Page 38 – Bioneers

Creating a Home Ecosystem with Permaculture

by Toby Hemenway

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.

Farming Like a Savannah

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.

For a Healthier Society, Ditch the Myth of Normal

This article was originally published in Yes! Magazine and is licensed under Creative Commons.

BY TRAVIS LUPICK

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.

Unpacking the IRA: The Good, The Bad & Everything In Between

Despite all the odds, a major piece of climate legislation finally passed Congress and was signed into law last week by the President. The Inflation Reduction Act is at once the single most significant piece of climate legislation ever passed in this country, opening the gates for a decade-long boom in renewable energy at the exact moment the sector is poised to really take off, while also being an enormous disappointment, enabling and falling victim to the same corrupt and inequitable systems that have pushed us to the brink of disaster in the first place.

Sound complicated? It is. Join us this week as we look into the ups and downs of this historic legislation with some leading voices from around the movement.

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The Inflation Reduction Act: ‘Step One, Not Step Last’ for the Planet

“The whole debate now is a race of rates. The energy transition is inevitable. It’s baked. We’re going to get off fossil fuels this century, let’s say that for certain. Shell will say that. They think it’s 70 years from now, and keep wanting to keep it 70 years from now. I think it’s 10 years from now, or should be, per the science. Probably it’s somewhere between those two poles. This act accelerates the US getting there, and the US is still the largest economy in the world, not on purchase power, but we’re a big fish, an 800-pound gorilla, really important in the world. So it’s a big step, but it’s not the end of the story. It’s just the first step, really.”

In this conversation with Bioneers, groundbreaking activist, entrepreneur and clean tech champion Danny Kennedy discusses why the portions of this new law are a huge step in the right direction, even as it falls short in other ways.

Read here.

Picture of the US Capitol Building — The United States Capitol building at sunset, Washington DC, USA.

How We Got Here: 3 Factors that Led to The Inflation Reduction Act

“This is both the single largest commitment that the United States has ever made towards clean energy and climate change while also extending a commitment to an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that will lock in, at least for some time, the unjust environmental and health burdens that frontline and fence-line communities have been facing for decades. It’s truly infuriating while also being a very hopeful moment. As one of the architects of the original Green New Deal framework, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, described it on Twitter, ‘It’s all very…American.’”

Bioneers’ Teo Grossman unpacks the larger framework that led to the passing of the IRA.

Read here.

Takes on the Inflation Reduction Act from the Bioneers Community

Climate Justice Alliance: The Inflation Reduction Act Is Not a Climate Justice Bill | “After careful study of the language of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Climate Justice Alliance concludes that the harms of the bill as it is currently written outweigh its benefits.”
Indigenous Environmental Network: Manchin-Schumer backdoor deal fast-tracks gutting of environmental policies and protections | “Among the many concerns in this side deal are the threats facing Indigenous Peoples as provisions to weaken two landmark environmental acts, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA), that would fast track extractive developments impacting Tribal land.”
Rocky Mountain Institute: How a new national green bank could steer $27B to clean energy projects | The Inflation Reduction Act’s seed funding could spur 10X as much in private-sector lending for community solar, efficiency and more in underserved neighborhoods.
Abigail Dillen, EarthJustice on Twitter: “The IRA affords a last chance to break the fossil fuels stranglehold on our health & human rights, our democracy, our planet. But we won’t make it happen without a movement that is fully resourced to fight fossil extraction & infrastructure while ramping up real solutions… We need to be equally real about the egregious concessions to fossil fuels and the whole universe of new threats we have to fight.”
Center for Food Safety: Statement from the Executive Director of Center for Food Safety on the Inflation Reduction Act | “Unfortunately, among other failings, the IRA does not include coming to terms in any way with the major impacts of industrial agriculture on the climate. The legislation is completely inadequate—and even counter-productive—in its provisions dealing with industrial agriculture.”
National Young Farmers Coalition: From the Young Farmers Policy Desk: A Statement on the Inflation Reduction Act | “While the Inflation Reduction Act is not a perfect bill, and not the bill that we would dream up together, we believe that it is our last, best chance this year to secure critical conservation and energy funding necessary to combat climate change.”

NDN Collective Responds to House Passing Inflation Reduction Act

“While first acknowledging that some pieces of the IRA are truly historic, it is critical to underscore that negotiations took place behind closed doors – it is not the people’s climate bill. A true climate justice bill would aim to mitigate current harm that frontline communities face, while also committing to a full just transition by stopping emissions at the source. Instead, the IRA provides another piecemeal response to the climate crisis by failing to divest from the fossil fuel industry.”

Read here.

Should the US Government Nationalize and Wind Down Fossil Fuel Companies?

The Inflation Reduction Act handed out enormous giveaways to fossil fuel interests including requiring new oil and gas leases to be offered in exchange for wind and solar leases and a side-deal aiming to transform or eliminate permitting regulations for dozens of pipeline projects. The fossil fuel industry has shown itself over and over to be completely irresponsible actors, unable to be trusted to put anything in front of short term corporate annual earnings. What can be done?

Journalist Kate Aronoff presents a provocative approach to hasten the end of the fossil fuel era: a public takeover and managed decline.

Read here.

Spirit in the Air: Reform, Revolution and Regeneration

In 2014, the legendary activist, progressive movement strategist and long-time California State Senator Tom Hayden (1939-2016), gave a poignant, moving and incredibly prescient address as part of a Climate Leadership symposium that Bioneers hosted. In his remarks, Hayden delved into the history of progressive legislation like The New Deal, exploring the movements and drivers that transformed social movements into policy wins. As we grapple with how to respond to the potent-but-flawed Inflation Reduction Act, we recommend revisiting Sen. Hayden’s wisdom and context on the hard work of how movements succeed.

Listen Here.

How We Got Here: 3 Factors that Led to The Inflation Reduction Act

The reality of the impact of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden recently signed into law, will likely not be fully realized for some time as many provisions in the nearly $400 billion bill will take a year or two to move their way through the system towards actual implementation. But what we do know immediately is quite clear – be prepared to hold several contradictory realities in your head at the same time (welcome to the real world). Inexplicably passed with the support of two bought-and-paid-for senators (by the fossil fuel industry and the titans of finance), this is both the single largest commitment that the United States has ever made towards clean energy and climate change while also extending a commitment to an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that will lock in, at least for some time, the unjust environmental and health burdens that frontline and fence-line communities have been facing for decades. It’s truly infuriating while also being a very hopeful moment. As one of the architects of the original Green New Deal framework, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, described it on Twitter, “It’s all very…American.”

I’m not going to try to break down the key pieces of the legislation as many other experts and specialists have already done that (including Bioneers in our latest newsletter where we find a variety of perspectives on the bill, highlighting the real opportunities while acknowledging and challenging the real failures that arrived in tandem). What I find compelling is to try to situate this moment with the larger framework of where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

To begin in the real physical world, 2022 is on track to be the hottest year on record (or, if you prefer, one of the cooler years for the next century). My own home came damn close to burning down in a mid-winter wildfire in Colorado, much of the US has been under an extreme heat warning this summer, Europe is enduring the worst drought in 500 years (topped only by the Colorado River Basin, mired in the worst drought in 12 centuries), large cities in Mexico are literally running out of water, left-behind mining communities in Appalachia have been completely deluged by flooding, and places like Iraq and India have been experiencing extended days of triple-digit heat that test the limits of human biology. Things are not going great, climate-wise. None of this is in any way a surprise, given the decades that we’ve known about the cause, extent, and results of fossil fuel-driven global warming (even #ExxonKnew). What has changed are three things.

First, the impacts of climate change have arrived ahead of “schedule” (or we had our heads too firmly lodged in the sand to see them coming), which has somewhat rapidly taken us directly past the realm of foreboding and straight into the panic room. Each successive IPCC report continues to zero in on the pace and scale of the changing climate, refining and clarifying what we’ve known for some time: We’re not ready for what’s coming, it’s going to be really hard, and it’s going to get here quicker than we care to admit.

Secondly, clean energy solutions of all stripes have become more sophisticated technologically and exponentially cheaper to manufacture and install. Even accounting for inflation and cost increases globally, “new onshore wind and solar projects cost roughly 40% less than coal or gas plants built from scratch—and the gap is widening,” according to a Bloomberg report from this summer. Why? Unlike fossil fuels, which have cost curves driven by scarcity, clean energy technologies like solar and wind and batteries benefit from very robust technology learning curves, enabling each successive manufacturing generation to become cheaper and more efficient. The plummeting price point of clean energy has also led to a boom in adoption. Even during the pandemic, when global energy use declined as a whole, demand actually increased for renewables, per the International Energy Agency. Industrial policy in countries like China has had an enormous impact as well, undergirding a tremendous rise in solar manufacturing and installation (and this new bill firmly sets the US on a similar path, as I discussed with Danny Kennedy in a recent conversation).

Third, we need to acknowledge the fundamental impact climate organizing has had on shifting public opinion and policy conversations. The grassroots climate movement that began in earnest in the early 2000s has matured and evolved into a much larger intersectional social movement, leading to the emergence of a variety of entities that have influenced the shape of the conversation, from advocacy and action groups like 350.org and the Sunrise Movement to the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Climate Justice Alliance to new action-oriented policy shops, like Evergreen Action and Data For Progress, along with hundreds of others.

This climate movement has been catalytic in many ways, mobilizing millions and millions of people into the streets with global days of action and marches, leveraging this popular revolt to launch an enormously successful divestment movement that has transferred trillions of dollars of investment portfolios out of fossil fuels (current estimates put the number at $39 trillion). The increasing intersectionality of the movement at large, transforming into a climate justice movement in many ways, has been essential. While global emissions obviously continue to rise, this collective effort has had a substantial influence on the public discourse, providing the pressure and political cover necessary for policy to slowly catch up to reality.

The role that the movement has played in getting us to this moment and, more importantly, getting us to the next moment and the one after that, cannot be understated. In a conversation hosted by Evergreen Action, activist Reverend Lennox Yearwood as well as policymakers Rep. Pramilla Jayapal and Sen. Edward Markey all made a point to tell host Dr. Leah Stokes about the incredibly essential role of activism and the climate movement. “This bill is the result of years of progressive activism and policy proposals on how to tackle climate change,” said Rep. Jayapal, the chair of the Progressive Caucus. “There is nothing that passes congress that isn’t the result of an enormous movement pushing things forward.”

From the perspective of those of us who care about the future of people and life in general on the planet, the takeaway is very clear – we should not and cannot let up the pressure to transform the way that modern humanity lives on this Earth. The Inflation Reduction Act is in no way a panacea. Even the best parts of the act are perhaps best thought of as the type of policy proposals we should have put into action 10-15 years ago. It is simultaneously an enormous step forward while being a glowing reminder of how far we have yet to go. In some ways, this half-in/half-out approach is a natural outcome of the demise of campaign finance reform, the Citizens United decision, and our gerrymandered corporate kleptocracy, a true example of the crumbling democracy we live in.

And yet, here we are, with the best opportunity we have had in decades to make real progress in transforming the economy and energy sector to one that is less harmful to life. There is vastly more work to be done, and it is unlikely to get any easier, particularly with the pace and scale of the challenge facing us, but there is no other option than to continue to push forward. I’m always hesitant to be the guy quoting the famous person to conclude an essay, but in the end, this is about hope as a practice, and the Czech playwright, dissident, and leader Vaclav Havel may have said it best: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

The Inflation Reduction Act: ‘Step One, Not Step Last’ for the Planet

Danny Kennedy is a former Greenpeace and climate activist who became a groundbreaking leader in the international clean energy industry. Currently CEO of New Energy Nexus, a global platform that connects and capitalizes entrepreneurs working to build a clean energy economy, Danny Kennedy has a unique perspective on the clean energy sector and the way that activism and social movements intersect with the technical reality of a clean energy transition. When the Inflation Reduction Act was signed, and it became clear that there was real potential for a transformation in how we power our economy, we reached out to get his analysis on what is in the bill and what the actual impact is likely to be.

Among his many achievements, Kennedy co-founded Sungevity, (the company that created remote solar design), was the first backer of the major solar loan provider, Mosaic, oversees the CalSEED.fund (nurturing early-stage California companies driving innovation) and is board chair of Third Derivative, a joint venture (with RMI) building the world’s largest climate-tech accelerator. He is the author of Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Power Can Save Our Economy – and Our Planet as well as the brand new podcast, Climate of Change (with Cate Blanchett).

Danny Kennedy spoke to Teo Grossman, Senior Director of Programs & Research at Bioneers.

TEO GROSSMAN, BIONEERS: You have a long history in this field and an interesting story for a person in clean tech, beginning as a dyed in the wool activist, becoming an entrepreneur and starting your own company to now leading New Energy Nexus, a collection of clean tech funds and accelerators. From your perspective, how much wind does this put in the sails of the clean energy sector?

DANNY KENNEDY, NEW ENERGY NEXUS: A lot. It’s worth believing at least some of the hype. Obviously during the Trump era this country was trying proactively to have a war on the war on coal, get out of the Paris accords, and God knows what. But even during the various Democrat regimes, it’s been hard to count on the federal government getting behind the energy transition in the way the Germans and the Chinese and others have. But now this is real federal industrial policy. The federal government just committed to clean energy for a decade at a time that’s really ripe. With a sustained set of incentives, a bunch of carrots, which is basically what the Inflation Reduction Act presents, plus the CHIPS Act, plus the infrastructure bill from last year, we now have a decade-long view for building out the clean energy transition that we all know we need.

Previous iterations of these incentives were two and three-year terms, and tax credits were available for limited horizons, so punks like me would try to build solar leasing businesses on the back of an announced solar investment tax credit. But it didn’t last long enough to get the business up to scale and so on. This is now committed until 2032, and even then, if we haven’t met 75% of emissions reductions targets, the tax credit finance will continue at the levels of this act.

There’s a real sense that this is the long-term strategic intent of the nation known as the United States of America, putting down serious coin on this side of the table.

TEO: For people who aren’t intimately familiar with solar finance and renewable energy development, is there a “regular person” version of what the impact is? Why is a 10-year tax credit transformational?

DANNY: Sure. I can try although I’m not an expert on legislative packages, particularly from the federal government, which I’ve studiously ignored for a decade, because I got burnt so often that I decided to stop believing in it and focused on state and local-level work, which is also quite fruitful.

I’ll try to break down the four areas, both consumer facing, for your audience, but also the other behind-the-scenes supply side stuff that matters in this bill.

To explain tax credit finance, the way I think of it as a kind of foreigner here (I was American born but lived outside the country and have built businesses outside the country), is that America likes to pretend we don’t subsidize things, whereas European countries, the Chinese and others will be quite explicit and say, “We’re going to back this business or this industry or whatever with money.” In America, we give tax credits instead. These credits, which allow the owner to forgo future tax payments, are fungible in a marketplace where they can be sold. Financiers or others who have a big tax bill can buy tax credits from an industry that’s been subsidized by the US via laws like the IRA. They buy that dollar’s worth of tax avoidance for 80 or 90 cents on the dollar, whatever the discount is that they negotiate, and then that saves them some money and they make a return effectively, rather than just paying the tax bill. The solar developer or whoever sold the tax credit now has investment capital to work with. Instead of the government giving money directly, it just doesn’t take future funds.

To be fair, this is the way Hollywood gets financed, how low-income housing has been built in many places in the US, and the energy industry has benefited from tax credits, historically, including the solar industry. But what we’re talking about here is tax credits both on the consumer side, ranging from better incentives for community solar – up to 50% of the community solar project in your community neighborhood could be funded by this federal financing – to EV purchases getting a tax write-off from your purchase of a car or even a secondhand car. One of the really creative elements in this bill is $4,000 for used EVs, which means that second hand cars will be cheaper, plus take $4,000 off the top. They’ve become quite accessible theoretically to lower-income folk who aren’t buying EVs yet, and benefiting from the total cost of ownership of the electric vehicles.

The bill also provides manufacturing tax credits, so battery supply chains might be “re-shored,” is the expression, given that currently most batteries are made in Asia, mostly in China. That’s a strategic issue, so the US government is now going to give factories 30% of their cost through tax credit finance, plus allow them to leverage loan guarantee money, which is also written into this bill, which then gets them additional benefits in the debt markets for their project finance. There are a lot of manufacturing tax credits we can talk about in different supply chains connected to the idea that we need to electrify everything. Heat pumps and induction stoves and all these things are prone to these types of tax credit benefits. Hydrogen, which is the fuel replacement we need for the hard-to-abate sectors like steel, and maybe some transport applications, gets significant tax credits.

There are also some dodgy things that I’m not big on, like Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and new nukes and nonsense like that, but that was the political compromise. There are definitely hairs on this, warts and all. It’s necessarily so, and the ‘Manchinian’ candidate was the key character to get this thing done. But there are vast gobs of dollars available for energy star-rated homes and good old things we know we need to make the energy transition real. It’s a big deal.

TEO: You’ve long been tracking the actual market competition of clean power against fossil fuels. Based on the data, clean power is already way more competitive on a cost basis and has been for some number of years. And yet we still have a long way to go to make the full transition we need to make. Short of drastic measures like nationalizing oil companies and taking them out of production, this cost competition between clean energy and dirty energy is likely to be the make-it-or-break-it race for whether we make this transition in time. From where you sit now, how close does this new legislation get us to where we need to be, to get 100% clean energy for 100% of people as you say?

DANNY: A good next lunge toward the try line (that’s a rugby metaphor, probably doesn’t translate to most of your audience) or toward the end zone, but not the last yards by any stretch. Now, forecasts are always wrong, and necessarily so, but all the models, the Rhodium Group and REPEAT scenarios along with a recent Department of Energy analysis, are all saying this gets us to 40% emission reduction by 2030. Biden’s electoral pledge, if you recall, was 50%. So it’s not there, but it’s a good stretch further than we would be on current trajectories.

The whole debate now is a race of rates. The energy transition is inevitable. It’s baked. We’re going to get off fossil fuels this century, let’s say that for certain. Shell will say that. They think it’s 70 years from now, and keep wanting to keep it 70 years from now. I think it’s 10 years from now, or should be, per the science. Probably it’s somewhere between those two poles. This act accelerates the US getting there, and the US is still the largest economy in the world, not on purchase power, but we’re a big fish, an 800-pound gorilla, really important in the world. So it’s a big step, but it’s not the end of the story. It’s just the first step, really.

We’ve now gotten serious, although not serious enough that we’re not still screwing around with the “all of the above energy policy” bullshit. I’m sorry, I start swearing when I start thinking about the fossil fuel side of this. The CCS incentives are just wasting money on prolonging the inevitable. And the idea of requiring oil and gas leases for every wind and solar farm lease on federal lands? What nonsense. That’s just hedging for Manchin again, and at the expense of communities. We have to recognize the work in front of us is to get rid of it; get it done, not try to fix it or tweak it.

There are some other elements in this that we haven’t talked about, beyond the finance piece, like the methane fee, which I don’t think anyone’s fully grappled with, just how far and deep that fee might impact the oil and gas sector. But fundamentally, we still have to accelerate the rates of adoption because meanwhile climate change is accelerating, as we’re all experiencing this summer, and it is literally that race of rates.

The question is whether the “green vortex” (a term which describes the positive feedback loop of innovation and “green” technology) will catch up and beat the greenhouse effects feedback loops that we’re seeing kick in. That’s the question before us. I wouldn’t discount the idea of the green vortex in an economy the size of America. What we’re going to see now is jobs across the rust belt, in red and purple states, in communities that have historically seen clean energy transition as a threat. Now because of this sustained industrial strategy that the United States has embarked upon, it will be seen as an investment opportunity – job creation not job loss. That will give the clean energy transition more social license, will allow more ambitious policy development, maybe getting rid of the compromise crap and moving on to just a very clear strategic industrial policy focused on clean energy. That’s the hope, that the next president picks this up and improves on it.

TEO: Some of the very justified criticism of the bill is that very little has practically changed for communities who have been getting a raw deal for decades as the fossil fuel economy developed on the back of their land and lungs and bodies. There are no mandates to transition away from the types of development these frontline communities have been dealing with and fighting for years. The CCS provisions are a prime example, allowing dirty plants to continue operating so long as they capture the carbon (even if it’s used for additional resource extraction). On the plus side, the bill actually contains some carrots in terms of additional incentives for just transition type projects that take place in communities that were previously home to large-scale fossil fuel projects: refineries, mines, power plants, etc. There are extra bonuses tucked in for developing in those communities.

The question is: How can those actors who are benefiting most from the new infusion of subsidies, this new clean energy boom, support some of the frontline and fenceline communities that are more or less in the same position they were in before this act?

DANNY: I should have said right up top that there is this very clear set of additional incentives to invest in what are being called “energy communities” in this bill. The idea is to broadly link investment to a lot of the frontline environmental justice communities on the fence lines of refineries and coal fields. If you’re in one of those geographies, yes, there are layers of extra incentive.

There’s also fantastic stuff in here around union labor and apprenticeship and the like. To dwell here for a second, as I said before, a community solar project, sub-five megawatts, could maybe get as much as 50% direct pay. But there are lots of conditions on that maybe, including a prevailing wage requirement and 15% of the workforce being apprenticeship. This will be a boon to the trades councils and job training programs and so forth. Then if you’re using domestic content, you can get extra, and if it’s in one of these “energy communities,” you get another 10% extra. Layer all these on top of the base 20-30% tax credit and your project finance booms. That’s an amazing screen across all of this.

At a higher level still, there’s something that I just don’t fully understand, and I don’t think anyone yet has interpreted the full implications of, which is Executive Order 14008, known as Justice40, requiring that 40% of investment in a set of categories including climate change, clean energy, transit, sustainable housing and more, is to flow to disadvantaged communities. Theoretically, all federal programs in these categories, including much of what is in this bill, might be subject to Justice40, meant to benefit communities that have historically been left behind.

To your question, what should people of privilege and those clearly benefiting from this bill do? If you’re a developer reading this interview, think about how you leverage these incentives, partnering with a coal community to build solar farms, tapping the transmission lines that used to run to the retired coal plant. If you’re a customer or an investor, how can you invest in projects that are conforming to these priorities? It’ll probably be to your financial advantage to do that, because of the way this law is written. Again, there may be unintended consequences. This might really be great and empower folks, which is the upside.

To talk about the equity and justice side of this, I feel like the way this was negotiated in basements by two white men, good old-fashioned American politicking at the end of the day, left communities that have always suffered with the short end of the stick. What madness is that, that these communities still have to suffer, and worse still, weren’t consulted at all? One of the backroom deals was to require oil and gas leases to be offered in order to get the solar and wind farm leases going on federal land. Now, my sense is that the oil and gas leases are unlikely to be taken up. They’re not being taken up at a high rate right now anyway because the industry is unsure it should develop upstream and is just trying to make hay with the projects under production now at this high cost of oil and gas. However, it’s terrible that that was even considered without environmental justice voices at the table.

I’m just appalled at the negotiation outcome. If Manchin was saying, okay, for every solar and wind farm that goes in offshore California or onshore federal lands, there must be oil and gas leases, at least there should have been a quid pro quo negotiated, something like, okay, for every oil and gas lease that goes in Alaska or the Louisiana Gulf, there needs to be a wind and solar farm lease offered as well. Just amateur hour outcomes. But whatever. The oil and gas industry in this country has run roughshod over Congress for 100 years, and expect to continue to do so. Hopefully this decade is when we begin to get rid of them once and for all.

TEO: Absolutely. Climate activism hopefully continues to be alive and well and will hold everyone’s feet to the fire.

DANNY: Exactly. My final thought is, like I said, the hype is real. This is a big deal. But don’t rest on laurels. There are no laurels here. This is just what we should have done a decade or two ago, and now we’re trying to do it. Politicians still need to be held to account and make sure this is done right, and even accelerate it. The next president has to do better. This is step one, not step last.

Should the US Government Nationalize and Wind Down Fossil Fuel Companies? – Kate Aronoff

Kate Aronoff, a Brooklyn, NY-based staff writer at The New Republic, and a former Fellow at the Type Media Center whose work has appeared in The Intercept, The New York Times, The Nation, Dissent, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, among other outlets, is the co-editor of We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet–And How We Fight Back.

The following is an edited transcript from a talk delivered at the Bioneers Conference, May 2022. Watch the full talk here.

To start off, I want to consider two data sets from the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The first one says that to have a better than 50% chance of capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, global coal, oil and gas usage will need to decline by 95, 60, and 45% respectively, below 2019 levels. The second says: “Limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius or below will leave a substantial amount of fossil fuels unburned and could strand consider fossil fuel infrastructure. Depending on its availability, carbon capture and storage (“CCS”) could allow fossil fuels to be used longer, reducing stranded assets, but the combined global discounted value of the unburned fossil fuels and stranded fossil fuel infrastructure has been projected to be around 1 to $4 trillion from 2015 to 2050, to limit global warming to approximately 2.5 degrees Celsius. And it will be higher if global warming is limited to approximately 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

How do you solve that potential $4 trillion “stranded asset” problem? Fossil fuel companies would like us to believe that there is no problem, as they argue that there’s no contradiction between keeping warming below 2 or 1.5 degrees Celsius and meeting the ambitious goals of the Paris agreement and their business model, which of course revolves around digging up and burning as many hydrocarbons as possible. They say that they are already putting their billions of dollars to work investing in solutions for a low-carbon tomorrow, such as algae and hydrogen and carbon capture and storage and all this stuff.

Exxon Mobil says it is “advancing climate solutions.” Chevron has a whole website devoted to explaining how it’s working to create a lower carbon future for all. But how do these claims compare with how they’re actually spending their money?

Earlier this year in a report from the UK-based think tank Commonwealth, researchers Joseph Baines and Sandy Hagar found that Exxon Mobil and Chevron devoted 0.16% (that’s not 1.6; it’s 0.16!) and 2% respectively to low-carbon energy last year. European fossil fuel companies are doing a little better, but not much.

A 2019 analysis commissioned by Greenpeace Netherlands analyzed 3,000 ads from six European fossil fuel companies and found that on average 63% of ads and promotion for each company focused on green investments. Half of all the ads focused on wind, solar, hydropower, renewable energy in general, the circular economy, company climate commitments, engagement with climate policy, reducing fossil fuel use, making transportation sustainable, etc. But what are they actually spending their money on? Eighty-one percent of Shell’s advertisements touted their clean energy investments, but 80% of their portfolio is invested in oil and gas.

These companies are not transitioning, despite what all of their advertisements and their lobbying will tell you. Privately held fossil fuel companies are still constantly expanding, finding new places to drill and growing the market for their products. What they’re asking the public and policymakers and regulators to believe is that they will voluntarily embark on one of the most stunning and dramatic transformations in the history of capitalism, tear down the energetic basis of the global economy, build a new one, and in the process leave trillions of dollars’ worth of profits on the table, all in a few years. We should not believe them.

In privately held companies, decisions about how long fossil fuel infrastructure will stay online are mainly made by corporate executives and the main investors in their firms, and both groups are primarily concerned with making as much money in as little time as possible, and that’s very strange in the context of other countries that produce fossil fuels everywhere on Earth. Unlike just about every other major oil producing country on Earth, the United States government has very little direct say over what its fossil fuel industry does.

Our government, instead, hands them land, money, permits – about $20 billion a year in subsidies – to make those decisions, but the reality is that leaving the terms of the energy transition up to companies means it will happen much too slowly or not at all.

Supposedly, some of the more responsible companies have come out with net zero commitments over the last several years, but even these aspirational goals, many of them relying on speculative improvements in technologies, fall far short of the kinds of production declines that are needed. The reality is that we are on track to produce double the amount of fossil fuels by 2050 than is consistent with keeping warming below 1.5 degrees. To meet that target, production would have to decline by 6% every year worldwide for a decade. We are not anywhere close to being on track for that goal.

The net zero goals put out by the fossil fuel companies, especially those in the U.S., only set out to reduce the “emissions intensity” of their own operations. They fail to even account for the emissions that occur when customers buy and burn their products. In the case of Exxon, these so-called “Scope 3” emissions account for 95% of their total emissions, so their net zero commitments don’t include 95% of the emissions that they actually produce.

What about those companies that are starting to transition and are starting to make more authentic commitments around their investments and production goals? Some European-based oil majors are beginning to do this, but how do they achieve these goals? Often, they just sell-off their most polluting and least profitable assets to private equity firms and national oil companies abroad, out of the public eye, escaping, for example, any mandatory emissions requirements now under consideration by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What does this actually look like in practice? In 2019, BP sold off all of its assets in Alaska to a little-known Texas company called Hilcorp for $5.6 billion, a move that padded its own bottom line and its reputation as a climate champion. BP was able to report a drop in emissions of 16% across its operations as a result of this sale, but those emissions didn’t just disappear. They actually rose. Under Hilcorp’s ownership, production of those assets climbed by almost 5% over the year before the sale, even amid a historic drop in energy demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. In emissions terms, it was like putting 108,000 new cars on the road.

Looking at a recent study from the Environmental Defense Fund, The New York Times reported a dramatic spike in flaring of methane at an oil field in Nigeria after Shell, Total and Eni sold off their holdings there. These kinds of transactions are only growing. Over the last five years, the same study from the EDF found that the number of public-to-private transfers exceeded the number of private-to-public transfers by 64%. Twice as many assets were sold from companies with environmental commitments to those without them as the reverse. In the coming years, Exxon Mobile, BP, Shell, Total, Eni, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Equinor, the largest privately owned (i.e., not state-owned) oil companies on Earth, are expected to sell off $111 billion worth of assets to adjust to the energy transition in moves that could look very much like those already undertaken by BP and by Shell.

Members of the financial sector have argued that these shady deals are a reason why they should hold on to their considerable fossil fuel investments. Blackrock has some $260 billion invested in fossil fuels around the world as part of its $10 trillion portfolio of assets, and like other asset managers, such as Vanguard or State Street, they’re a top shareholder in some of the world’s biggest privately owned fossil fuel companies.

In his letter to CEOs this year, Blackrock head Larry Fink said, “Divesting from entire sectors or simply passing carbon-intensive assets from public markets to private markets will not get the world to net zero.” I do not agree with Larry Fink on very many things, but I do think he has a point here. Where he’s wrong, I think, is to say that this is the reason why Blackrock and other companies should continue to pour money into the fossil fuel industry, on the premise that they can engage and that they will convince these companies to leave $4 trillion in climate-killing assets and profits on the table instead of selling them off the highest bidder to make themselves look greener.

Blackrock likes to talk a big game about its climate policy, but it has yet to ask companies to wind down production in line with Paris targets, and it confirmed just this week that it will not be doing that. They’re in the business of making money and aligning fossil fuel production in line with the goals of the Paris agreement would entail them losing money.

So, here’s my pitch: Winding down fossil fuel production is too important a task to leave up to markets. What if in return for the $20 billion in public money the U.S. hands over to US coal, oil and gas companies every year, the public got a return on that investment? What if the government had the same say as any other major investor in the fossil fuel industry, able to weigh in on investment and production decisions and emissions goals? And what if we, through our government, used that to affect an orderly, just, well managed decline of fossil fuel production?

What I’m advocating, to be clear, is that the United States government should bring fossil fuel assets under public ownership.

Throughout our history, this has not been a strange thing to do. Plenty of national priorities have been considered too important to leave up to markets. In response to Black Monday in 1929, the government nationalized several functions of the banking sector, and it created such institutions as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Fannie Mae, and the Export Import Bank. The Tennessee Valley Authority, created to provide power and jobs to hard-hit mountain regions in the southeast, was formed in part by nationalizing the Tennessee Electric Power Company over the protest of its executives. In 1943, Congress passed the War Labor Disputes Act, which let the government nationalize any facilities that might be needed in the war effort. FDR would use that authority on coal mining and oil drilling operations, as well as railroads, department store chains, and even the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign eyeglass, champagne and beer companies, among several others.

The government had plenty of carrots, of course, to encourage companies to meet wartime demands, such as rich federal contracts and government-built factories that companies could lease for a dollar, so usually a federal takeover was a last-ditch effort, in many cases a means to resolve labor disputes, but it was used, and used pretty often as a stick to encourage companies to comply with federal orders.

A lawyer in the office of the Assistant Secretary of War said, “The government was taking over approximately one plant a week in the lead-up to V-J Day.” In one case, a lumber heir and Montgomery Ward chief executive refused orders from the War Production Board to let his employees unionize, so soldiers came in and carried him out on a chair and took over the company.

What would it look like to do this for the climate? To start phasing out fossil fuel production, the Democracy Collaborative’s Carla Skandier has suggested a “51% solution” to the climate crisis. In this scenario, the government would use quantitative easing to take a majority stake in privately owned fossil fuel firms, winding down production along a science-based timeline, giving workers a dignified offramp into other well-paid work, all the while muting the industry’s enormous influence over our political system. Rather than selling polluting assets off the highest bidder, they could be properly retired and shut down for good.

Public ownership could also happen the next time the industry asked for a bailout, as it did in 2020. Instead of giving up the decision-making power that such a big share purchase would entitle us taxpayers to, as in 2008 when the government took over major auto makers, policymakers could use the government’s new equity stakes to begin a managed decline of fossil fuels and guarantee full pensions and wage parity to workers. Any federal support the U.S. gave to the industry would come with commensurate ownership stakes to be managed in accordance with federal climate policies.

The world is on fire. We don’t have the time to sit around hoping these companies will suddenly see the light and do their part. With its enormous wealth and outsized responsibility for the climate crisis, the United States should be transitioning faster than any other country on Earth off of fossil fuels. And it’s easier for us than almost anyone else. That $4 trillion problem I talked about at the beginning is just much less of a problem for the United States than it is for many other fossil-fuel-producing countries.

The United States is the world’s largest oil producer and net exporter, but oil accounts for only 2% of U.S. GDP. Even in the oil and gas heartland of Texas, fossil fuels just bring in 8% of tax revenue. Compare that to other major oil producers, many of them in very climate vulnerable countries. In Iraq, a country the United States has spent most of my life working to destroy with brutal sanctions and illegal wars, oil revenues represent one-third of GDP and 89% of government revenue.

Carbon Trackers found that maintaining a 50% chance of capping warming at 1.65 degrees Celsius and phasing out fossil fuels accordingly could cut worldwide oil and gas revenue in half over the next two decades, leaving a $13 trillion hole in public budgets before 2050. A $4 trillion problem in stranded assets for the oil industry is a $13 trillion problem in revenue loss for many of the poorest and most climate vulnerable countries on Earth.

The reality is that the world is going to need to continue to burn fossil fuels. I don’t like it, but that is the case, even if we transition as rapidly as humanly possible off of them. Among the biggest fights of this century will be how the revenue from burning that carbon gets distributed. Countries that have contributed the least to this crisis and are worst hit by it should collect more of that revenue. And there is absolutely no reason for that money to continue to flow to U.S. billionaires who have already set the planet on fire and delayed climate action for decades.

And right now, that’s exactly what’s happening. Fossil fuel executives and governments in the United States and Europe are taking advantage of a brutal war in Ukraine and high fuel prices to fast-track new fossil fuel infrastructure that will stay online for decades to come, eating up still more space in a dwindling climate budget and adding to the stock of assets that need to be rendered worthless to maintain any hope for a salvageable future.

I won’t pretend that our Congress is on the verge of agreeing to nationalize one of the nation’s most politically influential sectors, but it doesn’t only need to be up to us. Just to cite an example: There’s a company called Diversified Energy, based in Alabama, but listed on the London Stock Exchange, which is the largest owner of oil and gas wells in the United States. They have 70,000 wells and 17,000 miles of pipelines. As of earlier this week, market capitalization of Diversified on the London Stock Exchange was one billion British pounds, or about $1.2 billion. As a government that says it’s committed to net zero, the UK government could gain a majority stake in the United States’ largest owner of oil and gas wells and shut it down for the low, low price of $600 million. I know that isn’t going to happen, but the point is it wouldn’t take that much strategically leveraged financial pressure to start seriously disrupting the fossil fuel industry.

The bottom line is that the public desperately needs a say in how fast this transition happens and who benefits from it. Some progress can be made, but no genuinely adequate climate policy is in the immediate realm of political possibility, and there should be much, much bigger ideas and more powerful tools floating around when that opportunity arises again. So, to conclude, is responsible fossil fuel production possible? Yes, but only if public ownership is an option.

Bioneers Must Watch Staff Pick – The Territory

The Territory is a heartbreaking and powerful testament to what can be achieved when people come together across cultural divides to protect the planet. Co-produced by a settler-descendant American and members of the Uru-eu-wau-wau community, the Territory immerses viewers into the rampant destruction of the Amazon rainforest from the eyes of its original Indigenous caretakers. The Territory opens in theaters today, and you can learn more about it here.

Filmed over several years, the Territory chronicles “invaders,” non-Indigenous Brazilian farmers who illegally steal land from the Uru-eu-wau-wau tribe’s sovereign, 7,000 square mile territory supposedly under the protection of the Brazilian government. Wide scale drone shots show the community’s village and surrounding rainforest as an island in the middle of a burning and deforested Amazon. We meet Uru-eu-wau-wau forest protectors, their activist allies, as well as the farmers alike through the intimacies of their daily lives and conversations. When the COVID pandemic reached this part of Brazil, the tribe decided to shut off access to their territory entirely and formed their own task force and media team to get their story out to the world. What they captured is the crescendo of the story. I was amazed and thrilled that despite corrupt government officials and ever encroaching land poachers, that community members were able to get their story out, forcing recognition and change. I can’t tell you what happened, and I strongly encourage you to watch this film to find out for yourself.

What was once forest is now a charred landscape, as settlers push into protected areas of the Amazon rainforest. (Credit: Alex Pritz/Amazon Land Documentary)

In addition to the incredible cinematography, music and sound that drew me in, the Territory does a brilliant job with Indigenous representation. In parts of the film, we see the world from the Uru-eu-wau-wau. In other parts of the film, such as interviews with the farmers and activists, we still come to understand what it feels like to be dehumanized as Native peoples, whose land and resources are up for grabs, despite having sovereignty over it. The film effectively addresses stereotypes that Indigenous Peoples are primitive, showing that the Uru-eu-wau-wau can incorporate modern equipment and new organizing strategies alongside longstanding cultural practices and ways of life.

Finally, the Territory reminds us all that colonial capitalism is killing the planet. This story is about the Amazon rainforest and a tribe of fewer than 200 remaining members specifically, but this story is taking place all over the world in every continent but Antartica. “Manifest destiny” and the ideology that “terra nullius” is there for the taking, destroying, and developing is not something of the American past, but happening right now. Watching the Territory inspired me to continue to support campaigns to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery, eradicate fossil fuels, and live a more local lifestyle. I strongly urge everyone to watch the Territory, and I am grateful to the dedication of the film team, the Uru-eu-wau-wau community and their allies for making it.

WEBSITE: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-territory

TRAILER:

Excerpt from: They Don’t Call Her Mother Earth for Nothing: Women Re-imagining the World

***THIS IS AN EXCERPT***

Transformational women leaders are restoring societal balance by showing us how to reconnect relationships – not only among people – but between people and the natural world. This astounding conversation among diverse women leaders provides a fascinating window into the soulful depths of what it means to restore the balance between our masculine and feminine selves to bring about wholeness, justice and true restoration of people and planet. Join Alice Walker, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Nina Simons, Sarah Crowell, Joanna Macy and Akaya Windwood to imagine a future where women, children, men and the planet can thrive.

Want to hear the full episode? Click here.

Taking Wing: Feminine Leadership from the Heartbeat of Earth with Zainab Salbi

Globally, women experience some of the harshest challenges in wartime and the climate crisis while simultaneously remaining caretakers to their families, communities, and the Earth. Zainab Salbi is a humanitarian, author and media host who has dedicated her life to empowering women on the frontlines in conflict zones and climate crisis zones. Her vision is that the fate of humanity depends on elevating feminine leadership that offers a model for a new way of being – for both women and men.

Featuring:

Zainab Salbi is a celebrated humanitarian, author, and journalist, co-founder of DaughtersforEarth.org, “Chief Awareness Officer” at FindCenter.com, host of the Redefined podcast, and founder of Women for Women International. The author of several books, including the bestseller, Between Two Worlds and, most recently, Freedom Is an Inside Job, she is also the creator and host of several TV shows, including #MeToo, Now What? on PBS.

Credits:

Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
Producer: Teo Grossman
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Resources

Zainab Salbi – Daughters for Earth (video) | Bioneers 2022 Keynote

Daughters for Earth: Women and the Climate Change Movement (video) | Bioneers 2022 Panel

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

NEIL HARVEY, HOST: As Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden wrote:

“The true clash of civilizations in the future will [be] along the fault lines between civilizations that treat women as equal members of the human species, and civilizations that cannot or will not do so.”

In 1997, the U.S. National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís offered a parallel metaphor.

“The world of humanity is possessed of two wings: the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength, the bird will not fly. Until womankind reaches the same degree as man, until she enjoys the same arena of activity, extraordinary attainment for humanity will not be realized; humanity cannot wing its way to heights of real attainment.”

Zainab Salbi has spent most of her life seeking to help humanity wing it to those heights of real attainment by strengthening the wing of women’s power.

Born in Iraq, Salbi lived through the horror of the Iran-Iraq war and the terror of Saddam Hussein’s savage regime. Her family arranged her escape at age 19 by sending her to the US for an arranged marriage. When it turned out to be abusive, she fled and tried to go home, but the Gulf War prevented her.

At the age of 23, those early experiences led her to found the groundbreaking organization Women for Women International in 1993. The organization went on to help some 478,000 women in eight conflict zones, from the Congo to Afghanistan. It distributed $120 million in aid and micro-credit loans.

Little did she know then that several transformative experiences would forever shape her trajectory – including a near-death experience.

Zainab Salbi spoke at a Bioneers conference…

Zainab Salbi speaking at Bioneers 2022 | Photo by Alex Akamine

ZAINAB SALBI: Few years ago, I had the privilege of being invited by the Anishinaabe Nation to be on a four days vision quest out in the land. Now, a lot of that experience could be experienced as hard. I had to fast for four days from food and water, but more than that I was touched by how everyone in the community had to be with me in the process, keeping the fire going for four days, the ceremonies going for four days, and it was a show of an absolute hospitality and kindness and graciousness.

And so when you’re out in the land for four days, you’re not supposed to have a pen and paper or a phone or iPad or anything. You’re only alone with yourself and a sleeping bag, and you are to observe everything about nature. And you start paying attention to the ants walking in here and to the birds flying and everything. And at one point, I laid down on the ground, and I put my ears on Earth, and it was my first time ever to hear Earth’s heartbeat.

[Heartbeat sound]

Buh boom, buh boom, buh boom. And I had no idea up until that moment that Earth has a heartbeat. It’s alive.

HOST: In 2019, scientists at the University of Utah validated that experience. They placed seismometers on Castle Rock, a famous tall stone tower in the high red rock desert. They published their findings in Science News:

“At about the same rate that your heart beats, a Utah rock formation called Castleton Tower gently vibrates, keeping time and keeping watch over the sandstone desert. A red rock tower taps into the deep vibrations of the earth – wind, waves, and even far off earthquakes.”

ZS: I mean, I grew up in the city all my life, and despite the fact that I am from Iraq, a country which all my life, whenever I visit America, people will think, so, did you grow up in the tents in the desert and riding camels? [LAUGHTER] And, you know, after a while now, all one—and with all the invasions of Iraq and all of that, people say like, “So all your countries are terrorist people, right? And you’re an oppressed woman just because you’re in Iraq.” Now in both cases, it’s an injury to the soul when your own people and your identity is stereotyped to such an extent, but honestly in the first case I now say I wish I lived in tents and rode camels. I mean, I did live in houses and cars, but right now no one has a choice in my home country to do that, to live in tents, actually, because we have an average of 272 days of dust and sandstorms per year.

When I grew up, there were no sandstorms. None. We have now—water resources in the country are 50% lower this year than last year with the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is so personal for me, but it’s also the cradle of civilization where that right, is expected to dry within the next 20 years. Okay? And the camels, where everyone—When I was a kid, when I visited America, people thought, oh, you’re riding camels. One-third of them are dying at rates never seen before because they’re eating plastic bottles of water. And food production in a country that used to be self-sustainable up until the ‘90s, got reduced by two-thirds within 10 years of US occupation in the country – by two-thirds for different policies that enforce most farmers to drop their farming.

Now a lot of times when we talk about climate change, now the BBC reported on the dust storms in Iraq, and how many, 5,000 people went to the hospitals last week because they couldn’t breathe, we think of climate change as this alien thing – climate change, some something that we had nothing to do with it. We are the source of it. It’s human-created climate change. It’s greed-created climate change. It’s not just climate change by itself. Right? We did it.

HOST: Seeing the very cradle of civilization drying up and blowing away, Zainab Salbi knew that, as a citizen of Earth, she had to become more conscious in her own personal actions. She followed some of the basic practices: Never use plastic water bottles. Drive an electric car. Do composting. Recycle. Buy local. Buy organic.

“I’m just a decent citizen trying to do what they’re telling me to do,” she told herself.

Then a twist of fate brought her to another transformative event.

ZS: And then I touched my death a few years ago, and in that moment, that intimate moment between what I thought was going to be my last breath—because they found a quarter of a gallon of liquid pressing on my heart – the question for me was not did I have enough in life, did I have enough house or material possessions, it actually also was not did I accomplish enough – and I am a cause-oriented person. That question was kindness and did I live my life in kindness to myself, to others, and to Earth? And did I live my life in love to myself, to others, and to Earth.

And in the year-and-a-half that followed, where I lost my ability, my cognitive ability and my ability to walk or breathe, all what I could do, all what I could do is be in the presence of nature. And I felt each tree became my cheerleader. I mean, nature, all we know it heals us. Right? We have to eat healthy food and drink healthy water in order to heal our bodies. And that did impact me. But I actually felt, as I was trying to teach myself how to walk and to breathe again, I felt each tree was saying, You go, girl! You go, girl! You can do it! You can do it! And I came out of this experience saying, Oh my God! It’s not about doing this checklist – compost, electric car, whatever – I owe it to nature, we owe it to nature to do everything possible to protect it and restore it. And if actually nature was a lover–[APPLAUSE] she would have broken down with us humans a long time ago for being the most selfish narcissist, controlling, self-centered lover ever. [LAUGHTER] Seriously. I mean, she would say, “Walk out the door! And I will survive.” She would have kicked us out of her home. And she’s not. And we’re taking her for granted, okay?

In our human behavior, we go, we are conscious, we’re trying to be more conscious, but in our human behavior we still – me, okay, I’ll take the responsibility. I still go and I’m still traveling and I’m still thinking of a vacation, and I’m still thinking like all these human—and I still want to make money, and I still all of these things has consequences, because it’s ultimately not only—it’s about how we measure growth and how we look at our economy and how we are part of our economy.

We are the consumers. And so it’s not something separated from us, we are part of the crisis, not separated out of it. So, what do we do? So I came out of my new life saying I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to do everything possible to pay back to nature because I’m grateful for it for saving me. Right? And it became a personal experience with it. It became my heart journey.

HOST: It was as though nature took Zainab by the hand and said, “You’re working with me now.”

Friends who knew her work with Women to Women International urged Zainab to mobilize women around the climate emergency. Although she was reluctant to take on such a big issue that wasn’t within her expertise, she wanted to know how climate change was affecting women’s lives and what they were doing about it. A leading nonprofit group called

helped open the scientific window for her.

Suddenly her worlds came together. The worlds of women in conflict zones and climate crisis zones became one.

Zainab Salbi spoke with us at a Bioneers conference.

ZS: What I learned is women are impacted the most by climate change, according to the UN and many other studies. And I was like, okay, that sounds familiar to me. I’m someone who understands conflicts. Women are impacted the most by conflicts – 80% of the refugees around the world are women and children. Well, the same thing is going to be in climate change. The first crisis we’re going to have from climate is a refugee crisis, in terms of human rights, and women and children are the majority of that.

Women and children are going to be impacted the most by food insecurity. We’re already seeing that in most of East Africa, the Middle East. And that impacts women and children.

And then I discovered that women are actually innately doing activities that are scientifically backed because it makes sense, which is: science says according to research commissioned by One Earth that we need to do three interventions: We need to protect and restore 50% of Earth, land and water; we need to shift to 100% regenerative agriculture; and we need to shift to 100% renewable energy. Now, women are actually very engaged at the community level in protecting and restoring Earth and regenerative agriculture. They’re doing that intuitively because it’s their lives that are being impacted. Right? Men usually tend to be migrant laborers, and so women are the ones who are staying in these communities, so they are actually fighting for the restoration and protection of land, because they are small-scale farmers. Women are majority of small-scale farmers.

So I was like, okay, they’re being impacted the most; their work is actually significant and important, even though it’s small, small, small grassroots efforts all over the world; they are not being acknowledged whatsoever. Like you don’t hear about women’s role in solving climate crisis. You don’t hear that. You don’t hear half of the population, for God’s sake, being engaged in this discussion. We are patronized once again, seen only as victims, not seen as actually solvers of the crisis that we have not created.

The last point that really tipped me over, which is when I learned that women are getting two cents out of every dollar that is going to environmental justice. And that’s when I was like, enough. Because in my world and in my previous world working in war zones, it’s the same story. Women are impacted the most in wars in terms of victimization, refugees, attacks, rape, all of that. They actually keep life going in the midst of wars. I wrote two books about that, about, you know, we only hear about the weapons and the armies and more weapons and more weapons. What we don’t know is that life continues in war. You know, you get married in war, you get divorced in war, you have happy birthdays, you keep the kids to school, you have to eat every day, you have to work every—you know, life keeps going in war, and women are running that show, the backline decisions.

In conflict areas in the humanitarian world, women get 10 cents out of every dollar that goes to the humanitarian world. And they are not included in most negotiating tables about ending war and building peace. So it’s the same pattern, and that’s honestly when I moved from being just trying to be a good citizen – buy sustainable clothes, you know –moving to have an emotional connection – no, no, no, no, no. I need to—I owe it; this is an impor—like—it’s personal now – to being honestly charged and frustrated and a bit angry that I see the exact same story repeating itself, which is the marginalization and the lack of respect for women’s work and women’s voices, and and the need to resource women’s ventures and work to protect Earth, and to protect humanity, frankly speaking.

HOST: Suddenly it had all gotten up close and personal. Like her work in war zones, the climate emergency presented the imperative to resource women’s ventures and women’s work to protect Mother Earth and humanity itself. Clearly, flying with one wing was sending humanity in shrinking circles toward the abyss.

That’s when she decided to wing it. She co-founded the nonprofit Daughters for Earth.

When we return, Zainab Salbi works to fund frontline women climate healers, and describes how feminine leadership is about modeling a new way of being – for both women and men.

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers. This is “Taking Wing: Feminine Leadership from the Heartbeat of Earth”.

HOST: To resource women’s work and ventures on the climate emergency, Zainab Salbi co-founded Daughters for Earth with Jody Allen, the philanthropist and CEO of the Wild Lives Foundation. They partnered with Justin Winters, founder and CEO of the nonprofit One Earth, which brought its ground-breaking actionable scientific model and innovative philanthropic strategies.

Together, they designed Daughters for Earth as a global climate crisis solutions fund and campaign to mobilize women from all over the world. It meant empowering not only women’s voices in decision making; it meant seriously resourcing their efforts.

ZS: It’s to mobilize $100 million of funds and campaign to do four things. 1) Put more money in the hands of women on the frontlines who are preserving and protecting millions of acres all over the world, and doing regenerative agriculture so they can introduce another way of existing, co-existing with this beautiful Earth; raise awareness that these women, climate warriors, exist and they’re working, and they’re not being heard, and we have to tell everyone in the world we cannot go about climate solutions without the full inclusion of women; mobilize and include and invite every single woman and daughter and all of her children and her spouses to be part of the solution – everyone has something to do. Some people can give $10, some people can give $10 million, some people all that they can do is change their own behavior, buy local flowers, preserve that small plot of land we have in our gardens or whatever; rewilding, anything. Daughters for Earth is to mobilize this behavior change as well as financial mobility.

And then the last, but not least, demonstrate with feminine leadership, because the truth is, unless we make this century, the 21^st century, the feminine century, our humanity is at stake, and we shall not survive. Now, there’s so much—As a women’s rights activist, there’s so much going in women’s rights. And I feel like if this is a mountain, a few years ago we were celebrating for making it halfway through the mountains. I feel we just face mudslides and earthquakes and now we’re back to the beginning of the mountain. Right?

But we cannot fight women’s rights by emulating, and we cannot fight for Earth’s rights by emulating masculine leadership. We must demonstrate what feminine leadership is, because those who change the world, from Mandela to Gandhi, they didn’t change the world by just being angry, they changed the world by modeling a new way of leadership, and that’s what we need to do.

HOST: Numerous surveys show that women are making greater changes in their personal habits than men are to tackle climate change. Overall, women are more concerned and believe the climate crisis will threaten their way of life. In reality, it already is – big-time.

The data are also overwhelming in terms of the direct connection between the leadership of women and global security. As the landmark book Sex and World Peace documents, states that have improved the status of women are as a rule healthier, wealthier, less corrupt, more democratic, and more powerful on the world stage.

But for Zainab Salbi, the question is not, per se, economic growth. The question is, “What do we want to grow?”

ZS: A lot of the talks about climate solutions is very technology-oriented talk. Right? Let’s go to Mars and extract whatever, you know, from it. So a lot of money is going through that.

And the elephant in the room is our human behavior, and frankly speaking, our economy and how it is shaped. Because as long as we have an economy that measures success as growth – I make more money out of every dollar I invest in company X, Y and Z, and I wanted to get as much money as possible in a quarterly basis, as long as that is our measurement, you always have to be in a race to extract, extract, extract more, so you can grow more, so you can make more money.

We are fundamentally hurting this Earth. Right? And our solutions is very, I would say, masculine values-led solutions: technology, the war on climate, the, you know, more inventions—It’s very masculine values. So what I mean by masculine values, this is not about men. It is values that we can all cultivate in ourselves regardless if you’re a man or a woman. Our relationship with each other and with Earth has to include feminine values, and that we have to extract in ourselves, and that is being more kind to ourselves, to each other, and to Earth. That is being more loving to ourselves, to each other and to Earth. That is seeing the interconnections between ourselves, each other, and to Earth. And that has different measurements of what is success, what is growth, and what is happiness, and what is health.

Because we cannot have the solutions of climate change again be driven by only this big industrialization kind of thing. Right? It has to look into the biggest and the most important technology we need, and that is nature itself – just literally trees, you know, animals, wild animals, healthy season oceans. That is the technology we need, and for that to operate, we’ve got to change our behavior, our social and economic behavior, in my opinion.

HOST: Science affirms Zainab Salbi’s perspective on the true biotechnologies that nature uses. Restoring and conserving nature’s basic ecological services is the greatest tool at hand to begin to restore the balance that makes the planet habitable. And women worldwide are doing exactly that.

Zainab has also long worked as a writer and media-maker. As the author of several books, a PBS TV show, and a highly influential podcast heard in 22 Arab countries, she’s spent years interviewing women around the world, probing the question: What brings about change?

Her conclusion is that the secret sauce is the inspiration that comes from storytelling.

ZS: Now, I have lived and grew up in conflicts, all my life, and I have come to learn a few things. 1) All that we need to do in times of conflicts is to show up. We may succeed, we may fail, it doesn’t matter. We must show up and we show up from our integrity and our strength. And this is the time to show up for our bodies, for our rights, but for our Earth. It’s interconnected. They are not separated.

And then the second, conflict made me believe in hope. You know, people think, how can you like, you’ve been through all of this, and be optimistic? I’m optimistic because I am a believer that love is bigger than all, and that hope always triumphs, always triumphs, and injustice always gets toppled at the end. I am a believer we can do that. [APPLAUSE]

HOST: Love is bigger than all…Zainab Salbi… “Taking Wing: Feminine Leadership from the Heartbeat of Earth”.

The Farmer and the Chef: A Conversation Between Two Black Food Justice Activists

In their own distinctive ways, Karen Washington and Bryant Terry each embody the values of nourishment, community, and self-determination in ways that honor the struggle of Black life to overcome the horrors of racism. They belong to a long and proud lineage of Black courage and Black genius, working to create a resilient and celebratory food system.

Bryant Terry is the Chef-in-Residence of MOAD, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and an award-winning author of a number of books that reimagine soul food and African cuisine within a vegan context. His latest book is Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora.

Since starting a garden in a vacant lot in the Bronx in the 1980s, Karen Washington has become a powerful voice and respected leader in the urban farming movement advocating for community engagement and social and economic justice. A queer Black woman farmer, Karen is fierce in her belief that there is dignity and power in growing food.

At a recent Bioneers Conference, Karen and Bryant had this free-wheeling discussion that covered topics as diverse as collard greens, food justice, the joys of Black culture, racism, “white gaze,” Black power, and Master P as a model for Black entrepreneurs

KAREN WASHINGTON: I’ve known Bryant, God knows, for maybe 10-15 years. He was running an organization for youth back in the day in New York City. When I first met him, I knew there was something about him. You can tell from people’s posture, how they speak, how they talk about their vision—I knew he was going to do great things.

When we talk about Black history, it’s often about trauma and it’s never about joy. But reading your book Black Food, I felt the essence of joy coming through food. Talk to me.

BRYANT TERRY: I’m honored to be speaking with you. You have long been a heroine of mine and one of the guiding lights of the food justice movement. We have a lot of really enthusiastic people of my generation and younger, but when we look back at the OGs who really helped lay the foundation for the food justice work we’re doing now, you, Karen, are at the top of that list.

The book you mentioned came about in 2020 when we were, as a country, dealing with what people describe as a racial reckoning, looking inward, and facing the realities of how Black people, as well as other people of color, have been treated, but specifically Black folks because the book came on the heels of the murders of George Floyd and Breana Taylor.

In the midst of that period of reckoning, it came out that there was a lot of racism in food media. There were some legacy food magazines that were being called out for their mistreatment and racist behavior toward employees of color. Some publishing companies were even acting racist toward some of their own authors. A major publisher in New York City treated one of my friends horribly and tried to erase her from the book that she had co-authored with a white woman. They thought that the white woman would be a better face of the book than a heavyset black woman.

There is a pervasive attitude of anti-blackness: Everything we do is vilified, including our food, and historically and contemporarily, it’s not just the wider white-dominated culture. The thing that hurts and upsets me is that even people of African descent often talk negatively about our historical and cultural foods as “slave food.” When you say soul food or black food, people think of the antebellum survival foods upon which many enslaved Africans had to rely.

I’m not going criticize things like chitlins and pigs’ feet and other discarded parts of animals that plantation owners forced many enslaved Africans to eat. Enslaved people did their best to use their ingenuity and creativity to make the best with what they had.

When people talk about “Black food,” they also imagine big flavored meats, overcooked vegetables and the sugary desserts that you find at a soul food restaurant. I’m not denying that Black folks like to eat red velvet cake, mac’n’cheese, and ribs, but what about collards, mustard greens, turnips, kale, dandelion, sugar snap peas, pole beans, black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, kale? These are our traditional foods. These are the types of food that have sustained our people for generations, but when talking about Black food, they have been intentionally erased. Any Western-trained allopathic physician, nutritionist or dietician would recommend these foods. Collards are a Black superfood high in vitamins A, C and E. They have a lot of anti-cancer-fighting compounds, and okra, which originated in Africa – one of the king staples of Black food-ways– helps lower blood pressure.

Black liberation involves embracing our traditional cultural foods. I think that’s a very important part spiritually, physically and otherwise. We should be embracing these foods because it’s our birthright. They were there before us and they’ve sustained our people through the roughest times, and they can help address the exponential rise in preventable diet-related illnesses that we see in our communities.

For years, I had been thinking about writing a compilation of different voices throughout the African diaspora in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. One of my major inspirations for this book was Toni Morrison’s 1970s classic The Black Book that captured Black life from the 17^th up until the mid-20^th century using song lyrics, archival photos and ephemera. It wasn’t just text. It wasn’t just heady intellectual writing. It illustrated the multiple ways in which we can talk about Black lives.

So many books talk about our realities and focus on our struggles and our historical marginalization and oppression, but as Black people, we know about these realities. One of the things that I was clear about is that I wanted the book to be created without concern for “white gaze.” I wanted it to be about Black people speaking to each other, having conversations about our deep connection to food, about our foodways and how they’ve developed throughout the globe. And of course, I want to invite the world in to be a part of the conversation, but we’re not modifying to make it pretty, we’re speaking about our realities.

I thought about the Toni Morrison quote in which she asks Black people: “What do our lives look like without racism?” We’re constantly dealing with this albatross of white supremacy and the history of anti-black racism, but what would our lives look like without racism? So, that’s what I asked all the contributors, “What’s our magic; what’s our joy; what’s our creativity; what’s our agency; what’s our brilliance?” I want people to look at this book and feel inspired to do the work that you do, to do the work that I’m doing, to do the work that a lot of young activists are doing: the solutions-oriented work to improve our reality.

Starting at the cover, with the recipes, the essays, the poetry, and the artwork, I do feel this book truly invokes a sense of joy, power, brilliance and agency.

Read an excerpt from Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, edited by Bryant Terry.

KAREN: That’s what I felt when I read the book. I was blown away because you captured the essence of Black food through the lens of joy.

BRYANT: The book is actually a publication of 4 Color Books, a division of Penguin Random House, and is my own publishing imprint. At the time my literary agent and I pitched the book and got the deal there was a racial reckoning happening and a lot of companies and corporations were embarrassed, so they wanted to invest in repairing reputational harm.

I was trained as a historian and I’ve seen this before. Publishers were going to do everything to make Black folks happy or perform their kind of solidarity with blackness. I understood that that door was going to be open and then it was going to shut again, but I wasn’t clear about how long it was going to be open. I was in Philadelphia at a conference and had a conversation with Korsha Wilson, a Black freelance journalist, who wrote a profile of me in The New York Times. I brought up the fact that I felt like the door was closing, and she said it’s already closed. She talked about how, in 2020, she was getting an avalanche of jobs from magazines and newspapers, and then it slowed down to a trickle for this respected, seasoned journalist. So, imagine those up-and-coming budding writers who are trying to do this work and get into food media.

I was clear with my agent that that was a moment to grab power, a moment when we needed to move beyond just being rewarded as talent. At the time a lot of Black people were getting book deals, but that has stopped.

There is a parallel to when I learned about your work years ago and heard you speak about the impetus for your activism, how you would go into spaces that were geared toward fixing the food system, but the people who were most impacted by food apartheid and our broken food system weren’t in the room. It was mostly being led by policy wonks and academics who weren’t speaking to the people in communities suffering from these injustices and who knew the most about the problems.

KAREN: Nonprofits need to get out of the way because they’ve been pimping us. They need us in order to get funding for their programs. They say time and time again, “I want to come into your neighborhoods to help build leadership.” But after 10, 15, 20 years where is the leadership that they say they have been developing?

It’s time for white-led nonprofits and people with good intentions – the majority of nonprofit organizations in white and black communities are white led – to cut the umbilical cord and leave because we’re at a point in time when young people want to be empowered. It’s time for us to take back our power. For so long we’ve been sitting back being silent and complacent.

I’m charging Black people to start grabbing your power in such a way that your voices are heard. People talk about a seat at the table. Forget about a seat at the table. We need our own tables. We don’t need to be asking to be let in.

This is a reckoning. This is a point in time when people are talking about Critical Race Theory, and everybody’s afraid of the Black movement. To tell you the truth, white people are afraid, because of what they have done to us, that we will, in turn, do it to them once we get into power.

BRYANT: Tell it.

KAREN: But you know what? We are people of love. We’re going to make sure that when we do get into power, that it will be shared amongst all of us.

One thing I love about your book, Bryant, is that you bring in the element of history through food. You talk about how we came from Africa with seeds braided in our hair and that the cuisine we brought with us is in the food you now see in restaurants. Our ancestors brought seeds and cuisine and recipes to this country and now they’ve been coopted.

Another thing I love about the book is that it’s not only about the recipes; you also include a lot of poetry and art. It just shows that Black food is not in a silo, that it’s a mixture of song and art and recipes and people telling their stories.

And one other thing I want to bring in, because it’s very important to me as a queer woman of color, is that the book has a section focusing on queerness.

BRYANT: Since 2015 I’ve been Chef-in-residence at MOAD, the Museum of the African Diaspora. Many of the chapters in the book are literally pulled from programs at the museum – the “Black Women: Food and Power” chapter, the “Land Liberation and Food Justice” chapter, and the “Black Queer Food” chapter. I wanted to have space to bring many of my LGBTQIA brothers and sisters who talk about the intersection of the racism and the homophobia and the transphobia that they experience, and I wanted to create space for them to talk about it.

It was important to give queer people the space to tell their stories in the most authentic way and to hear folks talk about their experience of being queer. You can’t separate that from the work. It is who they are. As they’re doing the work, as Black people, improving our lives, improving our health, improving our communities, they are also human beings who deal deeply with the traumas of the way the outside world treats them.

I want to circle back to your approach about how it needs to be about ownership, and self-determination. That has helped me define food justice in a different way, one that moves beyond advocacy and direct service. It calls for organized responses by those most impacted by food apartheid. It’s about shifting power and resources into the hands of people in the community.

When I got my first contract and I talked to my parents about it, the first thing my dad said is “You know, son, I’m proud of you. Penguin Random House is a reputable publisher and I’m glad they’re going to put your book out, but I want you to remember this: you need to think like Master P.” Master P is an older rapper and entrepreneur who understood that it’s not just about making music, it’s about ownership; it’s about creating your own labels, it’s about having control; it’s about self-determination.

I’m looking at my publishing imprint under Penguin Random House as a prestigious and well-paid internship because the goal for me is to learn about the internal logic and the structure of how publishing operates so that I can eventually have my own independent publishing company and not have to rely on a big multi-national corporation.

When we look at the issues of food justice in cities in communities that lack access to healthy, fresh, affordable and culturally appropriate food, most often that lack of access is simply one indicator of the material deprivation in these communities. Most of these same communities often are also dealing with crumbling infrastructure, underfunded and segregated public schools, and environmental racism that places polluting industries that poison their air, water and soil in their neighborhoods. These are the same communities that often lack safe green space for people to be physically active. How can you tell people that to prevent chronic illnesses you should just be more active when there’s nowhere safe for people to be active?

So, sure, we need to fix our food system, but we also need to address the multiple structural barriers that prevent people in our communities from living happy, healthy and safe lives. My work, through my books and activism, has been about reintegrating cooking, healthy eating, sharing food, art, culture, community, and growing food in a sustainable way in concert with each other because it’s not just about food as fuel: it’s about life, it’s about connection, it’s about love, it’s about all these things that capitalism has stripped it of.

KAREN: Big up for that Bryant. I love what you just said.

For me, food justice is not a passive movement. You have to be actively involved in dismantling the social injustices that you see related to race, gender, trauma, and access to land. How that has to happen is not by trying to fix the existing broken food system but rather by completely transforming it. That has to come with a shifting of power back into the hands of the community, back into the hands of those who have been co-opted for so long.

Where does that start? There are 7.8 billion people on this Earth, but only a handful of companies control the food, water, land and seeds, and we sat back and let it happen. We were complacent and silent while a handful of predominantly white men gained control over the food system of 7.8 billion people. So, when do we wake up and grab our power? Where is the urgency for us to collectively take control of our social capital and communal wealth? I don’t want a handout. The system has to change so that we have the power to make decisions within our own community. But we’re not doing that. We sit back and let politicians and other outside organizations make change for us. The time is now for us to get off our asses and start coming together collectively to shift the power back into our hands. We can do it.

When we left the land, we lost our power. We lost who we are. I tell people of color: “Look at the color of your skin because the color of your skin is the same as soil.” When I put my hands in the soil, Bryant baby, and I look at that brown skin, I say: “Hello ancestors; thank you, thank you.”

We’ve got to start embracing ourselves collectively as a group of power. Don’t let people separate us. We stand on the shoulders of kings and queens. I tell my young people that when your crown is crooked, look in the mirror and make sure that crown is straight because you are the descendants of kings and queens on this Earth.

BRYANT: So much of my work has been about helping us remember that historically there’s a thread of Black-led food and health activism throughout the 20^th century that we need to acknowledge and uplift. There are so many of our own ancestors and our own kind of cultural practices that we can draw upon in order to move forward.

I talk about the West African concept of “sankofa”—looking backwards as we move forward and bringing with us the best practices and traditions. I’m just going to be real with you: when we were shopping around my book Vegan Soul Kitchen in 2007, we went to 12 publishers. Ten of them outright said: ‘Nope, this isn’t going to sell; you’re cutting the pie too thin. Black folks, vegan? Do Black people even eat vegetables?” That was the response we were getting.

My first encounter with veganism came from Black Seventh Day Adventists in my community. Then in high school, after reading the autobiography of Malcolm X – my obligatory obsessive period with the nation of Islam – I learned about Elijah Muhammad’s How to Eat to Live, a two-book collection that talked about the rejection of the standard American diet and the need to embrace foods that are healing and life-promoting. Also, there is the Rastafarian “Ital” diet – fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes influenced by African and Indian cuisine. Comedian Dick Gregory was also an activist for good food and health issues. My habits and attitudes and politics around food also changed when I heard the song Beef by Blastmaster KRS-One at Boogie Down Productions, a hip hop song that talked about factory farming.

The key to our health liberation is in returning to our traditional foods. You talked about eating fat-backs and collard greens. Traditionally, things like that were used to add nutrient density to a dish and to give it more flavor. It’s easy to vilify traditional culinary practices in Black communities as well as Indigenous communities, but people knew how to make the most of every part of the animal. They knew how to add things to the vegetables to allow the body to absorb the nutrients better and to provide more nutrient density.

I’m seeing more younger folks who feel the need to buy land. We need to be creating systems that don’t rely on Fiat currency. We need to be creating structures that allow us to care for each other and ensure that we’re whole and healthy and not waiting for some institution or the government that was never designed in the first place to care for people like you and me.

KAREN: When we started the Black Farmer Fund in New York a couple of years ago, we decided to be proactive and go to the governor, who at the time was Cuomo, and ask for $9 million. Black folks going to the governor asking for $9 million, they laughed at us. We said, “We want it because we deserve it. It’s our money. We pay taxes. Why can’t we have this money so that we can be self-sufficient and self-reliant?” They just laughed at us.

So, we started telling our story. I tell people time and time again, tell your story. Our story is that out of 57,000 farmers in New York state there are only 139 Black farmers. In a state with over 12% Black population, less that 1 % of the farmers are Black. We need resources to support those farmers and to encourage other Black folks to become farmers. By continuing to tell our story, we amassed over $3 million.

That $3 million was spent on helping Black farmers and Black businesses be self-sufficient and self-reliant, to learn about fiscal responsibility and get a financial education, and learn how to build social capital and communal wealth so the money they earned would go back into our community. We need to change the extractive capitalistic system that takes money out of our community. Our money needs to stay in our community and circulate to build the community so it doesn’t get gentrified and we get pushed out.

It’s time for us to think about what entrepreneurship and ownership mean. I’m not talking about ownership in terms of having something for yourself. I’m talking about being stewards of the land and of the community. Whatever occupation you’re in, you should be working to help the community. We have been trying to replicate a capitalistic food system that wasn’t meant for us and wasn’t built for us. Now is the time for us to wake up and start to help each other and come together and share.

I remember back in the day growing up, no one was hungry. I grew up in the projects, and when someone was hungry, we opened our doors and fed them. If you didn’t have shoes or clothing, we made sure that person got shoes and clothing. When Miss So-and-So, who was 90 years old, couldn’t buy food, we made sure that she was fed. We’ve gotten away from that. We no longer open our doors. We would rather walk over someone who’s homeless instead of asking them if they need something to eat or a place to sleep. We have become so conditioned to be the “I” instead of thinking about being the “we.”

BRYANT: Malcolm X made a speech in which he encouraged Black folks to support businesses in their communities. He said that when you go to a business where the person who owns the business does not live in that community, at the end of the day, that man takes his bag of money back to his own community. Creating community-based institutions and supporting existing local institutions enriches the community through what economists call “the multiplier effect” when each dollar continues to circulate in our community.

KAREN: I want to change the language of how we talk about ownership. When we talk about ownership of land, we’re replicating the extractive, exploitative system of capitalism. Instead of saying “ownership” we should say “stewardship” because we’re stewards of the land. I don’t believe you can own anything. You don’t live long enough on Earth to own anything.

We’re always trying to go against nature instead of working with nature. If you say that you want land so you can steward the land, so that you can work with nature so that that land is an element of the whole ecosystem, then it makes sense. It’s not threatening because you’re not grabbing it to hold onto it; you’re using it as a way to preserve the ecosystem that we’re all part of.

BRYANT: I love that, because that framing creates a different kind of lens. Faith-based institutions like churches, for example, have a lot of well-manicured land. What if we could turn those into edible landscapes? If people had a value system based on stewardship, then if someone had a building or land, they would do something with it that’s productive and is helpful to the community and not just aesthetically pleasing.

KAREN: But stewarding lands means you have to have some land to steward to begin with, and that brings up the issue of Reparations. It’s not just for Black people; Indigenous people need to be included in the conversation about reparations. How can land be placed back into the hands of both Black people of enslaved ancestry and Indigenous people? We want land back so we can be stewards of that land and self-sufficient/self-reliant, so we can feed our families.

BRYANT: We have to acknowledge the fact that the institution of slavery is what largely fueled capitalism in this country, so you can’t have honest conversations about repairing harms without talking about repairing the harm of the institution in which people of African descent were exploited for hundreds of years. It’s not just the institution of slavery, but also the kind of reimagined ways in which we continue to be oppressed like the prison industrial complex.

We need to be talking about reparations together with climate chaos, food apartheid, and all the ways in which historically marginalized communities have been exploited. You can’t have an honest conversation about repairing harm without talking about repairing the way in which Africans have been exploited and brutalized.

The Inspirational Artists Influencing Social Movements

Social, political, and environmental movements succeed when supporters feel deeply connected to the cause. Facts and statistics are certainly important, but a compelling story can spark an emotional reaction that motivates organizers on a more impassioned level. The arts have the ability to illustrate what facts cannot, making them an essential factor in nearly all successful movements.

This week, we’re sharing some of our favorite art featured at this year’s Bioneers Conference, including installations, participatory art, and performances. We’ll also share a great conversation we had with inspirational artivist David Solnit.

JUST A REMINDER! We’ve released videos of all Bioneers keynote presentations and performances. You can watch them all here. Don’t forget to share your favorites with your community.

Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse newsletter to receive news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox every two weeks.

Art at Bioneers 2022

Art and artists featured at the 2022 Bioneers Conference. Clockwise from top left:

Ana Teresa Fernández’s work explores the politics of intersectionality through time-based actions and social gestures. This piece, titled On the Horizon, is intended to instigate curiosity and agency around climate change through an immersive and alluring temporary installation.
For Michael Campbell, from an early age, handcrafted objects and the divine were connected. “I’m interested in our perception of the eternal, the divine and the otherworldly through objects that bring about an alternate mythological narrative spoken through the voice of nature.”
In response to this year’s site for Bioneers Conference, Fog Fire Collective participated in a series of physical dialogues with the surrounding land and water with the aim of reminding conference guests of the ecological communities that surround the Palace of Fine Arts. Inspired by the history of the nearby “Washer Woman’s Lagoon,” the collective inverts the gesture of “washing” by scrubbing mud, algae and soil found within these ecologies into 40- foot lengths of muslin that are then hung from the venue’s ceiling recalling both the verticality of the structure’s pillars and surrounding redwoods.
A piece by the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence (AIR) Program: The mission of the Artist in Residence Program is to empower all communities to conserve natural resources by providing professional Bay Area artists and university students with access to materials at the public dump, a workspace, stipend, and ongoing opportunities to exhibit work in public spaces.
A piece by Veronica Ramirez: “I remember the moment when it became a calling to make earth altars and where it would lead me was unknown, I just knew in that moment, I wanted to continue exploring this tremendously potent medicine that found its way to my path. An elder once shared with me that sacralizing our spaces with sacred art is so very fundamental to our revolution. I deeply feel this to be true and believe it’s true for our evolution as well.”

Performance by Jason Nious and Antwan Davis of Molodi

Molodi is far more than an extraordinary performance troupe: it’s a community of energetic leaders, educators, and seasoned entertainers. Molodi pushes the boundaries of stepping through its unique blend of “extreme body percussion,” gumboots, beatbox, poetry, hip hop dance, immersive storytelling, awakened consciousness, educational outreach and robust personalities that brings to life a high-energy percussive experience.

Read here.

Artivism: David Solnit on Using Art to Influence Movements

“Movements always use the arts, but I think there has been a kind of an emergent intelligence. A lot of people within the movements have started to realize that we need the language of art because the core conflict in our society is between dueling narratives, and if your opponents, the corporations and/or governments you’re combatting, hire top public relations firms and ad agencies and are able to be more powerful storytellers than you, they can keep wrecking the planet. And that requires a shift, because secular rationalist activist types are used to making their case with facts, data and information but that alone doesn’t work. You have to explain that data and information through narratives that resonate in actual people’s lives, and that’s what the arts can do, if you use them right.”

Artist and activist David Solnit discusses his work with Bioneers’ Teo Grossman.

Read here.

More Artivism from Bioneers.org

Relational Mindfulness and the Deep Feminine: An Embodied Immersion for Women

A workshop with Deborah Eden Tull and Bioneers’ Nina Simons

Consciously or not, most among us have been conditioned to adapt to a world that has biased us toward the masculine. But in truth, the vital energies of the feminine and masculine – the yin and yang, receptive and active – naturally co-exist in dynamic balance together. When they dance in wholeness, the result is thriving health.

Join Bioneers’ Nina Simons for a restorative retreat that explores more compassionate, wise, respectful, and embodied ways of being that can transform how you experience your life, family, work, and the larger world.

Register now.

The Inflation Reduction Act: ‘Step One, Not Step Last’ for the Planet

How We Got Here: 3 Factors that Led to The Inflation Reduction Act

Takes on the Inflation Reduction Act from the Bioneers Community

NDN Collective Responds to House Passing Inflation Reduction Act

Should the US Government Nationalize and Wind Down Fossil Fuel Companies?

Spirit in the Air: Reform, Revolution and Regeneration

Featuring:

Credits:

Resources

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Art at Bioneers 2022

Performance by Jason Nious and Antwan Davis of Molodi

Artivism: David Solnit on Using Art to Influence Movements

More Artivism from Bioneers.org

Relational Mindfulness and the Deep Feminine: An Embodied Immersion for Women

A workshop with Deborah Eden Tull and Bioneers’ Nina Simons

Keep Your Finger on the Pulse