3 Indigenous Leaders Offer Solutions to Climate Change in the Arctic

Indigenous Peoples in the north have been feeling the disastrous effects of climate change for far longer than the rest of the planet’s population. According to NASA record sets, the Arctic is warming up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, disturbing terrestrial and marine ecosystems, destroying villages, and disrupting healthy ways of life. 

Innovative solutions to the climate crisis born from the ingenuity rooted in Native knowledge systems are emerging from the circumpolar north. In this conversation, leaders at the Native Conservancy, Indigenous Climate Action, and Native Movement share their strategies for addressing climate change in the policy, civil society, and economic sectors. 

Featuring: Dune Lankard (Eyak), Native Conservancy; Eriel Deranger (Athabaska Chippeweyan First Nation), Indigenous Climate Action; Ruth Miller (Dena’ina Athabaskan/Russian Ashkenazi Jewish), Native Movement. Moderated by Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik), Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program.

The following is an edited transcript from a live panel discussion.

Alexis Bunten

ALEXIS BUNTEN (BIONEERS): When I was a very young kid, my grandfather pointed out that the Earth was getting hotter. Some scientists in very small circles were talking about it, but lots of Natives were talking about it. Even non-Natives who lived in the North were observing changes in the glaciers over a 60-year time span. People who lived up there knew it.

As people who’ve grown up in the North, what have you observed in terms of climate change? 

DUNE LANKARD (NATIVE CONSERVANCY): When I was 5 years old, the Good Friday 1964 earthquake happened in Prince William Sound in our backyard, and that turned our fisheries and our way of life upside down. Before that, we were the razor clam capital of the world. It was like climate change happened to us overnight. 

Dune Lankard

Then on the 26th anniversary of the ’64 quake, we had the Good Friday 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Again, our ecosystem took a major hit, our fisheries were disrupted, and everything was turned upside down again.

Then 25 years later, we have climate change, we have ocean acidification, we have ocean warming and ocean rise. About five years ago, we only had 44,000 sockeye salmon return home to the Copper River Delta. The following year, only 85,000 sockeyes found their way home. The next year, the ocean heated up to 76 degrees for over three weeks down to 20 feet below the surface, 40 feet at low water. Millions of krill, wild mussels, wild kelp forests, salmon, and birds died.

Sockey Salmon in the Copper River.

The ecosystem is changing before our very eyes. Because Alaska is colder than most places, it’s melting faster than most places. The permafrost, the sea ice, the glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates. Even two-and-a-half years ago, you could walk right off the shoreline onto Sheridan Glacier, which is right near Cordova, and walk for miles. Now it’s a mile away. 

Ruth Miller

RUTH MILLER (NATIVE MOVEMENT): It’s really difficult to answer a question about when I first got started in climate advocacy, because for an indigenous person, I would say I got started 30,000 years ago, when my ancestors began their deep relationship with our lands. Our traditional subsistence practices were first developed to honor and respect and live in reciprocity with the lands. That was the beginning of our environmental advocacy, when we first learned 30,000 years ago that our survival was interdependent with the survival and the well-being of our non-human relatives.

In this lifetime, I think that my advocacy was first initiated when I was about 14 or 15. My very first job was working for United Tribes of Bristol Bay against the proposed Pebble Mine, which would have been one of the largest copper and gold mines in the country: an open-pit mine that would have devastated one of the last great salmon fisheries in the world.

We were meant to be supporting fishermen to testify to the EPA proceedings about why we didn’t want the mine. But as I sat there starting to talk with people about what their stories might say, how they might articulate why they didn’t want the mine, I got nowhere. And at 14 years old, I was frustrated. I was like, “What do you mean you don’t know what to say? Doesn’t this sound scary enough?” But I realized, very early on, that I was asking for the wrong story. Instead of asking, “Why are you against the proposed Pebble Mine?” I began asking, “What do our salmon mean to you?” Suddenly the stories began to flow like the fish through our streams.

Mist settles on Cook Inlet, not far from Illiamna, Alaska, and the proposed Pebble Project seeking to mine gold, silver, and molybdenum.

Coming back to Anchorage, I slowly came to an understanding that the environmental justice issues we’re fighting aren’t far out in these rural places. Just last summer, almost 10 years since that first experience in Bristol Bay, I learned that the creek that runs right near my house carries a Dena’ina name that means King Salmon Creek. In this tiny little stream that I blindly walked past almost every day of my life, king salmon used to run. In fact, we have stories of our biggest city, our gathering place, being home to thousands upon thousands of traditional fish camps lining the shores. Now we have the Port of Anchorage. We have 50,000 people, settlers mostly, guests on our homelands that have polluted our lands beyond recognition. There are no king salmon that flow in that river anymore.

So when I think about climate change, it’s not just a matter of the thawing permafrost, and the melting sea ice, and the threat to our infrastructure, and the increasing threat from shipping and militarization throughout the Arctic. It’s an intertwining dialogue that has to address both the roots of our people and our lifeways, the ways that our livelihoods continue to reflect our subsistence and cultural need for interdependency with the other species that will also be impacted by climate change. It is also a question of where we want to go from here as we face this existential threat that we are feeling in Alaska and in the north more than any other place in the world. What kind of future will we choose? What kind of Anchorage will we choose? What kind of pathway will leave us any future at all?

We are living this reality now. But we also have 30,000 years of experience of what right relationship can look like.

Anchorage skyline on a winter evening.
Eriel Deranger

ERIEL DERANGER (INDIGENOUS CLIMATE ACTION): My people come from the Peace Athabaska Delta, which is in the Subarctic and the Arctic. It straddles both, and it is a really precarious place to be when we talk about Arctic impacts and northern impacts, because there’s this imaginary line. Are we Arctic, are we not Arctic? Do we get Arctic subsidies and supports like folks from the Arctic or do we not? We experience the same level of impacts that folks 80 kilometers north of us do, and some of those impacts are food. 

Food is the first place where we see deep impacts to our culture due to climate change. We’re river people. We relied on fish and caribou and muskrats and birds and waterfowl. These keystone species weren’t just about food for us, but also clothing. The biggest change that our people have seen is in the cultural ceremony of harvesting these species. It was about bringing the community together. For a lot of elders, when they talk about climate change, they talk about the loss of community. 

For us, climate change started with colonization. That’s when the climate changed for us, not just politically and culturally, but there were massive changes to the lands from ripping out those resources and treating them as something to be dominated and taken, and replacing them with consumerism and capitalism and hyper-individuality, and disconnecting us from those places. That led to this disconnected relationship with those keystone species. That led to this destabilization of our environments. 

With the imposition of colonial extractivism and the largest industrial project on planet Earth, the Alberta tar sands, which lies about 200 kilometers south of my community, we saw massive changes to the river system, from the dewatering of that river system to support the extraction of the Alberta tar sands to the contamination of those very same rivers. These are the rivers that fed into our community. These rivers not only fed the muskrat and the caribou and the bison and the waterfowl, but they fed our community. And as that river got lower, it got hotter, it got contaminated, and the muskrat stopped going into our river systems.

Caribou used to migrate in the hundreds of thousands through my territory. We are down to less than 20,000 caribou that migrate through our territory today. 

It’s not just climate change. Climate change is exacerbating the impacts that we’re feeling from extractivism, from the imposition of capitalistic values that have put a dollar amount on our species, that put a dollar amount on how we live. 

The tar sands oil refinery, Alberta, Canada.

ALEXIS: All of you are working with organizations and constellations of networks and incredible people to address climate change. What are some of the initiatives and projects that you’re working on?

ERIEL: I think first and foremost is bringing visibility to the fact that Indigenous Peoples at large globally are experiencing the impacts of climate change first and most intensely, and that’s because of the intimate relationships that we have with the land. Our community is already experiencing in some places more than two degrees in changes in temperatures. 

But beyond that, our knowledge is so critical to building solutions that aren’t just going to help our communities combat the crisis by building regional solutions, but that can be replicated at large to support regional solutions that are aligned with relationships with the lands and territories. Indigenous Climate Action is an organization based out of so-called Canada, and we’re really looking to skill up, empower, inspire, and inform indigenous leaders in our country to recognize that they have the knowledge and the power and the moral and legal frameworks to lead climate solutions – not just in Canada, but the world over.

We have legal rights, as dictated under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that allow us to self-govern, to decide how our lands and territories are managed, to give free prior and informed consent to projects that happen on our land, and to form our own systems of governance and education, and we need to start flexing those rights. We need to start advocating for them, and we need to understand the importance that they hold in advancing solutions. 

We do that through amplifying the beautiful solutions that we’re already seeing, whether that’s the cultural revitalization in our communities through language, artisan work, or indigenized economies. 

At Indigenous Climate Action, we are doing indigenous climate leadership training; we are building an indigenous just transition guide; we are working on having indigenous-led divestment movements; and we are also working toward looking at the suite of climate policies and what it means to decolonize them. 

This is the work that we see as critical, not just to ensure that folks in the Arctic can continue to thrive for this generation and the seven generations beyond us, but so all Indigenous Peoples can be recognized in the communities and for the values that our knowledge holds in driving solutions for tomorrow.

RUTH: In Native Movement, yes, we’re a nonprofit, but we work in a variety of ways to undermine the kinds of systemic rules that have been fed us. We have a variety of programs in addition to the climate justice work that I support. We have an environmental justice program that works at community invitation to intervene toward environmental justice and against extractive development across our state. But we also have a gender justice and healing department, where we work towards LGBTQ and two-spirit rights, where we work against police brutality, where we work toward the protection of our indigenous women and girls and two-spirit peoples, because we know that all of these issues are intertwining. They all create the fabric of what a healthy indigenous society can look like.

We also fiscally sponsor several community initiatives so that community members can bring their localized, home-grown solutions to us and be incubated to get strategic support, campaign support, and fiscal support to then grow and take on a life of their own.

One of our primary tactics is truth-telling. We do a lot of training and capacity building, working with our own community members to talk about the harms and the hurts that we’ve been through; what have we gone through to arrive at this moment of intertwining crises? Then we work to heal, because we deserve to be whole, we deserve to be healed and healthy as we advocate for our own dignity and our own human rights. When we build capacity, we are also elevating our local leaders into positions of power and supporting them to be able to articulate their expertise so that we are ever-growing, constantly replaceable, and our movement is sustainable. 

We do a ton of trainings, one of which is a decolonization training. (As if that can be achieved in a training, right?) But it is a very intensive, long training that we offer that tells the truth about the history of Alaska and the history of the US. Through these trainings, we’re doing that healing work, we’re doing that truth-telling work, and we’re also creating space for imagination and creativity to show us a path forward that is visionary and brighter than what we have been given.

We also work on a lot of policy, but it’s not just bringing policy to our communities. It is a two-way reciprocal relationship of translating complex English policy on climate into language that we recognize and that resonates with us. Then we apply our values-based framework to see if that policy reflects us. 

We also engage with a lot of storytelling and narrative work. When most people think of the climate crisis, they still see a polar bear stranded on an ice flow. Our story of climate crisis is emotional. It describes deep interdependency that goes back 30,000 years. Our climate crisis is my moment of heartbreak when I realize that the knowledge I was guided in by an elder about the time to harvest fiddleheads is wrong for the first time. That elder is wrong because the seasons have changed so drastically. By empowering greater narrative sovereignty from our community members, we are able to shift what the climate crisis looks like and what the story of climate solutions looks like. 

DUNE: My mother decided that when I was 10, I was “the one.” I said, “The one what?” And she said, “You’re the one who’s going to save our salmon and our people and our language and our way of life.” And I said, “I’m 10, Mama, what about Debbie, Linda, Don, Pam, Bruce and Joe?” And she said, “No, you’re more stubborn and you have more will power, and I know that you will never sell us out.” And I said, “So you’ve cursed me.” And she said, “I’ve gifted you.”

She and grandma started teaching me about the seasons of animals and berries. I remember we were out blueberry picking one time, and grandma said, “The pink salmon run is coming to a close.” We weren’t anywhere near a stream, so I said, “Grandma, did that just come out of the blue?” She said, “No, the fireweed is almost flowering at the top. When it’s close to the top, the run is over.” I was like, “Oh my god, from this flower you can tell that the run is dwindling?” 

Then I grew up with hatchery fish, “computer fish.” They’re remote release, so they have nothing to do with those flowers. They have nothing to do with reality. So whenever I see those fireweeds now, I know that things are not the same because I can’t tell time by the flowers anymore. 

Thousands of salmon spawning in August in the Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery near Valdez in Southeastern Alaska

We need to change our relationship with our traditional food sources and at the same time practice our subsistence way of life. In Alaska, 90% of the people who live in rural communities still practice a subsistence lifestyle. They’re still connected to the land and the sea and those seasons of animals. But already we can see huge changes happening. 

But here’s the thing: It’s not just a matter of climate change; it’s a matter of law and policy and the extermination of our resources and our way of life. And I’m not in the mood for this anymore. We’ve put up with this nonsense for way too long. 

We have to fight back. And how that happens isn’t by luck because we want it to, it happens because we file lawsuits, we block roads, we jump off of buildings with banners, we get CDQs for mariculture for the service of the ocean for Indigenous Peoples around the world. The people who are getting permitted are Indigenous Peoples on their ancestral land, in front of their ancestral waters, where they’ve lived for thousands and thousands of years. We’re the original stewards, the original guardians, so we should be leading the way, not following somebody else who doesn’t have a plan.

This is an opportunity to change the way that not only we live on the ocean but to change our relationship with our food source. We scale up by scaling down. We build local processing facilities, so we can process our own foods. We take care of our own people. We figure out how to sell our excess. We put ourselves in a position so we’re able to lead this industry by example. Because the fishermen are going to get their share, industry is going to get their share, the bigs, as we call them – the processors, the canneries, the hatcheries, the big seafood corporations – everybody’s going to get their share. But I’ll tell you what, if Indigenous Peoples don’t organize and don’t figure out how to overcome these barriers to entry, then they’re not going to be a part of this “emerging industry” that happens to be thousands of years old.

Our Native Conservancy is addressing the dozen or so barriers to entry. We’re starting an indigenous ocean farmer’s loan and grant fund. We’re starting the Native Kelp Cooperative. We’re starting the Native Kelp Alliance. We’re starting to build our own boats. We just bought our own boat company and we’re about ready to buy another. We’re going to try to figure out how to drive this economy that is about sustainability and being regenerative. We can do it ourselves by leading the way.

I feel like we’re at one of those pivotal times in history. With these modern-day land claims, if the Indigenous Peoples organize and lead, they’re going to be able to feed their people, they’re going to be able to be a part of a regenerative economy that’s actually good for the ocean. 

Our goal is to put our Indigenous Peoples in a position to take things back into their own control. To be able to live in their villages and know that they’re a part of something greater than just themselves. 

ERIEL: This is why listening to the people from the North is so important, because Northern people, we don’t take food for granted. We’re so far north we don’t have the luxury of just picking and choosing at the grocery store. Our people are connected to where our foods come from. It’s part of our identities. My people are called caribou people because of the vast caribou that existed there. We know what it means to build sustainable food systems, and we know that it requires stable ecosystems. 

It’s critical to listen to those who have those connections and understandings and relationships about what we can do to pave a better future. It’s all dependent on ecosystem health.

Protecting Biodiversity to Save Life on Earth

The delicate relationships that allow the natural world’s relatives — from microbes to mountain lions — to thrive are a reminder of our reliance upon one another. While Earth’s inhabitants literally can’t live without each other, recent reports have shown that global wildlife populations have declined by 69% since 1970. That loss of biodiversity not only affects the animals and plants that call these ecosystems home, but also the millions of people who rely on them for their livelihoods, food, and medicine.

As Justin Winters writes in an article below, “The only way to thrive is together.”

It is our responsibility to take action and protect these vital ecosystems by supporting conservation efforts, reducing pollution and habitat destruction, and implementing sustainable land-use practices. By conserving biodiversity, we ensure the survival of countless species and the continuation of vital ecosystem services that support life on Earth. 

This week, we share interviews, articles, and news covering efforts to conserve and improve the biodiversity of our planet.

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

“We Can’t Give Up Anything”: 3 Experts on Protecting Biodiversity

“It’s not just about protecting or conserving. It’s also about governing these territories from a life-centric view. It’s a community-collective vision articulated through many, many participatory activities that help define the future vision for the territory.” -Atossa Soltani

In 2020, the United Nations published an alarming report, stating that in the last two decades —  despite all of the global conferences and initiatives that took place to set agreements to stop the destruction of the natural world and to protect biodiversity — not a single goal was met. In these interviews, activists and scientists Atossa Soltani, Rod Fujita, and Carly Vynne describe promising methods for protecting wildlife and wildlands across the world.

Read more here.

From Childhood Fascination to Frog Conservation: An Interview with Robin Moore

“At school, when you’re really into this kind of thing, you’re sort of a weirdo. What I realized later in life is that the weirdos who hold onto that fascination are the most interesting.”

Robin Moore, the Vice President of Communications and Marketing for Re:wild, turned his childhood fascination with frogs into a career in conservation. In this conversation with Bioneers’ Teo Grossman, he talks about growing up in Edinburgh and spending his summers in the Highlands, where he had a passionate connection with the frogs and other wildlife in his backyard. He went on to study zoology and ecology, eventually earning a Ph.D. and studying a species of frog in Majorca, Spain. After realizing the extent of the threat facing amphibians, he became more involved in frog conservation efforts and spearheaded a project called The Search for Lost Frogs at Conservation International.

Read more here.

Protecting Cultural and Biological Diversity Is Central to Solving Climate Change

“Representation is key. The solution to tackle the climate crisis is, at its core, intersectional. By protecting cultural diversity, we protect biodiversity. The only way to thrive is together.”

The Amazon rainforest is home to over 16,000 different tree species and 40,000 plant species, making it one of the most biologically diverse locations in the world. Without the Amazon, our global climate system would collapse, and it is now more important than ever to respect and support the diverse cultures that have helped to preserve these priceless ecosystems that have enabled humanity to evolve.

Read more here.

Bioneers 2023 Conference Speaker Highlight: Casey Camp-Horinek

Casey Camp-Horinek, a member of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma, is a longtime activist, environmentalist, actress, and author. Her work has led to the Ponca Nation being the first tribe in Oklahoma to adopt a Rights of Nature statute and to pass a moratorium on fracking on its territory. Casey, who was instrumental in the drafting of the first International Indigenous Women’s Treaty protecting the Rights of Nature, works with Indigenous and other leaders and organizations globally and sits on the boards of WECAN, Movement Rights, and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. Register for the Bioneers 2023 Conference to hear Casey’s presentation this April.

Read more here.

Amazon Rainforest Defender Marina Silva Named Brazil’s New Environment Minister

“Brazil will return to the protagonist role it previously had when it comes to climate, to biodiversity.”

Brazil’s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that Amazon activist (and former Bioneers speaker) Marina Silva will be the country’s next minister of environment. This announcement indicates the new administration will prioritize cracking down on illegal deforestation in the Amazon, even if it means conflicting with powerful agribusiness interests.

Read more here.

Top 15 Species Discoveries From 2022

A resplendent rainbow fish, a frog that looks like chocolate, a Thai tarantula, an anemone that rides on the back of a hermit crab, and the world’s largest water lily are among the new species named by science in 2022. In this well-trodden world, finding a new species is a glimpse of the uncharted riches of biodiversity still hidden around the globe.

Read more here from Mongabay.

More on Biodiversity:

Black Food: Liberation, Food Justice and Stewardship | With Karen Washington and Bryant Terry

The influences of Africans and Black Americans on food and agriculture is rooted in ancestral African knowledge and traditions of shared labor, worker co-ops and botanical polycultures. 

In this episode, we hear from Karen Washington and Bryant Terry on how Black Food culture is weaving the threads of a rich African agricultural heritage with the liberation of economics from an extractive corporate food oligarchy. The results can be health, conviviality, community wealth, and the power of self-determination.

Featuring

Karen Washington, co-owner/farmer of Rise & Root Farm, has been a legendary activist in the community gardening movement since 1985. Renowned for turning empty Bronx lots into verdant spaces, Karen is: a former President of the NYC Community Garden Coalition; a board member of: the NY Botanical Gardens, Why Hunger, and NYC Farm School; a co-founder of Black Urban Growers (BUGS); and a pioneering force in establishing urban farmers’ markets.

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. 

Credits

  • Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
  • Written by: Kenny Ausubel and Arty Mangan
  • 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: Monica Lopez
  • Additional music: Ketsa

Resources

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

Karen Washington – 911 Our Food System Is Not Working

Working Against Racism in the Food System

Black Food: An Interview with Chef Bryant Terry

The Food Web Newsletter

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): Like other foundational contributions to American culture, the influences of Africans and Black Americans on food and agriculture have been variously erased, scorned and belittled. African American agrarian history is doubly complicated by its intimate association with the trauma of slavery. Africans who were violently forced into captivity and brought to the Americas to power the plantation economy were highly skilled farmers with expertise in agriculture founded in ancestral African knowledge. Their traditions were ones of shared labor, worker coops and botanical polycultures. At the heart of their worldview was reverence for the sacredness of the Earth.

Across centuries of enslavement, African-descended people survived savage injustice and suffering. When slavery ended, Black farmers were able to purchase nearly 16 million acres of land. Today almost all of that is gone, the result of stolen lands, terrorism and structural racism including by US government programs: the modern US Department of Agriculture has been legally found to have discriminated against Black farmers on a mass scale.

These burdens of history are the context for today’s radical health disparities between Black and white communities, including an epidemic of diet-related diseases.

But renowned urban farming trailblazer Karen Washington says it’s time to overcome those burdens of history and remember the deeper African-American lineage. 

Karen Washington (KW): So it starts by understanding your history. I grew up in an area where farming was equivalent to slavery. And now that’s starting to change because when the elders speak to young people they say, you know why we were brought here enslaved? We were brought here because of our knowledge of agriculture.

We weren’t brought here because we were dumb or strong. We were brought here because we had agriculture in our blood. We’re an agrarian people. We brought seeds in our hair to feed this country, and when you start talking to that—to black and brown people, all of a sudden they understand the power that they have, their connection to food.

A Negro tenant farmer and several members of his family hoeing cotton on their farm in Alabama © Dorothea Lange

Host: Inspired by a rich African agrarian heritage, Karen Washington sees food justice as a seminal space to uplift Black communities holistically. She has been recognized by Ebony Magazine as one of the hundred most influential African Americans, and the New York Times referred to her as “urban farming’s de facto godmother.” 

As a tireless advocate for the economic empowerment of communities of color, she is a powerful force for creating the conditions for people of color to have equal access to health, distributed wealth and power. 

Karen Washington spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Karen Washington speaking at Bioneers 2022. Photo © Alex Akamine

KW: For so long, the negativity that has been instilled in our head when our relationship to food—when the truth comes up—and also when it’s spoken from the elders who knew about farming, knew about the history—it changes, and then all of a sudden people say you know what, I want to be in the game. I want to understand my relationship to food because all around me I see the diet-related disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity that’s happening. But yet they’ll tell you my grandparent lived to 100 years of age because they ate the food from the Earth. And so, again, talk about your history, that rich cultural history. Bring it up to the surface so that people around are now proud of that history, and proud of that relationship to food and who they are.

Bryant Terry (BT): You know, I always talk about the idea of Sankofa, this West African concept of, you know, looking backwards as we move forward, and bringing with us the best practices and traditions. 

Host: Bryant Terry grew up in the South where he worked in his grandfather’s diverse urban garden. They grew grape vines, nut trees and a variety of vegetables, along with raising chickens and pigs. At the time, he hated weeding, harvesting, and shucking corn and peas. Now he looks back in appreciation of the life lessons he learned at that backyard garden in Memphis. 

Bryant Terry went on to author landmark books bridging traditional African American foods with veganism. But, he says, food is about a lot more than food.

BT: And I knew coming from these strong middle class black communities going to Atlanta and Chicago and Georgia, and other parts of the country and visiting black folks that 1) my first encounter with this idea of veganism came from Seventh Day Adventists, black Seventh Day Adventists in my community. And then in high school, when I had to go through my obligatory – after reading the autobiography of Malcolm X – my obligatory obsessive period with the nation of Islam, I learned about Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s How to Eat to Live two-book collection that talked about the rejection of the standard American diet and embracing foods that are for healing and life. We can talk about Rastafarians and the Ital diet. We can talk about comedians – Dick Gregory, and his activism around food and health issues. We can talk about—I mean, the impetus for me even shifting my whole habits and attitudes and politics around food was hearing the song Beef by blastmaster KRS-One at Boogie Down Productions, a hip hop song that talked about factory farming.

Beef, what a relief

When will this poisonous product cease?

This is another Public Service Announcement

You can believe it or you can doubt it

Let us begin now with the cow

The way it gets to your plate and how

The cow doesn’t grow fast enough for man

So through his greed he makes a faster plan

Host: Research has shown a direct link between diet and disease. Due to a severe lack of access to healthy foods and easy access to the Standard American Diet of highly processed carbohydrates, unhealthy fats and sugar, Black Americans suffer disproportionately from diet related disease compared to whites. 

At the same time, racist attitudes have disparaged traditional African and African-American foods that have sustained Black people through centuries of struggle and privation. 

Bryant Terry speaking at Bioneers 2022. Photo © Alex Akamine

BT: In the spirit of anti-blackness, everything we do is vilified, you know, including our food. And we know historically and contemporarily —and it’s not just a wider culture, it’s even—this is the thing that hurts and upsets me, and why I write books and why this book is so important, because it’s even people of African descent. Black folks who will be talking about our food as “slave food”, to vilify and talk so negatively about our historical and cultural foods. 

And I’m not going to deny things like chitlins and pigs feet and, you know, whatever, the kind of discarded parts that plantation owners might force many enslaved Africans to eat. That’s about ingenuity and creativity and making the best with what people had. So that’s one part.

But then the other one is that when people talk about black food, they’re imagining the big flavored meats and the overcooked vegetables and the sugary desserts that you find at a soul food restaurant, right?

I’m not denying that red velvet cake, and mac’n’cheese, and ribs, and whatever — But what about collards, mustards, 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 people for generations, and we can’t leave this out of the conversation, because it’s been intentionally erased. You know? These are the types of foods that any Western-trained allopathic physician, nutritionist or dietician would say we should all be eating. Collard foods is black superfoods. You know? They’re high in A, C and E. They have a lot of anti cancer-fighting compounds. Okra, which is like one of the king staples of black foodways coming from the continent and spreading around, it helps to lower blood pressure. So…  

Our liberation is embracing our cultural foods. I think that’s a very important part spiritually, physically and otherwise. We have to be embracing these foods because it’s our birthright. They were there before us and they’ve sustained us through the roughest times. And I think they will be a powerful way to address this exponential rise in preventable diet-related illnesses that we see in our communities. 

Host: Food at its essence is nourishment. It’s health and wellbeing. It’s family and community and culture. It’s a daily thanksgiving to the Earth and ancestors.

Then again, it’s one thing to embrace cultural foods and food culture. Yet how do you do that within a fundamentally extractive, commodified, and intensely monopolized food economy?Again, Karen Washington…

KW: And if we look at the food system closely, we can see that it’s in like four quadrants. 

There’s the production, there’s the processing, there’s the distribution, and there’s the consumption. On one hand you have the movers and the shakers, the shakers being the policymakers and climate change, the other side is the movers, labor and energy and waste. It’s being fueled by land and resources. 

But if you look at those four quadrants, what is the common denominator that you see? It’s labor. This land that we are on was built on the backs of indigenous and enslaved people, that even today our food system, again, is being built on labor from prisons, and now it’s the migrant workers that are providing the cheap labor in this country, and you wonder why there’s such a disconnect of people trying to understand where their food comes from, trying to feed their family, where for so long the food system is supposed to be helping those people but instead it’s exploiting them.

And so, for me, it’s about shifting of power, shifting of power. The way the food system is going to change is shifting the power from those who for so long have had power over others back into the hands of the community. 

BT: We can’t just talk about food in isolation because what our industrialized food system has done is create it as a commodity, and then you have this huge chasm where so many of the things that have been traditionally so integral to the way that we grow food and cook it and eat it, like art, like culture, like community, like building around the table, like growing food in a sustainable way, like feeling like we can do it in a communalistic way and not in this individualistic capitalist way. My work, through books, through activism, through talking has been about reintegrating that so that we can have all those things 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.

Host: Bryant Terry is constantly seeking ways to counter this shrink-wrapped racial capitalism that dominates the food economy.

At a high tide of racial reckoning in 2020, he was inspired by reading Toni Morrison’s book celebrating Black culture. Titled The Black Book, in it Morrison wanted to explore this provocative question “What would your life be without racism?”  

Bryant Terry decided to pose that question to Black cultural leaders and asked them to share family recipes and stories for his book Black Food. It was going to be published at an epic moment when the Movement for Black Lives was becoming the biggest and most diverse in American history. Publishers were scrambling to fabricate a more inclusive, anti-racist image. Bryant Terry seized the moment.

BT: This book came on the heels of, in 2020, when we were as a country dealing with this, what people describe as a racial reckoning, really looking inward, and facing the realities of how we have treated black folks, people of African descent and other folks of color, but specifically black folks, because this was coming on the heels of the state murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

And in the midst of that, there was a revelation of a lot of racism in food media. I don’t know if you all are aware of this, but there were some legacy food magazines that were being called out for their racist behavior, their failure to support their employees of color, the mistreatment of many of their black and other folks of color employees. And then there were some publishing companies – it was revealed that they were doing some horribly racist things to some of their authors, as well as employees. And one of my friends, I literally learned about this horrible way in which this major publisher in New York City treated her and practically tried to erase her from her book because she co-authored with a white woman. And they thought that the white woman would be a better face of the book than this heavyset black woman.

For me, it was a moment where, this book that I had been thinking about putting together for years, when I contacted all the contributors or potential contributors, what I told them is that you can’t write a book like this without touching on the ways in which black people have been exploited and marginalized and erased. That’s just a reality that we know we contend with all the time. And I feel like so many of the books that are talking about our realities do focus on our struggles and focus on our historical marginalization and oppression. And we know about these realities, so we don’t have to talk about it to each other because we’re aware of it. And one of the things that I was clear about is that this book, I wanted it to be created without concern for the white gaze. I wanted this to be about black people speaking to each other, having conversations about our deep connection to food, and about our different foodways and how they’ve developed throughout the globe. And of course we want to invite the world in to be a part of the conversation, but we’re not modifying, we’re not trying to make it pretty, we’re just speaking about our realities. 

BT: I’m just gonna be real with you all, when everything was going down with the racial reckoning with a lot of these companies and corporations, they were embarrassed, and they were invested in repairing reputational harm.

I was trained as a historian, I’ve seen this before, and I was very clear that there was going to be this period in which these companies were working really hard to repair reputational harm, and they’re going to be doing everything to make black folks happy or perform their kind of solidarity or blackness or whatever it looked like, and I was clear that that door was going to be open and then it was going to shut again. And I wasn’t clear about how long it was going to be, and it’s been interesting, because I have been talking about, yeah, I feel like the door is shutting.

I was in Philadelphia at this conference. Korsha Wilson is this journalist based in New Jersey. She wrote a big profile on me in The New York Times, and we were in conversation. And I brought up the fact that I felt like the door was closing. And she said it’s already closed. She talked about in 2020 how she was getting like an avalanche, a waterfall of like, you know, jobs from magazines and newspapers. And this is a respected, seasoned journalist and she said it slowed down to a trickle. So imagine those up-and-coming budding writers who are trying to do this work and get into like food media.

And so what I was clear about with my agent is this is a moment to grab power. This is a moment where we need to move beyond just being rewarded as talent, which often happens.

You know, when I first started publishing, the first thing when I got my first contract and I talked to my parents about it, the first thing my dad said to me is like, you know, Son, I’m proud of you; you know, Penguin Random House is a reputable publisher and I’m glad they’re going to put your book out, but let me just say this, and I want you to remember this always: You need to think like Master P. I don’t know if you all know who Master P is. He’s an older rapper and entrepreneur, but for the younger people, but, you know, he was one of these pioneers where he was just like, look, it’s not just about making music, it’s about ownership; it’s about creating your own labels, it’s about controlling, it’s about self-determination.

And so, in many ways, now that I have my publishing in print, sure, it’s still under Penguin Random House, but like honestly, I’m looking at it as like a prestigious and well-paid internship because the goal for me is to learn about the internal logic, the structure, like the way that publishing operates so that I can eventually have my own independent publishing company and not even have to rely on like some big multinational corporation doing the work.

Host: Bryant Terry has received the James Beard and NAACP awards for his writing and activism. He is currently the chef-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco where he also creates public programming at the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, and culture.. 

When we return… Can a broken food system that systematically disadvantages low-income communities actually be transformed? Can community-based wealth creation challenge the concentration of corporate power over our food? And how do we begin to build a more just economic system and a healthier food system? It comes down to power.

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…

You can visit bioneers.org to subscribe to our newsletters and podcasts, check out Deep Dives on the topics that matter to you most, and learn about our events. That’s bioneers.org…

Access to healthy, affordable food is a basic human right. Yet 34 million people in the US suffer from food insecurity – in other words, hunger. Black households experience food insecurity at almost three times the rate of white families. 

The term food desert is used to describe the countless communities where healthy food is flat-out unavailable. But Karen Washington says “food desert” is an outsider term imposed on communities which have been held back by structural racism. 

She has, instead, coined the term “food apartheid.” It signifies the institutional inequities that result in poverty, hunger and lousy food access. Just bringing in a food store to these communities doesn’t change the underlying causes of injustice. 

KW: 7.8 billion people on this Earth, but a handful of companies control the food, the water, the land, the seeds, and we sat back and let it happen. We’ve become so complacent and so silent, and yet a handful, predominantly white men control the food system of 7.8 billion people on this planet. When do we wake up to grab our power? Where is the urgency for us to collectively I talk about social capital and communal wealth. I don’t want a hand out, I want a hand in. 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 start coming together collectively, collectively to shift the power back into our hands. And we can do it. 

Host: ​​Two companies now control 40% of global seed sales. Three companies control over 50% of the grocery sales. The food system is one big monopoly board.

From seed to grocery shelf, corporate consolidation stands against the ability of communities to produce, process and distribute healthy, affordable, culturally-appropriate food.

Karen Washington and Bryant Terry both call for a shift of power into the hands of local communities.    

BT: The things that we often look at when we talk about health, food and farming issues is, you know, the things that I think are seemingly apolitical, like growing food, like cooking meals, like building around the table and eating with people in our formal and informal kinship networks. These are highly political, dare I say radical, in a food system that’s controlled by five multinational food corporations that largely control our food system. They don’t want us growing our own food. They want us buying their crappy food that they’re producing on these big farms. They don’t want us cooking. They don’t want us deepening our cooking practice because they want us buying their ready-made processed packaged foods, fast foods.

And I’m not blaming the victim, because structurally I understand why people are going to fast food restaurants and getting industrialized foods. But what I’m saying is that in the face of that, doing things like making—growing your own food in rural areas, in urban areas, making meals from scratch, building around a table, they want us eating our food in our car, over our sink, when we leave one low-paying job to the next low-paying job.

So I think that it’s important to understand that these are radical acts of resistance that we can do on a daily basis, and I think that cooking is a very powerful and radical act where we can exert our agency over how we feed ourselves.

Host: Karen Washington says that as crucial as food pantries and soup kitchens are for people’s survival, they are also part of the problem because they’re baked into the system.

KW: Folks, it’s emergency purposes only. It’s not people’s way of living. And I tell the nonprofits to get out of the way and let people start thinking about self-sufficient and self-reliance, and that means having the economic power or thinking about social capital and communal wealth, teaching people how to flourish in terms of economics, financial education, entrepreneurship, owning their own businesses, having money and resources that are being made by the community coming back into the community, and teaching communities the power of giving and loving and sharing.

Host: To build a food system with those values, Karen Washington and a group of fellow New Yorkers developed a plan to empower those at the very heart of the food system. It’s called the Black Farmers Fund. Instead of waiting for the government,  the Fund is designed to empower and support economic development, entrepreneurship, jobs, ownership, and community wealth building.  

But Washington also believes we need to rethink the very concept of ownership that led us to this predicament.

KW: And I’d rather say instead of saying ownership, we should say stewards, because that’s what we are. We’re stewards of the land because I don’t believe you can own anything. You don’t live long enough on Earth to own anything. You know, why is it that we’re always trying to go against nature instead of working with nature? 

But if you say that you want land so you can steward the land, so that you can work with nature so that the land is an element that’s part of this whole ecosystem, then it makes sense, and it’s not threatening because you’re not grabbing it to hold onto it, you’re using it as a way to preserve this ecosystem that we’re all part of. 

When we left the land, we lost our power. We lost who we are. And I tell people of color, look at the color of your skin because the color of your skin is soil. And when you look at that color, when I put my hands in that soil, Bryant baby, and I look at that brown skin, I say hello, ancestors. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And we’ve got to start thinking about that and start embracing us, embracing us together. Don’t let people separate us. Think about us collectively as a group of power. We stand on the shoulders of kings and queens. And I tell my young people sometimes when your crown is crooked, go in that mirror and make sure that crown is straight, because you are the remnants of kings and queens on this Earth.

‘We Can’t Give Up Anything’: 3 Experts on Protecting Biodiversity

In 2020, the United Nations published an alarming report, stating that in the last two decades —  despite all of the global conferences and initiatives that took place to set agreements to stop the destruction of the natural world and to protect biodiversity, not a single goal was met. 

In the months and years since, we’ve seen a global realization of the high stakes inherent in ignoring these goals. It’s an essential understanding that everything is connected: the mass extinction crisis, climate chaos, the collapse of the world’s coral reefs, sea level rise, and refugees fleeing the loss of their lands and ability to grow food. 

The good news is we know what we need to do. From landscape conservation to carbon reserves and drawdown tactics, the answers are within reach. But this is a global crisis, which raises big questions about how decisions are made. How are we going to create more protected land? What does protection mean? Who gets to decide which initiatives take priority and where the resources come from to address those initiatives? 

We also know what hasn’t worked before. There is a tacit agreement among most biodiversity protectors that the solution isn’t to turn large swathes of land into national parks and kick out the people living on it. Restoring ecosystems or leaving them intact doesn’t inherently require a ban on hunting or farming. While the old, outdated concept of “wilderness” was defined by the U.S. government as “a place where humans may visit, but do not remain,” we now know that a healthy symbiosis between humans, plants, and animals can make ecosystems thrive. There are 9 billion of us on the planet — we have to learn to co-exist. 

Unsurprisingly, an estimated 80% of the Earth’s remaining biodiversity is on traditional lands, where indigenous people have developed traditional ecological knowledge over thousands of years. Honoring and taking cues from this knowledge may very well hold the key to a future in which all of us not only co-exist, but thrive.

Conserving the Amazon with Indigenous Communities at the Helm

NASA calls the Amazon Rainforest the engine of the global weather system. Indigenous Peoples call it the heart of the world. According to Greenpeace, “As an ecosystem, the Amazon is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. Over 3 million species live in the rainforest, and over 2,500 tree species (or one-third of all tropical trees that exist on earth) help to create and sustain this  vibrant ecosystem.”

Development and extractive industry gravely threaten the Amazon, making immediate conservation efforts absolutely essential.

“Every tree in the Amazon lifts up about a thousand liters of water a day into the atmosphere. The area, which is collectively larger than the continental United States, lifts up a river larger than the Amazon River every day, into the sky,” says Atossa Soltani, founder and board president of Amazon Watch. “That atmospheric river summons the rain into the continent of South America, and also the rest of the world. It’s as if it is the engine of the global weather system, pulsating the rain, moisture, and vapor that makes the South American continent so green.”

Soltani served as Amazon Watch’s first Executive Director for 18 years. She’s been documenting and publicizing forest destruction and human rights abuses caused by extractive industries and large-scale energy projects throughout the Amazon, and she’s led successful campaigns to convince oil companies and international financial institutions to adopt stronger environmental and social standards.

“Just to give you an idea of the size of the Amazon, the flow of the Amazon River at the mouth is 209,000 cubic meters per second, which is the same as the next six largest rivers of the world combined,” says Soltani. “Imagine a river 20% bigger than that that’s lifted off the forest every day and into the atmosphere.  What they’re calling ‘the sacred headwaters of the Amazon’ is an area that’s larger than Oregon. It’s 74 million acres, where you have incredibly rich biodiversity, but also incredible amounts of threat. This area is also majority indigenous lands. If business as usual were allowed to go on, this area would be converted to mostly oil and mining reserves or cattle ranching or agribusiness.”

Somewhere around 20% of the rainforest has been destroyed, and Soltani says that we can expect to see a collapse or unraveling of the ecological systems in the region with just 5% more deforestation. 

So how do we stop this terrible trajectory and restore the forests and biodiversity? Soltani says the first step is to finally let the indigenous people who live on the land lead the way.

A coalition of indigenous peoples created an unprecedented collaboration to protect the crucial bioregion shared by Ecuador and Peru.

Soltani is the director of global strategy for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, working to protect one of the most biodiverse rainforests on Earth in an alliance with Amazonian indigenous nations of Ecuador and Peru and partners in civil society. It would permanently protect 80% of the Amazon rainforest by 2025 — that’s 34 million hectares of the Amazon forest that would be off limits to fossil fuel extraction, access roads, and mega-infrastructure projects. The initiative also requires that indigenous peoples be deeply involved in all policy decisions about their territories. 

“It’s an area in which the carbon in the trees and the carbon that’s in the oil reserves combined would be over almost six billion tons. That’s carbon that we could be conserving,” says Soltani. “Plus it would be the most biodiverse rainforest on the planet.”

In practical terms, what does it mean to protect this area? “One of the keys has been to create an alliance in which Indigenous Peoples are calling for no further major resource extraction, no industrial-scale anything, no dams, no roads, nothing that is at odds with the fabric of life,” says Soltani. “But it’s not just about protecting or conserving. It’s also about governing these territories from a life-centric view. It’s a community-collective vision articulated through many, many participatory activities that help define the future vision for the territory.”

Ocean Conservation that Recognizes Community Impacts

Our planet’s oceans sequester carbon at scales similar to those of rainforests. Despite the history of conservation and the role oceans play in biodiversity, a small percentage of oceans are protected from commercial exploitation. There are about 17,000 marine-protected areas covering the surface of the ocean, but that only represents about 8% of the ocean’s surface. And even for that 8%, what does “protection” really mean?

Rod Fujita is a marine ecologist and highly effective ocean conservationist. He is Senior Scientist and Director of Research and Development for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Oceans Innovations Program.

“When you really get down to looking at how these marine-protected areas are functioning, are they actually prohibiting killing? Are they actually preventing pollution? Are they actually preventing oil and gas extraction? The answer is no, not really,” says Fujita. “Less than 2% of those 17,000 marine-protected areas are functional. 8% is not enough, and 2% is definitely not enough if we’re going to save the ocean and allow it to contribute to the carbon drawdown.”

Fujita has studied ocean ecosystems all over the world and worked to preserve them for more than 30 years. When it comes to protecting and restoring oceans, Fujita says, we need to set goals that will actually help save ourselves and the planet. He’s helped protect over 10,000 square miles of ocean habitat, created a novel financing system for sustainability, and developed innovative tools for improving the wellbeing of the ocean and the humans that depend on it.

Fujita says that one reason conservation of the oceans is not scaling as we would like is that we are not aligning the value of conservation with the value of people whose livelihoods depend on fishing.

“Consider creating a marine reserve in a place where people are impoverished, and fishing is the employer of last resort,” says Fujita. “The proposition that we’re giving these folks is, hey, why don’t you stop fishing in your best fishing grounds so that stuff can grow, and so that I, in the United States or in Europe, can enjoy the biodiversity. It’s a terrible value proposition, and that’s why conservation is not scaling in the ocean.”

Fujita suggests approaching ocean conservation with a keen eye toward the needs of affected communities. “We have to align their incentives and their needs with the conservation proposition,” he says. “The way to do that is to embed these marine-protected areas within areas that are secure, that are reserved for the use of the people who are paying the conservation price so that they can reap the benefits of their own conservation action. That’s the key. The people who pay the cost need to get the benefits.”

In Belize, Fujita and his colleagues witnessed fishermen who were staunchly opposed to expanding marine-protected areas to benefit ocean ecosystems. That dynamic only shifted once a “territorial use right” for fishing was established. “It turns out the reason the fishermen were opposing these no-take reserves is not because they’re not interested in stewardship,” says Fujita. “It’s just that they were asked to pay the costs of not fishing while illegal fishermen from other countries and other places were coming and taking the fish. [The territorial use right] completely changed the political dynamics. It aligned the economics and the incentives with conservation, and Belize has tripled the size of its no-take reserves.”

The successful model in Belize of granting territorial rights could potentially be applied in fishing areas around the world. Though one larger scale challenge is that there are stark wealth inequalities between countries around the world, and the reality that climate change is shifting access to fish populations in favor of the Global North.

Cooperation on a large scale is crucial to address the crisis in biodiversity that we are witnessing. Scaling up successful models where collaborations and techniques are working can be a reminder that humans are part of nature and that restoration is possible. Fujita says there are examples like in Bristol Bay, where the state works with Indigenous communities to preserve the largest salmon run in the world because they understand that seeing the fish as a commodity is what got us in this situation in the first place. 

Restoring whale populations is another success story. Once the international community agreed to stop killing whales, the dire situation turned around.  

“The humpbacks are more abundant now. Blue whales still have a ways to go, but they are returning,” says Fujita. “When we get these big creatures back, all kinds of good things will happen. Big whales make big poop. And big poop falls down into the ocean, and that sequesters carbon. It’s a very important part of the biological pump that is saving us from even more severe climate change.”

Firing on All Cylinders: A Global Conservation Initiative

“People from all corners of the world agree that we actually need much more audacious and ambitious conservation targets than we currently have,” says Carly Vynne, an ecologist and Director of the Biodiversity and Climate Program at the nonprofit RESOLVE. “But it turns out that if your goal is to save most of life on Earth or provide essential ecosystems services or just regulate the climate, you’re going to need close to half of nature intact, if not conserved.”

Vynne is a key innovator in finding ways to develop maps of ecosystems to help other scientists, activists, and policymakers identify priority areas for protection and conservation attention.

Vynne is a key innovator in finding ways to develop maps of ecosystems to help other scientists, activists, and policymakers identify priority areas for protection and conservation attention. 

Earlier in her career, she co-led a project in South Africa to reintroduce lions on private lands and studied maned wolves, jaguars, pumas, giant anteaters, armadillos, and tapirs in the Brazilian Cerrado. At the U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Vynne helped launch several corridor initiatives to help large mammal movements in the West, creating the Northern Great Plains program to protect the underrepresented grasslands.

She co-authored the book The Global Deal for Nature, which calls for an ambitious, time-bound set of nature-based targets that must be achieved if we are to solve the climate and extinction crises.

Vynne has been working in the world of conservation long enough to have seen and participated in a variety of approaches as the global situation has grown more and more dire. There seems to be a consensus that many dramatic approaches are necessary. 

“In biodiversity conservation, we’ve treated our prioritization efforts as sort of ‘how do we get the most for the least?’” she says. “How do we conserve the most knowing that globally flexible conservation dollars are very rare? With the climate science coming on board and the threat of ecosystem disruption being so much greater than any of us imagined, we actually can’t give up anything else if we’re going to be successful at stabilizing the climate and/or stopping the biodiversity crisis. All of those approaches are important; all of them are necessary.”

That also means pulling together data and strategies from areas around the world to create a collective vision and a way to implement it. Vynne and her colleagues have consulted with people in regions that don’t map along the official lines of counties, or states, or even countries. Instead, these are realistic maps of living systems, ecoregions where the biodiversity of flora, fauna, and ecosystems tend to be distinct and usually cross over state and county lines.

“There have been eco-region-based approaches for a while,” says Vynne. “There are a variety of approaches to setting conservation. Because we wanted a comprehensive strategy for the whole Earth, where anyone and everywhere would necessarily be a part of designing strategies and contributing to that, it seemed like an eco-region-based approach really made sense.”

Vynne and her colleagues have assessed the locally determined conservation needs of all 846 eco-regions with the understanding that the needs of each area will vary. “At the end of the day, the regions will need to look at what the goals are and how do they conserve the species for that place.”

Setting the priorities for each region is key, and it’s where the complications lie. There’s conserving and protecting areas that haven’t been wrecked, restoring lands and biodiversity where it has been wrecked, focusing on areas to help stabilize climate, and finding ways to sequester carbon, to name a few.

In one-quarter of the world, only 4 percent of habitat remains. With such a staggering reality of destruction, the real goal is clearly restoration, not conservation. But in the other three-quarters of the world, protection and restoration where it’s needed would be the goal. Vynne says the intact habitat maps that they’re able to generate show those areas have enough habitat to do that right now. It’s also where the concept of climate stabilization comes into play.

“There are large areas of intact forests that might not be the highest priorities,” says Vynne. “They might not be biodiversity hotspots, but they’re really important for climate regulation. What if we consider maintaining them intact or, when necessary, doing restoration or management to promote their ability to store and sequester carbon, and finance and manage them accordingly?”

Tools are needed to make it as easy as possible to track our changing landscapes in real-time. To that end, Vynne co-created a cloud-based mapping tool called TerrAdapt, which helps decision-makers understand the landscape-scale impacts of their local land-use decisions on regional species and ecosystems. She says now is the time for everyone to dive into land-based restoration and that policies in the U.S. and other places could provide good training and jobs around restoration and monitoring and management. 

“There’s a lot that we don’t know,” says Vynne, “but we do know that we need to adhere to the basic principles of conservation biology, which we’ve known since long before the climate was changing. I think we’ve got to hope that some of the worst-case scenarios don’t come to fruition. In the meantime, we’ve got to do all the good work that we know how to do as people who think about large landscapes on the ground.”

From Childhood Fascination to Frog Conservation: An Interview with Robin Moore

“We’ve described over 7,000 species, but we haven’t even scraped the surface.”

Robin Moore, the Vice President of Communications and Marketing for Re:wild, turned his childhood fascination with frogs into a career in conservation. In this conversation with Bioneers’ Teo Grossman, he talks about growing up in Edinburgh and spending his summers in the Highlands, where he had a passionate connection with the frogs and other wildlife in his backyard. He went on to study zoology and ecology, eventually earning a Ph.D. and studying a species of frog in Majorca, Spain. After realizing the extent of the threat facing amphibians, he became more involved in frog conservation efforts and spearheaded a project called The Search for Lost Frogs at Conservation International.

TEO: As a child, what intrigued you most about frogs?

ROBIN: A couple of years ago, my younger brother dug up a diary of mine from when I was 7 years old. He took photos and posted them all over Facebook. One of those pictures was a drawing I had done of me emptying frog spawn into a large tank, and that pretty much summed up my childhood. I spent a lot of my waking hours out looking for frogs and newts. 

I think what intrigued me the most was I was able to get intimate with them. I tried catching mice and they bit me. Birds would fly away. But with amphibians, I was able actually to get in there. I was able to collect spawn. I was able to raise them in my bedroom and watch this incredible transformation from egg to tadpole to frog. It was almost like watching evolution on speed. In three weeks, you had this incredible transformation. 

As soon as I learned more about them, that these animals had been around since the dinosaurs … I mean, what kid isn’t fascinated by dinosaurs? Here you’ve got a creature on your doorstep, in your backyard, that was actually around alongside the dinosaurs and is still with us. That, for me, was just absolutely fascinating.

TEO: So you lived within collecting distance of a number of frogs?

ROBIN: Yeah. I grew up in Edinburgh. We would spend our summer holidays in the Highlands. That, for me, was heaven because I would roam the moors in these peat bogs. My grandparents’ neighbors had a pond, and I would climb onto my grandparents’ wall and sit there watching these frogs. I had this sort of intimate connection to wildlife right in the backyard.

TEO: Did that follow you all the way through? Did you go to college for it?

ROBIN: You know, I never planned a career in frogs, but it did follow me through. At school, when you’re really into this kind of thing, you’re sort of a weirdo. What I realized later in life is that the weirdos who hold onto that fascination are the most interesting. One of the biggest gifts you can have is to stay a child, keep your childlike sense of wonder and awe. I was lucky that I had the opportunity.

I went to study zoology, and then I went on to a Master’s in ecology, and then I went on to do a Ph.D., and I got to study a species of frog in Majorca, Spain, which was a pretty beautiful place to spend your summers measuring tadpoles. Shortly after I finished my Ph.D. was when I really found out what was happening to frogs around the world. So I got more involved in actual conservation. 

I realized that my research was getting more and more obscure. Probably fewer and fewer people were reading these obscure papers. I wanted to be more active in trying to see what I could do to contribute to protecting amphibians, because at that point in 2004, the first comprehensive global assessment of amphibians had been done. It showed that a third of all species were threatened with extinction: over 6,000 species. That, to me, was just alarming. Growing up, extinction was something that happened to the dinosaurs. I had no idea that these animals in my backyard could be in trouble. The idea that they could one day be gone never even crossed my mind.

TEO: People talk about frogs and amphibians as the canary in the coal mine. You said you sort of have problems with that general way of thinking about it. I wonder if you could tell us about that.

ROBIN: I think it’s a useful metaphor. I think metaphors resonate with people. The canary in the coal mine analogy was good to get people aware of the crisis affecting amphibians. And it tied it directly back to us. It made people see that what was happening to amphibians was an indicator. 

And amphibians are, generally, particularly sensitive to change. They have permeable skin, they have unprotected eggs, they generally have very small ranges, they’re tied to both freshwater and terrestrial. So they’re sensitive to changes in any of that. They’re cold-blooded, so they rely on the environment to regulate their own temperature and their breeding cycles.

My problem with the idea that they are the canary in the coal mine is that people don’t ever go down to the coal mine to save the canary. They die so we don’t have to. People would talk about amphibians being an early warning, but it wasn’t so early for them. I think it’s a very useful metaphor for getting people involved, but I think when you dig deeper, people first must actually care about the implications for amphibians and not just about what they’re telling us about our world.

TEO: This relates to the different motivations for conservation: the intrinsic value of the species, the right for the rest of nature to exist, which I think is really important. 

ROBIN: Yes, there are different values that people attribute. For me, the intrinsic value is important. I recognize that it’s not for everyone; that we need to be appealing to all different values and speaking the languages of different audiences.

TEO: Can you tell me some stories or just kind of paint me a picture of what it is that you find so wondrous about frogs?

ROBIN: For one thing, there’s a never-ending array of diversity within frogs. Even having spent a childhood obsessing over them, a career studying them, I still learn things about them that blow me away. I saw a tiger tree frog in Colombia for the first time a few years ago. It was newly described. Incredible green and black stripes. I just thought that was incredible. It’s a living work of art. It would be like discovering a Picasso that nobody’s seen. 

We’ve described over 7,000 species, but we haven’t even scraped the surface. In Madagascar alone, there are over 400 species described, but at least 150 species have not been described.

I did my Master’s thesis in Trinidad, where I was looking at different reproductive strategies of amphibians. It’s incredible the adaptations they have to different environments. In a single pond, you can have one frog that lays full nests on the top of the water with many, many eggs. And then you can have another frog that digs into the mud and lays its full nest, and then they go into this arrested development and wait for the rain to fill it, and the tadpoles come out. 

The gastric brooding frog in Australia, which went extinct in the mid-80s, would ingest the eggs, turn off its stomach acid, paralyze its stomach muscles, and turn its stomach into a womb. The eggs would turn into tadpoles, the tadpoles would metamorphose into little frogs, and the little frogs would jump out of the frog’s mouth. For me, that’s just incredible. It’s the stuff of your childhood imagination. You couldn’t dream up those kinds of things. 

TEO: At Conservation International, you spearheaded a project called The Search for Lost Frogs. Will you tell me a little about that?

ROBIN: When I joined Conservation International, it was right when we realized the dark predicament amphibians were in. I spent my first few there trying to get that message out. Then I realized it was even depressing me. It’s hard when you’re just hitting people over the head with these bleak, apocalyptic predictions of where we’re going. 

I realized that I needed to do something that was a little more positive and hopeful. Despair is not a good motivator. If you’re making people feel hopeless, they feel powerless, and they tend to go back into their comfort zone and do whatever it is that makes them feel safe and secure. I wanted to motivate people by inspiring them.

My colleagues and I came up with this idea of putting together a list of lost species that hadn’t been seen in years or decades. I put together a little wanted-style poster of the top 10 and found out that people really liked it. The communications team at Conservation International loved it and helped me to roll out over six months this global search for lost frogs. 

We supported 33 teams in 20 countries looking for lost species. We kind of invited people along for the journey. Having a six-month timeline on it helped keep the momentum on it. Then we had this platform to talk about occasional rediscoveries, but also to open the dialogue to conversation and the more nuanced aspects of this story. ‘Yes, we found these species, but, wow, there are 200 that we have on this list that are missing, that are gone, that may be extinct.’ It helped us to raise a profile and create flagships for conservation. 

You know, we often elevate polar bears, pandas, tigers, and these icons of conservation. They can be important, but the reality is that most people are never going to see a polar bear in the wild. They’re never going to see a panda. So they don’t have that immediate connection. Whereas most people are never too far from a log under which a salamander might be curled or a pond with frogs. You can generate pride. If you go into an area and say you have a frog here that lives only here, and it’s yours, I think that’s a powerful motivator for protecting it and protecting its environment. 

What we found with some of the lost species that were found is they went from these symbols of extinction to symbols of hope if you give nature a chance. There was one frog in Israel that disappeared for 55 years, and it was written off as being extinct. They re-flooded its habitat because it had been drained, and 10 years after it was re-flooded, the frog was found. It somehow had been hanging on. No one knows where it was. 

That’s part of it. It’s the mystery, right? It’s the sort of unanswered questions that bring people in.

TEO: That’s an example of getting real-time feedback on the kind of the cultural success of a conservation project. You’re a widely exhibited and distributed photographer now. Do you hear from people about the emotional or even conservational impact of the photos that you’re producing?

ROBIN: I guess a recent example of that was when I was contacted by some partners in Jamaica saying that the government wanted to sell the largest protected area in the country to a corrupt conglomerate who were going to build a port, basically ripping apart the mangroves and flattening two islands. These were the home of one of the rarest lizards in the world – the Jamaican Iguana. They contacted me and asked for help in raising the profile of this issue. Nobody outside of Jamaica had heard about it.

I went down there, and I took photos. My last day there, I met a local Jamaican researcher working with the lizards named Booms. For me, it was kind of like, ‘This is the face of the struggle here.’ He had grown up in Kingston, and he’d moved seven years ago to start working on these iguanas that had changed his life. I came back, and I did a story on Booms. I used my images, and they got into National Geographic and The Guardian. Ziggy Marley shared the photos and the video. One day I looked, and it had 25,000 plays. We didn’t get much feedback on it though. The government was tight-lipped.

I went back a year and a half later to keep their feet to the fire, to try and reengage, and this time we produced a higher-production film. A filmmaker came with me to tell the story. Again, we got it out there. I actually did an Instagram takeover of National Geographic, and that was a real-time way of getting the story out to people. It created buzz within Jamaica.

I was posting 24 or 40 hours behind so that I didn’t alert the authorities to where I was. I was told if they knew where I was, they would likely intervene. When I got back, I projected the film onto the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, D.C., with a #savegoatislands hashtag. I basically did this whole campaign around #savegoatislands. 

Again, it just went quiet. This was a $1.5 billion investment, so it was really sort of David and Goliath story. None of us were that hopeful. But later, the prime minister of Jamaica was in New York in a town hall meeting, and someone put their hand up and said, “What’s happening with Goat Islands?” And he said they had scrapped that project because of the environmental concerns.

I don’t know the impact that the images had on that decision, but I think they helped. From what I’ve heard, they had an impact. They helped get the word out there. There were some images I got of baby iguanas coming out of someone’s hand, and it brought you face-to-face with the issue. 

TEO: Do you think there is more room for the arts in environmental and social justice movements? Is there more that you think we could be doing? 

ROBIN: I think there’s much more room. Success, for me, would be a much closer relationship between the sciences and the arts. We have all these amazing scientists out there doing amazing stuff, but many of them are not communicating their work in a way that’s resonating with people. I think artists can take the findings and transform them into something that’s got cultural resonance, contextualize it in this broader picture of what’s happening, and can engage people.

When we try to communicate environmental issues, it’s easy to preach. It’s easy to point fingers. Art can deliver messages in a way that’s not preaching or guilting people. It’s opening a dialogue. Art has that emotional resonance, and that’s how you’re going to bring people in and motivate them to do something.

Finding Joy in Transformation

From the lifecycle of a human, to the fermentation of organisms, to the passing of seasons, beginnings and endings are a natural part of the world around us. These transitions can be both exciting and challenging as we adapt to new circumstances and let go of what has come before.

As we consider the beginnings and endings that shape our lives and our planet, we can also reflect on how to make the most of each moment, and how we can work toward a future that is sustainable and equitable for all. 

This week, as we all prepare for the end of 2022 and the advent of 2023, we’re sharing stories that highlight transitions and transformations.

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How Human Composting May Help Us Reimagine Death

Architect Katrina Spade invented human composting after learning about the “mortality composting” practices used on some farms. She has worked tirelessly to bring the process to the world, first getting a human composting bill passed in Washington state, then founding Recompose, a Public Benefit Corporation based in Seattle and the world’s first human composting company. Recompose started accepting bodies for human composting in December 2020.

Read more.

How to Transform the Way You Experience Winter

“Staying engaged with the flow of nature during winter may require extra discipline and determination.”

Yes! Magazine’s Natasha Deganello Giraudie has helped people go from viewing winter as a difficult season to one that brings delight, appreciation, and a sense of rooted thriving. In this article, she explains how restoring our relationship with nature physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually is key to transforming our experience with winter.

Read more.

Finding Joy in the Unknown

“I don’t know what the future will be, but I absolutely know that joy and the things that give us joy in this world, especially the natural world, are essential for everything.”

In this interview with Emergence Magazine, Dara McAnulty — a teenage author, naturalist, and conservationist — speaks about his identity as an autistic person, his award-winning book, and the great necessity of staying rooted in joy. Purchase his book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, here.

Read more.

Entangled Life

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies interviewed Merlin about his highly acclaimed book, Entangled Life.

Read more.

How to Transform the Way You Experience Winter

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

BY NATASHA DEGANELLO GIRAUDIE

When I was a teenager, growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, my family once took a summer vacation to the Alps. We were walking in the mountains in our cotton sweaters when we came across a white patch on the rocky dirt. I remember my brother, sister, and me squeezing into it, delighted to be able to take a picture in the snow!

That pretty much sums up my experience of winter. My mother had been scarred by living through bitter blizzards in the Midwest United States. She would tell what seemed to me as a child like unfathomable stories about how her damp hair would freeze if she went outside or how she trekked across her college campus to swim practice in below-freezing temperatures. My father, having grown up in Ethiopia and Somalia, was happy to stay in South America’s tropical setting as well.

I was in my 20s the first time I saw fairy-tale flakes falling from the sky. It was in the Sierras on a weekend trip from San Francisco, where I have lived most of my adult life. This could explain why I was so surprised when, in recent years, participants of my nature practice courses started to report that I was helping them experience winter in a whole new way. They were going from seeing winter as a cold-damp-icy-darkness-of-gloom-to-be-endured to experiencing it as a time in which they could find more delight and appreciation and even restore a sense of rooted thriving.

I first heard of this happy side effect of my work when I was leading a mini nature retreat for a group of humanitarian workers from the United Nations. We were at the University of Virginia in December of 2018 and got an unexpected snowfall. We brought out rocking chairs so we wouldn’t have to sit on the now-wet lawn as I had initially planned. I readjusted the schedule so we could pop indoors every 45 minutes or so to refill our teacups, which also acted as hand warmers. But otherwise, I guided the session as I normally would, attuning to what nature had in store for us that day. There was a bit of teaching, some meditation, journaling, poetry, and conversation. At the end of our time together, many of the participants, who lived in New York, told me they loved nature but had hated winter their entire lives. They said this was the first time they were able to see how they might experience it differently.

Their words struck me deeply. What did it even mean to hate winter your entire life? To live in an unhappy state for a quarter of every year? For a full quarter of your life? What does that do to your heart? To your mind? To your health? To your loved ones? To your colleagues? Does hating winter mean enduring a divorce from nature every single year? I had a hard time imagining it.

That’s why, since the rocking chairs in the snow, I’ve been helping people from around the world—even from places like Canada, Alaska, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands—look forward to winter. Through a process of “opening to the medicine of winter,” people in my community have now come to experience nature practice as their winter sustenance. What I realized is that rather than disassociating from the Earth when she withdraws things we like—things like light, warmth, fruits, flowers, color, etc.—the key is found in staying in vibrant, expanding, deepening relationship with the Earth. This means through good times and rough ones, just like in your other healthy relationships. 

This is not to say that a casual connection with nature on weekends, or on vacations, or when our “real work” is done is sufficient. Our relationship with nature is a vital one. It has a direct impact on our well-being during any season, but if we have particular difficulty with winter, then this relationship is most especially vital during this season. If anything, rather than letting our relationship with nature extinguish itself during the cold, wet, dark days, we need to take special care to keep it kindled. When we tend to nature and build rapport with her in this way, we ensure that the lifeline of wonder, awe, and nourishment stays vibrant.

At first, staying engaged with the flow of nature during winter may require extra discipline and determination to get through the discomfort. We may resist going out for a walk in the rain or taking our morning tea on the porch in the cold. But taking the extra step of putting on rain pants or keeping a blanket by the door may be just what we need to get a taste for the abundance available when we offer our presence to nature. Once that presence goes beyond being physical to include an open heart, then we start to crave that satisfying connection with nature, just like we crave quality time with our friends. 

Soon enough, as that goodness fills us up, it starts to seep into our thoughts and spill out through our words and actions. It starts to affect how we relate to others and to the Earth. It starts to impact the decisions we make and what they will mean for future generations.

Sometimes, this sort of healthy inter-seasonal relationship with nature is represented by a circle. We are in the circle along with the other beings of this Earth—with other human beings, animal beings, plant beings, fungi beings, bacteria beings, mineral beings, river beings, mountain beings. All of us are in the circle. This is how we have lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Even as modern society has largely abandoned the circle, Indigenous wisdom keepers from around the world have stayed committed to the model and have been strongly urging every one of us back in.

A foundational characteristic of the relationship established in the circle is that everyone is a being. This January, Spain came to the conclusion that dogs are sentient beings, allowing for special consideration to be offered to them. But when we live in the circle—as we have done for most of our existence as human beings—all beings around us are considered to be sentient, worthy of our respect. Not just people and our favorite domesticated pets. The Earth as a whole is acknowledged for her sentience, for her extraordinary wisdom, and for her poetic capacity to offer us a steady stream of breathtaking beauty. With this perspective, we are more likely to transform our resistance to the harshness of winter into curiosity for experiencing how it will play out and enthusiasm for getting to be a part of it.

As deeper appreciation and love develops for the preciousness of it all, we come to describe it, with reverence, as sacred. This is the quality of the circle and the reality of what is available to us during wintertime—and at all times—as long as we’re willing to continually deepen our relationship with nature.

The problem is that we’re distracted. These days, for the most part, the sort of relationship we often find ourselves in can be represented as a triangle. This is a shape that has been reinforced and solidified only in the past few hundred years of our existence as humans. In this way of relating to nature, there is scarce space for humans at the very top, generating artificial competition as well as a hierarchy of increasing objectification from there on down. If the circle facilitates flow and abundance of life, the triangle, by its very structure, pinches off that flow, creating scarcity through our disassociation from—and our exploitation and domination of—nature. We increasingly isolate and push ourselves into a corner.

The term I find useful to describe this experience is “biological homelessness,” where we lose the depth of relationship we long to have with the Earth. This condition has been normalized in a modern world that is predominantly disassociated from the natural world—constantly pulling us indoors (to the tune of 95% of our lives), onto our screens, and away from the truth of who we are. In a world that increasingly makes unrealistic demands of us, biological homelessness is a state of destitution that sneaks up on us. It feels like thirst, hunger, or saudade, meaning an inconsolable longing, as my Brazilian friends would put it. 

When we’re in this state of estrangement, then the harshness of winter makes everything worse, just like the darkness of nighttime prevents us from seeing things as they really are, making our problems bigger. As we starve ourselves of the soul-satisfying nourishment that a relationship with nature offers, then the deprivation that comes with winter hits us stronger. Without our curiosity and enthusiasm for the magical nature of the unfolding, the unpleasant aspects overtake our experience. In this state, everything becomes darker, colder, wetter, gloomier.

That’s why restoring our relationship with nature—physically, yes, but also mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—is key to transforming our experience with winter. Once we’re able to do this, we can thrive in any season. We stay open to the possibilities of responding consciously and creatively to changing conditions. We look for new ways to stay dry and warm. We may set up a firepit in the backyard to extend our time outdoors like several of my students have done. We may go out in a survival suit like my student on the island of Shetland in the North Sea does. We may put a clear tent on our Christmas wish list like my student in London did so she could sit outside and be in nature even during the wet season. As we stay committed to remaining engaged with nature in these ways, we give ourselves a chance to come into deeper understanding and a more embodied experience of her wisdom and her beauty. As a result, we are able to feel more energized, revitalized, calm, flexible, resilient, receptive, and inspired.

The hardship of winter heightens our awareness of what we take for granted. The lack of color increases our ability to take in even the slightest hues more intensely, giving us a fresh opportunity to appreciate the miraculous flow of life in new ways. In this state of renewed gratitude and wonder, we are also better positioned to offer more skillful healing to the challenges of our time.

And if we get distracted, we can always count on poets to support us on this journey back to the circle, to remind us of the possibility of awe, to point it out when we have become numb to it, and to help us keep this vital relationship alive and invigorated. One of my favorite stanzas for the occasion is from Joyce Rupp, who grew up on a farm in Iowa and knows a thing or two about winter. Her poem is called “Winter’s Cloak,” and it starts like this:

This year I do not want 
the dark to leave me. 
I need its wrap 
of silent stillness, 
its cloak 
of long lasting embrace.

If you’d like to learn more about creating a better relationship with winter, the author of this piece, Natasha Deganello Giraudie, is offering YES! readers a free workshop called Opening to the Medicine of Winter. Click here to take advantage of this free online course!

NATASHA DEGANELLO GIRAUDIE is a filmmaker and nature practice teacher specializing in covering stories that deepen our relationship with the Earth. Her most recent film, One Word Sawalmem, which she directed with Michael “Pom” Preston of the Winnemem Wintu tribe of Mt. Shasta, won a number of awards and was selected for 40+ festivals around the world. Natasha’s work draws on her studies with the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh; learning from some of the great naturalists of our time and spending time indigenous wisdom keepers from Venezuela, where she’s from, and California, where she currently lives. Her story has been featured on mindbodygreen, News from Native California, Threads of the Sun, and the Unstuck podcast. Natasha is based in Coast Miwok land, now know as SF Bay Area, and speaks Spanish, English, French and gets by with Italian and Portunhol. She can be reached at www.rosaguayaba.earth

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

Finding Joy in the Unknown: An Interview with Dara McAnulty

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

He was interviewed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.

In this interview, Dara McAnulty—a teenage author, naturalist, and conservationist—speaks about his identity as an autistic person, his award-winning book, and the great necessity of staying rooted in joy.

Emergence Magazine (EM): Dara, you wrote your first book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, at the age of fourteen and you’re seventeen now. Is that right

Dara McAnulty (DM): Yeah, I’m seventeen now.

EM: As I understand it, the book grew from a blog that you started writing when you were twelve years old. What initially prompted you to want to start writing publicly like this at such a young age?

DM: Well, I had been writing for a long time before that point. Writing was a way for me to communicate. I didn’t like to speak to people. In fact, I spoke to basically nobody outside of close family, and any conversation I had outside of that was incredibly awkward and I hated every second of it. Writing, on the other hand, I found incredibly easy to do. It was something where I could take what was going on in my mind and put it into something a bit more physical, something that I could touch.

The process of that became really, really important to me, and I don’t really know why I ended up deciding to go online with it. I guess I almost wanted to get it away from me instead of inside this sort of bubble. My writing was still sort of with me, if that makes sense. A lot of the stuff that I was writing about, my love and my troubles as well, I wanted to send it out into the world, even if nobody would really see it. It was also just going to be something fun I could do in my spare time. Now it is my spare time.

EM: Well, you were writing at least in part about your love of the living world and your concerns about what’s happening, and it seemed like that hit a nerve because people did start reading, and it resonated with a lot of people. What was that like? Was it a surprise to you?

DM: Yeah, it was a complete surprise. Honestly, I just sort of began blocking it out. I was like, “Nope, still nobody’s reading it.” Even as I saw people were reading it, I still told myself that there was nobody reading it because I felt like once I came to that realization that people were actually reading it, I would get too scared and I would stop. So I just kind of kept on going.

If you’ve ever been on WordPress, which is where I wrote the blog, they’ve got this little thing so you get all the statistics, and I do love a bit of maths and stats. The thing that sort of got me to realize that my blog was starting to reach people was this little map, and it sort of showed you how many people from different countries were reading your blog, and it was the funniest thing.

Honestly, my knowledge of geography improved with that, so I began to realize that people were actually reading it. I sort of admitted to myself that people were reading it, and then I wasn’t really scared anymore, because I was now so used to writing [the blog posts], and I loved writing them, and I loved writing for people now, in general, that the fear sort of disappeared. And now, obviously, I like writing for people. It’s something that still gives me a lot of happiness.

EM: You chose to document the cycle of the seasons in your book and use a very personal diary format that I guess grew out of the blog in many ways. Why did you choose to use this format and work with the seasons?

DM: I think I chose the format because I didn’t know I was writing a book. It was a series of blogs. I did not know it was ever going to get published. Then the publisher came up to me and my family, and they were like, “Do you want to publish a book?” Like a collection of blogs, it was meant to be, small collection of blogs. Give it out to Twitter followers, happy days. It didn’t end up like that.

So it’s about the end of spring when I actually know that I’m writing a book. Before that point, it is written with absolutely no knowledge that this is ever going to see anybody’s eyes but mine. I just sort of ran with it. There was no real active choice in the matter, although it did end up being better for the book as a whole, having it in a diary format. It allowed me to almost confide within the diary all of the things that were going on, some of the things I was angry about, some of the things that I loved, and all of the different things that you get in a diary, all that human emotion that you can only really get in a diary.

It also made an interesting dilemma for an author: that you have no idea what the ending of the book is, which is kind of terrifying when you think about it. There’s no such thing as foreshadowing if you don’t know what you’re foreshadowing. Usually, you can have all of these different lines linking up the entire book to make it a bit more cohesive. I couldn’t really do that. So I just put myself into every single diary entry, and I had to put everything in.

This is what I realized—that in a diary, I am technically the main character. As much as I hate to admit it, I am the main character in the book, and I’m a complex human being. We are all complex human beings. And because it’s a diary, it’s got to sort of reflect that. That led me down to, “Okay, now I need to tell everything. I need to put everything into the diary—the good, the bad, the ugly, the amazing, the brilliant, and the sad—all into writing, because if one little detail was missing from that, the entire character of Dara McAnulty sort of falls apart.” Because then you’re going, “Why did Dara do that? Why is he thinking this?” if I don’t actually put everything out there. So that was something that let me be a bit more honest with the book as well. But yeah, I’ve ended up loving and hating the diary format after this.

EM: I loved how personal it was and how open and vulnerable you were about everything, from autism to your school bullying to questioning your own place in the world. It felt like it was as much about your own process of self-reflection and personal growth as it was about your relationship with the natural world. And in fact, it feels like they became more and more inseparable as the book went on. Was that something that came about intentionally as you were writing and you started to see those threads come together, or was it more organic?

DM: I do think it was organic, because nearly everything about the book was organic, because I wrote blogs before this. I was never trained in literature. I didn’t really know how to craft a piece of writing. All I really knew how to do was the thing that I’d been doing for the longest time: to put emotion down on the page. I feel like a lot of my emotion is tied up in the natural world, and so the natural world became a forefront to the book, but also, all the other things that were going on in my life. So they did become quite intertwined because the natural world and all the things that make me up as a human being all had to come out in the diary. It’s all pretty emotion-based. You can’t really separate out everything that makes me, me. It just sort of starts to blend in with each other into this beautiful mixture that makes humans really annoying to understand, honestly. It’s been troubling me for a long time.

EM: Your book offers not just an interesting and intimate portrait of your own experiences but also very much [those] of your family, who you describe as being “close as otters,” which is a wonderful, wonderful description. I wonder if you could talk a bit about your family and your relationship with them, because they’re so central to the book and your life.

DM: I need to have a counter for how many times that line has been quoted now. I think it is the most quoted line in the book, which is kind of funny. I do love that line, though. My family mean a lot to me, and everything we do, we try to do together. Every single challenge that my family has faced, we face it together. Whenever I decided to go absolutely insane and start writing a book, they supported me. Whenever anybody in our family tries to do something, we all band together to get it done, and I feel like that does come out in the book, in the writing, that sort of cohesive unit.

Although it was kind of funny, after the book was published, it was like, “Does this family never argue?” Yeah, we do. That’s the answer. The arguments do happen, but they’re always resolved, and it’s nice to have a few people in your life that you can always sort of trust and have that confidence in.

EM: You said that your dad played a huge role in nurturing your love of nature, but also that your love and connection to nature was forged in your mum’s womb, the umbilical cord still nourishing you. I love that description, and I wonder if you could speak to that a bit, how that connection was forged.

DM: So when it comes to the parental connections, I think, with my dad, he taught me science, basically, because he works as a scientist. So he was that sort of grounding root in logic that I needed. And then my mum, she’s the more art-focused one, the one who got me into realizing that I could express myself through writing, and both of them supported me.

A lot of parents, if they would’ve seen the stuff that I’d gotten up to when I was a really, really young child, would’ve started screaming at their child, “Get away from that, get away from that! It’s dirty, dirty! It’s dirty.” I was picking up scat. I was picking up bone. I was picking up all manner of feathers. Nothing bad has happened to me, so it probably was fine. I don’t know why parents get so miffed about it. But the fact that they didn’t shout at me or get annoyed and close off that connection to nature—as children, we want to discover this incredibly beautiful new world. And so that connection, that growth, still lives on and continues even as I grow older.

EM: In the book, you describe yourself as having “the heart of a naturalist, the head of a would-be scientist, and the bones of someone who is already wearied by the apathy and destruction wielded against the natural world.” When did you start feeling this way in your bones, and how does that feeling affect your head and heart, so to speak, your approach to being a naturalist and a scientist?

DM: That weariness came from seeing a lot of the destruction. Seeing the apathy in people sort of brought that into my mind and into that focus. I feel like I’m a lot less weary than I was in the book. I’m a lot closer to being on my way to being a scientist; and my heart of a naturalist is still burning strong; and I think the weariness has sort of faded a little bit because I’ve realized that weariness gets nothing done anymore. Weariness is the idea that nothing can be done. And I didn’t think anything could be done, because all my life I’ve been told that nothing could be done, that the world is as it is, and we can do nothing about it; and that’s not really true anymore.

The entire battle of the book for me—people take different things away from the diary, but the one that I resound with the most is this inner struggle in me about whether or not art or writing or music is worth it. Can it make a difference? Can it change people’s minds? Can it change the world? I think at the end of the book, I realized that yeah, it can. It’s done it before. It changes people’s minds. It shows people the way that the world could be, in spite of the way that it is now. And only by seeing that future can we work towards it. That’s the artist’s job: to show the way that the world can be.

And I think, upon realizing that I became a lot more excited, I guess, a lot more enthralled, I had a lot more passion to go forth into the world, like at the end of the book, with the realization that what we do makes a difference—to maybe a small amount of people, but it still makes a difference. Without hope, nothing ever gets done.

That’s sort of where I’m at, at the moment—a lot more optimistic and a lot less angry, as I was in the book. I was quite angry in the book. I’m a bit more chill now. I’ve definitely still got that weariness in me, because sometimes you just see something and it just makes you want to curl up in a wee ball and disappear for a while. But I definitely—I’m a lot more hopeful.

EM: Well, joy feels like it’s a very central theme in your book, and I can feel the anger that you have in the book, your questions about what your role is and how to respond to this, and your art versus traditional activism, but it also seems you’re talking about joy being a needed response to the climate crisis and the ecocide, and that there has to be a way of being rooted in joy and not just outrage and anger. And there’s a line in the book that I was struck by that maybe speaks to this. You said, “Find joy in the unknown, because maybe all of life is unknown and we are grappling in the dark.”

DM: That was a good day when I came up with that line. And that line, I think, was sort of trying to be like, we can’t know the future. I feel like that joy we so desperately need is something that we need in order to actually solve all the crises that are coming in. Because one thing that I’ve always found among traditional activism is that quite a lot of the time, it works on fear. It works on the fear that, “Oh, my goodness me, the world is going to end.” That’s a pretty big fear, possibly the biggest fear you could have. If that’s the reason why we eventually sort everything out, if we sort everything out because we were so scared of the world, what happens after the crisis is over?

I’m still pretty certain we can fix this crisis, but if we solve it because of fear and we go back to our original ways, the problems that we thought we dealt with reappear, and we’re back in the same boat in about a hundred years, basically. But if we solve the problems because of wonder, because of joy, because we care, that’s a lot more permanent. That’s something we can pass on from generation to generation. And so I don’t know what the future will be, but I absolutely know that things that give us joy in this world, especially the natural world, are essential for everything.

EM: You write about this in the book, and you also share that autism makes you feel everything more intensely and that you don’t have a joy filter; because sadly it seems that in our current culture people can often dismiss joy as childlike, especially when it’s expressed in relationship with the living world. That it’s fine for kids to have feelings of wonder, but not adults. And in the book, you write that we’re told that childishness is wrong—bad, almost—and that you mourn a world without such feelings, a joyless world, a disconnected world. And it seems that part of what maybe emerged in the book, or maybe it was an intentional emphasis, was to challenge this notion of dismissing joy.

DM: Yes, it absolutely was. It’s something that I felt strongly about for a long, long time—this idea that joy and wonder are for children, and that once we grow older, we have to get really serious, and we have to go get jobs. We’ve got to live old and die. Life is a bit more interesting than that, honestly. We should be allowed to have wonder in the world, because the world is a wondrous place. I think the first step to that is being able to ask a single question, and that question is, “Why?”

I feel like as we grow older, we almost get scared of that question. We get tentative about it because we feel like we should already know it. Asking those questions generates curiosity, and through that curiosity, that will actually force you to look outside your house for a while. Look out into the world and think about it for a while, and that will actually give you joy, surprisingly enough. Thinking about stuff is quite a joyful activity. Taking a few moments to daydream a little bit, it’s what I do when I’m feeling a little bit sad.

EM: Throughout the book, you write about being different very directly and how you’re different from everyone in your class and your school, and that wildlife and nature is very much a refuge from spaces and people that feel foreign to you, and that wildlife never disappoints like people can—that nature has a purity to you.

DM: Yeah. I know that it’s autumn when the leaves are falling. Stuff like that is comforting. I also know that if I am sitting in a wood, a squirrel is not going to come up to me and start berating me or insulting me or hurt me, and that having a place where you can feel safe like that was quite important to me—a place where I could escape to, where I didn’t feel like people could get to me. And that purity of nature became a massive part of my life. It still is, because when everything else falls apart, nature is still standing there.

I can still, at the end of a horrible day, go out to a wood, and it was exactly the same as it was yesterday. And I feel like that’s probably why my life sort of falls apart whenever I see destruction. Because it’s that solid base, that solid structure that I’ve built my entire life off, almost. That entire support structure can be destroyed in a day, which is kind of terrifying.

I definitely need it. It’s something that I require to keep on existing, having that escape. I feel like I was escaping a world where there were bullies, where I didn’t feel like my voice could be heard, where there were constant stresses, where there were loud noises and ridiculous colors that made my brain go wild. And in nature, I know what I’m going to see. I don’t know what animals I’m going to see, but I know what colors I’m going to see. I know sort of what sounds are going to be in that environment. I know generally what temperature it’s going to be, and all of that sort of stuff feels stable. It regulates itself.

Honestly, the human world sort of stresses me out, and nature doesn’t. And I think that’s the baseline of it, isn’t it? Nature good, human bad.

EM: You offer a lot of very candid reflections about autism in the book and also about what it’s like to be classified as an “autistic person”; as you say, “Many people accuse me of not looking autistic. I have no idea what that means. I know a lot of autistics and we all look different. We’re not some recognizable breed. We are human beings.” And you’ve said that one of your hopes with the book is you want people to understand autism more. Can you speak to this a bit?

DM: I do speak quite candidly about autism and being autistic, because it’s a part of who I am, and it was a diary. And so it’s kind of a big detail, if I’m going to be honest with you. It’s kind of a big part of my life. It’s not a “condition,” quote, unquote. It’s just a reframing of perception. You just see the world in a different way. Different colors come into your brain, and some make you go crazy, some are fine.

Even among autistic people, what actually will sort of trigger negative emotions in you is different for everybody. I know autistic people who love loud noises; I, on the other hand, absolutely hate them. And more, that we should all look the same—it’s kind of ridiculous when you realize that it’s something to do with the brain, and you can’t really see the brain. So there’s no real reason why I should look different to someone else.

With the book, I tried to increase perception and awareness about autism. I can’t tell you what every autistic person is going to be like. I can’t tell you how you’re supposed to act around an autistic person. I can’t give you a rule book of the autistic person. What I can do is tell you that it’s not a disease; it’s not this horrible thing. And I can tell you that it’s this rewiring of the mind. It just changes your perception and how you process things, and how you express yourself can be changed as well, and how you think about stuff is different. And I guess that’s all I’ve really got to say. It’s a part of me, and so I’m completely free about talking about it.

EM: In the book, you talk about how dandelions remind you of the way that you close yourself off from so much of the world, either because it’s too painful to see or feel or because you’ve been open to people that ridicule you and the intense joy you feel about the living world; and that for years you’ve kept it to yourself, but now these words are leaking into the world. And I love the image of the dandelion here, both as a metaphor for closing yourself off, but also because when a dandelion is mature, it closes until all the seeds are ripe, and then they’re all released into the world, and they spread. I really felt this in the book, that process of what you were going through, of closing in and then opening yourself up through the sharing of your words. Did writing the book give you the permission you needed to feel comfortable being the voice of the next generation, which you’ve been called by a lot of people in the environmental space?

DM: I don’t think I’m the voice of the next generation. Nobody is, honestly. We’re a generation who mixes our voices together into one that is pretty strong, but I hate the idea of individual voices. The things that we’re talking about just need to be done. We don’t want to be considered voices or leaders or anything like that. We just want to bloody fix it. That’s the ground level of it.

I think the book was just my way of doing that. It was my way of showing my view on the world, showing what was going on in my mind, showing how much I love the world. And I guess doing everything after the book definitely gave me a lot more confidence, I have to say. When I was writing the book, I could not speak to anybody. I remember I was doing an event—I think it was with a charity named Ulster Wildlife—and I was doing a talk there and I nearly fainted onstage. I could not stand for a solid hour after doing the talk, and it was literally just like seventy people, and I was out. And then three-quarters of a year later, I got to speak in front of about eighteen thousand people. Honestly, I still couldn’t walk an hour after it, but it’s a bit of a step up in confidence levels.

Funnily enough, I was doing a talk to schoolchildren. I think it was like—it was yesterday; God, my time is not good—and that was about twelve thousand people. And this time, I didn’t have shaky legs after it. So I’ve definitely become more confident. It’s quite exhilarating, honestly, from a person who hated even talking to a stranger to now—honestly, I love it. I’ve become a lot more confident in my voice. I’ve become a lot more confident in general. I love speaking about the things that I care about, and I’ve sort of broken down that barrier.

Although, after an event, I still can’t speak to anybody; I’m talked out. But I love it. I actually do love it. It’s so much fun now. Give people a bit of joy, show them some wonder, perhaps make them laugh a little bit—because I do love to crack a few jokes onstage. Honestly, it can get really dreary very quickly, so I feel like people do sometimes need a little bit of a laugh.

EM: Do you have a joke you could share with us here?

DM: No. You can’t just ask for a joke. That’s not how it works.

EM: “In a fast-paced and competitive world, we need to feel grounded,” you say. “We need to feel the earth and hear birdsong. We need to use our senses to be in the world. Maybe if we bang our heads against a brick wall for long enough, it will crumble and fall, and maybe the rubble can be used to rebuild something better and more beautiful, enabling our own wildness. Imagine that.” I love and really resonate with this notion of enabling our own wildness. It feels like a different way of looking at the idea of activism or change and is really connected with what you were speaking about earlier, about being joyful.

DM: Yes, because—and I’ve realized it now, that banging your head on the wall, you’re not going to be doing that for a long time unless you’re enjoying something about it. And I feel like we need to keep on going, because if you try something for long enough, eventually something will crack. Either it will be you or it will be the wall; and by God, am I not going to crack while I still have strength in me.

Then, whenever we break through that wall, that rubble, metaphorical rubble, can then be used to rebuild. If that joy persists, then that will enable that connection to the natural world, and it’s something that I hope for, and it’s something that I definitely still resonate with. It feels like we’re getting close. There’s a lot more movement, I have to say, about these sorts of things than there was when I first started writing the book.

It’s like three years ago now. People do seem to be taking notice. Whether or not anything is done about it, we’ll find out. I will continue to feel joy for the rest of my life. It will be that thing that drives me forward; because what are you going to do in life if there is no joy, no happiness in it? And for me, the natural world is my entire joy.

EM: Winter is the last season in the book that you write about, and in the introduction to that section, you wrote, “More darkness means more quietness in the evenings, when all that can be heard is the robin’s song. The rook, the jackdaw, raven, or hooded crow, the distant squealing of gulls. I can hear so much more in between.” When I read that, I wondered how your relationship to the seasons had changed as you went through the seasonal cycle, and if you could now hear or see much more.

DM: I don’t think my connections to the seasons actually changed too much over the book. I just love winter. It’s always been my favorite season, always will be my favorite season. I think better in winter. My brain works better in winter. It’s a lot more quiet. I like the coolness of winter. Autumn isn’t so bad, either. Autumn is very nice, as you sort of get into that darkness. Summer sort of feels scalding at times. It’s burning down on you. There’s no mystery to summer. Everything’s illuminated. There’s no little secret that can be hiding in summer, if you sort of get what I mean.

Winter, on the other hand, the days are darker. You get snow. Everything is misty and foggy. It’s a lot more mysterious. That unknown exists in winter, something that you can really feel, and it’s like no other season. And so I don’t really think that my connection to the seasons actually changed too much over the book. But I think my connection to the landscape changes with the seasons.

I feel like I have a stronger connection during winter. My love of myths was allowed to sort of come out in winter. It was the first bit of reading outside of fact books that I did, really, were myths: Celtic myths, Norse myths, Egyptian myths, Rom—not Roman, I don’t like Roman myths—Greek myths. The Romans just copied everything.

Early on in “Winter,” I write about Ballynoe Stone Circle, and that, for me—that passage is possibly the proudest piece of writing I’ve ever done in my life. It was the only diary entry that I feel like I put a lot of work into, because most of the diary entries were scribbled on a notebook in bed at night, like you would a diary, honestly. Ballynoe, on the other hand, I put work into. I crafted it over about two weeks of thinking about it, thinking about the notion of that day, developing it, because it was something that I resonated with a lot, that misty feeling, that feeling of uaigneas—the Irish word for it—that sort of loneliness, that silence, that is louder than you could possibly imagine. It’s lonely with feeling everything, and it’s a feeling that I always get in winter, especially around Ballynoe Stone Circle. And I stuck to that feeling so much—I’m so fascinated by it—that was why I loved writing “Winter” so much.

I definitely improved as a writer over the book. I’m looking back on it now—some of the bits that I wrote, I’m like, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Dara, why did you write that?” Although it is character development, because the author is the main character, and if the author is improving, so is the main character. That was actually one of the reasons why, in the book, we didn’t want to edit it too much, mostly keep it the way it was—like, obviously fix grammar mistakes, because that would be kind of embarrassing, but keep some of the more technical details, keep them in there, because it lets it be a little bit more raw.

EM: Would you read that passage from “Winter,” the one that you love so much?

DM: Oh, it’s really long. Wait a second. It’s quite long.

EM: Well, read a piece of it, then.

DM: I’ll read a piece of it. Yeah, I think it’s the longest section in the book. But I’ll read the first bit. I’ll tease you all.

Saturday, first of December

We enter the holloway and I feel the string pull me along, the one that connects us with things that no longer exist but are real in our minds. Recently, my inner wanderings have been spiraling and the conversations I have with myself are becoming strange and unshapely, but feel profound and electric. I keep visualizing time as a length of string, with a flame burning at one end that represents the present, where we can act and be most alive. The ashes are the past, the intact string is the future. The string splits every time something happens. The dead are ashes: they still exist and never leave us. I can feel the string, descending, still blazing in parts, but mostly it is crisp and brown and stretched out ahead.

In the holloway, hazel overarches and I can see the exposed roots and the earth curl around me, narrowing to a vanishing point of light in the distance: a glistening full moon. My footsteps are loud in my ears, deeply trodden into winter earth. Everyone else is way ahead but I feel like the Iron Man, clanking along into another dimension, infused with sizzling energy. A sound pierces the footprint, the foot-beat: a robin in Morse code trills, an SOS messenger. I shake my head to spill out the strangeness but the eeriness remains.

A breath passes through the branches, a solemn creaking that almost sings. I start to feel really uneasy, and suddenly my senses invert as I emerge from the twilight passage. Strange shapes and colors emerge. I turn to the right and stride into the daylight. The gorse is almost in full flower here. Brambles too, with yellowing leaves. Hanging from the hazel are cuddly toys, trinkets, swaying baubles, boxes which I don’t open. I quicken my step and come to a green gate with a sign that reads “Ballynoe Stone Circle.” I walk over the grass tipped with sparkling frost; it crackles underfoot, deafening, and still, the string seems to tug me and pull me along, fire and ashes, towards the standing stones of the Neolithic burial ground.

I’m going to leave it there because the next paragraph will take me about ten minutes to read. Also, just so you know, the Iron Man is not Marvel Iron Man in this context. It is the Iron Man [from the novel] by Ted Hughes. If you haven’t read the book, everybody, you’ve got to read it so you know what I’m talking about now.

EM: Dara, thank you so much for speaking with us today. It’s been a real pleasure to talk with you about your work and have you read for us. Thank you so much.

DM: Thank you so much. It’s been amazing.

How Human Composting May Help Us Reimagine Death

Architect Katrina Spade invented human composting after learning about the “mortality composting” practices used on some farms. She has worked tirelessly to bring the process to the world, first getting a human composting bill passed in Washington state, then founding Recompose, a Public Benefit Corporation based in Seattle and the world’s first human composting company. Recompose started accepting bodies for human composting in December 2020.

Below, Katrina shares how this journey began and what she’s learned along the way.

On getting started thinking about “greening” the end of life:

I’m Katrina Spade. I was in grad school for architecture about eight years ago, and I actually hadn’t lost anyone I was close to at that point. But I had turned 30, so I was feeling quite mortal. It’s the truth. It happens. 

Architecture school isn’t just about buildings not falling down, it’s also about systems that humans create and use. I started to look at the American funeral industry as a system that we’ve created and that we have to use – we have no choice – and it quickly became just very apparent that I didn’t like the options we had. 

Before I even realized the environmental impact of those options, which are conventional burial and cremation, I was just struck by the fact that neither of them felt very meaningful to me. They didn’t excite me. It occurred to me that both of those options meant that the very last thing I would do on this planet would be to poison it with my body. My body that has been supported by the planet my whole life. It just seemed totally unfair and frankly, totally weird.

I also felt like the whole way that bodies are cared for after death was needlessly impersonal, frightening, inauthentic, and wrapped in plastic. 

So I spent some time thinking about what another option could be. How else can we care for bodies after death?

I started thinking about how we could bring nature back into this in a way that perhaps worked in an urban setting. Natural burial is a beautiful concept in which the body is buried directly in the ground, but that, of course, does take land, so maybe it isn’t an appropriate solution for all our urban dead. 

Luckily, right around that time, a friend of mine called me on the phone. She knew I was thinking about death. She knew I was kind of a compost geek also,  and she asked me if I’d heard about the practice that farmers have used for decades now to recycle farm animals – cows and horses – back to the land. It’s a form of composting called mortality composting.

That was my epiphany moment. 

On transitioning what she learned about mortality composting into something that could apply to humans:

I know I’m not the first person to think of this idea, but I think so far I’m the first person to run with it. I graduated with a thesis idea that was composting humans. My professors didn’t even laugh me out the door. 

The next year, I got a fellowship from an early-stage funder, and they didn’t laugh me out the door either. So I kept working on it and kept finding that more and more people love this concept of turning ourselves into soil after we die.

My favorite way to think of composting is that it’s what’s happening on the forest floor. We have dead organic material like sticks and leaves and the errant chipmunk, and with the help of microbes and lots of oxygen and moisture, those organic materials break down to create this beautiful topsoil. I think of composting as an accelerated version of that process.

My company Recompose is working on providing this option to human beings as an alternative to cremation and burial.

 

On the process of human composting:

The first thing to know is that we are using an in-vessel system. There’s a container that we put all of these wonderful natural materials in, and that helps us both control the process and accelerate it. So it’s faster than what’s happening on the forest floor. 

In 2015, I partnered with some beautiful people at Washington State University, because we knew if we really wanted to make this an option that was available to the public, we had to prove that it was safe and effective for humans as well as for livestock. These beautiful people helped me create a pilot research project at Washington State as part of the soil science department. We were deeply honored to invite six donors to this work. I’ve now met either the donors or the families of these donors, these six wonderful people who donated their bodies to the work and then died. They were part of a pilot to prove that recomposition is, in fact, safe and effective for human beings. 

We took the successful results of that study to the Washington state legislature in 2018. We approached it pretty straightforwardly as providing more options for a family at the end of life, and about having more sustainable choices for our bodies after we die. We actually saw really broad, bipartisan support. We had an 80/16 vote in the house for this bill that would legalize what is essentially human composting in Washington state.

Our vision is not just to turn bodies into soil, although that is, I think, the heart and the hook of it. Our vision is also to create places in our cities where families can come, where the dead are transformed, and also where we can have what is a more participatory, transparent, and authentic experience around this incredible, magical, mysterious event.

On death phobia and how to manage it:

I have deep gratitude for nature showing us how to do death really, really well. I love to be able to take what nature gives us and offer a new way for humans to be cared for. But I think it’s about more than just using nature. It’s about tapping into our own human ability that we all have to care for each other when we die. You don’t have to be an expert to do that. 

I think dying is like giving birth. The only time I went through labor to have a baby, I was thinking about it and reading about it and trying to plan out how it would go. Everyone was like, “No, you can’t do that. It just happens. Your body knows what to do.” I hope that’s what dying is like for me as well.

I think we’re all experts in this already, and we just have to tap into it. 

On the rewards of her work:

I got a letter yesterday from someone who said she was 84 and very grateful that this was going to be an option, hopefully before she died. And I thought, this is incredible timing. I needed that letter right then. That was very special.

The other thing I’ll say is I take tremendous satisfaction from trying to take something from just a concept to fruition. The reason that’s been so satisfying has everything to do with the people I’ve worked with. It’s taken lawyers, legal experts, soil scientists, project managers, engineers, and people who are experts in ritual and ceremony and funeral direction. It makes me very satisfied and feel very lucky to have this movement happening.

Our Top Stories and Projects From 2022

What a year it’s been. We bounced between news that was either terrifying, deeply heartening, or both, but the one thing we collectively understand moving forward is that the connections between us are what will keep us all going. As Sarah Crowell, founder of legendary arts and dance troupe Destiny Arts, once said, “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it—together.” From the bottom of our hearts here at Bioneers, we’re so deeply grateful to you, a community of leaders that we strive to represent and showcase in our programs, storytelling, and convenings. It is entirely due to your support that we’re able to continue the incredible work that makes such a difference each year. 

In this newsletter, we’re celebrating the stories that you loved most in 2022 and the exciting Bioneers projects that are in the world thanks to your inspiration and support. Below, you’ll find fascinating scientific research, engaging interviews, practical information for creating a brighter future, historical analyses, and so much more.

As we look toward the beginning of a new year with nearly endless possibilities, we hope you’ll consider continuing your support or becoming a new supporter of Bioneers at whatever level is comfortable for you. We’ve got even more on the horizon for 2023! Bioneers exists to showcase and lift up the brilliance that is our community. Let’s continue to make waves together.

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

Top Bioneers Articles of 2022

In what ways do men and women differ? Do we find the same differences in our fellow primates? Do apes learn sex roles, or is gender uniquely human? World-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal offers key insights into gender, drawing on his extensive experience observing chimpanzees and bonobos.

Read it.

As awareness grows about the lasting impact of stolen land and slavery in the United States, some Americans are becoming increasingly conflicted about Thanksgiving. While many cherish the turkey and family gatherings associated with the holiday, they also recognize its dark history for Native Americans. Some Native Americans view Thanksgiving as a Day of Mourning, while others have more complex feelings about the holiday. Learn three ways to teach children about Thanksgiving.

Read it.

Americans love to manicure their lawns. It is a sign of pride in homeownership deeply steeped in the “American Dream” to buy a house in the suburbs and raise a family. However, this “dream”  belies deeper, nefarious roots in settler colonization and white supremacy. Read how and why it’s important to decolonize your yard.

Read it.

With the surge of social dislocation, political unrest and illnesses resulting from climate change, it is apparent that our planet is inflamed, and that individual health is inseparable from planetary health. Physician and activist Rupa Marya explores how structural injustices affect both human and environmental health and calls for more holistic approaches to diagnosing imbalances in our bodies and communities to put us on a path of deep personal and collective healing.

Read it.

David Solnit is a San Francisco-based carpenter; climate justice, anti-war, arts, and direct-action organizer; an author; puppeteer, and trainer. Learn more about his history and how he uses “artivism” to spread his messages in this Bioneers interview.

Read it.

Bioneers 2023 Registration Opens Soon!

As we roll into our 34th annual conference, the big wheels of massive change are turning. Sign up for alerts here, and you’ll be the first to know when registration opens; plus, we’ll send you a discount code for 15% the price of your ticket.

Top Podcast Episodes of 2022

In the late 20th century, a handful of scientists proved that aquatic mammals have advanced communication capabilities and a consciousness strikingly similar to humans. Author and adventurer James Nestor leads us on a deep dive into the mystery of marine mammal consciousness, and the story of how a small band of freedivers, pushing the limits of human endurance, is finding that saving the whales may become the story of the whales saving us.

Listen now.

From local communities and states to federal policy, movements to dismantle monopolies are challenging the current system that can be summed up as: Make Feudalism Great Again. Although breaking up is hard to do, we’ve broken up monopolies before. In this second of our two-part program, we join Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell, and Maurice BP-Weeks to survey the landscape of rising antitrust movements seeking to break the stranglehold of corporate power and level the playing field for a democratized economy.

Listen now.

California Indians have survived some of the most extreme acts of genocide committed against Native Americans. We discuss this brutal history with Corrina Gould, a member of  the Lisjan/Ohlone tribe of Northern California and  co-founder and Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. We talk about the importance of addressing that historical trauma, which caused deep wounds that still affect Indigenous Peoples today.

Listen now.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. From the historic Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 to the fossil fuel fights throughout Canada and the U.S. today, Indigenous resistance illuminates an activism founded in a spiritual connection with the web of life and the human community – featuring Julian NoiseCat, Dr. LaNada War Jack and Clayton Thomas-Müller.

Listen now.

This conversation among diverse transformational women leaders offers insight into the depths of what it means to restore the balance between masculine and feminine to bring about wholeness, justice, and true restoration for people and the planet. Join Alice Walker, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Nina Simons, Sarah Crowell, Joanna Macy, and Akaya Windwood to envision a future in which all of us and the planet can thrive.

Listen now.

Most-Watched Videos from 2022

True solidarity requires stitching together what appears separate into a powerful, magnificent whole. Angela Glover Blackwell, a renowned civil rights and public interest attorney, longtime leading racial equity advocate, and founder of PolicyLink, discusses transformative solidarity and why it’s necessary for a thriving multiracial democracy.

Watch now.

California is the world’s largest single destination of oil from the Amazon rainforest, and its extraction contributes to climate change, deforestation, ocean pollution, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples who are the best stewards of  the Amazon’s remaining biodiversity. Two Indigenous Amazonian forest protectors, sisters Nina Gualinga and Helena Gualinga, work with Amazon Watch to appeal to Californians to demand corporate responsibility for people and the planet.

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As climate change and environmental destruction accelerate, women are disproportionately affected but also often on the frontlines of the fight to protect our future. However, their work and leadership are often not recognized or supported. Daughters for Earth, a new initiative founded by female leaders in the women’s rights, environmental, and philanthropic sectors, seeks to address this marginalization. Zainab Salbi, a co-founder and leader of the initiative, is a widely celebrated humanitarian, author, and journalist. She previously founded Women for Women International, and now explores the connection between personal healing and addressing the challenges of climate change.

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Nick Estes, Ph.D. is an Indigenous Rights activist, scholar, writer and author and a co-founder of The Red Nation organization. He speaks about the outsized impact frontline Indigenous communities are having in fighting climate change and resisting extractive industries, the importance and effectiveness of Earth-centered approaches to fighting for Climate Justice, and the overarching goal of being “good ancestors of the future.”

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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 reports 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.

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Bioneers Projects from 2022

In this multimedia series, we focus on the water scarcity facing arid regions, highlighting innovative designs and far-sighted strategies based on principles drawn from conservation hydrology, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and keystone species restoration that demonstrate that there are existing strategies and practices we can implement to sustainably steward our most precious resource and ensure water security for all life.

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Join Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons 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. Inspired and informed by Indigenous wisdom keepers who are leading the way towards a regenerative future, Nina invites women and people of all genders to, as Joanna Macy suggests, “see with new and ancient eyes.”

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Where do psychedelics fit into modern medicine and societal traditions? Because psychedelics are currently generating so much interest and societal attitudes about them are undergoing enormous change, we decided this would be a propitious time to bring together some of the most interesting and topical material in this domain that has been generated under the auspices of Bioneers in the last few years in an easy-to-read and to-share format.

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The Indigeneity Conversations podcast is a project of Bioneers Indigeneity Program, a Native-led Program that promotes Indigenous approaches to solving the earth’s most pressing environmental and social issues. We produce the Indigenous Forum, original media, educational curricula and catalytic initiatives to support the leadership and rights of First Peoples, while weaving networks, partnerships and alliances among Native and non-Native allies. 

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Nature’s Intelligence: Coming Down from the Pedestal | Jeremy Narby and J.P. Harpignies

These days, scientists are starting to talk like shamans and shamans are starting to talk like scientists. So says anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby. And, he says, we need to talk about talking – because words matter. In this episode, Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies speaks with Narby about how the very language and words we use reveal the topography and limits of our worldview, including Western culture’s adamant centuries-long but now increasingly discredited assumption that intelligence is restricted only to human beings.

Featuring

Jeremy Narby, Ph.D., an anthropologist who has been working as Amazonian Projects Coordinator for the Swiss NGO “Nouvelle Planète” since 1990, backing initiatives of Amazonian indigenous organizations in land titling, bilingual and intercultural education, environmental monitoring and sustainable economic development, is the author of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1998) and Intelligence in Nature (2005), and co-edited the anthology Shamans Through Time with Francis Huxley.

J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer, affiliated with Bioneers since 1990, is a Brooklyn, NYC-based consultant, conference producer, copy-editor and writer. A former Program Director at the New York Open Center and a senior review team member for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge from 2010 to 2017, he has authored or edited several books, including Political Ecosystems, Delusions of Normality, Visionary Plant Consciousness, and, most recently, Animal Encounters.

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: Monica Lopez

Resources

Interview with Francis Huxley and Jeremy Narby

Are Plants Intelligent? With Kenny Ausubel and Jeremy Narby

Intelligence in Nature: Our Family Tree of Life

More Bioneers podcasts, articles, and videos featuring Jeremy Narby

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): So it was obvious that there was this human supremacist thing lurking in the word “nature”.And anthropologists have pointed out that this is a concept specific to Western cultures. So you go to the Amazon and ask people there how they say “everything that is not human”, they say, No, we think plants and animals are people like us. We don’t have this idea – “everything that is not human”. 

In this program, we drop in on a provocative conversation about the concept of “Intelligence in Nature” and how language itself can encode our worldviews. Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies talks with anthropologist Jeremy Narby, author of many books including “Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge.” Narby suggests that today you’d be hard pressed to find a scientist who disputes intelligence in nature. But what is intelligence? And what if how we talk about it still signals a human-supremacist bias?

These days, scientists are starting to talk like shamans and shamans are starting to talk like scientists. So says anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby. And, he says, we need to talk about talking – because words matter. The very language and words we use reveal the topography and limits of our worldview, including Western culture’s adamant centuries-long but now increasingly discredited assumption that intelligence is restricted only to human beings.

We join a free-range dialogue between Jeremy Narby and J.P. Harpignies at a Bioneers conference.

J.P. Harpignies (JP): One of your big themes here at the conference has been your insistence on the fact that the words we use and the language we express ourselves in are really determinant in- not just our attitude towards the natural world, but how we behave.

Maybe we should talk a little about that, about why you think that’s so important. And you know- a lot of your life, one of your big intellectual challenges has been this idea of reconciling Indigenous wisdom and ways of knowing with the Western scientific approaches, something that’s very difficult to reconcile, but that’s been your life’s work. And you’ve often used the term being bi-cognitive. Now you’re sort of talking about being plural-lingual. So maybe let’s explore that a bit. 

Jeremy Narby (Jeremy): Ok, well, obviously, it’s complicated to talk about the limits of a language in that language. But that also makes it interesting. For me, it started to become clear when I wrote Intelligence in Nature. 

So English is my mother tongue. I also speak French. I know that when you go from one language to another, things don’t necessarily translate. So I think that experience of having grown up with several languages, and then Spanish, then a bit of German. I’m not bragging. Actually I feel my head’s relatively small. I know some people who can speak a whole bunch of languages. 

But anyway, as I was writing Intelligence in Nature, I still have the reflex of most people just to think that the words that are in our mother tongue are normal there, so “intelligence”. Well, everybody knows what intelligence is, or we think we do. Or okay, you can look in the Dictionary and there’s a definition. Alright. So my book is going to be about intelligence in nature, but the more I started looking into the subject, the problem with the word emerged fairly quickly.

So intelligence is a word that comes from the Latin inter legere, to choose between, so it’s in Western tongues, and if you look in the dictionary, the definition of the word is often in exclusively human terms, which means that it can’t really be applied to other species if we’re strict with words. 

So then you think, well, wait a second, how come intelligence is in exclusively human terms? Well, you look into it and you realize that there’s this thing in Western cultures, human exclusivity, this whole idea that humans have things that the others don’t, and there’s like a kind of a long shopping list that Western thinkers have tended, especially modern Western thinkers, to line up as being what makes us above all other species. And you think, but hold on. What is this above other species business? I mean, we’re all—we’re mammals, after all, so where is the above? 

Well, we say there’s a whole list of things that humans do and that other species don’t do, and intelligence is one of them; that over the centuries, Western thinkers have said humans have intelligence and the others have instinct or– 

JP: (overlapping): Well, but those goal posts have moved quite a bit. Right? Because a lot of recent research on animal—I mean, when you wrote [CROSSTALK] your book, it was early, but now there’s been quite a lot…[CROSSTALK]

But when I was doing the research in 2002, so, yes, the goal posts have been moved all over the place, but when a Japanese researcher showed that a slime mold could solve a maze and use the word intelligence in Nature magazine in 2002, all the Western commentators said, Wait, you can’t use the word intelligence for a single cell of slime.

I remember he said that if he used the word “cleverness” they were better with it.

Jeremy: (overlapping): “Smart. Smart.”

JP: Yeah, “smart”. 

Jeremy: But, so it was obvious that there was this human supremacist thing lurking in the word intelligence. Okay…And then I found that it was also lurking in the word “nature”, so that if you look in the dictionary, “nature” is defined as the phenomena of the physical world – plants, animals, and the landscape, as opposed to humans and human creations. This is the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word – as opposed to humans and human creations. Nature is everything that is not human.

And anthropologists have pointed out that this is a concept specific to Western cultures. So you go to the Amazon and ask people there how they say “everything that is not human”, they say, No, we think plants and animals are people like us. We don’t have this idea – “everything that is not human”. 

So then you think, okay, so let’s wind the tape back. So English is my mother tongue. Nature, we know I like nature; nature’s plants and animals. Okay. But it means everything that is not human. Yeah, it’s kind of a weird concept. I thought that nature was a natural concept. I thought nature existed. I like nature. I’m a friend of nature. But actually the concept is this weird concept.

JP: (overlapping): So what do you think about how to transcend—to deal with that, because as you were saying, the only languages we have are the ones that we are raised with, so how to—Is there any escape?

JEREMY: Yeah. There’s escape. Like, for example, I tend to not use the word nature. I tend to say plants and animals, or the living world, or all living organisms. You know, there are ways of—or the biosphere. 

JP: Or the web of life. 

Jeremy: The web of life. There’s all kind of ways of talking, but… So then, both intelligence and nature are centered on humans but in opposed ways. In fact, “intelligence in nature”, if you’re strict with words, is a contradiction in terms, because intelligence excludes non-humans, and nature excludes humans. But that just shows that our categories or our concepts have these blind angles.

So I think this is interesting, but it means that if we want to move forward with understanding what we would call “intelligence in nature”, or let’s just say “the full capacities of all living organisms”, if we want to understand that, doing away with concepts that put a difference between us and the other species seems like a good move. In other words, okay, if intelligence is problematic because it’s irremediably a human exclusivity, forget about it; we need a new concept. 

If nature is problematic because it also excludes humans and puts a difference between us and other species, then we don’t need it; we can use alternatives. 

JP: There is a sort of more underground philosophical tradition in the West, of panpsychism, this idea that consciousness permeates everything in the universe, even inanimate—what we think of as inanimate—that’s probably another problematic word. So—

Jeremy: Still, but you note that — let’s call it the capitalist world that has been established; this sort of huge industry, market-driven, worldwide distribution containers, plastic objects made all over the place, that world is a world that has considered plants and animals as objects, not as subjects. So there’s humans on one hand. They’re the subjects, they’re the consumers, and all the rest are objects. We can wrap them in plastic and sell them. And that’s what’s going on. 

So, this view that humans are somehow above all the rest and can do with all the rest what they want, is the world we live in. 

Asháninka tribe

Host: For over 30 years, Jeremy Narby has worked with the Swiss-based nonprofit Nouvelle Planète supporting Indigenous Amazonian initiatives in Peru for land conservation and cultural preservation. Living and working with tribes including the Asháninka, he participated in their ceremonial use of ayahuasca, a psychedelic plant medicine central to their medical and spiritual practices. These powerful experiences ignited in him a desire to seek to build bridges between shamanic and scientific worldviews.

JP: So one thing that will certainly interest probably a certain subset of listeners, is because you’ve written about ayahuasca, and ayahuasca experiences had a big influence on shaping your world vision when you were living with the Asháninka in your younger days, how do you think the use of sacred plants and ayahuasca in particular, and other sacred plants, might influence that type of—that linguistic struggle or does one access states that are beyond language or apart from language? Or what do you think the relationship is?

Jeremy: Well, I can talk on the basis of personal experience. For me it’s been clear that ayahuasca has kind of heightened or enhanced my attention to words, how one pronounces them, the choice of words, also the sound of one’s voice, that what comes out of one’s mouth counts and participates in the creation of the world. So that may sound a little bit – I don’t know what – but, yeah, words matter. What you say matters. And if you can say things clearly and with a pure heart, it has a ring that people can hear, and so you really can transmit, well, knowledge or these things through how you speak. Yeah, that is a kind of an ayahuasca insight. 

Language almost seems more concrete in that state of mind, or breath, certainly. And actually in the ayahuasca experience, people sing spontaneously, and as they sing, they experience the power of melody in their voice, that it’s really this beautiful thing that we can make these sounds with our voice and add meaning and melody to them. It’s such a precious and beautiful thing, that you don’t want to spend your day cussing and having garbage coming out of your mouth. 

JP: Do you think that those early ayahuasca experiences, you describe them as having really changed your worldview. How does that apply to this issue of language? Do you think the seeds of your questioning of Western language began then, or do you think it’s something else in your anthropological training that triggered that, or some combination of the two?

Jeremy: Well, it’s true that the ayahuasca made me think about language and how you say things, and then how when you say things in one language, it’s not the same as the other, and so forth. Then I started writing The Cosmic Serpent, and trying to think about things, and realized that actually it’s like two different systems of logic here. It’s not just that we’re in English on the one hand and in Asháninka on the other hand. It’s, we’re in Western science on the one hand and in a kind of a shamanic epistemology on the other. And it’s kind of like oil and vinegar, and making sense of one from the other is difficult. 

And then I started seeing it was towards the end of writing The Cosmic Serpent that I understood that it was kind of like bilingualism, and that you could look at the world from the point of view of science, and so the molecules that it contains, and so what does science tell us about ayahuasca and the brain, and so on and so forth. And then you could look at the same scene from the point of view of shamanic knowledge. And they’d be fairly complementary. The Cosmic Serpent was all about that, how you could reunite these two different gazes that had been separated, and actually they’re surprisingly coherent and agree on many fundamental levels about the nature of nature. 

So, hmm, it was like the metaphor I had, it was like a reserve camera angle. My main camera angle was Western science, but we could see the replay from a reserve angle, and you could look at any question, like how does a DNA molecule function. Well, seen from the shamanic side, there must be some portents of vibration, melody, if what the shamans say is true about the essences that animate living beings, then vibration must be part of what makes a molecule tick. Well, okay, so that’s what you can get from the reserve angle. It may not—These are ideas for future research, for example.

And so then I understood that what was at stake, or what could then happen, if you could line up science and shamanic knowledge, then it would be a question of learning to go back and forth, like a bilingual person. And as somebody who’s had experience learning languages, other languages to the point of more or less becoming bilingual, there’s a period when you learn the second language where you cease to speak your mother tongue as well as you used to, yet you don’t speak the second language fluently yet either, so you’re in this kind of no-person’s land, so you speak two languages poorly. And what it takes is a lot of going back and forth, and that’s how you become bilingual by going back and forth a lot. 

So the idea was that this was like bi-cognitivism. So it’s not two languages but two systems of knowledge.

Host: When we return, Jeremy Narby and J.P. Harpignies survey the erosion of the heretofore seemingly unbreachable dichotomies between scientific and shamanic ways of seeing the world. They suggest it might behoove us to try to come down from our imagined pedestal to be able to see ourselves as a part of nature, rather than apart from it.

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature…

You can visit bioneers.org to subscribe to our newsletters and podcasts, check out Deep Dives on the topics that matter to you most, and learn about our events. That’s bioneers.org

Today, science has established beyond dispute human beings’ literal kinship with all other plant and animal species. Half the genes of a banana have exact equivalence in the human genome. Chimpanzees, bonobos and humans share close to 99% identity in their genomes. There are genes common to both humans and bacteria. In other words, we’re family.

At the same time, a growing body of research has convincingly demonstrated that intelligent behaviors and capacities are widely distributed throughout nature. Pigeons have a better memory for paintings than college students do. Sheep have a better memory for human faces than people do. The list goes on and on. 

Yet how does the illusion that we humans are the only intelligent species, persist so tenaciously? Is it part of a Russian doll of false dichotomies that mistakenly separate humans from nature? Might our language itself be trapping us into faulty worldviews?

Let’s drop back into the mystery with Jeremy Narby and J.P Harpignies, talking about talking…

Jeremy: There’s that good old dichotomy where you have matter on one hand and then spirit on the other. And that’s what we then learn looking at this is that it’s not that Asháninka people don’t do dichotomies, they have a dichotomy between visible and invisible in that word “maninkari”, it’s that their dichotomies are a lot less watertight than Western ones. That’s what characterizes Western thinking. It’s not only that it’s dualist and it makes dichotomies, but that the categories are so watertight. 

JP: So you think fluidity is a key aspect of the Indigenous worldview that we lack in Western languages.

Jeremy: This has been commented on by different anthropologists and so on, is that there is an increased permeability in the categories in Indigenous traditions worldwide, really. You can think of it as the yin yang symbol, where you have not only white and black surrounding each other, but the little bit of black in the white and the little bit of white in the black. 

JP: Well that’s the dialectic where you get something else that results from the two forces. There’s a kind of a synthesis or interpenetration or—

Jeremy: But it comes from categories being less water tight. 

JP: Right. 

Jeremy: So what’s also interesting about thinking about other cultures and about the limits of our vocabulary to try to understand those other cultures is that we think we’re trying to understand the others but at some point we’re also looking in the mirror and understanding ourselves. So like, you know, by trying to understand Amazonian reality in English, I’ve learned a lot about the limits of English and of Western thought. And that so—By trying to understand Amazonian logic, I realize the extent to which my Western logic is filled with this tendency to dichotomize you know—mind-body—

I used to think I have a body. I used to think I know what a body is. But actually the body is the result of an opposition between mind and body. You go to Asháninka people, of course they recognize that you have a hand, an arm, they have the word for knee, foot, leg and so on. They don’t have a word for body. They don’t have a word for mind either. They don’t make a separation between mind and body. And when you ask them to say body, they say all my skin standing. [LAUGHTER] So it takes—So actually their word, it’s more like there’s a skin capsule. So that’s their view of the world.

And then what we would call mind is that with which we know, it’s the same word as heart. So then I go back to body and mind. I think that, well, first of all, body is a pretty strange concept, because it is this part of this whole thing of me that is not my mind. And then you think, wait a second, but this idea that there’s a mind that is entirely separate from the body.

JP: Well there also is the Buddhist tradition which tells you that you don’t have a body or a mind, as you think of them, and that your body, in fact, looks distinct but in fact it’s interacting with the environment, molecules are leaving and coming, and there is no clear boundary. And in the same way your mind was deeply influenced by your education, your school, it’s permeable. So there are other traditions that question this.

But also the other thing is that—

Jeremy (overlapping): Well, I’d like to make clear that [CROSSTALK] I don’t doubt that I’m an organism.

JP: Right.

Jeremy: I actually do like my whole physical setup. I’m not complaining.

JP: And if you stub your toe, you—

Jeremy: It hurts.

JP: It hurts. Yeah.

Jeremy: But I think that getting away from seeing it as being a sort of a body on the one hand and a mind on the other is what I want to do, because I want to understand myself, and I think that—like calling it body is like turning it into an object a little bit. Why do that?

JP: Yeah. But I mean, there is no complete way out, because we are stuck with language, to some degree. Right? So every effort we make in this will be partial. Don’t you think?

Jeremy: Well, like I could say I think of myself as a pulsating organism. Okay? Or a wet organism. Alright. I do try to think of myself that way. We could do—So it recognizes the physicality, but—And body, which is this kind of weird concept resulting from a pretty water tight dichotomy, we don’t need it.

JP: So, Jeremy, are you thinking of writing a new Dictionary of appropriate terms to describe the human condition? And which words to avoid and new ways to describe ourselves?

Jeremy: You know, it’s more like it’d be a guide to how to think ourselves out of this mess. And it’s true. I think that—

JP: Liberation through nomenclature…

Jeremy: Yeah, kind of. But obviously one would want to avoid word police, absolutely. But just that becoming aware that I don’t think that we can really remove ourselves from the pedestal we’ve put ourselves on relative to all the other species if we continue using the word nature, because it’s a—it’s a pedestal word. So there are pedestal words, and avoiding them is part of coming down from the pedestal. It’s as simple as that.

JP: The linguistic smashing of the pedestal…

Jeremy: Or just the coming down from. No smashing. 

JP: No smashing. Okay.

Jeremy: Just get down from the pedestal.

JP: So, Jeremy, the idea of your work having come at a time when very few people were open to this idea of intelligence in nature, forgive the use of those two terms, but it was the title of your book–[LAUGHTER] Do you—Have you seen progress in terms of the mainstream scientific establishment in terms of catching up with the ideas you expressed in that book? And do you see hope there, or do you think it’s just partial penetration and much more needs to be done?

Jeremy: Yeah. Actually the funny thing was that obviously my experience is specific to the quirk of what I lived, but the quirk of what I lived was publishing Intelligence in Nature in 2005. The book was mainly ignored, like it was non-reviewed and so on. Then in the months that followed and the years that followed, the examples of the intelligence in nature reported by scientists kept on cropping up, new ones, like some have said there’s been a revolution in vegetable biology since 2005. 

I mean, the timing was almost perfect, not for book sales because the book didn’t sell, but it was like all that science has produced since then has been an enormous confirmation of the surprising capacities of plants and of uni-cellulars, of fungi, of trees and networks of trees, and interspecies communications, and at this point, there’s no articles on stupidity in nature, and thousands of articles and bits of research on these surprising capacities of all kinds of species, including communication, learning, remembering, perceiving, even plants. They perceive. They smell. They hear. It’s just been demonstrated that plants can hear the sound of water and so on. So there’s all this research that has unfolded in the last decade, so, yeah, clearly it’s been shifting. And it’s funny how it happens, because for so long the subject of the intelligence of plants and so forth, this was almost like a taboo subject.

JP: Well hippie. It sounded like hippie nonsense…

Jeremy: Yeah. But now it’s like everybody knows that plants are intelligent. So I’m really happy. It’s never occurred to me to have been so right so fast. These things usually take longer. Now I don’t think there’s any argument. 

All plants and animals are objects in the eye of the law, except some are starting to receive personhood, except person is another one of these human-centered concepts. The first definition of the word, if you look in the Dictionary, is a human being regarded as an individual. So by definition, this is what critics say, you can’t grant personhood to other species because it doesn’t make sense.

JP: Although French is a weird one because it’s person and no one. 

Jeremy: Yeah. And the etymology, “person” in the Greek, refers to a mask—

JP: Right. 

Jeremy: And the mask is—can apply to anybody. In other words, person is one of these complicated concepts, and it’s probably going to be—get on the list of concepts that need to be avoided if—

JP: In your linguistic dictionary.

Jeremy: Getting down from the pedestal. We’re going to have to drop that one too. [LAUGHTER]

JP: I think we just came up with your next writing project. [LAUGHTER]

Jeremy: The list. Yeah.

Bioneers 2023: Transformation, Regeneration, Celebration

As Bioneers rolls into our 34th annual gathering, the big wheels of massive change are turning. Climate disruption bears down daily, and there’s a widely felt morning-after awakening that it’s going to crash the economy and bring civilization to its knees. Although the regime shift to renewables is now an accelerating inevitability, it’s going to take relentless political action. To beat the clock, we also need to override the doom loop of delay and propaganda the desperate fossil fuel industry will keep pushing.  

Meanwhile, the unprecedented movements of the past decade for liberation, justice and multicultural democracy are swelling to challenge the right-wing populist and neo-fascist forces underwritten by cynical plutocratic elites. “Make feudalism great again” is proving to be a marketing challenge. Something’s gotta give.

At the core is a crisis of democracy: a radical disconnect between the world people want and the world corporations and their client governments have hijacked. The climate crisis and the inequality crisis are the same crisis. Our separation from nature and our separation from each other are the same dis-integration. The choice is clear: nihilism or regeneration. Shattering or wholeness.

Slouching toward sustainability will not turn the tide. Only immediate, bold and transformative action will enable us to make the leap across the abyss. As Bioneers has long shown, the solutions are largely present, or we know what directions to head in. The solutions residing in nature surpass our conception of what’s even possible. Nature has a profound capacity for healing, and we can act as healers. What we do to each other we do to the Earth, and we’ll have peace only when we practice justice, a process that never ends. We can marry the genius of nature with human creativity to heal the web of life and ourselves.

Bioneers is about a revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart.  “As world leaders take us on a guided tour of Hell, let love reign,” as Robbie Robertson puts it. Since 1990, the Bioneers conference has illuminated the topography of transformative change. This transformation inspires a change of heart, celebrating the unity and intrinsic value of all life.

The rise of regenerative social movements and civil society leadership hold the greatest power and promise for successfully navigating the “Great Unraveling.” For over three decades, the Bioneers Conference has served as a trellis on which this visionary movement of movements has grown and grown together around authentic “solve-the-whole problem” solutions. This historic shift to become an ecologically literate and just civilization heralds a declaration of interdependence.

Never has it been more vital that we come together around the council fire to share what we’ve learned, link arms, fill our hearts and vision, and align ourselves to prevail for the long haul.

Especially in these darkest of times, we come together to regenerate and celebrate. We invite you to join forces with the Bioneers community of leadership in this time when we’re all called upon to be leaders. As David Orr says, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”

REGISTRATION WILL OPEN JANUARY 5, 2023.

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