Bioneers Inside Track: January 2015 Quarterly Donor Newsletter

Dear Bioneers Friends and Supporters!

Happy New Year! Thanks to your committed partnership, our 2014 was a milestone year and a celebration of our 25th Anniversary. We’re excited to share with you a sneak peek of what’s to come in 2015. Read on for more!

Watch Your (Snail)Mailbox

Your Limited Edition 25th Anniversary Yearbook Copy Coming Soon

We hope you enjoyed our year-end emails serializing chapters of our 25th anniversary yearbook, Seeing Around Corners: 25 Years of Visionary Leadership.

As a Bioneers supporter, you’ll be receiving a copy of the print edition as a token of our gratitude. Look for it in your mailbox in February. Savor and share it with friends and allies.

You can see the entire Yearbook right now as a digital download. Your feedback is most welcome. We love the back cover—what do you think?

Save the Dates

Kinship Circle Trip to Maui

May 22-26, 2015

Last year’s inaugural Kinship Circle expedition to Maui was an unforgettable journey into indigenous Hawai’i. It was inspiring, revitalizing and soulful, not least because so many of you got to meet each other and form lasting friendships.

Together with Board member Melissa Nelson’s Cultural Conservancy, we’re putting together a fresh program of teachers and guides for this expedition that will be equally inspiring. We’re in it for the long haul with our Hawaiian allies.

Among the high points of the 2014 trip:

  • A mind-blowing presentation by a global indigenous leader in reviving traditional canoe culture globally using the astonishing Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Polynesian star navigation.
  • A tour of Jeffrey Bronfman’s leading-edge Permaculture HAPI farm where we engaged with the ground-zero frontlines of Hawaii’s indigenous and multi-cultural resistance movement to stops GMOs in the research belly of the corporate beast. Later in the year a ballot initiative did indeed halt all GMO testing—for now.
  • Gorgeous outings to the Seven Sacred Pools, a traditional sunrise ocean ceremony, and daily swimming.
  • Deep dialogue and insight into Hawaiian Aloha cultural traditions with spiritual leaders such as the revered Auntie Pua and others, and cross-cultural comparisons with mainland native people’s beliefs led by the powerful Rose Van Thater.
  • Amazing food, even more amazing company, and slow time with magical Kinship Circle folks, Nina and Kenny, Melissa Nelson, Cara Romero (our Indigenous Knowledge program director) and executive director Joshua Fouts. As one Kinship member commented, it was the first such gathering she had ever participated in where she wanted to have dinner with every person there.

The Kinship Circle is a vibrant group of engaged higher donors ($25,000 and up) committed to the Bioneers vision and mission. If you’d like to join us on this second journey, please contact Maria Rotunda at 505.395.2801 or maria@bioneers.org. If you are not currently a member of the Kinship Circle but are able to consider the higher gift level, you are welcome to come.

Bioneers Donor Spotlight:

Seven and a Half Questions for Courageous Lauren Embrey

By Joshua Sheridan Fouts

In response to the economic downturn of 2008, many philanthropic institutions cut back on grants. Not Bioneers Kinship Circle member Lauren Embrey. Read on to learn about Lauren’s passionate approach to philanthropy, why she supports Bioneers, and her advice for young philanthropists.

1. How has your view and approach to philanthropy changed since you first started?

Wow…it has evolved, grown and blossomed. I didn’t know much, if anything, about philanthropy when I first started, so it was great to go into the work without any expectations or beliefs on the “right” way to do things. The first and most important learning was that of strategy, the importance of it, and how to develop it. I also learned very quickly that this was serious business and required great thought, care and heart to do it well.

So, my view has not necessarily changed since I first started, but developed. It has developed through my intense commitment to philanthropic education, my explorations surrounding cutting edge thinking and innovative initiatives and my experiences with those who came before and relationships with those doing the work in the world.

2. What was it that inspired you to spend-down your foundation’s corpus instead of only spending the interest as is the tradition in many foundations? Why?

I was inspired by a moment in history. The inspiration came during the economic downturn of 2008. It was a time when many philanthropic institutions and foundations of all sizes were cutting back on their grant dollars, they were concerned about the uncertainties of the economy. They needed to sit back and wait, watch and see what was going to happen. They had a fiduciary responsibility to their endowment and were not at liberty to continue spending down.

We had the latitude to react differently. I wanted the Embrey Family Foundation to be a role model for bigger and bolder giving, At a time when non-profit organizations and communities were in dire need of funds, people were suffering, I wanted to step out and say: “We are not going to hold back, we are going to seize this moment and give at a higher level than we ever have before, because our business is helping people, and there could not be a more important time to distribute funds in response to that need.”

I wanted to be a role model to shift the paradigm away from monetary accumulation and toward the universal wisdom of when we give we receive. I wanted to visibly and concretely express my faith in that wisdom. I wanted to harness the energy I felt was palpable in that moment to make change, I wanted to step into that energy, fully, with all the resources available to me, meaning dollars, networks, experiences and leadership. I knew the need for work in the area of systemic change, now was the time to take that on. I also knew I would learn so much from this experience if I just plunged in. And I did.

3. Has there been any response from other foundations? If so, how have they responded? 

There has not been a direct response from other foundations regarding our level of contribution, though when I speak about this and mention the percentage of our corpus we have contributed over the past few years people react in a very positive way. I have heard directly from others that we are respected and admired in the community for our strategic giving and the values we exhibit through our process.

4. What is your advice to other young philanthropists entering into this field?

Be open to all possibility. Be willing to step into your passion and therefore your power. Take the time to let your strategy develop, let it be a process of discovery…all does not need to be known immediately. Be flexible and nimble within your parameters. Stay true to what you care about and let that fuel you. Display pure intent and apply a willingness to learn, explore and experience. There are so many amazing people to learn from…network, listen and enjoy the ride. We are so blessed to be able to do this work. Revel in that blessing.

5. What specifically inspired you to support Bioneers among all the many good organizations that are in your universe?

The first year I went to Bioneers, I believe it was 2011, I was blown away by the innovative and cutting edge thinking that was presented at the Conference.

I was so invigorated and inspired by the way all the justice movements—environmental, social, women, indigenous—were woven together and intersected so beautifully. That is how I believed!! And it was so exciting to me to see this intersectionality executed with such precision and grace.

I felt Kenny and Nina, and all the speakers there were visionaries. Not only were they visionaries but they also brought in their constituencies, their communities into the conversation. All voices were heard, respected and appreciated. I wanted to help support that, and I wanted to support the experiential learning and the collectives that were nurtured and contained within the dialogue.

6. Bioneers co-founder Kenny Ausubel talks about how we are in an era that has moved from “urgency to emergency” in reference to our ability to react and respond and create meaningful change despite massive shifts caused by climate disruption. What do you think are the most pressing issues that philanthropy should be addressing in this time of “urgency to emergency?”

Violence and destruction and inequity: from violence against women to destruction of the earth to racial inequity. When I say that I mean it in all its forms. There is so much to do. We must tackle the principles and beliefs embedded in our institutions and our culture. We must uncover our unconscious and implicit biases to get to the root, the core. We must create balance, promote love. We must understand that violence produces violence, that if we don’t respect our women, how can we respect our earth. We must see how this is all interconnected. Ultimately, I believe, if people follow their passions and get involved in the issues they care about deeply and work for that….everything will be covered!!

7. Bioneers is about building bridges between cultures and generations. As you know, we have a big focus on youth leadership and youth scholarships to create this bridge. If you could time travel back to a 15-year-old Lauren, what words of advice would you give her about the world she is about to enter?

Don’t be afraid…don’t hold back…move forward as soon as you can, experience the world and all it has to offer, find your way, keep your eyes open and always stay positive. Believe in yourself and what your heart tells you. Ask for help, learn from others, stay humble and don’t close off. Use your voice, even when it’s really scary to do so. Network, find your tribe, and use your passion to fuel you. Don’t ever give up!

7.5. What words of advice do you have for the youth leaders attending Bioneers this year?

In addition to the above….drink up this experience…meet as many people as possible and share your thoughts, your ideas, your passions. Enjoy to the fullest, always believing in yourself!

The Sting:

Scamming Philanthropy

By Kenny Ausubel

As the saying goes, “Money is like manure. When you pile it up, it stinks. When you spread it around, it does a lot of good.”

As wealth has continued to concentrate at the tippy top and reached Gilded Age extremes, a whole lot of dough is piling up. Close behind are the big dogs of the financial services industry sniffing for tax breaks to hold on to it and make more. Enter the latest philanthropic sting—donor-advised funds.

Hold your nose when you read the recent New York Times exposé. As my grandmother used to say, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”

Huge clots of “philanthropic” dollars are now tied up in “donor-advised funds” that defy the bounds of ethics and intent by using legal loopholes that do not actually require them to give away any money!

People set up accounts at these giant firms and then in theory advise on which charities get how much. But these giant financial services companies are using these donor-advised funds as private investment vehicles to keep making the piles—and their fees—bigger. They have no intention of making grants, often for as long as 10 years forward, if at all. They can just pass it on to their heirs, too. Meanwhile donors reap the immediate annual tax benefits of their annual nonprofit “gifts.”

The overall result is that huge piles of “philanthropic” dollars never reach grantees. The situation is diminishing even further the receding pool of nonprofit funding that already contracted radically with the Great Recession beginning in 2008.

The funding environment for nonprofits since the Great Recession has been a bloodbath. Thousands if not tens of thousands of worthy groups (and conferences) have gone out of business. Virtually all the rest of us have had to cut back, often radically, just when our work is needed ever more in a society that privatizes profits and socializes costs.

Now the usual suspects are financializing philanthropy and reaping ever more windfall profits for themselves, while starving the nonprofit sector. Party on, Wall Street.

Please speak out about this, and join the growing movement to rein in this latest sting.

First 2015 Bioneers Conference Speakers Confirmed

Mark your calendars for the next Bioneers Summit Conference, October 16-18, 2015, in San Rafael, California. Planning is already well underway and we’re thrilled to announce our first three confirmed keynote speakers:

  • Jensine Larsen, founder of World Pulse, on the growing influence of the grassroots women’s leadership in media and citizen journalism.
  • Tom Hayden, activist, author and former CA Senator, on California’s game-changing role as a global leader in climate change policy, economics and practices.
  • Rinku Sen, Indian-American author and activist and president and executive director of the racial justice organization Race Forward and publisher of Colorlines.com, on racial justice innovations and initiatives.

We’re also convening a second follow-up Climate Leadership one-day intensive with Tom Hayden, and taking it global in scope.

Watch this space for more sneak peeks of this year’s conference as well as early-bird registration announcements!

Bioneers Youth Leadership: Blossoming at Bioneers

Youth at Bioneers 2014 exceeded all expectations

The desire to be part of the Bioneers experience among youth has surpassed our wildest dreams! We provided a record 357 scholarships in 2014 and still had an additional 300 applicants. We did not even have the staff capacity to address the record flood of applicants.

  • Fully 20% of all conference participants were youth! We consider this a huge signal of the health of Bioneers.
  • A majority were youth of color and the Youth of Color Caucus had 89 youth.
  • Over 65 indigenous youth participated too, many from the Bay Area (over 100 Indian Nations were represented in total, including adults).

Minds blown? Ours are.

This year we are aching to provide ever more places for these young representatives of the future we all want to see. We’ll soon be launching a campaign to ensure that we provide a pathway for as many youths as we can afford. It costs about $500 for a local youth, and $1,000 for long-distance.

If you are like us, when you hear the stories of the young people touched in life-changing ways, you know we’ve got to step up to support them.

“During a dinner for businessmen at the conference, I chose to sit in the back as the president of the American Sustainable Business Council gave a talk about the importance of aligning American policy with the goals of sustainable businesses. During the talk, he relayed that part of his strategy for influencing policy was to hold a conference at the White House to sway policymakers.

“After his talk, afraid that I might be overstepping my role as a youth at this conference brimming with professionals, I approached the ASBC president. After discussing how valuable and insightful his vision was, I pushed past my personal comfort and forced myself to ask, ‘You know what your White House conference is missing?’ He looked over at me, adjusting his initially reproachful expression to flash me a face of eager anticipation, for this had been the standard of behavior as people began to offer advice to one another at the conference. Before he could respond or shift his attention, I said, ‘Youth representation.’ He laughed off my hopeful smile, gave me his card, told me to email him, and quickly turned to talk to the next person awaiting a chance for conversation.

“Without much hope, I shot him a quick email a few days after the conference. Two weeks later, I received an invitation from the American Sustainable Business Council to attend its summit at the White House as a youth representative, waiving the fee to the conference.”         

—Jack Kornack, Bioneers Youth Scholar

It’s your love and support that makes this possible. We’ve got dozens of such stories.

Our larger goal is to expand the Youth Leadership program into year-round, perennial leadership development for young social justice activists and environmental leaders. Stay tuned for details in the next couple of months.

Support Bioneers Youth Leadership Scholarships »

California Climate Report:

Bioneers positioned to inform global climate conversation in unique ways

Thanks to a key contribution from one savvy and generous donor, we’re in production on an e-book on California’s Game-Changing Climate Leadership.

Edited from talks at the special one-day intensive at the 2014 Bioneers conference, this streamlined digital book will illuminate the emerging climate policy templates and breakthrough initiatives being developed in California that are already spreading nationally and globally. This little book will be really important right now as an educational and organizing tool to help spread the word about how “sub-national” governments are doing end-runs around federal inaction or insufficient action.

CA Gov. Brown has now upped the ante to 50% renewables by 2030, and continues to build both a national and global Green Bloc. This trend will become much more visible and powerful in the Paris 2015 global climate talks. Bioneers is positioned to significantly help advance awareness, make strategic connections and inform the conversation in unique ways.

The super-timely and strategic e-book will be available in digital format (PDF) as well as a more interactive online e-book. Once it’s ready, we invite you to help spread the word!

Until then, you can watch and share videos from the 2014 California Climate Leadership Forum on our website. Tom Hayden’s closing was remarkable—dropping wisdom on movement building with the long view of a wise elder and relentless campaigner. Goose bumps…

Bioneers Partners with Dutch Consulate on California-Netherlands Sustainability Summit

February 16-17, 2015 | San Francisco, CA

Another opportunity inspired by our 2014 California Climate Leadership Forum is a partnership with the San Francisco Consulate General of the Netherlands to convene a California-Netherlands Sustainability Summit.

On February 16 and 17, Dutch and US key players in business, government, and knowledge institutions will gather in San Francisco’s Presidio to build partnerships and economic opportunities between California and the Netherlands around the topics of Energy, Water, Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation, Sustainable Transport, and Smart Cities.

Among the speakers will be Henk Ovink, the Dutch visionary now doing New York City’s climate mitigation water strategies modeled on Holland’s advanced green and “soft” infrastructure.

We’re honored to be part of this convening focused on real, realistic, realized and integrated sustainable development solutions. It’s a vital part of our mission to bring leading-edge thinkers and solutions into the mainstream where they can shift paradigms and benefit us all.

Don’t Miss: Othering and Belonging Conference

April 24-26, 2015 | Berkeley, CA

Bioneers is truly honored to help support john a. powell’s April conference on “Othering and Belonging,” produced by UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society that john leads.

As john so eloquently described in his 2014 Bioneers keynote, this is a historic moment where we are called upon to reach out across our differences to create “beloved community” in recognition of our oneness as a species and our interdependence with the web of life. If we don’t, well, let’s not even go there…

Here’s some info about the conference:

“Belonging or being fully human means more than having access. It means having a meaningful voice, and being afforded the opportunity to participate in the design of social and cultural structures. Belonging entails being respected at a basic level that includes the right to both contribute and make demands upon society and political institutions.

“The conference will bring together scholars, researchers, advocates, and organizers to examine the issue of “othering,” a set of processes that engender marginality across any of the full range of human differences, such as race, socioeconomic status, gender, religion, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, skin tone, and more. It will feature a multi-disciplinary, intersectional examination of the forms of othering in order to craft transformative solutions that promote belonging. The goal of the conference is to discern possibilities and develop practices for generating more inclusive structures, narratives, and identities that prohibit othering and promote belonging.”

If you’re interested in participating, visit the Othering & Belonging conference website or call 510-642-3342.

Join the Revolution from the Heart of Nature

Let’s Do This!

Maximize the impact of your dollars by investing
in the Bioneers network: Indigenous,
women and youth leaders,
resilient communities and innovative solutions.

Re-imagine how to live on Earth with Bioneers media and programs

“A lot of the film subjects came from Kenny Ausubel [Bioneers founder] and the contacts that he had—the real innovators in the environmental movement.”
Leonardo DiCaprio, Stern magazine, Germany, regarding his 11th Hour film

Join Bioneers in accelerating the profound transformation already taking hold around the globe: the dawn of a human civilization that partners with the wisdom of nature’s design, grounded in values of justice, diversity, democracy and peaceful co-existence.

Whether you’re looking to radically transform your community, expand your personal leadership skills, or just want an inspiring video to share, Bioneers has you covered!

Bioneers gathers and cross-pollinates a unique network of networks through our multi-faceted programs:

  • Media Outreach, including an award-winning radio series and videos from our extensive archive
  • Annual Conference
  • Resilient Communities Network
  • Everywoman’s Leadership
  • Indigenous Knowledge
  • Youth Leadership

You’ll find people from many backgrounds and walks of life in the Bioneers community: professionals of all types, civil society groups, educators, entrepreneurs, public servants, the media, emerging and established leaders, and global citizens.

What Can We Create Together?

Since 1990, Bioneers has shown that the solutions to global challenges are largely present. The seed forms of the vibrant, life-giving world we want are here now—in the breakthrough, nature-inspired solutions, models and practices manifest throughout the Bioneers community.

Through our archives and network, you can discover a compelling vision, models and the “how” to:

  • Radically increase energy conservation and ramp up distributed renewable energy with off-the-shelf technologies to reach 100% clean energy.
  • Feed the world using ecological agriculture that sequesters carbon, restores natural capital and builds local economies and jobs.
  • Apply nature’s designs with biomimicry, green chemistry, cradle-to-cradle production, living buildings, smart growth and traditional indigenous knowledge in a next industrial revolution.
  • Use water wisely and fairly, and protect our watersheds.
  • Reinvent governance that challenges corporate constitutional rights and institutes rights for nature.
  • Create models of finance that democratize ownership and access.
  • Address racial and gender justice, supporting women’s leadership, and building beloved community in a culture of pluralism.
  • Cultivate a global wisdom culture and an expanded sense of kinship that embraces human diversity and celebrates the oneness of all life.

Let’s Do This!

As the state of the world has hurtled from urgency to emergency, we can still shift our course to re-imagine how to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations.

It’s bottom up and top down—all hands on deck to generate the biggest and fastest economic, industrial, political and cultural transformation in history. Together we can move the world from breakdown to breakthrough.

Join us! Make a donation today—whether $5 or $500, every gift is your investment in creating a just, resilient and joyful future.

Farming’s Future is Small: Big Farms and Big Data Don’t Feed People

Guest post by Kristen Loria and Severine von Tscharner Fleming

If you want to succeed in farming today, be prepared to spend your time not outside in the field, but behind a panel of computer screens. So says Quentin Hardy’s recent article in the New York Times (“Working the Land and the Data,” November 30, 2014).

Hardy claims that the future of our farms here in America lies in scaling up – that automation and data management technologies owned by the biggest agricultural corporations in the world (Monsanto, John Deere, DuPont Pioneer) make or break farmers today. He promotes a top-down, big-data argument that follows the logic of monopoly. Farmers must adopt the technology and methodology of the big players as the only pathway to success in a big-boy business with ever-tighter profit margins.

The implication is that only the biggest farms can afford to play, and only highly capitalized mega-scale operations will be viable in the future.  Hardy notes that these advancements make the once backbreaking work of farming much easier for the “modern day” farmer, who sits comfortably at a computer screen while his robotic tractors drive themselves. He barely mentions what is actually being grown by the farmers he profiles – that would be corn and soybeans, all of which will be used as raw material for animal feed, ethanol and highly processed junk food.  The logic of our agricultural production system (and its substantial government subsidies) tells farmers to grow crops that do little to healthfully feed people.

Hardy fails to discuss an alternative farm technology revolution quietly taking place – that of the small farmer. It is possible to “make farming easier” without imposing a food system that makes us sick, pollutes our water and land, and drives our neighbors out of business.

As small farmers with diverse farming systems, we choose new technology when it is appropriate and serves our needs, but also remember and respect time-tested farming knowledge and tools, as well as the efficiency and logic of natural systems. We might automate our rollup greenhouse vents with an arduino sensor to ensure that our seedlings don’t melt on a hot afternoon, shell our corn with a 100 year-old Black Hawk corn sheller, and spread compost made from cow poop on our soils and trust the earthworms and soil microorganisms to do the rest.

This movement is manifest in Farm Hack, a network and online platform for farmers to collaborate, share and build tools they need for success. Farm Hack supports technology development that is open-source; complete tool designs are shared freely by network members for use by others. It is non-competitive innovation, from something as simple as a wheel hoe to a mobile biodiesel processing trailer. This is technology built by independent farmers, engineers, hackers and fabricators, not by multi-national corporations that already control access to seeds, fertilizers and equipment, and whose sole motivations are their own bottom lines.

On our small farms we are not looking backwards with naïve nostalgia, nor are we left out of a Big Data-driven technological wave of the future. The already vertically integrated agribusiness sector should not control the destiny of our farms, our natural resources and our food supply.  Even the Farm Bureau, usually reliable as a mouthpiece and go-along partner of industrial agriculture, has cried out to protest that farmers’ harvest and other data would be ” owned” and accessible to Monsanto and other companies.

It matters which future we choose to pursue, and what percentage of our land comes under which kind of stewardship. A smaller number of farmers, data managers and chemical companies leave us more vulnerable, not less, to the uncertainties of a changing climate and changing economy.

As small farmers, we are creating our own tools for a better farming future. We believe in appropriate, resilient and farmer-driven invention to help make our farm businesses more successful. New technology should be created to fit the systems that work for us – not the other way around. Rather than drawing up non-binding privacy agreements with these corporations not to use our own data to exploit us later on, we are building resilient, healthful food systems and the technologies we need for a job done well, and done right.

More on the Small Farmer Movement from Bioneers 2014

About the Authors

Kristen Loria farms at Sparrowbush Farm, a mixed vegetable, livestock and grain operation on leased land in the Hudson Valley of New York. She attended Cornell Univeristy, and worked in Iowa in school garden and nutrition projects. For three years she managed publications and operations for Greenhorns, a grassroots organization that produces media and events for new agrarians. During that time she managed startup for Farm Hack, now its own 501c3 organization based in New Hampshire. Farm Hack is a social-mission platform for appropriate technology, and www.farmhack.net  currently has thousands of members who invent, document, share, and hack equipment suited to the needs of small and medium scale organic farmers, ranchers and foresters. 

Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a farmer, activist, and organizer based in the Champlain Valley of New York. She is director of Greenhorns, and co-founder of both Farm Hack and National Young Farmers Coalition, which now boasts 23 state and regional coalitions. She serves on the board of the Schumacher Center for New Economics, which hosts Agrarian Trust, her latest startup, focused on land access for beginning farmers, and permanent protection of affordable organic farmland. Severine attended Pomona College and University of California at Berkeley, where she graduated with a B.S. in Conservation/ Agroecology.

Explore more Farm Hack videos and press coverage.

It’s Official: Clean Energy Is Cheaper

In case you missed this little gem, tucked into the environment section of the New York Times last week, we wanted to share it again.  The big news?

“The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.”

This is a big deal.   For those who doubted the rise of solar and wind energy, the complaints have always been two fold: 1) It’s too expensive and 2) it’s not reliable (or, to use the tech jargon, issues with rapid deployability and intermittency).  #1 is officially gone as a roadblock.   The article goes on to point out that analysts expect this market competitiveness to continue even beyond the coming expiration of the various subsidies currently supporting the renewable energy industry – and there’s movement afoot to extend this support ongoing.   At this point, it’s simply about smoothing out supply & demand – how to ensure that the lights turn on even when the sun isn’t shining.  We’ll get there.

The race is on for solutions.  Major utilities are investing in energy storage solutions – Southern California Edison just signed papers to built the largest battery on earth.  On the flip side, distributed energy and energy efficiency are growing as fast as the price of solar is dropping.  As Billy Parish, founder of Mosaic, the crowd-funded distributed energy start-up, describes it on the Bioneers radio show below, “The transition to a world powered by 100% clean energy is inevitable.   The question is: How fast can we get there and who’s going to control the clean energy infrastructure we’re building?”

Meanwhile, as the industry matures, the value of a thriving renewables sector continues to prove itself.  At the 2014 Bioneers Conference, Bernadette del Chiaro, Executive Director of the California Solar Energy Industry Association, outlined what this impact looks like in California:

  • More solar installed in the past 18 months than in the past 18 years combined
  • More people employed in the California solar industry than in traditional fossil fuel dependent utilities.
  • On track to hit 2 million solar roofs by 2020.

World leaders are gathering in Lima, Peru this week to hammer out the important pre-work necessary to come to some sort of agreement on a global climate treaty next December in Paris.  They’ll be helped by news like this, the growing cost competitiveness of clean energy.  Regardless of what comes of negotiations at a global level, progress continues to be made on the ground and it’s certainly cause for hope.  As Ms. del Chiaro reminded the audience at Bioneers this year, this will take all of us:

“Through our political activism, through our ingenuity, our entrepreneurialism and our creativity  and by joining with other like-minded regions and countries, we will be both the source of the optimism and the engine of change.

Renewable energy and solar isn’t the entire piece of the pie, but it is a critical component. If we continue to grow, we will get to 100% renewable energy. We will get to it in time that the climate requires, and we’ll do it by small groups of people like this working together one house at a time, one community at a time, one state at a time.”

For more content like this, explore more of the talks given at our California Climate Leadership Summit www.bioneers.org/climateleadership or search for “energy” on our YouTube page.

California: Global Game-Changer for Climate Leadership

On Oct 16, 2014 Bioneers hosted a special one-day summit, California: Global Game-Changer for Climate Leadership.  The event featured visionary policy, government, finance and civil society representatives exploring how the state of California is emerging as a key player and model in the global movement towards a low-carbon, clean energy future.

Since the event, Governor Jerry Brown has been re-elected and momentum continues to gather.  It remains incumbent upon us to keep the pressure up and to take a leadership role in whatever capacity we can to keep moving towards a clean, equitable and low-carbon future.

Please explore the presentations from the plenary as well as an episode from our internationally distributed radio series and podcast, created from talks and interviews with speakers at Bioneers.

For your reference, here is complete program from the day.

Bioneers Digital Media Internship

Are you interested in amplifying the voices of change makers and building community around solutions for a more just and sustainable world? Bioneers is seeking an enthusiastic and tech-savvy intern to support our media outreach and communications program.

This position is perfect for someone looking to gain experience in the fields of communications, marketing, public relations and social media strategy. An interest in environmental justice, food justice, social justice, indigenous rights or women’s leadership is preferred.

Bioneers communications interns possess strong computer, research and writing skills and must have excellent attention to detail.

Primary Responsibilities:

  • Social Media Outreach: Support our digital communications, content creation and weekly reporting with an opportunity to take the lead on Instagram campaigns and contests
  • Press Relations: Research and do outreach to traditional and online publications, coordinate press interviews and track media coverage
  • Digital Media Archiving: Sort and categorize audio and video content, optimize our YouTube and SoundCloud channels

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

  • Excellent verbal and writing skills
  • Energetic self-starter who can work on projects independently
  • Digital native with experience using Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google applications
  • Good organizational skills, demonstrated initiative, flexibility and creativity
  • Interest in environmental health, biomimicry, social justice, food system reform, indigenous rights and women’s leadership is strongly preferred; passion around these issues is even better

Bonus:

  • Graphic design skills (Photoshop, Canva.com)
  • Video editing skills (Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere)
  • Experience managing social media campaigns
  • Experience with Google Analytics
  • Experience using Hootsuite

A small stipend is paid for this internship. No benefits included. We will work closely with you to translate the skills you learn into résumé language. Our office is located in The Presidio in San Francisco, CA. We are accessible by public transit and have secure bike storage on premises. The length of the internship is three months with the possibility of extension, and we are seeking a commitment of 5-20 hours per week.

About Bioneers: Bioneers is a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges. Our acclaimed annual national and local conferences are complemented by extensive media outreach including an award-winning radio series, book series, and role in media projects such as Leonardo DiCaprio’s film The 11th Hour. Our programs further focus on Women’s Leadership, Indigenous Wisdom, Community Resilience Networks, and Leadership Development and Youth.

Application Process:
Please submit the following to dorothee@bioneers.org with the subject line: Bioneers Digital Media Internship

  • A cover letter indicating your relevant experience and interests, what experience/skills you hope to gain during your internship, your available dates, and number of hours per week you wish to work
  • A current resume highlighting your experience and/or coursework relevant to the position
  • A brief writing sample, preferably online content.
  • Links to any relevant social media profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Bioneers Development Internship

Are you interested in engaging a growing community in solutions for a more just and sustainable world? Bioneers is seeking a passionate and articulate intern to support our Fundraising and Development program.

This position is perfect for someone looking to gain experience in the field of fundraising, and can offer experience in grant research and writing, running online campaigns, donor cultivation, event planning, and strategic development strategies. An interest in environmental justice, food justice, social justice, indigenous rights or women’s leadership is preferred.

Bioneers development interns possess strong computer, research, communication, and writing skills and must have excellent attention to detail.

Primary Responsibilities:

  • Event Planning: Assist in the planning of donor cultivation events, which range from small parties, to educational presentations, to trips
  • Grants: Research grants and foundations in line with our mission and assist in the writing of proposals and reports
  • Donor Communication: Support the Development and Communications Team in donor communications and developing and disseminating engaging materials to donors

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

  • Excellent verbal and writing skills
  • Excellent organizational skills
  • Energetic self-starter who can work on projects independently
  • Excellent organizational skills, demonstrated initiative, flexibility and creativity
  • Interest in environmental health, biomimicry, social justice, food system reform, indigenous rights and women’s leadership is strongly preferred; passion around these issues is even better

Bonus:

  • Graphic design skills (InDesign, Photoshop)
  • MailChimp or other e-communication platform experience
  • Experience with Raiser’s Edge

A small stipend is paid for this internship. We will work closely with you to translate the skills you learn into résumé language. Our office is located in The Presidio in San Francisco, CA. We are accessible by public transit and have secure bike storage on premises. The length of the internship can range from 2-6 months and from 5-20 hours per week.

About Bioneers: Bioneers is a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges. Our acclaimed annual national and local conferences are complemented by extensive media outreach including an award-winning radio series, book series, and role in media projects such as Leonardo DiCaprio’s film The 11th Hour. Our programs further focus on Women’s Leadership, Indigenous Wisdom, Community Resilience Networks, and Leadership Development and Youth.

Application Process:
Please submit the following to jessica@bioneers.org with the subject line: Bioneers Development Internship

  • A cover letter indicating your relevant experience and interests, what experience/skills you hope to gain during your internship, your available dates, and number of hours per week you wish to work.
  • A current resume highlighting your experience and/or coursework relevant to the position.
  • A brief writing sample (2 pages or less)

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

 

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