AI doesn’t run on magic—it runs on energy, water, and massive physical infrastructure. As tech companies scale up generative AI, they’re building out hyper-scale data centers that consume millions of gallons of water per day and as much electricity as entire nations. These facilities are quietly reshaping local ecosystems and rapidly increasing global carbon emissions, all while companies promise a more “intelligent” future.
In this essay, tech critic Paris Marx unpacks the environmental footprint of AI’s infrastructure and asks: Is this the future we really want? Adapted from the Bioneers 2025 panel AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley, this piece is the second in our four-part series exploring the unchecked impacts of artificial intelligence. Read to the end to access the other three essays.
PARIS MARX: Let’s go back to November 2022. You probably heard about an app called ChatGPT, released on November 30th. Almost overnight, generative AI was everywhere. It became the dominant topic of conversation, central to headlines, social media, and everyday discussions. The media couldn’t stop speculating about what ChatGPT might mean or how it could reshape society. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was tweeting about how fast it was growing, as if rapid adoption alone proved that a massive transformation was underway. And with everyone from tech outlets to your social feed buzzing about it, it felt almost obligatory to try it out just to see what the fuss was about.
That launch was accompanied by a sweeping narrative: this was going to change the world. Something bigger was emerging—something with the potential to be incredibly powerful, maybe even beneficial, but also deeply unsettling.
Proponents of generative AI framed it as a leap in collective human intelligence. They promised a wave of AI assistants, each specialized for different industries—an architecture bot, a science bot, and so on. These tools, they claimed, would revolutionize entire sectors and possibly replace human workers along the way. At the same time, they made sure to pitch a silver lining: AI would vastly expand access to education and healthcare. But let’s be honest: When they talked about people going to AI doctors, they didn’t mean themselves. That was clearly meant for everyone else.
These tech giants are channeling their capital into realizing their particular vision of the future—one that depends on expanding AI, increasing computational power, and rolling it all out at a global scale.
There may well be some positive outcomes from this technology, but there’s also the looming possibility of serious harm. The narrative goes something like this: We must develop AI, even though it might destroy the world. It could lead to the end of humanity. This mix of hype sprinkled with warnings of existential risk doesn’t just shape public perception; it influences how the media talks about AI and how organizations begin to position themselves in response to it.
The tech industry benefits from these grand, speculative conversations. They want us focused on how powerful AI might become someday, rather than examining how it’s already being used right now. It’s more convenient to keep eyes on the future than on the real impacts unfolding in the present.
That’s why it’s so important to understand the foundations of this technology—where it comes from, what it actually is, and why it feels like it’s suddenly everywhere.
So why, in November 2022, did a chatbot like ChatGPT emerge and suddenly dominate the tech conversation? I think there are three key reasons. The first is centralized computing power. Back in 2006, Amazon began building massive centralized cloud computing warehouses—what we now call data centers. Imagine an e-commerce warehouse, but instead of packages, it’s packed wall-to-wall with servers. These enormous facilities require a huge amount of energy and power. Over the past two decades, they’ve expanded rapidly and become essential to the infrastructure behind the internet and the digital platforms we use every day.
So why are we seeing this explosion of AI tools right now? Yes, they require centralized computing power, but they also need something else: massive amounts of data. Companies collect enormous quantities of information from the open web and beyond, feeding it into these models. The result? Tools that seem far more capable than previous versions, not because of magic, but because they’re powered by vastly more data and computing resources.
That’s why data collection is so central. It fuels not just generative AI but also targeted advertising and many other systems. To gather all that data, companies have built a vast surveillance infrastructure, quietly capturing information across nearly every corner of our digital lives.
But there’s a third ingredient here: money. Immense amounts of capital are required to build and scale this kind of infrastructure. Companies such as OpenAI are reportedly losing billions each year in the short term, betting that these tools will become profitable in the long run.
They can afford to take that risk because they’re backed by some of the largest, most valuable corporations in the world. These tech giants are channeling their capital into realizing their particular vision of the future—one that depends on expanding AI, increasing computational power, and rolling it all out at a global scale.
So what do these infrastructures actually look like?
We often talk about “the Cloud” as if it were something intangible—data floating in the ether. But in reality, all that data lives in massive physical facilities that require enormous amounts of power and water to operate.
Hyper-scale data centers are a step beyond the standard data centers that have existed for decades. These facilities are far more massive in both their size and their impact. And they’re growing fast.
In 2018, there were about 430 hyper-scale data centers worldwide. By 2020, that number had jumped to 597. By the end of 2024, it had nearly doubled to 1,136. According to Synergy Research Group, another 504 are currently under construction or in the planning stages, driven largely by the surge in demand for generative AI infrastructure.
Roughly 40 to 50 percent of these centers are located in the U.S., though international growth is accelerating, especially in China. The three biggest players—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—own about half of them.
As these facilities multiply, so do concerns from the communities where they’re built. One data center requires significant resources, but build five or ten in the same area, and the strain on local power and water systems becomes hard to ignore.
Around the world, more and more communities are beginning to push back, and for good reason. Hyper-scale data centers such as Google’s use an average of 550,000 gallons of water per day, or about 200 million gallons per year, primarily for cooling. Just as a laptop heats up under heavy use, these massive facilities, housing tens of thousands of constantly running servers, generate an enormous amount of heat. That heat has to go somewhere, so water and air conditioning systems are used to keep things cool.
Just between 2022 and 2023, Google’s water use across its data centers rose by 20 percent. At Microsoft, it jumped 34 percent. And that was before the generative AI boom really gained momentum, so it’s safe to say those numbers have only gone up since.
In pursuit of lower costs, many companies are building hyper-scale data centers in more remote or arid regions such as Arizona or parts of Spain—where water is already scarce. These areas often offer more access to renewable energy, which allows companies to market the facilities as “green,” but in reality, this shift puts even greater stress on already fragile water supplies.
Next, of course, is energy use. Globally, data centers currently account for about 2–3% of total energy consumption. In the U.S., that number is closer to 5%, since, as mentioned earlier, a disproportionate number of data centers are located here, and that energy demand is only set to grow. In 2022, data centers, along with crypto and AI infrastructure, consumed about 460 terawatt hours of electricity worldwide—roughly equivalent to the total energy use of France. By 2026, the International Energy Agency projects that number will more than double to 1,050 terawatt hours—about the same as Japan’s total annual energy use. That’s a massive escalation in just a few years.
Ireland is on the frontlines of this issue. Right now, 21% of all metered electricity used in Ireland goes to data centers. In winter, this creates serious strain on the grid, sometimes triggering public alerts that warn residents to reduce energy use or risk outages. As a result, there’s growing pressure to expand what has been a temporary moratorium on new data centers in Dublin. But Ireland’s struggle is just the tip of the iceberg; similar tensions are emerging in communities around the world.
How much computation do we actually need? Do we really need to build out endless data centers to support a flood of AI tools with questionable uses—tools that often serve tech companies’ bottom lines more than the public good?
So, where are we headed? Generative AI really began taking off at the end of 2022, and the momentum hasn’t slowed. In late 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum: “We need way more energy in the world than I think we thought we needed before. We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.” He went on to say that the world may soon have to embrace geoengineering as a stopgap for climate impacts, unless, of course, we have a breakthrough in nuclear energy. In other words, we’re pushing forward with AI, no matter the energy cost, and if it overwhelms the planet, we’ll just have to engineer our way out of it.
More recently, we’ve seen a major shake-up coming out of China. You might have heard about DeepSeek, a company that’s doing what American AI companies are doing, but far more efficiently. Its emergence rattled the industry, causing U.S. tech stock prices to dip as investors began to question whether this AI boom is really all it’s cracked up to be, and whether the massive buildout by U.S. companies was truly justified? But of course, they’re not backing down.
Not long after DeepSeek’s debut, Sam Altman, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son went to the White House to announce a $500 billion investment—code-named Stargate—aimed at building even more massive, nuclear-powered data centers. Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded to DeepSeek’s efficiency by saying that greater efficiency will only drive greater demand, ultimately requiring 100 times more computing capacity. In his view, more efficient models don’t reduce resource use, they multiply it.
But is that actually what’s happening?
We’re starting to see some serious cracks in the foundation. Microsoft has recently canceled a number of data center leases, raising red flags for investors. Even leaders such as Alibaba’s Chairman Joe Tsai have warned that we may be in the middle of an AI data center build-out bubble..
So I’ll leave you with two final questions.
First: Who gets to decide what kinds of technology we build? Should those decisions be left to people such as Sam Altman or Microsoft’s Satya Nadella? Or should we be making these choices democratically, asking whether it really makes sense to invest staggering amounts of water, energy, and materials into technologies whose benefits are still unclear?
And second: How much computation do we actually need? Do we really need to build out endless data centers to support a flood of AI tools with questionable uses—tools that often serve tech companies’ bottom lines more than the public good? These companies rely on constantly growing demand for Cloud services to keep profits up, but that doesn’t mean we have to go along with it. It’s worth asking: how much computing capacity do we truly need? I’d argue it’s probably a lot less than what they want us to believe.
This series—adapted from the Bioneers 2025 session AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley—offers critical perspectives on the systems driving the AI boom and the broader impacts of techno-solutionism.
In the wake of ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, artificial intelligence quickly became a global obsession—and a corporate gold rush. But behind the promises of productivity, convenience, and innovation lies a far more sobering reality: AI is accelerating energy consumption, fueling inequality, and embedding mass surveillance deeper into the foundations of society.
This article is the first in a four-part series adapted from the Bioneers 2025 panel AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley, featuring leading voices who challenge the dominant narratives about AI and call for deeper scrutiny of its impacts. Read to the end to access the next three essays.
Here, journalist and activist Koohan Paik-Mander delivers a sweeping critique of AI as the latest frontier of late-stage capitalism. A co-founder of the Tech Critics Network and board member of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Paik-Mander draws a clear line from data centers to autocracy, and makes the case that the surveillance economy isn’t just dystopian. It’s already here.
KOOHAN PAIK-MANDER: Artificial intelligence—AI—is attracting truly enormous amounts of investment these days. In the two years since the introduction of ChatGPT, hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into AI, all chasing the kinds of returns that Silicon Valley has traditionally seen. That’s why AI is being pushed down our throats at every turn.
At climate conferences like COP, you’ll see corporate banners claiming AI will cure climate change. At biological diversity conferences, fossil fuel companies tout AI as the solution to species extinction. And politicians across party lines, from Trump to Biden, celebrate AI as the path to U.S. dominance. Techno-utopianism is a bipartisan fever dream.
The entire globalized economy is racing to saturate civilization with AI, no matter the cost. If it means building data centers from sea to shining sea, so be it. If those data centers use so much energy that they foreclose the possibility of ever reaching climate solutions, hey, we’ll just open Three Mile Island and use nuclear power. And if those nuclear power plants take decades to come online? Fossil fuels will suffice in the meantime, because you can’t stop the wheels of progress, right?
This is late-stage capitalism, and AI is the poster child. It’s capitalism eating itself and everything else.
Now, I’m not saying that AI doesn’t have good, useful applications. But we need to start examining the real costs of an AI-driven society. That’s why I’m excited to introduce three incredible thinkers who are helping us do just that: Paris Marx from Canada, Soledad Vogliano from Argentina, and, from the exotic land of Healdsburg, California, Claire Cummings.
Before we get to them, let’s take a moment to demystify AI. It’s not intelligent. It doesn’t think. It’s basically a very sophisticated classification machine that makes predictions based on large volumes of data. Building an AI system typically involves scraping the entire internet, or collecting as much genetic or biometric data as possible, and training the model to recognize patterns. What you get is a fancy machine that makes educated guesses.
And because they’re just guesses, they’re often wrong. The industry doesn’t call them mistakes; it calls them “hallucinations,” a term that conveniently anthropomorphizes the machine. And these errors are baked into the system—you can’t eliminate them. Worse, you often can’t even trace how the mistake occurred. That’s the “black box phenomenon”: millions of calculations happening at once, totally opaque, with no audit trail.
When you think about the fact that Elon Musk has used AI to determine which people and programs are getting cut from the federal budget, it’s infuriating.
The enormous power asymmetry created by the AI economy can’t be overstated. In the past 30 years, digital technology has basically been the most effective means of accelerating inequity and centralizing control, maybe since slavery. Think about it: Of the ten richest people in the world, eight are Silicon Valley tech magnates. This isn’t a coincidence. There’s something inherent in this technology that drives inequality.
AI is what’s known as a “force multiplier.” It amplifies this dynamic of inequity and locks it in. It does this by embedding itself in society’s infrastructure: massive data centers, yes, but also the vast surveillance web of the “Internet of Things”—smart appliances, connected cars, facial recognition cameras, biometric sensors. These aren’t conveniences. They’re surveillance tools. And surveillance, as we know, is a cornerstone of autocracy and fascism.
At the same time, investors are frothing at the mouth to pour billions of dollars into AI. A few years ago, The Economist ran a cover that said, “Data is the new oil.” If that’s true, then AI is the refinery, processing raw data into pure power for a small group of oligarchs.
This is late-stage capitalism, and AI is the poster child. It’s capitalism eating itself and everything else.
The AI surveillance infrastructure entrenches a profound power asymmetry in our society. This is nothing to sneeze at. The corporate state knows everything about us, and we don’t know anything about it. These are the conditions for fascism.And the persecution has already begun.
This data surveillance infrastructure serves three main purposes. First, it continually trains AI by harvesting new data. It’s never done learning, and it needs constant input. Second, it builds detailed personal profiles for every one of us—profiles that can be used to control us. Third, those profiles are monetized. You become the product.
Let’s take a look at how that plays out. Say you miss a payment on your car insurance. Your insurance company can remotely deactivate your engine. Say you live in a smart home, and someone who remodeled your kitchen visits you regularly. If that person later commits a crime, it could be associated with your profile, potentially impacting your ability to get a job or a loan.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s the same proximity-based technology used by Lavender AI to determine kill list targets. Tens of thousands of people have been assassinated using this system, simply for being near someone labeled a terrorist.
The poster child for all this? Cambridge Analytica. Remember them? The cyber warfare firm that worked with Steve Bannon to manipulate 230 million Americans in 2016 using AI tools to identify and target persuadable voters. That manipulation helped elect Trump and later passed Brexit. Airbnb now uses similar methods to shut down local legislation aimed at regulating short-term rentals.
And still, people tell me, “This isn’t my problem—I’m not even on social media.” But it is everyone’s problem. If enough people are persuaded by this propaganda, it shapes policy that affects us all.
Sure, AI can be fun. You can make weird videos. But that doesn’t address the core issue: the staggering power imbalance created by embedding surveillance into the very fabric of our civilization just to prop up the AI economy. For me, that’s a deal breaker.
To continue unpacking the global consequences of artificial intelligence, we’re sharing a series of essays adapted from the Bioneers 2025 session AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley. Each contributor brings a unique lens to the broader critique of techno-solutionism and the systems that support it.
Our industrial, agricultural and land-use practices have set off a cascade of disruptions to the environment, increasing air and ocean temperatures faster than at any time in our human history. Rainfall patterns are shifting, glaciers and ice sheets are melting, permafrost is thawing, sea levels are rising, and severe weather is becoming more violent and frequent. All of these impacts cause specific harms, but they also have the potential to compound each other and lead to the collapse of ecosystems and the human systems that rely on them. To head off such devastating scenarios, there must not only be widespread global change but also targeted local action.
The biosphere is made up of hundreds of distinct ecosystems that support highly diverse societies, cultures and local communities, and each one faces its own specific series of threats, from deforestation to drought to flooding to dangerous pollution levels to plummeting biodiversity. To prevail in protecting our diverse planet, our greatest assets are often the local people who best know their ecosystems and communities. In this newsletter, we hear from several exemplary local leaders, including: Doria Robinson, among many other achievements, the longtime Director of Urban Tilth, a renowned urban food project building a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system; Abby Reyes, a lawyer, environmental organizer, and Director of Community Resilience Projects at the University of California, Irvine; and four other inspiring climate action leaders working on building bioregional alliances.
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Doria Robinson – Empowering Community from the Grassroots: The Richmond, CA Model
The city of Richmond, California, has provided an impressive example of highly effective progressive grassroots organizing that has included the building of groundbreaking citizens’ organizations, local institutions and co-operatives, and successful electoral campaigns, as well as a major Environmental Justice victory in a decades-long struggle with Chevron, whose massive facilities have long polluted the region. One of the most important figures in this exemplary community is Doria Robinson, whose multi-faceted activism has been a key element in its successes. Since 2007, she’s been the Executive Director of Urban Tilth, a renowned urban food project building a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system, and has helped nurture the birth of many local initiatives, from bicycle co-ops to urban “greening” projects. Now serving on Richmond’s city council, Doria shares some of what she has learned in her decades of building people’s power from the ground up.
The Struggle for Justice in Colombia’s Oil Wars: Climate Organizer Abby Reyes on Love, Loss and Resilience
In 1999, three land rights defenders were kidnapped after they left Indigenous U’wa territory in Colombia. Multinational oil interests seeking the massive reserves beneath the region were attacking U’wa lifeways — and those who accompanied them in resistance. The bodies of Terence Freitas, Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaiian) were eventually found bound and bullet-riddled in a cow pasture. The murders were part of a struggle that would continue for decades, bringing about both setbacks and victories for the U’wa.
Twenty years after the murders, Terence’s partner, Abby Reyes, found herself a party in Case 001 of Colombia’s truth and recognition process, set up to investigate the causes and consequences of that nation’s decades-long internal armed conflicts. In “Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice,” Reyes navigates her own grief and the fight for accountability for the murders of Terence and his colleagues. In this conversation, Reyes, a lawyer, environmental organizer, and Director of Community Resilience Projects at the University of California, Irvine, discusses land rights advocacy, entrenched oil interests, resistance and resilience, and what she hopes her book can offer climate activists.
As climate breakdown escalates, communities are increasingly realizing that climate action and resilience have as much to do with actual ecological boundaries as with political boundaries on a map. The fundamental principle of bioregionalism is that communities are to a large extent defined by their watersheds, foodsheds, and energy sheds and that basing their local organizing around these ecological realities can lead to meaningful strategic collective action. But how exactly can bioregional perspectives translate into effective political action? This visionary group of leading-edge climate action organizers illuminates multiple pathways for addressing both practical climate actions and emerging forms of eco-governance that center equity and justice.
In this presentation, we hear from global Indigenous climate leader Eriel Deranger; leading “Rights of Nature” attorney Thomas Linzey; climate justice organizer and attorney Colette Pichon Battle, whose Taproot Earth nonprofit works in the Gulf South and Appalachia; and OneEarth founder Justin Winters, whose science-based climate solutions framework focuses on Renewable Energy, Regenerative Agriculture, and Land and Biodiversity Conservation.
Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — Sacred Activism: Meeting our Challenges as Gateways for Cultivating Relational Leadership
What if our greatest challenges are invitations to become more whole? In an era of accelerating change and deepening divides, we’re being called to meet the moment—not only with action but with presence, compassion, and a reimagined sense of leadership. This course is not about striving harder — it’s about showing up more fully, guided by love, connection, and a deepened sense of relational leadership. Led by Nina Simons and Deborah Eden Tull, this four-week online course runs from November 13 to December 11, 2025.
As climate breakdown escalates, communities are increasingly realizing that climate action and resilience have as much to do with actual ecological boundaries as with political boundaries on a map. The truth is that communities are defined by their local watersheds, food sheds and energy sheds – as well as culture sheds. These ecological maps will increasingly redefine political maps that can engender meaningful strategic collective action. How do bioregional perspectives translate into political action? How can we build political-ecological alliances for climate action that address urgent bioregional realities and needs? This visionary group of leading-edge climate action organizers illuminate multiple pathways for addressing both practical climate actions and emerging forms of eco-governance that center equity and justice.
With global Indigenous climate leader Eriel Deranger; leading Rights of Nature attorney Thomas Linzey; climate justice organizer and lawyer Colette Pichon Battle, whose Taproot Earth nonprofit works in the Gulf South and Appalachia; and OneEarth founder Justin Winters whose science-based climate solutions framework focuses on renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, and land and biodiversity conservation.
This conversation took place at the Bioneers 2025 Conference. You can experience more of the amazing keynote talks, conversations and performances here. (photo: Boris Zharkov Photography)
For billions of years, the natural cycle of day and night, light and darkness, has governed the lives of plants and animals. They have evolved with these cycles, which play a critical role in their survival. This daily cycle of light and dark governs life-sustaining behaviors such as reproduction, nourishment, sleep and protection from predators. But humans and our plethora of bright outdoor lighting are breaking through this vital darkness.
In “Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark,”Leigh Ann Henion embraces darkness, rebuffing its associations with malady in the Western world. Henion writes that darkness is an integral and essential part of the human experience, and it’s one that we are collectively losing. She notes that organizations ranging from DarkSky International to the American Medical Association have implored the public to fight light pollution, which, in addition to degradation of entire ecosystems, has been shown to cause increased rates of diabetes, cancer and a variety of other ills in humans.
“What might we discover if we pause to consider what darkness offers?” Henion writes. “What might happen if we, as a species, stopped battling darkness—negatively pummeled in popular culture and even the nuance of language—as something to be conquered and, instead, started working with it, in partnership.”
Like many nocturnal creatures, salamanders’ natural activities can be confused or deterred by artificial light, including their mating rituals. As Henion explains, salamanders spend most of their lives underground, but once a year, they emerge to mate, navigating back to the ephemeral spring pools of their own beginnings to lay their eggs where fish cannot eat them. One such place is Barbwire Pond. In the following excerpt from “Night Magic,” Henion embarks with her friend Wendy to this ephemeral pool, hoping to see a spotted salamander dance.
Before I started spending time with salamanders, I’d never considered that it might be easier to slide across rain-glazed ground. I hadn’t thought about how moisture turns hard-edged leaves into tissue paper. I’d never looked up at bright clouds on a warm spring day and wished they would swell into dark forms. But that’s what happens the following day. Every hour of sunshine makes me think to myself: I wish it would just rain already!
When I tell Wendy that I’m headed out again that night even though clouds have failed to gather and temperatures seem below ideal, she offers to accompany me. Neither of us consider ourselves big news-watchers, but recent events have been acutely concerning. The specifics of doom are ever-changing. What remains the same is how scrolling newsfeeds makes me feel like my soul is shriveling.
My headlamp has, night after night, proven too diffuse for probing water. It is more of a bludgeoning device than a scalpel, so Wendy has brought her husband’s scuba light for me to borrow. I’m happy to have a better tool, but I’m having trouble figuring it out. The flashlight doesn’t have a switch; instead, its casing requires a twist. And I’ve twisted it too far, all the way to a distress setting that looks like the reflections of a disco ball. As the light thump-thumps against my calf, Wendy laughs. “How are you even doing that?” she asks.
The activity is so rare that some field biologists who’ve gone out for years have missed witnessing it. Still, I’m here because, against all odds, I want to watch a salamander dance.
The nightclub-style strobes inspire me to tell her that one of the reasons I’ve been excited to witness the migration is because I’ve heard that spotted salamanders perform artful courtship rituals. They nudge each other and move in circles. The activity is so rare that some field biologists who’ve gone out for years have missed witnessing it. Still, I’m here because, against all odds, I want to watch a salamander dance.
Wendy gets it. After a hard winter, she has specific natural-world yearnings of her own. “This time of year, I just want to get my hands dirty,” she says. “It’s the best way I know to combat the winter blues.”
It’s well documented that bacterium in soil can boost moods, maybe as effectively as antidepressant drugs. While light therapy plays a role in increasing serotonin and has long been used to combat seasonal affective disorder with morning exposure, researchers have started sounding warnings that being exposed to artificial light at night warrants more attention for its contribution to rising rates of mood disorders.
It’s been linked to pro-depressive behaviors, and it activates the part of the brain associated with disappointment and dissatisfaction. Brains that process artificial light at night are known to have lower dopamine production the following morning. But, given our cultural associations, it’s difficult to align with the concept of light as a force with the power to make us sad. We almost always use darkness to symbolize depression and light to indicate happiness.
The human relationship to artificial light is relatively new, but our relationship to natural darkness is ancient. This seems obvious, but it’s hard to absorb that, unlike society’s most prevalent light-dark metaphors, light is not always a positive force and darkness is not always a negative one.
It’s Friday, but there are no stadium lights tonight. The soccer fields are quiet. It hasn’t rained, and there’s nary a worm on the sidewalk. “I don’t think we’re going to see anything,” Wendy says, directing our attention across the New River, where security lights reveal the contour of a distant riverbank.
Instinctively, we turn to identifying the lights as if they are stars forming constellations. There’s a car dealership. A produce-distribution center. A new indoor gym that Wendy sighs at on sight. “That’s right on the river, one of the prettiest places in the world, and they didn’t put a single window on the backside of that building,” she says. Even in full daylight, people on treadmills cannot see the river running alongside them.
Outdoor lighting at night often gives people a sense of security, but there is not clear scientific evidence that it increases safety.
We recognize another cluster of lights as a gas station. We’re temporarily stumped by a parking lot that appears to be the brightest spot in the lineup. It’s directly across from the ephemeral pool. Ultimately, Wendy identifies the lot as being attached to the administrative offices of a local electric company. She shrugs. “I guess they were like, ‘Well, we’ve got the energy, might as well use it!’”
Outdoor lighting at night often gives people a sense of security, but there is not clear scientific evidence that it increases safety. In fact, some studies have found that streetlights do not lessen accidents or crime. Certain forms of security lighting have even been found to decrease safety since they make potential victims and property that might be stolen or vandalized easier for perpetrators to visually target. It’s a fraught topic with no easy answers, but the fact remains: It’s not uncommon for outdoor lights to be installed haphazardly, favoring as much illumination as possible with little thought as to how darkness might situationally be of aid.
Temperatures keep dropping. Our breath appears as chalky puffs against a blackboard. We walk back toward the ephemeral pool, drawn by the promise of life. At the place where the sidewalk ends, we crouch in foliage that shields us from the lights across the river. In my scuba beam, I can see fallen twigs with salamander egg clutches attached to them. And there, in the middle of the pond, embracing one of those clutches, is a female spotted salamander. The egg mass she’s clinging to resembles NASA images of a star expanding. And right now, she’s adding to it.
“She’s laying eggs! Right now!” Wendy says. She grabs my arm in an I-can’t-believe-this move, and we jostle up and down like we’ve just won the lottery.
This isn’t the courtship ritual I’ve read about, in which males attempt to woo females by nuzzling their heads, but it’s clearly some type of dance.
Next to the egg-laying salamander, the pale flash of a second salamander’s belly appears. Then it disappears. This isn’t the courtship ritual I’ve read about, in which males attempt to woo females by nuzzling their heads, but it’s clearly some type of dance. “Did you see that?” I ask Wendy. But she is still hyper-focused on the egg laying.
“I can’t believe this is happening! We need to be careful that we don’t disturb her,” Wendy says, turning her scuba light from its high to low setting.
Meanwhile, two frogs locked in an embrace pop to the surface of Barbwire Pond. They’re surrounded by a halo of fairy shrimp who are fanning their pink-feather legs, flashing tropical colors in dark waters. Through the cloud of translucent fairies, the frogs swerve into a gelatinous mass of already-laid frog eggs, shining purple. Their movement is making everything quiver.
That’s when I see the dancing salamander again. From the darkest part of this pool, in the darkest part of this beloved park, the salamander’s star-dotted body shoots again to the surface of water. This time, Wendy sees him, too. “Oh, my!” she exclaims.
The animal is flipping. He’s somersaulting. His feet-hands are fervently waving back and forth, churning with such joy that we start laughing along with the wood frogs as, all around us, the peeper frogs howl. Every species in this ephemeral pool seems to have come alive at the same time. The water is writhing with life. It twists and turns, colors of a kaleidoscope, until I’ve lost my bearings.
The most critical feedback loop in a democracy is a free press and access to vital information. Yet decades of corporate consolidation allowed giant conglomerates to annihilate local news outlets and predatory hedge funds are leaving news deserts in their wake. In 2025, a fifth of people in the U.S. live with little or no access to local news and three quarters of newspaper jobs have been axed over the last 20 years. But new models are crystallizing to fill the void, thanks to innovating journalists and publishers. With Larry Ryckman, publisher and co-founder of The Colorado Sun; Madeleine Bair, founder of El Tímpano; and Jacob Simas, community journalism director for the Cityside Journalism Initiative.
Featuring
Larry Ryckman, Co-founder and Editor of The Colorado Sun, was previously: Senior Editor at The Denver Post; Managing Editor at The Gazette in Colorado Springs; and City Editor at the Greeley Tribune.
Madeleine Bair, Founder of El Tímpano, an award-winning civic media organization designed with and for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.
Jacob Simas, Oakland-based Community Journalism Director at Cityside Journalism Initiative.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Claire Reynolds & Kenny Ausubel
Producer: Claire Reynolds
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Associate Producer: Emily Harris
Producer: Teo Grossman
Interview Recording Engineer: Rod Akil at KPFA studios
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
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Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): As the iconic journalist Bill Moyers has said, “The quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably intertwined.”
Yet decades of corporate consolidation in the U.S. allowed a half-dozen giant conglomerates to seize control of information and nearly annihilate critical local news outlets that people rely on and trust.
Two or more local newspapers go out of business every week. In just the past 20 years, nearly a third have folded under the crushing weight of giant media and digital platform monopolies that starve them of advertising revenues.
Some outlets that survive become distressed properties and therefore targets for private equity firms that swoop in, downsize them, strip them for parts, and then close up shop.
According to a 2025 study by Northwestern’s Medill Journalism School, about a fifth of people in the U.S. live with little or no access to local news – and they often live in rural and low-income areas.
One committed journalist who decided to fight back is Larry Ryckman. After decades working as a reporter for the Associated Press, he landed at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Denver Post.
Ironically, he’d previously worked as a foreign correspondent in the early 90s where he covered the dismantling and looting of the Soviet Union by big banks and investors. Returning to the U.S., he witnessed the Alden Capital hedge fund dismantling and looting the Post. Larry Ryckman spoke at a Bioneers conference.
Uprising against Alden in Denver. Credit: John Leyba
Larry Ryckman(LR): Alden is a hedge fund that buys distressed properties, whether they’re shoe stores or pharmacies or whatever it might be. I mean, you know, back in the day, owning a newspaper was like printing money; it was a very profitable business. Until it wasn’t. Craigslist came along, the Internet came along, digital advertising, print advertising became upended, and it became a very different business. And when the bills came due, the people who held the notes were hedge funds like Alden Global Capital.
So Alden went from not being involved in newspapers at all to being one of the nation’s largest newspaper owners. It’s just been awful to see them snap up newspapers left and right and do what they do.
So, they follow a very similar playbook in town after town after town. They come in and they buy the newspaper. They sell off the real estate – so that might be the newspaper’s building, might be the printing press, whatever that property might be. So they sell off the real estate, they jack up subscription costs, and they cut the staff. So they just lay people off, wave after wave after wave of relentless cutting.
And there’s another hedge fund that owns the nation’s largest newspaper group, which is Gannett. Take a look at Salinas, California, birthplace of John Steinbeck. The Salinas Californian was once a great scrappy newspaper that covered Salinas. Today, Gannett owns it, they have no local reporters left. They have laid off all the reporters. The only unique local content in The Salinas Californian are death notices. I mean, you can’t even make this stuff up. And that’s what the future looks like under hedge fund ownership. They are not planning for the future. It’s all about today.
A mural celebrating John Steinbeck on the former Salinas Californian building. The newspaper moved out of the historic building in 2017.
So they squeeze every dime they can out of these properties. And at the end, if nobody wants to subscribe to it, they’ve already made their money and they move on, and they just turn the lights out. They really do not care at all about newspapers, journalists, or these communities – or frankly, democracy itself.
These hedge funds are such a threat. I think that they have done more damage to American democracy than practically anything that I can even think about. I mean, how can we expect to have informed voters if people don’t have access to knowledge, if they don’t have access to, you know, verified information? There’s a reason the founding fathers put protection for freedom of the press in the very first amendment of the Constitution. It wasn’t that they were any big fans of newspapers. They got beat up pretty bad back in their day; maybe they should have gotten beat up a little more. But they understood that a healthy democracy depends on a vibrant free press. It depends on having a watchdog able to ask difficult questions of those in power.
Host: Powerful political and economic players benefit from information deserts. Research shows what happens when communities don’t have reliable local news sources: there’s more corruption and higher public spending. Fewer people register and turn out to vote, fewer people run for office, and there’s more polarization.
Research also shows that good local journalism holds policymakers to account. Communities that are well informed are more likely to have representatives that vote in their interests.
But since 2005, a whopping three quarters of newspaper jobs have been axed. Newspaper job losses now rank in the same range as employees of companies that manufacture DVDs and cassette tapes. Ryckman says that when we have fewer reporters, it’s the community that loses.
LR: We’ve lost so much. I mean, the fact is, it’s sad when anyone loses their job, whether it’s a journalist or someone working at a restaurant or a factory.
The tragedy is we’ll never know the stories that aren’t being told because there wasn’t a journalist there to tell them—the trials that weren’t covered, the city council meetings that weren’t covered, the school board meetings that weren’t covered because there wasn’t a journalist left to cover them.
Once upon a time, legacy newspapers like the Denver Post had teams of reporters who covered city hall, teams of reporters who covered state government, who covered religion, education, health, etc. Those are long gone.
Jacob Simas, Madeleine Bair, and Larry Ryckman at a Bioneers 2024 panel.
Where are people left to turn for news about their government? You know the fact is, there are bad people getting away with things because there was no journalist there to shed light on their misdeeds.
I mean, there are studies out there that show that borrowing costs for cities rise when newspapers go away. Government operates less efficiently when there are no reporters poking around in budgets and asking difficult questions.
But also, you know, journalism is not just about being the watchdog, it’s also about celebrating good people doing good things in our communities. And journalists provide the fabric that weaves together the tapestry of community; it helps us connect with each other.
I’ve heard from people in the arts community that they’ve noticed the absence of journalism as well. They’ve said we don’t care if we even get a bad review for our production. If there’s no review, people don’t come to our art galleries or they don’t come to our productions.
When there is a lack of local coverage, local news coverage, what do you have left? It is more of the national discussion, it’s the news coming out of Washington. It just dominates everything. It’s the politics, the things coming in from TV, from wire services, whatever it is. If the hedge funds and others aren’t willing to hire local reporters, they’re filling up their newspapers with something. It’s not things that are relevant to you and me on a local level.
Host: When Alden Capital hedge fund bought the Denver Post, it ordered Larry Ryckman and his fellow journalists to vacate their offices in the iconic downtown Denver Post building and exiled them to the printing plant in the suburbs. A few weeks later, Alden Capital cut another third of the newsroom.
That’s when Ryckman decided there must be a better way. He invited nine other journalists, including Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, from The Denver Post to start a new online news outlet. The Colorado Sun would explore new models for journalism.
LR: Journalism isn’t dying, but the old business models are dying. Newspapers, forever, 100-plus years, were dependent largely upon advertising. Yes, you had to pay for a subscription, but circulation never paid the bills for a newsroom, really, and newspapers could provide that because there was no Internet, there was no other way to get their message out there other than advertising in the newspapers or maybe going on radio or TV. So that model is dying right before our eyes.
Now, at The Colorado Sun, when we launched in September of 2018, we looked around and said, if the old model was built around traditional advertising, then let’s not do that; let’s come up with another way. And in the newspaper world, in the legacy newspaper world—and I’m talking digital here— the way you get get eyeballs is through page views. The way you get page views is to do things like write about zoo babies. When there’s a new baby at the zoo—and for the record, I love zoo babies—but those stories are easy to do, and they’re cheap to do, because you’ll get a press release, you can rewrite it in less than a half an hour, you post some photos and then you move on. But does that really provide us much understanding of what’s going on in the world? It doesn’t.
What takes time is to file public records requests, to sit through court hearings or sit through government hearings. Who’s got time to do that if not a journalist? Most people don’t. So we go there and try to do that work, because it’s important to do. But a lot of news organizations are just stretched so thin that their reporters don’t have time to go out and actually get out in the world and talk to real people and dig into documents, and do the kind of traditional work that needs to be done.
I look around the country and it’s not just TheColorado Sun that has popped up, but there are things here in the Bay Area, Berkeleyside, Oaklandside, CalMatters—things that have popped up to try to fill the void.
Host: When we return, Larry Ryckman joins two fellow news entrepreneurs innovating new models of journalism.
You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
Host: As local news outlets are shuttered week after week, new models of news media are crystallizing to fill the void. Today, there are nearly 500 nonprofit news organizations reporting for their communities. It’s clear there’s no lack of heart, grit, and reporting chops to provide vital local news. The question is how to pay for it when… Federal funding for public media has been slashed since the Reagan Administration declared war on it in the 1980s. Those grants continue to diminish today.
Some state governments have passed legislation to support local newsrooms. It includes subsidies, tax credits and journalism fellowships to retain and hire reporters. Philanthropy has also stepped up with hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s far from enough to stem the losses.
Some outlets are funded solely by their readers. One emerging nonprofit model revolves around building trust by listening to and reporting on the local community’s perceived needs and aspirations. Building that cohesion also helps outlets engage more effectively with city, county, and state governments.
Madeleine Bair is an award-winning journalist and the founder of El Tímpano, a media outlet which creates news stories for and with Spanish and Mayan speaking residents in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Madeleine Bair (MB): So I started El Tímpano back in 2018. And before launching, we undertook a process of just listening for nearly a year to Spanish and Indigenous Mayan immigrants in Oakland, to really hear what do they want to see in local media; what are the issues that are most important to them; where do they get news and information on those issues; what do they want to see change in local media. And what’s really interesting is when you start from that place rather than from the idea that, well, we’ll start putting up Spanish-language articles on a website, you wind up with a very different looking newsroom.
And in that initial listening process, we heard from so many people that, “I don’t have a home computer,” “I don’t have home Internet,” “I wish I could get the news on my phone or at any time of day.” And so text messaging became our primary platform for distribution and also engagement.
But we’re also in the streets. We do a lot of community outreach and engagement. We partner with a lot of other trusted organizations, because all of our work is really founded on a relationship of trust with audiences, the communities that we serve.
Erica Hellerstein, Senior Labor and Economics Reporter, helps a family fill out their event passport so they can be entered into the various raffles during El Tímpano’s resource fair. Credit: Hiram Alejandro Durán for El Tímpano/CatchLight Local/Report for America corps member
We have an editorial meeting each week where, you know, rather than us kind of looking at what other news outlets are covering, or what sort of press releases are coming in, we’re really listening to the community members themselves, and talking about, okay, what are the stories that came in that week from our text messaging community; what stories are worth investigating.
Also looking back at all of the surveying we’ve done, which has told us, for instance, a lot of people might think that as a news outlet covering immigrant communities, immigration might be the number one issue. Not true. Immigration is actually usually around number five. The top issue of concern for the communities we cover is health. Has been well before the pandemic and is every time we go out and ask people. And so that’s why the very first reporter that we hired is a health equity reporter, and that’s most of what you’ll see on our website.
Host: Journalist and educator Jacob Simas is the community journalism director for the Cityside Journalism Initiative. It’s a media outlet that creates hyper-local news stories in Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond, California.
Jacob Simas (JS): We also started a pretty in-depth community listening campaign to just really try to understand what people in Oakland wanted from a local news organization.
And so we really saw this absence of like a lot of the bread and butter stuff that local newspapers used to provide information about local community events, just consistent reporting about public meetings, what’s happening at the school board, what’s happening with the city council.
You know, we have a section that we call How We Work, and it’s just a space where, as editors and reporters, we can just explain to readers why we do journalism the way we do; why we don’t cover crime the way that the Oakland Trib used to; why instead we chose to cover the police department, and cover systems instead of symptoms, right? That kind of work I think has been really important in building trust with our communities in Oakland.
It’s just so important thatlocal news plays such a critical role of a town square, where people can have conversations and dig into the nuance without the polarization that you get at the national level with discourse, and that’s playing out on certain platforms.
Host: By listening to their readers, news outlets like El Timpano and Cityside can produce life-saving information for the communities they serve. That includes community feedback on what’s not working the way it’s supposed to.
MB: California became the first state in the nation to expand MediCal eligibility to undocumented immigrants of all ages – really groundbreaking policy to address a huge health equity issue. These are the communities that El Tímpano’s really designed to serve. We’ve been following this policy for years. It’s come out in stages. So when they expanded to include undocumented immigrants 50 years and up last year, we informed our community members about that; told them how to sign up; what the eligibility requirements are; where to call if they want to learn more.
For thousands of undocumented immigrants, they were newly eligible, newly enrolled, and really trying to access their healthcare coverage for the very first time. We found a number of these community members within El Tímpano’s own audience. As we were providing information about this expanded new policy, so many people were writing us back saying, actually, I’ve been trying to get back onto MediCal for months but no one will answer my call; or I was dropped from MediCal and I can’t figure out why, it seems to be a mistake.
That’s one example of why this method of really having a two-way conversation with our audience is so critical, because we could just provide this information about this great new policy, how you can access it, but whenever we do that and invite community members to write back, we hear, lo and behold, that policy usually isn’t working as it’s intended. So we want to cover the successes of policies like that, but also what are the challenges that they’re facing.
Host: The Bay Area’s Cityside publishes community input and actually pays community members to contribute stories. Again, Jacob Simas.
JS: We’re not the first publisher to run first-person stories, but we do it with a lot of deliberation and consistency, where we will find community members with important lived experiences to share, and we’ll invite them to either write a piece or allow us to listen to their story and then transcribe it into a piece that we can publish, and we pay them a commission, the same as we would pay a freelance reporter.
Some of those stories have been wildly popular. A few that come to mind would be a mother who lost a son and multiple family members to gun violence and getting that really nuanced take on the problem of gun violence in Oakland. Also from a solutions angle, because she’s now doing incredible violence prevention work for an organization in the community.
Host: New models of journalism range from an approach of community engagement and outreach to creative ways to sustain the small outlets that remain. Surprisingly, some of these new models are reviving the earliest form of news media – print journalism.
JS: We have two housing reporters at Cityside, they would get all these appeals from people in the community—emails, phone calls from folks—asking them, as experts in their beat and in their field—asking them about resource information and questions like: how do I get on this list for this housing in my community? They just realized there’s an incredible need for a one-stop shop for information that people can use about affordable housing in the East Bay.
They came to their editors and said, hey, we want to take this on, and we want to create this affordable housing guide, and we don’t want to just put it on the website because a lot of people are going to miss it. We actually want to create a physical product and distribute that in the community, and make it available to people.
So we piloted that and we did it. They did an incredible job. It was a bunch of reporting and multiple articles, but then also just a lot of resource information that they pulled out of their reporting, what people need to know to access affordable housing in Berkeley and Oakland, and put that content into a print publication.
Jacob Simas and Madeleine Bair at a Bioneers 2024 panel.
We printed 500 of those, because we were taking baby steps and we thought, okay, let’s just kind of see if there’s an appetite for this. Right? Brought it to some, you know, places in the community and some different community providers and libraries and things of that nature. Published the whole package online, made it available as a pdf download, and left an email for people to get ahold of us if they wanted us to actually bring them a copy of the print version. And we ended up producing 5,000 because of the outpouring of like messages that we received from people asking for that information – both people in personal situations where they wanted the information, but also from service providers who saw a benefit in what we produced and the way we produced it. It was very easy to sort of understand and access.
Yeah, it’s a cost, but it sure seems worth it. So I would love to just hear how you’re both sort of thinking about print as a medium.
Host: Again, Larry Ryckman…
LR: And we were just going along and growing at the Sun. Then the phone rang one day and somebody said, you know, have you ever thought about owning a group of newspapers. Like, no, I have not. Should I? And the answer was yes, I should.
A lot of newspapers, small newspapers, particularly in rural areas, are owned by mom and pop operations, and that was the case with these 24 suburban Denver newspapers. So we partnered up with the National Trust for Local News, which is a nonprofit, national nonprofit, and we jointly bought these 24 print newspapers. And the good news is more than two years later, those community newspapers are still doing their hyper local coverage, which is awesome.
As it turned out, you spend most of your money on a newspaper on two things: people, of course, in your newsroom; newsprint is the other thing. Newsprint prices have just gone up like crazy over the past few years. Newsprint manufacturers, you know, frankly make more money printing—creating Amazon boxes than they do creating newsprint. So there are very few suppliers for newsprint.
The place where we printed those community newspapers was up in Cheyenne, Wyoming. They wanted to more than double the cost of printing those newspapers. So we moved the printing to the Pueblo Chieftain, which is owned by Gannett. Well, not for long after, Gannett decided they were going to close the printing plant. So we ended up having to be printed at the Denver Post. [LAUGHTER] So, you know, there’s just no escape sometimes.
So we, along with our friends—really, it was the National Trust for Local News and the Colorado Media Project decided, you know what, what if we bought a printing press; what would that look like? And could we turn it into an asset for the community, for all of these other newspapers?
And we really ran the numbers. It was counterintuitive, like hey, I know a great business model: let’s get into print. [LAUGHTER] But as it turns out, it really—when you run the numbers, it made sense.
I’m still happy about being all digital at the Sun because it is a lot less complicated; we don’t have to worry about the availability of newsprint. But there is an equity issue as well. There are communities in Colorado, particularly rural communities, where their Internet coverage is not great. They need print. They want print.
Host: As established and emergent news outlets continue to research and reveal vital information for their communities, one way or the other, they require support.
Clearly good government policy ought to include support for journalism in a nation where the value of a free press is baked into the Constitution. At the same time, the reality on the ground is that communities themselves have a big stake in supporting local media and real news.
LR: Freedom of the press is something we should all care about. Readers can make choices. Do they want to support hedge fund-owned newspapers and news sites, or do they want to go support Berkeleyside and Oaklandside and some of the other digital startups that have tried to fill the void?
You have to fight for your freedoms, and you have to fight to preserve your rights. Freedom of the press is not something that you should take for granted. You know, whether it’s a hedge fund taking it away or whether it’s the government. We all need access to information and knowledge.
I’m up on my soapbox, but I’m not dramatizing this. Our democracy is at stake. And it’s not a partisan issue. It shouldn’t be a partisan issue. I think it requires vigilance on all our parts.
Host: Larry Ryckman, Madeleine Bair, and Jacob Simas … When No News Is Bad News…
Intensifying wildfires, droughts, floods, extreme heat, and biodiversity loss from climate change are not tomorrow’s problems — they are at our doorstep today. But nature has an extraordinary capacity to recover when we give it the space to do so. When the Klamath River was undammed, it took only 10 days for the salmon to come back. Reintroduced species such as beavers, gray wolves, and California condors have begun to rebound. When we work with nature and not against it, the potential for restoration is vast.
By improving agricultural practices, restoring ecosystems, and integrating natural infrastructure into climate policy, we can enhance biodiversity, improve public health, and support sustainable communities. In this newsletter, hear from California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot about the state’s commitment to nature-based solutions; from Indigenous rights and environmental advocate Amy Bowers Cordalis about the removal of dams on the Klamath River; and from three changemakers who are working to integrate land stewardship, conservation, and ecological restoration into California’s broader climate strategy.
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Wade Crowfoot – California’s Leadership in Nature-Based Solutions: Building Climate Resilience Through Ecosystem Restoration
California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot saysnature is finding its way into the work of governments, not only in California but around the world. “I call it hope with an action plan,” he says. In his presentation, Secretary Crowfoot addresses California’s commitment to nature-based solutions as a cornerstone of climate action and the importance of continued investment and collaboration to protect people, economies, and ecosystems. Crowfoot shares how California is harnessing the power of nature to tackle climate change and build resilience against wildfires, droughts, floods, and extreme heat.
Amy Bowers Cordalis – The Water Remembers: Year Zero
In 2024, the removal of the four dams on the Klamath River marked a historic victory for an Indigenous-led movement, achieving the largest river restoration project in history. A revolutionary approach is underway, blending Indigenous knowledge, modern science, and sustainable practices, and the early results are remarkable — salmon are returning in unexpected abundance to spawning grounds that have been inaccessible to them for 100 years.
Amy Bowers Cordalis is a mother, fisherwoman, Executive Director of the Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group and former General Counsel of the Yurok Tribe, which has played a major role in this struggle. In her presentation, she highlights the Indigenous values and lessons from the Klamath, showcasing nature-based solutions that heal the land, waters, and people while benefiting the economy. The goal is to restore the river as a living relative, ensuring its health for generations.
Putting the Land First: A Candid Conversation on Climate, Conservation, and California’s Future
As climate change intensifies, nature’s role in building climate resilience is moving from the margins to the center of public policy. In California, home to vibrant ecosystems and mounting climate threats, leaders are working to integrate land stewardship, conservation, and ecological restoration into the state’s broader climate strategy. With federal commitments in retreat, California’s bold approach offers a vital template for others to follow.
In this conversation, three changemakers working at the intersection of policy, land, and climate share their perspectives on what it takes to scale up nature-based solutions. Hear from Clesi Bennett, Senior Environmental Scientist at the California Natural Resources Agency; Torri Estrada, Executive Director of the Carbon Cycle Institute; and Juan Altamirano, Director of Government Affairs at the Trust for Public Land. Together, they explore the progress being made, the roadblocks still ahead, and why putting land first is essential to securing a just, livable future.
Through engaging courses led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, Bioneers Learning 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.
Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse | Sept 8-29, 2025 | This four-week interactive course offers a radical approach — merging nonviolent action, trauma healing, and spiritual practice to build movements rooted in connection and resilience.
From Reactivity to Resilience: Responsive Leadership and Fractals of Healing | Sept 13-Oct 18, 2025 | Grounded in ReParentive® Therapy, this six-week interactive course explores how healing intergenerational trauma ripples outward to inspire change in relationships, communities, and systems. You will explore practical tools to regulate your nervous system, heal trauma, and discover how to lead from an embodied, authentic place. Pending approval, this course will offer Continuing Education Credit for therapists and other mental health professionals.
Exploring the Resurgent Power of the Yin: Tao Te Ching Guided Reading Series | October 8–29, 2025 | In this four-week guided reading series, artist and spiritual-political practitioner Sonali Sangeeta Balajee and Ginny McGinn, Zen practitioner and process designer, invite us to explore the Tao Te Ching (Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendition) as a sacred companion for these hyper-Yang times.
Putting Biomimicry Into Action in Your Profession and Life | Oct. 9-30, 2025 | Led by Andrew Howley, Chief Editor of the Biomimicry Institute, this four-week interactive course will equip you with the tools to reframe challenges through nature’s lens and turn inspired ideas into action.
Rights of Nature 201: Moving Campaigns Forward | Nov. 6, 2025, 11 a.m.–2 p.m. PT | Designed as a continuation of Bioneers Learning’s four-week Rights of Nature course, this intensive session focuses on developing and advancing effective campaigns that push Rights of Nature laws forward—locally and beyond.
The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.
Imagine being able to taste the sweetness of a tablespoon of sugar that has been dissolved into enough water to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. Such a super-sense is what canines wield as they navigate a smellscape we can scarcely fathom. In the following excerpt from “Eavesdropping on Animals: What We Can Learn From Wildlife Conversations,” author George Bumann, an animal language expert, artist and naturalist, participates in the search-and-rescue training of a border collie–yellow Labrador retriever mix named Chapter. Through the experience, we are given a glimpse into Chapter’s powerful senses — as well as our own connections to the natural world and our place within it.
Bumann’s remarkable guide reveals what our ancestors knew long ago — that tuning in to the owl in the tree, the deer in the gully, and even our canine companions can tell us important information and help us feel connected to our wild community.
Secondhand knowledge gained through animal senses can be one of the greatest gifts to learning what is going on around us. Making use of the constellation of animal superpowers elevates our awareness severalfold. Even if we can’t see into the ultraviolet spectrum like an insect or respond to weak electrical impulses like a shark or feel fishes’ hydrodynamic trails like a seal, the behavior of other species gives us clues to what is going on in the more-than-human world. Although human olfaction is geared more for sniffing mangos and bananas than for huffing fumes off a drowned bison, as a bear does, for instance, we can ascertain the presence of a hidden carcass by closely watching a bear as it sniffs its way around an icy pond in early spring.
When teaching field-based classes, I sometimes motion with my arm as if waving an imaginary wand. I tell students they have been transformed into bison, coyotes, or harlequin ducks. Participants are then tasked with figuring out how to abide by unseen territorial boundaries, where to select the best grazing sites in a valley under several feet of snow, or when to set off on their continental-scale migrations. How would you navigate without a GPS, map, calendar, or compass? Where should you go and when would you leave? And how will you know when you get there?
Brief as it is, this thought experiment reveals the rift that exists between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Making a living in the wild is not child’s play, and without a trove of learned and inherited knowledge, animals wouldn’t know where to show up for breakfast, where to sleep, where to get a drink, who to trust, and who to avoid, and would probably end up being someone else’s lunch.
To survive in the wild requires superpowers. Some pet owners train their animal partners to hone the abilities they inherited from their wild forebears. Animal companions can understandably give us some idea of the depth of awareness available to their wild cousins and act as useful bridges between what wild and domestic messengers are telling us.
Bound for the mailbox one Saturday morning, my son, young George, and I have a chance encounter with our friend Colette Daigle-Berg. Colette, a former Park Service law enforcement ranger, is conducting search-and-rescue training with her female border collie–yellow Labrador retriever mix, Chapter, and Colette asks us if we would help with the day’s exercises. Although our formal introduction to Chapter is still a few hours away, we happily agree. Chapter’s name reflects the pup’s role in Colette’s life, as she embarked on her next life chapter following her retirement from her Park Service career. For our part, George and I are to create an interference pattern, an olfactory red herring, over a scent trail laid down by Colette’s assistant two hours earlier. In short, we are to complicate an otherwise simple path of odors and make things a bit more challenging for Chapter.
Though we are largely oblivious to it, each of us exists in an ever-present cloud of minute fragments that emanate from us like a microscopic ticker-tape parade.
Though we are largely oblivious to it, each of us exists in an ever-present cloud of minute fragments that emanate from us like a microscopic ticker-tape parade. Our unique clouds are partly composed of the roughly two hundred million skin cells we exfoliate each hour. We all resemble Pigpen, the character from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon with the persistent plume of grime billowing around him—as it billows around all of us, all the time. The chemicals in our sweat, combined with shed hairs, textile fibers, molecules of soap, detergent, and perfume, create a personal scent signature. This odor is a physical extension of our being, and we are leaving a lot of ourselves lying around for someone, or something, else to follow.
Chapter recovers avalanche casualties, drowning victims, and lost hikers for her job, and she depends on the invisible flotsam we generate. At times, the scent particles operate exactly like, well, particles. We might imagine them as minute sticky notes pointing the way. They adhere to the ground or to upright objects such as bushes, buildings, and fences. In other cases, odors behave more like fluids that eddy in, around, behind, and even through some of those very same objects. Scent can pool in low-lying areas such as a pit, a ditch, or a river bottom, and is further altered by each passing breeze.
A couple of hours after young George and I make our contributions to the smell-o-scape by hiking along in normal fashion, Chapter navigates the entire one-mile challenge course with ease. This was a walk in the park for her. Colette later shares with me a single black line on her GPS unit that shows where her human assistant walked through rolling hills and sagebrush, and back down to the road. Colette then shows me a blue line: the path that Chapter took. Chapter’s line lies atop the target person’s path almost exactly. There is a slight bobble at the beginning, where Chapter had to tease out our odors from that of the person she was supposed to find, but then she was off to the races. The only other discrepancies are periodic diversions of a few feet downwind. Chapter also cut off a wide, misleading tangent of about two hundred yards from the end of the exercise when she saw Colette’s assistant standing on the roadside; this, too, is part of the training. In the case of a person teetering on the edge of life, search-and-rescue dogs are taught to leave the scent trail and go straight to the individual whenever possible.
As Chapter bounds down the dirt embankment and onto the road, young George erupts with a resounding, “Yay, Chapter. You did it!”
None of this would surprise anyone who has worked with scenting dogs. This is routine stuff. What Colette shares with me next, however, really blows my mind.
Three years before our training run with Chapter, a man parked his car at a trailhead in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, and never came back. Colette and several other dog handlers were asked to canvas a specific area in hopes of finding evidence of the missing man. They, too, failed. The hiker’s remains would later be found, based on an anonymous tip, in a spot far outside the established search area. During the search that did take place, Colette said Chapter found something far more unexpected than a lost hiker.
At one point, Chapter began signaling that she had found human scent near the roots of an overturned tree. The dutiful pup did a perfect “refind,” as Colette calls it—a trained response where Chapter places her front paws up on Colette then returns to the source of the scent and lies down next to it. This signal is the dog’s way of saying, “Look here, right here!” Colette could see nothing.
Moving closer to the exposed roots of the tree, Colette still found no evidence of human remains. It seemed as though Chapter might be mistaken for once. And when it appeared that her mom might lose interest and drift away, Chapter did something she had never done before in a situation like this—she barked. Chapter’s outburst was so odd that Colette took out her phone and shot some video footage. She shows me the clip as we talk about the encounter. Still feeling a bit unsure, Colette praised Chapter, rewarded her with a treat, and moved on.
On a hunch, Colette checked in with one of the resource specialists at park headquarters afterward. “Are there, by chance, any Native American burials in that area?” she asked. In a guarded way, the specialist answered in the affirmative. “Yes, yes, there are. We don’t typically talk about them, though.”
What made Chapter’s find so remarkable was that this “lost” person was not from a few years before, or even from this century. This area holds ancestral Puebloan burial sites that date back between eight hundred and twelve hundred years. Chapter was not sensing the recently departed. She was mingling with the ancients. What would it be like to go about your day with the odor of the ancestors from centuries, if not millennia, ago swirling around in your nostrils? The thought is nothing short of dizzying.
Dogs trained to smell cadavers focus on a cocktail of fatty acids emanating from decomposing flesh and bone. Dogs and other species that are hyper-focused on these chemicals can often detect them in concentrations of as little as one part per trillion. To get a handle on what that means, envision dissolving a tablespoon of sugar in a volume of water equivalent to two Olympic-size swimming pools and still being able to taste the sweetness—that is how good they are.
Chapter has put these same skills to use when locating drowning victims beneath dozens of feet of water, and in one case pinpointed a deceased man beneath a foot of river ice: human crews couldn’t locate the victim until they used ground-penetrating (in this case, ice-penetrating) radar. I have always maintained that if we could smell as well as our canine friends can, we would probably be down on our hands and knees sniffing the lawn, rocks, and fire hydrants right alongside them.
Lauri Travis, an associate professor of anthropology at Carroll College in Helena, Montana, has taken advantage of the powers of those canine noses in her paleontology and archeology work. Dogs are commonly used to find drugs and buried bombs, and even to detect estrus in cattle. Lauri is among a small group of researchers harnessing canine noses to learn about the past. Lauri’s work started in 2018 with Hannah Decker, an under-graduate student in zoology at Carroll, and a shelter-rescued border collie–Australian shepherd mix named Dax. At that time, Lauri was working on a ten-acre study site and was permitted to dig no more than three one-meter-by-one-meter test pits to search for artifacts. Their teamwork paid off, as Dax’s nose was able to help narrow down a vast field of possibilities; it would have been a multi-acre roll of the dice otherwise. Dax’s oldest find to date has been a five-thousand-year-old bone buried beneath fourteen inches of soil. No man-made device has yet been able to duplicate such feats.
Imagine extending this sort of lesson from domestic super-sniffers to more of our local wild informants. What else might we be able to find? Entire books are filled with examples of these super-senses from across the zoologic spectrum, and as I write these words, more are being discovered. Elephants decode long-distance, low-frequency vibrations through their feet. Certain migratory birds are probably able to see Earth’s weak magnetic field and use it as a navigational aid. Mice are crooning to their darlings in ultrasonic frequencies. Dolphins are reflecting sound off nearly identical objects to differentiate textures and materials. Eels are able to both stun prey and titillate their mates with their electrical pulses, and the list goes on.
Planet Earth is literally brimming with a faunal cornucopia of sensory talents.
Planet Earth is literally brimming with a faunal cornucopia of sensory talents. Who needs Marvel Comics when the non-humans living in your own house or flowerbed can manage parallel feats? Despite our nifty gadgets and techno smarts, we are no match for biological evolution, which has been picking the winners and killing off the rest across millions of years of research and development. When your life is on the line and dinner is not waiting on the table at the end of a long day, every detail counts. For a lizard that misses the shadow of a hawk slipping across the ground, a butterfly that overlooks the fact that the sun has disappeared behind mounting rain clouds, or a young male deer oblivious to the approach of a larger adversary, the consequences can be severe. Meeting your maker sooner than planned is a real possibility.
We humans have put a lot of effort into our game of one-upmanship with the rest of Earth’s biota, but more than anything, this one-sided view has stifled our ability to see what is actually there. Watch your cat or your parakeet, or the resident opossum or groundhog. Wait until you see it react to some kind of external stimulus. See if you can tell what brought its head to attention. What made it rotate its ears? What elicited a call? Look in the direction it is looking, then listen carefully for what it has heard. Draw air slowly into your nose on the chance that you can catch a whiff of something it found interesting.
I did this with wild turkeys each spring for a period of three or four years, logging each sound that triggered them to gobble. The final count of gobble-inducing noises climbed to over a hundred natural and man-made sounds. The noises ranged from overhead jets and barking dogs to banging car doors and thunder. The diversity of that list speaks to the level of attention turkeys have for their surroundings at all times. Not all of what they noticed was a matter of life or death, but to truly get to know their home, they needed to take it all in. And by watching them and making a note of the stimuli they were responding to, I not only got to see things I would have completely overlooked, but also began, finally, to see the world a little more closely from their point of view.
In a somewhat comical version of secondhand knowing through animal senses, we were sitting in the living room one evening when our Labrador Hobbes suddenly leaped to his feet and uttered a menacing growl in the direction of the kitchen. I rose to my feet to find he was focused on something in the vicinity of the stove. Was Hobbes cornering a phantom menace that was about to pounce? I soon realized that our trusty defender had finally spotted the fresh loaf of bread that Jenny had pulled out of the oven and placed on top of the stove to cool. Good boy, Hobbes.
As climate change intensifies, nature’s role in building climate resilience is moving from the margins to the center of public policy. In California, home to vibrant ecosystems and mounting climate threats, leaders are working to integrate land stewardship, conservation, and ecological restoration into the state’s broader climate strategy. With federal commitments in flux, California’s bold approach offers a vital template for others to follow.
In this conversation, three changemakers working at the intersection of policy, land, and climate share their perspectives on what it takes to scale nature-based solutions: Clesi Bennett, Senior Environmental Scientist at the California Natural Resources Agency; Torri Estrada, Executive Director of the Carbon Cycle Institute; and Juan Altamirano, Director of Government Affairs at the Trust for Public Land. Together, they explore the progress being made, the roadblocks still ahead, and why putting land first is essential to securing a just, livable future.
This article is excerpted and edited from the transcript of a panel discussion held at the 2025 Bioneers Conference, moderated by Ellie Cohen, CEO of The Climate Center.
Ellie Cohen
Ellie Cohen, CEO of The Climate Center: Let’s start with a broad question. What does the new administration in Washington mean for your work? How is it impacting you?
Torri Estrada, Executive Director of the Carbon Cycle Institute: Part of the Carbon Cycle Institute’s theory of change is working through existing agricultural conservation infrastructure, specifically resource conservation districts, or RCDs. These were originally established as federal agencies in the 1930s, but after some pushback, they became local agencies. They’re now local government entities, but they remain closely tied to the USDA and are often even co-located with federal offices.
To put it bluntly, in the past three months, we’ve experienced funding freezes and staff reductions within an already weakened federal agency. And I’ll just say it, because I’m an advocate: the USDA has been privatizing much of this work. Government staffing at the local level has been declining for years, which has forced local partners to pick up the slack. A lot of the work has shifted to cooperative agreements funded by the federal government.
This isn’t just happening in California; it’s happening across the U.S. These cuts are detrimental to our work, and we’ll need to rethink where funding and staffing come from, possibly exploring shared staffing models or new funding streams to fill the gap.
Now, with both the funding freeze and reduced staffing, even for administering grants, many of the core staff who provide day-to-day support to farmers are being impacted. And this isn’t just happening in California; it’s happening across the U.S. These cuts are detrimental to our work, and we’ll need to rethink where funding and staffing come from, possibly exploring shared staffing models or new funding streams to fill the gap.
Unfortunately, I don’t see much of an upside, except that in states where climate leadership is strong, where they’re actually funding agriculture as part of climate work, there’s at least a silver lining. I do some work in New York, where RCDs receive core operational funding. That provides a much-needed baseline for the work to continue. In other states that don’t have that, it’s going to be really challenging.
We’re just beginning to feel the effects, and I do think we’ll find ways to recover, but these kinds of cuts are hard to come back from.
Ellie: Torri, is it true that California is one of only two states in the country that doesn’t provide state funding for resource conservation districts?
Torri Estrada
Torri: Yes, that’s right. It’s ironic—California is the largest agricultural state in the country, yet some of our water and resource conservation districts receive no state funding. That means they have to rely almost entirely on project-by-project grants. Some do get support from local county tax bases, and there are a few encouraging examples like Marin County, which is now putting a significant amount of local Proposition funding toward agriculture and climate work. So that’s a bright spot.
In contrast, in New York, where I live, I can call my local resource conservation district anytime, and they’ll send someone out. Their lights, buildings, and staffing are all covered by core operational funding. California doesn’t have that, and we’re working to change it.
And I should add that it’s not just about RCDs. While they’re our primary partners, there’s a whole ecosystem of organizations—nonprofits, Conservation Corps, and others—that do this work on the ground. Still, RCDs and water conservation districts are a critical part of the infrastructure we need to invest in.
Ellie: Juan, how is the new administration affecting your work at the Trust for Public Land, especially given your focus on urban areas?
Juan Altamirano
Juan Altamirano, Director of Government Affairs at the Trust for Public Land: The biggest challenge we’re facing is the strain on state and local budgets. The federal government plays a major role in funding social services, and as that funding diminishes, local and state budgets feel the impact. Unfortunately, environmental services such as open space and green space aren’t typically seen as constitutionally protected core services. So when budgets shrink, those areas often take the hit.
That means less money is going toward maintaining parks and open spaces, just as demand for them is likely to grow. It’s not just local residents who rely on these places. When national parks are forced to close or cut back due to federal budget issues, we see an influx of visitors to state and local parks. But if those areas don’t have the funding to keep up with basic maintenance and services, the whole system starts to break down. It’s a really damaging trickle-down effect.
We’re also seeing this play out in land conservation work. Land acquisition is complex, and many of the people who’ve been doing this work for decades are starting to leave the field. When that expertise disappears, it’s a serious loss; these deals are difficult to navigate, and losing institutional knowledge makes it even harder to move conservation projects forward.
Ellie: Clesi, as someone working inside state government, you’re in a unique position to see how California is navigating this moment, from political shifts to implementation on the ground. What’s your perspective on how these changes are affecting your agency’s work and the broader climate landscape?
Clesi Bennett
Clesi Bennett, Senior Environmental Scientist at the California Natural Resources Agency: I really appreciate everything Torri and Juan shared. I’ll add that there’s still a lot of uncertainty. We’re trying to fully understand how staff reductions and budget cuts will affect our programs.
That said, California remains firmly committed to achieving our climate goals, even as the federal administration begins the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and other national climate commitments. We’re staying the course on the targets we’ve set.
California voters passed a $10 billion climate bond last fall. That means we now have the privilege, and the responsibility, of putting those funds to work on real, on-the-ground projects across the state.
And I have to say, I’m feeling fortunate right now. As Juan mentioned, California voters passed a $10 billion climate bond last fall. That means we now have the privilege, and the responsibility, of putting those funds to work on real, on-the-ground projects across the state. So despite the challenges, there’s a lot of hope in this moment.
Ellie: Let’s talk about scaling up nature-based solutions. We know climate change is accelerating; 2024 was the first full calendar year with global average temperatures 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. California, as a major food producer, faces enormous challenges around water, land use, and resilience. How do we scale solutions quickly and effectively in this context? Juan, let’s start with you.
Juan: One thing that gives me hope is what we’re seeing at the ballot box. In November, there were 23 conservation-related ballot initiatives across the country, including here in California, and all 23 passed. That includes several in deeply conservative areas where the Republican presidential candidate won the majority of votes.
People are still willing to invest in their communities. They may not always identify their support as “climate” work, but with the right messaging, they’re voting for land, water, and wildfire resilience.
People are still willing to invest in their communities. They may not always identify their support as “climate” work, but with the right messaging, they’re voting for land, water, and wildfire resilience. One interesting trend is that wildfire has now overtaken clean water as the top environmental concern in public opinion. That’s a major shift from just ten years ago and reflects the growing urgency people feel.
At the Trust for Public Land, we really value ballot measures because they result in tangible outcomes: parks and green spaces people can see and use. While large-scale conservation is important, we can’t neglect urban areas. If people in cities don’t see or feel the benefits, they’re less likely to support broader conservation efforts. Reaching the urban core is essential to building public will and voter support.
Ellie: Torri, could you talk about how you’re working to scale nature-based solutions on agricultural lands in California and beyond?
Torri: Working in agriculture, I try to stay practical about how scale actually happens. We’re involved in state funding and bond measures, but at the end of the day, success depends on reaching individual farmers and land managers and getting them to act.
There’s already a strong groundswell of engagement, but the missing piece is democratizing the climate process. At the county level, we’ve done detailed mapping to assess the climate potential of working lands, then brought that data back to farmers to help them visualize what’s possible. For example, we might identify every denuded stream in a county and propose reforesting it. But then we have to ask: What does that mean for your stretch of land?
The key is empowering farmers to define what will work for their operation, family, and region.
The key is empowering farmers to define what will work for their operation, family, and region. That kind of work is already underway in many counties—from the Bay Area to San Diego—and when farmers are engaged early, they do show up and participate.
We also need to ask not just what we want farmers to do, but what they need in order to do it. For many, it’s access to equipment and financing. We recently helped pass an equipment-sharing program—something simple, but it removes a real barrier. Once a farmer can try a new practice and see its benefits, they’re more likely to innovate further.
Technical assistance is another major need, especially for small and medium-sized farms and farmers of color. If you’re a building owner installing solar, you don’t figure it all out alone; you get an energy audit. Farmers deserve that same level of support. Right now, California lacks robust infrastructure for providing farm-scale baseline information, financing analysis, and implementation support. But that infrastructure is beginning to grow.
A lot of funding is out there, it just hasn’t been organized around climate. We need smarter, countywide business planning that brings farmers together around shared practices and helps attract both public and private investment. I’m hopeful the USDA will continue to offer low-interest loans for on-farm improvements, many of which support climate outcomes. California’s opportunity is to get those projects aggregated and ready.
Not every farmer will join in. But enough will. Our job now is to invest in planning and pre-planning so we’re ready to meet this moment.
Ellie: Can you describe the RCD hub concept? That seems like a key part of scaling.
Torri: California has strong RCDs in about 60 counties. We’ve now organized them into seven regional hubs across the state. These hubs are designed to provide farmers with reliable, on-the-ground support: pre-planning, permitting, and project implementation. The idea is that when a farmer picks up the phone, someone’s there to help.
Just as importantly, these hubs give us a way to test and pilot different approaches. California is incredibly diverse, with over 160 agricultural products across a wide range of ecological and economic conditions. Cookie-cutter programs won’t work here. The hubs help us figure out what does work, share lessons learned, and adapt programs accordingly.
They also offer a feedback loop to the state: what’s effective, what’s not, and how programs can evolve. That kind of adaptive management is critical. We need to stay nimble, and we need the state to listen.
I’m also hopeful the hubs can help bridge political divides. Sometimes people assume farmers in more conservative areas won’t engage in climate solutions. But if they see the benefits—economic, ecological, practical—I think we’ll bring more people into the fold.
Ellie: Clesi, can you talk about what the state is doing to scale up nature-based solutions at a pace that matches the urgency of the climate crisis?
Clesi: A lot is happening across different fronts: funding and financing, policy development, capacity building, technical assistance, and improving science and data. We’re approaching this work from many angles, but I want to highlight three overarching strategies.
We need to stop thinking of nature and green spaces as “nice to have” and start recognizing them as essential infrastructure.
First is a mindset shift. We need to stop thinking of nature and green spaces as “nice to have” and start recognizing them as essential infrastructure. Just like sidewalks, curbs, and drainage systems have baseline public funding, urban trees and green spaces should too. They provide real, measurable benefits and need to be treated as core infrastructure in our communities.
Second is what we call a “big tent” approach. We’re working to integrate nature-based solutions across all sectors—not just natural resources, but education, transportation, energy, housing, public health, and more. Agencies and sectors that haven’t traditionally been part of the climate and conservation conversation are now coming to the table. For example, we’re working with the Department of Education on green schoolyards and with transportation and housing agencies on climate resilience. It’s about creating broad collaboration across government and beyond.
The third piece is workforce development. We’re going to need a much larger workforce to implement this work at scale—planners, designers, field crews, technical assistance providers. That means investing in programs that build the restoration and climate resilience workforce of the future. We’re supporting youth programs, local corps, and community college training to help build that pipeline now.
What if animals used names like we do — not just sounds, but unique vocal labels to call out to one another across the wild? A groundbreaking study recently confirmed that African elephants do just that, revealing one of the rarest forms of communication in the animal kingdom. For Dr. Joyce Poole, co-author of the study and Scientific Director of ElephantVoices, the discovery is part of a lifetime spent listening to elephants and decoding their rich, emotional world.
In this intimate conversation, Poole reflects on what first drew her to elephants as a child in East Africa, the pivotal moments that shaped her decades-long career, and what it means to truly hear and understand another species. From early discoveries of infrasound to the recent revelation of elephant “names,” Poole shares the wonder, heartbreak, and urgency of protecting these intelligent, socially complex beings.
Note: For listening to the audio clips included throughout, the use of headphones is recommended.
Filming elephants in Gorongosa, Mozambique, in 2012. Credit: ElephantVoices
What if animals used names like we do — not just sounds, but unique vocal labels to call out to one another across the wild? A groundbreaking study recently confirmed that African elephants do just that, revealing one of the rarest forms of communication in the animal kingdom. For Dr. Joyce Poole, co-author of the study and Scientific Director of ElephantVoices, the discovery is part of a lifetime spent listening to elephants and decoding their rich, emotional world.
Filming elephants in Gorongosa, Mozambique, in 2012. Credit: ElephantVoices
In this intimate conversation, Poole reflects on what first drew her to elephants as a child in East Africa, the pivotal moments that shaped her decades-long career, and what it means to truly hear and understand another species. From early discoveries of infrasound to the recent revelation of elephant “names,” Poole shares the wonder, heartbreak, and urgency of protecting these intelligent, socially complex beings.
Note: For listening to the audio clips included throughout, the use of headphones is recommended.
Bioneers:What first sparked your interest in elephants, and what has motivated you throughout your long career studying elephant behavior?
Joyce Poole:I was very fortunate to grow up in Africa. My family moved there when I was just six years old, and I met my first elephant in Amboseli. My family was living in Malawi at the time, and we drove all the way to Kenya in our Land Rover. I asked my father, “What would happen if the elephant charges at the car?” He said, “Well, it could squish the car down to the size of a pea pod.” We ended up being charged by the elephant, and I hid under the Land Rover seat, as my father stalled the car. As a six-year-old, it was pretty scary, of course, but also impressive. Growing up, we were often on safari during our school holidays, and I had lots of interactions with elephants, but that was the first.
Another key moment came when I was 11. I was lucky enough to go to a lecture by Jane Goodall at the National Museums of Kenya, and I turned to my mother then and said, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up: study animals.” My father was later offered a job back in Kenya, running the African Wildlife Foundation’s Nairobi office. At the time, I was 19 and had just finished my first year at university. I said, “Well, I’m not going to be left behind. I want to take a year off.” My parents agreed to that, so long as I applied myself to a worthwhile project. I was so lucky, because that worthwhile project turned out to be elephants in Amboseli, where I had first been charged by an elephant.
That was in 1975 at the beginning of a generation of behavioral ecologists. Iain Douglas Hamilton had just completed the first study of individually known wild African elephants, and Cynthia Moss, the woman who founded the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, was just beginning hers. I joined Cynthia in Amboseli. Being among the first to study individually known elephants meant there were countless discoveries waiting to be made. I soon found that male African elephants have a sexual cycle and come into a period of heightened sexual and aggressive behavior called musth. This phenomenon had been known about for centuries in Asian elephants, but those who came before me, all of whom were men, said it didn’t exist in African elephants. Cynthia and I documented musth in African elephants in a paper published in Nature in 1981. Making a major discovery at a young age and having my first publication in such a prestigious journal really propelled me forward.
Joyce photographed in Amboseli, Kenya, in 1989 with the JA elephant family. Credit: Bill Thompson
Joyce photographed in Amboseli, Kenya, in 1989 with the JA elephant family. Credit: Bill Thompson
“I thought it was so strange that these very aggressive, enormous animals were threatening me with a sound that I could barely hear.”
Bioneers:When did you start paying attention to the different types of sounds that elephants made and in what context they made them?
Poole:During my early work on musth, I noticed that when musth males threatened me, they approached flapping their ears in a characteristic way, and making a kind of soft ga-dunk, ga-dunk, ga-dunk sound, like water flowing through a deep tunnel. At first, I was puzzled whether the sound I was hearing was a vocalization or just the vigorous flapping of their large ears. And I thought it was so strange that these very aggressive, enormous animals were threatening me with a sound that I could barely hear. Gradually, I realized that the ga-dunk-ga-dunk sound was a type of rumble vocalization.
While elephants are well known to trumpet and roar, their most common vocalizations are deep harmonic sounds known as rumbles. I named those made by males in musth, musth-rumbles. It was then, around 1984, that I began to suspect that elephants were producing some sound that we couldn’t hear. And it turned out that in addition to audible sound, they were producing very low-frequency sound below the level of human hearing. Females and calves are much more vocal than the males, and I became very interested in the huge variety of vocalizations they made and the contexts in which they gave them.
I was put in touch with Katy Payne, who studied humpback whales and co-produced “Songs of the Humpback Whale” with her then-husband, Roger Payne. Because of her work with whales, Katy had gotten a similar hunch about Asian elephants. While visiting a zoo, she became aware of this sort of fluttering sensation in her chest when she was in the presence of elephants. When I contacted her, she was preparing to return to the zoo with a microphone capable of recording very low-frequency sound. I told her that if she found that Asian elephants were producing infrasound, she should come to Kenya so we could record African elephants together. Her hunch about Asian elephants was correct and together Katy and I found that all of the different rumbles produced by adult African elephants contain infrasonic components — some are so loud and powerful that they carry several kilometers and others fall completely below the range of human hearing and can only be detected through the use of sensitive recording equipment and observed on spectrograms.
Bioneers:What were some of the first observations you made of elephants that made you suspect they addressed each other by calls akin to names? What do these calls sound like, and in what contexts are they typically used?
Poole:Females live in multi-generational families generally made up of several related adult females and their offspring, which can range from just a mother and her calves to up to 50 or more individuals. Elephant families are very tightly bonded. Like our human families, they’re not together all the time — they may split up for a couple of hours, a day, a week or more. When family members reunite after having been separated, they greet one another with a special rumble and greeting ceremony.
But when they’re apart, they use what we call contact rumbles to try to find one another. An elephant will give this very powerful rumble, often with the head raised and the mouth open, and will then listen afterwards. You’ll see the elephant spreading her ears and turning her head from side to side, trying to localize an answer. Often, we don’t hear that answer because the elephant that she’s calling may be quite far away, but we can pick it up on a spectrogram. It was through observing these contact calls and answers that I started to suspect that elephants might be using something like names for one another.
“I started thinking, Well, does she have some way of directing that call to particular individuals? I thought then that maybe they had names for one another, but I didn’t dare suggest that.”
We would see an elephant give a contact rumble, and then observe one particular elephant answer, and everyone else in the group would carry on feeding or just ignore the calling elephant. At the time, I thought a contact rumble was a general call to the family, and so, I wondered why these elephants were ignoring her. Then maybe a half hour later, she would give another contact rumble, and somebody totally different would answer. I started thinking,Well, does she have some way of directing that call to particular individuals?I thought then that maybe they had names for one another, but I didn’t dare suggest that. In my book published in 1996, Coming of Age With Elephants, I wrote instead that perhaps they had some way of referring to particular individuals, such as a sister or an eldest daughter.
Then, in 1998, something interesting happened. I was told that some orphan elephants rescued by the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust were making a very weird sound that no one had ever heard before, and I was invited to record their voices. The Trust rescues orphaned baby elephants and slowly reintroduces them to the wild. These particular orphans were being kept in an enclosure at Tsavo National Park at night when, I was told, they made the sound. I’d been listening to elephants for so long, and I was quite skeptical that it was a sound that I hadn’t heard before. I went to the enclosure with my recording gear, and dusk fell. Suddenly, there was this weird didgeridoo sound.Woooooouuuu.It lasted about 14 seconds. “What wasthat?” I asked.
Joyce recording elephants in Amboseli, Kenya, circa 2000. Credit: ElephantVoices
I just couldn’t believe it. I recorded from the orphans for several nights. I began to notice that when I had my earphones on, I was finding it difficult to differentiate between the sounds the elephants were making and the drone of the trucks on the Mombasa road three kilometers away. I thought,This is really weird. Are these elephants imitating trucks?gain, I thought,No, I can’t go and tell people elephants are imitating trucks. It’s too strange. No one would believe me.It was some years later, in 2004 or so, that Angela Stöeger, who also studies elephant communication, got in touch with me.
She was working at the Vienna Zoo, where an African male elephant was housed together with two Asian females. She wrote to tell me that it appeared that the male African elephant was imitating the chirping sounds that are distinct to Asian elephants. She sent recordings of the sounds they were making. The chirp made by Asian elephants is anark-ark-arksound, and this male African elephant was definitely chirping. It was lower in frequency, but it was definitely an attempt to copy these females.
Angela asked if I’d ever heard anything like that. I said, “Oh my God, I have all these recordings of elephants that I think are imitating trucks.” We approached Peter Tyack and Stephanie Watwood, who studied vocal imitation in dolphins. Together, we wrote a paper, which was published inNaturein 2005, showing that elephants are capable of vocal learning.
Mickey Pardo, who led the elephant names study, was aware of our earlier work and questioned why elephants have this ability to create or imitate sounds and how they might use this ability in their daily lives. That’s part of what prompted the study.
“This ability to create and use names really expands elephants’ expressive power . . . It requires individuals to make an abstract connection between a sound and a referent.”
Bioneers:How do the “vocal labels” used by elephants differ from the imitative calls used by dolphins and parrots, and what does it indicate about their cognitive abilities?
Poole:Although elephants can imitate, we found no indication that they were imitating one another in these cases. We found the strongest evidence of vocal labels in contact rumbles and in the rumbles that mothers and allomothers give to infants. Considering that infants haven’t even learned how to rumble yet, the females couldn’t be imitating them. This ability to create and use names really expands elephants’ expressive power, because vocal labels are arbitrary, rather than imitations of the animal they’re calling. Most human words are arbitrary, and that arbitrariness is really crucial to language, because it enables communication about referents that are not dependent on imitating and could be more cognitively demanding. It requires individuals to make an abstract connection between a sound and a referent.
Elephant families split and reunite. In Amboseli, Kenya, the GB family members wait for the rest of the family to catch up before crossing to the plains to the swamp. Credit: ElephantVoices
Elephant families split and reunite. In Amboseli, Kenya, the GB family members wait for the rest of the family to catch up before crossing to the plains to the swamp. Credit: ElephantVoices
Bioneers:You’ve studied the importance of social learning and role models in elephant society and have documented that large adult males in musth can influence the occurrence of musth in younger males. Can you describe the destructive behavior that was being engaged in by a group of cull orphans and what changed after large males were introduced to the population?
Poole:In South Africa, it used to be common practice to cull elephant populations. For example, wildlife managers would decide that Kruger National Park should only have X number of elephants. Each year, they would do a count, and if there were “too many”, they would kill the excess. It’s pretty horrific. The practice involved rounding up families and shooting them from helicopters, often with scoline, a drug that immobilized them but left them cognizant. Then they would land the chopper and kill them. But they would leave calves between two to four years old alive. They then rounded up these youngsters and used them to repopulate, or as founders in new national parks or private game reserves. Basically, people could buy these baby elephants to start their own elephant population.
Fifty-one such babies were dumped in Pilanesberg National Park in the early 1980s and left there to fend for themselves without any older individuals. It was really a bad experiment. These young elephants ran around in a band together. When the males became teenagers, some started coming into musth early and became very aggressive. In a normal population, males come into musth when they are 25-30 years old, and each male is on his own sexual cycle. The older a male is, the higher his rank, the longer he stays in musth. Older males suppress musth in younger individuals. But in Pilanesberg, there were no older males.
Teenage males who had experienced extreme trauma as calves and had grown up without role models started coming into musth. They started mounting rhinoceroses and killing them. They began attacking vehicles. There were a lot of really aggressive incidents happening. In addition to the trauma and lack of role models, there were no older musth males to suppress musth in the younger individuals. The wildlife authorities contacted me and asked if I had any idea what to do. I suggested that they bring in a couple of older males from Kruger, and that solved the problem.
A musth male in Gorongosa, Mozambique. Credit: ElephantVoices
“Where you really see the importance of older matriarchs is when a family faces a threat. Then there is no doubt who the leader is as the family runs to her side and follows her lead.”
Bioneers:You’ve also been involved in studies that have shown the importance of older matriarchs in decision-making. What’s an example of how matriarchs influence the decisions of other elephants?
Poole:Elephant families are pretty democratic. Anyone can suggest a course of action using a “let’s go” rumble, pointing her body in the direction she wants to go and engaging in a series of other gestures indicating her wish to depart. While matriarchs and older adult females most often engage in this behavior, younger females, who play an important leadership role in the family, also try to influence where the family goes on a particular day. Often, though, the matriarch will just slap her ears very hard against her body, like, “Heads up, guys, I’m taking off,” and then she just heads off, and they’re expected to follow — if they want to stick with her.
Where you really see the importance of older matriarchs is when a family faces a threat. Then there is no doubt who the leader is as the family runs to her side and follows her lead. We saw this extraordinary teamwork on a daily basis in Gorongosa, Mozambique, where the elephants we studied still felt threatened by people a quarter of a century after the population had been decimated for their ivory during the civil war.
We have also found that elephant families with young matriarchs gravitate toward and join up with families with older matriarchs and follow their leadership. Likewise, Caitlin O’Connell has found that in groups of males, younger individuals follow the calls and leadership of older individuals.
In a study led by Graeme Shannon and Karen McComb, we used playbacks of contact rumbles recorded in Amboseli and Pilanesberg to look at the decision-making abilities of elephants in the two populations. Females in intact Amboseli families led by older matriarchs were much better at social discrimination than females in Pilanesburg, where families were led by young elephants who had been exposed to extreme trauma and orphaned by culling. Our work showed that key decision-making abilities that are fundamental to elephant societies can be significantly altered by the long-term exposure to severely disruptive events such as culling and translocation.
In Gorongosa, Mozambique, elephants Valente, and other family members engage in a highly coordinated group charge that lasted close to eight minutes. Credit: ElephantVoices
In Gorongosa, Mozambique, elephants Valente, and other family members engage in a highly coordinated group charge that lasted close to eight minutes. Credit: ElephantVoices
Bioneers:ElephantVoices maintains a database of elephant sounds and gestures, theElephant Ethogram, which documents around 400 elephant behaviors including written descriptions, sounds, photographs and more than 2,400 video examples. What are the main goals of this initiative?
Poole:Since my early study of musth, I’ve been interested in how elephants signal to one another, both their vocal communication and their body language. I have published numerous papers describing many of these vocalizations and gestures and given them names — such as ear-folding, ear-waving, musth-rumble, let’s-go-rumble, ear-lifting, etc, but it is hard for other people to understand exactly what I am describing through just the written word or via a spectrogram. Likewise, other scientists have described elephant behavior using different terminology. I felt that there was a need to document elephant behavior with video so that we could use a common language to understand what we were observing.
My husband and ElephantVoices co-founder and CEO, Petter Granli, and I had long studied elephants in Amboseli and the Maasai Mara in Kenya, where elephants are very habituated to people. Then in 2012, we went to work in Gorongosa in Mozambique, where 90% of the elephant population had been killed for their ivory during the 1977-1992 Civil War. They were shot from helicopters, shot from vehicles — and they really didn’t like people. We witnessed an extraordinary array of defensive behaviors that we didn’t typically see in Amboseli and the Mara. How they were signaling to one another was extraordinary and complex.
Joyce and her husband Petter at work filming and recording elephant behavior in Gorongosa, Mozambique, in 2016. Credit: ElephantVoices
“I have this knowledge that I carry with me, and I love to share what I’ve learned. I’m happy for people to understand these extraordinary creatures with whom we share the planet.”
In 2012-2013, we were involved in the making of a five-part series,Gorongosa Park: Rebirth of Paradise,that was filmed by my brother, Bob Poole. In an agreement with the producers, ElephantVoices was given permission to use the raw footage for science and education. Later, we made a similar arrangement with the footage my brother shot in the Mara about a family of elephants that we were studying, and Petter and I returned to Amboseli to document all the reproductive behavior with video. Armed with some 13 terabytes of footage, we began to make clips of all of the behaviors we’d named and documented over the years and to see what else we would find as we scrolled through the footage.
And why? Because here I am, I’m almost 70. I have this knowledge that I carry with me, and I love to share what I’ve learned. I’m happy for people to understand these extraordinary creatures with whom we share the planet. I think it is important. I don’t want someone else to have to start from scratch again. Also, when you read a scientific paper, there’s typically no video to demonstrate the behavior described, and usually the paper focuses on just a few behaviors. The communication that defines elephants is more than just a couple of sounds and a couple of behaviors. It’s incredibly complex, and we wanted to take a stab at documenting everything that we were aware of. In addition to theElephant Ethogram, we also have a separate offline database that contains elephant vocalizations. At the moment, we’ve got around 11,000 records of individually known elephants giving calls in particular contexts.
Rumble-Roar
Context: Coalition Building
From the Elephant Ethogram
An adult female and two tuskless calves, one about four and the other about 6 are feeding on grass. As we drive up we are unaware that another four year old – the son of the female on the left is separated from the family about 50 meters away and it is probably concern about him that stimulates their response. They react to us in a dramatic fashion, initiated by the larger tuskless juvenile female who Rumble-Roars twice. The other tuskless calf seems to Rumble-Roar, too. The mother on the left Head-Shakes and Trumpets and the other adult female comes running over to help, also Trumpeting.
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These are what we would call Social-Trumpets. They Bunch and the two mothers Stand-Tall, Rumbling and Reach-Touch one another and continue to Rumble. The female on the right Trumpets again. The older tuskless reaches Trunk-to-Mouth to the littler one. They Listen. The mother on the right reaches Trunk-to-Mouth to her tuskless calf. The older tuskless touches the younger again, too. They begin feeding again, but continue Rumbling.
We move the car and the female who is missing her male calf Rumbles and then Listens as we stop. Her male calf suddenly comes into frame – we have been hearing him give Separated-Rumbles. He walks to his mother and begins Suckling and then they all move off. The initial behavior and vocalizations are what we call the catch-all term ”Bonding-Ceremony”.
Bioneers:What could a deeper understanding of elephants, including elephant communications and behaviors, mean for conservation and the protection of elephants?
Poole:In the years that I’ve been studying elephants, we’ve gone from people thinking that you can just hunt them as you like, or round them all up and kill them, or send them off to a zoo, or use them in the circus. Even moving them around in captivity or across the world, as if they’re furniture, without regard to their individual trauma, the impact on families, and the consequences for their survival. But based on the long-term studies of individually known elephants and their families, studies that have now been going on for 50 years, we’ve learned so much about elephants as individuals and about the devastating consequences of the ways we’ve treated them.
“I think the idea that elephants have names for one another really struck people quite deeply. It is a novel concept for us humans to imagine, but think of it — why shouldn’t they? Mothers and daughters live together for perhaps close to 50 years. They care about one another.”
The more we learn, the more understanding we have of them. It wasn’t so long ago that people said to me, “What? Elephants communicate?” I think people thought,Well, humans communicate, but animals don’t talk to one another. They just make sounds that don’t have any kind of meaning.But now people have begun to realize that the sounds that elephants and other species make hold meaning. I hope that by understanding them, we will be better at seeing their perspective, better at sharing the little remaining space on this planet with them.
Regarding the recent study, I think the idea that elephants have names for one another really struck people quite deeply. It is a novel concept for us humans to imagine, but think of it — why shouldn’t they? Mothers and daughters live together for perhaps close to 50 years. They care about one another. They live in a fission-fusion society like ours — going their separate ways on the savannah, and to find one another, they call each other by name.
If they can create and use names for one another, what stops them from creating and using place names, object names, and names for predators? What stops them from creating words or sounds — whatever you want to call them — that help them to navigate their increasingly complex world? Now they are not just living with other wild species on the plains, but are having to navigate an increasingly complex environment in which there are humans.
We know from watching their behavior and also from satellite collar data that they are very finely tuned into our movement. They listen in. They know when people go to sleep. They know when it’s safe to leave the boundaries of the park. They learn really, really quickly. They’re also smart enough to cooperate on crop raiding expeditions, to short electric fences, to avoid the full moon when humans are more active.
In addition to their sizeable brains and complex social behavior, they’re endowed with some talents that we don’t have. For example, with their incredible sense of smell, they know when the onions underground are perfectly ripe. They use all their senses — their extraordinary sense of smell and hearing, and the ability to pick up vibrations through their feet — to monitor us and outsmart us. If we want to live together with them, side by side, it’s probably wise for us to try to understand them.
This article was written by Gillian Goddard. Gillian grew up in the Caribbean Island of Trinidad at a time when many local cacao plantations had been abandoned. After studying at Stanford University, she returned to Trinidad and became a community organizer and social entrepreneur focused on circular economy and regenerative farming as ways to elevate rural communities. Goddard developed a cooperative network of small chocolate entrepreneurs sharing skills and working together. That network has spread to 11 nations on multiple continents. This article is an edited version of a talk Gillian gave at a Bioneers Conference. [Note: The cacao plant produces a seed or bean that is processed into cocoa which is the main ingredient in chocolate. However, sometimes cacao and cocoa are used interchangeably.]
The Spanish were the first European colonizers in Trinidad. Under their colonial system, it was illegal to make furniture. Trinidad had to send the wood to Spain where the furniture was made and then shipped back to the Caribbean. For the most part, that model is used today for chocolate in most cacao growing countries. About 75% of cacao is grown by black hands, which means Africans or descendants of Africans, but only 5% of Black people are involved in value-added cocoa production. That’s what colonization looks like.
Colonies were not really encouraged, incentivized or allowed to do anything with their product. That is how Europe got rich. I always tell people I don’t need reparations. Just give me the difference between the price of cacao beans and the price of chocolate that has been produced for 300 years in Switzerland, and I will be satisfied with that.
Decolonizing Chocolate
So in 2014, I co-founded the Alliance of Rural Communities (ARC) that operates in the Caribbean, mainly in Trinidad, but also in Tobago, St. Lucia, and Guyana. ARC supports communities to develop collective chocolate production facilities in their regions so they can earn a much higher income than exporting the raw material, the cocoa beans.
At the time, I had an organic shop and all the cocoa was imported. I asked myself why in a region where cacao beans are grown are we importing cocoa? I, like almost everyone else in Trinidad, had never tasted local chocolate. It would be like an American never having eaten apple pie.
So my partner and I started making chocolate in our rented home. We had a small machine in the bedroom. It was the only room with air conditioning. Within a month we called some friends in a cacao growing village and said to send four young adults to our house to help and learn how to make chocolate.
I say this because people have the idea that there’s some lofty state you have to be in to make major change. But that’s actually when you don’t make change. When people see what I do, they often copy it because it looks so accessible. If you have a grandiose plan that needs hundreds of thousands of dollars, that looks unreachable. Regular people won’t do that. So we started training people from different local communities, and eventually those people started their own small chocolate enterprises.
We realized that you can transfer skills, but if people don’t have a car, if they don’t know anybody in the big stores, if they have the wrong accent, nobody is going to put their chocolates on the shelf. So skills transfer is often useless if you don’t have all those other things. So we now have a car, we have a delivery person, they pick up from the community enterprises, we buy spare parts together, we buy labels together. We do most things together.
It’s kind of a franchise model. Nature does franchises. A forest is a forest is a forest. It has regional variations but there’s a basic framework. Nature is very efficient and replicates things. So, we copy nature as much as we can, and we gradually grew a network.
We started a small marketplace and small innovation centers in the communities. What that looks like is individual chocolate mini-enterprises, a marketplace community, and craft companies. Most Caribbean countries import 90% of their food and drink, but we have a hundred percent local food catering operation. We did about 156 events last year.
We also started a conservation NGO because we wanted to be accountable. It was not some outside enterprise, it’s us local folks. We also have ARC destinations for conservation tourism. With all of this, we have a diversified system. But during COVID the tourism fell to zero because Trinidad closed our borders for two years. Sales for the community chocolate companies dropped. But the marketplace jumped up, and filled the space. That’s why you have to have diversity in a system, just as nature does.
The Network Expands to Africa
During COVID, I went on Instagram to find out who’s growing cacao outside of Trinidad. I reached out to a woman in Malawi who had expressed interest in learning how to make chocolate. And then somebody from Uganda sent me a WhatsApp message saying that a person from Trinidad told him to get in touch with me to learn how to make chocolate. Those were the first two people. Two weeks later, we had people from 14 countries on the phone and a Pan-African movement of chocolate began within two weeks. In October I said, “Let’s do a Christmas box.” We had to send machines to most people, teach them on Zoom how to make chocolate, package the product, create branding and get it to the US.
On Christmas Eve, we sent out 200 boxes with 12 chocolates each from a different country. It was pretty exciting. For the American bar, we mixed all the other bars together and called it the Melting Pot Bar.
That was an amazing example of how, with almost no money, we could make something like that happen. That network of cooperation is now called The Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective and is similar to the model of the ARC network. We now have a producer hive, which includes Global North countries that don’t grow cacao. They are setting up cafes and a wholesale network.
Sharing the Culture of Chocolate
Cacao is a crop native to the tropical regions of the American hemisphere that is now grown mainly in Africa. Part of our goal, as people from the place of the origins of cacao, was to ally with Africans and share the culture and process of chocolate making. One of my father’s early memories is grating a hard stick of cocoa and some spices into milk and dipping cassava bread into it, and that was a full meal. Some variation of that drink has been enjoyed for 5000 years by the people of the native cacao growing regions.
In the first classes we did in the Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective, it was very clear that not a smidgen of culture had been transferred with the crop.
Many Africans did not know that cocoa turned into chocolate. The people in our network said they had begged commodity traders and chocolate makers who were visiting them to show them some of the process and were repeatedly refused. There was no sharing going on. So we are attempting to do that to make a gesture of connection.
We are creating a model based on the idea that I am going to give you what I have no matter the consequences to me. That is what I call ethics and what I call bravery.
The Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective is a network of cooperatives. Ghana has an 806-women cooperative. Cameroon has 2000 people in cooperatives who work together. Côte d’Ivoire has a 310-person cooperative. St. Lucia has a women’s collective. The other people involved are generally entrepreneurial individuals of African heritage. We are sharing information and teaching each other. The Chocolate Hive in the US is made up of a group in East Cleveland, a group in Memphis and a group in Chicago. We have a few other places that we’ve started to work with as well.
The goal was to have African-Americans, especially in legacy African-American communities who were not traditionally engaged in the chocolate world, benefit economically by participating in this network.
Hopefully each one will end up with a cafe selling the products and also selling products from their own community following the model that we have in Trinidad. We have branded Cross Atlantic as Chocolate Rebellion and now we are seen as experts because many skill-sharing projects have failed. They don’t usually work for any length of time.
We want to also control distribution transportation. In our experience with ARC, using people who think differently about the world has not worked for us. So, we are building a 300 ton sailboat to move our products around the Atlantic. We’ve tested it by sending cacao beans to Cornwall, England, and chocolate and cocoa butter to Barbados. We are now developing the markets so we can fill the boats.
We did an event in three African countries in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana; three Caribbean countries: St. Lucia, St. Kit, San Neeva, Trinidad; Columbia; two places in the US: Memphis, East Cleveland; and in Paris, London and Copenhagen. So what we want to do is make sure we have enough product that by the time we build the boat, we can fill it.
A Cultural Movement Using Nature as a Model
I consider this a cultural movement because it’s the culture that has been stolen from us, not just the cargo. And when I say us, I mean regular people who are not big shipping magnates who are billionaires sending stuff all over the world. We are working with a Brazilian woman and a Canadian guy who are doing decarbonized shipping. We are working with two Danish master students who are doing route optimization, a marine architect in the Caribbean, and others.
There are still gaps that have to be addressed, but it was only ten years ago that we started in the Caribbean with ARC and only three years ago in Africa with the Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective. Currently there are thousands of people involved. I would say the maximum amount of money that has been spent to train all these people and get equipment is not even $70,000.
It’s amazing how much you can do with a little, if you create a model that imitates the efficiencies of the natural world. We do it by moving away from commodity-scale and monoculture thinking to a polyculture way of thinking. By mimicking a forest, we build redundancy and diversity into the model, and into the funding. We are creating relationships between people as we shift and dodge and move the same way the natural world moves.
The global chocolate commodity market is tarnished by a history of exploitation of cacao farmers and laborers that persists to this day. The TCHO (pronounced chō) chocolate company opposes exploitative business practices by working directly with global partner farmers and scientists to co-create unique flavored chocolates by investing in the sustainability of cacao-producing communities in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.
This article was written by Laura Sweitzer, Director of Sustainability and Strategic Sourcing for TCHO. Prior to joining TCHO, Sweitzer spent 5 years working on coffee quality improvement projects in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She has extensive real-world experience internationally in farmer capacity building, developing sustainable supply chains and ethical sourcing. This article is an edited version of a talk Laura gave at a Bioneers Conference. [Note: The cacao plant produces a seed or bean that is processed into cocoa which is the main ingredient in chocolate. However, sometimes the words cacao and cocoa are used interchangeably.]
In the global chocolate industry, there are some contradictions in the way business is done. Some companies have a head of sustainability that does outreach in schools, etc, and talks about their goals for the environment and the community. But the job of the person in charge of sourcing is to purchase cocoa as cheaply as possible. At TCHO our assessment of that structure is that the two positions essentially work against each other. Our main lever for achieving our environmental and sustainable livelihood objectives is our contracts. We not only cover the cost of production for cacao farmers, but offer a price that allows them to invest in their crops and processes enabling them to purchase new drying beds, lab equipment, etc.
The thing I love about my position as the director of sustainability and strategic sourcing is when I sign our contracts for cocoa, sugar, etc., I do that within the framework of TCHO’s sustainability goals.
I grew up on a farm in northeastern Indiana. We grew crops–corn and soy–that are considered commodities. The simplest definition I can give of a commodity is one ton of soybeans is treated as interchangeable with another. The price assigned to commodities does not take into consideration the cost to produce them or any other factors. The price is left to international markets and out of the farmer’s hands. Generally, cacao is also treated as a global commodity.
Cacao grows 20 degrees north and south of the equator. We work with cacao grown in Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo and Madagascar.
Flower of the Cacao tree
Cacao’s Distinct Flavors
Among TCHO’s products are chocolate from single origin cacao from a cooperative in Ghana, and another from a cooperative in the San Martin region of Peru, as well as a third product that is a blend of the two sources.
TCHO was founded with the intention of offering the distinct flavors intrinsically found in cacao. Different flavors can be found in various genetics of cacao. TCHO began with four single-origin products, each featuring a distinct flavor found in cacao from those regions.
When we started, we did not have the relationships with our supply chain that we have today. The products were launched without fully thinking through the replicability of producing a bar over and over that features a particular flavor. The supply chain, at that time, was not focused on flavor.
As I mentioned, I grew up on a farm that grew soybeans. We didn’t turn the soy into products and taste them first. We sold them specifically based on physical parameters. When TCHO first started, that was also how our supply chain was selling cacao. Even today, most of the world’s cacao is traded solely based on physical characteristics. When we launched a chocolate bar that was supposed to feature fruity notes, we would receive 20 samples and reject 19 until we found ones that tasted fruity. That’s very inefficient.
So an initiative that has been a joy for TCHO is installing mini bean–to-bar chocolate-making labs at cocoa research Institutes as well as in the headquarters of the various cooperatives that we work with.
Economic Justice for Cacao Growers
We provide sensory analysis training so our partner farmers can reach our standard on quality. And when they do, we pay a quality premium over the Fair Trade and the organic premiums. That premium recognizes all of the additional work that’s necessary to produce a flavor-specific cacao consistently. As a result, I’ve not rejected a sample of fruity flavored cacao in over seven years.
Historically the price paid to the cacao farmer is extremely low. The premium TCHO pays recognizes that the commodity market price for cacao is extractive and not sustainable for the farmer. TCHO has also provided premiums for programmatic work. For example, the European Union Deforestation Regulation requires mapping of all cacao farms that sell to EU nations to demonstrate that they are not linked to deforestation. So agronomists, who normally support farmers with crop issues and problems, were spending all their time on mapping. So, we provided a three-year temporary premium for additional agronomy support to farmers.
Awenade Cocoa Farmers Cooperative, Ghana
Working with the same network of people for almost 20 years in mutually beneficial relationships is key to building a strong supply chain for a company located in Berkeley that’s purchasing cacao from farmer-owned cooperatives and roasters in other countries.
Each year we review the prices to our suppliers to keep that discussion at the forefront. Currently the market price of cocoa is at a record high. TCHO still needs cacao that’s organic and Fair Trade with specific flavor profiles. So we continue to pay above-market prices even in a high market.
The Treasured Theobroma Cacao Tree
The cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) is a cauliflory tree. That means the pods grow from all the surfaces, from the trunk and large branches. Where I grew up in the Midwest, I was not used to this style of fruit tree. I was used to trees with apples that just grow at the tips of the branches.
When the cacao tree blooms, the flower is pollinated by a small moth called the coco midge. If the cacao is pollinated, a little pot appears, and if it’s not pollinated, the flower will fall to the ground.There is a lot of diversity in cacao pods even on one farm, and even more so at a regional level. That diversity can affect flavor, as well as resistance to diseases or pests.
It’s a lot of work to grow and tend the cacao tree to keep it healthy. In the warm, rainy, tropical regions where cacao grows, there are many diseases that can spread from tree to tree. Brazil used to be the world’s largest producer of cacao until they had a major outbreak of a disease called Witches’ broom that devastated hundreds of thousands of hectares of cacao in a relatively short period of time.
That’s just one historic example of how quick diseases that affect cacao trees can spread and how much work it is on behalf of the farmer to address those diseases at the source of the problem and have a resilient farm.
Making Chocolate: It Starts with Fermentation
After the ripe pod is harvested, it is opened and inside are the seeds (also referred to as cocoa beans), which are covered with a fruit pulp.
The seeds are scooped out and, for most cacao (not all), the next step is fermentation. The fermentation process can be done in a few ways. One of the ways is to wrap the cocoa bean in banana leaves or another leaf that’s flavor neutral and occasionally aerate them. Natural yeasts feed on the sugar in the pulp and in five to seven days, depending on your protocol and your climates, the cacao beans will be fermented.
White pulp surrounds the coca beans in cacao pods
The fermented cocoa beans are then dried. All of it is a laborious process, with each step a huge inflection point for flavor. You can change the acidity based on how you ferment and /or how you dry the beans. There are endless combinations of how the work is done and what results you get. Fast drying in the full sun, or slower drying with cover will have two very different flavors.
Once the beans are dried, and we approve cocoa that is the right flavor profile, it’s time to roast it. One of the things I’m most proud about TCHO’S model is we do not roast cocoa at our headquarters in Berkeley. 90% of our cocoa is roasted in the same country that it is grown in.
The roasted cocoa bean is ground up and turned into cocoa liquor. Cocoa liquor is the term we use for a cocoa bean that’s been roasted and ground. The fat is solid at room temperature. That’s what allows us to have a chocolate bar.
TCHO’s strategy is to partner with strong functional farmer-owned cooperatives who do this labor, who understand the plant, and who are the leaders for all of the steps in the process.
The cocoa liquor, cocoa butter (the fat from the cocoa bean), and cocoa powder are sent to Berkeley where we produce the finished product. We take the cocoa liquor and cocoa butter and grind them down to a very smooth particle, and that is put in various molds depending if the chocolate is going to chefs or made into bars.
An Inclusive Process Driven by Flavor and Relationship
It’s through dark chocolate and fans of chocolate with high cacao content that we find a shared joy for exploring all the different ways cacao can taste.
We use that enthusiasm for offering cacao not as a commodity, but as a product that acknowledges different flavors. It’s not interchangeable. One container or one bag of cacao is very different from the next. TCHO values those differences and rewards the growers for those differences. We have flavor labs in which everyone in the supply chain is tasting the product. We partner with national research institutes in both Ghana and Ecuador for support and leadership in those countries for what cocoa genetics are being shared as options to plants. We emphasize calibration of taste buds as an ongoing learning process. We calibrate our taste buds with our cacao-producing partners and researchers, but if you don’t taste together for a year or so, we will lose that.
Florence Deglo, Flavor Lab Technician at the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana pours freshly roasted cocoa beans into a bean breaker. One of several steps in the cocoa liquor and chocolate production process.
We learned that flavor is cultural. We had a lot of discussions in the beginning where, for example, I would say this tastes like blueberries and maple syrup. And my partner in San Martin, Peru would say, “We don’t have either of those things here.”
So we talk a lot about flavor families that bring common taste references for the region that the particular cooperatives we’re working with are in.
We’ve had the privilege of hosting several larger tasting summits that bring our whole supply chain together. Our partners from Ghana, from the Caribbean, and from South America, all come together sharing flavor references, sharing tips for tasting, and calibrating our pallets and co-developing tools for tasting. Building those systems in cacao with the same individuals who grow cacao has been a really great way for us to build a shared language around flavor. Each month we have a Zoom call and taste together. It’s a fantastic way to keep the relationships strong.
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