Movements matter. At the heart of every successful movement lies a group of leaders who ignite the spark of resistance and dedicate themselves unwaveringly to realize a more just future. This profoundly important calling requires not only a deep understanding of the issues at hand but also the empathy, vision and courage to inspire and mobilize others.
The complexity and urgency of today’s challenges require an ever-expanding cohort of visionary leaders, but the dangers and obstacles faced by these trailblazers are often great. We’ve had the privilege of listening in on truly global conversations from leaders of some of the most compelling movements in the world today, including women’s rights, indigenous sovereignty, and worker’s rights.
Read on to learn from a diverse array of inspiring figures, including Zainab Salbi, Rajasvini Bhansali, Saru Jayaraman, Jade Begay, Manuel Pastor, and Tom Hayden.
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Frontline Warriors: A Conversation with Three Movement Leaders
Leading a social or political movement in this moment is an arduous and complex endeavor. The challenges faced by movement leaders are numerous, ranging from navigating fierce opposition and threats to personal safety, to combating cancel culture and internal divisions within their own communities. In this conversation, leaders Rajasvini Bhansali, Saru Jayaraman, and Jade Begay shed light on the perseverance required to sustain their work and candidly discuss the critical role of resourcing and support from philanthropy to ensure the safety and effectiveness of frontline organizers.
Manuel Pastor – Movement Building for the Next America
Facing rapidly changing demographics, growing inequality and increased political polarization in the U.S., movement builders are grappling with creating new cross-generational ties and a new understanding of the relationship between equity and economic growth. How do we build movements based on vision and values, not interests and transactions? Manuel Pastor is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at USC, and founding Director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at UC Santa Cruz. He directs the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, and co-directs USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration.
Woven Liberation: How Women-Led Revolutions Will Shape Our Future
How are women around the world leading movements demanding liberation from oppressive and destructive patriarchal systems, and what might we learn from these movements?
In this conversation, Azita Ardakani, Zainab Salbi and Nina Simons discuss concrete actions women leaders are taking around the world and the inner work that’s needed to become genuinely heart-centered change-makers.
A burgeoning movement to transform prevailing legal systems that facilitate ecological devastation is spreading around the world. This “Rights of Nature” movement focuses on assigning fundamental legal rights to natural entities. In the same way some societies create systems of jurisprudence that assign legal rights to citizens or communities or institutions to protect them from myriad harmful activities, Rights of Nature initiatives seek to enshrine legal frameworks that protect nature from harm or require damages and remediation when harm is done. We’re excited to introduce a new series that illuminates the work and perspectives of many of the Rights of Nature movement’s most active leaders. Sign up below to check it out.
Spirit in the Air: Reform, Revolution and Regeneration | Tom Hayden
In times of massive social change, personal biography can coincide with historical epochs to produce leaders who embody the spirit of the times. In this historic and still powerfully resonant presentation from the Bioneers archives, the late and sorely missed activist, author, politician, and visionary Tom Hayden shares his unique, brilliant long view of social change movements. He traces the arc of struggle that has led to our current epochal challenge as the climate and inequality crises collide and threaten global civilization and human survival.
9/6: Design Thinking for Leaders with Marilyn Cornelius
Are you ready to gain a working understanding of the design thinking process and its steps?
Registration is open for “Design Thinking for Leaders” on Bioneers Learning, a platform for activists, innovators, and anyone seeking knowledge and tools to manifest social and environmental solutions. Register today for a live course with Marilyn Cornelius to learn about practical training for leaders in any field. Explore how to apply the design thinking process individually and with teams to systematically build innovation into their problem-solving approaches.
9/6: Community Conversations with Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil
Join us for the first Bioneers Learning Community Conversation of 2023, where Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil will guide us through an introduction to the emerging “Rights of Nature” movement. Thomas and Mari will explain what “rights of nature” is in the United States and internationally, how it is a significant shift in how humans protect nature, and where and how it’s becoming binding law. This event is ideal for anyone interested in embarking on conversations around how indigenous communities are adopting and enforcing rights of nature laws.
Azita Ardakani launched Lovesocial – a communications agency based in Vancouver, BC – in 2009 after spending over 2 years volunteering on online impact initiatives. With a background in Sociology from Simon Fraser University, Canada, Azita has always applied the lens of human drivers to her online marketing career. Staying committed to Lovesocial’s mandate of authentic marketing strategies, Azita has forged a new kind of entrepreneurship which mixes profit with purpose. She is the youngest female founder of the B Corporation model alongside the ranks of Patagonia, Etsy and Method.
Zainab Salbi, a celebrated humanitarian, author, and journalist, co-founder of DaughtersforEarth.org, “Chief Awareness Officer” at FindCenter.com, and host of the Redefined podcast, founded Women for Women International, an organization to help women survivors of conflicts, when she was 23, and built the group from helping 30 women to reaching nearly half a million and raising tens of millions of dollars to help them and their families rebuild their lives. The author of several books, including the bestseller, Between Two Worlds and, most recently, Freedom Is an Inside Job, she is also the creator and host of several TV shows, including #MeToo, Now What? on PBS.
Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.
NINA SIMONS: Welcome. The fundamental question we wanted to explore together today is: How are women around the world leading movements demanding change from oppressive and destructive systems, and what might we learn from these movements?
The three of us are approaching this conversation with a multi-dimensional lens, looking at both the concrete actions women leaders are taking and the inner work that’s needed to cultivate ourselves to become feminine-centered or heart-centered leaders of change. We want to look at the outer and the inner, recognizing that we’re all deconditioning ourselves and exploring emerging archetypes to replace the old, outmoded ones that are no longer serving us.
We all carry “masculine” and “feminine” aspects within ourselves, but because of the ages-old, deep-in-our-psyches biases about gender that exist around the world that are reflected in millions of ways, this exploration can serve us all as we aim toward a future that’s equitable, healthy, regenerative and liberatory for all people and all of our Earth community.
I have been in a 25-year exploration about how being in a female body has affected my leadership, and what I can do to peel away the layers of conditioning that keep me small or complicit, or untrue to my truest self. I’ve tried to do that in a number of ways. I’ve written a couple of books about it. I’ve convened women for explorations and leadership work together, and the more I looked at global trends around women leading change, the more convinced I became that as more women ascend into leadership at all levels and all sectors of society, everything benefits, the whole system improves – the economy, the land, the water, the food, everything.
But there’s a tremendous amount of work left to do. When I was invited to speak on a panel at a UN Commission on the Status of Women event about women and extractive industries, we heard from women from all over the world who told us stories about the extraordinary levels of violence and exploitation women were subjected to in frontline communities, so we have to do everything in our power to support their struggles.
ZAINAB SALBI: I was born and raised in Iraq, and a major thing that defined my life was the Iran/Iraq War, and for a long time I’ve wanted to be in dialogue with a woman from the other side of that war, Iran. It’s very emotional for me because when I was growing up, Iran was the enemy, but we evolve in time, and here we are, Azita and I, at the same table, working together in unity in so many ways for women around the world.
During that war, when I was a child, all the news we saw on TV was from a man’s perspective, all about the weapons, the tanks, the planes, etc., but all the people in my life were women – my mom, my teachers, my doctors, even the police. I came to realize that there are two sides of war: there’s a frontline which is mostly fought by men, but there’s a backline of war that is led by women, and that is an ignored story. It is women who keep life going in the midst of war.
I ended up working in wars for 20 years of my life as the founder of Women for Women International, and I saw that it was women who despite the bombings and all the horrors of war, sustain life, but they’re not incorporated in the decisions and negotiations of making peace, or in the definitions of what peace is. I remember interviewing a Southern Sudanese woman who had to keep walking during the entire Sudanese civil war because she and her family had to escape constantly. I asked her: “How do you define peace?” And she said: “Peace means the regrowing of my toenails” because she walked so much that all her toenails fell apart. Women see peace and war from a different perspective.
I started Women for Women International, an organization that works with women survivors of wars, and I became obsessed in my studies and in all my professional work about the role of women in wars and in leading revolutionary and liberation movements historically. I studied a lot of revolutionary movements, particularly from the part of the world that I come from, the Middle East.
Women have always played major roles in all liberation, revolutionary and anti-colonial movements in the region from Algerian independence to the Palestinian struggle to the “Arab Spring.” The revolution I studied the most is the Algerian anti-colonial movement in the 1950s and 60s against French colonialism. Women famously smuggled weapons and messages under their chadors. In the Palestinian liberation movement, women ignited the first Intifada and played a major in both intifadas. But throughout all these movements women are always told you need to prioritize the national liberation. Women want national liberation to include their liberation as women and equal rights, but they are always told to put these rights on the side as we focus on the fight for national liberty.
And nearly every single time, when a national liberation fight succeeded, the patriarchy reasserted itself and told women go back home and play their traditional roles. Revolutionary leaders would take over from oppressive leaders only to become oppressive leaders themselves. Over and over again, they betray women and say go back to your domestic sphere and have children. But we have proof that actually in those rare cases when women are included in peace negotiations or in shaping political changes, those peace plans and social changes turn out to be more sustainable and more popular. One clear example of an exception to the usual patriarchal pattern was in the South African anti-apartheid movement. Not only did women play a major role in that movement but women’s rights became an important part of the new constitution.
And the West is far from innocent in all this because in many cases in Asia and Africa the colonial powers actually made gender roles even more oppressive and eroded those freedoms that women and sexual minorities had traditionally enjoyed. And during the American administration of Iraq after the second Gulf War, women were excluded from political leadership even more than they had been before the war. It’s true that the status of women improved in some parts of Afghanistan during the American occupation, but that’s only because the Taliban were and are so incredibly oppressive to women, something that wasn’t the norm in Afghanistan in the 20th Century. In the 70s, some urban Afghani women were professionals and went to clubs and wore short skirts, if they wanted to.
And during the evacuation from Afghanistan women leaders whose names were on Taliban assassination lists—teachers, parliamentarians, journalists—were not prioritized. There was no political will by any country to focus on the evacuation of Afghan women leaders. We organized a private effort of women from all over the world and raised about $15 million in 2 weeks and chartered our own planes. We did not sleep for a month, but we ended up evacuating 350 women and 1500 of their family members into Albania. Most of them were relocated to Canada, some to Europe, but the U.S. only took 20. 20! The betrayal of women is a constant. We get thrown under the bus almost every single time. That Afghani episode was a wake-up call for me and a lot of my American feminist friends who worked on this evacuation effort. We were elated at this amazing, historic women-run operation we had pulled off, but we also felt what a slap in the face this abandonment of women leaders was.
We felt very betrayed, but I feel that these constant betrayals and assaults are bringing a wide range of women activists closer together in more unity and solidarity. I feel that something has fundamentally shifted in the last year. What has taken place in Iran in the last year is truly historic, whatever its short-term outcome. A new trajectory for a new women’s history and a new women’s story in which women’s liberation is at the center of any and all liberation movements is being born.
AZITA ARDAKANI: It’s a special sort of its own revolution to be sitting here with a woman ally when our childhood stories could easily have made us hate each other. It’s really powerful.
I’m Azita. I was born in Iran. I migrated to Canada, which was and has been my home for many years. My mother getting us out of the country was its own form of revolutionary act, a threshold act, choosing to move into the unknown. There are moments when large groups of people are willing to take huge risks to push for a better future, and they are willing to take those risks, and they just ask our support and to be seen and heard. And it is such a failure to not seize those moments to offer that support. It’s a shared collective opportunity, and we would be just so short-sighted not to get behind, in this instance, the Iranian women. They’re meeting violent reaction with their bodies, and all they ask is that we show up in whatever small revolutionary way we can.
I have a spiritual practice, and a lot of my time is spent asking: What is mine to do? Because many of the problems in this world just seem so overwhelming, and I feel paralyzed often about what is mine to do, but in this case the call came from the Iranian women, and our job was to respond, so a group of us embarked on a project. We worked to remove the Islamic republic from the Commission on the Status of Women. We were told by experts there was no mechanism to do it, but we decided to try anyways, and with the support of incredible organizations and allies and friends we were able to accomplish it in 10 weeks. When something wants to be birthed, it happens. They are rare moments, and it’s important to listen and be attuned to when it’s the right time to push and be good midwives to those moments when there’s an opening and change can happen much faster and more efficiently and elegantly than we think.
This felt important, but it was a small win given the dire situation of the women and girls of Iran. And a lot of our Afghani sisters came to us and asked “What about us?” They feel deeply forgotten in all this. Iran’s gotten the limelight, so less than a month ago, a group of Afghan and Iranian lawyers and legal practitioners teamed together to launch a campaign on March 8th, which is International Women’s Day.
The laws that bind us are ultimately words made of stories, and laws and stories can bind us but also be used to free us, so these incredible, brilliant group of women are using the concept of apartheid and seeking to expand its legal definition to include gender apartheid.
In less than a month we’re already seeing incredible progress, and this is an entirely community-led effort by Afghan and Iranian women collaborating to use the laws that oppress them, to try to use that pathway to liberate themselves. It’s a wonder to watch. It feels like a revolutionary act in and of itself.
I also really believe in the role of the arts. Yes, it was important to remove the Islamic Republic from the Commission on the Status of Women, which required a lot of politics and politicking, but it was also the arts that I think really freed up a whole other dimension of the imagination to see things through a part of ourselves that we don’t usually activate when we’re talking about revolution.
ZAINAB: What’s exciting about that story to me is its reconfiguring of alliances among women. In my professional career, we’ve been focused on building big bridges between American and European women and women in other parts of the world—North/South bridges. What this is doing is building South/South bridges. That alliance between Afghan and Iranian women, for example, is a model of reconfiguring the women’s movement, and it can shift the dynamics of many things – alliance-building, funding, political coordination. It’s very exciting.
But that reconfiguration can also entail some discomfort, and it has to be handled with love and sensitivity. On the one hand, it is very important for American women to continue to be involved in supporting women in other parts of the world. A complaint from activists from all over the world during the Trump era was: “We know your country is going through a painful moment, but please don’t forget about us, don’t just drop us from your awareness.” It was very painful because financing to activists overseas dropped a lot.
So, as we’re fighting for women’s rights in America, as we must because we’re losing so many rights here, we can’t forget about the necessity and the need – emotional, financial, physical – to continue that alliance and the support of each other and of other women in the Global South. And yet, the global women’s movement is no longer centered on American women. For a long time, American women shaped the narrative and defined what women’s rights mean, what liberty means. Now women from many countries are defining their own contexts for struggles. It’s an exciting moment.
I call myself a bridge builder, advocating for both big bridges and small bridges, because big bridges are not enough; they’re important but not enough. Sometimes small bridges are more effective. We all have to breathe through this birthing of a new process, a new manifestation, a new era of a women’s movement, as we are all fighting for women’s rights all over the world, because at the moment we’re losing ground very fast in a way we hadn’t expected 10 years ago, even. We were celebrating our inevitable progress 10 years ago.
We have to face the fact that it is a dark time, especially but not only in the Middle East. It’s a dark moment in history, but I believe that in that darkness, women are the lights. I really believe the light is going to come from women. I’m betting that it is the women who are going to lead these changes and revolutions, as Iranian women have started doing. I have to keep that hope, but we have to keep feeding that light because it won’t shine on its own.
NINA: Researchers who wrote the book Women, Sex and World Peace argued that gender bias is the deepest bias in the human psyche, deeper than faith or race or anything else, and I’ve come to believe that it may well be true. We are living with a legacy of gender violence and bias that is so deep from the Burning Times in medieval Europe to the mass rapes so frequent in wars to the brutality and genocides of colonialism that so often impact women and girls disproportionately. How can we not carry that in our bones?
I had an experience 10 or 12 years ago in a very, very long ritual with a Peruvian elder, and at the very end of this ritual he said if you remember only one thing from this experience, remember this: “Consciousness creates matter, language creates reality, ritual creates relationship,” so I was struck as I heard you describe both your campaigns with how strategically you are being culture transformers, including in the way that you have targeted language to change the culture. I am of the belief that if we don’t change our culture, we’re sunk. We can do all the strategic interventions and all the financial stuff and everything else, but the culture is what’s driving it all, and so I just really bow in admiration for the way that you have received the insight of what wanted to be born when.
I was just recently with a dear friend and teacher to me named Pat McCabe. Many of you may know her as Woman Stands Shining. She talked about how when her son came back from Standing Rock, he learned something fundamental there, which she will be forever grateful for, which is that the men should never initiate any action that involves possible loss of life or great danger without consulting with the elder women first. I thought of this when I heard Azita mention that many men have joined with the women in the streets in the protests in Iran, and in order for our movements to succeed, we will need the support of a number of men. How do you think we can make that happen?
AZITA: I can’t pretend to know why the men rose up alongside the women.There do seem to be mysterious breakthrough moments when the collective is able to suddenly see things in a new way, and that goes beyond anything I can understand or attempt to describe, but I think that the feminine ethic inside of men also wants to be liberated. I don’t believe men want their traditional way of being. It’s just not a humane or satisfying way to move through the world, so one reason men may be joining in this uprising against the oppression of women, whether they’re aware of it or not, is because the feminine ethic within them yearns for liberation from the sort of dominant attitudes and behaviors that patriarchic societies expect of them, but that just don’t feel good, for any human.
As Mother Earth is crying out to us, there’s a collective call and response going on inside ourselves, and women are more aware of it in general, but it’s inside men also, and some of them feel it strongly and want another way of being. When they see women lead in that way, something in them arises too, and a desire for shared liberation emerges. It might be a women-led revolution, but there is also a feminine-led revolution inside quite a few men, and we need to be aware of it and help it come forward.
ZAINAB: I have worked in many war zones, as I mentioned, from Bosnia to Rwanda to the Congo to Southern Sudan, and I always encountered some men in the population, even in the most conservative societies, who saw the oppression of women clearly and understood how unfair it was. I met a religious leader in a very traditional part of southern Iraq whose help I needed to gain safe passage for our work with women, and he said: “We can’t thrive when women in our society are like a broken wing; a society cannot fly if one of its wings is clipped.” Even some militia leaders I met understood it.
I went to Mosul two weeks after Isis was overthrown. Just about everything was destroyed, and I spoke to all sorts of people from garbage collectors and policemen to housewives and teachers, and they were all saying the same thing, basically: “We need a new human being. Every group came and promised us money and power if we would only kill these people, the Shia, then the Kurds, or the Christians, or the Yazidis, and we tried it all, and it failed us. This promise of money and power did not come true. We need a new human being with new ways of thinking.” I think many people can see that the false premises and promises that come with capitalism and colonialism and ethnic hatred are all falling apart, and many people are ready for a new awakening, a new story, and big changes in gender roles have to be a very big part of that story.
Audience Question: How can one know what the right thing to do is and how to choose the right time to act?
AZITA: Janine Benyus said that life needs two things to survive—sunlight and clear signals of communication, but our ability to hear and sense what’s happening is under threat because of the digital static we now swim in. It robs us of our capacity for genuine attention, so it’s harder than ever to actually listen to our instructions, but we have to try. For me, I look for a sense of intense aliveness that’s bigger than me when I start down a path. If I get that feeling, then I know I should be doing that. If there isn’t that aliveness in me, it’s probably not the right thing. To do work that sustains and fulfills me these days, I try hard to listen and to feel if something feels vitally alive both in me and beyond me. Is there a greater chorus of collaboration guiding it?
Audience Question: Do you have any advice about how to collaborate effectively?
NINA: To work together better, I think we have to slow down, and we have to prioritize collaboration. We have to decide that it’s imperative for our survival and our thriving, but, in my experience, collaboration takes time and patience. You really have to invest in building relationships and giving them time to mature enough for anything to come through. I think we have to be more process-oriented and slow down. The capitalist culture says do more, do it faster, produce, produce, produce, but I don’t think we can do that and collaborate well.
The other key element is nurturing feminine-based human values. We all have masculine and feminine values and orientations within us, but deeply ingrained cultural patterns have made us inherit a predisposition toward patriarchal values and approaches, whether we are conscious of it or not, so I try to resist my tendency to take on too much and to drive myself too hard and to not give myself adequate time to rest and integrate and receive.
It’s really a deep pattern in my life, as it seems to be for many of us, regardless of the gendered body we may be in. But I’m trying hard to be aware of it and get beyond my conditioning. I would like to have a full spectrum of all kinds of gendered realities and options within myself available at any time. That’s what I aspire to, and I want to learn to lead more from my heart than my head, but it’s not easy. It will probably take me all my lifetime, but there’s nothing I’d rather do. There’s nothing more joyful than shedding layer after layer of that onion skin.
I also think we could have a lot less violence in the world if everyone had a chance to express anger and despair and grief. We don’t have adequate places and ways to do that well in our culture, and it would be much easier to collaborate if we had a chance to express our grief productively and effectively, so we wouldn’t be carrying all that unexpressed pain into our work and relationships.
ZAINAB: I want to be honest. I’ve been in so many collaborations with women, and it’s not always nice. We all have a shadow side, and I don’t believe that if women led the world, it would automatically be a better world. The good, the bad, and the ugly exist in all of us, in women and in men, and I care about the qualities of the individuals who are leading. I do believe in equality and diversity, and if we have more diverse leaders in the world, it will definitely be a better world, but I’ve dealt with all kinds of female leadership, and it’s not always positive, so I won’t support a woman to lead just because she’s a woman.
In the old mode of female leadership, there were so few seats at the table, we had to elbow each other in order to fight for the one seat at the table. Right now, I’m not going to fight for the one seat. We need 50% of the seats, so let’s fight for 50% of the seats, not the one seat. In an earlier era, women had to be tough to have any chance of being heard, but now, if we are trying to balance between our ability to hear and our ability to be joyful, we’ve got to find a new path for collaboration that doesn’t involve leading with our egos. This involves doing the inner work of becoming comfortable with and seeing clearly the totality of who we are, our light and our shadow both. If we can do that, that will lead to successful collaborations.
Also, one last thought: my mother used to tell me that when the artist dies, all else dies. The artist carries the last frontier, so maintaining and supporting and acknowledging the artists among us is a crucially important part of every movement.
Leading a social or political movement in this moment is an arduous and complex endeavor. The challenges faced by movement leaders are numerous, ranging from navigating fierce opposition and threats to personal safety, to combating cancel culture and internal divisions within their own communities. In a deeply polarized society, where disinformation and misinformation abound, maintaining the credibility and integrity of their cause can be an uphill battle. The weight of responsibility to represent marginalized voices, drive meaningful change, and tackle systemic issues is often overwhelming. Moreover, the continuous struggle for resources and funding adds pressure to ensure the movement’s sustainability. Despite these formidable obstacles, some of our world’s most impressive leaders persevere, driven by an unwavering commitment to their vision of a more just and equitable world.
Following is an intimate conversation with three remarkable movement leaders who are at the forefront of social justice activism in the United States. Rajasvini Bhansali, the Executive Director of Solidaire Network and Solidaire Action, speaks passionately about the immense challenges faced by movement leaders, particularly women of color, who are constantly threatened and tracked by opposition forces. Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center, recounts her 21-year battle against the powerful National Restaurant Association, including personal attacks that targeted her family. Jade Begay, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the NDN Collective, highlights the toxic nature of political work, the fear dynamic within her movement, and the urgent need for protection for frontline organizers.
These leaders shed light on the perseverance required to sustain their work and candidly discuss the critical role of resourcing and support from philanthropy to ensure the safety and effectiveness of frontline organizers.
This is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Rajasvini Bhansali
RAJASVINI BHANSALI: I don’t want to gloss over the threats inherent in being a movement leader. The threats to security, to protection, to constantly having an opposition that’s tracking your movement, and threatening your children, your family. The cost of doing this work, on women, on women of color in particular, is immense.
Personally, this work has come at great cost to me. I’ve been flanking social movements, and I’m not even on the frontlines like you are.
Some of us see these charismatic, brilliant leaders in you, and we’re like, “Yeah! Inspire me!” But what does it take to do what you do?
Saru Jayaraman
SARU JAYARAMAN: I’ve been up against this incredibly powerful, well-funded trade lobby called the National Restaurant Association for 21 years. They, for many years, had a man named Richard Berman. He calls himself Dr. Evil. He was a hired goon. This is a guy who’s almost seven feet tall and was basically a hired mobster for big tobacco for years. Then he became the hired goon for restaurants and for food. And this man created attack websites. He put my children’s pictures up on them and took out full-page ads in Wall Street Journal, USA Today, driving people to these websites.
Wherever I went, he had a digital ad truck follow me around with a website condemning me. He went after funders or celebrities or anybody who would work with us. He went to their homes, bullied them, pressured them, went to some foundation funders’ homes to tell them not to fund us, tried to hack into a foundation website to stop a grant to us, and almost got our IRS status revoked.
I learned two things somewhere in the middle of that. One is that I take so much pride in all of that, because who am I? I’m like a little flea, and they’re this behemoth organization. For them to spend that much money trying to squash me proves that something I’m doing is right.
The second lesson was that not everybody sees it that way. Certainly, there were some foundations, funders, and allies that ran away. They would often compare us to other organizations that were less risky or had more of a stance of love and peace and joy. As much as I want to have a stance of love and peace and joy, my life’s work is going up against somebody who wants to kill me. I can’t be love and peace and joy in that context.
RAJASVINI: I will say, before we transition to Jade, that if you’re in a position to move resources or influence resources, stop acting like people like Saru are going to do it on a dollar and a dime. Please start asking people to invest in this work for real, because if we’re asking the low-wage workers of this country to win for us, we need to resource them to win for us all. I’m speaking to my people in philanthropy. Let’s do better. Because we are part of creating the risks to the lives of our frontline organizers by not providing them cover that resourcing can provide in real ways.
Jade Begay
JADE BEGAY: What are the threats, and what do they mean for us? I think about how what we’ve seen play out politically in the last few years does to the potential of leadership. Just recently, I talked to someone who does incredible work in the state of Arizona. We know Arizona is a hard place to organize; hard place to be a person of color; hard place to be a person who has a uterus, especially right now. And that’s what this person does: They support undocumented people with reproductive health. There’s an opportunity for this person to step into a public office. They feel supported by their community, but they are scared as shit to step into that role.
I see this with a lot of environmental justice and climate justice leaders. And then we wonder why our stuff isn’t moving forward in the political spaces. We don’t have our people in there.
There’s also this fear dynamic around each other. I sit on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Yes, I get threats in various different ways from people on the opposition. But it’s almost worse when I’m thrown under the bus by my own people who say I’m a sellout for sitting in these spaces and being in proximity to government. I’m not even paid by the government. I’m a glorified intern, if anything.
This is the toxic nature of political work. There’s cancel culture. All of this combined is tearing at the potential of leadership that we need. We see these mean laws, like banning drag, don’t say gay. These are mean and ridiculous laws, but you know what they do? They build the base. They signal to the GOP base that they can win. Yet we’re not seeing our side play the same game. We don’t have that mediocre-white-man confidence to do the same thing. I just wonder what it’s going to take for us to work at creating protection for our people.
So when I think of the threats and what they’re really doing to us, yeah, there’s bullying, but I can dust off my shoulder. The real consequence is the threat to how we’re building power or how we’re moving away from building power because of the fear that these threats are trying to instigate.
RAJASVINI: What brings you joy and what brings you resilience to keep doing what you do?
JADE: I have tossed being resilient out the window. We’re glorifying people going through oppression after oppression by saying they’re “resilient,” and it’s insulting. We want to thrive. We want to be safe. We just want to be okay. We don’t want to keep surviving and enduring, and then get a little gold resilient gold star.
I was talking this morning about the power of language. In my role in the different spaces I am privileged to be a part of around policymaking, we’re trying to nix that word. No more resilience. We want to talk about thriving communities. We want to talk about justice, adaptation, mitigation, things that actually keep people safe.
But what is bringing me joy? My dog, the simple things in life. In this work, it’s the opportunities and the wins that are building upon each other. I get to see every day the small but very important impacts of having Native leadership and having environmental justice leadership start to make the decisions at the highest levels, and it’s incredible to watch. It does bring me faith and hope that we can continue to build.
RAJASVINI: And Saru?
SARU: I think three things bring me joy. First, my children. I have two girls. They are 10 and 13, and when they were born, because I’ve been in this for so long, I made a personal vow that by the time they were old enough to work in restaurants, we would have seen a dramatic change. For women who’ve worked in restaurants, they’ve experienced the trauma of living off of tips and having to put up with anything and everything the customer does to you because you live off of those tips.
There’s no industry in the United States with higher levels of sexual harassment than tipped workers in the restaurant industry, including the military. There’s no policy more effective at cutting it than paying these women an actual wage so they don’t have to live on tips from customers.
My second joy is that we can see the promised land. We can see it. Workers are winning. The corporations know it. Their days are numbered. They know that wages have to go up. There’s an incredible joy in seeing workers realize for themselves that it’s coming, and they won’t put up with this anymore.
My third joy is seeing that at scale. There are ballot measures in Michigan, Ohio, Arizona. If these measures were successful, in each state, one million people would get a raise, and when we incorporate security for their families, that’s three million people in each of those states. These measures give one million people who have a 12% voter turnout record a reason to vote, a chance to vote themselves a 500% raise from $3 to $15 an hour, or in Arizona, $18 an hour. There’s no candidate, there’s no party, there is no canvassing, there is no ad, there is no new voter methodology that will get these folks out to vote more than the chance to vote themselves a raise. There’s a possibility of saving our democracy when people actually feel like their issues are directly on the ballot.
That gives me incredible hope because we’re doing it so differently. We’re not hiring a firm to collect the signatures. We’re paying low-wage workers to collect the signatures. They’re out in the streets doing it all day, every day.
We have the potential in 2024 to do five things in one: to give three million people a raise; to get people out to vote that could potentially turn three battleground states; to get people back to work because they finally feel there’s a reason to go back and work in restaurants; to allow restaurants to reopen because they finally have people; and to save the country from fascism, because we all know that fascism comes when you have these moments of incredible economic inequality and people feel completely disconnected from the political system.
The hope that I see is a multiracial democracy where we value the working people across America, whoever they voted for in the past, whatever their T-shirts say. They are people with needs and families, and we have the ability to, in this moment, allow them to change their own lives, and in the process, change the trajectory of the country.
I forgot to say one more thing: The other thing that gives me hope is that we are the majority. The overwhelming number of people in America agree on some very fundamental things: Everybody should be paid a livable wage; guns should be controlled; women should have the right to control their bodies; we need a planet we can live on; we need food that we all can eat that keeps us healthy. Most people agree on a wide variety of things. We are not polarized from each other. We are polarized from elected officials who pretend that we are polarized from each other. They use that idea of polarization to drive their political agendas.
What gives me hope is the potential for issues like this one to bring people together. Then once they come together, there’s the possibility to talk about things like race and slavery and the history of this country. But the first step is we come together around something we fundamentally agree on, which is everybody who works in this country should be paid.
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. Dealing with discarded plastic is bad enough, but when it starts to break down, the real trouble begins. The very thing that makes plastic so useful and ubiquitous – its toughness – means it never really goes away. It just gets smaller and smaller: eventually small enough to enter your lungs or be absorbed by crops or penetrate a fish’s muscle tissue before it becomes dinner.
Unlike other pollutants that are single elements or simple chemical compounds, microplastics represent a cocktail of toxicity: plastics contain at least 10,000 different chemicals. Those chemicals are linked to diseases from diabetes to hormone disruption to cancers.
A Poison Like No Other is the first book to fully explore this new dimension of the plastic crisis, following the intrepid scientists who travel to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the ocean to understand the consequences of our dependence on plastic. As Simon learns from these researchers, there is no easy fix. But we will never curb our plastic addiction until we begin to recognize the invisible particles all around us.
Purchase A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies here.
The year was 1863, and famous billiard player Michael Phelan was worrying about the sustainability of the very billiard balls that made him a fortune. At the time, the spheres were hand-carved straight out of elephant tusks, ivory being about the toughest material the animal kingdom had to offer. But the things were expensive, and poorly-made balls still couldn’t withstand repeated smashing without cracking. Also, what if there were suddenly no elephants? Whence would billiard balls come then? Phelan hadn’t a clue. But he did have $10,000, which he offered as a prize for the inventor who could find a suitable replacement for ivory. Thus Phelan would save the game of billiards and, sure, maybe a few elephants too.
Heeding the call was one John Wesley Hyatt, a 26-year-old journeyman printer. He fiddled with a few different recipes, including a core of wood fiber covered with a mixture of shellac (a resin derived from the excretions of the lac insect) and ivory dust, which was sort of cheating. That and the faux ivory ball didn’t have the hardness of the real thing, so billiard players spurned it.
Eventually Hyatt began playing around with cellulose nitrate—cotton treated with nitric and sulfuric acids—at his own peril, given that the compound was extremely flammable. Dissolve this cellulose nitrate in alcohol and ether and you get a syrupy solution called collodion, which surgeons used to bind wounds during the Civil War. Hyatt mixed this collodion with camphor (derived from the camphor tree) and found that the product was strong yet moldable. He called it celluloid, and billiard players called it a mixed blessing: Celluloid shaped into balls behaved enough like ivory, but being made of cellulose nitrate, they were still … fickle. “Consequently,” Hyatt later admitted, “a lighted cigar applied would at once result in a serious flame, and occasionally the violent contact of balls would produce a mild explosion like a percussion guncap.”
But no matter. Hyatt had invented the first practical, mass-producible plastic, a material that under the right temperature and pressure could be molded into all manner of shapes beyond a sphere. That meant engineers and designers had a new class of material to play with, albeit a volatile one. (Early film was made of celluloid and was therefore super flammable. That’s why in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, when the good guys burn down the theater with all the Nazis inside, they used a pile of film as an accelerant.) They were no longer stuck tinkering with natural materials like wood and leather, as humans had done for millennia. And glass was a hassle, given its fragility, whereas celluloid was strong yet lightweight.
However, though considered a plastic, celluloid was itself largely a natural material, as the cellulose in cellulose nitrate came from cotton and the camphor came from trees—celluloid literally means “cellulose-like,” as asteroid means “star-like.” (Credit where credit is due: Hyatt had improved on what was technically the first plastic, the cellulose-based Parkesine, which Alexander Parkes never managed to commercialize.)
Scientists concocted the first fully synthetic plastic, Bakelite, in 1907. It was borne of the world’s shift to electric power, which required insulators for wiring. Shellac did the job, but it was derived from an insect, so manufacturers were limited in the amount of natural material they could procure. By contrast, chemists whipped up the ingredients in Bakelite—phenol and formaldehyde—in the lab. The material kept things from lighting on fire and was durable to boot.
Humans had let the cat out of the plastic bag. Now that scientists knew how to create fully synthetic plastics, and now that the oil and gas business was booming, they could replace natural materials one by one. And the pace of plastic production only accelerated with the material shortages of World War II: Nylon replaced cotton, pure rubber was cut with synthetic rubber in tires, and plastic added to glass turned it bulletproof.
To say that WW II hooked the world on plastic like it was an opioid would be an insult to opioids. You can treat a person addicted to a drug, but you can’t get plastic out of humanity’s system—ever. Being honest, plastic is a miracle material. Get rid of single-use plastics like shopping bags, to be sure, but not plastic syringes and other medical devices, not plastic wiring insulators, not the many components in our cars and electronics. Level any criticism at the petrochemical industry about how they’re drowning the world in plastic and the first thing they’ll remind you is just how useful the stuff is. It’s our fault as consumers that we’re misusing plastic instead of recycling, which is a bit like opioid manufacturers blaming patients for getting hooked on their drugs.
Like opioids, plastics make everything better in the moment, temporarily masking the ravages of addiction. Just ask the folks jumping for plasticine joy in a two-page spread in the August 1, 1955, issue of Life Magazine, “Throwaway Living: Disposable Items Cut Down Household Chores,” which must have struck even a vaguely reasonable reader as preposterous. The photo features a radiant nuclear family with arms outstretched, as if worshiping the items falling all around them—plates, cups, utensils, bins, a disposable diaper. “The objects flying through the air in this picture,” the story reads, “would take 40 hours to clean—except that no housewife need bother. They are all meant to be thrown away after use.” Men need not worry about being left behind in this brave new disposable world, the article hints, thanks to “two items for hunters to throw away: disposable goose and duck decoys.” This is the central paradox of plastic: The material is exceedingly valuable in its versatility, yet worthless in that it can be chucked in the bin after one use.
The advertisements on the five pages following the spread are like a staircase leading to the modern consumerist plasticine hellscape. Texaco hypes “that ‘cushiony’ feeling” of its chassis lubrication. Some sort of living doll with hair made of yarn pours a box of Carnation instant chocolate drink into a glass. “Big-screen color television has arrived!” shouts RCA Victor. A man in a shiny convertible has a problem: He and his kids are enjoying hotdogs, yet deep down he knows that “brushing after meals is best, but it’s not always possible.” Luckily he brushed before breakfast with Procter and Gamble’s Gleem toothpaste, which keeps your maw fresh all day long.
In the decades after Life announced the arrival of throwaway living, oil and gas companies like Texaco made the throwaway dream a throwaway reality. A beverage market once cornered by Carnation is now overflowing with brands of soda and energy drinks and juices, all sealed in plastic bottles. The mammoth flat-screen descendants of RCA Victor’s 21-inch color TV are made of plastic. Toothpaste isn’t just sequestered in plastic tubes—until very recently, it was plastic.
In the early 2010s, brands began phasing out the plastic microbeads they’d been adding to toothpaste and face scrubs to boost their scrubbing power. Some of these products contained hundreds of thousands of microplastics, which washed off of your face and out to sea. It turned out that consumers weren’t particularly happy when they realized what was happening—President Barack Obama made that displeasure into law by signing the Microbead-Free Waters Act in 2015, four decades after microplastic scrubbers were patented in the cosmetics industry.
“In that bill, it was only for wash-off cosmetics, and that was mostly the facial scrubs,” says Marcus Eriksen, cofounder of the Gyres Institute, a nonprofit that’s tackling plastic pollution. “But then in cosmetics, there are tons and tons of shredded microplastic particles used as fillers, things to keep stuff on your face for a long time.” Eyeliners, mascaras, lipsticks—they’re still loaded with tens of thousands of microplastics each. Microbeads act like ball bearings, making the products more spreadable and silky-feeling. By one estimate, over 3 million pounds of microplastics from personal care products still enter the aquatic environment every year. Some 210 trillion microbeads flush out of China alone annually. And while yes, great, the US banned microbeads in wash-off cosmetics, all those particles are still tumbling around the environment and will continue to do so for a long, long time.
The microbead battle peaked and waned, and the world patted itself on the back—skirmish against corporations won. But people didn’t know the half of the microplastic problem. Not even environmental scientists knew the half of it. Microplastic had by this time become ubiquitous in the environment, and only a small community of researchers had noticed.
Exactly how much plastic humanity has produced thus far, we’ll never know. But scientists have taken a swing at an estimate: more than 18 trillion pounds, twice the weight of all the animals living on Earth. Of that, 14 trillion pounds have become waste. Just 9 percent of that waste has been recycled, and 12 percent has been incinerated. The rest has been landfilled or released into the environment, where each bag and bottle and wrapper shatters into millions of microplastics. Sure, many plastic products are relatively long-lasting, like TVs and car components, but 42 percent of plastic has been packaging, very little of which has been recycled.
There’s so much plastic pollution out there that if you were to gather it all up and turn it into cling wrap, you’d have more than enough to cover the globe. And this is very much a cling-wrapping in progress: 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 North America, where microplastic emissions are particularly high, it’s more like each person contributing three bags a week.
In 1950, when the wide-scale manufacture of plastic was taking off, the industry produced 4.4 billion pounds of resins and synthetic fibers. By 2015, that number had increased almost 200-fold: 838 billion pounds, half of which was single-use plastic—600 million plastic bags are now used every hour, enough to wrap around the planet seven times if you tied them all together. The average American generates almost 300 pounds of plastic waste a year, more than twice that of someone living in the European Union. By 2050, humanity will be churning out over 3 trillion pounds of plastic annually, equivalent to 300 million elephants. That number is all the more stunning when you consider that one of plastic’s charms is that it’s far lighter than other packaging materials like glass—and it’s certainly less dense than an elephant—so you need a whole lot of plastic to reach these weights.
More than half of the plastic ever produced has come in the last two decades, and production is continuing to grow exponentially as Big Oil embraces the inevitable: Humanity will someday ditch fossil fuels as fuels, but it’ll be impossible to ditch the plastic made from fossil fuels. By 2040, the flow of plastic waste into aquatic ecosystems is projected to triple—that means releasing an additional 1.5 trillion pounds of plastic into the environment, and that’s a scenario that assumes immediate and drastic action to reduce waste. By the middle of this century, humanity will have spent a hundred years producing a total of 75 trillion pounds of plastics and additives, equal to 100,000 Empire State Buildings, at which point four garbage trucks of the material will enter the ocean every minute. And around then, marine plastic will finally outweigh all the fish in the sea.
As a backlash against LGBTQ rights escalates into an authoritarian crusade, acclaimed author and queer activist Taylor Brorby asks how we can still be fighting this battle? As a writer addressing the fossil fuel industry’s acceleration in the midst of climate chaos, Taylor is forced to choose between the existential crises of the assaults on nature and on LGBTQ people. It’s all connected, he says, as he seeks to reconcile nature, culture, diversity and belonging.
Featuring
Taylor Brorby, a Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, is an award-winning, widely published writer and poet as well as a contributing editor at North American Review who also serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. Taylor regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change, and is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land; Crude: Poems; Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience; and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: 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.
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Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): In this episode, acclaimed author and queer activist Taylor Brorby conjures dreams of belonging. In his journey to reconcile nature and culture, he’s forced to choose between his defense of nature and the protection of queer communities and rights.
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Staying Alive: Reconciling Nature, Culture and Gay Rights.”
Psychologists have a term for a phenomenon they call an “extinction burst.” It manifests as a sudden spike in the frequency and intensity of a behavior when the reinforcement for that behavior is removed. Think of a child throwing a tantrum when a parent withholds screen time until homework is done. Usually, the behavior gets dramatically worse before it gets better, until eventually, without the positive reinforcement, the behavior becomes extinct.
Today, as human-induced climate disruption is ravaging the world, the fossil fuel industry has doubled down on what you might call an extinction burst because it knows the civilizational shift off fossil fuels is accelerating rapidly.
Simultaneously, epic social transformations are similarly producing cultural extinction bursts. One of those is the savage backlash against LGBTQ people.
It comes at exactly the moment when a record 84% of non-LGBTQ Americans support equal rights for the LGBTQ community. A 96% supermajority agree that LGBTQ people should have the freedom to live their life and not be discriminated against. A 91% supermajority says schools should be a safe and accepting place for all youth.
Writer and activist Taylor Brorby, who comes from generations of fossil fuel workers, has worked at the bleeding edges of both of these movements, and he believes they’re related.
He spoke on a panel at a Bioneers conference.
Taylor Brorby(TB): I come from the least visited state in the country – North Dakota. [CHEERS] If you haven’t been there recently, let me bring you in hot to what’s happening, because it’s the testing ground for the country’s worst ideas. [LAUGHTER] But I swear I’ve got some light I’m going to bring to you all.
But I grew up with the Badlands as my backbone and the Missouri River as the main artery of my life. And as you all know, I don’t need to tell this crowd what the Trevor Project reports about suicidal ideation in our various communities – 45% of queer youth last year had suicidal ideation. That number is higher amongst BIPOC queer youth. That number’s the highest amongst the transgender community, somewhere around 69% of what’s being reported.
Just the other day, my home state set the record by passing 10 anti-queer laws into being. A lot of work to do. You all know that.
I went home two weeks ago. I had my nails painted for the first time in 30 years. The last time was by Grandma Brorby who was a fierce little woman who looked cute on the outside but she’d cut you if you screwed up. And so it was great to go back home. I had my nails painted in transgender colors as a nice little middle finger to the state legislature of North Dakota, which continues to make my work possible. [LAUGHTER]
Host: But Taylor Brorby’s journey into activism did not begin with gay rights. It grew out of his deep connection to his beloved homeland – the landscapes of North Dakota that have suffered long-term destruction by extractive industries.
TB: But I grew up in a landscape where I was gaslit by all the adults I grew up around because, if you haven’t heard, every lake in North Dakota is supposed to freeze, but I grew up swimming in a lake that never freezes in North Dakota. You can sit in it in January and its bathtub-warm with your stocking cap on, because its water is used to cool the coal-fired turbine engines of the power plant, where my mother worked the entirety of her career, that was fed coal from the mine where my grandpa Brorby spent the entirety of his career.
So, the scary history of North Dakota, of course, begins with the genocide of Native Americans, and that of course wasn’t enough, because we need hydroelectric power in the state, so we dammed the Missouri River in intentional ways to flood sacred agricultural land. In the eastern part of North Dakota, we’re growing one crop that most people love – sugar. In the south-central part of North Dakota, where I come from, we strip the land of coal. To the west, we have hydraulic fracking. The northern third tier of the state, had it seceded in the 1950s during the Cold War, it would have been the third most powerful nuclear nation on the planet.
My home power plant where my mother worked, what paid for my saxophone lessons, is now the world’s test site for carbon capture and storage. Where we’re going to liquify carbon dioxide emissions and pump them 6,000 feet underground where it will stay forever. And this will impact every state from Maine to where we are in California by unleashing a pipeline revolution.
When these pipelines break, and if there’s wind, then you get a thing called a carbonic acid cloud, which prevents engines from operating, EMTs are not coming to help you. These pipelines will traverse the entirety of the continent, sending this liquid product to my home, to be shoved back down 6,000 feet under the earth’s surface, which is also the level where we’re fracking in North Dakota too.
Somehow in that rural little landscape, four generations of fossil fuel people produced a very gay, crunchy granola environmentalist here. [LAUGHTER] And so anything’s possible. You can go to the moon if you grow up gay in North Dakota.
Host: As a young person, if Taylor Brorby felt the grownups gaslit him about the flagrant environmental destruction all around him, being gay was also taboo.
TB: If you haven’t heard, just to bring you on the harbor tour of North Dakota and its worst ideas, and then we’re going to get in, because I fall into that 45% of queer youth. Maybe some of you in this room do. And what’s such a pleasure for me is I grew up in a tiny town of 600, going to school with the same 22 other students – 16 boys and six other girls. So even if you were unfortunately straight, the dating options were limited in my class. But what’s been so nice and surreal for me is that I never thought I would be standing in front of you publicly talking about being gay because I worked so hard to try to hide that very real part of who I was. And my big sister, if she were here, even when I lower my voice, my sister goes: “You sound like a drag queen who’s been smoking for 20 years.” [LAUGHTER] So even when I’m back in North Dakota, I’m like, [VOICE DROPS] “Hi, how are you.” It’s like as the day is long. You know.
Host: That sense of vanishing isolation is part of what moved Taylor Brorby to write Boys and Oil.
He spoke with us at a Bioneers conference…
Taylor Brorby, Nikola Alexandre, and Ashara Ekundayo speaking in a panel at Bioneers 2023
TB: So, if you follow the 100th meridian which divides the country from the arid west and the water-rich east where you don’t need to irrigate, for instance, to do agriculture. It runs through North Dakota. If you follow that line from North Dakota to Texas, then over to where I currently live in Salt Lake and up to Seattle, you’ll get something like a 15-state region, and there is no memoir about growing up gay in that region. There now is at least one – my book. And I hope a large number follow, because what I worry about – if you grow up without even a story that says you’re not alone, how do you know you’re not a freak or that, well, no one like me lives here.
You know, when I was writing my book, I was imagining this tiny town no one’s been to in Montana called Broadus, Montana, and I thought there’s some gay boy there who needs to be able to go to a library and pull off a book. I get quite emotional about this because I was that kid. There was no book that reflected– who I was was okay. And queer youth experience such a high rate of suicidal ideation. And I wanted to write a true book where the gay kid stays alive.
I mean, that’s how low the bar is in America right now for people like me. We’re being legislated against, and I just wanted a book to be out there that showed a life, and a life that kept going.
Host: Taylor says that when he was growing up, there was a default assumption that everyone was straight. Being gay in a place where supposedly no one was gay marked a harrowing descent into invisibility and self-denial. It also became a survival exercise to dream his way out of a nightmare – to imagine a different way of being and belonging. Once again, the landscape was there to hold him.
TB: It’s a lonely existence. You know? A few years ago, I had some Facebook post where a guy I grew up with had said, oh, I thought you were so happy. We were so happy as children. You seemed to be so happy. And I think what’s so heartbreaking about that is a lot of queer youth, I imagine, depending on where they’re growing up, they’re acting to just try to get by or fit in, or say get me to high school and to graduation, and then I can go someplace else where it might be a little easier for me. And so, there’s a certain loneliness there.
And so, my babysitters became like the Square Butte Creek, you know, or like the fish I would go fishing for with the beavers and things like this, because I get emotional thinking about it, but, you know, who I was growing up was very difficult for other people to handle just because of interests, because they didn’t quite compute. I wanted to take painting classes, or actually cared about piano. And I was grateful I grew up in a landscape that was big enough to hold what I felt, you know, because no one where I grew up went to therapy. There’s not a therapist in the town. And so, my therapy was wandering the hills and going fishing, and doing that, which is some solace, I guess.
Host: The solace of the ancient majesty and riotous diversity of the landscape nourished Taylor’s imagination and his soul. Yet at the same time, the burdens of history lived heavy in the land. The ghosts of generations of settlers, whose child he was, haunted him with a psychological disconnect.
TB: It was such an incredible place to grow up, especially as I age, because I realize my very county seems to be the origin story for every narrative of empire this country tells itself, you know, the genocide of Native Americans, the damming of the Missouri River, not only for hydroelectric power but to take away sacred agricultural land of the Mandan Peoples. I grew up a half hour upstream from where George Armstrong Custer last lived before he went west and had the worst day of his life. You know? And where Sitting Bull surrendered his rifle. You know? I mean, it was a phenomenal place, both in the human stories but in the grand geological scale of time I knew great ice sheets had shaped the land I loved roaming in. And it’s where I go back to in my mind whenever I struggle with writing. And my senses seem to flow. It is such a wellspring for my creativity.
But I grew up with men, as I say in my memoir, who call Oliver County God’s country, but they make their money by destroying it. And I thought if you really love something, why would you have this big thing called a dreg line that literally rips away the precious soil? So there’s a huge psychological disconnect, because I think, as a child, I trusted what adults were supposedly telling me, but found at every turn they were gaslighting me. And I thought, I don’t want to have to grow into an adult that has to exist in sort of this psychic break of a state, you know, of saying this is the way I have to earn my living by destroying my home.
And I think that’s why I’ve done the work that I do, is because I have to believe the people who are so hell bent on destroying my home, even members of my own family, do not see the prairie the way I see it, and that—that’s the tall order of writing, that I am naïve enough to believe if I write the perfect page to describe my prairie, this will stop. So that’s sort of the task I’ve set out for myself.
Host: When we return, Taylor Brorby is forced to choose between the existential crises of the assaults on nature and on LGBTQ people, while he seeks to reconcile nature, culture, diversity and belonging…
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…
Host: Taylor Brorby reached an existential fork in the road. He was forced to choose between the environmental crisis and a crisis of identity.
On the one hand, the fossil fuel industry was threatening the actual extinction of human beings and the collapse of the very web of life that sustains humans and all life.
On the other hand, the cultural extinction burst against LGBTQ people began to escalate into an authoritarian crusade.
Yet that cultural extinction burst was also empowered and amplified by a cynical political agenda. A divide-and-conquer strategy served powerful economic interests, in tandem with a Republican Party using anti-democratic schemes in pursuit of raw power for minority rule.
North Dakota has been in the vanguard of state governments that, by mid-2023, had introduced over 520 anti-LGBTQ bills nationally. Schools and teachers have been forbidden to teach about sexual orientation and gender identity. Books with LGBTQ themes or by gay authors were being banned from libraries – the very kinds of books that had saved Taylor Brorby’s life.
TB: I mean, right now I feel like I live in a country where a huge portion of the population doesn’t want the person that I am to exist. I know intellectually that’s not true; however, it’s hard to believe that when you see whole state legislatures, which are supposed to be representing their constituents, passing legislation in horrific ways. You know? It’s one thing to say, well, not all North Dakotans feel this way, but when the state is very, very red and passing very horrific laws into existence, it’s hard to feel safe in that whole entire state.
It’s very frustrating to live in this sort of media culture that doesn’t hold our politicians to account, so that people know it is the tyranny of the minority who are enacting this over many millions of people’s lives.
Bioneers 2024 at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, CA on March 28, 2024. Taylor Brorby – Raising Hell: Censorship, Carbon Capture, and Being Gay on the Great Plains.
We don’t have time to continue to battle for me to have access for me to being married in every state in this country. We already had a civil war over states’ rights, you know, and things like this. And so now, it’s not that those issues aren’t important, it’s that they should and have been previously settled issues. And we’re living in such an environmental pickle right now where we need many rapid solutions to help our literal species exist on the planet if that’s what we want, and there’s not enough time to do it all.
And we’re in this time where the issues we face are so desperately important in terms of literal existence, that now I have sort of pivoted from having done a lot of work against the fracking industry and coal mining, to say my job is to now keep queer youth alive. That feels like that shouldn’t have to be anyone’s job. Queer youth should be growing up in a world that’s rich and varied and shows them the magicalness of growing into adulthood. But we are in it right now with libraries being censored, with anti-trans legislation sweeping the country, it’s sort of like, look over here at this shiny thing while my left hand does the destroying of other things that are desperately important to life.
Host: Taylor Brorby left North Dakota for Salt Lake City where he joined the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center. There he has pursued his writing, and he speaks regularly around the U.S. about extractive economies, queerness, disability and climate change.
He’s been poignantly surprised by the reception to his book Boys and Oil. It comes at a time when men and the concept of masculinity are in crisis. According to the 2023 State of American Men report, 44% of men have had suicidal thoughts, and 60% say, “No one knows me really well.” The report found that “Younger men face higher rates of depressive symptoms, suicidal thoughts, and a sense of isolation.”
TB: Some of my favorite letters I’ve gotten since the book has come out have actually been from straight men who have been shaved down in a particular image their fathers thought they should be. You know? Linemen on the football team. This one letter really sticks with me. Mr. Brorby, I read your book. I’m unfortunately straight and happily married with three children. And my misfortune was that I was gifted a large body that my father wanted me to be a lineman on the football team. And I wanted to be an oil painter. And he said, you know, I’m 45 with a broken body, and I no longer paint. And I thought, that’s so sad.
You know? I mean, we talk about toxic masculinity and living in that culture, and then when you hear from people who are the victims of that, who we might see on the street and go, oh, their life is pretty easy; they’re white straight men who fit in, and all of this. And then you hear these sort of stories. They really crack open the nut of the issues that we’re living in.
And I just wanted a little—a book where, you know, little Bobby kept the pistol in the gun safe. And little Susie didn’t put the noose around her neck. That felt like a huge responsibility.
Going out now and having that book in the world, and you hear—You know, it’s only been out for a year, and regularly I will have queer youth come up to me and say, “Your book kept me alive.” And I thought, wow, within the last year you had thought the other option was an option. I mean, we are in a real moment as a society.
So I’m aware of that. You know? It’s sort of beware of what you wish for, you might get it. And then the bar becomes higher. These queer youth want some assurance that life is worth living.
The prairie teaches you that nature thrives in diversity. The prairie is nothing if not an intermingled system of varied and various roots. But I keep thinking about the stories that need to come out from these places, you know that, for instance, Black people have been in North Dakota as long as people who look like me. [APPLAUSE] Exactly. And I can’t write a memoir about being Black in North Dakota, and I need those stories. Stories are how we build empathy. It’s how I grow for myself to be a better ally and a better caretaker of my own inner landscape, as well, as it’s not only caretaking of others, but also to be kind to ourselves, because the world tries to whittle us into something that we cannot be.
I grew up in this incredible symphony of sound that nature gave me when the sounds of the human world were belittling me and beating me into submission. It was this variety of redwing blackbird and of pheasant clucks, and that the prairie, when it’s breezy, literally whispers. And so I learned growing up to listen.
And I think whatever those landscapes are, they’re whispering to us and they’re telling us what we need to buoy ourselves and to buoy each other. There’s a certain gentleness that the land reveals to us if we listen well and listen often..
Now, I know I wasn’t alone in that small place where I felt the only thing keeping me alive and that I felt important was that I was fortunate to grow up in a landscape big enough to hold what I felt; that we didn’t go to therapy; that my therapy was brought to me by the Square Butte Creek and the beautiful cirrus clouds that feathered the sky, was in relationship with sage grouse that heaved their yolk-yellow breasts into the air; it was by hearing beavers slap their tail in the water.
And so, as Mary Oliver says, no matter who you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over again, announcing your place in the family of things.
“Colonialism severs people’s relationship to land, so that a few can amass wealth and power. Landback is about healing by restoring those spiritual, emotional, mental and economic relationships. We’re trying to flip the tides of colonialism. Everywhere you can help people reconnect with land, you’re doing something incredibly powerful, especially if you are an Indigenous person connecting with your homeland. Those relationships are magic.” – PennElys Droz, PhD
Indigenous leadership on many of the core issues facing our planet today has never been stronger. On so many key fronts, from climate action to land preservation/restoration to biodiversity, Indigenous nations around the world are on the frontlines, not just resisting but actually winning many key struggles against a very serious backdrop, life threatening in many cases globally.
In this week’s newsletter, we hear from Jade Begay, of the NDN Collective, as she explores just how influential Indigenous leadership has become in today’s world, and then we dive into an extensive look at #Landback with three women at the very cutting edge of this incredibly powerful movement.
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Jade Begay – Strengthening Indigenous Leadership During Collapse
Indigenous Peoples protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity, despite being 5% of the world’s population. This simple fact alone should position Indigenous, Native, and Tribal Peoples as not only leaders but experts on resource management and climate mitigation and adaptation. Yet, in many spaces, political and institutional, Indigenous knowledge and expertise are seen as supplemental, and at worst, romantic.
In this presentation, Jade Begay, one of North America’s most effective Indigenous Rights activists, shares her insights on how far Indigenous leadership has come and what we can do to strengthen and embolden this leadership that is so needed if we are all to survive on planet Earth.
#LandBack has become a rallying cry in Indigenous circles and beyond from coast to coast, but what does #Landback really mean, and how can we be a part of this movement? In this conversation, leaders in the #Landback movement will share different approaches to the return and “rematriation” of ancestral territories. For tribal members, the discussion will include organizational, fundraising, and legal strategies. For non-Natives, panelists will share how to be a good ally for #Landback.
“As we come together, as people from all walks of life, we have to understand that we are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.”
Corrina Gould (Lisjan Ohlone) is the chair and spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and co-founder and Lead Organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change. Her life’s work has led to the creation of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a women-led organization in the Bay Area that seeks to heal and transform legacies of colonization and genocide.
Do you want to support and protect nature in your own community?
Learn about the background on the emerging rights of nature movement in the United States and internationally with Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil’s “Rights of Nature” Bioneers Learning course, a platform created for activists, innovators, and anyone seeking knowledge and tools to manifest social and environmental solutions. This course will prepare you to engage in your own communities to develop, adopt, and enforce local rights of nature laws.
Erin Matariki Carr – The Resurgence of Māori Law: The Constitutional Transformation Movement in Aotearoa NZ
Erin Matariki Carr is from the Māori tribal nations of Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Awa, and lives in Tāneatua in the east of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Matariki is a member of RIVER and a lawyer working within the inter-generational movement of Māori resistance that is now surging towards constitutional transformation in honor of the treaty Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1840 between the British Crown and sovereign hapū Māori. An important story in this movement has been the granting of legal personality to Te Urewera rainforest, the homelands of Ngāi Tūhoe.
In this presentation, Tūhoe aims to “disrupt the false notion of human superiority over the land” by removing human ownership and management, and providing a new kawa (or law) that starts with “human management for the benefit of the land”.
Congratulations to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Movement Generation for rematriating 43 acres of land in unceded Bay Miwok territory! With the support of partners like NEC members the Sustainable Economies Law Center and Nuns and Nones, MG raised the funds for Sogorea Te’ to purchase the land and liberate it from the speculative market. Together, they envision the land to become a Bay Area movement hub for “organizers, healers, cultural and earth workers” and a space to build “Black and Indigenous solidarity for a land-based revolution.”
Aquarius, created by film producer Bruno Wainer, is a carefully curated streaming platform offering award-winning films, series and documentaries on yoga, meditation, spirituality, sustainability, environment, culture, art, science and social justice.
#LandBack has become a rallying cry in Indigenous circles and beyond from coast to coast, but what does #Landback really mean, and how can we be a part of this movement? In this conversation, leaders in the #Landback movement share different approaches to the return and “rematriation” of ancestral territories. For tribal members, the discussion includes organizational, fundraising, and legal strategies. For non-Natives, speakers will share how to be a good ally for #Landback.
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Program Director of Indigeneity at Bioneers, possesses a background rich in Indigenous cultural studies, fine art and documentary photography and videography, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) workshops, protection of indigenous intellectual property, conservation of indigenous cultural resources, fundraising, grant-writing, marketing, and the formalization of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program.
Corrina Gould (Lisjan Ohlone), born and raised in the village of Huchiun (aka Oakland, CA), is the chair and spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and co-founder and Lead Organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change, a small Native-run organization that sponsored annual Shellmound Peace Walks from 2005 to 2009.
PennElys Droz, Ph.D., of Anishinaabe and European descent, a mother of five, is a Program Officer with NDN Collective (“an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building and narrative change”), and a founding board member of Sustainable Nations, an Indigenous regenerative community development organization.
Kawenniiosta Jock (Kanien’kehá:ka, Wolf Clan from Akwesasne, Mohawk Nation Territory), President of the Waterfall Unity Alliance, board member of Onkwe Inc., and an alumna of the Akwesasne Freedom School, is an activist, land protector, master seamstress, traditional full-spectrum doula, mushroom hunter and artist. She works on preserving and restoring her people’s language, cultural teachings and ancient knowledge.
Note: This is an edited and excerpted version of the transcript of this conversation.
CARAROMERO: Welcome to the 15th annual Indigenous Forum and to the amazing beautiful homelands of the Chochenyo-speaking peoples. We’re so thankful to be here, coming with a good heart to Berkeley, California, known as Huchiun .
We’re here to begin a conversation about a buzzword that we’ve been hearing for many years now—landback. This is a movement that has caught on like wildfire throughout not only the United States, but among our brothers and sisters to our north and south as well. We have with us today three leading figures in landback movements, and I hope you all get inspired by their wisdom and experience, so that perhaps some of you can begin similar work in your own communities and/or learn how to be good allies to help us Indigenous Peoples reclaim and steward land that was stolen from us.
CORRINA GOULD: Thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this beautiful panel here today, and spending time with us to dream in all of this amazing work. This work started thousands of years ago, but a couple hundred years ago when the Spanish first got here, they stole our sacred sites, our ability as women to be leaders and our ability to speak our own languages and to pray in our way, but we have never stopped trying to get it all back since first contact.
For us here, our struggle centered around trying to figure out how to get the remains of over 9,000 of our ancestors back from UC Berkeley and hundreds and hundreds of other ancestral remains that are in universities and museums and other places across the Bay Area. And as a non-federally recognized tribe erased from our place of origin, that was a very challenging undertaking.
Fourth grade history in the curriculum here taught about us as though we only existed in the past: that we ate acorns and had tule houses and tule boats, etc., and then the Spanish got here and everything changed. But they don’t tell the real story: that what they brought was not just their way of farming and their language, they brought rape and murder and oppression. Those same myths about us were taught when my kids went to fourth grade here in the Bay Area, but we are currently working with a lot of amazing educators to change the curriculum. Over 25 years ago, we started to do work in the Bay Area to bring recognition to the generic term “Ohlone,” and to drive home that we were still here. We started walking to shellmounds in the region starting in 2005. We walked from Vallejo down to San Jose and up to San Francisco with hundreds of people from all walks of life, stopping at these different burial sites of our ancestors that were under railroad tracks and parking lots and schools and bars and streets, and we laid down prayers for our ancestors, asking them to remember us as we were remembering them.
For decades, we worked together with many other Native people from across the country who had been pushed out of their reservations into big cities and now lived in our territory. And we did this work all on our own, without even a nonprofit, totally out of our own pockets. Then in 2011, the City of Vallejo east of here filed for bankruptcy, and there were two shell mounds along the Carquinez Strait, the last 13 acres of open space there, that they planned to develop. It’s a place that connects our bay to our rivers where our salmon come up and our salmon go back into the ocean. It had been one of my ancestors’ last strongholds before they got pulled into Mission Dolores in San Francisco. And after 12-and-a-half years of working, an organization called Spirit that was run by Wounded Knee DeOcampo and his niece, Kim (who is on the board of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust) came together to try to save this particular sacred site, and that began the process that got us to where we are today.
For 109 days we held that site. People from all walks of life came and put down prayers at the sacred fire we had lit, hoping to save it from destruction. We made a callout, and because we had been doing these walks and people now understood what shellmounds were and that our people were still alive, they came and they stayed with us, and we created a village there. We were surrounded by Coast Guard and police. It was an interesting time.
But that action and that land changed us. It changed our DNA. It made us somebody different. We remembered what it was like to be human beings and to live in community again, and to acknowledge each other and to share food and prayer with one another on a daily basis, to put down prayers every morning together and at night, and to hold strong together. In a way, that place saved us.
And on Day 99, two federally recognized tribes stepped in. It was not their territory, but they stepped in and created the first cultural easement between two federally recognized tribes, creating a park district of land freed from development forever. That happened because we stood strong. If we had not stood our ground, that land would be destroyed today, so that place, Sogorea Te’, that village site, still holds that sacredness to us, and we continue to go and have ceremony for our salmon there, joined by many other people, including my good friend from the Winnemem Wintu, their spiritual leader and Chief, Caleen Sisk.
But I didn’t know what a land trust was when we first started. About six months after we left Sogorea Te, many of us had a form of PTSD, because we had to come from being in that village in joyous community to our “regular” lives where neighbors didn’t talk to each other and we had to go to work from 9 to 5. But my good friend, Dr. Beth Rose Middleton, who’s now a professor at UC Davis, wrote a book, her dissertation at Berkeley, called Trust in the Land, and it was about Native land trusts, and she invited me to a meeting of Native land trusts about six months after. And I had no idea what I was going to go to do.
But when I went to Southern California, I met people from both federally and non-federally recognized tribes that were buying back their own land. They were buying back sacred sites through long-term leasing, so they could tell their stories again, and I thought that that was a good idea, a tool that we hadn’t had in our pocket for many years.
When I came back, I talked to my friend, Johnella LaRose (of the Shoshone Bannock and Carrizo tribes) who had been doing these walks, this work with me for all these decades, about this. We talked about the interesting thing that most of these land trusts, actually all of the land trusts that I went and saw, were all run by Native guys. And I met this guy, Dune Lankard, from Alaska, whom many of you probably know, and I asked my new friend if this was a men’s club, if it was a boys’ club, and Dune laughed and said: “Yeah, kinda, but not just Native land trusts, nearly all land trusts are run by men.”
Johnella and I started having this conversation. What does it mean that men are in charge of land and how does it relate to what happened to us when colonizers got here, the extraction and the rape and the taking away of the sacred happened that continues to happen to our Mother Earth? Maybe we need to bring a balance back, so we began to use the word “rematriation” because it’s about bringing that balance back. It does not mean that we throw away our sons and uncles and grandpas, but it means that during colonization, our men also lost their sacred responsibilities. It’s time for all of it to come back into place, and it’s our special responsibility as Indigenous women to bring that balance back. We have the songs for our medicines and for our waterways. We have those songs for those new babies and those that are leaving this Earth, and it is our time, right now, to take up that space again and bring us back on that right track.
The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust blew up in this crazy way that I never imagined because of a lot of beautiful human beings who live in the Bay Area and in the region who saw this as a way for us all to explore how to work together. We’re a non-federally recognized tribe. We have no treaties with the federal government. The federal government says that I don’t exist, that I am not an Indigenous woman sitting here in my own territory.
In 2016, after Standing Rock, as we were still putting together Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, I met a group of young people running an organic nursery in deep East Oakland called Planting Justice, half a mile from my house. They work with formerly incarcerated men and women and people that recently migrated to the area. They went to Standing Rock and they were moved by what happened there, and they said we want to give you back this land, this quarter acre of land that we’re not using on this two-acre plot. Johnella and I had no idea who these young people were, and the land was a mess with transmission lines and broken concrete all over, but we decided to try to clean up that land together and to see if the relationships would work out, so for a year we cleaned up that space.
My ancestors always tell me things in different, funny ways. That piece of land is right along the Lisjan Creek, who we are named after – our waterway. It’s under the elevated 880 freeway, under fill, and about a half a block away, one of our shellmounds were destroyed in order for them to put that freeway up, so that land sits in a place where my ancestors had a village site for thousands of years, and that they were bringing it back to us in this totally different way.
It still chokes me up, this first quarter acre of land that came back to us. Just about all of our sacred sites around here are underneath asphalt or rubble, so we decided that we needed a fire, a place to bring people back to a hearth. We decided to create the first arbor in our territory in 250 years, and that arbor was supposed to get danced in and right as we were getting ready for it, hundreds of white sage and tobacco plants had been readied for giveaway, but COVID happened, so we couldn’t dance it in in that particular way, but some young people being released from prison asked for permission to come and pray at that fire before they went home to their reservations. That fire has gotten a lot of use: we’ve had celebrations for people passing on; my daughter was married in that arbor during COVID; it has become a hearth again for the Lisjan people.
We have had to be creative, to use different strategies and build relationships in different kinds of ways to get access back to land. Often, it’s drawing up a MOU with a nonprofit organization. It generally doesn’t involve purchasing land directly, but we did have somebody gracious enough to give us money to purchase the Ashby Garden here in Berkeley recently. We have another MOU with an acre of land in El Sobrante, along Garrity Creek that we’re taking care of and growing foods that we distribute to our elders and to those that were immunosuppressed. We started doing that work during COVID. We have a small piece of land that has 13 fruit trees on it in West Oakland that we are using to harvest as well, and working with young people to do that work with another organization, the American Indian Child Resource Center. And we recently were the first non-federally recognized tribe in California to receive almost five acres of land back from a city, the City of Oakland.
So landback comes in a lot of different ways when you’re doing this in your own territories and you’re not federally recognized, and you’re using a nonprofit in order to do it. But I always say that if you open up your imagination, and people come up with a good idea, say yes, and figure out how we do that kind of work together.
PENNELYS DROZ: I’m Annishinaabe Wyandot and aEuropean descendant. I was raised to serve the continuation of Annishinaabe culture, so when you see my bio out there, a lot of the times it just says Annishinaabe because that’s the culture I’ve been brought up to serve, but I think it’s important to acknowledge all of our ancestors, because it does impact how we move in this world. I was also raised in Shirai Yurok territory. I actually thought I was Yurok until I was about 10.
Going back home when I was 18 to the Great Lakes transformed my life. I thought my family had lost our culture and language and everything, but when I realized that we hadn’t. It changed my life and created the direction that I have today. I was also raised in community with the Wiyot Tribe up there, who have been relentlessly praying, building relations, educating community and struggling and organizing to be able to get their sacred site back, their island, which is finally theirs again, so that was very influential.
The origin story into the work was when I was a young teen. I tried to join the environmental movement at the time, trying to be in EarthFirst! and other direct action environmental movements in the early ‘90s, but I did not find a welcome home there. I did not find a space of cultural safety in what existed back then, but I found my way to the Indigenous Environmental Network, which was very shaping. The other shaping things were that as a young teen, I also started learning about science. I was taking a physics class and reading science books, and I was really struck by how science seemed to be saying the same thing as our creation story, as our cosmology, as our way of even thinking about the world. The scientists never talk about the spirit, but I got the sense that what they uncovered is the same kind of magic, so I got very into science.
And then a huge fish kill happened up there. All this came together to make me realize that our creation stories, our cosmologies, our way of being in the world, our way of developing our intellects and our creativity in relationship to the land and each other have to be and can be the foundation of developing sustainable nations. Even though we have such deep intense struggles, we have so much powerful potential to be the leaders and the models of what is possible in this world because of our connectivity, the fact that we’re invested in each other and in our homelands. I grew up in a community where there’s a lot of addiction, a lot of violence, but, you know, people there take care of each other’s kids. Nobody’s kids are going to go hungry. That kind of community connectivity is what it will take to rebirth the new world, the world that we want to give to our descendants.
Long story short, we ended up starting an organization called Sustainable Nations. That organization served to provide training, project development, and consulting by and for Indigenous People in renewable energy, natural building, ecological wastewater treatment, economic planning, etc., and all from the basis of the spiritual responsibility we have to our homelands and each other. I did that work and learned a ton for a lot of years, and I studied engineering and applied the practice of engineering from within our cultural lenses to do appropriate design work and development work in communities.
But after many years I needed a change. I was a director for a long time of that work, and it was beautiful, but I’m a mother of many, and sometimes it’s time to shift. I had the blessing of being invited to join the NDN Collective when it was just starting. I was the fifth hire, and now we have over 70 folks on our team.
And now we’re firmly engaged in the landback movement. We’re articulating and networking around this powerful framework. Nothing is bolder than unapologetically saying land back. To create the big kinds of transformational change that this Earth is demanding and that our communities need to be able to provide a future for our descendants, we need to be able to speak bold things into this space. We have not lost our spiritual responsibility to this land.
NDN’s home base is in the Black Hills, in Lakota Country. The Lakota Nations have never accepted the money that they were offered for the Black Hills. The federal government acknowledged that the Black Hills were stolen from the Lakota illegally and have been offering the Lakotas a significant payment in exchange for that land, but they have never accepted, so we’re very involved in building a landback movement there.
Another way that we’re supporting this work is through a grant foundation. If you’re doing this work right now, we have a Community Self-Determination Grant open right now, but only for a month, so tell your people about this $100,000 a year, two-year grant opportunity. We also have a community action fund that is smaller in dollar value but that supports climate change protection and adaptation and land/water defense. We also have a regenerative business investment fund and a political arm that works in Washington and on other organizing.
So, we at NDN work to serve this movement in a lot of different ways. My new role there is exciting because I’m getting to use the experience from all those years of doing regenerative development work to now support people to learn about what land trusts are and how to use that tool. It’s all about supporting people with resources, building networks across our nations and sharing knowledge so they can step fully into this landback movement.
There are a lot of complicated issues involved in this work, sometimes even within reservations because the 1860 Allotment Act checkerboarded formerly communally-held land, allotting plots to each individual male household head, so new models have to be created to heal that. The Indian Land Tenure Foundation is helping people out on that front, and the San Xavier Community Farm down in Tohono O’odham territory did a lot of work to start a cooperative farm.
But there’s so much possibility, creativity and power in this movement. It’s really revolutionary for every single one of us, Indigenous or settler, wherever you come from.
KAWENNIIOSTA JOCK: Last fall, we were able to raise $874,000 to buy back ancestral lands in the Adirondacks. That’s where my Mohawk people came from, but they were forced out of their lands and put onto reservations four hours away, and our community got split up into seven communities throughout so-called Canada in both Ontario and Quebec, and also in NY State. Our reservations today mostly consist of cement sidewalks and houses really close together with only small spaces to grow food. Akwesasne is also home to one of the largest PCB dumps in North America. Our lands and waters are contaminated with PCBs, from a time decades ago when big Alcoa and General Motors plants just dumped all of their sludge into our waterways.
Today quite a few of our people are sick because of that history. There is a lot of cancer, and a number of babies are born with birth defects, all of those things, but I I was really fortunate to have met some really beautiful people who had started an organization with my father called the Waterfall Unity Alliance, and through that organization we were able to buy back a piece of our ancestral land that had been a Turtle Clan village, but that our people hadn’t occupied for 120 years, and I hope to move there with my kids.
It’s about four-and-a-half hours away from Akwesasne where I grew up. I was really fortunate that my parents raised me in my traditional ways. I am an alumnus of the Akwesasne Freedom School, and I have four of my children there now, and that’s keeping me in Akwesasne, because I don’t want to take my kids from ceremony, from our language, so we are creating our own school and a healing center and longhouse on the land we got back, and when that is ready, we will be able to fully move to that place, back in the mountains, back in our original homeland.
Landback isn’t just about getting our land back; it’s also about getting yourself back, so I’ve been on this journey of reconnecting with myself and with my ancestors. My grandmothers came from this land, and so I’ve been really guided by them. The land we reclaimed includes a 60-acre berry farm that’s been in operation for the last 50 years, but it’s not organic and the soil has been damaged. The land is barely hanging on, but me and my daughters have been rematriating that land, singing and doing ceremony on it and making offerings, burning tobacco. It’s all really hard work, but I know that I’m supposed to bring my people back home.
CARA: Could all of you share a few more of the beautiful experiences that you’ve had reinvigorating connections with ancestral lands. What happens when you get land back, and why is it important?
KAWENNIIOSTA: That contact with the land releases energy, and things start coming to you, including ancestors’ knowledge and teachings. It helps you remember where we come from.
CORRINA: I think that it’s important for our young people to say yes. That’s something I didn’t learn when I was a young person. And as a woman, I was fearful of saying yes, but learning to say yes has opened doors. And when we say yes to what our ancestors have asked us to do in this world, people come and cross our life paths and bring us unexpected miracles.
Those young people from Planting Justice who we didn’t know, offered us a quarter-acre of land. In 250 years, it was the first piece of land that we had gotten back. We have been homeless in our own homeland. I grew up in my own traditional territory, but none of us owned a home. We were the first ones “gentrified” out of our home territories, and that continues. Schools still teach that we are part of the past, so this is an ongoing genocide, a continuing attempt at an erasure of a people. But some of us were willing to say yes, and now hundreds of people are doing this work with me; and people who believe that these sacred sites are worth fighting for invite us to come and share our stories.
I was raised in my traditional territory, and I raised my children in our traditional territory, but it wasn’t until we got that piece of land back that I saw something different in my grandchildren’s eyes. They have a rootedness that is something that’s beyond magic. They understand that this is their place. They ask for their birthday parties to be at the arbor; they understand which flowers are growing there, and they’re picking up the language and creating their own songs.
We put ourselves out there as vessels for our ancestors, and now I watch my grandchildren thrive in their homelands. They know that they belong in a whole different way than the last five or six generations.
CARA: I’m from Southern California, from the Mojave Desert. Beth Rose Middleton, as was mentioned earlier, has done a lot of good work with the Native American Land Conservancy down there in the desert. Visiting sacred sites in our homeland is often a sad experience. There can be graffiti and broken beer bottles all over. It can feel as though the genocide worked: the people and places have been erased and the language is gone.
But they’re not gone. They’re just dormant. When we receive these lands back through whatever mechanisms people are moving through to be able to get these pockets of ancestral territories back, they, and we, come back to life. Those places need to hear the language. They need to hear the songs. If they do, they come alive, and not only in the landscape, but in the hearts of our children. And, actually, it’s one of those things that doesn’t just benefit Native peoples. Everybody that’s reckoning with their settler colonialism and feels the devastation themselves of what the results have been of taking Indigenous peoples’ caretaking ways from the land, a lot of those people also want to see these spaces re-indigenized.
So, I not only honor the people that are fighting to get land back and make sure these sites hear and feel their Native blood memory coming back to them, but it’s also really important for our settler colonial people that are reckoning with the privileges they’ve inherited to help in these efforts in different ways, though that doesn’t come without challenges. We’re still having to move through colonial constructs. I’m from a federally recognized tribe. Some of my sisters here on this panel are from non-federally recognized tribes, but even with federally recognized tribes, we do not own the land. Reservation lands do not belong to the tribes. They’re held in trusts by the federal government.
I had this epiphany about 20 years ago. I was meeting all these Indigenous People that I admired who were doing this to perpetuate culture, to bring orchards back, to bring language back, to bring all of the good things back, but none of them were tribal officials. They were all directors of nonprofits, grant-makers, so could you talk a little bit about the actual mechanisms you used to get land back. Was it through a nonprofit? And what were some of the key milestones, whether it be a gift from a non-native ally, or the organization of a nonprofit? Can each of you talk a little bit about a success story or a challenging story of how you were able to get land back?
KAWENNIIOSTA: We had a lot of support from different organizations. We had bridge loans. We had donations. We did fundraisers, unity concerts, and everything went through a non-profit organization. In the future, once everything starts going, we would like to put it back to the people and out of the organization so that it’s back to just being organic, just our homelands again, but we’ve been really grateful for everybody that supported us so far.
CORRINA: This whole thing of nonprofits is weird. When we were doing our original work as Indian People Organizing for Change (IPOC) and doing sacred sites protection work, it was not under a nonprofit. It was out of people’s pockets and good hearts, and people wanting to feed us and all of that kind of stuff, but when we started talking about a land trust, we had to figure out how to fit into this system that doesn’t recognize us as Indigenous People.
If you run a nonprofit, you’re on this treadmill, running and running and running. I was sitting during COVID at my kitchen table, unable to go to the bathroom for a number of hours because I had back-to-back Zoom meetings, and I was looking out at my backyard thinking “I did not start a land trust so that I could never get to the land, even to my backyard.”
And there are all these contradictions, things that are required by laws and regulations about nonprofits that don’t make sense when you’re dealing with Indigenous people. I want this work to pass down through the generations, so I’d like my children to work for the land trust, but according to conventional practices, that’s nepotism. But for whom am I building this if it’s not to bring the next generations with us? So, there’s a lot of weird stuff we have to dance around to figure out how to do this work effectively and to make the nonprofit model fit our needs as much as possible.
But, when land is involved, there are miracles every day. This last Tuesday we had a land day. We implemented a day a month during which everybody involved in the project, no matter what their job is, comes to the land to work that day. So, last Tuesday we went to one of the pieces of land, and we cleared four rows that we’re going to grow food in. We mulched it all back and turned the dirt over. It took us about an hour and a half, and then we were sitting there joking and eating food and sharing with each other, becoming in community, and that land begins to hear that laughter again. That’s where human beings are supposed to be.
The land feeds us emotionally, spiritually, physically, and mentally. Modern psychology is now saying the same things, but human beings have known that forever. During COVID, we got hundreds of people’s emails and phone calls wanting to come to the land because intrinsically, human beings know how healing being on the land is. Every time we’re able to bring people to the land, whenever we’re able to light a fire at the arbor, whenever we’re able to identify one of our traditional plants and actually baby it to go back to where it’s supposed to originally be, then we know that magic is happening. Any day on the land is a good day.
PENNELYS: I want to reflect what my sisters are saying. These tools, these nonprofits, these land trusts, whatever we’re operating with right now, these are temporary tools. Colonialism severs people’s relationship to land, so that a few can amass wealth and power. Landback is about healing by restoring those spiritual, emotional, mental and economic relationships. We’re trying to flip the tides of colonialism. Everywhere you can help people reconnect with land, you’re doing something incredibly powerful, especially if you are an Indigenous person connecting with your homeland. Those relationships are magic.
So, the tools we’re using now to reset those relationships are useful, but they are just temporary. When we have reinstituted our traditional agreements; when we have healed the hearts of our people so that we can live with our land-based governance practices again in community, accountability and health, then we can get rid of these tools.
CARA: When land is taken away from the first caretakers, the whole world is in trouble, and everyone can see the path of destruction our society has been on, but landback is a reaction to that loss of connection, that devastation, and that movement is happening and growing all over the place. But it comes with a lot of challenges because we’re having to find tools, mechanisms to be able to do it. Those of us who aren’t from federally recognized tribes have to do it through nonprofits. Sometimes the efforts can create factionalism in our communities. Sometimes people are confused about whom to give the land back to and whose territory is legitimate and whose isn’t.
But the big picture is that Landback can lead to healing that can take place across all cultures. Interculturally, this is the right thing to do. We are the original caretakers of the lands. We have not just knowledge that was passed down to us but inherent blood memory tied to the landscapes that we’re from. And, actually, you can re-indigenize any place. If you’re a Native person and you’re not in your homelands, you can still re-indigenize a place. Non-native people too. They can really attempt to decolonize their minds and decolonize their ways of being.
I’m going to close out this panel by asking each of my sisters how Native people and non-native people support your individual work.
KAWENNIIOSTA: You can support our project by going to WaterfallUnityAlliance.org. We have a GoFundMe page (gofundme.com/mohawkreturn), and you can read all about the story of how we began and how you can help us. We also have a crapload of berries that need to be picked, and you can come to the farm and help and visit and take a dip in the waterfall.
PENNELYS: I encourage all of us to reconnect—reconnect yourself to the diversity of your ancestors and to the land, because that is a revolutionary act and offers wisdom and power that will help guide everybody towards knowing how to build a world together. And if you are non-indigenous, find out whose land you’re on and figure out how to serve that to whatever your capacity is.
As far as NDN Collective goes, let folks know that we have resources. Let your local landback efforts know that NDN Collective has resources and can maybe provide support. And if you want to enter a learning network with other people that are working on getting landback, if you’re a Native person that’s working on that, get in touch. And if you want to support NDN Collective’s work buying back chunks of territory in the Black Hills and supporting the landback work in the heart of NDN Collective territory, check us out at NDNCollective.org.
CORRINA: We started an honorary tax, Shuumi. We ask people that are non-native that live, play or work in our territory, which is Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin, Solano, and parts of Napa, to pay into this Shuumi system. You can find out about it at SogoreaTeLandTrust.org. There’s a whole platform. You can plug in your numbers, and it’ll give you a suggested donation. And we actually live off of the donations that you all give us. If you live outside of the Bay Area, there’s a “Rematriate the Land” Fund that helps us purchase land and pay all the fees and taxes on that land that you can contribute to.
We are also still in a fight to protect the oldest shellmound in the Bay Area, and if you want to contribute to that struggle, go to Shellmound.org and donate there. We are still paying legal fees. It’s a beautiful website that talks about the history of the shellmound itself. I encourage you to go down to the West Berkeley shellmound. Please put a tie on the fence with a prayer, a message. Just know that those ancestors are still there, underneath that two acres of land that we’re trying to see and envision, opening up Strawberry Creek in our territory.
In general, get involved. Go out there and do something to help and protect the land, because all of this land is Indigenous land and we all need to live in reciprocity with one another.
Dr. Rupa Marya, a physician, activist, writer, mother, musician and composer, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-founder of theDo No Harm Coalition. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice, and she is co-author (with Raj Patel) of the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.
Dr. Marya also works to decolonize food and medicine in partnership with communities in Lakhota territory at the Mni Wiconi Health Circle and in Ohlone territory through the Deep Medicine Circle (DMC), which is dedicated to restoring societal and individual health degraded by capitalism and colonialism. A critical aspect of DMC’s work is reestablishing the place of indigenous peoples as leaders in their ancestral lands.
The following interview was conducted by Arty Mangan of Bioneers at the 38-acre DMC farm south of San Francisco.
ARTY MANGAN: What are you trying to accomplish on this land?
RUPA MARYA: Over the seasons and over the years we are looking at what happens to the soil when you give land back to Native people and you work together and blend techniques from contemporary agroecology with Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We are starting with annual crops, and then we will be rebuilding perennial food systems that were native to these regions. This is the first stage in what Ben Fahrer, DMC’s Director of Agroecology and Land Stewardship, considers a 20-year project of moving all the ecological engines on the land in that direction.
The first year, we did some keyline plowing and dug some swales. When the rains came, the fields of neighboring farms flooded, but in our fields, the water infiltrated the soil. We had groundwater recharge from all the water in the swales, and that allowed us to start planting our 100-fruit-tree orchard this year.
ARTY: Is rain your main water source?
RUPA: We have a water catchment off of a 6,000 square-foot roof that captures about 100,000 gallons a year on average.
ARTY: Do you have trouble with invasive plants?
RUPA: In the riparian area outside of the fenced agricultural zone, we’ve been removing the invasive plants to give room for the nettle to come back. There are amazing patches of nettle here. Some of these patches have been stewarded for a long time and can grow to about eight or nine feet tall. We will be using the stems for fiber to make rope. There are two different native varieties of nettles here side-by-side.
This riparian zone was all covered with invasive ivy and we’d been pulling it slowly, but during heavy rains this winter, the creek flooded and ripped it all out. Now we’re going to plant a California native basket garden here so that our Native friends can come in to harvest and process all the sedge and dogwood, and I regularly walk the creek to document the fish that are here.
ARTY: What aquatic species do you see?
RUPA: There’s mostly steelhead trout, and then some baby Coho salmon. I’d say hundreds of steelhead and maybe a handful of Coho. I still haven’t gotten good at distinguishing the fry, but when they’re juveniles I can tell them apart. I like to walk with my binoculars and just look at them; that’s been my favorite thing to do here.
ARTY: Many conventional farmers view wildlands outside the farm boundary as antagonistic. How do you see the wildlands interfacing with the farm?
RUPA: It’s been amazing to find red-legged frogs, an endangered species, in our peppers. Part of our work is extending the reach of the wild systems into the farm so that the ecology of the farm and the wild land ecology are consonant and harmonious. It’s been really beautiful to watch and survey who’s here and how they’re being impacted by our activity.
ARTY: How is the food that you grow distributed or marketed?
RUPA: The first field we put into production last year is about an acre-and-a-quarter and we gave away 32,000 pounds of food from it to community groups in San Francisco who were experiencing hunger. During the pandemic more political will to feed people experiencing hunger got activated, so we capitalized on that and moved forward a model that we call “Farming is Medicine,” and we’ve received good funding support to advance that model as a piece of public policy.
ARTY: It’s great that you got philanthropic funding to get the project going, but do you have a long-term plan for its economic sustainability?
RUPA: We need an alternate food system, one in which farmers are positioned as stewards of our health to take care of the earth and feed people, one that is not based on the profit motive, on the very capitalist structures that have caused the degeneration of the earth and our relationship to the web of life. I don’t think you can have a genuinely regenerative agriculture system that’s based in capitalism. I think it’s an oxymoron. It’s antithetical. To be truly regenerative, you have to have practices that honor both the earth and people. We need a system that doesn’t extract from either people or the earth, but our current system extracts from both. Even in industrial organic or regenerative agriculture, you’re seeing abusive labor practices, the exploitation of a labor force made vulnerable by our immigration system.
Ideally, the Deep Medicine Circle model of agriculture should be funded through a utility, in the same way we pay for our sewers, our electricity and the other things that we consider important for human life. We see the creation of a public food utility starting in a very local way and expanding out from there to provide income for all farmers, so they can have great livelihoods. All people working on land – farmers and farmworkers – should be honored for their labor with great salaries and benefits and support.
ARTY: How do you see this farm fitting into that vision in, say, twenty years?
RUPA: This farm is a seed. We’d like what we’re building here to help seed the futures for other groups to be able to do this kind of work and show how non-Native and Native people can live together and work on land in ways that sustain the health of the whole system. This system of agriculture would be supported through a food utility that captures dollars not only from food programs but also from health programs because you’d be advancing universal basic nutrition for everyone who lived in the urban environment through this peri-urban/urban relationship.
We also have a rooftop farm in Oakland, and we have opportunities to build out more rooftop farms and urban food system solutions that would also be supported by the food utility model because they’re providing ecological services in the urban environment as well as climate benefits from having a complex ecology in your neighborhood. These models benefit more than just the people who eat or grow the food, they benefit everybody, including the birds and the animals. We see being surrounded by wild ecology as part of the solution of what the future of city living looks like.
ARTY: An important part of your vision is being an ally with local Indigenous people and returning land back to Indigenous control. Who are the Indigenous folks you’re working with and how do they inform your vision?
RUPA: We have been in discussion with several different Ohlone groups. We decided to hire an Ohlone person, Charlene Eigen-Vasquez, who is the founder of the Confederation of Ohlone People. She’s a lawyer who specializes in tribal law and health law. She has also been involved in cultural work, building bridges between groups, and working as a peacemaker for many, many years. She is guiding how the transfer of this land going back to Native people would best be done, including who, or what entity, should be holding the land. These are the questions that she’s addressing among Native communities.
Photo By Ben Fahrer
Meanwhile, we’re working with our Indigenous partners on a two-acre field for medicine production and an 11-acre field where Charlene has some great ideas about how to reawaken our understanding that we’re on Ohlone land and that California Native people are survivors of genocide. We all have an obligation to support them in their healing so that they can lead the kinds of ecological work that needs to happen right now when we’re watching skies turn orange, whether it’s in New York or here in California, or we’re watching these deluges happen because we don’t know how to manage the land systems. No settler knows how to manage the land systems here, but California Native people have been in touch with this land for thousands of years and have understandings, that, even if they’ve been dormant, are still there culturally. Our work is to help support that reawakening.
There are folks we work with here who are Ohlone and others who are from other California Native communities. Sage LaPena, a Nomtipom Wintu ethnobotanist, is our Director of Indigenous Plant Medicine and leads all the traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) work happening on the land, including identifying all the plants and medicines already here. Sage is helping us imagine how to make these sites accessible and relevant to California Native people with the cultural practices that they want to bring back.
We’ve also been honored to have the presence of Tiffany Adams, who is a Chemehuevi tribal member from Lake Havasu and also of Konkow and Nisenan Maidu ancestry. She is an incredible artist and thinker.
Land-based projects take time. We say that we are embarking on a 252-year song cycle. 252 years before the elders asked us to come here, (Spanish explorer Gaspar de) Portola landed close by in 1769, ushering in an era of colonization and genocide, but 252 years later songs and ceremonies have started happening on this land again, and people started working together in a way that hadn’t been done ever before in this area. That’s what we’re embarking upon, and it’s challenging and hard. You realize why people don’t even try to do it because wounds are opened that can only be healed collectively, but it’s exciting and it’s beautiful.
ARTY: You say it’s hard, so could you share how you were able to move through the resistance? How did you get the difficult conversation going to initiate a collaboration?
RUPA: It’s not hard getting people to understand what dire straits we’re in as a species, especially people who are working close to earth and who are aware of the dynamics between people that can fracture us at a critical moment when we really need to come together. People like that are drawn into this work, and they show up in incredible strength, grace, beauty, kindness and generosity. We’ve been overwhelmingly blessed by elders who are stewarding this vision with us, and guiding and helping us know how to handle things when they get challenging, so that part has not been hard.
For me, as a non-Native person working to support returning land to Native people, there’s a lot of learning that’s happened and continues to happen, but what I realize is that no matter how hard it is, we’re all in it. There’s something much bigger than me or my lifetime. It’s like planting an oak tree. We planted baby oak trees. I will never see those trees in the fullness of their lifecycle, but they’ll be beautiful for my grandchildren, so when you start planting like that, when you start doing this kind of work, it’s about something that’s so much bigger than you or your ego or your feelings. It’s been a great lesson, and you get over yourself and you keep going. That’s what we’re doing.
ARTY: You’re walking along the creek; you’re slowing down enough to see the Coho and steelhead; you are learning to listen to the land. What are you hearing?
RUPA: I hear that the land is grateful for our presence and our work. I see the way, with just a little bit of interaction, the medicinal plants bounce right back if you remove even a little bit of the invasive plants or you create a little space. I’m getting a sense of the power and the vitality of this space. Most of this watershed is protected Douglas Fir and redwood forest. All the nutrient density comes down and deposits itself in the silt under these alders, and you get huge nettles because they’ve been fed from this entire beautiful watershed.
I see the creek rise with all the songs and prayers. I also feel the sadness of the people who lived here, who offered their medicine and got violence and land theft and genocide and erasure as a response. I feel there’s sadness and confusion here. Even as a non-Native person, I’m learning how to talk to and listen to the land, to be in conversation with it so that we can bring reciprocity back to our relationship to the land. These are all things that have brought me into greater consciousness of all the beings who are and have been here.
What I’ve been learning is that no matter how hard things get, we are living in a time where the seeds need to be kept safe, the seeds need to be adaptive, the water systems need to be reimagined, our relationships to one another need to be reimagined. If we can do that, we can get through this time.
ARTY: Talking about listening to the land and what the land is saying, as I was driving here, up over the Santa Cruz Mountains and down to the coast, I saw that after years of drought followed by 13 “atmospheric river” storms in less than 3 months—a historic deluge that caused mudslides, fallen trees and flooding—plants are again vibrant and vigorous after the much-needed rain. These extreme events can wreak havoc, but they also provide an opportunity. How do you work with this land to make it ready to receive and take advantage of that sort of opportunity?
RUPA: It was beautiful when it was deluging here. Ben was out there in the water with his rain gear on. Everyone else was hunkered down, but Ben said “I’ve got to go out there!” He had his hoe, and he was watching the water run on the land, and then he sat with me and described it. Being with him for the last 10 years of my life has been the most incredible education because I discovered that the way he sees this land is the way I see my patients. He touches the land and moves on the land the way I care for the people who I’m treating as a doctor. He’s doctoring the land. He’s helping to move things so that they can heal over time. He has the ability to have long-term vision, to think how perennial systems can move and shift and come back over 50, 100, 200 years, if we start doing this work now. That’s the kind of planning that most people don’t know how to do or even imagine. That’s been really beautiful to watch and consider how the land will be affected in 200 years by what we do today. That’s wild!
Alison Sant is a partner and co-founder of the Studio for Urban Projects, an interdisciplinary design collaborative based in San Francisco that works at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, art, and social activism. For more than 15 years, the Studio has focused on public programming, urban prototyping, and civic dialog – aiming to bring social justice and sustainability to the design of cities. Sant is the author of From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities (Island Press, 2022) a book that examines how American cities are mitigating and adapting to climate change while creating greater equity and livability. She has taught at the College of Environmental Design, University of California Berkeley, the California College of the Arts, Mills College, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
For decades, American cities have experimented with ways to remake themselves in response to climate change. These efforts, often driven by grassroots activism, offer valuable lessons for transforming the places we live. In From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities, design expert Alison Sant focuses on the unique ways in which US cities are working to mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating equitable and livable communities. She shows how, from the ground up, we are raising the bar to make cities places in which we don’t just survive, but where all people have the opportunity to thrive.
Purchase From the Ground up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Citieshere.
Part 1: Reclaim the Streets, Chapter 1: San Francisco, Places by People
In 2005, a San Francisco collective of artists and designers called Rebar ignited a global street intervention, which later became known as Park(ing) Day.
“We observed that 70% of the right-of-way was allocated to vehicles, while only 20% or 30% was for people on foot or bike,” said John Bela, one of Rebar’s founders. “That just seemed like an imbalance.”
The group decided to reclaim a small piece of the road. On a sunny weekday morning in November, Rebar members fed a downtown San Francisco parking meter and set up a temporary park with grass, a bench, and a young bay tree. There the park remained for two hours until the meter ran out. They rolled up the sod, packed away the bench and the tree, gave the spot a sweep, and left. “When people sat down on the bench and began having a conversation, we realized it was a success,” Bela recalled.
Rebar wasn’t the first to reclaim San Francisco streets for pedestrians. Artist Bonnie Sherk had introduced portable parks under freeway overpasses and alleyways in the 1970s. But in 2005, the idea took off. Flooded by requests from other cities, Rebar published an open-source how-to manual empowering others to create their own installations. Many people were eager to see cities change, and Park(ing) Day allowed them to take this process into their own hands. Park(ing) Day is now an annual open-source global event, a day when people take back parking spots to make spaces for people in hundreds of cities all over the world.
By 2009, cities across the United States were finding inventive ways to reclaim city streets with tactical experiments using quick, low-cost methods. These increasingly common practices became known as “tactical urbanism.” Street interventions were not just the creation of guerrilla artists and activist planners; they were the work of transportation agency directors and mayors.
The introduction of New York City’s plaza program, including closing Times Square to traffic, set a new bar for cities. Inspired by Park(ing) Day, the San Francisco Planning Department began an official program repurposing parking spaces into what they called parklets. By design, parklets are temporary microparks, permitted with one-year renewable permits; they usually occupy one to three curbside parking spaces.
Parklets often include seating areas, planters and greenery, bike racks, and café tables, but in contrast to more typical restaurant patio or sidewalk seating areas, parklets are public spaces. They are an extension of the sidewalk into the parking lane and offer a fast, inexpensive way to create much-needed open space on city streets.
Rebar strongly advocated for parklets to be public, and today each has a small sign indicating that seating and amenities are open to all. Parklets are constructed and maintained by residents and local businesses in public-private partnerships with the city’s Planning Department.
Robin Abad-Ocubillo, the director of Shared Spaces at San Francisco Planning, ran the parklet program for 10 years after his tenure at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Working in parks gave him an appreciation of their democratic influence. “Our shared open spaces are the venue and the vehicle for connecting us as individuals across class, race, and other demographic divisions. They cultivate civic engagement and our sense of stewardship,” he said.
These principles could be applied not only to San Francisco’s large parks, but to the small ones as well. Abad-Ocubillo and his colleagues envisioned the 25% of city land given up to roads as the perfect site for a new park system. Since the parklet program began, close to 80 parklets have been installed, turning more than 100 parking spaces green across the city and inspiring similar programs worldwide.
However, the biggest expansion of the program came during the COVID-19 pandemic when, as an emergency response, a version of parklets was initiated as the Shared Spaces program. Within one year, close to 2,000 applications were approved, transforming many of the city’s commercial corridors and supporting the operation of businesses during the pandemic.
Despite the open-space benefits of parklets, their design-heavy execution by upscale coffee shops and restaurants associated them early on with the forces of gentrification and displacement. They have been called “utopian window dressing on gentrifying development plans.”
San Francisco is one of the most expensive and challenging housing markets in the United States. Minimum-wage workers must work more than four full-time jobs to afford a two-bedroom unit in the city. The Mission District, which is home to at least 15 parklets, has become a symbol of these forces. With the city’s highest eviction rate, the neighborhood is steadily losing its long-term Latinx population and has the third highest rates of unhoused people in the city.
Bela, once a resident of the Mission, rejects this view.
“In the Mission, along the 24th Street corridor, they didn’t want parklets, as they saw them as vectors of gentrification,” he said. “However, gentrification and displacement are a bigger structural issue of systemic inequality that shouldn’t be conflated with access to safe sidewalks, public transit, and a quality public realm in that neighborhood. How many cycles of disinvestment are we going to allow before we address these systemic causes? It’s critical that any public space investment be distributed equitably throughout the city.”
As a planner, Abad-Ocubillo sought to guide the parklet program to invest in communities, not just commerce.
“We emphasized technical assistance and outreach to parts of the city that needed extra support because of our legacy of neighborhood disinvestment, including less well-provisioned park spaces,” he said. “We diversified the composition of parklet sponsors to include cultural institutions such as art galleries, youth development organizations, and educational institutions that could experiment with programming public space.”
Swissnex created the Event Machine parklet, which hosted film screenings, panel discussions, and workshops. A Mission District gallery used its parklet for rotating art exhibitions. A progressive science museum called the Exploratorium created Ciencia Pública, in collaboration with the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, and installed it outside the Buena Vista Horace Mann Community School as an outdoor lab for science classes.
San Francisco has even experimented with installing bathrooms in parking spots, such as the P Planter designed by Hyphae Design Laboratory, which uses plants as biofilters to treat urine and wastewater, aiming to solve the problem of public urination. The trial contributed to the Public Toilet Project master plan in the Tenderloin neighborhood.
It is not just parking spots that have been reclaimed in San Francisco, but entire streets. With growing recognition of the public appetite to create public spaces, city officials built upon the parklet program and other public space experiments to create the Places for People Program in 2016.
This inter-agency permitting framework aims to lower the barriers to participation for all the city’s communities. It integrates permitting processes for curbs, sidewalks, streets, and lots into one public space program called Groundplay. With the tagline “When imagination goes public,” the program intends to enable a fast-paced grassroots process that promotes resident initiatives to create and activate inventive public spaces on sidewalks, curbsides, roadways, crosswalks, and public parcels.
Jodie Medeiros, executive director of Walk San Francisco, said that “experiments like Park(ing) Day, parklets, and Groundplay have enabled us to do a lot more with city streets. These pilots go even a step further with car-free streets.” Now these tactical approaches are being used to retake roadways with Vision Zero quick-build projects deployed to help make San Franciscans safer from the threat of speeding cars.
In January 2020, San Francisco realized a long-envisioned goal of eliminating cars from 10 blocks of its central commercial corridor, Market Street. Improvements at intersections were installed to make the street safer for pedestrians and cyclists. Within the first two months, bike and scooter usage increased by 25%, and bus travel speeds went up an average of 6%.
When the pandemic hit, the city expanded car-free streets by deploying a 45-plus-mile network of slow streets, supporting walking and biking. In March 2021, Mayor London Breed announced legislation to transition Shared Spaces from an emergency response into a permanent program, helping to move San Francisco more aggressively toward the goal of making pedestrians safe.
Alison Sant is a partner and co-founder of the Studio for Urban Projects, an interdisciplinary design collaborative based in San Francisco that works at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, art, and social activism. For more than 15 years, the Studio has focused on public programming, urban prototyping, and civic dialog – aiming to bring social justice and sustainability to the design of cities. Sant is the author of From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities (Island Press, 2022) a book that examines how American cities are mitigating and adapting to climate change while creating greater equity and livability. She has taught at the College of Environmental Design, University of California Berkeley, the California College of the Arts, Mills College, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
For decades, American cities have experimented with ways to remake themselves in response to climate change. These efforts, often driven by grassroots activism, offer valuable lessons for transforming the places we live. In From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities, design expert Alison Sant focuses on the unique ways in which US cities are working to mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating equitable and livable communities. She shows how, from the ground up, we are raising the bar to make cities places in which we don’t just survive, but where all people have the opportunity to thrive.
Purchase From the Ground up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Citieshere.
Part 4: Adapt the Shoreline
“Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary.” (1) — Rachel Carson
Throughout the history of the United States, its coastlines have both nourished the growth of cities and devastated them. As John Gillis described in his book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, town planners “sought to outwit nature, bringing it into line” by engineering urban coastlines and fixing their boundaries. (2)
In 1849 and successive years after, the Swamp Land Act destroyed the nation’s tidal areas by transferring ownership of marshlands from the federal government to the states to make new land. (3)
These acts affected California, New York, and other states, incentivizing them to fill their wetlands as urban populations swelled. (4) This loss has made the task of adapting to climate change much greater, as natural buffers to storm surge have been vastly diminished.
Today, approximately ninety-five million Americans live near the nation’s coasts. (5) Long ago, relatively small coastal populations could readily adapt to rising tides by upping stakes and moving, but today millions are at risk from rising sea levels and severe storms. Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, and Superstorm Sandy, which hit New York in 2012, have caused unprecedented storm surges and flooding, costing far too many lives and inflicting billions of dollars of economic damages. (6)
The impacts of climate change disproportionately affect those with socioeconomic inequalities, including many people of color. (7) From the Black community condensed in Bayview–Hunters Point, among toxic industries and contamination burdens mobilized by future sea-level rise, to the Indigenous communities driven to live beyond the levee systems in the outer banks of coastal Louisiana, people of color have been geographically marginalized for generations—reinforcing the connection between socioeconomic and environmental vulnerability. These injustices have been allowed to persist, normalized in a country that has historically left systemic racism unchecked. As Kristin Baja, climate resilience officer for the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, explained, “This country is founded on the idea that White male landowners were superior to all other people. When we base our constitution on that mentality, it then permeates every level of government and every single institution that we put in place. As a collective humanity within this country, we have put certain people in harm’s way intentionally.” (8)
As the project of adapting shorelines moves forward, it is critical that solutions are found in these communities first, not only because of great need, but by a moral responsibility. In the San Francisco Bay Area (see chapter 10), policies are acknowledging environmental injustices and social inequities, regulating shoreline development to lessen the impact of climate change on vulnerable communities. (9)
San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department projects are prioritizing investments in “equity zones” to focus on communities that are “socioeconomically disadvantaged.” (10) New York City is reviving the polluted waters of the Gowanus Canal, restoring its native marine ecology while planning floodable green spaces in a neighborhood inundated by Superstorm Sandy (see chapter 11). And as land is lost along the Louisiana Coast, opportunities to “gain water” are creating resilient districts and new housing prototypes (see chapter 12). (11)
In both the near term and the far term, however, we will need to step back from the shorelines and away from the inevitable flooding caused by sea-level rise and storms. Experiments are underway to test financial and social tools for enabling the transition when communities relocate. Voluntary buyouts have been used to purchase flood-prone properties in communities of risk. However, these solutions can often leave populations in an uneven residential patchwork as some stay and some go, while housing values decline and necessary infrastructure is lost. Buyout prices often reflect the impact of recurring floods that have already degraded home values, making it difficult for residents to afford alternatives elsewhere. (12) With piecemeal solutions, the fabric of communities and the history of cultures can dissolve.
Remedies need to be proactive. As Mathew Sanders, former resilience policy and program administrator for the Louisiana Office of Community Development, described “Once a community has already experienced so many disaster events and the consequences of so many people moving away, the social fabric has been ripped in a way that it can’t be fully repaired. We should really be getting more involved at a much earlier stage.” (13) However, the majority of federal funds are reactive to climate impacts rather than proactive.(14) Hurricanes like Sandy and Katrina created poststorm funding that is helping New York and New Orleans plan for the future. But this funding was focused on recovery efforts. What about other communities that have not encountered severe storms yet but are bound to in the future? What can they do to build their capacity now before disaster strikes?
To plan ahead, future funding should be directed at making communities, not just infrastructure, resilient to the challenges ahead. Baja said, “With coastal resilience, we do a lot of hard engineering focusing on what we’re going to do to control water, rather than actually thinking about how we’re going to create community benefits and adaptive capacity building. In the end, this is the more important task. This idea of controlling water—we’ve proven it doesn’t work.” (15)
In San Francisco, creating shoreline resiliency is also creating resiliency for communities. Liz Ogbu, founder and principal of Studio O, has been working on a series of shoreline parks in Bayview–Hunters Point. “We are rethinking what it means to do community development, which isn’t just about creating a better engagement process, but understanding that it’s not just about the creation of physical things. We are looking at things like local hiring as part of the scope of the project or addressing issues of trauma and grief,” she said. “To support a community in the conversation about resilience and about their future, we have to break out of the silos of what we think it takes to develop projects.” (16)
Building the capacity of communities not only improves lives and creates civic agency, it helps restore collective strength to weather the storms ahead. Social infrastructure may be the most valuable tool we have in facing the effects of climate change. As Eric Klinenberg writes, “Engineered systems can be more or less responsive to the emerging climate, but history shows that they are never infallible. Breakdowns often occur for unanticipated reasons. Social infrastructure is always critical during and after disasters, but it’s in these moments that it can truly mean the difference between life and death.” (17)
Eventually, many of us will face difficult choices, whether from flooding, fires, or extreme heat. On the coasts, we need to live with water. Our shoreline communities will continue to flood from sea-level rise and increased storms. We cannot reverse the effects of our already warming planet, but we can decide how we want to live with the challenges ahead. Our resiliency will have much to do with how inevitable change is taken as an opportunity to address the injustices of the past and power communities to define their futures.
Faith Kearns is a scientist and science communication practitioner who focuses primarily on water, wildfire, and climate change in the western United States. Her work has been published in New Republic, On Being, Bay Nature, and more. She has been working in the science communication field for more than 25 years, starting with the Ecological Society of America and going on to serve as a AAAS Science and Policy Fellow at the US Department of State, manage a wildfire research and outreach center at the University of California, Berkeley, and bridge science and policy advocacy efforts at the Pew Charitable Trusts. She currently works with the California Institute for Water Resources. Faith holds an undergraduate environmental science degree from Northern Arizona University, and a doctorate in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley.
In Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, Faith has penned a succinct guide for navigating the human relationships critical to the success of practice-based science. Using interviews and personal anecdotes, as well as her own insights as a field scientist, Faith walks readers through the evolution of science communication and how emotional and high-stakes issues have shaped communication.
Purchase Getting to the Heart of Science Communicationhere.
Chapter 8: Equitable, Inclusive, and Just Science Communication
Until recently, science communication advice was seemingly agnostic as to who the practitioner was, although the implicit assumption has been largely white, male, with tenure at an elite institution. Simultaneously, many science communicators spoke to a mythological “general public,” in which everyone was lumped together. It was assumed the same strategies would work for all—practitioners and communities alike—and that factors such as race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and class did not affect the communication and engagement process, much less power and authority. Even today, discussions about the diverse people who are doing science communication work and why that matters are held at the edges of the field.1 While marginalized, these are hardly marginal matters. In fact, they are central because who creates and disseminates knowledge, including the languages they use,2 affects not only what is considered valid but also who influences the questions that are asked and benefits from resulting knowledge.
As a recent example, thirty-five female scientists wrote about working on the coronavirus and navigating patriarchy at the same time. “Neither epidemiology nor medicine are male-dominated fields, but women are quoted less often—sometimes not at all—in articles. What’s more, the lack of inclusion of leaders of color is striking and disenfranchising for minority women scientists of color, particularly as communities of color are being hit hardest by this epidemic.”3 Although these researchers and science communicators were speaking about COVID-19, the issues they raised are the same ones that appear over and over again in science communication practice.
Rebekah Fenton further explains how these kinds of gendered and racial dynamics affect her as a Black professional working in the midst of both the coronavirus pandemic and widespread protests in the wake of police brutality. “After the first week of the protests, I was in church. When my pastor started to talk about the current protests in the context of this very long struggle, I started to cry. That release was key for me, knowing I was going into a workweek where I’d be alongside other Black and brown medical students who serve predominantly Black and brown patients,” she said in an interview.4 “Systemic racism prevents us as doctors from promoting people’s health and well-being in a broad sense, beyond addressing disease. I hear a lot of doctors say, ‘Well I’m just going to take good care of my patients,’ in response to the protests, and leave it at that. But taking good care of your patients means acknowledging racism.”
To be sure, a failure to acknowledge the identities, knowledges, and lived experiences of diverse science communicators affects not just their careers but also the communities they work with. “We live in an era of abundant scientific information, yet access to information and to opportunities for substantive public engagement with the processes and outcomes of science are still inequitably distributed,” wrote the authors of a paper on inclusive science communication, led by Katherine Canfield, after the first national conference on inclusive science communication.5
Because broad discussions of inclusivity are relatively new in science communication, it is also a dynamic area of conversation where even the terminology is contested. It can be seen through any number of possible lenses: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) being one—with justice sometimes added to create the acronym JEDI—representation and belonging another. Positionality is yet another term that arose in geography as a way to acknowledge where one comes from and how they know what they know, giving a way to think about and work with power differentials, access, and gatekeeping. Discussions about antiracist practices are becoming more common and commonly debated as I write this text. To be clear, these are not interchangeable terms, and each has its own rich scholarship and practice. Interrogating and contesting their varied meanings is a form of negotiating viable and just science communication practices.
Before going further, for this chapter in particular, it is important for me to identify myself and the position that I am writing from. To restate a brief version of what I did in the preface, I am a cisgendered white woman with a doctoral degree and a non-tenure-track academic position. For some, these may seem like superfluous details, but I state them to indicate that these factors, and many more that I am unlikely ever to share widely or even recognize, inform my outlook on my science communication practice and affect whom I am able to connect with. In coming to understand this, I am grateful for the world-changing work being done by a brilliant group of practitioners with diverse experiences and expertise. Instead of layering my own necessarily limited point of view on top of the perspectives they have generously described, I am sharing their work and their words.
This is an invitation to science communicators to approach people as individuals and communities as unique with an eye toward reducing potential harms for all. The people and initiatives in this chapter demonstrate why relating—rather than theorizing—is vital to releasing the field from communicating in abstractions.
Developing Trusting Relationships
“I was invited to the Grand Canyon for the hundred-year anniversary of the park, but there was no acknowledgment that the land was there long before, that there were people there long before,” says Sergio Avila, a scientist and outdoors coordinator with the Sierra Club in the southwestern United States.
“Viewing humans apart from nature is a myth and a very European invention. There is a history of racism in the field of conservation that has resulted in scientists being comfortable talking about ‘prehuman’ time in places where humans have always been,” he adds. “As part of communicating science, we need to break the paradigm that environmentalism and conservation are separate from social justice.”
Born in Mexico City and raised in Zacatecas, Mexico, Avila says he is following in the path of his parents, both of whom are scientists, though he is taking a slight turn from their careers as professors. “I’ve had a lot of access, privilege, and comfort with learning and navigating academia.
As I started out, I could easily see myself on that traditional path to success—many publications, a big lab group. Instead, I worked with Indigenous people and found a different calling. I realized that for me, the path I was on was not going to give communities what they needed. They had immediate needs I could help with, but it would have to be in a different role.”
Avila was researching endangered jaguars along the border between the United States and Mexico. In addition to working with Indigenous peoples, he had to learn to engage with numerous people with distinct lived experiences. Simply finding jaguars and gaining access to their territories for data collection was difficult. To do that, he had to work with landowners and quickly saw that “there was no instruction for this part.”
“I had to explain my work to landowners and realized all the tools I had to do that were exclusionary,” Avila says. “Too often, scientists create language that is actually meant to exclude people. We build ourselves up as the experts. And then we’re supposed to ‘dumb down’ or simplify our language, which just leads to more feelings of superiority. Scientists walk into a place they don’t know at all, acting like they do know it all. In fact, it is very humbling to meet landowners who truly know a place in a way I never will.”
Avila says that unfortunately there are still a lot of bad research and communication practices that persist. “It makes the people we need to work with skeptical. And that’s hard because we scientists, especially people of color, have to do a lot of emotional labor.”
Emotional labor is the process of managing one’s own feelings and expressions to fulfill the requirements and expectations of a job, which is enforced by the dominant culture. This functions to keep others happy and is largely invisible, unrecognized, and unpaid, which results in a mental load or burden not carried by everyone, though it can also be explicitly taken up to help “share the load” as well.
“We scientists and science communicators don’t always see that we are asking communities to do more than their fair share of emotional labor too. It can lead to community burnout.” Science is a tool, but it can’t be used to exclude people, notes Avila. “The idea of ‘science literacy’ is not inclusive. We ignore so much—language, learning outside of classrooms,
eating meals together.”
Avila learned that efforts like shared time are crucial, but sometimes he had to learn the hard way. “I can be pretty funny and I tend to talk a lot, and while it can be useful sometimes, I’ve also been told that I need to tone it down at times. Those community interactions lay bare who
you are as a person, aside from the degrees and institutional affiliations.
“I’ve had to learn to listen more, to offer less ‘solutions’ and advice that nobody wants. You have to talk about things you have in common and see where things go from there. I have a lot of ranchers in my family, so I was able to start there to create some trust with ranchers whose land I was trying to access.”
Trust is also key for Avila:
In Mexico, there is virtually no public land, unlike in the United States, and so the dynamics when it comes to research access are also quite different. Ranchers and landowners on both sides of the border have their own community and talk a lot; therefore, they tend to view predators like jaguars in similar ways. Mexican landowners might fear their lands being taken away if they disclose there are jaguars, not necessarily seeing that in the United States many people are working on public lands with grazing allotments that have to be renewed. Developing trusting relationships, following through, is the only way to do this work.
What are the most effective wellbeing practices and supports for this time of upheaval and uncertainty? Community leaders and activists, especially those of us who have suffered othering and colonization, are reporting greater stress, grief, and mental health challenges. As current systems transform, collapse and shift, there is a great and growing need for radical artists, activators and healers to center collective wellbeing.
Bioneers: Why is Slowing Down so important for people to learn about right now?
Sonali Sangeeta Balajee: Every day, thelackof valuing, embodying, and really living into centering our collective wellbeing and spiritual health in our work for justice and liberation is having a tremendous negative impact on our lives, leading to greater stress, grief, and mental health challenges not just for ourselves, but for our families, communities, and our transformative efforts.
We are investing billions in market-based strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save the planet, while the communities on the frontlines of climate emergencies have wisdom and knowledge we need, even as they continue to bear the brunt of harm.
Reflecting on the following questions helps form the antidote necessary for inner and community transformation: How do we begin investing in communities, in ourselves, our health and well-being, How do we undo what we as a species have done through our capitalistic, oppressive systems and structures?
We must learn the skills, abilities, and practices, to stay present with each other, with the joy, the grief, and our noticings and realities around our health and wellbeing, here and now, and into the future. We must learn as whole psyche-mind-spirit-body-collective-political learning and engagement.
We are the earth, the earth is who we are, so we need to center the values and medicines we espouse and stand for to heal the Earth, activating and embodying principles of thriving life, wellbeing, and liberation, because the benefits of such are countless and vital. We can do so by both turning our gaze towards and embodying practices that are the antidotes to capitalism: consumption, anesthesizing, checking out, disembodying, and compartmentalizing.
Bioneers: How did your career in Slowing Down begin?
SSB: At an early age, I became committed to our spiritual traditions in my family, Hinduism and Buddhism. These traditions emphasize the practice of reflection and contemplation, which I started to learn to embody at the tender age of seven. These practices also supported my early experiences of chronic illness. My study of these ways of reflecting, slowing down, and finding balance continued through yoga and meditation through my early life into college, when I began teaching yoga. I’ve been learning about and practicing these ways of knowing and being since my time in college, anywhere from ancient philosophies to current sciences on the benefits of such through two current projects that center the medicines for our time (Our Bodhi Project and SSoMA).
Bioneers: What is one book that you find particularly fascinating about Slowing Down? Why?
SSB:When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron. This book has supported so many I know who do deep activism and frontline work around how to be still, awaken to our most beautiful inner natures, and find ease (not perfection) in every moment. I find this fascinating and such a compelling book on Slowing Down because she shares not only the practices, but the philosophies grounding the practices that help support them becoming more ingrained and sustained.
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