Elk River: Looking at the whole picture

It’s been several weeks since thousands of gallons of a chemical used to process coal spilled into the Elk River in West Virginia.  300,000 people were told to turn their taps off, nearly 200 people have been admitted to hospitals for treatment and the overall response at a state level has been somewhat short of an A+ grade.

It’s easy enough to point to each problem independently.  There’s the oft-maligned and outdated Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), which grandfathered in 62,000 compounds, requiring no further testing for toxicity.  There’s the general ineffectiveness of West Virginia’s environmental regulations, which do not require inspection of chemical storage facilities – ever.  There’s the impressive incompetence of the official response- when asked whether it was ok for residents to drink the water coming through municipal pipes weeks after the spill, WV Gov. Tomblin responded, “It’s your decision.”

However, the Elk River spill is a poignant reminder of just how interconnected environmental concerns are and why taking a systems approach to these issues is so important. In this case, consider two key root causes:

  • Our reliance on coal for energy (these chemicals are utilized in the manufacture and cleaning of coal)
  • Our reliance on toxic chemicals for so many of our industrial and commercial processes.

(Note: Water privatization is another key consideration and Appalachian Voices has a good piece on the privatization of municipal water supply.)

Much has been made of the unknown toxicity of MCHM, the chemical in question.  Perhaps we need to be asking a bigger question – why do industrial chemicals need to be toxic at all?

Paul Anastas and John Warner are responsible for the rapidly growing field of Green Chemistry. They emphasis the upside down reality here in which we are purposefully designing toxic chemicals when the industry has the technology and sophistication to accomplish many of the same processes with much less toxic results.  Anastas and Warner have both spoken at the Bioneers Conference about the vision and reality of a much less toxic world. “You ever ask yourself why do we have hazardous materials? Who in their right mind would in- synthesize a red dye that caused cancer? Who in their right mind would develop a plasticizer that causes birth defects? Why are we in the situation that we’re in?” – John Warner

 

Sacred Activism: Engaging Communities of Faith in Environmental Advocacy

The Bioneers Conference brings together exciting and cutting-edge innovators tackling the world’s most challenging social, cultural and environmental issues. Here, we bring together two thought-leaders and Bioneers presenters to share their deep wisdom in an intimate, in-depth conversation between peers. In our first conversation between Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and theologian Matthew Fox, the faith leaders discuss sacred ecology, unity consciousness, spiritual narcissism and bringing reverence for the earth into today’s ecological debate.

Matthew: Today [Bioneers has asked] us to talk about ecology and spirituality. Who can deny that it doesn’t matter what your particular tradition is, or if you’re an atheist, if your backyard is burning up and you can’t plant food anymore, and the waters are rising? We’re all in trouble. And it can finally bring religions together and get over their narcissism.

Llewellyn: I hope so. Mysticism, as you know, has always held this common thread underneath religion- the union of inner experience. Part of the reason I wrote this book, Spiritual Ecology, was to try to bring that into the ecological debate because I felt that, although it was present, it wasn’t voiced enough.

Matthew: Absolutely. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with the archetype of the cosmic Christ- to awaken at least Christians that crucifixion is not something that happened 2,000 years ago, it’s happening with the killing of the rainforests and the whales and the polar bears and everything else today.

Llewellyn: It’s happening to the earth.

Matthew: To me, that not only can energize spiritual warriors to get work done today, but it also can reinvent our faith traditions themselves, which I think fall into narcissism as distinct from mysticism.

Llewellyn: I have a concern that somehow people who have a spiritual awakening or awareness are somehow too focused on their own individual inner spiritual journey, and to me this is a travesty of real spiritual awakening or spiritual awareness, which has to do with the whole, and this whole includes the earth.

Matthew: I couldn’t agree more. If you’re breakthrough does not lead to transpersonal service, to compassion, to justice, including ecojustice, then I doubt its authenticity. And Jesus said it very simply, that by their fruits you’ll know them. And we can be so taken by our spiritual experiences that we don’t realize this about energizing you to serve.

Llewellyn: In Sufism they actually say after the station of oneness comes the state of servant hood, that one is then in service. Sufis are known as servants.

Matthew: Or as someone else put it, after ecstasy comes the laundry.

Llewellyn: Somehow we have become so focused on our own human journey that we’ve forgotten that this human journey is part of the earth’s journey. There used to be, I’m sure you’re aware of this, a deeper understanding that our soul is part of the world’s soul, the anima mundi, and we’ve lost that connection. We’ve lost that understanding that our spiritual light is part of the light of the world. And we have to regain that.

Matthew: Right. And how the earth story itself is part of the cosmic story.

Llewellyn: It’s all one. It’s all one living, breathing, inter-related, interdependent spiritual organism as much as a physical organism, and I think we have, for some extraordinary reason, forgotten that.

Matthew: I think there are a lot of reasons, and one of them is the anthropocentrism and the narcissism of the modern consciousness. But I also think part of it too is the beating up of matter over the centuries by theologically influential thinkers. That kind of separation, that kind of dualism is so destructive because then you think the body is secondary, and then Mother Earth is secondary, and everything else. To put things in context, we wouldn’t have our imaginations and our breath and our food and our existence without matter. Matter is not an obstacle to spirit.

Llewellyn: I think the early rejection of all of the earth-based spirituality by the Christian church has left a very sad vacuum that we’re now, in a way, seeing the result of.

Matthew: Paying the price for. And I think it goes back, actually, to the 4th century. If you’re going to run an empire- as the church more or less inherited the empire in the 4th century, it behooves you to split matter from spirit, and also to talk about original sin, and get people confused about their own inner nobility and empowerment, and divinity, really. I think that it has served political interests and cultural power trips to split people that way.

Llewellyn: Well, the male domination of nature kind of took the high ground, and now we have to, in a very few years, try to redress this balance and reclaim the sacred nature of creation. And what is central to me is to try to bring that into the ecological debate because I don’t see how we can address this physical devastation of creation, this ecocide, unless we look at its spiritual roots and reconnect ourselves to the sacred nature that is the world around us.

Matthew: And within us. And that’s what makes deep ecology different from ecology.

Llewellyn: Right. My teaching is to say mystics teach simple things, but those simple things change people’s worlds. And how can we re-energize that mystical perspective so we can bring it into this global arena that is calling out to us? I mean, the earth is calling. That’s why I called this book Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth because the earth is crying, the soul of the earth is crying. We need to respond from our own soul as well as with our hands.

Matthew: And, of course, Einstein said it’s from intuition and feeling that we get values, not from the intellect. He says the intellect gives us methods; it does not give us values. And I think when you look back at it, this is how various traditions of monastic learning also included the heart in some way or other.

Llewellyn: When you say including the heart, I would suggest something even more radical. How can we bring our love for the earth into the center of this concern with the well-being of the earth? In fact, Thich Nhat Hanh recently said real change will only happen when we fall in love with our planet.

As a mystic, I believe in the primacy of love, and we have this love for the earth. It is so generous. It has given us life. It has given us breath. It has given us water. And we have treated it so badly in response. I feel that this mystical center of divine love is really the power behind the planet, because it is really what gives life to us all. I mean, it’s a really radical thought to bring that essential quality into the ecological debate.

And although we have this physical responsibility, how can we bring this love that belongs also to our sense of the sacred? How can we learn once again to live in love with the earth in the way we live, in our daily activities so that everything becomes imbued with this sense of the sacred?

One can educate the mind, but also we somehow have been stripped of the power of love, which is, as a mystic, the greatest power in creation.

Matthew: In our traditions, certainly the Jewish tradition but also the Aquinas, it is said too that the mind resides in the heart. We don’t have to, how should I say, pit one against the other. That real heart knowledge- when you’re really in love with something, you want to learn more about it.

Llewellyn: Also the heart and the mind in the heart see the oneness in things. Sufis say when the eye of the heart is open—the Sufis talk about the eye of the heart—then in each atom there are a million secrets. And we see the unity in life, in everything that we are part of. We need to reclaim that unity, that oneness, because life is dying and it’s dying because we split spirit and matter, we separated ourselves from creation. The analytic mind tries to split everything up into smaller and smaller pieces. We need to return to this oneness, this awareness of the interdependence of all of life, this web of life, which our ancestors knew and revered so deeply.

Somehow we have lost connection with this spiritual dimension of creation, and to me that is the root of our present ecological imbalance because we don’t respect or revere creation as our ancestors and indigenous peoples have always done.

And somehow, as you say, the mystics have held this thread in the West, but a thread is no longer enough. It needs to be a revolution, a revolution of the heart, a revolution of consciousness that sees the oneness that is within and all around us. I suppose the challenge is, how do we give this back to humanity, this forgotten treasure, this secret, this deep awareness of the real nature of creation, that it is not dead matter?

I always say the world is not a problem to be solved, it’s a living being to be related to, and it is calling to us. It needs our attention, not just of our minds, but also of our hearts. It is our own awakened consciousness that can heal the earth.

Matthew: Another dimension, I think, including when it comes to the love, is grief. We don’t deal well with grief in our culture, and that’s one reason I think anger gets battered all over the walls. We don’t deal with anger in a constructive way very often.

I do a lot of grief ceremonies- we need practices and rituals. When grief builds up, when you can’t deal with grief, not only does anger build up, but also that joy, that love gets clouded over, and people feel disempowered then. So I think grief work is a part.

What can I say? Who cannot be grieving today about what’s happening to the earth? You’d have to be extremely busy covering up your grief and putting a lot of energy there.

Llewellyn: But I think we do. We’re a culture of mass distractions. We try to avoid at all costs seeing the real fruits of our actions.

You talk about practices; I would say the most important practice is to listen. Thich Nhat Hanh said to heal the earth, he says to listen to its cry because the earth is crying, but we don’t know how to listen. We’ve forgotten this feminine wisdom of deep listening. If there is deep ecology, there is deep listening. We have to relearn this feminine wisdom of listening to the earth. It is so old, it is so wise, it has been through many crises before, and we need to cooperate.

In fact, Thomas Berry says we are only talking to ourselves; we are not talking to the rivers; we are not listening to the winds and stars; we have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. And we have to learn again how to listen to the earth, and how to open that ear of the heart. We have been told this great lie that we are separate from the earth, that it is something out there. It is not out there, we are part of the earth. We are made of stardust.

We need to feel the grief within our own self for the earth and learn to listen to the earth, learn to hear it, learn to re-attune ourselves, just like the shamans did of old, just like the wise people who listened to the wind, who listened to the rivers, who felt the heartbeat of creation. And it might not sound very practical but it has a deep, deep wisdom within it, and I think we need all the help we can get at the moment.

Matthew: Absolutely. And that’s where the world’s spiritual traditions, if they get out of their anthropocentric, reptilian brain dimension of wanting to conquer each other and be number one or something gets shaken down, and as you say, bring this feminine dimension back, the receptivity and contemplation and silence.

Llewellyn: And not to rush for a quick fix, because I don’t think we can quickly fix this environmental crisis. It has been building up for centuries.

Matthew: I do think that the patriarchal mindset feeds the reptilian brain excessively, whereas, I think the real way to treat the reptilian brain is to learn to meditate and be still, because reptiles like to lie low and in the sun… We have to make room for that mammal brain, which is half as old as the reptilian brain in us, which is the brain of compassion and the brain of kinship and family, and also of getting along with the rest of nature.

Llewellyn: This is what Oren Lyons said, when he spoke about our original instructions in the Native American tradition. He said one of the original instructions is we have to get along together. And it’s very simple, but once you realize we are one living community and we can only survive as one living community, it’s very fundamental. It’s not sophisticated, but we seem to have forgotten it, that we are part of this living, interdependent, interwoven organism that is all around us and that we are part of.

I think we have a duty, any of us who have an awareness of this, to bring this into the forefront, to claim it; not to allow this dark side of our civilization to devour all the light. That’s why when you spoke about religious narcissism, and I spoke about my concern that spiritually awakened people are just using their own light for their own inner spiritual journey or their own image of spiritual progress, we have to make a relationship between our light and the world which is hungry for this light. And there used to be always this relationship between the light of the individual soul and the light of the world’s soul, and somehow we need to reconnect with this earth on a very deep, foundational, spiritual basis. We are part of one spiritual journey, one life journey, one evolution, and our soul and the soul of the world are not separate, and we have to reclaim this connection.

And somehow, as you say, human spirituality and religion became narcissistic, and that was never the intention because Christ’s love was for the world; the Buddhist’s peace was for the world. The message is always for the whole.

Matthew: I think today a lot of young people are being caught up in the vocation of, as you say, re-sacralizing the earth, but doing it through everything from the way we eat and farm to the way we do business and politics.

Llewellyn: It’s the attitude that we bring to it. It’s always the attitude. If we come in the deepest sense, with an attitude of prayer or even just respect and reverence for each other, for the earth, for what is around us, then the healing can begin, and the forces of darkness will recede. But we will wait and see.

It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Matthew: It’s been fun. Thank you.

 

An Indigenous Perspective on Energy Development: Q & A with Darcie Houck

Darcie Houck is a descendent of Mohawk and Ottawa native tribes and an attorney specializing in environment, water resources, energy development and Native American land use. She previously served as staff council at the California Energy Commission, and has taught law at several universities, including UC Davis and San Francisco State.

Bioneers: Where are you from and how did you come to do the work you are doing?

Darcie: I’m from upstate New York, and am Ottawa and Mohawk on my mother’s side. I was very close to my Mohawk/Ottawa grandpa. He used to take me back to the reservation when I was a child, and told me that I needed to be a lawyer when I grew up to defend Native rights (chuckles). It always stayed with me. And that’s what I did. I was originally a political science major, until I wrote a paper on tribal government. I got a horrible grade and when I asked the professor why, he said, “Because tribal governments are not real governments.”  That moment changed my life. I went to the counseling center and was directed to the Native American studies program. I switched majors and ended up with an amazing education I wouldn’t have gotten if that incident hadn’t happened.

Bioneers: What kind of law do you practice?

Darcie: During the energy crisis, I was hired by the California Energy Commission because of my background with Native American law. They were dealing with potential projects on Indian land that they had never dealt with before. I learned a lot about energy law and environmental law. Then I went into practice with the largest private law firm in the US that focuses exclusively on Native American issues. We practice in everything from general counsel to internet gaming issues, cultural resource protection and water law.

My focus is environment, water and energy.  My passion is cultural resource protection, and unfortunately, because of the nature of the business, that work is typically pro bono.

Bioneers: What are the biggest issues you face in cultural resource protection cases?

Darcie: The cultural resource issues that deal with Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Indigenous peoples are particularly critical because of what’s happening with climate change, and because many state and federal government decisions-makers base their decisions on western science. However, there has been some realization by these entities that TEK and all of the practices that Indigenous peoples have had forever are really what is going to create truly sustainable development. It’s a slow process. People are starting to listen.

Bioneers: Are your tribal clients resisting energy development or embracing it?

Darcie: Both, and there’s a lot of work trying to combine the two. That wasn’t the case 10-20 years ago. Tribes are really dedicated to improving their economies and looking at their natural resources as one option for development. Tribes want to develop these resources responsibly. You can be a traditionalist, want to have a sustainable way of living that respects and honors Mother Earth and nature, while utilizing modern tools in doing so.

Bioneers: Many environmental laws promise meaningful consultation with tribes for energy development; what is your take on the effectiveness of these consultations?

Darcie: I just sat on a panel at a tribal-sponsored conference in California with a representative from the Governor’s office who was unaware of any law that protected tribal cultural resources. Several laws already exist to protect cultural and historic resources. If decision-makers do not comprehend the importance of the resources that need protection, these resources will not be a priority. So these laws need to be interpreted and implemented in a meaningful way by those with the power to do so. Until this happens tribes will be fighting an uphill battle in the protection of these critical resources.

Also, tribes are often brought in at the tail end of the process. If tribes were brought in at the very beginning of the planning stage, and fully included as meaningful participants, we could probably avoid many of the problems we see with the development of some of the solar projects.

Bioneers: Like down in the Blythe, CA area where there’s a proposal to laser level a huge, magnificent portion of the Mojave for solar? The tribes are screaming, ‘hey wait, that’s a huge culturally significant, sacred area. You can’t do that.’

Darcie: And my perspective is that there’s a cultural disconnect that is so typically European. Throughout history, Europeans have come here and assessed the landscape as unutilized. They then decide to build this and destroy that in the name of progress. It’s the same with the desert- they see it as land that nobody is ‘using’ but in fact, it’s one of the few places left that has an intact ecosystem that is so beautiful and amazing.

There are other places to put solar that would be much more effective like rooftops, parking lots and other places that are already developed. We all hear talk about sustainable development and in-fill projects, but major projects still seem to lean toward green fields for large scale development.

Bioneers: What are some of the misperceptions about tribes and development?

Darcie: The same gentleman from the Governor’s office commented that, “We only hear from tribes that want to develop projects.” It seemed that he was insinuating that tribes only wanted to develop things, not save or protect them.  Just because a tribe has a resource that can be developed to the benefit of the tribe for economic or welfare purposes, does not mean that the same tribe is not concerned about protection of traditional cultural resources. The fact is that state governments don’t hear from many tribes because they often do not include them in the process until its too late.

Bioneers: What are some of the other challenges for tribes, whether it be supporting or opposing development?

Darcie: Oh, there are so many. You have this inherent contradiction where, despite public perception, it can be much more difficult for tribes to develop within their tribal lands than it is for off-reservation private entities to. And for those private entities, protecting cultural resources is often simply an afterthought.

Also as more and more issues face society at large with climate change, society as a whole will have to develop response strategies. In many cases it’s the global Indigenous communities that are facing the most severe impacts in very defined, limited land bases- impacts that they had no hand in the creation of, and often opposed or tried to prevent. These conditions will persist, and likely get worse.  We have to find a way to make sure that Indigenous voices are heard. Those who are facing the worst impacts should have an equal or even greater voice in what decisions are made, and we are not seeing that right now.

Bioneers: How do you make these Western laws mesh with the Indigenous thinking?

Darcie: That is so critical. These laws are made and developed by people who don’t have the same worldview.  The ‘dominant society’ priority is how to use a resource. The end goal is to use it, not preserve it. It’s so counterintuitive to the worldview of Indigenous communities.

Bioneers: Why should a wider audience listen?

Darcie: We, as a society, are in a disaster management stage, and the wisest people are the ones being overlooked because of people’s stereotypes of what a leader is supposed to look or sound like. How mainstream society has educated their children as to who is in charge and who is not- without a shift in that mentality, I don’t know what happens.  But I do think that with projects like Bioneers and other individuals I’ve met in this work, it gives me hope that there will be a shift before it’s too late.

Agriculture and Climate Change: An Interview with Darren Doherty

Darren Doherty has developed a set of ecological agricultural practices for large-scale farming that he calls Regrarianism, based on the work of master agrarians like Rudolf Steiner, Joel Salatin, Elaine Ingham and others. Regrarianism integrates Permaculture, Keyline design, Holistic management and carbon farming to transform farms from their current atrophic condition into regenerative systems that provide ecological profit as well as economic benefit.   

Bioneers: What are the basic principles of Regrarianism?

Darren: Some of the key principles are to produce stable environments with sound watersheds; increase wildlife species and stability of populations; improve water, soil and vegetation resources of cities, industry and agriculture; prevent waste of financial, human and natural resources; utilize Permaculture design principles; and develop viable decentralized energy production systems.

Bioneers: How does Regraranism help farmers mitigate and adapt to climate change?

Darren: One of the things we look at, which might seem like an unusual climate change strategy, is reducing debt, which in an agricultural environment is really crippling because it disempowers farmers from making the land stewardship decisions they would normally make. We try to get the debt out of the way by getting some higher margin activities in the stream of an enterprise so we can start to self-fund the more regenerative practices.

Bioneers: What’s the most important agricultural climate change practice?

Darren: We can start to build more soil carbon into the equation because that’s one of the great buffers against climate change. Not only does it download atmospheric carbon out of the process, but it also creates a resiliency against the biggest problem in a lot of zones where there has been reliable rainfall in the past and now rainfall is unreliable.

Bioneers: How does carbon farming work?

Darren: There’s an amount of carbon right above any landscape that can be utilized, primarily in the form of carbon dioxide and other carbon compounds that soil organisms, plants and others use as nutrients.

We’re looking to create systems that hold more of that carbon in the organisms and the residues of those organisms for the longest possible times, and then take advantage of the benefits that the diversity and the residues provide. Whether that’s residues in the form of humus, which is a very stable carbon-compound, or whether it’s residues in terms of a leaf litter that’s on the soil surface, which reduces evaporation.

We’re trying to increase the retention time of carbon in its solid form in landscapes for as long as possible as opposed to allowing it to become gaseous, that’s when it becomes quite dangerous to us all. That is what carbon farming is all about.

Bioneers: What’s the relationship between carbon and water?

Darren: Every unit of soil carbon holds about eight units of water. Any farmer knows that as their carbon levels grow in their soil, so does the water holding capacity of that soil, and that also happens to increase the nutrient exchange capacity of that soil as well.

Bioneers: Can enough carbon be sequestered in soil to significantly mitigate climate change?

Darren: The only place in the world where there’s more carbon than in the soil is in the ocean and in the sedimentary rocks. ­ We try to build in our system multiple elements with trees, ground cover, canopies of grasses or other plants, that keep carbon in its place for as long as possible, and therefore also hold water in place. ­

Bioneers: What’s the best way to keep carbon in place for as long as possible?

Darren: You have to understand the different kinds of carbon and the states of carbon soils. Let’s look at compost, for example. Depending on the state of compost and how it’s made, it’s largely made up of what are called short-chain carbon molecules. So mulch, compost, leaf litter, cover crops, all of these things aren’t processing carbon into its long-chain form. It’s quite unstable, so as a result a lot of that carbon ends up being put back into the atmosphere.

Compost and cover crops certainly have a conditioning effect on the soil, but a lot of that carbon is being cycled within the top six inches of the soil, which is the highly aerobic zone of the soil, so carbon therefore is in a greater stage of flux.

Bioneers: Are you saying compost and cover crops are not effective ways to sequester carbon?

Darren: You might increase your net soil carbon quite heavily in the first few years by the application of compost, and all of the aforementioned methods, but will that last over the longer term? The answer is quite clearly no. Great techniques, great to do, but what we need more of is long-chain carbon. It’s largely delivered in the form of polysaccharide exudate or nutrients released from plant root systems, particularly grasses.

Where we want the carbon and where farmers can look to increasing their carbon levels overall is in the depth of soil. You can have 10% carbon in the top six inches and 2% in the next 10 inches, and 1½% in the next 10 inches. That’s not going to sustain agriculture over the long term, and the top 6 inches is not where carbon is going to be kept and stored and sequestered. It’s pretty well impossible to get that short-chain carbon down into the depths without a lot of intervention, which requires a lot of fossil fuels. The best way to do that is to get plant roots to penetrate these depths and to put their exudates down in those depths. There are carbohydrates created out of the interaction between water, sunlight and carbon dioxide, and then manufactured by the plants as a residue, and their primary objective is to feed the soil microlife.

Bioneers:  So deep-rooted plants are key to this process.

Darren: What drives the sustenance and the regeneration of the soil life is the plants. The plants are the conduit between the atmosphere and the lithosphere [the Earth’s deep outer layer, which includes soil]. They keep the lithosphere, the soil, and the rhizosphere, the root zone, alive, because they transfer the energy of the sun, manufacture the sugars as carbohydrates, as long chain carbons, and that’s what feeds the economy of the soil.

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the relationship between using perennial systems and annual systems as an analog of our own human economy, and how if I look at an annual plant, for example, it lives fast, it dies young, it’s quite profligate in the use of its resources because it leaves very little of the residue behind, it doesn’t have any savings; its whole objective is to reproduce.

If you look at a perennial plant, particularly a perennial grass, it puts very little energy into being in a nightclub, it has very fibrous, deep root systems, which have long, long term arrangements with the whole suite of soil life, it has all the very cultivated and highly developed and synergistic relationship; it has a carbohydrate starch reserve, which is like a bank where it puts a lot of its capital flows out into the general soil economy over the longest period and often when it’s not raining, and it puts something behind so when disturbance occurs, it can come back. In fact, in many cases, it actually thrives on disturbance.

I think a lot of economists in the financial sector, if they wanted to know what would be a good model to base economies on, they could probably look no further than a tree or a forest or a perennial grass. Much of our agriculture is annual based. We’re living fast and dying young.

Make sure to see Darren’s sessions at the 2013 National Bioneers Conference:

Darren Doherty | Regrarianism: Re-booting Agriculture for the Next 10,000 Years – Saturday – October 19, 2013

Climate Change and Agriculture – Saturday – October 19, 2013

Sandberg’s Lean In & Cultivating Women’s Leadership

By Nina Simons

As I read about Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In, with recent reviews in the Nation by Katha Pollitt and in the NYT Book Review by Anne-Marie Slaughter, I appreciated how each of them decries the immediate array of attacks on Sandberg from other women, and eschews women’s tendency toward a kind of viciousness any time a new voice for women emerges.

Slaughter notes the value of Lean In acknowledging the self-doubt that is so prevalent among women, and the efficacy of encouraging women to practice overcoming it. Neither she nor Pollitt speaks to where that self-doubt comes from, though I’ll have to read the  book to find out whether Sandberg does. They do note that – although she certainly comes from an extremely privileged perspective, her views encouraging women to get out of our own way and intentionally hold our own value higher are valid. Also, while she begins to address the internalized biases and fearfulness that many women carry, she only speaks minimally to the urgency of systemic changes, to provide greater access to women as leaders in the workplace through flex time and addressing some of the other structural impediments to women’s equity in the corporate world.

For me, though, her book and the ensuing reviews miss a key point that’s necessary to address whole systems change: many women don’t aspire to leadership because we’ve inherited a definition of the word that’s at the least conflicted, and often even an overt turn-off. Around the globe and in various sectors, women – and some men – are reinventing leadership, and unless and until we wrap our arms around a new, emergent definition, we’ll continue to be in conflict with ourselves and slow our own progress in achieving it. Why stretch yourself to reach for a brass ring that you inwardly dislike, and that promises to make your life miserable? This was a core premise of our Moonrise book, as it is of our Cultivating Women’s Leadership Leadership trainings.

In the conventional view – the one many of us have unconsciously inherited – leadership is often based largely upon charisma and luck or achievement, and it often implies aggression, and a top-down or hierarchical approach to others. It is typically conferred through getting a position, advanced degree or receiving inherited wealth or privilege, and is often practiced solo. It implies a degree of commitment to work at the exclusion of all else that’s associated with tremendous sacrifice. It is rare, in the inner story that we carry mostly unconsciously about leadership, that leaders can have a satisfying home life or family. Or a creative life, or take decent care of themselves.  Is in any wonder that few women feel whole-hearted in pursuing it?

After 7 years of offering Cultivating Women’s Leadership Leadership intensives, we’ve surfaced reinventions of leadership that are occurring all over the world, and that exemplify the kinds of flexible, invitational and team-based or rotating leadership models that women have practiced throughout time. Here are what some women have said about this retreat, and how it’s changed their approaches to leadership.

Hope you’ll apply and come join us, and co-create a leadership revolution that’s in service to Earth, Life and Justice for all.

You Have the Power to Empower

“My first Bioneers experience was one of the most emotionally uplifting 72 hours of my life! Bioneers brings solutions to life… in a most electrifying and loving environment.” – Mimi Riley, Sociology Instructor at Butte College

In 2007, after Mimi Riley attended the Bioneers Conference in California for the first time, she began raising funds for and coordinating the attendance of Butte College faculty and students every fall.

Prior to receiving enough funding to get herself and her students to the conference, Mimi used her own money to pay for their registrations – which is not an easy commitment to make living on a teacher’s salary. But thanks to the generosity of Bioneers donors, Mimi’s students and fellow teachers have benefited greatly from the John Mohawk Conference Scholarship Fund, receiving both partial and full scholarships over the years.

Since attending the Bioneers conference, Mimi has designed and disseminated campus-wide sustainability education materials, and aided in the creation of a Sustainability Studies certificate program at Butte College.

Most of the instructors teaching within the Sustainability Studies program at Butte College have incorporated Bioneers plenary videos into their curriculum. Students are well acquainted with what and who the Bioneers are before they enter into Butte’s Capstone Seminar program, which centers on attendance at the conference in October.

Mimi says: “That first year, I was amazed at the effect the 3-day conference had on the students. They were instantly electrified (current sunlight!), inspired, and motivated to make big changes in their own lives, on our campus and in our community as a whole.

“I’ll never forget the words and range of emotions these students expressed as they shared their experience. They were crying, laughing, loving, supporting and bonding with each other in a way that I had never witnessed in my years of teaching. One 24 year-old male student confessed, “ I feel like I have been wasting my whole life up to this point hiding behind video games. Now I have been touched and I know that my life must and can count for something way beyond myself.”

You have the power to empower the next generation of visionary educators and students by donating to the John Mohawk Scholarship Fund today.

Butte Community College’s relationship with Bioneers has transformed its institutional culture to prioritize and focus on sustainability.

  • Every year after attending the conference, students have conceived of and coordinated inspiring campus-wide initiatives.  They designed and gained funding for a restoration project on campus. They instituted a healthy food initiative that incorporates organic gardening and a monthly Eat Local vegan lunch that serves the entire campus. They created a national student sustainability initiative called Camp UBUNTU. And they linked up with the California Student Sustainability Coalition (CSCS), and will be instituting a chapter of CSCS on their campus in 2012.
  • Butte students have advocated for policy changes at the institutional level, calling for change in cafeteria purchasing policies, which culminated in the hiring of a new organic-minded food services director. Perhaps most importantly, the students have pushed to reorganize the structure of the Associated Students council to include a new component, The Student Alliance for Sustainability, to make sustainability the “lens through which everything else on campus is viewed.”
  • Initiating community-based projects has also played an important role for students returning from attending the Bioneers conference. Pathways to Change is a collaborative organic garden project in a low-income minority neighborhood in Oroville.Gleaning Chico gathers volunteers to go to orchards and private yards to gather up unused fruit and vegetables to distribute to the local homeless shelter.
  • Students are also empowered to advocate on behalf of issues about which they are passionate, traveling all over the state and country to make their voices heard within government about fracking, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline,and other fossil fuel issues.
  • At a time when leadership development remains a critical gap, and many established leaders are aging and becoming invaluable elders, there is little infrastructure to help develop young leaders and connect across generations and interest areas.

As a Community of Leadership and Mentors, Bioneers is filling in the leadership gap. Butte College is proof positive that participating in the Bioneers conference has profound effects on the capacity of both educators and students to collaborate for change on school campuses and in communities.

Won’t you help us fill the leadership gap by making a donation to the John Mohawk Conference Scholarship Fund today? Your contribution will provide full and partial scholarships to dynamic educators, young people, indigenous people, people of color, young and low-income women leaders and other community-based change-makers.

You have the power to empower!

Please give what you can and give generously. Future generations are counting on us. Thank you!

With grateful appreciation,

Nina Simons and Kenny Ausubel

Bioneers Co-Founders & Co-CEOs

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2012 Conference Educator scholarships give educators access to a dynamic scope of sustainability materials and opportunities to engage in peer-to-peer learning to support integration into their year-round teaching and curriculum. Highlights include a participatory network formation workshop and evening reception, a session exploring the transformation of education, and the availability of Continuing Education Credits.

Learn more about the education programming at this year’s conference to see how your gift today can transform our educational institutions to prioritize and focus on sustainability.

2012 Conference Youth Scholarships  enable youth to engage for the full three days in skill sharing, leadership development, networking and project collaborations with other youth from across the country. Highlights this year include talks from Brower Youth Award winners, Rhiannon Tomtishen, Madison Vorva, De’Anthony Jones and Rachel Barge. Also, youth will have the opportunity to participate in 12 interactive panels, workshops, campaign connections and special events, including a panel on jobs, an interactive workshop on eco-apartheid, a collective art mural and a slam poetry contest, just to name a few!

Learn more about the youth programming at this year’s conference to see what a difference your gift today will make in the lives of young change-makers from around the country.

Escaping the Tilted Room: Cultivating Relational Intelligence

Nina Simons

This talk is dedicated to everyone who has ever felt powerless, experienced being the dissenting or minority voice, or felt unfairly judged, devalued or dismissed for being different. It is intended for anyone who has experienced a culture that elevates some while denigrating others.

by Nina Simons

As a young woman right out of college, for some years I believed the “feminist movement” had accomplished its goals, and that I was stepping onto a level playing field.

That same naiveté, mixed with idealism and some cultural blindness, also had me imagining that the Civil Rights Movement had largely ended racial bias and injustice in this country.

It wasn’t until much later – after years of being the only woman in business settings, of negotiating biased gender dynamics personally, professionally and politically, that I began to realize how much gender roles and related power dynamics were impacting my experience – and how painful and damaging those impacts were.

And it wasn’t ‘till several years after that, when I began peeling back the layers of my own defensiveness and denial that I began to learn how racialized our society still is, and to discover my own personal and cultural complicity in it.

Gender and race are only two of the ways we rank and compete with each other – benefitting some, and harming others. In this society, we also do it about age, sexual orientation, body shape, class, education and abilities, to name just a few.

As I work to integrate and distill what I’ve been learning, an especially useful metaphor for me is the Tilted Room.

I found it in Melissa Harris Perry’s book Sister Citizen, about the stereotypes that Black women in America encounter as they work to establish a unique identity, and achieve agency and recognition.

She describes a cognitive psychology experiment in which people were placed in a crooked chair within a crooked room, and asked to align themselves vertically.

Researchers were surprised that – even in a room tilted as much as 35°– some people reported that they were perfectly straight, simply because they were in alignment with their surroundings.

Only a few managed to find uprightness. As Harris Perry notes, “It can be hard to stand up straight in a crooked room.

We’re all products of a culture that’s filled with tilted rooms, spaces designed to get us to relate in ways that defy the natural instincts of our bodies, hearts and souls.

Though the room may be tipped according to differing sets of biases, it’s rarely level. Some benefit from a headwind, while many face persistent and systematized obstacles.

Our dysfunctional families, educational institutions, media, cities, food and health care, economic and political systems create and reinforce striated structures of race, class, gender and other “isms” that keep us apart.

Since these biases aren’t conducive to symbiosis, and we all contain both victim and perpetrator within us, we become stuck in win/lose, dualistic and polarizing dynamics.

Tilted rooms keep us divided – preventing collaboration, coalition and movement-building. And, though it may seem otherwise, they damage the ones who benefit from the tilt as much as those who are disadvantaged by it. They hurt us all.

How do we escape the tilted room?

It is no small feat. It requires practice to disengage from those prevalent, insidious beliefs within us that help keep it in place. It asks that we reorient ourselves toward reaching across these divisions of gender, race and class – and be willing to fail, for the sake of learning. It means strengthening that intrinsic relational intelligence that comes from our body’s wisdom, our heart’s guidance and our moral compass.

I believe we escape it by investing in our relational intelligence.

Being white, or male, or heterosexual, or middle class, or highly educated, or rich or successful makes

It particularly difficult to recognize that a tilt exists.

But if you’re on the losing end of the tilt, it’s hard to ever forget, or not feel, the injustice of it, every hour of the day.

One friend, a leader of mixed ethnicity told me she felt as if she is continually climbing uphill on her knees, with broken glass strewn across her path – while white folks have running shoes, a clear walkway, and the wind at their backs.

I realize I previously grappled with injustice principally through my rational analysis and intellect – and from a distance that my privilege afforded me.

But hearing the truth of others’ realities, and feeling how painful they’ve been, trying to listen at the deepest level, while loving and respecting the beauty and power I see in them has changed me.

For centuries throughout Western history, intellect has been lauded, while the value of emotional sensitivity, body awareness and intuition have been devalued or even scorned. They have been seen as indicators of inferiority and of vulnerability.

But I believe they are essential to our resilience, our leadership and our strength.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Einstein noted. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

When I ask my physical body to tell me what it knows, when I listen to my gut, my body never lies.

When I ask my heart, it has far more strength than my mind, and it expands flexibly to embrace each newfound love.

My intuition, my instincts, and my ancestors – when I’m receiving them clearly – are the most powerful ways of knowing I can access.

Listening to them, I attune to whale song, elephants and the language of crows. To the wisdom of fungi and jungle vine. I gain access to myths, dreams and symbols that offer me guidance and meaning, nectar in this turbulent, transformative time.

As I practice getting better at appreciating these gifts, I recognize and encourage them more, both in myself and others.

I find this freeing me from tilted rooms, and increasing my toolkit toward co-creating the beloved community which is my heart’s deepest yearning.

We can cultivate relational intelligence, thankfully, by choosing it. By practicing it ourselves, and by being mentored by nature’s abundant examples.

In nature, no-one lives in isolation, and the sense of balanced partnership is palpable. In nature, diversity is much more than political correctness – it creates resilience in any thriving ecosystem.

We can opt to be mentored by the mastery (or mistressy?) of our mother, Earth – if we can quiet ourselves long enough to hear, smell, feel and learn from it.

I believe our survival, as well as our fulfillment and joy – may depend on our making this shift, cultivating relational intelligence to escape the tilted room.

A River of Purpose: One Woman’s Journey through a Human-Nature Landscape

My life has been a long and windy river, with many twists and turns, and it’s led me to fall in love with many of the issues and people and passions that bring us together through Bioneers.

As a child, though I grew up in a city, nature was the place I frequented for both play and sanctuary. When I was a girl about 6 years old, I had a collection of stuffed animals that lived on my bed.

One day, after our parents’ read us Charlotte’s Web, I piled them into shopping bags and took them to the park. There, I set each of them carefully into their own nook within a huge tree, returning them to nature, to be free among their own kind. I came home to an empty bed, happy with what I’d done.

Reflecting upon my life now, I realize that in a way, my purpose is still to return my animals to the wild.

I understand purpose as what happens when my own particular loves, commitments and talents converge with a need for reinvention in the world.

My life has been a long and windy river, with many twists and turns, and it’s led me to fall in love with many of the issues and people and passions that bring us together through Bioneers.

I realize now that I have felt most fulfilled and effective when I have allowed myself to fall in love, letting my heart, mind and hands converge in commitment to a people, a creature, a place or a challenge.

We tend to think of love as a personal, intimate thing, but it can also be far more expansive. Cornel West said “justice is love made public.” For me, Earth and Justice have become twin loves, inter-related and entwined.

As the daughter of artists, at first I assumed that it was through collaborative art-making that I’d make my contribution to the world.

After college, I worked for a theater company, managed restaurants and studied with a school for consciousness called Arica.

When I met Kenny, my yearning for self-expression, for cultural healing and to contribute to the common good took a radical turn. He was finishing a film about the politics of cancer therapies. About an herbal treatment and two conflicting visions of medicine.

As I learned about the growing number of cancer patients, and their lack of access to good information or options, I became passionate about helping address that gap. I worked with him to complete and market the film. I discovered I was good at communicating to advance ideas I cared deeply about.

Then, my life’s current took another surprising turn in an organic, biodiverse garden in Southern New Mexico.

That abundant Eden was full of thousands of unusual kinds of food and herb plants growing in close relationship to each other, a dazzling spectrum of colors and forms, scents and flavors.

In that garden, my senses danced in exuberance at it’s beauty, deliciousness and sensual fertility.

That ecstatic experience became an irresistible call to work on behalf of nature and biodiversity.

I learned about the rapid and accelerating loss of thousands of heirloom and traditional varieties in our food system. I discovered the horrors of factory farming and the dangers of GMOs.

I was overjoyed to be able, in some small way, to serve the sacred diversity of life on Earth, joining the company that Kenny and Gabriel Howearth, the creator of that garden, founded – that became Seeds of Change.

Soon after, we started Bioneers, partly in response to James Hansen’s 1988 early warnings about global climate change.

I embarked on two steep learning curves – one about food and farming and being a social entrepreneur and the other – about leadership, Indigenous wisdom, and how to collaborate, design, invent, educate and organize on behalf of the sacred web of life on Earth.

In 1992, to recognize the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing on Turtle Island, we assembled a group of indigenous leaders – people from New Mexico’s ‘legacy communities’ – to discuss what could be learned.

A man from Acoma Pueblo, named Petuuche Gilbert said “500 years ago you came, and we welcomed you with open arms. If you came again today, we would do exactly the same.”

I was humbled, awed and shaken by his words. I sensed how much wisdom his culture carried about forgiveness and patience and generosity, about how to be a good person.

And also about survival. Native growers knew about dryland agriculture, about seed breeding and nutrition. About how to live in kinship, reciprocal relationship, and relate to all life as sacred.

Indigenous Peoples’ capacity for cultural preservation, despite the ravages of colonization, their traditional ecological knowledge, and their ways of learning and practicing right relationship became touchstones of my worldview.

It wasn’t till I approached forty, fifteen years ago, that I began exploring my identity as a woman.

When I learned about the period in European history – between the 14th and 17th centuries, a time some refer to as The Burning Times – a root cause of centuries of gender biases were illuminated in my mind’s eye.

I discovered that seven generations of children saw their mothers, grandmothers, aunties and sisters tortured and burned for the supposed crime of being witches. Seven generations of men lost their loved ones, daughters, healers and hospice workers.

During that time, the culture also sustained deep losses. The structural institutions of healing and spirituality were systematically shifted from the purview of women to the primary control and leadership of men. Land use transferred from a commons to a privatized, enclosure system, and a tremendous transfer of wealth occurred, from women to men.

I realized that what I came to call “The Hidden Holocaust of Women” lives on in my cellular memory and insidiously permeates our society, institutions and collective psyche.

At this point, all of the issues I’d become passionate about through Bioneers began to make sense within a single lens: the imbalance of ‘masculine’ values and a zero-sum relationship to competition, hierarchy and power over ‘feminine’ values and the equity of women.

Personally, I observed how long I’d held myself back, making myself small in response to unexplored fears and unconsciously-adopted stories.

Once I recognized the pervasive gender bias and disadvantage that I’ve experienced just from being born female, I wondered more deeply about racial injustice, especially for women of color.

What I learned about our racialized culture and the ways it impacts people I love shocked me.

What shocked me most was to begin to see my own prior ignorance, denial and complicity.

As I challenged myself to face the truth about my own life, and to begin to take risks in speaking out about what I saw, it triggered a well of fear so deep that it surprised me.

But a new dignity emerged from facing my own fears while co-facilitating our Cultivating Women’s Leadership Leadership intensives. I found friendships with women I admired, women of other origins, women I might have felt estranged and distant from before. I found a new ease of expression with them, and therefore with myself.

I’m still working to shed my ignorance, guilt and shame, and to recover more promptly when I do make mistakes or harbor false assumptions. I try to bring a yearning for connection, respect, and a desire and willingness to learn.

Now, a desire to integrate all of these passions has accelerated and converged into a waterfall within me.

Climate uncertainty has re-emerged as a context that engulfs all of my heart’s loves: art, healing, biodiversity, environmental justice, indigenous knowledge and legacy communities, women’s leadership and racial justice. Challenging our selves to courageously reveal our vulnerabilities. What doesn’t it touch?

But I find that feeling this much love also involves feeling a lot of pain.

Recently, I heard a song that was once my favorite one for skiing. I used to dance down mountains, gleefully, with headphones on, listening to The Talking Heads’ Burning Down the House, blaring. This time, noting the apparent obliviousness or intentional denial of so many among us, I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing in irony, or start sobbing, with grief that threatens to never end.

On a tiny plane flying into the Ecuadorian rain forest, I sensed how sacred that place’s wild existence is to us all, not only in terms of cultural and biological diversity, but also spiritually.

And I still feel outraged when I see the inhibiting impacts our masculinized culture has in keeping wise, strong and skillful women small, timid and quiet.

A burning desire to serve the emergence of a new world that celebrates and engages with the mystery of life with humility, listening and grace, ignites me. My heart is calling me to find new ways to engage with transforming our ways of living and being, with story and climate and energy – in defense of all I hold so dear.

This is my prayer: May we remember ourselves as trees, elk, ocean, dolphin, winds and crow.

May we slow down enough to attend to the mystery, to hear with humility and receptivity

May we cultivate our relational intelligence and community resilience –

Listening deeply and collectively with hearts, bodies and spirits fully engaged to help us to reconnect and rebound after crisis through love and co-creativity.

I think the world my heart desires is emerging from the inside, out – it’s forming within the invisible darkness of our imaginal cells – growing from the dance of Gaia’s ancient wisdom with our collective dreams, so that the world that created us, and the world we create may come together as one.

Bioneers is a time for us to enter an eddy in the river, to imagine how to navigate the rapids ahead, and consider together how we might best proceed.

We can hold this daunting awareness of the disruptions to come and their cascading impacts while maintaining a sense of joy in our connection and forward motion by taking one step at a time. By knowing we are heading for a changed world, and acting to head toward a future that’s also loving, peaceful and just. By encouraging and appreciating each person, place and creature’s beauty, mystery and inherent value.

I believe we’re all called to be mothers now, since we all have masculine and feminine within us. To be protectors, and nurturers, hospice workers and caregivers, and engaged activists.

In service to a love that’s simultaneously intimate and inclusive, in defense of our one and only shared home.

Thank you for being here.

We Make the Road by Walking

In this epic moment of radical environmental and social disruption, the world is experiencing the dawn of a revolutionary transformation to becoming an ecologically literate and socially just civilization.

The existential gauntlet is to make the shift fast enough to outrun global cataclysm. The next five or six years will be the once-in-a-civilization window to change course. We can move from breakdown to breakthrough.

The Mayan people call this the “Time of No Time.” From here on, we’re on Earth time. Mother Earth is shaking to her core. It’s a time of madness, disconnection, and hyper-individualism.

It’s also a time when new energies are coming into the world — when people are growing a new skin.

The Mayan vision says we in the West will find safe harbor only if we can journey past a wall of mirrors. The mirrors will drive us mad—unless we have a strong heart. Some mirrors delude us with an infinity of reflections of our vanity and shadows.

Others paralyze us with our terror and rage, feeding an empire that manufactures our fear into resignation.

But the empire has no roots and it’s toppling all around us. In this time, everyone is called to take a stand. Everyone is called to be a leader.

To get beyond the wall of mirrors, the final challenge is to pass through a tiny door. To do this, we must make ourselves very, very small. To be very humble.

Then we must burrow down into the Earth, where indigenous consciousness lives. On the other side is a clear pond. There, for the first time, we’ll be able to see our true reflection.

In this Time of No Time, we can go in any direction we want—by dreaming it. Our dreaming can shift the course of the world.

Paradoxically, the crisis confronting us today is precisely the dream of our current civilization. That dream of endless growth, hyper-individualism and domination has turned into a nightmare. How do we dream our way out of a nightmare?

One way is to wake up. All over the world, people are awakening to a new dream.

We’re re-imagining a civilization in the Age of Nature that honors the web of life, each other and future generations. It’s a revolution from the heart of nature.

For decades, brilliant scientific and social innovators such as the bioneers have patiently been creating the shadow systems for how we live on Earth for the long haul. For the most part, the solutions are present, or we know what directions to head in.

It’s not that we need more solutions — we need to rapidly spread and scale what we’ve already got. We need to mobilize at the scale we’ve previously done in times of war.

It’s emergence in an emergency. As the Talking Heads sang, “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around.”

In 2012, two rude awakenings are releasing the floodgates of transformation.

The first is the onset of conspicuous climate disruption. The second is the stranglehold of the greatest extremes of wealth ever seen in human civilization. They are not unrelated.

As Bill McKibben points out, scientists have underestimated the speed and scale of early climate disruption, at a rise of just .8 degrees Celsius. Even if we stopped pumping carbon right now, what we’ve already done will raise the
temperature by another .8 degrees Celsius.

But we’re not stopping – we’re putting record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. At this rate, in 16 years, the planet will become uninhabitable.

Meanwhile the major oil corporations hold reserves five times higher than the amounts of carbon we can burn to keep below the hopefully “safe” threshold of 2°Celsius of warming. They’re planning to burn it all.

As McKibben warns, rapid transformative change is the only way through – picture the civil rights movement in fast forward. The key is stopping the fossil fuel oligarchs before they poach the planet.

As the International Forum on Globalization observes in its report Outing the Oligarchy, “Today’s single biggest threat to our global climate commons is the group of billionaires who profit most from its pollution and, in turn, push government policies that promote more fossil fuels…

“Cooperative global action to address the most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced is being held hostage by a handful of profiteers who wield decisive power over our governments.”

Globalization has triggered a tectonic shift of financial wealth and political power upward to a group of multi-billionaires. According to Jeffrey Winters, the author of Oligarchy, wealth in the U.S. today is “two times as concentrated as imperial Rome, which was a slave-and-farmer society.”

Call it bottom down and top up – breadcrumbs and circuses. As Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz points out, more equal societies are better for everyone, including the wealthy.

Jeremy Grantham, the far-seeing Chairman of the $100 billion GMO Capital fund, asserts that global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future, and advocates very large immediate investments in
renewables and smart grids.

He says humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. He concludes that “If we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash – Peak Everything Else.”

That’s the nub – Boom and Doom — the final throes of an oligarchic economic system bedeviled by its original sin of unlimited growth on a finite planet.

Nature does not favor centralization because one shock can crash the whole system all at once. Climate change compounded by the concentration of wealth and distribution of poverty is pushing natural and humans systems to a perfect storm of tipping points.

One key is to build resilience from the ground up through a radical decentralization of our infrastructure, energy and food systems.

It means a greater devolution of political power to local and regional levels. It means democratizing wealth and access to capital. It means democratizing democracy.

It’s do-able based largely on what we already know.

Using off-the-shelf clean technologies, we can radically increase energy conservation and rapidly ramp up distributed renewable energy. We know how to feed the world using ecological agriculture that sequesters carbon, restores natural capital and builds local economies. We have a good idea how to begin to restore ecosystems on a large scale – fairly quickly in some cases.

We’re rapidly learning how to deploy biomimicry to emulate nature’s designs and recipes with green chemistry, cradle-to-cradle industry, living buildings and smart growth. We can conserve and use water wisely. We’re reinventing finance as well as governance, instituting rights for nature and revoking corporate constitutional rights.

In this Age of Nature, we’re breaking through what author Richard Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder” with healthy doses of Vitamin N – the Nature Principle. We’re looking to nature as mentor and model, rather than physical resource.

The vanguard of the banking industry, including the Bank of England, is studying ecological networks and disease patterns to understand how nature avoids cataclysmic systemic shocks. One conclusion is simple: Too big to fail means too big. Break up the big banks, as the conservative Chicago School of Economics originally proposed.

In the wake of the banking crisis, millions of people have moved their money to smaller, local, values-driven banks, such as those that formed the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. It’s a new consortium of 19 of the world’s leading sustainable banks whose decisions are based first on the needs of people and the environment.

A 2012 study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation compared the performance of 17 values-based banks against 29 banks considered too big to fail. The study showed the values-based banks outperformed traditional mainstream banks in: return on assets, growth in loans and deposits, and capital strength. The smaller banks delivered better returns.

The report concludes their success is precisely their values, and they’re smaller.

The Global Alliance for Banking on Values has set the goal of financing sustainable businesses that will impact 1 billion people by 2020.

Twenty states are now studying how to create a state public bank based on the Bank of North Dakota, a major success story. This publicly owned bank receives all state revenues and promotes local commerce and industry, makes student loans and supports new farmers. It was largely unaffected by the banking crisis.

The big wheels are also turning at the Department of Defense. The DoD his embedding sustainability into its national security strategy. It’s moving away from fossil fuels and toward the national decentralization of energy and other vulnerable infrastructures.

Marine Colonel Mark Puck Mykleby, who just retired as Special Strategic Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, puts it this way: “The Grand Challenge is global unsustainability. National security and the bridge to resilience have just as much to do with food, water, the built environment, transportation, education, health care, and the physical solvency of our nation as some bad guy sitting in some dark corner plotting whatever deed he’s going to do.”

Most importantly, the DoD is funding cutting-edge clean technology R&D. Just as it developed microprocessors, jet engines and computers, it’s using its market-making leverage to ramp up tomorrow’s clean tech industries.

Opinion research shows a shifting political landscape. Americans want action to address the threat of climate disruption, and strongly support clean energy. The Presidential Climate Action Project has just re-booted with an action plan recommending how the 45th President can address global warming even without Congress, by using executive authorities. Examples from prior PCAP recommendations include the recent upping of vehicle mileage standards and the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases.

Business also appears to be reaching a tipping point. Two thirds of companies are turning to sustainability for a competitive edge and higher profits.

For the first time in 2010, investment in renewables exceeded that in fossil fuels. According to McKinsey & Company, solar energy will come back strong after 2015, driven by the rapid spread of distributed energy with miniature community power stations and home solar. Google has capitalized two solar residential funds of $365 million apiece.

The Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign has succeeded in forcing the closing of 124 coal plants and prevented many others from being built. Its goal is to shutter a third of the nation’s coal plants by 2020.

Bill McKibben and 350.org are hitting the road in November to build the movement strong enough to take on the fossil fuel industry. They will mount a campaign like the anti-Apartheid campaign to cut off the industry’s financial and political support.

But our greatest resilience resides in community. Social ties literally save lives. In Japan, the government sponsors small local festivals for people just to meet each other because experience shows they’ll be better prepared to weather crises. San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Seattle are following suit.

The Department of Homeland Security funded a successful 3-year FEMA pilot project in 8 cities to create a Whole Community Resilience System for disaster prevention.

As Sarah Crowell said, “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it – together.”

The hardest thing to change in a system is the paradigm, yet that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Emergence in an emergency. Breakdowns to breakthroughs.

Imagine catalyzing a massive shift to Los Angeles becoming a sustainable city by 2021. Imagine reworking the city as a functioning community forest model of an urban watershed. Imagine
biomimicking the forest as the pathway to sustainability in water, energy, air,
and transportation.

Imagine inspiring, engaging and supporting a million Angelenos and families in changing their homes and neighborhoods. Imagine everybody becoming a manager of the ecosystem.

Imagine an integrated ecosystem management team, a Board of Chiefs among the infrastructure agencies, to create sustainability. Imagine there’s enough money by reallocating existing funds and it rebuilds the economy and jobs.

Imagine a community and multi-agency collaboration, bottom-up and top-down, to rapidly adapt L.A. before the crash.

You don’t have to imagine it. Andy Lipkis and TreePeople are doing it.

Imagine a partnership between a college and its Ohio Rust Belt hometown to go carbon-neutral by 2020. Imagine an agro-forestry belt that can grow 70% of the community’s food locally. Imagine combining these with an emerald green arts downtown redevelopment that models an economic driver for the whole region.

Imagine leveraging this template of town-gown partnership to mobilize the nation’s 4,100 colleges and universities and their communities.

You’re imagining David Orr’s Oberlin Project, and $60 million is making it real.

Imagine 142 communities comprising over 350,000 people adopting Corporate Rights Elimination Ordinances that give communities the right to refuse to recognize corporate constitutional rights at the municipal level. Imagine Pittsburgh becoming the first major municipality to adopt a Community Bill of Rights and enforce it by banning fracking and corporate rights within the city.

Imagine these same communities driving Rights for Nature into their ordinances. Imagine it spreading to Ecuador as the first country to recognize in its Constitution the rights of ecosystems to “exist, persist, regenerate and evolve.”

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund led by Tom Linzey and Mari Margil is doing it.

Imagine a new regional model of development such as an environmental bank that keeps your money in your region and gives loans to the people who grow your food.

Imagine a Forest Fund that manages forests for timber, jobs, conservation, and carbon sequestration. Imagine it makes a financially attractive return. Imagine buying industrial forestland and growing trees for their own sake because they provide habitat and carbon sequestration — and eventually bigger trees to sell in better markets. Imagine returns attractive to investors who see the value of storing wealth in natural capital, and want a return for their kids and grandkids.

You’re imagining EcoTrust and Spencer Beebe and Astrid Scholz in the Pacific Northwest.

Imagine disrupting our current institutions by giving people these better choices.

Imagine proliferating these kinds of winning institutional innovations rapidly around the world.

Imagine an infrastructure that shortcuts these innovations, and gets the world’s social entrepreneurs access to existing ideas and capital more quickly.

Imagine a global action network of resilient communities.

Imagine that.

As Naomi Klein wrote, “The real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system — one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power.

“It demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal — and acutely sensitive to natural limits.”

In this Time of No Time, what we don’t have is time. Can we dodge the point of no return by ramping up the emergent shadow civilization fast enough?

If you have a meaningful conversation with almost anyone these days, within minutes the tears start to flow. We’re all hurting badly. We’re scared. We’re suffering under chronic background levels of PTSD.

In this Time of No Time, what we need to get past the wall of mirrors is a strong heart. Andy Lipkis of TreePeople sees it this way.

“I believe every single one of us has a scanner on board that’s operating in our body that nature must have installed. It’s our heart, and it’s asking the question, ‘Where am I needed? How can I help?’

“When something hits your frequency, my frequency, it converts to adrenaline, a biochemical response. It might be a drip. It might be a shot.

“When we’re given a shot of adrenaline, like when we see a car accident, it gives us the power to go help lift a car off the injured person. It looks like a miracle, but it’s nature’s gift to us.

“When the ecosystem is hurting, we get the drip. We’re hardwired for this. The love that’s there can sustain us. It’s what really feeds us.

“I’ve come to believe nature has adapted us to be its healers. It has raised us from being infants that were helpless to brilliant, powerful, compassionate beings.

“We’ve got to take care of the mom, Earth, because she has given us everything to raise us to this point — not so we can kill ourselves.

“Where am I needed? How can I help? Your heart will answer. You’re big enough. We can do this.”

In this Time of No Time, at no time have we ever before faced what we face today.

We make the road by walking.

It’s an honor to walk this road with you.

Mourning Into Daybreak with Nina Simons

What happens when we cultivate empathic connections towards ‘others’? Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons describes her vision of a beloved community that encompasses other people, all species, and the natural world.

This presentation took place at the 2010 National Bioneers Conference.