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.
“There’s nothing more fundamental than Earth itself. We and the Earth are the same: an amalgamation of that which came before. To stand in an open grave within a nature preserve, surrounded by nature, is to stand at a doorway between worlds: the world of what is and the world of what once was. It is to remember our connection to each of these worlds and to help one another as we move in and around and between them.” – John Christian Phifer, Larkspur Conservation
As more and more people consider their impact on the planet during their lives, a nascent movement is springing up to transform and, in some cases simply return to less harmful and toxic end-of-life practices, providing the opportunity to honor both the departed and the Earth. From green burials that prioritize natural decomposition and preserve ecosystems to emerging techniques such as human composting that transform our remains into fertile soil, innovators are exploring profound ways to reduce our ecological footprint.
Below, discover how leaders in this emerging field are reimagining an approach to death and embracing rituals that celebrate life without poisoning the air and soil.
Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.
Embracing Green Burial: Honoring the Earth in Our Final Farewell
In an era characterized by the depletion of our planet’s resources, green burial offers a compelling alternative to conventional funeral practices. Inspired by the age-old concept of returning to the Earth, this environmentally conscious approach aims to minimize harm and embrace the regenerative cycle of life. As the executive director of Larkspur Conservation, John Christian Phifer advocates for the integration of sustainable practices in the funeral industry, blending his extensive expertise as a licensed funeral director and embalmer with a profound understanding of the emotional and spiritual aspects of death and dying.
In this article, we delve into his transformative work and explore the profound impact of his efforts to usher in a more sustainable and mindful approach to our final farewell.
Architect Katrina Spade invented human composting after learning about the “mortality composting” practices used on some farms. She has worked tirelessly to bring the process to the world, first getting a human composting bill passed in Washington state, then founding Recompose, a Public Benefit Corporation based in Seattle and the world’s first human composting company. Recompose started accepting bodies for human composting in December 2020.
As we face so much accelerated and multi-faceted change, we are each called to serve what we love and want to protect from the deepest parts of our being.
Join Nina Simons and Deborah Eden Tull in exploring sacred activism and relational leadership by celebrating the learning that happens through your own lived experience and discoveries on the Bioneers Learning platform.
Suzanne Kelly: A Leader in the “Greening Death” Movement
Bioneers Senior Producer, J.P. Harpignies visited the “Natural Burial” section of a cemetery in Rhinebeck, NY, led by Suzanne Kelly, Ph.D., the cemetery’s administrator and a prominent figure in the green burial movement.
Suzanne, who is a scholar, farmer, and writer, authored the book Greening Death–Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth in 2015, exploring the philosophical and practical aspects of green burials in the United States. She played a crucial role in establishing the second municipally operated green burial ground in New York State, located in Rhinebeck.
I recently had the pleasure of being given a tour of the “Natural Burial” section of the town cemetery of the Hudson River Valley community of Rhinebeck, NY, by the cemetery’s administrator, Suzanne Kelly, Ph.D., an extraordinary woman who has been one of the nation’s most important thought leaders on “green burials.”
A scholar, farmer and writer, her 2015 book, Greening Death–Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth, traced the philosophical roots and practical underpinnings of the then burgeoning but now rapidly growing green burial movement in the U.S. Suzanne chaired the committee to form the 2nd municipally operated green burial ground in New York State, i.e., the site in Rhinebeck I toured with her, which opened in 2014. Kelly has been a recipient of the Green Burial Council’s Leadership Award, recognized for her “demonstrated foresight, innovation, and extraordinary commitment to the environment through sustainability and attainability in the area of human death care practices.”
One of the very cool things about Suzanne, besides her keen intelligence, gracious disposition and lively wit, is that she not only runs the town’s cemetery but also an organic farm and CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) operation, Green Owl Farm, not far from the cemetery, so she is not only helping “green” death but also feeding the living, keeping them healthy with vibrant, fresh, organic produce (which, I have been told by members of said CSA, is some of the absolute best in the region).
I visited the cemetery because I was considering purchasing a plot for myself (though, of course, I fervently hope it would be a reservation that would only require activation many years hence), and I got from Suzanne a sense of a deep commitment to the health of the land and to the sacredness of the site’s mission. I was profoundly impressed by her and left feeling hopeful that with visionaries of her ilk on the case, there is an excellent chance that a radical cultural shift in how our society deals with death will gain even more momentum in the years ahead.
In an era characterized by the depletion of our planet’s resources, green burial offers a compelling alternative to conventional funeral practices. Inspired by the age-old concept of returning to the Earth, this environmentally conscious approach aims to minimize harm and embrace the regenerative cycle of life. John Christian Phifer is at the forefront of this movement. His commitment to ecological preservation has paved the way for a more mindful approach to end-of-life rituals. As the executive director of Larkspur Conservation, Phifer advocates for the integration of sustainable practices in the funeral industry, blending his extensive expertise as a licensed funeral director and embalmer with a profound understanding of the emotional and spiritual aspects of death and dying.
By promoting green burial practices and advocating for personalized, holistic end-of-life experiences, Phifer empowers individuals and communities to cultivate a deeper connection with nature and create lasting legacies that honor both the departed and the Earth. In this article, we delve into the transformative work of John Christian Phifer and explore the profound impact of his efforts to usher in a more sustainable and mindful approach to our final farewell.
Following is an edited transcript of a presentation by John Christian Phifer.
John Christian Phifer
I’m kind of a storyteller, and I want to tell you a few stories today.
I grew up on a farm in Western Tennessee. I was a child of Mother Nature, and I was commonly found burying grasshoppers. I would wrap the grasshopper in a leaf and create a little grave. I told my parents in seventh grade that I thought I wanted to be a mortician.
My granddad died right after high school, and it really pulled my attention back to those roots of being a child, growing up on a farm in the country surrounded by nature, where I was so connected to the cycles of life. Nature was where I first learned of death.
Fast forward, and I had spent 15 years in the conventional funeral industry. I evolved into managing a large funeral home in Nashville. There was a cemetery there, and we did all kinds of funerals — big fancy ones and little bitty ones too. But I got to a point where I knew there had to be more that I could do.
So in 2012, I made a leap of faith. I wanted to find a more mindful funeral care option in our area and beyond. That option became Larkspur Conservation. Larkspur is Tennessee’s nature preserve for natural burial. It’s a protected conservation space that’s also a living memorial to those that we love. As a nonprofit organization, we steward and care for 800 acres in Tennessee. This is my 25th year caring for the dead. That doesn’t count the grasshoppers. I find myself going back to those roots and asking myself what Mother Nature would do.
There’s nothing more fundamental than Earth itself. We and the Earth are the same: an amalgamation of that which came before. To stand in an open grave within a nature preserve, surrounded by nature, is to stand at a doorway between worlds: the world of what is and the world of what once was. It is to remember our connection to each of these worlds and to help one another as we move in and around and between them.
We have a problem, particularly in the West. We don’t want to acknowledge both of these worlds. We don’t want to acknowledge the world of the dead, even though it’s all around us. We push it to the side because it’s icky, it’s scary. We’ve been taught not to talk about it at the dinner table. That makes it harder for us all when death does come, and it will. People, families, generally will end up spending much more than they intended to on things that they didn’t actually want, and they end up using products that harm the environment.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. occupies 1.9 billion acres of land. How are we using it? Or how are we forsaking it as people? How can we save more land and use it as a tool to curb climate change?
We use our land for cattle grazing, followed by forestry, and then followed by food production, generally to feed livestock. We lose about 1 million acres per year to urban sprawl.
Every year, conventional burials in the United States use about 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid. Embalming fluid is a formaldehyde-based chemical that, when it’s mixed in water, is used to treat our bodies to temporarily prohibit decomposition. Any extra goes into the water; it’s flushed into the sewer. For traditional burials, annually we use 20 million board feet of hardwoods, including rainforest woods; 1.6 million tons of concrete; and 64,000 tons of steel. Conventional cemeteries have essentially become landfills.
We can do better.
Cremation, which is now the most common option in America, requires enough gas to power a car about 550 miles. It also releases carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, as well as mercury from old-fashioned dental fillings.
Researchers at Columbia University have found that cremating a single body is equivalent to the average home’s monthly household energy consumption. If half of us take our earthly home and cremate it, think about the amount of energy that we are using. Cremation may be the fastest and cheapest way to go, but it’s also the most environmentally expensive. Finally, when ashes are improperly spread, the alkaline remains can eat away at plant roots and damage the pH of healthy soils.
By contrast, green or natural burial requires only a biodegradable casket or burial shroud. The grave is dug about 36 inches deep in the living layer of the soil, ideal for aerobic decomposition and returning all of our carbon nutrients to Mother Nature. It’s legal in every state and nearly everywhere around the world.
So I say to you again, we have a problem. Our refusal to acknowledge our part in the world of the dead has left us making decisions that we don’t like and that devastate our world. We need to slow down. We need to look around us and return to the wisdom of Mother Nature and our past.
For the past 25 years, there’s been a growing movement around natural and green burial: a burial using no chemicals, plastics, metals, or concretes. We don’t use embalming fluids. We don’t use vaults in this cemetery, and everything must be compostable.
Let me remind you, this is not a new-fangled idea. This is as old as humans. We’re not reinventing how to care for the dead. We’re using care of the dead to solve a climate issue and be more responsible and more engaged in protecting our environment, not only for ourselves and our communities, but for those generations that are going to come after us.
As a part of this green movement, there are all kinds of new things you can do to mitigate your environmental impact. But you need to remember, trying to create a new product or something that looks fancy with bells and whistles is getting away from the problem. It’s feeding into the problem, I should say. We need to focus not on what we can buy and make, and in the process, we need to slow down.
If we’re going to continue as a species on this planet, we have to find ways to create positive change. We have to do good. We have to find ways to protect the Earth and connect people with it. We have to learn to see death as commonplace and essential to life itself. The more we work to heal our relationship with death, the more we will heal our relationship with the environment.
That’s where conservation burial comes in. Conservation burial is just a fancy natural burial. If natural burial answers the question “What are we putting in the ground?” conservation burial answers the question “How?” Conservation burial takes the idea of natural burial a step further by adding a conservation easement and active land conservation efforts. It incorporates the ethos of stewardship to both land and people.
A conservation burial ground like Larkspur is a protected nature preserve where people can have a natural burial. It’s a place where kids can play in the woods, a family can have a picnic, people can go birding. These are all things that happen regularly at our nature preserve in Tennessee. All of this is made possible because of individuals and families who choose a more mindful end-of-life option.
We’ve all heard that cemeteries are a waste of space. I say that this is the kind of taking-up-space we want to do. It’s a statement of care and defiance – over my dead body. Over my dead body will you use more of this precious, precious Earth.
Conservation burial is not just a one-time gift to the planet. It’s a carbon sink that continually pulls carbon, as a breathing, living memorial, back into the soil. Talk about a return on investment or something to leave to your grandchildren.
Conservation burial has all the wonderful carbon-mitigating effects of a natural burial, but it does more. It creates shared green space. It can be a connection point for a community and habitat, for the flora and fauna of an ecosystem.
The magic, though, is in the people, rituals. We are all about rituals and creating space for families to come together, and when we do that, we enable these families to have an experience in an open green space that connects them to land in a way that they’ve never experienced before. We encourage people to get close and participate in these rituals. We don’t flip a switch for a casket to magically float into the ground, into a hole that you never see the bottom of. Instead, the person’s body is lowered by hand by the people who love them. They get to fill in the grave by hand with shovels. They do the thing that is hard because it is hard, and because of that, in that natural setting, there is transformation.
I described staring into an open grave as looking into a doorway between worlds. The act of burial is the moment a community comes together, and for a moment, looks through the door. In looking through, they see that humanity is not separate from the natural world after all. We’re simply a part of it, and we will inevitably return to it. There is no other method of caring for our dead that mitigates our carbon footprint, actively conserves and protects green space, and creates a cultural shift in our understanding of the human place in the world the way that conservation burial does.
A national thought leader on GMO issues and longtime healthy and sustainable food activist/advocate, Megan Westgate helped launch the Non-GMO Project in 2006. She lives with her family on an organic permaculture homestead in the Lake Whatcom watershed in Washington State and is co-author of The Non-GMO Cookbook. In this interview conducted by Arty Mangan of Bioneers, Megan talks about how, as a young activist, she was drawn to the issue of GMOs and how the Non- GMO Project is rigorously providing real information to consumers about what’s in their food.
ARTY MANGAN: I first heard you speak at the Eco Farm conference about 15 years ago, and I was really impressed with the Non-GMO Project. Around that time, I served on a Santa Cruz County subcommittee that ultimately resulted in the County Board of Supervisors banning the growing of GMOs in our county, so I was very excited to hear about your work to inform the public about GMOs in food products because then, and even today, the labeling regulations are woefully inadequate in informing people if a food product contains GMOs. What inspired you to do this work? How did you conceive of the idea of testing for GMOs?
MEGAN WESTGATE: In the early 2000s, I had a handful of experiences that exposed me to the topic of biotechnology and GMOS at a time when it was not a very public conversation. Some of those touchpoints came through work I was doing as a student activist. I had the opportunity to go to a Ruckus Society activist training camp on biotechnology. They were preparing for a big march in Boston that summer, and the GMO issue was just starting to heat up.
As soon as I heard about this idea of manipulating the genes of our food in a laboratory and then releasing it into the wild untested, I became very concerned and realized how important it would be to make sure that we protected our food supply and our living systems from these experiments.
A few years later, I was working at the Food Conspiracy Co-op in Tucson, Arizona, and I heard about an initiative from a retailer in Berkeley and another one in Toronto to work on labeling GMO food. I had seen firsthand in our food co-op that people were coming into the store looking for foods that were non-GMO, and there wasn’t a clear way to tell. Meanwhile, the application of genetic engineering in the core commodity crops, such as corn and soy, was increasing exponentially. Upwards of 80 to 90 percent of those commodity crops were being genetically engineered and those ingredients were being used in so many packaged foods, and no one really knew what was going on.
So, this idea emerged that we could create a standard and a certification system to help the public know which products were non-GMO. I still feel that the fact that this is necessary is pretty ludicrous. The lack of application of the scientific method to the whole process of releasing GMOs into our food supply and into the world is deeply troubling to me; the lack of oversight of the government is concerning. But, on the flip side, I am deeply encouraged by how we, through grassroots activism and public will, have been able to protect the non-GMO food supply in this country despite the corporate money behind developing GMOs and despite of the lack of government oversight. So far, we have been able to protect the non-GMO food supply, and people in North America can now go into a grocery store and easily find non-GMO options.
ARTY: The FDA website claims that extensive research shows that GMOs are just as safe and as healthful as their non-GMO counterparts. What’s the process for a new GMO food to be approved?
MEGAN: There’s almost no regulatory process in place to approve GMOs. The exception to that is something called the Plant Protection Act. Because of the way that traditional transgenic GMOs are developed, they are considered a plant pest because some of them contain genes from Bacillus thuringiensis [a soil bacteria that is a parasite to certain plant pests]andhave been engineered to produce insecticide in every cell of the plant.
But the biotech company that produces those GMOs goes through a simple process to show that they’re not a plant pest, and even the ones that probably are still get approved. And that’s it. There is no regulatory process to assess whether they are safe and healthy for people to eat or what their long-term impact on the environment might be. Is this new genetically modified organism going to cause problems for the water supply or soil health? No one knows, because no one is obliged to do that research.
The lack of any application of a genuine scientific process is deeply concerning to me. That process should start with observation and then move into inquiry. None of that has been applied to look at what the impact of releasing a slew of genetically engineered organisms on the living systems of planet Earth, including human health, might be.
ARTY: How often does the FDA reject a new GMO product?
MEGAN: I’m not aware of that happening. And even more concerning is the way the technology is evolving: a lot of genetic engineering is now being applied to things being produced not for crops in the field but in vats inside of warehouses, and those have even less, if any, oversight. Techniques such as gene editing, CRISPR and Synthetic Biology have just about zero regulatory process, so there isn’t even any mechanism for them to be rejected.
ARTY: Michael Hansen, Ph.D., Senior Scientist at Consumer Reports, prior to the Impossible Burger being released, studied how Impossible Burger Inc. used CRISPR to develop the novel protein Leghemoglobin, a molecule that mimics the flavor of beef blood. At a 2016 Eco Farm Conference, Hansen said that the data showed there were unanticipated mutations throughout the genetic sequence of the novel protein. He felt that because of the uncertainties of the potential health risks of those mutations, that there was no way the FDA could rationalize approving the product and yet they did. How are new biotechnologies entering the food system and what are some of the consequences?
MEGAN: One of the things that’s most concerning to me about the new applications of biotechnology is that many of the developers are branding and positioning these products as non-GMO, which is completely inaccurate and unscientific. They’re doing that on the basis of them not being transgenic, meaning that they haven’t combined DNA from multiple different species, which is how GMOs have traditionally been made, and the majority of GMOs coming into the food supply are still coming through transgenic crops. When we started the Non-GMO Project, there were a handful of those crops, and it was relatively easy to track the development of new products because they were being made by just a handful of agrochemical companies, Monsanto being the most widely known.
But Biotechnology is evolving; it’s becoming less expensive and more accessible, and there is a ton of venture capital flowing into it. As a consequence of those combined factors, The Non-GMO Project needs a team of three full-time researchers just to keep track of the new products being developed, and we’re tracking more than 500 biotech companies now, up from just a handful 10 years ago.
These companies recognize that, overall, the majority of consumers in North America don’t want to eat GMOs, so they’re positioning these products as non-GMO, but that’s scientifically inaccurate because they’re still been developed using biotechnology. There is a well-established international definition for what biotechnology is. It’s the definition that we use in our standard. It’s the same definition that’s used by the UN. It’s used in the Cartagena Protocol. All of these new products are incontrovertibly produced using biotechnology, i.e., using in-vitro nucleic acid techniques to alter DNA. It is different than traditional breeding out in a field; it’s manipulating DNA in a laboratory, and whether or not the resulting GMO is transgenic [taking a gene from one species and inserting it into another species], it’s still biotechnology, and anything produced with these techniques is a GMO.
The concern about working in this way, as Michael Hansen has spoken to, is that we’re very far from being able to understand and control DNA sufficiently to make changes like that in our environment and bodies and understand the long-term impact to the entire web of life, so the whole premise is faulty.
Bioneers influenced me in my early years coming out of college and doing activism by helping me be grounded in the sense that we have to look at the interconnectedness of living systems. We have to look at the whole. We can’t only break things down to their constituent parts and think that gives us a full understanding. That’s the essence of colonialist thinking that has been imposed on human beings but also on nature with technologies such as biotechnology and the production of GMOs. It’s hubris to think that we can reduce things in an incredibly complex system into their parts and manipulate those parts and gain full control of the outcome without unintended consequences. We know that that’s absolutely not true. We know that at a scientific level, and many of us also sense it on an intuitive level, that it’s disrespectful and risky to go into living systems and manipulate them in extractive ways.
ARTY: With all the risks and uncertainties you just talked about, let’s discuss the current GMO labeling standard. What is the reality of the national GMO labeling law. Is it really serving consumers and giving them proper information?
MEGAN: The only reason we have any sort of federal GMO labeling in the United States, after many years of there being no movement on it, is because grassroots campaigns built up momentum at a state level for GMO labeling laws. At the time that the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard was passed, there were 54 GMO labeling laws on ballots in 26 states, and in Connecticut, Maine and Vermont labeling laws had successfully been passed. One of the key provisions of the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard was to supersede all of those state laws and roll them back and take away the power they had to actually give eaters/shoppers in those states informed choice about what they were eating. So, the only reason that there was momentum at a federal level is because the biotech industry felt threatened by the transparency that state labeling laws required.
The national law, which supersedes those state labeling laws, provides almost no information to consumers about whether or not there are GMOs in a product.
And perhaps just as bad is the language used to disclose that the product contains GMOs, the word they can use is “bioengineered.” We did a lot of research, as did other groups such as the Center for Food Safety, for example, to find out if “bioengineered” is a term most Americans recognize as having anything to do with GMOs, and the answer is no. Bioengineered has typically been used in the medical space, so they clearly chose language that would obfuscate the truth.
And beyond all of that, only a very narrow subsection of products requires labels. Labels of any kind are only required for products that have testable GMO DNA intact, and for the most part, the testing methods used to identify GMOs at a molecular level are not able to do it accurately once a product has been heavily processed, which, of course, is the case for most packaged foods. That’s why to meet the Non-GMO Project standard we require that testing be done at a point in the supply chain where there is still testable DNA intact.
Another huge loophole with this law is that the majority of GMOs grown in this country are grown for animal feed. For example, the majority of corn, one of the biggest agricultural crops, goes to animal feed and ethanol. That’s why with the Non-GMO Project standard we require testing of animal feed, but that’s completely out of the scope of the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard. So really, the truth is that the national standard does not provide any meaningful insight to consumers as to whether or not a product contains GMOs.
The Non-GMO Project has continued to be really meaningful for shoppers because people know that when they see the Non-GMO Project logo (a butterfly) that real, rigorous testing has been done, that we’ve looked to see if new GMO techniques – such as CRISPR, Synthetic Biology, gene editing, etc. – have been used (because those too are also completely excluded from the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard).
ARTY: Enforcement is complaint driven, and if my understanding is correct, the only consequence of violating the regulation is that the FDA will post the violation on their website.
MEGAN: Yes, that’s correct. In the final version of the rule that passed, there were no financial penalties for violation, so basically there are no enforcement provisions. That’s why I say when you look at how meaningless the regulation is overall and at the timing of its passage, it’s crystal clear that its only purpose was to block the meaningful legislation that was getting put into place in certain states.
ARTY: Essentially the Non-GMO Project is taking on the responsibility that the FDA is defaulting on.
MEGAN: It is. And that’s really why we started the Project, because even at the time that the project formed, there had already been years of efforts to get the federal government to do something. In the EU, GMOs have to be labeled. In many countries around the world, governments ensure that citizens can easily see which products have been produced using biotechnology. There were efforts in the United States to get those same protections in place for our citizens, and it’s because they weren’t going anywhere that we started the Non-GMO Project, and where things ultimately landed with the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard confirmed that our best bet was to do this ourseleves, as a consumer movement, so we could define for ourselves what we are concerned about and what information we want to know about each product we consume.
ARTY: Occasionally my wife will come home with a product that’s labeled “GMO free.” And I’ll wonder: “What does that mean? What is their standard?” But when I buy something that’s certified by the Non-GMO Project, I know what that means. What distinguishes the Non-GMO Project’s certification from other labels that make a GMO free claim?
MEGAN: We are a nonprofit organization, and we have the most rigorous and the only third-party standard for GMO avoidance. What that means is we have a standard that’s been developed according to international best practices, and we have public comment periods. There’s a high value placed on transparency and also opportunities to participate in our standard revision processes.
We also have separation of function. We work with accredited testing labs. We work with technical administrators. Everyone has a separate role, and our function as a nonprofit is in setting the standards. it is not the Non-GMO Project itself that directly evaluates products. We contract that out to top notch accredited labs, i.e., an independent, highly respected third party. We set standards, we oversee the implementation of the standards; but there are outside certification experts who do product reviews and assess whether or not they meet our standards. And all the information about who our labs and our technical administrators are, what the requirements are for all of them, and what our standards consist of is all publicly available on our website. There’s nothing like that level of transparency with any other non-GMO certification claims out there.
ARTY: For human food and supplements you have an action threshold for high-risk inputs of less than 1% GMOs. How do you establish that threshold? And what is your response to people who criticize that for not being 100% GMO free?
MEGAN: That threshold is based on what’s in the European Union standard. In the EU, if something is more than .9% GMO, it has to labeled. And because we didn’t have that provision in place at a regulatory level in the U.S., we did the inverse of that and said, well, okay, anything below .9% is our standard.
There’s also a pragmatic element to it. By the time the Non-GMO Project started in 2007, the majority of corn, soy, canola and cotton was already genetically engineered. It had already been released into the environment. Corn is really promiscuous. Its pollen can travel large distances. For someone who is concerned about or doesn’t understand why it’s not zero, picture an organic farmer who’s growing organic corn, and a little bit of pollen with GMOs blows in from their neighbor’s fields. We believe that there should be testing and that GMOs need to be kept under a strict limit, but at the same time, it would be almost impossible, especially with corn, to have a zero limit. You wouldn’t really any food available in the United States that could meet that standard, just because of how widely GMOs are produced.
ARTY: 99.1 % pure is a pretty high standard in this dirty world we live in.
MEGAN: We have the most rigorous standard that anyone has, and it’s not an easy standard to meet. Companies, farmers and processors have done a tremendous amount of work to build a non-GMO supply chain to respond to eater demand. One of the things that inspires me the most, even 20 years into doing this work, is just seeing the power that eaters have to change the way our food is grown and made, and really, from the simple demand of shoppers in grocery stores saying they wanted non-GMO food, it led to this massive shift. We’re getting to 99.1% non-GMO. The work to do that throughout the entire supply chain has been enormous, and it’s happened because of the eater demand. I find that deeply inspiring. It helps me imagine what else can we could do to change our food system simply by being informed and educated, and asking questions.
ARTY: Are you able to detect the use of CRISPR and other newer technologies in your testing?
MEGAN: There are scientists working on developing tests for them, and there are early results showing that gene-edited products can be detected with a fair amount of confidence. The challenge is getting to affordable, commercially viable testing for all of them.
So right now, for the new techniques, we require affidavits, which is why we have three full-time researchers tracking everything. As far as I know, we’re the only organization in the world maintaining this database of all of the developers and all of the products, so that we know where to look and where to ask questions. Without that information and without the testing, it’s pretty much impossible to control for these new GMOs, especially because the developers of these products are positioning them as non-GMO, and that’s happening throughout the supply chain and food industry, so brands, when they’re procuring ingredients, are getting things that are being sold to them that as non-GMO that in fact have been developed using biotechnology, such as synthetic biology products. It takes a lot of work for us in our certification program to do the research and make sure that we’re asking questions where they need to be asked, and getting the paperwork in place that is necessary to have confidence about the non-GMO status.
ARTY: You have taken on some fairly powerful entities. You’re doing the job that the FDA should be doing. I’m sure the biotech industry is not a big fan of the Non-GMO Project. Have you gotten pushback or pressure from any of those entities?
MEGAN: Not directly. I do think that it’s partly because of the approach that we’ve taken. While I certainly have serious concerns and objections and a sense of what is right that is different than what’s happening, we’ve been committed to not being in dualistic mindset of right and wrong and engaging with a fighting energy that often happens in activism, and particularly in non-GMO activism. We’ve made it less about attacking Monsanto and more about affirming that we have a right to know what’s in our food.
People have a right to safe, healthy food. People have a right to feel good about what they’re putting into their bodies and feeding their children. That approach has diffused some of the pushback that might otherwise have been there, because that’s a pretty hard thing to argue with. I believe that increasingly, even more so than when the project started, we’re at a time in human history on planet Earth where divisiveness does not serve us. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to stand stronger than ever for the things we believe and to speak the truth as we see it, but it also means that we can’t afford to be putting our energy into the drama of fighting. We need to put our energy into creating the reality to support the health of living systems on Earth.
ARTY: How do you assess the impact of the Non-GMO Project on the market?
MEGAN: For me, one of the main things I look at is just how many verified products we have, which at this point is more than 120,000 SKUs [the unique identifying number for each product] that are in the marketplace that have the butterfly on them, and that’s mind-blowing to me, because when we started the project, it really seemed like a long shot. There were entrenched corporate interests that were influencing regulations, that were influencing development, that were influencing public opinion through marketing dollars, and I wasn’t sure that we would ever get our butterfly onto a single product.
I remember in the first few years when we set our goal of getting 10,000 products verified, it seemed so audacious – but it’s good to have audacious goals. Now, all over North America, people have access to non-GMO choices and to clear information that helps them make those choices.
People have the power to change the way food is grown and made; we have the power to choose new stories. We all have the gift of imagination that can create something new. Food is such an incredible nodal point in the health of people and of living systems on the Earth. And non-GMO is really just one way of doing that.
The Non-GMO Project is also starting to look at nutrient density and the connection between that and soil health and regenerative agriculture practices. And I’m really excited about what, as eaters, we can continue to dream together for a new future where food is actually nourishing all life.
Design thinking is a process of creative problem-solving that is used to bring transformative change to people’s wellbeing or career, or to their chosen cause. In this Q&A with Marilyn Cornelius, we explore the importance of design thinking and how she began her career in the subject. Sign up for the Design Thinking Bioneers Learning course to learn more about how leaders can make innovation a habit.
Marilyn Cornelius
Bioneers: Why is Design Thinking so important for people to learn about right now?
Marilyn Cornelius: It’s a problem-solving process that builds in creativity so anyone can use it for any problem, particularly complex or “wicked” problems where conventional thinking often fails.
Bioneers: How did your career in Design Thinking begin?
MC: At Stanford University where I took a class in design thinking, then another, and then co-founded a program called Research in Design and began co-facilitating workshops for graduate students, post-doctoral scholars and faculty.
Bioneers: What is one thing that you find particularly fascinating about DesignThinking?
MC: I love the Ideation and Prototyping phases of design thinking because you can come up with tons of ideas and build a 3-D solution in less than 30 minutes total.
Bioneers: Tell us one great reason why people reading this should sign up for your course.
MC: It’s going to be a refreshing journey filled with fun, inventiveness, and integration of methods to help you learn and immediately apply tools to the challenges you’re facing right now.
Sacred activism speaks to what inspires, guides and resources us to serve life, while integrating deep listening, collaboration and restoration. In this Q&A with Nina Simons and Deborah Eden Tull, we explore the importance of sacred activism and how they found themselves fascinated by the subject. Sign up for their Sacred Activism Bioneers Learning course to learn more about sacred activism and relational leadership.
Bioneers: Why is Sacred Activism so important for people to learn about right now?
Nina Simons
Nina Simons: We’ve received a culturally entrained bias that inclines us to falsely segregate our relationships with the Sacred and Activism, to our detriment. Now that we’ve entered a time of convergent crises — both ecological and social — that asks so much of us, reconnecting Activism with the Sacred can offer us regenerative energy for the long haul.
Deborah Eden Tull
Deborah Eden Tull: This is an age of collective liminality and change. We face the unknown together, as narratives, stories, assumptions, limiting beliefs, and reliance on systems that human consciousness has invested in for a long time come into question. Many people are feeling powerless today. Sacred activism invites us to embrace a more vast perspective about who we are and how we can respond wholeheartedly to the times we face.
Sacred activism invites us beyond the limiting confines of ego to embrace our partnership with nature, the more than human realm, and the invisible realm… as we work on behalf of our collective. It’s not just what we do but how we do it. Sacred activism begins from the ground of deep embodied listening — listening within, to one another, to mother earth, and to the world at large.
Bioneers:How did your career in Sacred Activism begin?
NS: Every major career decision in my life — I see now in retrospect — has been motivated by my sense of the Sacred, or by a sense of feeling called to serve a larger purpose that seems fundamentally (but not religiously) spiritual in nature, so it’s been a lifelong practice that I’ve only recently begun to recognize as such.
DET: I come from a family of activists, visionaries, and agents of change. As a young person whose heart was broken by the polycrises inherited by my generation, I had, at the same time, the privilege of being raised in a family mindset dedicated to service. I witnessed both the power of people dedicated to change, as well as the potential for burnout and self-righteousness. As a Buddhist dharma teacher, my path has been about bridging personal and collective awakening, and helping to nurture a movement of regenerative leadership. In other words, how we treat ourselves and how we treat one another and the earth are the same.
My passion is bridging the personal, interpersonal, transpersonal, ecological, societal, mystical, global effects of engaged meditation. Over the years, I’ve helped meditators awaken their activism and have helped activists embody mindfulness. We are more powerful change agents when we recognize interbeing, our connection with source, as the ground of all conscious response.
Bioneers: What is one recent learning or piece of inspiration that you find particularly fascinating?
NS: Central to my own worldview is that unless we can alter our culture, we won’t access the power needed to alter our collective course. I believe that combining the Sacred with our definition of Activism can potentize all of our efforts in those directions, and also help to address our current tendency for leaders to over extend their efforts, and burn out.
DET: Right now I’m drawing great inspiration from the teachings of Harriet Tubman, as celebrated in Spring Washam’s new book about Harriet Tubman’s life. In an age of profound adversity, Harriet modeled spiritual partnership with nature and immeasurable courage, to save hundreds of lives through the Underground Railroad. There are lessons to be learned. The challenges we face today require that we move beyond the shortsightedness and reactivity of the human ego. It is vital that we move beyond anthropocentrism and egocentrism and tap into the inter-being that gives us access to skillful and collective response. It is vital that we address the polycrises of our times with a deeper, more embodied, imaginative, and interconnected awareness.
Bioneers: Tell us one great reason why people reading this should sign up for your course?
NS: Our Sacred Activism course will open up new pathways and frameworks that can help you to tend to your own nervous system’s equilibrium, to regenerate your sense of commitment to effectively influencing change, and to cultivate a sense of balance and joy within yourself, even while facing the challenges and difficulties that we face.
DET: This course is not about sitting back and receiving more information from the “experts.” This course is not an intellectual or heady training about activism. This series invites your participation in an experiential journey, a heart-based community, and an emergent conversation that may be one of the most important conversations of our times. These are divisive times, and we reclaim shared power through the relational field. We hope that you will join us, with the intention of both strengthening and sharing the unique gifts and medicine that are yours to share in response to the crises we face together as a species.
During times of great division, we can easily forget that we are all intricately connected. Can we find a true sense of belonging when we are disconnected from each other and the planet? We must make a conscious effort to lean into connection and community. Only then will we find a sense of belonging and achieve the harmony necessary to solve the issues our world is facing, together.
This week, we’re sharing three presentations about belonging from Yuria Celidwen, john a. powell, and Angela Glover Blackwell.
Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.
Yuria Celidwen – The “Ethics of Belonging” of Indigenous Traditions
“In community we pause, we open, we nourish, and we become.”
Yuria Celidwen is of Nahua and Maya descent from the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, born into a family lineage of mystics, healers, and poets. Her scholarship centers on Indigenous forms of contemplation and has evolved into a broader perspective she calls the “ethics of belonging.” It has become evident that when we pay attention to the world around us, all we hear is urgency. It is time for community reflection. Yuria shares two core guiding principles from her scholarship, “Kin Relationality” and “Ecological Belonging.” She explains how these concepts can help us access an ever-expansive unfolding of a path of meaning and participation rooted in honoring Life.
john a. powell – Belonging without Othering: The Story of our Future
Western culture has for the last several centuries built a society founded on three strong separations: our separation from ourselves, our separation from the other (or the person we call the other), and our separation from the Earth. But, according to john a. powell, one of our nation’s long-time leading experts on civil rights, structural racism, poverty, and democracy, Director of the groundbreaking Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, the reality is that we’re not separate. We’re deeply connected to each other. Our challenge is that in order to emerge from the existential crises we face and to birth a far more humane civilization, we now need to look deeply at ourselves and our social structures to overcome the separations that have been inculcated into us for so long and rediscover our fundamental connection to each other and the entire web of life.
Creating a World Where Everyone Belongs: From a Change of Heart to System Change
In this moment of radical transformation, shifting the societal pronoun from “me, me, me” to “we” may be the single most transformational pivot we can make in order for anything else to work. Our destiny is ultimately collective. How can we overcome corrosive divisions and separations that are tearing us apart and create a world where everyone belongs?
In this program, we dip into a deep conversation on this topic between Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell, two long-time friends and leaders in a quest toward building a multicultural democracy.
Mark your calendars for March 28-30, 2024! Bioneers is coming back to Berkeley for our 35th annual conference. More information and early registration access is coming soon.
WILD HOPE is a new series of short films that highlights some intrepid change-makers who are restoring our wild places with localized activism, sparking new hope for the future of our planet.
Labor organizer and Founder of One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman, takes us inside one of the fiercest labor struggles to challenge a mighty oligarchy: The food, beverage and restaurant industry. Workers are walking off the job and refusing historically low wages. She says if “we the people” stand with workers as they face this powerful lobby, they can win.
Find out more about One Fair Wage’s latest campaign 25 by 250 which launched in 2022, “to raise wages and end subminimum wages in 25 states by the United States’ 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. Today, and each year, we’re declaring independence from so many things including: Poverty, racism, homophobia, sexism, sexual harassment, income inequality, legacies of slavery, and having to rely on tips and the whims of customers to survive in America.” We need #OneFairWage now. #OFW25x250
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): In this program, the labor organizer and Founder of One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman, takes us inside one of the fiercest labor struggles to challenge a mighty oligarchy: The food, beverage and restaurant industry. She poses this question: If you work full-time, shouldn’t you be able to have enough money to feed your children, pay the rent and cover your basic costs?
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Take This Job and Shove It: The Great Resignation or The Great Revolt?” with Saru Jayaraman.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933 in the freefall of the Great Depression, he faced off against a powerful oligarchy. The Industrial Revolution had created vast new American fortunes that organized themselves into bloated monopolistic cartels and waged war against workers.
The result was oligarchy: the concentration of political power of, by and for the wealthy.
When their runaway greed crashed the economy in 1929, a quarter of the population was left unemployed and bereft. A third of those working could get only part-time jobs with radically reduced wages.
FDR sought to save capitalism from the capitalists. He promised the American people a New Deal. The government passed historic progressive legislation and programs such as Social Security, unemployment insurance and the beginnings of a welfare social safety net.
Workers’ rights became law and practice: the right to collective bargaining, the 8-hour day and 40-hour work week, worker’s compensation, and the prohibition of child labor.
In 1936 in his re-nomination speech at the Democratic Convention, FDR said this: “An old English judge said, ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ Liberty requires opportunity to make a living. For too many of us, the political equality we once had was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. ”
Yet the battle raged on, and the oligarchic forces have relentlessly sought to roll back these New Deal Reforms ever since.
As the billionaire Warren Buffett summed it up, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Like the 1930s, once again today the extreme wealth inequality and stranglehold of corporate power that catalyzed the New Deal are precipitating a re-awakening of labor and economic justice movements, in the US and around the world.
Saru Jayaraman(SJ): We’re in a really incredibly historic, inspiring, just upheaval moment of worker revolt in this country. And I don’t know how many of you are aware of it, I’m going to share what’s going on. So let me first share a little bit about me and the history of this issue. I’ve been working on raising wages and working conditions in the restaurant and service sector for over 20 years now. Getting older. [LAUGHS]
But the reason this is my life’s work, the reason why this is important is that the restaurant and food service sector has been one of the largest and fastest growing private sector employers in the United States for decades. It was 14 million workers pre-pandemic. That was one in 10 American workers pre-pandemic. But it’s been the absolute lowest paying employer for generations, dating back to Emancipation when the restaurant industry first demanded the right to hire newly freed slaves, newly freed Black people and didn’t want to pay them anything; they wanted to continue non-chattel slavery. They wanted to get free Black labor.
And so they took this notion that had just come from Europe at the time to the United States called tipping. Tipping in Europe had always been an extra bonus on top of a wage. They took that notion which had just come to the US and they mutated it from being an extra bonus on top of a wage to becoming the entirety of a Black person’s wage in the United States. They said, “I’m not going to pay you, but you’re going to have the wonderful fortune of getting to get these white people’s tips.” And so they did.
Saru Jayaraman speaking at Bioneers 2023
They created a system in which tipping was the only income for a workforce that was mostly Black women. In 1919, an entity was formed to make sure this policy, this idea that these workers got only tips, stayed in place, called the National Restaurant Association. We call them the other NRA. [LAUGHTER] They were founded in 1919 with this express mission and intent. In 1938, they made it the law. When everybody else got the federal minimum wage as part of the New Deal in 1938, these workers were mostly women, Black women, were left out and told you get nothing, you just get tips. And we went from 0 dollars in 1938 to the extraordinary $2.13 cents an hour, the current federal minimum wage in the United States of America for what I just told you is one of the largest workforces, in fact the number one fastest-growing workforce, the number two largest private sector workforce in America, legally gets to still pay at the federal level, $2.13 an hour.
And while California is one of seven states that rejected this system many decades ago, most states – 43 states in the US – still have a wage for these workers that is under five bucks an hour. So New Mexico is $2, and Pennsylvania is $2.83, and Massachusetts is still at $5. It’s a shame! It’s a shame in 2023 that America gets to still allow this industry, which is essentially telling Americans we shouldn’t have to pay our workers, you the customer should pay our workers’ wages for us through your tips.
Host: Today, wealth in the US is already over two times as concentrated as it was in Imperial Rome, which was a slave-and-farmer society. In this age of the precariat, at least 50% of Americans can’t afford an unexpected $500 emergency. Over half a million Americans annually file for bankruptcy from medical debt. And it keeps getting worse.
As if economic and workplace conditions weren’t already bad enough, then came the 2020 Covid pandemic. Slamming the economy into shock, it was an extinction-level event for small and medium-sized businesses. Six million restaurant workers lost their jobs almost overnight. Many others quit in what became known as “The Great Resignation.”
Suddenly a new term was coined: “essential” workers.
SJ: We started a relief fund – 300,000 workers came to us for relief, and two-thirds of them told us they actually couldn’t get unemployment insurance because in most states they were told that subminimum wage of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 dollars in Connecticut, too low to qualify for benefits. They were disqualified from getting unemployment insurance.
Then they went back to work in the summer of 2020 before they felt safe. You know, CDC named restaurants the most dangerous place for adults to be during the pandemic. UCSF named restaurants the most dangerous place to work above hospitals. A third of the workers we surveyed said somebody in the restaurant died due to COVID. Very dangerous place to work but they didn’t get unemployment insurance, so millions of workers went back to work in the summer of 2020, when some of us started to try outdoor dining. They found tips had gone way down because sales were down, and harassment way up. We already had the highest rates of harassment.
And when they were told to enforce COVID protocols on the same people from whom they had to get tips to make up their base wages, they were done. They were done – 1.2 million workers have left this industry, and of those who remain, 60% say they are leaving. More than half of the current restaurant workforce in California across the country says they are leaving; 80% says the only thing that would make them stay or come back is a full livable wage with tips on top. That’s why I say historic. [APPLAUSE]
For the first time since Emancipation, millions of workers are walking off the job and saying, “Take your job and shove it!” And thousands of restaurants across the country miraculously, many of whom fought us and told us it can’t be done and you’ll put us out of business, are suddenly paying $15, $25, and $30. In Dallas, they were paying $2.13. That’s the wage in Texas. We’re seeing restaurants in Dallas paying $25 an hour, plus tips. [APPLAUSE] In Massachusetts, in Massachusetts the wage has been $5 an hour. Cape Cod restaurants we’re seeing paying $50 plus tips. We are seeing— Pennsylvania, the wage is $2.83. We saw Applebee’s offering 20 bucks in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, because they cannot find people willing to work for these wages anymore. [APPLAUSE]
Host: Saru Jayaraman first became inspired to do labor organizing after 9/11 when 250 immigrant workers in the restaurant atop the World Trade Center died in the attack. The survivors and families started fighting for better working conditions for their profession.
When Saru learned there was no organization or union to fight for workers’ rights in that sector, she co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center or ROC United. She also founded One Fair Wage to end all subminimum wages in the US.
ROC United went on to launch a campaign that resulted in a major victory in Washington D.C. 76% of DC voters voted to raise the wage for tipped workers from $5 to $16.75 – a 300% increase.
ROC United also campaigned against companies deducting credit card processing fees from worker’s tips and got a bill passed in Philadelphia to make it illegal. They’re now working to make it federal law.
As ROC advanced legislation and ballot measures in 15 states to raise the minimum wage, the oligarchic backlash grew increasingly savage.
One feature of oligarchy is to install the best politicians money can buy. Couple that with anti-labor judges and courts that define money as free speech, and it’s one dollar, one vote. Do the math.
Saru Jayaraman spoke on a panel at a Bioneers Conference.
SJ: There’s this overwhelming euphoria that we’re in a moment of worker power, but the sadness is, even in a moment of worker power, I cannot get some of these state legislators and sometimes federal legislators as well, to even follow where the market is heading. The market is driving wages up, and the state legislators are still stuck in small business. What’s it going to do for small business? Business, business, business, business. That’s what’s changed so dramatically, it’s been such a hard fight for so long. We’ve been trying to move these things. Every time we put it on the ballot, everywhere we win, because frankly red states, blue states, we’ve had people with Confederate T-shirts walk up to us and sign our petitions for $15 and $18 and $20, because everybody in America, most people in America – not the elected officials or the elite circles they run in – but most people in America agree, no matter what state they live in, no matter their political spectrum, if you work, you should be able to have enough money to feed your children and pay the rent and cover your basic costs. Most people believe that. There is no future unless working people’s needs are addressed. [APPLAUSE]
We are the majority. We are the frickin’ majority, the overwhelming number of people in America 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. [CHEERS] [APPLAUSE] And they use that idea of polarization to drive their political agendas.
And so what gives me hope is the potential for issues like this, bread and butter issues, to bring people together, and once they come together, with the Confederate flag and the folks from Cleveland – and I’ve seen it in a room – 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.
Host: In 1944 , a year before his death, FDR went on to propose a Second Bill of Rights to complement the political rights won by the American Revolution. He called it an Economic Bill of Rights, because, he said, “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”
It included rights such as:
Gainful employment
An adequate income for food, shelter and recreation
Decent housing
Education
Adequate medical care
Social Security
And freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
After the 2008 financial crash catalyzed the Occupy Wall Street movement, it also spawned a renaissance of union organizing. Some of the biggest strikes in history ignited, including the Fight for $15 and 672,000 teachers striking in 21 states.
Yet even in a time of rising worker actions and power, the restaurant industry still towers among the most powerful political forces in statehouses and Washington DC – and it’s bipartisanship in action.
SJ: We just issued a report. 1960 was the first time New York state ever even had a minimum wage. Since that time until today, every time the minimum wage has gone up, tipped workers – who are overwhelmingly women, women of color – have gone down as everybody else went up. We’ve always been the let’s just throw these women under the bus so everybody else gets a raise, over and over and over again. In 2016, when everybody else got $15 an hour in New York state, tipped workers’ wages went down from 83% of the wage to 66% of the wage, a 25% decline in their wages, when everybody else went up. By Democrats! It’s when it happens on the left and they—or I don’t even know if you call it the left, but the other side of the aisle. [LAUGHTER] Right? And they’re supposed to be for working people, and they even are for working people, everybody except you. Because you are up against the most entrenched, powerful trade lobby that there is among the employers.
Host: When we return, we hear how Saru Jayaraman and ROC United took on the lobby that compels workers to pay for their own wage suppression – how a living wage curbs sexual harassment – and how we the people can fulfill an Economic Bill of Rights.
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…
Host: As Bob Dylan famously sang, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”
Between 2007 and 2022, the 20 top food industry associations contributed a whopping $33.7 million to federal candidates. Since 2008, they’ve bankrolled $303.2 million to lobby federal agencies and lawmakers. Just three titanic trade groups including the National Restaurant Association have accounted for almost half of these lobbying dollars.
You may not have heard of this “other NRA,” because that’s the way it wants it. As the second largest food industry funder of political campaigns, it means business, says Saru Jayaraman.
SJ: Turns out, about a decade ago, they came to California and Illinois and Texas and Florida, the four largest restaurant industry states, and they got a bill passed in California. It was actually State Senator Alex Padilla at that time who passed the bill, that said every worker in the state of California that works in food service shall be required to take food safety training, and it just so happens the other NRA owns the monopoly food safety training company ServSafe.
So for the last decade, millions and millions of the lowest wage workers in California have been required to pay this food safety training. The other NRA takes that money and then has ballooned their lobbying budget to lobby against those same workers’ wage increases without those workers knowing about it. Millions of workers across this country have been funding their own wage suppression for decades without them knowing about it.
And there are lots of bad lobbies, y’all. There’s fossil fuels, there’s Walmart, there’s the Retail Association. There’s lots of bad lobbies. This lobby took it to another level. They said not only are we going to lobby against people’s interests, we’re going to use those people’s money to lobby against their own interest. How sadistically genius is that?
Saru Jayaraman speaking at a Bioneers 2023 panel
And with that money and power, totaling about $80 million in revenue a year, they have held a stranglehold on both Democrats and Republicans for decades. And pre-pandemic it was so hard for us. We kept fighting to raise these workers’ wages and we’d win. We won on the ballot in DC. We won on the ballot in Maine. We won in Michigan. Each time the Restaurant Association would use its millions of dollars to convince legislators, often Democrats, to overturn the will of the people.
And beyond that. They went after me. They put my children’s pictures up on attack websites. They follow me around the country. They send me death threats. It’s been 21 years of attack, attack, attack, bullies, bullies with so much money – by the way, that they’ve stolen from low-wage workers to fight this fight.
Host: In the class warfare of oligarchy, the story of the battle is also the battle of the story. Controlling the narrative through mass media and disinformation is a lynchpin of maintaining the corporate power structure. Expect to get framed.
One notorious character who pressures people like Saru to back down is the food, beverage and alcohol industry’s fearsome go-to PR hatchet man…
SJ: If you’ve not heard of Richard Berman, I really encourage you to go look up a 60 Minutes special. I think it’s still on YouTube, and it literally is Dr. Evil. That’s the name of the—that’s the name of the clip on 60 Minutes, because he calls himself Dr. Evil. He was a hired goon. This is a guy who’s almost seven feet tall, hired mobster, basically, for big tobacco for years, and then became the hired goon for restaurants and for food. And this man created attack websites, like I said, put my children’s pictures up on them, 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. And worse, went after funders or celebrities or anybody who would work with us, went to their homes, bullied them, pressured them—you know, 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, almost got our IRS status revoked.
Then when Trump was in office, these are—He is a member of the restaurant association, so they were trying to shut us down for the whole Trump administration. I take so much pride in all of that, because who am I? I’m like a little flea. [LAUGHS] And they’re this behemoth organization, and for them to spend that much money trying to squash me, something I’m doing is right. [APPLAUSE]
Host: For Saru Jayaraman, it’s very personal. As she works with ROC United in the national fight for a living wage, she’s doubly dedicated to that goal because providing a living wage is key to ending sexual harassment in the restaurant industry.
As the mother of two girls, aged 10 and 13, Saru made a vow that by the time her daughters were old enough to work in restaurants: there would be such drastic transformation in the industry that they would no longer have to endure what so many women suffer through every day just trying to eke out a meager living…
SJ: Everywhere I go, more than one in two people in America have worked in restaurants. And for those of us that are women who’ve worked in restaurants, the trauma of especially living off of tips, and having to put up with anything and everything the customer does to you. You know, young women being told, show more cleavage, dress more sexy, wear tighter clothing so you can make more money in tips, and then during the pandemic, show your face.
I worked with Catharine MacKinnon who’s the professor who coined the term sexual harassment, worked on it, is very legendary law professor, and she has said there’s no industry in the United States with higher levels of sexual harassment than tipped workers in the restaurant industry, including the military, she said. And she said there’s actually no policy she’s ever seen as more effective at cutting it than paying these women an actual wage so that they don’t have to live on the tips from customers, she said, including by the way—she thinks it’s more effective than making sexual harassment illegal, which was her life’s work.
Host: If, as FDR said, “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” then perhaps an Economic Bill of Rights is unfinished business whose time has come. Saru Jayaraman believes these so-called bread-and-butter issues are also the gateway to solving the larger constellation of political crises bedeviling the nation and the world.
She points to the story of a woman leader in ROC United’s office in Washington DC. Already fed up with making $5 an hour, the bartender finally walked away after one last straw landed on a haystack of last straws…
SJ: During the pandemic, a customer came to the bar and said, “Take off your mask; I want to see your face.” She said, “No, I’m sorry, my manager won’t let me.” He said, “I guess we know who’s not going to eat tonight.” That is how customers in so much of the country, you may or may not believe it, see servers. They see them as servants, not as servers. Right? And she left. She left the industry during the pandemic because of things like that. I just—I can’t do it anymore. And she was interviewed by CNN, and she said, “Listen, it’s not a great resignation, it’s a great revolution. We know our worth. We know we’re worth more than $2, or $3, or $4, or $5.”
And they’re winning in the market, if we were to help collectively then institutionalize their gains through policy to say not only are you winning $15 and $20 in the marketplace, but we’re going to stand with you and support you and make that the law. We could also then allow them to have the capacity and wherewithal to say, “I also deserve a livable planet; I also deserve bodily autonomy; I also deserve the safety for my children to go to school and not get shot; I also deserve a safe, prosperous life, like everybody else.” And act out their worth on every other issue.
There will never be the political will in this country to truly win on those issues at the scale we need to win them to save our planet if we don’t address the needs of working people, because working people [APPLAUSE] are the majority of this country – 30 million people, 30 million people still earn under $15 an hour, 30 million people. A third of working people are still working and living in poverty. And we cannot shame them and expect them to vote and go knock on their door and say, what’s wrong with you, unless we address their basic needs.
And that is why I’m here pleading with you to say let us not fight in silos. Let us work together. Let us support these workers in their massive revolt, [and] allow them to support all of us as we change the politics of this country.
Ultimately, ultimately, that we the people, that we the people decide for us, do we say as a country that corporations and the National Restaurant Association, the Rifle Association and fossil fuels, and Monsanto, do they control this country? Do they decide what our future is in the next 250 years? Or is it we the people? I know—I know if we support these workers, it can be we the people who win. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
I invite you to sample this amazing Sierra taste that I’m talking about, but also to pause and consider the impact of your choices when you set out to enjoy the plants of the Sierra, especially if you are a visitor. So many people come to enjoy the splendors of Tahoe and the Sierra that if every one of them picked just one rare edible flower, it could exacerbate the challenges already faced by our remaining native flora in the face of development and climate change. This is something to be aware of especially in the Yosemite region, which already has an overabundance of traffic. I just ask that you stop for a minute right now and promise me that you will learn from this book to harvest with utmost care only for your own purposes, because our wild plants are a shared resource that we all must tend to and protect. If you do want to start a plant-focused foraging business, please harvest invasives only, or plant a wild garden!
When you are foraging on wild lands, watch your step just as you would if you were in your garden. I was once part of a film shoot for a travel channel where I was talking about juicy miner’s lettuce. While I pointed out the plant, another forager stepped on several patches, effectively killing the plants. Don’t do that, please. This is our big garden—you wouldn’t step on the tomatoes you grew with great care, would you?
I have included a sustainability section in each plant description to indicate when a plant is abundant and can be readily foraged in most places, or when it is more sensitive and should only be sampled, not collected in bulk. I have intentionally left out some rare wild edibles, because part of being a respectful forager is knowing where we can do harm and holding back. Even an abundant plant population can be overharvested.
So unless you’re harvesting invasives and you are being part of the solution of restoring our wild meadows and forests, please only take what you need or a small sample. When you do harvest invasive plants, such as salsify, dandelion, and mullein, please be careful not to spread their seed. (Most plants are best eaten before seeding anyway.)
With all this said, I believe that knowing about the uses and edibility of our local plants is extremely important. That is why I’ve written this book.
Fireweed, Chamerion angustifolium. Photo by Mia Andler
Mindful Foraging
We have already lost too much of the deep knowledge allour ancestors carried. We can only restore it collectively. I believe that
knowledge and connecting with the plants through eating them will be an essential part of restoring and protecting our local landscapes. I also hope to see us integrate a lot more local foods into our diet again—for our own good and the good of the environment. Food plants adapted to local conditions often require far fewer inputs and energy and cause far less environmental damage than introduced species. If we find that a plant we want to eat is dwindling in numbers, I hope that discovery will serve as our call to action to restore it to abundance.
We humans have a great capacity for taking care of this earth. Foraging can connect us to place and inspire that caretaking. My hope is that you will proceed with that attitude. “Leave it better than you found it” is my motto. Pick up some trash, pour some water on a patch of plants you harvested from, and remember to say thank you.
Horsetails, Equisetum spp. Photo by Mia Andler
Ethics and Rules of Foraging
The following are some general foraging rules I like to go by for any location:
Don’t harvest a plant that is the only one or one of only a few of its kind in that spot.
An often-repeated foraging rule is never to harvest more than one-third of the entire quantity. In my opinion, however, one-third is far too much; I would suggest more like one-seventh.
Watch how the animals engage with the plants. Don’t harvest something that wildlife clearly prefer.
Consider the current condition and health of the plants.
Don’t harvest struggling plants at drought time or in the winter.
Most public lands have rules with regard to foraging. Please make sure you look into those before foraging on public land. Here are a few specific regulations relevant to the Sierra:
In the California State Parks, harvesting of wild foods is severely restricted: “No person shall willfully or negligently pick, dig up, cut . . . any tree or plant or portion thereof, including but not limited to . . . flowers, foliage, berries, fruit, grass . . . shrubs, cones, and dead wood, except in specific units when authorization by the District Superintendent or Deputy Director of Off-Highway Motor Vehicles to take berries, or gather mushrooms, or gather pine cones, or collect driftwood is posted at the headquarters of the unit to which the authorization applies.” Some exceptions may exist, so check the rules before you go.
In national forests, which are federal lands run by the US Forest Service, in general harvesting “incidental amounts”—often defined as one gallon—of mushrooms and berries for personal use is allowed without a permit. Check the rules for your specific national forest. Harvesting from wilderness areas is prohibited.
With regard to Yosemite National Park, the following fruits may be gathered by hand for personal consumption, up to one pint per person per day for immediate consumption: blackberries, raspberries, elderberries, strawberries, thimbleberries, and huckleberries. Himalayan blackberries can be gathered in unlimited quantity. You can read the rules in more detail at Yosemite’s website.
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land and national wildlife refuges may be more permissive. If you intend to forage on private land, it is prudent to ask the permission of the owner.
Keep Your Finger on the Pulse
Our bi-weekly newsletter provides insights into the people, projects, and organizations creating lasting change in the world.
