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

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

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

Kate Aronoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bioneers Must Watch Staff Pick – The Territory

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRAILER:

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

***THIS IS AN EXCERPT***

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

Want to hear the full episode? Click here.

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

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

Featuring:

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

Credits:

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

Resources

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zainab Salbi spoke at a Bioneers conference…

Zainab Salbi speaking at Bioneers 2022 | Photo by Alex Akamine

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

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

[Heartbeat sound]

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

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

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

Castleton Tower | Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

helped open the scientific window for her.

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

Zainab Salbi spoke with us at a Bioneers conference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRYANT: Tell it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Inspirational Artists Influencing Social Movements

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

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

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

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Art at Bioneers 2022

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

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

Performance by Jason Nious and Antwan Davis of Molodi

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

Read here.

Artivism: David Solnit on Using Art to Influence Movements

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

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

Read here.

More Artivism from Bioneers.org

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

A workshop with Deborah Eden Tull and Bioneers’ Nina Simons


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

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

Register now.

Artivism: David Solnit on Using Art to Influence Movements

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

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

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

David Solnit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAVID: Movements always use the arts, but I think there has been a kind of an emergent intelligence. A lot of people within the movements have started to realize that we need the language of art because the core conflict in our society is between dueling narratives, and if your opponents, the corporations and/or governments you’re combatting, hire top public relations firms and ad agencies and are able to be more powerful storytellers than you, they can keep wrecking the planet.

And that requires a shift, because secular rationalist activist types are used to making their case with facts, data and information but that alone doesn’t work. You have to explain that data and information through narratives that resonate in actual people’s lives, and that’s what the arts can do, if you use them right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A poster Solnit made for an Immokalee farmworkers fundraiser.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Standing Rock “Water Is Sacred” print by Isaac Murdoch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Native Alaskan Fisherman Turns to Kelp Farming to Restore Ocean Health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copper River, Alaska

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STEPHANIE:  How did you get stated with ocean farming?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelp and oysters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch here.

Youth-Led Intersectional Environmentalism: Today, not Tomorrow

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

Read here.

Youth Activism on the Frontlines of Urban Oil Drilling

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

Read here.

More Youth Activism from Bioneers.org

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

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

Get your copy.

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

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

Featuring

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

Credits

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

Resources

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

Professor Frans de Waal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Frans de Waal spoke at a Bioneers conference…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us back to the sisterhood of bonobos…

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

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

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

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

Bonobos grooming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby chimpanzees playing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonobo mother and baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Youth-Led Intersectional Environmentalism: Today, not Tomorrow

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

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

Kevin J. Patel

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

So what is intersectional environmentalism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crafting a Regenerative World, One Building at a Time

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

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

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

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Jason McLennan – From Reconciliation to Regeneration

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

Watch here.

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

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

Watch here.

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

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

Watch here.

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

Read the report.

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

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

Get your copy.