At the core of the impact of climate change are communities that live at the nexus of systemic violence. Gender, race, class, ability, and other socio-economic variables factor into one’s experience of climate destabilization. Building a sustainable climate justice movement means centering the needs of those who bear the chief impact of the problem. One of this year’s Brower Youth Award winners, Alexia Leclercq, an environmental justice organizer based in Austin TX, and NYC, shares her passion for these rarely discussed aspects of intersectionality.
Here in the U.S., we’re all told to recycle if we care about the environment. Mainstream environmental groups, many founded in the late 19th or in the 20th century by white middle-class lobbying groups, usually encouraged individual actions and the preservation of national parks as solutions to the climate crisis. They didn’t take social justice into consideration, and the creation of those national parks in a number of cases directly led to the displacement of Indigenous folks who had lived sustainably in those places for centuries. And campaigns for recycling fail to mention that only 9% of plastic actually gets recycled and that a lot of it was being dumped abroad. These recycling campaigns in fact often wind up helping corporations create and sell more plastic.
Currently, around 100 corporations are responsible for about 70% of emissions. Their actions result in mass ecocide, spewing toxic waste and spilling millions of gallons of crude oil, leaving hazardous waste on forest floors. These practices are illegal, but corporations get away with it because their interests are so often above the law.
When we address environmental issues as separate from social justice issues, things like environmental racism are ignored. Environmental racism is the fact that people of color disproportionately live next to polluting industries, leading them to suffer from far more than their share of extreme health issues such as cancers and respiratory diseases. Because of this, environmental justice organizers came together in the 1990s to create their own movement, the Environmental Justice Movement, because they had been left out of the mainstream environmental movement.
If we are going to achieve climate justice, we are going to have to address the systems of oppression that caused the climate crisis in the first place, and these include capitalism and colonialism. These are systems that encourage the exploitation of land and labor in order to accumulate wealth. To cite only one example, British colonialists transformed the Malay Peninsula into a plantation economy to meet industrial Britain and America’s need for cheap rubber, leading to extreme deforestation. Recovery from this sort of extensive devastation perpetrated on native ecosystems is extremely difficult. The great colonial powers created a global infrastructure in which countries from the Global North ruthlessly exploited countries from the Global South for resources while simultaneously destabilizing their Indigenous and local cultures. This pattern is still in place. Today, Indigenous groups make up 5% of the global population but preserve 80% of the planet’s biodiversity on their remaining territories, so we need to support them in the defense of their lands and cultures and look to them for solutions.
Social justice is climate justice because the root causes of social and environmental destruction are the same. For example, the redlining by banks of black neighborhoods, which prevented people in those communities from building wealth, also allowed, through related zoning policies, companies and governments to place their most polluting facilities in those same neighborhoods. And police brutality, which we think of as strictly a social justice issue, is also an environmental justice issue because many Indigenous land defenders are attacked by law enforcement here and are frequently murdered in countries such as the Philippines and Colombia and throughout Central America and around the world for their activism.
The climate crisis is predominantly a result of our global economic system. If we don’t address how people of color are disproportionately impacted by a ravaged environment and we aren’t willing to face the fact that a small group of giant corporations are directly responsible for much of the planet’s pollution and habitat degradation and climate destabilization and that our governments continue to support those corporations (and in some cases will literally go to war, such as in Iraq, where they killed perhaps two million people in order to maintain those corporations’ control of oil), we won’t get anywhere. If we don’t center social justice in the fight for climate justice, we will fail to tackle climate change.
A wide range of justice movements, such as disability rights and economic, racial, LGBTQ and gender justice, need to be linked. Just to cite the example of disability justice, which is almost never talked about in the context of discussions around climate: a lot of disabled folks are often left out of climate emergency plans. We need to understand we are all in this together, and if we leave whole groups behind, we won’t win.
So, what do we do? There are a lot of things that need to be done and can be done. On my end, I co-created a group called Start: Empowerment, a social and environmental justice education nonprofit that seeks to bridge the gap between education and action, that seeks to educate people about these issues and the systems of oppression we need to dismantle using a wide range of approaches, including formal and informal education, storytelling and sharing the voices of community elders.
I am also an organizer with a local environmental justice organization in Austin, Texas called PODER. I urge every single one of you to either join or to support in some way a grassroots environmental justice organization. Volunteer your skills or donate. There are many ways to get involved in supporting people in frontline communities most directly impacted by the crises we are facing, and by helping them now, you will be helping all of us down the line.
At the end of the day, social justice and climate justice are not separate; they are one in the same, so we can’t fight them separately, we have to fight them together, but I believe we can create a new world based on community care and sustainability.
With a seemingly insurmountable mantle defined by climate change, systemic racism, and corruption, youth activists are nurturing a sustainable future for all. Growing up frustrated with inaction by adults and with the rest of their lives at stake, youth activists are a crucial force in the movement to transform our reality. Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) are working to train the next generation of activists, and Alex Gordon, one of these young activists, a winner of this year’s prestigious Brower Youth Award for her organizing prowess on the “Break Free from Plastic Pledge,” voter registration drives and other student power initiatives, shares her experiences as a young person working to create a world that can work for everyone.
My name is Alex Gordon. I’m in my fourth year at Eckerd College (in St. Petersburg, Florida), and I organize with the Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) to empower and train the next generation of youth activists.
I started doing activism work with absolutely no idea of what organizing was. I’m originally from Houston, Texas, so I’m definitely no stranger to the impact of climate change, and while I was growing up, I always wanted to make a difference, but I really just didn’t know how to go about it, so when I first found Florida PIRG students at my campus, I was really excited because I could see that that organization offered me a way to finally get to take action. I got trained on all the basics of grassroots organizing, and I jumped into our voter registration campaign. The work we did that semester helped increase voter turnout by 350%, and seeing the impact that just a small group of students could have on an entire city really empowered me, so after working on voter registration and turnout, I decided to tackle plastic pollution at Eckerd.
And to make a long story short, after months of campaigning, we were ultimately successful, and the president of Eckerd signed what’s called the “Break Free from Plastic Campus Pledge.” This was the first and most stringent campus-wide purchasing guideline to be enacted in the nation. It effectively eliminated the purchase of all non-essential, single-use plastics on our campus, and it all started with me not even knowing what organizing was. And that passion for tackling plastic pollution grew into something much bigger than success on one campus. Working with the national PIRGs network of student-run and mostly student-funded, non-partisan, nonprofits, I started building a movement of young people who would tackle the plastic pollution crisis on their own campuses all over the country. And doing that national work really helped me see that, at the end of the day, organizing for environmental protections was more than just working on one issue or problem: it was really about bringing young people, who are so often sidelined in conversations dealing with our future, into a space where we could make the changes we want to see.
If we want to take huge action, we all have to start somewhere. For some folks, that can involve organizing at the state level or on national policies, but for many of us, it’s addressing the immediate needs in the communities we live in. And for students, that’s often on our campuses, and there are many issues that need addressing on campuses. To name just one that I’ve worked on, students shouldn’t have to choose between their next meal and being able to pay for their course books. In general, young people should feel that they have a voice in our democratic process and are able to use that voice.
My generation is the largest and most diverse in the history of the United States. We are going to be the ones most impacted by the climate crisis, and we are inheriting a world with a lot of huge problems all around us. It can be daunting to even think about: how can we even begin to tackle those immense challenges? I think that it’s going to take young people recognizing our power, getting the resources and the skills that we need to harness that power, and then ultimately organizing to create the change that we deem necessary, starting in our local communities. There has never been a large successful movement for change without young people.
Campuses are potential powerhouses. They have always served as incubators and avenues for change. Campuses are little microcosms of our larger communities, so models that can spread to cities and states can be initiated there. Colleges have a lot of purchasing power and influence in their communities and a lot of students and employees, and groups such as our PIRG chapters have been able to leverage that power and influence. By building a culture of agency among students on campuses, we can create much longer-lasting, sustained change. Successful campaigns such as the one to get the entire University of California system to phase out single-use plastics, efforts to stop the automatic textbook billing that leaves students without a choice and broke, and lobbying at the state and even national levels to make higher education more affordable, have shown over and over that students can be highly effective agents for change when they’re organized and empowered. It all starts when young people decide we want to do something, but to build that impulse into effective action, we need support and resources.
I started working on voter registration, not because I knew I wanted to be an organizer, but because I was searching for a way to protect my future. I was then invested in by an organization that saw the value of my story and my voice, and by working on the campaigns that I do, I’ve been able to bring other young people into the change-making process. The more young people there are working for change, the better our world will be. Imagine if all of the passionate students across the globe were given the support and the tools they needed to organize effectively. We young people today feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, but often we don’t have the tools or the training we need to do something about it. Having access to those tools and that support is not a reality we should be having to imagine, but one that should be the standard.
Although a new year signifies new beginnings, many of the challenges we face are years in the making. This week, we are highlighting innovative work from Deanna Van Buren and Rupa Marya, two leaders at the forefront of architecture/design and medicine, respectively, who are challenging our failing approaches to our justice system and to public health. By transforming how we relate to care and community, these leaders are creating a blueprint for a future of profound equitable healing.
Deep Medicine for Bodies and a World Inflamed: Healing Requires the Right Diagnosis | Rupa Marya
Our world, our bodies, and our society are inflamed with mass uprisings in the wake of racist violence and climate change induced illnesses. In this presentation, physician and activist Rupa Marya explores how structural injustice affects human and environmental health and calls for the right diagnosis to create deep healing.
Designing Spaces for Justice & Care | Deanna Van Buren
Our nation’s current punitive architecture is designed with cruelty compounded by a criminal justice system that disproportionately impacts communities of color. Architect Deanna Van Buren committed her life to create spaces that harness care and restorative justice. As co-founder and Executive Director of the Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), Deanna works to counter the traditional adversarial and punitive architecture that characterizes our legal system by creating spaces and buildings that enable Restorative Justice, community building, and housing for people coming out of incarceration.
Achieving profound socio-economic, environmental, and political changes calls for radical and intensive re-visioning of our world. In this conversation, Rupa Marya and Deanna Van Buren weave together their respective knowledge in medicine, architecture, and law to share how their work can radically transform professional paradigms.
How can we reconnect with water and understand our relationship with water bodies based on values of kinship? In this unique online course from Guardians Worldwide, learn from practitioners from many different nations about traditional water knowledge and global confluences of water thinking. Want to become a River Guardian? Use code “bioneers20” for an exclusive 20% discount.
After growing up across an oil drilling site in Los Angeles, NalleliCobo and her many neighbors suffered from a range of illnesses including heart palpitations, headaches, and nosebleeds. Her firsthand experience of the effects of oil drilling led Nalleli to lead a campaign against the site. She has since become an internationally renowned, award-winning environmental justice activist. She shares the story of her trajectory and challenges, the importance of the ongoing struggles in which she’s engaged, the very high price she and many people in disenfranchised communities continue to pay, and how local struggles relate to the larger global fight for climate justice.
Of the 20 years I have been alive, I have spent 11 of them fighting for my health, safety, community and environment. Since the age of 9 I have been tirelessly advocating to end urban oil drilling and for a “just transition” away from a fossil fuel-based economic system. I have been fighting monsters: going up against the oil industry, my local archdiocese and a broken regulatory system is not a walk in the park. However, that has never mattered to me, because there’s only one thing that matters in this situation – my community.
To give you a better understanding of my struggle, I have to take you back in time. The year is 2010, I’m 9 years old, in fourth grade, living with my mom, three siblings, grandma, and great grandparents, honestly living my best 9-year-old life. One night, as I was coming home from a late-night yoga class with my sister, I was overwhelmed with this sort of guava scent, but a smell so bad I was immediately sick to my stomach and my head really hurt. Thinking it was just a random smell, I kept on walking and ignored it.
As soon as we got home, the house was quiet and seemed empty. It was pretty late and we are a big family, so that was really odd, but suddenly my mom burst into the room and told us to follow her. We then saw our entire family clustered in my sister’s room. My mom had set up an air filter there. She explained to us that the guava scent was coming from our next-door neighbor, an oil well owned by Allenco Energy, and that we all needed to sleep in that one room.
The next morning, on my usual walk to school, I stopped by the doors of the oil facility that I had passed every day and hadn’t thought much about, but this time I really stared at the big doors and the tall brick wall, and I read each sign on that wall. Behind those walls was a silent killer. I lived 30 feet from an active oil well operating on land leased to the oil company by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Oil drilling releases many toxic and foul-smelling emissions harmful to human health into the air, and those sorts of facilities are also highly prone to leaks, so Allenco often used a variety of chemicals to mask the smell of oil. On different days my neighborhood, for miles on end, would smell like chocolate or citrus or guava or cherries. I began to get more and more headaches and stomach pains, and then I started to get nose bleeds so intense I couldn’t sleep in my bed. I had to sleep sitting up in a chair to prevent choking on my own blood. I started to experience body spasms so intense I had to be carried from place to place because I would freeze up. I got bad heart palpitations and had to use a heart monitor for several weeks. But it wasn’t just me or just my family—it was most of my community that was also suffering.
We were living in a “sacrifice zone,” an area where people tend to be poor and don’t know much about their rights and are too busy trying to survive day-to-day to resist. That’s where industries and governments choose to put their most polluting facilities: in the most vulnerable communities, but this time they chose the wrong community.
In January of 2011, Allenco had a leak that lasted seven days. My community filed over 300 complaints to the South Coast Air Quality Management District that week. We were constantly inhaling large quantities of toxins that whole time, but no effort was made to relocate anyone. This was really the beginning of our fight. In 2013, I helped found “People not Pozos” (note: “pozos” means “wells” in Spanish), a grassroots campaign to permanently shut down Allenco Energy. It was clear that no one was going to do it for us. It was up to us to become the experts, up to us to defend ourselves. After four years of town hall meetings, city hall hearings, door-to-door knocking, we were fortunate to have The Los Angeles Times write a story about our community efforts. That article captured the attention of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer. She flew out and had a press conference in my community in front of Allenco, where she pleaded with Allenco to cease operations, and I’m very proud to say that as a result of all our work, Allenco has been temporarily shut down for eight years now.
But we then noticed that we weren’t the only community in Southern California being affected by oil extraction. Los Angeles is in fact the largest urban oil field in the nation. Over 580,000 Angelenos live within a quarter-mile or less of an active oil or gas well, and over 93% of that number is made up of Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other people-of-color. So STANDLA (“Stand Together Against Neighbor Drilling Los Angeles”) was born, and it has become an essential organization in the fight to end urban oil drilling. I also co-founded the South-Central Youth Leadership Coalition, which, along with Youth for Environmental Justice, sued the City of Los Angeles in 2015 for violation of CEQUA, the California Environmental Quality Act, and for environmental racism, and we won. Now when a company wants to reopen or expand a well, there’s a new, much stricter application process.
For us, this win felt monumental. We, the youth from our communities, had done that. We had taken steps to claim our future back. Often in activist work, we young people get overlooked. When I began my activism, I was often told, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re only 12.” And to them, I’d say, “You’re right, I don’t know everything; I don’t fully understand everything, but I know my story. I know my community’s story and how we’ve been affected on the frontlines, and that’s what I’m going to share.” Storytelling is a very compelling form of activism. I like to think of myself as a normal young adult, the only difference is that I found my passion much sooner than most, in part because my circumstances left me no choice but to confront the threats to my life and my family’s and community’s life.
It’s what pushes me to fight so hard. I had my childhood robbed from me. While most kids were outside playing, I wasn’t allowed outside in order to limit my exposure to toxins. Not only did I have the health issues I mentioned, I also lived with constant fear and anxiety because those sorts of oil pumps operate at such high pressure that they need to be opened every 10 to 15 minutes to release pressure to prevent an explosion. We weren’t just being poisoned: we were living on top of a bomb. And they didn’t have any form of emergency evacuation plan for the surrounding community. Allenco operated in an area with nine schools nearby, and its facility even shared a wall with two of them, one of them a high school for children with disabilities!
That upbringing is what drives me to create change. I don’t want any other youth to have to experience the kind of childhood I had, so that’s why I fight. After high school, I went to Whittier College to pursue my education. I wanted to create my own major, a combination of political science, economics, international relations. I wanted to become a civil rights lawyer, work for the ACLU, establish my career in politics. I had my entire life planned, but there was one thing that wasn’t in my life plan—cancer.
On January 15, 2020, my entire world was turned upside down. I was diagnosed with Stage II cancer. I only had one question: “Can I have kids?” The doctors tearfully answered “No.” How do you tell a 19-year-old girl she may never fulfill her dreams of becoming a mother, that the five years she spent begging for medical attention went unnoticed, and that the system failed her and may cost her her life? I immediately thought of the sign I’d read a thousand times on Allenco’s wall: “Dangerous chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm.” That’s exactly what I had, a reproductive cancer. I knew then, that after fighting so hard for my community, I now had to fight for myself. My life was on the line.
And after three major surgeries, three rounds of chemo, six weeks of radiation, eight minor procedures, and fighting off two infections, I am very happy to say I am officially 10 months in remission. I fight because I believe everyone, whatever their age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status or zip code, has the right to breathe clean air. Clean air is a basic human right, and it’s not fair that it’s being denied to so many of us. I fight so urban oil drilling is something you only read about in history books. That’s why I fight and why I will continue to fight as long as I am able. Thank you.
Design and architecture play an integral role in facilitating the lives that unfold inside of them. Architect Deanna Van Buren committed her life to create spaces that harness care and restorative justice. Our nation’s current punitive architecture is designed with cruelty compounded by a criminal justice system that disproportionately impacts communities of color. Deanna Van Buren is the co-founder, Executive Director, and Design Director of the Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS).
Deanna shares how her studio works to counter the traditional adversarial and punitive architecture that characterizes our legal system by creating spaces and buildings that enable Restorative Justice, community building, and housing for people coming out of incarceration.
I’m so excited to be here at the Bioneers Conference. This community is amazing to me in that it includes people from so many places and from every discipline I can imagine. There are so few communities that have this interdisciplinary approach to solving our problems. I passionately believe that this is the way we need to do things, and I, in fact, set up my entire firm, Designing Justice/Designing Spaces, to do just that because I think we all have gifts to bring to change the world.
And my gift, my thing, is that I’m an architect. That’s the role I play. And architects are the folks who take the beliefs and the values of our society and manifest them in the world around us to support human lives, but I think we have to start to question whose values and whose beliefs we’re actually manifesting.
I’ve had a pretty visceral experience of this. I was able to travel the world for years working for the 1%, the wealthiest people in the world. We were designing huge shopping centers, leisure precincts, luxury buildings. And I’m not going to lie, it was fun; I had a good time, but I also started to look around me, and I started to see the gross inequities the built environment was manifesting. I was seeing situations on my job sites in which the construction workers were basically living in squalor. I started to see the informal settlements they were living in literally in the shadow of corporate towers. And here in our own country, I started to see many members of BIPOC communities living in conditions in which they had drastically limited access to basic resources—food, adequate housing, clean air, water, etc.
I started to realize that our society was still permeated by white supremacy, structural racism, patriarchy, and classism and that I as an architect was actually manifesting those beliefs, the values of a very elite group of people who didn’t much care about all the rest of us. Most architecture tends to anchor and amplify a society’s dominant beliefs and the worldview of its elites, so I started to realize that we have to be careful what we believe and what we’re building. I came back from all my travel and working abroad with a new set of eyes. I started feeling that we were living in somebody else’s imagination.
Ruha Benjamin (note: author of Race After Technology) has said that “we’re living in the imaginations of the elite.” And as an architect, I had participated in giving form to that elite’s beliefs in the built environment, and I didn’t want to do that anymore.
And here in this country, I started to see deeply that there was one system that was the most egregious and intense manifestation of those twisted values, and that was our system of mass incarceration. We have about six million of our citizens under some form of carceral control, a grossly disproportionate amount of them people of color. It’s the most blatantly obvious expression of our structurally racist system.
This is what the architecture of the system looks like. What values and what beliefs is this communicating to us? How do you feel in your body when you look at this? I feel terrified, actually, and I see punishment; I see separation; I see naked power. And I don’t want to reimagine this. This is not an imagination coming from me or anyone that I want to love and care for.
But what do we do? What do we build instead of this? And at first, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to use design to impact and change a structurally racist system, such as our mass incarceration infrastructure, but then I heard about Restorative Justice. It was like a light coming on for me. It opened my heart to know that there was another approach to justice, an ancient, Indigenous form of justice that has a totally different set of values. It says that when harm has been done, healing, is required. It is based on the idea that those who have been harmed have needs that need to be addressed so they can be made whole, and that those who have committed the offense or done the harm are obligated to make those amends and be accountable, but it is not based on punishment as its guiding principle.
Once I encountered Restorative Justice, I began to think that perhaps we designers could really do something tangible to help support this sort of “re-indigenization” of the justice system. What if we could start to talk to folks who have been most impacted by the system and see what kind of justice they might imagine and what kind of physical infrastructure would help manifest that vision? I started to work with a social worker and Restorative Justice practitioner named Dr. Barb Toews, and we started to run the first design studios inside prisons and jails around the intersection of design and Restorative Justice. And the folks held in those institutions were coming up with incredible ideas. It changed my life to get to know these folks.
We began to build our team, and we started to grow. We started to talk to municipalities and community-based organizations. We started to work with systems-impacted people and their communities of care, and we started to take the sort of creative tools that we’d previously used to design for the wealthy to begin to design with and for these folks, and together we began to come up with new ideas. It started small. Bigger is not always better. The small things can have huge impacts, so we started by creating a peacemaking center, a space for Restorative Justice in which we brought some Native American peacemaking practices into a non-Native community for the very first time in the U.S. We took what had been a drug house and turned it into a peacemaking center that had spaces for circles where elders were the judges and could moderate conflicts.
New, unexpected things started to happen there. The place started to amplify and foment a totally different way of being. People started to come there for celebrations and rituals, from birthdays to baby showers. The community was coming together and creating social cohesion, which is really the only thing that ultimately keeps us safe. That early success was heartening. We realized we could make beautiful spaces and engage with a community imagining alternative systems, but we had to figure out how to finance these sorts of initiatives to be able to scale it up.
Designing Justice/Designing Spaces, the organization I helped co-found, really came out of that understanding that we could be architects and designers, but we also had to be real estate developers. We had to figure out how to pay for these projects to make them sustainable. Restore Oakland became one of our first attempts to integrate those elements. We helped community organizers buy this building, find it, purchase it, and it became the country’s first center for Restorative Justice and Restorative Economics.
Restore Oakland LLC
We were able to gut the building and create a space in which community organizers could fight mass incarceration and resist gentrification. We included a restaurant that trains low-wage restaurant workers to get living-wage jobs in fine dining. We were trying to create conditions that would help address the root causes of problems people face, by bringing jobs to the community and giving organizers the space to work to change policy. We also included the first dedicated spaces in our county for Restorative Justice work. We were able to take what we had learned in that original Indigenous justice center in Syracuse, NY, and expand it in Oakland, so that some young people could get diverted out of court and come into Restorative Justice circles and be part of community conflict resolution processes.
We noticed quickly that survivors, folks who had been harmed, had no way to heal their trauma in the standard criminal justice system which is so obsessed with a punitive lens that it doesn’t focus on actually addressing the suffering of those who have been harmed, so we started to engage in something called evidence-based design research and to initiate real-world projects that created a series of spaces that could support survivors throughout the entire experience of recovery. Through these sorts of projects, we started to see there are some basic contexts that we need to create for healing to be possible. We have to create environments that are deeply embedded in and connected to nature, that can moderate our “fight, flight and freeze” responses—spaces for refuge in which we can cool off; spaces where we can break bread; spaces of comfort with art, light, sound, texture and materials that are soothing and enriching for our senses.
The building of some new spaces is necessary, but in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we built hundreds of prisons and jails all over the country, so there’s also a lot of “unbuilding”/repurposing that needs to happen. Realizing that, we started a new type of project. Working with community organizations such as the Racial Justice Action Center and Women on the Rise in Atlanta who were fighting to close prisons and jails, we started to repurpose a 475,000 square-foot jail in downtown Atlanta to take what had been a place of punishment and re-imagine it as a center of wellness. On the architecture side, we had to take off a lot of the outside of that building. We had to literally let the light in. We began to open it up. We began to integrate into the façade art that spoke about freedom and a sense of liberation, and then we started demolishing all the cells, taking down the interior and really transforming it into a space for community. This is what folks wanted more than anything, a place for daycare, for their families, a space to come together.
But infrastructure is expensive. It costs a lot to build a new building, and maybe not as much but still a whole lot to gut and transform old structures. We know that we need to stop investing in the old criminal justice system and begin to reinvest in the communities most impacted by that system. Building a jail can cost $300 million, but for $300,000 I can create a mobile classroom, so we started to do that, to build classrooms that bring GED and high school education to system-impacted folks coming home from prison to their communities of care, so they are able to get their GED and high school diploma and have a much better chance to get jobs.
They also have circles and reading groups and all sorts of activities in those spaces. It’s one of the most copied prototypes that we’ve ever made.
We then realized we could expand on that model. We could build mobile, pop-up villages that could bring social services and health and wellness resources as well as provide spaces for music and art to disenfranchised communities, bringing people together to help foster community cohesion. From there we realized we could draw from those pop-up models to create permanent versions. We’re doing that in Detroit where we bought 12 parcels of land to create a campus, which is intended to be a creative oasis for social justice, a development that will support the social, economic, and environmental health of the adjoining communities.
In just about every community we work in, we get the same message: “We just need space to come together; we need space to be with our families and neighbors, a safe place people can come to.” We always try to anchor a project with arts and culture. We realize that feeding the soul has to be at the center of any such initiative, so it’s always good to place a theater that folks can come to in the center of the action. We also have to always create opportunities for income generation, nurturing local social enterprises, micro-entrepreneurs, and cooperatives, and of course provide healing spaces for restorative justice processes.
On the environmental side, we’ve been fortunate to be able to work with the Biomimicry for Social Innovation Group, so we’ve been able to keep an environmental sustainability lens in the development of these projects. We’re trying to think seven generations out, as Indigenous traditions teach, with all the infrastructure we’re designing and building.
There are so many communities that have been hit hard by structural racism and inequity, that have been devastated by mass incarceration, and so we have so much work to do. One critical issue is that most people (around 95%) who are incarcerated come back to their communities from prison at some point, and their re-entry can be very difficult, so another piece of infrastructure we are working on is a different kind of campus, a campus for reentry, where the formerly imprisoned can live and transition, where they have access to behavioral health resources, job training, a family reunification space, etc. We’ve been working with black churches to create these kinds of environments for men and women coming home. As part of that, we’ve been designing and fabricating what we call mobile refuge rooms. It’s our first patent. They’re designed to provide home-like environments on these campuses, where people can regain some dignity and privacy in their lives.
We’ve also begun to create tools and databases that draw from all the work we’ve done, so communities can use that information as they design their own initiatives and spaces. One key project we’re working on is developing an “alternatives to incarceration” tool that takes the lessons from all the prototypes we’ve built, so communities everywhere can begin to plan out what their neighborhood would look like without mass incarceration and without the police state as we know it. It would include everything from diversion and reentry spaces to restorative reinvestment funds to spaces for behavioral health, for youth, for survivors, etc., etc. There’s a lot to build.
I want to invite all of you to join me in thinking about what our justice system would look like with a different set of values in place. What would a system that values love, that is rooted in care, look like? I believe we could create such a system just as easily as we can build a prison or jail, maybe even more easily, and I honestly don’t think there’s a better community than this one to begin to reimagine what those spaces could look like. I’m really looking forward to everything that we’re going to make together.
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!
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