It is not surprising that Indigenous Peoples are leading the way in the “Rights of Nature” movement given that the idea that trees, waters, and ecosystems have a right to flourish reflects Indigenous worldviews. In this panel, we’ll hear from Indigenous leaders whose tribes have adopted Rights of Nature frameworks to protect sacred territories. They will share practical strategies for organizing and implementing Rights of Nature campaigns within international legal frameworks. Join us to learn more about the movement, and how you can be a part of it. Moderated by Brittany Gondolfi. With: Samantha Skenandore; Danielle Greendeer and Erin Matariki Carr.
This talk was delivered at the 2023 Bioneers Conference.
Britt Gondolfi, born and raised in Southeast Louisiana, is a law student, community organizer, future state legislature candidate, and mother. Since 2017, Britt has worked with the Bioneers Intercultural Conversation Program facilitating programming for students from Atlanta and from Bogalusa and Houma, Louisiana. While in Law School, Britt has supported the Bioneers Rights of Nature initiative by researching the intersection of tribal sovereignty and federal Indian law and facilitating workshops on the Rights of Nature at the Ho-Chunk and Mashpee Wampanoag nations.
Samantha Skenandore (Ho-Chunk/Oneida), Attorney/Of-Counsel at Quarles & Brady LLP, has vast knowledge and experience in working on matters involving both federal Indian law and tribal law. Her extensive previous experience includes serving as a Tribal Attorney for the Ho-Chunk Nation Department of Justice and clerking for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Indian Resources Section. She currently advises tribal and corporate clients in tribal governance, governmental affairs, corporate transactions, real estate, labor issues and litigation. Samantha represents clients before members of Congress, congressional committees and agencies through federal lobbying services.
Danielle Hill Greendeer (Mashpee Wampanoag), is a writer, farmer, crafter, dancer and artist who is also a seed-steward of King Philip Corn, a historically Wampanoag heirloom corn variety stolen during the King Philip War but now rematriated back into Wampanoag soil. Danielle also teaches a course on Native Food Systems at the UMass Amherst Stockbridge school of Agriculture.
Erin Matariki Carr, of Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Awa descent, lives in her traditional homelands in Aotearoa/New Zealand and works in law and policy, with a focus on the interface between Indigenous and Western legal systems and methodologies. She previously worked as Manager of Planning & Design to create and implement policies under the world-first legislation conferring legal personhood to the Te Urewera rainforest. Matariki is currently a project lead at RIVER, where she focuses on the constitutional transformation movement in Aotearoa with a number of other teams, including Tūmanako Consultants and Te Kuaka NZA.
Dr. Shane Gero, a visionary marine biologist, is angling to crack the code of sperm whale communication. His mind-bending research is transforming what we thought we knew about these ancient leviathans. It’s calling on us to embrace the reality that perhaps we’ve long suspected: Sperm whales are living meaningful, intelligent and complex lives whose cultures suggest that whales are people too. What can whale culture teach us, and can deep listening help us learn to coexist respectfully in kinship with these guardians of the deep?
Featuring
Shane Gero, Ph.D., is a Canadian whale biologist, Scientist-in-Residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, and a National Geographic Explorer. He is the founder of The Dominica Sperm Whale Project and the Biology Lead for Project CETI. His science appears in numerous magazines, books, and television; and most recently was the basis for the Emmy Award winning series, Secrets of the Whales. Learn more at shanegero.com.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Teo Grossman and Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): In this program, we meet Dr. Shane Gero, a visionary marine biologist who is angling to crack the code of sperm whale communication. His mind-bending research is transforming what we thought we knew about these ancient leviathans. It’s calling on us to embrace the reality that perhaps we’ve long suspected: Sperm whales are living meaningful, intelligent and complex lives whose cultures suggest that whales are people too. What can whale culture teach us, and can deep listening help us learn to coexist respectfully in kinship with these guardians of the deep?
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Deep Listening: Whale Culture, Interspecies Communication, and Knowing Your Place” with Shane Gero…
Shane Gero(SG): Human cultures have played a huge part of deciding where people live and how they behave across human civilization. As early humans evolved, language served as this cheat sheet for ‘do you do things the same way I do?’ And even today, you’re far more likely to help someone who yells for help in your natal language than in any other. And so culture can be this unifying force, but also, of course, a very divisive one, and it’s structured all of human civilization.
Host: Dr. Shane Gero has spent the past two decades studying whale culture. Listening deeply and seeking to understand their language is a natural place to start. He’s a marine biologist, National Geographic Explorer and Scientist-in-Residence at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He founded and runs the Dominica Sperm Whale project, which since 2005 has been tracking over 20 families of sperm whales in the Caribbean Sea.
Shane Gero spoke at a Bioneers conference.
Shane Gero speaking at Bioneers 2023
SG: And of course, now we know that humans aren’t the only cultural animal out there. Animal culture pervades all facets of their lives. And in this amazing study in chimpanzee communities across Africa, these primatologists documented the different ways, the different solutions that chimpanzees have figured out how to live. But because of the destruction of their habitat, mostly caused by us, chimpanzee communities are very isolated. And so it’s hard to understand if I never meet a stranger, do I need a sense of I am Canadian, if you just know me as Shane.
But in the world’s oceans, there’s this one ocean nomad that feels like they live in this boundless blue. And in that giant area, they are succeeding together to build multicultural societies. You see, sperm whales have been sperm whales for longer than us humans have even been walking upright, and so their stories are deeper than our stories.
Host:A prolific scientist, Shane Gero has been dubbed a “family builder.” He splits his life between what he calls his human family in Ottawa and his whale family off the coast of Dominica, the Caribbean island where he has been able to peer into the complex social lives of animals that few other humans have ever even experienced.
Several miles off the island, the warm Caribbean sun shines down on Shane and his team bobbing in their small boat. In the marine depths far below them, it’s pitch dark. At six hundred feet below, the sun fades away entirely – and that’s just the beginning of a Sperm whale’s journey into the hidden depths.
In their search for food, these immense creatures regularly venture down to 2,000 feet, sometimes as far as 6,000 feet below the surface. They spend 85% of their lives in near total darkness. The humans on the surface rock quietly in their boat, hydrophones in the water, headphones over their ears. They patiently await the familiar pattern of clicks: “one plus one plus three” that tells them the resident families of sperm whales that they’ve been studying for decades are heading to the surface.
SG: Sperm whales are all sperm whales across the globe, but how they’ve learned to live their lives are very different. In the same way that some of us use chopsticks and some of us use forks, these sperm whales differ in what they eat and how they eat, where they roam, how fast they move around, their habitat preferences, their social behavior, and to be honest, probably a myriad of ways that we don’t even understand yet. These cultures are fundamental to their identities.
And they use acoustic markers to label where they belong. And that makes these sperm whale clans the largest culturally defined cooperative groups outside of humanity.
When they talk to each other, they talk in these distinct patterned sequences of clicks with stereotyped rhythms and tempos, and we call those codas. And the norm for conversation is to overlap one another, and to match each other’s calls. And it sounds very exciting, and it has this elegant complexity to what, at least initially, seemed like a very simple system of clicks and pauses. And it sounds like this:
And right now, I’m running this large project with international researchers from around the world, across three different oceans, where we’re mapping the boundaries of these sperm whale clans. Because whales have been traditionally managed based on pretty much arbitrary lines that were defined by the whalers that were killing them.
Photo: Jennifer Modigliani
Host: According to Shane Gero, not only are Sperm whales clearly talking to each other, but it appears their language and dialect change based on where they live. Sound familiar?
Their behavior, food choices and activities have evolved over generations of place-based learning to support the local whales’ ability to survive and thrive in the places they call home. They live as collections of families – groups of mothers, grandmothers, aunties, sisters, brothers. In other words, clans.
For the whales off the coast of Dominica, the underwater seascape and soundscape, the diversity of life from the surface to the depths – this is deep knowledge gained from transgenerational experience stretching back eons.
SG: When I think about spending half of my life learning from and listening to someone who is fundamentally different than me, I’ve taken away a lot of sort of universal lessons. Lessons like spend time with your siblings because eventually they move away.
One of the novel things that we were able to do with so much time in the company of whale families is follow the lives of the young males as they grow up and leave their families. You see, if you’re a male sperm whale, the first 15 years of your life is spent in this hyper social community of families where you’re born. When you’re a teenager, you sound like your mom, you behave like your mom, and then all of a sudden you start this incredible voyage around the world to live a mostly solitary life until you grow to be the size of about two school buses, and really become Moby Dick. [LAUGHTER]
So there’s this big shift, which isn’t so unlike our late teenage years, where you leave behind your family and go out on your own. But for the families that stay in Dominica, they learn from generations of strong female leaders – grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, who live together for life. And they’ve learned this fundamental truth that both they and we know, which is that family is critical to our survival.
Host: Shane Gero has spent literally thousands of hours in the company of sperm whales doing a deep dive of research to learn how these sophisticated animals live. Because sperm whales spend nearly 85 percent of their lives in the deep sea, learning about them involves extraordinary amounts of time spent listening to their calls, clicks and noises. His team has made leapfrog progress as they seek to understand what the whales may be saying to each other. Shane Gero spoke on a panel at a Bioneers Conference.
SG: I know what I believe they’re saying; I don’t think I know what they’re saying. But it’s pretty clear based on how they interact that they have a need to label each other as individuals, as family groups, and as clans. And that those patterns of differences emerged in such an obvious way. Once we had figured out who spends time with who, the sound overlapped perfectly. And so that explains how they might be able to not only label each other but then broadcast their own identity.
And that’s, like, a bias in how we study the whales. So I call that the dentist office problem, which is if your microphone happens to be in a dentist office and you don’t know what a dentist office is, you’re going to think the word root canal is, like, critically important to English speaking society. [LAUGHTER] Right? But it’s only because you have such a narrow picture of all of the potential contexts and behaviors that humans do when they talk. And that’s where it comes with a scale. It’s either a huge amount of boat time invested in people on the water recording across all these scenarios. Like when two cultures meet at sea, that happens very, very rarely, so the conversation of, oh, you’re not from my clan just hasn’t been recorded that many times. And the same when the males show up, born from the Azores, coming to the Caribbean for the first time, hearing that 1+1+3 click, click, click-click-click, that symbolizes or we think symbolizes the Caribbean, we’re not there necessarily when those interactions happen.
And so scaling up across contexts allows us to get the who and the what we got, but the where and the when so we can answer that why question of what are the important things that whales talk about. And that becomes a domain gap problem. Right? What is the difference between a human experience and a whale experience?
Host: To probe these interspecies mysteries, Shane Gero helped found another truly groundbreaking project. Project CETI – the Cetacean Translation Initiative – it’s an audacious effort to leverage machine learning and gentle robotics to decipher whale communication. The project builds on the tools and technologies that have rapidly transformed human language translation, such as Google Translate.
He’s collected nearly two decades of carefully tagged and coded recordings of sperm whales. It’s a veritable treasure trove of data for an interdisciplinary group of scientists who yearn to bridge the communication gap between human and other-than-human animals.
SG: I think where I find a lot of hope already with the machine learning, just even from providing this 20-year data set to these amazing modelers is that it’s blowing open the encoding space potential. Right? So when someone like myself, who have spent the better part of a number of years just cataloging all of the different calls, we’re doing that on such a basic pattern recognition scheme. Early on, literally by saying, Do you think these calls are the same when looking at them on spectrograms? And what the machines have done, quite rapidly, is open up multiple new dimensions within an individual call, within a click for sperm whales, where there is the potential for variation. So what we used to say was a 1+1+3, there’s now four different types of 1+1+3, and they seem to be used in different contexts.
So it’s not going to be Google translate next week, and there’s all sorts of reasons for that, but what it will do is give the whales a bit more credit in terms of literally defining the complexity of the information that they’re sharing with each other simply because we weren’t paying attention.
Host: As the child of a Canadian diplomat, Shane Gero grew up moving from country to country, repeatedly having to make new friends in new schools. He says he learned to observe group dynamics as a matter of social survival. He paid close attention to how various networks of friends operated.
Fast forward to today. Trained by the legendary whale researcher Hal Whitehead, he’s obsessed with watching groups of whales and figuring out their relationships with each other. Over the course of two decades of his life, he estimates he has spent nearly 5,000 hours directly in the company of these gentle giants. He’s learned not just what they do, but, increasingly, who they are.
Shane Gero recalls the story of one young whale whom he’s known since birth, nicknamed Can Opener after the white hooked shape on her right fluke.
SG: They’re individuals as much as we are, and there are some that are super curious, and especially when they’re young, about pretty much anything. So we can do things objectively and produce results and test hypotheses, but then you’re on the water the day that Can Opener decides to fake a dive.
She figured out the system that we do, which is we would get behind the whales, the whale lifts its immense tail, and we take a picture because their tails are like thumbprints, and then they dive, and then they disappear for 45 minutes. So we move up to the fluke print of where the whale just was, and we do all the sciencey things, like collect poo and record.
And what she did was see something in her environment that was doing something repeated that she could predict, and then she faked dives. And this was something that she did first, and then it kind of went through the whole community where we would come up to the fluke print, and then she would blow out all of her bubbles, and come to the surface. But importantly, she would roll her eye out of the water and look right at the people on the boat. Right?
And that’s where fundamentally the science of ‘can animals predict the future,’ ‘can animals acknowledge living and nonliving things,’ and all these questions that you can’t—I can’t as a biologist speak to, but in my mind, there’s no way that that process of events happens without complex thought and an understanding of living and non-living things.
I’ve invested so many hours trying to learn what they’re doing and who they are that the fact that they would acknowledge that we’re there is pretty substantial to me, personally.
But also just like being sort of allowed to be there, where, you know, we had these two little calves from family Unit D, they’re cousins, but the same age and basically siblings, and they’re playing and slapping each other, and making all sorts of codas, having this conversation, and it was hard not to feel like you were in their bedroom watching them mess around with their cousins, like kids do.
Like I’ve known some of the whales that I work with for longer than I’ve known my kids, which is a ridiculous thing to think about. We just had a male named Allen start to leave his family, and we found him kind of alone playing in the seaweed, you know, like maybe five miles from the rest of where his family was. And they’ve started to sort of ostracize him because he’s supposed to leave now, and he would make codas and no one would answer, and he would make these quasi-mature male sounds called clangs, but they weren’t really very good and no one was interested.
And you just kind of felt really sad for him because he’s switching from living in this super supportive community to basically spending a huge chunk of his life all alone, and it felt like he didn’t want that; like he wasn’t happy about it. And then I went back and found the first picture we have of him from 2008, and he’s like this tiny little sausage with a dorsal fin on it, and that’s—I mean, that’s so powerful to me about how these long-term projects with wildlife have so much more into them than the papers, the scientific publications that come out of them. Spending that much time following the lives of a sperm whale who’s got six years on my eldest son, is kind of like a crazy thing to think about.
I literally call them my other family. People ask me where I’m from, and I say, well, my human family’s in Ottawa, and then people kind of double take at that sentence, but it’s become so second nature to me to say it that way, you know?
Host: When we return, how understanding and honoring animal cultures can further our ability to protect the other-than-human lives of the wondrous web of life with whom we share this precious and watery planet.
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…
Host: In the 1960s, the acclaimed biologist Dr. Roger Payne led a legendary team of colleagues at the Ocean Alliance to collaborate with a US Navy engineer. They produced an album of songs they recorded from critically endangered Humpback whales.
The transformational experience of hearing these hauntingly beautiful songs galvanized a global movement. The epic Save the Whales campaign became instrumental in the conservation and protection of Humpback whales and ending the mass slaughter of commercial whaling. Shane Gero sees in that story several parallels in his work with sperm whales.
What if we now built a movement for the vital restoration of sperm whales, based on a true understanding of both our kinship and of nature’s intricate interdependence and diversity?
SG: We think there’s somewhere around 350,000 sperm whales left in the world, which is huge compared to some things, you know, like the North Atlantic right whale, where there’s less than a few hundred, and some species of dolphin where there’s like dozens or fewer. Right?
But it means, because they’re so spread out at this global level, it’s really hard to determine if they’re actually on a good trajectory or not, and the error on that is big enough that we don’t want to think about it. And certainly before whaling, we were talking about maybe four or five times as many whales.
And in the Caribbean, it’s quite a small clan, so the cultural group that we work with is called the Eastern Caribbean clan, and then we know of at least two other clans that pass through the Caribbean. But most of our information is about the Eastern Caribbean clan, and we think there’s fewer than about 500, and I think that’s probably being generous. And if you break that down by families that are about 7 to 10 animals, it’s only about 50 families that have this way of life of living in the Eastern Caribbean and identify themselves with that 1+1+3 coda.
Host: These distinct populations have a deep relationship with the specific places they live. Shane Gero suggests that their distinct cultural practices – how they communicate, how they find food, how they keep their offspring alive – are fundamentally different from other populations of Sperm whales living in deep relationship to the many unique other places they call home.
Any formal protection whales currently are afforded by national or international laws and treaties stems from our partial understanding only of the global population as a whole. In truth, it’s a “globalocal” phenomenon.
From a conservation standpoint, it’s imperative that we recognize these unique place-based groups as essential to the health and biodiversity of the entire species. Asking whether cultural diversity or biodiversity matters more is asking the wrong question. The answer is yes, both are true and it’s all connected.
SG: Sperm whales have typically been treated just as sperm whales, but the science increasingly, in sperm whales and in many other species, is that the important population divisions are based on culture, and that the animals are literally self-identifying in the evolutionarily important unit.
We know that genetics can’t capture the diversity that we’re trying to protect, right, which is your grandmother’s grandmother’s secret on how to survive in that space.
We’ve been fighting for a while now just to build this map of where the cultural boundaries are, so we have this empirical map that says this is where the management units are, and there’s so many more; this is where the cultural boundaries are, and we need to act on that now. Because it has been easy to say, well, we just don’t know yet. That’s often the hardest argument for conservation is, well, we don’t really know yet. Well now we know, so what are we going to do about it?
We’re going to do things differently because we listen to and learn from those to whom it matters the most. And we need to do that now, because sadly we’ve been killing whales for hundreds of years, and we do so now mostly out of ignorance rather than intent. We hit them with our ships from the ever-growing shipping fleet that brings us the economy from around the world. We entangle them in our omnipresent leftover fishing gear.
And every calf counts. When you have small families that desperately need females to perpetuate themselves, if they don’t survive, you lose the family. And when we lose a family, we lose generations of traditional knowledge of how to succeed as a Caribbean whale. And that can’t be replaced, even if the global population could swim into the Caribbean again, because these would be different whales from elsewhere who do things differently, who’ve learned from different grandmothers and are missing the solution on how to succeed there.
So these cultures aren’t just animals who’ve learned to do things differently because they never meet. These are really the link between the ocean that they live in and the animals that live there. It’s a bond between where and who.
And that’s why we can’t just do wildlife conservation based on total numbers or genetic stocks. We need to have the definition of biodiversity include cultural diversity. [APPLAUSE] These secrets are the secrets that are allowing these species to survive. They’re the viable solutions to species survival, and we need to model our framework for conservation around that.
If you can take one message from the culture of whales, it’s the power of community, that in the face of these unimaginable obstacles, the solution is to come together, and the last few years have taught us to do the exact opposite.
They’re fundamentally different from you and I, there’s no doubt about it. Right? But we can talk about shared values that we all understand. Learn from your grandmother. Love your siblings. Be a good neighbor. Because if we’re going to preserve life, ours and theirs, we need to find ways to coexist above and below the surface, and value cultural diversity in our society and our ecosystem. Thank you.o your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over again, announcing your place in the family of things.
Host: Dr. Shane Gero… “Deep Listening: Whale Culture, Interspecies Communication, and Knowing Your Place”
Plastics, once hailed as revolutionary materials for their versatility and durability, have now become a global nightmare poised to persist for hundreds of years. The story of plastic is catastrophic from start to finish, as its creation requires the dangerous extraction of fossil fuels and its disposal results in alarming levels of pollution. Still, the modern global economy continues to rely on plastic, often unhindered by regulations that could halt this process of never-ending waste. Petrochemical feedstocks currently represent 12% of global oil demand, and as climate concerns demand a reduction in oil consumption, fossil fuel companies are pushing to increase plastics production as fast as they can.
The plastics industry would have us believe that the responsibility for solving this problem rests with us, the consumers. We’re told to recycle carefully and avoid plastic straws, while in reality, plastic has become so deeply embedded in our society and the products that keep it running that these so-called “solutions” are laughable at best and a dangerous distraction at worst.
Leaders worldwide are actively working toward real solutions. In this newsletter, we recognize and take cues from their work and ideas.
Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.
From Plastic Mythology to Environmental Reality: Experts Discuss the Crisis
Plastic pollution has evolved into one of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time, infiltrating every corner of our planet, from pristine oceans to remote wilderness. The proliferation of plastic products, coupled with the myth of effective recyclability, has lulled us into complacency, fostering a culture of convenience that has dire consequences for our environment.
In this conversation hosted by The Ecology Center, four plastic pollution experts, Shilpi Chhotray, Yvette Arellano, KT Morelli, and Martin Bourque, talk about their work to expose the harsh realities of plastic pollution and production while debunking industry-driven myths.
Mark your calendars for March 28-30 for Bioneers 2024 in Berkley, California. Planning is well underway for our 35th annual conference, and we’re excited to share our exciting lineup of confirmed speakers with you soon. Sign up for alerts here, and you’ll be the first to hear announcements and know when registration opens.
What You Need To Know About Microplastics and Textiles
We are increasingly surrounded by plastic in our daily lives. It’s the clothing we wear, it’s the containers we eat from, furniture we sit on, and toys our children play with. Plastic has an enormous presence in mass-manufactured textiles, meaning that everything from our clothes to our curtains to our sheets are often petroleum-based. But it doesn’t have to be this way…
Plastic Planet: Stopping Big Oil, Big Plastic, and Big Misdirection
After World War II, the U.S. government worked with industry to create a single-use, disposable consumer culture as a way to ensure ongoing market prosperity. Who benefited? Consumer product companies like Coca-Cola, and the fossil fuel industry, whose petrochemicals are at the source. The result? Plastic pollution is now found in virtually every living organism – including humans – and is one of the worst threats to ocean ecosystems.
In this podcast episode Anna Cummins, Deputy Director and Co-Founder of the Five Gyres Institute, talks about the global resistance movement that is rising to abolish petrochemical plastics and to shift to a zero-waste, circular economy.
The World Is Drowning in Plastic. Here’s How It All Started
“Every year, nearly 18 billion pounds of plastic enter just the oceans — one garbage truck full every minute. Just the amount of microplastics entering the environment is the equivalent of every human on Earth walking up to the sea and tossing in a grocery bag every week.”
In A Poison Like No Other, Matt Simon reveals a whole new dimension to the plastic crisis, one even more disturbing than plastic bottles washing up on shores and grocery bags dumped in landfills.
This toolkit aims to cultivate knowledge and expertise among the community of leaders across the world, empowering them to enact change locally in their communities and countries. This portal provides a complete suite of resources, successful initiative examples, and strategy development options focused on the elimination of our global reliance on disposable packaging and on plastic’s harmful impacts.
Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses & Community Conversations
Through engaging courses and conversations led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, Bioneers Learning and Community Conversations equip engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community.
Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses:
Slowing Down: Cultivating Healing Spaces of Belonging | Starting September 26 | An experiential session featuring mindful and creative practices designed to help us slow down, heal and collectively receive our greatest wisdoms.
The Rights of Nature | Starting October 19 | A full background on the emerging “rights of nature” movement in the United States and internationally and how to develop, adopt, and enforce local rights of nature laws in your own communities.
Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem | Starting November 14 | A grounded and surprising exploration of the healing genius in your emotional realm.
A Doorway into the Imaginal Expanse | December 6 | Create a home for your intuition, coax the artist within, and make soul commitments enriching our intraceptive landscape.
What We’re Tracking
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending some of his wealth to try to block the construction of petrochemical plants that make fertilizer, plastics, and packaging. | Read More
Plastic pollution has evolved into one of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time, infiltrating every corner of our planet, from pristine oceans to remote wilderness. The proliferation of plastic products, coupled with the myth of effective recyclability, has lulled us into complacency, fostering a culture of convenience that has dire consequences for our environment. As we navigate a world awash with plastic waste, it becomes increasingly critical to shift our focus from industry-spun myths to genuine solutions that address the root causes of this crisis.
For decades, the plastic industry has skillfully perpetuated a narrative that recycling is the panacea for the plastic problem. It offered a comforting illusion, one that allowed us to believe that as long as we placed our plastic waste in the right bin, it would magically reemerge as new products, sparing our environment from harm. Yet, the truth remains elusive to many: a vast majority of plastic, born from fossil fuels, defies the promise of recycling, ending up as pollution in landfills, incinerators, or fragile ecosystems.
How can we collectively dismantle false narratives and underscore the urgency of embracing real solutions that transcend recycling? In a conversation hosted by The Ecology Center, we talked to four plastic pollution experts about their work to expose the harsh realities of plastic pollution and production while debunking industry-driven myths.
The following is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place at the 2023 Bioneers Conference. It features:
Shilpi Chhotray, a plastic pollution activist and co-founder and executive director of People over Plastic
Yvette Arellano, an environmental justice advocate and founder and director of Fenceline Watch
SHILPI CHHOTRAY: I actually had the privilege of speaking at Bioneers in 2018, about five years ago. This morning, as I looked back over these five years of work, I couldn’t help but notice the substantial changes and forward momentum we’ve gained. Even when discussing a topic as challenging as Plastic Pollution, the tremendous grassroots activism worldwide fills me with great hope.
Back in 2018, I was involved in the Break Free from Plastic movement. At that time, the prevailing narrative on plastic pollution was heavily centered on the ocean, with the belief that recycling would be our savior. It was also around this period that the heart-wrenching video of a turtle with a straw up its nose went viral, appearing across social media and nightly news broadcasts. The industry seized this opportunity to reinforce the message that ocean cleanups were the solution and that the blame lay with irresponsible consumers who needed to improve their recycling habits. Yes, they claimed we just needed to put plastic in the correct bin.
Interestingly, the industry was somewhat relieved that the focus had narrowed to one single-use plastic item – the plastic straw – as it diverted attention from the broader range of problematic plastic products and packaging. Concurrently, the Break Free from Plastic movement was gaining significant strength worldwide.
“We’re talking about tracing plastic from extraction and production to consumption and disposal. It’s worth noting that 99% of plastic originates from oil and gas sources, with less than 9% being recycled globally – a figure even lower in the United States.”
Shilpi Chhotray
Our mission went beyond rescuing marine life and organizing beach cleanups. We aimed to connect all aspects of the plastic pollution life cycle, which was no small feat. We were talking about tracing plastic from extraction and production to consumption and disposal. It’s worth noting that 99% of plastic originates from oil and gas sources, with less than 9% being recycled globally – a figure even lower in the United States. Unfortunately, the communities most affected by plastic production and disposal, despite being the ones harmed the earliest and most severely, often receive minimal attention, especially regarding their vulnerability to additional impacts from climate change.
Our esteemed panelists today bring extensive personal experiences and unique expertise in understanding the health effects on communities, as well as community-driven solutions that prioritize equity and justice. I’m thrilled to share this stage with them – Yvette Arellano from Fenceline Watch, KT Morelli from Breathe Free Detroit, and Martin Bourque from Berkeley’s Ecology Center. Together, we’re here to reveal the true stories behind plastic pollution and how leaders within the movement continuously challenge the status quo of the industry. We’ll also discuss how you can actively contribute to tangible change in your community.
Now, let’s dive into the topics we’ll cover today. Yvette, who joins us from Houston, will shed light on the connections between fracking pipelines and petrochemical processes. KT, all the way from Detroit, will provide firsthand insights into the battles against waste incineration, which, for those unfamiliar, involves the burning of plastic – a solution that isn’t truly sustainable. And lastly, Martin will unveil the harsh truths and myths surrounding plastic recycling, particularly in the face of the booming consumer packaging industry.
YVETTE ARELLANO: Good afternoon, everyone. I use they/them pronouns, and I call Houston, Texas, my home. Houston boasts the largest petrochemical complex globally, stretching for approximately 52 miles. My community, including Magnolia Park on Houston’s east end, is situated within the first 16 miles of this massive complex. I work alongside four other port communities to combat the encroachment of fossil fuels into our neighborhoods.
I’d like to start by refraining from showing you the complete Houston Ship Channel because I genuinely believe that what you see today is not our future. It’s crucial to understand that wealth does not equate to a sustainable or prosperous livelihood. If Texas were its own economy, it would rank as the 27th largest globally. Texas produces around 44% of the petrochemicals used in plastic production, not only for the nation but worldwide.
“Plastic production is a significant component of the fossil fuel supply chain, with many fossil fuel companies owning plastic producers, and vice versa.”
Shilpi Chhotray
The ExxonMobil refinery in Baytown, Texas, is the second-largest refinery. Contrary to popular belief, all of Exxon’s facilities coexist on the same site, housing Exxon Chemical, Exxon Oil, Exxon refinery, and soon, Exxon’s hydrogen hub, which I’ll touch on later. Jobs and prosperity don’t necessarily follow in the wake of these industries. Many workers in the sector endure the grueling Dupont schedule – two weeks on, one week off, working 14 to 16 hours a day.
Numerous industry workers grapple with substance abuse to cope with the relentless hours. And the sacrifices made come with severe consequences, as evidenced by the release of toxic substances in our communities. These range from 14,000 pounds of cancer-causing benzene to over 25,000 pounds of ozone-polluting toxins. These are the impacts felt in my community.
With 99% of plastic originating from fossil fuels, the 618 plants lining the Houston Ship Channel are at the heart of global plastic production. Asthma and leukemia rates are alarmingly high in these areas. A Harris County study showed significantly elevated rates along the Houston Ship Channel compared to the rest of the nation, and the same holds true for brain and cervical cancer.
In Texas, the absence of zoning regulations allows schools, nurseries, elementary schools, and communities to coexist adjacent to refineries. These conditions persist in other communities along the Houston Ship Channel as well. In contrast to other communities where children paint murals of their homes and schools, children in our community paint murals depicting nearby petrochemical facilities.
For me, the intersection of these issues lies in language. Spanish is my first language, and I had to learn English. By second grade, I was proficient enough to join English-only classes. Our communities are populated by migrant workers. In fact, a nearby school in Manchester has a 64% English language learner population, meaning English is their second language. Harmful substances like butane and ethane are being permitted at several times their legal limits in Spanish-speaking communities.
Schools throughout the Houston Ship Channel face similar challenges. To address this, we formed Title 6, which received a remarkable 48-hour turnaround from the Department of Justice. This initiative now legally requires the petrochemical industry to translate their permits for air, water, and waste. It represents one more barrier to ensure public participation in the democratic process.
Our objective is to dismantle and transform systems that no longer serve us, allowing these roles to work in our favor, thereby fostering real systemic change.
To conclude, I emphasize the importance of rejecting false solutions. A report from the Principles for Responsible Investment reveals that while people acknowledge the harm caused by plastics, they still struggle to fully grasp the strong connection between plastics, chemicals, natural gas, and oil. It’s crucial to reinforce the idea of plastic as an extractive product rooted in the fossil fuel industry. We must not allow big businesses to escape accountability.
“We can’t solve this problem with the same mindset that led to it. The participation of First Nations people and the most impacted communities is essential.”
KT Morelli
SHILPI: I want to emphasize the crucial connection between plastic and climate change. Plastic production is a significant component of the fossil fuel supply chain, with many fossil fuel companies owning plastic producers, and vice versa. They are deeply intertwined, which underscores the importance of holding industry polluters accountable for the complete life cycle costs of pipelines, petrochemical plants, and plastic production.
For those who are new to this topic, I recommend checking out the Center for International Environmental Law’s “Fueling Plastic” series. While it’s a few years old, it remains an invaluable resource that I personally reference regularly.
Additionally, Yvette’s organization, Fenceline Watch, consistently produces exceptional on-the-ground research on this issue. I encourage you to follow them on social media for the latest updates; we’ll provide a slide with their information shortly.
Now that we’ve discussed the origins of plastic and its impact on human lives, let’s delve deeper into the consumer-facing aspect of this issue, including the realities and misconceptions surrounding recycling. Martin, please take it from here.
MARTINBOURQUE: You know, at the Ecology Center, we have been in this space for a very long time, founded around the first Earth Day. Recycling at the time was considered a radical notion, that we could take things out of the garbage and do something positive with them. Early in the 1970s, the Ecology Center and its supporters initiated the nation’s first curbside collection program. To this day, we continue to work with the City of Berkeley to promote responsible recycling and dispel recycling myths.
The hierarchy has always been reduce, reuse, and then recycle, as your last option. What’s happened is that the packaging industry has moved away from reduce and reuse, solely promoting recycling as the solution for everything from hair loss to erectile dysfunction. This paints an unrealistic picture of plastic recycling as a paradise of rainbows and unicorns.
The reality is much more challenging. The Ecology Center has been combating false narratives in plastic recycling from the beginning. We lost our bottle refill program in the 1980s as the bottling industry shifted from glass to plastic. Today, we fight to improve and maintain the Bottle Bill. We need to return to a model that prioritizes reuse and reduction.
“Focusing on marketing solutions and pushing more plastics into the recycling stream does not address the root problem of overproduction and overuse of plastics.”
Martin Bourque
In order to amplify our voice, we’ve partnered with other early adopters, leaders in their communities, and formed AMBR, the Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers. Together with the Break Free from Plastic movement, we hold the industry accountable.
The plastics industry has spent millions convincing us that all plastics are recyclable. One of their campaigns, “Collect All Recyclables,” encouraged recycling programs to collect all packaging, even though only number 1 and number 2 bottles and jugs have viable markets. This created a global problem.
We must consider not just can we recycle, but should we? California’s recycling law focuses on diverting waste from landfills, but exporting our plastic scrap to other countries isn’t a solution. We need to prioritize reduce and reuse and consider the health impacts.
The surge in plastic exports coincided with the “collect all plastics” campaign and the growth of single-stream plastic in the US. However, China and amendments to the Basel Convention in 2018 and 2019 reduced this trade. Now, we need to determine where this plastic is going.
We’ve taken local action in Berkeley, focusing on reduction. We passed the Plastic Bag Reduction strategy, initiated a single-use disposable foodware and litter reduction ordinance, and are pushing for reusable alternatives. We must challenge industry myths that claim all plastics are recyclable, that recycling will solve everything, and that innovative technologies can magically fix the problem.
Petrochemical reprocessing of plastic and plastic-to-fuel are not the way forward. The truth is, recycling should be the last option after reduce and reuse. Recycling is generally beneficial, but it has its limits, especially for plastics. Most plastics should not be recycled due to toxicity and environmental issues.
“We must recognize the urgency of stopping their production in the first place.”
KT Morelli
SHILPI: Before we move forward, let’s clarify something for those new to the numbers. Martin discussed the numbers you find under plastic packaging, which are usually 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7. The focus has typically been on recycling 1 and 2, but what about 3 through 7? That’s where the bulk of the issue lies – low-value, single-use plastic packaging that often ends up burned or shipped, rarely disposed of properly.
Additionally, it’s essential to recognize that using reusables is not a radical concept. Communities, especially people of color communities, have been doing this for generations. I recall going to India, where I’m from, and taking aluminum cans and tiffins to the market, getting them weighed, and then heading home. This is a practice deeply rooted in our culture.
Now, shifting gears a bit, we have KT Morelli presenting on the impacts of waste incineration. Both Martin and Yvette touched on this briefly. KT Morelli is the campaign organizer of Breathe Free Detroit, an experienced activist who has lived in the shadow of Detroit’s incinerator for a decade.
KTMORELLI: I come from Detroit, and in 2019, we successfully shut down the largest incinerator in the country, located about a mile from my house. This incinerator had a long history of causing problems for our neighborhood and continues to affect us today.
I will provide some insights into the history, health issues, transitions, and future directions related to our fight against this incinerator.
Our battle spanned 33 years, with people opposing the incinerator’s construction since 1986. Unfortunately, in the 1980s, incineration seemed like a viable option due to landfill space depletion. However, trash, especially plastics, isn’t designed to be burned at the end of its life. Despite being easily combustible, the chemical changes and environmental impacts make burning plastics detrimental to our health and the environment.
In 2019, the Breathe Free Detroit campaign took the lead in the fight to shut down the incinerator, following in the footsteps of many other dedicated activists. When it closed, we learned on the same day that the workers would lose their jobs after 2:00 pm. Incinerator facilities often neglect their employees. Detroit lacks a robust zero-waste system, which could have provided better alternatives for these workers.
When waste is burned, 30% of it becomes toxic ash, often containing microplastics. This ash is typically unregulated and often ends up in landfills. Landfills, if not properly managed, can lead to environmental issues, such as soil contamination and leachate leakage into water systems. Although landfills might be a marginally better option than incineration, a just transition to zero waste is the best solution.
Communities living near incinerators worldwide face health problems stemming from contaminants such as lead, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, particulate matter, and nitrous oxides. These communities share common health issues, and the thermal treatment of plastic waste, including incineration, exacerbates these problems.
“It’s crucial to reinforce the idea of plastic as an extractive product rooted in the fossil fuel industry. We must not allow big businesses to escape accountability.”
Yvette Arellano
Recent studies by GAIA reveal a substantial presence of microplastics in incinerator ash, which ultimately enters our waterways. Even though our incinerator shut down in 2019, the lifelong health effects persist. Our community, plagued by respiratory and heart issues from living near an incinerator for generations, faced severe impacts during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 22 neighborhood members succumbing to the virus due to pre-existing health conditions caused by incinerator pollution.
Incinerators require waste as fuel, diverting recyclables and compostables away from more sustainable solutions. When money and effort are directed toward incinerators, opportunities to establish effective zero-waste systems are missed.
Community-led policies are crucial in the fight against the fossil fuel industry and plastics. Environmental justice communities are at the forefront of creating climate justice solutions. We implement these solutions out of necessity and possess valuable knowledge on how to combat the problem and protect our communities. It’s imperative to have our voices at the table to drive these changes.
I’d like to highlight the Environmental Justice Delegation, a group of EJ advocates representing communities directly affected by the entire life cycle of plastic pollution. We recently participated in the first international negotiating committee for a global plastics treaty held in Uruguay. We demand justice for human rights violations, climate damage, and biodiversity loss caused by plastic pollution.
We can’t solve this problem with the same mindset that led to it. The participation of First Nations people and the most impacted communities is essential. A legally binding global agreement is a rare opportunity to address the multi-generational harm caused by the plastic pollution crisis, affecting human rights, climate, and biodiversity.
“The plastics industry has spent millions convincing us that all plastics are recyclable.”
Martin Bourque
SHILPI: Now, let’s discuss what you should be cautious about because there are numerous false solutions circulating. As Martin hinted at earlier, to provide some context, the plastics industry has invested millions of dollars since the ’80s in PR campaigns, media sound bites, and nightly news clips asserting that plastic can and should be recycled. We’ve all seen that infamous “crying Indian” commercial, which had its own set of issues, including the fact that the person wasn’t even Native American.
Regrettably, this issue is at risk of becoming increasingly politicized as we connect it to other movements, such as climate, labor, and food justice. So I’d like to delve into this topic with the three of you, exploring what false solutions we’re encountering and what our audience should be wary of. Additionally, how can they actively engage in advocating for real solutions?
MARTIN: I’d like to begin by pointing out that the plastics industry, packaging companies, and major consumer brands are currently facing immense pressure from the global movement against plastic pollution. However, they tend to view this challenge as a marketing issue, a matter of consumer loyalty, and a problem with their brand image. Consequently, their proposed solutions often revolve around marketing tactics. Many of these solutions include introducing new terminology and planting ideas about chemical recycling and advanced recycling as the miraculous solutions to the problem. They often advocate for recycling more and advise against ceasing production or consumption of plastic.
One of the major concerns within the recycling industry is the potential flood of new types of plastic packaging being encouraged to go into the recycling bin, even though they should not be produced in the first place and are better suited for landfills. For instance, plastic pouches have become increasingly popular for everything from soup to nuts, often equipped with zip locks. These pouches are not recyclable due to their multi-material composition. However, companies like Dow Chemical have introduced 100% polypropylene pouches and claim they are recyclable. In practice, these pouches often end up mixed with paper in recycling bins. When these paper bales are exported to paper mills, especially in countries like Indonesia, the plastic is separated out, as you saw in the video. This false narrative could lead to a significant increase in the types of plastic being placed in recycling bins, creating challenges for environmentally responsible disposal methods.
The critical issue here is that focusing on marketing solutions and pushing more plastics into the recycling stream does not address the root problem of overproduction and overuse of plastics. We must remain vigilant and discerning consumers to avoid falling for these marketing-driven false solutions.
“The carbon capture initiative, which involves massive fans to capture carbon, isn’t a viable solution.”
Yvette Arellano
YVETTE: I want to highlight that for quite some time, many people haven’t been aware that the fracking industry employs plastics extensively. They utilize a thick, gooey substance, almost like sludge, and inject it into the ground. This substance is reactive and aids in determining whether the borehole is proceeding in the right direction. Plastic is already being used in various ways that most of us aren’t even aware of to support extraction processes.
Adding to this, we must also be vigilant about future false solutions that involve not only the continued production of plastics but its expansion, as exemplified in Corpus Christi with the largest ethylene plant partially funded by SABIC Aramco. This expansion is exacerbating another existential crisis—the water crisis.
Across the nation, desalination plants are sprouting up along the coastlines, posing dangers. Not only do they hyper-salinate waters, causing harm to ecosystems, but the filters used in these plants are predominantly plastic.
Furthermore, we should be concerned about the convergence of hydrogen hubs, carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear energy. These elements are rapidly emerging under the guise of clean energy markets, and they are infiltrating the plastics market for various purposes, such as creating membranes for hydrogen storage. This, however, prolongs the problem.
The carbon capture initiative, which involves massive fans to capture carbon, isn’t a viable solution. And the coupling of offshore hydrogen plants with desalination facilities powered by wind turbines raises questions about what truly constitutes clean energy. We need to inquire about what’s being decommissioned and the feedstocks for these new energy sources. It’s essential that we begin reducing our reliance on dirty energy sources, including plastics.
“We need to inquire about what’s being decommissioned and the feedstocks for these new energy sources. It’s essential that we begin reducing our reliance on dirty energy sources, including plastics.”
Yvette Arellano
KT: I’d like to add to this discussion since I work in the waste management field. Every day, I’m surrounded by objects, and I constantly wonder about their ultimate destination. Unfortunately, there’s no favorable outcome for plastics. When you encounter a park bench made from thousands of recycled water bottles, it may seem like a positive recycling effort. However, as that bench deteriorates due to factors like teenage vandalism or exposure to the elements, it simply releases more microplastics into our environment. The same goes for items like work vests made from recycled bottles—when washed, they shed microplastics into our water systems.
The key takeaway here is that there is no environmentally friendly destination for plastics. We must recognize the urgency of stopping their production in the first place.
This article was originally published by Fibershed.
We are increasingly surrounded by plastic in our daily lives. It’s the clothing we wear, it’s the containers we eat from, furniture we sit on, and toys our children play with. Plastic has an enormous presence in mass-manufactured textiles, meaning that everything from our clothes to our curtains to our sheets are often petroleum-based. But it doesn’t have to be this way…
And it hasn’t always been this way. Plastic production has increased exponentially over the past several decades. In 1990, 1.74 billion tonnes of plastic was produced globally. That number jumped to 3.39 billion tonnes in the year 2000, and in 2015, global production of plastic reached 7.82 billion tonnes. Production of polyester, a plastic-based synthetic textile, has also skyrocketed, increasing by nearly 900% between 1980 and 2014.
Most of us are at least somewhat aware of plastic’s outsized negative impact on our planet, ecosystems, and health. Plastic is a product of the petroleum industry—which is responsible for enormous environmental harm—and up to 10% of humanity’s oil supply goes toward making plastic each year. Once manufactured, plastic continues to be hazardous both because of its longevity and the way it breaks down. A plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill, and as most of the plastic we produce is single-use, our plastic addiction is literally piling up all over the planet. All plastic that has ever been manufactured (unless toxically incinerated), is still present within our Earth’s biosphere and ocean.
Petroleum-based plastic is dirty and extractive from start to finish. One major concern lies in the proliferation of microplastics, which are plastic pieces smaller than 5 millimeters but often microscopic. While many people are aware that microplastics can result from the breakdown of larger plastic (macroplastics) and from tiny plastic spheres used in manufacturing and personal care products, most people don’t realize that a majority of microplastic pollution is fiber, primarily derived from clothing and textiles. These small plastic particles travel through our air, soil, and waterways.
Why are microplastics in our environment such a huge problem? First, they’re easily ingestible by many organisms thanks to their small size, and ingestion of the chemicals in microplastics can lead to serious health problems. Microfibers are also capable of absorbing additional harmful pollutants. Because some of the smallest members of our food chain ingest these toxic chemicals, and because microplastics are floating in the air around us, avoiding the effects of microplastic pollution is extremely difficult.
A primary source of microplastic pollution is synthetic fibers, produced and promoted by the apparel and textile industry.
Microplastics and the Textile Industry
Plastic in textiles takes the form of synthetic fibers—most often, polyester. The majority of textiles manufactured today make use of synthetic fibers, and if we continue with the current economic and regulatory incentives, these fibers will be even more prevalent in the future. That increased reliance upon petroleum is a major environmental concern, in addition to the contribution of synthetic textiles to worldwide microplastic and microfiber pollution.
Textiles made from plastic fibers are responsible for microplastic fiber shedding at every stage of their lives: when they’re worn, when they’re washed, and when they’re disposed of. These microplastics enter the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. They’ve been found in some of the deepest depths of the ocean, in the placentas of unborn babies, in Arctic snow and Antarctic ice, and in our rainwater.
A study of microplastic pollution around the North Pole recently found that more than 73% of microfiber pollution can be traced back to polyester fibers that resembled PET from textiles.*
*PET (polyethylene terephthalate) is the chemical name for polyester, a clear, strong plastic used in food and beverage packaging and synthetic fibers.
The popularity of synthetic fabrics has made this concern even more pervasive. Yet, we often see synthetic fiber and textiles underemphasized when it comes to conversations about the systematic shifts required in the clothing industry to start truly addressing the microplastic pollution crisis.
However, there is a growing movement of individuals recognizing the threat of microplastics and more specifically, evaluating individual consumer choices in order to combat this challenge. Synthetic fibers and textiles are one of the main sources of microplastic pollution, making the choice an easy one.
How We Can Solve the Microplastics Problem
While some brands and organizations are celebrating innovations said to reduce microplastic pollution, many of these ideas are merely Band-Aid fixes that don’t address the full scale of the issue. Laundry filtration can address only a fraction of the microplastic emissions generated by clothing. Textiles manufactured from recycled plastic, such as recycled polyester, are no better from a microplastics perspective. In fact, these textiles actually increase the prevalence of environmental microplastics, as recycled polyester has been shown to emit more microplastics than new polyester.
Reducing or eliminating our overreliance on synthetic textiles and reducing our textile consumption and waste overall, while strengthening infrastructure and support for healthy natural fiber textile systems, is the best method for a holistic solution. Textile producers and consumers must prioritize the use of natural fibers. Not only do natural fiber systems not release microplastics into the environment, they require less washing, and, with the proper support, they also can address key issues including biodiversity enhancement, climate stability, and right livelihoods.
Consumers have enormous power in this movement. By choosing 100% natural fibers such as wool, alpaca, cotton, and hemp, and avoiding plastic-based synthetic fibers such as polyester, nylon, and acrylic, shoppers can vote for a cleaner environment with their pocketbooks. Seeking untreated fibers and natural dyes (while not easy to do given current market choices), is also a critical element when it comes to protecting our oceans, biosphere, and health.
We know that natural fiber systems need significant investment to become truly land regenerating and non-toxic. Natural fibers, dyes, and cleaner chemistries have had to compete with fossil carbon based plastics industries. Fast fashion and performance-based textile industries continue to drive the use of inexpensive plastics within our clothing. The continued push to compete with synthetic fibers has driven natural fiber agricultural systems to either disappear or follow suit and maximize earnings while externalizing costs. The only way to secure investments in natural fiber and dye systems that can regenerate land is to support their existence and develop incentives that strengthen the infrastructure that delivers them to the marketplace.
Critically, big players in the textile industry must be held accountable. State and federal policies supporting reductions in synthetic textile production and consumption, taxes on virgin plastic manufacturing, incentives for natural fiber and textile producers, and holding textile producers and manufacturers accountable for costs of management and end-of-life treatment for their products are all potential steps in the right direction.
Finally, everybody who is concerned about microplastic pollution can push this movement forward by talking about it; talk to friends, post on social media, and ask questions of your local leaders. Even brief but targeted comments to policymakers will have a large impact.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
By Katie Surma
After 50 years of expanding oil operations in its Amazonian region, Ecuador will close the door on crude extraction in three oil fields that are home to Indigenous communities, including one of the country’s uncontacted groups.
The reversal in policy for the oil-exporting nation was sealed when 59 percent of voters chose in an Aug. 20 nationwide referendum to shut down operations inside the Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini oil fields located inside Yasuní National Park. The government will have 365 working days to comply with the referendum, which includes a requirement for environmental remediation.
The so-called ITT fields, located inside Ecuador’s Oil Block 43, contain a fraction of the hundreds of oil wells that will remain in operation throughout Yasuní and the greater Ecuadorian Amazon region. The ITT fields produce about 54,800 barrels of oil per day; for reference, the United States, which is the biggest buyer of Ecuadorian crude, consumes over 20 million barrels of oil per day.
Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso and the state-run oil company Petroecuador released statements saying Ecuador would comply with the results after the minister of energy and mines initially said Ecuador would continue with oil production in the ITT fields despite the outcome of the referendum. In the runup to the election, Petroecuador and pro-oil industry groups argued that stopping production in the ITT fields would cost Ecuador nearly $14 billion, imperil economic growth and cause job loss. The Orellana province where the ITT fields are located was one of only two provinces in the nation that voted “no” to the referendum.
The vote to halt and dismantle production in the ITT fields was widely acclaimed by environmentalists as a victory for the climate and nature. Yasuní National Park is one of the most biologically rich places on the planet and keeping the remaining ITT oil in the ground has been estimated to prevent a total of 410 million metric tons of planet-warming gas from being released.
Yasuní’s rainforest is home to endemic species unique to that area as well as endangered and threatened species like the jaguar, pink dolphins and giant otter. Oil operations in the park have been ongoing for decades and are responsible for large-scale deforestation and over 1,500 oil spills, among other ecological injuries.
The outcome of last week’s referendum holds even greater implications for local Indigenous communities whose families have inhabited the region for over 12,000 years.
Members of one grassroots community, the Baihuaeri of Bameno, announced on Monday that they have convened meetings with neighboring groups to collectively defend other parts of Yasuní which remain under threat from encroaching oil operations. The Baihuaeri are an autonomous clan of Indigenous Waorani peoples whose ancestral territory includes the southern part of the ITT fields.
Their message, released on Monday, thanked Ecuadorians who voted “yes to Yasuní” and said that the Baihuaeri are worried about expanding operations in at least six other oil blocks (numbers 66, 55, 14, 17, 16 and 31) that affect them and other Waorani peoples, including other recently contacted communities and three uncontacted groups. Uncontacted Indigenous peoples are also referred to by the technical term “Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation.” It is unclear why the referendum, which was pursued by the Ecuadorian nonprofit group YASunidos in 2013, did not include oil fields inside oil blocks beyond Block 43.
The Baihuaeri are spearheading efforts to bring affected communities together to agree on clear boundaries to stop the expansion of oil operations throughout Yasuní and demand that the government stop sending oil companies into their territories and recognize their land rights.
Ecuador’s constitution and international treaties affirm Indigenous peoples’ rights to their ancestral lands as well as the right to be consulted about activities that could affect them. In Ecuador, however, those rights have often been in tension with other laws allowing extractive activities to go forward if they are in the “national interest.”
“We have heard pretty words from governments and world leaders about the need to stop destroying the Amazon Rainforest to mitigate climate change. We want those words to be a reality,” the Baihuaeri wrote.
Penti Baihua, a traditional Baihuaeri leader, said his Bameno community wants to form alliances with neighboring Waorani communities in order to protect the greatest amount of forest possible. He has been organizing gatherings with other community leaders to discuss the situation of the uncontacted peoples in Yasuní, the encroaching oil companies and their visions for the future.
Penti Baihua, a traditional Baihuaeri leader, and his uncle, Kemperi, of the Baihuaeri community of Bameno. Kemperi, one of the last jaguar shamans, passed away in March 2023. Credit: photo courtesy of the Ome Yasuni organization and Javier Awa Baihua.
“We need to set clear boundaries to stop the expansion of oil activities in order to protect our living forest for our children and grandchildren, respect the families who live in isolation, avoid conflicts, and allow everyone to live in peace and tranquility,” the Baihuaeri statement said.
Reaching a universal agreement will have obstacles. Unlike some other Indigenous groups, Waorani peoples do not identify as one nation with a single leader. Rather, they historically have been self-governed at the family and community level.
Prior to the Aug. 20 referendum, at least one Waorani community opposed cessation of oil operations inside the ITT fields, citing the education, healthcare and other services the oil companies provide to their Kawymeno community.
It is unclear whether Petroecuador will continue to fund those services now that operations in the ITT fields will shut down. Typically, governments are responsible for providing those types of public services to citizens.
The Baihuaeri, in their statement, included a message to communities that believe there will be no jobs, education or healthcare without oil operations.
“The oil companies always contaminate, make noise and damage the forest. The animals need a large forest in order to live and reproduce,” the Baihuaeri wrote. “It is important to remember what our grandfathers and grandmothers taught us, and to think about how future generations will live.”
The statement also spotlighted the plight of Ecuador’s three uncontacted Waorani family groups.
One of those groups, the Dugakeri, have been relatively insulated from outsiders’ intrusions into their territory due to the remoteness of where they live. But the group is known to migrate through Oil Block 43, which houses the ITT blocks, and neighboring Oil Block 31. The Baihuaeri said they fear that if new oil operations continue to expand in those areas, the Dugakeri’s future would be afflicted with displacement and violence, much like the two other uncontacted groups, the Tagaeri and Taromenane, are now.
Oil operations and colonization have heavily impacted and displaced the Tagaeri and Taromenane, who in response have violently defended their territory and isolated status by spearing any outsiders entering their lands.
The Tagaeri and Taromenane have also been the victims of deadly attacks, including three mass murder events in 2003, 2006 and 2013. The Baihuaeri warned that if oil operations continue to advance, the violence involving the Tagaeri and Taromenane will increase.
The Dugakeri, Tagaeri and Taromenane are widely considered to be the last remaining uncontacted Waorani groups in Ecuador. All Waorani peoples had lived isolated in the Ecuadorian Amazon region until 1958 when American missionaries with the Summer Institute of Linguistics began the first wave of a campaign called “Operation Auca,” aimed at contacting and evangelizing Waorani people. The term Auca is a pejorative term meaning “savages.”
The second wave of that campaign took off in the 1970s when the American oil company Texaco encouraged the missionaries to accelerate and expand their operations into areas where the company wanted to operate. The aim was to clear Waorani people from their land so drilling could move forward. In her landmark 1991 book “Amazon Crude” and later writings, Judith Kimerling cataloged this history, including statements by U.S. missionaries who recounted how Texaco gave the missionaries use of company helicopters.
In the book “The ‘Inside’ Auca Story,” missionary Catherine Peeke is quoted speaking about the alliance between oil companies and the missionaries. At one point in the book, Peeke describes the missionaries’ use of Texaco’s helicopters, which she refers to as “this thing”:
This thing costs $200-300 an hour to run; and it was a three-hour operation—besides the four high-priced employees! The oil people, in turn, are more than willing to do what they can for our operation, since we have almost cleared their whole concession of Aucas. They assure us that they aren’t just being generous!
The missionaries’ campaign did not reach all Waorani people, and some who were taken to the missionaries’ “Christian protectorate” later returned to their ancestral territories. Still, the campaign was successful at opening up large swaths of Waorani lands to oil operations, and today those areas are heavily polluted, deforested and overrun with oil infrastructure and colonization.
Beyond the displacements and contamination brought on by missionaries and oil operations, Waorani families have lost control over their territories in other ways. In 1979, the Ecuadorian government created Yasuní National Park out of ancestral Waorani lands without consulting or informing the affected communities. Since then, hundreds of wells, including those in the ITT block, have been installed on the legal basis that the oil operations are in the “national interest.”
Now, the Baihuaeri say they want Ecuadorians and the wider world to know that they and other Waorani communities are engaged in their own process to save what remains of Yasuní, defend their territories and protect their isolated relatives. Their statement invites “those who say ‘Yes to Yasuní” to support their efforts.
“Our message to everyone is that we want to live and protect our rainforest territory, Ome, for future generations,” they wrote. “We have our own voices, and we want to be heard and respected.”
How the Yasuni ITT Initiative Came Together
Last week’s vote on oil operations in the ITT fields has been more than 15 years in the making.
The idea that Ecuador should forgo extracting some of its oil in exchange for international financial support from wealthy countries was raised in December 2006 by the economist and incoming Minister of Energy and Mines, Alberto Acosta.
Acosta’s proposal was embraced by his boss, the newly elected leftist president Rafael Correa. The following year, Correa announced at the United Nations that Ecuador was seeking to raise funding commensurate to half of the value of 846 million barrels of unexploited oil the the Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini oil fields (about $3.6 billion as of 2007). By 2013, with only a small fraction of the funds raised, Correa declared that Ecuador would move forward with operations in the ITT fields. “The world has failed us,” Correa proclaimed.
In the months that followed, Correa’s administration took two steps to advance oil operations within the ITT fields. He asked the Ecuadorian congress to declare that oil operations in the ITT fields were in the national interest, a constitutional prerequisite for drilling inside a national park. And, his administration changed official maps that had shown the presence of isolated family groups living in and around the ITT oil fields. The nation’s constitution prohibits “all forms of extractive activities” on the territories of peoples living in voluntary isolation, and so the change in mapping was widely seen as a bureaucratic maneuver to circumvent the legal protections for the Dugakeri, Tagaeri and Taromenane.
In August 2013, the non-governmental organization YASunidos launched a campaign to gather enough signatures to force a nationwide referendum on the question of whether Ecuador should leave the oil under the ITT fields in the ground into perpetuity. By 2015, the activists amassed over 750,000 signatures, the majority of which were invalidated by the Correa administration. Nearly a decade and multiple legal battles later, Ecuador’s constitutional court ruled on May 9 that YASunidos’ had enough valid signatures to force the referendum.
As that litigation was unfolding, the Correa administration forged ahead with operations inside the ITT fields, which began producing oil in 2016.
Natalia Greene, an Ecuadorian political scientist and founding member of YASunidos, said last week’s vote “sent a very powerful message” that the people of Ecuador were voting for life—both for the rights of nature and for the Indigenous people living in Yasuní. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution. Greene said she sees the outcome of the August 20 referendum as the nation’s affirmation of the recognition that nature and all its constituent parts have inherent rights to life, among other things. Humans, she emphasized, are also a part of nature.
Greene, who is now an executive committee member of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, also rebutted the implication made by Petroecuador and pro-oil groups that oil extraction is needed to alleviate poverty in Ecuador.
“We’ve had 50 years of oil exploitation and we’re still a very poor country,” she said. “Exploitation of nonrenewable resources has a structure where few people and foreign companies win a lot of money, a few people get poor-paying jobs and our resources are exported. The social and environmental costs are never taken into account.”
Chocó Andino Referendum
The ITT vote was one of two referendums Ecuadorians decided last week.
About 68 percent of Quito’s voters also approved regional plebiscite questions to block mining in the forests and Andean mountains of the Chocó Andino de Pichincha Biosphere Reserve located just outside the capital city.
The Chocó Andino referendum, led by the non-profit organization Quito Sin Minera, will affect an area slightly smaller than the state of Rhode Island.
The outcome of the vote means that the 12 exploratory mining concessions for copper and gold cannot progress to extractive licensing and no future mining licenses can be issued.
The Chocó Andino region is rich in both cultural and ecological diversity. It has hundreds of archaeological sites and is home to endangered species including the spectacled bear, as well as around 10,000 plant species and hundreds of species of mammals, reptiles, birds and amphibians. As one of Ecuador’s seven United Nations’ Biosphere Reserves, it is also an epicenter for pioneering research on sustainable living and economies.
Greene said the Chocó Andino referendum should remind people that copper, gold and other materials desired by developed countries for the transition to cleaner energy sources often come from biodiverse places.
“There’s no fighting climate change without biodiversity and the biggest threat to biodiversity in Ecuador is mining. We need to look at the bigger picture,” she said.
Both the ITT and Chocó Andino referendums were part of snap presidential and congressional elections. Ecuador’s presidential race will be decided on Oct. 15th in a runoff between Luisa Gonzalez, a leftist affiliated with Rafeal Correa, and pro-business candidate Daniel Noboa.
We’ve all been told time and time again to hide our emotions away. That they’re too much, unreliable, or just flat out unwanted. Karla McLaren, M.Ed., believes that we should be embracing our emotions and learning how to work with them, not against them. All of our emotions are essential to not only embracing innovation, but understanding the world around us.
In this Q&A with Karla McLaren, award-winning author, educator, workplace consultant, and social science researcher, we learn about how keeping our emotions locked up in the shadows is holding us back. Sign up for the upcoming Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem Bioneers Learning course to gain insights on the most effective ways to gain a better understanding of your own emotional ecosystem.
Karla McLaren, M.Ed.
Bioneers:Why is Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem so important for people to learn about right now?
Karla McLaren: Emotions are a part of everything you think, everything you feel, everything you do, and every decision you make. Your emotions are also a vital part of your ability to connect with others, understand your place in the world, communicate, engage, and function in relationships and social groups.
In this time of global upheaval and conflict, learning how to work with your emotions is essential to your own well-being, and to the well-being of the people around you. If you’re doing any sort of social change or environmental work, your emotional and social well-being are vital to your ability to maintain your focus, your grounding, and your vision as you work to bring healing to our waiting world.
Bioneers:What is one publication that you find particularly fascinating about Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem? Why?
KM: I’m celebrating the 2023 re-release of my revised and updated book, The Language of Emotions. This is the first and only book to explore all of the emotions in one place and help readers learn to identify, value, and work with unique genius in every emotion they have.
Since its original 2010 publication, I’ve become a social science researcher and developed a licensing program in my applied work, which is called Dynamic Emotional Integration®. My colleagues and I have discovered so much about emotions in the last 13 years, and I’m so fortunate to be able to share these updates!
Bioneers:Tell us one great reason why people reading this should sign up for your course?
KM: Our emotions have been in the shadows for many centuries as unwanted, distrusted, and unloved things. If you know about shadow work, however, you’ll remember that the shadow is where the gold resides. It’s where the magic is, and it’s where deep healing can be found.
We’ve been chased away from our emotions for far too long, and the ecosystem of our souls has been damaged by their absence. In this course, we’ll welcome them back to the center of our lives, which is where they were always meant to be.
“The purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” —Sydney J. Harris
In our quest to create a more just, sustainable, livable world, it’s hard to imagine anything more vital than ensuring widespread access to high-quality education. Yet our educational institutions are being stripped of necessary funding and attacked by agenda-chasing politicians. From the imperative need for comprehensive environmental education to the controversies surrounding book bans and the discourse on critical race theory, the path toward educational stability in the U.S. is filled with potholes. In the midst of these complexities, dedicated leaders are actively working to reshape education, ensuring equitable access to knowledge and a brighter future for all. Explore their stories below.
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Ilana Cohen – The Time for Fossil-Free Research is Now
Ilana Cohen is a lead organizer of the Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard campaign and the international Fossil Free Research movement, which combats the fossil fuel industry’s dangerous influence on academia. In her presentation, Ilana discusses how we need to evolve the fossil fuel divestment movement to the next level by holding universities and academia broadly accountable to fully separate from Big Oil’s influence.
Beyond Benign Is Changing How Chemical Products Are Made Through Green Chemistry Education
From life-saving pharmaceutical drugs to high-performance materials, chemicals and chemical products are essential in providing society the products it requires to survive and thrive. But the creation and use of many chemical products is hazardous to people and the environment. In order to ensure a habitable future planet, the field of chemistry must adapt and find new ways to be sustainable as well as economical.
Beyond Benign’s cofounders, Dr. Amy Cannon and Dr. John Warner, are challenging educational institutions and the chemical industry at large to adopt green chemistry practices. Green Chemistry is defined as the design of chemical products that reduce the use or generation of hazardous substances. By supporting educators and students to teach and learn green chemistry and sustainable science, Beyond Benign is equipping the next generation of scientists and citizens with the tools required to design and select products that support human health and the environment.
The Bioneers Indigeneity Program is the go-to source for accurate and contemporary information about Indigenous science, media, and curriculum for social change.
To support the use of Bioneers’ original content in the classroom, we’ve developed thematic discussion guides and curriculum bundles aligned with national standards for grades 9-12+. Each bundle includes teacher instructions, activities, assessment, and additional materials for a week of instruction around a set of themes. All lesson plan objectives and activities are aligned to high school standards for science, social studies/history, and English.
Amara Ifeji mobilized a grassroots effort to address racism in her high school in Maine, at age 14. She also developed a love for the mountains and woods around her, but she saw her passions for the environment and racial justice as distinct until she heard youth of color like herself share their experiences working at this intersection and realized these struggles were completely intertwined. She shares how this awakening shaped her subsequent work as a remarkably effective organizer and advocate who centers storytelling to advance environmental justice, climate education, and outdoor learning for ALL youth.
Ten Strands Empowers California’s Schools to Lead the Way in Environmental Education
While climate change and environmental instability will impact people of all ages in the coming years, our planet’s youngest citizens will shoulder the heaviest burdens. As the environment influences nearly all of today’s pursuits — from the stories we tell to the chemicals we use in labs to the products we create, consume, and throw away — providing young students with an education that incorporates environmental literacy has never been more important.
Ten Strands is a California–based nonprofit established in 2012. Their mission is to build and strengthen the partnerships and strategies that will bring environmental literacy to all of California’s K–12 public school students. They operate with a small, diverse, and nimble staff and strategic partners throughout the state. Ten Strands utilizes the largest and most diverse institution in California—the public school system—to impact 58 county offices of education, more than 1,000 school districts, approximately 10,000 individual schools, over 300,000 teachers, and 5.8 million children.
The Guardian: Kimberlé Crenshaw warns against rightwing battle over critical race theory
Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor and co-founder of the African American Policy Forum, is a leading voice on critical race theory. In this article from the Guardian, she warns that the rightwing battle against racial justice education not only threatens US democracy, but encourages a revival of segregationist values and policies. Read More
Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses & Community Conversations
Through engaging courses and conversations led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, Bioneers Learning and Community Conversations equip engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community.
Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses:
Slowing Down: Cultivating Healing Spaces of Belonging | Starting September 26 | An experiential session featuring mindful and creative practices designed to help us slow down, heal and collectively receive our greatest wisdoms.
The Rights of Nature | Starting October 19 | A full background on the emerging “rights of nature” movement in the United States and internationally and how to develop, adopt, and enforce local rights of nature laws in your own communities.
Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem | Starting November 14 | A grounded and surprising exploration of the healing genius in your emotional realm.
A Doorway into the Imaginal Expanse | December 6 | Create a home for your intuition, coax the artist within, and make soul commitments enriching our intraceptive landscape.
Rebecca Newburn is a permaculturalist and math and science educator who, in 2010, began the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library in Richmond, California, one of the first in the country. Seed libraries are a community resource that offer free seeds to gardeners with the understanding that they will grow the plants, save seeds and return some of them to the seed library. Rebecca is a national leader in promoting and supporting seed libraries; her “Create a Library” resources have been used to help hundreds of seed libraries open around the world.
Several years ago, when legal challenges arose around people’s right to save and share seeds locally, Rebecca was a partner in the National Save Seed Sharing Campaign. The Campaign successfully pushed to pass legislation to protect seed sharing in key states and amend the Recommended Universal State Seed Law to exempt seed libraries from commercial regulations. In this interview with Arty Mangan of Bioneers, Rebecca shares her experience developing a seed library and why saving seeds at the community level is important.
ARTY MANGAN: What inspired you to get involved with seeds?
REBECCA NEWBURN: I was sitting in a permaculture design class with Christopher Shein, (author of Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Permaculture), realizing that there are so many amazing ideas in permaculture. I asked myself which one is mine to do, and the word “seeds”came into my head. It made sense to me on a fundamental level because if we don’t have access to food, we don’t have a community and we don’t have a culture. Christopher had been one of the people involved in the creation of the first seed library, BASIL at the Ecology Center in Berkeley. I connected with him and the other people that had co-founded that organization. I told them that I wanted to create a seed library in my hometown of Richmond, CA, and I wanted it to be a replicable model. I didn’t have any seed-saving experience at that point, but I was able to use the expertise at Seed Savers Exchange to figure out how to create a model that would work in my community and that I could share with people in other communities in a way that could be adapted or scaled up to suit their needs and their preferences and their cultures.
ARTY: After that moment of clarity and inspiration that set you on the path of sharing seeds, how did you actually begin the process of starting a seed library?
REBECCA: When I started to work on this in 2010, a friend of mine, Catalin Kase, who is a brilliant thought buddy, was taking some time off of work to do some creative projects. So, I asked her if she’d be able to help me for a while to get started. At the time, a friend of Catalin’s who was a very experienced seed saver was visiting from out of town. She said, “It’s good you don’t know anything about seed saving, because if you did, you’d never start this project.” We were just walking into it with love, wanting to share seeds and share stories, not really knowing what we were doing, but, fortunately, we had a lot of support from experienced seed savers along the way.
ARTY: I imagine that in 2010 seed libraries were a little-known concept.
REBECCA: At that time, we were the seventh seed library to open in the country, and all of them could be traced back to BASIL. Today there are over a thousand seed libraries in the country. We have a sister seed library list. It’s very self-reported, so our numbers are not very accurate. I had a Google alert for seed libraries and as things came up on my feed, I would reach out to the new startups and add them to the list. Within the first year, I think we were at 20, and then the next year we were at 100, and the next year 200. Now we’re talking about doing an inventory every five years so that we can keep that list properly updated and also reach out to communities to see if they need any support or can offer support to others. We are looking to figure out ways to use that list in more useful ways, and we offer resources on the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library website on how to create a seed library.
ARTY: What do you feel drove that kind of interest and growth in seed libraries?
REBECCA: For many people, there’s an awakening or re-awakening of a traditional awareness and connection with seeds. But most people don’t have a connection with the whole lifecycle of the seed. But I think that’s gradually changing as people realize that that we’ve lost a lot of our connection to nature and to the cycle of life. There is also the increasing concern around climate change and biodiversity, as well as concerns about the impacts of big Ag and GMOs. A lot of convergent factors are bringing people to the realization that having your own seeds and having them stewarded by the community is super important, and a really wonderful way to do that is through a seed library, which is accessible to all.
ARTY: What is the state of the global industrial seed industry and the consolidation of seed companies?
REBECCA: If you look at the data around what’s happened with seeds, there used to be a lot of local seed companies that had regionally adapted seeds, seeds that were special to that area and those communities, but, over time, we’ve lost a lot of those regional seed companies. Even some of the remaining ones are actually owned by larger companies. The statistics of the percentage of the seed that is owned by just a handful of seed companies is alarming [four companies control 60 % of global commercial seed sales]. I love the idea of keeping seeds in the hands of the people, and a seed library is a wonderful way to do that. It’s a local repository; it’s available for free; it’s accessible to the community. And while I think it’s also important to have seed banks, those are often more closed collections that are not nearly as accessible. They’re in storage and are not being grown out every year and responding to whatever changing climate we have in different places. With seed libraries, seeds are planted each year and are able to respond to what’s happening weather-wise in our communities,
ARTY: How do you do quality control in terms of seeds’ purity when dealing with home gardeners returning seeds to the library? How do you know what you’re getting has been accurately identified?
REBECCA: That’s a very good question. There is a lot of diversity in the skill levels of different seed savers. Communities need to decide for themselves how they want to approach that. We have some best practices and guidelines to ensure seed quality, and those are available on our website, but there are some new questions we’re asking ourselves. First off, we’re not seed companies. We’re not going to have the isolation distances for things like brassicas. The brassicas that come into the seed collection, we automatically label them “crossed” because we have no idea if that plant cross-pollinated with another variety and its seed may be a mix of the genetics of the two. We have signage that says we’re not a seed company. We are sharing seeds that we are growing in our community as has been done for tens of thousands of years.
The concept of purity is a much more recent concept because historically nature is diverse. The idea that everything is going to germinate within 14 days and be ready to harvest in 65 is not something you find in nature, and it’s not necessarily safe or desirable. If all of my seed germinates in 14 days and we have a heat wave at that time and everything dies, then I’ve lost my entire crop, but if some seeds germinate a little bit later and I miss that heat bubble, then I might actually have a crop, so I think we need to reexamine that question of purity and examine if it’s really important in our food crops. Quality is important, but we don’t equate quality with purity.
In the past, if squash seeds, for example, were donated and weren’t labeled “hand-pollinated,” and we didn’t know the grower, we would compost it. Now we’re looking at being more proactive. Let’s actually take some genetically diverse seed, let it promiscuously pollinate and see what happens.
Now that we’re having much more diversity and extremes in our weather, we need to have more diversity in the seeds we’re offering. So, we are beginning to look at land races, [locally-adapted seeds with a wider genetic diversity than modern varieties] so that we can accelerate climate adaptation within our collection. I’m at a point where I’m asking questions about what I really value in terms of what my garden looks like and what I’m growing and offering, so I’m much more up for an adventure than I was before. I think the most important thing, though, regardless of whether you want to maintain varietal purity or if you want to have more diverse genetics, is that you need to label things well. Some of the labels we use for seeds are: “genetically diverse mix,” “hand pollinated,” or just the variety name if the isolation distances have been maintained. Sharing that kind of information by proper labeling is an important part of a seed library’s mission.
ARTY: I imagine that with crosses and mixes you will get some pleasant surprises and some disappointments
REBECCA: I love what [seed expert and author] Bill McDormand said: “Let us eat our mistakes.” When I was first getting into seed saving, and something didn’t come out as I expected, Bill’s advice was, “Just eat it.” You don’t need to save the seeds, but it can still provide food for your family. And sometimes we may be surprised by something that’s uniquely delicious. In this era of a bottleneck of food crop genetics in which large seed companies offer fewer varieties, one way we can honor our ancestors is by offering something to the future. We can be a bridge from the past into the future by taking traditional seeds and being in partnership with them, listening to what they have to tell us to help us bring more genetic diversity into the foods that are going to feed future generations. I’m personally interested in looking at what can I do in my garden and in my community and with other people to offer something valuable that’s going to feed my community well into the future.
ARTY: You gave the example of genetic diversity within one variety that results in germination in a scattered fashion as a hedge against a very specific weather event. How else is biodiversity important in this work?
REBECCA: In my own home collection, I have, for example, an apple tree that has 15 varieties grafted onto it. Not only does it provide food over a longer period of time, but sometimes if there’s a heavy rain and the insects can’t come out to pollinate when one particular variety is flowering, I know that I have a backup because other things are flowering later, so I’m going to have an apple crop. Historically, people grew lots and lots of different foods, but now we’re reliant on just very few handfuls of crops to feed ourselves, and even those are very limited in terms of the varieties that are grown. So, plant what you like, but also plant a lot of different types of what you like to balance it out, whether it’s several different types of tomatoes or lots of different types of vegetables. I have so many different types of vegetables there’s always something growing. It provides for a rich diet. I’m hoping that more and more people will become interested in expanding what they eat for their health and for the health of the planet.
ARTY: Can you describe the community that you’re serving with the seed library?
REBECCA: We have a very diverse community that’s evolving. There are lots of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, mostly working-class families. The local seed library is in the Richmond Public Library. Now there are 25 seed libraries in the East Bay, and there are more in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re doing more collaborative work. We’re doing a seed-saving project with Going to Seed, a group that focuses on land-race gardening. We came together as a community to decide which plants we wanted to steward and work with to help create delicious, locally-grown, genetically diverse food. It’s so exciting to work with people in the community and to see what people are interested in doing. Within the larger community, there is a robust community of seed savers in the East Bay working together.
ARTY: What is the response you get from people using the seed library?
REBECCA: What I’ve heard from most people is how it’s connected them with a family member. I was out in my front yard where I have a little seed library for my neighbors, and a guy driving by slammed on his brakes and jumped out of his van, and said “Oh my gosh, I found your seed library and I started planting, and it reminded me of my grandfather who was a farmer and who passed away a couple of years ago. It made me feel super connected with him.” I’ve heard so many stories like that from people. They got seeds from the seed library and by planting them, they felt really connected with someone who’s passed away recently who was a gardener or farmer. And now they’re inspired to save seeds. I ‘ve also heard from a number of people who said that growing their own food has been important to help them put a little bit more food on their table. Those stories of how it’s helped make a difference in people’s lives have been really rewarding.
ARTY: What advice would you give someone interested in starting a seed library?
REBECCA: It’s really nice to know that there’s no one model. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. Some seed libraries are a shoe box at a reference desk. Others are beautiful cabinets that have been painted by a local artist. There’s no one way that it needs to look. The other thing is do it in stages. The first year, the first couple of years even, you might just be able to offer donated seeds from seed companies or maybe even purchase some. It’s important to get the word out that the seed library is a new community resource. Then, over time, you might try something like a “Grow a Row” program, or a “One Seed, One Community,” where you’re trying to get people to actually save seeds by offering a seed-saving class. Be patient. It takes time to get people to start saving seeds and returning some to the library. And you need to figure out what your standards and practices are about accepting the seeds. Are you going to be accepting anything or are you only going to accept better varieties? What practices and policies make the most sense for your community? Giving yourself some grace and giving yourself some time is super important.
ARTY: What is the “One Seed, One Community” project?
REBECCA: The idea behind the “One Seed, One Community” projects is that you chose something that is interesting to grow or maybe has some cultural relevance to your community or is so beautiful that when you open up that pod you get excited to become a seed-saver. People are afraid to make mistakes. A lot of people don’t want to save seeds because they’re afraid they’re not going to do it right. That’s why examining that question of varietal purity is important. People are so afraid that they’re not going to do it right that they don’t do it at all. That approach allows people to have more freedom around planting and saving seeds. It’s a learning process, and that’s why I like initiatives such as “One Seed, One Community” because it helps people get their toes in the water. We always do something that’s extremely self-pollinating like a bean. It’s pretty when you open it, and it’s easy to see the seeds, so start with something that’s easy to do, and then, as you get excited about it, you can go onto things that are more complicated such as hand-pollinating squash.
ARTY: Hearing you talk, it just dawned on me that the library concept is even broader than just taking out seeds and bringing some back. As with a book library, there is also an exchange of information.
REBECCA: When I created the structure for the seed library, the cabinets were labeled: “super easy,” “easy” and “difficult.” We try to embed education about the seeds, explaining why these seeds are easy to grow and save, these others are difficult, etc., as well as helping people understand that things that are self-pollinating are going to come out like you would expect without any work on your part. The seed library being in a library makes sense because seeds are our commons and libraries are our commons, and being able to connect those two, in my mind, was a natural fit.
In the 1980s Frank Morton began as a farmer of mixed salad greens with a budding interest in saving seeds when he discovered one red lettuce among many flats of seedlings of green leaf lettuce. This unintentional cross of red romaine and green oakleaf piqued his curiosity and launched a lifelong vocation of innovative classical seed breeding. Frank and his wife Karen have since moved on from the salad business to devote themselves full-time to Wild Garden Seed, which provides organic, open-pollinated salad greens and vegetable and flower seeds bred specifically for organic farming systems. Frank Morton has bred over 100 unique plant varieties. In this interview with Arty Mangan of Bioneers, Morton offers insights into the fascinating world of seed breeding and explains why classical seed breeding has an evolutionary biological advantage over genetic engineering and gene editing.
ARTY MANGAN: When breeding seeds for new traits such as flavor, resistance to pests, resilience to weather extremes, etc., what are some of the fundamental considerations?
FRANK MORTON: Whenever people have had to move from a favorable climate to a harsher one, they have had to adapt their seeds to that new climate. If you want to breed seeds for some trait or resistance to stress, then you’ve got to have the environment to breed it in, and so in some sense you’re always a little bit behind the curve, unless you’re able to think ahead and do your breeding under a stressful situation that mimics the stresses you are anticipating will prevail in your environment in the future. I’ve always believed that the best way to grow and breed plants is under low-input conditions in which the plants are under a little bit of stress, so they are forced to use their genetic potential to survive, so, for example, if you want to know which plants have resistance to disease, you grow them in a nursery that’s full of disease. If you want to know which plants can do well under low-input, high-stress conditions, you breed them under those conditions, such as a lack of irrigation or minimal irrigation, or intentionally not having your breeding ground be fertile, or any number of similar parameters. In that way you’re breeding for resilience to stress.
ARTY: How does that approach differ from the way genetic engineering breeds new varieties?
FRANK: The biotech seed companies claim that by using genetic engineering and inserting a new gene aimed at a particular trait, they can produce plants resistant to specific stressors. I don’t think a single gene can accomplish that in the overwhelming majority of cases. Genomes are incredibly complex, and nearly all of a living organism’s responses are polygenic, i.e., they involve multiple genes. As a plant breeder, you should be selecting the whole organism. That’s my opinion, and I know there are a lot of plant breeders who would agree with me.
ARTY: Genetically engineered GMOs have been controversial for a number of reasons, one of which is that they are approved without having to conduct long-term safety trials. Now with newer gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR, the promise by the biotech industry is that it their new methods are more precise and safer.
FRANK: What hasn’t changed at all, even in light of CRISPR, is the falseness of that promise. Much to the surprise of CRISPR fans, it is emerging that often changes to “a single gene” in a plant have unexpected impacts that are way off target. For example, in the case of sweet corn breeding, there is a gene involved in conversion of sugar to starch. In the CRISPR mindset, this is a target gene to “knock out” in pursuit of sweeter corn that doesn’t get starchy after harvest so that it can be shipped long distance without losing the sweet crispness of fresh picked corn. It turns out, though, that the plant has multiple copies of this gene functioning in different tissues of the plant, and it is essential that most of those copies continue to function for the plant to be healthy. “Knocking out” that specific gene turns out to not be nearly as clean as it sounds, because you may want to “edit” it out of the developing seed tissues for the desired effect, but not from the leaves, stems, and elsewhere. That requires a much more accurate “address” for editing than first impressions of the technology would suggest. Plant genetic function is much more complicated than CRISPR proponents wish to concede. Years into it, those researchers are still babes in the genetic woods, but, meanwhile, traditional plant selection still works very well to improve plant performance, as long as we engage with plants as partners in the process and do it in the real world. That’s the time-tested method.
ARTY: Miguel Altieri of UC Berkeley, one of the world’s longtime thought leaders in the field of Agroecology, has said that some genetic engineering interventions could result in unintentionally “turning off” other genes and actually reducing plants’ capacity for resilience and adaptability.
FRANK: That’s a good point. In organic plant breeding, when breeding for durable resistance, one strives for “horizontal resistance,” the opposite of “vertical resistance” (which is single gene resistance). With vertical resistance, for example, there’s one gene that prevents downy mildew from making lettuce sick. That gene corresponds to a gene in the downy mildew; in fact, it’s called “gene for gene” resistance, but when downy mildew evolves around the one resistance gene, then the whole organism becomes susceptible as soon as that one gene is overridden or gone-around by evolution. So, if you had used genetic engineering to insert this one vertical resistance gene to prevent downy mildew, that disease organism might evolve to bypass that gene, and you wind up with a weaker plant than if you hadn’t intervened at all. Horizontal breeding, on the other hand, involves breeding for polygenic disease resistance. It’s aimed at strengthening the whole plant and its entire complex genome, not just one gene to support resistance to a specific disease. As a traditional plant breeder, I select the whole organism because many genes contribute to resistance, so pests can’t evolve around the defenses as easily.
Flowerbed at Wild Garden Seed (Photo by Karen Morton)
ARTY: When you select a plant for certain traits how does that affect its future generations?
FRANK: Rutgers University did a study some years ago with radishes that were genetically identical. One population of radishes was exposed to leaf-eating caterpillars, and the other population was not, and they saved seeds from each population. The offspring of the plants that had suffered herbivory in the parental population germinated with hairs on their leaves and with higher levels of anti-feeding chemicals in their sap. Some genes had obviously been turned on in the parent generation, and the offspring germinated with those genes functioning.
ARTY: So, the response to the stress carries forth to the next generation?
FRANK: Yes, and as long as the stress continues to be a part of the environment, then that gene will carry on expressing that obvious trait in the organism. If that stress goes away over time, selection will direct the organisms to turn that gene off and save energy. Making protein for the genes takes energy, so not all genes are expressed all the time.
ARTY: Would you say that plants have a kind of genetic toolbox that allows them to respond to environmental conditions?
FRANK: Plants have always been flexible. There’s something about the way plant genetics work that’s a little different than the way animal genetics work. Animals (including humans) don’t have as much untapped potential that they can turn on in a stressful situation. We’re just not the same in that way. We express most of the useful genes that we have, whereas plants don’t express most of their genes. Plants typically only express about a third of their genetic potential under normal conditions.
ARTY: Does that mean that plants are able to respond evolutionarily more rapidly than animals, including humans?
FRANK: Well, they have to respond without changing location because they can’t. They have to stay where they are and use their genetic potential to adapt in place. Animals, more typically, move south or north or up or down in elevation, when under stress, so the mechanisms of adaptation are different.
ARTY: Much of the general public has lost touch with natural processes and is unaware of the genetic information and potential contained in something as small as a seed.
FRANK: Most people just don’t know where seeds come from. When my sister-in-law found out that I was growing lettuce seed, her response was: “Lettuce has seeds? Where are the seeds in the lettuce.” She’s trying to imagine where inside her iceberg head the seeds are. That’s where a lot of people are at. They just have never thought about the fact that nearly every plant they eat, every plant they come in contact with, all come from a seed. Weeds just appear. People don’t realize that weeds come from seeds. Imagine a world in which, when the ground was made bare, nothing sprouted. If there weren’t weed seeds in the soil, we would be in so much trouble. I think weeds are a blessing, and they are a great job creator. I think of weeds as nature-enforced cover-cropping, and I use them that way.
Most of our food comes from seeds. The creation of agriculture depended on the domestication of seeds. Being able to collect and store the seed and to plant it next year, was the first agricultural act after the time of hunter-gatherers. People had to learn how to select and store wild seeds. One of the next challenges was the elimination of dormancy in seeds. Take wild lettuce for example: if you plant wild lettuce, it doesn’t sprout like lettuce. It’s dormant, just like all wild plants. If you take any domestic lettuce and plant it, it grows right up. If you ever work with native seeds, you’ll find that it’s nothing like gardening. It’s really a puzzle to get native seeds to germinate when you want them to. The whole history of agriculture is based around the domestication of the seed and the plant that produces the seed, making it something that fits your lifestyle and provides the kind of food you want to eat and survive on where you are living.
When I was around 5 years old, I was in West Virginia, and the biggest treat that I remember was watermelon, and I knew that watermelon came from watermelon seeds, and the damn thing was full of them. It occurred to me that I could have all the watermelon I wanted if I just kept those seeds and planted them. Where the hell that impulse came from, I have no idea, but that was my first seed impulse. So, I went out and I tried to plant those seeds out by the garage. It was my first agricultural act. Of course, they didn’t grow past seedlings. It was the middle of summer and no way was it going to work, but it didn’t matter. The next year my dad helped me plant a garden.
I think that seeds are something that traditionally we humans pretty well understood, but in our modern world, the seed is the most mysterious part of our agriculture. Nobody thinks about it—where it comes from, how it’s grown, what’s important to know about it. In commercial seed production, there’s a lot of arcane knowledge that only the people who do it know. It’s like a secret order of knowledge, almost, because so few do it anymore, but there must have been a time when everybody kept some seeds, if only for their garden.
ARTY: The place of origin of seeds is also something the general public knows little about. From ancient times, seeds were exchanged farmer-to-farmer, region-to-region and ultimately globally.
FRANK: The geography of seeds is an interesting question. Spinach, for example, started in the Middle East in Iran, and some varieties went east and some went west. The ones that went via the Afghan/China route and eventually ended up in Japan look quite a bit different than those that went the other direction and ended up in Amsterdam and then in the United States. The leaves are a different shape. The Western style is like our Bloomsdale spinach; it’s dark green and has sort of rounded leaves that are under-cupped and very thick. The seeds are round, not at all spiked to the touch.
The seeds that went the other way that ultimately ended up in Japan, the leaves of those plants are much larger and flatter. They’re a lighter shade of green. They’re way more productive. Each plant makes more spinach. They don’t have the same flavor. They’re not as meaty as western Bloomsdale types that have a very thick texture. The Japanese and Asian varieties are thinner; they’re more “lettucey.” Interestingly, the seeds are spiked with spines all around the seed. If you had a handful of them and squeezed them, they would hurt your hand. They are precisely the same species as Bloomsdale, and yet the seed itself and the human hands that selected them are so different. I wonder why the Asians put up with all those pokey seeds that hurt. Maybe it has to do with seed predation by birds; the spikes may act as a deterrent. It’s just so interesting. The carrots that went through Europe to Amsterdam are orange and crisp, and we often eat them raw. The carrots that ended up in the Far East are not that good raw. They’re chewier. They’re not crisp and crunchy. They’re excellent when they’re cooked. Think about the cultures that selected them. In China, when these crops were being developed, nobody ate raw vegetables. Farmers used nightsoil (composted human manure) as fertilizer, so their public health realities encouraged the cooking of food.
It’s not that way when you go the other direction around the globe. Everybody eats raw vegetables, and if there’s E. coli in your soil, people get sick. It’s interesting the way the culture and the plants interplay, and it’s still going on today. Chefs make a lot of what is possible and successful for the organic farming community. The chefs understand different varieties and the excitement of new flavors and textures and possibilities of food. And plant breeders get it too. Plant breeders work with seeds, and have the fun of breeding new forms, flavors, and colors. They also understand the agronomic advantages of certain traits, such as a carrot that can grow without splitting or that has a top that is strong enough so that you can pull it out of the ground by the top. That’s an important trait if you don’t want to harvest carrots by digging them all up.
All of that is mediated through the seed. Why does the seed express a trait? It expresses it because the people working with that seed want a certain thing, and they select for it. And often, the plant naturally provides a diversity of choices, so the answer to the question “where do seeds come from?” is to a large extent that they come from our desires. What does Monsanto/ Bayer want in a seed? Total ownership, total profits. But what do you and I want in a seed? We want freedom, the freedom to operate, the freedom to grow our own food, to be happy and not obliged to anybody to eat want we want, so what’s in the seed is actually a reflection of the values of the culture that created it.
Although Labor Day is celebrated by many as merely a long weekend, it’s important to look back on the long history of movements for fair labor practices, which continue today. Intense struggles for safe workplaces, worker-friendly policies, and fair wages are in fact in full swing right now, and we have even been seeing the weakening of child labor laws in many states.
The fight for fair labor intersects with many other social and environmental movements. Join us as we uncover the powerful connections between these movements and shed light on the shared vision of a just and equitable world and future for families and communities.
In this week’s newsletter, we explore the parallels between the fight for climate justice and the modern-day struggles for fair labor policies, the creation of clean energy jobs, the need for child labor laws, and how to stay up-to-date with current labor actions.
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Saru Jayaraman – The Great Revolution: What A Worker Power Moment Can Mean for Climate Justice
Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center and launched One Fair Wage to end subminimum wages in the US. In her keynote presentation, Jayaraman speaks about her work organizing food service and other low-wage workers over the last 20 years and the incredible moment of historic worker revolt currently underway in the United States, one that could have enormous implications for both climate justice and for our democracy.
A Just Transition: Workforce Development and Jobs for a New Clean Economy
We know that the climate imperative in front of us is to transition as rapidly and comprehensively as possible from a fossil fuel based economy to a global economic system that runs on clean energy. Among the thornier questions involved in this shift is how the bold new economic visions for this large-scale transformation can support working-class families whose livelihoods are currently tied to the fossil fuel-based economy.
“Just Transition,” is the phrase frequently invoked as the answer to this question. In this panel conversation, four leaders answer the question, “What does a Just Transition mean?” and outline the need for and progress toward proactive labor policies to ensure an equitable future for families and communities.
Danny Kennedy, entrepreneur and founder of New Energy Nexus, has become one of the nation’s leading figures in clean-technology entrepreneurship and the capitalization of the transition to a “green” economy. In his keynote presentation, Danny delves into the race to the finish line of the transition away from fossil fuels and a plan to build out the full potential of clean energy — energy that is not just distributed, but decentralized in ownership and democratized in control.
YES! Magazine – Pushing Back Against Loosening Child Labor Laws
Child labor is making headlines in the United States following a wave of Republican-led efforts to roll back protections in several states, most recently in Iowa. Proponents of the legislation claim that extending working hours for children, eliminating work permit requirements, and lowering the minimum age for teens to work in certain industries would reduce red tape and protect the rights of parents without putting children at risk. In this article, experts explore this deceptive narrative and the reality of child labor in the nation, which has been grim for decades and is only worsening.
Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses & Community Conversations
Through engaging courses and conversations led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, Bioneers Learning and Community Conversations equip engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community.
Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses:
Design Thinking for Leaders: Making Innovation a Habit | Starting September 6 | Practical training for leaders in any field to learn how to apply the design thinking process individually and with their teams to systematically build innovation into their problem-solving approaches.
Slowing Down: Cultivating Healing Spaces of Belonging | Starting September 26 | An experiential session featuring mindful and creative practices designed to help us slow down, heal and collectively receive our greatest wisdoms.
The Rights of Nature | Starting October 19 | A full background on the emerging “rights of nature” movement in the United States and internationally and how to develop, adopt, and enforce local rights of nature laws in your own communities.
Honoring Your Emotional Ecosystem | Starting November 14 | A grounded and surprising exploration of the healing genius in your emotional realm.
Upcoming Community Conversations:
Origins, Evolutions, and Practice: Exploring Rights of Nature | Starting September 6 | A one day group discussion about what Rights of Nature is, how it is a significant shift in how humans protect nature, and where and how it’s becoming binding law.
More coming soon!
Payday Report Interactive Strike Tracker
Keep track of strikes around the country with Payday Report’s Interactive Strike Tracker. This comprehensive database of strike and labor protest activity across the United States was created to better inform and support labor movement activists, policymakers, and scholars.
Child labor, often thought of as a problem only in other countries, is making headlines in the United States following a wave of Republican-led efforts to roll back protections in several states, most recently in Iowa. Proponents of the legislation claim that extending working hours for children, eliminating work permit requirements, and lowering the minimum age for teens to work in certain industries would reduce red tape and protect the rights of parents without putting children at risk. But experts say this narrative is impossible to reconcile with the reality of child labor in the nation, which has been grim for decades and is only worsening.
“It is very concerning,” says Reid Maki, director of child labor issues and coordinator at the Child Labor Coalition (CLC). Having worked on child labor protections for decades, Maki says he has seen the negative impacts of labor on childhood health and development, academic success, and socialization. “There are so many reasons that kids should not be allowed to work,” he says.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines child labor as work that deprives children of their childhood, potential, and dignity; is harmful to their physical and mental development; and interferes with their schooling. Using similar definitions, organizations including the CLC and Human Rights Watch, have condemned the prevalence of child labor in the U.S. and called on Congress to strengthen protections. Instead, the issue is intensifying. The U.S. Department of Labor’s wage and hour division recorded a 37% increase in the number of minors employed in violation of federal law from 2021 to 2022.
Current restrictions on child labor in the U.S. are outlined in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which contains significant loopholes allowing children as young as 10 years old to be hired as farmworkers, even on commercial farms. This means that in addition to children laboring in violation of federal law, hundreds of thousands more work legally in jobs that experts say are detrimental to their healthand development. Unlike the ILO, the U.S. labor department defines child labor in strictly legal terms as “work below the minimum age for work, as established in national legislation,” thus shifting the focus away from child well-being and excluding child farmworkers in the U.S. According to various estimates, there are anywhere between 300,000 and 800,000 minor farmworkers in the U.S. today, including an unknown number employed in violation of the law.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing problems. One ongoing study based on interviews with Latinx farmworker families in North Carolina has found that many children worked more during the pandemic to support their families, or even because they felt disengaged from school or bored and isolated at home. Several children have reported experiencing periods during which their families could not afford groceries, which increased the pressure they felt to work. “The pandemic made things worse for these families that already experienced many challenges,” says Taylor Arnold, a Ph.D. candidate studying public health education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the lead researcher on the study. The pandemic has had other widespread effects on the U.S. workforce, and claims of labor shortages are driving young people to work in growing numbers.
Rather than supporting families and protecting children from being forced onto the labor market, the recent Republican-led push would weaken protections in several states. According to the Minnesota Reformer, lawmakers in 11 states have either passed or introduced laws to roll back child labor protections.
Arnold says that interventions to combat this assault on child labor protections should focus on the root causes of child labor, including structural vulnerability and low wages. He also says that funding programs to support vulnerable populations, such as the Migrant Education Program, could mitigate some of the harms that child workers face.
While there aren’t exact numbers, experts agree that the vast majority of children employed in the U.S. are migrants or from migrant families. A recent exposé from The New York Timesrevealed a “shadow work force” of migrant children working across industries in every state, many in hours-long shifts, sometimes overnight, with hazardous equipment and potent chemicals.
“These children are vulnerable to exploitation because they are on the margins, their families are on the margins, and they have very little access to public benefits or protections—legally or sustenance-wise,” says Mary Miller Flowers, director of policy and legislative affairs at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
Miller Flowers says ensuring respect for the best interests of migrant children begins with keeping families together. “That starts at the border with our immigration policy, because whenever you exclude adults from seeking protection, you further vulnerabilize their children,” she says. The Young Center also supports expanding community-based and peer-led newcomer or cultural navigator programs that help migrant children and families access economic, social, and civic support without increasing surveillance or placing additional administrative burdens on families.
Ultimately, though, researchers, advocates, and other experts agree that bolstering federal legislation on child labor is the best way to prevent children from being forced into the workforce. It is also the surest way to protect kids in the face of Republican-led efforts to weaken restrictions on child labor in some states, because employers nationwide must follow federal employment law.
A bill that would amend the FLSA to close loopholes allowing children employed in agriculture to work longer hours, at younger ages, and in more hazardous conditions than those in other industries has already been introduced in Congress multiple times, but each time has failed to reach a floor vote. The bill is called the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act, and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat, has introduced it 10 times during her two-decade career.
Maki says the bill has failed to move forward because child labor is a stubborn partisan issue. “It is popular with progressive legislators, but it is not bipartisan.” Of the 10 bills’ cumulative 365 co-sponsors, only one has been a Republican. The bill garnered the most co-sponsors in 2009, during the first year of the Obama administration. In 2011, the administration also proposed new rules that would have required children under age 16 to take a training course before operating most power-driven farm equipment, and would have banned those under 18 from working in feedlots, grain bins, and stockyards. But the proposal faced staunch opposition from right-wing lawmakers and agricultural lobbyists, and the administration withdrew the bill in the lead-up to the 2012 election.
“Part of the challenge is that farmers have always had a wholesome image,” says Maki. “But the reality is that these are dangerous work environments.” According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, agribusiness leads all industries for work-related child fatalities. From 2003 to 2016, 52 percent of work-related deaths recorded among minors in the U.S. occurred in agriculture.
Sara Quandt and Thomas Arcury, professors of family and community medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, have been researching child workers for years. Arcury says the image of the small all-American family farm is little more than a myth. Most farmworkers labor on commercial farms. The pair have also studied children working on local-producer farms that sell directly to consumers. “There is a lot of risk for them, and the injuries are notable,” says Quandt.
“The new battle broke down largely along urban-rural lines,” says Wood, as farm families across the rural U.S. bought into the fear that the planned amendment “was a surreptitious effort to interfere with parental rights.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because the issue continues to break down along similar lines today, and opposition figures employ similar rhetoric. For example, recent legislation passed in Arkansas eliminating requirements for children to secure work permits before employment promises to “restore decision-making to parents concerning their children.”
To push the nation toward policy change, many organizations raise awareness within communities where these talking points hold sway. Julie Taylor is the executive director of the National Farm Worker Ministry, a faith-based organization that supports farmworker organizing. One aspect of the group’s work is outreach, and Taylor says the issue of parental rights often arises. When talking about restrictions on child labor, she finds that many imagine children working a few hours after school in a safe environment rather than performing grueling agricultural labor. “We challenge those ideas and illustrate the realities that we hear through our farmworker partners,” she explains.
While current debates about child labor rehash century-old talking points, Wood says she also recognizes an alarming new trend. “Instead of just trying to prevent new regulations, these efforts are going on the offense to overturn existing protections,” she says. “It indicates a new confidence and ambition in deregulation efforts that we haven’t seen in many years.”
Those working to improve child labor protections agree the current situation is worrying, but they also hope that renewed attention to the issue could push the needle toward change. “We’re hoping that all of this attention will focus enough energy into the area that we will be able to enact protections,” says Maki. “There has been very little positive change in the last 20 years, and it’s long past time for protections to be enacted.”
Marianne Dhenin is a YES! Media contributing writer. She covers social and environmental justice and politics.
