The Amazing Life of Bees and the Threat of Systemic Pesticides: An interview with urban beekeeper Terry Oxford.

Terry Oxford of UrbanBeeSF has been a successful treatment-free beekeeper on San Francisco rooftops gardens since 2011 and an outspoken advocate against pesticides that harm pollinators. Arty Mangan, program lead for the Restorative Food Systems Program at Bioneers sat down with Terry to talk about bees.

AM: Bee society is very sophisticated. Some people refer to the hive as a super organism.

Terry Oxford: It’s a completely intelligent being. You have to look at a hive as an entire entity. It’s made up of different components and living parts, but the whole thing operates as one system, and the entire goal is to keep itself alive. Everything it does is for the whole, for the group.

That’s why bees are so much more intelligent than humans are because bees are long-termers on the planet. They’ve been here for billions of years. They’re going to far outlive us because they work for the whole. They work for the group and help support each other. It’s very unselfish, whereas, humans – bless our souls – are much more focused on the individual and we don’t see ourselves as a group. We’re less sustainable as a species than bees are.

Bees sacrifice themselves for the others and interact with other parts of nature during pollination, that’s what makes them such special creatures and important to so many different parts of our existence.

The whole hive is largely a female group. There is the queen and the workers. The workers are the bees you typically see outside of the hive working in flowers. They bring in the nectar and the pollen. When they’re very young they stay home and they do jobs within the hive, such as nurse bees, taking care of the larvae, packing the pollen and doing all sorts of work.

The males, who are also very very important, reproduce with the queen. That’s their main job. They’re shorter lived and are often removed from the hive if they’re not needed. The ratio is much higher female to male within the hive at any given time.

The important thing about the hive to consider is that it is basically a uterus. The entire thing is a nest of eggs and larvae at varying stages of life, and the nest has to be protected, taken care of, fed, and the entire thing is constantly keeping itself at a certain temperature to keep the larvae alive, and also at a certain critical mass of larvae.

Bees plan for a future hive that may not include them individually, because they don’t live very long. Their whole existence is about keeping the babies healthy and safe. That’s what keeps them sustainable. I really admire that as a society.

AM: You’re in an urban environment, do the bees help put you in touch with nature in the city?

Terry Oxford: Raising bees in the city is critically important. About 6 or 7 years ago the majority of the planetary population shifted from rural to urban. Cities are now where most of us live, and one of the things that is making us suffer as a species- our madness and depressions- come from a lack of nature.

In 2010 I put bees on the roof of Quince and Cotogna restaurants. They’ve planted a pollinator garden on their roof. Any beekeeper knows that’s just a snack, but it’s an important message, and it’s symbolic of what you can do wherever you are. Now almost all of my rooftop gardens are all organic, largely native, and the restaurants pick flowers and vegetables for the meals. Everything serves a purpose.

I see all sorts of nature on the rooftops. I see stick bugs, swarms of beneficial insects like ladybugs. They come because there’s food. I see a lot of birds, and I feed them. They’ll eat the dead bees on the ground, or they just pick them out of the air.

I make a concerted effort to get companies interested in helping bees-grocers, hotels, all these groups- to put bees on their roofs. I ask that they make sure they’re planting plants that aren’t poisonous to bees. If they aren’t interested in doing that, then I don’t work with them. I only work with companies that will really, truly be green and do something effective to feed the nature in the city.

I work with a company that manages seven commercial properties in the city, and they’ve created little pollinator feeding stations all around downtown. It’s filled with all these native pollinators. You already see mason bees flitting around. It’s safe. It’s not filled with any chemicals.

AM: What are the issues with pesticides and pollinators?

Terry Oxford: There is so much to fight for right now on this planet. There are so many causes, so many fires going, so to save my sanity I picked one fight that I think I can make a little dent in – that’s the systemic pesticides or neonics that have been used in the United States. They were introduced on the market probably 18 years ago. Their invention and use matches exactly the decline of the pollinator system.

When I say pollinators, I’m talking about all the major important pollinators, not just honeybees, the birds, bats, butterflies, native bees, all of these creatures that don’t have as much of a voice as the honeybee does.

Systemic neonicotinoids are a class of pesticide/insecticide that are amazingly effective. Systemic refers to the delivery system for the poison. You can inject it into a tree trunk, you can drizzle it in a soil drench on the root ball, you can spray it on the leaf. It goes inside of the system of the plant and it comes out in the nectar, the pollen, and the moisture drops that ooze out of the leaf that a bumble bee will come along and take a sip of. It’s can be deadly immediately or it can be taken back to the hive and packed into that uterus in the pollen or nectar where it sits in the heat, off-gassing. The neonics kill the reproductive system of the queen, and they’re saying it might have an effect on the males’ reproductive systems as well. It kills over time. It also destroys their navigation system. A bee without navigation is a bee without a home, so it dies. That’s why these particular class of poisons are so incredibly horrible.

Photo By David Lawrence

There is so much money being made by the pesticide corporations with these poisons that there is no way that they will allow any legislation against them. They don’t care about the pollinator system.  They work really, really hard to fight any legislation to stop or even slow down these poisons. They don’t spend any money on fixing the problem and changing their products. They just intimidate. They’re just like the tobacco industry, and they control the narrative.

Last year in April, there was a really great bill in front of the Sacramento legislature – Senate Bill 1282, a pesticide bill that would have prevented the general public from buying neonicotinoid pesticides, a very bad poison that is so toxic that in agricultural conditions you have to be licensed to use it. But currently anybody can buy it and spray it all over their garden and kill everything. The bill was going to ban that, plus require that plants treated with neonics be labeled in California.

The pesticide industry has been working to control the narrative, often through beekeeper associations. Many beekeeper associations will not allow discussion against the pesticide industry. They just shut it down over and over again. The California Beekeepers Association voted with the pesticide industry to prevent the passage of this bill on imidacloprid, which is one of the worst poisons.

I’ve been to the meetings in Sacramento. I’ve tried to talk about this at beekeeping meetings. I’ve been silenced in my own beekeeping association. The pesticide industry operates with the same playbook as the tobacco industry, the oil industry.

The only measurement that we make of bees is honey, because that’s financially the reason that we’re tied to them and also the reason that they have a voice. Trees are the best source of food – pollen, that’s protein, and nectar, that’s carbohydrate. These two important nutritional factors are critical to the life of the pollinator system. Trees are the best way to ensure that bees are healthy, and that they get healthy, diverse nutrition.

In California, almost every major conventional farming tree nursery is treating their trees with some sort of systemic, making the flowers poisonous. When you plant a tree that has any sort of systemic in it, it will probably last for years, bloom after poisonous bloom, year after year these trees are emitting toxic levels of poison to pollinators.

Why these systemic poisons are so bad is they are persistent. They accumulate in all sorts of areas. They accumulate in the beehive. They may not kill instantly. The pesticide industry doesn’t have to prove their product is safe. They just grease the wheels and the product gets approved and overused by the general public and agriculture as well.

When you go out and buy a garden plant that’s good for pollinators, like lavender, for instance, if it’s not organic and if it’s treated with a neonic, it’s likely to kill pollinators. So you’re going to a store with the full intention of helping the planetary life system of pollinators, and you’re coming back with a little pod of poison and putting that in your garden. For the entire life of that plant or potentially up to 6 years in a tree, it’s poisonous to anything coming for some nectar or pollen.

Unless you are buying plants that are organic or native; no native plant nursery I’ve spoken to uses chemicals like that. But I feel like in these times you’ve got to know, you have to ask the question: What has this been treated with? The general public has a lot of trust in what they’re told. I think that we all need to be much more skeptical. Annie’s Annuals in the East Bay or Bay Area Natives in San Francisco don’t use systemic pesticides. There’s a new nursery in Santa Rosa called Bees and Blooms. They’re planting all organic, biodynamic trees that are great for the Bay Area and have flower blooms almost all year long. They’ve just completed a planting of 1100 flowering ornamental tree seedlings. If I have anything to do with it they’re going to be sold to the City of San Francisco in order to feed my pollinators. But the safest thing to do is to find an all organic nursery.

What I’m hoping to create is a need for systemic-free trees that the City of San Francisco will buy so they’ll stop planting their systemic-filled trees. San Francisco is going to be planting 55,000 trees over the next several years. 75% of those are treated with systemics.

California is the battleground we need to win. If we can get California tree nurseries on board, it will be able to create the financial necessity that the tree nursery industry will listen to.

I think if you want to be a healthy human being, you have to be focused on empathy and compassion for the things that don’t have any voice and don’t have any power. That’s basically the entire natural world.

My fight is for this city and the nature that we live with and need more of. I go to government and city meetings, and they all know me. I had a legislator say to me that I was the very first person to come to him defending earthworms. I took that as a compliment!

 Terry Oxford will be displaying her bee produced art at the Bioneers conference October 20-23

My Commitment to Becoming an Accessibility Evangelist

“What’s the appropriate term for referencing the broader community of people who are disabled in one way or another?” my colleague asked me the other day. “Seems like ‘disabled community’ is not quite right.”

How would you have answered this question? Have you thought about what our relationship is with the word “disabled” and all of the values, implicit and explicit, that accompany it?

Fortunately, I knew *the* person to go to with this question (and you will too when you see him speak at Bioneers this October). I asked my old friend and colleague James Thurston who will be introducing his collaborator and Bioneers plenary keynote speaker accessibility rights activist Victor Piñeda at Bioneers on October 20-22.

James is the Vice President, Global Strategy and Development at G3ict, the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies an NGO that works to facilitate and support the implementation of the dispositions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) related to the accessibility of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and assistive technologies.

Victor Piñeda is the President of World Enabled and of The Global Alliance on Accessible Technologies and Environments (GAATES), the leading international organization dedicated to the promotion of accessibility of the built and virtual environments.

In distilled terms, they are accessibility evangelists.

James and Victor travel around the world with their joint initiative, Smart Cities for All, meeting with municipal and civic leaders about digital inclusivity for all city residents, citizens and visitors. Together they have met with mayors and chief technology officers in Mexico, Brasil, Israel, India, Japan, and throughout the United States.

Their work is helping to raise the awareness of the importance of digital accessibility and inclusivity for all.

Possibly more significantly, they are working to change the narrative around the term and meaning of “disability”, which has become such a disempowering and polemic word in our society, often associated with other or less than.

Victor and James like to quote the words of Ambassador Luis Gallegos of Ecuador known to many as the “father of UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.”

“Ambassador Gallegos often says that being a person with a disability is the one minority group that we will all, if we live long enough, become a member of at some point in our life,” James told me. ”Either from aging (we all pick up impairments as we age and those affect how we use technology) or accidents, illnesses, wars, crime, etc.”

And that number is growing. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) approximately 15% of people on earth are people with a disability. Some quick math: that’s around one billion people.

There is still much work to be done to make the world aware of this issue. One of the points of entry is the workplace. James and his organization, G3ict, have launched a new campaign and web portal with a toolbox to help organizations, cities and countries incorporate accessibility and digital inclusivity policies and tools. It’s called BuyICT4all and includes resources in both Spanish and English. The portal includes a specific pathway to support people wanting to be evangelists in their own organizations.

So, what’s the appropriate term for referencing the broader community of people who are disabled in one way or another?

The answer was one that hit me viscerally and poignantly: “It’s persons with disabilities,” James told me. “Persons with disabilities are defined by their personhood, not their disability.”

That was enough to make me an accessibility evangelist.

Follow the work of James and Victor on Twitter.

Suzanne Simard and the Underground Fungal Networks

Professor of Forest Ecology in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Suzanne Simard will address a keynote talk at Bioneers 2017.

One of the foundational, guiding principles of Bioneers since its inception nearly three decades ago is that we humans need to rediscover humility vis à vis the natural world. The scientific revolution that began with the European Enlightenment has produced many wonders and a powerful method to understand the workings of the universe, but in its noble quest to move beyond medieval superstition and ill-conceived notions it also went overboard and threw out the baby with the bathwater. It developed a view of nature as a soulless mechanism to be studied and dissected with no sense of its inherent sacredness, something that First Peoples, despite all the oppression they have had to endure, never lost and have been generously transmitting to those among the rest of us open to their teachings.

What the current era demands of us if we are to successfully transition to a genuinely sustainable and life-honoring civilization is that we find ways to reconcile and integrate the deep wisdom of First Peoples’ and ancient cultures’ worldviews applicable to our time with the best of modern science, especially its holistic and “whole systems” branches. Many Bioneers stalwarts, including Paul Stamets, Janine Benyus and Jeremy Narby, to cite only a few, have in their own ways been leading the way in using cutting edge scientific discoveries to reveal that nature is not a mindless machine but a complex adaptive system teeming with intelligence, and now we are thrilled to bring to the conference for the first time a scientist who might exemplify this quest more perfectly than anyone.

Suzanne Simard, Ph.D., a Professor of Forest Ecology in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia, is a groundbreaking researcher who studies the astonishing complexity and symbiotic relationships in forest and other ecosystems, especially the underground fungal networks that connect trees and permit them to share nutrients and information. Her research, which was recently highlighted in the international bestseller by German forester Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World, has shown beyond doubt that forests are in fact communities with highly complex and adaptive networks centered around what she calls “hub” or “mother” trees. Suzanne’s work has far-reaching implications about how to be wise stewards not only of forests, but wetlands, tundra, grasslands and alpine ecosystems as well. In revealing how these networks look a lot like human neural and social networks, her discoveries show us that if our species intends to survive, we had best seek to learn about how to live in balance in the biosphere from the webs of plant and fungal life that have been here far, far longer than we have and know far more than we do about resilience for the long haul.

We hope you will be able to join us in October to hear from not only one of the most important ecologists on the planet, but one of the best scientific communicators as well. Early-bird ticket rates end on July 31. Get yours now!

Carbon, Climate, Food and Fiber

In this podcast excerpt from a Bioneers workshop, Rebecca Burgess, Ariel Greenwood, and Guido Frosini explain how drawing carbon from the atmosphere and capturing it in the soil can reverse climate change.

“Our soils have a carbon debt. Our atmosphere is gushing with carbon. The carbon over our heads is literally in the wrong place.” Rebecca Burgess

Rather than being the problem, carbon can be the solution to climate change by managing our landscapes to capture atmospheric carbon through photosynthesis and sequester it in the soil where it increases fertility and makes the land more drought resilient. Marin and Sonoma County ranchers and entrepreneurs are building local agricultural economies while regenerating ecosystems and sequestering carbon. The Fibershed Project, founded by Rebecca Burgess, is developing regional clothing production with a community of ecological farmers and artisans. Solar power, grey-water and recycling are all embedded aspects of the Fibershed’s. They have also implemented a Climate Beneficial Certification for their suppliers to ensure that from soil to garment production the stewardship of the environment and climate are paramount considerations.

Two young climate conscious ranchers who share the Fibershed’s ethos are Ariel Greenwood and Guido Frosini. Both balance deep ecology with landscape and livestock management and economic sustainability. Ariel, who describes herself as a “feral agrarian,” holistically manages a herd of cattle to regenerate ecosystems and restore water cycles by increasing biodiversity and sequestering carbon. Guido Frosini of True Grass Farms is an innovative land steward who balances soil and grass cycles with the intentional movement of livestock in a climate beneficial ranching system. Rebecca, Ariel and Guido share their experience, knowledge, and aspirations on this Food Web podcast: Carbon, Climate, Food and Fiber

Mariel Nanasi and the Power Shift to Local, Green Energy Democracy

As we enter into the biggest civilizational shift ever attempted – the global transformation from fossil fuels to clean energy – it’s an epic power struggle in more ways than one. It’s an economic war, but at the same time it’s a clash of paradigms between the quest for a decentralized, economically distributed democratic economy versus a centralized, trickle-down, corporate monopoly.

One of our greatest Bioneers sheroes in these David-and-Goliath battles is lawyer-activist Mariel Nanasi, who will keynote at Bioneers 2017. She is unstoppable, she is brilliant, she is eloquent – and above all she is exceptionally effective here in the US Southwest where the clean energy battle is among the nation’s fiercest and with the highest stakes.

Interestingly, Mariel had a transformational experience at the Bioneers conference several years ago, which set her on her current path to build a green energy localized economy founded in public power and energy democracy. She has courageously taken on one of the nation’s worst corporate actors, PNM Resources, the local utility monopoly that has remained committed to fossil fuels, nukes, and endlessly rising rates that soak the public while enriching Wall Street and backwardly building yet more of yesterday’s climate-destroying energy system.

Mariel has worked for many years now to end the horrendous environmental crimes in the Four Corners region, disproportionately impacting Native American peoples. Their living cultures and communities suffer daily and have suffered for decades from the countless health harms from fossil fuel and uranium extraction and filthy, toxic power plants. Not to mention the extreme economic exploitation resulting from this model. Mariel works to change all that.

She has been the spark plug for the city of Santa Fe working to shift to a public power system and create its own renewables-based system and locally-based clean energy economy. Integral to her success has been her unwavering faith in community and her ability to forge genuine relationships.

Mariel works closely with the tribes, governments and, more recently, with a statewide network of cities, towns, and counties seeking to reclaim ownership of their power systems and shift to clean energy. She will share her expansive national view of this growing movement to reclaim community rights to determine our own clean energy future and create jobs, health and equity.

It’s a power struggle alright, and Mariel is one of our greatest warriors and visionaries. 

Saru Jayaraman and a Movement for Change

Have you ever thought about what happens to a tip you leave for a server at a restaurant? Most of us would think that the amount we leave will be added to a sufficient wage. Unfortunately, this is not true for most of the restaurant industry workforce.

Currently, in the US, 43 states have a two-tiered wage system, which means employers in the restaurant industry can pay different wages for tipped and non-tipped workers. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour and while many states have their own laws, the minimum wage for a non-tipped worker on a federal level is $7.25/hour. In other words, in 43 states, it is legal to pay a tipped worker as little as $2.13 per hour as long as the tips they receive add up to match the least an employer should remunerate their staff in a given state.

Needless to say, this is a problematic system. Two dollars and thirteen cents an hour is the minimum amount before taxes are discounted. This means that, in reality, millions of servers, bussers, hosts, and bartenders survive practically only out of the tips they get from us, the consumers. And because tips are variable, shareable, and not guaranteed, they don’t have a stable income they can count on.

Depending on the uncertainty of tips to pay bills that don’t vary in price every month is only the tip of the iceberg. Seventy percent of the restaurant workforce are women and more likely to suffer sexual harassment. Most of the norovirus outbreaks (food-related illness) caused by contaminated food occur in food settings like restaurants. Nearly ninety percent of restaurant workers don’t get benefits such as health care and paid sick days and two-thirds of those who responded to a survey reported cooking, preparing and serving our food when they’re sick for lack of an alternative.

Luckily, there are groups of people fighting this system, such as the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United). Since its founding after the events of 9/11, their main mission has been to achieve better wages and working conditions for the restaurant workforce, including a single, fair wage that workers can depend on, even before tips. ROC-United’s Co-Founder and Co-Director, Saru Jayaraman was one of Bioneers’ keynote speakers in 2017. She will tell us about how this national movement began, why she is committed to this fight, the victories over more than a decade of work and the difficulties of challenging such a powerful industry and the government. She will also be on a panel on how to build movements to transform institutions and systems.

Find out more about Saru Jayaraman and how you can engage with  her campaigns and efforts by visiting the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United)

Climate Change: Not Just An “Environmental” Issue

The disgraceful, shortsighted and embarrassing decision by the Trump Administration to pull out of the Paris Climate Treaty has since fallen by the media wayside, given the Comey testimony and the absurd reality show accompanying it. During the week when the Paris agreement was front page news, much ink was spilled on the topic and several of the most salient perspectives worth spending some time on include Elizabeth Kolbert, Naomi Klein, Vien Truong & Bill McKibben, among others.  

I was drawn to another piece of media coverage of the Paris withdrawal, although not so much for the content as for the headline. The June 2 issue of the New York Times Online points towards the continuing challenge of media coverage of climate change issues. This headline, and others like it, represent a fundamental problem with the way that climate change is still being discussed and covered. The headline for the article, bylined by Michael Shear, read: “Trump Pulls U.S. Out of Climate Accord, Weakening Fight Against Global Warming: Environment Will Suffer as Result, Allies and Rivals Say,” (emphasis added).

If it isn’t abundantly clear by now that climate change is not just an “environmental issue”, I don’t know when it will be. Certainly there will be calamitous impacts on the non-human biosphere as a result of unchecked climate change. Miles of bleached coral reefs, ice-free arctic summers and the potential impact of rapid climatic shifts on intricate interspecies relationships established over millennia are just a few of the risks. However, continuing to cast climate change a strictly environmental issue is as much of a failure as a lack of climate action. For a quick hit litany of what we’re facing as a society, just read the opening section of Bill McKibben’s landmark 2016 New Republic article. It almost feels absurd to lay out, again, the potential fundamental threats to various components of human society posed by a global climate system gone into overdrive: inundated coastal cities, massive droughts, urban heat waves, supercharged storm systems, acidic oceans, global pandemics, climate refugee crises, etc. It’s entirely likely, for instance, that Miami will become the next Atlantis. I haven’t read any analysis regarding the environmental impact of a major metropolitan city going underwater, but it seems patently obvious that the real losers would be human health, economies and societies.

Whether or not the Trump Administration’s decision will have an overwhelming impact on the future temperature of the earth remains to be seen. In many ways, he has been the greatest organizer for civil society that we’ve seen in recent times. The overwhelming response by American businesses, states, cities and regions (collectively referred to as ‘sub-national actors’) has been inspired and heartening. The question really is related to whether we’ll take aggressive enough action in time to avoid the most deleterious impacts that could arise down the road, as the ship has already left the harbor. In the end, climate change, like most other ‘environmental’ issues, is in fact neither a strictly human nor environmental problem. As David Suzuki famously said on the Bioneers stage, “We are the environment; there is no distinction.” We’re all in the same boat– and we need to start acting like it.

 

Amy Goodman: Back to Bioneers

By Anthony Lappé

“I think the media can be the greatest force for peace on earth.” – Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman

Long before fake news infected our body politic and the web exploded with a million points of misinformation, the news was controlled by a few mega corporations. Each of them with varying degrees of deference to the defense contractors, polluters, drug makers and other assorted Goliaths that grease the wheels of our so-called democracy.

It was up to a small band of outsiders to provide an alternate set of facts to counter the narrow spectrum of what made up the acceptable narrative. Back then we were called the independent media.

Like many members of this outsider band coming of age in the late 90s and early “oughts,” one of our heroes was Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! She deconstructed the structures of power with a calm poise that was everything the blow-dried network anchors weren’t.

If journalism is history’s first draft, Amy was providing footnotes in real time.

Today, she’s reached iconic status as one of the paragons of the progressive media, giving voice to the often intertwined struggles of indigenous peoples, environmental activists, criminal justice reform, and a myriad of other movements who have blossomed over the course of the last two decades.

Despite the electoral college triumph of Trump’s America, all indicators show the nation is becoming more tolerant, is showing more respect for nature and is more open to economic justice issues than ever before. A big part of these encouraging trends are progressive communicators like Amy Goodman.

Democracy Now! started in 1996 as a community radio show in New York, and she soon attracted a dedicated group of fearless young journalists who often joined her putting their lives on the line to report the truth. In Nigeria, Amy and future bestselling writer Jeremy Scahill reported on Chevron’s role in the ongoing conflict between the government and indigenous tribes pushing for the energy giant to stop drilling on their land. As a result of their reporting, the company was forced to acknowledge it helped transport troops to a remote village where innocent civilians were massacred. The documentary won the George Polk Award, one of the numerous awards Amy has earned, including the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel.

The turning point for Amy’s’ professional career came on the week of 9/11, when coincidentally the show added a video feed. That soon evolved into a full-fledged television broadcast, chronically reporting the worst abuses of Bush’s fledgling so-called “war on terror”. From that one public access station in New York, demand for the show spread, reinvigorating public access stations around the country with an increasingly robust daily news show. Today, Democracy Now! is on a staggering 1,400 television and radio stations around the country, is translated into Spanish, and is an integral part of millions of progressive media diets.

Last year, Amy proved her mettle again. Braving the elements of the North Dakota fall, she was arrested while covering the native uprising against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Her arrest helped build momentum for the inspirational, intersectional stand against fossil fuel expansion. Soon after, major media outlets began covering what had been little more than obscure Facebook post for most Americans. And two months later, President Obama ordered the pipeline construction to halt.

Amy Goodman will be back at the Bioneers’ stage in October as a key note for this year’s Bioneers Conference. She will tell us about the first 20 years of Democracy Now! and the journey to stay true to its original mission of “going to where the silence is and giving voice to the movements that are shaping our world”. And for a taste of what’s like to see Amy live, watch the video of her talk at the 2006 Bioneers Conference.

You don’t want to miss it! Early-bird tickets end on July 31. Buy yours now!

Anthony Lappé is an independent writer and television producer. His most recent series is the four-part docs-series America’s War on Drugs for HISTORY, airing 9 pm ET June 18-21.

Carl Safina and Animal Consciousness

Do animals have feelings? Do they think?

Anyone who has had a close relationship with a pet like a cat, a turtle, a dog, or a bird, will jump at this question with a resounding; Yes!  While they can’t all be like a Border Collie that has learned hundreds to thousands of words and sentences, we know first hand about their spark of intelligence and affection.

In biology, this question becomes a tricky one. Traditionally Biologists were urged not to anthropomorphize animals and assign them what were considered “uniquely human” traits like emotion, thought, and consciousness. The practice has been considered speculative and unscientific, even though examples that require very little speculation are ever more abundant.

Elephants have been observed as “grieving” over their fallen pack members. Octopuses can solve complex puzzles, sometimes just through observation. Cuttlefish use the powerful color-changing cells in their skin to communicate. Even hyenas have been shown to have complex social relationships and problem-solving abilities.

One particular speaker at the upcoming Bioneers conference in October, Dr. Carl Safina, has dived into this world of animal behavior. As a marine biologist, Carl Safina began his career researching seabirds. Through his work, he became a MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim fellow. He developed into an ecologist and marine conservationist as he increasingly found himself debating on the side of conservation. Eventually, he was pulled back to the science of animal cognition through his abundant curiosity.

“Like many of us, I have wondered what thoughts and emotions motivate animals to do the things we see them do,” Carl Safina writes in an online question and answer session, “ I went to the heart of this by asking animals the question that for a scientist was forbidden fruit: Who are you?”

In his talk, titled “We Are Not Alone; What Animals Think and Feel,” Dr. Safina will explore animal consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy and the link to how that helps us protect the wildlife habitats of our animal cousins. Perhaps he will even answer the age old question, “does my dog really love me?”

Carl Safina will address a keynote talk at the 2017 Bioneers conference and he has a message for you. Watch the video below and buy your tickets to Bioneers now! Early-bird rate ends on July 31.

Trump, Paris, and the Citizen Leader

Yesterday’s news on the United States withdrawing from the historic Paris Climate Agreement reinforces what many have known for a while now– that Donald Trump ran on a dangerous, short-sighted, and oppressive campaign. It is no surprise that everything he and his “swamp-filled” administration have done since assuming the Presidency is take whatever progress has been made and fought for over the better part of the last 60 years and sell it to the highest billionaire willing to profit from it.

As a young adult who has grown up with the internet as the backdrop for my world-expanding experience at home, I’ve had the privilege of access to content and information previously inaccessible to so many. With that access comes the reality of being exposed to the best and worst of society. Being educated and having enough common sense as a millennial to realize that we only have one planet to live on for the foreseeable future, I have enough common sense to know that we are going to suffer the consequences of climate change in my lifetime and in the lifetimes of the children I one day hope to have.

The retraction from the Paris Climate Agreement triggers and angers me. However, I am not alone in that anger. That anger is felt to this same degree by everyday people who also feel small in comparison to the federal government. Some of these same angry people in turn have channelled their frustration and taken more leadership than even that same government on some of the most critical issues of our time, in this case Climate Change.

A quote from Margaret Mead comes to mind when evoking the newly awakened reality of the nation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

As a young person who will eventually need to deal with the adverse effects of a warming planet and all the climate issues that ensue because of it, I see my peers shoulder to shoulder, genuinely pissed off. Yet that anger has not been confined to an empty void, limited to 140-characters. It has been the catalyst to promote an outpouring of love and resilience that has become the source for sustainable energy used to resist and fight against these destructive policy decisions.

It has even shown up in top business leaders around the country which, as a young adult who has to deal with those choices, provides a level of relief that even some of the corporations which could benefit from the withdrawal have chosen to go against the decision.

Still it can be easy to fall into a sense of powerlessness, but if I have taken anything away as an activist, warrior scholar, defender of Mother Earth, and fighter for social justice reading Mead’s quote, it is that the response by Pittsburgh’s Mayor Bill Peduto, and other city and state leaders across the nation,  to the withdrawal is yet another step towards a much larger fight that will need our collective energy, time, and above all, belief. For after all, it is our planet too.

Regenerative Agriculture Can Help Solve Climate Chaos

There are two great Will Allens in organic agriculture. One is a 6’7” former professional basketball player and founder of Growing Power in Milwaukee, the renowned urban agriculture training center. The other Will Allen is an organic farming pioneer and activist who started out as a professor at UC Santa Barbara, but was fired and jailed for his anti-Vietnam war activism. No longer able to work in academia, he took up farming following in his father’s footsteps.

Will’s zeal for justice and reform was transferred to agriculture. He founded the Sustainable Cotton Project (SCP) in 1990, which helped farmers transition to organic while reducing farmworker exposure to pesticides. SCP created markets for organic cotton selling to major manufacturers like Patagonia, Esprit, Levis, Marks and Spencer, and Nike.

Understanding that war creates more victims than heroes, Will became a founding member of Farms Not Arms (now the Farmer Veteran Coalition), which helps veterans heal from the trauma of war by training them for jobs in agriculture.

Will moved from California to Vermont to farm and became active in the Vermont GMO labeling law campaign. He farms with his wife Kate Duesterberg on 40 acres, producing a diversity of vegetables and fruits, grains, oil sunflower, dry beans, and ornamental and cut flowers. The farm has a certified kitchen producing organic products, and an organic coffee shop. The Cedar Circle Farm educational program hosts over a thousand school kids each year.

I sat down with Will at the 2016 Eco Farm Conference to talk about his work with Regeneration Vermont that promotes climate-friendly agriculture, social justice for farmworkers, stewardship of the natural environment and the production of healthy food.  At the age of 80, Will is still a vital and transformative force, steadily pushing the food system to be more accountable, more in tune with nature and to be in service of human and ecosystem health.

Jeremy Narby Returning to the Bioneers Conference

 

We are delighted to announce that the renowned Canadian-born/Switzerland-based author, anthropologist and activist Jeremy Narby, one of our favorite people on the planet and one of the most spellbinding speakers ever to grace our main stage, is returning to give a keynote address at Bioneers in 2017 after several years’ absence.

Jeremy has a nearly 30-year track record working with indigenous peoples in Peru as the sole Amazonian representative of the Switzerland-based international NGO, Nouvelle Planète, an organization deeply influenced by the world-renowned humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) and his ideas on the “Ethics of Reverence for Life.”

Jeremy has been highly effective in his backing of many initiatives by and for the indigenous peoples of Amazonia in such domains as: land titling, self-determination, bilingual education, sustainable resource use, preservation of plant knowledge, environmental monitoring of petroleum companies, and of course the protection of the integrity and biodiversity of the tropical rain forest. Jeremy has carried on this extensive, remarkable activist work discreetly, so his accomplishments on that front are not widely known.

Jeremy (who studied history at the University of Kent at Canterbury and got his doctorate in anthropology at Stanford) is far more well known internationally for his authorship of some groundbreaking books and his thought leadership in seeking to reconcile indigenous wisdom traditions with modern scientific approaches to knowledge. He is uniquely well suited to this pursuit because he is a rigorously trained anthropologist and highly literate in several contemporary scientific fields, but he also lived among the Ashaninca in the Peruvian Amazon for several years and became immersed in shamanic ways of seeing the world, which impressed him by their profundity and sophistication. His profound respect for both these seemingly irreconcilable cognitive systems has driven him to make it his life’s work to seek to find common ground between them, something he has done with extraordinary originality, insight and clarity.

His books include:The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and The Origins of Knowledge;Intelligence In Nature; The Psychotropic Mind: The World According to Ayahuasca, Iboga, and Shamanism (with Jan Kounen and Vincent Ravalec); and the collection: Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge (co-edited with Francis Huxley). Jeremy also sponsored a few experimental expeditions that brought small groups of molecular biologists and other scientists to the rainforest to experience indigenous knowledge systems and visionary plants. One of these journeys was captured in a documentary film, Night of the Liana.

We hope you can join us in October to hear one of the most brilliantly original thinkers of our time. Here’s a clip of Jeremy’s talk at the 2005 Bioneers conference.