The ocean covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface and is home to the majority of its wildlife. From jellyfish and giant squid to deep-sea crustaceans, sharks, sea turtles, marine mammals, and tens of thousands of fish species, its biodiversity can mystify and amaze.
The ocean produces at least 50% of the planet’s oxygen, plays a core role in regulating the climatic system, and provides food to more than a billion people while supporting the livelihoods of millions more. We truly do live on a water planet. Yet this vast, life-sustaining ecosystem faces growing threats, including overfishing, climate change, pollution and deep-sea mining. Half of coral reefs have already been destroyed, 90% of big fish populations have been depleted, and an estimated 60% of marine ecosystems have been degraded or are being unsustainably used.
To protect and restore the ocean, we must consider all its creatures and functions. In this special issue for World Oceans Day on June 8, learn about some of the people and organizations that are working to deepen our understanding of the ocean and its inhabitants, and are using that knowledge to advance conservation. Explore Project CETI’s interdisciplinary work to decode sperm whale calls; how the Safina Center is reenvisioning ocean conservation by incorporating environmental justice, story and relationship lenses; and work by the National Geographic Pristine Seas project to protect the last wild places in the ocean.
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Can an Ethically Built AI Decode Whale Communications? Project CETI is Here to Find Out
What if we could understand the language of another species—one with its own culture, dialects, and deep intergenerational bonds? David Gruber, founder and President of the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or Project CETI, shares how a world-class team of scientists is using advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art gentle robotics to translate the clicks and codas of sperm whales. Plus, watch a conversation with Gruber and César Rodríguez-Garavito, an Earth Rights scholar, lawyer, and founding Director of the MOTH (More-Than-Human) Rights Program at NYU School of Law, where they discuss the innovative collaboration between the MOTH and Project CETI to establish ethical and legal guardrails that can permit us to harness the potential of these technologies while minimizing their risks. Sperm whales / Photo by Amanda Cotton
How Understanding What Whales are Saying Can Help Us Protect Oceans
In the late 1960s, scientists, including principal CETI advisor, the late Dr. Roger Payne, discovered that whales sing to one another. His recordings, “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” helped spark the Save the Whales movement, one of the most successful conservation initiatives in history. The campaign eventually led to the Marine Mammal Protection Act that marked the end of large-scale whaling and saved several whale populations from extinction. All this by just hearing the sounds of whales. Imagine what would happen if we could understand them?
In 2020, Project CETI formed as a nonprofit organization with catalyst funding from the TED Audacious Prize. CETI’s science team is made up of some of the world’s leading artificial intelligence and natural language processing experts, cryptographers, linguists, marine biologists, roboticists and underwater acousticians from a network of universities and other partners. The team listens to and translates how other species communicate, starting with the sperm whale. The mission is simple:
Achieve breakthroughs in decoding sperm whale communication
Share CETI’s learnings with the world
Transform human understanding and connectivity
Leverage CETI’s findings to protect our oceans and planet
Rewriting the Rules of Ocean Conservation through Justice, Story & Relationship
As the conservation field reckons with ecological breakdown and social inequity, a growing chorus of voices is calling not only for new strategies, but for a transformation in who leads, whose knowledge counts, and how we define care for the natural world. That shift is especially visible in marine conservation, where centuries of exclusion are slowly giving way to more relational, justice-rooted approaches.
In this conversation among three Fellows of the Safina Center, the ocean becomes a lens for examining what conservation can look like when it’s guided by inclusion, storytelling, and deep community ties. Marine biologist and environmental educator Jasmin Graham shares how her work with endangered sharks and rays is shaped by local wisdom and her Gullah Geechee heritage. Danielle Khan Da Silva, a National Geographic Explorer and intersectional conservationist, discusses the power of ethical storytelling and Indigenous relationships with whales. And naturalist and captain Katlyn Taylor reflects on how firsthand experience and curiosity can spark lasting connections between people and the sea.
Protecting Our Life Support System: Challenges and Opportunities in Marine Conservation
Without the ocean, life would be impossible. It provides food, livelihoods for millions of people and regulates the climate. Yet today, only 8% of the ocean is somehow protected — and less than 3% is fully protected from fishing and other damaging activities. The world-renowned National Geographic Explorer in Residence Enric Sala launched the National Geographic Pristine Seas project in 2008 to explore and help inspire the protection of the last wild places in the ocean. Pristine Seas works with local communities, Indigenous peoples, government and partners to protect the ocean, but also areas that have been somehow degraded by human activities, so they can bounce back.
Made up of an extraordinary team of scientists, conservationists, filmmakers and policy experts, Pristine Seas has helped protect 6.9 million square kilometers of ocean habitat (more than twice the size of India). Partnering with 122 different organizations and agencies across 23 countries, its work has inspired the establishment of some of the largest marine reserves in the world. In this presentation, Enric discusses the vital importance of healthy oceans to humanity’s future and what Pristine Seas hopes to accomplish in the years ahead.
From Bioneers Learning – Rights of Nature 201: Moving Campaigns Forward
Our waters and lands need our help, but how can we work within our communities and beyond to codify the protection of nature? Rights of Nature is not just a philosophy—it’s a growing legal and cultural movement. In this three-hour interactive seminar, instructors Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil return to offer focused guidance on organizing, drafting, and advancing Rights of Nature campaigns in communities across the U.S. and around the world.
This live seminar is a deeper dive for those already familiar with Rights of Nature principles and ready to move from education into action. Designed as a continuation of Bioneers Learning’s four-week Rights of Nature course, this intensive session focuses on developing and advancing effective campaigns that push Rights of Nature laws forward—locally and beyond. Get 20% off with code VISION20 until June 15, 2025, at midnight PT.
Recent advances in technology have made it possible to understand some of the communication of a few animal species. Leading interdisciplinary initiatives such as Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) are developing cutting-edge advancements in machine learning, robotics, natural language processing, linguistics, cryptography, complexity science, and marine biology to record and begin to understand the fundamental elements of some nonhuman animal communication, beginning with that of sperm whales.
While these technologies hold significant promise for enhancing the well-being and rights of nonhuman animals, they also present serious risks of further manipulation and exploitation of animals.
This conversation dives into the innovative collaboration between the NYU More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program and Project CETI to establish ethical and legal guardrails that can permit us to harness the potential of these technologies while minimizing their risks.
With David Gruber and César Rodríguez-Garavito. Moderated by Teo Grossman, President of Bioneers.
The natural world is alive with sound—birdsong, whale calls, insect rhythms, the quiet pulses of water and wind. These sonic landscapes aren’t just background noise; they’re rich, expressive languages of life. For those who choose to listen, they offer not only beauty, but insight into the deep interconnections that bind all beings.
David Rothenberg, a musician, composer, author, naturalist, philosopher, and independent publisher, has been a unique and fascinating explorer of humanity’s connections to the natural world for more than four decades, widely recognized, among other accomplishments, as a groundbreaking figure in “the joys and mysteries of interspecies music-making.”
He has released some 40 albums under his own name and collaborated with many prominent musicians on countless projects, including such luminaries as Paul Winter, Pauline Oliveros, Marilyn Crispell, Paul McCandless, Glen Moore, Scanner, DJ Spooky, and Jaron Lanier, to name only a few. One of his unique forms of experimentation in his extensive travels over the decades has been not only his recordings of bird and whale and other animal songs but his highly original attempts to engage with other species in musical exchanges, quite a few of which have been captured on film and/or discussed in his many books. Someone recently said of him: “He’s played with everyone from Peter Gabriel to Pauline Oliveros, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, cicadas, humpbacks, frogs, Estonian pond organisms, et al.”
Rothenberg is the author or editor of some 20 books, several of which are accompanied by audio or audio-visual components. His works in print include:
And, most recently, Secret Sounds of Ponds, a detailing of his attempts to capture and share hidden, normally inaudible underwater soundscapes (a couple of those experiments with hydrophones can be seen in these clips:
Rothenberg, who has been a professor of philosophy for nearly 35 years, also, among his other contributions, helped make better known in the English-speaking world the work of the important Norwegian philosopher and eco-activist Arne Næss, who coined the term “deep ecology.”
You can find more comprehensive information about David Rothenberg’s extensive and multi-faceted life and work on his website.
In this recent interview, Bioneers senior producer J.P. Harpignies invited Rothenberg to recount some of the key episodes in his career trajectory, unpack some of his guiding ideals and passions, and regale us with some anecdotes from an extremely full life which has included some surprising encounters with quite a few renowned cultural and scientific figures.
As the conservation field reckons with ecological breakdown and social inequity, a growing chorus of voices is calling not only for new strategies but for a transformation in who leads, whose knowledge counts, and how we define care for the natural world. That shift is especially visible in marine conservation, where centuries of extractive practice and exclusion are slowly giving way to more relational, justice-rooted approaches.
In this conversation among three Fellows of the Safina Center, the ocean becomes a lens for examining what conservation can look like when it’s guided by inclusion, storytelling, and deep community ties. Marine biologist and environmental educator Jasmin Graham shares how her work with endangered sharks and rays is shaped by local wisdom and her Gullah Geechee heritage. Danielle Khan Da Silva, a National Geographic Explorer and intersectional conservationist, discusses the power of ethical storytelling and Indigenous relationships with whales. And naturalist and captain Katlyn Taylor reflects on how firsthand experience and curiosity can spark lasting connections between people and the sea.
The following is an excerpted and edited transcript from a conversation originally recorded at Bioneers 2025.
JASMIN GRAHAM: I view all my work through an environmental justice lens. In order to address marine conservation issues, people need to be able to communicate with each other, so science communication and education are really important to me. But science education has to be a two-way street: when you’re teaching people and communities how to protect species or ecosystems, you should also always be listening and learning, because folks on the ground often know the most about their environment.
My science basically revolves around endangered species of sharks and rays, so a lot of my work involves animals with weird faces, such as sawfish and hammerheads. One of the animals I study is the smalltooth sawfish, a critically endangered species of ray that used to be present in a lot of places but now is only found regularly in Florida and the Bahamas. I’m working to try to understand the threats these animals are facing, where they move, how they use the coastline, and how they interact with anthropogenic effects, such as bycatch (i.e., the accidental catching of sawfish). Because, you know, when you have a hedge trimmer on your face, it’s very easy to get tangled up in nets, and when you get tangled up, you rarely survive.
I work with fishing communities to help understand how we can mitigate these bycatch risks. Fishers don’t want to catch them either, because getting one of those caught in your net just means you now have a giant hole in your net. The sawfish don’t want to be there, and the fishers don’t want them to be there. So that’s what I’ve been working on: trying to make them both happy.
One of the social justice components of my work is to try to expand who is involved in marine conservation conversations and decisions, so I’m sort of a marine biologist moonlighting as a social scientist. I want to include far more people in conservation and science. We’ve created too many silos and separations that prevent a lot of people from being involved and engaged.
“If you don’t have that buy-in, you won’t be able to leverage the social capital that’s already in the community.”
A lot of what I do is based on the ICON framework. I added an extra two letters to so I could call it ICONIC: integrated, coordinated, open, networked, inclusive conservation, which is dedicated to making sure all the stakeholders are involved from the beginning, not just brought on at the end. Local and traditional knowledge and values have to be seriously engaged with and respected in science and conservation, because local folks often know their spaces far better than you do. There needs to be clear communication throughout, so they, for example, don’t find out you made a law that stopped them from fishing in their favorite spot after the fact. Policymakers, scientists, and local stakeholders all have to be engaged in the process. If you don’t have that buy-in, you won’t be able to leverage the social capital that’s already in the community.
Part of what inspired me to do the work I do is my Gullah Geechee heritage in South Carolina. My grandma fished her entire life in the same area, and I realized she had 50 years of data on local aquatic life, which we call a long-term data set. But no one had ever asked her anything because she was Black, poor, and illiterate. The people in my family and community knew a whole lot about the local fish and ocean currents, but they had no idea what a marine biologist was. I noticed fast that the scientists in my field didn’t even think about paying attention to all that local wisdom. They thought they knew it all, or only they could figure it out. When you come into a community with an attitude like that, all you get is distrust and hostility.
Danielle Khan Da Silva
DANIELLE KHAN DA SILVA: I turned from conservation biology to storytelling because the conservation biology world was incredibly toxic, especially as a queer woman of color in science. I didn’t want to leave the field of conservation, but I wanted to see it from a different angle. I’m a National Geographic Explorer, and that has allowed me to work with many brilliant minds and travel the world to see different ways of being through my lens. I’ve worked all over the world, from Mongolia to decolonized anti-poaching projects in South Africa to volcano eruption recovery in Bali to Sumatra to Hawaii to First Nations in Canada. I’ve also done a lot of work on animals and animals in captivity.
I view my storytelling as a form of activism. Since this conversation is mostly about ocean issues, I’ll share two amazing experiences I had with whales and coastal people. Work with marine life is new for me. Diving and all the expensive gear required weren’t accessible to me in my youth, so it took me a while to get into the field of marine conservation. My work in Polynesia has taken me into a very esoteric feeling space where I’m trying to understand more about the things that we don’t know, the things in that liminal space, including interspecies communication.
I have had the honor and privilege of working with Ismael Huukena, who is well-known throughout Polynesia as being a sort of ocean whisperer, somebody who can speak to whales and other marine creatures. I come to these things with a healthy skepticism, but I’ve seen many incredible things this man has done. He was asked to help rescue a beaked whale that had crossed the coral reef and was trapped in a marina. It was exhausted, and a team of about ten people was trying to keep this beaked whale afloat so that it wouldn’t drown.
Huukena came from Tahiti, and I happened to be with him. As soon as he got there, he jumped in the water and started talking to the whale in Tahitian, and she started moving. As we stood on the reef, kind of just sending her off, Huukena instructed all of us to get in the water and give her a goodbye. She was able to leave successfully.
Another project I’ve been working on is with the Coast Salish matriarchs, such as Kayah George, a young matriarch-in-training, taught by her mother, Deborah Parker, who is Tulalip, and her Auntie Charlene, who is Tsleil-Waututh. Their people have many stories that relate them back to orcas and wolves. They see the orcas as transformational beings that can transform into wolves, and some humans as capable of transforming into orcas.
Kayah’s great-grandfather was Chief Dan George. He was taken as a child and forced to go to one of those infamous, brutal, repressive residential schools where so many kids died. When he came back all the totems that had lined the beaches were gone. A number of the surviving tribal reservations are surrounded by toxic industries, including oil pipelines and refineries. One major spill could doom the remaining local orca population. The ongoing onslaught of colonization is never-ending for these folks, but they’re still constantly fighting for their orca kin and themselves.
“We feel a responsibility to capture their stories and messages because so many elders are dying without being able to transfer their knowledge, and so much is being lost.”
We’re doing a four-part series with National Geographic that tries to show the deep relationships between orcas and the Coast Salish people. We feel a responsibility to capture their stories and messages because so many elders are dying without being able to transfer their knowledge, and so much is being lost.
For Tsleil-Waututh and all Coast Salish people, paddling is an important part of their lives and culture. When they have their canoe races, the orcas sometimes come and swim alongside their boats. They have an orca song, and when they sing it, the orcas will often come and visit them. There is a really long-standing relationship between the orcas and people in that culture.
Orcas are some of the most intelligent beings on this planet. They have a proven capacity for empathy, and they have language, which is being studied. I think we’re really close to being able to have conversations with orcas, just as we are with sperm whales and humpbacks, but there’s so much there that we just don’t know, and, tragically, we are destroying so much before we’re able to find these things out.
Katlyn Taylor
KATLYN TAYLOR: I’m a marine biologist, but I didn’t really know how cool whales were until I got to university. I didn’t grow up on the ocean but along rivers in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon. I went to Oregon State and got a degree in marine biology, and I figured out that whales were way cooler than everybody was giving them credit for at the time. I wanted to share that with as many people as possible in a powerful way, to get them to love whales and to spread awareness and knowledge about our oceans. So I’ve spent the last ten years working in the eco-tourism space, starting in the amazing waters of Monterey, California.
My time in Monterey deeply informed my naturalist and guiding career. It’s a uniquely rich bay, and for a budding naturalist to try to guide and educate people about an ocean ecosystem, Monterey is a beast. You have to be prepared to explain 30 to 40 different species in the span of three hours, and not just identify them but explain how they’re all interconnected and how it all works together.
“The ecosystem literally hit rock bottom before we figured out how to start to fix it.”
Monterey Bay has a really interesting history. People like to call it the poster child for our modern-day definition of conservation success, but it also comes with a history of extraction and colonization. The ecosystem literally hit rock bottom before we figured out how to start to fix it. The Bay was so full of sludge and effluent from industry and commercial fishing that people didn’t want to be there anymore. We came close to absolutely destroying it, and it’s still got challenges, but it’s starting to recover. There’s still lots of work to do, but it’s a really unique place for interspecies interactions, especially with whales. Humpback whales don’t generally feed or cooperate with any other species, but in Monterey Bay, they have now started to feed with California sea lions on the same prey patches of anchovies. That’s something that’s new and cutting edge, and really interesting.
My day job is working as a naturalist and a guide, and now also for the last few years as a captain. Monterey’s an incredible place, but once I started to seasonally move around and follow the whales, I got a larger perspective. I observed them in different places, engaging in different behaviors at different stages of life. Getting a vaster sense of how they interact throughout their entire ranges has really helped me hone my skills as a guide, and it’s helped me up my game in sharing information and connecting with people. A conservative estimate of how many people I’ve talked to on whale watches and cruises around the world at this point is around 400,000 people in 10 years.
Shifting to the captain role over the last few years has presented a new challenge. I have to be in charge of where we’ll go, what animals we look at, and how long we stay in a place. Working on boats is not easy. A lot of my day is spent on checklists, protocols, safety management, guest relations, and managing the crew. On a whale watch, sometimes you see things such as a whale getting trapped in crab or lobster gear, or killer whales hunting a baby gray whale, or you see an actual still-existing whaling station. Some guests will say: “You’ve got to intervene; you’ve got to do something.” And you have to figure out how to have these tricky conversations on the fly, and still keep it a positive learning experience for people.
I have to face certain paradoxes. It’s not lost on me that we burn fossil fuel to go out and look at whales, so I have to believe the impact I’m having on people and the actions they take as a result of what they’ve seen will outweigh that harm. It’s really important to me that I be able to communicate with them in a way that will lead to their caring about the ocean enough to want to protect it, but I have to meet people where they are.
Given that these are people who can afford to go on an ecotourism trip, it’s perhaps surprising, but some of them think whales are fish and that the ocean is just water with salt in it. So I have to basically offer crash courses reteaching biology and ecology so these people who live lives so separate from the natural world can understand how everything is connected.
“I’m trying to get people to fall back in love with nature and realize we’re all connected.”
Ecotourism can do harm when it isn’t done with a lot of conscious thought, and there are places it has done quite a bit of damage. But I think people need to see things for themselves to connect with nature. I always advise them at the end of each trip to put the environment in their decision-making process in whatever way they can, whether it’s in voting, donating to organizations, shopping, etc. I’m trying to get people to fall back in love with nature and realize we’re all connected.
DANIELLE: One thing that’s important to acknowledge is that we wouldn’t even need conservation if there hadn’t been colonialism and extractive capitalism ravaging ecosystems. There’s often a well-intended eagerness to jump to the whole unity part without doing the work necessary to face what’s happened and continues to happen around the world. Colonialism is not a thing of the past, it’s ongoing. It shows up in so many ways in conservation, in storytelling. I am actually in the middle of writing a book about it.
“If we don’t have a clear-eyed understanding of our history, we are likely to do more harm than good…”
If we don’t have a clear-eyed understanding of our history, we are likely to do more harm than good, and that has happened a lot in conservation movements, whether intentionally or unintentionally. To cite just one example, as most of us know, several of North America’s first national parks were created by evicting their Indigenous inhabitants. But it’s become ever more obvious in recent decades with tons of data that, globally, Indigenous peoples are usually the best stewards of ecosystems. We need to learn from those cultures and elevate Indigenous science so it carries equal weight with Western science and support rematriation and land-back initiatives. We need to rethink conservation from the foundations and to be really intentional in the solutions we support so we don’t repeat the errors of the past.
JASMIN: I definitely agree with that. In my work, rethinking conservation is thinking about not only what we are protecting, but why and for whom. We tend to forget that we’re all part of the ecosystem, but we are all different parts. We have learned that when you take out a part of the ecosystem, it collapses. And, yes, that means plants and animals, but it also means that if you have a coastal community that can’t live and survive and thrive, your ecosystem will be damaged. We have to include people in the conservation equation. We have to understand how humans fit into the ecosystem in the same way that we study coral reefs, which form the base of the trophic levels of the food chain, because the conditions of people and human communities have a huge effect on the ecosystem. If they’re not on board, your solutions will fail.
“Those folks have to be part of the conversation and help design the solutions.”
It’s easy to tell people to stop eating fish because species are endangered or the water is too polluted, but if fishing is a poor coastal community’s only source of income and protein, that isn’t possible. Those folks have to be part of the conversation and help design the solutions.
In 1999, three land rights defenders were kidnapped after they left Indigenous U’wa territory in Colombia. Multinational oil interests seeking the massive reserves beneath the region were attacking U’wa lifeways — and those who accompanied them in resistance. The bodies of Terence Freitas, Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaiian) were eventually found bound and bullet-riddled in a cow pasture. The murders were part of a struggle that would continue for decades, bringing about both setbacks and victories for the U’wa.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Bioneers: The book chronicles your personal journey of grief and environmental organizing in the wake of the murders of Terence and his colleagues. What moved you to write this story now, and what do you hope it offers to emerging climate activists?
Abby Reyes: To me, their murders were a harbinger of the climate chaos that we are grappling with now. At the same time, the way they lived their lives set an example that helped usher in the rise of climate justice. The land rights defenders who were killed with Terence were beloved native North American women leaders who were ahead of their time. Lahe’ena’e Gay, from Hawai’i, was a traditional Indigenous knowledge educator and educational systems designer, and Ingrid Washinawatok was a Menominee leader from Wisconsin who was key to what eventually, after her death, became the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The rights the U’wa community asserted before their deaths and have continued to advocate for at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights draw on this United Nations declaration that Ingrid worked tirelessly to put in place.
“I wrote with the hope that the practices that helped me come back home to my body and voice might help others as we navigate the climate disasters already underway, do all we can to prevent further harm, and work together to build the climate future we know is still possible.”
I came into adulthood through the gates of these murders, with this paradox lodged in my throat, and I needed to clear my throat. Writing was one way that I did that. It’s this very specific story, yes, but it’s also a universal one — about how we navigate grief and the efforts we make to reestablish connection with the people, animals, plants and minerals that make up this earth. Above all, it’s a story about the power of collective action. I wrote with the hope that the practices that helped me come back home to my body and voice might help others as we navigate the climate disasters already underway, do all we can to prevent further harm, and work together to build the climate future we know is still possible.
These murders took place near U’wa land, a known mother load of oil in that country. It’s a place where oil pipelines have always been a magnet for armed violence. When the internal armed conflict in Colombia shifted and the country entered a transitional justice process, I was invited, along with Terence’s mom and the families of the others who were killed, to be recognized as victims in Case 001 of the Truth and Recognition process. Terence’s mom and I opted in. The first requests from this tribunal included: What are your stories? What questions have you been holding about what happened? What do you want to see happen now? The requests felt enormous to me, and they felt impossible. For decades, figuring out how to live in the world in relation to these unanswered questions was a feat of survival. So having these questions presented to me again in earnest took a reorganization of my relationship to the events.
What I knew to be true was that for me to be able to move through this process, I needed witness of what was happening. I wrote in order to have that witness. That’s why the timeline is now. But what emerged, unexpectedly, was that some of the legal claims the community had filed at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, even before the murders, began to move forward. After years of dormancy, we worked underground to create the conditions for emerging U’wa leaders to pick up the baton and carry it to victory, which came about just a few months ago. So the timing also feels right to share my part of this story, because it is important for all of us, globally, to draw inspiration from the U’wa community’s recent victory. This victory establishes Colombia’s accountability for human rights violations against the U’wa people and sets the stage for strengthened protections of Indigenous peoples across Latin America. We need those victories now.
Bioneers: Land rights advocacy has only gotten more dangerous in recent years. What do you believe needs to shift—politically, legally, or within movements themselves—to better protect those doing this work?
Reyes: It is way worse than when I was a young person starting out in the rural southern Philippines. In the mid-90s, my mentors, Jesuit lawyers who were working in the countryside, were already facing lethal threats to their personal safety. But what was merely anecdotal then is very well documented now. Structurally, the answers are what you would expect from me: demilitarize and uncouple our militarization from our dead-end commitment to fossil fuel extraction.
The other shift that we’re seeing more is a move toward operationalizing our commitment to taking cues from grassroots leaders. We need to follow the leaders of Indigenous, Brown and Black communities who are closest to the harms, because the solutions are there. When we combine the wisdom and lived experience of the frontlines with the brawn and resources of allies who are in right relationship, we have a chance at using the dominant culture’s forums — legal, cultural or structural — to embed frontline vision, principles, stories, and strategies into more mainstream forums (where, in our current systems, decisions are largely still made). We have a chance at it — if we can figure out how to listen in a way that is operationalized.
“Social movements aren’t just banners and narratives; they’re made up of people, and those people must seek right relationship.”
Pueblo U’wa offers a good example of long-term accompaniment, which looks like decades of support from people across society in response to the Pueblo’s requests. At the social-movement level, people need real relationships with each other across organizations and frontline communities. Social movements aren’t just banners and narratives; they’re made up of people, and those people must seek right relationship. Growing into right relationship depends on our ability to hold both the past and the future while being rooted in the present. Moving backwards, there are often measures of repair, accountability and reset that need to be made. It also means looking laterally and forward in a way that lets us stand in our interdependence. It’s never been a case of helping. It’s always been the case of mutual liberation.
Bioneers: Environmentalists have spent the last 25 years struggling to deal with super entrenched oil interests, and that struggle has only become more heightened recently as political winds have shifted. What can the environmental movement do, strategically and tactically, as political momentum favors oil and gas development?
Reyes: This is happening in our political discourse as we speak. Yet there are indications that our legal systems are currently holding — against all odds and despite the shock that our democratic institutions could be pushed this far. I would answer your question in part by pointing to the need to hold carbon majors accountable for climate damages. Those are strategies that have been tried in forums all over the world for the last 15 years or so, with varying degrees of success in moving forward judicial analysis and procedure.
“So even in this moment where use of the courts feels like a weak muscle, we know it is a muscle that strengthens with use.”
Just recently, scientists from Dartmouth published an article in Nature illustrating the trillions in economic losses attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from individual carbon major companies. In many cases, it has been challenging to convince courts that we could crack that nut. Courts might say, How could you tell if one company was responsible for emissions in Boulder, Colorado, versus Vanuatu? Therefore, the liability has seemed obscure and unattainable. Now, the premier scientific publication has said, “Wait, wait, wait, that’s actually not true, and here’s how we do it scientifically.” So even in this moment where use of the courts feels like a weak muscle, we know it is a muscle that strengthens with use. Right now, we are seeing scholars and scientists be more willing to be in right relationship with cities, counties, states and communities that have been asking the bar to take action.
Bioneers: You’ve worked across continents and contexts — from rural Philippines to Colombia to California. What threads of resistance or resilience have felt universal across those places?
Reyes: One common thread that stands out is that communities know what they need. Communities are living the consequences of our dominant economic system, and disinvested communities know that the solutions to environmental mitigation or adaptation issues are linked to economic justice and building the human infrastructure for deep democracy. These solutions cannot be untied from each other. Over time and across geographies, I’ve also seen disenfranchised communities call for those walking alongside them to put bodies on the line.
In the U’wa territory, for example, especially in the period immediately following the 1999 murders, the violence against the community by public and other forces was acute, armed and lethal. That action was in response to the U’wa people literally placing their bodies on the road to block Occidental Petroleum trucks from reaching a sacred site where the company wanted to drill another exploratory well. The call for bodies on the line was well received in the countryside in that period. Indigenous folks were joined by non-Indigenous farmers, students, clergy, legal witnesses, and others. And it mattered — it deterred the violence for some duration. So when we’re working with communities where we need remedies beyond legal and policy intervention because those methods aren’t working fast enough to prevent harm, there are also these “meta-legal remedies,” as my mentors in the Philippines would call them.
“Building the new can feel removed from the struggle, but it is every bit as much a practice of bodies on the line.”
A thread of resistance that feels universal is that work is often happening not only to block the bad in all the ways that we just said, but also to build the new. Building the new systems, structures, and cultures we need is a significant part of the social movement framework often called Just Transition. Building the new can feel removed from the struggle, but it is every bit as much a practice of bodies on the line. In the communities I work with here in California, in particular the Mexican majority city of Santa Ana, building the new looks like worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, regenerative agriculture, cleaning the soil, and mutual aid infrastructure to face climate disaster and achieve health equity.
In places where it has long been clear that the dominant systems weren’t set up to facilitate thriving for all, communities are looking to each other and themselves to create community owned systems of regeneration, resilience and interdependence. That, too, is a form of bodies on the line — one that excites me because it gives us something to rally around.
Bioneers: In your view, what would a truly just legal framework for climate resilience look like?
Reyes: There are community stewards across the country pioneering and articulating practices of community-driven climate resilience planning and action. Many of those stewards are organized into the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners. The association started out in part as a way for community stewards to assert their place at the table when local governments, whose hands were often forced, realized the need for environmental justice analyses in climate planning. When governments hire consultants to talk to the community, these community stewards were saying, “Hey, we’re right here, andwe’ll help you shift.” Now many community stewards have turned more directly to creating the “just enough” infrastructure needed for community ownership and sacred governance for the whole.
Supporting these forms of deeper public participation requires all sorts of legal apparatus. And that lawyering is happening. We created the Just Transition Lawyering Institute in recognition of the skilling up that lawyers everywhere, especially lawyers serving Brown, Black and Indigenous communities, are doing right now to meet this need. It’s an enormous question. Even just this one slice requires transformations at every level. But it’s an instructive lens that reveals the road maps that are right in front of us for where we need to go.
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
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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.
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