encourages us to turn toward one another in unprecedented and radical ways.

In the book, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian make a powerful and sweeping case for adopting a paradigm of belonging that does not require the creation of an “other.” This new paradigm hinges on transitioning from narrow to expansive identities — even if that means challenging seemingly benevolent forms of community-building based on othering.

john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in civil rights, structural racialization, housing, and democracy, and the Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Stephen Menendian is Assistant Director at the Othering and Belonging Institute, where he manages many ongoing research projects, including the Inclusiveness Index and the California Zoning Atlas.

Elements of Belonging

Like many important ideas, belonging is a complex, multifaceted, and multidimensional concept. It is also dynamic, meaning that it can exist in one context but disappear in another, or appear and reappear in the same context over time. For decades, scholars have sought to define belonging and decode the elements that appear to constitute it. One of the classic definitions is the “satisfaction of an individual’s need to be personally involved with their environment and to feel part of a larger social entity—socially embedded.” More recent definitions, often emphasizing different elements, have been propounded. In many ways, these efforts are similar to the efforts to measure and define “happiness,” which is also a highly subjective experience and eludes a specific and singular definition.

In lieu of agreement upon a specific definition for belonging, scholars have instead developed—and sought to validate—a series of scales capable of measuring belonging. One of the first, and probably the best-known of these instruments, is the “Sense of Belonging Instrument” (SOBI), published in 1995. The SOBI is a long questionnaire (a 27-item survey with 49 questions) divided into two parts, “psychological states” and “antecedents.” This instrument has been widely applied in a variety of contexts. But that has hardly slowed the creation of new measures. Intervening research and additional efforts have produced new scales and instruments, with their authors touting their advantages over the alternatives.

Despite these impressive efforts, there remain many limitations to and criticisms of these instruments. Even if these instruments maintain predictive validity, that does not mean that they are capturing or illuminating the elements that constitute belonging. Paradoxically, they may be successful at predicting or measuring belonging, but fail as operational definitions or at generating such definitions.

Moreover, as the names of these instruments suggest, they are focused on a sense of belonging, and have limited ability to tell us why belonging is experienced or what sorts of conditions, traits, or interactions help generate that sense. By focusing on the respondent’s personality, identity, or dispositional traits, many of these instruments fail to document or identify the contextual or situational factors that could provide further illumination on the material conditions that shape the experience of belonging.

Further research has sought to unpack different dimensions to belonging, with different researchers arguing for or against different components. For example, some emphasize the dimension of “connectedness,” while others might emphasize “participation” or “recognition.” It is not our goal to resolve these debates here. Given the variety of circumstances in which belonging may be desired, it is possible that there is no comprehensive or complete set of elements sufficient to create or foster belonging in every possible context. Nonetheless, we can specify a few elements that may be necessary to belonging irrespective of context and a few related fundamental insights along the way.

In terms of general principles, first, we maintain that belonging is a compound concept, which incorporates multiple elements and/or dimensions. To the frustration of many, like other important compound or complex concepts, it is not reducible to a simple proxy or singular element, even “fit” or “feeling of home.” Second, belonging is a relational concept, which means that it cannot be understood in a reductive, analytic mode of examining individuals or their psychological traits or attitudinal tendencies. We must examine the relationship itself, not simply the things that are in relationship. Third, and relatedly, belonging is both subjective and objective.*

As a concept measured by self-report, belonging may ultimately be subjective (existing or not according to subjective experience), but it nonetheless has a material substrate. This is a point we wish to emphasize: there exist socio-ecological preconditions that make the experience of belonging more or less likely. Thus, like othering, belonging is structured and patterned in society, not simply the experience of individuals. In general, the psychological instruments that measure belonging give insufficient attention to these conditions. To the extent that these preconditions are functionally “necessary conditions,” whose absence makes belonging either impossible or extremely unlikely, we feel comfortable including them as definitional elements.

In terms of elements, we contend that, first, belonging encompasses and requires inclusion, and to some extent equity as well. This is part of the objective aspect to belonging. If extreme disparities persist or exclusion is maintained, then the conditions for belonging cannot arise or exist. Belonging may also require accommodation.** Norms, customs, or practices that are designed to be neutral, but have a persistent disparate impact, undermine belonging. If an institution, for example, provides food options that fail to recognize certain religious or dietary needs, then members of some groups may be or feel excluded. Similarly, if building design or other physical structures impede access for people with disabilities, then exclusion can occur even if formal inclusion is the policy. These and other examples are discussed in more detail later in our book.

Second, belonging requires a sense of connection, with an emphasis on sense. Whether we wish it or not, most things exist in some sort of dynamic relationship, and belonging is no exception. The experience of belonging is more likely when there is a tether or a tie, something that binds or affiliates a person to another person, community, group, or institution. That connection need not be intimate; nor must it be permanent. But the absence of a sense of connection is unlikely to generate a sense of belonging. This is part of the subjective aspect of Belonging.

Furthermore, this connection generally comes with an emotional valance, often a sense of attachment, fondness, safety, or warmth. This is what is meant by an “affective” component to belonging that is not generally acknowledged or emphasized in other equity and inclusion practices, even those that stress representation. The affective element describes how individuals regard or feel about the object of belonging. This affective component cannot be known by simply scanning formal policies or objective conditions, but only by investigating the sense of connection itself.

Third, belonging requires visibility or recognition. The simple act of being seen can engender powerful feelings between people, even a sense of intimacy between erstwhile strangers. In the public sphere, people yearn to be heard and understood, especially if they feel neglected or overlooked. Recognition occurs when people feel that their social group is seen, respected, and valued. This is partly why representation is so important: if a person feels that their identity or their group is invisible in the community or institution, they are less likely to feel a sense of belonging. A feeling of belonging is fostered when a community or an institution affirmatively communicates that participants belong, and does so in a way that demonstrates that the community or institution sees and respects their identities.

Recognition may form the predicate for a sense of connection, which then becomes a reciprocal element: the subjective experience of belonging is more likely if the connection is in some way mutual, if the person holding the connection to the community, institution, or group simultaneously feels that they are visible, recognized, and valued. The sense of connection may be a by-product of feeling recognized and valued.

Mixed messages or subtle cues can undermine efforts to engender belonging. If the message feels more like a marketing slogan than an authentic expression of intent, it could weaken attachments rather than engender belonging. Such messaging should be grounded programmatically. It should resonate in the life of an institution.

Fourth, belonging requires agency. Agency is the sense or feeling of control people have over actions and their consequences. Belonging requires a meaningful degree of actual agency in relation to the object of belonging. If barriers are removed, objective disparities are eliminated or reduced, recognition is accorded, and connection is forged, but agency is denied, then belonging is unlikely exist. Or if inclusion occurs, but some participants are given a voice and a say, but others are denied it, then belonging is thwarted for those who are treated less generously.

The requisite of agency brings power into the belonging formula. To have agency, one must individually and collectively have the power to act and the potential to influence. This goes beyond the classic formulation of “voice.” Having a voice means being heard, which is largely a corollary to being recognized or visible, our third definitional element. Agency goes beyond voice to “say,” or influence. Having a say does not necessarily mean getting one’s way, but it does entail more than the right to be heard; it means some degree of capacity to shape the proceedings or the deliberations. To foster belonging, we call for the empowerment of people, especially those from marginalized groups, to be able to fully participate in society. Belonging will arise when institutions and communities take steps to facilitate agency so that these participants ultimately feel that they have a say.

*We recognize the inherent complexities and difficulties in the notions of “subjectivity” and “objectivity,” but these concepts serve as close-enough heuristics or approximations to convey our intended meaning as it applies to belonging. Moreover, the focus throughout our book has been on the status and experience of groups rather than individuals, along with the broader societal conditions, meanings, and practices that generate othering. While not ignoring the subjective experience of belonging, we wish to emphasize that belonging is also materially grounded, patterned, and structured in society.
** The incorporation of inclusion into a compound definition of belonging may be intuited from the fact that belonging is, in many ways, an evolution of the concept of inclusion and builds on it. It is difficult to peg exactly what minimal level of equity is required to create the material conditions for belonging, but it is likely a threshold that varies from context to context.

Buy a copy of the book and check out powell’s 2023 Bioneers keynote.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from “Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World” by john a. powell and Stephen Menendian, published by Stanford University Press, 2024.

Youth-Led Solutions for a Brighter World 

As we continue to wade through a moment marked by unparalleled global crises, it is often the youngest among us who have the clarity, passion and energy to take the lead in tackling the dire problems we face. As they prepare to wrestle with the challenges left behind by their ancestors, youth movement leaders are inspiring people across generations to act boldly to right historic wrongs and implement genuine solutions.

Below, we invite you to hear Sage Lenier discuss how we can transition to a green economy; read about Yurok leader Sammy Gensaw III’s progress in restoring the Klamath River; watch the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company’s explosive creativity in its social justice advocacy; and hear young genius inventor Charlotte Lenore Michaluk share her hopeful vision for sustainable technologies. The new generation is setting the course, and is asking us all to join them. 

Explore these inspiring campaigns lead by the next generation, and help us spread the word about the diverse ways youth are working to heal our world. 

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Sage Lenier – Towards a Just Transition: Blueprint for a Green Economy

We spend a lot of time talking about the ecological crisis and not nearly enough talking about real, workable solutions. If the ultimate goal is to keep fossil fuels in the ground, how must we transform our economy to make that possible? Award-winning activist and innovative educator Sage Lenier, one of the most impressive young leaders to emerge in recent years, sheds light on what a realistic and just transition looks like and the role we can each play in leading us toward a more circular and equitable economy.

Watch now 

Navigating the Currents of Change: A Conversation with Indigenous Activist Sammy Gensaw III

“I really want people to know that these are whole families that have depended on these watersheds for thousands and thousands of years. We will continue to depend on these watersheds until the end of time.” — Sammy Gensaw III

Gensaw (Yurok) was born and raised as a fisherman along Northern California’s Klamath River. From his earliest days, he was steeped in the ethos of community organizing, a legacy passed down through generations within his Yurok heritage. This upbringing instilled in him a profound understanding of the interdependence between human communities and the natural world, a perspective that would shape his life’s work. As Director of the Ancestral Guard, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching traditional fishing and farming practices to Indigenous youth, Gensaw’s approach encompasses not just environmental advocacy but also food sovereignty, cultural revival, community resilience, and self-sufficiency. Working alongside his people, he played a pivotal role in securing the removal of four of the six major dams on the river. Watch his Bioneers keynote and read more in the below Q&A. 

Read the conversation

Performance by Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company

In a performance that weaves together spoken word, step and dance, the diverse group of teens who make up Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company express their experience and vision. Since 1993, Destiny Arts has performed original work for up to 25,000 audience members annually, garnering critical acclaim and widespread community support for both their technical prowess and their commitment to advancing inclusivity, equity, and justice. Destiny Arts collaborates with professional artists to create dynamic, original productions. Combining hip hop, modern and aerial dance, theater, song, and rap, company members take the stage to tell stories that stem from their lived experiences and express their visions for a world transformed. 

Watch now

Charlotte Michaluk – Sailing into the Future: Weaving Tradition and Modernity

What can fiber arts and rotor sails have in common? How can we create sustainable technologies that can be implemented in the near future while balancing economic realities with public health and climate change mitigation? Charlotte Lenore Michaluk, an extraordinary 17-year-old scientist, researcher, biomimetic inventor, passionate eco-activist, and conservationist shares her hopeful vision informed by a deep respect of the natural world and powered by brilliant, clean green technologies.

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Kevin J. Patel – A Brief But Spectacular Take on Giving Climate Activism a Shot

“When people tell me that climate change is inevitable, I always tell them that that’s not true. We can still do something about this crisis. I’m very optimistic in the young people who are leading this fight.” — Kevin J. Patel on PBS NewsHour. 

Los Angeles climate justice activist Kevin J. Patel was recently featured on the PBS NewsHour program Brief But Spectacular. As part of the program, Patel talks about how he was inspired to take action after experiencing health issues due to poor air quality. In 2019, he founded OneUpAction International, an organization that supports and empowers youth to implement climate solutions. Watch the PBS segment below and check out his 2022 Bioneers talk on collective ecosystems. 

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Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses 

Through engaging courses led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, Bioneers Learning equips engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources, and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community.

Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses:

Navigating the Currents of Change: A Conversation with Indigenous Activist Sammy Gensaw III

Sammy Gensaw III (Yurok) was born and raised as a fisherman along Northern California’s Klamath River. His journey reflects a blend of ancestral wisdom and contemporary activism, all centered around the profound significance of preserving ecosystems and Indigenous traditions.

From his earliest days, Sammy was steeped in the ethos of community organizing, a legacy passed down through generations within his Yurok heritage. This upbringing instilled in him a profound understanding of the interdependence between human communities and the natural world, a perspective that would shape his life’s work. As Director of the Ancestral Guard, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching traditional fishing and farming practices to Indigenous youth, Gensaw’s approach encompasses not just environmental advocacy but also food sovereignty, cultural revival, community resilience, and self-sufficiency.

Gensaw’s pivotal role in the remarkable dam removal project on the Klamath River stands as a testament to his unwavering commitment to environmental justice. The removal of these dams, which will be finished by fall of 2024, will mark a historic victory, not just in terms of ecological restoration but also in reclaiming ancestral lands and revitalizing Indigenous lifeways. 

In this Q&A with Bioneers, Sammy Gensaw III delves deeper into the intricacies of the Klamath River, the challenges posed by dam infrastructure, and the transformative power of grassroots activism. 

Sammy Gensaw delivered a keynote address at Bioneers 2024 about the Klamath River and anti-dam activism. Watch it now.

BIONEERS: You just won an incredible victory by helping get the removal of four of the six major dams on the Klamath River approved, with their demolition starting this year and ending this fall. Can you talk a bit about the Klamath River and its importance in your culture?

SAMMY GENSAW III: When we talk about the Klamath River, we have to realize how important it is to the health of California. Many things that happen within the Klamath Basin determine how the rest of California’s water year will look. 

Our river systems are so connected. My community is tucked away so far up north that it’s sometimes hard for people in California to imagine whole communities living and depending on these river systems. I really want people to know that these are whole families that have depended on these watersheds for thousands and thousands of years. We will continue to depend on these watersheds until the end of time.

It’s really important to me that people understand not just the benefits of removing dams on rivers, but also the significance for the communities around those rivers. 

BIONEERS: Tell us a bit about these dams. Why are there dams on the Klamath River, and what impact are they having? 

SAMMY: Beginning in the early 1900s, there was this huge infrastructure boom across America. Dams were new and exciting. There were originally plans to put dams all the way down the Klamath. Thankfully, the people at Blue Creek or Ah-Pah and the Yurok tribe along with people from all over the world stayed at the river bar, determined not to let this beautiful place be decimated by dams. They stopped those projects.

But unfortunately, four other dam projects on the Klamath River moved forward in the name of electricity. Those projects were publicized as being good for communities and the river. Resistance to the dams began in the 30s, so we know problems with the dams started much earlier than many people realize. The dams have been an issue practically since they were built.

Today, the way that we’re able to live our lives is based on our rights and access to this river. If the river is not healthy, then our people aren’t going to be healthy. You would expect people living on a river to have an abundance of salmon, steelhead, and fresh greens. But we don’t, because access has been denied to our people.

BIONEERS: What effect did the dams have ecologically? 

SAMMY: The Klamath River is a really special river because of the way it’s formed. We have wetlands at the top of the river, and then the river does a turnaround, goes back up north, and then runs out to the ocean. This has created a paradise for our people at the mouth of the river, but these dams have decimated the number of salmon. And there are more people depending on this river than ever before.

These dams slow or completely stop the natural flow of the river. The river should be almost breathing. It should rise and fall. It should pick up algae and other materials and throw them up higher on the bank. When the river gets low again, it should dry that stuff out. 

That process slows the creation of blooms that we see today such as toxic blue-green algae. We have natural moss paddies in our eddies, and they’ll collect toxins coming down the river from poor agricultural decisions, mining, and dams. Add that all up, and it creates a perfect disaster of shallow water conditions and places where salmon can’t spawn, where people can’t swim, and where even dogs can’t drink. And this is the river that our whole way of life is based around.

We get together in hopes that this river stays healthy enough to sustain our people, because our people are sick. I like to look at the whole situation. Being a fisherman, we’re sitting on the river and can tell that something is obviously wrong. The water’s super warm. You reach down, you feel it, you can touch it. When you can catch the fish, you can see sickness in them. There are all kinds of little things. When our people see that, they ask why it is like this. 

Then someone will say climate change. In reality, it’s not climate change that’s directly affecting our people this way. It’s people sitting comfortably in their houses that this river has paid for. It’s people who are deciding that we do not get to live a healthy lifestyle so they can cushion their bank account. It’s these types of decisions that are impeding our ability to live a good life. Some people claim to know the value of water. But it’s not like when you go into your gas station to buy a bottle of water. Our lives are not included in this estimate.

These dams—they’re not a monster; they’re not something that’s undefeatable. That’s something I want Indigenous people around the world to know. These dams are not mythical creatures. These are things that can be dismantled. These are things that can be organized against. And there are people all around the world who are willing to help you fight for your right to live a healthy life. You’re not alone.

BIONEERS: That’s a really strong message. Could you tell us about your activism and experience fighting to get these dams removed?

SAMMY:  I’m an old salty fisherman. I’m a fisherman first, and my whole life revolves around the river and the needs of my people. That’s what’s most important to me.

My activism started in the fifth grade. I spent a long time with my grandma, and she kind of coached me. The school district in Del Mar County was going to shut down fifth to eighth grade on one of the only elementary schools on the reservation instead of adjusting the budgets of neighboring schools in the city. That was the point in my life when I realized that the whole world wasn’t run by tribal council. I realized that the majority of the world wasn’t Indigenous.

Then when I went to school, we were forced into the back of these buses and driven two hours every day. When we got to school, we’d get in trouble for being late and sent straight to detention. It was this terrible thing that I experienced. 

The ACLU came in, and they started asking me questions. They became our lawyers. We fought the county. We advocated for the perfect environment for Indigenous students to thrive, but the court decided that was impossible to provide. We actually didn’t win that legal battle. That was my first experience with activism.

What we did do is strike a deal to make sure that none of these Indigenous children had to suffer the same way I did in school. None of them had to face the same problems that I faced, and that was something that made me feel really good. So it started there.

I wasn’t allowed to go back to that school. I had to be home-schooled. Then a school on the reservation opened up, the Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods, and I enrolled there in the eighth grade. From there, I became an organizer, and then an organizer for the Klamath River Justice Coalition. I’ve spent the majority of my life fighting for the removal of dams and the health of our community. I didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning. I just knew that if our people were to live a healthy existence on the Klamath River, we couldn’t do so while these dams existed. Something had to go, and we weren’t leaving. 

I moved into the teen advisory group through United Indian Health to teach about diabetes prevention, health awareness, and sexual education, among other topics in local schools and communities. From there, I moved into pretty much full-time activism. I’d leave my house sometimes for long periods of time without a dollar in my pocket. I would go on the road to these meetings, one after the other. Luckily I wasn’t on my own. There are so many people who have dedicated their lives to seeing these dams come down.

I grew up in this ragtag group of organizers, and I realized that what they were saying and the changes they were creating were monumental. I knew I was in the right place. I knew that I had to do something to make myself useful among these people so I could continue to be with them. 

It’s so important to have youth in every aspect of organizing. Children have the solutions. We’re making the decisions, but they have the solutions. If we continue to break that connection, we will forever be in this status quo. We have to make sure that we think about children as our next generation of elders and leaders.

The Fair Food Program: Fighting For Farmworkers’ Rights

“The Harvesters” image – courtesy of artist Erin Currier (@erincurrierfineart www.erincurrierfineart.com) – depicts three Coalition of Immokalee Workers leaders: Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Nely Rodriguez, and Lucas Benitez.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) began as a small group of Florida farmworkers fighting against abuses in the field, wage theft, and forced labor. Eventually, realizing structural change had to come from the top, the CIW campaigned against some of the most powerful corporations in the food industry. After decades of rallying consumers, students and church groups, they were able to negotiate enforceable standards to safeguard farmworkers’ rights.

At the EcoFarm Conference, Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed three CIW leaders who shared the horrific conditions that farmworkers endure and how the CIW was able to make real change in the daily lives of those who grow and harvest our food.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez has been a farmworker since age 11. He works with consumer allies in the CIW Fair Food Campaign, educates farmworkers on their rights, and helps investigations of abuse and modern-day slavery.

Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, a former NY State Supreme Court Judge, directs the Fair Foods Standards Council, which monitors and enforces the Fair Food Program’s agreements between agricultural workers, growers and corporate buyers to ensure human rights for farmworkers.

Greg Asbed, a former farmworker, is the co-founder of the CIW, a human rights strategist and principial author of the Fair Food Program. Asbed was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow in 2017 for “transforming conditions for low-paid workers with a visionary model of worker-driven social responsibility.”

ARTY MANGAN: What was the turning point for each of you to get involved in this work? What drew you in?

GERARDO REYES CHAVEZ: While working in the fields in Mexico, I heard that there was work in Immokalee, Florida. So I went there thinking that I would work, save money and support my family. But I didn’t expect to see all of the situations of abuse against farmworkers. My friends and I were taken advantage of by the crew leader. He didn’t pay us for two weeks of work. That was how we were welcomed to Immokalee. We had asked for a little bit of money just to buy utensils and basic staples to cook instead of buying the food from his sister-in-law, which was making us sick. He didn’t like that so he fired us and didn’t pay us.

Because of that, we ended up with no home, no money, no job, and we didn’t know anybody.  Then I met two workers who were part of the second case of modern-day slavery that the Coalition Of Immokalee Workers (CIW) helped bring to justice. They became my roommates and told me their stories. I learned very quickly about all the abuses against farmworkers working in the agricultural industry in Immokalee – wage debt, sexual harassment, violence in the fields, etc.

They introduced me to the CIW. I went to a meeting and met Greg, and I met Lucas Benitez and other colleagues. At that time they were planning a 230-mile March for Dignity, Dialogue and a Fair Wage for farmworkers from Fort Myers to Orlando, to the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, carrying a paper mâché Lady Liberty that is now sitting in the Smithsonian on permanent display in Washington. That was my entry point.

And after I learned about the general strikes that took place in the ‘90s – there were three of them, 3,000 workers each time, the march against violence, hunger strikes, all of those things – I knew that that’s where I wanted to be. So I got involved.

LAURA SAFER ESPINOZA: I was a judge in New York State for 20 years, and moved to Florida in 2010, after retiring from the bench. I was working for the US Department of Justice, teaching in Latin America, and one day, on NPR, I heard a program talking about situations about 30 miles from my doorstep of modern-day slavery and, in fact, hearing federal prosecutors call Immokalee ground zero for modern-day slavery. Like many people of my generation, I was aware of the situation of farm workers from the early campaigns in California in the 1970s, centered in California. That news echoed across the country. But this was 40-some-odd years later, and to hear that this was still happening seemed incredible and horrendous.

I looked into who was doing something about the situation and came across the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. So I showed up offering to volunteer a couple of days a week. But they had just gone through 10 years of incredible sacrifice on this campaign for fair food and were at the point where the entire Florida Tomato Growers Exchange agreed to come into what was to become the Fair Food Program after nine participating buyers had signed legally binding agreements with the Coalition. The CIW told me they didn’t need a volunteer, what they really needed was someone to direct a statewide monitoring organization.

That really wasn’t in my retirement plans, but they pointed out that they had worked for 20 years to arrive at this point, and if things weren’t set up properly, it would be worse than if they had never started, because people would have no belief in it. Then they pointed out that the 30 years of my legal career had probably just been intended for this one moment when I would come across their path. That was 12 years ago. They are really consummate organizers.

ARTY: Gerardo, perhaps people are aware that farm workers suffer poor working conditions and sub-poverty wages, but to hear about modern-day slavery is something I think is unfathomable for most people. What are the conditions in the field that CIW works to change?

GERARDO: When you go to the fields, you wake up around 3:30, 4:00 a.m. to get ready to go to a center location in town in the parking lot or La Fiesta Tres, which is a Mexican store. That’s where the farm labor company bosses gather to get workers. Farmworkers get there by walking or riding bikes because wages are so low they can’t afford transportation. The wages paid are basically the same for the last 30 years, so we have to walk because of that poverty.

If you were lucky to find a job, you get on the bus that takes you to the fields. There they make you wait for hours. And you can’t complain, because if you complain, then you won’t have a job the next day. So for the time you wait, you are not getting paid; then you start working. The typical day could be between 10 to 12 hours working in the fields.

This is an industry where it is mainly men working in the fields. But for very few families, it was especially difficult because they have to take their kids to the home of somebody else who would take care of them and bring them to school. By the time they come back home, they have not been able to see their kids during the light of day. And sometimes their kids are already asleep. So, that’s like a typical day of work.

Within that workspace, the crew leaders pit the Haitian, Mexican and Guatemalan workers against each other to push them to work faster. With the low wages, you have to really be pushing yourself in the fields to be able to make ends meet, to pay rent and to try to save some money.

People are living in overcrowded mobile homes because that was a way to try to save money. So sometimes people are living with 8, 10, or sometimes even 15 other workers, paying exorbitant rent for a small place.

And there were beatings in the fields that happened very often. Before the Coalition started in ’93, seven to ten cases were reported to Rural Legal Services. And there was an estimate that for each case, there were seven to ten situations of violence that were not reported because of fear of reprisal. When the Coalition started, it helped to reduce a little bit of that, but it still continued to happen.

The goal of the CIW was to be able to sit at the table with the growers to talk about how to work together to eliminate all of that from the industry, but during the ‘90s, the industry wasn’t ready to sit at the table. After the hunger strike by six workers in Immokalee, a grower was asked by another grower, “Why not sit at the table?” He said, “I’m going to put it to you this way: A tractor doesn’t tell a farmer how to run his farm.” That was basically the way in which the entire industry was looking at the workforce, not as human beings but simply as tools for the job that were disposable like a tractor.

That’s what led us to think about what we should do to force the industry to hear what we have to say, and to sit and talk about a different way of doing things.We knew that we needed more power to be able to do that, so we started to analyze the market to understand who the big buyers of tomatoes were.

The Packer [a major produce industry magazine] mentioned that Taco Bell had connections to many of the farms where abuses were happening. After several attempts trying to communicate with Taco Bell, we decided to start a boycott against Taco Bell. We wanted them to sit with us to discuss an agreement on conditions to purchasing and the implementation of a list of rights including a code of conduct. We were also asking for a penny per pound increase for tomato pickers.

LAURA: At the time, tomato pickers were earning 45 cents a bucket for 32 to 36 pounds of tomatoes, meaning that you have to pick essentially over two tons of tomatoes in a day to make minimum wage, if your hours are actually counted for minimum wage, which as he described, they had many people waiting hours and hours before going in the field, and that time was never on the clock. So it was massive wage theft and underpayment.

In the cases of forced labor, the CIW didn’t start out to be an organization that would investigate forced labor. They were organizing against abusive conditions in the field and for decent wages. But in doing so, CIW uncovered cases of forced labor, people who were indebted and being held against their will. And so they became the pioneers of investigations into those cases, and ultimately received a presidential medal as a result of their extraordinary efforts to combat human trafficking. It was not the original intention, but it was a very prevalent situation that impacted networks of hundreds of workers at a time.

ARTY: You used the words forced labor, and we also used the language of modern-day slavery. Can you unpack that a little bit so people understand what was going on? And also, did it expand beyond Florida?

LAURA: I can give you the legal definitions, but Gerardo lived and witnessed the situations.

The legal groundwork is people were being held against their will and forced to work through violence, or threats of violence, or psychological coercion, having their documents withheld, having their families threatened, and certainly not being paid adequately for their labor while this was happening. I know it sounds remarkable in the 2000s, however, there were actually situations of people being held against their will, being beaten, held behind electrified fences, and taken from one state to another. These were multi-state networks that the CIW investigated. One of their first cases became the seminal case that helped to motivate the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

GREG ASBED: That’s the legal framework today. At the time when we started with US vs. Miguel Flores, which is the first one of the two seminal cases in the birth of the modern anti-forced labor movement, there were no laws like that. They were using the 14th Amendment or whatever laws after the Civil War that made slavery illegal.

To give you the real, on-the-ground worker experience that led to that, the CIW was starting to organize in Immokalee. People would come together every week and have meetings to talk about the problems they faced as farmworkers, and some leadership was starting to emerge. In the Guatemalan community there were leaders who were deeply connected to the world of recent Guatemalan refugees because a lot of people were coming from Guatemala for political and economic reasons. At the same time, people from Haiti were leaving their country after the overthrow of a government that was popularly elected.

The people from the Guatemalan community were coming to the meetings and talking about a particular crew leader or pair of crew leaders – Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez – who were bringing people over from the border. Back then it was referred to as being coyotes. They were bringing over van loads of people and creating crews of hundreds, but they were treating people absolutely horrifically. They were threatening to cut their tongues out if they talked to the police; they were holding young women and taking them as their slaves, essentially, not to work but for sex, and just treating people horribly.

The CIW was starting to come together. We were starting to hear about that more and more. And then summertime came and people went north into South Carolina from Immokalee to get work. But a group of people who stayed in Immokalee decided to go follow up and see if they could find out where Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez were working.

We went to a labor camp and some people came up to us and said, “Can you help us get our last check from another employer? We’re working at this labor camp now, but we lost our last check at the last place.” We said, “Yeah, we do that all the time.” We asked what happened. They said, “Well, the police came in the middle of the night, and so we left quickly.” And then we asked, “Why did the police come?” “Well, our boss, Miguel Flores, shot one of our friends in the stomach because he was telling us all that we don’t have to work like slaves, not in this country. In this country, we can work where we want to. And he shot him. And then the police came, so we took advantage of that and took off.”

That led to the investigation that led to the case US vs. Miguel Flores. Those are the conditions behind what workers themselves call slavery. There’s some debate at higher levels in this world about whether slavery’s the popular term, but if you ask the people who actually experienced that, when your friend gets shot for saying we don’t have to work like slaves, that’s the word people use, they say, “I feel like I’m being treated like a slave.”

GERARDO: The agricultural industry has much more abuses than any other industry that create an atmosphere in which modern-day slavery can flourish. So for us, it was also a question of changing those conditions, creating something to be able to basically eliminate the oxygen for those kinds of extreme abuses to continue to happen.

GREG: We became well known for discovering and helping to investigate major forced labor prosecutions. But we also realized that that wasn’t a solution; we could chase these things forever; even with a successful prosecution somebody else would fill the void. And so we weren’t satisfied with that as success. Success had to be stopping them from happening altogether, and that’s what eventually led to the Fair Food Program.

ARTY:  There was a key shift in your strategy from attempting to get change from the middle of the system – the labor bosses and farmers – and realizing that wasn’t where the leverage was and pivoting to put pressure at the top of the system. I think that was a brilliant move.

GREG: If you take 10 years to make it happen, I’m not sure how brilliant it is. [LAUGHTER]

When you’re working in a field, you see what’s in front of you; you see the crew leader, first and foremost.

GERARDO: And that’s all you think about.

GREG: That’s your world. And then if you expand it, you think about the farm. But actually, in the farms where people work in Immokalee, you never see the owners.

GERARDO: You would see them sometimes flying over, but you didn’t get to actually meet any owner of the company.

GREG: So for people who work in the fields, it’s very difficult to see beyond that. But, for example, if you’re loading 18-wheelers with melons all day long, and if you pay attention, you hear where those trucks are going. You learn that they’re going to Walmart and to places like that. So then you start to connect the dots.

You realize how powerful those companies are. You realize that there is an immense power at the top of that system. What farmers can pay farmworkers is actually limited by the price they receive. So if we were looking for a structural change that can actually be sustainable in terms of raising wages and improving conditions, it’s going to start at the top. That’s the analysis that got us there, eventually. Like I said, it took us a long time and a lot of sacrifice to actually do it.

But every single step of the way was closer toward realizing that the answer’s not inside of the farm gate, but outside of the farm gate.

LAURA: It was also realizing that ultimately consumers were going to be the final destination for those crops. And that they were going to help the farmworkers to turn this around by telling buyers what they wanted to see in terms of the working conditions for the produce that they were buying.

Many people were active in the ‘70s, and boycotted grapes and lettuce, but this is an evolution of that, and a more powerful leveraging of that buying power at the top of the supply chain, driven by a consumer alliance with farm workers.

GREG: Yes, a more sustained leveraging.

LAURA: Because the goal of it was to arrive at agreements that would be broad, and cover not employer by employer but an entire industry.

GREG: It sounds idealistic to say that consumers are at the top of the market, and literally they are, but if we all make individual decisions about what we’re going to buy, it’s not going to add up to real power. The collectivized purchasing power is with the corporations. And the more restaurants or the more grocery stores that they have, the more power they have in the market.

But we were actually able to collectivize the purchasing decisions of enough consumers through this tireless organizing that we did for another decade, that we were able to take that itemized market of individual consumers and make it act collectively to move corporations so that they in turn exercised their collective leverage and changed conditions in the field. So Taco Bell stopped making farmers poor. Taco Bell started making farmers a little bit better off.

ARTY: And then came the legal structure of the Fair Food Project.

LAURA: Yes. The legal structure – I can say this since I had nothing to do with designing it – is brilliant and also elegantly simple. The buyers commit to pay a premium for their produce, which is destined to supplement workers’ wages with a small percentage that goes to the farmer themselves to mitigate against any increased payroll taxes or administrative costs that they might have in managing the premium, and they also commit to purchase preferentially from growers in good standing in the program, meaning that they’re in compliance with the program’s code of conduct. So good conduct is rewarded by the market.

If there are offenses, we understand that nothing is perfect when you start, and all can be remediated if there is goodwill on both sides. We have a very incremental and gradual and collaborative approach toward compliance, but without cooperation, nothing gets done. So if that point is reached, then the buyers have an obligation to cease purchasing from any operation that’s suspended from the Fair Food Program.

So it rewards good practices and it sanctions the worst practices. There is zero tolerance for offenses such as forced labor or systemic child labor, or an operation ceases to cooperate with the program. And that’s been a tremendous incentive for improving everything that Gerardo was describing at the beginning, everything from dangerous health and safety conditions, to sexual harassment, to physical violence, to discrimination and, of course, forced labor.

The same farms that were making headlines in The New York Times: “Slavery in the Florida Tomato Fields” are now recognized as the best work environment in US agriculture, also on the front page of The Times. So it’s a dramatic transformation brought about by those market incentives.

GREG: Interestingly, when you really think about it, it wasn’t any innovation, it was just making them honest about what they claim. The corporations were all claiming they had codes of conduct.

What’s the idea of a code of conduct? It means if I’m going to buy from you, you have to meet these standards. But if there’s no enforcement to that, then it’s meaningless. What we did was challenge the claim that the buyers only purchase according to certain standards, and made them sign a legally binding agreement to that effect. So, now we will be able to enforce the standards if they don’t. And that changed everything.

We added new standards based on what workers asked for to make the industry more fair. But essentially 95% is already existing law. Our position is to have the corporations do what they claim they are doing, and have us, as people whose rights are in question, monitor and enforce on the ground. That’s what is needed to have a much more just system.

LAURA: That’s what really had never been done before. There are a lot of certifications out there with a code of conduct that may have a once-a-year or once every two- or three-year audit.  There may be an 800 number to call or maybe a committee that is supposed to regulate things. But because this program was created by farmworkers themselves, it became meaningful.

The process includes educating workers on their rights, so people knew it was a new day. They are educated by farmworkers themselves – people who have lived their experience – and are told what to do if things did not go as everyone is now saying they should. And beyond that, they set up a whole new organization dedicated to this process, to monitor and enforce these agreements with the buyers and growers.

That was the birth of the Fair Foods Standards Council, the FFSC. FFSC audits get a snapshot of conditions, and the auditors have tremendous access. There’s been a huge fight based on cases in California for access to workers during the workday, but by contractual agreement, the Fair Food Program has that access. Two workers in the field as they work, two workers at company housing, and we interview at least 50% of workers. We have full transparency into growers’ records, their payrolls, their health and safety records. We work with them on an agreement for corrective actions for non-compliances or risks.

So we have the complaint mechanism, which is 24/7. And the investigators, the same people who go to the field, they respond to the 24/7 hotline. They carry it on their person. And so it’s always answered live, and we investigate those complaints collaboratively with the grower. But ultimately, there has to be a resolution.

I was a judge for 20 years, and I know how long a case takes to wind through the tribunals and appeals processes. We resolve about 67% of our cases in two weeks, and 80% in just under a month. That’s lightning speed. It’s good for the grower, it’s good for the workers, and it’s good for putting in place measures that’ll prevent the next case because we not only want to resolve the individual case, but also want to eliminae the cause of the problem.

There is a working group that is composed of growers who are invested in the success of the Fair Food Program. During COVID, the working group created a set of prevention and response protocols. If you look at the statistics, they managed to cut in half the number of illnesses it affected and workers impacted from the general agricultural population.

We have heat stress protocols to protect farmworkers now. Heat is a serious and growing threat, especially to farmworkers.

There is an education committee. That goes to the farmworkers. And there are tens of thousands of frontline monitors of their own rights. They can be effective because they know they are not going to be retaliated against.

CIW march for farmworker rights. Image courtesy of marie, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

ARTY: Can you give an example of something that the farmworkers themselves asked for that has improved since the code of conduct has been implemented?

GERARDO: Tomato pickers were forced to overfill the buckets that get dumped onto the truck, but they weren’t getting paid for the extra amount. It was basically a 10% theft of wages. The money would eventually go into the pocket of crew leader. So there was a lot of violence. There were workers who had their foreheads split open when the dumper threw the bucket back at them if the dumper thought the buckets weren’t overfilled enough. So eliminating over-filling of the buckets is a way to strip the power of the dumper and the crew leader, and has mitigated instances of violence.

GREG: Establishing that was important for our community. All the conversations with the farmworkers to create the code of conduct helped create a needed picture of all the abuses. In that process, we put all the ideas together, and the Fair Food Program is the end result. What it contains comes directly from those conversations.

LAURA: The workers knew the source of abuse that they were suffering, but in terms of how to make real changes on the ground, we needed the knowledge and the input of the farmers themselves. It was in conversation and collaboration with growers that the fill-to-the-rim standard (not overfilled) was created.

GREG: To help operationalize the standard, we had three or four of the biggest growers in the Florida tomato industry in the CIW office, in the office of a group that they refused to recognize for 20 years. This was the first time that we collaborated, actually worked together toward one solution. We were able to agree on a standard that created more fair conditions for farmworkers, and that was efficient for the growers’ production, as well as reduced violence in the fields. 

LAURA: Implementing these changes by recognizing that collaboration was going to be the key to success, CIW gained this tremendous power. I worked for 30 years [as a NY State Supreme Court judge] in an adversarial system, and this is not that. During an investigation of a complaint, there is a constant back and forth with the grower until we arrive at the findings and what we are going to do about it. That can only happen because now everyone respects confidentiality, everyone respects the right of workers not to be retaliated against. And if there is retaliation, as there were many attempts of that in the very early implementation days, it doesn’t work because we will know about it, and the power of the market stands behind the enforcement. So it is very effective.

And now our growers don’t have major Department of Labor judgments. There aren’t forced labor cases. You’re not having EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] cases brought for sexual harassment, or class action cases. I would say that we have become the best insurance policy that growers could have.

Many growers came to the table out of a desire to do the right thing, to do the right thing for the soil, to do the right thing for the Earth, to do the right thing for the people they work with. This program recognizes good practices. You don’t have to start out with bad practices to join the Fair Food Program. In fact, our expansion is happening with growers knocking on our door. For the first time, we have emails wanting to find out more about a worker-driven responsibility program. We did not think in 2011 that we would see that.

ARTY: It’s seen now not as punitive, but rather as an asset.

GREG: All of the certification programs start from the idea that there is a human rights crisis to be addressed in agriculture and it has been since time immemorial. That problem can have two consequences: suffering for the humans whose rights are in question; and for the employers and corporations who sell the products harvested by those humans, there is a public relations problem that harms their reputation.

The reason the Fair Food Program is different from other codes of conduct is because it’s worker driven. This is the only program that starts with the humans, whose rights are in question, being the ones who created the standard. Quite naturally, their solution goes toward ending human rights violations. Whereas all the other programs are managed either by the corporations or by the farmers.

When it is the employer or the buyer establishing the code, the focus is on stopping the reputational harm, not on stopping the human violations. When it’s the humans who suffer abuses, it’s about stopping the human rights violations. The funny thing is, one of those two solutions solves everybody’s problems because when you stop the human rights violations, the reputational harm stops too. But when you only focus on reputational harm, the human rights violations continue, and that’s the difference, and that’s what makes this uniquely successful, and that’s what’s driving the paradigm shift over time. But it’s huge industry involving billions of dollars. With that infrastructure built around the old paradigm, shifting it takes take time.