With the surge of political unrest and illnesses as a result of climate change, it is apparent that our planet is inflamed. The health of the individual is inseparable from our collective planetary health. In this transcript from her presentation at the Bioneers 2021 Conference, physician and activist, Rupa Marya explores how structural injustice affects human and environmental health and calls for a right diagnosis to create deep healing to begin global healing.
Good morning, Bioneers. I am speaking to you today from the occupied and unceded Ohlone territory of Huichin (now called Oakland, California). I’m grateful to my ancestors for all their love that brought me here today to be able to share these ideas with you, and to the ancestors of this land who have offered me a safe home to raise my children far from Punjab, where my family comes from, and who inform how I’ve been learning and growing in this place I call home. I also want to acknowledge my elders whose teachings continue to shape my own work and understanding.
A diagnosis is a story that helps us identify the cause of a disease or form of suffering, with the goal of alleviating it. For healing, in order to get at the right course of action, one has to start with the correct diagnosis. The wrong diagnosis at best delays and at worst prevents the proper treatment. Recently, I was taking care of a black woman in her 50s, hospitalized where I work at UCSF. She had a history of sickle-cell disease and had come to the ER with shoulder pain. When she was admitted, the doctors who evaluated her saw that her X-rays showed no fracture or dislocation and that her blood counts indicated anemia, so they concluded that she was having a sickle-cell pain crisis, but this woman hadn’t had a sickle-cell pain crisis in well over a decade.
By the time I met her, she was 10 days into her hospitalization, and she had been on IV fluids and IV opiates with no change in her shoulder pain. I sat down with her and listened to her story. She told me her pain woke her up from sleep. With a brief exam and an MRI to confirm my suspicion, I diagnosed a full thickness rotator cuff tear. She got anti-inflammatory medicine, physical therapy, and a surgical consultation. With the correct diagnosis, she was on her way to healing.
Today, the world heaves from systems-level failures as evidenced currently by the intersecting crises of the pandemic and of climate catastrophe. Public health experts and governments are failing to properly address the problems we face because their solutions do not address the problems at the level of the system. While vaccination and masking are helpful to mitigate the harms of COVID, if we look at how the virus spreads through spaces of incarceration, where humans are warehoused in nursing homes or prisons, or where people are forced into exposure at work in places such as meat-packing facilities, it becomes clear that changing a system that creates those forms of incarceration has to play a central role in our response.
To understand why our bodies and our planet are suffering in the ways that they are, we need the correct diagnosis, and for that we must extend our story back in time to some 600 years ago, when a narrative that opened the door to systems of domination, that made land theft and resource extraction possible on a global scale, began to be widely disseminated. That colonial capitalist cosmology has long been driving damage around the globe in ways that make a healthy life for humans impossible, and that damage will continue until that cosmology and the systems it imagines into reality are abolished and replaced with ones that recognize our interconnectedness and that center care.
That care revolution must be grounded in a clear understanding of who we are, how we got here, and how we can be on this planet together in ways that generate health. Bodies of people living in societies organized around that colonial capitalist cosmology are bodies wracked by inflammatory disease. Inflammation underlies nearly all the leading causes of death in modern industrialized societies. These diseases, such as cardiovascular and auto-immune disorders, cancer and diabetes, are rare in traditional and Indigenous communities living with intact cosmologies that weave them into the web of life that supports them. The hallmark of colonial capitalist cosmology is one of separation—of people from one another, from the Earth and her systems, and from other living entities upon which our own health ultimately depends. This sense of separation serves an important function for those who benefit from this system: it’s much easier to extract resources, exploit labor and concentrate wealth into your own hands when you don’t feel connected to other people and to the natural world, so this feeling of separation generates enormous damage.
The body’s response to damage or the threat of damage is inflammation. The inflammatory response is the body’s ancient healing mechanism to restore its optimal functioning in the face of damage. In the acute setting, as with a paper cut, the inflammatory response heals and then turns off, but when the damage keeps coming, the inflammatory response runs unabated. This healing response, then, begins to do more harm than good. It turns the body on itself. When it comes to chronic inflammatory disease, studies of twins have shown that the environment is more impactful than genetics. Those environmental factors include not only what is in our local environment but also our histories and the way lines of power have been drawn around us.
The sum of our lifetime exposures is called the exposome, and it actually extends before our lifetimes through our ancestral lineages because intergenerational trauma leaves traces in our bodies that can express as inflammatory disease. This is important to understand because colonial medicine frames chronic inflammatory disease as the outcome of poor lifestyle choices. We are told to improve our diet and get more exercise, and peddlers of various supplements and microbiome pills are there to capitalize. And while these things can help, they can’t be the ultimate source of our healing. Focusing on individual choices is a form of medical gaslighting, when the actual driver of pathology is in the world that has been constructed around our bodies.
For most people on planet Earth, a toxic exposome is not a matter of choice. It is the outcome of colonial capitalist social architecture. In this understanding, disease is situated in the spaces around the body in the exposome and in the accumulated history lived through our bodies and minds. When we look at this process on a cellular level, we can see how these exposures leave their marks on our replicating somatic cells. Usually these replicating cells will divide and live until they reach senescence, or cellular aging, when they go metabolically quiet, but cells can age prematurely as a consequence of damage. A toxic exposome accelerates this phenomenon, driving the premature aging of cells through the accumulation of damage over time. Premature aging forces a cell into a radical transformation in which that aging cell acquires what’s called the “senescence-associated secretory phenotype” or SASP. Instead of being metabolically quiet in their old age, these cells become factories pumping out molecular messengers that drive chronic inflammatory diseases in older people in societies organized around damaging structures. These cells are driving fire in our bodies.
Inflammation is not just an animal’s way of responding to damage in an attempt to restore optimal bodily functioning, it’s also what we see today in the planet’s body, with heat or swelling, e.g. catastrophic wildfires, uninhabitable temperatures, flooding, etc. From the tiniest invisible thing to the largest invisible thing, i.e. from the microscopic to the macro-economic, systems impacted by damage are systems that are inflamed. The same mindset that is hurting our bodies is setting our world on fire.
The deep trouble we are in requires deep medicine. Nothing less than a transformation of our world and the way it is organized will be sufficient to bring about the cooling we need, and that transformation must be led by the correct diagnosis. Just as “deep ecology” recognizes the value and intrinsic rights of ecosystems above and beyond their capacity to serve humans, deep medicine moves individuals from the center of our understanding of health and places the systems to which we belong in focus. Individuals can only be healthy when the systems around them are healthy. Deep medicine understands that health is an emergent phenomenon that can occur when nature’s systems and social systems are interacting in mutually beneficial ways. We cannot have health when we leave some people or some other beings out of the circle of our concern. If disease is caused by a toxic exposome, health only becomes possible when the exposome is restructured through systems of care.
Colonial capitalism has ruthlessly and systematically exploited the world’s people and resources. Deep medicine seeks to put the personhood back in the beings that capitalism would have us see as inanimate—the mountains and rivers, the very body of the Earth we are inextricably part of, not apart from. To put ourselves back in the web of life and to awaken all of our relationships and responsibilities to each other, to other humans and other more-than-humans, that has to be the foundational starting place of deep medicine.
Deep medicine will require of us that we abandon the culture of individualism and the damage of domination and that we opt for care brought about through nurturing networks and the embracing of collective experience and knowledge. These sorts of networks are more resilient to climate shocks and volatility, as evidenced in a number of peasant farming and agro-ecological movements throughout the world. Deep medicine eschews self-aggrandizing thought leaders and billionaire philanthropists for the wisdom held by the lived experience of communities, groups of people who are already working autonomously throughout the world to advance a culture of care. It understands that the logic and system of capitalism cannot be used to heal the wounds that have been created through capitalism, which must be abolished, as other toxic systems have been. It’s time for radically new concepts of healing.
This is the work we are doing with the Deep Medicine Circle, a woman-of-color-led, worker-directed organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, learning and restoration. We are building bridges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to help Indigenous groups reassert their sovereignty and their homelands while weaving together multiple systems of knowing that can teach us how to care for the Earth and each other. Here on a farm in Ramaytush Ohlone territory, just a few steps away from where Portola landed and started his genocidal march across the San Francisco Peninsula, we are trying to demonstrate what that looks like in practice.
One of our principal areas of our work is what we call “farming is medicine.” As with every modern institution, today’s food system is rooted in colonial capitalist cosmology. The land has been stolen, Indigenous people rendered invisible in their own homelands, labor exploited; and the soil, water, and air have been damaged through extractive processes that enrich a few and leave the rest of the system in poor health. Farming as medicine seeks to reverse that order. First, land is “re-matriated,” i.e. Indigenous women’s authority over community well-being is re-asserted. Farmers are recast as ecological stewards and health workers, growing food and tending soil under Indigenous leadership to heal the Earth and heal the people. The food we grow is liberated from the market mentality to be what food always was before colonialism—medicine. If we want to end world hunger, we have to stop playing by the rules that create hunger in the first place.
The care revolution requires that we accurately diagnose why we are here today with our bodies and planet inflamed so that we can move forward with the correct solutions and not delay the urgent need for healing. While policy will be critical to stopping the damage, much of the healing work is already happening all around the world in communities that have rejected the logic of capitalism and started to create economies of care. With the correct diagnosis, the correct path ahead becomes clear. It is not a softer, fuzzier version of colonialism and capitalism: it is committing to the fire of those old structures that must burn so that a world of care can come forward.
Happy New Year! As we bid adieu to what has admittedly been a challenging 2021 for so many of us, we wanted to share with you, our Bioneers community, the top 10 stories from the past year that resonated most with you, reflecting our collective passion for such topics as Indigenous rights, the complex microbial world beneath our feet, women’s leadership, regenerative food systems, and many others.
We hope you enjoy this look back and that you’ll join us as we look forward, despite all the challenges, to a new year in which we will be able to keep highlighting news, stories, and exemplary projects, movements, and leaders that inspire us all to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations.
Decolonizing Regenerative Agriculture: An Indigenous Perspective
Bioneers interviewed A-dae Romero-Briones (Cochiti/Kiowa), Director of Programs-Native Agriculture and Food Systems at First Nations Development Institute, about Indigenous farming, agriculture, and relationships to the land.
How Breathing Exercises Can Change Your Life | James Nestor
In his bestselling book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, investigative journalist James Nestor shared remarkable research about the healing power of breath.
Psilocybin Mushroom Medicines: A Paradigm Shift in Global Consciousness | Paul Stamets
The great mycologist Paul Stamets, perhaps the world’s leading expert on the topic, explored the healing potential of psilocybin and the challenges posed by the rapidly changing social and legal attitude toward these ancient medicines.
Grief, Sacred Rage, Reckoning, and Revolutionary Love
This powerful conversation with three of the most extraordinary women of our era, Terry Tempest Williams, “V” (formerly known as Eve Ensler), and Valarie Kaur, was hosted by Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons.
No More Stolen Sisters: Stopping the Abuse and Murder of Native Women and Girls
In communities across Indian Country in the U.S. and Canada ravaged by fossil fuel extraction and mining operations, Native women have been going missing at alarming rates while tribes have had little recourse to successfully identify and prosecute the predators responsible. In this program, 5 Native women leaders described how they are taking action to address this crisis.
Hidden Hunger: Does Food Lack Essential Nutrients?
Nutrients in fruits and vegetables have declined in the past 50-70 years. People may be getting sufficient calories yet are experiencing “hidden hunger”—a lack of essential nutrients. In this interview, soil scientist Dr. Gladis Zinati of The Rodale Institute discussed the impact of soil health and farming practices on human nutritional health.
The Feminist Climate Renaissance: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis | Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
In this talk, marine biologist and activist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson discussed the collection she co-edited, All We Can Save, and the powerful voices of leading figures in the emerging “Feminist Climate Renaissance” it showcases.
Indigenous Voices for Decolonized Futures | Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy
In this inspiring presentation, leading Indigenous educator Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy shared a three-step approach to re-imagining climate and environmental justice in California and beyond, focusing on concrete actions that challenge us to dream better futures together.
Starlings, Infinity, and the Kith of Kinship | Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt
Starlings’ impressive ability to mimic the sounds of the life around them illuminates their practice of sharing in the web of life. In this excerpt from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, ornithologist/environmentalist Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt explores the infinity of intelligences cradled by reciprocity in a world that both includes yet surpasses the limits of human knowledge.
Interview with Merlin Sheldrake, Author of Entangled Life
In this conversation with Bioneers’ J.P. Harpignies, biologist Merlin Sheldrake drew from his bestselling book, Entangled Life, to discuss his remarkable exploration of fungal networks and the radical rethinking of our relationship to the web of life their study can lead us to.
Join the Ecological Farming Association at their in-person 42nd Annual EcoFarm Conference, January 19th-22nd at the Asilomar State Beach & Conference Center. The EcoFarm Conference convenes agriculturalists working to advance just and ecological farming and food systems for four days of visionary keynote speakers, skill-building workshops, pre-conference events, an expo, seed swaps, networking, and farm tours.
From local communities and states to federal policy, antitrust movements to dismantle monopolies are challenging the system that can be summed up as: Make Feudalism Great Again. Although breaking up is hard to do, we’ve broken up monopolies before.
In this second of our two-part program, we join Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell and Maurice BP-Weeks to survey the landscape of rising antitrust movements to break the stranglehold of corporate power and level the playing field for a democratized economy.
Thom Hartmann, the top progressive talk show host in America for over a decade, a four-time Project Censored Award-winning journalist, and bestselling author. Learn more at his website.
Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which produces research and develops policy to counter corporate control and build thriving, equitable communities.
Maurice BP-Weeks, Co-Executive Director of ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy) where he works on campaigns to create equitable communities by dismantling systems of wealth extraction in Black and Brown communities.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Producer: Teo Grossman
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: According to Jeffrey Winters, the author of Oligarchy, wealth in the U.S. today is over “two times as concentrated as imperial Rome, which was a slave-and-farmer society.”
If billionaires were a nation, they’d be the world’s 3rd largest economy.
As Fortune magazine CEO Alan Murray has observed: “More and more CEOs worry that public support for the system in which they’ve operated is in danger of disappearing.”
Indeed, from local communities and states to federal policy, antitrust movements to dismantle monopolies are challenging the system that can be summed up as: Make Feudalism Great Again.
MAURICE BP-WEEKS: Amazon hosted this kind of game show like search for the best city to build their second headquarters in, and the way that the contest worked is basically whoever could give them the most tax giveaways or benefit was going to be the city that it chose.
HOST: Maurice BP-Weeks worked on one of the most explosive and high-profile campaigns to resist and challenge Amazon. He’s co-director of the Action Center for Race and Economy where he works with community organizations and labor unions to create equitable communities, and dismantle a monopolist system he calls, racial capitalism.
The campaign erupted in the borough of Queens in New York City, which is among the most diverse and low-income in the nation.
Maurice spoke online at a Bioneers conference.
Maurice BP-Weeks
MBP-W: So, you know, from leaked documents and some public documents, we know that cities were offering all sorts of things, you know, no income tax by Amazon employees for 35 years, no property taxes paid at all, we’ll build a rail line for you, all sorts of things that cities were offering.
And when Queens was chosen, you know, I think the residents there realized a couple of things. One, this isn’t really a good business partner to have in your neighborhood. So there’s lots of diverse businesses in Queens that have been there for lots of years, and one thing we know that happens when Amazon comes into a particular place is they suck away both the labor market and just drive down the quality of the actual area while not paying any taxes into that area in order to upkeep other things.
That along with, you know, the company having no response to things like them having contracts with ICE or other policing entities. The areas that they were looking at going into were filled with immigrants – either first- or second-generation immigrants – to have a neighbor coming in, this huge corporation, that is so aggressive towards immigrants with their contracts with ICE just wasn’t something that was possible.
And frankly, New York City is, along with lots of other states in this moment, you know, there are lots of financial needs there in schools and roads and parks. And there’s a lot of financial need. I think communities correctly agreed that it just doesn’t make sense to give giveaways to one of the wealthiest corporations on Earth run by the richest man on Earth when we could instead fund our schools more, fund our train system more, etc.
So, that’s a little of why the Queens pushback happened. That was a higher profile. And I will say that both Amazon and Google, and other companies, really do this all of the time.
HOST: For Stacy Mitchell, the Queens rebellion was déjà vu all over again. As co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, she had been battling the same players in the same matrix ensnaring local communities nationwide.
She’s produced many influential reports and articles, and testified before Congress. And she’s been seminal in some of the antitrust actions dogging Amazon.
Stacy Mitchell
STACY MITCHELL: There is this growing focus on structure, economic structure and on policy, and we’ve been living for a number of decades here imagining that big companies have been taking over and growing in size and power simply because they were better at what they did, right, they were more efficient. Like every time you walked past the corner drugstore that had closed its doors or another workplace that had gone out of business, or another small town somewhere that was struggling, you just sort of assumed that this was like the price of progress, the natural evolution of companies taking over that were just better at what they did.
And what’s really true and what a lot of our research and other research shows is that in fact what has happened is that we’ve written a set of policies that have favored these companies extraordinarily. And as they’ve grown, they’ve been able to manipulate government further and further and further to their own advantage. I mean, Amazon has picked up over $4 billion in local and state subsidies. You know, governments across the country writing Amazon checks.
If you’re a local hardware store and you want to open a second location, like good luck getting a dime from your city council. You’ll be laughed out and told that this is a free market and you have to compete. Right? I mean, while your biggest competitor is getting these huge subsidies.
And that’s not all. Amazon didn’t collect sales tax in most places for over 20 years, and incredible advantage. And we see that even today in the midst of the COVID crisis, you know, not actually stepping up and providing protection for the employees that are in their warehouses the way that they’re really legally obligated to do, and certainly ethically obligated to do. And our anti-monopoly laws, the fact that we really shelved our antitrust laws 40 years ago, has been a whole set of tools that, again, has fueled the exercise of power.
So the pushback in Queens that Maurice talked about and that we’re really seeing at the grassroots level across the country is this growing focus on, you know, it’s not just about calling these companies out for their bad behavior and trying to get them to do better, it’s about recognizing that this is our government and we own these rules, and we need to change these laws, and we need to think about, well, what does an economic structure look like that actually serves the democracy and that actually serves the needs of people.
HOST: So how did we get here?
Beginning in the 1960’s and ‘70s, the lawyer and later failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork launched a full-frontal attack against anti-trust law. He shifted the focus from fair competition to a matter of efficiency and price points. If customers were getting a cheaper price, then monopoly was just fine.
He marketed the phrase “consumer welfare” so successfully that in 1971 the famous Powell Memo by the Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell redefined the metric for judging monopoly down to price points.
Bork teamed up with Milton Friedman of the rising Chicago School of Economics and Neoliberalism. They asserted that corporations were accountable only to shareholders – not to employees, communities, or the environment.
This radical shift was contrary to the original intent of antitrust law, which was to protect small businesses, fair competition, and democracy itself against the concentration of great wealth and power.
Beginning in the 1980s, the Reagan administration started systematically dissembling antitrust law and dialing down enforcement. That trend has continued full-tilt-boogie ever since, landing us in today’s world of giants and dwarves.
So, how’d that work out? Pretty much the way you’d expect, says progressive radio talk show host and author Thom Hartmann…
Thom Hartmann
THOM HARTMANN: I think the most important thing though is educating people. I don’t think most Americans realize that the average American family pays a $5,000 a year monopoly tax. Americans pay twice as much for cable television as any other developed country in the world. We pay two to three times as much for cell phone service. We pay more than twice as much for WiFi. We pay more for airfare. We pay two to ten times more for pharmaceuticals. I mean, the list just goes on and on. We’re spending a lot more for a lot of things than any other developed country in the world, anyway. Duh, it’s because they enforce their anti-monopoly laws and we don’t. So I think this step one is waking people up, educating people.
HOST: Data show that monopolies smother the economy. They drive down wages, raise prices, throttle small and independent businesses, damage local communities and economies, and stifle innovation and competition.
The predicament is that they’re now so embedded in the economy that they compose a kind of private infrastructure that people depend on. But there’s another way to approach this dilemma, says Maurice BP-Weeks.
MBP-W: I live in a neighborhood where most of my neighbors are elderly and at high risk for contracting the Coronavirus in a way that would be a real health complication for them, and they’ve been ordering a lot on Amazon, a lot of stuff, everything from kind of regular groceries to paper towels, to things to keep them busy in the house, etc. and they love it too. That’s the other thing, you know, everyone gets excited when they’re getting an Amazon package, they love the company. But the fact that there’s an infrastructure that exists so that we could get things that people need to them quickly at a time where they can’t get them themselves, that’s actually great. And they built it using really, really shady and not so great strategies, but now it is there, and we can actually take it; we can use it; we can do a lot of the things that they’re doing.
Whether it can be operated in the way that it currently is, at the size that it is, is a real question to which personally I think the answer is no. We have to break it up and we have to have some sort of more democratic control over it.
You know, of course, controlling for– we don’t want to pay the workers crappy wages. We want it to be safe. We don’t want it to be harming the environment, etc. But I think there are things there that prove that this is a piece of infrastructure that we can use.
SM: It’s not online commerce or, you know, the Cloud or any of the other industries that Amazon controls, it’s the fact that those things are controlled by this single unaccountable player that operates essentially above any kind of law. That’s the problem that we have to address, not the technology, not how much we enjoy online commerce and its convenience. That’s all great.
SM: And they found that these companies – Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple – are in fact monopolies, that they have monopoly power, that they exercise that power in ways that harms people and harms independent businesses and communities,and then they laid out a set of recommendations. And essentially with regard to Amazon, what they’ve called for is exactly how we handled the railroads.
So in 1906 we passed a law that said, look, if you’re a railroad, that’s fine; you can’t also own other companies. Like you have to be a neutral carrier, a common carrier. You can’t have a financial interest in commodities because then you’re going to favor your own commodities over those who need the railroad.
And that’s what we should do with Amazon. We should say, look, you as an online platform needs to be separate from Amazon as a retailer. AWS needs to be spun off. And their logistics infrastructure—they’ve now built a logistics operation, a shipping operation that rivals UPS and even the Postal Service in scale, but they also need to be spun off as an independent company. And then Amazon, when its functioning as critical infrastructure needs to be subject to a set of public oversight laws.
HOST: But needless to say, breaking up is hard to do. Like the railroads before them, Big Tech funds the best government money can buy, including Congress.
Stacy Mitchell says much of the real action has already been happening at the local and regional levels. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance published a guide called “Fighting Monopoly Power” that details actions states and communities can take.
SM: It goes through a whole range of tools that people have at the state and local level, some of those that I just named, but also things like starting a public bank, which your city can do and can be a great way to untangle our financial system from Wall Street and begin to build locally controlled banking systems that work with community banks and local credit unions to actually channel our capital where it needs to go, to create the kinds of businesses and jobs and economic development that we need.
We can, you know, enact rules that eliminate subsidies. There are just tons of powers at the state and local level. And we see that in the hundreds and hundreds of municipalities that have built their own publicly owned broadband networks and told Time Warner and the other—Charter and the other giants to go away; we’re going to have better Internet at lower cost.
We’ve seen it in places like Oklahoma and other states that have passed referendums blocking corporate ownership of farmland and taking action against some of the big ag monopolies. We see it in places like North Dakota where they’ve said that you can’t operate a pharmacy in the state unless you’re a pharmacist. So every pharmacy in North Dakota is a locally owned, independent business. And we see this in all kinds of ways across the country, that people have used local government to try to push back against corporate power and to actually build systems locally that they control. I think when we start to look at the economy through that lens, we can see all the ways that we can begin to shift things.
MBP-W: There are local tools that we’re used to using that we can use on Amazon that, you know, we just have to sort of build a little bit of spine to do. So ensuring workplace safety in a particular municipality can pass a law that just does that in the way that you want.
You can still continue to do your local organizing, but connecting with folks who are doing that same type of organizing all around the country is really, really key so that we’re sort of connected in a way that starts to make us a more formidable force against this huge company.
HOST: Maurice BP-Weeks and Stacy Mitchell are part of a coalition called Athena, which is taking on Amazon. Along with advocates, policy experts, and academics, Athena is a group of forty-plus organizations whose communities and livelihoods are negatively impacted by Amazon. Athena’s stated aim is “to break up the power of Amazon and other mammoth corporations and recreate a world where all people, our environment, and our economy are healthy and sustainable; where everyone is safe, respected, and able to thrive.”
When we return, we look from the local to the global as anti-trust movements start to upend the Monopoly board.
HOST: Although breaking up is hard to do, we’ve broken up monopolies before. When the Nixon and Carter administrations used antitrust laws to break up the AT&T telephone monopoly, it vaporized the corporate propaganda campaign that it would harm shareholders and 401(k)’s. Instead, one share of stock became 7 or 8 shares. Shareholder value increased.
But today’s Big Tech companies have taken monopoly to a dizzying new level. Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff calls it “surveillance capitalism,” the title of her influential book. Thom Hartmann, Maurice BP-Weeks and Stacy Mitchell say that these days, Big Brother is not only watching you…
TH: Amazon is in the perfect position to know what people are buying. They’re selling stuff from small businesses, which is their sales pitch. Right? We’ve got, you know, half of our business is small businesses flowing through us. But what they’re doing is they’re very carefully looking at which one of these small businesses are actually doing pretty good so we can just screw them, wipe them out, and find some manufacturer to make the generic version of what they’re selling, and, you know, put them in the ground.
SM: Amazon sells its own goods as like a retailer, where it’s buying goods from other suppliers, selling them on its website. It also manufactures its own private label goods, so there are thousands of items that are Amazon-branded goods…
HOST: Stacy Mitchell…
SM: And it hosts on its platform all of these third party sellers, and those third party sellers are, you know, independent retailers, they’re major brands, you know, big companies that you would know, small companies, there are bunch of them overseas, you know, all kinds of different sorts of businesses, and, you know, what that enables—
If you want to sell online right now, because Amazon is getting so many people right out of the gate, so many eyeballs right out of the gate, your choice is either you can hang your shingle out on a world wide web on your own, have your own site, but it’s like, you know—you’re like on a dirt road that few people are actually traveling by and never finding you. Or you can become a seller on Amazon.
And if you become a seller on Amazon, you are giving to your most ferocious competitor everything of value that you have. You’re giving them the relationships with your customers, you’re giving them your knowledge of the particular products that you sell. And because they own all that infrastructure not only for ecommerce but also we can talk about Amazon web services and increasingly Alexa, their sort of voice-operating system. All of those pieces of infrastructure give them this god-like view of everything that is happening across the economy.
And from that vantage point, they can pick off hot-selling products that some business has found and start selling it themselves and demote that business in the search result, or they can simply use their gatekeeper power to raise fees. And so, you know, what we’ve found is that the businesses that are selling on Amazon site are increasingly having to pay a bigger and bigger cut of their sales. Today, about one out of every three dollars in sales that a business makes on Amazon site, they have to pay to Amazon. That’s up from 19% just a few years ago.
So this is a company that governs our markets, that effectively levies a tax on our trade, and if you have a problem with it, you know, the judge and jury again is Amazon. So again, it’s back to this issue of control and power.
HOST: Along with corporate capture of government, law and regulation, equally important is capturing people’s minds. Although Thom Hartmann says educating the public is a critical piece of the solution, what do you do when mass media and the internet are also monopolized and manipulated by giant corporations?
TH: So we have, you know, a handful of corporations now that control the public dialogue. And then sitting atop that, or perhaps under that like the roots of a tree, kind of a substrate or subsurface of that, you’ve got Facebook, which has, you know—I’m personally of the opinion that Mark Zuckerberg is the most powerful man in the world and, you know, is able to influence public opinion similarly. And I never saw any really aggressive conversations about net neutrality there either, although those would tend to be more scattered. We need to take this on systemically, you know, top to bottom.
HOST: Maurice BP-Weeks…
MBP-W: It’s not just an economic power, it is also a political power, and that power doesn’t just come from the amount that they give on the books to legislators. There’s a real fear of going after Zuckerberg, going after Bezos, being seen as going after one of these companies. You know, folks are really scared to take them on. And we end up with these things like we’ll allow Facebook to impanel their own review of their practices, that they get to pick the people on, and then decide whether they want to implement the changes that they—you know, these wacky things that are like, whoa, it would be easier to just have government do that, but we’re so—we’re so afraid of these sort of too-big-to regulate companies, that we don’t do anything.
HOST: That may be changing. The European Union hit Google with billions in fines from 2017 through 2019. But these are just rounding errors for the nearly two trillion dollar corporation.
More significantly, Australia passed a law forcing Facebook and Google to pay news publishers for their content. South Korea forced Apple and Google to open their app stores to alternative payment systems, threatening their 30% gatekeeper commission from developers. Turkey is demanding that Google stop favoring its own properties in local searches, a critical issue with major financial consequences both for Google and its would-be competitors.
In the US, a series of ongoing whistleblower leaks and scandals have continued to turn up the heat on Big Tech.
SM: The opportunity here by taking on monopoly power, directly going after the sort of private accumulation of power, is that it’s a real opportunity to re-invigorate the idea of democratic government.
The House antitrust subcommittee’s work and the investigation that they did this year, one of the really electrifying moments in that was they had a hearing in late July where they had the four CEOs – Jeff Bezos and the others – up there.
Many of the hearings that we see, there’s a kind of deference that lawmakers give to these CEOs, a sense of like: I don’t really understand technology, but you do, and you’re powerful, and all that sort of like–and, you know, letting them grand stand. And this committee did not have any of that. They made it very clear that these companies are subject to the law and subject to accountability in terms of how they just conducted themselves. If one of the CEOs was not answering the question and was starting to like wander off and do a PR thing, they just cut them off and moved on, politely, but, you know, just really clear cut.
And they brought in all of these voices of ordinary people – small business owners, workers, other people who’d been harmed – and gave them—you know, people who they’d uncovered as part of the investigation, really gave them voice during the hearing. And so I think part of the reason I’m excited about this growing anti-monopoly movement is that it’s a chance not only to counter corporate power but inherently within it, a chance to think about how we can get government back that actually works for us.
HOST: When Jeff Bezos returned to Earth from his 15-minute vacation in space on his corporate Blue Origin rocket, he gleefully thanked Amazon employees and shareholders. They had just paid $5.5 billion dollars for his 4 minutes hanging out at the edge of outer space.
It wasn’t rocket science for the world to grok the clueless lunacy of the moment.
MBP-W: I’ve tried to explain something like Bezos’ wealth to children before, and [LAUGHTER] saying if you stacked one dollar bills just of his wealth, you’d be way past the space station by the time you’re finished counting. They get a huge PR boost when they give these tiny, tiny, tiny percentages of their wealth to solve problems that they are actually contributing to.
So Bezos, you know, just recently made a lot of headlines by contributing to a climate fund. Amazon is one of the worst polluters, of course, in America. You know, probably the world.
TH: And I think we need to deal with the sociopathy of great wealth. A number of these people are just literally screaming sociopaths.
Doniga Markegard trained as a tracker of wild animals as a teenager, which ignited a lifelong passion for the natural world. On the trail of a mountain lion on the California coast, she met Erik Markegard, a rancher with a similar reverence of the wild. They fell in love, got married, started a family and together they run Markegard Family Grass Fed, a pastured livestock operation in which Doniga blends her tracking, Permaculture and holistic grazing skills to regenerate coastal prairie lands.
My background is in wildlife tracking and Permaculture. I was immersed in the wilderness in high school in a special program in which we learned bird language, wilderness survival, and how to track animals. Tracking is probably the oldest science known to humans. It utilizes so much of your brain: you have to be totally in the present moment and yet be tracking the past; understanding what came before you and projecting into the future. Hunter-gatherers are able to pick up on very small clues in the landscape, such as a lizard darting 50 feet away and countless other subtle but significant clues.
Efforts to separate Indigenous people from the land was a big mistake. We need to bring Indigenous knowledge back and ask how we can learn from those who tend the wild and understand that humans are an integral part of the landscape, just as predators are. We largely removed humans and predators from the landscape, and that increased the stagnation and the sedentary behavior of prey species. I spent seven summers in the middle of the wilderness in Idaho during the re-introduction of wolves. In my book Dawn Again: Tracking The Wisdom of the Wild, I wrote about tracking an alpha wolf carrying just a water bottle and a radio. I set out on the trail at dawn and trotted along incredible, pristine meadows. I came up over a ridge and a feeling rose up through my legs, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It had just begun to rain a couple of minutes before, and there were raindrops on top of the tracks that I was following. I realized that I was very close on the trail of the wolf. I went over the ridge and came to the edge of the meadow. As a tracker, I learned to stop in the shadows and observe. The edges are where the most activity occurs—the edges of the forest and the meadow, the edges of water and land. I saw the wolf moving along in the shadows of the forest. My body filled with so much adrenaline that all I could do was sit and soak my feet in the cold stream. As I was doing that, wolves howled all around me.
I heard a raven call. I got up from the stream and walked over and found a bull elk, partially submerged in the ox-bow part of the creek. It had just been taken down by a pack of 11 wolves. That was the moment in my life, as a 17 or 18-year-old, when I internalized the cycle of life and death. I realized that the meadow was full of life. I could smell the elk. I could see the saliva on the grass. I could feel the energy of the herd moving through the landscape. I didn’t fully understand what I experienced in that meadow until many years later. I witnessed a phenomenon called the trophic cascade: when predators are introduced into a landscape, they affect the behavior of prey species. Their herds have to move more often, so they no longer overgraze plants, so vegetation thrives, and that brings the songbirds and beavers back; it boosts biodiversity.
I thought a lot about how we can mimic nature in our human activities and apply its models to something like regenerative agriculture. Regenerative farming and ranching involve moving animals around to prevent overgrazing, but many farmers are focused on just one aspect of the whole natural system. I study and teach Holistic Management, which involves studying how all of the environment is interconnected. You have to learn how to work with water and mineral cycles and with the energy flow of photosynthesis (the light energy from the sun that feeds plants and sequesters carbon). We try to work with the community dynamics of all the biodiversity on our lands. You can’t just focus on one element if you’re practicing authentic regenerative agriculture. If you’re going to steward your environment, you have to know your environment. You have to intimately know the plants and you have to intimately know the animals.
The settlers didn’t listen to the Indigenous people whose land they stole. Those first people understand that all life is kin. It’s a completely different approach to land. If you view all life as interconnected, why, for instance, would you deplete all of the underground life-forms that enrich the soil– the microbes and the nematodes – by turning that soil over with a plow? Another big mistake, over the past 30 years, was the idea that removing cattle to let the landscape “go back to nature” would improve the land. But what happens when cattle are removed? Many studies have shown that, especially on coastal terrace prairies, when cattle are removed, biodiversity plummets. One clear indicator is that the number of grassland songbirds plummets drastically. Conservationists are now beginning to realize their mistake and are starting to understand the need for ranchers and cattle as essential components of ecosystem management.
There’s a lot of bad press about cows, but the problem is not the cow, it’s the how; it’s the way humans manage the animals. Ecosystems have evolved with large herds of animals moving across the landscape—thirty million bison, ten million elk. I manage ranches on the coastal prairies north and south of San Francisco, and those prairies are the most biodiverse in all of California. We are proud of the fact that on our ranches we grow 157 species of plants without ever purchasing a seed. Not many farmers can claim that kind of productivity.
We raise cattle by moving them in a way that mimicks nature and the herd effect, i.e. large packs of grazing animals in constant movement. When we move cattle away from a piece of land, we follow that up with chickens. We raise about 8,000 broiler chickens a year. They add additional fertility to the land. The chickens mimic the massive flocks of band-tailed pigeons in the West and passenger pigeons in the East, which are now extinct. They once flew in such great numbers that when they would land on a tree, you couldn’t even see a leaf. When they flew, they would blacken the sky. What happens when you have that many birds flying through an area? They deposit a lot of droppings on the land, which is food for the soil. The land depended on those flocks, but since they’re gone, we use chickens that we move every day. We’re out there first thing in the morning, moving their shelters across the landscape. As a result, when spring comes, the pastures are vibrant.
We also raise grass-fed lamb. We work with an organic, diversified vegetable farmer in our area. He took a 75-acre farm that was farmed conventionally in Brussels sprouts that he is in the process of transitioning to organic. He called us up and said: “I need your sheep. I can’t afford to truck in massive amounts of inputs and compost to get my soil fertility up.” He planted different varieties of cover crops, and instead of mowing with a diesel-powered tractor, he used our animals to mow and mulch the cover crops down. Animals are incredible biological farming units with great microbiomes that provide fertilizer out of their back end. There’s no ecologically intact natural area devoid of animals. Animals are integral to healthy soils and to food production. Using animals properly is key to an agricultural system that mimics how nature functions.
Stagnation leads to oxidation and desertification. In the same way that if we’re not moving our bodies, we’re going to be unhealthy, if there isn’t animal movement on grasslands, they’re going to overgrow, and then die. Especially in an environment such as California that’s brittle and dry eight months out of the year, we need something to keep the cycle of decay and life active year-round. That’s where the animals come in: they enhance the cycle of grass plants from birth, growth, death, and decay. Using the principles of regenerative agriculture, we’re working towards having green, living plants 365 days a year. Before we leased many of the ranches we work on, the cattle had been removed, and the pastures had become predominantly one species of invasive grass that was oxidizing and releasing carbon. When we brought cattle in and moved them around in a holistic management system, native grass plants came back and biodiversity increased. The management system is based on knowing how native perennial plants grow and flourish. We now have 32 percent perennial grass cover; we never planted a seed. It’s all about management.
Holistic management is part of a suite of regenerative agriculture practices that capture carbon in the soil and ultimately result in soil full of water and life. It’s the best way to build drought resiliency.
On one ranch we manage, at the tail end of a five-year California drought, we saw an increase of shallow carbon of 3% and an increase in deep carbon of 7%. Those are impressive numbers. If just 10% of California’s rangelands were to sequester carbon at this rate, it would be equivalent to taking two million vehicles off the road for a year. It’s about a half-ton of carbon per acre sequestered per year.
When we regenerate perennial native grasslands, everybody benefits. We see a rise in grasshopper sparrows that are declining everywhere else in the state. We’re seeing an abundance of endangered red-legged frogs. We lease the Jenner headlands on the Sonoma coast, and there’s an endemic wildflower that grows there that is threatened with extinction. We manage the cattle to come in and graze the thatch right at the perfect time so that wildflower can thrive. The local conservation groups are very happy with the impact the animals are having on biodiversity.
We monitor carbon sequestration in our ranches and compare them to nearby ranches that are conventionally grazed or left fallow. In conventional grazing operations, cattle stay in one area for a for an extended period of time and aggressively graze down the plants. The areas that were fallow and conventionally grazed both lost carbon content in their soil, while some of our lands had up to a 25% increase in sequestered carbon. Stewardship that understands how nature works is key.
Wildfires in California are a big reason the state is not meeting its emission reduction targets.
California forests are dense with fuel loads that have a devastating effect on intensifying wild fires. Forest lands are choked with impenetrable walls of greenery, poison oak, blackberries and other undergrowth that add to the fuel load, but it’s not necessary to spray herbicides to kill that undergrowth. We raise pigs in forested lands, and our pigs eat the blackberry, the poison oak, and most all of the plants of that fuel load. We can go in after the pigs and seed any bare areas that the pigs left behind with native grasses, and we can let the grasses regenerate. We thin out the firs and steward for oak trees. The Indigenous people of California tended the oak trees because their life depended on that acorn harvest, and now all our lives depend on us tending to these forests correctly because we’ve seen how many people have died in the last few years in forest fires and how much pollution has resulted, and it’s a win-win: we can mitigate fire risk and grow food at the same time.
We also graze grasslands at the Jenner Headlands above the Russian River. The land is owned by the Wildland Conservancy, the largest private landowner in California. They wanted somebody who was raising grass-fed beef and selling it to the local community. It’s an important step for a conservation group to take: to stop supporting industrial feedlot animal-confinement agriculture. The Wildland Conservancy selected Markegard Family Grass-Fed because we’re part of only 2% of the production in the U.S. that raises animals 100 % on grass, the way they’re designed to be raised.
I personally think that the messaging that eating meat is bad for the planet should really be to stop eating industrial-raised meat, and it should also be to stop eating industrial-raised soybeans and corn. It shouldn’t be plant versus meat. It’s looking to how that plant or animal is being raised and how much harm is being done by the most common farming and ranching methods versus how much life is being nurtured by regenerative, holistic approaches.
Singer-songwriter Ryan Amadorand life-long cultural architect, artist, musician, and filmmaker Alixa Garcíahave collaborated on a new song and video called “False Alarm.” The pair previewed this video and song for the 2021 Bioneers Conference audience before it was released.
“The song is a cry for our attention, not toward a debate over facts and data, but an essential, intrinsic, recommitment with the Earth. We wrote from a not-so-distant future about the world of consequence, and about the children who are inheriting that world, looking back at us, wondering what we did and what more we could have done.” – Alixa & Ryan
Singer-songwriter Ryan Amadorand life-long cultural architect, artist, musician, and filmmaker Alixa Garcíahave collaborated on a new song and video called “False Alarm.”
Video directed and edited by Alixa García Song written and performed by Alixa García (@alixagarcia_) & Ryan Amador (@ryanamador) Produced by Brad Kemp (@bradkempmusic) Engineered by Brett Castro (@brettcastro.wav) Additional engineering by Daniel Weildlein (@biosoulmusic)
With our planet in a climate emergency, an explosion in wealth inequality has led to a bizarre reality where billionaires continue to make news, dreaming of leaving the earth behind and adventuring into space. If we’re lucky, maybe they will… While some find it easier to imagine a future in the stars, extraordinary scientists and researchers are revealing the fascinating reality of the dynamic ecosystems beneath our feet — in the incredibly complex interrelationships of plants, bacteria, fungi, insects and minerals that life aboveground depends on.
This week we share presentations and discussions featuring some of the world’s leading experts on underground ecosystems, including Suzanne Simard, Ann Biklé, and David R. Montgomery.
Suzanne Simard – Dispatches From the Mother Trees
Suzanne Simard is one of the planet’s most influential, groundbreaking researchers on plant communication and intelligence. In her presentation at the 2021 Bioneers Conference, Suzanne discussed the dire global consequences of logging old-growth rainforests and nature-based solutions that combine Western science and Indigenous knowledge for preserving and caring for these invaluable forest ecosystems for the future generations.
David Montgomery and Anne Biklé – You Are What Your Food Ate
The intimate connections between the life of the soil and the nutritional quality of food points to the profound importance of farming practices that can imbue the human diet with the nutrients and compounds that underpin health, or rob us of them. In this presentation from the 2021 Bioneers Conference, geologist David Montgomery and biologist Anne Biklé share the growing body of scientific evidence linking soil health with human health discuss how a growing vanguard of farmers pioneering regenerative practices is proving that farming practices that are good for the land are good for us too.
Call for Submissions! Bioneers Conference – Artist Application 2022
Bioneers invites artists to bring captivating, compelling, and inspiring art to the 2022 Bioneers Conference, which will be held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, May 13-15th, 2022. Learn more about how you can share your art with the Bioneers community!
Most people live and move through life without a second thought ABOUT the extraordinarily dynamic life hidden beneath our feet. In this recorded conversation, three of the world’s leading specialists on different aspects of those underground ecosystems share their cutting-edge research. Moderated by Bioneers’ Restorative Food Systems Director Arty Mangan, this conversation features Suzanne Simard, Ph.D., Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, one of the planet’s leading experts on the synergies and complexities of forests and husband and wife duo, Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery, both scientific researchers whose groundbreaking work on the microbial life of soil has revealed its crucial importance to human wellbeing and survival.
At a time when the world is desperate for a new approach to living on the planet, can permaculture scale up to create the global ecological and social changes that are needed for human survival? Hosted by Permaculturalist Penny Livingston, this 2021 Bioneers Conference session features Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren, Permaculture magazine co-founder, and editor Maddy Harland, and author and regenerative farmer Mark Shepard.
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 “bioneers 20” for an exclusive 20% discount.
Indigenize the Law: Tribal Rights of Nature Movements with Casey Camp-Horinek | Part 2 | In this episode of Indigeneity Conversations, we talk with tribal elder and matriarch Casey Camp Horinek about why a tribally led movement is the best hope for the planet, and how the unique legal and political relationship between tribes and the U.S. federal government can help protect & restore the planet.
Reflecting on the 400 Year Anniversary of “the First Thanksgiving | Marking the 400 year anniversary of Thanksgiving, Alexis Bunten and Tony Perry attended the 51st National Day of Mourning in Plymouth Massachusetts. In this piece co-authored by Alexis and Tony, they both reflect on American history, mythos, and the mourning of injustice.
The Legacy of Wangari Maathai | Among the most prominent environmental activists of the last century is the late Professor Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement and inspired hundreds of thousands of people around the world to push for environmental progress. In this article, we honor the legacy of Wangari and her important contributions to climate justice.
Democracy vs. Plutocracy: Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime | In the first part of this two-part radio and podcast episode, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy that goes back to the very founding of the United States. The extreme concentration of corporate power and the prevalence of monopoly are indeed inarguable. If the solution is once again to throw the tea in the harbor, what does that look like in the 21st century?
A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis | In a viral moment that captured the world’s attention at the 2020 World Economic Forum, Vanessa Nakate had been cropped out of a picture where she posed alongside other youth activists where she was the only person of color in the photo. In her new book, The Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, Vanessa writes about the bigger picture of the global climate struggle often ‘cropped out’ of the fight against climate change.
Democracy and the Power of Connection: An Interview with Frances Moore Lappé | Frances Moore Lappé is a longtime food and human rights activist who received the prestigious Right Livelihood Award (often referred to as the “Alternative Nobel”) “for revealing the political and economic causes of world hunger and how citizens can help to remedy them.” In this interview, Frances discusses how she’s seen the world’s food system evolve.
This is Part Two of our conversation with tribal elder and matriarch Casey Camp Horinek. We discuss why a tribally led movement is the best hope for the planet, and how the unique legal and political relationship between tribes and the U.S. federal government is advantageous in efforts to truly protect ecosystems. Casey also discusses the journey her tribe is taking as they explore the best ways to incorporate rights of nature into their legal framework.
Casey Camp-Horinek, a tribal Councilwoman of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma and Hereditary Drumkeeper of its Womens’ Scalp Dance Society, Elder and Matriarch, is also an Emmy award winning actress, author, and an internationally renowned, longtime Native and Human Rights and Environmental Justice activist. She led efforts for the Ponca tribe to adopt a Rights of Nature Statute and pass a moratorium on fracking on its territory, and has traveled and spoken around the world.
This is an episode of Indigeneity Conversations, a podcast series that features deep and engaging conversations with Native culture bearers, scholars, movement leaders, and non-Native allies on the most important issues and solutions in Indian Country. Bringing Indigenous voices to global conversations. Visit the Indigeneity Conversations homepage to learn more.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Co-Hosts and Producers: Cara Romero and Alexis Bunten
Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
Consulting Producer: Teo Grossman
Studio Engineers: Brandon Pinard and Theo Badashi
Tech Support: Tyson Russell
This episode’s artwork features a tintype portrait of Casey Camp Horinek by Will Wilson. Mer Young creates the series collage artwork.
Additional music provided by Nagamo.ca, connecting producers and content creators with Indigenous composers.
Transcript
ALEXIS BUNTEN: Hi, Everyone. Welcome to Indigeneity Conversations, our native-to-native podcast dialogues from Bioneers. I’m Alexis Bunten, co-host and also co-director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program along with Cara Romero.
CARA ROMERO: Hi Everyone. This is Part two of our conversation with tribal elder and matriarch Casey Camp Horinek about her remarkable work in the tribal rights of nature movement. We had such a wonderful time talking with her about what led her to this work, and about the roots of the rights of nature movement.
We talked about how we launched our tribal-led Rights of Nature initiative at Bioneers through our Indigeneity Program. And the difference between customary laws and laws set forth in tribal constitutions.
AB: On this episode, we discuss why a native led movement is really the best for all of us in the United States and beyond, and the best hope for the planet. Federally recognized tribes have a unique political and legal relationship with the US federal government that gives us the potential to lead the way in protecting ecosystems for generations to come and all Americans really.
Casey also talks about the journey her tribe is taking as they explore ways to determine the best approach for their community to incorporate rights of nature into their legal framework.
CR: So now, we’ll go to our conversation with Casey. We pick up where she tells us about the experience that her tribe had as they explored ways to approach adopting rights of nature laws.
CASEY CAMP-HORINEK: When we started looking at this Rights of Nature thing, our first thought was we wanted it in the constitution. But knowing all of the hoops that they try to make us jump through in order to get from A to Z, to get something done, was what made us decide to just go directly for a statute. We had done the community organizing here at home, and my brother Cart always called it a kitchen table organizing, We all started sitting at mama’s table, or my table, as it turns out, and kind of talking to one another and batting things back and forth, and seeing the best way, the worst way, and the way forward. And then we kind of expanded into – well, we don’t have a word for cousin, so it would go to the brothers and sisters beyond, and the uncles and aunties, and grandmas and grandpas. Our kids were always running through the rooms, and they’d listen, whether they seemed to or not. Then it would expand to a community meeting, and eventually work its way to council. So I understand your process. I think it’s the same wherever we are.
But then when we decided—I believe we have to understand more than anything else right now, critical timing is happening. We do not have time to jump through the hoops that the BIA and the federal government and these IRA constitutions are trying to demand of us. That’s why we went for a statute. And its wording was not exactly what we chose it to be to begin with, but understand with anything that you put in your own statute or any resolutions that are passed to get you there, any of those resolutions can be tweaked. So you go ahead and put it in whatever language is the best language you have today, get it passed, get it moving, get it into the BIA’s records, get it to a place where you can already say I’m exerting my sovereignty now. And then if you need to, and you find a better way to present that, go through your tribal council again and say it looks like these words need to be adjusted a little bit; let’s do it this way. In five minutes or less, they can rescind that resolution and replace it with the next resolution with the words that you want.
When we got ours in place, we found that we should have and did eventually include our original tribal territory that we were blessed to be able to caretake in Nebraska. Because we know we have to stop KXL from coming through our traditional territory and destroying the Ogallala aquifer. We knew that our people came from Nishu or the Missouri River, where DAPL was trying to cross. That’s what took us there. When we formed the Cowboy and Indian Alliance or helped to reform that and were part of that resurgence, probably six or eight years ago, one of the things that we utilized up there was the sacred Ponca corn that my son Mekasi had brought back with a nephew Amos. Through agriculture we had – it’s a very ‘nother long story, but when we were forcibly removed, that was in the caretaking of some Lakota who found our fields and started taking care of the corn that was there. So Mekasi in a ceremony, in a dream, was told where to plant it. And we made this alliance with a wonderful white farmer and his wife, Art Tanderup and Helen Tanderup, and they lived on Ponca territory, original territory, but they’re the caretakers now. And we planted that through ceremony. My son Mikasi and family planted that, and it is deemed now in the Department of Agriculture as a sacred site because sacred Ponca corn is planted there. That is nature asserting its own rights, what Mother Earth is telling us needs to be happening. So, there are many forms that we can reclaim.
CR: I agree with your sense of urgency. This is the time that we have to stand for the land, that there is very little time left. I mean, I am bearing witness in my young 43 years to the devastating changes in our other brothers’ and sisters’ landscapes. I know being from Oklahoma, I have witnessed that landscape. I have lived in Oklahoma, and now is the time.
I love Rights of Nature because it really flips the paradigm from all of this property law into all the laws that we know to be true; that we are in service to nature, and that we must help her protect herself.
We’re protecting our children. We’re protecting all the things that we know in our blood memory have to be protected, not just for ourselves. These battles are not just for tribal peoples on their ancestral lands. They’re for certainly for future generations, certainly for the health of our children, but really for all people.
AB: I’d like to add a little bit more about why it’s so innovative. Rights of Nature law is proactive and it’s really seventh generation; you’re looking to your lessons, what you’ve learned, what’s been passed down from the past; we’re thinking about protecting what’s here now for future generations. And it’s set up to protect ecosystems and not to pay individuals for damages done. So even if there is a damage done, if it is prosecuted through Rights of Nature, damages paid would be to restore the ecosystem and to make it regenerative so that it can be healthy and live on its own terms, by its own rules.
Sometimes you hear the word customarylaw, sometimes you hear the word traditional law, sometimes you hear the word natural law, sometimes you might hear the word original instructions. Any of those terms are all the same thing. I wanted to clarify that to begin with.
And then when you layer on impositions by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the US federal government on tribes, then within the, I guess you could say, Western legal system, you’ve got two other layers on top of that. You’ve got tribal law, which is how a tribal nation governs itself within its own trust lands, sometimes called reservations, sometimes called other things. And then you have federal Indian law, and federal Indian law pertains to these IRA constitutions that federally recognized tribes have adopted, and this constitution, just like the federal government has a constitution, is a document that establishes that tribes deal directly with the US federal government. They’re not like a city or a town that has to go to the state first, through the state before they get to the federal government. Tribes, as sovereign nations, deal directly with the federal government.
And so this is one of the reasons why tribes adopting Rights of Nature language into their tribal constitutions is so exciting, because what’s happened in the United States is when we’ve heard all these exciting stories about cities and towns and municipalities and boroughs doing their own grassroots organizing and adopting Rights of Nature law, it immediately gets contested by the polluters, by the frackers, by the multinational corporations, and they have a lot of money to fight those little cities and towns, and they’ve been losing, because they have to go through the state level and all these appeals to get to the federal government.
Now if a tribe adopts Rights of Nature law to their constitution, it goes straight to the federal government. Now I don’t know the exact number, but we have over 100 tribes with IRA constitutions throughout the United States. If 50 of those 100 and something tribes adopted Rights of Nature language into their constitution, none of those corporations would be able to keep up with that.
With the NO DAPL Dakota Access Pipeline occupation by water protectors in 2016, for the first time ever, Americans from all walks of life, all backgrounds, different ages, different socioeconomic categories, different races, ethnicities, people understood that if the Missouri River was polluted, that when it goes through reservation lands, that that river has to come out somewhere, and it has to go through about a thousand more miles of the US before it reaches the ocean, and that that would affect all of us. It would affect grazing animals, it would affect water supplies, it would hurt everybody. But if these tribal lands have Rights of Nature measures, they can make these fights for the rivers, and the air, and the ecosystems, and the earthquakes because of fracking that’s happening in their lands, it ripples out and it protects everybody else.
CCH: You know, I think that there are—there are areas that we really need to kind of weigh in a different manner than we ever have before, because we are having to use the colonizers’ words when we address our feelings around the Rights of Nature. And I remember I was with 100 women globally. I believe it was 2010 or ’11, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network had invited us, and Shannon Biggs, who I now work with closely in movement rights and Pennie Opal Plant, we’re talking about Rights of Nature and looking at it as a possibility for us, and trying to convince me.
And my immediate pushback was I don’t think we can do that because any law that is made is just another fence put around us, just another reservation status, just another BIA construct, just another federal government trick.
Nature has its own rights and will inevitably heal herself, and hopefully take humans along on this ride. And by recognizing these Rights of Nature, we’re including ourselves in her journey as a living entity, because as humans, if we breathe, we’re part of the four winds, we’re part of the Thunder Nation, we’re part of…it just is exciting to me and gives me chills to really feel what this breath of life means, like an infant when its born, and that first [INHALES] that happens. It’s so sacred. And it’s coming from the womb, from the water, that salinated water, just with the same pH factor even as the Mother Ocean.
So if we drink and fill ourselves with her, with this sacred water, oh my goodness, how blessed are we to be part of her and to have her nurture us. If we eat something today, as I know I did, berries from the bushes, the incredible blessing of the buffalo, and the wings, the eggs I had this morning, and the wheat that came in that even, the grain. Those have roots in our Mother Earth. They come from the ancestors. They come from even the unborn that are part of the cycle of the mother and the father. It is so powerful that the sun rose today, that the moon mother is guiding the rhythms of life. And we’re part of this. We’re part of this revolving Earth as she nurtures us unconditionally. And if any of us have any ideas that simply recognizing, recognizing not giving rights, but recognizing the rights of all that that is called nature, get over it, feel it, and ask through your prayer and through your innate, as my relative Cara said, blood memories, if this is the path that will move us into a sacred future for the seventh generation, recognizing that we, too, are the seventh generation from [Her language], from before us.
It’s a beautiful opportunity that we’ve been given to begin to have this understanding seeping through and weaving through, just like the sacred water herself does. We’ll go around these obstacles. We’ll come together and be part of this ocean of understanding. [Her language]
CR: Casey, can you tell us a little more about the doctrine of discovery?
CCH: I think many of us are going to have to talk about this, because it’s like examining this beast from all angles. And the beast, to me, is the vehicle that was used in order to overrun this continent and many other continents, and to be able to find in their way of creating their law a legal way to do all of the murderous, Holocaust victimizing that they did to the indigenous people of what’s called North America and Africa and Australia, South America, everywhere. They used Christianity. They used a way of saying that the papal bull edict, and maybe one of you know the actual year that happened in the early teens of their Gregorian calendar, that the pope says, “This is my law now – if you come upon a shores of a place that you are – I really don’t use air quotes much, but discovering deserves air quotes – then those—if those people are not Christianized, then they don’t even count.” They, of course, did not see the value in a sacred tree or in the sacred waters, or in any of those things that we feel related to and we know in fact that is part of this sacred system of life that we exist in as human beings, but certainly not humans. And in fact, allowed them to come on these shores and use their understanding of even women, that women were property. That’s the way they looked at it. And other humans were property.
Chief Standing Bear, 1877
And I remember when I was young, hearing about the first Native American to be called human under the eyes of the law was in fact a Ponca, in 1878, who had escaped from the reservation. His name was Standing Bear. He was captured. He was returning his son’s bones to the ancestral lands after he was—after he died from the forced removal. And they had to do a writ of Habeas Corpus to take him to court. And the judge had to then rule that indeed he was a human being with constitutional rights in order for that writ of Habeas Corpus to work. And so, in 1878, we were then called human.
Although, it didn’t work. We’ve never had full—what their constitutional rights are supposed to have engendered us with, even as sovereign nations supposed to have our government-to-government relationship. It’s all a sham.
But certainly the first sham that allowed them to inflict all of the ownership of us and the territories that we protected came through the doctrine of discovery. And it has been with the indigenous hive mind, so to speak, to have that rescinded.
And I believe that first we must do that internally, and this is after talking to my family, my sons Mikasi, Jeff, Julie and Suzaatah, and my companion, that we need, as traditional people, traditional leadership to first reject that within our territories, and then reject it internationally, and then perhaps that person who is God on Earth, called the pope, might see the folly in this and rescind it.
AB: I agree. And I’d like to add a little bit more to this as well. From my understanding, the doctrine of discovery was a law put in place by European colonizers when they encountered Indigenous Peoples living here where we live, in what is now North America. And it was a way to take legal title of our ancestral territories and pass it down between white men.
And the way that the papal bulls fit into this is there were a series of edicts in the 1500s set out by the pope in the Vatican that were in the service of the Vatican and the Catholic Church gaining more power and more money in partnerships with the monarchs in Europe at the time. And these papal bulls said that—They basically proclaimed that any people – they wouldn’t have even called them people, I think – they encounter in these new places full of riches that they discovered with the land and resources that could be exploited, if they are not “Christian” or Christianized, or recognized as humans in the eyes of God, they would not be recognized as humans in the eyes of the—of the settlers, of the colonizers, and therefore, they were considered like animals, lesser than, which is of course a false premise that’s absolutely not indigenous at all. We are a part of nature. Human beings are no better or higher or more evolved or more progressed than a rock or a—or a fly, or any other creature, or living being or plant on this planet. So it builds up that idea of humans being better than.
Well then, once you can dehumanize us, then Indigenous Peoples became the first slaves. Our lands could be taken. We could be killed, flogged, made examples of to terrify and cause trauma for generations that are still here.
The same thing happened when treaties were made between sovereign European nations and tribal nations. At some point the colonizers did realize that we have nations, and even though treaties have been used against us, now we’re using them in our favor to have those sovereign nation-to-nation relationships with the federal government. So we can take these laws and we can use them to our advantage and turn them on their head.
And also, I guess the last thing I would like to point out, I mentioned that Indigenous Peoples were the first enslaved peoples in what is now North America, it’s important to also point out that legally sanctioned by the federal government slavery has existed through the 1960s in Alaska on the Pribilof Islands to the Unangan people there who I’m related to, and that was allowed by the government. It was only recently stopped. So first to be enslaved and last to be enslaved.
And of course the rest of us are enslaved by the lies we’re taught to believe, but that’s another conversation. [LAUGHTER]
So, well, we’ve kind of gone over the background of the Rights of Nature movement, we’ve talked about all the amazing organizing that Cara has done with her tribe, the Chemehuevi, that Casey has done with her tribe, the Ponca. I’d like to talk to both of you now about what’s happening now and what are we looking forward to in the future, and how can people get involved.
CCH: Learning a new kind of organizing is what I’m doing now. For instance, being on this particular type of organizing that we’re doing today. You know, COVID has given us many opportunities and created many, many, many families in mourning. Here in our territory, the ones we’ve lost, it’s painful, the illnesses it’s caused, the harm to even our ability to sit for four days with our loved ones, and to feed, it’s difficult to even imagine how different things are.
And at the same moment, I’m trying to understand it as a season of being. In the past, in our original ways, we did have particular meanings for particular seasons. Obviously in the spring, you planted. Obviously in the summer you grew, you roamed, you hunted, you fished. And in the fall, harvest. In the wintertime it was time to come inside and to be with your extended family, and to tell the stories of the ancestors, to tell the parables of understanding what the animals are teaching you, to pass on the wisdoms that you had, and to listen to the voices of the youths.
And in many ways, this COVID has created a [glitch] like the wintertime, where we’re beginning to share the wisdoms, that we’re listening to the voice of the youth, that the youths are at home instead of being confined in the schools, although they still have to deal with that formal education, which is kind of a tricky thing for me because our natural world is such an educator of its own. But we have this moment where the Earth has shown us how quickly she can heal if humans would just take a step back. And it shows us that our—this thing they call a carbon footprint can be much lighter if we quit traveling, if we quit using the fossil fuel industry in order to help us to live our lives in a different way.
You know, I’ve been doing webinars with the Break Free from Plastic, with movement rights, with the Condor and the Eagle, with Bioneers, with EarthWorks, with many, many others that are all with the same message. And that’s the sense of urgency that Cara mentioned, the understandings that both of you have talked about of how to realign ourselves with the natural world again.
And it bears the teachings that we have had. I’ve talked to my young ones of some of the stories that I’m not going to relate here, but about the staying at home during these times of mourning, about the staying of home in the time of transition, where we don’t disturb what’s going on out there, because the deer still know how to live in a good manner. They have broken no natural laws, and the same with the fish, and the same with the winged ones, and on and on and on. Only humans have broken the law.
And so with us being confined inside, we are in some ways relearning a little bit about how we’re supposed to live, and we’re sharing through, instead of the—this sacred web of life that we have talked about in our ceremonies, those of us in the Plains at least, we’re talking about these webinars, and we’re communicating en masse with one another about how to recognize a way forward. And it’s a valuable moment, even to acknowledge those in mourning, and that we feel them, and to help them through this period of time.
So those thoughts come to me, and that’s how I’m getting through this moment. And it’s helping me also to restructure how—what the next move is going to be. We’re going to, within our areas, recognize the rights of what’s called the Salt Fork River. But when we were removed here, it was called [NATIVE TERM], and the other river over here, where they converge was called [NATIVE TERM]. And we feel that’s going to help protection, not only of us, but everyone downstream, as you were speaking about. We all live downstream in some fashion or form, downwind and downstream. So, that’s what, in our particular little corner of the world, we’re doing right now.
CR: I wanted to just recap a little bit about today, and just reinforce that today—that now is our moment. Now is our moment to rally around not only this idea of protecting our land at all costs but rallying around each other, as we need protection from ourselves really. We need to be protectors of our landscape. And that people may realize that US Native lands are often the most biodiverse left on the globe, that we are stewards and protectors of the most pristine landscapes that we have left, and that we are working to protect these landscapes, that we’re working to protect them for all people, and that they’re often the segue between clean and dirty energy, so that these are protections of tribal lands are becoming even more important.
I hope that people understand that the tribal Rights of Nature movement and being tribally led is leading the way for all peoples. And I hope that [INAUDIBLE] also a way to heal ourselves and for all peoples to re-indigenize to our place, and to stop being colonizers, to start learning to indigenize and uphold all those traditional laws, those original instructions for all people, because we’re really all a part of this protection, and many of us are away from our lands, from which they originated. But now’s the time to indigenize the way they hold relationship to the lands that they are on. And I really believe that Rights of Nature is for all people to protect their lands. I hope the pope rescinds the doctrine of discovery and hears this message. And I hope that people understand all the importance of honoring the treaties in the United States and beyond.
AB: We’ve talked about how the doctrine of discovery and the papal bulls, and treaties, and all of these legal works put into policy hundreds of years ago are continuing to affect us today as Native Peoples and as non-Native guests living on indigenous lands. And we were all subjected the privatization of nature and of the lands on which we live. And what Rights of Nature really does is take that property/owner mentality out of our ecosystems, out of the way Mother Earth should work. It should work as a living, breathing entity that exists and regenerates. But so long as land is considered private property to be extracted from, we’re going to keep killing it, and we’re going to keep killing ourselves.
Except, as Grandmother Casey said, nature’s always going to be there. It’s going to thrive. It’s more powerful than us. So even though we as humans are committing ecocide, we’re really committing suicide.
So what’s really exciting about Rights of Nature is that we are thinking about nature in a new way, in a more indigenous way, in a way of relating to nature, in a way that’s true to nature’s natural laws, and that to me is really the takeaway and what’s really exciting. And it’s also really exciting that Indigenous Peoples all around the world are leading this movement, not just for their own ancestral homelands and territories, but for everybody.
A big thank you to Casey. Thank you so much for spending time with us. I always love spending time with you. I’d like to offer you the [CROSSTALK] kind of land statement. If you have any final words or thoughts you’d like to share before we say goodbye.
CCH: Thank you. It’s been wonderful spending time with you all. And it’s an honor to learn. And I always learn from all of you young people who are the new leaders, the ones that are going to take us into this next generation and bring on the generations behind them to understand where we are in this. It is a natural portion of prophecy for me to feel part of this.
Now we were told when we were young to prepare. Time of purification was going to happen. I wasn’t sure in what form it would be, or if it would be in my lifetime, but we were told to prepare. And the Earth herself is preparing to have her purification. The beginning is what they call climate change. But that started a long time ago. And the generations before there was something we could look in the past at and see how to come forward. And we’re doing that again. We are regenerating and rising, and being resilient by looking at the past, not in terms of, oh, we’ve got records of weather, so we can see what’s happened there and forecast the future. No. We’re looking at what has worked before, and how can we recreate that situation in today, and how today’s working.
So if we look and we see that the weather is changing because of a certain behavior that humans have participated in, how do we change that behavior? Well, we begin to move towards renewable energies. In this day and age, voting is important. We really don’t have a choice. And I was taught that if you don’t, then you have no reason to cry. So those voting things have to happen internally. What do you vote for personally? Do you vote for a change in the way that we relateto the world around us? Or do we continue to be the brainwashed people who are forced into a certain form of education, certain form of dressing, and on and on? Or do we break free from that and see what has worked and what needs to work next? And then we take it to that level, and we warrior up. Quit waiting for someone else to show you a way. Go internalize. Sit inside yourself. Meditate, as they say. And find what your spirit needs you to do. It is time to protect. It is time to go forth, take to the streets if you have to, take to city halls if you have to, create the policies within your community that will endanger that seventh generation philosophy that we all have been taught, no matter what the words are that we use, and set a place at a table that is going to be there for your great-great-great, for the simple things that we enjoy – air, food, water, earth, and the sacredness of all.
I have to sing a song for you. And this song is very, very simple, and I’m only going to sing one verse, because all it says is: My Mother, you’re good. [SINGING]
For the Mother of all of us, the one true Mother we share, our Mother, the Earth. We’re here for you Mother Earth. My Mother, you’re good. [her language] Love you girls. Thank you for all you do.
CR: Thank you, Casey…
AB: Thank you everyone for joining us for this episode of Indigeneity Conversations. I hope you found this informative, and if you haven’t listened to Part 1 of our conversation with Casey Camp Horinek, please check it out. Go to our website bioneers.org, and you can hear that episode and see and hear more from Casey.
CR: We have other episodes there to listen to and share, and we offer other original Indigenous media content. You’ll also learn about the Indigeneity program and all of our initiatives, including curricula and learning materials for students and life-long learners.
It’s been such a pleasure to share with all of you today. Many thanks and take care!
The Biomimicry Institute has been awarded EUR 2.5 million to lead a multi-year initiative called Design for Decomposition. By embracing true decomposition—the way leaves break down into the soil to build healthy ecosystems—the initiative will demonstrate scalable new pathways for the ~92 million tonnes of fashion waste discarded annually. The initiative is an ambitious follow-up to the Institute’s The Nature of Fashion report in 2020, which identified decomposition as the missing link for the sector.
The initiative begins with a deep dive into biological research about the various types and circumstances of natural decomposition and then matches those approaches to the hundreds of known decomposition technologies to determine which best model nature. In the pilot phase, these approaches will be tested in Accra, Ghana, which receives about 15 million used garments each week, and also in a city like Amsterdam or Berlin with a more established waste management infrastructure. Simultaneously, researchers at Yale will be taking a hard look at what really decomposes and how.
“Determining the rate or speed at which molecules degrade in the environment is of crucial importance to assess risks to our own health and health of the environment. While experiments to assess the biodegradation of chemicals when in the environment have been developed and are routinely carried out, these have several limitations that make it hard to predict the fate of chemicals and materials in the ‘real’ environment,” explained Dr. Paul Anastas, Director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. “Our goal is to close that gap.”
To avert some of the worst effects of a global industry that produces 100 billion garments each year for a population of 7.5 billion, a new approach is needed for the fashion sector. In the last 25 years, the amount of clothing bought in the EU per person has increased by 40%, following a sharp fall in prices. Europeans on average discard about 11 kilos of clothing every year, with some used items shipped overseas to places like Accra but about 87% are incinerated or landfilled, including the donated clothes people were hoping, would have a second owner. But with landfills closing, new ones too costly to make, and incinerators under scrutiny for carbon emissions, a new option—or a very old one—is increasingly necessary.
“Nature has primary producers, consumers, and decomposers, and all rely on dispersal, entropy. Without all three there is no cadence to life,” said Beth Rattner, Executive Director for the Biomimicry Institute. “If the fashion sector is going to be a force for good on the planet, it has to follow the same laws of nature. The North Star is not a shirt that becomes another shirt, but a shirt that subsidizes the regenerative fashion system we all know is possible.”
With catalytic funding from Laudes Foundation, the initiative is part of its fashion materials portfolio, which supports brave, innovative efforts that inspire and challenge the industry to harness its power for good. “Demonstrating that decomposition can put fashion back into natural resource cycles will be a powerful proof point for fashion and its allied industries, and a bold step towards reversing the environmental damage the industry has created thus far,” said Anita Chester, Head of Materials at Laudes Foundation. “We are thrilled to support this consortium led by Biomimicry Institute, and eagerly await the results of their game-changing pilots to scale bio-compatible solutions for the fashion industry at large.”
More than a third of all microplastic pollution—some 500,000 tonnes—is released each year from clothing, most ending up in oceans. Knowing that over 60% of garments are plastic-based and nearly all apparel is made with toxic processes, dyes, and coatings, the foremost question in the initiative is: what will this post-consumer waste decompose into that is not hazardous? All decomposition technologies are being screened through this lens, and the team has engaged toxicology partners from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, University of Ghana, and Yale.
“The end-of-life management of waste is a huge and complex problem that sits at the interface of the biosphere and the technosphere. We must find alternative pathways for handling the myriad of natural and synthetic materials embodied in the products we consume,” said Savanna Browne-Wilkinson of Metabolic Institute. “This is a critical and under-represented part of the current discourse on industrial transformation and will play an important role in how we design a regenerative, inclusive, and circular bioeconomy.”
After proving that advanced decomposition is viable locally, the joint partnership plans to prove that this system change can scale globally.
The OR Foundation, leading the work in Accra, Ghana, sums up the schism humans often experience around what we buy versus our place on the planet: “Waste makes visible our separation from nature, and yet this separation is rarely in focus. We are excited to be part of this initiative, because the goal is not to maintain a false sense of control, attempting to perpetually juggle products above nature, but rather the goal is to work with nature, to find our place within the ecosystem.”
Reflecting on the scale of the problem and the goals of the initiative to address this volume, Edwin Keh, CEO of HKRITA, remarked, “It doesn’t get much more ambitious than this.”
The consortium is looking for more partners, technologies, pilot sites, and funders who want to tackle post-consumer fashion waste. To learn more or contribute to the project, please visit d4d.biomimicry.org.
About the Biomimicry Institute
The Biomimicry Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization founded in 2006 that empowers people to seek nature-inspired solutions for a healthy planet. To advance the solution process, the Institute offers AskNature.org, a free online tool that contains strategies found in nature and examples of ways they are used in design. It also hosts a Biomimicry Global Design Challenge and Youth Design Challenge to support project-based education; a Biomimicry Launchpad startup accelerator program; a Ray of Hope Prize® for developing companies to bring designs to market; and a Biomimicry Global Network that connects innovators across the world.
About Laudes Foundation
Laudes Foundation is an independent foundation joining the growing movement to accelerate the transition to a climate-positive and inclusive global economy. Responding to the dual crises of climate breakdown and inequality, Laudes supports brave action that inspires and challenges industry to harness its power for good. Part of the Brenninkmeijer family enterprise, Laudes builds on six generations of entrepreneurship and philanthropy, working collaboratively to both influence finance and capital markets and transform industry with a focus on the built environment and fashion. For more information visit LaudesFoundation.org.
This piece is written by Alexis Bunten, Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program and guest author Tony Perry, Citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and author of Chula the Fox (Chickasaw Press).
Four hundred years ago, British settlers celebrated their first harvest, made possible through the generosity of the Wampanoag people. Tony and I wanted to truly understand the Thanksgiving holiday from the place where it all happened, so we traveled to Massachusetts to commemorate the day and see for ourselves.
As Native Americans, we have a complex relationship with the holiday. The story that most Americans learn growing up evolved from a myth born at the height of the Civil War. The idea of “Pilgrims” and “Indians” celebrating the harvest together symbolized American unity, but their unity came at the cost of erasing the heavy and sustained price that Native peoples paid. And it erases the fact that Native peoples have endured over 400 years of systematic genocide and forced assimilation, including massacres, “gifts” of smallpox-infested blankets, and boarding schools created to “kill the Indian, and save the man.”
Alexis Bunten
This problematic relationship makes it difficult to embrace the myth. For this reason, Alexis Bunten (Yup’ik and Unangan) initiated a series of events and a campaign to provide Americans with knowledge and strategies to decolonize (and re-indigenize) Thanksgiving. Inspired by this campaign, Tony Perry, a Chickasaw author, envisioned retelling the story, creating a new, more accurate, and inclusive narrative that would ultimately replace this myth altogether. We shared our vision with Danielle Greendeer, a Mashpee Wampanoag citizen and food sovereignty leader, and she agreed to join us as our lead author. A few months later, Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story was born.
Keepunumuk retells historical events through the eyes of the native plants that saved the Pilgrims—namely, the ‘three sisters’: corn, beans, and squash. This story rests on the historical record and Native ways of knowing and being in the world, leaving readers with an emphasis of gratitude for the world around them. Garry Meeches Sr (Anishinaabe) brought the story to life with heart-warming illustrations. We want Keepunumuk to become the default “first story” that American children will hear about the “first Thanksgiving.” At the same time, Keepunumuk will raise questions for their parents and support broader conversations around our nation’s birth as well as themes including mutual aid and traditional ecological knowledge.
The day before Thanksgiving, we visited Plimouth Pautuxet Museums. Given its storied history, we expected to join swarms of Americans in Plymouth to mark the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving. With the critical acclaim and reach of the 1619 Project to bring critical awareness to the American institution of slavery, we imagined that 2021 would be a critical opportunity to reach millions of Americans with the true story of Thanksgiving.
That didn’t happen. Important sites, such as the Mayflower II—an exact replica of the ship that took the Pilgrims (and other settlers) to their new home—and the Plimoth-Patuxet Museum—which offers a recreation recreated period Wampanoag and English communities—were largely quiet.
Tony Perry
Other families were present, but we had no problem getting anywhere or seeing what we wanted. It was an educational and productive visit, and an experience we will long remember. From reading primary sources left behind by the Pilgrims, we knew that upon arrival, the Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag winter caches of corn and beans. So, Tony and I were shocked to learn from multiple interpreters that the Pilgrims were not starving, as is typically told in the “traditional” story American children learn. Nearly half the Pilgrims died of exposure to the cold—not starvation. It turns out that they had plenty of food to last their long first winter. To us, it made the act of stealing the Wampanoags’ winter food store a far worse reflection of the Pilgrims’ moral character!
For us, the question remains: Why was it so quiet? This runs deeper than near-empty car parks at historic sites. Thanksgiving itself received little attention in the media, beyond a few stories—such as this one that questioned the historical narrative and even a couple of dinosaurs, such as the Wall Street Journal and Breitbart that defended the myth. Of course, being in our second year of the pandemic explains part of it, but we don’t believe this lack of interest in the 400 year anniversary of Thanksgiving is due to COVID, especially given that Thanksgiving 2021 brought the highest air travel numbers in the US since early 2020.
We believe it’s more than that. Fundamentally, it’s clear that the traditional narrative has lost its resonance with the wider American public. Stories of “Pilgrims” and “Indians” persisted no doubt, but they were muffled by family gatherings, turkey feasts, and the chance to pause increasingly fast-paced lives. Due to growing awareness of the racism underlying tragic police shootings of Black Americans and uninvestigated murders of Native Americans (MMIW), Americans aren’t putting up with whitewashed and “idealized” histories of our country. Americans deserve and want to know the truth about our country’s origins and history. Keepunumuk offers this to the youngest readers at the start of their learning about our history by exposing them to a Native perspective that doesn’t center Pilgrims or the Wampanoag for that matter but invites readers to reflect upon our gratitude for the plants and animals that make our lives possible.
On Thanksgiving Day, Danielle, Tony, and I attended the 51st “National Day of Mourning” with over 1,000 people concerned about the effects of “Thanksgiving” and its aftermath on Native peoples. Taking place on Cole’s Hill, overlooking “Plymouth rock,” and organized by the United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the event included prayers, speeches, and a march through downtown Plymouth. Although the event was somber, it filled our hearts to see so many diverse Natives and allies in the huge crowd, which was reported as the biggest crowd the event had ever hosted. This was doubtlessly a response to Americans’ growing desire to acknowledge and redress the theft, genocide, and slavery that built so much wealth for white settlers and their descendants.
Indigenous speakers from across the Americas spoke about various pressing issues facing Native peoples, and all peoples. We were particularly taken with the lead speaker, Kisha James, a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag and Oglala Lakota tribes and granddaughter of Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag leader and activist whose 1970 speech denigrating the whitewashed celebration of the 350 year anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival to Wampanoag land was rejected and suppressed by the event organizers.
We were moved to tears of outrage at the injustice the US government continues to impose on men of color through the prison industrial complex when one of the participants read a message to the National Day of Mourning from Leonard Peltier, who is not receiving adequate medical attention in Federal Prison, for a crime of which there is no evidence he committed. We heard firsthand from speakers from tribal lands across the US that are threatened by natural resource extraction, pipelines, and pollution. We listened to an update about the current situation with the Houma people who are still suffering unbelievable, long-term losses in the wake of Hurricane Ida. The event closed as the march came to an end with the crowd gathering to hear a final speech about the MMIW crisis that brought us to tears again.
After the event, Danielle and her husband cooked us an Indigenous Thanksgiving feast in Mashpee, the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe’s hometown. We ate all native foods –duck, turkey, wild rice, squash, mushrooms, succotash, and greens, much of which was grown by Danielle. (By the way, earlier in the week, the New York Times published a beautiful piece on Danielle’s work in the food sovereignty movement, including the story about how she revived the planting of the traditional Wampanoag heirloom corn species.)
As we ate, we realized that most Americans probably don’t know the name of the tribe that taught the Pilgrims how to plant and fertilize the three sisters and that they may even think of the tribe that helped the Pilgrims as “of the past,” or even “extinct” true to the stereotypes that are circulated in schools and popular media. And yet here is a resilient, vibrant, and thriving tribal community that has never stopped living on their ancestral territory and practicing their culture.
Our country is again deeply divided, and it’s time for a new narrative based on both the complexities of history and the hope of a brighter, more equal future. For us, this is the story that needs to be told for Thanksgiving —that, despite 400 years of genocide, the Wampanoag, and Native Americans in general, are here to stay. Practicing our cultures heals us from the ongoing trauma of colonization, and appropriately sharing our cultures with others can help all Americans to recognize the truth of our history of our country’s birth and begin to heal together. This will help us create a new story built on history that also reflects the inclusive society we aspire for.
In this first part of a two-part program, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy that goes back to the very founding of the United States.
The extreme concentration of corporate power and the prevalence of monopoly are indeed inarguable. If the solution is once again to throw the tea in the harbor, what does that look like in the 21st century?
In today’s new Gilded Age of rule by the wealthy, rising anti-trust movements are challenging the stranglehold of corporate monopoly.
Thom Hartmann, the top progressive talk show host in America for over a decade, a four-time Project Censored Award-winning journalist, and bestselling author. Learn more at his website.
Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which produces research and develops policy to counter corporate control and build thriving, equitable communities.
Maurice BP-Weeks, Co-Executive Director of ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy) where he works on campaigns to create equitable communities by dismantling systems of wealth extraction in Black and Brown communities.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Producer: Teo Grossman
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
In 1889, Frederick Townsend Martin was known as the “millionaire with a mission.” He had famously turned class traitor, betraying his filthy rich family dynasty. These were his words, later published in his book The Passing of the Idle Rich.
Among my own people, I seldom hear purely political discussions. When we’re discussing pro and con, the relative merits of candidates or the relative importance of political policies, the discussion almost invariably comes down to a question of business efficiency. We care absolutely nothing about any other political question, save in as much as it threatens or fortifies existing conditions.
Touch the question of the tariff, touch the question of the income tax, touch the problem of railroad regulation, or touch the most vital of all business matters – the question of general federal regulation of industrial corporations – and the people amongst whom I live my life become immediately rabid partisans.
It matters not one iota what political party is in power or what president holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can, by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connection, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our state.
Sound familiar?
In truth, the battle between democracy and plutocracy goes back to the very founding of the United States.
THOM HARTMANN: So the American Revolution was triggered by the Boston Tea Party, which was done in response to a tax cut for the largest monopolistic corporation on Earth.
HOST: Thom Hartmann is the number one progressive talk show host in the country and world. He has written and spoken extensively about monopoly, while highlighting solutions to restore democracy in books such as The Hidden History of Monopolies. He spoke online at a Bioneers conference.
Thom Hartmann
TH: Queen Elizabeth I signed the charter for the British East India Company on December 1, 1601 and brought into birth the modern corporation. It was the first of what we would today call modern corporations. And it was modeled on the Dutch trading companies which had existed for about a century before that. And at that time, England was just starting to come up, and the Netherlands were really much more powerful.
And they basically, by the 1770s, had monopolized the trade of most of the world that interacted with Europe, and had very radical laws that had been passed by the British Parliament regulating commerce in the United States. It was, for example, illegal to manufacture fine clothing in the United States. It had to be bought from the British East India company and it had to be manufactured in the United Kingdom.
But one of the other things that they had monopolized was tea, and tea was the drug of choice, along with alcohol, in those colonies at that time, all up and down the eastern seaboard. You couldn’t pass a city block without a tea house. They were the centers of social life and of commerce. And about half the tea sold in the United States was coming from smugglers, and the British East Indian Company was very flipped out about that, and they were hiring people to—in fact, some of the pirates were actually employed by the Brits to stop that trade.
And so parliament passed the Tea Act.The way it worked was when the East India Company imported tea from India into the UK for shipment to us, they would pay tax on it when they brought it into the UK. So they had millions of pounds of tea in their warehouses that they had already paid taxes on. And what the Tea Act did was gave the East India Company this massive rebate on the taxes that they had already paid. So they got this cash—huge cash advance and dropped radically the tax on the tea that they would ship to North America. And this allowed them to compete with the smugglers and try to run them out of business in all these tea shops up and down the east coast, which really pissed off the colonists.
HOST: The British East India Corporation became the only game in town for Colonial tea shops. The Colonists said “enough.”
In 1773, when three British East India company ships carrying tea entered Boston Harbor, the Colonists boarded the vessels and dumped a million dollars’ worth of tea into Griffin Harbor.
TH: And then of course, the Brits in response to that passed the Boston Ports Act that said that no commerce could take place through the Boston port until the City of Boston paid back the East India Company a million dollars for that tea, which of course Boston didn’t do, and that led right to the Boston Massacre, which led right to the shot heard round the world, which led right to the American Revolution.
HOST: From the earliest days of the Republic, there was great concern about corporate power, such as the British East India Company. Corporations were kept on a very tight rein, usually at the state level where they were chartered for limited terms with strict limits. But because the US Constitution exalted property rights above all other rights, and because corporations were the largest holders of property, gradually they began to gain greater and greater power.
The Civil War coincided with the full-throttle economic explosion of the industrial revolution. Central to that revolution were the Railroads, which were like the Internet of their time. Leading their rise were Robber Barons such as Collis Huntington and J. Gould. Their business model was summed up by Huntington: “Anything that’s not nailed down is mine – and anything that I can pry loose is not nailed down.”
TH: The railroad barons basically were trying to grab more and more and more political power, along with the economic power that they already had. They were among the top four oligarchic enterprises in the United States, and monopolistic as well. And they had bribed Stephen J. Field, who was a member of the US Supreme Court, and back in those days, the members of the Supreme Court also did what was called riding the circuit, they were also the chief judge in the circuit court. And Field was the judge in the Ninth Circuit, which was California. And he had been bribed by J. Gould and some buddies. They told him they were going to help make him president if he would help this accomplish.
There were a series of cases – this is just a decade after the 14th Amendment was passed—there were a series of cases that were referred to as the California tax cases. There were seven of them altogether that came out of California and were sent to the US Supreme Court by Field. He sent them from his own court in the Ninth Circuit to himself on the Supreme Court.
And of course, that would require them to be covered by the 14th Amendment, which says persons repeatedly. So in these seven cases – this was one of them; this was the most notable of them that went to the Supreme Court – the railroads lost all seven cases. But this one particular cases – Santa Clara versus Southern Pacific Railroad, where the county sued the railroad and said you’ve got to pay your damn taxes, and the railroad said no way; we’re being denied equal protection under the law – what lawyers will tell you – and it’s fascinating; I get to talk—Actually I’ve given all kinds of talks on this all around the country at various law schools, and I’ll start out by saying, you know, with a room full of law students and law professors, how many of you know that in 1886 in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad corporations were given personhood rights under the Constitution so that they could claim things like free speech rights under the First Amendment, privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment, you know, etc. And everybody’s hand will go up. And, you know, it was in that decision.
Well, it turns out that decision actually the railroads lost. Morrison Remick Waite, who was the chief justice of the court, just dismissed the argument altogether, and Delphin Delmas was the lawyer who was arguing on behalf of the county. He was the guy who saved the redwoods in California. Both of these cases, by the way, he did pro bono. And Delphin Delmas famously said, you know, what, you would give corporations the right to marry? And, you know, he went through all the absurdities of this. And Waite agreed with him.
HOST: The landmark 1886 case called Santa Clara County versus Southern Pacific Railroad has been used ever since as the precedent for granting personhood for corporations.
But the plot thickens…
TH: But weirdly, there was the guy who was the clerk of the court who stayed in Washington, DC all year long, even though the court was only in session three months and the other justices were all out riding the circuit. The clerk of the court, in the head note to that decision – a head note has no legal standing; it’s basically there for lawyers and law students; it’s a short summary of the case – in the head note to that case, he said that the chief justice had asserted that corporations are persons under the law and therefore entitled to equal protection under the law.
So, you know, the Supreme Court never actually ruled that corporations are persons. There have been rulings that danced close to that; they certainly have artificial person status. That was established in 1815 in a case that involved Dartmouth College. But they’ve never explicitly ruled until the 1890s and then into the 20th century when they started simply asserting that it had been done in 1886. And in fact, the Citizens United decision in 2010 cites Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. Falsely, you know, wrongly. So, you know, this is another one of those b.s. stories that gets shoveled to us, and even to our lawyers and law students and that I think could be subject to challenge.
HOST: Right up to the Citizens United decision, an entire body of corporate law has been built on a falsehood, on a lie by a scheming law clerk. Nonetheless, it’s considered settled law.
Similarly, during that infamous period called the Gilded Age around the turn of the 20th century, the robber barons devised the template for the modern corporate monopoly.
At the front lines of that political revolution were the railroad barons. The golden apple was to build the transcontinental railroad connecting East and West. Whoever controlled the railroads would control commerce. The Big Four understood that monopoly was the name of the game.
Along with a shopping spree to purchase state politicians and judges, the Big Four targeted the nation’s capital. Huntington arrived with a suitcase filled with cash. He returned with a portfolio of federal contracts. They included the monopolistic right to build the railroad line connecting West to East; 12 million acres of free land grants; the right to set their own freight rates; and cheap federal loans for his own company to build the railroad, which he never paid back.
The Southern Pacific railroad was universally reviled as the “octopus,” memorialized in the famous novel of the same name. Its iron tentacles strangled all of Western commerce.
Farmers shipping their goods to market were quoted one price at spring planting, then a higher price at harvest. It charged the highest freight rates in the nation — except of course for the “rebates” – or kickbacks – that it secretly gave to other Robber Baron customers such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, thus methodically wiping out smaller competitors. As Rockefeller snarled, “Competition is a sin.”
In industry after industry, the monopolists seized control.
Karl Marx was correct in identifying monopoly as the ultimate logic of capitalism, but he was dead wrong in predicting that the workers of the world would rise up in solidarity against it. It has been capital that successfully organized and globalized.
Fast forward to Amazon. Stacy Mitchell says the railroads are a very apt analogy to Amazon today.
STACY MITCHELL: Originally questions of corporate power were really handled at the state level because corporations generally didn’t—they were chartered at the state level and they generally didn’t, you know, extend beyond state lines. And that changed in the 19th century with the rise particularly of the railroads. And suddenly you had these corporations that became an infrastructure for the entire national economy.
Stacy Mitchell
HOST: Stacy Mitchell has been one of the most effective actors on the national stage challenging Amazon. She’s co-director of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance where she directs the group’s initiative to decentralize economic power and level the playing field for independent businesses.
She has produced many influential reports and articles, testified before Congress, and been seminal in antitrust actions against Amazon. She’s also helped to design local and federal policies and collaborated to build effective coalitions and campaigns.
SM: And you had industrialists at the time who gained control of those railroad lines, people like John D. Rockefeller, part of how he built his monopoly in oil was that he commandeered relationships he had with railroad companies and got these setups where he was able to move his oil to market but his competitors were not.
And that’s what really led to our first national anti-monopoly laws. Even before the Sherman Act, we had laws designed to address railroad power and interstate commerce, and then in 1890 the Sherman Act, which for various reasons never really was fully used. We have some additional laws that come along in the 1910s.
And then really it isn’t until like the Great Depression that we get the fuller realization of our anti-monopoly laws.
In essence, our history’s sort of gone up and down with the degree to which we’ve confronted monopoly power through law. And for the last 40 years we’ve been at a real downward kind of low point where we’ve really largely ignored corporate power and treated it as though it weren’t an issue and it were somehow separate from our politics, separate from our democracy.
And in that space, along have come a new set of companies that have an even more dangerous form of monopoly power than the concentration that we see across farming or retail – Walmart, Monsanto, all of these other big companies, which are hugely destructive.
But the rise of Amazon, Google, Facebook is sort of another degree of monopoly power, and that’s because they function very much like the railroads. They control the infrastructure of commerce and communications, and so they’re able to set the rules. They control who can be on those platforms and how they operate, and they can favor their own products; they can essentially govern us. We should recognize them as a form of private government.
And so the analogy of the railroad is very apt. And also I think the solutions that ultimately came about around the railroad is part of the solution that we need with Amazon.
HOST: When we return, how the modern Robber Barons run the table, and how that table was built on racial capitalism.
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
HOST: The current level of corporate and financial concentration is unprecedented. We’re living on a giant Monopoly board.
Ten asset-management firms manage about $20 trillion globally, an outlandish, unparalleled concentration of capital.
Ten corporations control virtually all US military contracting, half the semiconductor and chip markets, and 73% of global auto sales.
Eight companies own nearly all US broadcast and cable networks.
Five banks control about half of all US banking assets, more than after the bank bailout in 2008
Four corporations own 83% of the beef market, and 60% of the hog and broiler chicken industries.
Three control 99% of the US pharmaceutical market.
Two dominate global aircraft manufacturing.
And one, Google, has up to 90% of online searches globally outside China.
If you’re waiting for a partridge in a pear tree, the list goes on – and on. When people say “free markets,” ask if “free” is a verb.
But Big Tech takes the cake. Or more precisely, they want to have their cake and eat yours too. Again, Stacy Mitchell.
SM: And to understand a little bit more about Amazon in particular, Amazon captures about half of all online spending, but the even more relevant statistic is that about two-thirds of Americans when they want to buy something online they start at Amazon. It used to be that they went to a search engine and they put in what they were looking for and they would run across all sorts of different results, including local businesses also including Amazon. Now most people start at Amazon. And what that means is if you make or sell anything and you want to reach people online, you have to sell on Amazon’s platform, and they essentially control your business. They can levy a toll on you. They can stop you from selling. They set the terms. They decide what we see as consumers, what we don’t see.
And Google and Facebook similarly are these kind of powerful gatekeepers. And that concentration of power means that we have an incredible concentration of wealth with lots of people who are struggling to get by, and who have no control over their own livelihoods. We have lots of communities that have lost their sense of agency and direction. And then we increasingly have these giant companies that, you know, use the incredible power that they have over how our economic systems are run to gain a great deal of power politically and power over Congress, and to really set the rules.
I very much believe that what we need to do is we need to disperse economic power, that we need stronger unions, we need more independent local businesses, we need more cooperatively and publicly owned infrastructure and institutions to deliver what we need, we need more democratic oversight.
The concentration of power in the hands of someone like Jeff Bezos, who is now worth $200 billion, which is extraordinary, is just antithetical to all of those values.
So in all of these ways, I think we need to understand Amazon and some of these other companies as a form of autocratic private government, and the solution in effect is to throw their tea in the harbor.
HOST: In the founding of the United States, part and parcel of the battle between democracy and plutocracy was slavery. Colonial slavery had actually first begun with Indigenous Peoples, and then led to the enslavement of Africans. It formed the foundation of the economy.
Slaves were the country’s single largest financial asset. The profits from cotton catapulted the US into one of the world’s top economies. By the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region.
Maurice BP-Weeks
MAURICE BP-WEEKS: Yeah, it’s another one of those stories about the founding of the country that we learned in school that, you know, usually doesn’t bring up the fact that we had free coerced labor from enslaved Africans for many, many years, which was able to create lots of profit for the country. There’s a key factor, the really key factor of capitalism is a drive to produce the maximum profit by paying as little as possible for labor and materials.
There are a couple of things we can stand in the way of that. One, you know, as Stacy talked about is a form of economic democracy. So, you know, forcing there to be some competitors in your space, so even if you, you know, you try to pay your workers, you know, $5 an hour to maximize your profit, someone else is willing to pay $6 an hour and your workers leave. So there’s some competition to get you to reduce your profit. Or government regulations that stop you from doing things that increase your profit.
So, you know, we all can—we all know a bout collusion and why it’s illegal to sort of go get a group of firms together and all agree that you’re going to charge the same exact price so that you can stay in the market and, you know, take as much from a [INAUDIBLE] group of people as possible. There’s a government regulation against doing that. There were government regulations on the books against forming monopolies. And that’s sort of the other factor that’s sort of pushing things down.
HOST: Maurice B.P. Weeks is co-director of the Action Center for Race and Economy, called ACRE. He works with community organizations and labor unions on campaigns to create equitable communities by ending systems of wealth extraction that exploit black and brown communities. He’s working to dismantle a monopolist system that he calls racial capitalism.
Maurice B.P. Weeks spoke online at a Bioneers conference.
MBP-W: Racial capitalism really is a term that speaks to the real founding – both the evolution and the founding – of capitalism, and just to lift up the fact that the fundamental form that the exploitation takes place is on top of racist ideals and racist profit practices. So in that terms, think of course slavery and the production of crops in the South by Africans, and really global slavery, share cropping, low wage immigrant work, all these things that really at certain—at different points in our economy have really powered our entire economy are built on top of these racist systems of social division.
You can trace some of the same practices that monopoly owners and operators like Bezos do to those same racialized practices that people did in the era of slavery. And that’s what allows us really to correctly charge that their very business model is racist and takes advantage of race in the same way that other economic forms have in the past.
A colleague and friend of mine, Derrick Hamilton, likes to say that the US economy is structured on rules that either privilege or exploit based on race. If we agree that concentration of corporate power is something that is happening in our economy, which I think is of course inarguable, and monopolies are sort of the pinnacle of that corporate concentration, then we must look to them as the ones who are sort of the high-water mark for racially motivated racist undertones, privileging and profiteering. So that’s how we sort of weave together this notion of racial capitalism, some of the drawbacks of capitalism itself, and racial inequality and monopoly.
HOST: The extreme concentration of corporate power and the prevalence of monopoly are indeed inarguable. If the solution is once again to throw the tea in the harbor, what does that look like in the 21st century?
In part two of this program, we look at contemporary solutions and the growing antitrust movement rising both in the U.S. and worldwide.
This has been Democracy Versus Plutocracy Part 1: “Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime”, with Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell and Maurice B.P. Weeks.
Among the most prominent environmental activists of the last century is the late Professor Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement and inspired hundreds of thousands of people around the world to push for environmental progress. In commemoration of the 30th anniversary of her 1991 Goldman Prize win—and the 10th anniversary of her passing—we’re remembering Wangari’s rich background and innumerable contributions to both the environment and human rights.
Determined from the Beginning
Wangari Maathai with the Ouroboros after winning the 1991 Goldman Prize for Africa
Born in 1940 in Nyeri, Kenya, Wangari spent her childhood in the Kenyan countryside and her young adult life in the United States. She studied biology at Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas, then obtained a master’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh. After returning to Kenya and pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Nairobi, Wangari became the first woman in East Africa to receive a doctorate.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, along with teaching at the University of Nairobi and serving as a department chair, Wangari was an active member of the National Council of Women of Kenya, an organized group of rural Kenyan women fighting for women’s rights. Women came to the council in part to search for solutions to the environmental degradation they were witnessing in their villages; deforestation and desertification had caused many of the resources women relied on for food and clean water to dwindle.
Fueled by her knowledge of biology and innate passion for helping others, Wangari decided to take action.
Solving a Problem, Starting a Movement
Wangari had two goals in mind: to help restore environmental resources and give women the ability to support their families in a self-sufficient, sustainable way. To achieve her goals, she came up with a practical but impactful idea: to grow seedlings and plant trees. The trees would counteract the effects of deforestation, bind the soil, and improve rainwater sequestration, in addition to providing food and firewood—and, therefore, a livelihood for local families.
Wangari’s plan inspired the formation of the Green Belt Movement in 1977, an organization dedicated to environmental conservation and poverty reduction in Kenya. As the work of the movement evolved, Wangari realized that the environmental issues impoverished communities faced were a direct result of bigger problems, like governmental corruption and a history of disenfranchisement.
To help address the root causes of these concerns, the organization began leading what is now called Community Empowerment and Education seminars, meetings designed to educate community members about the environment and their civic rights.
Expanding Her Influence
As the Green Belt Movement grew and began to inspire tree-planting missions across the continent, Wangari expanded her focus. A champion of both social justice and the environment, Wangari’s activism sat at the intersection of several different but intertwined causes: environmental conservation, democracy, and human rights.
Wangari used grassroots activism to lead important protests throughout the decades that followed. In the late 1980s, she mobilized her community to oppose the construction of a skyscraper in Uhuru Park, Nairobi’s central public space. Though international investors eventually backed out of the project as a result of her opposition, the Kenyan government and press vilified both Wangari and the Green Belt Movement in the process.
Efforts to thwart Wangari’s influence and activism only intensified. In 1992, Wangari participated in a hunger strike in Uhuru Park to advocate for the release of political prisoners—and the police beat her unconscious. Then, in 1999 she led a protest against the privatization of Karura Forest in Nairobi, during which Green Belt Movement members were beaten by private guards. Despite facing ongoing repression and opposition from powerful actors in the region, Wangari never wavered in her work.
Creating a Legacy
Wangari served on the boards of countless environmental organizations, spoke to members of the United Nations, and represented her community as a member of Kenya’s parliament for several years in the early 2000s. Due to her tireless work as both an environmental activist and humanitarian, Wangari received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.
After winning the prize, she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem, wrote four books (The Green Belt Movement, Unbowed, The Challenge for Africa, and Replenishing the Earth), and continued speaking and advocating for greater representation within the global environmental movement.
Today, Wangari lives on through the countless lives she’s touched, and through the Green Belt Movement, which has continued its work in Kenya and globally through international tree-planting and climate change advocacy. Her daughter, Wanjira Mathai, continues her legacy as a prominent environmental advocate and member of the Goldman Prize Jury.
Every one of us—regardless of geography or background—can honor Wangari’s lifelong work and support her legacy by taking a few simple steps. In her famous “Rise up and walk” speech, Wangari said that we can start by planting 10 trees to offset the carbon dioxide we each exhale; practice the philosophy of reducing, reusing, and repairing; and look for opportunities to volunteer our time and services to our communities.
In a moment that captured the attention of the world, Vanessa Nakate posed in a photo at the 2020 World Economic Forum with fellow youth climate activists. When the photo appeared in media, Vanessa, the only person of color in the photo, had been cropped out. Brushed aside by many as “just a photo”, in her new book, A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, Vanessa Nakate writes about the bigger picture of the global climate struggle often cropped out of the fight against climate change.
Vanessa Nakate is the founder of the Rise Up Climate Movement, which aims to amplify the voices of activists from Africa. Vanessa spearheaded a campaign to save Congo’s rainforest, which is facing massive deforestation.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—or rather, what I wasn’t. It was a freezing cold day in January 2020, and I was scrolling through my social media feeds. I’d just finished lunch with other climate activists, who like me were in Davos, Switzerland, to urge some of the three thousand business leaders, financiers, politicians, opinion formers, celebrities, and other globetrotters attending the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) to get serious about the climate crisis. We’d held a press conference that morning, before which I’d posed for cameras with four other activists, and I’d stepped away from the dining area to find out how the media was reporting our message.
Within a minute, I came upon a link to an article that featured one of the photos that had been taken of us. My heart nearly stopped. It was clearly the picture I’d been in, since you could make out the edge of my coat on the far left of the frame. But I was nowhere to be seen. I’d been cropped out.
I cycled rapidly through my feelings. I was frustrated, angry, and embarrassed. As I looked at the image, it became impossible to ignore that of the five women who’d posed for that photo, I was the only one who wasn’t from Europe and the only one who was Black. They hadn’t just cropped me out, I realized. They’d cropped out a whole continent.
At the press conference that morning in Davos, I’d been the only climate activist from Africa (there were a few others at the WEF itself), and not only had I been cut out of the Associated Press’s photo but out of the AP’s article that reported on our press conference too. “Does that mean I have no value as an activist or the people from Africa don’t have any value at all?” I asked in a ten-minute video I streamed live later that day. I was struck by the cruel irony of the exclusion of the only African from the photo. “We don’t deserve this,” I said. “Africa is the least emitter of carbons, but we are the most affected by the climate crisis.”
For a year, I’d organized climate strikes on the streets of Kampala, the capital and largest city in Uganda, in east-central Africa, where I live, to demand action on the climate emergency. I’d attended international climate conferences and been active online, and now I’d come to Davos to help more people wake up to the truth that global heating is not an abstraction or a theoretical event awaiting the planet in a few decades.
My message was, and is, straightforward: People in Uganda, in Africa, and across what’s called the Global South are losing their homes, their harvests, their incomes, even their lives, and any hopes of a livable future right now.
This situation is not only terrible, it’s also unjust. Although the African continent has just 15 percent of the world’s population, it is responsible for only between 2 and 3 percent of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. The average African’s greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of those of people living in the US, Europe, China, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, or many other countries. An Oxfam study concluded that a person in the UK will have emitted more CO2 in the first two weeks of 2020 than someone in Uganda or six other African countries will in the whole year.
Nonetheless, Africa will, according to the African Development Bank, bear almost half the costs of adapting to the consequences of climate change, and seven of the ten countries most susceptible to the harshest effects of the climate crisis are in Africa: South Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Chad, Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic.
Those with fewest resources and who’ve contributed the least to the crisis are contending with the gravest consequences: more frequent and more serious flooding, longer droughts, periods of extreme heat, and rising sea levels. Increased food scarcity, forced migration, economic losses, and higher rates of death are also disproportionately affecting people of color, not only across Africa and the rest of the Global South, but in the Global North too.
This is my world—a world where Earth’s temperature has already risen 1.2°C (2.16°F) above pre-industrial levels. A planet that’s 2°C hotter is a death sentence for countries like Uganda. Yet, as you read this, we’re on course for temperature rises that are much, much more than 2°C. That means many more millions of people will be displaced and extreme weather events will strain health and economic systems to the breaking point. At the same time, the world’s oceans are being depleted, biodiversity is collapsing, and species are going extinct at a rate greater than since the time of the dinosaurs.
My video response was seen by tens of thousands of people around the world, including many in Uganda, who shared my outrage and disappointment. Like me, they realized that, quite literally, something was very wrong with this picture. Being cropped out of that photo changed the course of my activism and my life. It reframed my thoughts about race, gender, equity, and climate justice; and it led to the words you’re now reading.
In A Bigger Picture, I explain why that photo and that moment mattered, and why it’s crucial that the fight against climate change includes voices like mine. I describe how I first became a climate striker, and my eventual journey to the Alps and what has happened since. I show how what we must call the climate emergency is an immediate, even daily struggle for millions of people, including across Africa, and how the heating of Earth’s atmosphere is connected to everything: economics, society, politics, and many forms of inequality and injustice— racial, gender, and geographic.
Like many of the young climate activists I’ve organized with and been inspired by, I live in a profoundly interconnected world, with instant access to huge amounts of information (and disinformation) and more means of connecting to others than at any time in history. Those of us born at the end of the last century and in the early years of this one have grown up in the shadow of HIV/AIDS, terrorism, financial meltdowns, and huge technological change and disruption. We’ve witnessed greater concentrations of wealth and increased disparities of power. Many of us have experienced firsthand how our planet’s ecosystems are breaking down under climatic stresses unprecedented in human history.
Perhaps more than any other age group, we are questioning the premise of an economic, social, and political model that has led us to a precipice beyond which no economic or governance system will survive. These realities have shaped our recognition that we, and those that follow us, will bear the brunt of several Nakate_A-BIGGER-PICTURE_interior-ARC.indd 4 7/20/21 10:41 AM 5 Introduction centuries of burning fossil fuels and our calamitous failure to leave the remaining carbon in the ground.
A Bigger Picture also showcases the work and perspectives of a fresh wave of activists from a new generation. Many of them focus their vision on and from Africa, a continent that has been ignored, silenced, and exploited for too long. We believe that at the center of this effort must be a genuine commitment not only to environmental, racial, and climate justice, but to the empowerment of girls and women, who are facing the crisis most acutely and are at the forefront of efforts to combat it. Without tackling climate change, we won’t be able to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, or bring about a resilient and sustainable future. I also share the practical solutions that climate activists are applying to support communities in Uganda and other countries in Africa and around the world.
Finally, I offer ideas for how you can become active in addressing the climate emergency wherever you live, and how you can amplify the voices and acknowledge the presence of those who’ve too often been left out of the picture.
I wrote A Bigger Picture in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and, like you, I am stunned and deeply saddened at the loss of so many people in so many countries to the virus. Across the world, families, communities, and nations are in shock and are mourning the livelihoods ruined, the families dislocated, the schooling interrupted or curtailed, and the businesses shuttered. We’re also shaken by other shameful effects of the pandemic: the lack of access to health care and vaccines for people of color; the upturn in the incidence of child marriage and domestic violence; and the delaying of urgent action on the climate emergency. Though these inequities existed before COVID-19, the virus has brought them to the fore and made many of them worse.
In these multiple tragedies, we can find stark warnings and lessons. First, scientists are telling us that zoonotic diseases like COVID-19 will become more common in the future as we encroach on habitats where wild animals live; continue to use, raise, and sell wildlife in close proximity to human communities; and confine billions of domesticated animals in factory farms. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and deadliness of such diseases.
Second, throughout the pandemic, people around the world have paid special care to the elderly, who’ve proved more vulnerable to the virus. We’ve kept them safe by staying inside. But for decades, many people in these generations have made decisions that will leave their heirs vulnerable to the effects of global heating. Third, the pandemic has disproportionately affected those with fewer resources; less access to health care and enough nutritious food; more cramped living conditions; work that makes social distancing difficult; and underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk from the virus. A majority of these are people of color. This, too, echoes the climate crisis.
Finally, governments have been telling us to follow the science on the coronavirus, but they aren’t following the science on climate change. They aren’t moving nearly as fast or as comprehensively as scientists tell us we must to meet—or exceed—the commitments made under the 2015 Paris climate accord. The pandemic has reminded us that climate change is not in lockdown. It has demonstrated that we live in a deeply connected world and that we need one another to survive.
Even though the climate forecasts are terrifying, I still believe we can have hope. We have to. There isn’t any other option. The pandemic has shown that (some) leaders can listen to the science, and the international community can act together with a common purpose. And, no matter how disturbing the present and future may appear, we have neither the time nor the luxury to shut down emotionally, especially those of us who live in countries where the climate crisis is a daily reality.
The stakes could not be higher: unless we take dramatic action now, whatever plans any of us have for the future—whether big or small—will fail. So, join me and some of the many young climate activists in Africa and around the world who are working right now to change that future. Let’s fight together for what is right and what is just.
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