Artivism: David Solnit on Using Art to Influence Movements

David Solnit is a San Francisco-based carpenter; climate justice, anti-war, arts, and direct-action organizer; an author; puppeteer, and trainer. He was a key organizer in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, and in San Francisco the day after Iraq was invaded in 2003. He co-founded Art and Revolution, which uses culture, art, giant puppets and theater in mass mobilizations, as well as for popular education and as an organizing tool. As an artist/activist (“artivist”), he has co-created visuals for the campaigns of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, National People’s Action and numerous other mobilizations and actions. David is also a direct action, strategy and cultural resistance trainer who currently works with Courage to Resist, supporting GI resistance to war and empire.

David edited Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World and co-wrote (with Army veteran Aimee Allison) Army of None; How to Counter Military Recruitment, End War, and Build a Better World. He also co-wrote and co-edited (with his sister Rebecca Solnit), The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (AK Press 2009).

Bioneers’ Teo Grossman spoke with David about his history with artivism and how arts and storytelling can lead us toward a brighter future.

David Solnit

TEO GROSSMAN: Do you consider yourself an artist or an activist or both?

DAVID SOLNIT: I’m an artist, but I mostly call myself an arts organizer. Throughout public school and then in community college I loved making art – ceramics, painting, drawing — and I received some mentoring from one of the artists-in-residence we had in our high schools in Portland. I wanted to be an artist, but when I was 15 or 16, I became more acutely aware of the situation of the world: the threat of wars for oil loomed large at the time. President Carter had brought back draft registration, and all the kids in my high school who were surrounded by Vietnam vets and Vietnam era people who had tried to stop that war, feared being sent off to the Middle East in a war for oil.

So that got me involved in anti-war, social justice and environmental organizing, and at a certain point I realized that if I became a successful artist and made a painting that ended up behind some rich person’s couch, that wasn’t really going to help the world, so I shelved my professional art ambitions, and I’ve spent most of my adult life supporting myself doing carpentry and construction, but also funding myself so I could be a full-time volunteer organizer. I came up in the anti-nuclear direct-action movement, and we managed to stop the nuclear power industry, which was a huge, huge industry in this state, cold in its tracks in California by the end of the ‘70s.

TEO: You’ve become very well-known for your activist puppetry. I heard that one of your first big puppets was for an anti-nuclear weapons demonstration. How did that come to be?

DAVID: I got drawn into the anti-nuclear power and weapons movement, which really was in the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement of well-organized mass civil disobedience. I was inspired by that model and also very influenced by the feminist movement and the example of non-hierarchical organizations such as the Spanish anarchist “grupos de afinidade” structure. It was a really resilient form. People would stay organized even when 1,000 people were arrested and thrown in jail. They always had a plan and managed to overwhelm the authorities and often get demands met, so I was very drawn to that.

But at a certain point, I started to feel that we needed new ways of telling our stories, and one of my friends had just come back from the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre in Minneapolis. They do a giant May Day festival and, as part of it, make big puppets out of cardboard boxes, so I asked them to teach us how to make puppets for our next action. This was in 1989 at the Livermore nuclear weapons labs. I had spent five years organizing with Western Shoshone activists to stop nuclear bomb testing in the Nevada desert. We set up a workshop and K. Ruby trained me and many others in giant puppet-making, and we transformed that demonstration into a theatrical pageant. K Ruby and Amy Christian met there and went on to found Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, and we worked together quite a bit after that.

I took what I learned and started to recruit artists and performers. We were trying to use the arts to speak to people in a different way. That led to a project called Art & Revolution Collective, in which we cross-trained activists and artists all over the country, and that led to a series of actions culminating at the World Trade Organization mass demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, where we took everything we had learned those past few years, all the arts organizing we had been experimenting with, all the alliances we had built, and we deployed stilt walkers on butterflies and giant puppets to face the Darth Vader-looking police in the streets of Seattle, and it was a very effective part of the larger demonstrations by activists from all over the world, which turned out to be very successful at derailing the WTO’s meetings and its agenda and putting the anti-globalization movement on everyone’s radar.

TEO: You’ve been involved in direct action a really long time, from the late 70s to today, from the anti-nuclear movement to WTO protests to climate and social justice and Green New Deal and women’s rights campaigns and more. Have you seen like a shift over time in the way that the arts have been involved in these movements?

DAVID: 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.

“Environmental justice communities from the greater New York area led by Uprose in Brooklyn, led the march and were holding giant sunflowers, a whole field of them that they had made themselves, each with a different message on it. And each section of the march had 16-foot banners on bamboo poles and giant parachutes.”

TEO: How does that express itself through the actual work that you do?

DAVID: Here’s an example: In 1999, when activists started to talk about corporate globalization, it sounded like a very complicated economic lecture in a college, so we tried to break it down using theatre and song and simplifying the narrative to convey the core truth in a way most people could grasp. We also had people tell their own stories: a sweatshop worker from Saipan traveled with us and told her own story embedded into the theatre piece, as did a locked-out steelworker from Kaiser Aluminum. They told their personal stories about the impacts of globalization on their lives as part of the performances in a way that people could understand and relate to emotionally as well as intellectually.

TEO: Do you think the climate movement has been able to make that sort of shift?

DAVID: There are really many climate movements. Everybody who’s impacted and fighting back, which is almost everybody, is part of it on some level, but I think the Climate Justice Movement is currently one of the most artful movements in the world. Many of us have pushed hard to lift it up. The People’s Climate March in New York City in 2016 was a good turning point where we were able to center the arts. The big coalition around that event provided the resources for two giant art spaces and getting stipends for some artists and artist organizers, and centering it in the march. Environmental justice communities from the greater New York area led by Uprose in Brooklyn, led the march and were holding giant sunflowers, a whole field of them that they had made themselves, each with a different message on it. And each section of the march had 16-foot banners on bamboo poles and giant parachutes. There was just a lot of art.

A ton of artists and metal workers and immigrant gardeners and all kinds of folks came and made parade floats, spending a month on them. It was a very artful march, and that model has caught on, and we’re not just talking about visual art, but music, song, theatre, performance, poetry, all that. And you’re seeing more of this sort of approach, be it in climate actions, teachers’ strikes, the Poor Peoples Campaign, etc. It’s important to get many people’s hands in planning and making this type of art. You want for it to become a space where all kinds of people come together and create together. We humans have always made things with our hands, whether it’s food, shelter or art, and it’s becoming a core part of our movements.

A poster Solnit made for an Immokalee farmworkers fundraiser.

TEO: I know it’s a bit like asking which of your kids is your favorite, but are there particular banners or puppets or theatrical presentations that you were involved in that really stand out to you?

DAVID: After the Seattle WTO shut down, I met a group of farm workers from Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and they asked if I would come to Florida to make art with their farm workers in preparation for a national tour to raise awareness about their struggle. This was the first time someone had said they wanted to prioritize making activist art three months in advance of their campaign, not the usual last-minute “Can you bring the puppet to the action tomorrow?” sort of thing.

So, I went to Florida and sat down with the farm workers and they talked about their work and living conditions, and we sort of collaboratively devised what became, to this day, the core image on their picket-signs, the giant plastic buckets they picked the tomatoes in. At that time, those workers probably had the worst working conditions of any low-wage workers in North America, in some cases actual something close to modern-day slavery, but they had been inspired by examples from Haitian, Mexican and Guatemalan peasant movements because some of their members had migrated from those three countries. In those places workers’ movements often used art and theatre in their organizing, so they were interested in doing that as well.

We made giant tomatoes and other props, and they would often do a silent theatre piece about their working conditions. I’ve been going there for almost 20 years now, and I’ve watched them use art and theatre together with smart strategic organizing with great success. They’ve turned the work conditions upside down, leveraging fair food contracts with the big buyers, so that if their human rights aren’t respected, they can actually stop the purchase of the product from the growers. The members of that coalition are probably now some of the more dignified low-wage workers in North America.

But it was a long struggle and many farm workers are still treated brutally. At one point maybe ten years ago a major case of modern-day slavery drew a lot of attention. Some farm workers had been routinely locked in a box truck each night, unable to leave, and not paid. The Coalition was pressuring the then governor of Florida to speak out about it, but he wouldn’t return their calls, so they called me up and said: “David, we’re going to go to the state capital. Can you make a giant box truck for a silent play re-enacting the events?” I showed up in Tallahassee, and we built a life-size box truck that included the shackles that chained the workers each night, and we had a cardboard sun for the day and a cardboard moon, and cardboard tomato plants where they were forced to work. Every TV station in the state showed it, and the newspapers wrote about it, and it made quite an impact. The governor called them back the next day…

TEO: That’s an incredible story. And you still work with them?

DAVID: Yeah. I’ve learned so much about organizing and centering arts and culture from them.

TEO: And I know that you’ve also been involved in the Standing Rock water protector movement. How did that involvement emerge?

DAVID: I met Clayton Thomas-Muller through work in the Climate Justice Movement. He’s based in Winnipeg, and he’s a leader in both First Nations’ sovereignty movements in Canada and in climate justice campaigns throughout North America. And he asked me to come up and help make some art for a totem pole journey designed to travel and support different Indigenous struggles along the way that was ending in Winnipeg.

Standing Rock “Water Is Sacred” print by Isaac Murdoch

Clayton admired the work of Isaac Murdoch, a well-known Anishinaabe artist, so we ended up screen-printing one of Murdoch’s designs, the Thunderbird, (the spirit in the sky when there’s a lightning storm). We made giant 16-foot puppets of them, marched with thousands of folks, mostly Indigenous but lots of allies and people from all over, through Winnipeg. A few days later, they permanently installed the totem pole directly in the path of a pipeline that was being opposed in that treaty territory.

Winona LaDuke was in Winnipeg for that march, and when it was over, she took a truckload of the art to Standing Rock, and the youth who initiated that campaign were doing a run, and they carried the thunderbirds, and they really caught on there. So, through Clayton and through the Indigenous Peoples Power Project that was at Standing Rock doing trainings, I went to support the struggle. I brought a truck full of paint and plywood, and we set up and mass produced the thunderbirds there. It became one of the iconic images of Standing Rock and of the climate justice movement across North America.

TEO: Are there other iconic images from campaigns that had that kind of impact?

DAVID: Well, the giant sunflowers that led the People’s Climate March that I mentioned earlier have an interesting origin story. It began in Detroit during the U.S. Social Forum, part of the World Social Forum. The Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance introduced us to the Zero Waste Coalition in Detroit who were campaigning against a super toxic trash incinerator, and I agreed to make art for a march against that facility with my collaborator, Mona Caron, a San Francisco muralist.

I think they were the ones who suggested sunflowers as a possible image, because sunflowers can take toxins out of the soil and they provide nourishment and are a symbol of beauty and resilience, so we made a couple hundred sunflowers in someone’s front yard in Detroit, including a giant one so big (16 feet tall and 8 feet across) it had to be on wheels. And we made a giant mock incinerator, and we paraded through the streets.

Then, the sunflowers re-emerged as a theme in 2012. I live in California in the East Bay, and we have four major oil refineries there, mostly in Richmond, and in 2012 there was a massive explosion at one of those facilities that released huge amounts of toxic gases. 15,000 local residents had to go to a hospital with respiratory and other problems as a result. On the one-year anniversary of that catastrophe we did a mass march on that Chevron refinery, and one of the folks in Urban Tilth, Richmond’s Urban Food Co-op, asked what we would do we do when we got there, and a young farmer suggested we should plant some sunflowers because they bioremediate.

We got 1500 actual giant sunflowers from farmers in the region and used the images of sunflowers as well. 3,000 people came and marched on the one-year anniversary of the Chevron disaster at the Richmond refinery, and half of them were holding four-foot-high giant sunflowers marching through this industrial wasteland. Then, when we got there, we shut down the streets, and a group of artists, including Mona and Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Peraza and community members, sketched out and painted a 40-foot sunflower directly in the path of the main entrance to the Chevron refinery, so the sunflower sort of organically became a symbol of the Climate Justice Movement.

TEO: I’ve heard that some of this art and these ideas have spread all around the world. What it’s been like for you to see these things take hold globally, and conversely which current international movements inspire you?

DAVID: When I started working outside areas I could visit in person, I started to try and figure out how to make resources that people could use all over. We tried to create images that could speak beyond language, so some of the images we’ve used have indeed been widely picked up. We’ve also directly worked with artists from all over the world. We did a Rise for Climate Action in which we had one artist from each continent create an image, each one using as a starting point an orange X which symbolized “stop destroying the planet” and a yellow sun which suggested a desirable alternative. Christi Belcourt, an amazing Métis First Nation artist, did a beautiful one, and artists from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific Islands, all contributed, and some of those images are still widely used.

TEO: Another thing I wanted to ask you about is mentorship and apprenticeship. I know you care a lot about passing what awareness and understanding you’ve gathered over the years to new generations. Can you share a little bit about how you approach teaching others the unique skillset you’ve developed at the intersection of all these movements?

DAVID: On the basic level there are some physical handcraft skills that you need to make physical objects and a different set of skills if you’re doing theatre or singing, and we need all of them, and they can be learned, but shifting the culture of movements is more complicated. I worked with 350.org for five years, and I was the sole arts organizer out of 150 or 200 of their organizers on planet Earth. And for them to have an arts organizer on staff was an anomaly. Most organizations think of art as an afterthought and invite artists to contribute something to an action or campaign at the last minute.

Many of us in the activist art world would like to flip that upside down because we think effective, engaging storytelling is critical to getting our points across. Of course, we need administrators and policy experts, but not necessarily as the main or only communicators of a movement to the broad public. So, yeah, I and other arts organizers engage in a lot of skill sharing and trainings, live and online, and we try to get resources to both artists and organizers who include art in their work. In the last giant project I did, for Defund Climate Chaos, which targeted banks financing the fossil fuel industry, we produced 30,000 posters with six movement artists that were printed on cheap newspaper and shipped out. People assemble them and then wheat-paste them on appropriate sites in their communities, and that project also served as a skill-training, so now some 600 more groups of activists know how to do street wheat pasting.

But the skills we need to teach are not just about actual art-making. To be successful in this space, you need a wide range of skills. You need to know how to facilitate a meeting, host a press conference, write a press release, give a talk, explain an issue, lead a song, put together a short play or skit, etc., as well as organize an art-build to make the physical art.

TEO: You’ve been part of these social movements for so long. On the one hand this is a very depressing time, but it also seems to be a really dynamic time for all these intersectional social movements, and activist art seems to be flourishing. How are you feeling about it all at this point?

DAVID: One thing I like about making art with other people is it is that it’s enjoyable, and it gives people an opportunity to celebrate. If we can create a little bit of what we want the world to be like even as we’re opposing the bad stuff (of which there’s a lot). There’s no denying that this is a really polarized, challenging and dangerous time and that we need to desperately change the shape of our society, and fast. But I think that if we’re smart, strategic, and learn to be better storytellers than those who seek to divide and keep us down, then we can actually win a lot of changes, as we did in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And I think centering arts even more will help us win. I mean, for the sake of human survival, we have to win. We have a tight timeline, and we have to win majority support, and arts and storytelling can be the way to do that.

Native Alaskan Fisherman Turns to Kelp Farming to Restore Ocean Health

Dune Lankard, an Eyak Native, was a subsistence and commercial fisherman before the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. In response to the catastrophe, he founded the Eyak Preservation Council and Native Conservancy, which has helped preserve more than a million acres of wild salmon habit along 3,500 miles of the Gulf of Alaska coastline, and is helping to build resilient communities and regenerative economies. Lankard was interviewed by Stephanie Welch of Bioneers.

STEPHANIE WELCH: When did you develop your strong sense of stewardship for the ocean environment?

DUNE LANKARD: Growing up in a commercial fishing family, we would spend three to four months a year on the ocean. When I was 9 or 10 years old, we were heading out to the fishing ground, and my father was replacing one of the big boat batteries that weighed about 60-80 pounds. He asked me to throw it overboard. I said, “You throw it overboard.” Sensing my hesitation, he asked if I was having trouble lifting it. “I can lift it, but I’m not throwing it overboard,” I told him. “Why not?” he asked. “Well, because we make our living in the ocean, and I’m not going to be throwing batteries down where there’s sea life.” He got really upset with me and came flying out of the cabin, but just before he threw it overboard, my mother made him turn the boat around and head back to port to recycle the battery.

When I see things that aren’t quite right, I ask questions.  A few years after the battery incident, we were fishing for Dungeness crab. Every crab pot had a little U-shaped ruler. As long as the tips of the crab on the widest part of their body would fit in that piece, then it was a keeper, but anything smaller was thrown back. All the mama and the baby crabs were too small, but there were no escape hatches in the crab pots. So, I said, “Why don’t we have escape hatches so the mamas and babies can get out before we pull the pot to the surface?” My father got upset with me again. I said, “This is about conservation. This is about preserving those baby crabs for the future so we can catch them when they’re bigger.”

Within a year, he came into the welding shop where we made crab pots and gear, and he threw a bunch of rings on the floor that were about 4 inches in diameter, just big enough for the mammas and the babies to escape. He said, “You got your wish.” I lobbied every fisherman that ever came over to our shop and told them that they needed to put escape hatches in their crab pots too.

STEPHANIE: What was the turning point when you decided to dedicate your life to environmental activism?

DUNE: The day in 1989 that the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened changed my life. For me, that was the day that the ocean died, yet something inside of me came to life. I realized that I needed to do everything I possibly could to preserve not only our fishing way of life but also how we were going to stop future oil spills because we have already lost the war once the oil hits the water. The key goal is to prevent oil spills from ever happening.

I decided that I was going to spend my life being a community activist. Fishing became kind of secondary because if I was going to continue to be able to fish, the only way that was going to happen was if I became an activist to try and change laws, legislation and policy.

STEPHANIE: How did the oil spill it affect your community?

DUNE: It impacted everybody in a profound way because this once pristine, road-less habitat of abundance and beauty-beyond-belief was tarnished. When the spill happened, we realized that we are expendable. Even though we provided millions of meals to people around the world, that didn’t matter to government or industry. No one came to help us.

Exxon came to town and said, “We’re Exxon. We do it right. You’re lucky that the oil spill happened on our watch because we’re going to make you whole again. If your nets don’t fill up with fish or your hotels and your restaurants don’t fill up with people, then we’ll make it right.”

 But instead, Exxon appealed the $5 billion verdict that we won in 1994 17 times over 20 years until they got the Supreme Court of their dreams. Out of the 30,000 original plaintiffs, 20% of them died without ever receiving a settlement.  Our $5 billion was reduced down to $500 million, which for 30,000 plaintiffs was equivalent to one good day of fishing.

As a result, there were divorces, suicides, fishing cooperative breakups, friends and family were fighting, a lot of people left town; they couldn’t make a living anymore. The price of our fish, our permits, the value of our boats all plummeted. For 15 to 20 years, we couldn’t make a living. It was hard for me to see our community being torn apart like that. A lot of people had their hands out wanting to become “spillionaires” and receive big settlements from Exxon.

I had known that it was inevitable that a spill of that magnitude would happen in our lifetime. When they first passed a law to allow Prince William Sound to become the terminal for the Trans Alaska pipeline from Prudhoe Bay into Prince William Sound, they said that an oil spill of that magnitude would only happen once in every 432 years, but it happened in the 13th year of operation, and it changed our lives forever. That was the day that I decided I was going to be louder than everything else, yet remain a voice of reason and take on the powers that be.  I believed that as long as I was a voice of reason, people would listen. That’s when I received my Eyak name, Jamachakih, which means little bird that screams really loud and won’t shut up.

STEPHANIE: What is the state of things now in regards to the region’s ability to recover?

DUNE: There are four species on the Endangered Species List – the Pacific herring, the marbled murrelet, the pigeon guillemot, and the AT1 resident killer whale pod. Killer whales only mate with lifelong partners so their herd of 36 or so has been reduced down to about six killer whales. There are many areas in Prince William Sound that are still considered dead zones where it used to be full of life every spring, but no longer.

There used to be 200,000 tons of herring returning annually to Prince William Sound to spawn. It has dipped as low as 4,000 tons. In the last couple of years, it’s bumped up a bit to about 20,000 tons, which is only 10% of what it was. It’s not enough to support a commercial fishery. For the first time in 33 years, they had a subsistence fishery, so some of our native family and friends were able to go out and catch some herring. If herring ever do recover, then every species impacted from the Exxon Valdez oil spill would also recover because all of those critters made a living off of the herring. Herring are eight or nine inches long, little torpedoes of energy. They’re just full of oil, and that’s what keeps a lot of those other species happy and alive.

STEPHANIE: As a Native fisherman who experienced a catastrophic oil spill you turned into an activist. Now, along with your activism you have taken up ocean farming. How have those transitions affected you personally?

Copper River, Alaska

DUNE: I miss fishing every day. Monday was the first opener on the Copper River. All my buddies are heading out today and tomorrow. I feel like I’m beached, like I should be on the water.

But in the last five years, we’ve had terrible returns. From 44,000-500,000 sockeye salmon depending on the year. Prior to that, on an average run, we would catch a million-and-a-half to two million sockeye salmon annually. The Copper River Delta / Prince William Sound were the second largest and richest fishery in Alaska after Bristol Bay. This year they’re predicting another bad return. One year, the ocean heated up for three weeks to 76 degrees down to 20 feet below the surface killing millions of krill. Mussels couldn’t migrate quick enough, wild kelp forests suffered, and birds and salmon had to deal with the drought with no freshwater in the streams where salmon spawn. To watch that decline and that demise happen over the last four or five years, I knew that I had to do something.

When the spill happened, I sat down with my family and friends and said, “This is not the way it ends. This is the way it begins. We’re going to have to do everything we possibly can to preserve our wild salmon way of life.”

When you go back in the history of Prince William Sound, we had the 1964 Good Friday earthquake that rocked our world and our fishery, and turned everything upside down for about 25 years. Then 25 years to the date of the anniversary of the ’64 quake, we had the Good Friday Exxon Valdez oil spill happen in our backyard. And again, our fisheries and our way of life was rocked and turned upside down. And then 25 years later, we are dealing with climate change with ocean acidification, ocean warming and ocean rise.

The good news is that not only is the community resilient, but the ocean environment is too. But with climate change, I don’t think we’re going to rebound as quickly. With climate change, if we don’t change the way that we think and act, then we’re not going to recover, we’re not going to make it.

I realized that rather than putting my net around fish or seafood, I had to learn to put my net around people and corral them and convince them that there was a different way to do things. Over the last 33 years, we’ve been able to protect a million acres of wild salmon habitat. We’ve been able to start a food security program to feed our elders and youth in this time of hardship. We’re realizing that if we’re going to talk about change, we actually have to lead that change and create examples of how to live on the planet differently.

As much as I miss fishing, I miss the ocean more. Kelp and mariculture farming give me an opportunity to get back out on the ocean on my own terms and be a part of restoring the ocean, feeding my people a traditional food source and creating a regenerative economy that I can be proud of. The work I do benefits 300 critters that live off the wild kelp forests, and hopefully it’ll give the herring and the salmon a chance to recover as well.

My family has spent several generations making a good living on the sea. The ocean took care of me; it’s my turn to take care of the ocean.

STEPHANIE:  How did you get stated with ocean farming?

DUNE: I met Bren Smith who used to fish Alaskan waters, and who now has a company called GreenWave. Bren has developed an ocean polyculture farming system based on kelp that grows a mix of seaweeds and shellfish and requires zero inputs. Whenever we talked about what he was doing with kelp and mariculture, I would say, “Bren, you’re the future, and I’m still living in the present; I’m still making a good living. But when things go to hell in a handbasket, you’ll be one of the first people I call.” So, when we had four crashed fisheries in a row, I called him.

Kelp can sequester carbon five to twenty times more than living terrestrial forests, and bivalves can filter 40 to 60 gallons of water each per day. One oyster farm can clean an entire bay itself in an afternoon. I wanted to learn more about that and see if it can apply for Alaskan waters.

“Imagine a vertical underwater garden with hurricane anchors on the edges connected by floating horizontal ropes across the surface. From these lines, kelp and Gracilaria and other kinds of seaweeds grow vertically downward next to scallops in hanging nets that look like Japanese lanterns and mussels held in suspension in mesh socks. Staked below the vertical garden are oysters in cages and clams buried on the sea floor.”. … Bren Smith

I went to the East Coast with the Native Conservancy team and some of the members of the Baum Foundation, and we had several meetings on how we could do ocean farming in Alaska. Indigenous People have thousands of years of history harvesting kelp along our coastlines. The first job I ever had making money from the sea was harvesting herring roe on kelp when I was 12. It was the first $4,000 that I earned. And now here I am, 50 years later, and one of my last incomes from the sea will be from kelp farming, which can help restore habitat and sequester carbon.

But there are many barriers to entry for Indigenous Peoples; your average native person can’t afford to even get a permit let alone get a farm. The Native Conservancy began looking at the bottlenecks and the barriers to entry and ways to address them in different pilot programs, everything from building our own wild sea nurseries to growing and sourcing our own kelp seeds. We had to figure out how to have certified native divers harvest kelp seed so that we could cultivate it in our own nurseries. We needed to make our equipment. We needed to develop a pilot program with test farm sites to learn what could grow where.

Now we’re interested in figuring out how to capitalize building our own processing and value-adding centers so we can do our own marketing and deal with transportation and renewable energies, because the thing about Alaska is it costs a lot to live there and energy is expensive. The way I look at it is nobody’s figured out how to stop the sun from coming out or the tide from running in and out, or the wind from blowing, so if we can capture and utilize that energy to run our processing facilities, then we can power this industry ourselves.

We also have to address building different boats because this is a different fishery. It’s a whole different ballgame because commercial fishing starts in May and ends in October while kelping starts in October and ends in May. We’re kelping in the darkest, coldest, stormiest times of the year, so you need sturdy vessels that have a lot of deck space so you can carry a lot of totes, because unlike a salmon, where you have an hour-and-a-half to figure out what to do with it when you get it aboard your boat, with kelp you’ve got about 20 minutes. After that it starts turning colors. The quality, the texture, everything starts going down. So, you’ve got to take care of it right away and get it in a cool, dark place or into refrigerated seawater.

So, we bought two boat companies to start building boats for Indigenous Peoples. We want to figure out how to start an indigenous ocean farmer loan program that also has a grant division so we can help Native Peoples get permitted on their ancestral lands that they have thousands of years of history with. We are thinking long-term about how we’re going to make it in this industry. The wonderful thing about farming kelp is you don’t have to chase it around like a salmon. You don’t have to feed it, you don’t have to water it, you don’t have to fertilize it, and if you do it right, you can get paid to watch kelp grow. It’s the fastest growing organism on the planet at 18 to 24 inches a day.

Our goal, through the Native Conservancy, is to help Indigenous Peoples get a leg up and an opportunity to get this industry off the ground, and to be a part of it in a big way because the reality is there is no mariculture plan for Alaska. There’s not one for America, and there’s certainly not one for the world. We want to help devise that plan and lead the policy and infrastructure to correct a lot of things that aren’t right in the industry.

Kelp is important in so many ways. It creates vital ocean habitat that supports many ocean species. And when it’s harvested, it can be made into biofuels, bioplastics, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, fertilizer and compost. If you add 2% kelp to animal feed for cows and pigs, it reduces their belching and methane emissions by 50 to 60%.

There are 200 different food products that you can make from it. It has numerous nutrients, 14 different vitamins, iodine, and 10 times more calcium than milk. It’s one of those magical things that grows in the water and is good for the ocean and can be turned into many different products that are good for people.

Kelp and oysters

STEPHANIE: What do you hope to accomplish with ocean kelp farming for yourself, your people and the local marine ecosystem?

DUNE: The biggest thing for me is if I’ll be able to teach my daughter how to run boats and how to make a living on the sea, not quite like how her daddy did, hopefully, it’ll create that habitat that’ll allow the herring and salmon to come back, and, possibly, she’ll be able to fish one day.

On a personal level, for me to be on the ocean is different than being on the land. I remember my father wasn’t so nice on land. He was always barking orders, and we had to deal with the jurisdiction of the city and the state and the federal government. It was just always one drama after another, but once he would untie the boat and we’d leave the harbor and there were no lines that we had to stand in, and we could make a livelihood on the ocean out in Prince William Sound or on the Copper River Delta, I always marveled at how his personality would change. He’d be a nice man; we got along on the ocean. It wasn’t until I started skippering boats when I was 12 or 13 years old that I realized why he was that way. Once you get out there in the wild on the ocean, there’s nothing like it. You’re your own person. You’re your own boss. You go out there on your own terms and catch what you can.

When we started our elders’ food security program, I told all of our young kelpers: “When you go out there, throw your hooks in the water, do all your kelp work, and then go up in the mountain and kill something, come back to town with kelp and venison and seafood – whether it’s halibut or cod or crab or snapper, spotted shrimp, whatever it is – and bring it home and we’ll freeze it and package it. Then we feed our elders and our youth and they love it. We’ve had people call us to thank us over and over, saying “oh my god, that is the best quality seafood or venison” or whatever it is that we’re feeding them every month. They’re thrilled because in this time of COVID, a lot of people weren’t able to get out and catch their traditional resources that they normally harvest every year. We saw that that was a detriment and it could lead to health issues, so we decided to start that program so we could feed our people ourselves.

All the Native Peoples that we’ve spoken to in about 36 tribes across the state of Alaska want to get in kelp and mariculture for three reasons. Number one is to do something restorative for our oceans because Native People traditionally have been the original stewards and guardians of the land and the sea; that’s why we still have something to fight over.

The second thing is that they want to grow a traditional food source that they’ve been enjoying for thousands of years. A lot of people say this is a brand-new industry. Well, maybe to you pal, but we’ve been doing this for thousands of years.

The third reason is to build a regenerative economy by re-localizing fishing jobs that have been lost to the seafood industry that has owned and controlled us for 150 years. It’ll give the native villages, which are seeing upwards of 75 to 85% unemployment, an opportunity to create blue-green jobs or blue carbon jobs helping restore the planet, feed their people, and re-localize native women and youth, because if both of those demographics come back home, the men will follow.

Kelp farming is an opportunity to change not only our relationship with our food sources, but also our relationship with the sea. People will start remembering things that they never knew but that are part of their cultural DNA. If you restore wild salmon spawning habitat, salmon runs that disappeared 100 years ago, can come back within three to five years to spawn and die. It is in their DNA and that DNA is who we are. We are the salmon people.

Our salmon runs have diminished, not only in run size but in smaller fish size. By growing more habitat and helping the juvenile herring and salmon have cover, then the mortality rate is going to be less, and the returning number is going to be greater.

Salmon go on their world tours– pinks and chums head out for two years, sockeyes and coho go out for four to five years, and the kings go for seven or eight years – and then all return home, but they’re coming back smaller in size because they’re competing for the same food source with a lot of other fish and animals out in the sea. Our hope is that, with the work that we’re doing, salmon are going to be a little healthier and stronger before they go on their world tours, so they’ll come back a little stronger and happier and in bigger numbers.

What a lot of humans don’t understand is that preservation is key to restoration. As long as you preserve what you still have, whether that’s pristine habitat, or wild salmon, or endangered languages, or clean air, or clean water, then you have some opportunity to restore what’s been lost.

 As humans, we’ve lost our ability to connect with nature and reality. When you’re out in the wild, either you figure it out and you start remembering things that you never knew, because they will come to you, or you will perish. Indigeneity is decolonization. When you indigenize, that is decolonizing our minds. It’s about thinking differently, acting differently, being differently. That’s what we all have to do if we want to survive.

The Pulse 7/21/22: Building Coalitions in the Youth Climate Movement 🌎

In the wake of the collapse of meaningful climate legislation in the US as a result of a dysfunctional political system (followed immediately by a record-smashing heat wave in Europe), the impulse to throw up your hands and give up hope is all too real. It is no secret that our “planetary health” is headed in a disastrous direction, and to pretend otherwise is to bury your head in the sand. While climate change is ravaging communities worldwide, leaders with the power to slow the slide towards catastrophe are not those who will experience the worst effects. It is young people who are inheriting a planet deeply scarred by older generations’ poor decisions and inaction. Given these realities, the movements being led by the next generation of leaders are nothing short of awe-inspiring. With their futures on the line, youth activists are rising up worldwide, displaying the type of vision, leadership and clear-eyed assessment of priorities that we should all be aspiring to achieve.

This week, join us in learning from three transformational young climate activists — Alexandria Villaseñor, Kevin Patel, and Nalleli Cobo — who exemplify how youth the world over are taking a stand to create a desirable future.

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

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Working Together: Building Coalitions of Power in the Global Youth Climate Movement

Building authentic power in order to achieve success in global youth climate movements will require enhancing international solidarity, communication, and organizing capacity. Building relationships with allied groups and organizations is the key to making genuine, lasting change. An international youth organizer since the age of 13, Alexandria Villaseñor shares the unique ways in which a multicultural, geographically distributed youth movement is building trust, negotiating compromises, distributing decision-making and centering the stories, experiences and leadership of those most impacted in each action and campaign. From grassroots movements to national organizations, Alexandria shows us how youth intend to win the climate fight by working together.

Watch here.

Youth-Led Intersectional Environmentalism: Today, not Tomorrow

Kevin Patel, a 21-year old LA-based Climate Justice activist extraordinaire who passionately demands that youth be listened to right now, not marginalized as “leaders of tomorrow,” recounts his own health challenges growing up in heavily polluted South Central Los Angeles and insists that climate action and ending racial and class disparities have to be inseparably linked in our movements.

Read here.

Youth Activism on the Frontlines of Urban Oil Drilling

After growing up across from an oil drilling site in Los Angeles, Nalleli Cobo and her many neighbors suffered from a wide range of illnesses including heart palpitations, headaches, and nosebleeds. Her firsthand experience of the effects of oil drilling led Nalleli, still only a child, to lead a campaign against the site. She has since become an internationally renowned, award-winning Environmental Justice activist. She shares the story of her trajectory and challenges, the importance of the ongoing struggles in which she’s engaged, the very high price she and many people in disenfranchised communities continue to pay, and how local struggles relate to the larger global fight for climate justice.

Read here.

More Youth Activism from Bioneers.org

NOW AVAILABLE! Nature, Culture & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, 2nd Ed.

We are excited to announce that the second edition of Nina Simons’ book, Nature, Culture & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, is now on sale! Nature, Culture & the Sacred offers practical guidance and inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership on behalf of positive change. Join Nina on an inspiring journey to shed self-limiting beliefs, lead from the heart and discover beloved community as you cultivate your own flourishing and liberation.

Get your copy.

Busting the Myth of Primate Patriarchy: The Nature of Sex and Gender in Our Ape Relatives 

The late world-renowned primatologist Professor Frans de Waal explores the nature of sex and gender among our cousins the apes, and how gender diversity is a common and pervasive potential on nature’s masculine-feminine continuum. In the quest to overcome human gender inequality, he suggests that our focus needs to be on the inequality.

Featuring

The late Frans B. M. de Waal, Ph.D., was a Dutch/American biologist and primatologist widely renowned for his work on the behavior and social intelligence of primates. C. H. Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University, de Waal was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and was declared one of The Worlds’ 100 Most Influential People Today by Time magazine in 2007. The author of numerous highly influential books including Chimpanzee Politics, Our Inner Ape, and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

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
  • Production Assistance: Anna Rubanova

Resources

Read an excerpt from Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution

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: In this program, the world-renowned primatologist Professor Frans de Waal explores the nature of sex and gender among our cousins the apes, and how gender diversity is a common and pervasive potential on nature’s masculine-feminine continuum. In the quest to overcome human gender inequality, he suggests that our focus needs to be on the inequality.

I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Busting the Myth of Primate Patriarchy: The Nature of Sex and Gender in our Ape Relatives”.

Professor Frans de Waal

FRANS B.M. DE WAAL: This topic, gender: Well, I saw it, you know, let’s pick a topic that’s not controversial and that everyone agrees on. And so that’s why I picked it. And I’m going to be speaking at it from the perspective of primatology and biology. I’m a biologist by training even though I’ve been in the psychology department for 25 years.

HOST: It’s telling that one of the worst slurs you can hurl at someone is to call them an “animal.” As the professor of psychology Nick Haslam observes, yes, we are animals – but we’re animals who like to believe we’re not merely animals. 

Of course, he notes, calling someone a snake or a rat or a toad is very different from calling them lion-hearted or eagle-eyed. Then again, as the Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff once observed, “The best way to keep a sheep a sheep, is to convince it that it’s an eagle.”

We’ve sort of convinced ourselves that in some imagined animal hierarchy, we’re the eagles. Nevertheless, we are indeed animals. Rather than denying or defying our animal nature, we’d do well to understand our kinship with other close animal relatives. 

Professor Frans de Waal’s formidable lifelong body of work has vividly shown that we are definitely still apes. On the tree of life, we’re very closely related to our chimpanzee and bonobo cousins. We can learn a great deal about ourselves by studying them, as he has devoted much of his life to doing. 

He has woven his decades of study on the behavior and social intelligence in primates into best-selling books, including Chimpanzee Politics, Our Inner Ape and Mama’s Last Hug. Then he decided to take a fresh look at a very old and increasingly controversial paradigm: the relationship between sex and gender in primates. It resulted in his book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

Professor Frans de Waal spoke at a Bioneers conference…

FdW: So first let me say something about sex and gender. People confuse it and our language is beginning to confuse the two. Sex relates to the biology. Sex is binary, mostly binary, male and female. There’s an in-between category. It relates to genitals and sexual dimorphism, size, secondary characteristics, all biological characteristics, hormones and so on.

Humans are actually not very different, males and females. The males are physically a lot stronger, even the best-trained female athletes only reach average male strength. So there’s a huge difference in physical strength, but otherwise the differences are not nearly as great as we see in many other primates.

Now, gender, gender has to do with expectation. So this guy has an expectation that he needs to be taller than a woman, and gender has to do with social norms, education, culture, how you’re supposed to behave as a male or as a female, what we teach our kids, and so on. And so that’s the gender side. And unfortunately, in English, we have begun to confuse these two – gender and sex – because English unfortunately has only one word – having sex and being of a certain sex – has only one word for that, and that’s why people, I think, have started using gender now. Now they will say what is the gender of your dog? Well, my dog doesn’t have a lot of cultural expression. I think of gender characteristics. And so that’s an inappropriate question, actually. And gender-reveal parties is an inappropriate use of the word gender because before birth, children don’t have gender yet.

So in biology, of course, we’re very used to that debate. We have the nature vs. nurture debate, and in biology, we all know that you cannot tease them apart. I know that the media often does that. The media says this characteristic is 90% genetic. That’s nonsense. That’s an impossibility. You cannot tease these things apart. And so nature and nurture are always intertwined and always go together. So sex and gender automatically are related.

Now gender I usually divide in masculine and feminine, not male and female, and everything in between, and so gender is a far more fluid and flexible concept than sex.

HOST: In looking at gender in this fraught age of gender fluidity, pronouns and political and generational discontinuity, Professor de Waal goes where angels fear to tread.

Western science has a long and torturous history of abusing and distorting biology and animal studies for political ends. It’s been used to bolster racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and rigidly hierarchical gender social structures. The ideologies of Sociobiology and “biological essentialism” have served as justifications to dehumanize, exploit and subjugate people of color, women, and gay and non-binary people.

Western science has also promulgated the centuries-long myth that only humans are capable of intelligence and emotions. Today it’s hard to find a scientist who would agree with that.

Although these museum-quality paradigms have been fading in recent decades, the burdens of history still weigh heavily.

So with fresh eyes, what can we learn from our closest animal cousins?

FdW: In the other primates, our closest relatives are bonobos and chimpanzees. And the sex difference is not that great either. It’s not nearly as great as let’s say in a gorilla, where the male is twice the size of the female. And so they are more similar. People often forget about the bonobo, and there is a reason for that is that the anthropologies don’t like the bonobo. The bonobo is female dominated, is peaceful, and is very sexy, and the anthropologists have built a career on the evolution of the human species built on warfare and eliminating everyone and conquering the Earth, and the bonobo doesn’t fit in that picture. It’s sort of a hippy who doesn’t fit in the society.

But I pay attention to bonobos, exactly genetically, exactly equally close to us as the chimpanzee. There is really no good reason to eliminate them from the picture, and so they need to be part of it. And so let me first explain the difference between chimpanzees and bonobos.

Chimpanzees are very male dominant, first of all, but they’re also very dominance-oriented. They’re constantly working on their status, and this is, for example, here, you see two males, two male chimpanzees. They’re actually the same size, but the one on the left is the dominant one who stands up, puts his hair up, looks big, and tries to intimidate the other one, and that’s the dominance behavior between chimpanzees.

HOST: Frans de Waal’s decades of studies of chimpanzees and bonobos convince him that the great majority of the members of primate groups, including us humans, are clearly differentiated by sex. Those differences are fundamental and pronounced.

Yet at the same time, he finds that sexual and gender diversity abound. Same-sex relations are quite common among many animal species including primates. Genes can also be fluid, taking less common permutations that express nature’s non-binary spectrum.

He also points out that women primatologists, when they arrived in the 1960s, changed the way the discipline looked at primate societies and the role of female primates, which until then was neglected.

Which brings us back to the sisterhood of bonobos…

FdW: This is a bonobo. [BONOBO SOUNDS] The bonobo has a childlike voice, much higher pitched than the chimpanzee, and has very different behavior, and looks very different. Anatomically, they look more humanlike. They have been compared to australopithecine, and so even though genetically they’re equally close to us as the chimpanzee, anatomically, I would say, we are more like bonobos or bonobos are more like us, and they’re more similar to us.

The females are dominant. They have a collective dominance over the males. They don’t have an individual dominance. If you have, sometimes happens at a zoo, you have one male and one female bonobo, then the male is dominant. The male is bigger and stronger than the female. As soon as you add a second female, the females are going to be dominant over the male. So that’s how a bonobo society is set up. Basically a sisterhood and that’s how they keep the males in control.

So bonobos have a lot of sex. This is actually quite typical, belly-to-belly sex, between male and female in this case, but they also have sex in positions that you will find very hard to imagine, like hanging upside down by their feet, for example, something we cannot do. And so they’re very creative in their sexual behavior.

The sex serves bonding, and so there’s a lot of female-female sex in the bonobo, because the females have this powerful sisterhood which needs to be maintained, and sex and grooming is the way they do that. The easiest way to get sexual behavior in the bonobo is to give them food, because food introduces competition, as it does in all animals, and as soon as there’s competition, the bonobos will have sex to eliminate it, and then they share the food.

Bonobos grooming

HOST: In 1871, Charles Darwin concluded this: “Man is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than women, and has more inventive genius.” His patriarchal viewpoint reflected the larger perspective of the 19th and 20th century male-dominated discipline of evolutionary science: that evolution created the binary of male and female, and our behavior and nature reflect this biological duality.

That binary has been translated into deeply unequal, cultural, political and legal structures that dictate how we’re supposed to be and act.

The problem is that does not mirror nature’s rich sexual and gender diversity and evolutionary potentials. Nor does it remotely match the actual living expression of human beings being human.

Professor de Waal found the role of play among young primates to be especially revealing about the nature-nurture gender dynamic.

For instance, in the wild, female chimpanzees and apes pick up rocks and wooden logs, hold them, and put them on their back and play mother with them. They build nests for them, and young females cluster around the babies like fervent babysitters.

FdW: If you have a discussion why boys are attracted to trucks and why girls are attracted to dolls. Certainly the attraction to dolls is natural in all the primates. We see the attraction to infants in young females. The attraction to trucks, by the way, this is a strange thing – these experiments have been done with dolls and trucks, and giving them to monkeys, and the males, they do play with the trucks. For me, it’s an amazing thing, because they—it doesn’t relate to anything in their natural environment, but they are attracted to these things. So what do the males do?

HOST: Frans de Waal finds that male primates are not particularly interested in babies. They spend a prodigious amount of time doing rough-housing and mock fighting, called “rough-and-tumble play.”

Professor de Waal says it’s found among all primates, including in human studies. Boys just like to wrestle a whole lot more than girls do.

Baby chimpanzees playing

But inevitably, evolution is way more complicated and nuanced than that. And so-called alpha males have gotten a bad rap in a politicized reality distortion field of badly done science.

FdW: The mock fighting of the males is a preparation for adult competition, but it’s also very important for them to learn skills of how to contain their strength and how to control their strength.

For example, a gorilla male, with this enormous physical strength, he only needs to press a little bit on a gorilla baby and he will kill it. But he does play with gorilla babies. Adult males play with babies, and everything goes well, which means that he has learned over his lifetime – this is not instinct or something – he has learned over his lifetime how to control his strength. It’s very important for males to get that kind of control because they have greater physical strength than other members of the society. So that’s what the rough-housing does, and it’s a very important part of development.

Now something about male affairs and how we got into the patriarchy, basically, the story that the natural order between men and women is that men are dominant over women because look at all the primates. In all the primates, the males are dominant over the females. This started with a study on baboons, a study of 100 years ago, which was disastrous. At a zoo in London, they threw 100 baboons together and in the wrong sex ratio. They put I think 95 males with 5 females, and it became a bloodbath. And the one who did it, Zuckerman, a very famous scientist at the time. He wrote books about it, and so that’s how we got to the story that patriarchy is what’s in our genes because that’s what all the primates do. It comes from baboons, which are monkeys. We are apes. We’re different from the monkeys, but regardless of that, it was a faulty experiment, basically. We know that even baboons in the wild, they don’t fight like that. It’s not the same kind of social order that Zuckerman observed.

If you look at alpha males in a chimpanzee society – I’m partly responsible for the use of the word alpha male in politics, because when I wrote Chimpanzee Politics, I used that word. And Newt Gingrich recommended it to the Republicans at the time, and I think that’s how the word got entrenched in political language. And then the business people picked it up and they wrote business books about how to be an alpha male, and reduced alpha male basically to bullies. Someone who beats you over the head every day and lets you know that he’s boss and so on, and that’s how they see what an alpha male is.

But, you know, most alpha male chimpanzees that I’ve known, and I’ve known many, they are very loved by their community. If they’re good alpha males, they keep the peace, they break up fights, they support the underdogs, they support juveniles against adults and females against males, they’re very empathic usually, they share food very easily. So a good alpha male can become extremely popular, and the result of that is that when he’s going to be challenged by another male, a younger male, the group is going to defend his position because they want to keep that alpha male. And it is very important for the harmony of the group and if you remove alpha males – we’ve done experiments with monkeys, where you sometimes for a day, remove high-ranking males, you get chaos in the group. And so it’s a very important part of the group structure.

Alpha females, by the way, because also every group has an alpha female, alpha females, they have a different way of resolving conflict. They usually do it afterwards. Instead of stepping in when the conflict occurs, which requires a lot of intimidation, they step in afterwards and bring the parties together. And so I described in my book, Mama’s Last Hug, how Mama, the alpha female, would bring parties together, literally drag a male to another male, to get them to groom each other and so on, and so fixed the relationships in the group.

HOST: Like the myth that a primate patriarchy is deterministically encoded in our human biology, it turns out that male care for offspring is common among primates, and gender diversity and gender potential are pervasive and accepted.

And what’s that got to do with gender equality? More when we return…

HOST: Although male primates are overall much less interested in babies, Professor Frans de Waal suggests that a closer look reveals a more complex picture. It comes down to what he calls the gender potentials that are always present – in this case, for male care.

FdW: I’ve seen on conservative media that they talk about how paternity leave is ridiculous. They can understand maternity leave but not paternity leave, because men are not supposed to be taking care of the children. And if you look at the other primates – and they sometimes use this argument – if you look at the other primates, it’s mostly a female job to take care of offspring, and males do very little except protecting the offspring sometimes. But, you know, sometimes a female loses her life, so the mother dies, and all of a sudden there’s an orphan available in the group, asking for attention. Other females will not adopt that orphan because they have their own kids and they have no room for an additional one. It’s very hard to live in the forest and travel through the trees with multiple children. And so the females don’t adopt that infant, but the males do.

So these males are usually not—we know that from DNA studies they’re usually not related to the infant that they adopt. They take care of them, not just for a few days, but sometimes for five years or two years, or five years. So it’s a real adoption. And I wanted to show that is because this is the potential of male care for offspring, which I think in our species is even more developed than in bonobos and chimpanzees because we evolved nuclear families. So they didn’t evolve nuclear families. The males are not fathers involved in the care of offspring. But we evolved that sort of system, and so I’m sure that in our species these paternal tendencies are much better developed. And so this whole nonsense of that care for offspring is not naturally present in the males, I think, is nonsense.

HOST: Another potential Professor de Waal finds among primates is gender variability. One instance he cites is Donna, a chimpanzee female who looks and acts decidedly masculine.

FdW: She had female genitalia. She had the long hair and the physical build of a male. She hangs out with males from very young. She is mostly asexual. She’s not interested in sex really, and she’s mostly peaceful. And so Donna, from very young – I’ve known her since she was a little baby like this, 3 years old – she liked to play with males. She liked to do this wrestling game that males do all the time. The adult males normally don’t play with young females, but in the case of Donna, they did, which already showed that she was different from the rest. And from that time on, she developed into a male-like character. From a distance she looked like a male, and she hung out with the males, and she acted like a male, even though she was non-aggressive in most ways. And so I cannot ask her her identity, sexual identity, but I think she acted like a male and she behaved like a male, and she was extremely well-integrated.

That’s another thing that’s very interesting is that we do have individuals who are more homosexual than heterosexual. That’s actually quite common in the primates and in the bonobo, I would say, they don’t have a preference for one gender or the other – so we do have that kind of individuals. We have individuals like Donna. We have males who don’t play the macho game, even though they’re big adult males. They don’t want to be involved in status struggles, and they stay out of them. And so we have all these exceptions, all this variability, and I’ve never noticed that the primates are intolerant of it. So that’s a big difference with the human society is that they have generally no trouble with it, and Donna was extremely well-integrated and well accepted in her group.

So the gender diversity, as we usually call it, I think if we start looking for it, because scientists haven’t really looked for it – we like typical behavior more than atypical behavior – if we start looking for it, we will see tons of it.

HOST: Along with gender diversity, another long-overlooked gender potential among primates is female leadership. Although psychology textbooks often assert that males are more hierarchical than females, Professor de Waal says that received knowledge is nonsense. It’s just different, ask any alpha female…

FdW: All animals that I know have female hierarchies, with an alpha female on top. The word pecking order comes from hens, not from roosters, and so female hierarchies are found everywhere, and I think women are just as sensitive to status differences as men are. But people say these things. And we have alpha females all over the primate world, and even in a species like the chimpanzee, which is male dominated, the alpha female is very important, and I think you always need to make a distinction between physical dominance, which in a chimpanzee is the males, and power, which can be many individuals. It can be these old males or it can be Mama, the female chimpanzee. And in my last book, Mama’s Last Hug, I write about her leadership and how she expressed it.

And then in the bonobos, of course, we have this situation that the alpha female is alpha over everyone, including the males. And so female leadership is really not hard to find in the primate world, and I think we do need to make a distinction between physical dominance, which is a different thing, I think, from power.

Bonobo mother and baby

HOST: The ground truth, says Professor de Waal, is that it all comes back to the basic nature-versus-nurture dynamic, which is another false binary. Nature and nurture are inextricable and ever-evolving.

And of course although there are close evolutionary ties between humans and apes, we’ve also evolved autonomously for millions of years. That evolutionary branching has obviously led humans onto our own unique pathway. Going ape only gets us so far.

That ineffable mystery of continuous evolutionary transformation – of the “nature-nurture” dance – is nevertheless deeply relevant to our human quest for gender equality on the masculine-feminine continuum.

FdW: Gender and sex are different things, and it’s very useful to distinguish them because one is the cultural side, the other one the biological side. They’re always connected. So when people disconnect them – that happens, of course, some people say gender is purely cultural, there is nothing in our life that is purely cultural; there is also nothing that is purely natural. And so I think they always remain connected.

I think gender—I haven’t talked about it, but I think the gender concept is applicable to other primates. You know, a chimpanzee or bonobo is adult when they’re 16 years-old, so they have an enormous long lifetime in which they pick up all sorts of behavior, including they model themselves on adults and pick up their behavior. And so the gender concept, a cultural transmission of sextypical behavior, let’s say, is applicable to the other primates.

I think there are behavioral sex differences. I mentioned, of course, the play behavior of the young, but there are other behavioral sex differences that we share across all these species and that are grounded in our biology.

And finally, there are behavioral potentials that we don’t always get to see but that are clearly present and that blur these sex differences that we see and that we should pay attention to, especially given that we would like to change society.

And finally, there are behavioral potentials that we don’t always get to see but that are clearly present and that blur these sex differences that we see and that we should pay attention to, especially given that we would like to change society.

And the last thing I want to say about that is that of the term “gender inequality” that we often use, which is a problem in society, and gender inequality is real and existing, and is more in favor, of course, of males than females, we have focused on the wrong part of the equation. Gender inequality, we are focused on gender. We’ve said there’s something wrong with gender. Let’s go gender-neutral. Let’s abolish gender. Let’s not pay too much attention to it or reduce it, or the gender differences. And I think the problem is really in the word inequality.  It’s the inequality and the injustice associated with it that’s the problem. It’s not gender itself that’s necessarily the problem. But people have turned that into a problem that they want to fight. And I thank you for your attention. [APPLAUSE]

Youth-Led Intersectional Environmentalism: Today, not Tomorrow

Kevin J. Patel is a 21-year-old climate justice activist and the founder of the youth-led environmental justice organization OneUpAction International. Patel initially launched OneUpAction in 2019 as an organization to amplify BIPOC voices and leadership. His goal was to empower communities to take local action. Today, the organization works tirelessly to fight for a regenerative future by providing resources and support to marginalized youth.

Following, Patel shares his hopes for immediate climate action in which young people are given the resources and agency to advocate for climate justice on their own terms.

Kevin J. Patel

I want to start off by talking about where our collective movements for climate and environmental justice should be. I begin with a quote from my good friend Leah Thomas, where she talks about intersectionality in environmentalism.

So what is intersectional environmentalism?

“This is an inclusive version of environmentalism that advocates for both the protection of people and the planet. It identifies the ways in which injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected. It brings injustices done to the most vulnerable communities, and the earth, to the forefront and does not minimize or silence social inequality. Intersectional environmentalism advocates for justice for people and the planet.”

Intersectional environmentalism is the framework in order to realize environmental justice.

We know all too well that the climate crisis is the single greatest issue of our time. We have only a few years left for our politicians and world leaders to act. These critical years will ultimately determine the future of our planet and the fate of our generation and generations to come. We are in the fight for the future of not just the planet but for all of humanity.

The climate crisis isn’t just about the future, it’s about our lives. It is about the air we breathe, the water we drink, the homes that have burnt down, and the people who have died. It is about those who are diagnosed with cancer and asthma. It is hard to see so many members of my community being disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. Seeing and hearing their voices is what intersectional environmentalism is all about. We must also not just see and hear these voices, but make sure they have the power and agency to make their own decisions.

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, I am intimately familiar with the effects of climate change. In middle school, I was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat, a direct effect of growing up in a community plagued by air pollution and neglect. I notice that the place I call home is still being destroyed by the very thing that caused my health issues.

The State of California is known to be the most progressive state in America, yet we are still being affected by wildfires, droughts, and heat waves. Communities in which some of my friends and family members live are near oil refineries or being affected day in and day out by other injustices. It is not the affluent communities in Los Angeles or elsewhere in California that are being affected, it is the low-income communities of color.

When I say the affluent are not being affected, I mean they have the luxury to escape the injustices that plague communities of color. They have far more resources, wealth, privilege, and connections that allow them to escape wildfires and other climate-fueled disasters, whereas people of color, who are the working class, don’t have those privileges. They are trapped in the accelerating effects of the climate crisis.

Let us all remember that environmental injustice occurs within a racialized context. BIPOC communities are the most exposed to poor air and water quality. This isn’t random. This is a policy choice. We are the ones who are disproportionately impacted and have to suffer these injustices.

Today, the whole world faces daunting challenges, from persistent poverty to entrenched inequalities. Yet one key solution is just over the horizon. Countries and leaders can take action by empowering our youth to face these challenges upfront.

Now you might be asking yourself, aren’t we already giving young people a voice? And it’s true. I’m here, aren’t I? Or aren’t we already empowering young people to take action? I want you to keep those two questions in mind. Our leaders frequently bombard us from all angles of society with the axiom that young people of today are the leaders of tomorrow. But why not the leaders of today?

The irony lies in the fact that the youth are overlooked in the formation, implementation, and monitoring of exactly the key decisions that will ultimately affect us because we are seen as the leaders of tomorrow, not today.

From a politically correct perspective, youth are the leaders of tomorrow. The use of the word “tomorrow” in any context has a way of conducting complacency in promoting the importance of actions and decisions made today and shaping tomorrow.

According to well-known activist Malcolm X, the future belongs to those who are prepared for it today. Why must the youth wait until tomorrow to lead? What about today? When does tomorrow begin, and what does tomorrow look like? Let us ask ourselves those key questions, but let there be no misunderstanding: As often as the youth are reminded that they are the leaders of tomorrow, they must also be reminded of the fact that today is the tomorrow they were waiting for yesterday.

Calling the youth the leaders of tomorrow has brought about the mindset that they are incapable of making an impact or change in their communities today, because it is not their time. It has also caused them to sit back and criticize the governments or corporations we see as today’s leaders and who should be held responsible for all the present societal injustices in our communities. It has made young people look at the problems we face in our communities, believing that someone else, not us, will fix them. Being a leader tomorrow requires a vision today, and this vision today must be put to work to be implemented.

So let me go back to my main question: What does today look like? Young people being able to lead and implement climate solutions is something I find myself working on every single day at OneUpAction. We must find and fund young people who are not only taking action on climate through education, but also those who are implementing climate solutions in their communities.

We are all given a superpower, and that power can be used collectively: It’s our voices. Our voices are the most powerful tool at our disposal. We all have a voice to speak out against injustices. We only have to use our voices.

I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but we really don’t have time to waste. We need everyone to get involved in this fight, because that is the only way for us to solve these social inequities.

Watch a full video of Kevin J. Patel’s keynote at Bioneers 2022 here.

Crafting a Regenerative World, One Building at a Time

The ways in which we design our cities, public spaces, and buildings can reflect our overall attitudes about justice, accessibility, and environmental stewardship. Are these spaces designed, for example, to work with or in opposition to the natural world? Are they designed to foster community harmony and collaboration? Are they designed with all of the space’s stakeholders in mind? Forward-thinking designers and architects are fostering a movement that recognizes the built environment as so much more than siloed artistry.

This week, we celebrate the ideas of leaders — including Jason McLennan, Kongjian Yu, and Deanna Van Buren — who exemplify how the built environment, when thoughtfully created, can benefit people, communities, and ecosystems.

JUST A REMINDER! We released videos of all Bioneers keynote presentations this week. You can browse them all here. Don’t forget to share your favorites with your community.

Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive newsletters (like this one!) featuring the most recent stories and updates from the Bioneers community.

Jason McLennan – From Reconciliation to Regeneration

Sixteen years ago Jason F. McLennan launched the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most progressive and advanced green building program, to show that our buildings could serve as one of the key paths toward a regenerative future. Since then, numerous Living Buildings that demonstrate a better, more inspiring way of living and working have been built around the world. Although these projects create ripples of change and are living proof of regeneration in action, and in spite of these and other great models, we continue to build and live in ways that degrade the planet. Why? Jason McLennan explores why physical demonstrations of better solutions are not enough to create change when society has not grappled with its deeper systemic trauma. If we are to participate fully in regenerating the conditions for life on the planet, a deeper process of reconciliation is necessary. To heal the planet, Jason argues, we must fundamentally heal our culture.

Watch here.

Kongjian Yu – “Sponge Cities”: Visionary, Nature-Based Urban Design from China

What if cities were designed so that they could absorb excess rainfall, neutralize floods, and turn their streets green and beautiful in the process? Kongjian Yu is doing just that, as he will report from China. This award-winning leader in ecological urbanism and landscape architecture, and founder of the planning and design firm, Turenscape in Beijing, has become world-renowned for his “sponge cities” and other revolutionary nature-based solutions. These approaches are being implemented in well over 200 cities in China and beyond. Yu’s extraordinary city-wide systems of stormwater-retaining ponds, wetlands, and parks draw from both ancient Chinese hydrological wisdom and cutting-edge design to offer the whole world a model of inspired climate adaptation in an era of rising seas and extreme rainfall events.

Watch here.

Designing and Building a Regenerative, Restorative, and Just World, One Building at a Time

Our laughably inefficient buildings account for some 40% of all U. S. primary energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, our built environment also very often sickens, oppresses and alienates the humans who inhabit it. In this historic session, Bioneers is thrilled to be able to bring together for the first time two of the most visionary architects of our time, who, coming on very different career paths, are both at the forefront of radically expanding our sense of what a truly healthy, nature-honoring and socially equitable built environment could look like. Deanna Van Buren, the co-founder and Executive Director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, is a leading figure in the movement to build “restorative” infrastructure that addresses in its very design the root causes of mass incarceration—poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself. Jason McLennan, arguably the most influential “green” architect of our era, has set a high bar, showing us what truly “living,” genuinely regenerative buildings can be. Can these two very different but equally imperative re-visionings of how we rethink the built environment be reconciled/synthesized?

Watch here.

We are gratified to share with you our program accomplishments in 2021. Over the past year, the Indigeneity Program continued to be flexible in light of the second year of the ongoing pandemic, shifting our areas of focus to respond to real time contexts and needs. We used this time as an opportunity to focus on creating accessible media, reaching more people than ever before, as well as provide COVID relief in the second year of the Indigiving mutual aid campaign.

Read the report.

NOW AVAILABLE! Nature, Culture & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, 2nd Ed.

We are excited to announce that the second edition of Nina Simons’ book, Nature, Culture & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, is now on sale! Nature, Culture & the Sacred offers practical guidance and inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership on behalf of positive change. Join Nina on an inspiring journey to shed self-limiting beliefs, lead from the heart and discover beloved community as you cultivate your own flourishing and liberation.

Get your copy.

Designing and Building a Regenerative, Restorative, and Just World, One Building at a Time

Our laughably inefficient buildings account for some 40% of all U. S. primary energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, our built environment also very often sickens, oppresses and alienates the humans who inhabit it. In this historic session, Bioneers was thrilled to be able to bring together for the first time two of the most visionary architects of our time, who, coming on very different career paths, are both at the forefront of radically expanding our sense of what a truly healthy, nature-honoring and socially equitable built environment could look like. 

Deanna Van Buren the co-founder and Executive Director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, is a leading figure in the movement to build “restorative” infrastructure that addresses in its very design the root causes of mass incarceration—poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself. Jason McLennan, arguably the most influential “green” architect of our era, has set a high bar, showing us what truly “living,” genuinely regenerative buildings can be. Can these two very different but equally imperative re-visionings of how we rethink the built environment be reconciled/synthesized? This conversation was moderated/hosted by Dawn Danby, co-founder of Spherical.

This discussion took place at the 2022 Bioneers Conference.

PANELISTS

Jason McLennan, one of the world’s most influential visionaries in contemporary architecture and green building, is a highly sought-out designer, consultant and thought leader. A winner of Engineering News Record’s National Award of Excellence and of the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Prize (which was, during its 10-year trajectory, known as “the planet’s top prize for socially responsible design”), Jason has been showered with such accolades as “the ‘Wayne Gretzky’ of the green building industry and a “World Changer” (by GreenBiz magazine).

Learn more about Jason McLennan and his work at McLennan Design.

Deanna Van Buren, M.Arch, is the co-founder and Executive Director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, an architecture and real estate nonprofit that seeks to build infrastructure that addresses the root causes of mass incarceration: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself. She has been profiled by The New York Times, and her TED Talk on what a world without prisons could look like has been viewed more than a million times. Van Buren is an alumna of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Dawn Danby is co-founder of Spherical, an integrative design, technology and research studio offering “cosmovision remediation and ontological repair services.” Dawn’s celebrated ecological design work over two decades has traversed scales and industries, from green chemistry to green infrastructure. A long-recovered industrial designer, Dawn now investigates the paradoxical roles of technology in supporting the integrity of Earth’s living systems. Her team’s current work is dedicated to the ecological healing of urban watersheds in California.

Nick Estes – The Age of the Water Protector and Climate Chaos

Nick Estes, Ph.D. (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux), Indigenous Rights activist, scholar, writer, co-founder of The Red Nation organization and author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, describes the Anishinaabe people’s resistance to the “Line 3” pipeline in Minnesota that would devastate their lands and livelihood, the outsized impact frontline Indigenous communities are having in fighting climate change and resisting extractive industries, the importance and effectiveness of Earth-centered approaches to fighting for Climate Justice, and the overarching goal of being “good ancestors of the future.”

This talk was delivered at the 2022 Bioneers Conference.

Nick Estes

Nick Estes, Ph.D. (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux), is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a group of Dakota, Nakota and Lakota writers. In 2014, he was a co-founder of The Red Nation in Albuquerque, NM, an organization dedicated to the liberation of Native people from capitalism and colonialism. He serves on its editorial collective and writes its bi-weekly newsletter. Nick Estes is also the author of: Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.

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Averting a Hot, Toxic Endgame panelists

Averting a Hot, Toxic Endgame: Strategizing & Mobilizing for Climate Justice

In this panel discussion, three visionary climate justice leaders they share their strategic insights. With: Eriel Deranger, Indigenous Climate Action; Leila Salazar-Lopez, Amazon Watch; Osprey Orielle Lake, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). Hosted by Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons.

Julian Brave NoiseCat

Julian Brave NoiseCat – Apocalypse Then & Now

In this Bioneers 2021 keynote address, Julian Brave NoiseCat, an activist and one of this era’s most brilliant emerging progressive journalists and thinkers, lays out the case for the moral imperative to assure that Indigenous voices have a central role in humanity’s struggle to address the existential climate crisis.

Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming

Excerpted from Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming by Liz
Carlisle; Copyright © 2022 Liz Carlisle. Reproduced by permission of Island Press,
Washington, D.C (Introduction pages 12-15)

Nikiko Masumoto is optimistic. The third generation to farm her family’s certified organic orchard in California’s Central Valley, the thirty-six year-old queer feminist performance artist–peach grower is well aware that hers isn’t the face that people typically imagine when they conjure up an image of a farmer. But she is working to change that, to build an agrarian culture that fully embraces diversity both on the land and in the community. Part of that work involves situating herself in her own family legacy on the land.

“Whenever I begin conversations about myself and my relationship to the land, it’s always through my grandparents and great-grandparents who touched this same soil,” Masumoto says. “There is a gift of that, which is thinking of my life in a lineage that is much more important than my own individual life.” This sense of connecting across generations is central to regenerative agriculture, Masumoto believes. “So many of the methods that develop soil take time—the horizon is long. When you’re wanting to leave a farm to several generations in the future you have a vested interest in taking up those practices.”

But digging into her family’s history is also a painful and complicated process. Discriminated against as immigrants, Masumoto’s great-grandparents never owned the land they worked. What little savings they had built up was lost during Japanese American internment, when some 120,000 people—most of them US citizens—were incarcerated for years simply for the crime of their Japanese descent. So Masumoto’s grandparents had to start from scratch, eking out a living on marginal land as they gradually built up the soil.

“We are the ones that the world needs in this climate crisis,” Masumoto says, referring not just to Japanese Americans but to other communities of color who have experienced oppression. “Because we have those stories, we have that sense of fighting against the impossible.” As I continued my research, I heard Masumoto’s sentiments echoed dozens of times. From Hawai‘i to New York, Montana to Puerto Rico, young farmers and scientists of color were reviving ancestral regenerative farming traditions in a self-conscious effort to respond to climate change and racial injustice in tandem. These farmers and scientists understood regenerative agriculture not as a menu of discrete, isolated practices from which one could pick and choose and then tally up into a sustainability score. Rather, they saw regenerative agriculture as their ancestors had—as a way of life.

“For me agroforestry is not just about figuring out how to minimize your impact and still grow food within that system,” says Olivia Watkins, who is farming mushrooms in the understory of forested land in North Carolina that has been in her family for more than 130 years. “There are so many pieces involved in growing food that don’t just have to do with the crop itself. The fungi in the soil. The wildlife in the area. How does water fall on the land? All those things are intertwined, so for me, the question is always, how can I be mindful of all those things?” Watkins is equally mindful that she’s conserving not only forest but also Black-owned land, which her family resolutely held on to over the course of a century when 98 percent of Black landowners were dispossessed. “With the history of oppression around land, the fact that we are stewarding the land and taking care of it is revolutionary,” Watkins says. On Watkins’s and Masumoto’s farms, what’s being regenerated is not just soil but a complex web of relationships. As both women described to me, this form of regenerative agriculture can only be fully realized when the entire web is repaired so that the interconnected parts can function as a whole. This means attending to a component of the farm often left out of scientific discussions: people.

“I get pissed sometimes at ecologists,” says University of California, Irvine researcher Aidee Guzman, “because they forget that people are involved in stewarding these systems.” Guzman is herself an ecologist—she studies soil microbial activity and pollination on farms—but she’s also the child of farmworkers who left their small farm in Mexico to immigrate to the US. When she looks at California’s Central Valley, she sees thousands of people like her parents—people who have both the knowledge and the desire to steward regenerative farms, if only they had the opportunity. “We have to stop and think about the fact that farmworkers here in the US, people who were brought over from Africa and enslaved, they left their farms, probably extremely biodiverse farms,” Guzman says.

Masumoto, who grew up just an hour away from Guzman, agrees. “Structured inequality in farmworker lives infringes on people’s right to think about the future,” Masumoto laments. “The very people who have the skills right now [to implement regenerative agriculture] are the very people who we have marginalized the most in this country.”

In short, truly regenerating the web of relationships that support both our food system and our planet is going to take more than compost. We’re going to have to question the very concept of agriculture, and the bundle of assumptions that travel with the English word farm. What is the objective of this activity? To convert plants into money? Or to foster the health of all beings?

We also need to think hard about who farms and why. Will agricultural labor continue to be structured as a punishment for the oppressed and a means of marking and fortifying class hierarchies? Or might it be woven into the fabric of social life for all of us, in ways that are regenerative for the human spirit and sustainable for the human body?

As we rethink farming, we’ll likewise need to reconsider our relationship with land and whether we can or should own it. Decolonizing agriculture will require big changes in our economic system. But it will also require daily rituals, coming together for meals that connect us to the land and sustain our bodies as well as our ties to the sacred. “I think what we are learning, or perhaps relearning,” says Masumoto, “is how to belong to a place. That philosophy is embedded in the practices you use to feed yourselves.”

Building this kind of regenerative agriculture will require a much deeper understanding of what happened on these lands that we in the United States now call home. It’s a complicated story and, in many ways, a painful one. But facing it squarely offers an irresistible promise: by coming together to rebuild these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet and its carbon cycle, we can heal ourselves and our communities too.

Karen Washington – 911 Our Food System Is Not Working

Many of us have reached a point in our work at which we realize the food system is not working. Leaders keep on relying on band-aid solutions, autocratic jargon and political hypocrisy to tackle the problems of hunger and poverty. Yet our society’s way of feeding and treating people just isn’t sustainable, especially when the United Nations predicts that by 2050 we will have an additional 2 billion people on this planet, most ending up in urban areas.

The simple truth is that we can’t talk about a fair, just, and equitable food system without radical new thinking and putting in a lot work. What sort of work needs to be done and who will be the people to do it? Karen Washington, one of the most renowned and influential food activists of our era shares her wisdom and her analysis of why the food system doesn’t need to be fixed but has to be dramatically transformed.

This talk was delivered at the 2022 Bioneers Conference.

Karen Washington, co-owner/farmer at Rise & Root Farm in Chester New York, is a renowned activist and food advocate, who, among her many achievements, in 2010 co- founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS) an organization supporting growers in both urban and rural settings. In 2012, Ebony magazine voted her one of their 100 most influential African Americans in the country, and in 2014 she was the recipient of the James Beard Leadership Award. Karen also serves on the boards of the New York Botanical Gardens, the Mary Mitchell Center, SoulFire Farm and the Black Farmer Fund.

Learn more about Karen Washington at her website.

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Malik Yakini – Food, Race and Justice

In this Bioneers 2015 keynote address, Malik Yakini, Executive Director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, explores how the current industrial food system that supplies most of our food creates inequities and shares wise perspectives on addressing racism, thinking beyond the logic of capitalism and how we might create a more just, sustainable food system.

The Food Web Newsletter

All life depends on food. It is that commonality that connects diverse species and is the basis for a relationship with our environment. From the microorganisms in the soil food web like the mycorrhizal fungi that exchange nutrients with plant roots to the woke gourmand at Chez Panisse ordering roasted, pasture chicken and local organic greens, all species depend on the cooperative interactions of the web of life to eat.

Dive into the Food Web with Bioneers and learn more about how a transformed food system can be a source of community wealth, creative culture, and individual health, as well as a way to fulfill our sacred calling as humans for environmental stewardship.

Alexandria Villaseñor – Working Together: Building Coalitions of Power in the Global Youth Climate Movement

Building power and achieving success in the global youth climate movement require international solidarity, communication, and organizing. Relationships with allied groups and organizations are key to making change. An international youth organizer since the age of 13, Alexandria Villaseñor shares the unique ways in which a multicultural, geographically distributed youth movement is building trust, negotiating compromises, distributing decision-making and centering the stories, experiences and leadership of those most impacted in each action and campaign. From grassroots movements to national organizations, Alexandria shows us how youth intend to win the climate fight by working together.

This talk was delivered at the 2022 Bioneers Conference.

Alexandria Villaseñor co-founded the U.S. Youth Climate Strike movement (part of the youth-led international Fridays for Future movement) at age 13. Now 16, Alexandria has become an internationally-recognized, prestigious award-winning activist, speaker, author and founder of several initiatives, including Earth Uprising International. A contributing author to All We Can Save, an anthology of women climate leaders, and a child petitioner for the groundbreaking international complaint to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Children vs. Climate Crisis, Alexandria serves on the advisory board of Evergreen Action, is a youth spokesperson for the American Lung Association, and is the youngest Junior Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

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Alexandria Gordon – The Power of Young People

In this Bioneers 2021 keynote address, Alex Gordon, a winner of the prestigious Brower Youth Award for her organizing prowess on the “Break Free from Plastic Pledge,” voter registration drives and other student power initiatives, shares her experiences as a young person working to create a world that can work for everyone. 

Bioneers Youth Leadership and Education Program

Over the last 20 years, the Bioneers Youth Leadership and Education Program has served as an incubator for thousands of youth and educators to deepen their passion and power through self-expression, skills development, mentorship and deep relationship building within the broader community of Bioneers. The program has produced some of the most dynamic, engaging, and cutting edge programming within the Bioneers kaleidoscope and it continues to shape the work of youth movements, activism and education. 

Clayton Thomas-Müller – Reparations, Healing and Reconciliation—A Battle Against the Winter Spirit, Witigo’

Cree legends talk about the nefarious winter spirit Witigo’ and how it can possess you to such an extent that you become an all-consuming cannibal stricken with insatiable greed and hunger. 350.org‘s Cree Campaigner and best-selling author of Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing, Clayton Thomas-Müller, discusses how this sort of possession offers us an excellent metaphor for the mindset that has brought us the ravages of ruthless extractive capitalism and the oppression of First Peoples and other historically disenfranchised groups; and he proposes some answers to the question: What is it going to take for us to move through and heal from the violence of colonization?

This talk was delivered at the 2022 Bioneers Conference.

Clayton Thomas-Müller is a member of the Treaty #6 based Mathias Colomb Cree Nation also known as Pukatawagan located in Northern Manitoba, Canada. Based in Winnipeg, Clayton is a senior campaign specialist with 350.org. Clayton is a campaigner, award winning film director, media producer, organizer, facilitator, public speaker and best selling author on Indigenous rights and environmental & economic justice.

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Excerpt: Life in the City of Dirty Water

The mass Indigenous-led movement against oil pipelines has made a permanent impact in the fight against climate change. Indigenous nations are leading the movement to protect water and hold governments accountable to treaty laws that preserve Indigenous relationships with the environment. In this excerpt from Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing, Clayton Thomas-Müller shares the power and wisdom of Indigenous climate advocacy. 

Indigenous Activism NOW: Talking Story With Clayton Thomas-Muller and Julian NoiseCat

In this Bioneers 2021 panel, Clayton Thomas-Müller and Julian Brave NoiseCat share the story behind the story about how their lives intersect with their activism and discuss their new projects and their hopes for the future. Moderated by Alexis Bunten (Unangan/Yup’ik), Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program.