Encouraging news is coming out of Ecuador that could bolster Indigenous rights and keep fossil fuels destined for California permanently in the ground! On September 9th, Ecuador declared a temporary moratorium on new oil and mining concessions, which will remain in place for at least 12 months or until there is a law guaranteeing the right to free, prior and informed consent for Indigenous peoples before such activities can take place in their territories. The agreement between the Indigenous movement and the administration of President Guillermo Lasso halts any new contracts for 16 Amazonian oil blocks, putting government plans to auction the concessions in the next year on hold and creates a window of opportunity to permanently stop these potential projects before they start.
“These exciting developments on the ground in Ecuador need to be met with action from the north to end California’s complicity in Amazon destruction and convert these positive advances for Indigenous rights and forest protection into permanent victories.”
Leila Salazar-Lopez, Executive Director of Amazon Watch.
The agreement comes on the heels of recent legal challenges that could also restrict oil extraction of Ecuador’s largest oil reserves – Ishpingo, Tambococha, Tiputini (ITT) – underneath Yasuní National Park. A recent decision by the country’s national electoral court revived a case that could put the question of whether to leave the ITT fields permanently in the ground before voters in a national referendum as early as February 2023. And a hearing that started in August by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights could give territorial rights to two Indigenous peoples living in isolation, expanding a “no-go” zone for them and restricting both new wells and some currently in production.
While the Indigenous movement is also calling for a moratorium on current oil and mining production and for all new concessions to be canceled, the agreement is a necessary first step towards avoiding the lock-in of concession contracts and projects without securing the consent of Indigenous peoples.
Defending land rights and preserving tribal culture is difficult for North American tribes, especially for those that do not have sovereign nation-to-nation status with the federal government. The lack of recognition of a tribe’s nationhood as a self-governing entity (as defined by the U.S. Constitution) has been explicitly used as a tool to continue to prevent Native peoples from living on the most desirable lands or protecting sacred lands that have been stolen.
We talk about these issues with Corrina Gould, a celebrated leader and activist of the First Peoples of the Bay Area from the Lisjan/Ohlone tribe of Northern California. She also co-founded the grassroots organization “Indian People Organizing for Change”, which works to defend and preserve sacred Ohlone shell mounds formed over generations.
Corrina Gould (Lisjan/Ohlone) is the chair and spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, as well as the Co-Director for The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a women-led organization within the urban setting of her ancestral territory of the Bay Area that works to return Indigenous land to Indigenous people. Born and raised in her ancestral homeland, the territory of Huchiun, she is the mother of three and grandmother of four. Corrina has worked on preserving and protecting the sacred burial sites of her ancestors throughout the Bay Area for decades.
Resources
California Indian Genocide and Resilience | 2017 Bioneers panel in which four California Indian leaders share the stories of kidnappings, mass murders, and slavery that took place under Spanish, Mexican and American colonizations — and how today’s generation is dealing with the contemporary implications.
This is an episode of Indigeneity Conversations, a podcast series that features deep and engaging conversations with Native culture bearers, scholars, movement leaders, and non-Native allies on the most important issues and solutions in Indian Country. Bringing Indigenous voices to global conversations. Visit the Indigeneity Conversations homepage to learn more.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Co-Hosts and Producers: Cara Romero and Alexis Bunten
Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
Consulting Producer: Teo Grossman
Studio Engineers: Brandon Pinard and Theo Badashi
Tech Support: Tyson Russell
This episode’s artwork features photography by Toby McLeod. Mer Young creates the series collage artwork.
Additional music provided by Nagamo.ca, connecting producers and content creators with Indigenous composers.
Transcript
ALEXIS BUNTEN: Hi, Everyone. Welcome to Indigeneity Conversations. I’m Alexis Bunten, co-host and also co-director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program along with Cara Romero.
CARA ROMERO: Hi Everyone. Today we have part two of a wonderful conversation I had with Corrina Gould, a celebrated leader and activist of the First Peoples of the Bay Area from the Lisjan/Ohlone tribe of Northern California. Born and raised in her ancestral homeland, Corrina is the mother of three, and grandmother of four.
I talked with Corrina about the critical differences between federally recognized and non-federally recognized tribes.There are historical and contemporary inequities that those differences present when it comes to defending land rights, preserving culture, and having a sovereign nation-to-nation status with the federal government.
I’m particularly delighted about this conversation between two California Native women. I’m an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian tribe, a federally recognized tribe of Southern California. But like many tribes in California, the Confederated Villages of the Lisjhan do not have federal recognition.
AB: Corrina is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a Native American land conservancy in the heart of an urban epi-center.
She also co-founded the grassroots organization “Indian People Organizing for Change” which works to defend and preserve sacred Ohlone shell mounds formed over generations. She’ll be talking today about the efforts to save those shell mounds from development.
CR: So now let’s go to my conversation with Corrina Gould…
CR: Corrina, what has it been like, because you are an activist in the Bay Area. First, can you tell the audience about the shell mounds of the Bay Area? And can you also talk about what it’s been like to try and protect what’s left of your land base without federal recognition?
CORRINA GOULD: So shell mounds are our traditional burial sites, our ceremonial places, our villages. It’s a part of a landscape. And what I like to say is that, you know, we are looking at this climate crisis right now, and everybody’s talking about leaving a smaller footprint on the Earth. Right? And so our ancestors did that. For thousands of years they left this small footprint. Our houses, our boats, our basket materials, almost everything we utilized was biodegradable, went back into the land. Right?My ancestors left few things behind – our mortars and pestles, our arrowheads, our shell beads, and our shell mounds, these monuments that my ancestors created burying our people in the land covered by soil and shell, and over thousands of years grew to be sometimes three story high. And they were devastated by the mass influx of people in the Bay Area, not just the Spanish or Mexican rancho period, but really around the time of the 49ers, and when the United States got here, the Bay Area became this booming place, and they began to level out our shell mounds and to build on top of them.
Partial destruction of the Emeryville shell mound for the building of an industrial plant in 1924
At that time, you have to remember, we had no laws protecting us. And we have still few laws that protect our sacred places. And so when I started working on this with Johnella LaRose we created Indian People Organizing for Change, but around 1998, when the Internet blew up in the Bay Area, it caused a huge wave of people to move out of the Bay Area, including Native people, because they couldn’t afford it anymore, because people that had made money with the Internet had started outbidding each other for houses and apartments here in the Bay Area, and it caused people to start building more.
And around that time, they started hitting many places that my ancestors were buried at because of that. And we realized that nobody in the Bay Area knew what shell mounds were. People still thought we didn’t exist, you know, Ohlone people were all dead. And it was at that time that Johnella and I started really fighting against the City of Emeryville and other places that were destroying our sacred sites, and really educating our intertribal Native people that lived in the Bay Area, and really getting people to come out and talk about protecting of the sacred and why it was important.
In 1909, this man named Nels Nelson created a map, because back in 1909, before my mother was even born, this man knew that these shell mounds were important places to our ancestors, and he created a map of 425 of these shell mounds that were in the Bay Area, 425 places where there was villages and there were ceremonial places, places that we buried our ancestors at, beautiful landscapes that were being destroyed by development in 1909.
Today we find this development happening in the Bay Area again, this wave of people building and building, using the excuse that there’s not enough housing, knowing full well that the housing that they’re building will not be able to put the people that are on streets in them. The housing that they’re building is because of greed. There is more than enough housing here to house everybody. But in the meantime, they’re taking every inch that’s left of the Bay Area, and they’re destroying it.
Today, you know, I’ve been fighting the destruction of our shell mounds for over 20 years. The Bay Street Mall was built on the largest of all 425. I’ve been in battle with a developer for over four and a half years for our oldest shell mound, the West Berkeley shell mound on 4th and University, which looks like a parking lot today, but it’s the very first place our ancestors lived along the waters where freshwater met saltwater, along that marshy place where it aligns with our sacred Alcatraz Island and aligns with our Western Gate, where people think the Golden Gate Bridge is now. You know, these sacred places and landscapes you don’t see because of the asphalt and the buildings on top of it. We have responsibility and obligations to those sacred places.
And so it’s been a fight to try to do that. And it has been allies and accomplices that have been coming to the side of us to help us to really talk about stopping the desecration of these sacred places. And so it’s really been an education process for the last 20 years, first to tell the cities in the Bay Area that we still are alive, that Ohlone people are still here; second to educate people about what our sacred places is and why it’s their responsibility to help us to save them now that they live on our traditional territory, and as good guests, they should work with the host of whose land they’re on.
And then there’s the other side of it, also having the burden of having to know which development in which city is happening, answering to all of these different developers wanting to consult about it, and if you miss one, you could be in danger of losing something precious.
Prior to our tribe getting onto the Native American Heritage Commission list, there was a development that was approved. And so we didn’t have anything to do with it until they found a body.
And what happened to this grandma was that she was the first body that was found. And we thought she was the only one that was going to be found. And today, they’re literally unearthing anywhere between 50 and 100 of my relatives in order for them to put a development on top of it. So it’s not something that’s in the past. It’s continuing today that we are dealing with this historical trauma that creates issues with our health, that creates problems with our people that is devastating, not just to Ohlone people on this territory, but it should be devastating to everybody that now lives on our lands, that a Native cemetery that is thousands of years old, older than the pyramids of Egypt, can be destroyed so that they can put something impermanent on top of it.
CR: I think that that is the purpose of all of the erasure of our history in schools, our erasure of representation in the media, our dehumanization of California Native Peoples, the lack of federal recognition is all to continue genocide, to continue the great taking of landscape.
And one of the things that we talk about in the South is that people need to be reminded that no matter the amount of development or the amount of time that’s passed since the sacred sites have been invigorated, that those places are not dead, that those places might be dormant but that they can be brought back to life. I would like to talk about the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Can you talk about the founding of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and what it is?
CG: I’d love to talk about the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust because it’s my ancestors’ dream come true, I believe.
There’s a story that I remember of our salmon run that was written in a diary by a Spanish soldier as they were chasing my ancestors. They got to the Carquinez Strait, and it was during a salmon run, and they wrote in their diary that they lost my ancestors but when they looked into the water, that there were so many salmon that they could practically walk across to the other side on their backs.
Now we’ve never seen a salmon run like that in our lifetimes, and wouldn’t it be beautiful and be blessed for us to do that, to have that salmon come home like that.
On the other side of that waterway is Sogorea Te’. It was one of the last strongholds of my ancestors. They didn’t get taken to missions until about 1810, and it was a place– always where a creek meets a saltwater body. And there’s a creek that runs through there, and there were two shell mounds that were there. And for months we had been trying to figure out how to stop the devastation from happening there. And in April of 2011, when the city filed bankruptcy, they gave the park district $30,000 worth of permits for free in order for them to destroy this sacred area. There was eight of us at that time that were on the committee to save Sogorea Te’ – four women, four men, four Native and four non-Native people. And we all looked at each other at the same time and said, “What do we do?” And then we all said, “We have to take it back.”
And we took back that sacred land for 109 days. We had a sacred fire that was lit there by Fred Short who was the Northern California American Indian movement spiritual advisor. And at the same time that that fire was lit, four other fires around the world was lit that stayed going as long as ours did.
On day 99 of that takeover, there was people from all walks of life that came and created a village site there. And of course there was Homeland Security and the Coast Guard off the water and the police department and the fire department all showing up, but people stayed there and we had ceremony together. And it changed us as human beings. We remembered what it was like to live together in a village again, to rely on each other for food and for water, for each person to have purpose and to create their own job that helped the rest of the community.
After 109 days, we left there because the first cultural easement between a city, a park, and two federally recognized tribes was created in the country. It was because we took that stand that that was able to happen. So the Patwin people paid into this cultural easement so that they have the same rights to that land as the park district and the city, and no one entity could ever change the land without the other two’s approval. And so that would save it forever. They had to sign some crazy document saying that no more than 10 Indians would ever gather there again, and that no big drums would be there. And we were angry about that until we realized that we didn’t sign the contract. And so every year, we show up with hundreds of people to do ourtraditional responsibilities and pray at that site, and pray back those salmon to come home, and working with another non-federally recognized leader in California, Caleen Sisk, who is the chief of the Winnemen Wintu, to do that salmon walk and that prayer run with her every year.
As a non-federally recognized tribe, we don’t have a land base. And so for years we had been praying in front of the Hearst Museum asking for those thousands of ancestral remains to come home. But what if they would come home? Where would they come home to? We have no place to put them back to rest. So this land trust was really about how do we get them home so we could do that. How do we build a place for my grandchildren, my nieces and nephews to come back to the song and the language?
And the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust was blessed a few years ago to get our first piece of land. This had been in the works for years. I had started the campaign to save the West Berkeley shell mound, Standing Rock was happening, and this man named Gavin and his wife Haleh run an organization, an organic nursery in East Oakland, in one of the most depressed parts of East Oakland, half a mile walk from my house, and it’s called Planting Justice. They work with formerly incarcerated men so that when they get out of prison they have a place to go and to have a job. On this two-acre nursery that they have, it runs along the Lisjan Creek, the waterway that we’re responsible to. And they offered us a quarter acre of land on that two-acre plot that was not being used by them at the time, that had transmissions on it and garbage, and we took that land. It was the first land returned to us in 250 years. Johnella worked on that land, and we hired someone else, and transformed that land to grow our medicinal plants and food. And we gathered together and found a place where we could cut down redwoods, and we brought them back to Oakland. And after praying for each of those redwood trees to give their lives so that we can create an arbor on our land.
After a year of working on those logs and then drying, and hundreds of people putting their hands on it, we put up that arbor, the first one in our territory in 250 years. When you walk into it, in the middle of the city to see an arbor standing there, it still takes away my breath.
CR: I very much admire the work that you’ve done to create the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, and I would implore people to find out more about the ancestral homelands that they live on, because throughout the United States, whether it seems that you’ve moved into an area that was empty, I guarantee you there is a rich indigenous history on the lands that you live on, and this is a beautiful way to get involved and help reinvigorate and wake up those sacred sites, and begin to live in reciprocity and re-indigenize, as all human beings in these areas, so that we can find balance. And Indigenous Peoples hold a sacred role to the health of the Earth and the people and the planet and these urban centers.
Protecting sacred sites and defending land rights is especially difficult when a tribe doesn’t have sovereign nation-to-nation status with the U.S. federal government. So Corrina and I shifted our conversation to talk about the kinds of complications that lack of recognition creates. I started by backtracking a bit to my own tribe’s federal recognition, and how that changed the course of not only my tribe’s history, but also our family history.
So our tribe had a very vast land base that was then condensed into a small reservation that wasn’t where the majority of our tribe was traditionally from.And then in addition to that, after the Great Depression, the United States government had what was called the Reformation Act, and they wanted to dam up all the rivers to create hydroelectric energy. And—So in addition to not having federal recognition and kind of trying to survive, the one, condensed land base that we received was then flooded in the name of hydroelectric energy to create energy jobs for the United States. And it took my ancestors many years to reorganize, but not after another suffering. You know, it was another great sadness. We lost our fertile valley. We lost an agricultural area, which to the Native Americans of that time, you know, a recreational lake did not make sense. The settlers had taken everything that was important in the name of development. They flooded the agricultural plains. They flooded out the basket materials. So all the riparian belt, the cottonwoods and the willows that grew in the wetlands along the river, the feeding areas for all of the wild game – the rabbits, the deer – was all gone, and now our reservation was this chunk of salty mesa, basically, out in the desert.
So our tribe didn’t really come back together to gain their federal recognition in the 1960s and ‘70s. There were some cousins that got together. Like I’m sure it was happening all over California, people trying to seek their federal recognition and have a land base.
I think one of the other things that many people don’t understand is this whole era, right, of relocation and termination. And we don’t have to go into all of that here, but I think it’s very important that there were 55 treaties for federal recognition that were not ratified in California. And I think it’s very important for people to understand that many of the tribes that were not federally recognized were in these geographic locations along the Western coast, the ocean-side tribes. I’m sure your tribe was one of those. Can you talk a little bit about the 1950s and how that affected your tribe’s federal recognition?
CG: You know, it kind of went before that, Cara, because we were affected by Dorrington, who was the head of the BIA in 1927. And in 1927, he was given an order by the United States government to provide the amount of money needed to purchase land for homeless Indians in the territories that he was in charge of. And he was an alcoholic. And he did not answer the correspondence coming from Washington, D.C. It was finally a telegram that was sent to him that told him that if he did not answer the correspondence that he would be required to go to D.C. and answer them there. And he quickly penned a letter and said that for all intents and purposes, the Native people from our territory didn’t exist anymore, and so there was no money needed to purchase land for the tribes in our territory.
And so with that, we stopped having government-to-government relationships. We were never terminated as a tribe. But we stopped having communications with—You know, the Bureau of Indian Affairs would not do anything for us anymore.
It was during—I think it was later on that some of my relatives – and they were always women that were doing this work, right, started doing this work of trying to get us on that Indian roll, it really was around trying to have that recognition as tribal people. The roll number was about that. It was about really trying to prove we have these connections to our tribal lands, we have connections to our communities and our elders.
There is maybe one tribe along the coast of California that is federally recognized. What happened? Why is it that these mission Indians are not recognized by the federal government?
The Bay land is the most, in terms of Western ideology, it is the richest land in the country. And so why would they want to have Native people have access to that land? So being non-federally recognized has stopped us from having a land base, not having federal recognition, does not put us at the table with the federal government about infrastructure and about creating programs around education and medical. So we have been homeless in our own homelands—since contact now.
CR: I think it’s very important for the audience to understand is with federal recognition comes not only the government-to-government status, this nation-to-nation status, this idea of inherent sovereignty of the tribes which provides protections for religious gathering, which provides land base, and which also provides environmental protections or is supposed to provide environmental protections for things like protecting sacred sites, things like protecting sacred sites from development and resource extraction.
And I hope for the audience, especially our audience members that live along the coast of California, that they can take away from this conversation both the importance of federal recognition and how tribes that are not federally recognized have been affected, and how they can continue to help be protectors of those landscapes, and to acknowledge the ancestral peoples of those homelands, and continue helping them protect their sacred sites and reinvigorate those sacred sites, because while they may not have federal recognition, they very much exist. They very much continue to fight for the rich histories of their landscapes and for the many people and ancestors that came before them, that gifted them the knowledge of the area. So I just implore the audience members that are there along the California coast to learn your true history of those urban epicenters of the California coast, and continue learning how to become good allies to California Native Peoples.
Corrina, thank you so much.
CG: Thank you so much, Cara. I send a lot of love from our people to your people, from my heart to your heart.
AB: We’re so delighted to have been able to have such a wonderful conversation with Corrina Gould. If you didn’t hear part one yet, you can go to our website bioneers.org. And in addition to that episode, you can find other episodes of Indigeneity Conversations there to listen to as well as other original Indigenous media content.
CR: You’ll also learn about the Indigeneity program and all of our initiatives, including curricula and learning materials for students and life-long learners.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Indigeneity Conversations. It’s been a pleasure to share with all of you today. Many thanks and take care!
The ecological systems of the Amazon have long been threatened by damaging industries. Oil and mining operations have caused massive deforestation within the rich, planet-healing Amazonian ecosystems that many refer to as “the lungs of the world.” On the frontlines of efforts to protect the Amazon are more than 20 Indigenous communities, fighting for their home, land, and the wellbeing of the planet at large.
Atossa Soltani is the Director of Global Strategy for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, an alliance of 30 Indigenous nations in Ecuador and Peru working to permanently protect 86 million acres of rainforests in one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth. She founded and is board president of Amazon Watch, of which she was the first executive director from 1996-2014. Atossa has been documenting and publicizing forest destruction and human rights abuses caused by extractive industries and large-scale energy projects throughout the Amazon for decades, and she’s led successful campaigns to force oil companies and international financial institutions to adopt stronger environmental and social standards.
Here, Atossa discusses the fight for Amazonian conservation with the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative.
ATOSSA SOLTANI:
Atossa Soltani
The mass extinction crisis is one of the biggest challenges of our time. In the Amazon Basin, there are ever more catastrophic summer fires, bringing that immense forest perilously close to a tipping point of ecological unraveling. Already somewhere between 17 and 20% of the Amazon rainforest, which encompasses parts of 9 countries, has been destroyed or degraded. Once we get to a deforestation rate somewhere around 25%, we can expect to see an unraveling of entire ecological systems of the Amazon, so it’s imperative that we work hard and quickly to safeguard the future of the largest forest on the planet. Some call the Amazon “the lungs of the world,” but Indigenous peoples there have always said it’s the “heart of the planet.”
An average tree in the Amazon lifts up about a thousand liters of water a day into the atmosphere, so an area larger than the continental United States lifts up a river larger than the Amazon River, every day, into the sky. And that atmospheric river generates rain throughout South America and into the rest of the world. It’s one of the key engines of the global weather system, and it makes South America much lusher and greener than other continents in the same latitude.
Just to give you a scale of the size of the Amazon River itself: the flow at its mouth is 209,000 cubic meters per second, equal to that of the next six largest rivers of the world, combined! And then imagine a river 20% bigger than that, being lifted out of the forest every day and propelled into the atmosphere.
Some economists have estimated that 70% of South America’s GDP is dependent in one way or another on that rain, but fires each summer now are burning ever more millions of hectares of forest. One recent summer, Bolivia lost 40% of its forests. And to be clear, those are predominantly intentionally set, man-made fires set to expand cattle ranching and agriculture.
But there are, in some places, exciting initiatives bringing hope for change. I returned from Ecuador recently, and a really powerful, grassroots Indigenous peoples’ movement there was able to mobilize and force the government to listen to many of their demands to protect their territories.
It is especially crucial to save the most biodiverse parts of the region, and most of the plant species there haven’t yet been cataloged. There is so much we don’t know, and much of it could be lost forever if we don’t act now. Amazon Watch, the Pachamama Alliance, and many of our other colleagues have been working for the last 20-plus years in the Napo and Pastaza river basins, an area that has among the planet’s greatest bio and cultural diversity, as some 20 plus Indigenous nations live in this area, and they have been the best protectors of that biodiversity. In fact, globally, 80% of the world’s biodiversity is on Indigenous territories, and very often, the traditional stewardship of Indigenous cultures has produced the most exceptional results in protecting ecosystems.
These river basins begin high in the Ecuadorian Andes in the glaciers of sacred mountains. Many consider this area, which is larger than Oregon, the sacred headwaters of the Amazon. If business as usual is allowed to go on, most of this land will be converted to oil and mining operations. There are over 2,000 oil and mining concessions. In this region, oil is a huge driver of deforestation, whereas in other parts of the Amazon, such as in much of Brazil, it’s cattle ranching or agribusiness. Half of the oil extracted from the Ecuadorian Amazon ends up in refineries in California, so the protection of the Amazon is directly related to our energy consumption here in California.
The Sacred Headwaters Initiative that we’re working on is an unparalleled collaboration between Indigenous peoples and allied organizations. We’re working on trying to create a 74-million-acre bi-national Ecuador/Peru protected region, but an unusual one, because in this case, the region would be protected by Indigenous people with full rights to self-determination and stewardship, rather than just by governments. In fact, sometimes the land has to be protected from corrupt governments. Empowered Indigenous groups are far better protectors than just governments.
The climate contribution of preserving this forest would be enormous, somewhere around six billion tons of carbon that would not go into the atmosphere. But what do we need to do to protect this incredibly important forest? The first thing that the Indigenous folks have been demanding is that there be no further major resource extraction initiatives: no industrial-scale mining, oil drilling, agriculture, and no more dams and roads—nothing that is at odds with the fabric of life.
Secondly, these territories need to be governed based on a life-centric worldview. Indigenous inhabitants of this place have had that philosophical orientation for millennia, but for the last 20 years or so, they’ve been developing a vision and putting it on paper. They’ve been working on producing a community collective vision developed through many, many participatory activities seeking to build a consensus about a desirable future for their territories based on their cosmologies and values. They are talking about maintaining the tree cover and keeping their forest clean, abundant, and full of life so they can continue to live off the land and practice their traditional ways of being. They want to maintain their cultures while working on incorporating such positive modern additions as clean energy and scientific expertise in some areas. All of us might do well to emulate that sort of collective visioning process for our own communities.
The Sacred Headwaters Initiative is working to help the various local Indigenous people articulate and then combine their various “life plans” into an overarching bioregional plan for the protection of the whole area. There are many dimensions to it. One component is that we have also created a global commission of experts to help us find the best examples of ecosystem protection from around the world that can be drawn from to successfully protect this area.
This requires a radically different way of viewing land management. We have to shift the goals of the entire economic system to a holistic model that sees human prosperity as inseparable from regeneration and the flourishing of life. And this raises big challenges because Peru and Ecuador’s economies are largely based on income from resource extraction, and that’s true in most of the 17 most biodiverse countries in the world, mostly in the tropics. Getting those governments to keep fossil fuels in the ground and to stop mining in protected regions is a top global priority both for biodiversity conservation and climate stabilization, but it’s a very tough sell.
We are working globally on ideas around how to find funding to pay these governments of mega-biodiverse countries to transition their economies and get beyond fossil fuels. It was tried before in Ecuador before the Paris Climate Accord, and it failed, but we have to get creative and keep trying because these countries will need strong incentives to make those difficult transitions. And eventually, we need a deeper cure: We have to get away from the current economic model that’s at war with nature, that’s seeking to consume nature to convert it into cash.
My personal evolution of working on these issues came from the realization at a young age of the validity of the Gaia Hypothesis. I firmly believe that the Earth is a living system, a super-organism that seeks to perpetuate conditions conducive to life, and that we, the humans on this Earth, have to align ourselves with this larger super-organism and be productive cells in the body of that living Earth. I think that seeing the Earth as a living system of which we are productive members can bring a shift in identity and perspective that will help us find solutions.
Note: This is an edited/excerpted version of a presentation given at the Bioneers Conference.
Alexis Bunten, Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program and curriculum developer, guides attendees the learning activities, arts and crafts designed to teach young children about the importance of sharing, valuing nature, animal behavior, the three sisters, and more. Guest speakers include Danielle Greendeer, and Tony Perry, co-authors of the new picture book, Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story, for a reading and Q&A.
Alexis Bunten, PhD, Co-Directs the Bioneers Indigeneity Program. She is an Alaska Native writer, media maker, consultant and educator. Her first book, “So, how long have you been Native?” Life as an Alaska Native Tour Guide(2015) won the Alaska Library Association Award for its originality, and depth. Her writing has appeared in First American Art Magazine, Cultural Survival Quarterly, American Indian magazine, and in many academic journals. Her first childrens’ book, Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story, co-authored with Danielle Hill and Tony Perry, was released in August 2022, and her second picture book, What Your Ribbon Skirt Means to Me: Deb Haaland’s Historic Inauguration, will be published in 2023.
Alexis lives in Monterey, California with her partner, daughter, 3 dogs, cat and lizard. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, studying DNA and creating cultural tours.
Danielle Hill, Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Citizen, Hawk Clan. Mother of five children, Julian, 17, Anysa 14, Maple 5, Quill 4, Tulsi 2, and wife of David Greendeer, Ho-Chunk/Narragansett. We are an art family and enjoy spending our days, crafting, painting, building, making wampum jewelry and spending days and nights at the beach. As a writer, farmer, crafter, dancer and artist I always find inspiration from museum archives and collections. When the children go to bed, I spend time looking at old photographs and imagining what life our ancestors lived. Through the silence, I find motivation to create new imagery and stories. I am also a seed steward of the King Philip Corn, a historically Wampanoag heirloom corn variety stolen during the King Philip War but now rematriated back into Wampanoag soil. When I am not out in the corn field or in the gallery, you can find me teaching a Native Food Systems Course for UMass Amherst Stockbridge school of Agriculture. The future for me is to continue to merge my love of art and corn.
Anthony Perry (Chickasaw) grew up in Oklahoma and now lives in England with his wife and young children. This is his second children’s book. His first book, Chula the Fox, brings 18th century Chickasaw history to life and is being adapted into a film. He works as a quality improvement manager in the National Health Service in England and volunteers with hospitals in Pakistan to improve health services. He loves history and enjoys spending time with his family and traveling.
Perry has an undergraduate degree in comparative religion from Dartmouth College, a master’s degree in public health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a master’s degree in public policy from Birkbeck College, University of London. He is currently working on a sequel to Chula the Fox.
In this episode, Indigenous scholar and organizer Nick Estes explores how Indigenous land-based and Earth-centered societies are advancing regenerative solutions and campaigns to transform capitalism. “Eco-nomics” puts Indigenous leadership at the forefront of assuring a habitable planet.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: In this episode, Indigenous scholar and organizer Nick Estes explores how Indigenous land-based and Earth-centered societies are advancing regenerative solutions and campaigns to transform capitalism. An ancient “eco-nomics” today puts Indigenous leadership at the forefront of assuring a habitable planet.
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Indigenous Eco-Nomics: Ancestors of the Future.”
NICK ESTES: Today I want to talk about what it means to be a water protector, and why the identity of a water protector in this era of climate chaos is so important to a future on this planet, but also a different way of living with the Earth.
And I think it’s important to point out that while there’s a lot of talk about how indigenous struggles are attached to the land, and how we have an Earth centered and Earth-based knowledge system, which is all true, there’s often a tendency to not fully understand traditional economies. They’re not historic, and so maybe traditional isn’t the correct term, but maybe they’re just land-based economies that aren’t entirely capitalistic.
HOST: What do you do when you’re trapped in a system where you don’t belong? Sometimes, the only way out is through.
That’s the predicament facing many Indigenous communities, both in the US and around the world. Capitalism is fundamentally in conflict with Indigenous values, cultures and lifeways. It also appears to be in conflict with a habitable Earth. The climate emergency is the ultimate logic of a voraciously extractive paradigm that’s also systematically unequal – by design.
Just as economics is driving the destruction, it needs to power the restoration — to transform the global economy from a vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle.
Today Native Peoples are showing the world what it means to come together not only as protestors, but as protectors – peaceful guardians of the sacred sources of life and of justice. Indigenous peoples worldwide are linking networks to build power and engage millions more non-Native allies to build a just and regenerative economy and world.
Nick Estes is Kul Wicasa Oyate, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. His nation is the Oceti Sakowin Oyate – the Nation of the Seven Council Fires.
He co-founded the nonprofit coalition Red Nation which is dedicated to the liberation of Native People from capitalism and colonialism. Estes is also an author and founded Red Media to amplify Indigenous voices.
He joined the University of Minnesota in 2022 as Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies.
In 2021, he visited the “No Line 3” Water Protector camps in Dakota and Anishinaabe territory. There he saw the catastrophic consequences of climate disruption and the fossil fuel economy on the tribes’ sacred wild rice, called manoomin. Instead of a normal harvest of 80 pounds, the epic drought left just a cup and a half of this critical food for the community and their economy.
Nick Estes spoke at a Bioneers Conference…
Nick Estes speaking at Bioneers 2022 | Photo by Alex Akamine
NE: Anishinaabe people have an esoteric spiritual connection to manoomin, which is codified within their 1855 treaty that actually protects the right of manoomin to exist, it’s the only grain that is protected by treaty rights, by indigenous treaty rights, which isn’t necessarily an aberration because Article 11 of the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty, which was signed by my nation, the Oceti Sakowin, the Lakota Nation and the Dakota Nations, also set aside territory for the continued perpetuation of the Pte Oyate or the Buffalo Nation or the Buffalo people. And so even within these colonial treaties, these colonial laws, we inserted our rights of our relatives to exist and to continue to exist.
We know, today, Western societies have adopted the Rights of Nature movement, and this is being attacked by the right as an anti-human and anti-life movement as well, and we can see the recent successes of certain countries, like Ecuador and Bolivia, in codifying it within their constitutional frameworks or within legal systems to protect Mother Earth or Pachamama.
HOST: Today, the Rights of Nature movement has become the fastest growing environmental movement in history. By 2022, 24 countries and 9 tribes had passed laws in the US and Canada.
It flips the capitalist paradigm from nature as property to be exploited – to nature as rights-bearing to persist, evolve and thrive. It’s a fundamentally Indigenous worldview, customized to modern times.
It’s no accident that First Peoples, who comprise just 3 percent of the world’s population, continue to protect 80 per cent of global biodiversity on Indigenous lands. Yet everywhere they’re frozen out of economies.
So how do you transform economics into eco-nomics? Start by looking to the past…
NE: Where was the question of jobs when it came to the destruction of rice paddies? Where was the discussion of green jobs when it comes to land defense? Typically, jobs as we know them in a capitalist system is often workers in relationship to capital, and oftentimes our jobs entail acts of pollution. And in the case of these pipelines where there was the Dakota Access pipeline, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, or the Line 3 pipeline, which was essentially a reroute of the Keystone XL pipeline, carrying the same tar sands, the question of unionized labor always came to the fore, and the jobs that were going to be provided.
And when these indigenous nations, whether at Standing Rock or whether at the Line 3 protests, decided to set up blockades and to say these pipelines will not only destroy our water systems, but they will destroy our economies, unionized pipeline workers crossed a picket line. What do we call people who cross picket lines? [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] We call them scabs. And in this era of growing, intensifying, organized labor militancy, we have to understand that indigenous lifeways, indigenous protection of water, of air, of land, the very sustenance that we need to survive, should also be considered a form of labor that is valued and protected.
In other words, protecting and regenerating nature is a green job.
Nick Estes cites a report by the Indigenous Environmental Network called “Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon”. It details the work of tribal nations, water protectors, land defenders, pipeline fighters, and many other grassroots networks who have dedicated their lives to defending the sacredness of Mother Earth. They’re also protecting their inherent rights of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.
Indigenous Peoples have developed highly effective campaigns that utilize a mix of non-violent direct action, political lobbying, multimedia strategies, fossil fuel divestment, and other tactics to accomplish victories in the fight against neoliberal extractive projects, like Keystone XL and Line Three pipelines endangering the Minnesota waters and lands where manoomin grows.
NE: That report found that indigenous-led movements from a variety of struggles, whether it was through direct action, court cases, legislation, were challenging about a quarter of greenhouse emissions from both Canada and the United States. In other words, Indigenous People, a minority within both settler states, are punching well above their their weight class, in terms of impact on climate change and preventing cataclysmic climate catastrophe. [APPLAUSE]
To put that into perspective, that’s about 400 new coal fired power plants that are being challenged. And just the Line 3 pipeline alone is about 50 coal fired power plants. So the completion of the Line 3 pipeline and the carbon emissions that it will produce over its lifetime are about the equivalent of 50 coal fired power plants. That’s more than twice the carbon emissions of the entire state of Minnesota.
I also want to turn to a recent backlash against water protectors and against the climate justice movement. There was a legislative initiative led by the American Legislative Exchange Council called the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, which is model legislation that is planned to go through state legislators to ban and to make illegal the divestment from fossil fuel companies [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] as a form of energy discrimination.
If you’re challenging a quarter of greenhouse emissions from both Canada and the United States against one of the most violent and destructive industries in human history, of course there’s going to be backlash, of course there’s going to be punishment and revenge against those who have hit the bottom line of this capitalist society.
HOST: Nick Estes says that when we think about capitalism, we also have to think about class. He spoke on a panel at a Bioneers conference.
NE: Class isn’t just about your income, class is about power. It’s fundamentally about power. And I think Indigenous Peoples are often removed from that question. And the massive genocide of indigenous people within this hemisphere —the largest genocide in human history that we know of, was a form of class warfare that not only destroyed entire nations of people but destroyed entire alternative histories and possibilities of this particular land.
And so we’ve been knocked off our course of development, and I think it’s appropriate to not only challenge capitalism, but also move through it and work towards a different kind of system, and to understand that the culture and the values and the languages and the practices we still retain, the remnants of that, can be the basis of a new system, and should be the basis of the new system. I think of Black Elk saying, they cut down the tree of life, but the roots still remain. Like, indigenous lifeways are the roots of this land.
HOST: When we return, Nick Estes examines how the original DNA of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism continues to evolve today with resource colonialism on Indigenous lands, and how global Indigenous movements are building allyship with all peoples to become protectors of life on Earth and ancestors of our future…
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers. This is “Indigenous Eco-Nomics: Ancestors of the Future”.
Nick Estes with fellow panelists Sikowis (left) and Alexis Bunten (center) at Bioneers 2022 | Photo by Alex Akamine
HOST: The so-called “transition” from feudalism to capitalism in Europe was in truth a blood-soaked three-centuries of class war, privation and grave inequality. Bankrupt monarchies and feudal manors became un-economic.
Feudal estates were sold to merchants to raise export crops as investments. Enclosure laws forced tenants off the land and privatized what had been the commons for an already precarious subsistence existence.
It transformed landless peasants and workers into wage slaves. Money replaced nature as the preferred medium for the accumulation of wealth.
Simultaneously came the conquest of the Americas. Colonization yielded the biggest transfer of wealth in history: a head-spinning fifteen-fold increase in Europe’s money supply.
Within a century, 95 percent of the Indigenous populations of North America were dead. Then the elites began enslaving Africans.
A new model had been set for an emerging global capitalist market economy: export-oriented production, monopolistic wealth, and the international division of labor in a race to the bottom. It systematically destroyed local economies.
With that model also came a worldview and ideology. The Earth was a thing, commodity to be exploited for profit, and might made right.
In 1493, a Papal Bull called the Doctrine of Discovery declared all non-Christian peoples less than human, with no rights. The Church became business partners with the state, providing theological justification for land theft, genocide and slavery. The Doctrine of Discovery has yet to be rescinded.
Sometimes the only way out is through. But how? Again, Nick Estes.
NE: Capitalism is neither inevitable nor is it natural to human society. We can look at all the human societies that have existed throughout time, immense diversity of human culture, and understand that this is a minoritarian kind of like tendency that developed out of Western Europe that kind of spread to the rest of the planet, at great peril to many people, and now at great peril to everyone because of catastrophic climate change.
When we talk about the invention of the steam engine in the early 1800s, or I guess the mass proliferation of the steam engine in industrial capitalism in the mills, the textile mills in England, that was a result of hand-picked cotton by an enslaved labor force on land that was stolen from indigenous people. And so when we think about the historical carbon emissions, it’s fundamentally tied to those two processes, and that was only possible because of global capitalism, something we know as imperialism. Capitalism wasn’t just an isolated thing that kind of started off on a small scale and then expanded. It was fundamentally a global system when it was inaugurated.
And so I think to understand it that way opens up a new set of problems but I think a new set of solutions as well. And looking at global supply chains, you know. We can even look at tribal nations. We can ask ourselves why some—a place like the Navajo Nation, which is essentially a state, you know, in terms of its size and population and how much resources that it holds in terms of coal, oil and gas, as well as uranium, but why is it that that nation isn’t as rich as all of the, you know, Chevrons or all of the Shell oil companies or all of the energy companies that exist? It’s because it’s fundamentally resource colonialism. It’s taking those places and purposefully impoverishing them so that they can take the raw material, develop it, and then sell it back to somebody else.
We had moments in time where various kind of nationalist tribal councils within the Navajo Nation tried to essentially nationalize its oil industry and keep production within its boundaries, but that was attacked by the federal government, to break that up, in the interests of these energy corporations. Because they don’t want tribes to reap the profits of their very own resources that are on their land, let alone do they want developing nations or nations in the South to reap the profits from materials such as lithium, the new green energy frontier
And so, capitalism is not the solution, it’s the problem. You know? We need to go beyond capitalism, but how we get there is another question. You can’t wake up tomorrow, have good intentions, and then go and hug the murder out of capitalism. We have to move through the system, and we have to organize on all fronts.
We have a new growing labor militancy that’s attacking one of the most destructive carbon-intensive industries, which is the Amazon. The Amazon monopoly on logistics. We should support unionization efforts and workers’ democracy because unions aren’t environmentally bad. They often are pitted against environmentalists all the time, but there are examples, going back to when the Black Hills Alliance allied with gold miners and ranchers in our homelands — people who would be ideologically considered settlers and colonizers — to say that treaty rights not only protect indigenous people at our access to the land but they also protect workers who are working in hazardous conditions, who drink water that their mine tailings are polluting. Right? We all drink the same water. Like indigenous people aren’t unique and somehow like water that enters our body is like, you know, something like that that’s different.
And so thinking about that and scaling up the idea of the local to the universal, and thinking that indigenous values protect everybody’s access to clean drinking water, access to air, access to land that we all need to survive. And I think the most ethical action that we can take is to really fight like hell to build something that’s different. And whatever that looks like, we have to find out through struggle itself. And the only way we win is if we struggle, and we can’t be afraid to do that in this moment.
HOST: In 2020, The Red Nation nonprofit coalition that Nick Estes co-founded published, “The Red Deal”. It describes a political program for the liberation that emerges from the oldest class struggle in the Americas — the fight by Native people to win sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity. It’s a call to action to come together to confront climate catastrophe and build a world where life can thrive.
Nick Estes says the Red Deal was inspired by the 2010 People’s Agreement of Cochabamba in Bolivia at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.
NE: We have things such as the Green New Deal. I think the sentiments behind such endeavors are important, but what the Cochabamba Accords, or the People’s Accords, put forward is a critique, not only of the patriarchal capitalist system that commodifies nature and that commodifies relations between humans and the non-human world, but also the uneven expectations of transition that are outsourced, oftentimes to Indigenous People and those people of the Global South; that if Global South countries, nations, and peoples developed along the same pathway as those in the United States and the so-called First World, we would need three planets to survive the immense amount of resources that it’s going to take.
And we can see that same mentality, that same system operating today. When the United States wants to make a one-to-one transition of energy consumption without understanding the extractive relationship it has to continue to consume — the lithium, the copper, the cobalt that goes into renewable technologies has to come from somewhere. Whether it was Biden, whether it was Trump, they understood that the key trading partner in that particular energy transition, the so-called “green revolution”, was China. And much like the fracking boom that began in 2008, which was an attempt to wean the United States off of what it considered conflict oil from countries that it was in disagreement with, the United States is again trying to develop its own strategic mineral reserve for green technology, rather than questioning the mass consumption of energy in the first place. [APPLAUSE]
And we can see that Indigenous Peoples again are on the chopping block, whether it is Resolution Copper in the sacred site of Oak Flat, to build one of the world’s largest copper mines to fill the needs of the so-called green energy revolution, or whether the massive open pit lithium mine that they’re trying to build in Nevada at Thacker Pass on sacred Northern Paiute lands, we understand that this relationship is still fundamentally colonial, and we need an alternative. And so that’s why we’re saying we need a people’s agreement not only amongst human nations and relations, but we need a people’s agreement with the Earth itself, and that we draw inspiration from buen vivir, or the idea that living and development in correct relations doesn’t mean overconsumption, doesn’t mean that we measure our successes on material consumption but we measure our successes on the quality of life, not only of human beings, whether it’s housing, whether it’s education, whether it’s healthcare, or whether it’s just living a good life, not at the expense of the planet. [APPLAUSE]
And we have models to draw from, as I pointed out with Bolivia, with Ecuador, but now there are growing models here in the United States. We have to go back to the water protectors. There’s a reason why we are living in the era of the water protector. For sure, water protection, the defense of land, the defense of non-human species and relatives has existed since time immemorial, but there was something different about 2016, where anyone, not just Indigenous People, could walk through the gates at the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock and become a water protector.
It’s a universal identity that’s grounded in indigenous values, and we need support for those who have sacrificed their freedom, indigenous and non-indigenous. Over 900 water protectors in the Line 3 struggle are going through the court systems right now. And I want all of you to go online, to go to DropLine3Charges.com to donate, to find out how you can support the legal defense, because the most ethical thing that you can do right now is direct action; to support those who are putting their bodies on the line.
Because as my mentor and my relative, Madonna Thunderhawk, told me, that it’s the highest honor of a Lakota person to be an ancestor of the future, and that’s what we’re asking you in this moment in time, to be good relatives of the future generations. So thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
HOST: Nick Estes… “Indigenous Eco-Nomics: Ancestors of the Future”.
Given humanity’s impact on the planet, the once-fringe concept of the Anthropocene is now more or less taken as a given. Our collective degradation of the landscapes and marine environments of the planet is undeniable. However, we know that Indigenous people have been “managing” landscapes in various ways for millennia, finding ways to support and respect the natural systems that we are very much a part of, not apart from. The late O.E. Wilson’s visionary “Half-Earth” movement proposes a goal of setting aside 50% of the planet for nature. How do we accomplish this equitably and ethically? We need to conserve what remains and work to restore the rest, and, as Dr. Carly Vynne reminds us, “huge efforts on both fronts will be necessary.”
This week, join us as we begin to explore the restoration side of this essential work. How do we reintegrate the idea of wild places into a transformed world? What is working right now? Are there strategies and models that fit the myriad situations in front of us?
From London to Frankfurt to Barcelona, European cities are undertaking rewilding initiatives that are benefiting human and wild residents alike. Read more here.
Wild Mammals Are Making a Comeback in Europe Thanks to Conservation Efforts
In this story told by stats, Hannah Ritchie of Our World In Data explains how many European mammals — including beavers, bison, seals, and wolves — are experiencing population growth as a result of conservation and rewilding efforts. Read more here.
Rewilding Europe: Letting Nature Take the Lead
Rewilding Europe, a nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands, is working to make Europe a wilder place, with more space for wildlife, wilderness, and wild values. Read more here.
Forest landscape
Restoration in Practice: Making a Mini-Forest with the Miyawaki Method
The Miyawaki Method is unique in that it re-creates the conditions for a mature natural forest to arise within decades rather than centuries. At the heart of the method is the identification of a combination of native plant species best suited to the specific conditions at any given planting site.
“The final thing I’ll say is – and I know this is within the ethos of Bioneers – we are so bombarded by negative, depressing environmental news, and it’s understandable. We’re in a dark place as a global civilization. But the beavers are an amazing ray of light in some ways. They are one of history’s great conservation success stories. The species was basically on the brink of extinction, certainly in the continental United States around the turn of the century, and now there are 15 million of them. They are proof that species can recover.” — Journalist Ben Goldfarb
Nature is our best ally when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, revitalizing local economies, and stabilizing the environment. This basic principle is fundamental to the unique Dutch non-profit organization Rewilding Europe, which works across 18 countries with a mission to make Europe a wilder place, with more space for wildlife, wilderness, and wild values. Many of us living in the United States think of Europe as a densely populated land of cosmopolitan cities. The idea of wilderness, we think, is more Montana than Scotland, more Alaska than the Danube Delta. But there are truly inspiring projects underway on “The Continent,” and groups like Rewilding Europe are steadily gaining ground in the larger effort to breathe life back into our landscapes through a process known as rewilding.
What is rewilding?
Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation that embraces nature’s ability to manage itself. This process can be guided by the right conditions – by removing dykes and dams to free up rivers, reducing active management of wildlife populations, allowing natural forest regeneration, and by reintroducing species that have disappeared due to human actions. Some components of rewilding include bringing back wildlife, connecting people to rewilded landscapes, and protecting areas where rewilding can occur. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habitats.
“[Rewilding] is about understanding that we are just one species among many, bound together in an intricate web of life that connects us with the atmosphere, the weather, the tides, the soil, fresh water, the oceans and every other living creature on the planet.”
Rewilding In Action
Founded in 2011, Rewilding Europe has grown to work in nine large rewilding landscapes across Europe, with staff, board members, ambassadors, and volunteers from 18 European countries. The group enacts its mission through a variety of initiatives and rewilded landscapes, including:
Through a place-based approach to rewilding landscapes, Rewilding Europe promotes natural processes through various kinds of agreements with landowners, local park and reserve authorities, area managers, and concession holders. The organization has established dozens of rewilding agreements, with numerous pilots and initiatives demonstrating rewilding. These landscapes are spread across Europe, from Romania to Croatia, and act as an inspiration and demonstration for rewilding initiatives across the continent. Fundamental to their work is the development and maintenance of the rapidly growing European Rewilding Network, a collective of nearly 80 member organizations
“Dynamic and contemporary wildlife and nature-based businesses can benefit local societies by creating new economic opportunities that are more closely tied to natural environments.”
As a result of its rewilding initiatives — including increased legal protection, reintroduction and population support measures, and corridor creation — Rewilding Europe has seen a marked increase in the populations of many species that were once in decline. Species such as beaver, elk, and ibex are starting to make a comeback. Overall, the organization claims 6.5 million hectares of land and water as part of the initiatives it has launched or supported.
“Rewilding can create favourable conditions for the spontaneous comeback of numerous wildlife species – this is by far the most important tool for wildlife recovery in our operational rewilding landscapes. This can involve reducing hunting quotas or creating hunting-free areas, combatting poisoning and poaching, mitigating conflict and damage, protecting nesting, denning or breeding sites, and by creating incentives for people to appreciate local wildlife.”
The European bison is the continent’s largest herbivore. It was once abundant across the region. Archaeological evidence suggests that the bison was widespread, stretching from France to Ukraine, down to the tip of the Black Sea.1 The earliest fossils date back to the Early Holocene period – around 9,000 BC.
Bison populations steadily declined over millennia, but experienced the most dramatic decline over the last 500 years. Deforestation and hunting of this iconic mammal nearly drove it to extinction. Look at old cave paintings and we find that hunters had etched bison next to bison in charcoal. They had gone extinct in Hungary by the 16th century; in Ukraine by the 18th century. And by the early 20th century they had gone completely extinct in the wild, with only tens of individuals kept in captivity.
The overhunting of the bison is no outlier. It’s part of a long history. Look at the size of mammals through millions of years of human history and we find that they get smaller and smaller. Humans preferentially hunted the largest mammals, often to extinction.2
This is still the case today. It is the largest mammals that are most threatened by hunting.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, and the bison shows it. The European bison has made an impressive comeback over the last 50 years. Successful conservation efforts have seen their numbers rebound. Europe is now home to more than 2500 of them.
It’s not the only one. Across the world, we find examples of successful conservation programs that have restored animal populations.
Here I look at the change in mammal populations across Europe. Many species are making a comeback. Once on the brink, iconic animals such as the European bison, Brown bear, and elk are thriving once again.
Many mammals across Europe have made a comeback over the last 50 years
By the first half of the 20th century, many of Europe’s mammals had been reduced to just a fraction of their historical levels. Millennia of hunting, exploitation, and habitat loss had forced them into decline. Many had been wiped out completely.
But most mammal populations have seen a dramatic increase over the last 50 years.
In 2013, a coalition of conservation organizations – including the Zoological Society of London; Birdlife International; and Rewilding Europe – published a report on how mammal populations across Europe had changed since 1960.3 They looked at the change in populations of 18 mammal species. The results are shown in the chart.
There are more than 30 times the number of European bisons alive today than there were in 1960.
Brown bear populations achieved an average increase of 100% – a doubling. For Eurasian elk, this was a tripling. Red deer have increased five-fold, on average.
The Eurasian beaver has made the most remarkable recovery. It’s estimated to have increased by 140-fold, on average. There were likely only a few thousand beavers left in Europe in first half of the 20th century.4 Today there are more than 330,000. This study only included data for studied countries in Europe. When we take Eurasia as a whole, it is estimated that there are well over one million beavers.
All species but one – the Iberian lynx – have significantly increased in numbers. Despite its 50-year decline, there is recent positive news for the Iberian lynx. Over the last decade it has been making a remarkable recovery. So much so that the IUCN moved it from Critically Endangered to Endangered on the Red List in 2015.
How are these mammal populations estimated?
Long-term monitoring of wildlife populations is difficult. The methods used and the quality of estimates can change and improve over time.
In this assessment, for each mammal, researchers drew on published studies that assessed the most recent population estimates, and the change over time. These are population estimates that are included in the Living Planet Index. To address the limitations of changes in data collection, the authors only include analyses where the same methods are applied over the same time series, and the data is transparent and traceable.
This means that the data coverage may vary from species to species. For some, we have good estimates for all countries in Europe where it is present. For other species, it may only be a subset of countries where it can be found. One example here is the Eurasian beaver: the study did not include consistent data for beaver populations across some parts of Russia and it populations outside of Europe, in Asia. That means the total figure for Eurasian beavers does not reflect the complete total.
Unfortunately, the researchers do not have complete long-term assessments for all populations for all species. This means giving an accurate starting (e.g. 1960) population level is difficult and would come with a large uncertainty.
Instead, they report two values:
The estimated final population across Europe in the final year (e.g. 2013) where populations have been studied.
The average relative change in abundance across measured populations for a given species.
For some species, the change across populations for a given species is very similar, and this might be close to the true change in abundance for a given species. For others, there can be large variability in the rate of increase: for example, one population might have increased by 60% while another only increased by 10%. For these species, inferring an absolute change from these figures would come with high uncertainty.
Effective conservation and reintroduction programs have allowed mammal populations to flourish
How did Europe achieve this impressive recovery of mammal populations?
In short, stopping the activities that were killing mammals off in the first place. Effective protection against hunting, overexploitation, and the destruction of habitats have been key.
Agricultural land use has declined across Europe over the last 50 years. This allowed natural habitats to return where agriculture had previously taken them over. It is a point that I’ve made before: high agricultural productivity is key to protecting wildlife. We need to produce more from less so that we can leave wild spaces for the world’s animals to flourish.
Another essential development was to stop hunting them. Countries brought in effective protection policies such as complete bans on hunting or hunting quotas; designated areas with legal protections; patrols to catch illegal poachers; and compensation schemes for the reproduction of certain species.
Most mammals are now listed under various region-wide protection schemes with strict regulations such as the EU Habitats and Species Directive; the Bern Convention and CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora).
In 1981 Sweden introduced hunting quotas on brown bears.5 This is thought to be the main driver of the recovery of this species. There has also been a European-wide ban on the hunting of Harbour seals, with the exception of Iceland and Norway.6 Sweden established a compensation scheme with financial rewards for the reproduction of wolverines.7 Most impressive of all, the Eurasian Beaver has not only had legal protection, it has also been reintroduced in more than 25 countries across Eurasia.8
The European bison made its comeback as the result of more than 50 years of breeding and reintroduction programs. In the 1930s, after going extinct in the wild, conservationists published the first edition of the European Bison Pedigree Book. It records the full genealogical history of all surviving bison. It was the first conservation program of its kind and it has been updated every year since.
The bison has come a long way since its first reintroduction to the wild in 1952.9 A century after going extinct in the wild, the IUCN Red List moved it from the classification of Vulnerable to Near Threatened thanks to continued conservation efforts.
What these promising trends show is that the recovery of wildlife is possible. Improvements in agricultural productivity not only halted the expansion of agriculture, but eventually reversed it. Farmland was given back to nature. Importantly, Europe achieved this while producing more food at the same time.
And what has been essential has been the vital work of conservationists. From fighting for wildlife protection policies and hunting quotas, to reintroduction programmes, the dedication of determined individuals lies at the heart of this wild mammal comeback.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues Max Roser, Matt Conlen, Daniel Gavrilov, Saloni Dattani, Fiona Spooner and Bastian Herre for valuable suggestions and feedback on this article. I would also like to thank Robin Freeman and Louise McRae from the Zoological Society of London for their feedback on this work.
Endnotes
Benecke, N. 2006. The Holocene distribution of European bison – the archaeozoological record. Munibe (Antropologia– Arkeologia), 57 (1): 421–428.
Andermann, T., Faurby, S., Turvey, S. T., Antonelli, A., & Silvestro, D. (2020). The past and future human impact on mammalian diversity. Science Advances, 6(36), eabb2313.Smith, F. A., Smith, R. E. E., Lyons, S. K., & Payne, J. L. (2018). Body size downgrading of mammals over the late Quaternary. Science, 360(6386), 310-313.Klein, R. G., Martin, P. S. (1984). Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution. United Kingdom: University of Arizona Press.Barnosky, A. D. (2008). Megafauna biomass tradeoff as a driver of Quaternary and future extinctions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(Supplement 1), 11543-11548.Sandom, C., Faurby, S., Sandel, B., & Svenning, J. C. (2014). Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1787), 20133254.
IUCN/SSC Bear and Polar Bear Specialist Groups 1998. Brown bear conservation action plan for Europe (Ursus arctos), in Bears. Status survey and conservation action plan., C. Servheen, S. Herrero, and B. Peyton, Editors., IUCN, Gland, Switzerland: 55–192.
Reijnders, P., Brasseur, S., van der Toorn, J., et al. (1993). Seals, fur seals, sea lions, and walrus: Status survey and conservation action plan. IUCN/SSC Seal Specialist Group. Cambridge, U.K.
Special Committee on Seals (SCOS) 2010.Scientific Advice on Matters Related to the Management of Seal Populations 2010.
Special Committee on Seals (SCOS) 2010. Scientific Advice on Matters Related to the Management of Seal Populations 2010.
Halley, D.J. & Rosell, F. 2002. The beaver’s reconquest of Eurasia: status, population development and management of a conservation success. Mammal Review, 32 (3): 153–178.
Pucek, Z., Belousova, I.P., Krasiñska, M., Krasiñski, Z.A. and Olech, W. 2004. European Bison. Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan. IUCN/SSC Bison Specialist Group. Gland, Switzerland. 1–68.
Our World in Data is not an active author or contributor to Bioneers.
The following excerpt is from Hannah Lewis’s new book Mini-Forest Revolution (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2022) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.
Most of us know the term old-growth forest, which refers to natural forests that are still mostly free of human disturbance (though not necessarily free of human presence). These forests have reached maturity and beyond—a process that often takes centuries. As a result, they host incredible biodiversity and sustain a complex array of ecosystem functions.
The Miyawaki Method is unique in that it re-creates the conditions for a mature natural forest to arise within decades rather than centuries. At the heart of the method is the identification of a combination of native plant species best suited to the specific conditions at any given planting site. As we’ll see, determining this combination of special plants is not always so straightforward.
More than just the species selection, the Miyawaki Method depends on a small collection of core techniques to ensure the success of each planting. These include improving the site’s soil quality and planting the trees densely to mimic a mature natural forest. It’s also necessary to lightly maintain the site over the first three years—which can include weeding and watering. Amazingly, though, if the simple guidelines are followed, after that point a Miyawaki-style forest is self-sustaining.
The trees grow quickly (as much as 3 ft [1 m] per year), survive at very high rates (upward of 90 percent), and sequester carbon more readily than single-species plantations. The Miyawaki Method is also special for its emphasis on engaging entire communities in the process of dreaming up and planting a forest. Whether you are three years old or eighty-three, chances are you can place a knee-high seedling into a small hole in the ground. At the very least you can appreciate and cherish the return of quasi-wilderness to a space that was once vacant.
Imagining a Mini-Forest’s Potential
The Miyawaki Method calls for planting native species, but not just any natives. In particular, the method involves a careful investigation of what’s known as potential natural vegetation (PNV). This unusual term refers to the hypothetical ecological potential of a piece of land. Or another way to say it is that potential natural vegetation is “the kind of natural vegetation that could become established if human impacts were completely removed from a site” over an extended period of time.1 A site’s PNV depends on many factors, including current climate conditions, soil, and topography.
How is potential natural vegetation different from the plants we see growing around us in towns and cities? For starters, in almost all developed landscapes, many of the plants are not native to the area, and as such may require maintenance to survive or reproduce.
Given that most of Earth’s land surface is significantly altered by urbanization, agriculture, road construction, mining, and the like, it is far from obvious what the original vegetation of any given location would have been. (Original vegetation and potential natural vegetation are not necessarily exactly the same, but they are closely related.) Unraveling this mystery takes curiosity, patience, and persistence. However, thinking about land in terms of its potential natural vegetation is a powerful angle from which to approach ecosystem restoration, because it reveals which species and groups of species are best adapted to a particular environment and therefore more likely to thrive and to support a wider web of wildlife.
To arrive at the potential natural vegetation for a given site, it helps to understand the sequence in which plant communities develop.
Nature’s March
If left alone, previously forested land can grow back into mature forest via a process known as ecological succession, wherein the biological components of the ecosystem change over time as larger and longer-lived plant communities colonize the land. As mentioned, this process can take centuries to unfold. A foundational aspect of the Miyawaki Method is that it sidesteps the slow and capricious march of natural succession, instead focusing on those plants that mark the theoretical endpoint of succession.
In nature, the successional process begins when lightweight seeds drift in and germinate on bare ground. Hardy, fast-growing plants—what scientists call pioneer species—such as clover, plantain, and dandelion take advantage of ample sunlight and space. They live short lives, produce a lot of seeds, and shelter the ground in the process. Next to show up are larger perennial herbs and grasses, followed by shrubs and pioneer trees, such as birch, poplar, or pine.
“Each new group of species arrives because the environmental conditions, especially the soil, have been improved; each new species becomes established because it is more shade tolerant than the previous species and can grow up under their existing foliage,” Miyawaki wrote.2 He explains that just when a community of plants appears to be reaching its fullest potential, the seeds of the succeeding community are already germinating in its shade. The species making up each new successional stage tend to be bigger, more shade-tolerant, and longer living than those of the previous stage.
“The plant community and the physical environment continue to interact,” Miyawaki explained, “until the final community most appropriate for the environment comes into being, one that cannot be replaced by other plant types. In regions with sufficient precipitation and soil, the final community is a forest.”3
Theoretically, this final community of plants, known as the climax community, is not easily superseded. Big trees that are considered climax species in their respective environments live for hundreds or thousands of years, forming canopies that shade the interior of the forest, keeping it cool and moist. Climax species shade out pioneer species and dominate the forest.
“In the absence of major environmental change, the climax is normally the strongest form of biological society and is stable in the sense that its dynamic changes are constrained within limits,” Miyawaki wrote.4 Partly on account of the microclimate they create, such ecosystems tend to be more resistant to external conditions, such as heat or drought.
What might climax vegetation look like? There are generally a few different climax communities in a given landscape. Cottonwoods and willows might grow in a river valley while pines and firs populate the nearby mountain flanks. In flatter regions with moderately moist soils, the potential natural vegetation is evergreen or deciduous hardwood species such as laurel, oak, maple, or beech. Miyawaki forests have typically been planted in conditions like this. Not all of Earth’s biomes, on the other hand, are dense forest. Places like natural grasslands, desert scrub, and sand dunes, for example, have their own ecological value and should generally not be replaced by forest—Miyawaki Method or otherwise—except perhaps along their riparian corridors.
Making a Mini-Forest: The Basics
Rejuvenating the soil is one of the basics of creating a mini-forest on a degraded site. In fact, it’s the critical first step—the goal is to simulate the living soil of a healthy, mature forest. This happens naturally during the stages of ecological succession, but because the Miyawaki Method skips immediately to the climax stage, some preparation is required to compensate. In the absence of a loose soil with plenty of organic matter, trees will struggle to grow properly. In a Miyawaki forest project, the soil is typically recharged by decompacting and amending the site with organic materials.
Planting density is another signature of the Miyawaki Method. Conventional wisdom says that plants compete for light, water, and soil nutrients; therefore, plants should have lots of space between them to reduce that competition. But it’s not how a Miyawaki forest works. For a Miyawaki forest, the standard planting density is three plants per square meter. This density helps achieve the goal of ecosystem regeneration. After all, in a natural forest, plants are not evenly and widely spaced. Dense planting stimulates mutualistic and competitive interactions among the plants and facilitates connections with soil microorganisms. It also promotes virtuous competition for sunlight, hastening upward growth.
Mulching is a critical component of the Miyawaki Method. After planting, the ground is covered with a thick mulch similar to fallen leaves on a forest floor. Indeed, once the young trees have had a chance to mature, they will contribute leaf mulch to the forest floor naturally. Mulch protects the bare soil from water loss by evaporation, from erosion, and from temperature extremes. Mulch also suppresses weed growth and eventually decomposes into the soil, enriching it.
As they become established over the first few years, the plantings typically need occasional watering and weeding, but after three years the young forest patches are developed enough to shade out weeds and shelter the soil. They are then generally self-sufficient and need no maintenance of any sort—no pruning, no watering, no fertilizing, no pest control—ever.
Author Bio:
Hannah Lewis is the editor of Compendium of Scientific and Practical Findings Supporting Eco-Restoration to Address Global Warming, published by Biodiversity for a Livable Climate (BLC), a nonprofit environmental organization based in Cambridge, MA. She has worked in various roles related to building a sustainable food system, including as the Midwest regional director for the National Center for Appropriate Technology. She is the author of Mini-Forest Revolution (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2022).
Toby Hemenway was a permaculture author and design teacher who passed away in 2016. His intelligence and ability to synthesize and express the ethos as well as the practical skills of Permaculture are brilliantly on display in his book Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, one of the best-selling permaculture book of all time and an essential operating manual for the beginner as well as the seasoned practitioner. This is an edited excerpt from a presentation Toby gave at a Bioneers conference.
It’s interesting that humans, being tool-using, thinking animals, have only recently, at least in our culture, been thinking about what design really is. How do you design things in an intelligent way? Where’s the instruction book for good design? To answer that question, more and more people are turning to nature for those instructions and trying to preserve the parts of nature that are still intact so that we can learn from them.
I did environmental work for a while but found it depressing to be constantly in reaction to the destructive forces, but when I learned about permaculture, I was encouraged by its proactive design principles.
Permaculture was started by Bill Mollison, a wild Australian, who had worked at a variety of jobs: ecologist, trapper, instructor at a girls’ school, etc. While working in forestry in Tasmania in the 1950s he observed the ecosystem around him and was struck by the question: “Why can’t humans design environments that are as resilient, as productive, and as stable as those in nature.” He spent the next 20 years working with a student of his named David Holmgren to extract the principles from nature that generate fertility, resilience and long-term ecological health.
If you go into a forest and observe how it’s working and return three months later, even after a drought, that forest will still be in good shape. But if you go on vacation for three months and come back to your yard or garden, it’s a whole different story. Everything’s dead or overgrown. What is it that nature, left to its own devices, does right?
Often in modern society, when something is built, there is a net loss to the environment. It usually winds up creating a lot of pollution, waste and energy use. There’s got to be a better way. In permaculture when we’re building something, one of the first things we do is ask questions. What are the things we’re trying to achieve? What are the big objectives? When humans go into cities or anywhere else to live, what do we need to look at? And what are the main effects and problems of the project?
The things that we usually look at as problems are: excessive energy consumption and water use, and the production of waste. When humans build structures, they often build impermeable surfaces around them. As a result, rainwater does not percolate into the ground the way it should, and on the north side of buildings, at least in the northern hemisphere, it’s hard to grow anything because of the shade. These are some of the things that could be considered problems, but in permaculture, we like to think of the problem as containing the seeds of its own solution. The mantra is “The problem is the solution.”
When you put up a building, you’ve got a big roof area that can collect water and you can also put solar panels on it. That way, the building, instead of just using energy and water, can also supply some of its own resources.
Most of us are packrats. We’re always bringing things on site. The idea is to try to reuse materials rather than using them in a linear cycle in which things are thrown away when you’re done with them. Organic “waste” can be made into compost. Discarded items can be reused to build graywater systems to harvest wastewater for a second use. The nutrients in the waste water, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, are good for the garden.
The south side of a building is warmer than the other sides and is going to collect heat. Observe where the shady areas, the areas protected from the wind, the drier areas and the wetter areas are. Around the structure, there will be a number of microclimates; how can we use them appropriately? Drought-tolerant plants can be placed in the dry areas. Bog plants are the obvious solution for wet parts of your yard, etc.
Ecotones are areas where two biological communities or ecosystems meet. Interesting things happen in these edges. Where a forest meets a prairie, for example, there will be forest species and prairie species, but also species that are unique to that edge environment. Edges are the places of maximum diversity. Human beings unintentionally create a lot of edge. Deer like the open forest edge. If you look at suburbs, there are often large deer populations because deer love those divided up edges typical of suburbs. Edges are places where things are translated and accumulate. If you put up a fence, things that blow up against it can be harvested and used.
In suburban communities, the plant diversity can be astounding, as people bring in their favorite plants from all over. Sure, you’ll find some sterile places in the suburbs that just have rhododendrons, but often, if you walk around in a suburban neighborhood noticing plants, you’re probably going to see greater plant biodiversity than there was in the original, natural ecosystem. It’s not true everywhere, but people bring in hundreds if not thousands of plant species into the places humans inhabit. People do create biodiversity, though I’m not making a value judgement about whether those non-native plants are good or bad. But it does imply that humans, with the right approach, can become stewards and can be a net asset to a place rather than the usual liability.
Another concept in permaculture is the idea of zones or relative location. It’s about putting things in the right place. Think about the specific needs of plants and how often you need to take care of them, and then put them in the location that’s most appropriate. Plants that you use the most or that need the most care go closest to the house. It’s rather simple, but often people don’t think about those things. You don’t want to put plants that need a lot of water far away so you have to drag a hose to them, that would be a better place for desert or drought tolerant plants.
Larry Santoyo, Toby Hemenway, Arty Mangan and Brahm Ahmadi at a Bioneers permaculture field day in 2004
Mary Zeemak lives in Los Alamos, NM, at 7,000 feet in the high desert that gets only 14 to 16 inches of rainfall a year. It’s a really severe regime. It gets bitterly cold in the winter, and in spring and fall the temperature swings can be enormous from day to night. And in the summer, it gets very hot. It’s a harsh environment to be gardening in, and the main concern there is water conservation.
Her water supply comes from some deep wells that the Army Corps of Engineers drilled, and it’s expensive: you can spend $300 a month watering your yard if you have a conventional lawn. Mary took a permaculture course from the brilliant designer Ben Haggard and has installed a permaculture garden on her property. She has eliminated the need to use municipal water for the most part in her yard. She waters about every three months, and this in an area with only 16 inches of annual rain!
How does she do it? She uses a set of strategies, one of which is to contour the land to hold water. She dug depressions or swales next to her sidewalk. You can think of it as a long, skinny, pond. It’s just a few inches deep and of couple feet wide, big enough to capture all the runoff water from the sidewalk and infiltrate into the soil. She contoured the land so it will hold water and deliver it to where she wants it. The downspouts from the house are directed into other little swales that take the water to the plants that need it.
Swales are a fantastic way of infiltrating water into the soil. Once the water is in the soil, it slowly migrates downhill from your swale. The underground water is held together by hydrostatic tension. It’s like a little underground lake, and all the plants below your swale stay green longer into the dry season.
Her neighbor uses a typical overhead sprinkler that goes on late at night, so Mary dug a little swale right around the edge of her yard to capture the overspray. She’s not stealing the water; she’s just making the best use of this resource.
The permaculture principle that Mary employed is that each important function should be served by multiple elements. It basically means that you should build in redundancy. You should have fail-safes and back-ups. Nature never does an important thing with just one method. Nature always has multiple back-up systems or redundancies in place. Water conservation is an important function, so you want several different strategies to accomplish that. Mary has five water conservation strategies.
As I mentioned, the first strategy is contouring the land to hold water. The second one is increasing the organic matter in the soil. Mary had a conventional lawn that she sheet-composted. She added lots of organic matter because it holds water in the soil.
The third strategy is to mulch everywhere. One of the hallmarks of a permaculture landscape is a big mulch pile next to the house with mulch on everything. Mulch protects the soil from drying out. It keeps the roots of plants cooler so they’re not transpiring as much water. It’s a great way to conserve water.
People ask me, “Don’t you have a terrible slug problem with mulch?” I’ve found that I have fewer slugs in my yard with mulching because it’s also great slug predator habitat. Garter snakes like slugs. There’s a predacious beetle that really likes slugs. There are a lot of insects that occur in the mulch, so birds come in and start picking through it and they find the slugs and pull them out of it. If you don’t have mulch, you only have slugs, but if you have mulch, you’ve got slug predators that bring down the slug populations.
The next strategy is to have dense plantings so sunlight doesn’t fall in between the plants. Dense plantings shade the soil and reduce evaporation. Mary planted 1300 plants in her one-third-acre yard, and most of them have survived.
The next strategy is to put plants in the right place. The hard and fast rule for water conservation is to use only drought tolerant plants, but each situation is different. Consider what is appropriate for a specific spot. In the places that have water– near downspouts, or near water faucets or water collection tanks – are where you should put plants that need the most water. Out by the street is where the native and drought-adapted plants should go.
The five strategies – contouring, building soil organic matter, dense plantings, mulch, and the right plants in the right places – all work together in support of water conservation. In that way, if one of the strategies fails, for example if during a windstorm all the mulch blows away, those other strategies still conserve water. Mary is able to go away for three months in between waterings, even with very little rainfall.
The other benefit of multiple strategies that support an important function is that synergies can occur. When we build up organic matter to hold water, we’re also building the fertility in the soil. When we add mulch to the soil, it breaks down and also creates additional fertility. Serving important functions, such as water conservation, with multiple elements that have several advantages is how nature works.
There are other permaculture principles that use nature as their model. Diversity is one of them. Mary’s yard is full of tremendous diversity: Echinacea, a peach tree, Joe Pye weed, lots of salad greens and edibles. She lives on a north facing slope, which is a gardener’s nightmare. It’s dry and shady, but she’s managed to grow a tremendously productive garden with lot of biodiversity.
Mary raised a family with her husband and they had a four-car driveway. There was lots of concrete that they wanted to get rid of and turn the space into a productive growing area, so they had most of the concrete driveway dug up. The permaculture designer that they worked with said, “You know we have to keep all this concrete. You have to be as responsible onsite for our own waste as you can be.” He proposed that they make terraces out of it. “Urbanite” is what permaculturists call broken-up concrete. It’s a rich mineral resource in cities.
But Mary wasn’t really wild about the idea of broken concrete chunks in her yard; it didn’t fit with the upper middle-class image of the area, but the designer did a demonstration bed that she absolutely loved. The terraces are now completely overgrown with plants. You can’t even tell that it’s concrete. She loved it so much that after they used all their own concrete, they went to the dump and gathered another 40 tons of concrete and brought it back and re-did the whole yard in “urbanite” terraces.
Down from her backyard is a ravine full of piñon pine and juniper trees; she’s gardened part of the way down but left the rest as a wilderness area. This is where the native birds, insects and plants are. Mary can go down there and observe and learn from them and bring those teachings back into her yard.
Up from the ravine the soil is not very good. Instead of importing a lot of materials to build soil and working only on that one task, she has constructed a straw-bale greenhouse. The inside is hollow. You put hoops and greenhouse plastic over the straw-bales and put your plants inside. After two or three years, the straw-bales mulch down and you have a foot of beautiful soil without having to do the work of building the soil. You just let the natural organisms do the work for you. While you are using the greenhouse, you’re also building soil. Then you bring in new strawbales and build another greenhouse in another place.
Mary and her family like to entertain, so she needed a little social space in the backyard. They have a little patio and a small lawn, the only lawn on the property. They planted buffalo grass, which is drought-tolerant and grows very slowly. You hardly need to water or mow it, so it’s much less resource-intensive than Kentucky bluegrass and other common lawn grasses. The lawn area is dished in the middle, shaped to hold water. It’s about four inches lower in the center than it is on the edges, so when it rains, the water pools there and soaks into the soil and it doesn’t run off.
In the past, fires in Los Alamos have run through the ravines. In addition to being a social space, the lawn area is also a fire break. It’s a big enough opening so, in any but the most catastrophic fires, it’s probably going to stop fire from coming from that arroyo to her house.
The principle that this illustrates, which is the converse of the earlier principle that every important function is served by multiple elements, is that every element should serve multiple functions. Everything you have in your design should be doing more than one thing. In this case the social space is also a fire break and also captures water.
When conventional landscape designers plant a tree, they usually think of it in terms of creating shade in one spot, or providing fruit, or having pretty pink blossoms in the spring. They think in terms of one function for that tree. But a tree in nature is creating shade, food and beauty all at the same time. Its leaves are picking up pollen and dust from the air. It’s harvesting rainwater. It’s breaking up soil with its roots. It’s adding organic matter. The list of its functions goes on and on. It’s doing many things at once.
Intelligent, creative designers make sure that elements in their designs serve at least two and preferably three or four functions. Doing that connects your landscape together. If you have plants that provide habitat, then you’re connecting to the birds and the insects. If you have a downspout connected to a little pond or to an irrigation system, you have connected your structure to your gardens. Connecting pieces together is “whole-systems” landscaping.
Using these permaculture principles (as well as others) to develop intelligent design you can take care of some of your own needs and reduce your ecological footprint while you generate habitat, conserve water, conserve energy, grow food, and have a beautiful place.
Mark Shepard is an iconoclastic farmer and author of a number of books on regenerative agriculture. He runs New Forest Farm, a 106-acre “perennial agricultural savannah.” The farm is a planned conversion from a typical row-crop and grain operation into a commercial-scale, perennial agricultural ecosystem using oak savannah and successional eastern woodland brush-land as its ecological models. New Forest is entirely solar and wind-powered, and its farm equipment is driven by locally produced biofuels.
Bioneers’ Arty Mangan spoke to Mark about his unique farming philosophy.
ARTY MANGAN: Historically, farming has radically changed the natural environment – clearing forests or plowing prairies – and has often been antagonistic to nature and destructive to ecosystems. How can ecosystem succession be used as a guide for designing productive farms in a way that heals land that has been abused?
MARK SHEPARD: When you start with an ecologically disturbed site, you need to first work to increase the species diversity there, and the thickness, depth and fertility of the soil, until it hits a middle phase, which is when you achieve 30 to 60% canopy cover, which is the savannah phase. If it’s in a brittle environment where there are too many tree species too close together, they will compete for all the surface moisture, and they’ll suck it dry, and it will go into a system collapse, and will diverge into a scrub chaparral landscape – welcome to California. If there’s enough humidity, it will evolve into a closed canopy forest in which you lose much of the green understory, and it ends up like Pacific Northwest.
The highest photosynthetic flux (how much light actually penetrates to the crops) happens in the savannah phase. There’s more total biomass in an old growth redwood forest, but there’s not as much photosynthetic flux. If we want to keep the ecosystem in that middle, savannah phase, as I do, we have to manage our light and water levels carefully, or big wide-spreading, sprawling oaks, will start to shade out the ground and all the grass will die underneath.
So, the trees need to be pruned regularly. The result is that we get valuable saw timber and we let more light come through. Then, as we get to a point at which the grass gets shaded out and we start to lose it, it’s time to move trees. At that stage, we’ve created a resource base: a timber industry where there wasn’t one before.
If we don’t harvest the trees, the system goes to the “canopy closure” phase and we lose grass, which means we’re going to have fewer beef cows, which are part of my income. I want to make sure I’ve got 100% grass on my 110 acres, so I’ve got to remove material. I go through with a chainsaw and cut the excess trees into mushroom logs and firewood. The smaller material I lay down on the path and chip.
But the timing when I chip has to be strategic. Chestnuts in Wisconsin, for example, will ripen between the middle of September and middle of October. Around August, I put chips down in close contact to the ground and put mushroom spawn on them. The timing is important to make sure that the chips break down and provide a fertilizer release right when the tree needs to ripen the chestnut crop. We time the litter deposition phase of chipped branches with the nutrient needs of the trees.
I strive to have as few entries into a particular plot as possible. I only enter to harvest something: hay or mushrooms or cut flowers or firewood.
ARTY: When you harvest material, you’re removing carbon and other nutrients. What’s the replacement regime for the nutrients embedded in the material that you harvest?
MARK: It’s an act of healthy biological soil life. The fungi help dissolve the bedrock. That’s where the minerals are coming from, and the Sun provides energy for the whole system. The solar energy is stored in the carbon that then decays, and the decay cycle in turn helps mineralize the soil. The more amped up your decay cycle is, the faster the bedrock will release minerals What we’re doing is slowly, biologically dissolving the Earth’s crust, but we’ve got a lot of crust to go before we hit the bottom.
ARTY: But geological time doesn’t necessarily coincide with agricultural timelines and the needs of production.
MARK: If you plant a polyculture, you can get an immediate cash flow. If a farmer has grass and cows, he can plant raspberries and blackberries next year. The year after that, currants and grapes. It ends up being additive. The big problem is he’s got to add enough of those to make it economically worthwhile.
The secret is that you don’t treat a polyculture system the same way you would growing one crop. Polycultures are more of a natural system. You have to take more of a minimal approach to each crop. If you are moving a fence and a branch from a nut or fruit tree hits you, just cut it with the pruners and throw it down. Minimize your labor input.
ARTY: You take a systems approach to farming but have unexpected changes in land and climate conditions ever forced you to change your plans?
MARK: That’s something I’m learning about as I go. I’ve only been doing this on this particular property in Wisconsin for 20 years. I’m new at managing an ecosystem this way.
A typical American life in 2022 might include spending 50 hours a week mostly alone in a cubicle, riddled with chronic stress but on track for a promotion. Evenings pass isolated in a tower, where a doorman ensures strangers and even neighbors are kept at bay. You swipe down into the bowels of Instagram until you fall asleep. Something on Netflix plays in the background, but only so you don’t have to listen to your own thoughts.
Typical, perhaps. But none of that should be accepted as natural, argues Dr. Gabor Maté in his new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Our cardiovascular systems were not built for the stress of a Wall Street job and single decisions that move billions. Humans evolved as collective hunter-gatherers who cohabitate, not hyper–individualized competitors locked away in steel skyscrapers. And the psyche was not designed to handle a single entire life and all its inevitable blemishes compared with billions of people’s photoshopped images cherry-picked to share only their happiest milliseconds.
Moreover, all of that roughly describes what many consider “success” and says nothing about poverty, racism, or sexism—three cancers of the modern Western world with serious health impacts that are thoroughly documented but seldom discussed. For example, the average life span of people living in areas of Chicago that are just a few miles apart can differ by close to 30 years.
The Myth of Normal—written with the help of Maté’s son, Daniel—prescribes a more authentic self that breaks free of the world’s expectations of us, offers a path to happiness, and also promises to alleviate physical ailments, because, as Maté reminds us, the mind and body are not separate.
The former physician, now approaching 80, has spent decades exploring these connections, first in his 1999 book Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder; next in 2003’s When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress; and then in 2008’s seminal work on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. This most recent book, The Myth of Normal, is the culmination of a life’s work. It is also presented at a time when our culture has never needed it more.
“Acquired personality traits such as excessive identification with socially imposed duty, role and responsibility at the expense of one’s own needs can jeopardize health,” Maté writes in the book. “This and other conditioned characteristics are the result of a child’s developmental needs being denied, of Nature being thwarted. Culture cements them through reinforcement and reward, encouraging people to perform tasks even if chronically stressful, under circumstances they might naturally want to avoid.
“My own workaholism as a physician earned me much respect, gratitude, remuneration, and status in the world, even as it undermined my mental health and my family’s emotional balance,” he continues. “And why was I a workaholic? Because, stemming from my early experiences, I needed to be needed, wanted, and admired as a substitute for love. I never consciously decided to be driven that way, and yet it ‘worked’ all too well for me in the social and professional realms.”
Dr. Gabor Maté recently spoke with me about his new book, how forgotten traumas and misfired defense mechanisms shape us as adults, and the health implications of unrestrained capitalism.
TRAVIS LUPICK: The title of the book is The Myth of Normal. What are some things that we accept as “normal” that we should not?
GABOR MATÉ: There are many conditions in a society that are completely unnatural and unhealthy. But we mistake normal for healthy and natural. The way we live, the way we raise kids, the way we deliver babies, the way we go to work—we all assume them to be normal, and therefore natural and healthy. But it’s a bit like studying zebras in a zoo. You can study zebras in a zoo and learn things about them. But you’re not learning about them the way they naturally are in a context that is naturally healthy for them. It is the same with human beings. To assume that this society, because it’s the norm, is therefore natural and healthy, is a really false and dangerous assumption. That’s the one sense in which I am talking about the myth of normal.
The other is that we have this idea that those who are sick are abnormal, and the rest of us are normal. Whereas I think there’s a real spectrum of well-being and ill-being that runs through society. There are no clear lines between normal and abnormal.
And then the third sense in which I mean it is that the people who are ill—mentally ill or physically ill—they’re not abnormal. These are normal responses to abnormal circumstances.
What are the abnormal circumstances that we accept as normal?
We know, for example, that stress in pregnant women has a huge impact on the biological and emotional development of the child. Yet a lot of women, when they’re pregnant, are under terrible stress, in terms of work and their personal lives, and physicians are not even asking them questions about what it is that is stressing them in their life. Then there is child-rearing. Parents get all kinds of advice on child-rearing, like sleep training babies, learning not to pick them up at night, or making them sit by themselves if they are angry, putting them in timeout. These are considered normal practices, and yet they completely undermine healthy human development. And then schooling. I could talk about every aspect and developmental experience, and point out that, from the point of view of human needs, it’s not normal. Yet they are considered norms, in this culture.
The book serves as an urgent criticism of modern life. What are we doing wrong?
The biggest thing that we do wrong is that we are meant to be connected to our gut feelings and are meant to be true to ourselves. But just like in Brave New World, people are designed to want what society wants from them; not what is good for them. In this society, we create expectations for people that they should not be authentic to themselves, but rather, that they should fit into society. To be suppressing their own needs for the sake of being accepted. To be attractive rather than valuing themselves for who they really are. To conform rather than to really know what their own minds are. And for women, particularly, to suppress their emotions for the sake of meeting the emotional needs of their environment. That people should take on jobs that have no meaning or purpose for them. Their only recourse to make a living, though, is to accept employment that is soul-destroying for them, in many ways. To accept cultural icons that are completely manufactured personalities—that are manufactured in terms of their looks and in terms of their personas—and yet are our heroes. Totally inauthentic ways of being are modeled for us. I’m supposed to care about which Hollywood celebrity sleeps with who, as if this really mattered. And the papers are full of this kind of information. But the things that really matter, we don’t talk about.
It’s evident that this book is the culmination of ideas you explore in your previous books and have been wrestling with for a very long time. Talk about your central thesis and the journey that brought you here.
What has interested me, as a physician, is what promotes human health and what undermines it. And what I find is that the more people are divorced from their true selves—whether it be for personal, traumatic, or cultural reasons—the more illness they’re going to have. For me, it’s a journey of health. There is, for example, the way we live in isolated apartments. In the last several decades, there’s been, throughout the Western world, a documented and highly pernicious rise in loneliness. Loneliness is as bad for health as smoking, according to many studies. And in the United States, twice as many people say they’re lonely as did 20 years ago. So as a physician, I’m concerned with, what are the factors in society that promote behaviors or situations that undermine health? Loneliness is one of them.
The trajectory of my work has been to look at mental health conditions like ADHD—such as I’m diagnosed with [and wrote about in Scattered Minds]—the connection between physical stress, emotional stress, and illness—as I did in When the Body Says No—and the traumatic basis of addiction [covered in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts]. In this book, I just broadened the lens to look at the whole culture, and say, what are the social, economic, and political factors that are driving all this? And what are their impacts on human health? How can we live a healthy life, even in the face of all this stress that this society puts us under?
How is the body connected to the mind? How is what we put our minds through and how we treat ourselves affecting the health of our physical bodies?
Even the word “connection” is inaccurate, because it implies that two separate things are connected. The mind and body are not the same, but they are one unit. You can’t have one without the other. There are studies that show, for example, the more episodes of racism Black American women experience, the greater their risk for asthma. The stress of racism actually inflames the lungs and makes the airways narrow. Children with parents who are stressed are much more likely to have asthma. The emotional states of the parents are affecting the physiology of the child. Why? Because both racism and stress in parents are highly stressful to the individual organism emotionally, and those emotions translate into physiology, as they can’t help but do, because the mind and body are inseparable.
What’s frustrating here is that this science has been documented voluminously, over decades now. It’s not controversial, scientifically, but it’s not even talked about in medical schools. For example, a study three years ago in the Journal of Cancer showed that the greater the symptoms of PTSD in a woman, the higher her risk for ovarian cancer. Women with severe PTSD symptoms have double the risk of ovarian cancer. Why? Because emotions are not separable from physiology. Those stressed emotions undermine the immune system, they cause inflammation, they trigger cancerous change, and they depress the body’s defenses. Because the emotional apparatus of the human organism is one part and parcel of the hormone apparatus, of the nervous system, and of the immunological system, the immune system. When something happens in any one of those areas, it affects all the others. There’s no separation of mind and body in real life. And yet it’s a separation that is entrenched in Western medical thinking, contrary to all the evidence.
Lacking healthy coping mechanisms and holistic ways to heal and grow, what are the ways you see people responding to these pressures and so much trauma?
The problem is, when people are hurt in childhood, they have to find ways of coping. Those coping mechanisms are helpful in the short term, but they can create problems in the long term. One coping mechanism for too much stress is for the child to tune out, because the child can’t escape or change the situation. If my mother is stressed, as a 1-year-old, I am stressed. What do I do with it? I scatter my attention. I tune out. Later on, that gets diagnosed as ADHD, as if I had this genetic disease. I don’t have a disease. It’s not genetic. I have a coping mechanism that was helpful at some point, but that is no longer helpful. If your parents can’t handle your emotions—because they’re too stressed, depressed, or too behavior-oriented—and so discourage your expression of strong emotion, then you push down your emotions in order to maintain a relationship with your parents. What’s another word for pushing things down? Depression. We depress our emotions to survive in our environments. Later on, we are diagnosed with the so-called disease called depression. Yet it started off as a coping mechanism.
Addictions are all started off as a coping mechanism. They are attempts to soothe pain. The issue, for me, with addiction, is not, why the addiction? But rather, why the pain? If you look at why there is pain in addicted people—whether they’re addicted to drugs, sex, pornography, or gambling—that pain always originates in childhood. And then the addiction is an attempt to cope with the pain of it, to escape from it, temporarily.
In families where the parents are very needy, where the parents are alcoholics, or where they are emotionally troubled, the child will very often cope by pushing down and repressing their own emotions, in order not to bother the parents. That repression of emotion shows up in the form of autoimmune disease or malignancy later on. This is not idle speculation. It’s pure science. It’s been shown many times. It’s also why women have 80% of autoimmune disease. Because they’re the ones in this society who are most trained to repress their own needs and serve the needs of others. Not surprisingly, in Canada, an Indigenous woman has six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis than that of anybody else. Why? Because they’re the most traumatized and most oppressed segment of the population.
Moving from the individual to the collective, you present capitalism as the backdrop for many of our myths of normal. What needs to change?
Capitalism is the system that we live under, so that’s the system I’m looking at. And for all its economic achievements and scientific breakthroughs—which are very unevenly distributed, with a lot of inequality, which itself is a source of illness—it’s a system that’s based on fundamental assumptions. One is that the profit of the few is for the benefit of the many. That’s not how it is showing up. Also, that people are individualistic and competitive. That’s not our nature as human beings. In fact, from an evolutionary point of view, had we been individualistic and competitive, we never would have evolved. We evolved as communal creatures in close contact with each other, with a lot of mutual support. Now, if you develop a system that’s based on the opposite perspective—because that’s the nature of this system—then you’re running roughshod over human needs. And so to understand what’s happening on an individual level, you really have to look at what’s happening on a macro level. And this trauma shows up, not only in the personalized, but of course in politics and other areas of our culture. So we really have to look at the larger picture, and not just think that illness is somehow an individual aberration. It’s really a manifestation of a system that is a toxic culture.
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