To understand the astronomical shift in media consumption over the past several years, one needs only to look at the trends in local newspaper readership. From 2015 to 2020, weekday circulation of local newspapers in the U.S. dropped by 40% and Sunday circulation dropped by 45%. Many of these struggling publications have been bought up by private equity funds, hedge funds, and other newly formed investment partnerships, which generally lack journalistic backgrounds and interest in local enrichment. Their focus is on quick profit instead of quality journalism, and communities are suffering as a result.
Pull that focus back to a national level, and the picture is just as bleak. Audiences have a low level of trust in news media organizations, and Americans under 30 are almost as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust information from national news outlets.
The great news is that independent nonprofit news organizations have gained steam on a local and national level. These organizations, largely supported by foundations and individual giving, aren’t obligated to consistently and rapidly grow their bottom lines. They’re perpetuating a model of journalism free from the trappings of market pressures, and they’re filling the void left behind by shuttered traditional newsrooms.
YES! Media has been traversing the media’s choppy waters for 27 years. As an independent nonprofit publisher, the organization has consistently prided itself on publishing high-quality, solutions-focused journalism. YES! seeks to be a constructive part of essential conversations, and while it has managed to stay afloat without sacrificing its values, its success hasn’t come easily.
We had the opportunity to sit down with Evette Dionne, YES! Media’s executive editor for nearly a year. Hired after a short stint at Netflix, Dionne’s experience is largely in journalism that tells the important stories from which other organizations shy away. She spent more than four years as the editor-in-chief at Bitch Media, a feminist storytelling organization focused on pop culture. Today, she’s ushering in YES! Media’s new wave of editorial direction and journalism that speaks to audiences ready to change the world.
What was it about working with YES! that appealed to you?
The idea of doing solutions journalism. I’ve been a journalist for more than a decade, and journalism tends to focus on the problem. It’s rare that people, especially ordinary citizens, are empowered with the knowledge and the information to try to fix problems in their communities. What appealed most to me about YES! was moving to the other side. Instead of just saying, “Police violence is an issue,” it’s, “Here’s what we can do about police violence. Here’s how we can approach it. Here are different things that have worked. Here are things that are not working. Here are solutions that you can scale.”
Has YES! always been dedicated to solutions-focused journalism?
YES! began on Bainbridge Island, Washington, 27 years ago. Originally, their focus was mostly on how to bring people together in ways that allow communities to build toward solutions.
The earlier iterations of YES! were focused a lot on the environment and climate change. Over time, it’s evolved to be more social-justice and racial-justice focused. It’s not just about whether it’s possible for us to come together to make things happen, but rather, what are the impediments to that? Often the impediments are around class and race and gender and gender identity. The newer iteration of YES! focuses a lot on if a solution will work for the most marginalized among us. If it works for the most marginalized among us, then we can scale it.
How do you envision YES! as part of the broader media landscape?
I think one of the things that YES! is trying to orient ourselves around is moving from taking a broad view of the issues. Even though the publication has been solutions-focused, it’s really been this broad view. We’re learning how to go from that to being embedded in movements and being an outlet for organizers and lobbyists and people who are on the ground involved in these issues. We want to allow them to speak their piece and explain the reasons why it’s important to become involved from that ground view. I would say that’s really the mission and the purpose now. Instead of being on the advocacy side, we want to move into the activist element of it.
Could you tell us a little bit about your editorial process and how you determine which stories to tell?
Actually, you’re asking me this question at the right time because we’re switching it up. In addition to becoming executive editor, I’m now responsible for our strategy, which means overseeing our content vision, overseeing our strategy and how we do what we do. A lot of it now is around intentionality.
We come together collectively to determine the stories we are going to pursue and the reasons why. Sometimes we want to reach a broader audience, and sometimes we want to deepen our relationship with an audience that we already have. Sometimes we want to start to build relationships with particular audiences, and it’s important to create and publish stories that appeal to them.
We’re in a really unique place because we’ve been doing this a certain way for so long. Our editors have been on beats for a long time. This shift asks them to come out of their beats and asks us to come together collectively to decide what we want to do. Our test run of doing that was the magazine. We have shortened the number of stories that are in each issue, and we come together to decide which are the best stories around the theme that we can pursue. It requires us to do a lot more soliciting, which is also a change. Typically, we were a pitch-driven organization. Now, it’s all around this idea of being more intentional in the kinds of stories we’re pursuing.
YES! has never been and will never be a breaking-news organization. That’s not what it exists for. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t become a part of news cycles. Consider what happened to Jordan Neely on the subway. People may feel hopeless in that situation. We might tell the story of how to become a better bystander in that situation, for instance. We’re really infusing ourselves into those sorts of situations and being more timely by looking at the landscape and saying, “Okay, that’s important. What is the solutions angle?”
Then we find the right writer for the story and the right sources, and then we present it to our audience as almost definitive: “This is our single story about this.”
I always say we’re building toward a quality rather than quantity model. There’s no need to keep producing, producing, producing. We can take our time and be the definitive story around a single issue. That’s worth our time. So that’s the way I’m trying to shift our team to think about it in our organization.
Which recent stories are resonating with your audience the most?
We did a story about the importance of ethnic grocery stores, and people loved it. I think that’s because one of the things that solutions journalism fills people up with is a sense of hope. I frequently quote the abolitionist Mariame Kaba: “Hope is a discipline.” Sometimes you just need something like a bright spot. Something to read that makes you feel warm and fuzzy. It’s a solutions story. But it’s not a solution to an evil problem that is keeping you up at night.
The story talks about the need for people from marginalized communities to go to a grocery store and feel like they’re at home. They have all the things they need to prepare their cultural cuisines. There is a problem there, clearly, but the solution is also fuzzy and warm. It makes people feel good, which is always good.
Do you see any other trends within your audience?
I’m a big data person. I believe a lot in using data and analytics to tell a story about what audiences care about. Instead of just throwing spaghetti at the wall, we can use data to guide the decisions we make about what stories to pursue, especially when we have limited resources.
The thing that we found on the digital end, in particular, was that those audiences care a lot about racial-justice-focused stories, far more than anything else. I wish I could see that more around body politics, around reproductive justice, around gender identities and the attacks on trans people in our world. Audiences tend not to care as much about that, which is interesting to me.
Does that data influence the types of stories you tell?
Yes and no. Data can inform, but it’s not definitive. There are times when all the metrics tell us that we shouldn’t do something, and we do it, and people love it. Data can inform a picture, but it’s not the entire picture. That’s where editorial instinct needs to come in. We might publish a story that only 10 people read, and then publish another story in that same realm, tweak an SEO headline or tweak a social headline, tweak a social image, and it can make the difference between a story performing well and not performing well.
Sometimes a story’s success isn’t about the topic or the sources. It’s not the writers. Sometimes it’s completely out of your hands. Sometimes it’s algorithms. I think part of this is also figuring out distribution. How do you reach people? Being beholden to tech really sucks in that way, which is why YES! is really big on newsletters and direct-to-reader communication.
Do you have a favorite type of story to tell or a favorite format to tell a story in?
I love to tell stories in video format. I think that we’re in a time when we have to meet people where they are. I get asked quite a bit about combating disinformation. So often people are consuming things in video form, and they assume if they see it on TikTok or YouTube, that means it’s accurate. I think a solution to combat that is presenting things in video format that are fact checked, copy edited, and reviewed, and are taking on these big issues of the day in a format that is compatible with what people are looking for.
What’s your ideal future media landscape?
My ideal feature media landscape involves a lot of co-ops and a lot of worker-owned publications. Indie publications that are taking journalism back to its roots. One of the things that really gets my goat is everything being called “journalism” when it’s not.
I think moving into those financial models where you’re not relying on advertising allows you to hold power to account. It also provides space for more people from marginalized communities to get into leadership roles because they don’t really have to play the same political games that you have to play at a legacy publication.
My future of media really takes seriously the purpose of informing and educating the public and doesn’t play footsie with fascists.
How can we take the steps to get to that future?
I think it’s really important to support your local news. They’re being bought by conglomerates. They’re being decimated. If there’s an alternative to a news source bought by a billionaire conglomerate in your local community, support them, because that’s where you’re going to get accurate, real information about what’s happening in your community.
We need to put pressure on legislators to start to control disinformation, whatever that could look like. We know that public television is owned and regulated by the federal government through the FCC. That should start to happen in digital media as well.
And then support unions. Support the folks who are helping people secure jobs and build careers, especially in the digital media landscape. My biggest worry is how much brilliance journalism is going to lose because the financial models don’t allow people to have financial security and job security for long periods of time.
Bioneers readers have the opportunity to subscribe to YES! Magazine at a discounted rate. For just $5 (regularly priced at $24), you’ll receive four issues of their inspiring and solution-oriented magazine delivered straight to your door.
What persuades us to take action in a world that desperately needs citizen involvement to solve some of its most pressing challenges?
Facts and statistics are available to us in abundance: Wildlife populations have decreased by 69% in the past 50 years. The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016. In 2021, women made up 47.4% of the workforce, but only 31.7% of top executive roles.
These data points are compelling, but research in many fields has long since concluded that humans are hard-wired for stories, regardless of the facts on the ground. As the author Margaret Atwood describes it, storytelling is, “built into the human plan. We come with it.”
Storytelling has the ability to succeed where facts often fail, creating an emotional connection to a cause or issue. There are real people and real lives connected to each of the data points above — the empathy created by their stories can spell the difference between action and indifference.
In this newsletter, we’ll dive into the transformative potential of storytelling and explore the ways in which stories can be used as tools for social and environmental justice. From personal narratives that inspire us to take action, to community-based storytelling initiatives that empower people to share their stories, we’ll examine the many ways in which storytelling can be a catalyst for change.
Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.
Rebecca Solnit | Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
How do we imagine what’s possible, what matters? Who we are shapes what we do, and what we do in the present shapes the future. In addition to the many practical, scientific and material aspects, the climate crisis has cultural aspects with which we need to engage in order to meet this emergency. Drawing from the new anthology she co-edited, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, Rebecca Solnit talks about the stories emerging from what science, Indigenous leadership, good organizing, and visionary thinkers are giving us. These stories offer grounds for hope and the work hope does.
Amara Ifeji mobilized a grassroots effort to address racism in her high school in Maine, at age 14. She also developed a love for the mountains and woods around her, but she saw her passions for the environment and racial justice as distinct until she heard youth of color like herself share their experiences working at this intersection and realized these struggles were completely intertwined. She shares how this awakening shaped her subsequent work as a remarkably effective organizer and advocate who centers storytelling to advance environmental justice, climate education, and outdoor learning for ALL youth.
Can Storytellers Help Change the World? From Fictional Narrative to Real World Change
In times of crisis, societies look to their storytellers to understand and process the challenges they face and to peek around corners to see pathways that purely rational analyses simply don’t reveal. Today, best-sellers in fiction and memoir are setting real-world information about the climate crisis, social justice movements, and migration realities within their narratives. Audiences are ready for these stories, but what about artists? Does the moment dictate the art? Join a conversation with leading writers about their creative process, how they consider the bigger local and global conversations as they craft their work, and the relationship between fictional narratives and real world movements for change.
Kim Stanley Robinson | What I’ve Learned since The Ministry for the Future Came Out in 2020
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of our greatest living science fiction writers. His more than 20 award-winning books over four decades, translated into some 26 languages, have included many highly influential, international bestselling tomes that brilliantly explore in a wide range of ways the great ecological, economic and socio-political crises facing our species, yet nothing had prepared him for the global explosion of interest in his visionary 2020 novel, The Ministry for the Future, which projects how a possible climate-disrupted future might unfold and how the world might respond meaningfully. It’s also chock full of brilliant science and wildly imaginative ways humanity steps up. Among other results, he was invited by the UN to speak at COP-26 in Glasgow. In this presentation, Stan offers us his overview of where we currently stand in relation to the climate crisis.
Solutions Journalism within a Shaky Media Landscape: An Interview with Evette Dionne of YES! Media
We had the opportunity to sit down with Evette Dionne, YES! Media’s executive editor for nearly a year. YES! Media has been traversing the media’s choppy waters for 27 years. As an independent nonprofit publisher, the organization has consistently prided itself on publishing high-quality, solutions-focused journalism. YES! seeks to be a constructive part of essential conversations, and while it has managed to stay afloat without sacrificing its values, its success hasn’t come easily.
Read the article to see how you can subscribe to YES! Magazine at a discounted rate.
Bioneers Learning: Permaculture, Regenerative Design and Earth Repair for the Great Turning with Penny Livingston
Through engaging courses led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, the brand new Bioneers Learning platform equips engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community.
Register now for a live course with Penny Livingston, “Permaculture, Regenerative Design and Earth Repair for the Great Turning,” to learn about the principles of permaculture, including how to work with natural systems, design for resilience, and create regenerative systems.
Alice Waters started a culinary revolution based on local, organic food in season when she open the renown Chez Panisse restaurant in 1971. Her belief that “food is not just something to eat, but a way of life” lead her to found the Edible Schoolyard project in one school in Berkeley, CA. That project has spread to thousands of schools worldwide. In this excerpt from her latest book, We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto, Waters explains how eating foods in season puts us in harmony with nature and awakens our innate attraction to ripeness and flavor.
Seasonality means eating and living in rhythm with the changing seasons. We are all aware of the seasons and their impact on our daily lives. But not many people understand what the seasons mean for our food supply. When we eat foods that are in season, we are connected with the local cycles of germination, growth, fruiting, death, decay, dormancy, and regeneration. Understanding the seasons teaches us patience and discernment and helps us determine where we are in time and space and how we can live in harmony with nature.
In the very early days of Chez Panisse, I knew the importance of the flavor and freshness of our ingredients, but seasonality wasn’t uppermost in my mind. We’d have a chilled soup in the summer and a warm one in the winter, but we were more focused on following traditional recipes and figuring out what made a good menu. We had a different menu every day, but not strictly because of what was in season. It was more of an intellectual exercise: because we served only one fixed-price menu in the early 1970s, we had to make sure it was interesting and different every evening so we could please the clientele. This was a big challenge. Back then, desserts were the arena where our cooking was more seasonally determined, though we weren’t consciously talking about it that way at first. It was more along the lines of “Oh, God, the fruits that came in aren’t good enough—we’d better make an almond tart instead.” The truth was, seasonality was an invisible force out there that we were grappling with every day, but we weren’t fully committed to understanding what it meant. At a certain point, instead of feeling limited by seasonality, we started to embrace it. We could focus on exactly what was ripe and perfect in that moment and surprise people with the taste of a fruit or a vegetable they didn’t expect. It invigorated our daily menu, which is now entirely inspired by the seasons. I can’t think of planning a menu any other way.
The shift to seasonal cooking at Chez Panisse came with our connection to the farmer Bob Cannard, and the aliveness of the food that came into the restaurant from his farm. In the late 1970s, my father and mother were tasked with the job of finding a local, sustainable farm to partner with the restaurant. We wanted a farm that we could rely on to provide a significant portion of the produce we needed every week. My parents visited at least twenty-five farms in the area and ended up choosing one: Bob Cannard’s. When my dad first went out to Bob’s farm, he looked out onto the fields and couldn’t even see the lines of crops. What was Bob even growing? It looked like fields of weeds to my father, a man who had long prided himself on his immaculately mowed lawns and fastidiously weeded gardens. Then Bob took him on a walk through the fields, pushed the weeds aside, and unearthed a beautiful carrot that was unlike any other carrot my father had encountered. The taste of it was transcendent, and it changed my father’s entire outlook on business and agriculture.
When we started our work with Bob, we were disappointed that we couldn’t get things from his farm that we’d hoped to get all year round. We adapted quickly, because the ingredients we could get from him were so remarkable. Part of this was because of his semi-coastal Sonoma microclimate; part was because he knew precisely which vegetables and fruits he could grow successfully at different times of the year. He would send us vegetables we didn’t even know were in season. Finding something in the winter like Bob’s carrots or chicories—which were so beautiful and flavorful—was an edible education. His ingredients made us realize that there were new and different flavors to be found, whatever season we were in.
Ripeness is the key to seasonality. There’s a subtlety to ripeness, and it takes discernment to know when something is ripe: the right amount of give to an avocado, the color of the shoulders of the Blenheim apricot, the scent of a passion fruit. You must look carefully, evaluate the flavors, and figure out the essence. I find that practice at the restaurant deeply stimulating, and I’ve gotten better and better at it over the years. It’s an exciting and educational process to understand different gradations of flavors. Discernment is not the same thing as judgment; it’s not merely This is good; this is bad. To understand ripeness, you have to learn through trial and error—you have to taste and taste again.
You really come to understand ripeness when you grow food yourself. People who farm or have fruit trees and vegetable gardens in their yards—or tomatoes or herbs on their fire escape—learn through experimentation, and after a few seasons they begin to figure it out. At the Edible Schoolyard, for example, the kids now know exactly when the raspberries and mulberries are ripe, because they’ve learned from exploration. Before they started school, they had no idea what a mulberry was! But when they come back to school in mid-August and go out for their first science class of the year in the garden, they go straight for the mulberries. Ripeness pulls them in every time.
People might think eating only what’s in season is unfeasible, or means denying ourselves foods we have grown accustomed to eating all year. We have been conditioned to expect the endless bounty of summer foods through every season, even though that’s simply not the way nature works. I say this all the time, but in truth, when all year long you eat those same second-rate fruits and vegetables that have been flown in from the other side of the world or grown in industrial green‑houses, you can’t actually see them for what they are when they come into season, when they’re ripe and delicious. By that time, you’re already bored. You’re eating in a thoughtless way. Letting go of this constant availability doesn’t have to be restrictive. On the contrary. It’s about letting go of mediocrity. It is liberating.
Another argument I hear against seasonality is that we can’t possibly feed everyone on this planet if we have to survive on what’s locally grown. I don’t believe that. I’m convinced that using networks of small, local farms is the only way we actually can feed everyone sustainably. Yet I’m always told, “It’s all very well for you to talk about seasonality in Berkeley, but I live in Maine. We have a long winter. What am I supposed to eat?” I recognize the challenge. And it is true: in California, some fruits and vegetables do grow outside all winter long. Bob Cannard’s extraordinary farm is proof of that. We are lucky. But it is possible to eat seasonally in seemingly inhospitable climates. We are so unaccustomed to eating in season that we’ve forgotten the traditional ways people have preserved and cooked food. I am amazed by all the ways it is possible to capture seasonality: salting cod, curing ham, pickling cabbage or carrots or turnips, canning tomatoes or peaches—or cooking with all the heritage varieties of dried beans, lentils, pasta, rice, spices, nuts, and dried berries. As recently as sixty years ago, preserving was a skill that most families had. One of the few things I remember my mother did do in the kitchen while I was growing up was stock our New Jersey cellar for the winter with foods from our victory garden: winter squashes, canned rhubarb, applesauce. When you know how to cook and preserve foods, you can employ these ingredients in myriad ways. Freezing can also be used to capture a moment, as with stocks or fruit that can be made into smoothies and ice creams later in the year. Preserving food helps us all be less food insecure. And while I am completely devoted to seasonality and the primacy of localness, I do recognize the benefits of Carlo Petrini’s idea of “virtuous globalization”: buying coffee, tea, spices, chocolate, and other nonperishable goods from people in other countries who are using best farming and labor practices.
I am constantly inspired by other cultures and how they’ve eaten seasonally for centuries, whether in the mountains of Tibet or the deserts of Morocco. Living in the season is empowering—and there can be enough local food, even in the months when there are fewer fresh ingredients available. It’s possible to prepare yourself. You need to have cool places to store sweet potatoes and apples and nuts. You need to have the forethought to capture and preserve the bounty of the harvest when it’s at its peak.
Eating in season also challenges you to be inventive. I find I take much more care with ingredients when I’m eating seasonally. I’m more economical, too: I might candy the orange rinds instead of throwing them away, and I might make a broth using the green tops of vegetables and onion skins. I’m not as inclined to let things go to waste, because I know this is the one moment of the year to have that beautiful spring pea, or that September fig. I cherish it. The good news is there are also many ways to naturally extend the growing season. This is not the same thing as shipping food halfway around the world or building industrial greenhouses that rely on the use of pesticides. It’s a way of working creatively with our shifting seasons. We know from the farmer Eliot Coleman’s greenhouse operation in Maine, for example, that it’s possible to grow food organically all winter long. In Milwaukee, Will Allen is growing food on a massive scale right in the middle of the city, using green‑houses that are heated by the composted by‑products from local breweries. In cold climates, we absolutely need green‑houses where we can grow carrots and salad and herbs in a warm environment. One of the most extraordinary organic greenhouses I’ve ever encountered is at the Ballymaloe Cookery School, in Ireland; the sheer diversity of plants in it is staggering. It is an organic laboratory. They have taken the local agriculture around them and extended it through the winter. There are still limitations, of course—you cannot have a ripe cherry from a greenhouse in January—but your options can be expanded through skillful organic, regenerative growing practices. And it can happen all over the world
This is an edited version of the transcript of a conversation with and interview of the world-renowned visionary chef, restaurateur, author, educator and activist, Alice Waters, conducted by Nikki Silvestri, founder and CEO of Soil and Shadow, who has considered Alice a mentor since the time they collaborated on an edible education course at UC Berkeley. The session took place on April 7th, 2023, in front of a live audience as part of the Bioneers Conference in Berkeley.
While studying culinary arts there in the 1960s, Alice Waters’ creative passions were awakened by France’s food culture that elevated flavor, freshness and seasonality. She was enchanted by the slow food approach to meals, daily trips to farmers’ markets and the wealth of food literacy among the population.
After returning to the U.S., Alice launched a veritable food revolution. Her ongoing 50-year legacy is that she has radically changed the way many of us eat. Her zeal for good food inspired her to open the now world-famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley where local, organic, seasonal foods have delighted the palates of her patrons for decades and where a movement antithetical to the uniformity, commodification and hustle of fast food began.
Alice Waters has been a defining force of the local, slow food, farm-to-table and edible schoolyard movements. Her latest endeavor is The Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education dedicated to advancing “a transformative vision for the well-being of our communities, our food systems and our planet.”
Nikki Silvestri
NIKKI SILVESTRI: Alice, in your latest book, We Are What We Eat, A Slow Food Manifesto you talk about culture change and how food is at the root of many culture shifts. I’m curious why you wrote this book now? What do you most want people to understand?
ALICE WATERS: I finished the book right at the beginning of the pandemic. It became urgent that I write down these thoughts because I think that we learned a lot during the pandemic about what was happening to our industrial food system. We learned a lot about what it is to ship food around the world. We learned about farmworkers that were brought across the border to work in meat factories when nobody else was allowed to come across the border. We learned a lot about hunger. I wanted to understand how we lost our human values in such a short period of time since the end of World War II.
With my co-authors, we decided that the reason was the introduction of fast food. It wasn’t just that the food became available everywhere, but it was the values that we sort of digested with the food – more is better; time is money; everything should be available 24/7; it’s okay to eat in your car; it takes too much time to sit at a table; kids don’t like to eat your kind of food. The most important one for me was that food should be fast, cheap and easy. But it has never been since the beginning of time. People cared about food. People shared food at the table. Now, we’re not doing that anymore.
My theory is that when you eat food, you eat the values that come with it, and it has an effect on your whole life. You become engaged in the world in a very different way. People weren’t gathering anymore, they were home; they were on a screen, and that screen was telling them this is what you need to buy.
Alice Waters
Since the 1980s, there has been a one-size-fits-all, industrialized school food system. What has happened in those years in schools is shocking to me. It’s important that I talk about my Montessori education. I went to England in 1968, which was a good time to be in London, where I took the course for the international Montessori training. I didn’t realize how important it would be in my life.
Dr. Maria Montessori, founder of the Montessori schools, believed in education of the senses and learning-by-doing. She had been the first woman doctor in Italy in the 1880s. She wanted to know why children who lived in the slums of Naples or in India couldn’t learn the way other children learned. She discovered that they were sensorially deprived. In other words, they were not using all of their senses. They were not smelling and tasting and looking carefully, listening carefully to what was going on in their world. Those senses are pathways into our minds. Maria Montessori believed that our hands are instruments of our minds.
A very important part of the training was to go out into the park and pick leaves and come back and trace the leaves in my notebook. Then I learned how to calligraph the name of the tree. In that way, I really learned.
But I got fired from the Montessori school. Not because I bit a kid who was biting all the other kids, but because I was wearing a see-through blouse with flowers embroidered all over it, and some parents of 3 to 6-year-old kids objected.
NIKKI: It was the times.
ALICE: I’m so grateful that that happened because it made me realize that when I returned to Berkeley, I should do what I really loved to do, which was cooking at home. We had all kinds of people coming and having dinner with us. Then I thought, if I open a little restaurant, they’ll be able to come and eat and pay for it.
NIKKI: Since that time, you have connected your passion for food to a passion for attending to values at the core of our culture, which is our children, with the Edible Schoolyard Project.
ALICE: Well, something else that was very important to me was that I went to France in 1965, and it was a real slow-food nation then. I’d never been out of the U.S. before then, and I was just entranced. I watched people stand in line to get a baguette, and I wondered why they would wait in line like that. Then I discovered the pleasure of a freshly-baked, hot baguette.
There were farmers’ markets in every area of the city. That’s how people bought food. And it was very seasonal. It was the little “fraises des bois,” the wild strawberries, that woke me up. They were picked in the mountains and only available in the springtime. I thought, “Oh my goodness, it’s so wonderful.”
Kids at school, at that time, came home to eat lunch with their families and return in the afternoon. I was so affected by the beauty and by the deliciousness of the food and the comradery of students.
It was the way I wanted to live my life when I came back to the US, I wanted to live like the French.
I tried to do it at home with friends, but then I thought: “If I open a restaurant, I should be better able to find fresh locally grown food.” But I didn’t anticipate the difficulty of finding real food. It was really hard until I found the local organic farmers.
I found taste when I met Bob Cannard. He’s one of my heroes and was Chez Panisse’s first farmer. He said to us, “I want you to take whatever I grow.” There was no middleman. We took all the food scraps from Chez Panisse to Bob to compost and picked up his vegetables. We never knew what we were going to get. Bob said, “Use them. Figure it out.” Sometimes it was nettles, so we made nettles pizza.
We didn’t ask Bob to sell to us wholesale. We didn’t have a middleman who would pay the farmer wholesale prices and resell it to us at a higher price. Soon the word got out to farmers that we were paying the real cost of food. Then everybody wanted to sell to us. And we had about 70 farmers and ranchers and fishers that came to us, and we relied on them for the goodness of Chez Panisse, truly.
For example, Masumoto’s peaches. People would ask, “When are they coming?” I said, “Well, maybe for one month in September, if all goes right.”
It was the seasonal changes that inspired the food that we cooked, so we were never bored with trying to cook the same thing. We only did one menu meal downstairs. After 10 years we opened the café upstairs and served more foods for people to choose from, but at the beginning, you had to eat what we chose. And I guess people liked it, because here we are, 52 years later.
So, it led me to realize how the power of food engages people. Give them something that they’ve never tasted before, and they fall in love with it. It makes you aware of nature. When you are constantly looking to see what’s ripe, you’re in harmony with the seasons and more aware of nature. To think that we all ate that way before 1950. We canned food for the winter. We ate corn and tomatoes in New Jersey where I grew up, and I longed for them, but we never had anything that was from someplace else. Maybe an orange at Christmas from Florida, and maybe some dates from my father from California, but that was it. Otherwise, it was all from our local region.
That’s the way we’ve been eating since the beginning of civilization. I think we have the genes in us that connect us to that way of eating and thinking about nature. I know that from the experience of the Edible Schoolyard because there are a thousand sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade kids that speak 22 languages at home, and we made a kitchen classroom and a garden classroom; not to teach gardening or cooking per se, but to teach all the academic subjects, so when you’re having a geography class around the Middle East, you’re in the kitchen, you’re making pita bread, and you’re making greens, and hummus. Who knew kids like hummus and greens?
It’s partially the fact that they are empowered to cook food in season in the way that they like, but it’s also, as it is in Montessori schools, an education of the senses. Kids are empowered to learn-by-doing, by making those dishes. But they will never forget where the Middle East is and where that type of food is grown. It’s all part of their edible education.
NIKKI: There are a few themes I want to surface in what you were saying about shifting values. I heard talk about agency, and having the ability to lead: not just participate in, but lead. That seems to be one of the things the kids are learning. We live in a fast, efficiency-oriented culture, but it takes time to practice something and to do it repeatedly, so that you can gain the skills for it. It requires social patience, not just individual patience, and it’s a skill that we are collectively atrophying with our obsession with convenience, so that feels very much like something to lift up.
And you spoke of relationship skills, relationship with our own senses, relationship with nature, relationship with farmers, the relationship with the folks that come into the restaurant.
When I was the Executive Director of the nonprofit, People’s Grocery, I didn’t have enough of the beauty that you talk about. I burned all the way out, because “damn the man” and all of that just led me to damn myself, frankly, so I founded Soil and Shadow, based on the thesis that relationships require skills. What does it mean to be in relationship, to honor relationships, whether it’s with the soil, whether it’s with farmers, or whether it’s with each other?
Some of the basic skills of being in relationship are: Are you good at giving and receiving feedback? Do you integrate feedback once it’s been received, or do folks feel like they’re banging their head against a wall because they keep giving you feedback but you don’t integrate it? Do you know how to work through the discomfort of changing an agreement that is no longer useful? Do you know how to navigate conflict and take personal responsibility? There are actual skills to being in relationship. Soil and Shadow supports folks doing the good work to gain those skills so that they don’t break themselves against the grindstone.
When talking about the Edible School yard you talked about children learning the skills to be in relationship. It’s so important to teach children the skills to be in relationship through problem solving.
You talked about how the school kids at the edible school yard speak 22 different languages. The idea of reestablishing the grace and generosity of cultural exchange before using the word appropriation is really important. It has to be safe to ask questions. It has to be safe to exchange. It has to be safe to learn about one another in a field of positive intent and goodwill. And we actually can’t assume that anymore, unfortunately, because of the way the world has evolved.
Reminding our children that there’s a way to have cultural exchange that’s graceful and generous, is actually revolutionary work.
ALICE: There are two things that have given me the confidence to believe that education and food need to go together. From one school in Berkeley, edible schoolyards have spread around the world to 6200 schools.
I was so excited by how quickly this network happened. It’s been 27 years since we started it, and we didn’t start the network for at least five years after that. It just kind of grew because people believed in learning-by-doing and the education of the senses.
We started in six schools around the country just to have proof of concept. Can it be done in a hot place like New Orleans or in the culture of a big city like LA? So, we started in those places and in North Carolina, Brooklyn and upstate New York. They all have the same set of values, but they teach them differently.
When I was in New Orleans, the first thing that they did was to invite all the neighbors to come over to the school and see if they wanted to help in the planting of the garden, and when they came, they sang songs as they worked in the garden.
Then I came up with this idea of school-supported agriculture, like community-supported agriculture. You put farmers first and pay farmers the real cost of the food because they are doing the hard work of taking care of the land with regenerative, organic farming and ranching. I wanted to set up that relationship between the people who were buying the food and the people who were growing it.
It seemed that it would be too difficult to make it happen on a large-scale unless there was an edict from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but we thought that maybe we could start with the University of California as a model for, and if it worked, it would send a message across the country and around the world. If UC decided that they were going to only buy food grown in the state of California, and serve it seasonally, just imagine what an economic stimulus it would be for the whole state.
So, I invited Janet Napolitano, the former President of the University of California, to come to my backyard during the pandemic to have lunch with me. I said, “Janet, could food be part of the carbon neutrality for 2025.” She paused and said, “Organic, yes, but maybe we have a few more years ‘til regenerative.” And I nearly fainted, so she introduced me to the new UC president, Michael Drake
who was familiar with regenerative agriculture through his work as Chancellor and President of Ohio State and Chancellor at UC Irvine. He made a number of visits to my backyard to eat and discus where we could make a model.
And at that point, UC Davis asked me if I would do an institute for edible education and regenerative ag at their Aggie Square campus in Sacramento. That stirred up all of my ideas about teaching people how to cook food affordably and in season, and using what has been grown in the state of California.
It’s going to be an amazing research project into what grows at different times of the year. We have a lot of history from people who lived here for hundreds of years. I want a regenerative design in which everybody in the kitchen has a role to play and is valued. The dishwasher is essential to a restaurant and to the work in the kitchen. So even that work should be done in a beautiful room, not in the basement. If students at the university are getting food from a nearby farm or ranch, they can have classes at the farm on science, etc. and of course regenerative ag classes. So that’s the master plan.
There is no better place than public schools to teach that edible education and regenerative agriculture can be part of the solution to promoting health and reversing climate change and can provide meaningful work and build community. How could we not want to do that?
In this age of global weirding where climate disruption has tumbled the Goldilocks effect into unruly surges of too much and too little water, the restoration of beavers offers ancient nature-based solutions to the tangle of challenges bedeviling human civilization. Droughts, floods, soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity loss – you name it, and beaver is on it.
In this episode, Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center share their semi-aquatic journey to becoming Beaver Believers. They are part of a passionate global movement to bring back our rodent relatives who show us how to heal nature by working with nature.
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Featuring
Kate Lundquist, co-director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign in Sonoma County, is a conservationist, educator and ecological artist who works with landowners, communities and resource agencies to uncover obstacles, identify strategic solutions, and generate restoration recommendations to assure healthy watersheds, water security, listed species recovery and climate change resiliency.
Brock Dolman, co-founded (in 1994) the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center where he co-directs the WATER Institute. A wildlife biologist and watershed ecologist, he has been actively promoting “Bringing Back Beaver in California” since the early 2000s. He was given the Salmonid Restoration Federation’s coveted Golden Pipe Award in 2012: “…for his leading role as a proponent of “working with beavers” to restore native habitat.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): In this episode, Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center share their semi-aquatic journey to becoming Beaver Believers. They are part of a passionate global movement to bring back our rodent relatives who show us how to heal nature by working with nature… I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Beaver Believers: How to Restore Planet Water”.
We live on Planet Water, where water is life. During the past 4.6 billion years or so of Earth history, we’ve had water for about 4 billion years. 70 percent of Earth’s surface is water. Water has carved and sculpted the landscape in a dance among geology, hydrology and biology. Our bodies are mostly water. Try living without it sometime.
As the iconic ecologist Aldo Leopold’s son Luna Leopold put it, the health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land. You’d think that by now, we’d have learned to cherish water and think like a watershed.
To the contrary, as the species that is the greatest degenerative disturber of our surroundings, we’ve commodified, trashed and wasted water like there’s no tomorrow. Now that there may be no tomorrow unless we radically change our ways of living on Planet Water, we can turn for solutions to that other famously busy, regenerative disturber of its surroundings: cousin Beaver.
In this age of global weirding where climate disruption has tumbled the Goldilocks effect into unruly surges of too much and too little water, the restoration of beavers offers ancient nature-based solutions to the tangle of challenges bedeviling human civilization. Droughts, floods, soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity loss – you name it, and beaver is on it.
So let’s begin at the beginning. Who is cousin beaver anyway?
Brock Dolman(BD): So we’re really talking about the North American beaver, which is Castor canadensis. They are rodents. So a colony could be 5 to 12 individuals. Beavers slow water, irrigate the land to grow vegetation to grow themselves food, and make a pond deep enough that they can escape predation. Mountain lions, for instance, like to eat beavers.
They’re forest farmers. They’re going to have a main dam where they live in their house, whether that’s a stick house out in the middle like a little island, or burrowed into the bank. And that’s where they spend their day times mostly inside the lodge. They are protected in there. It’s cozy and warm in there. They get to hang out and groom and they might emerge out at sunset. They’re going to go work on the dams, patch things up, they’re managing water, they’re socializing, they’re marking territory. And then they may go harvest food. They’re just busy as beavers.
Host: Brock Dolman co-founded the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in Sonoma County, California, where he co-directs its WATER Institute, Permaculture Design Program, and Wildlands Program. He has consulted on regenerative project design and implementation internationally.
Along with Brock, Kate Lundquist co-directs the Center’s WATER Institute as well as its Bring Back the Beaver campaign. She’s a conservationist, educator, ecological artist and wildland tender.
Kate Lundquist (KL): So they go as high up as the Taiga, and now with the melting of the Arctic, they are moving into the Arctic as well, and there’s been a lot of press about that: Beavers are ruining the Arctic! Actually, I don’t think it was beavers that burned all that carbon that is now melting the Arctic, so we’ve got to cut them a little slack. They’re just adaptable and taking advantage of that habitat that’s being freed up. And they go down as far as the Sonoran Desert.
They have these incredible adaptations that make them really, really capable of being in the water a lot. They have these paddled feet so they can swim. They have the tail that is also really good for helping propel themselves in the water. They regulate their body temperature through their tails as well. They have this really cool specialized toe. They need to groom themselves to keep their fur waterproof so that they can stay warm in the water and stay dry when they get out. And they have these incisors that are super key to their ability to cut down the trees and to peel the bark, and to do all of the incredible engineering work that they do.
And they’re unusual as a rodent. Beavers only have one set of kits every year. They keep the young around for up to three years, training them in all the skills of being a beaver, living together and doing this work collectively.
Host: Beaver is a keystone species. “Keystone” is the architectural term for the stone at the top of an arch that holds it in place. Remove it and the arch collapses. In other words, beavers disproportionately benefit many natural processes which in turn support countless other species, including us humans. It’s all about managing life-giving water, for which they are uniquely fitted.
Beavers are crucial for water conservation. Their dams slow water down and spread it out, creating lush wetlands while recharging ground water. They store water against droughts. They prevent violent flooding. They create firebreaks against the now common “firenados” that have beset California and the Western states. They create habitat for countless other species – from fish and turtles to birds. The list goes on.
KL: What those dams end up doing is they act like these sieves. So when you have these floods that are delivering nutrients or sediments, they’re trapping all of that. And the study that was done in 2007 demonstrated that the dams were trapping phosphorous, which is actually a contaminant and causes poor water quality.
They end up buffering many of the impacts that happen with the climate changes that we’re experiencing right now. And so multiple dams, they end up being like speed bumps, and so you get these high-flow events coming in, and it helps slow that water down, shunt it off onto the floodplain, and then basically distribute the energy and de-escalate that energy that comes in with those floodwaters.
But then similarly, in a drought situation, they’re holding that water and keeping it there longer on the landscape into the dry season.
Host: As environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb illustrates in his book, “Eager,” we need to reconfigure our historical conception of what a healthy riverscape looks like. Not every stream fits our English countryside inspired vision of an idyllic mountain brook, free-flowing, fast-moving, and gravel-bottomed. Instead, across the continent beavers created complex, multi-threaded webs of water, patched with swampy wetlands that also built soil and sequestered carbon. Goldfarb estimates that pre-contact North America beaver dams may have impounded an additional 230,000 square miles of water. That’s the size of Arizona and Nevada. Although wetlands comprise just 2 percent of land area, they support 80 percent of biodiversity.
KL: Beavers will dig entire canal systems out to their favorite food sources, especially if it’s like willow thicket. You’ll see this a lot in Sierra meadows where they’ve dammed up the stream in the meadow and that’s created a big wetted area behind the dam, but then there’s these aspen stands, and they love aspen. That’s one of their favorite foods. They will risk their lives for aspen.
And so for them, digging these canals to get to those aspen groves so that they can fell the trees and cut them up, get the bark, get the leaves, and then drag what they want back through these canal systems. But ideally you find these areas where beavers have been living there for generations, and so they just inherit the work of the former colony of their ancestors, and they get to build on it, and it creates these just amazing expanses of wetlands. And some areas will have younger trees because the beaver harvested those, and other areas will have more mature trees, and it just creates this beautiful mosaic.
Host: Think of it as a vast hospitality enterprise – an all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet for the neighborhood. As Goldfarb puts it, “The list of organisms that benefit from beavers is basically a list of organisms in North America.”
In their relentless drive to change their surroundings, beavers are creating conditions conducive to a riotous diversity of life. Northern California’s Smith River, which is the last mighty undammed river of its size in California, is a case in point. Again, Brock Dolman.
BD: It’s a system too big for the beavers to dam across. It’s too deep and too wide, and the beavers are like, there’s plenty of water; we don’t need to dam up. Right? So what they do is they’ll dig a burrow into the bank, and folks got their snorkel gear on, and they would like snorkel up into these little like bank caves and stick their head up into the entrance of this bank burrow and look at all the critters in there, and then see all of this wood, like after the beavers chew off all the bark and—we call it corn on the cob, like you take a willow stick and you strip off that bark. That’s what they’re eating is the cambium layer. Then the stick is either just used there—and then they pile up outside of these. And these folks coined this idea that they were called river reefs.
So the bank lodge, inside the entrance to the bank burrow, they found all kind of coho salmon and steelhead hiding out in there, and then on all those sticks, they found all these types of native critters that were using this complexity like a coral reef. These are what they were calling river reefs. And it was the three-dimensional heterogeneity, the complexity that the beavers created in their refuse pile that increased the carrying capacity, creating conditions conducive for life, for Castor canadensis. Right? And so they’re super cool that way.
Host: Along the Feather River that originates in the Sierra Nevada mountains, a group doing water restoration work discovered sticks that beavers, dating back to around 580 AD, had chewed on. These aquatic creatures had created a landscape of lush mountain meadows over a twelve-hundred-year timeline.
Pre-contact in 1491, before European settlers arrived in North America, there were as many as 400 million beavers on the continent, compared to today’s 10 or 15 million. Lewis and Clark described beaver dams as far as the eye could see, up every tributary of the Missouri Basin.
This was well-known to the millions of First Peoples of North America. Beaver was a revered totem animal for numerous tribes across the continent.
However, as the Haudenosaunee put it, “What your people call resources, our people call relatives.” The European settlers saw this revered creature only as a valuable commodity.
BD: Beavers unfortunately made really good hats, and their castoreum gland has a scent to it that was used for perfumes and flavorings and all kinds of things. And really the arrival and the driver of settlement in North America starting way back in the Northeast in the 1500s and 1600s was the push for beaver fur.
But we also had the Russians working the coast of Sonoma County, and Mendocino and Marin County in the late 1700s– sea otters, fur seals, but also trading for beaver or any other fur they could get on the inland as well. And that process drove beavers to near extinction.
Host: After the fur rush came the devastating Gold Rush that resulted in another beaver massacre. Subsequently, settlers removed beavers to drain the wetlands for agriculture and cattle grazing. The beavers had created rich, carbon-laden soil for farmers to exploit.
By the early 1900s, there were fewer than 1,000 beavers in California. The meadows dehydrated, dryland plants disappeared, lodgepole pines invaded, Then came the sheep who overgrazed what was left.
By 1911, the state of California tried to reverse the damage and passed a law to protect beavers.
BD: And then the Government of the Division of Wildlife, it was called then – it’s now called California Department of Fish & Wildlife – actually engaged in a process of relocating beavers. And California relocated about twelve hundred beavers, more than any other Western state by a longshot.
In Idaho, in 1948, they started parachuting beavers out of planes, and they had “Geronimo”, the beaver who they dropped to figure out the mechanism on this parachute box when it landed so it would open up and beaver Geronimo could walk away. California, not to be outdone, we had our own beaver parachuting campaign in 1950, into the El Dorado National Forest up kind of eco summit, south of Tahoe, if people know that part of the world. And they did that, imagine, because beaver dams in the mountains save water for fish, wildlife and agriculture.
Credit Idaho Fish And GameCredit Idaho Fish And Game
Host: But by the 1950s, the various agencies, fisheries, and biologists became less interested in restoring beaver populations. Some said beavers were bad for salmon, blocking their passage in rivers. Others claimed the beavers weren’t native to California and were put there only when states were moving beavers around. Perhaps most of all, they complained beavers were a major nuisance to human affairs.
Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist co-published with a number of other authors two peer-reviewed papers in the California Fish & Game journal that looked at the historic range of beaver in both the Sierra Nevada and the coastal areas of California. They worked with colleagues to gather evidence that indicates beaver are native to much of California.
BD: And the result of those papers is, that was a shift in the perception, I think. The data shows beaver and salmon have coexisted forever. Beaver habitat, beaver dams, salmon, they’re symbiotic. And then all these other benefits. So I think we’ve systematically just been rigorously and as scientifically as possible organizing and addressing the misperceptions in societies, specifically in California, around beaver.
And then what is possible with respect to how to coexist with this very large rodent – 60, 70, 80-pound rodent with really big teeth that chews down trees and builds dams and floods things, and does amazing stuff. But if that’s your driveway or that was your favorite tree or your vineyard, you might not be so happy – or your culvert. So thankfully there’s a lot of affordable, accessible, non-lethal coexistence strategies to live with the beaver and get the benefits of the beaver.
Host: Although today’s beaver populations of about 10 to 15 million are a small fraction of their former glory, they are a relative success story in the restoration of an endangered species. However, there’s no doubt beavers can be a serious nuisance for human activities.
So the question becomes: How can we learn to live with beavers? Because we can’t live without them. More when we return…
Indeed, beavers can present serious disruptions to human endeavors. Consequently, Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist are supporting farmers, landowners and others who are frustrated by busy beavers that mess with their waterways and agricultural lands. They say that human ingenuity combined with beaver mimicry is yielding a beaver peace treaty using non-lethal strategies to both peacefully coexist AND partner with beavers. Again Kate Lundquist.
KL: We really want to ideally keep the beaver where they are, if we can, because that’s going to be the easiest for the beaver, also the easiest for us. Trapping and killing beaver is actually economically not sustainable. They just keep coming back if you have the good habitat and the water.
KL: We work in a lot of different areas of California, so starting at the ridgeline and really focusing on our montane meadows in particular, because those places act as sponges, and in an era of decreasing snowpack, we really need to invest in restoring those meadows and making sure that they can retain as much water that falls on them later into the season. And so there’s already a huge movement of folks doing this restoration work in mountain meadows. And we really help bring the beaver to that conversation. A big part of this is beaver mimicry, as well, so putting in these structures in the stream that goes through these meadows that mimic beaver dams. We’re doing a lot of this work, especially in areas where fires have come through and there’s a lot of sediment now being delivered, and ash and whatnot.
We really want to ideally keep the beaver where they are, if we can, because that’s going to be the easiest for the beaver, also the easiest for us. Trapping and killing beaver is actually economically not sustainable. They just keep coming back if you have the good habitat and the water.
So figuring out ways to fence them out totally works. You can protect your levies and culverts so they aren’t going to dig into them. You can put a pipe through a beaver dam and you can set the water level that you want that pond to be at – high enough so the beaver sticks around and you get all the benefits, but low enough that it’s not going to flood your property. And we’ve been putting in these devices all over. We’ve been working with water agencies, community service districts, CalTrans, a bunch of different agencies and these are really cost-effective, simple ways, time tested, they’ve been utilized. There are certain states where you can’t trap beaver, and the departments of transportation there have to use these devices.
And so we’re working with the California Department of Fish & Wildlife to rethink their guidance on how they give their permits for landowners to kill beaver.
Host: In California, thanks to the work of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and others, Governor Newsom signed landmark legislation in late 2024 that helps landowners, NGOs, and Indigenous tribes promote habitat restoration and climate change resiliency.
The law codified the Beaver Restoration Program at the Department of Fish and Wildlife to encourage coexistence and relocation strategies. The agency works with landowners who seek permits to kill pesky beavers that are causing damage and ensures that they first exhaust coexistence strategies before resorting to lethal ones. Lundquist says all these efforts are helping to change perceptions of the beaver.
KL: There are ranchers in Nevada who have been at beaver restoration longer than those in California, who are willing to go on record now saying, “20 years ago we used to shoot the beaver and now we wouldn’t have a cattle operation without them” and they’re having to save their neighbors who come and literally get water from them and truck it to their operation because they haven’t been able to retain the water in the same way as those who have these beaver complexes.
KL: Because they’re a sovereign nation, the department had no legal standing to refuse their desire to restore beaver. And so they were saying, sure, we’ll help you find the beaver, test the beaver, quarantine, and deliver you the beaver, which is like, huh; that’s good. And so we’re, in the meantime, really trying to set the stage of making good habitat, and so we got to work with the Tribal Natural Resources Department, and just do this amazing collaboration of thinning fuel loads, so taking out a lot of these extra fuels, limbing and thinning, and then stuffing them in the creek and really trapping the sediment.
Host: Thanks to the work of the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign and other advocates across the state, beaver restoration is taking root in riparian rangelands…
National Wildlife Refuges, and the Central Valley Duck Clubs and rice-growing fields. It’s also infiltrating urban areas. In downtown Napa, the mayor issued a formal beaver welcome proclamation. In San Luis Obispo, they formed a Beaver Brigade. The town of Martinez annually hosts a wildly popular beaver festival and parade.
KL: Something that could take decades we can actually put in structures and work with the beaver and accelerate it to happen within a decade, and restore these wetlands, both to keep that water on the landscape longer, but then also to mitigate all these other damaging impacts that are happening from climate change.
BD: Those wetlands that the beaver habitat create then can sequester carbon, can create these peat bogs, creating a place for sequestering atmospheric CO2, greenhouse gas emissions, which is a big topic.
And so here we have an organism who works for free, who does it better than we can do it, who doesn’t require permits, who makes babies and trains their own young how to do this, and they slow the flow, they recharge the water, they clean the water, they create fire refugia, they improve the drought resilience, the flood resilience, the fire resilience and make habitat, and people love to go see them. And they’re watchable wildlife.
Host: Much of the momentum for bringing back beavers is coming from the grassroots – from regular folks. Beavers need all the help they can get from citizen scientists, says Kate Lundquist.
KL: We absolutely encourage citizen science, because right now, we don’t actually know how many beaver we have and where they all are. And so through the iNaturalist program, which is run by California Academy of Sciences, there’s a great way that people can make observations. And so you can do it on your Smartphone. And just upload observations of signs of beaver, chewed sticks, dams, the beaver themselves, if you’re lucky enough to find some. They do generally only come out at night or in the sunset and sunrise hours, the crepuscular times – I love that word. So that’s really helpful for us, knowing where the beaver are.
And then also just really getting the word out about these different strategies. So if you know of a neighbor or if you yourself are having problems, if you have a conflict with a beaver, then let us know and we want to connect you with the resources and information of how to implement these coexistence strategies.
Host: That grassroots impetus is also leading to actual state policy change and funding. The campaign has even gotten beavers their own lobbyist.
KL: So just want to remind everyone that we are all keystone species and we, too, have impacts on the ecosystems that we’re living in. And we can disturb them in a way that’s regenerative or we can disturb them in a way that’s destructive. And the more we can learn from our allies like beaver and all of our other allies out there, the more we can show up in a way that is, in fact, more regenerative.
Fania Davis is redefining justice. Her bold vision is “a justice that seeks not to punish, but to heal. A justice that is not about getting even, but about getting well.” As the founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), Davis has developed a practical methodology that requires all parties involved in conflict or crime to have the courage to enter into conversation, lean into discomfort and work toward personal healing and community peace.
A group of thoughtful, young leaders from RJOY recently conducted a restorative justice circle in the youth program at the Bioneers Conference. Khantane Jackson, a 23-year-old RJOY intern, was among them. As a young boy, Khantane was ridiculed for his speech impediment so he turned to writing as his preferred form of expression and to develop self-awareness. But his writings were, for the most part, kept private. Charged by an argument he had with his mother, he used the energy of that conflict to write a poem and in the safe, brave space of the Bioneers Open Mic, Khantane performed his first spoken word piece in public.
I say they get mad when I express myself. They need help.
Mentally, Physically, Spiritually, Holistically.
That’s wrap-around support. Yeah that’s what I do.
In this work…it’s Heart work, so it’s hard work…I just speak my truth.
And they like how I move. Calming, healing, intentional. Aligned with the mission.
If alignment is not the assignment then something’s missing.
You see ever since I was a young, young, young, young kid I knew I was different.
Or maybe I was tripping. It’s just no one around me could see my vision.
But I love my people. I mean more and more everywhere I go I see Black Joy on so many faces.
That’s hope.
The hope I’m glad I had as a kid because otherwise I’ll probably be addicted to that dope.
But I thank God because now I’m not alone on this lonely road.
From the streets of Oakland to RJOY. We are JOY.
I hope these words feed your soul. I want to thank each and every one of you.
May you stay blessed and highly favored.
And let us say Ase Ase Ase. We pray we pray we pray.
Not just for better days. Not just to elevate. Not just to find a way but for love and strength to enjoy all of the beautiful moments we have each and every day.
Because before you know it…they will all fade away.
After his performance, Brittiny Moore, Bioneers Young Leaders Fellow, conducted this interview with Jackson.
BRITTINY MOORE : We just got out of the Open Mic, and I had the pleasure of listening to your performance, which was absolutely amazing. You noted at the beginning that it was your first open mic. What inspired you to get up and share your poem?
KHANTANE JACKSON: Shout out to Gold Beams in Oakland. They have an open mic for Black creatives. Everyone always is like, hey, are you signed up? I’m like, “Do I look like I’m an artist? How do you know I write?” I’ve always been a writer. But It’s been hard for me to read my words aloud because of my speech impediment and people making fun of my voice and the way I talk. What really inspires me is my community. They kept pushing me to get up there. Everybody was telling me, “The only way to get up there is to face your fears.” Before I got on stage, my heart was really beating fast. I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to do this. But when I got on stage, feeling the energy from the people in the room really welcomed me in; so, I felt more comfortable. That’s why I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I was going to be when I actually got on stage.
BRITTINY: I’m glad that you were able to be in a warm and welcoming space to share your art. As a writer, where do you find inspiration?
KHANTANE: I find inspiration from my life experiences, my imagination. I always go very deep in my dreams. I’m a Pisces and so my imagination is very big. I get inspiration not just from my own imagination, but from the imagination of other people. I read many different books. So, I feel the inspiration and imagination from other people. I also just wanted to speak my truth and express myself. That gives me inspiration.
BRITTINY: I imagine that being able to have this medium to speak your truth and to amplify your voice has to be somewhat healing for you.
KHANTANE: It’s definitely healing. A lot of times, I write not for other people, but just for myself, and so it really has been a healing thing for me to write every day. I don’t have to say the words. When I write the words, they come out how they should come out. Sometimes when I talk out loud, the words don’t come out the way I want them to. I can’t articulate it how I want. But when I write, I can.
BRITTINY: You said this is your first Bioneers conference. It’s also my very first Bioneers conference. So we’re in that together. How has your first experience been?
KHANTANE: I would say the experience at the Bioneers Conference opened my heart to different people from different walks of life. To be honest with you, I’m not really surrounded by too many white people on a daily basis. Coming to this conference, I was told that it was going to be a lot of Indigenous cultures and learning about indigenous ways of life, and so I wasn’t really expecting to be in a population of so many white people. It made me more receptive to seeing the reflection of everyone and not just focusing on color. Some people expressed that they felt uncomfortable around so many white people, because growing up in our neighborhoods, the fear and hatred is so generationally ingrained in us. But I like to see the light in everything, so me coming to this conference, I smile at everyone, and I love the energy that everyone has.
I attended a ritual yesterday called Tending to Our Grief with Breath and Ritual with Ladybird Morgan and that was really powerful. It felt really good to release the grief I was holding. I cried a lot, but they were good tears, and just being able to talk to my friend who passed away, and to put a song into the water. I really do love water, so that really touched me as well.
Participating in the Youth Speaks spoken word workshop, Myra Estrada inspired me to do Open Mic today. Talking about activism, just knowing that people at Bioneers are here to make a change. They’re actively in a community. I feel blessed and honored to be at Bioneers.
BRITTINY: Well we are blessed and honored to have you here with us. Is there maybe one particular thing that you think has been most impactful that you can take with you after this conference and apply to your everyday life?
KHANTANE: I would have to go back to the grief circle that I was in, because Ladybird really taught me a different way to move through my grief. And I have to shout out to someone I met there who also told me different ways I can move through my grief. She was telling me that my friend who passed away is always here with me. The last time I saw him was on my birthday and he passed away two days later, so my recent birthday was very hard for me. She told me that he’s still here, that you can talk to him, you can do things that you did together. Make a plate of his favorite food and talk to him. He wouldn’t want you to be sad. That’s going to stick with me because I’m always pouring into people, and I don’t have too many people pouring into me, so to hear those words really touched me.
And I have to say that I was talking to Jada Imani, the facilitator for the youth Open Mic and the orientation, and she was telling me because there’s not too many people of color, our presence is needed here. And so I definitely feel like I have to show up in these spaces where we’re not that seen. It’s important for us to come and have a voice.
So I did a poem at the Open Mic. I was arguing with my mom and it inspired a poem, and I just want to say that I love my mom to death. I talk about my mom so much, but we like to run away from the trauma in the house and bring it outside. But my intentions in this lifetime is to be a healer and to break generational curses. So, having an argument with my mom and turning it into something as powerful as that poem I did, I feel like it was a testament to show that even through the dark times, we can always find a light. Even if we may have some broken relationships with our friends and family, there’s always hope because they have to do their own inner work. So just realizing that and giving them grace is very important.
This performance took place at the 2023 Bioneers Conference.
Jason Nious, a performing artist and creative director whose background with high school step teams and NCAA gymnastics launched his career, has traveled extensively with Cirque du Soleil, Usher, Stomp, Step Afrika, and numerous theatre and film productions. As founder and Director of the Las Vegas, NV-based, award-winning body percussion ensemble, Molodi, Jason designs new touring productions and facilitates Molodi’s arts education program, reaching over 20,000 students per year. He also serves as an arts integration consultant with Focus 5, Cirque du Soleil, Cleveland Playhouse, and The Smith Center; and is an Artist-In-Residence with the Museum of Dance, Education Chair of the LAB LV Theatre Company, and regularly conducts in-school residencies through the Nevada Arts Council.
Jason Nious, a performing artist and creative director, and Antwan Davis, a multi-percussionist specializing in body-percussion, improv actor and stand-up comedian, perform at Bioneers 2022.
We’re in the midst of a civilizational crisis, a moment of transformation as we attempt to wean ourselves off polluting and extractive energy and move towards an era where economies are powered by clean and efficient electricity. It’s going to be a big lift and has been a bumpy road.
Bioneers has long highlighted the work of leaders at the forefront of advocating a just transition to a more sustainable, regenerative, and equitable future. This is a community committed to building a world where human activities are in harmony with the natural systems that support us.
As we continue to face the challenges of the climate crisis, it’s more important than ever to stay informed and take action. In this newsletter, we hear from some of the world’s most informed experts on the energy transition and share a conversation between frontline activists about the importance of women’s leadership in the struggle for climate justice.
Leah Stokes | The Future is Electric
Leah Stokes, Ph.D., one of the nation’s most influential leading experts and “engaged scholars” in climate and energy policy, is the author of the award-winning book Short Circuiting Policy, which examines the role of utilities in undermining regulation and promoting climate denial. In her presentation, The Future is Electric, Leah explores the massive influx of clean energy investments that are poised to transform the American economy and the opportunities available to take advantage of new climate incentives. She challenges questions such as “What did it take to pass a historic $370 billion climate deal in Congress?” “How can American households and businesses take full advantage of it?” and “What does effective, equitable implementation look like?” to show the ideals of our electric future in this decade and beyond.
Danny Kennedy, with an extensive background in activism, has become one of the nation’s leading figures in clean-technology entrepreneurship and the capitalization of the transition to a “green” economy. In his keynote presentation, Danny delves into the race to the finish line of the transition away from fossil fuels and a plan to build out the full potential of clean energy — energy that is not just distributed, but decentralized in ownership and democratized in control.
Grassroots Women & Climate Justice | What’s Working and Why
The dominant culture that brought us colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism has led us to the brink of global ecological, economic and social collapse. In this conversation, women leaders who are lifting up frontline women around the world share what they see as emergent directions in movement-building, healing and transformative change. Osprey Orielle Lake, Leila Salazar Lopez, Zainab Salbi, and Amira Diamond show how it’s essential to amplify and invest in BIPOC and grassroots women climate leaders globally.
Ilana Cohen | The Time for Fossil-Free Research is Now
Ilana Cohen is a lead organizer of the Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard campaign and the international Fossil Free Research movement, which combats the fossil fuel industry’s dangerous influence on academia. In her presentation, Ilana dives into how we need to evolve the fossil fuel divestment movement to the next level by holding universities and academia broadly accountable to fully separate from Big Oil’s influence. Ilana explains how a burgeoning international grassroots movement of students and academics, known as Fossil Free Research, is seeking to combat the industry’s pernicious influence, and how you can get involved in the fight.
Bioneers Learning: Permaculture, Regenerative Design and Earth Repair for the Great Turning with Penny Livingston
Through engaging courses led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, the brand new Bioneers Learning platform equips engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community.
Register now for a live course with Penny Livingston, “Permaculture, Regenerative Design and Earth Repair for the Great Turning,” to learn about the principles of permaculture, including how to work with natural systems, design for resilience, and create regenerative systems.
Diane Wilson is Announced a 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize Winner
Congratulations to Diane Wilson as well as other winners for being named 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners. Thank you for all of your hard work and your continuous efforts in fighting against industrial pollution.
Bioneers has been a fan and supporter of Diane’s incredible work for decades. Her early talks at Bioneers were legendary, telling the riveting stories of her fight against Formosa plastics and her transition from a gulf shrimper to one of the most inspiring activists we’ve seen in a long time.
Before Rep. Pramila Jayapal was elected to Congress and later became the Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she was an organizer and activist, and an enthusiastic Bioneers participant. In this personal video message to the Bioneers community, Rep. Jayapal discusses her theory of change that she developed as an organizer and has employed as a legislator. She highlights an “inside-outside” approach to building power and enacting meaningful change and policy shifts at national, state, and local levels.
This talk was delivered at the 2023 Bioneers Conference.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, now serving her third term in Congress representing Washington’s 7th District, the first South Asian American woman elected to the House, is the Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and serves on many key committees. A highly influential leader on progressive policies on: immigration, LGBTQ rights, labor issues, economic inequality, climate, clean energy, etc., Congresswoman Jayapal, prior to her election to political office, spent decades working internationally and domestically in global public health and development and as an advocate for women’s, immigrant, civil, and human rights. She is the author of two books, including, most recently: Use the Power You Have: A Brown Woman’s Guide to Politics and Political Change.
In this Bioneers 2022 keynote, Angela Glover Blackwell, a renowned civil rights and public interest attorney, longtime leading racial equity advocate, and founder of the extraordinarily effective and influential national research and action institute PolicyLink, discusses transformative solidarity and why it’s necessary for a thriving multiracial democracy.
In this podcast episode, Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, tells the story of the birth of this powerful movement for racial justice, and shares her vision of a world where black people are actually free, a world that we all deserve to live in.
“We are not victims. Yes, we’re being impacted. We are being impacted terribly. But we are the solution.”
While women throughout the world more heavily bear the burden of the climate crisis’s worst effects than men, their voices are still incredibly underrepresented within movements, organizations, and initiatives intended to address climate change. In the following conversation, three climate justice leaders discuss the ways in which their organizations and those they’ve worked with are successfully empowering women in frontline communities to solve enormous environmental challenges in intersectional ways.
ZAINAB: We’re here to talk about the interconnection between women and climate action and climate justice.
Women get two cents out of every dollar that goes to environmental issues and solutions. They’re being impacted, and they’re doing a lot of work, but they’re not getting resources, and they’re definitely not included in decision-making. I find it amazing that the biggest crisis confronting humanity – a climate crisis – is excluding 50% of the world’s population in solving it.
We are here to talk about solutions. Osprey, can you take us into more depth about the issue we’re facing?
Osprey Orielle Lake
OSPREY: When I first learned about the climate crisis, I was looking for an entry point for what would be the most effective use of my time. What was I going to dedicate the rest of my life to on this issue? Through a lot of research over a decade ago now, I found that the nexus between the role of gender and women leading is a key to resolving the climate crisis.
Because of unequal gender norms all over the world, women are impacted first and worst. Some of that is because they don’t have access to funds. In some countries, they’re not taught how to swim, so if there are floods, they die. They’re displaced. They’re taking care of their children and elders. The list goes on.
And at the same time, we work with women in 50 different countries in different capacities, and all of them will tell you, “We are not victims. Yes, we’re being impacted. We are being impacted terribly. But we are the solution.” And they’re absolutely right.
Just to give a few examples: 60-80% of household food production in developing countries is done by women. Studies show that if you don’t involve women in water collection and water practices, they don’t work because women are the ones who know what’s going on in the environment and what’s happening with water and their families. Counties with women in charge are doing far better on environmental laws. And in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries led by women did far better in caring for their populations.
I mention these examples because people sometimes like to degrade this conversation to “It just feels fair that women should be in charge.” That’s true, we’re fighting for equity, but women’s value in leadership is also a fact. We need to be in decision-making places.
I have been attending climate negotiations every year for a decade, and 74% of speaking time is occupied by men. We’re not where we need to be.
I also want to consider a larger arc for a moment to understand how we got here. We talk about the climate crisis and the environmental biodiversity crisis and the crisis of violence against women. We can weave these crises together when we understand that we do see a mirror image of the violence against the Earth and violence against women. In my opinion, we all need to start taking deep responsibility for our own education, our own research, and our own historical analysis of what this moment is. I believe if we don’t look to the past and learn from our ancestors and our histories — including the roots of patriarchy, extractive and dangerous economic structures, and colonization, even if they’re really uncomfortable — if we don’t step back and really look at where this comes from, it’s very difficult to come up with a deep enough analysis to meet the moment.
We’re in this huge moment of transformation. We’re either heading into deep peril or into deep promise. Everything we do and everything we think and how we’re thinking about it absolutely matters.
ZAINAB: What I’m hearing from you is that it’s not enough to only act. We actually need to redefine our relationship with Earth and our leadership. It’s not only reacting to the crisis, it’s owning our voice and our leadership in acting about it.
OSPREY: That’s exactly right. The crisis is here, and we want to move with haste. At the same time, we have to slow down and go deep. Both are happening, and it’s quite an amazing time.
ZAINAB: Leila, can you tell us more about the work you are addressing at Amazon Watch and what women are saying there?
Leila Salazar Lopez
LEILA: Our work at Amazon Watch is about protecting and defending the Amazon rainforest and our climate in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples. I don’t live in the Amazon. I live in the Mission District of San Francisco, and we have lots of our own battles in our local community. But my work is about standing in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, forest peoples, our NGO allies, and our partners across the Amazon and around the world.
When I first started working in the Amazon in 1995, one of the things I first noticed was that all of the leaders were men. I was working on campaigns, and there were always very few women, if any, in the room. Any time I would go to a meeting, I would literally say, “Where are the women?” We have to ask that question with a lot of respect. The dynamics between men and women in some of the communities are very different than in our cultures and our communities.
We weren’t the only ones asking those questions. In 2013, the first Indigenous women’s march took place in Ecuador. The men had negotiated with the government to allow oil companies onto their land. Women from all of the different Indigenous nationalities of Ecuador came together, held a press conference, and said, “We are Mujeres Amazónicas. We are Amazonian women, and we are organizing in defense of the Amazon and Mother Earth against extraction.”
And that began their march from the rainforest all the way to Quito: days of walks with their babies on their backs. It began their challenging of their brothers who were in leadership. They were saying, “We don’t agree with you; you do not speak for us. You cannot negotiate our rivers and our rainforests and the water that we need to survive and to live.”
That began a movement of Amazonian women that is now very well known in climate justice work. It’s inspired many other women across the Amazon. Where the men used to fight each other, the women from the nationalities have come together, and they’re united in this collective. They’re inspiring their young people, their young women, and they’re connecting with other women across the Amazon.
ZAINAB: It just really speaks to the power of storytelling. Women are not well-known in the space of climate discussion. But they are getting the job done, and these stories keep us going. We need to tell these stories to each other, to our daughters, and our granddaughters.
Amira, tell us about what were you doing in Indonesia recently. I think you have some inspiration to share with us.
Amira Diamond
AMIRA: I am just back from eight months in Indonesia. I was there with my husband and my two sons, and we had the opportunity to visit a lot of Women’s Earth Alliance projects around Bali. Women’s Earth Alliance started our programs there in 2019, and our organization was founded in 2006 to address the issues that frontlines women leaders are facing. It was a moment when there really was not a lot of widespread recognition that women’s voices were needed at decision-making tables.
When I think about our challenges, I think of my colleague, Sumarni Laman from Kalimantan, who is with Ranu Welum and the Heartland Project. She would tell you that fires have been burning in her community since she was a small child and that the destruction caused by palm oil is ravaging her community. My colleague Lil Milagro in the East Bay who runs Mycelium Youth Network would say the youth are demoralized and don’t know what to do in the face of climate change; we need to activate programs and stories to make sure they know there’s a future they can be part of building. My colleague Morning Star Gali, who is with the Pit River Tribe and runs an Indigenous Justice, would tell you that missing and murdered women is an epidemic around the world, and in particular in Northern California, and that it needs to be addressed; our sisters are going missing, and there’s very little attention on that fact.
These are the voices that are arising throughout our work. The beautiful thing is that the women I am naming now, and there are literally thousands more, are actually raising their hands to do something about it.
I think one of the things that we can all possibly agree on is that we’re experiencing a bit of a leadership crisis right now in our world. When I talked with Sumarni, she shared with me how she had just gotten back from doing a rescue mission in the floods. And she doesn’t know how to swim. But people weren’t raising their hands, so she put on her life vest, and she got on boats, and she traveled hours and hours through the jungle to find families that hadn’t had food or water for days.
Her mission is to mobilize 10,000 forest guardians, and she’s doing it. In the face of these incredible difficulties, there is so much power and strength rising right now.
ZAINAB: I have a question for everyone because you all touched on, directly or indirectly, the intersectional aspect of movements related to women, climate, colonization, the patriarchy, etc. I am not from the climate movement. I’m in the women’s rights movement. But for a while, I was very sick, and I ended up spending a lot of time in nature. I came out of that personal experience saying I am going to do everything possible in the rest of my life to help Mother Earth because I owe it to Mother Nature. So it’s very personal.
But I’m learning in the climate movement. And in the process of learning and in my travels, I have come to discover that there is a huge gap between the discussion and the narration of climate issues in America or in Europe and the rest of the world – in the language we’re using and in the attitude we’re going about it with.
What I’m seeing is a Western-centric narrative of how we should engage in the discussion. I’m curious to learn about your experiences of how women at the grassroots level are changing that narrative.
OSPREY: I think it’s important to realize that there are many realities. As we’re talking about intersectionality, the idea is sort of that you can’t just pull on one thing without pulling on something else because they’re really tied together. But there is no question that there is a huge inequity happening right now, which is why it’s called the climate justice movement, because it’s not impacting everyone the same.
We’ve been working for about eight years now with a wonderful woman in the DR Congo, who is a force of nature herself. She’s incredible. She is disabled. She has been walking with support for most of her life.
Some of you may know that the DR Congo is one of the most violent countries in the world for women. It has one of the of the highest rates of rape. It’s extremely patriarchal, and additionally, it’s a war zone. Getting anything done there is miraculous.
At the same time, they’re facing terrific droughts and starvation because of the climate crisis.
So the project that we started with her needed to be really intersectional. We were given funds for them to reforest areas that have been completely damaged through different techniques of agricultural business that are industrialized. We’re talking clearcut to the point of—it’s not sand, but it’s as close as you can get to sand. And the region we’re working in is a rainforest. The complexity was that the Indigenous populations there are now engaged in chopping down trees and the old-growth forests because of the desperate situation of war, and also safety. They have to feed their families and build their homes.
Over the course of about eight years, we’ve been reforesting areas. Some fast-growing trees were purposely grown so that the communities can now start using their firewood and growing their own medicines and their own food. So 25% of the trees are for human use, and 75% of the trees are intended to bring back the natural forest and more local species and native species. It’s this very complex reforestation project.
Then we started growing food because food security is a major issue. Iit’s been really amazing. We’re actually reforesting this incredibly damaged land and now protecting 1.6 million acres of old-growth forest. That’s helping the climate, helping the communities, and it’s also positive because these women are now more valued because they’re bringing in food. They are becoming leaders in a very patriarchal society.
LEILA: We call it “climate change” or “climate crises,” but people on the frontlines may not call it that, especially people in very remote communities. But when there are floods, for example, in Sarayaku, that haven’t happened in 100 years … like even the grandparents didn’t remember floods like this. Then the younger people will come in and say, “This is climate change,” and they’ll talk to their elders and say, “Has this ever happened before? Has the river ever been this high? Did it used to rain like this?”
When you break it down like that, then people are like, “Oh yeah, that’s climate change.”
Lots of people say to me, “That’s why we want to speak for ourselves. We want to speak for ourselves about what’s happening in our own communities, and we want to address it ourselves.” We need to be directly supporting Indigenous Peoples on the frontlines.
AMIRA: You know, there’s a nasty legacy of development where, in so many cases, well-intentioned or potentially not well-intentioned organizations have come into communities and delivered solutions from a charity perspective, from a top-down perspective. And as Osprey was saying, our colleagues are saying every day, “We’re not victims; we are here as agents. We know how to lead our communities forward. We know what the solutions are.”
The Women’s Earth Alliance model is based on being responsive. It’s about listening to communities and what the community sees as an important solution. Sometimes the first thing isn’t to talk about climate change, as is the case in Nigeria where my colleague Olanike Olugboji
Olanike launched a really robust clean cookstoves initiative, and clean cookstoves are a clean energy intervention that have a ripple effect of benefits. So women are no longer making a long walk to cut down fuel, to cut down forests. Deforestation is minimized. The danger that women face when they make a long walk and often encounter sexual violence is diminished. The time that comes back to them because they’re no longer making that long walk allows them to engage in other potentially income-generating opportunities or in going to school. And then the health benefit is really the first thing that turns women on to wanting to take this step, because they’re tired of coughing. They’re tired of their babies on their backs having asthma and smoke inhalation-related diseases.
The critical thing is that there’s a trusted community leader who’s actually saying, “Hey, this is an intervention that works.” It’s not someone from the global North walking in and handing someone something.
Our model also integrates economic sustainable livelihoods work. In all of the programs we run, women are either learning how to sell some kind of sustainable technology or they’re learning about how to fundraise for their community-based organization.
I think that it’s really important, as someone from the global North, that I’m not coming in with my language and trying to tell my colleagues what to think or what to say. Instead, I should listen, really long and really hard, about what someone’s experience is and find ways to connect. As part of our accelerator program, women leaders fill out a strategic framework where they get to look at their impacts as they relate to the sustainable development goals.
What we find is that women feel empowered by that information because they’re choosing to think about who they are as it relates to achieving these global goals. So rather than importing these goals that have been created not necessarily with their voices at the table, it’s an opportunity and a launchpad for leaders to really see how powerful they are and how connected they are to all of the solutions that, frankly, people at decision-making tables are looking for.
I believe that it’s time to let the innovating rise from the ground, and really listen, because clearly those who are in power haven’t been able to figure out a solution that’s working well for all. It’s really time for listening.
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 powell, one of our nation’s longtime 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.
This talk was delivered at the 2023 Bioneers Conference.
john a. powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, was previously Executive Director at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State, and prior to that, the founder and Director of the Institute for Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He also formerly served as the National Legal Director of the ACLU, co-founded the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, and serves on the boards of several national and international organizations. Well-known for his work developing the frameworks of “targeted universalism” and “othering and belonging,” john has taught at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia University. His latest book is Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.
In this podcast episode, 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.
In this Bioneers 2020 keynote, john a. powell challenges us to think beyond individualized practices of bridging across differences, which ignore the structural injustices we live in.
“As we confront the sorrows of our time, there’s authentic hope in nature’s solutions, and in each other. It’s times like these when the nobility of the human soul swells to meet the moment.”
Bioneers’ founder takes us on one of his renowned, tour de force surveys of the current zeitgeist, this time masterfully tracking the diabolical machinations of the fossil fuel industry and oligarchs seeking to derail global economic decarbonization, but offering us genuine pathways to building a green and just world together, if we put our shoulders to the wheel.
Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.
In this Bioneers 2021 keynote, Manuel Pastor, one of the nation’s most influential progressive thought leaders, activists and scholars, proposes that drawing on our instincts for connection and community can actually help create a more robust, sustainable, and equitable economy.
In this podcast episode featuring Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell, and Maurice BP-Weeks, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy that goes back to the very founding of the United States. In today’s new Gilded Age of rule by the wealthy, rising anti-trust movements are challenging the stranglehold of corporate monopoly.
Keep Your Finger on the Pulse
Our bi-weekly newsletter provides insights into the people, projects, and organizations creating lasting change in the world.
