In 1999, Abby Reyes lost her partner, Terence Unity Freitas, who, along with Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaiian), was murdered after leaving Indigenous U’wa territory in Colombia. Spanning three decades and three continents, “Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice” charts Reyes’ journey as she navigates the waters of loss, purpose, and impermanence while fighting for truth and accountability from big oil. Today, Reyes is the Director of Community Resilience Projects at University of California, Irvine, where she supports leaders from climate-vulnerable communities and their academic partners to accelerate community-owned just transition solutions.
In the following excerpt from “Truth Demands,” Reyes reflects on the resistance to multinational oil interests in U’wa territory. Plus, check out this conversation with Reyes, in which she discusses land rights advocacy, entrenched oil interests, resistance and resilience, and what she hopes her book offers climate activists.
“Vuong observed that the word narrative comes from the Latin word gnarus, meaning knowledge. Stories then, even fragmented, can be the translation of knowledge and a transmission of energy. This energy cannot die.”
I am reminded of the story Terence told, writing from the cloud forest floor of the Colombian Andes. The story described the song cycle that his U’wa companions conducted to mark one U’wa girl’s transition into adulthood. Days of continual singing of the stories of their people, of how the rivers got their names. It was a song with no end. Some would pick up the song where others left off. And then eventually silence, within which the song reverberated for hours in the earthen floor. The reverberating stillness is not unlike the aftereffect of the monks and nuns chanting the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara’s name at Plum Village. Of the U’wa song cycle, Terence’s U’wa companion Daris later said that, while marking these life transitions, they sing about all the territory, including the rivers and mountains from Patagonia to Canada. She said the singing itself represents the equilibrium and sustainability of the planet. They sing so that people can remember who they are, right where they are, through the words, mountains, and waters that shaped them. So that the parable of the choir can persist. Terence wrote, “This is the reason we are doing this work, so that people can listen to singing.”
The U’wa say Terence, Ingrid, and Lahe’ “aren’t wandering in the river of the forgotten”; rather, their aka-kambra, or “word with spirit,” persists. After Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh died in 2022, Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong reminded the gathered and grieving community that language and sound are one of humanity’s oldest ways to transmit knowledge. Vuong observed that the word narrative comes from the Latin word gnarus, meaning knowledge. Stories then, even fragmented, can be the translation of knowledge and a transmission of energy. This energy cannot die. “In this way,” he said, “to speak is to survive, and to teach is to shepherd our ideas into the future, the text is a raft we can send forth for all later generations.”
The U’wa are known as the thinking people, the people who speak well. To speak well can take many forms. Whether the narrative is heard depends on the listener. In Terence’s notebooks from March 1998, he meditated on the voice of silence in the U’wa people’s resistance to oil extraction in their territory. “Where is the voice of silence? Of women? Of children? Of the communities that cannot speak publicly about opposition to petrol?” He wondered about the relationship between silence and fear. His final note regarded the silence of “the sound of the stumps cut during seismic line studies.” In U’wa territory, Terence contemplated the narrative that silence elicits.
Twenty years later, Colombia prohibited its post-civil war truth and recognition chamber from investigating the role of multinational fossil fuel extraction corporations during the internal conflict. In relegating corporations to third-party status, Colombia designed the chamber in a manner that restricted the range of stories that could be safely elicited. The narrative of silence was thus harder to hear. The sound of the stumps cut during seismic line studies did not ring out in the chamber. The earth itself was also rendered a third party, peripheral to the deliberations.
Out here on the shore, we know better. We know how to listen for the silence of the stumps and the parting song of the manatees. We know how to listen for the reverberation of the songs of belonging and for what Biago Diap would call “the ancestors’ breath in the voice of the waters.” The practice of listening sharpens our other senses. Our vision is clear: the truth demands we move these so-called third parties—both the corporations and the voice of the waters—out of the periphery and into the center of our vision.
And when we do, we look carefully. We heed the voice of the waters. We take note of the momentum in the water, and the timing. We remember that water flows around boulders. And that boulders get worn away. We take note of who stands gathered with us. We ready ourselves to leap.
The solutions to the urgent and interconnected ecological challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution cannot come from the same mindset that created them. Addressing these simultaneous crises requires fundamentally shifting the destructive, anthropocentric worldview that brought us here. The More-Than-Human (MOTH) Rights Program at NYU School of Law is a unique collaborative initiative working to reimagine this relationship by challenging the legal and philosophical frameworks that place humans above and apart from the rest of the natural world.
The perspectives below offer insight into where and how we can begin that shift. In this issue, we dive into the expansive and inspiring body of work that MOTH Founding Director César Rodríguez-Garavito and his collaborators are engaging in. Watch a riveting keynote address from the Bioneers Conference in which Rodríguez-Garavito reflects on the experience that first introduced him to the Rights of Nature. Learn about the legal pathways for ethical AI in animal research. Listen in on two fascinating projects: a new first-person podcast from South American Indigenous leaders, and join innovative musician Cosmo Sheldrake as he explores the idea of nature as an artist through the creation of the new track “Song of the Cedars,” co-written with the forest itself.
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César Rodríguez-Garavito – More-Than-Human Rights: Pushing the Boundaries of Legal Imagination to Re-Animate the World
“The forest is alive. The rivers and the mountains are alive. They are people just like us.” These were the words spoken to César Rodríguez-Garavito by Sabino Gualinga, the shaman of the Sarayaku people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, who had been resisting oil drilling in their territory. Speaking with Don Sabino along the Bobonaza River, Rodríguez-Garavito felt invited to listen to the life all around them. At the time, Rodríguez-Garavito was a human rights attorney, and this was the first time he was introduced to the idea of the rights of nature. It stayed with him, and over time, the idea grew.
Now an Earth Rights scholar, lawyer, and founding Director of the More-Than-Human (MOTH) Rights Program at NYU School of Law, Rodríguez-Garavito has advanced new ideas and legal actions worldwide on issues such as climate justice, Indigenous rights, and what he proposes to call “more-than-human rights,” which are as much a legal proposition as they are a story about our relationship with the more-than-human world. Drawing on his fieldwork and participation in legal actions advancing the rights of nature around the world, Rodríguez-Garavito tells a renewed story about the living world: one in which all of nature is alive; where human and nonhuman animals, plants, fungi, rivers, forests, oceans, and other ecosystems are all animate, subjects of moral and legal consideration, and entangled in the planetary web of life.
Listening, Not Controlling: A Legal Path for Ethical AI in Animal Research
The idea that nonhuman animals might possess rich, structured languages—complete with dialects, social codes, and meaning—was once, for modern society, the stuff of science fiction. But recent breakthroughs and research from the scientists, including the innovative team at Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), who are using advanced AI and gentle robotics to study sperm whale communication, are making that possibility scientifically tangible.
But as science gains the tools to interpret animal language, a deeper question emerges: How do we ensure that listening leads to protection—not control or harm? As we enter this potent new era of potential interspecies understanding, the ethics of how we use this knowledge may be more important than the discovery itself. In this companion article to Project CETI founder David Gruber’s piece on how AI is helping researchers decode whale sounds, César Rodríguez-Garavito, founding director of the More Than Human Life (MOTH) program at NYU, explores the legal and ethical implications of decoding animal communication. Photo by Amanda Cotton
Plus, read more about the work of MOTH and CETI below:
Read an exploration from National Geographic of a paper co-authored by MOTH and Project CETI members, “What If We Understood What Animals Are Saying? The Legal Impact Of AI-assisted Studies Of Animal Communication”
Hear Directly from Indigenous Leaders in the “Crossing the River” Podcast
Despite crossing the river from shore to shore countless times and crafting different strategies to enter into dialogue with Western society, Indigenous leaders in this unique podcast series suggest that the West has not listened carefully enough. “Crossing the River” is a podcast in which we hear from Indigenous leaders who defend life on Earth every day, in their own words, because they are the protagonists of their own stories. To make the collective decisions that will define our present and our future, and to re-examine the stories we tell about our past, the “Crossing The River” podcast series makes the case for listening carefully to their voices.
Nature as Artist: Legal Petition Seeks Co-Authorship for Ecuador’s Los Cedros Forest
In a groundbreaking move, the More-Than-Human (MOTH) Rights Program is submitting a petition to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognize the Los Cedros cloud forest as the co-creator of a song titled “Song of the Cedars,” composed in collaboration with musician Cosmo Sheldrake, writer Robert Macfarlane, field mycologist Giuliana Furci, and legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito. This will be the first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship in the co-creation of a work of art. The song will be available for free download and released on streaming platforms. Any income generated will go directly to the recently established Los Cedros Fund for the protection of the cloud forest. Artwork by Elina Landinez
Through engaging courses led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, Bioneers Learning equips engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community. Get 20% off with code VISION20 until June 15, 2025, at midnight PT.
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Exploring the Resurgent Power of the Yin: Tao Te Ching Guided Reading Series | October 8–29, 2025 | In this four-week guided reading series, artist and spiritual-political practitioner Sonali Sangeeta Balajee and Ginny McGinn, Zen practitioner and process designer, invite us to explore the Tao Te Ching (Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendition) as a sacred companion for these hyper-Yang times.
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Cayo Santiago, a 38-acre island off the coast of Puerto Rico, may be uninhabited by humans, but it’s far from empty. The island is home to a colony of approximately 1,700 rhesus macaque monkeys. The monkeys, which were first brought to the island from India in 1938, are the world’s oldest continuously studied group of free-ranging macaques. For researcher Lauren Brent, the island represented an ideal location to study the behavior of these highly social primates.
In “The Well-Connected Animal: Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies,” evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin writes that by 2017, Brent and her colleagues at the lab of neuroscientist Michael Platt had a deep understanding of the way that the social networks of macaques on the island worked and what they meant. Then Hurricane Maria struck, hitting the island with its full force and devastating everything in its path. The scientists feared the worst for the macaques.
“They weren’t all dead, but Hurricane Maria turned the monkeys’ world upside down and meant they needed to reestablish their society, with all its intricate and complex working parts. And quickly,” Dugatkin writes. “For Brent and her team, Hurricane Maria meant many things, including figuring out new ways to think about the effects of large-scale natural disasters on social networks.”
How would fewer resources, including reduced food and shade, affect the monkeys’ dynamics? In the following excerpt from “The Well-Connected Animal,” Dugatkin tells of the distinct shifts in the macaques’ social behavior following the Category 4 Hurricane that decimated their world.
Lee Alan Dugatkin is an evolutionary biologist and historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. In addition to “The Well-Connected Animal,” he is coauthor of “How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)” and the author of “Power in the Wild,” both also published by the University of Chicago Press.
More than 60% of the green vegetation on Cayo Santiago, along with a lot of the infrastructure that the Cayo team had put in place—including the feeders that supplied the animals with some of their food, which they now needed more than ever—was decimated by Hurricane Maria. But not a single macaque was killed during the hurricane, and only about 2% of the animals died shortly thereafter, probably due to starvation. “It’s completely incredible,” Lauren Brent says. “They’re not that big, right? And all their trees were being blown over. It’s not like you can hold on to something.” At first Brent thought that maybe the macaques hid in a place known as Happy Valley, which is partially protected from wind, but normally Happy Valley holds fifty macaques, and there was no way it could have provided shelter for 1,700 monkeys. She and her team are working hard to piece together what happened, but still have not been able to figure out how every single macaque survived the full brunt of a Category 4 hurricane.
About three months after Maria, when the shock had partly worn off, Brent began thinking seriously again about the dynamics of macaque social networks, primarily because of what she was hearing from Danny Phillips and the other field assistants who were back on the island. They’d tell her “the monkeys are acting weird,” and when Brent would ask how so, the on-the-ground team told her that they seemed to be especially friendly toward one another. In early 2018, about five months after the hurricane, she went down to check for herself. The island was still reeling from Maria (as was most of Puerto Rico). “But when I got to Cayo,” Brent says, “I was like ‘Yeah, I see it.’ . . . They look more tolerant. . . . Monkeys I never expected to be cool just sitting next to each other.’ ”
They’d tell her ‘the monkeys are acting weird,’ and when Brent would ask how so, the on-the-ground team told her that they seemed to be especially friendly toward one another.
At the time, very little was known about how animals adjusted their social dynamics after full-scale natural catastrophes, and as awful as the consequences of Hurricane Maria were for Puerto Rico, perhaps, Brent thought, one silver lining might be that the disaster shed light on those dynamics. When she and her team looked more deeply at her suddenly much more friendly macaques, what they found was that Maria had fundamentally altered the social networks of the monkeys. For one thing, when they compared the grooming and proximity networks in two groups of macaques during the three years prior to Maria versus the one year immediately after the hurricane, the data confirmed the anecdotal observations about the monkeys being nicer to each other: macaques were four times as likely to be found close to one another after the hurricane, and they were 50% more likely to groom one another. What’s more, monkeys who groomed least and had spent the least time near others before Maria were the ones who showed the greatest increase in these behaviors after the hurricane.
Focusing their analysis on grooming behavior, Brent and her colleagues thought that the changes in network structure might be due to either an increase in the number of partners or an increase in time spent with specific partners. Or perhaps a bit of each.
Grooming networks of rhesus macaque monkeys on the island of Cayo Santiago before and after Hurricane Maria. After Hurricane Maria, macaques had more social partners but had not formed stronger bonds with their previous partners. (C. Testard, M. Larson, M. M. Watowich, C. H. Kaplinsky, A. Bernau, M. Faulder, H. H. Marshall et al., “Rhesus Macaques Build New Social Connections after a Natural Disaster,” Current Biology 31 (2021): 2299–309.
What they found was that post-Maria, macaques had more social partners, but the average strength of a grooming relationship with a partner had not changed. The monkeys had formed more friendships in their network, not strengthened already existing ones: Maria had brought the macaques in a group closer together, with additional grooming partners buffering them from the devastating effects that the hurricane left in its trail. And again, friends of friends mattered: monkeys took the path of least resistance in forming new relationships. If monkey 1 had been in a grooming relationship with monkey 2 before Maria, it was more likely to enter a grooming relationship with one of monkey 2’s grooming partners after the storm. Disaster, in the form of Maria, had brought the monkeys closer to one another, and social network analysis was the perfect means to show how.
Since time immemorial, storytellers have held an exalted role in human societies, because stories illustrate parables that help us make sense of the world and survive. In this episode, we hitch a ride with comedian, writer, futurist, technologist, and storyteller Baratunde Thurston. At this perilous existential threshold that will determine the fate of the human experiment, he knows that the story of the battle is equally the battle of the story.
Featuring
Baratunde Thurston, a writer, communicator, and creator and host of the How To Citizen podcast, is also a founding partner and writer at Puck. His newest creation is Life With Machines, a YouTube podcast focusing on the human side of the A.I. revolution. Author of the bestselling comedic memoir, How To Be Black, Baratunde also serves on the boards of Civics Unplugged and the Brooklyn Public Library and lives in Southern California.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
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): We hitch a ride with the comedian, writer, futurist, technologist and storyteller Baratunde Thurston.
Like so many stories, his story began with a journey. But in this case, the journey was storytelling.
As human beings, our brains are hard-wired for stories and metaphor. At this perilous existential threshold that will determine the fate of the human experiment, Baratunde knows that the story of the battle is equally the battle of the story…
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Declarations of Interdependence: A Story of Storytelling”.
Baratunde Thurston(BT): I want to tell you a story, because that’s what I do. I try to weave stories of interdependence through our relationships with Earth, with each other, and with technology. And that’s important now more than ever because we are in a crisis. In fact, it’s so big, people are calling it a poly-crisis. This is a crisis that can’t commit to just being one crisis. [LAUGHTER] It’s a crisis in an open relationship. You’ve got a democracy crisis entangled with a climate crisis, entangled with an economic crisis and a technology crisis. And there is another crisis, and that is the overuse of the word crisis. [LAUGHTER] It’s a serious crisis, and I’m proud to be brave enough to name it. You’re welcome.
Host: As a storyteller, Baratunde Thurston has been nominated for an Emmy and has worked for the Daily Show. He’s the host and executive producer of the PBS TV series America Outdoors.
His comedic memoir, How ToBe Black, was a New York Times best-seller. He first developed his stand-up comedy shortly after graduating from Harvard.
Since time immemorial, storytellers have held an exalted role in human societies because stories illustrate parables that both make sense of the world and help us survive.
As the writer Ferris Jabr wrote in The Story of Storytelling, “In many ways, stories are uncannily similar to living organisms… They were simulations that allowed our ancestors to develop crucial mental and social skills and to practice overcoming conflict without being in actual danger. A story is really a way of thinking – perhaps the most powerful and versatile skill in the human cognitive repertoire.”
Baratunde Thurston, Writer, Producer, Proud Earthling. From Me to We, A Story of Interdependence. Bioneers Conference. Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, CA. March 27, 2025. Photo by Nikki Ritcher.
BT: My name is Baratunde Rafiq Thurston. [CHEERS] When we speak our names, we speak our ancestors who spoke us into being when they named us. I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. I am the son of Arnold and Arnita, who were both born and raised in Washington, D.C. My mother, the daughter of Homer and Lorraine, who were both born and raised in…[AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Washington, D.C. My father, the son of Leon and Dora, who were both born and raised in…[AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Orangeburg, South Carolina. [LAUGHTER] And so we’ve arrived at our first lesson, about the limitations of autocomplete and pattern recognition as a substitution for intelligence. Some of the best patterns are the ones we intentionally break.
My mother was a powerful force of nature, born into a story too small to contain her full nature– her spirit. Born in 1940 in these United States, born to a family that told her she was too Black and too dumb to amount to anything, into a nation that didn’t have space for a woman or a Black person as big as she was. But she found a way toward liberation through a more expanded story through her relations with her own grandparents who loved nature and the outdoors. And she would spend a good time with them out on the land. She found herself in a community of Pan-Africanist radical people trying to reform a sense of self and identity, to love themselves. She found herself as a computer programmer in the early 1980s for the federal government.
When you have a mother like this, that well of beautiful, pure water, it flows right down into me. My mom put me in this Boy Scout troop, all Black Boy Scout troop, put me in a rights of passage program run by these West African-inspired Afrocentric people. Basically I was in a Wakanda sleeper cell. And I am not even joking, y’all. [LAUGHTER] We’ve got a meeting later today. You know who you are.
She would take me on these camping trips and biking trips and fishing trips with my little friends. She would take me to community meetings and political rallies and cultural events so I could feel who we are as people together. She would liberate excess inventory of technology from her job, [LAUGHTER] and bring a computer home so me and my older sister, Belinda, had a taste of the future before most people even knew. And when she sent me to private school, she gave me this bumper sticker. It said: Question authority. She said, “You should put this in your locker.” And I did so without question. [LAUGHTER] Now you know something about her and something about me.
One of the greatest gifts my mother gave me was to plant a seed in the form of a question. She gave me an extra homework assignment. I was no more than 12 years old when she said to me, “I want you,” and by extension my older sister, Belinda, “I want you to come up with a system we will live under after democracy and capitalism have failed.” [APPLAUSE] What? I had just started sweating from my armpits at that age. I got nervous feelings in my chest when girls were too close. I was not prepared for this homework assignment. So I set it aside, thinking I had discarded it, only to discover later it was a seed planted in my own journey through life to find bigger stories of who we can be, would water that seed, and it would start to sprout so beautifully.
Host: That seed unfolded into a story of storytelling. Again, Baratunde Thurston…
BT: There are three narrative universes I want to take you through that have shown me what we already know, that we got this, because we always have.
In 2020, my wife Elizabeth and I started a podcast—You may have heard I like those—called “How to Citizen.” Citizen is a verb. We have a valuable use for it as a noun, but that is a separating function. The verb is an invitation to function, to practice. And we started this journey, and we uncovered—it was revealed to us, I will say – four principles of what citizen as a verb practically means, four things.
Number one: Show up and participate. Assume there’s something for you to do.
Number two: Understand power, just the ability to get somebody to do what you want them to. It could be physical, financial, gathering, ideas. It could be attention. Where you give your attention, you give your power. Right now, I’m the most powerful being in this room. [LAUGHTER] But my own power is also what I choose to do with it.
Number three: To citizen is to commit to the collective, not just the individual self, which is made easier when we conceive of ourselves as more than just ourselves, where we take the advice of our very first guest, Valarie Kaur, who wrote the seminal book See No Stranger. A stranger is just a part of myself I do not yet know. We can still be selfish so long as we expand the self.
In this podcast episode, award-winning scholar and educator Valarie Kaur says to overcome racism and nationalism, we must not succumb to rage and grief. As someone who has spent much of her life challenging horrific injustices and intolerance, Kaur learned the lesson that historical nonviolent change-makers understood: social movements must be grounded in an ethic of love. Listen now.
Which leads to the fourth principle: To citizen is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet around you. Because we’ve been lied to, told we are separate from all these things. We’re just one thing.
So we found beautiful stories exemplifying this, because I was tired of the story that said we’re just divided, we’re just dysfunctional, we can’t get anything done, and that is not the world from which I come.
Host: That theme of interdependence began to take center stage in Baratunde’s work. After all, what you appreciate appreciates, and stories can quickly take on a life of their own…
BT: So we talked to people you may have heard of, like José Andrés, the surface story is, oh, José Andrés is out here, running around the world, feeding people after disasters. No. He is out here and his team is out here with a process that unlocks the local foods and the local cooking capacities, from the food truck operators and the restaurateurs, and the mamas and the aunties who feed themselves. That’s the story. [APPLAUSE]
We heard the story of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative right around here. Shout out to the East Bay. Creating their own housing for the businesses that they choose, meeting their own needs.
We heard the story of a radical politics without politicians. That sounds tasty. An ancient tradition, it turns out, of citizen assemblies. Spoke with Claudia Chwalisz from DemocracyNext who reminded us of this old school way of conscripting people into public service. That’s the most representative system there is, a random allotment and sortition of everyone there? Not just the folks who raise their hand, the extroverts who like to see themselves on stage? There is wisdom in every crowd.
We met fellow travelers along the way, the Adrienne Maree Browns. Jon Alexander was a fellow traveler we met, all the way, ironically, from England, helping us citizen here in America. Has a beautiful book, Citizens, and a framework for the stories that we are moving through: a subject story, where a single source tells you what to do; a consumer story, where we get to choose from choices that we didn’t choose, to transact our way into community is a dead end; the citizen story, where the answer lies within the worlds within all of us, taking on challenges so big, no one entity or person or party could solve it.
So I felt really good about the How to Citizen thing. I was like we solved the democracy thing but America kept America-ing. So I went outside. I got invited to host America Outdoors with PBS. And y’all, I got to see America and Amurica. [LAUGHTER] And they’re both beautiful. I got to spend time with people connected to this land, literal common ground under our alleged divisions.
I went to a town called Elaine in Arkansas, site of one of the most violent and deadly racist massacres in U.S. history that most of us had never heard of. But I went there with a multi-racial bicycling group called BikePOC. [LAUGHTER] Get it?
It’s in the name. The railroad tracks that had brought such devastating and violent destruction at the end of a Gatling gun mowing down farmers and their wives and their children for standing up for their rights. Those tracks had been converted to a bike path, and we rolled deep in our multi-racial joy, healing ourselves and the land in the process. We met the very first Black mayor of this town ever, who’s changing that story.
What do we do with the histories we inherit that don’t feel good? We can metabolize them. We can. [SIGHS]
Photos courtesy of Baratunde Thurston
Host: When we return… Baratunde Thurston’s storytelling journey takes him across the great divide through the country’s heartlands. Along the way, he discovered the ancient Native American roots of American democracy that flourished a thousand years before the first Europeans arrived.
You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
Host: As Baratunde Thurston criss-crossed the country hunting and gathering the American story, he experienced the post-modern ground truth of the poly-crisis.
BT: I spent time on the South Fork of the Salmon River with Shoshone Bannock people, the Salmon People. We showed up to do a salmon hunt, but the salmon decided not to show up. Because we had turned the temperature up on their home. We’re cooking them in their very home, and the spirit that we felt from the people when we arrived was of mourning, the loss of their siblings who had provided so much throughout their history.
I felt this feeling mirrored in one of the most conservative places I ever visited—Tangier Island, Chesapeake Bay, where the mayor of that town nearly broke down in tears because he had to exhume his own ancestors and move them to higher ground because that island is about to disappear due to rising sea levels.
United in a story of grief and kinship across alleged divides, I felt this common lesson, this beautiful privilege to engage with the nations within our nation. We did a story about Death Valley, which is really Timbisha. It’s called Death Valley because some white folks back in the day didn’t pack right. [LAUGHTER] They should have called it We Didn’t Prepare Valley. We Misunderstood the Assignment Valley. [LAUGHTER]
Everywhere I went, from explicitly and implicitly Indigenous people, I kept hearing the same refrain. Dudley Edmondson said it so well: We are not apart from nature, we are a part of nature. I felt my own kinship with trees, trees that had been weaponized against people like me, conscripted into violence through the series of lynchings. We never think about what we’ve done to them as well; to recognize that a tree is more than just timber to be mined, a product to sell. But our lungs, beyond our bodies, helping us breathe, which makes me want to take a big inhale because…ChatGPT?
I remember where I was when that guy dropped on our heads. Do you remember where you were when ChatGPT hit our feeds and our headlines? The odds are you were on the toilet. [LAUGHTER] So, being the podcast fiend that I am, my wife and I were like let’s make another show—Life with Machines, exploring the human side of this AI moment.
We are invoking and creating a new population of synthetic beings when we are out of balance and right relations with our fellow human beings and the Earth beneath our feet. Which presents an opportunity. We could double down on the colonial mindset, on the extraction, on the buy, buy, buy, and the sell, sell, sell. Or we could tell ourselves a different story, of using these technologies to deepen our humanity.
Seneca scholar John Mohawk – he’s been invoked once on this stage already, a long-time advisor to this very community, wrote of liberation technologies, those that free us from multinational corporations, those that are built by, of, and for the people. They’re “fubu” technologies—for us, by us. They come from a local place, solve problems defined by the people themselves. We could do that right now, and I’ve seen hints of it.
We talked to the Earth Species Project, literally using AI to listen in to whales. Whales have a group chat. [LAUGHTER] It’s lit, yo, you have no idea.
The Climate Trace Project using AI to spot climate criminals all over the world, and measure emissions even when people don’t want you to. To shift our energy use to the things that are good for all of us. We could even apply AI to help us connect better to ourselves to upgrade our social technology of so-called democracy and bring it into the fold like those people in Taiwan. Audrey Tang has told the story well. We can have a more fluid, collective intelligence that allows us to see what we have in common, not just what separates us, but we must choose this future.
Baratunde Thurston, Writer, Producer, Proud Earthling. From Me to We, A Story of Interdependence. Bioneers Conference. Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, CA. March 27, 2025. Photo by Nikki Ritcher.
Host: For Baratunde, choosing the future that elevates what we have in common opened windows to the distant past. He fell upon an ancient Native American history of democracy that influenced the founding of the United States. It’s the story behind the story most of us have been taught.
That history of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Confederacy would become his next podcast-in-progress: Project Interdependence.
BT: Now, I thought the stories were going pretty good, but there was something gnawing at me, a missing piece. As we were winding down the podcast phase of How to Citizen, we knew that there was a story of peace, of democracy right here on this land, heard the echoes of the words Haudenosaunee Confederacy, literally had reached out to a man named Chief Oren Lyons to bring him on the show. Didn’t hear back though. [LAUGHTER] He’s busy. So we moved on.
And then, as my friend C Lai says, sometimes you’ve got to trust the timing. One year ago, almost to this day, a group of us, roughly 12, invited into deep relational community with elders from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, to sit and exchange, to hear and feel the deep truth that only an oral tradition can communicate. It is the closest thing to time travel, to hear people speak of their time immemorial practices of the preexistence of a confederacy of many nations before this nation was ever born. And the colonists and the settlers found it when they arrived. And they studied and were influenced. Many hands making the soup but some of them were Indigenous hands. Ben Franklin even wrote about it.
They had something figured out that we’re still working on—the equal role for women, the long-term thinking, a seat at the table for nature herself. [CHEERS] This is great news. This is great news, because, look, we’re in this polyamorous crisis situation. [LAUGHTER]
Which is really just a narrative battle. It’s a battle of stories. And we have this story over here that says I, alone, can fix it; this story over here that says we don’t have enough, that we should fear one another, that the only way to exist is on top of someone else, to dominate and extract and destroy in order to exist. That is a lonely path, because you leave aside all your relations and all your allies. The people moving in that story right now are trying to burn it all to the ground.
But here’s what they don’t know. We here, we Earthlings, we people who believe in the full spectrum of life understand the full power of fire to cleanse, to renew, to lay ground for a forest to grow stronger than before. The toxins put off by the systems that are dying are ones that we can compost into something more beautiful. [APPLAUSE] That is our task. They speak of I, we speak of we. They speak of less, we speak of more.
We are already doing it. We’re seeing languages, thought extinct, to be reawakened. I have seen Appalachia rising, former coal miners now turned into beekeepers, changing their violent relationship with a mountain to one of stewardship. I have heard white ranchers sounding like Indigenous people, saying, I don’t own this land. I’m taking care of it for these birds.
Photo courtesy of Baratunde Thurston
The future we want is already here. The story we need, we’re embedded within. We must tell it again and again and again. That’s how we make things true. That’s how we manifest it into being. That’s the task.
The biggest lie is that there’s such a thing as I that’s separate from you. Quantum physicists will tell you through and through, we’re all just energy, an explosion of the big bang cruising on waves of cosmic energy from then to now that has never lessened or increased. We are each other. We is just me flipped right side up. Let’s get that trending. [LAUGHTER]
Tell the story we already know. Listen to and honor those who’ve been telling it the whole time. Remember, y’all, renew our commitment to belonging. Remember, we’re already doing it. We’ve already won, because we exist across this continuum that’s never started and never stopped. It just is. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Host: Baratunde Thurston, “Declarations of Interdependence: A Story of Storytelling”…
Miguel Altieri describes agroecology as a dialogue of wisdoms between Traditional Ecological Knowledge that has stood the test of time, and modern agrarian and ecological sciences.
One of the pioneers in the field of agroecology, Altieri also emphasizes its socioeconomic and political aspects as an a more democratic alternative to the flaws of the capitalist, globalized, industrial agricultural system that prioritizes the pursuit of profit over the health of people, animals and land.
Building on the fundamental belief that food is a human right, the concept of food sovereignty–the right of people to have agency over their food system in a way that enhances the well-being and economy of local people–has central importance in an agroecological system.
The practical science of agroecology embodies a number of principles, guided by Indigenous knowledge and natural systems, that are applied in different ways depending on the ecosystem, the local culture, and scale of the farm. They consist of: recycling biomass; increasing biodiversity; building healthy soil; minimizing loss of energy, water and nutrients; diversification of species; and enhancing beneficial biological interactions.
Miguel Altieri, a professor of agroecology for over 40 years at UC Berkeley, has worked extensively with farmers in Latin America and is the author a number of books and publications on agroecology. Altieri was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers at an EcoFarm Conference.
ARTY MANGAN: You left Chile in your early 20s when Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet led a bloody coup against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. The coup resulted in Allende’s death and beginning of the brutal regime of Pinochet. How did that experience shape your life?
MIGUEL ALTIERI: At the time of the coup, I was finishing a degree in agronomy. My family wanted me to have a professional career. My mother wanted me to be an American doctor, my father wanted me to be a lawyer In Chile. But I was in a popular rock band called Embrujo, (which means bewitch) and that’s what I wanted to do. We were composing our own songs that had a political message.We had even made some records. But my family convinced me to get a degree. So I chose agronomy because that’s what I qualified for; I wasn’t even sure what it was.
Then the coup happened very suddenly. A lot of my friends started leaving Chile and some of them disappeared or were put in jail. My mother told me to leave the country. So, I took a bus to Colombia. There, I entered a master’s program. And that was my entry into agroecology because I became exposed to small farming, intercropping systems.
ARTY: In the book The Fatal Harvest, there’s a quote by you that has stuck in my mind. It refers to the collateral damage of industrial agriculture, such as the degradation of soil life, erosion, pollution, the list goes on and on. The quote is: “Each ecological disease is viewed as an independent problem rather than what it really is, a symptom of a poorly designed and poorly functioning system.” Would you expand on that?
MIGUEL: The French philosopher, scientist and mathematician René Descartes said that you cannot study the whole, you can only study the pieces. The sum of the parts may give you an understanding of the whole. That very reductionist Cartesian approach somehow entered into science of agronomy.
Then there was the misinterpretation of Darwin. People think that Darwin just focused on competition and that “survival of the fittest” is the main driver of evolution. Agronomists interpreted that idea to mean that anything that is not a crop has to be eliminated because it’s going to be competing. They didn’t think there could be cooperation in nature.
And finally, in the 19th Century scientist Justus von Liebig, whose concept of the “limiting factor” greatly influenced the green revolution that came about in the 20th Century. His theory is that there is always going to be a limiting factor, so if it’s nitrogen, you have to apply nitrogen. If it’s a pest, you have to spray. But that way of thinking does not understand that the limiting factor is a symptom of a much deeper ecological disease in the sense that if there’s no nitrogen, it’s not because there’s a lack nitrogen, it’s because the microbic relations are not active to promote the nutrient cycling, the nitrogen cycle.
Very early on, I came to understand that, especially when I was exposed to mixed farming systems in Colombia. I saw that small farmers were mixing crops, and that this theory of competition was totally wrong, that there can be a collaboration between species. I saw that you didn’t have the pest problems that exist in monocultures. It became very clear that the pest problems, or the nutrient deficiencies are just a symptom that something is not functioning well in the system, and what we need to do is go to the root causes and try to promote biodiversity that is responsible for all the processes that will lead to nutrient cycling, pest regulation, and so on.
ARTY: Are those traditional small, diversified, integrated systems, the precursor for agroecology? Were there people using that term at that point? How did that all evolve?
MIGUEL: There were a lot of writings done back in Europe, back in the early 1900s, in which they used the word agricultural ecology or crop ecology, which were trying to understand how crops adapt to the environment. So, those were good influences.
The term agroecology, as a science that tries to understand the whole farming system and interactions, came about later in the early 1970s, early ‘80s. Interestingly enough, if you look at the pioneer agroecologists of this country, like, for example, Steve Gliessman at UC Santa Cruz or John Vandermeer at the University of Michigan, or Peter Rosset, or Chuck Francis. These are people who have worked in agroecology early on. They all had one thing in common: They all studied traditional farming systems in Latin America. Gliessman was working in Mexico and was inspired by those systems.
Basically what agroecology does is promotes a dialogue of wisdoms. On the one hand, you have the modern sciences of ecology, and studying soils, plant pathology, and topology and so on. But traditional knowledge was crystallized in systems already that stood the test of time. We’re not trying to replicate those systems, but rather to understand the principles that underline the sustainability and resilience for centuries. Drawing from traditional knowledge, we can design farming systems based on a the agroecological principles.
ARTY: In what ways does that system avoid the flaws of the industrial system?
MIGUEL: It’s unrealistic to think that we’re going to convert the industrial systems into traditional systems. But what we can do is learn from the systems, apply the principles of agroecology, and transition to those systems based on agroecological principles. Agroecology designs systems that are not based on inputs, but rather are based on processes. You develop so much biodiversity in the system that all the interactions that happen between the soil, the insects, the microbes, etc., promote necessary processes like nutrient cycling, pest relations, etc.
What’s interesting is that agroecological principles can be applied at different scales. You can do a small garden or you can do large-scale farms like 2,000-hectare farms that I’ve seen in Argentina and Brazil and places like that, where the principles are applied but the technology they use is very different from a small-scale two-hectare farm.
What we need to do is figure out ways of convincing large industrial farmers to transition. It’s in their interest because when you do the transition, there are a lot of things that happen. One is that your cost of production goes down about 40 percent because you’re based on process not on inputs. Secondly, you’re efficient. When you measure productivity, not in kilograms per hectare, but kilograms per hectare per centimeter of water or unit of energy, then they’re much more efficient. In a traditional farming system, for kilocalorie of input, you get 20 out, whereas in a modern system, for one kilocalorie of input and you only get 1.5, very low efficiency. On top of that, you have all the other benefits such as the ecological health benefits, etc.
From a technical perspective, it is possible to transition to that kind of efficient system, but it is a political process that has to support that transition.
After the Dust Bowl, the USDA’s Soil Conservation Service, was promoting large-scale polycultures, intercropping, for example, with rye or lettuce with the barley because they wanted to have tall crops protected from the wind, because wind erosion was the main problem. Those systems were not done by hand; they were a thousand hectares done with machinery. So it is possible to do it, it’s just the industrial system pushes farmers to become specialized by providing subsidies for a small number of crops. There’s a whole legal and economic and political structure that promotes monocultures rather than diversified farming systems.
ARTY: Traditional Indigenous foodways and economies emphasize the importance community, sharing and cooperation. Have those ethos influenced agroecology? Is there a social aspect to agroecology?
MIGUEL: One of the main objectives of agroecologists is to democratize the system. That means to realize the right to food; food should not be treated as a commodity like a TV or a car, it’s different because food is a human right. Agroecology is the basis for what is called food sovereignty, which is very different from food security. Food sovereignty means the right of the people of a community or region or country to define their own production system in order to have food self-sufficiency. That doesn’t mean that they cannot have surplus and engage in national or international marketing. But the priority is first to produce food for the local people.
In order to do that, you have to have basic access to land, to seeds, to water. So the issue of land reform becomes very important. For example, right now in Colombia, the government of President Gustavo Petro, which is the first leftist government in Colombia in a hundred years, started land reform. But doing land reform in a country where you have big landowners can be a very dangerous game. So, what he’s doing is buying land from the land owners. He bought three million hectares, paid them, and now he’s giving the land away to small farmers. The idea is that the small farmers are going to be able to beef up the production of basic foods. Colombia is one of the top countries with the most biodiversity, and yet it imports food. This is ridiculous.
There is a social and political dimension of agroecology. That means first of all to realize the right to food. To be able to promote food sovereignty, you need political changes. But the problem is that the food system is so controlled by corporations, that it’s kind of impossible to change that. So what we propose is a bypass. The large food corporations are strangling the food system. They determine what farmers are going to grow, what technology they’re going to use, etc. They are also vertically integrated so they own the supermarkets and control what people are going to eat, how much they’re going to pay for the food, the quality of the food, and so on. But if you create a bypass with the agroecological systems where you control territories, where you set up solidarity networks with consumers and producers and so on, then things can change.
I think it is possible to do. It doesn’t change the big picture, but as long as you start promoting these local changes, maybe they start spreading from one community to another and create a collective energy. And then maybe that will lead to a bigger change.
There’s many examples of this in countries like Brazil, Peru and others. Basically, we gave up the idea of trying to change the industrial system, but rather to bypass it by creating these new arrangements of local markets. These local markets are accessible to everybody. In the U.S., at least my experience has been, that organic food markets are not accessible to everybody, just to a sector of society. So how do you democratize the food system?
For example, in Brazil and Colombia, the municipalities that are strong administrative units, people elect agroecological farmers that become mayors. So they gain political power at a local level, and with that they can have their own regulations and so on to promote this.
The second thing is that both countries have a national law of agroecology. One component of national law is school lunch programs. For example, in a particular municipality, that municipality has to buy 30 percent of the food of the small farmers to serve it in the schools. That’s by law. So you have to get out of the market economy, you have to intervene in the economy and create these kinds of social arrangements in order to be able to promote this.
ARTY: Vandana Shiva did a study in India that determined that if a farmer grew at least 12 different crops, they would never have anything less than a 75 percent harvest. If one or two crops failed, the farmer would still have a decent harvest. Why is diversity important in creating resilience in an agroecological system?
MIGUEL: There’s been a lot of research done in basic ecology studying natural ecosystems that bolstered the theory that higher diversity leads to stability. What happens is you have redundancy in a system where multiple species are playing the same role. If one goes, then it’s no problem because there are other species that will compensate. If one species fails, the other continues. It’s the same in agriculture. In a system with a lot of crop diversity there are complementary interactions.
Diversity is important at different levels; microbial diversity of the soil is very important, and it’s fostered by plant diversity. The more plants you have, the more different roots they have with different exudates that recruit different microbes. So it’s all tied to plant diversity. Plant diversity is the primary producer. The more species you have of plants, the more below-ground diversity you will have, as well as above ground—more insects, more predators, more parasites, more pollinators, more everything.
I don’t know if you need to have seven species or five species—it could be two or three species, but if they are complementing each other and creating resiliency and stability, then three species are fine. The point is that diversity is very important because of the ecological roles it plays in the system. Each species is playing a different role and the roles are complementary to each other.
ARTY: A number of years ago, I met some agronomists from Peru from an organization called Pratec who studied agronomy in universities. Initially their mission was to bring the Green Revolution to peasant farmers and elevate and improve their lives. The way that they would convince farmers to abandon their traditional practices and start using hybrid seeds and agrochemicals was to gather the local farmers, and spray chemical nitrogen on a field causing rapid lush growth; a “milagro” of modern technology. Seeing that, the farmers then viewed their practice’s as antiquated and began to adopt modern techniques. But after a few years, the chemicals destroyed soil fertility and the farmers couldn’t afford to keep buying the chemicals. The systems crashed. Seeing that, the Pratec agronomists realized that had a lot to learn from these farmers and pivoted to helping farmers enhance their traditional practices that have sustained them for millennia. My question is: How is industrial agriculture a colonization of agriculture?
MIGUEL: The Rockefeller Foundation was the main promoter of the Green Revolution [ED note: the Green Revolution is the introduction of high yielding, hybridized seeds that ultimately lead to increases in chemical fertilizer and pesticide use]. They had a bunch of agronomists from Iowa and Ohio. Among them was the Nobel Prize winner for developing the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug. They also recruited Carl Sauer, who was a geographer at Berkeley because he knew a lot about pests and agriculture, and had been studying traditional agriculture in Mexico for many years.
When they finished the tour, Sauer wrote a minority report that basically said if agronomists from Iowa and Ohio are going to push their northern varieties in Mexico, you’re going to ruin traditional farming forever. Of course, they kicked him out of the committee, and the Green Revolution proceeded. So there were red flags that were raised.
Basically the idea of the Green Revolution was to modernize agriculture, because that would open markets for the big companies. Who was behind the Green Revolution: Rockefeller, petroleum; Ford Foundation, machinery; and Kellogg, cereals. There was an agenda to raise political action to open markets for inputs, but at the same time, for produce to be sold. The Green Revolution was not as much the replacement of one variety for another, but even more, it was the replacement of one knowledge for another. In that way, it was a colonization.
Colonization happened through the Green Revolution, and promoted through the American universities. After the Cuban revolution, money was spent to bring professors from the different faculties of agriculture to study in the United States. Different countries were distributed to different universities. A California project funded by the Ford Foundation brought hundreds of professors from Chile to UC Davis and brainwashed them. They went back and replicated the California model. Brazilian professors went to the University of North Carolina. Colombians went to Nebraska. The colonization was not just introducing a new technology, it was also brainwashing the scientists so they could replicate the model.
When I look at my own trajectory, at the beginning, in 1983 I published my first book on agroecology, Agroecology: The Scientific Basis for Alternative Agriculture, in Spanish and was trying to get it translated into English. The establishment—the universities, the faculties of agriculture, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN)—basically ignored us. They said we were a bunch of communists. But agroecology kept growing, without funding from the government, without funding from foundations.
A few years later, they started arguing against us. They couldn’t ignore us anymore, so they claimed that you cannot feed the world with agroecology. It’s not productive. But agroecology kept growing, especially in Latin America.
Now, after battling us, the FAO has co-opted agroecology. I remember being at FAO fighting with them about how they defined the principles of agroecology. A lot of people jumped on the bandwagon. But their agroecology is kind of a junk agroecology because it leaves out the social and political aspects. They don’t talk about food sovereignty, or land reform, or things of that nature.
The idea that nonhuman animals might possess rich, structured languages—complete with dialects, social codes, and meaning—was once, for modern society, the stuff of science fiction. But recent breakthroughs and research from the innovative team at Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), who are using advanced AI and gentle robotics to study sperm whale communication, are making that possibility scientifically tangible. Sperm whales, long known for their complex social lives and patterned vocalizations, are not just making noise—they may be speaking a language we’re only just beginning to decode. And they’re not alone—similar tools and insights are now being applied to species like elephants, birds, and other animals whose vocalizations may hold linguistic complexity of their own.
But as science gains the tools to interpret animal language, a deeper question emerges: How do we ensure that listening leads to protection—not control or harm? As we enter this potent new era of potential interspecies understanding, the ethics of how we use this knowledge may be more important than the discovery itself.
In this companion article to Project CETI founder David Gruber’s piece on how AI is helping researchers decode whale sounds, César Rodríguez-Garavito, founding director of the More Than Human Life (MOTH) program at NYU, explores the legal and ethical implications of decoding animal communication. He shares how MOTH and CETI are working together to establish legal, philosophical, and community-centered guardrails—frameworks designed to ensure these technologies are used in service of the animals they study, not at their expense.
The following is an edited transcript from César’s panel conversation at Bioneers 2025.
Navigating the intersection of science, AI, and law can feel deeply charged—especially when working alongside the tech world, which often operates with a “move fast and break things” mentality. That mindset couldn’t be further from our approach.
That’s why, when David and I met at a conference in Los Angeles, we immediately recognized something important: we shared the how. Both of our collectives—the Cetacean Translation Initiative (Project CETI) and the More than Human Life (MOTH) program—are grounded in care, caution, and reciprocity. We’re aligned in believing that we should move only as fast as the science requires and never faster than the well-being of the animals, or the more-than-human world, allows.
Which brings us to the heart of our collaboration: exploring how this groundbreaking science with the potential to understand and even communicate with species like sperm whales, elephants, and others, might reshape the law.
It became clear that we’re standing at the threshold of an entirely new legal frontier. Questions that once belonged to the realm of science fiction are now becoming science.
As we began asking what the legal implications of these discoveries might be, it became clear that we’re standing at the threshold of an entirely new legal frontier. Questions that once belonged to the realm of science fiction are now becoming science. CETI has already shown that sperm whales exhibit complex communication patterns—possibly even language. And with that, many of the longstanding objections to animal rights start to fall apart.
Fifty years ago, people said animals weren’t sentient. That argument no longer holds. Then it was, “Okay, maybe they’re sentient, but they’re not intelligent.” But science has steadily overturned that, too. And now, the last holdout: “Well, they don’t have language.” And here we are.
Working with CETI is a joy. And honestly, I also love how it pushes back against mainstream assumptions, especially when people ask, “How far are you going to raise the bar?”
That’s exactly the question we’re exploring: What if it’s proven that cetaceans have the capacity for language? That’s not science fiction anymore—it’s current science. As we just heard from David, we’re already operating with evidence that strongly supports this idea. Even without future breakthroughs from CETI or other research teams, we now have a foundation for making powerful legal arguments using existing laws, both in the U.S. and internationally.
Of course, what excites many people the most is the possibility of understanding the content of these communications. What if we could truly interpret what whales are saying to each other? Depending on who you ask, some believe that this future is just a few years away.
Male and female sperm whale / Photo by Amanda Cotton
The legal implications of CETI’s research and that of similar collectives are split between two key fronts. The first is opportunity, and the opportunities here are absolutely unprecedented. But equally important are the risks. These emerging technologies hold real promise, but they also present serious concerns regarding the protection and well-being of the animals involved.
In most collaborations, the conversation centers almost entirely on the upside. People want to hear about what’s possible. When I speak at animal law conferences, for example, the interest is naturally focused on new tools for animal protection—and for good reason.
But in many legal circles, and certainly in much of the AI world, there’s a reluctance to engage with the risks. So in our work, we’re committed to giving equal weight to both: the opportunities and the necessary guardrails.
In our work, we’re committed to giving equal weight to both: the opportunities and the necessary guardrails.
Starting with the good news—the opportunities—we’re already thinking ahead and taking concrete steps. One of the most exciting developments in our collaboration is the potential to pursue new animal rights litigation grounded in this emerging science.
We’re also looking to support parallel efforts happening around the world. Polynesia and New Zealand, for instance, are moving quickly to integrate new scientific insights into legislation. The data being generated by CETI and others could help strengthen the accuracy and depth of legal protections for sperm whales, other cetaceans, and a broad range of species.
Another area where this science has clear legal implications is in the realm of animal research. We’re advocating for stricter protocols—particularly for research involving sperm whales and other marine mammals—based on a growing understanding of their intelligence and communication.
And finally, there’s an important legal avenue that doesn’t require new laws or litigation at all: reinterpreting and applying existing legislation in more protective ways. I mentioned this briefly this morning, but let me expand on one example.
As you heard from David’s presentation, sperm whales depend on sound to survive. Their lives are shaped by communication. These are highly auditory animals—they rely far more on hearing than sight.
When we consider the scale of ship traffic, the expansion of deep-sea mining, and the continued extraction of offshore oil, we have to acknowledge the consequences: these activities generate massive noise pollution that masks and interrupts whale communication. Their clicks can no longer carry across the ocean. They can’t hear one another. And when whales can’t hear each other, they lose the ability to maintain their social bonds, to navigate, to survive.
To me—and to the human rights scholars on my team at NYU—this isn’t just an environmental issue. My background is in international human rights law, and much of my work has focused on identifying and addressing systemic violations of dignity and well-being, particularly for vulnerable communities. So when David first presented an early version of his research, I sat there listening, and what I heard was: This is torture. This is cruel, degrading treatment.
The idea that sentient beings are being acoustically assaulted—unable to communicate, navigate, or maintain social bonds because of human-generated noise—resonated deeply with legal frameworks we’ve long used to protect humans.
The idea that sentient beings are being acoustically assaulted—unable to communicate, navigate, or maintain social bonds because of human-generated noise—resonated deeply with legal frameworks we’ve long used to protect humans. And now, we’re asking: What would it mean to apply those same protections across species lines?
As it turned out, David and I both approached each other after that talk. I told him, “I think I have an idea for you,” and he replied, “I think I have some science for you.”
That moment sparked the foundation of our collaboration. We’re now working to make a legal case that this kind of acoustic disruption—this forced silencing of sentient beings—constitutes torture, cruel punishment, and inhumane treatment under international law.
All of this work depends on a deepening scientific understanding of the more-than-human world—specifically, the perceptual worlds of animals. As we come to better understand how animals perceive and navigate their environments, we become better equipped to articulate how human activity disrupts those experiences—and how such disruptions can amount to violations of their dignity and well-being.
But alongside the promise, there are serious risks and challenges.
One major concern is the potential for manipulation and exploitation. Imagine a scenario where tourism operators use playback devices to lure whales toward boats. Now extend that to other species, such as elephants, for example. The possibilities for misuse are vast. Poachers, traffickers, or others with harmful intentions could use insights from animal communication to control or manipulate behavior. Understanding the structure or content of animal communication could, in the wrong hands, become a tool for exploitation.
The second risk is the invasiveness of the research itself. CETI has taken great care to avoid disrupting sperm whales’ lives—avoiding blood draws, minimizing interference, respecting the natural rhythms of the pods. But not all researchers operate with the same level of caution. In the wrong context, this kind of observation could become something else entirely: a form of surveillance. A 24/7 intrusion into the lives of animals who never gave consent.
The third major concern is the potential for real physical, psychological, and communal harm to animals and ecosystems.
To address these risks, we’ve taken two key steps. First, my team at NYU examined a range of legal frameworks in animal law as well as in adjacent fields like human rights and child protection. We looked at guidance from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, as well as the U.N. Declaration on the human rights responsibilities of corporations, which is especially relevant given that many of the actors in this space are corporate entities.
We also reviewed existing protocols governing animal research at academic institutions. But here’s the thing: nothing currently exists that specifically regulates the use of machine learning and bioacoustics in the study and recording of animal communication.
That is a problem. Especially when you consider that the field of AI is already deeply underregulated and becoming more so by the day. In many ways, it’s still a free-for-all.
So we decided to create new guardrails. After a year of research, we’re preparing to publish a set of guiding principles developed in collaboration with other concerned scientists and legal scholars. We also co-hosted a workshop at NYU that brought together experts like Joyce Poole, a prominent elephant biologist and conservationist, and others who are actively grappling with the ethical and ecological impacts of this emerging research on the animals they study.
Let me give you just a small preview of the guardrails we’ve developed.
We have what we call a PEPP framework, which stands for Prepare, Engage, Prevent, and Protect. Each pillar contains three principles, for a total of 12 guiding standards for ethical research.
The Prepare principles focus on what scientific collectives and technologists must do before they begin their research. Here’s just one example: it may sound basic, but it’s critical—implement transparent and robust ethics and data governance protocols from the outset. One of the biggest unanswered questions is: What happens to all this data?
Too often, animal communication recordings are treated like any other data stream, as fodder for training large language models, with no safeguards around ownership, consent, or use. If we’ve already struggled to regulate the circulation of human data, imagine the risks of misusing data collected from non-human species.
The second pillar is Engage. This is essential and is something CETI has already dedicated significant time and care to. While other entities might see this kind of work as a distraction or a non-essential expense, CETI has made real investments in community collaboration. For example, all of the equipment used in the Dominica-based research is returned to the community once the studies are complete.
What MOTH adds to this engagement pillar is a commitment to connecting Western science with Indigenous knowledge systems. Many Indigenous nations—particularly across Polynesia, in Hawaiʻi, along the Pacific coasts of North and South America—have long traditions of meaningful interaction and communication with whales. We believe it’s essential to create space where CETI’s findings can be placed in conversation with these other ways of knowing, expanding our ethical and perceptual frameworks.
The third pillar, Prevent, might sound simple, but it’s foundational. Anyone working in environmental law will recognize this as the precautionary principle. I recently asked a large language model to explain it for a five-year-old, and it came back with: Better safe than sorry. Honestly, that’s a pretty good summary.
At its core, the principle says that if you’re uncertain about the potential impacts of your research—you abstain. That’s a sharp contrast to the prevailing logic in much of the tech world, where uncertainty often leads to forging ahead anyway. In this work, precaution must come first.
Finally, the boldest and most ambitious pillar of the framework is Protect. This is about recognizing that there will be times when the interests of non-human animals, such as sperm whales, come into direct conflict with human interests.
Sometimes those human interests include the goals of scientists themselves. For example: in some corners of the scientific community, there’s pressure to play back recorded whale sounds as a way to validate whether we’re truly understanding their communication. CETI has encountered peer reviewers requesting this. But they’ve refused because that kind of interaction could interfere with the whales’ natural behavior.
The boldest and most ambitious pillar of the framework is Protect. This is about recognizing that there will be times when the interests of non-human animals, such as sperm whales, come into direct conflict with human interests. Sometimes those human interests include the goals of scientists themselves.
We had a powerful conversation about this at CETI’s most recent meeting in Dominica, and I think we managed to reach consensus: It’s worth keeping this principle in place. That means prioritizing the interests of the whale even when they conflict with the interests of researchers who are under pressure to publish.
In crafting this principle, we took inspiration from international law on children’s rights, specifically, the concept of the best interest of the child. Now, let me be clear: We’re not infantilizing animals, nor are we animalizing children. I know this analogy gets pushback from both directions—some in the child rights world resist the comparison, and some in the animal rights world object to likening animals to children.
But the underlying point remains: When vulnerable beings are impacted by decisions made in research, law, or policy, their interests must take priority. In this context, that means placing the well-being of the animal—of the sperm whale—above other competing human interests.
I’ll end by returning to the place where I feel most at home: using law and legal research as a tool for social change.
Before we look forward, it’s worth looking back. This isn’t the first time that listening to whales has changed the course of history.
In 1970, bio-acoustician Roger Payne released Songs of the Humpback Whale, a groundbreaking album that introduced the public to the haunting, elaborate vocalizations of humpback whales. It was truly historic. Many of you may know that the album became a surprising success. But more than that, it played a pivotal role in the movement to end commercial whaling. The science and the recordings sparked Save the Whales, a powerful global campaign that helped lead to the ban on commercial whaling. That was the early 1970s through the early 80s, which was a time of profound uncertainty in geopolitics and global conflict.
Sound familiar?
It’s one reason we believe we’re at another such juncture today. This science, the careful, ethical exploration of cetacean communication, has the power to once again inspire wonder. Wonder can lead to empathy. Empathy can lead to hope. And hope, if nurtured, can lead to action.
Carl Sagan closed his 1972 essay, “A Message from Earth,” with this line: “The cetacean holds an important lesson for us. The lesson is not about whales and dolphins—but about ourselves.”
Our hope is that this work, if approached with care, can do the same. That it can push science, law, and ethics toward a future where animal research is guided by protection and reciprocity—where wonder becomes action, in defense of the more-than-human world.
Want to dive into the science behind this legal and ethical frontier?
In his companion article, marine biologist and Project CETI founder David Gruber shares how AI and soft robotics are unlocking the language of sperm whales, potentially opening a new chapter in interspecies communication.We also invite you to watch Shane Gero, CETI’s lead whale researcher, explain why understanding sperm whale society is key to protecting their future—and what it means to treat their cultures with the same respect we expect for our own.
The devastating storms, droughts, wildfires and heatwaves we’re experiencing with increased frequency and ferocity aren’t just environmental issues, they’re human ones. They’re reshaping the places we call home, the systems we rely on, and the futures we imagine. While these impacts don’t fall equally, in the long run, none of us will be untouched.
In a time when division is actively stoked — by media, by politics, by fear — the path forward must be collective. That doesn’t mean erasing our differences. It means finding ways to work together across them, to build coalitions rooted in justice, care, and a shared commitment to survival.
The perspectives below offer powerful insights into how we begin to do that. Colette Pichon Battle speaks to the leadership and wisdom of frontline communities; Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous explores the transformational potential of a green economy; and civil rights scholar john a. powell explains how the concept of “bridging” can create curiosity and understanding.
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Colette Pichon Battle – The 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
As the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, long-time, award-winning Environmental Justice litigator and activist Colette Pichon Battle reminds us of the powerful lessons from the storm and its aftermath. In her impassioned presentation, Pichon Battle, a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, lays bare the nation’s racism, neglect of disenfranchised communities and environmental mismanagement — and the need to follow the lead of the frontline communities as we address the climate crisis. She encourages us all to participate in whatever way we can in the major events commemorating the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this August to help mobilize and redouble our efforts for Climate Justice.
The renowned civil rights and environmental leader Ben Jealous, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, examines how the green economy is driving job creation and transforming industries, including renewable energy and electric vehicles. Jealous, former President of the NAACP and People for the American Way, debunks myths that the transition will lead to job losses or take too long, instead showcasing how innovation is fueling economic growth. He underscores how the green economy is reshaping industries, improving workforce opportunities, and enhancing public health outcomes.
john a. powell Discusses the Power of Bridging for a Fractured World
How do we create connection in a world where political forces profit from division, and “belonging” feels, for many, like a distant ideal? In this thought-provoking conversation, civil rights scholar john a. powell discusses how the concept of “bridging” can create curiosity and understanding when authoritarian political leaders are increasingly seeking the opposite. Instead of “othering,” which frames people as threats, or “breaking,” which excludes them, powell discusses how bridging can help us better communicate and create a world where we all belong.
Through engaging courses led by some of the world’s foremost movement leaders, Bioneers Learning equips engaged citizens and professionals like you with the knowledge, tools, resources and networks to initiate or deepen your engagement, leading to real change in your life and community.
Biomimicry for Social Innovation: Nature’s Lessons for Movement Leaders | May 13-June 3, 2025 | This four-week experiential course reveals how biomimicry—a practice that draws on the genius of ecosystems—can inform leadership, partnership building, and decision-making for lasting, regenerative change.
The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.
Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse | Sept 8-29, 2025 | This four-week interactive course offers a radical approach — merging nonviolent action, trauma healing, and spiritual practice to build movements rooted in connection and resilience.
From Reactivity to Resilience: Responsive Leadership and Fractals of Healing | Sept 13-Oct 18, 2025 | Grounded in ReParentive® Therapy, this six-week interactive course explores how healing intergenerational trauma ripples outward to inspire change in relationships, communities, and systems. You will explore practical tools to regulate your nervous system, heal trauma, and discover how to lead from an embodied, authentic place.
Putting Biomimicry Into Action in Your Profession and Life | Oct. 9-30, 2025 | Led by Andrew Howley, Chief Editor of the Biomimicry Institute, this four-week interactive course will equip you with the tools to reframe challenges through nature’s lens and turn inspired ideas into action.
Baratunde Thurston, host and Executive Producer of the PBS TV series America Outdoors, creator of the How To Citizen and Life with Machines podcasts, and author of the comedic memoir How to Be Black, summarizes three days of the 2025 Bioneers Conference in an astonishing spoken word performance.
Baratunde Thurston, a writer, communicator, and creator and host of the How To Citizen podcast, is also a founding partner and writer at Puck. His newest creation is Life With Machines, a YouTube podcast focusing on the human side of the A.I. revolution. Author of the bestselling comedic memoir, How To Be Black, Baratunde also serves on the boards of Civics Unplugged and the Brooklyn Public Library and lives in Southern California.
While we work fervently in response to the many crises we face, we also need to pay attention to the story, because what we tell ourselves about ourselves shapes how we show up in these times. In this keynote address, Baratunde Thurston shares the stories he has been unearthing about our relationships with the natural world, our fellow humans, and even with machines, that provide strong hints of where we need to go and how to get there.
The city of Richmond has provided an impressive example of highly effective progressive grassroots organizing that has included the building of groundbreaking citizens’ organizations, local institutions and co-operatives and successful electoral campaigns, as well as a major Environmental Justice victory in a decades-long struggle with Chevron, whose massive facilities have long polluted the region. One of the most important figures in this exemplary community is Doria Robinson whose multi-faceted activism has been a key element in its successes. She’s been the Executive Director since 2007 of Urban Tilth, a renowned urban food project building a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system and helped nurture the birth of many local initiatives from bicycle co-ops to urban “greening” projects. Now serving on Richmond’s city council, Doria shares some of what she has learned in her decades of building people’s power from the ground up.
This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.
Doria Robinson, a 3rd generation resident of Richmond, California, current member of the Richmond City Council (District 3), and one of the most effective, exemplary community organizers in the nation, has been, since 2007, the Executive Director of Urban Tilth, a widely renowned community-based organization dedicated to cultivating a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system. Also co-founder of the Richmond Food Policy Council, former co-chair of the US Food Sovereignty Alliance Western Region, and member of the Climate Justice Alliance, Food Sovereignty Working Group, Doria (a Certified Permaculture Designer, Bay Friendly Gardener, Nutrition Educator and Yoga Instructor) has a strong background in farming, from working on the 350-acre Apostolic Temple of Truth Ranch on weekends in her youth to working on organic farms in Massachusetts while in college, and later at the legendary Veritable Vegetable women-owned organic produce distribution company.
For over a decade, longtime reporter on economic and social change, Laura Flanders, has been looking for alternatives – new economic models that are different from the kind of capitalism we’ve come to know, or state socialism. What if, she asks, instead of tweaking the system to reduce the damage, we reorganized entirely so that both local and national economies produced better outcomes for people, communities and the planet in the first place?
In this podcast episode, award-winning lawyer and climate justice organizer Colette Pichon Battle lays out a bold vision to transform the Gulf South and Appalachia away from the lethal matrix of fossil fuel extraction and extractive economics, and toward a regenerative future of clean energy democracy, and an equitable, inclusive economy.
This performance took place at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.
The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (DAYPC) is a diverse group of teens that collaborates with professional artists to create dynamic, original productions. Combining hip hop, modern and aerial dance, theater, song, and rap, company members take the stage to tell stories that stem from their lived experiences and express their visions for a world transformed. Since 1993, DAYPC has performed original work for up to 25,000 audience members annually, garnering critical acclaim and widespread community support for both their technical prowess and their commitment to advancing inclusivity, equity, and justice.
A performance by Oakland’s own incomparably dynamic and uplifting Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company. DAYPC’s extraordinary energy, brilliant choreography and inspired lyrics have been rocking the house at Bioneers for many years.
Sarah Crowell is the Artistic Director Emeritus at Destiny Arts Center, which Sarah co-founded and where she has held a variety of leadership roles for the past 30 years.
Is biodiversity conservation a science, a form of stewardship, or perhaps an art? Artist and activist Haley Mellin shows how it can be all three. As the founder of Art into Acres, she uses her creative talents to support Indigenous and community-led efforts to protect wild places, weaving care into the tapestry of sustaining biodiversity. She brings her creativity from the canvas to the planet, generating a cultural tributary of philanthropy to land stewardship. In 2024 alone, this work helped preserve 6.45 million acres. Raised in Northern California surrounded by Blue Oaks, she shares how her passion inspires action and how we can all connect to the earth through the art of land preservation.
This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.
Haley Mellin, PhD, is an artist focusing on painting and land conservation. In 2017, she founded Art into Acres, a non-profit supporting permanent land conservation on behalf of the arts. Indigenous-led and community-led protected areas are the focus, and the initiative has supported the designation of about 70 million acres of new protection. Haley initiated the first environmental council and carbon emissions calculations at U.S. art museums, and juried the inaugural National Endowment for the Humanities climate grants. She is the co-author of Conservation Imperatives published last year in Frontiers. Her painting is observational and done outdoors. Haley advocates for environmental justice for all life, and was mentored by Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, Chandra Pai and the South African artists rosenclaire.
The key role of the arts in social movements is as true today as it’s ever been, and we at Bioneers have sought to feature the work of groundbreaking socially and eco-engaged artists from across different disciplines.
Learn how Jolie Elan, founding Director of the Go Wild Institute, is drawing from her background in ecology and ethnobotany to conserve the ancient Oak life system.
As co-leaders of a global alliance working at the intersection of gender justice and environmental resilience, award-winning, groundbreaking activists and visionaries Amira Diamond, Melinda Kramer and Kahea Pacheco explore the transformative power of grassroots women’s leadership in confronting our most pressing ecological challenges. By sharing stories from their global network, they illustrate how frontline women leaders are implementing community-based solutions that protect land, water, and biodiversity as well as advancing climate resilience across diverse regions. They also delve into WEA’s unique co-directorship model—a shared leadership structure that embodies collaboration, collective visioning, and sustained impact in alliance-building work.
This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.
Amira Diamond, co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), where she collaborates with frontline communities, global NGOs, investors, and philanthropists to implement environmental programs focused on nature-based solutions, clean energy, advocacy campaigns, replicable models, resilient communities and justice across environmental, health, and LGBTQ rights, is a seasoned social entrepreneur with over two decades’ experience designing and leading rights-based programs at the intersection of climate solutions, gender equity, and economic development. Previously, she served as the West Coast Director of Democracy Matters and directed organizations such as Julia Butterfly Hill’s Circle of Life.
Melinda Kramer, co-founder (in 2006) and Co-Executive Director of the Women’s Earth Alliance (inspired by the resilience of women in impacted communities around the world and the desire to bridge the resource gap for these frontline women tackling urgent climate challenges), is a passionate advocate for social justice, the environment, and women’s rights. An environmentalist and cultural anthropologist, she has worked globally, learning from grassroots leaders on the frontlines of environmental crises. Her career has spanned sustainable agriculture work in Kenya with CARE International, capacity-building initiatives in the North Pacific Rim with Pacific Environment, and co-founding the Global Women’s Water Initiative.
Kahea Pacheco (Kanaka ’Ōiwi), Co-Executive Director of the Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), is a passionate advocate for Indigenous people’s rights and climate justice that puts aloha ʻāina at the heart of solutions. She joined WEA in 2011 after receiving her law degree with a focus on Environmental and Federal Indian Law. With WEA, Kahea has facilitated legal advocacy partnerships for Indigenous women-led environmental campaigns and co-led the development of the “Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies” initiative. She also serves on the Advisory Councils for the World Economic Forum’s 1t.org and Daughters for Earth.
In this Bioneers 2022 keynote address, Zainab Salbi, a co-founder of Daughters for Earth, explores the interconnection between our personal search for healing and how we face the challenges of climate change.
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