What Now? Pandemic. Social unrest. And war.

This article was authored by Mark Trahant and originally published at Indian Country Today. Read the original here.

The list goes on and on: The pandemic. George Floyd’s murder and the growing call for racial justice. Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and, at the same time, an orchestrated attempt to overturn a democratic election. Global protests over vaccines and masks. And now war. How does this make any sense?

“Could there be a symbiotic relationship between COVID-19 and conflict?” ask scholars Alexi Gugushvilil and Martin McKee. In a paper written in October 2020 for the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, UN Secretary-General António Guterres appealed for an immediate global ceasefire to enable the world to confront ‘a common enemy’ but his plea went largely unheeded,” the scholars wrote. “We argue that there is a bidirectional relationship between COVID-19 and conflicts: on the one hand, circumstances associated with wars may facilitate pandemic spread; on the other hand, COVID-19 has already heightened xenophobia and nationalism, which in turn can encourage armed confrontations.”

Gugushvilli is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oslo. McKee is professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is also past president of The European Public Health Association and a health policy expert on the former Soviet Union.

“Wars and epidemics have a long and close history, going back at least to the well-documented Plague of Athens in the 5th century BCE,” the scholars wrote. And a common thread is when the national economies are shrinking.

The link between war and plague is also a familiar story in Indigenous communities. Europeans brought with them dozens of infectious diseases along with their weapons of war. Smallpox, chickenpox, cholera and even, the common cold.

There is also a relationship between mass protests over such things as mask requirements and war. There were more than 139,000 recorded protests in 2020, an increase of 68.5 percent from the previous year. More than 33,000 of those protests were directly related to COVID-19 and responses to the pandemic such as the trucker blockade in Canada and the convoy of trucks now headed to Washington, D.C.

“These protests are an obvious marker of public discontent that can easily be exploited by powerful forces. here, history again offers a warning,” the scholars wrote. “Those German municipalities that suffered most in the 1918 influenza outbreak were the ones that saw the greatest electoral gains for the Nazi Party a decade later.”

So what now? Will history repeat or even, as some say, rhyme? That question depends on the policy choices that are ahead.

The Economist says: “Over the past decade, intensifying geopolitical risk has become a feature of world politics, yet the world economy and financial markets have shrugged it off … Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to break this pattern, because it will result in the isolation of the world’s 11th-largest economy and one of its largest commodity producers.”

That means higher oil and gas prices because Russia is one the world’s largest producers, and it dominates the European market for natural gas. On Thursday the price of oil topped $100 a barrel (a cost that will soon show up at gas stations) and Germany said it would no longer permit a pipeline project that is supposed to transport natural gas from Russia to Europe.

And while it’s true that Russia views NATO as a threat; this invasion is also about natural resources, climate change, and shrinking economies.

“First, we know that it is only because of oil and gas that Russia is able to afford this military invasion,” said Jade Begay, climate justice campaign director for NDN Collective. “This makes it clear that not only are oil and gas used to carry out war but are also a root cause for exponential climate change. Second, as an organizer who is actively working to shut down fossil fuel infrastructure, I am hyper aware that this conflict will potentially drive up domestic oil and gas development, onshore and offshore gas leasing, and/or potentially roll back recent wins when it comes to fossil fuels, thus contributing to an increase in carbon emissions. Finally, I’d be remiss to not mention the impact that militaries have on the climate, when it comes to the U.S., our military is the single largest institutional polluter in the world, which creates more greenhouse emissions than 140 other countries.”

The Economist predicted that Russia may deliberately create bottlenecks in order to raise prices. 

Normally governments go out of their way to limit the impact of war (or any other disaster) on the price at the pump. Governments do not want people mad at them over higher prices. But what if this time is different? What if this is a proxy war for oil?

President Joe Biden has talked about climate change as an existential threat. So perhaps the smart play is to lean into the price increases and cut off Russia’s ability to market oil and gas.

As the president said after the invasion: “President Putin has provided the world with an overwhelming incentive to move away from Russian gas and to other forms of energy.”

Some fear that the White House won’t make the hard call.

“First and foremost, our organization, the Indigenous Environmental Network, stands against any and all forms of imperialist expansionism, which we’re seeing right now with Russia invading Ukraine. But we also saw that when they already invaded and annexed Crimea, which impacted Indigenous communities who live in Crimea, and now we’re seeing potential violations of human rights in Ukraine at this very moment,” said Dallas Goldtooth from the network. “It has to be stated that almost any and all conflicts in the world today implicate fossil fuels. Russia is the second largest producer of natural gas in the world behind the United States. And is the top supplier of gas to Europe. Our fear is that this conflict will only deepen the pockets of the oil and gas industry as any modern war does, but more, it will give the Biden administration further reason to delay action, to stop the expansion of fossil fuels here in the United States.”

But there is another alternative.

Begay is Diné and Tesuque Pueblo of New Mexico. “Over the last month,” she said, “fossil fuels have been at the center of how nations are holding leverage against one another, point and case, the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline. This should be a clear signal to our leaders that we need a Just Transition & Green New Deal now, so that we are liberated from this toxic dependency on oil & gas.”

“This is a moment to seize on the call and demand for a just transition away from fossil fuels,” Goldtooth said. Too often the conflict over fossil fuels come at the detriment of Black, Brown, Indigenous and working class peoples. “Here’s a moment for us to step up to the plate and say, ‘Hey, we’re not gonna be feeding the beast anymore. We’re gonna stop the exports of oil and gas.’ We can take an opportunity to set the path forward because the U.S. is the largest provider of natural gas on the planet. They can take, make a solid step in the right direction by stopping the expansion of that sector and investing in communities for a just transition.”

A Russian-controlled Ukraine could add to the global warming matrix because it could expand oil and gas as well as uranium and other minerals that can be mined.

Then again Europe might be ready for a different energy.

“There’s this narrative, this false narrative out there, that to step away from fossil fuels is impossible,” he said. Goldtooth is Mdewakanton Dakota and Dine. “Countries are already doing it. Iceland’s a great example. It’s getting the vast majority of its energy from renewable sources. On a smaller scale, tribal nations and small communities are already set in the path forward on how to step away from oil and gas.

And so we just need to continue to invest in those local visions of how we wanna make a better future for our communities, for our people and for the ecosystems around us. So that the path forward is out there, we’re just not elevating those uplifting those stories.”

Putin’s War Highlights the Dangers of Fossil Fuel Dependency

This article was originally posted on 350.org

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked the world. We stand, along with millions of others, in solidarity for Ukrainians at this time of unimaginable hardship. Underlining this solidarity should be a vision for a more peaceful, secure future free of fossil fuel dependency.

The invasion has highlighted the core role that fossil fuels play in driving conflict and have become a key battleground upon which this war in particular, and responses to it, are being played out. As long as we are dependent on fossil fuels, our geopolitical, economic, and energy security will be at the behest of an ever-changing political-economic landscape that climate change will only exacerbate. 

As the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report on climate impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability released last week confirmed, the effects of climate change are manifesting at a faster rate than scientists had predicted. The report confirms that unless drastic action to limit greenhouse gas emissions are enacted swiftly, we will miss the short window we have to avert the worst impacts of climate change. It’s not too late, but we must act now.

We need a concerted government-sponsored push to energy efficiency and renewables. Rather than replace one source of fossil fuels with another, we must use our collective power to demand from our leaders that they invest in a new path forward. It’s our responsibility, as the climate movement, to raise our voices louder than the vested interests in the fossil fuel industry are doing. We are calling for a radical shift to renewable energy — for a more resilient, peaceful, and secure future.

“Climate change and conflict have the same roots — fossil fuels — and our dependence on them. We will not surrender in Ukraine, and we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate resilient future.”- Svitlana Romanko

Fossil fuels create conflict, and are the backbone of Russia’s power

The invasion of Ukraine demonstrates how our dependence on Russian oil and gas enables dictators like Putin to use fossil fuel money to carry out and sustain devastating wars. As the second-largest exporter of gas and the third largest exporter of oil, the Russian economy is heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, which make up 36% of the country’s total budget. Oil and gas also contribute significantly to Putin’s personal wealth while fueling the country’s military resources and keeping the Russian currency, the Ruble, afloat.

25% of Europe’s oil and 40% of its fossil gas comes from Russia. Russia’s position as one of the world’s dominant energy suppliers serves as a point of leverage for Putin geopolitically — particularly in Europe — as Western leaders know that directly sanctioning the supply of oil and gas would create dire economic hardship for their constituents. If Putin decided to hold hostage Russia’s supply of oil to Europe, prices would directly impact the livelihoods of millions of people who depend on it.  

The fossil fuel industry’s response to the invasion 

Since the start of the war, the tightening of supplies of oil and gas coming out of Russia have resulted in a sharp rise in prices globally. The fossil fuel industry outside Russia didn’t waste any time in attempting to leverage this situation in their favor. On February 24th, the day of the invasion, the American Petroleum Institute called for increasing fossil fuel extraction saying it was ‘crucial’ that the United States invest in more pipelines, drilling, and fracking. 

In response to the invasion, we are seeing Western fossil fuel companies announce their intention to pull out of the country. BP announced it will cut ties with Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft, a significant development as the company constitutes the biggest foreign investor in Russia, and abandoning its stake will amount to a $25 billion loss while shrinking its oil and gas reserves in half.

ExxonMobil has newly released a statement announcing it will comply with sanctions imposed on Russia by “discontinuing operations and developing steps to exit the Sakhalin-1 venture” (a project which has exported over 1 billion barrels of oil and 1.03 billion cubic feet of natural gas since it began operations in 2005). Shell has announced plans to exit operations in Russia including its flagship Sakhalin 2 LNG plant, Engie of France, ENI of Italy, Equinor of Norway, and Uniper of Germany have stated intention to pull out out varying degrees. 

In President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1st, he announced the US and its allies will release 60 million barrels of oil to help alleviate the surge in prices that will come as a result of sanctions against Russian oil, with US oil accounting for half of this amount.

The fossil fuel industry has never done anything like this. It’s a clear signal that a major shift in global energy markets is underway. We need to demand that our leaders direct that shift towards clean energy, not more fossil fuels.

We need a just transition to renewable energy, now

Germany has responded by announcing it will move up its 100% renewable energy goals to 2035, rapidly accelerating expansion of wind and solar power and moving off from fossil fuels fifteen years sooner than it had previously declared. This is a significant step, and we’d love to see more of this climate leadership around the world. As we move further towards reducing dependency on gas and other fossil fuels, any one country or leader’s decision to cut off supply will lose its leverage. 

A transition from Russian fossil fuels to non-Russian fossil fuels is not acceptable. Though this transition will not be seamless, we must push leaders to accelerate the investment required. Waiting will only make it harder.

We in the climate movement are the counter-voice to the fossil fuel industry. If we don’t speak up, the only voice making demands of our politicians are fossil-fueled voices. In our globalized world, crises like this impact us all, though not equally. 

The latest IPCC report concluded with the following statement: “climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.

We stand in solidarity with the people and communities affected by this attack on their lives and livelihoods, and fully support Ukrainian calls for sanctions, international solidarity and resources. People in Ukraine, like people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, are demanding an end to economic systems that allow their lives to be thrown into violent chaos on the whims of despots and profiteers.

It is our responsibility to show leaders that a transition to renewable energy is the only promising pathway to bringing about the peace and resilience we all deserve. A better world is possible.

Inheriting the Mantle of Tomorrow: Youth Climate Activism is Transforming Our Future

As a member of the Bioneers community, you frequently hear and learn from leaders on the frontlines of local, national, and global movements of dire importance. These are individuals who rise up for justice and a brighter future, even as many of the obstacles they face seem, at times, insurmountable. When we ask these leaders what gives them hope for the future, we often hear the same response: the resilience and vision of young people – and the power of intergenerational partnerships to drive change. Youth leaders and activists, having inherited a world warped by their forebears, are taking matters into their own hands and realizing incredible progress.

This week, we highlight the next generation of leaders and the inspiring movements that they’ve built.


9 Inspiring Bioneers Youth Leaders Share Their Knowledge

For many young people, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of the systems that exploit the planet at the expense of future generations. With their futures on the line, youth are inspiring hope, kindling a generation of changemakers and leaders. In this article, we highlight just a few of the incredible next generation of movement activists who are taking on the mantle of leadership.

Read more here.

Youth Climate Justice with Nalleli Cobo, Alexandria Gordon, & Alexia Laclerqc

Young people are prime movers of social change, and the values and skills they absorb in their formative years impact our collective future. Nurturing youth leadership helps sow the seeds for a more regenerative, sustainable, and equitable society. Three inspiring youth leaders, Nalleli Cobo, Alexandria Gordon, and Alexia Laclerqc are a few of the incredible leaders inheriting the mantle of tomorrow. 

Nalleli Cobo – On the Frontlines of Environmental Injustice: Standing up to Urban Oil Drilling | Nalleli Cobo began her journey as a youth activist growing up across the street from an oil drilling site in Los Angeles. As her family and neighbors suffered from health problems as a result, Nalleli marched to the frontlines of a growing movement of youth climate justice leaders. 

Alexandria Gordon – The Power of Young People | With a seemingly insurmountable mantle defined by climate change, systemic racism, and corruption, youth activists are leading the movement to pave a path toward a sustainable future. Alexandria Gordon, a winner of this year’s prestigious Brower Youth Award, shares her experiences as a young person working to create a world that can work for everyone.

Alexia Leclercq – Climate Justice Must Be Social Justice for All | Building a sustainable climate justice movement means centering the needs of the communities at the nexus of intersecting violences. Environmental justice organizer and one of this year’s Brower Youth Award winners Alexia Leclercq shares her passion for these rarely discussed aspects of intersectionality. 

Our Power: Exemplary Young Activists—the 2021 Brower Youth Awards Winners

The Brower Youth Awards, named after the late, legendary environmental giant, David Brower, are one of the most prestigious prizes for youth activists. These young mobilizers, organizers, and paradigm-shifting leaders discuss their activist trajectories, the challenges they face, and their aspirations for the future.

Watch here.

Youth-led Campaigns to Follow & Support

Start:Empowerment | Social and environmental justice education non-profit implementing a justice-focused education and programming in schools and community spaces to achieve social-environmental justice and liberation for all.

Apache-Stronghold | A nonprofit community organization resisting colonialism by building a better community through neighborhood programs and civic engagement in Arizona. 

Zero Hour | A movement of young people acting on the urgency of climate change, Zero Hour is coordinating a march and advocacy day in Washington D.C. 

Youth vs Apocalypse | Oakland-based org of diverse climate justice activists working together to lift the voices of youth for a livable climate and an equitable, sustainable, and just world. 

March for Our Lives | Born out of the Parkland tragedy, March For Our Lives is a youth-led movement dedicated to promoting civic engagement, education, and direct action by youth to eliminate the epidemic of gun violence.Sunrise Movement | A youth movement to stop climate change, end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics, and elect leaders who stand up for the health and wellbeing of all people while creating millions of green jobs.

Music Video – “Remember” by MaMuse featuring Claudia Cuentas

Inspired by traditions of folk and gospel, MaMuse is a musical duo comprised of Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker. Interweaving brilliant and haunting harmony with lyrics born of honed emotional intelligence, MaMuse invokes a musical presence that inspires the opening of the heart to nurture love and inspire. In their latest song, “Remember”, MaMuse collaborates with Claudia Cuentas, a Peruvian artist whose work explores trauma, Indigenous knowledge, decolonization, and healing.

Watch here.

Chacruna Religion & Psychedelics Forum

The Religion and Psychedelics Forum will feature three days of panels and discussion exploring the role psychedelics may have played in the history of religion, as well as the role that religion plays in the modern psychedelic renaissance. Take a multidisciplinary and intercultural approach, this forum will examine important questions around mystical experience, Indigenous spirituality, religious freedom, and drug policy, and how psychedelics intersect with both Eastern and Western religious traditions.

Register here.

What We’re Tracking:

  • From E&E News: “Fighting for my future’: Teenage climate activism takes off” | A student coalition in Indiana is inspiring landmark climate legislation to confront the climate crisis. 
  • From Mother Jones: “The Oil Industry Is Terrified of College Kids” | Harvard University’s decision to stop investing in fossil fuel companies was heralded as a win in the fight against climate change. In this interview from Mother Jones, Connor Chung, one of the students behind the movement that led to the historic decision, talks about the role of climate finance and divestment.
  • From The Lawrence Hall of Science: “Lingering Concerns & Signs of Hope for Nation’s Outdoor Science Programs” | Despite outdoor learning being an ideal environment for students during the pandemic, a new policy brief from the Lawrence Hall of Science found that millions of children have missed out on enriching outdoor science education. 

Sole Food Street Farms: Growing Food and Providing a Sense of Belonging

Sole Food Street Farms in Vancouver, British Columbia, founded by farmer, author, photographer, and organic and urban farming pioneer, Michael Ableman, is North America’s largest urban farm project. It has transformed acres of previously vacant and contaminated land into urban farms that grow artisanal quality fruits and vegetables. By providing jobs, agricultural training, and inclusion in a dynamic farming community, the Sole Food project has empowered dozens of individuals with limited resources who are managing addiction and chronic mental health problems.

In his poignant and inspiring book, Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016), Michael Ableman chronicled in words and images the challenges, growth and success of this groundbreaking project, sharing his life-changing experiences as well as those of the residents-turned-farmers whose lives have been touched by Sole Food. It contains a number of moving accounts from residents in the notoriously low-income, drug-blighted neighborhood about how the farm changed their lives.   

Michael Ableman also runs the 125-acre Foxglove Farm in British Columbia selling a wide diversity of crops at local farmers markets and regional restaurants.  

In this transcribed, edited excerpt from a conversation with Michael, he discussed his experiences with people, the process of creating and sustaining the project, and the agricultural innovations he implemented in the context of the urban environment of a very distressed community. All photos were taken by Michael Ableman.

All photos are from Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier and are copyrighted and cannot be distributed, reproduced, or reused in any way without the explicit permission of the photographer (Michael Ableman).

MICHAEL ABLEMAN: I founded Sole Food Street Farms 14 years. My primary goal was to provide training and meaningful agricultural employment to individuals on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, many of whom were dealing with long-term addiction, mental illness, and material poverty. It’s the poorest postal code in Canada, and it encompasses about a 15-square-block area almost entirely inhabited by people dealing with serious drug addiction. The open use of drugs on the streets is a daily norm.

The goal of the project is to give some of these residents a little bit of support and a reason to get out of bed each day, to provide them with an opportunity to join a community of farmers and to grow food, and to give them a sense of purpose and belonging.

Sole Food Street Farm photo by Michael Ableman

When you’re growing food and you work with your hands in the soil, all kinds of amazing things can happen for your mental health. People who work at Sole Food are able to step out of the very stressful, dangerous neighborhood streets and enter these farms where they can do meaningful work in a supportive environment.

We produce a pretty staggering amount of food–30 to 40 tons of food annually on giant parking lots. We designed an innovative system that allows us to both isolate the growing medium from pavement or contaminated soil (which are issues that exist in every city) and to move on short notice (because the value of the land is quite high). We’ve employed a ton of people, and had, I believe, a fairly profound effect on a lot of folks’ lives. I’m not in the business of saving anyone, or even getting them off of drugs; we’re just trying to provide them with a sense of purpose and belonging.

With Sole Food Farms, we tried to do something with agricultural credentials. The 30 tons of food we grow is a respectable agricultural scale, but also the quality of what is grown is high enough that our food is sought after by top chefs, and it’s coming from the labor of people dealing with some pretty heavy shit and very tough lives.

The late Jesus Cristobal-Esteban photo by Michael Ableman

Jesus was a lovely man. You can see in his smile. In spite of the hardships in his life and his personal issues, every time I saw him he had a beautiful smile and something nice to say.

Jesus traveled during the civil war in Guatemala by foot through the US into Canada as a refugee to escape the violence in his home country. Sadly, two years ago, on New Year’s Day, he was the victim of violence. He died in a park at the hands of someone else. I wrote about him in an Op-ed piece that appeared in the Vancouver Sun and other papers because the reportage of his death wrote him off as just another lowlife. That was hard for all of us who knew him, not only because he was a friend, co-worker and elder in the Latino community, but also because the reporting done on people from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside portray them as less than the rest of us. So, I took that on in a piece I wrote, which was initially rejected. Then after a long conversation with the editor of the paper, it was accepted. I was quite critical of not only that paper, but also many papers and how they depict the murder of someone in that neighborhood versus if that person had been living in a more upscale neighborhood in Vancouver. 

Miranda photo by Michael Ableman

There’s a feeling of joy that comes from abundance, especially when it’s been your hands that have helped manifest it. It’s a hard thing to describe unless you’ve experienced creating that abundance through seeds and soil. You are able to stand before your community and say: “Here, this incredible abundance that we’ve created is available for you.”

When I started this project, I came to Sole Food with the same prejudices and preconceptions about the population that I was going to be working with that everybody else has. I’d see people on the streets with needles in their arms, or somebody looking through my car window. You make judgments. We all do. We look the other way or roll our window up, or try to pretend we don’t see it, but as I’ve gotten to know these people on a regular basis over the years, I’ve developed relationships and seen that they are amazing, creative people, and just like us. They want all of the same things we want. They have big hearts and the desire to do something meaningful in the world.

Addiction is a tough situation, and so is poverty. Miranda was somebody who I think was able to pull her life together to some degree. She worked with us early on in the history of Sole Food and left when she became a mother.

Sole Food Farm Orchard photo by Michael Ableman

It’s one thing to grow vegetables in an urban environment, but when I proposed doing an orchard, people thought I was crazy. And because it is in a very high-profile location, I wasn’t going to be able to hide my mistakes, but I was confident that I could make it happen.

When you plant a tree into a large box of soil that’s above ground, the root systems warm up nicely and there is good drainage, so they really take off. These things looked like 20-year-old trees in two-or-three years; they just grew like crazy.

But what happens when the root system reaches the edges of the boxes? The way I handled it was to maintain a semblance of balance between the tops and the root systems, which means pruning the tops quite heavily. That more or less worked. We had more success with some trees than others. We discovered that when you take a bunch of soil and you separate it from the broader environment of a field, weird things start to happen because you don’t have all the dynamic biological interactions, which we can’t see, that go on in a broader, open, uninterrupted field space.

Biology tends to go downhill in a hurry under those conditions, so we had to learn how to compensate in a significant way. We tried all kinds of interesting things. Worm castings and compost tea are great. It requires a lot more attention than you’d have to pay in a field space. Soil fertility is important as well, but the bigger issue we found was maintaining organic matter and soil biology. At first, everyone thought that we were nuts until we started showing up at doors of restaurants with cases of beautiful persimmons, figs, lemons, cherries, apples, pears, plums, and quinces.

The habitat that this orchard created in a totally paved urban hardscape was remarkable. In the understory of these trees, in every other box, we had culinary herbs, and every bird, insect, creature for miles around showed up because of the amazing, inviting habitat that we’d created.

photo by Michael Ableman

This is not beginning gardening. This photo demonstrates a highly productive, pretty sophisticated system. It’s a hinged flat box that opens up and slides over the top of a pallet. We had a gazillion of them made, stamped with our name, but the boxes started degrading and delaminating within a year or two. It was a disaster, so we had to replace everything with plastic ones that we had made that will last forever. They’re indestructible, which one could say is not so good, but I think it is good. Forever’s a problem, but if they’re going to continue to be used in farming, it’s great.

I write very honestly about the compromises that we had to make, ecologically, socially, economically, etc., in the book. I am upfront about all the mistakes–and there’s a million of them–that we made in this whole process because I feel that’s much more valuable information for people than just hearing about all the great stuff we did.

9 Inspiring Bioneers Youth Leaders Share Their Knowledge

Youth are inheriting a world smoldering at its edges. For many young people, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of the system that exploits the planet at the expense of future generations. With their futures on the line, youth are inspiring hope, kindling a generation of changemakers and leaders. 

Bioneers has long been committed to regularly featuring a variety of young leaders who are sowing a bright and brilliant future by centering their communities and realizing the true power of youth organizing and action. In this article, we highlight just a few of the incredible next generation of movement activists who are taking on the mantle of leadership.

1. Isha Clarke on Environmental Racism and Centering the Most Vulnerable in the Movement for Climate Justice

“Environmental racism is coal terminals through West Oakland, is oil refineries through Richmond, and oil pipelines through Indigenous lands. I thought to myself: If this is true if this is the root of environmental injustice, why doesn’t the environmental justice movement include anyone from these communities? And if they do, why are they not the leaders? And on top of all of this, why aren’t these movements talking about environmental racism and its importance?” – Isha Clarke, A New Era of the Climate Justice Movement

2. Naelyn Pike on the Recognizing Diversity as a Step Toward Protecting the Earth

“I cannot let this world be gone, and I cannot be a bystander because I’m afraid or I don’t want to talk about the truth or I don’t understand. In order to create change and make change for the people, we must unify. True unity is accepting one another’s diversity, because each and every one of you in this room is beautiful. We all have a story. I have my own story. My mom has her story. But as long as we understand each other’s stories and we accept that beautiful diversity in all people because we are human beings in this world, the one thing we can understand is that we all have one issue on which we can relate. And that’s that we need to protect this Earth.” Naelyn Pike, Youth Leadership For a More Just Future

3. Jamie Margolin on Finding Balance as a Youth Climate Activist

“How do we, as a movement, fight against a well-funded machine, without taking ourselves down in the process? We need people in this movement for the long run. We have more numbers than them. We have to find a way where we can maintain our humanity and who we are outside of fighting against the end of the world” – Jamie Margolin, Burnout and Balance: Finding an Identity Outside Of Your Activism

4. Alexia Leclercq on Intersectional Movements

“The climate crisis is predominantly a result of our global economic system. If we don’t address how people of color are disproportionately impacted by a ravaged environment and we aren’t willing to face the fact that a small group of giant corporations are directly responsible for much of the planet’s pollution and habitat degradation and climate destabilization and that our governments continue to support those corporations (and in some cases will literally go to war, such as in Iraq, where they killed perhaps two million people in order to maintain those corporations’ control of oil), we won’t get anywhere.” – Alexia Leclercq, Building An Intersectional Climate Justice Movement

5. Alexandria Gordon on the Power of Youth Climate Organizing

“My generation is the largest and most diverse in the history of the United States. We are going to be the ones most impacted by the climate crisis, and we are inheriting a world with a lot of huge problems all around us. It can be daunting to even think about: how can we even begin to tackle those immense challenges? I think that it’s going to take young people recognizing our power, getting the resources and the skills that we need to harness that power, and then ultimately organizing to create the change that we deem necessary, starting in our local communities.” -Alexandria Gordon, The Youth Movement Building Power for a Sustainable Future

6. Nalleli Cobo on Finding Her Passion For Climate Justice

“I started to experience body spasms so intense I had to be carried from place to place because I would freeze up. I got bad heart palpitations and had to use a heart monitor for several weeks. But it wasn’t just me or just my family—it was most of my community that was also suffering. We were living in a “sacrifice zone,” an area where people tend to be poor and don’t know much about their rights, and are too busy trying to survive day-to-day to resist. That’s where industries and governments choose to put their most polluting facilities: in the most vulnerable communities, but this time they chose the wrong community.” -Nalleli Cobo, Youth Activism on the Frontlines of Urban Oil Drilling

7. Mishka Banuri on the Intertwined Struggles and History of Indigenous Peoples in the U.S. and the Middle East

“This colonial and imperialistic behavior of the United States is not new. Literature has shown that the military has adopted a metaphor of referring to places with resources ripe for intervention, like the Middle East as “Indian Country.” The behavior modeled is not new because it is how the U.S. exists in the first place, stealing land, resources, and the lives of Indigenous and black people. So while we continue to see privatization and extraction on indigenous land, we will also see privatization, militarization, extraction and thievery from ethnic minorities, Muslims, and the Global South.”- Mishka Banuri, A First Generation Immigrant’s Perspective on Youth Climate Justice

8. Jayden Lim on Dehumanization and Native Stereotypes

“While Native American symbols have been popularized in media and commercial markets, those symbols are appropriated and devalued of their meaning once they are stripped from their Native communities. The popularity of the symbol of the headdress is a symptom of a much larger problem, and the problem is dehumanizing and exploitation of Native Peoples and their ancestral lands. We need to move from symbolism to reality. In order to start this movement, we must acknowledge the past.” – Jayden Lim, Beyond the Headdress: Breaking Free from Native American Stereotypes and Misinformation

9. Edna Chavez on the Role of Youth in the Climate Movement

“We’ve been ignored far too long, and for the first time in many years, all eyes are on us. People need to understand that they need to listen to us. This is our moment as young people, as Black and Brown youth leaders, to use our voices, to be more inclusive in these conversations, to share our stories, to reclaim our power, and most importantly, to hold policymakers accountable and demand they invest in young people and organizations that are creating spaces for young people to lead.” – Edna Chavez, Edna Chavez Is the Voice of a New Generation of Changemakers

Unfinished Liberation: Honoring Contemporary Struggles for Racial Justice

The long trajectory of movements for racial justice in America, born of incredible oppression, has seen periods of breakthroughs and progress and periods of reaction and regression. Recent decades have been no different, and the last two years have offered an extreme example of that pattern. The extraordinary size and breadth of the demonstrations following the George Floyd murder lead to tremendous hope that a watershed moment was upon us, but the tenacious forces of racism are in the midst of mounting a massive, vicious reaction. We must not lose hope, however. These struggles for the soul of our civilization are long-term affairs, and we must be in it for the long haul, investing in the promise that the ark of progress will ultimately “bend toward justice” if only we keep our shoulders to the wheel.

This week, we share perspectives from some of the most important and eloquent figures in the contemporary effort to combat racism and build a far more equitable social order. These include: the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, Patrisse Cullors; the brilliant thinker on race and justice, Heather McGhee; the incredibly influential academic Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality” among other achievements; and several other major leaders.

Racial Justice Beyond Trump: Confronting an American Legacy

Racism and White Supremacy comprise the foundation of America’s historical and economic development. Understanding the systems that gave rise to figures like Trump is essential to disentangling the monolithic mythos that leads many to absolve us from facing our legacy as a nation. In this conversation, four powerful activists discuss the history of racial justice struggles, the current context, and paths forward. With Bakari Kitwana, LaTosha Brown, Mutale Nkonde, and Greisa Martínez Rosas.

Watch here.

Patrisse Cullors on How Black Lives Matter Began

Patrisse Cullors is the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, a movement that has swept our nation into a reckoning with historical and systemic violence. Cullors is a performance artist and award-winning organizer from Los Angeles and is one of the most effective and influential movement builders of our era. Listen as Patrisse Cullors shares the moving story of her work helping in the fight against racism.

Listen here.

Heather McGhee: A New ‘We the People’ for a Sustainable Future

In our current U.S. political, economic, and social environment, how do we find ways to come together and to believe in a better future? Heather McGhee, an award-winning author, and policy analyst on the national stage has helped shape key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. McGhee led the important nonprofit, Demos, which is also one of the most subtle and profoundly compassionate thinkers on America’s social contradictions and how to work toward a sustainable and equitable future for everyone. 

Read more here.

Backlash Moment: Converging at the Crossroads of Identity and Justice – Kimberlé Crenshaw

Visionary law professor and change-maker Kimberlé Crenshaw shows that it’s only at the crossroads of our many identities that we will find a story big enough to embrace the diversity and complexity of our globalized 21st-century world.

Listen here.

The Latest from Bioneers.org:

  • “False Alarm” by Ryan Amador & Alixa García | As a ballad to healing and recommitment to the future generations who will share in the world we leave them, Alixa Garcia & Ryan Amador’s new song “False Alarm” is an anthem for inspiration calling us to protect what’s most sacred.
  • Rebugging the Planet | Vicki Hird is an experienced and award-winning environmental campaigner and researcher. In this excerpt from her latest book, “Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things that Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More,” Vicki introduces the importance of bugs to a healthy landscape and lays out a blueprint for ecological restoration and sustainability. 

Rebugging the Planet

The following excerpt is from Vicki Hird’s new book Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things that Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More (Chelsea Green Publishing, September 2021) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

By Vicki Hird

Why Rewildling Our Landscapes Needs to Include Bugs

What is rewilding? Basically, it’s the attempt to recreate the natural ecological systems that once covered our landscapes — woods, rivers, wetlands — and trusting nature to look after itself, perhaps with some help at the start to fix the most broken pieces.

Many rewilding projects are large in scale, to allow nature to really do its stuff without interference and pollution from us. It is about vast estates and landscapes, large herbivores or carnivores and huge decisions made by distant landowners or institutions. These are invaluable. But is not always about completely removing people — after all, humans are part of the natural world.

Instead, we need to find new ways to live while reconnecting with the ecosystems we live in, creating a richer world in which people and nature can thrive together. We can live alongside more bees, worms and flies, and I believe there is a benefit to taking the debate on rewilding down to the tiny scale of some of the smallest creatures on the planet.

Invertebrates are core to any rewilding project: ideal foot soldiers for the cause at every level as they travel, adapt and multiply so brilliantly. And, aside from farmed honeybees, silk moths and biological control agents, almost all the invertebrates we encounter, wherever we encounter them, are wild. They may be there because we created the environment for them, but they are not domesticated or tame — or even that interested in us.

How Does Rewilding Help Bugs?

Rebugging is looking at the ways, small and large, to nurture complex communities of these tiny, vital players in almost all the natural and not-so-natural places on earth. It means conserving them where they are managing to hang on, and restoring them where they are needed as part of a rewilding movement. And it means putting bugs back into our everyday lives, our homes and where we play and work.

But what does “good” look like for the bugs? We need to better know what the “perfect” habitats and conditions would be for bugs to thrive: the baselines against which recent losses occurred. We can’t tell what the true losses are as we don’t know what was there before people arrived, or even a hundred years ago. But how exciting to discover more new insect habitats through rebugging, as we let nature make its way.

Even rewilding a relatively small area can create something akin to the original habitats of the invertebrates, and we will discover so many intriguing aspects in the process. Rewilding projects are already throwing up some challenges to our previous knowledge about their favored habitats as species take to a habitat in a rewilded area that we had no idea they liked.

Viki Hird (photo by Tim Rice)

Bringing Back Lost Species

Which animals belong where is a fascinating issue in rewilding. It can involve reintroducing a species to re-establish it or to boost numbers of a native animal or plant at risk of going extinct. Or it can be about recreating an ecosystem that has got out of balance, such as a flood plain that needs the plants and animals back to slow water flow.

Would we want to bring invertebrate species back into countries and regions that have lost them? The removal of keystone species — a species that is fundamental to the existence of a particular ecosystem — can be catastrophic for a wild ecosystem, but reintroduction can work in unforeseen ways.

The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the western U.S. created unexpected and positive results for the park ecology. When wolves were removed from the park 70 years ago, elk overgrazing became a problem and only resolved when the wolves were reintroduced, and so elks were naturally managed better. But there was a further impact: beaver populations grew now that their willow trees were not overgrazed by the elk. This created new fish and water invertebrate habitats, which then influenced other species feeding on the bugs and fish. Everything is connected, and while many focus on the furry vertebrate species, we need to recognize and nurture the bugs, too, as vital parts of the arrangement.

Beavers are also being reintroduced into UK river systems, leading to new habitats, more diversity, and even floodwater management and boosting green tourism. Sometimes iconic species can be hugely important for building public support for conservation, but also can help fund projects through carefully managed tourism.

But what about invertebrates? Rebugging could allow species lost to an area to be introduced successfully and this is indeed happening.

Given their size and ability to produce numerous offspring quickly, invertebrates have the wonderful ability to recolonize far more quickly when they spot the opportunity than larger species. Just take the aphid, which can produce five to 10 offspring every day. The African driver queen ant can produce an estimated three to four million eggs a month. And they do not need so much careful handling as, say, a wolf.

However, it makes sense also to focus on protecting the native bug species that are still in their habitats, but are just hanging on in pockets of scrub, hedgerows or small woodlands, and even urban parks, where once their habitats would have been far more widespread. And they can help rewild the small spaces as well as the big ones.

The School of Rebugging

Critical to keeping places wild and protected will be helping people to have a stronger relationship with nature. Making public access safe and easy in rewilded space will help create a movement for rebugging. Great wilderness parks such as the 63 federally designated U.S. national parks present a whole other level of invertebrate opportunity. As these areas are managed by government bodies largely for wildlife, rather than farming or other purposes, they can be described as wild — and over 80% of the areas involved are managed as wilderness.

They maintain some of the best habitats, perfect for invertebrates to thrive. This is an extraordinary asset, but one which compares dramatically with other land management in the U.S.: the empty prairies and often car-filled cities, where insects and other invertebrates are subject to massive pressures from industrial farming, pollution and development.

Take the sub-arctic Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska where there is an abundance of invertebrates such as bees and flower flies. People visit this park to see the grizzly bears but the other fur-covered animals should also gain attention. Alongside the flies, the bumblebees are critical for pollination and they have recently found a new species of bumblebee in this park — always an exciting moment.

These are keystone species and the Denali park’s grizzly bears, caribou and wolves would not survive without the bugs because they all need the wildflowers and shrubs for their food or the food of their prey. The grizzlies in particular need the bees to pollinate the blueberries, one of the bear’s main foods. As we know, honeybees are under threat globally, so it is vital that we protect the other pollinators like bumblebees so they can pollinate both wild plants and farmed crops.

Wildlife parks do have threats such as the pressure of visitors, especially at peak holiday periods. Other dangers respect no boundaries — for instance, climate change, illegal hunting and invasive species. But these places provide a fantastic way to conserve bugs in their natural world and to show what they can do.

Rebugging Actions

The joy of rebugging is that you can do it almost anywhere. Give people the chance to act and to encourage some bees, or even hummingbird hawkmoths, in a green patch of land, and you can start to change hearts and minds. From a Costa Rican municipality giving bees citizenship to an amazing three thousand food-growing spaces making space for nature in London, it is possible — and it is happening.

The “rebugging” title of this book was inspired by another, recent book Rebirding: Rewilding Britain and its Birds by Benedict Macdonald, who argues that to have more birds around, larger mammals must be allowed to do their work and re-engineer the landscapes. Letting nature heal itself and letting it get messy is key to a revival in birds and other species. If we can use the lens of birds and beavers to understand rewilding, we should also use bugs.

About Vicki Hird

Vicki Hird is Head of the Sustainable Farming Campaign for Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming, and she also runs an independent consultancy. An experienced and award-winning environmental campaigner, researcher, writer and strategist working mainly in the food, farming and environmental policy arenas, Vicki has worked on government policy for many years and is the author of Perfectly Safe to Eat?: The Facts on Food. Vicki has a masters in pest management and is a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society (FRES).

Building An Intersectional Climate Justice Movement | Alexia Leclercq

At the core of the impact of climate change are communities that live at the nexus of systemic violence. Gender, race, class, ability, and other socio-economic variables factor into one’s experience of climate destabilization. Building a sustainable climate justice movement means centering the needs of those who bear the chief impact of the problem. One of this year’s Brower Youth Award winners, Alexia Leclercq, an environmental justice organizer based in Austin TX, and NYC, shares her passion for these rarely discussed aspects of intersectionality.

This talk was delivered at the 2021 Bioneers Conference. Watch the video of this presentation here.

Here in the U.S., we’re all told to recycle if we care about the environment. Mainstream environmental groups, many founded in the late 19th or in the 20th century by white middle-class lobbying groups, usually encouraged individual actions and the preservation of national parks as solutions to the climate crisis. They didn’t take social justice into consideration, and the creation of those national parks in a number of cases directly led to the displacement of Indigenous folks who had lived sustainably in those places for centuries. And campaigns for recycling fail to mention that only 9% of plastic actually gets recycled and that a lot of it was being dumped abroad. These recycling campaigns in fact often wind up helping corporations create and sell more plastic.

Currently, around 100 corporations are responsible for about 70% of emissions. Their actions result in mass ecocide, spewing toxic waste and spilling millions of gallons of crude oil, leaving hazardous waste on forest floors. These practices are illegal, but corporations get away with it because their interests are so often above the law.

When we address environmental issues as separate from social justice issues, things like environmental racism are ignored. Environmental racism is the fact that people of color disproportionately live next to polluting industries, leading them to suffer from far more than their share of extreme health issues such as cancers and respiratory diseases. Because of this, environmental justice organizers came together in the 1990s to create their own movement, the Environmental Justice Movement, because they had been left out of the mainstream environmental movement.

If we are going to achieve climate justice, we are going to have to address the systems of oppression that caused the climate crisis in the first place, and these include capitalism and colonialism. These are systems that encourage the exploitation of land and labor in order to accumulate wealth. To cite only one example, British colonialists transformed the Malay Peninsula into a plantation economy to meet industrial Britain and America’s need for cheap rubber, leading to extreme deforestation. Recovery from this sort of extensive devastation perpetrated on native ecosystems is extremely difficult. The great colonial powers created a global infrastructure in which countries from the Global North ruthlessly exploited countries from the Global South for resources while simultaneously destabilizing their Indigenous and local cultures. This pattern is still in place. Today, Indigenous groups make up 5% of the global population but preserve 80% of the planet’s biodiversity on their remaining territories, so we need to support them in the defense of their lands and cultures and look to them for solutions.

Social justice is climate justice because the root causes of social and environmental destruction are the same. For example, the redlining by banks of black neighborhoods, which prevented people in those communities from building wealth, also allowed, through related zoning policies, companies and governments to place their most polluting facilities in those same neighborhoods. And police brutality, which we think of as strictly a social justice issue, is also an environmental justice issue because many Indigenous land defenders are attacked by law enforcement here and are frequently murdered in countries such as the Philippines and Colombia and throughout Central America and around the world for their activism.

The climate crisis is predominantly a result of our global economic system. If we don’t address how people of color are disproportionately impacted by a ravaged environment and we aren’t willing to face the fact that a small group of giant corporations are directly responsible for much of the planet’s pollution and habitat degradation and climate destabilization and that our governments continue to support those corporations (and in some cases will literally go to war, such as in Iraq, where they killed perhaps two million people in order to maintain those corporations’ control of oil), we won’t get anywhere. If we don’t center social justice in the fight for climate justice, we will fail to tackle climate change.

A wide range of justice movements, such as disability rights and economic, racial, LGBTQ and gender justice, need to be linked. Just to cite the example of disability justice, which is almost never talked about in the context of discussions around climate: a lot of disabled folks are often left out of climate emergency plans. We need to understand we are all in this together, and if we leave whole groups behind, we won’t win.

So, what do we do? There are a lot of things that need to be done and can be done. On my end, I co-created a group called Start: Empowerment, a social and environmental justice education nonprofit that seeks to bridge the gap between education and action, that seeks to educate people about these issues and the systems of oppression we need to dismantle using a wide range of approaches, including formal and informal education, storytelling and sharing the voices of community elders.

I am also an organizer with a local environmental justice organization in Austin, Texas called PODER. I urge every single one of you to either join or to support in some way a grassroots environmental justice organization. Volunteer your skills or donate. There are many ways to get involved in supporting people in frontline communities most directly impacted by the crises we are facing, and by helping them now, you will be helping all of us down the line.

At the end of the day, social justice and climate justice are not separate; they are one in the same, so we can’t fight them separately, we have to fight them together, but I believe we can create a new world based on community care and sustainability.

The Youth Movement Building Power for a Sustainable Future | Alexandria Gordon

With a seemingly insurmountable mantle defined by climate change, systemic racism, and corruption, youth activists are nurturing a sustainable future for all. Growing up frustrated with inaction by adults and with the rest of their lives at stake, youth activists are a crucial force in the movement to transform our reality. Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) are working to train the next generation of activists, and Alex Gordon, one of these young activists, a winner of this year’s prestigious Brower Youth Award for her organizing prowess on the “Break Free from Plastic Pledge,” voter registration drives and other student power initiatives, shares her experiences as a young person working to create a world that can work for everyone.

This talk was delivered at the 2021 Bioneers Conference. Watch the video of this presentation here.

My name is Alex Gordon. I’m in my fourth year at Eckerd College (in St. Petersburg, Florida), and I organize with the Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) to empower and train the next generation of youth activists.

I started doing activism work with absolutely no idea of what organizing was. I’m originally from Houston, Texas, so I’m definitely no stranger to the impact of climate change, and while I was growing up, I always wanted to make a difference, but I really just didn’t know how to go about it, so when I first found Florida PIRG students at my campus, I was really excited because I could see that that organization offered me a way to finally get to take action. I got trained on all the basics of grassroots organizing, and I jumped into our voter registration campaign. The work we did that semester helped increase voter turnout by 350%, and seeing the impact that just a small group of students could have on an entire city really empowered me, so after working on voter registration and turnout, I decided to tackle plastic pollution at Eckerd.

And to make a long story short, after months of campaigning, we were ultimately successful, and the president of Eckerd signed what’s called the “Break Free from Plastic Campus Pledge.” This was the first and most stringent campus-wide purchasing guideline to be enacted in the nation. It effectively eliminated the purchase of all non-essential, single-use plastics on our campus, and it all started with me not even knowing what organizing was. And that passion for tackling plastic pollution grew into something much bigger than success on one campus. Working with the national PIRGs network of student-run and mostly student-funded, non-partisan, nonprofits, I started building a movement of young people who would tackle the plastic pollution crisis on their own campuses all over the country. And doing that national work really helped me see that, at the end of the day, organizing for environmental protections was more than just working on one issue or problem: it was really about bringing young people, who are so often sidelined in conversations dealing with our future, into a space where we could make the changes we want to see.

If we want to take huge action, we all have to start somewhere. For some folks, that can involve organizing at the state level or on national policies, but for many of us, it’s addressing the immediate needs in the communities we live in. And for students, that’s often on our campuses, and there are many issues that need addressing on campuses. To name just one that I’ve worked on, students shouldn’t have to choose between their next meal and being able to pay for their course books. In general, young people should feel that they have a voice in our democratic process and are able to use that voice.

My generation is the largest and most diverse in the history of the United States. We are going to be the ones most impacted by the climate crisis, and we are inheriting a world with a lot of huge problems all around us. It can be daunting to even think about: how can we even begin to tackle those immense challenges? I think that it’s going to take young people recognizing our power, getting the resources and the skills that we need to harness that power, and then ultimately organizing to create the change that we deem necessary, starting in our local communities. There has never been a large successful movement for change without young people.

Campuses are potential powerhouses. They have always served as incubators and avenues for change. Campuses are little microcosms of our larger communities, so models that can spread to cities and states can be initiated there. Colleges have a lot of purchasing power and influence in their communities and a lot of students and employees, and groups such as our PIRG chapters have been able to leverage that power and influence. By building a culture of agency among students on campuses, we can create much longer-lasting, sustained change. Successful campaigns such as the one to get the entire University of California system to phase out single-use plastics, efforts to stop the automatic textbook billing that leaves students without a choice and broke, and lobbying at the state and even national levels to make higher education more affordable, have shown over and over that students can be highly effective agents for change when they’re organized and empowered. It all starts when young people decide we want to do something, but to build that impulse into effective action, we need support and resources. 

I started working on voter registration, not because I knew I wanted to be an organizer, but because I was searching for a way to protect my future. I was then invested in by an organization that saw the value of my story and my voice, and by working on the campaigns that I do, I’ve been able to bring other young people into the change-making process. The more young people there are working for change, the better our world will be. Imagine if all of the passionate students across the globe were given the support and the tools they needed to organize effectively. We young people today feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, but often we don’t have the tools or the training we need to do something about it. Having access to those tools and that support is not a reality we should be having to imagine, but one that should be the standard.

Blueprints for Justice & Health: Designing Futures for Equitable Healing

Although a new year signifies new beginnings, many of the challenges we face are years in the making. This week, we are highlighting innovative work from Deanna Van Buren and Rupa Marya, two leaders at the forefront of architecture/design and medicine, respectively, who are challenging our failing approaches to our justice system and to public health. By transforming how we relate to care and community, these leaders are creating a blueprint for a future of profound equitable healing.

Deep Medicine for Bodies and a World Inflamed: Healing Requires the Right Diagnosis | Rupa Marya

Our world, our bodies, and our society are inflamed with mass uprisings in the wake of racist violence and climate change induced illnesses. In this presentation, physician and activist Rupa Marya explores how structural injustice affects human and environmental health and calls for the right diagnosis to create deep healing.

Watch a video of this presentation or read the transcript here.

Designing Spaces for Justice & Care | Deanna Van Buren

Our nation’s current punitive architecture is designed with cruelty compounded by a criminal justice system that disproportionately impacts communities of color. Architect Deanna Van Buren committed her life to create spaces that harness care and restorative justice. As co-founder and Executive Director of the Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), Deanna works to counter the traditional adversarial and punitive architecture that characterizes our legal system by creating spaces and buildings that enable Restorative Justice, community building, and housing for people coming out of incarceration.


Watch a video of this presentation or read the transcript here.

Designing Futures for Health and Justice

Achieving profound socio-economic, environmental, and political changes calls for radical and intensive re-visioning of our world. In this conversation, Rupa Marya and Deanna Van Buren weave together their respective knowledge in medicine, architecture, and law to share how their work can radically transform professional paradigms.

Watch here.

Guardians of the River — Online Course

How can we reconnect with water and understand our relationship with water bodies based on values of kinship? In this unique online course from Guardians Worldwide, learn from practitioners from many different nations about traditional water knowledge and global confluences of water thinking. Want to become a River Guardian? Use code “bioneers20” for an exclusive 20% discount.

Learn more here.

Youth Activism on the Frontlines of Urban Oil Drilling | Nalleli Cobo

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

Nalleli Cobo delivered this talk at the 2021 Bioneers Conference. Watch the video of her talk here!

Of the 20 years I have been alive, I have spent 11 of them fighting for my health, safety, community and environment. Since the age of 9 I have been tirelessly advocating to end urban oil drilling and for a “just transition” away from a fossil fuel-based economic system. I have been fighting monsters: going up against the oil industry, my local archdiocese and a broken regulatory system is not a walk in the park. However, that has never mattered to me, because there’s only one thing that matters in this situation – my community.

To give you a better understanding of my struggle, I have to take you back in time. The year is 2010, I’m 9 years old, in fourth grade, living with my mom, three siblings, grandma, and great grandparents, honestly living my best 9-year-old life. One night, as I was coming home from a late-night yoga class with my sister, I was overwhelmed with this sort of guava scent, but a smell so bad I was immediately sick to my stomach and my head really hurt. Thinking it was just a random smell, I kept on walking and ignored it.

As soon as we got home, the house was quiet and seemed empty. It was pretty late and we are a big family, so that was really odd, but suddenly my mom burst into the room and told us to follow her. We then saw our entire family clustered in my sister’s room. My mom had set up an air filter there. She explained to us that the guava scent was coming from our next-door neighbor, an oil well owned by Allenco Energy, and that we all needed to sleep in that one room.

The next morning, on my usual walk to school, I stopped by the doors of the oil facility that I had passed every day and hadn’t thought much about, but this time I really stared at the big doors and the tall brick wall, and I read each sign on that wall. Behind those walls was a silent killer. I lived 30 feet from an active oil well operating on land leased to the oil company by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Oil drilling releases many toxic and foul-smelling emissions harmful to human health into the air, and those sorts of facilities are also highly prone to leaks, so Allenco often used a variety of chemicals to mask the smell of oil. On different days my neighborhood, for miles on end, would smell like chocolate or citrus or guava or cherries. I began to get more and more headaches and stomach pains, and then I started to get nose bleeds so intense I couldn’t sleep in my bed. I had to sleep sitting up in a chair to prevent choking on my own blood. I started to experience body spasms so intense I had to be carried from place to place because I would freeze up. I got bad heart palpitations and had to use a heart monitor for several weeks. But it wasn’t just me or just my family—it was most of my community that was also suffering.

We were living in a “sacrifice zone,” an area where people tend to be poor and don’t know much about their rights and are too busy trying to survive day-to-day to resist. That’s where industries and governments choose to put their most polluting facilities: in the most vulnerable communities, but this time they chose the wrong community.

In January of 2011, Allenco had a leak that lasted seven days. My community filed over 300 complaints to the South Coast Air Quality Management District that week. We were constantly inhaling large quantities of toxins that whole time, but no effort was made to relocate anyone. This was really the beginning of our fight. In 2013, I helped found “People not Pozos” (note: “pozos” means “wells” in Spanish), a grassroots campaign to permanently shut down Allenco Energy. It was clear that no one was going to do it for us. It was up to us to become the experts, up to us to defend ourselves. After four years of town hall meetings, city hall hearings, door-to-door knocking, we were fortunate to have The Los Angeles Times write a story about our community efforts. That article captured the attention of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer. She flew out and had a press conference in my community in front of Allenco, where she pleaded with Allenco to cease operations, and I’m very proud to say that as a result of all our work, Allenco has been temporarily shut down for eight years now.

But we then noticed that we weren’t the only community in Southern California being affected by oil extraction. Los Angeles is in fact the largest urban oil field in the nation. Over 580,000 Angelenos live within a quarter-mile or less of an active oil or gas well, and over 93% of that number is made up of Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other people-of-color. So STANDLA (“Stand Together Against Neighbor Drilling Los Angeles”) was born, and it has become an essential organization in the fight to end urban oil drilling. I also co-founded the South-Central Youth Leadership Coalition, which, along with Youth for Environmental Justice, sued the City of Los Angeles in 2015 for violation of CEQUA, the California Environmental Quality Act, and for environmental racism, and we won. Now when a company wants to reopen or expand a well, there’s a new, much stricter application process.

For us, this win felt monumental. We, the youth from our communities, had done that. We had taken steps to claim our future back. Often in activist work, we young people get overlooked. When I began my activism, I was often told, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re only 12.” And to them, I’d say, “You’re right, I don’t know everything; I don’t fully understand everything, but I know my story. I know my community’s story and how we’ve been affected on the frontlines, and that’s what I’m going to share.” Storytelling is a very compelling form of activism. I like to think of myself as a normal young adult, the only difference is that I found my passion much sooner than most, in part because my circumstances left me no choice but to confront the threats to my life and my family’s and community’s life.   

It’s what pushes me to fight so hard. I had my childhood robbed from me. While most kids were outside playing, I wasn’t allowed outside in order to limit my exposure to toxins. Not only did I have the health issues I mentioned, I also lived with constant fear and anxiety because those sorts of oil pumps operate at such high pressure that they need to be opened every 10 to 15 minutes to release pressure to prevent an explosion. We weren’t just being poisoned: we were living on top of a bomb. And they didn’t have any form of emergency evacuation plan for the surrounding community. Allenco operated in an area with nine schools nearby, and its facility even shared a wall with two of them, one of them a high school for children with disabilities!

That upbringing is what drives me to create change. I don’t want any other youth to have to experience the kind of childhood I had, so that’s why I fight. After high school, I went to Whittier College to pursue my education. I wanted to create my own major, a combination of political science, economics, international relations. I wanted to become a civil rights lawyer, work for the ACLU, establish my career in politics. I had my entire life planned, but there was one thing that wasn’t in my life plan—cancer.

On January 15, 2020, my entire world was turned upside down. I was diagnosed with Stage II cancer. I only had one question: “Can I have kids?” The doctors tearfully answered “No.” How do you tell a 19-year-old girl she may never fulfill her dreams of becoming a mother, that the five years she spent begging for medical attention went unnoticed, and that the system failed her and may cost her her life? I immediately thought of the sign I’d read a thousand times on Allenco’s wall: “Dangerous chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm.” That’s exactly what I had, a reproductive cancer. I knew then, that after fighting so hard for my community, I now had to fight for myself. My life was on the line.

And after three major surgeries, three rounds of chemo, six weeks of radiation, eight minor procedures, and fighting off two infections, I am very happy to say I am officially 10 months in remission. I fight because I believe everyone, whatever their age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status or zip code, has the right to breathe clean air. Clean air is a basic human right, and it’s not fair that it’s being denied to so many of us. I fight so urban oil drilling is something you only read about in history books. That’s why I fight and why I will continue to fight as long as I am able. Thank you.

Designing Spaces for Justice & Care | Deanna Van Buren

Design and architecture play an integral role in facilitating the lives that unfold inside of them. Architect Deanna Van Buren committed her life to create spaces that harness care and restorative justice. Our nation’s current punitive architecture is designed with cruelty compounded by a criminal justice system that disproportionately impacts communities of color. Deanna Van Buren is the co-founder, Executive Director, and Design Director of the Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS).

Deanna shares how her studio works to counter the traditional adversarial and punitive architecture that characterizes our legal system by creating spaces and buildings that enable Restorative Justice, community building, and housing for people coming out of incarceration.

Deanna Van Buren delivered this talk at the 2021 Bioneers Conference. Watch the video to this transcript here!

I’m so excited to be here at the Bioneers Conference. This community is amazing to me in that it includes people from so many places and from every discipline I can imagine. There are so few communities that have this interdisciplinary approach to solving our problems. I passionately believe that this is the way we need to do things, and I, in fact, set up my entire firm, Designing Justice/Designing Spaces, to do just that because I think we all have gifts to bring to change the world.

And my gift, my thing, is that I’m an architect. That’s the role I play. And architects are the folks who take the beliefs and the values of our society and manifest them in the world around us to support human lives, but I think we have to start to question whose values and whose beliefs we’re actually manifesting.

I’ve had a pretty visceral experience of this. I was able to travel the world for years working for the 1%, the wealthiest people in the world. We were designing huge shopping centers, leisure precincts, luxury buildings. And I’m not going to lie, it was fun; I had a good time, but I also started to look around me, and I started to see the gross inequities the built environment was manifesting. I was seeing situations on my job sites in which the construction workers were basically living in squalor. I started to see the informal settlements they were living in literally in the shadow of corporate towers. And here in our own country, I started to see many members of BIPOC communities living in conditions in which they had drastically limited access to basic resources—food, adequate housing, clean air, water, etc.

I started to realize that our society was still permeated by white supremacy, structural racism, patriarchy, and classism and that I as an architect was actually manifesting those beliefs, the values of a very elite group of people who didn’t much care about all the rest of us. Most architecture tends to anchor and amplify a society’s dominant beliefs and the worldview of its elites, so I started to realize that we have to be careful what we believe and what we’re building. I came back from all my travel and working abroad with a new set of eyes. I started feeling that we were living in somebody else’s imagination.

Ruha Benjamin (note: author of Race After Technology) has said that “we’re living in the imaginations of the elite.” And as an architect, I had participated in giving form to that elite’s beliefs in the built environment, and I didn’t want to do that anymore.

And here in this country, I started to see deeply that there was one system that was the most egregious and intense manifestation of those twisted values, and that was our system of mass incarceration. We have about six million of our citizens under some form of carceral control, a grossly disproportionate amount of them people of color. It’s the most blatantly obvious expression of our structurally racist system.

This is what the architecture of the system looks like. What values and what beliefs is this communicating to us? How do you feel in your body when you look at this? I feel terrified, actually, and I see punishment; I see separation; I see naked power. And I don’t want to reimagine this. This is not an imagination coming from me or anyone that I want to love and care for.

But what do we do? What do we build instead of this? And at first, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to use design to impact and change a structurally racist system, such as our mass incarceration infrastructure, but then I heard about Restorative Justice. It was like a light coming on for me. It opened my heart to know that there was another approach to justice, an ancient, Indigenous form of justice that has a totally different set of values. It says that when harm has been done, healing, is required. It is based on the idea that those who have been harmed have needs that need to be addressed so they can be made whole, and that those who have committed the offense or done the harm are obligated to make those amends and be accountable, but it is not based on punishment as its guiding principle.  

Once I encountered Restorative Justice, I began to think that perhaps we designers could really do something tangible to help support this sort of “re-indigenization” of the justice system. What if we could start to talk to folks who have been most impacted by the system and see what kind of justice they might imagine and what kind of physical infrastructure would help manifest that vision? I started to work with a social worker and Restorative Justice practitioner named Dr. Barb Toews, and we started to run the first design studios inside prisons and jails around the intersection of design and Restorative Justice. And the folks held in those institutions were coming up with incredible ideas. It changed my life to get to know these folks.

 

We began to build our team, and we started to grow. We started to talk to municipalities and community-based organizations. We started to work with systems-impacted people and their communities of care, and we started to take the sort of creative tools that we’d previously used to design for the wealthy to begin to design with and for these folks, and together we began to come up with new ideas. It started small. Bigger is not always better. The small things can have huge impacts, so we started by creating a peacemaking center, a space for Restorative Justice in which we brought some Native American peacemaking practices into a non-Native community for the very first time in the U.S. We took what had been a drug house and turned it into a peacemaking center that had spaces for circles where elders were the judges and could moderate conflicts.

New, unexpected things started to happen there. The place started to amplify and foment a totally different way of being. People started to come there for celebrations and rituals, from birthdays to baby showers. The community was coming together and creating social cohesion, which is really the only thing that ultimately keeps us safe. That early success was heartening. We realized we could make beautiful spaces and engage with a community imagining alternative systems, but we had to figure out how to finance these sorts of initiatives to be able to scale it up.

Designing Justice/Designing Spaces, the organization I helped co-found, really came out of that understanding that we could be architects and designers, but we also had to be real estate developers. We had to figure out how to pay for these projects to make them sustainable. Restore Oakland became one of our first attempts to integrate those elements. We helped community organizers buy this building, find it, purchase it, and it became the country’s first center for Restorative Justice and Restorative Economics.

Restore Oakland LLC

We were able to gut the building and create a space in which community organizers could fight mass incarceration and resist gentrification. We included a restaurant that trains low-wage restaurant workers to get living-wage jobs in fine dining. We were trying to create conditions that would help address the root causes of problems people face, by bringing jobs to the community and giving organizers the space to work to change policy. We also included the first dedicated spaces in our county for Restorative Justice work. We were able to take what we had learned in that original Indigenous justice center in Syracuse, NY, and expand it in Oakland, so that some young people could get diverted out of court and come into Restorative Justice circles and be part of community conflict resolution processes.

We noticed quickly that survivors, folks who had been harmed, had no way to heal their trauma in the standard criminal justice system which is so obsessed with a punitive lens that it doesn’t focus on actually addressing the suffering of those who have been harmed, so we started to engage in something called evidence-based design research and to initiate real-world projects that created a series of spaces that could support survivors throughout the entire experience of recovery. Through these sorts of projects, we started to see there are some basic contexts that we need to create for healing to be possible. We have to create environments that are deeply embedded in and connected to nature, that can moderate our “fight, flight and freeze” responses—spaces for refuge in which we can cool off; spaces where we can break bread; spaces of comfort with art, light, sound, texture and materials that are soothing and enriching for our senses.

 

The building of some new spaces is necessary, but in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we built hundreds of prisons and jails all over the country, so there’s also a lot of “unbuilding”/repurposing that needs to happen. Realizing that, we started a new type of project. Working with community organizations such as the Racial Justice Action Center and Women on the Rise in Atlanta who were fighting to close prisons and jails, we started to repurpose a 475,000 square-foot jail in downtown Atlanta to take what had been a place of punishment and re-imagine it as a center of wellness. On the architecture side, we had to take off a lot of the outside of that building. We had to literally let the light in. We began to open it up. We began to integrate into the façade art that spoke about freedom and a sense of liberation, and then we started demolishing all the cells, taking down the interior and really transforming it into a space for community. This is what folks wanted more than anything, a place for daycare, for their families, a space to come together.

But infrastructure is expensive. It costs a lot to build a new building, and maybe not as much but still a whole lot to gut and transform old structures. We know that we need to stop investing in the old criminal justice system and begin to reinvest in the communities most impacted by that system. Building a jail can cost $300 million, but for $300,000 I can create a mobile classroom, so we started to do that, to build classrooms that bring GED and high school education to system-impacted folks coming home from prison to their communities of care, so they are able to get their GED and high school diploma and have a much better chance to get jobs.

They also have circles and reading groups and all sorts of activities in those spaces. It’s one of the most copied prototypes that we’ve ever made.

We then realized we could expand on that model. We could build mobile, pop-up villages that could bring social services and health and wellness resources as well as provide spaces for music and art to disenfranchised communities, bringing people together to help foster community cohesion. From there we realized we could draw from those pop-up models to create permanent versions. We’re doing that in Detroit where we bought 12 parcels of land to create a campus, which is intended to be a creative oasis for social justice, a development that will support the social, economic, and environmental health of the adjoining communities.

In just about every community we work in, we get the same message: “We just need space to come together; we need space to be with our families and neighbors, a safe place people can come to.” We always try to anchor a project with arts and culture. We realize that feeding the soul has to be at the center of any such initiative, so it’s always good to place a theater that folks can come to in the center of the action. We also have to always create opportunities for income generation, nurturing local social enterprises, micro-entrepreneurs, and cooperatives, and of course provide healing spaces for restorative justice processes.

On the environmental side, we’ve been fortunate to be able to work with the Biomimicry for Social Innovation Group, so we’ve been able to keep an environmental sustainability lens in the development of these projects. We’re trying to think seven generations out, as Indigenous traditions teach, with all the infrastructure we’re designing and building.

There are so many communities that have been hit hard by structural racism and inequity, that have been devastated by mass incarceration, and so we have so much work to do. One critical issue is that most people (around 95%) who are incarcerated come back to their communities from prison at some point, and their re-entry can be very difficult, so another piece of infrastructure we are working on is a different kind of campus, a campus for reentry, where the formerly imprisoned can live and transition, where they have access to behavioral health resources, job training, a family reunification space, etc. We’ve been working with black churches to create these kinds of environments for men and women coming home. As part of that, we’ve been designing and fabricating what we call mobile refuge rooms. It’s our first patent. They’re designed to provide home-like environments on these campuses, where people can regain some dignity and privacy in their lives.

 

We’ve also begun to create tools and databases that draw from all the work we’ve done, so communities can use that information as they design their own initiatives and spaces. One key project we’re working on is developing an “alternatives to incarceration” tool that takes the lessons from all the prototypes we’ve built, so communities everywhere can begin to plan out what their neighborhood would look like without mass incarceration and without the police state as we know it. It would include everything from diversion and reentry spaces to restorative reinvestment funds to spaces for behavioral health, for youth, for survivors, etc., etc. There’s a lot to build.

I want to invite all of you to join me in thinking about what our justice system would look like with a different set of values in place. What would a system that values love, that is rooted in care, look like? I believe we could create such a system just as easily as we can build a prison or jail, maybe even more easily, and I honestly don’t think there’s a better community than this one to begin to reimagine what those spaces could look like. I’m really looking forward to everything that we’re going to make together.