john a. powell’s decades of work delving deeply into the process of “Othering” shows practical ways we transcend and transform the all-too-human tendency to retreat into tribalized and racialized identities that diminish others as less than human.
john’s many years of racial justice work crystallized in his current role as Founder and Director of UC Berkeley’s esteemed Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, which is a national beacon for the leading edges of how we can recognize our interconnectedness as people and as members of the diverse web of life, and turn it into systemic and policy change.
The Haas Institute brings together researchers and scholars, community partners, strategic communicators, and policymakers to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society and to create transformative change toward a more equitable world.
john is a Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion. He’s an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racialization, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy. He joined the Bioneers Board early this year after many years of participating in the Bioneers conference.
In the filmed interview I did with john, he points out some of the hidden history of the New Deal that’s coming home to roost again today. The only way FDR could gain Congressional support for radical ideas such as the minimum wage and social security was to make a deal with Southern Dixiecrat politicians that the New Deal would be for only white people and would not disturb the racialized caste system of the South.
The 1960s civil rights movement, including Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, was designed to finally bring to fruition the promise of the New Deal for African Americans and people of color. In turn, that provoked the white identity backlash exploited in the Southern Strategy by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, stoking racial anxiety to divide and conquer ongoing.
Today’s racialized upheavals around white identity can be traced to the Southern Strategy becoming the national strategy of the Republican Party, of which Trump is the logical outcome.
In his most recent address to the Bioneers Conference, john sheds light on how we can move through this transformational moment in American society when an increasingly diverse national and global society calls for all of us to overcome the burdens of history and rise together as one in the recognition that we are one – on one Earth.
Calla Rose Ostrander and John Wick will address a keynote talk during the 2017 Bioneers Conference and host a workshop on Monday, October 23.
It doesn’t seem that long ago when carbon was not a topic of everyday conversation. But that’s changed now that carbon literally hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles, a grim reminder of the dangers of continuing to feast blindly on the affluence of a fossil fuel economy.
The irony is that carbon, the basic building block of life, has been so systematically misused, it has become humanity’s greatest threat. The consequences of carbon’s excess in the atmosphere affect all life. After all, it’s carbon’s nature to be a foundational aspect of nearly all biological forms and processes.
So, is it a surprise to say the imbalance in carbon in the atmosphere can cause political instability? Not according to former Secretary of State John Kerry who said: “It’s not a coincidence that, immediately prior to the civil war in Syria, the country experienced its worst drought on record.”
And it should also come as no surprise that climate disruption will affect food supply. A study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said that without substantial emission reductions, the US, the world’s largest food exporter, would suffer serious (20-40%) yield losses in wheat, soy and corn by the end of the century.
But many say a reduction in emissions alone will not get the job done even if the world gets serious about transitioning to a non-carbon economy at the rate of the Paris Climate Accord. Does that mean that the situation is insoluble?
“The most intractable problem today,” Margaret Mead said, “is not pollution or technology or war, but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.”
Two individuals who decided to do something about the existential dilemma of our global climate unraveling from its evolved harmonious state into an unstable and inhospitable state are John Wick and Calla Rose Ostrander. John is the co-founder of the Marin Carbon Project and Calla Rose has spent almost 20 years working to transform large complex systems like the cities of Aspen, CO and San Francisco from climate problems to climate solutions.
As dead serious as both John and Calla Rose are about solving the climate quandary, they are, on a personal level, quite joyful; perhaps because they may have found the elixir of life–carbon.
What they want to do is re-shift the balance of excessive atmospheric carbon and capture it in the soil where, instead of being a disruptive force, it supports healthy life systems by increasing fertility and water retention, and kick-starts the biology of the soil food web resulting in increased yields and healthier more resilient plants while holding carbon deep in the soil in a stable form reducing the atmospheric overload.
Make no mistake, this is not some hobby project on the rural fringes of Marin. Soil carbon, as an answer to climate change, is being adopted into global climate thinking. France has introduced the 4 per 1000 Initiative, which promotes a 4% increase in soil carbon per year and is working to bring players in the public and private sectors to get on board.
The math is extremely encouraging in regards to how re-carbonizing depleted soils globally could play a transformative role in turning the clock back on climate change by drawing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil through the everyday ubiquitous magic of photosynthesis.
Wow, there is a future and it’s dirty and full of earthworms and mycorrhizae fungi, nematodes and billions of beneficial bacteria—all thanks to carbon.
Calla Rose Ostrander has teamed up with John Wick and the Marin Carbon Project team to do the trials and gather the rigorous science on how pasture lands can be managed to maximize carbon sequestration. They are working with ranchers to develop carbon farming plans and their work has been instrumental in influencing the potentially game changing California Healthy Soils Initiative that will monetarily incentivize carbon farming.
Agriculture and land management have been underestimated if not completely missing from the climate conversation. Food production accounts for about 40 % of the earth’s land use. A deeper understanding of how the carbon cycle works and how that informs climate smart soil management practices may very well be the most realistically hopeful solution in solving our most intractable problem.
John Wick and Calla Rose Ostrander share their momentous work on carbon farming research, practices, policies and how they are building a statewide network of carbon farmers and ranchers in a keynote presentation at the Bioneers conference (Oct. 20-22). And on October 23, in a full day workshop at Stemple Creek Ranch, they will be joined by an array of remarkable farmers, scientists, ecologists and food system activists who will make the connection between carbon and climate justice, local foods systems, organic agriculture, and agroforestry.
Yes, there is a future, its secret is in the soil and, like all life, it is made of carbon.
Amy Goodman tells the story of reporting from a refugee camp, and discusses the ways in which her independent media organization, Democracy Now!, endeavors to ask the tough questions and change history.
In 1996, Democracy Now!—a well-known independent radio and television program—began telling stories the mainstream media overlooked. With award-winning journalist Amy Goodman at the helm, the nonprofit organization has grown to become the United States’ largest collaboration of public media, currently broadcast on more than 1,400 stations. Democracy Now!’s programming has covered wars, economic catastrophes, environmental degradation, and social movements, and its hosts, Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, have become trusted voices within a mass-media cacophony. Bioneers has been honored to host Goodman on our stage over the years, and we look forward to her appearance at the 2017 conference.
The independent media organization’s self-titled book,Democracy Now! (Simon & Schuster, 2017), recounts 20 years of groundbreaking storytelling through Goodman’s lens. The book’s first chapter, “The War and Peace Report,” is a deep-dive into the violence—and consequences thereof—witnessed and reported on by Democracy Now! journalists. The following is an excerpt from that chapter.
Endless wars have now spawned the largest migration of human beings since World War II. Europe has been the first stop for this wave of humanity.
In December 2015, my Democracy Now! colleagues and I visited a massive, makeshift refugee camp called “The Jungle” on the outskirts of the northern French town of Calais. The camp grows daily, swelling with asylum-seekers fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and beyond. Their countries of origin are a map of the targets of US bombing campaigns. More than six thousand people in this, France’s largest refugee camp, hope for a chance to make the last, dangerous leg of their journey through the nearby Channel Tunnel to England. Wind whips off the North Sea, blasting the shelters made of tarps, tents, plastic sheeting, and scrap lumber in this sprawling, ramshackle end of the line. The roads in the camp are muddy; the portable toilets are filthy. The charity health clinic had been closed since mid-November. The main entrance to the camp is below a freeway, with several police vans parked with lights flashing and armed officers stationed above.
Most who arrive here have endured arduous journeys of thousands of miles, hoping to cross to the United Kingdom. The Channel Tunnel offers asylum-seekers a way to make it to the UK without risking a dangerous crossing of the English Channel, by stowing away on either a high-speed passenger train or a freight train. Accessing either type of train involves significant risk, and accidental deaths occur almost weekly when people leap onto moving trains or stumble under truck tires.
A few days before Democracy Now! visited the camp, a Sudanese man named Joseph was killed when he was run over by a car on the highway. Camp residents were protesting that the police had not stopped the driver, holding signs reading “We are Humans, Not Dogs” and “Do survivors of war not have the right to live in peace?” We asked a young man named Majd from Damascus, Syria, why he fled his country: “I escaped from the war. I don’t want to die. This war is not my war.” We asked him who was attacking his country. He said: “Who? Everyone. Russia and America and Iran—everyone.”
Days before we met Majd, the British Parliament voted to attack Syria and began bombing immediately. In the few months prior, the British government built multiple layers of high, razor-wire-topped fences in Calais, sealing off the tunnel entrance and the rail line for miles before the tunnel, as well as the staging area where freight trucks line up to drive onto the rail cars that will carry them through the tunnel. Each truck is also subjected to an infrared scan to look for stowaways. Before the enhanced security, scores of asylum-seekers might get through the tunnel nightly. Now, it is almost impossible. The more the West bombs their countries, the more it shuts out those who flee its wars.
In the Afghan section of the refugee camp, Sidiq Husain Khil was eager to speak about the fourteen-year-old US war in Afghanistan—the longest war in US history. Like many, he did not want his face to be filmed. We asked him about the effects of US bombing and drone strikes on Afghanistan. He replied: “If they are killing one person or ten persons, one hundred of them are joining the group of Taliban…. The war is not the solution for finishing terrorism. They have to talk face-to-face.”
As we roamed the camp, pulling our coats tightly around us in the cold, we looked for a woman who would be willing to speak. We met Dur, an Afghan professor of English, who also did not want her face shown. She traveled more than three thousand miles with her four children, by car, bus, horse, foot, and boat. In almost perfect English, her twelve-year-old daughter described their unimaginable route: “First we go to Nimruz province of Afghanistan. Then we went to Pakistan. Then we walked to Saravan, Balochistan. Then Iranshahr, Kerman, Shiraz, Tehran, Kurdistan, and Turkey. Then we start walking in mountains. Then we went to Istanbul, Izmir. Then we arrived to the sea.” Dur hired a smuggler to take them in a leaky boat from Turkey to Greece. She told me, “When I saw that boat… I called all my children and I start to cry… I spent all my money to buy them death.” Miraculously, they survived. Whether they make it to their destination, Britain, is another question.
As we left the camp, a man named Najibullah raced up to us. An Afghan who worked with the US Marines as a translator, he applied for a special visa for Afghans who put themselves at risk by working for the United States. He said he was turned down because he hadn’t worked for the marines for a full year. “Working with the US government… just one day or a year… it doesn’t matter to the Taliban,” he told me. “As long as you work with them just one hour, you’re condemned to death.”
“Today, Joseph. Tomorrow, who?” read one of the many signs at the protest earlier that day. These refugees are the roadkill of war.
A few days after we left the camp, a painting appeared on the concrete wall of the underpass, where the protest had occurred. It was painted by the globally renowned street artist Banksy, whose identity has never been revealed. Banksy painted a life-size depiction of Steve Jobs, the visionary founder of Apple, with a bag slung over his shoulders. Banksy released a statement to accompany the painting of Jobs:
“We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7 billion a year in taxes—and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.”
A Noble Endeavor
Working for peace is among the most important and noble of human endeavors. Individuals might feel powerless when confronted with a nation intent on going to war, but history shows that movements matter; that small acts of defiance and dissent can ripple out and create change. Noam Chomsky is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus of linguistics, a field of science that he revolutionized. He is perhaps best known, though, as one of the world’s most prolific analysts of US foreign policy. He has authored over a hundred books and still, in his late eighties, is a tireless writer and speaker on issues of war and peace. In the early 1990s, Chomsky wrote an essay called “What You Can Do,” which reads in part,
One of the things [people in power] want is a passive, quiescent population. So one of the things that you can do to make life uncomfortable for them is not be passive and quiescent. There are lots of ways of doing that. Even just asking questions can have an important effect. Demonstrations, writing letters and voting can all be meaningful—it depends on the situation. But the main point is—it’s got to be sustained and organized. If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people who keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.
Covering social movements like those Chomsky was writing about, reporting on efforts to effect lasting change—the movements that make history—that is our daily labor at Democracy Now! The global protest on February 15, 2003, didn’t stop the invasion of Iraq. We can’t know for sure what impact it had, or continues to have, as the demands of those thirty million marchers continue to reverberate. Thousands of individuals and groups around the world continue to work for peace, each contributing a small share to what Martin Luther King Jr. called, in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, “the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”
Watch a video of Amy Goodman’s 2006 Bioneers conference talk below, and check out her 2017 speaker page for more on her involvement in our upcoming conference.
Searching for the perfect news round-up? Look no further! We’ll keep you savvy with all the Bioneers creativity and inspiration you need in your life. Follow the Bioneers Blog for our bi-weekly news roundup:
“Beyond the fields, women are working to make every aspect of the food system more sustainable, equitable, and innovative. Whether it is researching new technologies to reduce food waste or founding organizations to better feed the hungry, women are working around the world to build the future of food.” We are honored to have 2 of these incredible 22 women, Rowan White and Saru Jarayman, gracing the #Bioneers2017 stage.
Occidental folks, this one’s for you! The Forum on Religion and Ecology Conference at Yale is featuring two long-time #Bioneers, Kristin Rothballer and Brock Dolman, at an August retreat. Learn more »
Danny Kennedy’s Organization, CalCEF, is putting together a virtual Hackathon to tap into the genius of our U.S. Veteran Community to crowd source design of the Ultimate Virtual Clean Energy Hackathon. The winners will receive $500 each! Learn more »
“All those girls who are growing up . . . need to see women who are really owning themselves in a self-loving way, and serving the transformation of the world.” How femininity can save humanity? Nina Simons, Bioneers co-founder, is interviewed by Lauren Schiller on her show, the Inflection Point – listen today!
“If you’re not incorporating the most brilliant ideas from the natural world into what you sell, you’re leaving money on the table. Biomimicry is now going mainstream.” How do you incorporate biomimicry into your life? Jay Harman is featured in this piece on “5 Trends to Ride in 2017” »
“I’m not a fatalist. The reason I’m an activist is because I think that the future, at least in part, is up for grabs. I think that there are great forces that produce some outcomes that are deterministic or semi-deterministic. And there are other elements that are up for grabs.” #Bioneers2017 keynote speaker, Cory Doctorow
Listen to a new podcast episode of Deena Metzger, author of A Rain of Night Birds, in conversation with Nina Simons on Rare Bird Radio here!
Outdoor equipment and clothing companies led by Patagonia, but including names like REI, North Face, and Adidas, are joining together in an unprecedented alliance. These folks are organizing to resist the Trump administration’s attempts to roll back land protection in national monuments and forests, with the Bears Ears one of the hottest flash points. One of the #Bioneers2017 panels this year will focus on large-scale land conservation, and Deon Ben of the Grand Canyon Trust will be there to chat all about it.
“The change that we need is not going to come from a politician…it’s going to come from something that’s always been the driver of change – people power, power of young people” Board Member Xiuhtezcatl Martinez in Rolling Stone »
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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
“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 includesa 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.
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 foresterPeter 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!
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
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.
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)
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. Theoverwhelming 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, asthe 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.
“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.
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Anthony Lappé is an independent writer and television producer. His most