Strawberry Fields Forever?

Organic strawberries protect the ozone layer as industrial agriculture trades one toxic chemical for another.
By Arty Mangan

“Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.”
– John Lennon

In the early days of Odwalla, “BC” (before Coca-Cola bought it), the juice plant was a state- of-the-art remodeled brussels sprouts packing shed that stood on the cliffs of Pacific Coast Highway One. Just up the road was Swanton Berry Farm, run by one of America’s truly great, innovative farmers.

Jim Cochran was the first commercial organic strawberry grower in the country. He was also the first organic farmer to unionize his work force, when he invited the UFW in to “formalize the professional relationship we have with our employees as co-partners.”

Jim would harvest his utterly delicious organic strawberry seconds— the fruit that was misshaped or too small for market – and deliver them to the juice plant, with which we (I worked for Odwalla in those days) would promptly make strawberry lemonade, a euphoric nectar, thanks to the Swanton strawberries- genus fragaria named for their fragrance- suitable to serve a potential lover during an artful seduction.

Initially Jim was told that it was impossible to grow strawberries organically for commercial markets. The conventional “wisdom” was that without sterilizing the soil with methyl bromide – a highly carcinogenic soil fumigant that burns holes in the ozone layer- growing strawberries for market just couldn’t be done.

But Jim through crop rotation- artichokes, cauliflower and broccoli are part of his mix- and other organic fertility management practices, created optimum conditions for a healthy soil food web instead of destroying the soil biology with methyl bromide, proving conventional wisdom dead wrong to the culinary and ecological delight of his customers and his land.

In 2002, Jim Cochran received the EPA’s Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award for being the “pioneer…in developing the technology of farming strawberries…without relying on the soil fumigant methyl bromide”.

Nutritionally strawberries are rich in vitamins C and B and contain good amounts of potassium, iron, and dietary fiber. Conventional strawberries, however, are notorious for consistently being among the foods with the highest pesticide residues.

Methyl bromide under the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and the Clean Air Act was phased out in 2005, but strawberries were given an exemption because there was no feasible alternative; apparently they neglected to talk to Jim Cochran about that.

In 2007 the EPA approved methyl iodide as an as alternative to methyl bromide. Methyl iodide does not cause ozone layer depletion, although it is, according to the Pesticide Action Network, “so reliably carcinogenic that it’s used to induce cancer in the lab.”

California has proposed more stringent regulations on its use but at the same time seems to have largely ignored the California Scientific Review Committee findings that “any anticipated scenario for the agricultural…use of this agent would…have a significant adverse impact on the public health.”

Unless there is a substantial public outcry the chemical will become legal in California, which grows almost 90% of the nation’s strawberries. The comment period has been extended to June 29. Comments can be sent tomei_comments@cdpr.ca.gov.

Michael Pollan, in a 2006 Bioneers plenary, speaking of the “technocratic vision” of agriculture said, “As industrial agriculture fails and sickens us, the solutions promote more industrialization of agriculture.”

Dr. Miguel Altieri, agro-ecologist from UC Berkeley, describes the flaws in the industrial agricultural methodology and mind set saying, “Each ecological disease [in this case ozone depletion] is usually viewed as an independent problem rather than what it really is- a symptom of a poorly designed and poorly functioning system.”

California is a Leader in Climate Smart Agriculture

After forty inches of rain, more than double the historical average, the Blue Ridge and Capay Hills that border the beautiful Capay Valley had turned green. I was traveling through this rural fertile valley, the traditional home of the Wintun people and now home to 60 organic farms, as part of a farm tour hosted by the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN). The first stop on the CalCAN farm tour was Three Feathers Ranch, part of an extensive farming operation comprised of 1400-acres of which 250 are organic. The farm and ranch, owned by the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, raise livestock and grow olives, almonds and row crops. Three Feathers Ranch is home base for 600 head of cattle that rotationally graze on 10,000 acres.

Capay Valley almond orchard

The day before the farm tour, CalCAN produced the California Climate and Agriculture Summit at UC Davis. The summit hosted programming on the latest developments in climate smart agriculture including farm biodiversity, carbon farming, farmland conservation, integrated livestock and crop systems, renewable energy, and water conservation. Thanks in no small part to CalCAN’s efforts, California is a global leader in researching and implementing climate smart agricultural policies and practices. One critically important example is the Healthy Soils Initiative, funded by the Cap and Trade program, which has $7.5 million to distribute among California farmers to design and implement plans to reduce on-farm greenhouse gas emissions and increase soil carbon stores. California has allocated $40 million for water conservation (SWEEP), $37 million for farmland preservation (SALCP), and $50 million to reduce dairy methane emissions with anaerobic digesters (methane is a greenhouse gas that in the short term is twenty-five times more damaging to the climate than carbon.)

On the farm tour, we met with Three Feathers Ranch Manager Adam Cline, who works with Point Blue biologist Corey Shake and the NRCS (National Conservation Resource Services) to promote the conservation of wildlife and the local ecosystem by studying nature-based solutions to climate change. Federal programs like EQIP and State programs like the Heathy Soil Initiative provide monetary incentives for farmers to operate as ecosystems mangers in conjunction with their farm management.

Empowering and training farmers/ranchers to be ecosystem mangers and land stewards is a transformational concept. During the Dreaming New Mexico project, a whole-systems look at what a sustainable and regenerative future for an entire state might look like, Peter Warshall wrote, “A landowner does not just own land. He/she owns a piece of the watershed(s) that helps regulate: floods; fires; water flow and soil health; the spread of pathogens, pests and disease; biomass production (photosynthesis); food webs and biodiversity; and nutrient cycling. The land carries memories of the family or beauty or spirit, and may provide space and time for recreation and refuge. Caring for these assets has rarely or adequately been rewarded.”

Programs like EQIP and the Healthy Soil Initiative encourage and compensate the right activities, farming in more enlightened ways to produce food in partnership with nature. Clearly there are not yet enough financial resources allocated, but it is an encouraging start.

Staff members at Full Belly Farm

It was a pleasure to meet and learn from the farmer-biologist team of Adam and Corey and later in the day the great folks at Full Belly Farm who are focusing their intelligence on understanding and working with nature’s power and complexities.

And where it gets fascinating is at the ground level, the interaction between a farmer and the land through observation, experimentation, learning and making adjustments. The localization of knowledge, the grounding of the art and science of farming to a very specific landscape is a completely different worldview from chemical mono-crop farming that degrades the living system by treating it mechanistically. Respect for the complex life forms in a biologically active farming system is the foundation for creating a resilient, sustainable, food production system and a vibrant and flourishing agrarian culture.

This respect for the complexity of life forms was evident even as Adam and Corey talked about the challenges of balancing a healthy ecosystem with the need for the land to be economically productive. They have developed a dynamic process that takes into account diverse factors including conditions on the ground, wildlife, vegetation communities, soil sampling, water infiltration, soil organic matter and soil carbon, and ongoing adaptive management. They are managing photosynthesis to save carbon in the soil by planting deep-rooted perennial grasses, like Perla grass, that penetrate the soil breaking up compaction and facilitating water infiltration. Deep roots go through growth and dieback cycles, leaving carbon-rich dead roots in the soil. The live roots exude carbon in the form of carbohydrates to feed the beneficial soil biota. Maintaining a healthy riparian zone stores carbon in woody shrubs and trees and provides wildlife habitat. Three Feathers Ranch practices rotational grazing, leveraging animal disturbance on the land to enhance and stimulate new growth instead of weakening plant vigor by overgrazing.

Perennial Perla Grass at Three Feathers Ranch

Ten miles north of Three Feathers Ranch is Full Belly Farm, one of the truly remarkable organic farms in California. Full Belly has 350 acres of certified organic production growing 80 different crops and selling all their produce within a 120-mile radius.

The forty inches of rain that the region experienced this year, an eighty-year weather event, added to the complexity, particularly coming after several years of drought-conditions. Paul Muller, one of the four partners of Full Belly Farm, said, “It’s a sobering moment and mud on carrots dwarfs the potential risks if the rain keeps coming and the storms turn warm and melt Sierra snowpack. We certainly keep an eye on the hills above us, realizing that we are simply subject to a much larger power of nature that humbles us and challenges our short-term assumptions of stability and regularity.”

For Full Belly Farm this has meant adjusting planting schedules and techniques around the variables and extremes of drought and torrential rain. Paul led us out to one of the fields that was planted with a cover crop mix of Sudan grass, cow peas and buckwheat that was grazed down by sheep and has now grown back. He explained that having plants on the soil buffers the soil surface from the erosive impact of rain and the root system supports deeper infiltration of rainwater, which mitigates runoff. Using sheep to mow down the cover crop instead of a tractor is a form of no-till agriculture. Paul dug up a shovel full of heavy clay soil to show its friable structure, ideal for root growth and healthy microbial activity, and full of earthworms.

“The trick to no-till is to grow enough biomass and put it down in place rather than using fossil energy to harvest it, compost it and bring it back to the land. How do we make this system fairly stable so the biology is working so we are not using a lot of energy to get the mulch here? There is a lot of experimentation … the mulch is fairly well digested so it could remain as a mulch or be incorporated into the soil. We are trying to figure out how different systems respond.”

Paul added that healthy soil supports soil fungal populations that colonize the sheep manure and decompose it eliminating pathogens. UC Davis has done testing on Full Belly pasture that has had animals on it for 15 years and could not find any e-coli. Interestingly they also found that after cultivation bacterial populations increase and e-coli is present. The thinking is that cultivation disturbs the healthy fungal populations that break down the manure and e-coli. Reducing tillage is not only good for the beneficial microbial populations of the soil food web, but it also reduces the amount of carbon the soil emits to the atmosphere when fields are plowed.

Contrary to industrial farming practices and food safety regulations that try to sterilize the fields, ultimately the answer is more healthy biology in a living system from the soil to the canopy that is not only a food safety buffer, but also the best way to create a climate resilient farming system.

Knowledge-intensive farmers like Adam Cline and Paul Muller, who are keenly observing the dynamics of their land, are experimenting and learning how to manage soil biology and carbon not just for the benefit of their production, but also for the health of the ecosystem and ultimately for the health of the planet. They deserve an enormous amount of respect and must be financially incentivized so that it’s not just the pioneering few who are climate smart farmers and ecosystem managers, but a whole system that culturally and economically supports all farmers to follow their lead.

The Barbarians Inside the Gates: Can the Center Hold?

Many of us of a “progressive” bent are still in a state of shock akin to a waking surrealistic nightmare following the U.S. presidential election, and the Trumpists have if anything so far proven to be even more horrific than our worst fears in their policy initiatives. The saving grace is that if one has to endure authoritarians and xenophobes, far, far better for them to be bungling than hyper-efficient, and this crew has, mercifully, so far anyway made the Keystone Cops and Three Stooges look like Swiss technocrats. Sadly, one can’t count on that to last forever, as tremendous pressure is building among government and business elites, and basic empire-maintenance chores are already forcing the recruitment of some competent managers in at least some key posts.

The best-case scenario would be that the Caligula-esque figure at the top remains impossible to completely rein in, so that his unhinged pronouncements continue to destabilize the governing process and thereby prevent the consolidation of this vile regime’s agenda. Enormous harm is being done and will be done to a wide range of our nation’s institutions, but whether this period proves to be an aberration and that damage can be at least partially reversed, or whether Steve Bannon’s project gains real traction and has “legs,” is an existential question. Does the body politic have sufficient antibodies to repel this viral infection, or is it too weakened and moribund to effectively mobilize its defenses? If the latter proves to be the case, we are in enormous danger.

The upcoming elections in Holland, France and Germany will tell us whether the barbarian hordes will succeed in breaching the last defenses of the post WWII status quo and in cementing the global conquest of right-wing “populist” nativism, or whether the center can hold in “old Europe.” As a lifelong leftist, I find myself in the odd situation of praying for the success of centrists, even the center right — any vestigial forces of relative sanity capable of uniting to hold back the far-right tide. That the dour center-rightist Angela Merkel, the pipsqueak Emmanuel Macron and a Catholic Pope seem to me like heroes of resistance and the last hopes on the barricades plunges me into a state of cognitive dissonance.

That dissonance is even more pronounced here, stateside, where at least some of us on the left, who for decades stridently denounced the CIA and NSA and their ilk and the mainstream media and the centrist elites, now find ourselves in the mind-bendingly hallucinatory condition of praying fervently for the saner parts of those institutions and social groupings to be able to derail the budding neo-fascist vulgarians occupying the pinnacles of state power.

I have gotten into many passionate arguments with my comrades on the left who insist now is not the time to compromise but to push ever more forcefully for a radical leftist agenda. Of course, these people have always made that argument, no matter the situation, like test animals banging their noses into the glass partition trying to get to the food behind it, over and over. They seem to believe that if only the left had pushed a more populist economic agenda, then the gains of the far right would not have occurred. There may be slivers of truth to that, but the left has almost always followed in Rousseau’s footsteps and overestimated people’s fundamental goodness and their desire for solidarity and downplayed the hard-wired tribalism, selfishness, and fear of change and strangers that are also central components of the human psyche, and that are far easier to awaken and exacerbate in large swaths of the population than any latent angelic traits.

The fact is that any classic left/progressive formation in Europe or the U.S. is not currently capable of coming to power or of pushing forth a truly leftist platform if it does miraculously succeed in acceding to power locally or regionally (e.g. Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Madrid). I like Bernie Sanders, but I don’t believe he would have won the election, and he would not have been able to enact any substantive legislation if he somehow had. There is a very large swath of the voting public that is motivated by fear of the other, anger at the disorientation of too rapid social change and xenophobia as much or more than by purely economic factors.

Whether in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Europe, or the U.S., a very large group of rural, suburban and exurban dwellers are very religiously conservative and/or cling to traditions and their own ethnic and national identity. They vote for Putin or Erdogan or the Muslim Brotherhood….or Trump. And it’s not just because they feel left out of economic prosperity (though that of course contributes). If they have a choice between a leftist promising a bigger share of the pie but with tolerance for foreigners and immigrants and those of other faiths, and a nativist promising a bigger share of the pie but protection against the evil other/outsider as well, the second one has been winning, over and over, in recent years.

 

Far too many people engage in political action as a form of self-expression and are therefore incapable of adaptation to changing conditions. This is excusable in the young and inexperienced, but inexcusable among the more sophisticated, those who should know better. Of course all political ideologies have a utopian foundation. At the core of everyone’s political orientation is a vision of what, given one’s view of human nature and potentials and one’s fundamental ethical orientation, an ideal society would look like. Even those pessimistic about human nature, such as Hobbesians, still have a concept of the best possible societal structure (in Hobbesians’ case one that best constrains people’s basest impulses). What most people don’t seem to understand, though, is that the utopian aspirations that inform one’s core political ideology and navigating the realities on the ground in complex, rapidly mutating societies are two very different things.

To encourage an insurrection when one has insufficient forces to prevail, for example, is a form of suicide, not cogent political action. If one wants to be an effective, coherent political actor, one needs to lucidly analyze socio-political realities as they are, not as one wishes them to be. The left has historically been very bad at this (other than some ruthless Leninist/Stalinist types, but they had other serious problems…). This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t advocate for one’s beliefs or campaign for those issues closest to one’s heart (as long as one understands that most of these are very long-term struggles that take generations), but it does mean that one also needs to have a broader vision and to be alert to changing conditions, so that one can respond intelligently to the actual situation, to the facts on the ground.

Global civilization is indeed in a major ecological and social/economic/political crisis that the band-aid remedies of centrist elites are woefully inadequate to address, but in the immediate moment the reality is that if all the social forces from the sane center right to the left don’t make common cause and build temporary electoral coalitions to stop the forward motion of the far right, we face the very real risk of plunging into an abysmally dark period, one that might preclude ever being able to effectively address the root causes of that civilizational crisis, or that would, at best, radically retard those efforts by generations. We can return to our internecine struggles with wild abandon after the current crisis is over, but if we insist on focusing solely on our divisions rather than on building a broad-based, multi-faceted resistance, history will judge us very harshly (if there are any competent, independent historians left standing in the rubble…). I’m not saying we should abandon our specific issues or campaigns, just that we have to also focus on the gestalt as well.

Some revolutionaries have always argued that it’s best to root for the most oppressive segments of the ruling classes to accede to power, as they will “exacerbate the contradictions” and awaken people to the true nature of the system. This is easy for a few intellectual theoreticians to tout when it is not they, or at least not they alone who pay the price, but large swaths of the most disenfranchised who bear the brunt of authoritarian regimes. Those who said there would have been no difference between Hillary Clinton and Trump were horribly misguided. In life it is far more important to first avoid catastrophe than to constantly seek one’s ideal of perfection. You can return to that pursuit of perfection in due time, but if you drive your car off a cliff, you will have permanently precluded all hope of pursuing those refined ideals. Many said they weren’t excited about Hillary, but I urge everyone to develop the capacity to get very excited about avoiding abysmal horror, and to develop an appreciation for muddling through when it’s the best one can do.

Does anyone today remember who ran against Hitler in 1932? It was Paul von Hindenburg, a stuffy military man and far from an enlightened chap, but can anyone doubt that even a potted plant or a schnauzer would have been a vastly preferable alternative to the National Socialists?

In my heart of hearts I am a utopian anarcho-socialist who yearns for a world without money, with genuine meritocracy, free of racism and misogyny and all forms of discrimination, with no poverty or hunger, in which workers and stakeholders own their enterprises, with nothing but totally sustainable green, biomimetic technologies, organic food, half the world reserved for the non-human natural world, etc., and I will argue for that ideal model in contexts in which it feels productive, and in my work I hope to continue to highlight positive, inspiring models and initiatives that point the way to aspects of such a world. I’ll also continue supporting those heroic folks who engage in resistance to the most egregious abuses of power, whether governmental or corporate. But I’m also a realist and a grown up, and in my life I’ve often had to negotiate far from perfect situations to find the least bad outcome. We all have to do that. I urge us to grow up and to apply that real-world experience to our political lives as well.

J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Conference associate producer, is a Brooklyn, NY-based consultant, conference producer, copy-editor and writer. The author of four books: Political Ecosystems, Double Helix Hubris, Delusions of Normality, and Animal Encounters; he also edited the collection, Visionary Plant Consciousness; and was associate editor of the first two Bioneers books: Ecological Medicine and Nature’s Operating Instructions. A senior review team member for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for the past seven years, he was formerly a program director at the New York Open Center and the founder/co-producer of the Eco-Metropolis conference in NYC. JP also taught t’ai chi chuan in Brooklyn, NY for nearly 25 years.

Ten Leaders to Celebrate on International Women’s Day

On International Women’s Day, we celebrate and uplift all the powerful leaders in our lives and we are honored to share 10 incredible talks and performances from our most recent Bioneers Conference with you:

Katsi Cook

Legendary Mohawk midwife and environmental health researcher and advocate Katsi Cook illuminates her dynamic new work strengthening Indigenous communities and addressing the cultural and physical safety and thriving lives of Indigenous girls and women. As Program Director of NoVo Foundation’s Indigenous Communities Leadership Program for Indigenous Girls and Women, she’s building bridges across communities and existing networks to increase synergy in the protection of Indigenous girls and women from multiple forms of violence and oppression.

The wisdom and energy for a movement is at its edges.

Ericka Huggins

Ericka Huggins, the renowned former Black Panther, political prisoner, human rights activist – and educator, poet, and professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Merritt College in Oakland – has advocated for Restorative Justice and the role of spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting social change for 35 years. Grounded in her belief in the greatness of the human heart, Ericka says each one of us has the ability to look there for the answers to questions about the future of our world.

Once your heart is awakened, you can’t help but speak the truth.

Kandi Mossett, Eriel Deranger, and Tara Houska

Bioneers invited frontline activists from Standing Rock and the Alberta Tar Sands to speak about Indigenous efforts to protect water, air and other natural resources for all. These visionary leaders highlight the need for mainstream understanding of the benefits of protecting  human rights as they apply to resource extraction and Mother Earth.

It’s no coincidence that [in pregnancy] when we carry our babies, we carry them in water.

Noris Binet, Nikki Sylvestri, Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining)

What does it mean to bring the “feminine” forward in leadership from diverse cultural and ethnic perspectives? How might a spectrum of views help us to integrate relational intelligence into all our leadership? With poet Noris Binet; Nikki Silvestri, former Executive Director of Green for All and The People’s Grocery and Pat McCabe, or Woman Stands Shining, a Navajo teacher working on Indigenous frameworks for gender and all of life.

“Many devices have been used on the five-fingered ones to create the illusion of separation, but none has been more effective or longer running than the illusion of the war between the men and the women, and the masculine and the feminine.”

Vien Truong

Vien Truong, director of Green For All, has worked tirelessly to bring equity, social justice and climate justice to the frontlines of the environmental movement and public policy. She has been a central force in putting environmental justice at the center of California’s groundbreaking climate policy, legislation and cap-and-trade funding. Vien shares her wise perspectives on how to build a new clean-energy economy that brings prosperity and justice to low-income communities and communities of color.

This Climate Justice fight is not just a fight for a new energy system – it’s also a fight for a new economy, a new democracy, a new relationship with the planet and to each other.

Janine Benyus

Our species is finally turning toward other species for their embodied wisdom, borrowing these insights to solve challenges such as delivering nutrition in a way that nourishes both planet and people. Biomimicry author and visionary Janine Benyus shows how nature-inspired breakthroughs in agriculture are evolving from plant-focused “silver bullets” to system-savvy healing. Cooperation, naturally enough, is the best way to learn from life’s genius!

Don’t ever ask small questions.

Nina Simons

“Reclaiming Relationship & Tradition: Towards a Future that Works for All” – 2016 Bioneers Conference opening remarks by Bioneers co-founder and President Nina Simons.

Anyone who considers the practice of long-term relationship to be a soft-skill clearly has not tried it.

Climbing PoeTree

Extraordinary award-winning poets, performance activists and cultural architects Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman of Climbing PoeTree explore the network of mutuality that binds our existence through the ricochet of oppression and the reciprocity of liberation. Their art is a tool for catalyzing action, cross-pollinating solutions, getting at the root of our most pressing social and ecological issues, and reminding us that we all belong to each other.

Creativity is the antidote to destruction. It’s the opposite of the violence that divides us, a force that builds empathy across difference and awakens us to new ways of participating in the creation of the world.

Destiny Arts Center

The beloved Oakland youth dance troupe rocks the house every year.

For those of you who are parents, I want you to pledge that you will teach your son about feminism – the all inclusive feminism. And I want you to pledge to me today that you will spend this year in particular doing everything you can to remove the barriers that face us. (“The Pledge”, Alicia Garza)

Eve Ensler

Globally renowned playwright and activist Eve Ensler performs one act from her new “Fruit Trilogy”. Coconut is mesmerizing and provocative edge-walking that explores a woman’s mystical journey into her body. Eve is the creator of “The Vagina Monologues”, perhaps the most performed play in history, as well as the founder of the immensely impactful V-Day movement, which seeks to end violence against women and girls globally. As an author-artist-activist, she has fearlessly explored women’s oppression, empowerment and emancipation with unparalleled intensity and influence.

I want the power of your watching, the force of your acknowledgment – not for praise or judgment, permission or acclaim. I want to know that I am safe in the open eyes of the world.

Need more? Check out our Women’s Leadership video playlist and Everywoman’s Leadership audio playlist, and our latest International Women’s Day-inspired newsletter!

Bioneers Partners with Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund on Rights of Nature in Indigenous Communities

In the shadow of the illegitimate approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the escalating corporate assault against Indigenous lands and rights, Bioneers is honored to announce our landmark collaboration with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). Together, we will introduce innovative legal strategies to Native American community partners in a unique position to lead our collective fight for the Rights of Nature.

After learning about CELDF’s current work with the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin to create a Rights of Nature legal framework, Bioneers saw a crucial strategic opportunity. Bioneers secured the resources to support CELDF, specifically enabling the development of this unique partnership initiative.

The idea of Rights of Nature reflects a fundamentally Indigenous worldview of inter-being, kinship and responsibility to Mother Earth. Marrying a Western legal framework to that worldview can be a powerful tool to protect the land, to shift people’s consciousness, and ultimately to transform the law. Check out the powerful 2016 Bioneers keynote by CELDF’s Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil, which includes their work on Rights of Nature.

Since our inception in 1990, Bioneers has honored Indigenous knowledge and rights, serving as a key communications platform and networking hub for Indigenous peoples. Members of over 90 Tribal nations participated in the 2016 Bioneers conference. Our Indigenous Forum has become a trusted and unique cross-cultural space both for Native Peoples and non-Native allies to connect, spread knowledge and solutions, and act together for common goals.

Our Indigeneity Program and CELDF will work side by side to provide trainings and toolkits to Indigenous organizations that express a desire to institute Rights of Nature in their communities. As Thomas Linzey puts it, “There hasn’t been an environmental movement in the United States because nature has no rights. Movements are about taking what was previously property and transforming that property into a rights-bearing entity.” In this framework, citizens are legally empowered to act as trustees on behalf of animals, rivers, ecosystems and nature itself.

CELDF has already helped more than three dozen US communities put Rights of Nature into law. The largest to date is Pittsburgh, whose Rights of Nature ordinance has prevented fracking inside the city limits because it violates the fundamental rights of natural communities to live, to exist, thrive and evolve.

Bioneers and CELDF previously played a key role in helping bring Rights of Nature into the Ecuadorian Constitution – the first national constitution to do so. Through a daisy chain of Bioneers connections, our friends at the Pachamama Alliance brought Mari and Thomas to Ecuador to assist in writing that historic legal framework.

We are immensely grateful to our many Indigenous allies and friends who will participate in this landmark initiative, and to CELDF for its clear vision, skillfulness and courage to challenge the corporate state on behalf of life, people and all beings.

We’ll keep you posted as developments unfold. Your generous support makes this work possible. Now is the time to act. The world is at stake. Thank goodness the Bioneers community of leadership exists to meet this transformational moment.

Three Social & Environmental Leaders Join Bioneers Board

We are deeply honored and grateful to welcome Professor john a. powell, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Scott Spann to the Bioneers Board. At this critical moment in human history, these three leaders bring exceptional wisdom, skill and resources to our shared work.

john a. powell

At this transformational moment when the politics of hate, extremism, exclusion and othering threaten the very fabric of our country, john a. powell elegantly makes the connections among the climate crisis, structural racialization, inequality and corporate power. We believe his work is among the most important in the country today.

john is an internationally recognized expert in civil rights and civil liberties, race, structural racialization, structural inclusion, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy. He’s the Executive Director of the esteemed Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley. The 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. In addition to being a Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies, john holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion.

john has given two keynotes and other talks at the Bioneers conference, and we collaborated to help support the landmark “Othering and Belonging” conference he founded two years ago, and which will take place again this spring. The event is a “don’t-miss” – a profoundly important gathering and platform. Bioneers is also a signatory to the New Social Compact created by the Haas Institute.

Previously, john served as Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. He founded and directed the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He has taught at numerous law schools, including Harvard and Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including “Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.” He has worked in nations across the globe, including South Africa, France, the U.K., Taiwan, and Sweden, among others.

Bioneers media featuring john a. powell:
Bioneers Keynote 2014 video
Bioneers Keynote 2001 video
In Pursuit of Happiness radio show
Circles of Concern radio show
One Percent Solutions radio show

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

Bioneers has long been committed to empowering, cultivating and supporting youth leadership and youth voices. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s work at Earth Guardians is giving voice to the current generation and generations to come who are committed to protecting our planet. We are honored that one of Earth’s preeminent and most inspiring youth leaders and defenders is joining our board.

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is a 16-year old indigenous climate activist and hip-hop artist, and a powerful voice on the front lines of a global youth-led environmental movement. At the early age of six, Xiuhtezcatl began speaking about the need for action on climate change. Since then he has spoken around the world, from the Rio+20 United Nations Summit in Rio de Janeiro to addressing the General Assembly at the United Nations New York. He is the Youth Director of Earth Guardians, an organization of over 2,000 young activists, artists and musicians from across the globe who are stepping up as leaders and working together to create positive concrete action in their communities to address climate change. His work has been featured on PBS, Showtime, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Upworthy, The Guardian, Vogue, CNN, MSNBC, HBO and many more outlets.

Xiuhtezcatl is also a plaintiff in the ground-breaking lawsuit against the federal government for its failure to protect against the dangers of climate change. “Our Children’s Trust” includes 21 youth, aged 9-20, along with renowned climate scientist Dr. James E. Hansen; their case asserts that the federal government has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, and has failed to protect essential public trust resources.

Bioneers media featuring Xiuhtezcatl Martinez:
Bioneers Keynote 2016 video
Hip-Hop Performance with Itzcuauhtli Martinez video
Youth Solutionaries radio show

Scott Spann

Scott Spann is a master of applied networks, who worked with us on the Bioneers Resilient Communities Network project. We’re excited to bring Scott’s expertise to bear on operationalizing the Bioneers network of networks to create transformational change that honors people and nature.

Networks are nature’s favorite form, and social networks are going to be the primary organizational form for the 21st century. Our archaic societal systems, institutions and structures will continue to fail against the magnitude and complexity of the wicked problems the modern world faces.

Scott’s work through his company, Innate Strategies, draws on his experience as a systems thinker and modeler; his work as a trauma and developmental psychotherapist; developments in chaos, complexity and network theory; and emerging understanding from neuroscience, anthropology and ethology.

Scott is working to create deep, lasting impact in business and in society. Most recently, he’s helped create effective networks for projects as diverse as the restoration of the Mississippi River Basin and the Dead Zone in the Gulf, Vermont’s Farm to School Network, and the Minnesota Child Welfare System. He also serves as Chair of International Rivers, which recently received the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

His work is inspired by his experience with business leaders – trying to do the right thing in complex, competitive situations; his work with social leaders in NGO’s and government – seeking to satisfy diverse stakeholders in ways that benefit the whole; his career as a Rolfer and trauma and developmental psychotherapist – witnessing people recover from the injuries that life and humanity too often deal us; and his time in nature as a cowboy, hunter and sailor.

Scott’s experiences range from consulting with Arthur Andersen & Co. to launching the Texas office of the Nature Conservancy; leading the Rolf Institute as Executive Director; as Vice President for ARC, International, a global consulting firm specializing in leadership development and cultural change; and working for Stone Yamashita Partners, a leading branding and strategy firm.

At this world-changing juncture in human civilization, we are grateful beyond words to have these three visionary leaders join our circle. We look forward to navigating these uncharted turbulent waters together, to bring peace, justice, compassion and ecological wellbeing into reality.

Synchronicity Strikes! New “Leading from the Feminine” Podcast Episode

We could not have known how perfect a moment this would be to release our new one-hour radio and podcast special episode: Leading From the Feminine: Keepers of the Cradle of Life.

 

Many of us experienced the profound sense of solidarity and shared power during the Women’s March on Washington (and the world) last weekend. In the wake of this epic event, among the most profound transformations in the women’s movement is the leadership of women of color. This special episode is a deep dive with three eloquent, wise multi-cultural women of color in a deeply honest conversation about how nature and nurture cross paths with culture to produce a whole and balanced human being.

Sharing intimate stories of their role models, inspirations and the unique gifts of their cultural lineages, Nikki Sylvestri, Noris Binet and Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining), offer vulnerable glimpses into their inner worlds, relationships to the feminine, and learning. They explore how leading from the feminine requires a sacred marriage with their own masculine qualities, and ultimately the reconciliation of women and men and of the masculine and feminine qualities we all embody.

“Leading from the Feminine” at the 2015 Bioneers Conference (from left): Anneke Campbell, Nikki Sylvestri, Noris Binet and Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining).

We honor Nina Simons who put this remarkable conversation together at the 2015 Bioneers Conference, and Anneke Campbell who brilliantly moderated it.

“Following on the heels of last weekend’s transformative experience of solidarity across issues, classes, races, orientations and generations, I am so thankful to be able to share these heart-bolstering stories with you, to strengthen us all towards the work we face ahead, together.

Women aligned in purposeful action are unstoppable.”

                                                                       – Nina Simons

We’d love to hear your feedback. And please share the show widely. These voices and stories have never been more important.

The Clean Energy Revolution Is Happening, and Faster Than You Think

When Bioneers first released 100% Renewables: Late and Fast in 2014, as part of our annual radio series Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature, renewable energy was already on the rise. But in the two short years since the show aired, a lot has changed in the energy space. At the 2016 Bioneers Conference, Danny Kennedy shared some updates on the inexorable rise of clean power — a rise that is happening faster than any of us predicted.

For starters, the US now gets 17% of its energy from renewables, and the amount of energy generated globally from renewables has climbed to 30%. Clean energy financing has taken a similarly dramatic upward turn – with banks now flocking to fund renewables. New investment in clean energy topped $287B in 2016. As the global population and its energy needs continue to grow, this exponential increase in clean power generation and financing are good news for the health of the planet.

This growth has also increased the number of jobs in renewables – most of which cannot be outsourced overseas. The wind and solar industries added almost 100,000 new US jobs just in 2016, increasing by 32% and 25% respectively. The nation also added 133,000 energy efficiency jobs, employing a new total of 2.2 million Americans. Building the new clean energy infrastructure is, as solar entrepreneur Billy Parish promised, “one of the biggest business and job creation opportunities on the planet.”

Improving battery and grid technology is the next hurdle – but as the costs of energy storage plummet, the promise of a distributed clean energy future remains strong. The question now is, will the U.S. act quickly enough to make a difference on climate change – and to enjoy some of the immediate economic benefits of leading the clean energy revolution?

Bioneers Conference Sparks Real Change

Bioneers is a life-changing conference and the source of tons of media, but it’s also an incubator, a connector, and a catalyst to action. Here at Bioneers, we try to measure our impact, not through traditional ROI but through “Return on Influence” and “Return on Engagement”. Together, we’re making that happen.

Here’s just one powerful story about what we’re achieving together:

When we booked ocean farmer Bren Smith to speak at the 2016 Bioneers Conference, we knew that his work was one of the most powerful breakthroughs we’d seen in many years. (Thanks to our partners at the Buckminster Fuller Institute for finding him!). It’s on the scale of Paul Stamets’s mushroom magic, and Joel Salatin’s regenerative farming mojo. We had referred Joel to Michael Pollan (who then made him famous in the best-selling “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) – so we shared Bren’s keynote with Michael. He promptly tweeted it out to his 500,000 Twitter followers.

Bren’s GreenWave ocean farming is authentically revolutionary. It produces abundant, high-quality food while radically sequestering carbon. It filters and purifies water, providing habitat for local biodiversity. It also introduces a key innovation: partnering with terrestrial farms to provide them with organic compost and fertilizer – helping local organic farming to scale up, while dramatically reducing pressure on land and farmlands. Last but not least, GreenWave ocean farming creates a shining opportunity for economic democracy, by providing a very low-cost entry point for small producers to make a right livelihood while restoring the Earth.

Bren told us his small team has been working overtime, trying to keep up with the tsunami of interest that has engulfed GreenWave since the Bioneers conference:

  • GreenWave now has nearly 100 people wanting to start farms in CA.
  • Internationally, Bren now has requests to start farms everywhere from South Africa to the Baltic Sea and the Georgia coast.
  • Representatives of Tribal Nations have reached out to plot an Indigenous ocean farming outreach program.
  • A former staff member at the California Coastal Commission has joined GreenWave, to help California farmers move through the challenging permitting process – a critical and imperative step.
  • Wesley Clark Jr. and other influencers are exploring how they can support efforts to build a GreenWave reef in California.
  • GreenWave received a $30,000 donation from a Bioneers attendee to sponsor an ocean farmer.
  • A donor is ready to seed a fund to launch a wave of entrepreneurial ocean farmers with a lens of social, racial and economic justice.

And this is only one success story, among many.

Millions more people are going to be searching for Bioneers – looking to us for vision, real solutions and deep wisdom, whether or not they know it yet! Let’s step up our game and bring a restored world into being.

Join us in giving voice to solutions – donate to Bioneers today.

Youth Leadership: Powering the Movement in 2016

Thanks to the support of the Bioneers community, over 500 youth attended the 2016 Bioneers Conference, making this year the largest youth gathering in our history. Over 400 came on full scholarships, with an additional 100+ offered discounted passes! Almost half of our youth attendees were youth of color, 100 of whom were Indigenous. In addition to our Youth Unity Tent programming, we were proud to feature youth on our main stage, including keynotes by Naelyn Pike, Ryan Camero, Kian Martin, and 16-year-old environmental activist  Xiuhtezcatl Martinez – whom Bioneers is thrilled to welcome as the newest member of our Board of Directors.

The Youth Leadership Program continues to reach historic thresholds each year, increasing in both size and diversity. We believe this surge of passionate youth engagement is one of the biggest signals of Bioneers’ success, and an exciting opportunity to continue producing a unique intergenerational bridge where youth and experienced leaders can interact in deeply meaningful ways.

“I was always a huge environmentalist, but Bioneers definitely refocused me toward the social justice (especially racial equity and female empowerment) aspect of the environmental movement at a deeper level than I had felt before. I was able to widen and sharpen my focus of my values, passions, and goals. I am so, so grateful!
– Megan Phelps, 17, Youth Scholarship Recipient

One of my favorite things was watching my little sisters open up to all the beauty that Bioneers had to offer. I loved seeing all the wonderful things that people are doing to help this planet. It gave me hope and strength to keep trying to fight for what’s right and to know that my support does mean something. We can make a change together.
– Lili Lopez, 24

Support like yours makes it possible for youth to continually experience life changing programming – experiences that radically expand their understanding of the diversity of visionary, solutions-oriented approaches. At Bioneers, youth have the opportunity to not only learn from their peers, but to connect with many of the world’s greatest social and scientific innovators in a learning-and-action context.

Ryan Camero, Brower Youth Award winner, on the 2016 Bioneers main stage

Looking ahead, Bioneers is deepening its commitment to youth leadership development and expanding our youth engagement, both at the conference and beyond. The struggle for a healthy planet and a just society will continue into the next generation, and it is essential that we invest in nurturing new leadership.

Your support is more crucial now than ever before, for Bioneers to continue building our capacity to serve youth in relevant and meaningful ways. We invite you to partner with us to empower the next generation of visionary leaders!

Arty Mangan and Ernesto Reyes

Thank you,


Arty Mangan, Youth Leadership Program Director
Ernesto Reyes, Youth Leadership Program Manager

Election Reflections

Dear Bioneers:

I want to extend my deep love and compassion to each of you in this grave time of trauma and sorrow. We’ve been snake-bit. Powerful poison is coursing through our body politic.

Let’s not mince words: Trump’s election is cataclysmic. It’s also repulsive. We’ve been slimed by some of the darkest shadows of the human psyche – from the authoritarian will to power to the most flagrant demons of racism, bigotry, misogyny and patriarchy. For this job, we may need the Ghostbusters.

It’s critical that we honor the trauma. Take care of yourself. Don’t be isolated. Let the tears flow freely. Reach out and process it with friends and family. Thank goodness we bioneers exist to meet this moment. I want to thank you for being part of this community of leadership, and for all you’ve done and all you’re going to do and all we’re going to do together to set the world right again.

Remember that the bigger the light, the longer the shadow. We’re in the throes of an epic archetypal struggle between the forces of light and darkness. Any truly transformational experience is preceded by dread. As Rick Tarnas says, “There are no pretend near-death experiences.” This is for real and it’s for keeps. We’re here to put a whole lot of light into the world.

I’d like to offer a few observations and some speculation.

First, let’s be clear. Trump lost the popular vote by a number likely to be well over 2 million votes, with fewer votes than the loser Mitt Romney got in 2012. Not only does Trump not have a “mandate,” we who voted against him are the majority. We need to start acting like it, immediately.

We’ve got to grok the incomprehensibility of this election at large. Surgical hacking by Russia and deranged Wikileaks of the Democrats to tip the scales toward Trump. The FBI’s policy-shattering intervention at the eleventh hour for what proved to be a non-event. Large-scale Republican Party state voter suppression in the wake of the weakening of the Voting Rights Act. The overwhelming of journalism by social media to create a fact-free zone and photoshop political messaging.

Welcome to the new abnormal. As Tom Linzey puts it, “The system is fixed. Let’s break it.”

Our republic is supposed to be based on the “consent of the governed.” As it says in the Declaration of Independence regarding our inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

I for one revoke my consent from this illegitimate and deeply immoral regime. What about you? #noconsentofthegoverned.

My wife (and Bioneers Co-Founder) Nina pointed out to me that, for years, many of us have wondered if somehow there would be a catalytic, galvanizing event that would awaken and activate masses of people to step up and step out on behalf of nature and the human community. This is it. It has come in the most bizarre package imaginable, but make no mistake: This is fascism rebranded.

Six months ago my mother became traumatized and correctly called the election. Fleeing Eastern European pogroms, she had immigrated to the US with her mother in 1926 at the age of six. She grew up in the Brooklyn Jewish ghetto and she was hearing unmistakable echoes of Hitler and Mussolini in the voice of Trump.

As J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame wrote about Brexit in her June 2016 essay On Monsters, Villains and the EU Referendum, “Nationalism is on the march across the Western World, feeding upon the terrors it seeks to inflame. Look towards the Republican Party in America and shudder. ‘Make America Great Again!’ cries a man who is Fascist in all but name.”

This reactionary whiplash arises from the noxious cocktail of the ravages of corporate economic globalization and the racism and xenophobia the corporate class has long cultivated to deflect attention from the real issues of inequality and democracy. The same backlash occurred in 1968 with “law and order” Nixon after the earthshaking gains of the civil rights anti-war movements. It happened after Lincoln and Reconstruction with Jim Crow. For more perspective on this moment, I urge you to view the video I did with john a. powell on “The Invention of Whiteness” for a larger perspective on this moment.

As Michael Parenti said in the mid-1990’s (still frighteningly relevant today):

“The GOP agenda today is really not much different from the kind pushed by Mussolini and Hitler. It’s fascism without the swastika. It’s fascism in a pinstriped suit. First, break the labor unions. Depress wages. Impose a rightist ideological monopoly over the media. The rest of the GOP agenda: Eliminate cultural dissidence in the arts. Attack the rights of women and gays. Abolish taxes for the big corporations and the rich. Eliminate government regulations designed for worker and consumer safety and environmental protection. Privatize and plunder public lands and enterprises. Wipe out public services. And cloak this whole reactionary agenda in a kind of revolutionary sound. We’ve got a revolution going here in Congress. Some revolution. It’s the same old reactionary class agenda.

“Today in the U.S. we witness some middle-class Americans, like the middle-class Germans of yore, beset by real economic difficulties. They really are facing economic injustices, and they’re turning their anger toward irrelevant or imaginary foes: the immigrants, the Jews, the poor, the welfare mothers, people of color, feminists, gays, atheists and others.

“You convince people that government is the enemy, especially its social democracy aspects, at the same time you strengthen the repressive capacities of the state. You preach the imaginary virtues of the free market.”

We cannot let this Neo-Fascism take even one step without fierce resistance and calling it for what it is, as we witness self-avowed White Nationalists celebrate in DC chanting “Heil Trump.” Meanwhile we need to keep building the movements to create the next world, and have faith knowing the tide will turn, hopefully much sooner than later.

♦

For those of us who are white, we have a profound responsibility to stand in solidarity with communities of color and all those who will be impacted first and worst. I had the poignant experience of being in the middle of the first Intertribal Gathering-Bioneers event outside Santa Fe when the election happened. (We’ll post a report on that soon.)

When I arrived on the morning after the election, shell-shocked and weeping, there was an odd feeling of equanimity among the 130-plus Indigenous people there from dozens of tribes, along with a small smattering of non-Indians. Although Trump’s election was disastrous news for Native Americans as well, they seemed to absorb it as just the latest unsurprising chapter in a 500-year colonial psychosis.

It was an especially acute counterpoint because there’s a renaissance among Native peoples today, and an unprecedented linking of countless tribes and nations into rapidly growing networks of solidarity and support. Standing Rock has been a catalytic event, and innumerable non-Indian allies have stepped up to stand with them, including Black Lives Matter.

As I said at Bioneers 2016, (watch or read remarks) there’s an unprecedented conjunction of movements occurring today, and that’s going to be the key to our prevailing. Our solidarity arises in the recognition that it’s all connected and we’re all connected. This is what beloved community looks like.

It’s critically important to recognize the imperative and living example of nonviolence in our movements. Those of us who lived through the ‘60s learned quickly that most of those espousing violence were police provocateurs. Quite apart from personal ethics, violence alienates the public and justifies the full repression of the state.

Ours are movements born of love and reconciliation. We’ve now reached a point of no return where the very soul of humanity is on the line. This is fundamentally a spiritual and moral moment we face. To be the change is incredibly hard, but that’s our charge.

We’re already witnessing a rising such as has not been seen before, certainly not in my lifetime. It’s coming from every level and corner of society, including many very powerful forces. Countless millions of Americans are horrified, searching for how to act and engage.

Progressive movements have succeeded the most when there is a split in the ruling elites. There are several radical splits today. For starters, Google is not Exxon Mobil. As climate disruption continues to bear down, large sectors of big business have already bet their futures on clean energy and the end of fossil fuels. The markets are speaking loudly and the vast majority of new energy investment is going into renewables because it makes irrefutable business sense. Although a Trump administration cannot bring back coal, it can do inconceivable near-term damage. We need to limit the damage and to act in the areas where we can keep making progress.

Business is going to play a radically more important role in general, and another split lies in the area of diversity, inclusion, and immigration. Quite apart from a human revulsion of racism, big business generally favors inclusion because it has very diverse customer bases and needs diverse workers in a global society. Witness the business backlash when then-Governor Mike Pence of Indiana passed a law allowing businesses to discriminate again gay people, or the severe backlash against North Carolina for its “bathroom bill,” which included the iconic NCAA moving its near-sacred basketball Final Four out of state for 2017. Companies cannot afford the brand of bigotry.

Another key split is in the “sub-national” space that includes cities, counties and states and the large and growing “green blocs” that already exist among many of these entities. By far the most progressive action is already occurring at the subnational level, which Bioneers has been highlighting for over ten years. Examples include our Dreaming New Mexico project and the game-changing model of California’s climate policy. California, the sixth largest economy in the world, is successfully decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions, while embracing environmental justice and racial equity. We need to intensify our efforts in these subnational and bioregional spaces to the max.

But we need to be clear-eyed: There is going to be a full-on political clearcut on the environment at exactly the moment we absolutely cannot afford it. They will strip regulations and criminalize resistance and dissent. There is likely to be severe repression against the environmental community and climate action. It’s going to take everything we’ve got to stop as much as we can. We’ve got a whole lot of people on our side for this one, and we need to mobilize as never before. To do that, we need to radically ramp up our educational efforts including public education through media. Ignorance is still astonishingly high about the kinds of real solutions highlighted by the Bioneers community over the past two decades.

The one thing that Trump and the Republican Party have in common is a plutocratic agenda. During his first 100 days, we can bank on the most extreme plutocratic legislative battering ram we’ve seen in modern times. It will concentrate already extreme wealth even more and secure dynastic wealth. In words often attributed to the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more accurately be called corporatism, because it is the merger of corporations and the state.”

Even here, there is a split in the elites – witness billionaires such as Tom Steyer, Warren Buffett and certainly quite a few others. The Bernie “political revolution” showed how a large progressive base, including parts of the white working class, exists to create a society that works for all. Trump’s election, driven by the white working class, is a masterpiece of misdirection and a ticking time bomb – because of course Trump won’t and cannot deliver on his promises.

During the Great Depression, the New Deal averted what otherwise could well have been an outright class war. Only a Green New Deal is going to avert this same scenario. This is the best-case model that can actually bring people together around meaningful work and large-scale job creation while addressing the critical restoration of nature and our ecosystems. There are many forces already aligning to make this possible. Now a catalytic event has occurred that could actually trigger it into a reality. The solutions are there, as Bioneers has long shown.

♦

There are several other trends that are unstoppable against the inexorable trajectory of history.

The US is well on its way to becoming a majority-minority nation within 30 years, a seismic dislocation of white identity and anxiety that Trump has tapped. We are confronting the most overtly racist and xenophobic administration in modern history. It’s already shaping up as a rogue’s gallery of museum-quality retrograde throwbacks so out of step with the arc of culture and history as to be like soldiers on an island still fighting after the war’s over.

Masses of people are going to be profoundly alienated by its stance, and it’s an extraordinary teachable moment. We need to be reaching out across our differences ever more energetically and skillfully. Occupying public space to create these authentic conversations is crucial, as are media and communications.

Another fault line is the urban-rural divide, which is now extreme and politically untenable going forward. Republicans are able to retain power because of a federal system set up in the 1700s to favor rural communities, even though more people have been living in cities than in the country since 1920. The bottom line is that it’s going to blow because the cultural divide is so severe and the political and economic injustice is absurd. I encourage you to read this first-rate New York Times article for more detail.

The Electoral College, which is just one tool in this reality distortion field, is within striking distance of being abolished before the 2020 election, if a few more states totaling 105 electoral votes opt out. But we can’t wait that long, and several metropolises have already declared themselves “sanctuary cities,” while stirrings of secession are rising in California. It won’t happen, but it indicates how far gone the divide is.

Some other things to watch:

The Republicans have a diabolical predicament on their hands with Roe v. Wade. They know the majority of Americans want to retain abortion rights, and they’ve been content to chip away at the edges and keep their base on board. Now for the first time they’re in a position to actually overturn it. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Trump seems likely to become embroiled in serial scandals, from sexual predation lawsuits to countless legal problems in his finances and of conflicts that are at the scale of a banana republic. Hitler famously devised a new licensing scam called the “personality right” where he made a fortune charging a small fee for every postage stamp sold with his picture on it. Watch for the sequel.

Trump is a loose cannon and the Republicans are likely sharpening their knives in hopes he can be ousted in favor of a President Pence. Pence would be even worse in many ways, as a Christian supremacist and for his anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion positions. But make no mistake: Trump’s base is not really Republican and many of them are thoroughly disgusted with the Republicans. It won’t take much to alienate them.

Within a year or two, it’s very possible Trump’s base will sour on him or he’ll be embroiled in more personal battles than he or the country can cope with. He is a deeply unhinged person who checks every box on the Psychopathy Index. According to Richard Clark, the large preponderance of the military and intelligence community has regarded him as a serious national security threat. We can only imagine the backchannel scenario planning roiling in the Pentagon at the prospect of Yosemite Sam in the Situation Room. Any kind of major terrorist event or other excuse for invoking martial law is a deadly serious concern especially if it’s wag-the-dog political cover to get him out of his personal swamp.

It’s anyone’s guess how he’ll melt down. When engineers test a new machine, they run it at high speed and intensity to see what blows out, where the flaws are. This is a radioactively unstable personality who’s now got a whole lot of thin skin in the game. It’s hard to see how he’s going to survive the pressure very long before the wheels come off.

This is the time to take an unwavering stand. Let’s not kid ourselves about how dire and dangerous this Trump moment is. As Christian Parenti points out:

“The worst-case scenario is that Trump will establish a modus vivendi with the far-right Koch brothers-led wing of the GOP and achieve an historic gutting of the regulatory state, plus a momentary debt, tax-cut and infrastructure-funded economic boom. This could consolidate a new right-wing populist based at least until it all comes crashing down. Or perhaps the Chaos Candidate’s colossal ego, infamously short attention span and apparent pleasure in firing people will produce the Chaos Cabinet and exacerbate divisions within the GOP and paralysis on the home front. Perhaps the Clinton-DNC cabal can be broken up and run off, and the Democratic Party can re-launch on the basis of a neo-Rooseveltian/Sanders-style set of programs.”

At this epic moment, civil society is going to be more important than ever, and it’s also going to be under great threat. One of Trump’s fiscal proposals already includes essentially eradicating tax-deductions for charitable contributions that would delete the social sector with the stroke of a pen.

♦

If you were at the 2016 Bioneers Conference, you know what a jarring experience it has been to come off the high of experiencing the mushrooming reality of genuine transformation, happening at ever larger scales to restore nature and our human communities.

We know this other world is not only possible, but it is rising fast. Now that rising is going to expand exponentially. We don’t have centuries more to change the game. The time is now.

Twenty-seven years ago, a very small band of us came together with a bold vision of spreading visionary and practical solutions to restore nature and our human communities. Today Bioneers has grown into a unique network of networks and a hub of diverse solutions and movements that are already changing the world.

This is the time to radically amplify our movement building. Climate action cannot wait four years. Biodiversity loss cannot wait four years. Racial Truth and Reconciliation cannot wait, nor Gender Reconciliation. Our youth and future generations cannot wait, and they’re counting on us.

Transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof relates this moment in humanity’s evolution to the four-stage birth process. In the first stage, the fetus experiences a state of oneness and wellbeing with its first environment, the womb. In the second stage, cataclysmic contractions bring the house down, but there’s no way out because the birth canal hasn’t yet opened. It’s a sense of no way out, of prison, desperation, nihilism, and terror. In the third stage, the birth canal opens and the life-and-death struggle is to reach the light at the end of the tunnel. The fourth stage, if all goes well, is liberation into the world.

Grof says we’re between feeling there’s no way out and fighting for our lives to reach the light. We know that abundant solutions already exist to solve and mitigate humanity’s crisis. It’s up to us to swim toward the light with everything we’ve got.

Revoke your consent and let us declare our interdependence with people and nature. Let us take action together to make liberation a living reality. The one thing we cannot afford right now is Intention Deficit Disorder.

We’ve got to ramp up our work to the maximum we possibly can. More than ever, we need you in order to do this.

I urge you to support Bioneers, as well as the many other invaluable groups doing crucial work at this time – to the maximum you possibly can. Your vision, care, hard work and generosity have brought us to where we are today, and thank goodness our network of networks exists to make this archetypal transformation. You know what profound influence we’ve already had on so, so many people, groups and leaders. Now, with your enduring commitment, we can expand that influence and change the game once and for all.

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What Now? Post-Election Responses from the Bioneers Community


Today is a hard day. As citizens, as parents, as children, as human beings, as a community, we are all trying to understand and grapple with how to respond and react and deal with the prospects facing us. For 27 years, Bioneers has served as a hub for hope, inspiration and solutions. We intend to stay the course moving forward and redouble our efforts to bridge movements, issues and approaches as we all work to heal our relationships with people and planet.

In these poignant initial days, many of the brilliant speakers and leaders from our conferences over the years are speaking out, sharing their responses and strategies for moving forward. We’re collecting many of these responses here and will continue to highlight and share important and relevant messages from our community.

Sister Simone Campbell

My faith tells me that now, more than ever, we need to mend the gaps and bridge the divides among us. We know that Democracy is hard work. If anger fueled the election, we need to listen deeply to this reality, not dismiss it. The temptation is to immediately think about how we will fight back, but fighting back will only reinforce this mess we’re in. Instead, we have to fight for a vision that eases people’s fears, brings us together, and solves problems. I pray that President Trump will come to this realization and not be the same as candidate Trump.

john a. powell

We must find a way to extend our circles. Even if some reluctantly accept, even if some outright reject, still we must offer

Ai-jen Poo

Our country is diversifying racially and generationally. At the same time, we have grown more segregated from one another, by income, race, and geography. We need more courageous thinking about how to bridge those differences. Creating proximity and well-planned conversations that build trust across difference is essential to a democracy where everyone feels represented and connected. Each of us must cultivate a willingness to be vulnerable and step outside our comfort zones. Our future as a nation depends on it.

Naomi Klein

The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are “leaderful”, as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.

Rachel Bagby 

Wondering what you can do to take action beyond the ballot box? I just took the #our100 pledge! Join me! https://our100.org

Clayton Thomas Muller 

If you’re in the USA on November 15 please plug in & join us in targeting the US Army Core of Engineers in our nations day of action. #noDAPL

Alisa Gravitz

This is a time to take action. Together, you and I have put the foundations in place for a green economy and made enormous progress over the past three decades. Together, we can continue our progress in the economy for clean energy & climate, sustainable food & agriculture, responsible finance and fair labor, even in the face of gridlock or worse in the national political system.

Favianna Rodriguez 

Pledge to resist Trump, defend those who will be targeted by his hate, and please ask your friends and family to do the same because no one should go it alone.

Terry Tempest Williams 

I am a writer without words who continues to believe in the vitality of the struggle. Let us hold each other close and be kind. Let us gather together and break bread. Let us trust that what is required of us next will become clear in time. What has been hidden is now exposed.

Wallace J. Nichols 

Protecting access to healthy oceans + waterways is more important than ever, our best source of resilience + empathy

Michael Brune

As we reflect on what this means for our country and our planet, it’s most important that we stand in solidarity with all those who have been targeted by Trump during his campaign. People of color, Muslims, immigrants, women, the disabled — millions of Americans have been singled out and attacked by Donald Trump before he has even taken office…We are clear-eyed about the fact that those attacks could continue once he is inaugurated. That is why, as the saying goes, we will not mourn (for too long, anyway) — we will organize.