Bioneers 2023 kicked off with incredible inspiration and energy. We’re overjoyed by the in-person attendance in Berkeley, where we’ve welcomed 1,000+ new faces into the Bioneers community. To our friends who aren’t able to join us this year: We look forward to sharing takeaways, transcripts, and recordings with you in short order.
Today, we learned from leaders in animal intelligence, workers’ rights, economics, indigenous activism, and more. Keep reading for select highlights and action items from a motivational Conference day.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Inspiration from Bioneers Speakers
“We’re standing at a pivotal threshold in the human experiment. There are abundant opportunities for co-creativity and reimagining in every single field of human endeavor.” -Nina Simons, Bioneers
“It’s not a great resignation. It’s a great revolution.” -Saru Jayaraman, One Fair Wage
“Think about your own community media wealth. What’s the media that tells the story that gives you inspiration and hope? That gives you some sense of your place in this community, on this planet, and some sense of your power? Support that media.” -Laura Flanders, The Laura Flanders Show
“A lot of people in our ecosystems are healing from trauma. Just like our trauma can be remembered and stored in our bodies, so can our joy. This is why it’s critical to celebrate and acknowledge even the baby steps that take us toward the world we deserve.” -Jade Begay, NDN Collective
“The packaging industry has done away with the reduce and reuse part and has just sold us this idea that recycling can fix everything from hair loss to erectile dysfunction.” -Martin Bourque, Ecology Center
“Sperm whales really know who they are because of who they’re with. We also know who we are because of our relationship to other individuals. It’s so universal. It changed my view of us and what it means to be an individual.” -Carl Safina, The Safina Center
SHARE THIS!
The power of the ideas shared at Bioneers can be even greater with your help getting the word out. Download the graphic below and share it on social media, via email … everywhere and anywhere! On social, don’t forget to include the #Bioneers2023 hashtag.
CAMPAIGNS TO SUPPORT
Support the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people. (Mentioned by Corrina Gould)
Support the Democracy Collaborative to advance transformational solutions grounded in community, shared wealth and power, antiracism and reparative justice, and protection of the planet. (Mentioned by Laura Flanders)
Get involved with Third Act, which is building a community of experienced Americans over the age of 60 determined to change the world for the better. (Mentioned by Akaya Windwood)
Support the NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building, and narrative change. (Mentioned by Jade Begay)
Join Youth vs. Apocalypse in San Francisco on Earth Day to march for community protection from catastrophes caused by systemic injustice. (Mentioned by Aniya Butler)
This performance took place at the 2023 Bioneers Conference.
Wildchoir, formerly known as “Thrive Choir,” is an Oakland, CA-based, politically and socially engaged diverse group of vocalists, artists, activists, educators, healers and community organizers who join together in harmony. They have performed with nationally-acclaimed artists for social change including Rising Appalachia, Climbing PoeTree and MaMuse. They also frequently share the stage with progressive leaders, including Bernie Sanders, Ericka Huggins, Joanna Macy, and Fania Davis. Their music has inspired thousands at marches, conferences and festivals across California. Wildchoir spent its first years as the musical voice of Thrive East Bay and the global Thrive Network, and it is forever grateful to the Thrive Network for all its support and collaboration, and it is thrilled to be beginning a new phase of its musical journey as an independent ensemble.
“We Shall Be Known” was written by MaMuse (Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker), a 12-year old musical duo rooted in folk and gospel traditions. The Thrive Choir (now Wildchoir) joined MaMuse for this special performance at the 2020 Bioneers conference.
The high seas treaty — an agreement among UN members many years in the making — took substantive steps toward adoption on March 4, 2023. The treaty is being heralded as enormous progress toward protecting marine life outside of national boundaries. “The new High Seas Treaty addresses many of the governance gaps that have plagued the ocean, setting out clearer ways to conserve biodiversity in the high seas,” wrote the High Seas Alliance.
“That an agreement was reached between 193 nations at all, was a huge achievement,” wrote The Guardian, “but conservationists say it leaves significant scope for improvement. In particular, countries agreed that existing bodies already responsible for regulating activities such as fisheries, shipping and deep-sea mining could continue to do so without having to carry out environmental impact assessments laid out by the treaty.”
Bioneers reached out to two ocean conservation experts for their reactions to the high seas treaty.
Dave Phillips
Executive Director, Earth Island Institute Director, International Marine Mammal Project
Marine Sanctuaries are critical for the survival of whales, dolphins, and myriad other species that are depleted and endangered. I’ve been part of efforts to establish the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary and the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary, but these are such rare examples and took decades to enact.
Ocean areas outside of the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones of countries cover roughly two-thirds of the world’s oceans, and these areas have largely been free-for-alls.
The new UN treaty emphasizing ocean biodiversity protection beyond national jurisdiction is a big step forward. Once 60 countries ratify it, it will drive the establishment of marine protected areas that are desperately needed. The Treaty is specifically designed for establishing a legal framework for addressing ocean pollution, unsustainable fishing, climate change impacts, and plastic pollution. It’s not a panacea but is a monumental chance to set a new course for the protection of ocean life.
Rod Fujita
Senior Scientist and Director, Research and Development, Oceans Program Environmental Defense Fund
How important is the treaty?
This treaty is an historic milestone and a great achievement of the international community. In this time of increasing focus on narrow self-interest and isolation, it’s heartening to see that nations can work together to answer difficult, long-standing questions about the global commons of the high seas, like “who gets to benefit from the genetic resources of the high seas” and “who gets to become empowered by doing research in the high seas” and “how should the resources of the high seas be used, and how can they be protected”
What are your hopes for the treaty?
The treaty’s provisions for creating more equitable access to high seas resources and more equitable access to the scientific and economic benefits to be gained on the high seas seem particularly important to me. If these are implemented, they could transition the current situation of might makes right, in which the powerful and well-capitalized get the benefits, to a world in which nations work together to explore and sustainably use high seas resources and then share the benefits. Provisions in the treaty for creating marine protected areas and the call for sustainable use of high seas resources rightly recognize the importance of conservation as fundamental to ensuring streams of benefits that can improve human welfare while protecting the intrinsic values inherent in marine biodiversity and ecosystem processes.
What concerns do you have about the treaty?
I fear that sustainability, which is embodied within the treaty as the imperative for resource use, is no longer enough. In the context of catastrophic climate change, widespread habitat degradation, and massive biodiversity loss, the planet urgently needs active care and regeneration. It’s no longer enough to just prevent harm or to ensure that we don’t take so much that the resource base collapses. I am also concerned about the lack of mechanisms for acting on the newly required environmental impact assessments. While this is a useful requirement, information rarely results in any kind of action on its own. Either intrinsic motivation based on care for the planet and for each other, or lacking that, powerful external incentives from strong governance or market forces aligned with stewardship are required to motivate action based on knowledge. The new treaty does not seem to create these kinds of incentives, so I fear that many of the well-intentioned measures of the treaty, which run counter to profit-maximization incentives will not be implemented or be effective.
Designer, art director and illustrator Guillermo Flores is based in Guadalajara, México and specializes in collage, illustration and digital art. He has collaborated with organizations and companies around the world serving as a creative and art director on multiple projects, developing brand identity, strategy, planning and execution.
Flores has been part of various exhibitions inside and outside of México, one of the most important being the International Collage Art Exhibition in Warsaw, part of the collective exhibition called Surreal Lovers at Retro Avangarda Gallery where he has 12 works on display, referring to the relationship of humans and nature.
Bioneers reached out to Flores to create an original collage illustration for the Bioneers 2023 conferenceposter and main stage animation.
Emily Harris (EH): The first thing I want to say is how much we appreciated working with you for the stunning conference art. It’s so rare to be able to work with an artist who’s willing to take you into their world. The way that we got to sit with you, showing us how you were constructing everything, it was really mesmerizing to watch how you work. So thank you!
Guillermo Flores (GF): You’re welcome. Thank you very much.
EH: How did you find your way into art and art direction?
GF: It really was something very casual. In college, I had my first course with Adobe Photoshop and I loved it. I mean, I found the perfect tool to create illustrations. And, I was going to study music. But finally, I decided on design. I decided to study design because I thought there’s no math [laughs] you know, that mathematica. That was my breaking point.
EH: I totally get it [laughs].
GF: Yeah. But finally graphic design showed me that I could achieve many things. I think everything comes from nature. I mean, that’s my inspiration all the time. Plants, birds, the yard, the universe, I mean, everything is there. The bright colors, the shapes.
For example, the peacock or maybe imagine this other animal called octopus. So I think it’s something super crazy, like it’s from another planet! It’s completely surreal. So yeah, everything is in nature. We have it in front of our eyes.
EH: You’re so right!
GF: I think that’s my inspiration. And that’s why this I decided to create collages and illustrations.
EH: It shows, I think that’s what I was struck by most. We are always looking for artists to collaborate with on various projects and when we discovered you on Behance, I just kept returning to your work and it was that wild and aliveness in your art that caught my attention. Your appreciation of nature just speaks so authentically through your artwork. And I also love your playfulness with it.
GF: When I was a kid my mother had a lot of books and these books showed me a lot of nature and birds. She was a singer she had like, 70 studio albums. The artwork on the covers was inspiring also. So maybe that’s a reason that I love to create illustration. I loved to read a lot of books when I was kid for example, let me show you. [Flores shows me a vintage Natural History book]
EH: Cool! So as a kid, you were already drawn to those illustrations?
GF: Yeah, exactly! I don’t know how to say this but it’s like when a baby from their mother [laugh]. Yeah. It’s was the same with books for me.
EH: So you were already drawing from what you were exposed to. It’s funny that you showed me the anatomical human body, the parts. Sometimes people might say, oh, well that person’s destined to be a doctor or a surgeon or something, you know what I mean? But I love that, for you, it seems like it was about the wonder and the beauty of it, right? The beauty and the awe of that influenced how you were going to interpret that in your artwork. Thank you for showing me that, really wonderful to see those vintage books that have been with you.
You also use a lot of botanical prints in your work as well. Is there anything else that helped influence the development of your unique style?
GF: A lot of people ask me about this. Like how did I find my own style? This is going to sound crazy, but I think the style finds you. In the end, I think that’s how it works. I just start with exploring and then try with different colors, shapes, and I think you just need to put attention to nurture, your environment and then you can find something. Actually, my recent illustrations have a lot of color. I think it was like this process inside of me. You know what I mean? I’ve been working with my psychologist to find new ways to relax more. So it’s like that, exploring, trying new things. [laughs]
So that’s the reason that I found new colors. It’s like an internal process. I think when you need to be like, I don’t know, what’s the word? Chill or relaxed, then you can find something in front of your eyes. Things open up. If you try hard to find your style, it’s going to be a nightmare. Just ask, what’s the reason that moves you? You just need to create, experiment, and try.
EH: Two things come to mind; I’m feeling inspired by your process. I love walking in nature, it’s my refuge. I think when we live in a chaotic, fast paced world, finding places to relax is critical. There’s a certain aliveness that allows for your senses to open up when you can calm your nerves. I was interested in interior design at one point in my life, and I always thought, if I were creating a paint palette, I would only draw from nature because it always creates– this reminds me of what you’re saying, nature presents the most incredible combinations and textures. Nature provides endless inspiration. I appreciate your sentiment to just relax and kind of let it happen. It’ll come out. What drew you to collage and illustration?
GF: That was a weird mix that I found. I’ve worked in advertising agencies for many years. At some point I mixed the two it was very casual. I think collage is a very novel technique. You can explore and try and create really beautiful things. I think collage comes from the idea of exploring materials and experimented with images that are already there. It’s very easy to approach. Everyone can explore this technique. The final result, it’s going to be great because it doesn’t have rules.
For example, you can cut some images from magazines and you can create your own composition and there’s no pressure. If you paint or do a technique where materials are expensive, you feel this pressure, like I can’t make a mistake. [laughs]
EH: So true, working with this inherently experimental form takes some of the pressure off.
Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for people whether they consider themselves an artist or not, but are interested developing their artistic side?
GF: Yeah, I always say just do it. Just experiment, show your work and at some point, everything else will come. So meanwhile you should create and read and study about art and design. At some point in your life, all this information, it’s going to show in your eyes, like, boom, you know? And that’s it. You need to be patient. In art or graphic design or this kind of art you need to really be patient. For example, if you want to be a musician, you need to practice a lot, even if you have talent you need to practice.
EH: Absolutely. Are there any dream projects coming up or current that you’re really excited about?
GF: I’m doing large murals. I don’t know why people think collage is only for small pieces. You can create a lot of huge graphics so I’m trying that out. I love it. I’m also really excited about the launch of my Domestika course on advertising, illustration, and the whole process. I shot it in Mexico City, really looking forward to sharing with everyone.
GF: I have a funny story. When I was a kid, my mother was an actor. She did eight movies. She would bring me to her movie sets and I got asked to act as an extra in some of the movies when I was a kid.
EH: Congrats! We’ll look for it. That sounds really exciting. Did you always want to teach?
GF: [laughs] So, I don’t know. My whole life, I always been in front of a camera. I mean, when I was a musician, I was a front man, the guy who gave interviews. So when Domestika approached me to teach design, I said, of course! It was an amazing experience. It felt natural.
EH: I can imagine because, again, you’re very patient and you clearly love what you do. I think those two things have always made for the best teachers, in my life, who really want you to understand and get it because they love it and they want to share that with you. So that’s really wonderful.
GF: Right, maybe the word for this is passion?
EH: Passion, exactly.
GF: If you have passion and if you love your work, your jobs are your soul or I don’t know how to say that. It’s a romantic way to say this, right? [laughs]
EH:I think you’re right about that. I think passion is a language of your soul. It shows through, people can feel it, even if they can’t put words to it, they sense it deeply.
GF: When I was young, I learned you could express yourself with music. Even if you don’t have the words, you can play some instrument. And you can say how you feel. So my principal instrument is drums. When I felt angry, I played angry on drums. I learned to cry in my lyrics. I found a way to express myself with music and with some lyrics with singing.
I think illustrations or graphic design or art is the same. You can express yourself painting. Maybe you are angry. You can paint a lot of shapes with like hard colors, maybe reds or blacks or, you know. I think it’s the same.
EH: Yeah. As much as I love language, it doesn’t always get at a feeling. Once you realize how profound or how special they are to you, you hope that other people in the world find those outlets for themselves.
GF: You don’t need to speak the same language. But I think the music and arts, it’s a language. It’s the same language.
EH: Yeah, more universal. Thank you again for all your time and for creating this incredible artwork to kick off our conference in Berkeley, it will surely have a wonderful impact.
GF: So excited to hear how everyone responds. Thank you!
In this moment of radical transformation, shifting the societal pronoun from “me, me, me” to “we” may be the single most transformational pivot we can make in order for anything else to work. Our destiny is ultimately collective.
How can we overcome corrosive divisions and separations that are tearing us apart and create a world where everyone belongs?
In this program, we dip into a deep conversation on this topic between Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell, two long-time friends and leaders in a quest toward building a multicultural democracy.
Featuring
Angela Glover Blackwell is Founder-in-Residence at PolicyLink, the organization she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity. One of the nation’s most prominent, award-winning social justice advocates, she serves on numerous boards and advisory councils, including the inaugural Community Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve and California’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): If there’s one fatal systems error in the modern worldview, it’s the assumption that we are separate – separate from nature, separate from the cosmos, separate from each other.
In this moment of radical transformation, shifting the societal pronoun from “me, me, me” to “we” may be the single most transformational pivot we can make in order for anything else to work. Our destiny is ultimately collective. How can we overcome corrosive divisions and separations that are tearing us apart and create a world where everyone belongs?
That question is at the heart of the lifelong work of two deep friends and colleagues going back 50 years. Both Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell have worked tirelessly for decades to change public policy and systems of governance to create equity and a multicultural, multiracial democracy. Both are professors at the University of California at Berkeley, and both are policy advocates whose work has led to authentic structural change.
Blackwell is the Founder-in-residence at PolicyLink, which has worked since 1999 to advance racial and economic equity for all. She formerly served as a senior vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation where she oversaw the Domestic and Cultural Division.
powell is the founder of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. He’s an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties, as well as on a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy.
Blackwell defines equity as “just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, thrive, and reach their full potential.” Yet, although progress has occurred, that kind of inclusion remains a far cry from current reality.
How, asks john a. powell, do we let go of the story of othering so that we can tell a better story of belonging where everyone belongs?
We drop into a candid conversation between these two pathfinders at the Bioneers conference…
Angela Glover Blackwell(AGB): I have spent most of my adult life being an advocate, working sometimes in confrontational ways, sometimes in more persuasive ways, but most of that time has been spent trying to impact policy and systems and institutions, and trying to do it in a way that’s just very logical – looking at a problem and seeing what’s not right, not just not fair but not just not right, and having real outrage about it, and thinking if I’m going to do anything in life, I’m going to do something about that. I’ve had success, if you want to call success seeing a system change, seeing a needle move, seeing a policy come into being, but I have to admit that after 50 years, we’re stuck. We’re stuck.
It’s not that we haven’t made progress, but it’s not sustainable. It’s not guaranteed. It’s not a platform that we stand on as we try to spiral up to the next place. It’s delicate. It’s impermanent, and we keep going back and forth. And it’s that frustration that’s led me to the conclusion that you may have reached a long time ago, I have a suspicion that you have been more of a hearts person than I have, that I was a systems person, a policy person, an advocacy person. But I recognize that I come at it because of what’s in my heart, because of what was in my family, because it was in my neighborhood, in my church, and that I have given inadequate attention to those same aspects of the people who I wanted to move.
Angela Glover Blackwell speaking at Bioneers 2022. Photo by Alex Akamine.
And oddly enough, I’m a latecomer to notions of joy and love being part of the work. Those were not words that I used. But I have come to realize actually through a podcast that I do called Radical Imagination, and I interviewed Adrienne Maree Brown, who talks about pleasure activism, and I must say talking with her changed my whole attitude, because she made the point that if you do not have a vision of joy that is connected with whatever it is you’re working on, it’s not an authentic vision of change. And as I reflected on that, I realized that I was a secret joy seeker. I create a lot of joy in my life, but that wasn’t my work. You know? It’s like my family is my joy, swimming is my joy. I had lots of joys, but they were separate from my work. That conversation caused me to move joy more front and center.
And the other thing that I have moved front and center is the story, because I realized that everything you do is animated by a story that you have told yourself. Sometimes it’s a scary story, sometimes it’s a negative story, sometimes it’s an aspirational story, sometimes you think it’s a true story and nothing you can do about it.
So I agree with you 100% on both things that you have lifted up. One is that what’s in our hearts is not enough, but if it’s not in our hearts, it’s not sustainable when we put it in our policies, in our institutions. It can be gone tomorrow. And the other is that we need to translate our beliefs into a story that everybody can see themselves in and have a sense that they can be a part of it.
john a. powell (jp): Thank you. Thank you. I think we can leave now. [laughter]
AGB: Ok! (laughter) But, you know, I do think that the way that some people hear “belonging” suggests that we can get there by not having to go through race, and we can’t; that there is no belonging if there are people who feel marginalized because of race and ethnicity and those things. Can you talk a little bit about that and how they relate?
jp: As you know, our institute is called the Othering and Belonging Institute, and it’s made up of seven clusters, and those clusters focus both on populations and on issues. And so race is one of the issues, but so is gender, so is LGBTQ, so is disability. And when I first got there, about 10 years ago now, we had these seven clusters, and we were called the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. And without rewriting history, I would say that it was closer, in some ways, to what you described in terms of policy. And there was a little bit of competition between the different groups. Each group was like, “No, my group is the one that really suffers. I know you suffer too, but my group really suffers.”
And a couple of things, and this was an evolution. It occurred to me that they all were experiencing systematic othering. They all were being denied their full humanity. And they all wanted to fully belong. They all wanted to be fully recognized and to fully participate in the world that they were co-creating. And they weren’t against each other, they just didn’t really deeply hear each other. And over a period of time, we moved to the Othering and Belonging, because we felt that underneath each one of those expressions, there was the architect of othering.
Now just in terms of personal biography, some of you may know I’ve lived in many different parts of the world. My daughter was born in Tanzania. I tell her we might change our terminology from African Americans to something else. She will always be an African American. She’s literally an African and an American.
And what I saw in working in places like Tanzania, South Africa, living and working in places like India, is that othering is extremely grounded in virtually every society. So in India, it is the caste system. But I was just with some people from Europe. And they talked about the struggles they’re having in mixed communities in Ireland. Of course they meant Catholic and Protestant. And for them, all these just get boiled down to that. Right? The religious difference between Protestant and Catholics is the penultimate. And maybe it is the penultimate in Ireland. So race is the penultimate expression of othering in the United States.
The paradigm is a structure, it’s how we look at the world. So if we have a Black-and-White paradigm, it doesn’t mean it’s just about Black people and White people, it means that this is the way we organize our view of the world. And so in the United States, historically, the closer you are to White, the better off you are through many indicators. The closer you are to Black, the worse you are.
So in the United States, we have to address race not to help Black people, but to actually – this is an American project. If we’re going to change the United States, we have to change the way we think about this paradigm. We have to come up with a different paradigm.
john a. powell speaking at Bioneers 2022. Photo by Alex Akamine.
Coming up with a different paradigm is complicated, because it’s not just doing something different, it’s being different. It actually means we will not have the same meaning associated with Whiteness and Blackness that we do today. If you go back and look at early definition of Whiteness, early definition of Whiteness was not Black. They didn’t have a positive definition, it’s just that you’re not Black. In California, they have some proposed laws that would make California only available to Whites. And they don’t know what Whites are. And these are two powerful people, and they said, well, it means not Black.
What I’m suggesting is that these definitions, these meanings, these frameworks keep changing. They’re not stable. What we do changes them. And so that’s why James Baldwin said there’s no hope for us as long as they think they’re White. And what he really was saying, as long as their identity is organized around white superiority, white hierarchy, there’s no hope for us.
If you take away white superiority and white dominance, what’s left of Whiteness? It’s certainly not what we see every day in our society. It’s something else. And part of what we have to do is not only reject that old, we have to also propose the future. We have to tell the story about the future.
And I often times say in talking about this that as we interrogate and shift from the ideology of superiority and white supremacy, we’re not talking about people who are necessarily phenotypically White. We’re talking about an ideology. And if you need any clarification of that, just think about Justice Thomas. Justice Thomas to me embodies the concept of white supremacy, even though I think he’s the same hue as I am.
AGB: So, you know, listening to you talking about othering and belonging reminds me of why art is so powerful in helping us see things that we sometimes can’t see otherwise. It has to do with the universal and the particular, that sometimes people write – and often it’s academics, but not always – about universally what’s going on, which is kind of the way I take in othering and belonging, that you and your colleagues have done a magnificent job of looking across the globe and seeing there is a pattern that’s repeated again and again and again. And that phrase “othering and belonging” just really captures it.
And I’m talking about the particular. And for me, the particular starts in St. Louis, Missouri on the 4900 block of Terry in the 1950s, and it branches out to the whole nation, but within the particular, it is race, and it is all race, all the time. And being able to hold those thoughts together is often the challenge.
The problem that I deal with every day is how to be able to reach and galvanize the overwhelming majority of people in this country who actually want to live in a different way. Many of them are of color. Many of them are people with disabilities. Many of them are people who are transgender and gay and lesbian. Many of them are living in poverty. Many of them have studied what it is to find your best self and are working every day toward doing that. Many of them are just good people because they came up in good families, and while no mother ever went on a march and no father ever put his body on the line for anybody, what they heard at the dinner table after school was, “You be nice to your classmates, all of them.” That’s the majority of the people in the United States.
And what we have not been able to do is recognize that the thing that is holding us back is because we haven’t dealt with the racism, that we allow school systems to operate where if you live in one neighborhood, you go to a school that is as good as any that can be paid for with every dollar that could be earned, and it is a public school. You live in another area of the city and you go to a public school that has nothing, is producing nothing, and has been doing it for decades, and we live in these cities and we’re okay with it.
We live with that because it is happening to people that somewhere deep in our bones in this nation, we have let them be at the bottom of the hierarchy of human value, so that if you’re forced to think about it, it seems outrageous, but when you live with it every day, something about it kind of seems okay.
And if we could just find all the people who really know that it’s the way that we have dealt with the difference of race in this nation that has allowed us to develop institutions and systems and policies that perpetuate the wrong on all kinds of people, people who’ve never seen a Black person are suffering in a society in which Black people were deemed to be at the bottom of the hierarchy of human value and we allowed our economic and other systems to be developed on that hierarchy.
And so, john, I just love that you have been able to put that in a context globally, and to give us something that wherever you happen to land you can know that there’s othering going on, and you need to be sure that you’re finding it and that you’re standing up against it.
But the thing that I try to live up to is that if I am in the room, your back is covered, no matter what your back might be. That that’s what I try to do, because that’s what we have to do, which means identify that othering and work against it, but in this context we cannot jump to that’s just othering because it is a racial othering, because that’s our othering. And so we’ve got to deal with that in particular.
Host: If indeed a majority of people want to come together across our differences, how can we overcome the hierarchy of human value that’s designed to other and separate us?
When we return, Angela Glover Blackwell and john a. powell explore the big gnarly questions. Is the glass half empty or half full? Is this the last gasp of a culture of othering? How can we use our own agency to realize the better angels of our nature and create a transformative solidarity?
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers.
Host: In the quest for a multicultural democracy, one obstacle is what’s sometimes called the “oppression Olympics.” How might things change if we acknowledge and respect everyone’s suffering? Can changing that story change the world? john a. powell…
jp: PolicyLink does a lot of work in the community, and so does the Othering and Belonging Institute. And I can just tell you that the experience—First of all, I’m a little uncomfortable—You know, frankly, talking about Black people in a monolith. Black people represent every hue.
We are one of the anchor institutions right now for reparations. One of the issues that came up is like who is eligible for reparations. A lot of people and the majority, frankly, at the Reparations Commission for California said you have to have a certain experience—that if you didn’t have grandparents who were enslaved in the United States, you’re not eligible for reparations, because the experience in the United States was unique.
What most people missed, including apparently most people on the commission, many of whom are educated, is that slavery in the Caribbeans in many instances was worse than the United States. But we know our own pain but we’re not willing to acknowledge that other people, in this case, other Black people, they’re not historically Black Americans, but they are Black people, but that’s not good enough It’s been said by many people we have a fidelity to our own pain but an inability to see other people’s pain.
At the height of the attacks on Asian Americans, I wrote a piece basically talking about we need to stand behind, stand with our Asian American brothers and sisters. On social media, including among a lot of Black activist friends, attacked me for that because they felt I was detracting from focus on Black people. This is actually happening in America right now. We’re fracturing.
And I think the fracturing that’s happening can and in fact is happening between the different groups. Bob Marley said every man thinks his burden is the heaviest— we need to tell a story that allows for other people’s suffering as well. And I’m not saying it to diminish African American suffering, but neither do I want to diminish Native American suffering. We don’t know their story.
And so we have to learn about all, the leadership has to make it clear about all. So that’s why I think in some ways, I think, substantively, there’s very little difference between what you’re saying and what I’m saying. I think there’s a difference in terms of emphasis.
I think there is this danger of not seeing other people’s pain, of wanting to define the world just in terms of our own experience without hearing other people’s experience. And I think when we do that, the chance of actually turning this into something really good is greatly diminished.
AGB: I agree. And there is a danger in not seeing when we really are making progress. I must say when people talk about is the glass half empty or half full, for me it is so half full, because you talk about the struggle around reparations. I am so elated that we’re having conversations about reparations. I never thought that was going to happen. And not only are we having conversations about reparations, but California has a commission focused on it. Gary, Indiana and other places have actually tried to see what they can do within their local communities, and they’re calling it reparations. And people are going to understand what that is. That is amazing to me! I mean, I will tell you that I did not think in my lifetime that I would see serious conversation in the United States of America about reparations.
I did not think in my lifetime that I would see CEOs of major corporations doing something as simple as taking a knee. Now I don’t want to make a bigger deal out of that than it is, because that didn’t take anything out of them. That was not a big deal, but it was a big deal, because for the most part, people who were White, male CEOs didn’t think that what happened to a poor Black man in some city in America had anything to do with them, that they had no obligation to respond. Not only did they have those gestures, and that’s what taking a knee was, but they have put huge money behind trying to figure out what to do with these problems.
I did not think I would have some of the conversations with people, many of whom the majority have been White, who have come to me to say: How can I lead this institution? How can I lead the whatever it is; it might be a foundation, it might be a corporation, it might be a university, it might be a civic association, it might be a huge not-for-profit. White people questioning their legitimacy to lead institutions when these institutions have to quickly step into a moment where race is front and center and they’re being challenged about how it is that they’re going to deal with these issues going forward.
Things are changing in this society. I am not naïve about how fundamental the change has to be to be transformative, but I am also not blind to the fact that there are people and institutions and resources that are running as fast as they can to figure out how to do something different. And I think we’ve got to take note of that. We have got to take note of that. [APPLAUSE] Right, john?
jp: I completely agree. And a lot of things have come forward, and it’s like that old saying: Is it good or bad? It’s too early to say. We are running out of time. And part of what I’m positing is, can we actually accelerate this? And can we accelerate it—I think part of the way is to make it clear that yes, we are about everyone, without apologies. And it doesn’t mean we have to apologize for being grounded in addressing racism and anti-black racism in particular. But that doesn’t have to translate into, therefore, you step back, therefore we don’t care about you.
And I can tell you from a lot of the activists, a lot of the writing that’s happening right now, I can give you some concrete examples. I’ll just give you one. And these are people I know, so many of them are friends. Think about Robin DiAngelo’s work. What she describes is actually quite…I’ll just say it’s quite. So she describes white fragility and black trauma. So if you’re in a meeting or something happens, and you freak out and you’re White, it’s too easy from Robin DiAngelo’s perspective to say that’s fragility. It’s not deserving of any empathy. Why? Because you’re White. If you’re in a meeting and something happens and you freak out, and you’re Black, from Robin DiAngelo’s perspective, that’s trauma. We need to understand it. We need to support it.
And I’m not saying there’s not some performance happening in either direction when these things happen, but to categorically assume that if you’re White and you’re struggling, emotionally and otherwise, that that’s fragility, that you’re being a butterfly, you’re being whatever, a “Karen”, and we don’t have to take it seriously is saying your pain doesn’t really count. And at the same time, she turns around and says we should care about Black people’s pain. I say we should care about pain and we should also care about it being institutionalized and weaponized. So there’s some complexity that matters. And in the midst of this, sometimes we galvanize our own group by alienating another group gratuitously.
Host: If, as Angela Glover Blackwell says, an overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. really do want to live in a different way and be our best selves, how do we turn that change of heart into system change? Sometimes it’s easier to see what’s dying than what’s being born. Again, Angela Glover Blackwell…
AGB: I think that we actually are moving forward, and that it’s hard to see, because the people who are fighting to maintain – the phrase that I often use in talking about this is you have people who are being nostalgic, who are being nostalgic for a time that never was while ignoring a future that is inevitable. And I think that’s exactly what’s going on. I think that is a minority group, but it’s getting a lot of attention. The media is over-playing it, and so it looms larger than it is for that reason, but it is big.
But what I also think that it is a last gasp, and a last gasp can be long and shrill and dangerous. So that is not to dismiss it, but it is last. It is the past. It is not the future. And people are finding themselves, they are engaging in transformative solidarity, they are questioning institutions, and they’re questioning practices and customs and beliefs that have never been questioned before. And that’s what I’m attaching myself to so I get up energized every day.
This is our moment and we have agency. How are we going to use it? If we find each other, lean in and use it, we will get to a much better place, and we will stand there and go forward. But this is a perilous moment, it is a last gasp.
The one thing that we can do is to lift up, to articulate the highest, most aspirational things that we can agree upon and work toward that, learning how to let go and how to add to what you bring, so that we can do that effectively.
jp: So if you go online and just Google “Lessons from Suffering”, something I wrote 10 years ago. And I looked at how a number of other religious traditions are organized to deal with suffering. And so this is a longer answer, but I’ll just give you the short end of it. We are literally born connected to another human being. Humans will not survive without belonging.
We are connected. We may not acknowledge it. We may hate it. As James Baldwin said, you know, sometimes we think it’s unfair, but we can’t do anything about it. But we can do something about it. We can mess it up. We can deny it. We can be pissed about it.
And part of it is because of suffering. Part of it is because of pain. It’s like I cut myself off from you because I’m afraid you’re going to hurt me. And not realizing that when I cut myself off from you, I’ve hurt myself.
How much of the suffering we experience is self-generated? It’s not that there’s not a lot of suffering that other people visit upon us. And I call it surplus suffering, that we suffer just because we’re alive. But we don’t have to be homeless. We don’t have to be shot by the police. We don’t have to be disrespected in school. That’s surplus suffering. Even if we take all of that away, we still would suffer.
And so I think for me, being in touch with that, my suffering and others’ suffering, and realizing that everyone suffers, and everyone belongs. And Maya Angelou, I don’t know if I’ve sent it to you, Angela, if not I will, she says, I belong no place, and therefore, I belong every place.
Host: john a. powell and Angela Glover Blackwell… “Creating a World Where Everyone Belongs: From a Change of Heart to System Change”
The global momentum supporting efforts to enshrine rights for rivers, species and ecosystems has been building for more than a decade. It feels like there is a new report or story in the press on a weekly basis, if not daily. From Florida to Washington State to Cape Cod to Ecuador, New Zealand, India, England and beyond, the movement around Rights of Nature is burgeoning around the planet. If you’re a long-time reader of this newsletter, you’re likely at least familiar with the concept, but for many, even those well-steeped in environmental activism, this revolutionary approach arguing that nature should have legal standing turns the page on traditional notions of environmental law.
Briefly stated, the current system of environmental regulations and their enforcement in this country (and around the world) are only as strong as the legislation and the mindset they sprang from. Advocates of a Rights of Nature approach hold that this system is doing nothing more than attempting to regulate the pace and scale of ecological destruction. The recent approval of the Willow Project in Alaska is a reminder that the government oversight of land and water was designed to ease and support resource extraction from the start, and it was only later that regulations regarding environmental harm were added to the mix. Imbuing natural systems, features and species with specific legal rights and standing changes the game, theoretically giving nature the right to literally have her day in court.
Giving nature legal standing challenges many core tenants of Western society and makes a variety of players in the system deeply uncomfortable. These are not minor distinctions being made; rather the Rights of Nature movement is truly revolutionary, with all the danger, drama, contradictions and passion that come with revolutionary movements. In this newsletter, we dip into the growing river of activity, highlighting projects, opinions, news and perspectives to support our collective understanding of this building movement.
Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.
Opinion: Rights of Nature Is a Logical Extension of the American Legal System
“The line between harm to humanity and harm to Nature is non-existent. Despite our enormous capacity to create and destroy, we humans are not separate from our natural environment.”
Britt Gondolfi has supported Bioneers Rights of Nature initiatives by researching the intersections of tribal sovereignty and federal Indian law. In this opinion piece, she details why nature should have rights, and how Tribal Courts are taking the matter into their own hands.
Learn more about Rights of Nature at Bioneers 2023 with a film screening and a panel session.
“Does Nature Have Rights?” is a short film that shows frontline Ecuadorian conservationists invoking the “Rights of Nature” clause in their nation’s constitution to work to save areas of immense biodiversity.
In the “International Perspectives on Rights of Nature in Tribal Law” panel, we’ll hear from Indigenous leaders whose tribes have adopted Rights of Nature frameworks to protect sacred territories. They will share practical strategies for organizing and implementing Rights of Nature campaigns within international legal frameworks. Join us to learn more about the movement, and how you can be a part of it.
“I think we need to recognize that the most important thing that we have to disabuse ourselves of in the modern world is this false dichotomy between nature and culture.”
Dan Wildcat, Ph.D., discusses what we need to do to save Mother Earth, beginning with changing our view of our place on the Earth in this speech from the Bioneers Indigenous Forum.
Rights of Nature is a global movement to protect nature (rivers, mountains, and entire ecosystems and the life forms supported within them) by recognizing its legal rights. Just as humans and corporations are considered to “have rights,” this legal strategy grants rights to nature itself. These frameworks turn the existing property rights-based paradigm upside down and offer a powerful basis and strategy to conserve lands and communities. They also offer a radically different worldview: the right of nature to exist, persist, flourish and evolve.
Rights of Nature legal frameworks could hold important keys to shifting the system and transforming the law from treating nature as property to a rights-bearing entity on whose behalf people have legal standing as trustees. Bioneers is partnering with a variety of Native allies and organizations to explore these alternative legal strategies to “occupy the law.” Bioneers is partnering with a variety of Native allies and organizations to explore these alternative legal strategies to “occupy the law.”
Urban Tilth: Transforming Soil in a City of Industry for Urban Farming
In At Home on an Unruly Planet, science journalist Madeline Ostrander reflects on the climate crisis not as an abstract scientific or political problem, but as a palpable force that is now affecting all of us at home. She offers vivid accounts of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly dangerous circumstances. This excerpt details the struggle of creating a farm on land that was previously home to an oil refinery in Richmond, California.
Register for Bioneers 2023 Conference to see Madeline Ostrander as a panelist and purchase her book here.
Bioneers 2023 Conference Media Partner: San Francisco Public Press
Check out these recent print and audio pieces from our friends at the San Francisco Public Press: California Indian Tribes Denied Resources for Decades as Federal Acknowledgement Lags They air our Bioneers radio show every Wednesday at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on their radio station KSFP 102.5 FM and streaming at KSFP.fm. You can find their investigative reporting and solutions journalism at SFPublicPress.org – Sign up for their free newsletter here, so you’ll be the first to access upcoming reporting on sea level rise and building on the bay and their “Civic” podcast.
Center for Earth Jurisprudence| The mission of the Center for Earth Jurisprudence is to advance law, policy, and governance systems aimed to legally protect the sustainability of life and health on Earth.
Movement Rights | Movement Rights is founded on the idea that we must align human law (and culture) with the laws of the natural world.
Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature | The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature is a global network of organizations and individuals committed to the universal adoption and implementation of legal systems that recognize, respect and enforce “Rights of Nature.”
Anyone who has seen the egregiously violent and inaccurate Disney film Pocahontas (1995) may have heard the Indigenous value that “every rock, tree, and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name.” But does Nature also have a right to have her day in court?
The American legal system is primarily based on a straightforward moral theory: You break it, you buy it. A person or entity who has been legally wronged can sue the alleged perpetrator; the public benefits from these suits because they keep bad actors in check and allow victims to recover from their losses. The Rights of Nature movement has cleared the way for Nature to literally follow suit, seeking damages and relief for her undue losses. Business as usual has and will continue to cost us more of the natural world than we can afford to give.
Critics complain that the Rights of Nature movement just opens the door for never-ending lawsuits and siphoning money from the companies that rely on altering the natural environment for profit. If people can sue in the name of the trees, that opens the door for people filing injunctions against every development they fear will permanently and tragically alter and harm the natural environment. These complaints encompass the entire point of the Rights of Nature movement. Speaking for the trees in legalese should be easier. Giving people the legal standing to file lawsuits and plenty of them in the name of nature is the name of the game. And when nature is harmed, demanding consistent repayment from those that cause the damage is how our civil court system creates justice. It is only fair that the current extracting economy should have to pay the price of losses taken by nature. Nature on her own cannot draft a petition, employ counsel, or have an assessment of damages done, but that should not impede her capacity to have her injuries assessed in a court of law.
Fairness aside, Rights of Nature laws are wildly unpopular in our American legal system. Cities that have taken a stand have been sued and attorneys who have brought forward cases have been threatened with sanctions. Despite the pushback from the American legal system, Tribal Communities are using their sovereign governments to assert that Nature has a right to thrive.
Given that these communities are often on the frontlines of environmental devastation, from radioactive waste discharge sites, uranium-poisoned wells, flooded bayous, poisoned cancerous skies and more, it makes sense that Tribal Nations would take the risk of furthering the Rights of Nature movement. The stakes are higher when the violence is at your doorstep, and tribes that have legislative and judicial branches have the authority to pass laws and enforce them.
With every environmental calamity, Nature cries for an advocate. Indigenous communities continue to be the first to answer that call, and Indigenous wisdom teaches that the only way to survive as a people is to ensure that Nature thrives. From controlled burns to tending the wild to managing diverse networks of clans in complex biospheres from swamps, deserts, to plains, to forests, Indigenous people have centuries of experience in preserving Nature’s abundance. For that reason, there is no better community in the United States to plead the Rights of Nature than this country’s First Peoples. When settlers first landed on this continent, they needed the indigenous inhabitants to teach them how to cultivate the land, navigate, and survive the new complex ecosystems. We now need to look to Indigenous wisdom to navigate how our laws will adapt to the ecosystem destruction we are witnessing in the 21st century. Needless to say, the EPA isn’t cutting it.
Our political-legal system desperately needs to rethink itself, but it won’t without being provoked. The federal courts have clearly spoken, telling us that Nature cannot have what was so easily given to corporations: the right to be a plaintiff in court. This disdain for acknowledging the Rights of Nature in court might be one of the top reasons Tribal Governments should act in unison and stand in direct contradiction to the common law of this country.
Tribal Governments along with Tribal Courts have the power to do something the United States Court system has cruelly refused to do. Tribal governments wanting to exercise sovereignty have the choice to follow the legal lead of the nation that has forced tribes into the status of being “domestic dependents” or use the governmental power they have to open the room of the courthouse for Mother Nature.
Our legal system allows corporations and humans to make “prayers for relief” after suffering an injury. Nature prays too, we just aren’t listening. With every fire, flood, oil spill, deforestation, landfill spilling into the sea, and fracking waste seeping into natural aquifers, Nature prays for relief. The Rights of Nature movement is working to see that Nature can one day be a plaintiff and have her case heard.
The line between harm to humanity and harm to Nature is non-existent. Despite our enormous capacity to create and destroy, we humans are not separate from our natural environment. If the mountains could speak, they would say that no quantum of money would fill the hollow voids the mines have left. If the species lost to habitat destruction could speak, they would say that no picture books will replace them. If the rivers could speak, they would cough up mountains of oil, waste, and trash and ask us what we expect to give our children to drink. If the Lakes could speak, they would say that the birds and fish are starving and the water is not safe for your children to swim in. If the trees could speak, they would say that they need legal standing and that we need them more than they need us.
Britt Gondolfi, born and raised in Southeast Louisiana, is a law student, community organizer, future state legislature candidate, and mother. Since 2017, Britt has worked with the Bioneers Intercultural Conversation Program facilitating programming for students from Atlanta and from Bogalusa and Houma, Louisiana. While in Law School, Britt has supported the Bioneers Rights of Nature initiative by researching the intersection of tribal sovereignty and federal Indian law and facilitating workshops on the Rights of Nature at the Ho-Chunk and Mashpee Wampanoag nations.
Madeline Ostrander is a Seattle-based climate journalist and the author of At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth, one of Kirkus Review’s 100 best nonfiction books of 2022. The former Senior Editor of YES! Magazine, her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, The NewYorker.com, The Nation, PBS’s NOVA Next, Slate, and numerous other outlets.
Register for Bioneers 2023 Conference to see Madeline Ostrander as a panelist and purchase her book here.
It is a radical thing to imagine you can grow food in an oil town.
The city of Richmond, California, has a long tradition of kitchen gardens, flower nurseries, and backyard farm animals. But it also grew up around industry—especially an oil refinery. Built in 1902 and now run by Chevron, the refinery is one of the largest emitters of carbon pollution on the West Coast. Such industry leaves both visible and invisible marks all over an urban landscape. Air pollution can deposit on soils, for instance. In 2012, when a major refinery fire and explosion at the Chevron Richmond facility sent a 4,000-foot-high plume of black smoke into the air—and drove about 15,000 people to nearby hospitals and doctors’ offices with respiratory complaints and headaches—flurries of ash and dark material also fell to the ground around parts of the city.
So a couple years later, when Doria Robinson—director of a small but audacious Richmond-based agriculture organization called Urban Tilth—wanted to open a new farm just a couple miles from the refinery fenceline, she knew she’d have to reckon with the possibility of soil contamination.
Soil is an ecosystem. Peer through a microscope, and soil can be a forest of half-composed stems and leaves with filigreed veins, shiny mites and little bugs, worms and their glistening trails, netted root hairs, strands and filaments of fungi, and various microbes and molds, a furious mix of rot and rebirth. Soil is also a kind of historical record—it hangs onto waste and files it into layers of accumulated dust and particles. In some kinds of soil layers, you can find the char of millennia-old fires or volcanic events. Soil can also be forgiving: in experiments, fungi and microbes have sometimes been able to munch through toxic substances and break them down, even clear away some residues of oil spills.
For a long time, Urban Tilth had relied on new soil with no memory, manufactured by nurseries, donated and hauled to its gardens. In the long run, it would be hard to grow a lot of food in Richmond if the soil always needed replacing and importing. The question remained: Could the soil endemic to Richmond ever be safe enough?
There’s never been a lot of study of what happens to plants and dirt just after industrial accidents. But there were reasons to worry. For instance, after an industrial fire at a warehouse, some British scientists had detected alarming levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, carcinogens and by-products of combustion. The scientists determined that the level of PAHs was 70 times higher than normal in grass shoots and 370 times higher in soil.
Joshua (Josh) Arnold, a soil science student at the University of California, Berkeley, had just moved to Richmond at the time of the refinery fire. “I remember just being absolutely astounded that there was a refinery there! I thought I was moving to the Bay Area that’s super environmentally friendly,” he recalls. Two years later, Josh, who had just graduated, and two others, an organic gardening teacher and a Ph.D. student in soil science, offered to help other Richmonders test the soil. They recruited people from all over the city to volunteer their yards and dug samples from nineteen spots in Richmond. They sent bags of dirt away to labs, searching for trace amounts of carcinogens like xylene, benzene, and toluene, found in crude oil—and PAHs. Although these are common contaminants, it is surprisingly difficult to find any standardized safety rules specifically for residential soils. There’s no straightforward consensus about what concentration of these chemicals the average row of backyard tomatoes or roses can hold or what might still be safe if, say, a child eats some dirt or a dog tracks garden mud through the living room. So the students cobbled together a list of health guidelines from a motley range of sources. When the results came back, they found few things of great concern—traces of hydrocarbons and xylene. The students recommended earthworms and compost as an antidote to any lingering contamination. And at the middle school farm, the Urban Tilthers aggressively layered on compost and cover crops and followed the guidelines offered by the soil science students until Doria felt safe to let teens plant vegetables there again.
This act of soil renewal prepared Urban Tilth for a far more ambitious project to reclaim abandoned land at the edge of the city.
Richmond sits at the northwest tip of Contra Costa County, which curves east along the Suisun Bay and south, behind Oakland and Berkeley—a mishmash of agriculture and industry. To the north lies a community outside city limits called North Richmond. It is somewhere between urban and rural, like a place that has fallen off the map. The community of about 4,000 remained “underserved”—with not a lot of help from government entities. Garbage dumps and recycling centers, storage lots, homeless encampments, and run-down convenience stores were splotched through the area, along with an elementary school and residential houses that were too often aging and cramped.
The area was also riddled with vacant lots, and the supervisor of Contra Costa County had recently become an enthusiast of urban farming. He asked his staff to sniff out some property that might still be suitable for growing food, then chose Urban Tilth to develop a three-acre plot of land between two creeks. The property, three miles north of the refinery, was tiny compared to an industrial farm, but it would be large enough to demonstrate what was possible and to allow people’s imaginations to unfurl.
The chosen land parcel spread northeast from an intersection of Fred Jackson Way (named after a local civil rights activist). It lay in a historic Japanese flower-growing district; some descendants of those growers still owned the property next door and rented greenhouses to an orchid cultivator and a wholesale seedling nursery. Numerous Indigenous Huchiun Ohlone villages had stood near and around the land long before North Richmond was settled by migrants from elsewhere. A local association of Black cowboys had run horses there. But industry had never touched it, and the first soil tests came back clean.
It took two years for the Tilthers to negotiate with the county—to rezone the land, get permits, and draw up a lease.
When Doria first laid eyes on the place, it was a jungle of weeds higher than her head, in some spots twice as high, with a few trees scattered within them, and some weeping willows slumped by the street like long-haired old men. Urban Tilth mowed the weeds down. But by the time the lease was approved, they had grown back, especially the blackberries.
Much of the coastal West suffers from an infestation of an especially aggressive variety of blackberry from Eurasia. (It’s rumored that the famed botanist Luther Burbank first planted them on American soil, and from there, the thorny fruits went rogue.) While the berries are tasty, the canes sometimes grow into a colossal tangle—a Medusa with barbed tentacles sharp as knives, capable of grabbing and shredding clothing and skin.
The thicket of thorns at the farm site was roughly the size of eight basketball courts lined end to end, surrounded by other dense weeds, including enormous, fragrant, stubborn-rooted fennel. The land hadn’t been fenced for four decades, and as the Tilthers explored further, they discovered it had also been an informal dump and was piled with hidden trash.
Yet Doria’s optimism was unscathed. She could see it already, a vision in the weeds—the rows of vegetables, an educational center. “My eyes are permanently rose covered,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, man, this is the best farm ever.’” By the time they began clearing the land, she and a colleague, Tania Pulido, had already assembled a group of local residents to help them in this seemingly quixotic process—and their dream for the site grew more elaborate—a farm stand, an amphitheater, perhaps even a café. “We just had no idea what the heck we were jumping into,” Tania said afterward.
The land itself was cantankerous. First, the Tilthers rented a team of goats to chomp down the weeds. But the goats “looked at that blackberry patch, and they’re like, ‘Oh, no. You will have to deal with that,’” Doria said. Then they brought in large mechanized equipment—toothy mowers and mulchers, grinders and bulldozers. Underneath the weeds, they found orphaned couches, chimneys, chunks of broken asphalt, used motor oil, several discarded wallets including credit cards, rusty barbed wire, old tires. Urban Tilth hired workers from several local organizations, including a program that worked with women who were recently released from prison and eager to gain new skills. With hands and machines, these crews dragged dozens of semitrailer truckloads from the site.
But the land was like a geologic formation of waste, strata full of trash layered like fossils in rock. “We went through a process of realizing that everything we were standing on was also dumped material, “Doria remembered. With the machines, they scraped the ground surface, then walked behind and scooped up more debris by hand. “We would literally just clear a few feet at a time, trying to get all the stuff out.”
The Berkeley soil science students came to the farm to run a more detailed search for contamination. They drew a grid over the entire lot; then Urban Tilth’s summer apprentices retrieved soil samples from each square of the grid. The soil was so hard that the kids had to use pickaxes in some places to extract the earth. The results came back from two different labs: there were dregs and residues of asphalt and one spot of lead, all in small amounts. The ground was also nearly devoid of life or nutrients—it was mostly crushed rock and clay. But the situation could be handled as before—with compost and earthworms and bugs.
“We need to put back a ton of organic materials,” Doria said. We just need all kinds of rot to be happening throughout the site. Truckloads of manure arrived on the land, forty cubic yards of compost every week, donated by the same company that was contracted to handle city organic waste, along with straw—spread and raked and spread again. Over and over for months, dumping manure, turning manure, planting cover crops of buckwheat and daikon radish. Turning the soil again. Rot and renewal. In the fall of 2016, while this process was still underway, Doria and the Tilthers decided to plant what they could. At first, they had to bring in soil and more compost to create a series of mounded rows, arranged in a circle, where they grew mustard greens, collard greens, garlic, Swiss chard, cabbage, broccoli, and cilantro.
The next year they plotted an orchard on the northwest edge and sectioned it off, ten-foot-by-ten-foot squares, each a home for a tree. About 350 volunteers showed up and laid down more layers of manure, straw, and compost. And in each square, they placed a bare-root whip, a little stick that would become an apricot, peach, persimmon, pear, or apple tree. Over the next year, the vast majority of the trees survived. Within a couple years, they were bearing fruit that was sent to members of Urban Tilth’s farm share program.
About a year later, the Tilthers could finally begin planting in crop rows, in soil they were building there on the farm.
The first greenhouses went up.
It was the un-wasting of land, the reimagining of place.
It was also an act of rebellion. No one would tell Urban Tilth what was and was not possible on an old, broken bit of ground.
ARTY MANGAN: As an elder who has had the privilege of being involved in organizing Bioneers’ Youth Education and Leadership Program for over 16 years, I am increasingly impressed by the resilience and creativity of the young people we work with, but at the same time I’ve become increasingly concerned about what the world is offering them—a confluence of intense anxieties surrounding climate change, racial and gender oppression, the menace of gun violence, social isolation, increasingly corrupt political and economic systems, etc. That’s a lot for teenagers to absorb, let alone navigate, while their minds are developing and their bodies are changing. With the pressure of all of those discouraging realities, it’s often difficult for them to envision a positive future.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) conducted a 2022 study of high school students asking the question: “Do you feel persistently hopeless or depressed.” 45% said yes, almost double what it was 20 years ago. That level of psychological suffering in youth is a pervasive public health crisis.
At a recent Bioneers event co-produced with the David Brower Center in Berkeley, I had the opportunity to talk to some frontline youth organizers about how older generations can support them in creating spaces that foster self-confidence and leadership and help young aspiring activists move beyond feelings of alienation and confusion. I asked them to share their main concerns and their greatest hopes about the current condition of young people.
The three young leaders I spoke with were:
Sam Martinez, a youth leader at Bay Peace (a group that works with youth to help them heal from systemic violence and intergenerational trauma and empowers them and nurtures their creativity through the arts), a first-generation Mexican/Vietnamese-American, and a queer trans person of color.
Julianna Horcasitas, also of Bay Peace, a native of the East Bay who grew up in a Hispanic family culture surrounded by strong women mentors.
Ayo Lewis, the Youth Coordinator for RJOY (Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth), an organization that seeks to shift the way we think about justice from seeking vengeance and retaliation to a focus on healing broken relationships and trauma.
ARTY MANGAN: What are your main concerns about the challenges young people are currently facing?
Sam Martinez and Julianna Horcasitas. Photo by Jan Mangan
SAM MARTINEZ: A big thing that concerns me is the prison industrial complex and the “school-to-prison pipeline” that incarcerates so many young people of color. Bay Peace is working to close youth detention centers, and we help youth find health resources and provide spaces of belonging and safety, so they can be who they really are, whether that be artists, creatives, organizers, or whatever field they are drawn to.
JULIANNA HORCASITAS: A main concern of mine is the level of violence youth are exposed to. Sam and I are both impacted youth. The violence that we endure at homes, in our schools, in our streets, and just within our general community troubles me. When violence is at the forefront of one’s life, it influences you to adopt that energy and that role because you only know violent ways. With violence and horrible stories always in the news, my main concern is that a lot of youth feel like that’s how they need to act.
We also talk a lot about intergenerational trauma, so as youth ourselves, we want to make an impact to stop that cycle. My hope for youth who are affected by intergenerational trauma is that they can understand their power and the important role they have as young leaders in the community. Fortunately, in the Bay Area there are many community members who have that same vision. I just hope that the empowered youth of the Bay Area will be able to spread that vision all around the world.
ARTY: How does Bay Peace work to try to accomplish that?
JULIA: Bay Peace offers leadership intern programs. Sam and I were interns when I was in high school. The program empowers and uplifts youth by putting them at the forefront of actions or marches, or even by hiring them to be full-time staff. They are put in a position in which they can be heard. When we give those opportunities to youth, it allows them to get outside of their comfort zone and see themselves as leaders able to make decisions. At Bay Peace, we always have youth leadership at the forefront. There are no adults making the big decisions; it’s all youth leading Bay Peace. With that feeling of being empowered, they keep coming back and taking the work outside of Bay Peace.
SAM: A big thing that we do every year is organize healing circles where we talk about our issues, because youth often don’t have spaces where they get to openly talk about the violence and harm they’ve endured and the trauma they’ve been through. The youth in our program get to experience us as people. We answer their questions and work with imagination, asking the question: “If anything were possible, what would you need to feel safe?” And we end it using art, whether that be digital, painting, music, poetry, any form of art that gets their creative juices flowing. And we take pride in creating community-based art.
ARTY: Ayo, what are some of your main concerns about the lives of young people?
Ayo Lewis. photo by Jan Mangan
AYO LEWIS: A lot of our youth are hurting and don’t have spaces to be open and vulnerable. Personally, in my family, if my younger cousins didn’t have me, they wouldn’t have a lot of other people to talk to about what they’re going through. And often a youth’s perspective is dismissed by adults who say, “Oh, we’ve been through that,” or “You don’t have anything to stress about.” Having more spaces to be vulnerable, more spaces where youth are seen as full humans, as people not just kids, would be a great start in helping address some of these issues.
ARTY: That’s the kind of space that RJOY creates for youth. What do you see happening with youth in the RJOY healing circles?
AYO: Youth, like all people, have different personality types. Some are quiet and reserved, while others are more open about the challenges they’re going through, and what excites them and what makes them happy. You see it in the way that people handle conflict. Before going through the Restorative Justice process, most youth handle conflict negatively, whether that’s with violence or harsh words or detaching. At RJOY, they learn to lean into discomfort and have tough conversations. Oftentimes, it ends up building stronger relations and changes how people show up and how they express themselves and interact with others.
What brings me the most hope is when I see our youth groups within the program having honest conversations and figuring things out. Adults don’t always have the answers, but I don’t think they have to as long as they have the space to work together with youth and figure it out honestly, together.
The Bioneers Youth Education and Leadership Program works to engage youth fully with their minds, bodies and spirits so that personal healing can lead to collective healing, clear thinking, and an open heart as the foundations for building a sane, respectful, inclusive, and fair future. Bay Peace and RJOY will be holding workshops for youth at the Bioneers Conference in April.
As we continue to face unprecedented environmental and social challenges, it is more important than ever to empower students — from kindergarten to graduate school — with the knowledge and skills necessary to create a viable and equitable future. Innovative leaders and organizations are finding ways to incorporate place-based learning and environmental education into curriculums while still honoring essential standards. The result? Classrooms and labs that feel more intuitive, make better use of real-word situations, and make students more excited to learn.
In this newsletter, we will explore how biomimicry, green chemistry, and environmental literacy are being incorporated into education programs in schools across the world.
Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.
Beyond Benign Is Changing How Chemical Products Are Made Through Green Chemistry Education
From life-saving pharmaceutical drugs to high-performance materials, chemicals and chemical products are essential in providing society the products it requires to survive and thrive. But the creation and use of many chemical products is hazardous to people and the environment. In order to ensure a habitable future planet, the field of chemistry must adapt and find new ways to be sustainable as well as economical.
Beyond Benign’s cofounders, Dr. Amy Cannon and Dr. John Warner, are challenging educational institutions and the chemical industry at large to adopt green chemistry practices. Green Chemistry is defined as the design of chemical products that reduce the use or generation of hazardous substances. By supporting educators and students to teach and learn green chemistry and sustainable science, Beyond Benign is equipping the next generation of scientists and citizens with the tools required to design and select products that support human health and the environment.
Bioneers 2023 Conference Highlight: Beyond Benign’s John Warner
John Warner, Ph.D. is a co-founder of the field of green chemistry. With 300+ patents and 100+ publications, he has designed and created technologies inspired by nature with the principles of green chemistry. After working at the Polaroid Corporation, John served as a tenured full professor at UMASS Boston and Lowell (in Chemistry and Plastics Engineering). In 2007 he co-founded (with Jim Babcock) the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry and (with Amy Cannon) Beyond Benign, a non-profit dedicated to sustainability and green chemistry education. John has won many prestigious awards for his research, inventions and policy advocacy and has served as a sustainability advisor for several major firms.
Sign up for Bioneers 2023 Conference to hear his Keynote address, “The Materials Metabolism – Rethinking our Molecular Relationship with Nature.”
Bioneers 2023 Conference Media Partner: KPFA 94.1 FM
Bioneers welcomes KPFA 94.1 FM as a 2023 Conference media partner — the first listener-supported, non-commercial radio station in the United States. KPFA first went on the air in Berkeley, California in 1949 and the station is still going strong. You can listen to Nina Simons talk about the upcoming Bioneers 2023 Conference on Kris Welch’s show “The Talkies” here.
Ten Strands Empowers California’s Schools to Lead the Way in Environmental Education
While climate change and environmental instability will impact people of all ages in the coming years, our planet’s youngest citizens will shoulder the heaviest burdens. As the environment influences nearly all of today’s pursuits — from the stories we tell to the chemicals we use in labs to the products we create, consume, and throw away — providing young students with an education that incorporates environmental literacy has never been more important.
Ten Strands is a California–based nonprofit established in 2012. Their mission is to build and strengthen the partnerships and strategies that will bring environmental literacy to all of California’s K–12 public school students. They operate with a small, diverse, and nimble staff and strategic partners throughout the state. Ten Strands utilizes the largest and most diverse institution in California—the public school system—to impact 58 county offices of education, more than 1,000 school districts, approximately 10,000 individual schools, over 300,000 teachers, and 5.8 million children.
The Bioneers Indigeneity Program is the go-to source for accurate and contemporary information about Indigenous science, media, and curriculum for social change.
To support the use of Bioneers’ original content in the classroom, we’ve developed thematic discussion guides and curriculum bundles aligned with national standards for grades 9-12+. Each bundle includes teacher instructions, activities, assessment, and additional materials for a week of instruction around a set of themes. All lesson plan objectives and activities are aligned to high school standards for science, social studies/history, and English.
“For most of human existence, we’ve always mimicked nature. That’s just how we survived.” -Beth Rattner, Executive Director at the Biomimicry Institute
In this short film, get a sneak peek into a professional development training for educators hosted by the Biomimicry Institute, Bioneers, and Ten Strands. Hear from participants and instructors and see how biomimicry offers an effective, engaging, and inspiring framework for STEAM education while empowering the next generation of problem-solvers to think differently about nature, engineering, and a sustainable future.
Calling all innovative nonprofits and social entrepreneurs: Apply for the 2023 J.M.K. Innovation Prize, awarding $175,000 for early-stage projects with transformative potential. This year, 10 Prizes will be awarded to innovators in the environment, heritage conservation, and social justice. Apply by April 28th!
Enter below by April 30 at midnight PT for a chance to win an incredible bundle of books!
A long, violent legacy of colonization has inflicted oppression on Indigenous communities worldwide. Today, leaders and tribes are organizing, resisting and leading local and global movements to to revitalize their cultures and institutions.
Indigenous activists, writers and culture bearers are leading efforts to preserve and further Indigenous knowledge. Broader society has much to learn from many of these sophisticated, Earth-honoring worldviews — wisdom too long ignored by modern society..
With our Indigeneity Book Giveaway, we celebrate the literary revelations of some of the world’s foremost indigenous storytellers and researchers.
Entry Form
One randomly selected winner will receive:
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer | As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.”
There There by Tommy Orange | A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story by Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry, Alexis Bunten | In this Wampanoag story told in a Native tradition, two kids from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe learn the story of Weeâchumun (corn) and the first Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving story that most Americans know celebrates the Pilgrims. But without members of the Wampanoag tribe who already lived on the land where the Pilgrims settled, the Pilgrims would never have made it through their first winter. And without Weeâchumun (corn), the Native people wouldn’t have helped.
The Round House by Louise Erdrich | From one of the most revered novelists of our time, an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer | In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes’ distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don’t know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.
Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future by Melissa K. Nelson | Original Instructions evokes the rich indigenous storytelling tradition in this collection of presentations gathered from the annual Bioneers conference. It depicts how the world’s native leaders and scholars are safeguarding the original instructions, reminding us about gratitude, kinship, and a reverence for community and creation. Included are more than 20 contemporary indigenous leaders.
Click Here for the Indigeneity Book Giveaway Official Rules
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. PURCHASE OR PAYMENT OF ANY KIND WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED OR RESTRICTED BY LAW. THE SWEEPSTAKES IS SPONSORED BY BIONEERS/COLLECTIVE HERITAGE INSTITUTE, 215 LINCOLN AVE #202, SANTA FE, NM 87501.
Entry Period: “Indigeneity Book Giveaway” (the “Sweepstakes”) commences at 12:01:01 AM (PST) on February 29, 2023, and ends at 11:59:59 PM (PST) on April 30, 2023 (the “Sweepstakes Period”).
Eligibility: To take part in the Sweepstakes, participants must be legal residents of the United States or Canada (excluding Quebec, where the promotion is void), and at least 18 years of age at the time of entry. Employees (and their immediate families, i.e., parents, spouse, children, siblings, grandparents, stepparents, stepchildren and stepsiblings) of Bioneers and its giveaway affiliated partner companies, sponsors, subsidiaries, advertising agencies and third-party fulfillment agencies are not eligible to enter Sweepstakes. By participating in this Sweepstakes, entrants: (a) agree to be bound by these Official Rules and by the interpretations of these Official Rules by the Sponsor, and by the decisions of the Sponsor, which are final in all matters relating to the Sweepstakes; (b) to release and hold harmless the Sponsor and its respective agents, employees, officers, directors, successors and assigns, against any and all claims, injury or damage arising out of or relating to participation in this Sweepstakes and/or use or misuse or redemption of a prize (as hereinafter defined); and (c) acknowledge compliance with these Official Rules.
To Enter: Enter required information in the Giveaway Signup form above during the eligible period. Contestants may only enter the Sweepstakes once. If multiple entries connected to a single person or email address are received, only one entry will be eligible. All entries submitted in accordance with these Official Rules shall be hereinafter referred to as “Eligible Entries.”
Prize Winner Selection: 1 winner will be randomly selected from among all eligible entries received at the end of the stated period, or within a reasonable time thereafter. Winners will be responsible for all U.S. and State taxes and/or fees. No transfer, substitution or cash equivalent of prizes permitted. Winners will be notified by email. Sponsor is not responsible for any delay or failure to receive notification for any reason, including inactive account(s), technical difficulties associated therewith, or winners’ failure to adequately monitor any email account. The winners must then respond to Sponsor within 48 hours. Should a winner fail to respond to Sponsor, Sponsor reserves the right to disqualify that winner and select a new one in a second-chance random drawing.
Prize list and estimated retail value:
One paperback print copy of Braiding Sweetgrass book. One paperback print copy of There There book. One hardcover print copy of Keepunumuk book. One paperback print copy of The Round House book. One paperback print copy of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee book. One paperback print copy of Original Instructions. Total value: $94.53
General Prize Terms: The value of Prizes may be taxable to Prize Winner(s) as income. All federal, state and local taxes, and any other costs not specifically provided for in these Official Rules are solely the Winners’ responsibility. Sponsor shall have no responsibility or obligation to a Prize Winner or potential Prize Winner who is unable or unavailable to accept or utilize the Prizes as described herein. The odds of winning the Sweepstakes depend on the number of Eligible Entries received. Noncompliance with any of these Official Rules may result in disqualification. ANY VIOLATION OF THESE OFFICIAL RULES BY A PRIZE WINNER OR ANY BEHAVIOR BY A PRIZE WINNER THAT WILL BRING SUCH PRIZE WINNER OR SPONSOR INTO DISREPUTE (IN SPONSOR’S SOLE DISCRETION) WILL RESULT IN SUCH PRIZE WINNER’S DISQUALIFICATION AS A PRIZE WINNER OF THE SWEEPSTAKES AND ALL PRIVILEGES AS A PRIZE WINNER WILL BE IMMEDIATELY TERMINATED.
The Sponsor assumes no responsibility for incorrect or inaccurate entry information whether caused by any of the equipment or programming associated with or utilized in this Sweepstakes or by any human error which may occur in the processing of the entries in this Sweepstakes. The Sponsor is not responsible for any problems or technical malfunction of any telephone network or lines, computer online systems, servers, or providers, computer equipment, software, failure of any email or players on account of technical problems or traffic congestion on the Internet or at any Web site, or any combination thereof, including, without limitation, any injury or damage to participant’s or any other person’s computer related to or resulting from participation or downloading any materials in this Sweepstakes. The Sponsor is not responsible for any typographical or other error in the printing of the offer, administration of the Sweepstakes, or in the announcement of the Prizes and Prize Winners. If, for any reason, the Sweepstakes is not capable of running as planned, including, without limitation, infection by computer virus, bugs, tampering, unauthorized intervention, fraud, technical failures, or any other causes beyond the control of the Sponsor which corrupt or affect the administration, security, fairness, integrity or proper conduct of this Sweepstakes, the Sponsor reserves the right in their sole discretion to cancel, terminate, modify or suspend the Sweepstakes. Should the Sweepstakes be terminated prior to the stated expiration date, notice will be posted on the Sponsor’s Web site and the Prizes may be awarded to winners to be selected from among all Eligible Entries received up until and/or after (if applicable) the time of modification, cancellation or termination or in a manner that is fair and equitable as determined by the Sponsor. All interpretations of these Official Rules and decisions by the Sponsor are final. No software-generated, robotic, programmed, script, macro or other automated online or text message entries are permitted and will result in disqualification of all such entries. The Sponsor reserves the right in its sole discretion to disqualify any individual they find to have tampered with the entry process or the operation of this Sweepstakes; to be acting in violation of these Official Rules; or to be acting in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner, or with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any other person or to have provided inaccurate information on any legal documents submitted in connection with this Sweepstakes. CAUTION: ANY ATTEMPT BY ANY INDIVIDUAL TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE ANY WEBSITE OR UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THE SWEEPSTAKES IS A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAWS AND SHOULD SUCH AN ATTEMPT BE MADE, SPONSOR RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SEEK DAMAGES FROM ANY SUCH INDIVIDUAL TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. Entrants agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Sponsor from any and all liability resulting or arising from the Sweepstakes, to release all rights to bring any claim, action or proceeding against the Sponsor.
Privacy Policy: Bioneers and giveaway partners may collect personal data about participants when they enter the sweepstakes/when a winner is selected. Personal data may include: Name, email, address, home and office phone numbers and other supplied demographics-related information. All entrants will be automatically added to the Bioneers email list. They may opt out of emails at any time.
SPONSOR: THE SWEEPSTAKES IS SPONSORED BY BIONEERS/COLLECTIVE HERITAGE INSTITUTE, 215 LINCOLN AVE #202, SANTA FE, NM 87501.
While climate change and environmental instability will impact people of all ages in the coming years, our planet’s youngest citizens will shoulder the heaviest burdens. As the environment influences nearly all of today’s pursuits — from the stories we tell to the chemicals we use in labs to the products we create, consume, and throw away — providing young students with an education that incorporates environmental literacy has never been more important.
Ten Strands is a California–based nonprofit established in 2012. Their mission is to build and strengthen the partnerships and strategies that will bring environmental literacy to all of California’s K–12 public school students. They operate with a small, diverse, and nimble staff and strategic partners throughout the state. Ten Strands utilizes the largest and most diverse institution in California—the public school system—to impact 58 county offices of education, more than 1,000 school districts, approximately 10,000 individual schools, over 300,000 teachers, and 5.8 million children.
Bioneers talked to Karen Cowe, the CEO of Ten Strands, about the start of the nonprofit organization and her personal journey toward merging her interest in the environment with her professional life.
Bioneers: Tell us a little bit about the beginnings of Ten Strands.
Karen: Ten Strands was founded in mid-2012 by Will Parish. I first met Will in November of that year and joined him to launch Ten Strands in January 2013 fully. You can read my ten-year reflection here, which includes our origin story. When Will founded Ten Strands, he was finishing up a decade of teaching at Gateway High School in San Francisco. In 2009, the State Board of Education (SBE) appointed him to the Instructional Quality Commission (IQC). The IQC is responsible for advising the SBE on matters related to curriculum and instruction. In 2009, the Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) Curriculum was evaluated by the IQC, and Will taught many units in his school as a pilot teacher in both environmental science and civics. The IQC recommended to the SBE that it approve the EEI Curriculum for use in all schools, which it did in 2010. The EEI Curriculum is a model curriculum that demonstrates to teachers how to integrate California’s Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs) into standards-based instruction, with a focus on science and history-social science. Will was eager to see it used all over California, but he couldn’t see how that was going to happen unless he established a nonprofit to work in partnership with the state agency responsible for disseminating the curriculum. He founded Ten Strands to partner with the Office of Education and the Environment at CalRecycle (a branch of CalEPA) and later worked closely with the California Department of Education.
Karen Cowe
As Will was getting started working with the Office of Education and the Environment, I was finishing up a long-term commitment to a STEM publishing company. I was the CEO of an innovative math and science education company based in Emeryville, California, and we had just sold the company to McGraw Hill Education. During the transition of the company to McGraw Hill, I had time to think about what I wanted to do next. I was eager to stay in the education sector, and I was also interested in seeing if I could move my personal interest in the environment closer to my professional life. I was exploring this intersection of education and the environment when I was introduced to Will. We often talk about the serendipity of that moment.
By the time we launched Ten Strands, I had already spent over 20 years working with teachers in the UK, Greece, and the US to introduce them to locally published, engaging, student-centered, place-based instructional materials, so our first initiative at Ten Strands was a very natural fit for me. However, only representing one curriculum wasn’t enough for me, and I said to Will very early on that I needed to make sure there was more we could take on for greater impact. I won’t go into the details here, but in my ten-year reflection I list our top ten accomplishments, so there clearly was plenty to do!
We didn’t particularly think about this at the time, but on reflection, it was a good time to launch Ten Strands because California had adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in 2013, and there is a lot of content in the standards related to the environment, including climate change. Also, California was in the process of revising a number of content frameworks in the few years after we started Ten Strands. Through a partnership with Dr. Gerald (Jerry) Lieberman from the State Education and Environment Roundtable (SEER), we were able to integrate California’s EP&Cs into five frameworks – science, history-social science, health, art, and the upcoming math framework. Finally, the California Department of Education worked with the environmental education sector and in 2015 published the Blueprint for Environmental Literacy. Those three things combined – the promotion of the EEI Curriculum, the integration of EP&Cs into content frameworks, and the publication of the Blueprint – gave us the foundation and momentum we needed in those first few years.
I’m not sure Will and I were the “right ones” to take it on but we were at career crossroads, interested in the intersection of education and the environment, had relevant experience, were eager to make an impact, and were willing to take a leap. There’s a quote I love by Elizabeth Alexander, “Anything can be made, any sentence begun.” I pretty much start every day with that in mind, and it was that sentiment that started Ten Strands – for me, anyway. Will and I meet every Wednesday evening for dinner. Those dinners give us a chance to reflect, look over the horizon, and feel grateful for the amazing support we’ve received over the years from our staff, board and advisory board, partners, and donors.
Bioneers: In what ways have you seen environmental education change since Ten Strands started?
Karen: After a publishing career focused first on English as a second language and then on mathematics, I was surprised by how small the environmental education sector felt when I first joined it. I was used to large numbers of teachers at conferences, such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and giant trade show booths by publishing companies. In California, the STEAM Symposium was just getting started, and they even had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a keynote! The environmental education conferences felt a little quiet compared to my prior experience, and I did wonder if there was sufficient interest in the topic by teachers.
Three things changed my mind. The first was a conversation with Dr. Gerald Lieberman. Jerry explained the focus of his work to me. He believed that we would never get the traction needed for education in, about, and for the environment unless we could bring these ideas closer to the day-to-day work happening in classrooms and on school campuses. Otherwise, environmental education would be relegated to an occasional field trip for some students some of the time in some places. Jerry’s work on the EP&Cs and the EEI Curriculum exemplified his approach.
The second was the publication of the Blueprint for Environmental Literacy led by Craig Strang from the Lawrence Hall of Science and Elizabeth Babcock who, at the time, was at the California Academy of Sciences. The Blueprint provides a definition of environmental literacy that made a lot of sense to me, especially the part I’ve bolded: “An environmentally literate person has the capacity to act individually and with others to support ecologically sound, economically prosperous, and equitable communities for present and future generations. Through lived experiences and education programs that include classroom-based lessons, experiential education, and outdoor learning, students will become environmentally literate, developing the knowledge, skills, and understanding of environmental principles to analyze environmental issues and make informed decisions.” I strongly felt that this was something I could get behind and advocate for.
The third was the realization of the value of community-based partners to the environmental education movement. This is not something I had paid much attention to when I was focused on English and math. I first met educators working in this sector at early ChangeScale events in the Bay Area. Also, when Jerry Lieberman and I first worked with the San Mateo County Office of Education, we asked community-based partners from the region to join us to work with teachers shoulder-to-shoulder. I think intentional partnerships between teachers in the formal education system and educators in the nonformal education system can be the “secret sauce” for this work to grow and thrive in communities.
I do think we’ve seen progress in the last ten years. We mostly experience that progress through the partnerships we’ve forged. Our main mechanism for that is the California Environmental Literacy Initiative (CAELI). CAELI is a collective action network that we’ve provided backbone support to since 2016. It was originally set up to support the implementation of the Blueprint. Within the network, we focus on capacity-building activities related to community-based partners, county offices of education, districts, equity, green and blue careers, policy, and professional learning. Also, since 2019, we’ve been working with the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems to support the Environmental and Climate Change Literacy Projects (ECCLPs). ECCLPs has adopted an upstream approach with a focus on infusing climate change education into pre-service and in-service teacher professional learning, research, and relationships with community-based partners.
We’re fortunate to be doing this work in California where we have supportive policies related to environmental literacy within our statute from our teachers’ unions and district board policy recommendations from the California School Boards Association (CSBA). There’s no question that a lot of the current momentum and motivation is coming from concerns related to climate change. In 2021, California was the first state in the nation to commit to creating resources for teachers focused on climate change and environmental justice. Our project, the Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program (CCEJP), is now underway, and the resources will be made available for free to teachers when they’re ready.
Bioneers: Ten Strands is challenging educators and educational institutions to change and grow. How has that challenge been received? Has there been pushback?
Karen: The biggest challenge is access to instructional minutes, and it’s why, from the beginning, we’ve promoted environmental literacy as something you can integrate into standards-based instruction in the subjects you’re already teaching. The state’s model curriculum demonstrated this for science and history-social science. Also, our content frameworks give guidance on how to do this not only for science and history-social science, but also for health, arts, and mathematics. The English Language Arts (ELA) framework has not been revised yet, but we’ll focus on that, too, when it comes up. Importantly, the frameworks give guidance to publishing companies too.
Having said that, I think this is a particularly challenging time for educators and students. The pandemic had a devastating impact on teaching and learning. At a recent PACE Conference in Sacramento, Kevin Gee, an associate professor from UC Davis, compared the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards in ELA and math in 2018-19 to 2021-22. In ELA, there were declines at every grade level with the biggest drop in third grade (6.4 percentage point decline). English learners and Black students were impacted the most. In math, again, there were declines at all grade levels with the biggest drop in eighth grade (7.4 percentage point decline). Again, English language learners and Black students were impacted the most.
Beyond academics, in that same session, Kevin shared data from the ACLU and CSU Center to Close the Opportunity Gap where, of the students surveyed in 2022, 77 percent reported experiencing a lack of motivation, 72 percent reported feeling overwhelmed, and 63 percent reported having experienced an emotional breakdown during the prior year. In answer to the question, “In the past year, where did you get help from a counselor or therapist?” 57 percent of students said “Nowhere.”
It’s a very delicate time for educators and students. As we move forward with our plans and aspirations, it is essential for us to fully appreciate this and only ever show up in ways that demonstrate an authentic interest in the issues they are grappling with, and contribute in ways that are supportive, generative, and helpful.
Bioneers: Which projects or initiatives are you most excited about looking ahead to the next few years?
Karen: I’m excited about all our projects because they either build on prior work and therefore further strengthen the contribution we’re making to the field, or they take us in practical new directions. We currently have six core initiatives. Three are focused on teaching and learning, two are focused on school grounds and school buildings, and one is focused on creating a dashboard to help school districts understand the current status of their “whole school sustainability” progress. You can learn about our current work on our website. Our two latest initiatives aren’t on our website yet, so I’ll describe them briefly below.
We are partnering with UndauntedK12 to focus on decarbonizing school buildings and ensuring school buildings and grounds are resilient to support student health, safety, learning, and development in a time of rapidly increasing extreme weather. Current efforts include the launch of the Climate Ready Schools Coalition, which supports California policymakers, agencies, and district leaders to adopt, resource, and implement nation-leading policies, as well as an advocacy campaign to raise funds for a Statewide Master Plan that will coordinate county, district, and local actions to align with state decarbonization and climate resilience goals.
Our partnership with UndauntedK12 has also resulted in the launch of the Data Initiative for Environmental and Climate Action in California’s TK–12 Schools. Currently released in beta, this database and service supports scaling implementation of environmental and climate action in California’s schools by using an equity-informed and data-driven approach. The initiative identifies key demographic indicators related to need, as well as tracks readiness and progress on high-impact leverage points for change such as school board policies, bond measures, and investments in environmental and climate initiatives and staff to lead these initiatives.
Bioneers: What gives you hope in the work you’re doing?
Karen: I was in the room at a Bioneers conference when David Orr said, “Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.” I’ve never forgotten it, and it’s why I love the Elizabeth Alexander quote I referenced above too. It’s the action orientation in both quotes that mean the most to me. I’ve met some incredible people in the last ten years of being focused on this work. Also, there are a good number of people who were previously involved in other professions who, in the last five years or so, have quit that work to “focus on climate.” That gives me hope. Also, there are amazing teachers in classrooms and educators in community-based organizations who really do the day-to-day heavy lifting, inspiring students to learn and to care about the Earth.
Finally, I’m grateful to all the students in California, around the country, and around the world who are creating youth-led organizations focused on climate change and environmental justice. They fill me with hope. Read the latest story we published in our Youth Voices series by Rishi Gurjar, a youth activist, here.
Bioneers: Can Bioneers readers get involved?
Karen: As an advocacy organization, we often seek letters of support to advance our work. It would be great if we could reach out to the Bioneers community during those times. Also, if anything we’re doing seems relevant to the Bioneers community, it would be great to be able to share that through your network. We’re 100 percent philanthropy run, so a donation would be much appreciated too! Sign up for our newsletter to receive updates, and check out the stories our friends and partners share about the work they do in environmental education.
I’ll end by saying I’m a huge fan of Bioneers, and I attended my first of many conferences as far back as 2001. Thank you for everything you do.
Keep Your Finger on the Pulse
Our bi-weekly newsletter provides insights into the people, projects, and organizations creating lasting change in the world.
