The Bioneers community of leaders is working toward a more just world every day. It has been a true honor to share their ideas and projects throughout the year. One of the ways we do this is by working with authors to publish excerpts of their newly released books on Bioneers.org.
This holiday season, we’re excited to share a list of 15 incredible books that were featured on Bioneers.org this year. Each book can be purchased at your local bookstore or via the Bioneers Bookstore on Bookshop.org, an online bookstore with a mission to financially support your local, independent bookstore. Peruse. Support. And be inspired.
1. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations | Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt
Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. More than 70 contributors–including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie–invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. These diverse voices render a wide range of possibilities for becoming better kin.
2. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art | James Nestor
There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.
Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of S o Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.
3. Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora | Bryant Terry
In this stunning and deeply heartfelt tribute to Black culinary ingenuity, Bryant Terry captures the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora through the prism of food. With contributions from more than 100 Black cultural luminaires from around the globe, the book moves through chapters exploring parts of the Black experience, from Homeland to Migration, Spirituality to Black Future, offering delicious recipes, moving essays, and arresting artwork.
4. Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge | Jeremy Narby & Rafael Chanchari Pizuri
In Plant Teachers, anthropologist Jeremy Narby and traditional healer Rafael Chanchari Pizuri hold a cross-cultural dialogue that explores the similarities between ayahuasca and tobacco, the role of these plants in indigenous cultures, and the hidden truths they reveal about nature. Juxtaposing and synthesizing two worldviews, Plant Teachers invites readers on a wide-ranging journey through anthropology, botany, and biochemistry, while raising tantalizing questions about the relationship between science and other ways of knowing.
5. Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens For Leadership | Nina Simons
Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. Informed by her extensive experience with multicultural women’s leadership development, Simons replaces the old patriarchal leadership paradigm with a more feminine-inflected style that illustrates the interconnected nature of the issues we face today.
6. Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter | Ben Goldfarb
In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”–including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens–recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them.
7. Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter | Manuel Pastor & Chris Benner
In this book Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor invite us to imagine a new sort of solidarity economics – an approach grounded in our instincts for connection and community – and in so doing, actually build a more robust and sustainable economy. They argue that our current economy is already deeply dependent on mutuality, but that the inequality and fragmentation created by the status quo undermine this mutuality and with it our economic well-being. They outline the theoretical framing, policy agenda, and social movements that we need to revive solidarity and apply it to whole societies.
8. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures | Merlin Sheldrake
In Entangled Life, the brilliant young biologist Merlin Sheldrake shows us the world from a fungal point of view, providing an exhilarating change of perspective. Sheldrake’s vivid exploration takes us from yeast to psychedelics, to the fungi that range for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, to those that link plants together in complex networks known as the “Wood Wide Web,” to those that infiltrate and manipulate insect bodies with devastating precision.
9. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest | Suzanne Simard
In her first book, Suzanne Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths–that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
10. The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us | Meg Lowman
With a voice as infectious in its enthusiasm as it is practical in its optimism, The Arbornaut chronicles Meg Lowman’s irresistible story. From climbing solo hundreds of feet into the air in Australia’s rainforests to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States, from searching the redwoods of the Pacific coast for new life to studying leaf eaters in Scotland’s Highlands, from conducting a BioBlitz in Malaysia to conservation planning in India and collaborating with priests to save Ethiopia’s last forests, Lowman launches us into the life and work of a field scientist, ecologist, and conservationist.
11. Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land | Leah Penniman
Farming While Black is the first comprehensive “how to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest.
12. Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing | Clayton Thomas-Muller
Tying together personal stories of survival that bring the realities of the First Nations of this land into sharp focus, and lessons learned from a career as a frontline activist committed to addressing environmental injustice at a global scale, Clayton Thomas-Muller offers a narrative and vision of healing and responsibility.
Through The Apology V has set out to provide a new way for herself and a possible road for others, so that survivors of abuse may finally envision how to be free. She grapples with questions she has sought answers to since she first realized the impact of her father’s abuse on her life: How do we offer a doorway rather than a locked cell? How do we move from humiliation to revelation, from curtailing behavior to changing it, from condemning perpetrators to calling them to reckoning? What will it take for abusers to genuinely apologize?
14. Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice | Rupa Marya & Rajeev Charles Patel
Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body–our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems.
In 1971, Diet for a Small Planet broke new ground, revealing how our everyday acts are a form of power to create health for ourselves and our planet. This extraordinary book first exposed the needless waste built into a meat-centered diet. Now, in a special edition for its 50th anniversary, world-renowned food expert Frances Moore Lappé goes even deeper, showing us how plant-centered eating can help restore our damaged ecology, address the climate crisis, and move us toward real democracy.
For all the ink and pixels spilled over the past year on political infighting about what qualifies as “infrastructure,” one of the most notable omissions has been any real mention of the natural world. The biosphere we all inhabit is, fundamentally, the infrastructure for life itself. As we know all too well, humanity has, for the most part, neglected, destroyed and actively pillaged many of the natural systems that support our continued existence by cooking the climate, unleashing a looming micro-plastic apocalypse, triggering a tragic global decline in all biodiversity benchmarks and more.
What will it take to turn our attention towards the rebuilding of our natural infrastructure, for the benefit of all life and human society? How can built infrastructure elegantly and respectfully engage with and support nature? The answers are not easy, and our understanding of these systems is only just scratching the surface of the evolutionary timescales that nature functions on. However, we know enough to get started – and, unsurprisingly, it often begins with letting nature lead. In this discussion, experts and leaders dive into what a more enlightened, effective, biophilic and biomimetic infrastructure conversation needs to look like.
With: award-winning environmental journalist and author of Eager: The Surprising Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter, Ben Goldfarb; Pyrogeographer and Assistant Professor in the Management of Complex Systems Department at UC-Merced, Dr. Crystal Kolden; Director of Education and Community at TreePeople, Ariel Whitson. Moderated by Teo Grossman, Bioneers’ Senior Director of Programs & Research.
This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
Panelists
Ben Goldfarb
Ben Goldfarb is the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His work has appeared in publications including the Atlantic, Science, Orion Magazine and the Washington Post. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his wife and his dog, Kit (which is, of course, what one calls a baby beaver).
Crystal Kolden, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Fire Science in the Management of Complex Systems Department at the University of California, Merced, is a former wildland firefighter. She conducts research on how humans can mitigate catastrophic wildfire disasters while embracing and acknowledging fire as our ancestors did. She lives in rural California, where she burns the land to heal it.
Ariel Whitson
Ariel Lew Ai Le Whitson, Director of Education and Community at TreePeople, leads and manages TreePeople’s environmental education, water equity and community organizing departments. The engagement team supports thousands of community members across Southern California, with a focus on environmentally and economically stressed communities that have faced historical environmental injustice, in actively participating in initiatives focused on climate change solutions, reforestation, water security, fire resilience, urban soils, waste management, and planting a healthy urban tree canopy.
Teo Grossman
Teo Grossman, Senior Director of Programs and Research at Bioneers, previously worked on a range of projects from federal range management to state-level assessments of long-range planning to applied research on topics including climate change adaptation, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and ecological networks. A Doris Duke Conservation Fellow during graduate school, Teo holds an MS in Environmental Science & Management from UC-Santa Barbara.
Frances Moore Lappé is a longtime food and human rights activist and the renowned author or co-author of 20 books about world hunger, living democracy, and the environment, including her influential bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet (1971), a 50th anniversary edition which was just released.
In 1987 Frances was a recipient of 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.” She co-founded three organizations: the Oakland based think tank Food First; the Small Planet Institute (which she leads with her daughter, Anna Lappé); and the Small Planet Fund, which channels resources to social movements worldwide.
Francis Moore Lappé was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Director of Bioneers’ Restorative Food Systems Program.
ARTY MANGAN: In the fifty years since you wrote Diet for a Small Planet, there have been many positive trends in the food system, but the inefficiencies and flaws of industrial agriculture that you exposed in the book, are, in some cases, worse than ever, and yet your enthusiastic activism for a healthy, fair, and just food system has not seemed to wane. What keeps you going?
FRANKIE LAPPE: I don’t call myself an optimist, but I am a “possibilist.” I believe that all humans are creatures of agency; we need the sense that we have power. I think all humans need to get into action to feel that sense of agency, of possibility, to think that there’s at least some chance that their actions can make a difference in the world for the things they care about and can help connect them with others in that process. Power, meaning, and connection are what our species strives for.
And, despite the frightening trend lines, there is evidence that our actions do matter. It is not too late. That’s my orientation toward life. I love food because it’s a center-point of power; we can trace all of our choices about what we put into our bodies back to how it’s grown, how the people who harvest it are treated in the fields and what their experience is; we can trace all of that that back to ourselves. We can see the impact of the choices we make every day rippling out.
It’s that sense of power, meaning, and connection that keeps me going. In life, it’s not always possible to know what’s possible; therefore, why not strive for the world we want since there’s still a chance that we can make a difference and get closer to birthing that world, one that supports life in all its forms. That’s really what keeps me going on a daily basis.
ARTY: Talking about taking action to make a difference: in 2016 you participated in a Democracy Spring March. You were part of a group that walked 140 miles from Philadelphia to the U.S. Capitol building in DC, performed civil disobedience there, and got arrested. What was that experience like and what do you think it accomplished?
Frances Moore Lappé with fishing floats from Wake Island (photo courtesy of Francis Moore Lappé)
FRANKIE: It accomplished a great deal. In fact, your question just brought back that memory and made me tear up, because it was truly transformative. Any time we do something we thought we couldn’t do, it can be life-changing. Afterwards I had that sense that maybe there were other things I could do that I hadn’t thought I could do. I had thought I was going be the little old lady who couldn’t even walk ten miles, and they would have to carry me off, but I was right up there; I wasn’t dragging in the back of the pack. And being part of that march, I met people I would not have known otherwise—an ex-banker from upstate New York, a teenager from LA, a professor from MIT. There was such a range of people, and that in-and-of-itself gave me hope. All these different people were drawn to the insight that democracy is the root solution.
The bonding with strangers made us feel that we are not alone. We were experiencing what I and Adam Eichen, my buddy who wrote Daring Democracy with me, call “the thrill of democracy.” Unfortunately, many Americans think of democracy as a dull duty, the blah spinach we push down in order to get our desserts of personal freedom, but the experience of that march was anything but dull duty. I experienced the thrill of feeling like an actor, a doer with a voice in democracy. It was truly thrilling. There were about a 100 of us by the time we got to DC, and the last few miles, when the dome of our Capitol came into focus, Adam and I both started weeping because we realized that the people in Congress work for us. Often we feel so powerless, we think those bigshots are in control, but, fundamentally, in a democracy, they work for us. So, the thrill of action, this insight about our own power, and then the bonding with strangers were all life-changing. We were arrested and taken to a detention center to be processed. I didn’t get out of there until midnight, so I was able to have long conversations with people I would have never met otherwise.
ARTY: For those who are not familiar with the fundamental food system flaws you identified and analyzed in Diet for a Small Planet, can you spell out why producing protein through feedlots is so inefficient?
FRANKIE: In the late 1960s, people were terrified because we were being told we’d really hit the Earth’s limits. Friends of mine said, “I can’t ever have a baby because that would be immoral; there’s just not enough for everyone.” There was a book that came out in 1966 called Famine 1975. We were being told that famine was just around the corner, and that some people wouldn’t make it. There was an essay called “The Lifeboat Ethic” that argued that we had to accept the notion that some people would just have to be “thrown overboard,” that some countries couldn’t make it and we shouldn’t try to save them. That was pretty scary. The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich also really freaked people out. The framing that I was hearing was that we’re running out of food. I was 26 and took that at face value, but I wanted to find out for myself.
Francis Moore Lappé in the 1960’s (photo Courtesy of Francis Moore Lappé)
When I did the research and put the numbers together in the UC Berkeley library, I realized that there was more than enough food to go around. We are creating the experience of scarcity out of plenty. In an anti-democratic system, if you don’t have money, you starve, no matter how much there is, but what was so shocking was that we humans , supposedly the brightest of species, were taking an abundant food supply and reducing it drastically in its capacity to feed us. I calculated the numbers, and at that time it took 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. Peer reviewed studies show for all the calories that enter a beef cow in the form of feed, we get 3% of the calories back in the beef that we eat. We devote about 80% of our agricultural land to livestock to get back to about 18% of our calories. I call it the “protein factory in reverse” and think it’s insanity.
I knew that I didn’t want to be part of that insanity and could choose not to be. I could choose a diet that’s better for my body and better for the Earth and all its people. I consider it an act of rebel sanity. To me it was exciting. I didn’t feel that eating less meat was a sacrifice, and besides the greatest variety of color, texture and taste is in the plant world anyway. It was a thrilling period for me. I was able to embrace the knowledge I was gaining and actually act on it in my daily life, and that was the beginning of my quest to always keep learning and going deeper and putting the pieces together in new ways.
ARTY: Has anything changed since your first analysis of meat production when you wrote the original of Diet for a Small Planet?
FRANKIE: The biggest thing is the climate factor. Back then, we were not talking about greenhouse gas emissions and climate catastrophe around the corner. I think the earliest that scientists were beginning to wake up to that was in the ‘70s, but I certainly didn’t know about it. The climate impact is therefore something new that I have included in the 50th anniversary edition, and it’s, of course, a major factor. If cows were a country, they’d be the 6th largest greenhouse gas emitter, by some estimates.
ARTY: How is the current food system decreasing the Earth’s capacity to feed a global population, and what do we need to do to reverse it?
FRANKIE: A key piece of that is the way that we produce meat. Something like 80% of the destruction of rainforest in the Amazon is related to meat production, both feed and grazing, and the Amazon is the richest biodiversity “hot spot” in the world.
I recently wrote a short piece called “America’s Killer Diet.” We’ve reduced meat consumption somewhat, but the real dramatic change in our diet in the past century is the corporate driven processed degradation of the food we consume. Around 60% of the calories in the typical American diet come from processed products that give us lots of salt and sugar and virtually no nutrition. The shocking reality is that we’ve turned our food into a major health threat. We are undoubtedly the first species that’s purposefully made our food supply lethal. For the supposed brightest species, that’s not too bright. Over 40 % of adults in America are either pre-diabetic or diabetic. That’s just terrifying because we know that diabetes is a terrible disease and a lot of it is preventable. Many people live in areas where it’s very hard to get healthy food and many people don’t have enough money to buy healthy food, so systemic inequality and injustice are directly leading to this level of disease.
ARTY: In the book, you state that hunger isn’t caused by a scarcity of food, and that poverty comes with a sense of powerlessness.
FRANKIE: The United States has deeper inequality than most of the world’s monarchies. We are worse than about 100 countries. We’re more unequal than Saudi Arabia in the distribution of income and wealth according to World Bank rankings of inequality. It’s hard for Americans to get their heads around that because we think that everybody has opportunity in America, but getting a home that you can afford and living in a place that has access to healthy food is a challenge for most of us. Extreme inequity is an affront to democracy.
When wealth is that concentrated, it will infect the political process. In 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.” That, in its essence, is fascism. We have hunger in America and worldwide. One in three people in the world cannot afford an adequate diet, despite the fact that since I first wrote Diet for a Small Planet, we have about 25% more food per person available globally now than we did then. One in five children below the age of five are stunted due to nutritional deficiency, and that has lifelong impacts. That statistic about children is the most devastating.
Maybe the biggest “Aha” I’ve had in my life was when I read a quote from Anais Nin: “Human beings don’t see the world as it is. We see it as we are.” In other words, we see the world through cultural lenses. Both a Hopi proverb and Plato say something akin to: “He who tells the story rules the world.” And I figure if both Plato and the Hopi said it, it must be true. So, then, I asked myself: “Well, what is the story?” That question oriented my whole life, because I realized the story of scarcity being told when I was becoming an adult was the dominant frame. It was based on the idea of limits, that scarcity is everywhere and we’re all separate. It really put people in this competitive fight over lack. There’s not enough, so I’ve got to fight for mine. And the dominant theme today is still that there’s not enough to go around and therefore we have to scramble to get ours, but I realized that the reality is there is more than enough, if we shift our worldview from separation to one of connection. This was the heart of what I call the eco-mind, moving from the three Ss of scarcity, separation and stasis to the three Cs of connection, change and continuous co-creation.
In a chapter in the new book, I quote a new friend, German physicist Hans Peter Duerr, who said: “In biological systems, there are no parts, there are only participants.” I think that’s true in any system: we are all in relationship. If we can see it that way, then we can get out of fear mode and realize that we can adopt norms that bring out the best in our species and allow everybody to thrive, but when we see the world through a fixed frame, our beliefs form what we can and cannot see. The dictum “seeing is believing” actually has it backwards as far as humans go. For most of us “believing is seeing.” Albert Einstein saw this clearly in his field of physics: “It is theory which decides what we can observe.” In other words, if it doesn’t fit into the prevailing theory, we are likely to be blind to it. I kind of get teary at this point because that’s really what my whole life has been about—trying to help people put on a whole new set of lenses to see all these connections so that they get unstuck, understand that they can make a difference, and act.
Francis Moore Lappé at the Democracy Spring Rally (photo courtesy of Francis Moore Lappé)
ARTY: He who tells the story rules the world. We’ve been told a story about the free market, how it’s going to serve our needs, how it’s going to lift everybody up economically. What’s the fallacy of that story?
FRANKIE: That’s a story that took hold pretty early in my adult life, with Ronald Reagan’s election. He said that government is the problem and viewed the market as magical, a reductive misreading of Adam Smith’s very sophisticated philosophy. Smith was actually a great moral philosopher (and an anti-monopolist), but modern capitalism distorted his ideas to serve their interests. The point is this: Human beings are not just selfish little monads; we are relational, but the idea that we can’t trust ourselves because we’re so selfish and competitive and materialistic (and if we can’t trust ourselves, we can’t trust our neighbors) really took hold here in the 80s. That’s why we fall for this notion that we can’t fiddle with the market because individually we are flawed, but somehow the market magically balances out all our selfish impulses and leads to the best collective outcome. That was the dominant story that led us to where we are today.
The irony is that a mindset of unquestionable faith in a magical market actually kills the market, because a “free” market only works if it’s genuinely competitive. We’ve been killing it because we’ve allowed it to turn into a highly concentrated system in which just a handful of companies dominate in every major industry, certainly in the food industry. In most major industries, we have an oligopoly, not a competitive market, and anti-trust laws are no longer enforced. In the ‘70s or before, there were about 50 or more meat companies competing for farmers’ business. Now it’s just a handful. I believe it’s four that control most of that market. Every market has rules; our market has one rule, and that is do what brings the highest return to existing wealth. That’s why we end up with inequality greater than the world’s monarchies, and we end up with three billionaires controlling as much wealth as half our country’s population.
That myth of a magical market is a huge obstacle. We need to replace it with the idea of a democratic market. We need to “democratize our economy” just like we need to democratize our democracy. That means everything from building up cooperatives, protecting the public’s interest, enforcing anti-monopoly laws, and removing obstacles for unions to grow in power and hopefully follow Germany’s example of workers sitting on councils that having a say in major corporate decisions.
ARTY: There’s another foundational story we’re told, the one about the unbridled freedom of the individual. How does that affect democracy?
FRANKIE: It’s a sad reflection of the idea that we all are ultimately alone, but in fact the preamble to the U.S. Constitution states that the reason for creating that document and the nation was to promote the general welfare, and one of Teddy Roosevelt’ core beliefs was that government had a right to regulate business for the common good. If we could just pause for a moment and engage with each other, we’d rapidly realize that if other people aren’t concerned about our well-being and we’re not concerned with theirs, then we’re all going to be doomed. I used to have a bumper sticker with a quote from Paul Wellstone, the late senator from Minnesota that said, “We all do better, when we all do better.” We have to reframe these destructive ideas about the unbridled freedom of the individual.
We evolved as hunter/gatherers. We’re the most profoundly, intuitively cooperative species. The go-it-yourself and screw the other guy mentality is really alien to the way we evolved over eons of time. When the hunter went out and made the big kill, it wasn’t just that hunter and that hunter’s family, everybody got to eat the meat. That’s who we were. Our species could never have evolved if we hadn’t been a highly cooperative species. That’s how we got to be where we are, and we should appreciate that and nurture it.
In my trilogy of human needs, I say that we need: a sense of agency, a sense of meaning, and connection. It’s true that those needs can sometimes be met in terrible ways–in extremist terrorist groups, in gangs or cults, in warfare, etc., but the only way we can meet those needs in a mass society in a way that nurtures life is through democracy, which I define as requiring three conditions: diffusion of power (so we all have voice); transparency (so everyone knows what’s going on, because human beings can behave very badly if nobody’s watching); and mutual accountability. Rabbi Joshua Heschel said: “Some are guilty, but all are responsible.” I like to say that if we’re all connected, we’re all implicated, and therefore we all have to take responsibility. We cannot just point fingers. Those three conditions of inclusive power, transparency, and a culture of mutual accountability define democracy for me. We need those three conditions to be able to meet the three needs of power, meaning, and connection. That is the essence of the democratic vision for me.
Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé at a Climate March, 2014 (photo courtesy of Francis Moore Lappe)
ARTY: My last question is about courage. It’s a wild world, and there are numerous historical challenges to survival, not only to our species, but all species. These kinds of circumstances can be absolutely frightful. How do you deal with fear?
FRANKIE: For me it began with a “dark night of the soul” experience. Everything kind of fell apart all at once in my life a little more than 20 years ago. During that experience and coming out of it, I had some of the most singularly powerful, beautiful moments in my life, including traveling the world with my daughter, Anna Lappé and writing a book with her, which any parent would have to say would be an over-the-top glorious experience. We were interviewing some of the most courageous people on Earth and traveled on five continents over a year.
On that journey, Anna and I interviewed a friend of [Noble Peace Prize winner] Wangari Maathai’s, a reverend who had been threatened by the then dictator of Kenya. He articulated for us that fear can produce pure energy. He got up and acted out a scene of when a lion sees a prey. It doesn’t just jump. It recoils and organizes its energy, and then chooses action. So, the idea that fear can generate energy is something we can all work with. That idea that we can transform fear into rewarding, meaningful action was planted in us during that trip to Africa.
Then I had kind of a funny moment, in a situation in which I knew I had to kind of break from my pack. I was in a lecture hall, and I knew what I was about to say [to Al Gore] would really not be in tune with all my friends who were sitting next to me. When I started to put my hand up, my heart started to pound with fear that I’d make a fool of myself, or feel they would be upset with me for saying what I was going to say. When I realized my heart was pounding with fear of looking like an idiot, or fear of judgment, I said to myself, “you’re the great re-framer, Frankie. Why don’t you reframe that?” So, I reframed it as my inner applause going off.
We’re taught that when we get that fear energy, we can either freeze, fight or flee. When our animal nature tells us that those are our three choices, we can choose to say no and realize that it’s pure energy and that we can do with it what we want. That was a glorious moment for me. I try to really live by that as much as I possibly can because of course I still have moments of fear from time to time, even though, in general, I have a very blessed life.
Another way to become more courageous and transform fear energy into generative action is through social connection. I always say that if you want to become gutsier, hang out with people who are more courageous than you. The more we hang out around courage, the more courageous we can be. That’s why on that over 100-mile walk and then sitting on the Capitol steps waiting to be arrested, I didn’t feel that I had to be courageous because I just felt so held by all the others in the group. There was a spirit of “we’re all in this together, so there’s nothing to fear” and we joked with each other, even as they were arresting us. Change is always difficult, but change is essential and inevitable in every aspect of our lives. We just have to accept that it’s scary and think: “OK, so what if I’m afraid; I can do it anyway” and to know that when you’re acting righteously and in community, your fear will melt away. That’s been my experience.
This is our annual Decolonizing Thanksgiving newsletter, which is part of a commitment Bioneers made in 2016 to share the truth of what this holiday means for Native Americans and all Americans. Beyond sharing the information and resources below, we’re taking our commitment one step further this year with the publication of our Decolonizing Thanksgiving deep-dive resource.
On this page, you’ll find a collection of content and tools related to decolonizing Thanksgiving, and you’ll also find our guides to decolonization in general. We’ve also included a selection of resources and tools from tribes, educational institutions, and Native-led organizations to support continued engagement.
We hope you’ll take a moment to browse through what we’ve collected here and to consider what the decolonization of your Thanksgiving might look like this year.
The True, Indigenous History of Thanksgiving
The American mythos of the First Thanksgiving erases a large part of the history of European colonialism and its impact on tribal nations. For the true story of what happened at the First Thanksgiving, and how Indigenous lives have been affected ever since, Bioneers’ Indigeneity Program’s Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik) hosted a conversation with Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy), the Director of Education for the Akomawt Educational Initiative.
While thanksgiving can inspire gratitude, nurture relationships, and bring families together, celebration should not come at the expense of the history of the Nations Indigenous to North America. For many Native people, the holiday is a national day of mourning. Decolonizing thanksgiving can establish new traditions seated in healing, reciprocity, and kinship.
A fundamental task for non-Indigenous people who want to be better allied with Indigenous people is to learn whose land they are currently living on. Identifying the Nation native to the land you live on can foster gratitude, humility and open doors to learning more about the history of colonial dispossession.
A Lesson Plan & Teacher’s Guide to The Real Thanksgiving
The story of Thanksgiving begins with the Wampanoag tribe and European settlers. In this teacher guide, walk through the real history of thanksgiving with an in-depth lesson plan that includes drawing activities, discussion questions, and videos.
From Scholastic: “If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving” | In this brand new book for young people, Chris Noodlz dives into a comprehensive examination of the history of Plimoth and the first thanksgiving.
From truthsgiving.org: “Decolonize and Celebrate Truthsgiving with Indigenous Peoples” | Truthsgiving is a collective effort from Indigenous community organizers to uplift the actions of Tribal Nations that are attempting to abolish institutionalized and aggrandized white supremacy that is supported through the thanksgiving mythology.
Architect Deanna Van Buren illustrates her lifelong commitment to ending mass incarceration by building infrastructure that addresses its root causes. She 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. She is co-founder, Executive Director and Design Director of the Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS).
A widely-traveled, award-winning, groundbreaking activist architect with 16 years’ experience designing projects internationally and a major thought leader in advocating for restorative justice centers (a radical transformation of the criminal justice system), Deanna Van Buren is Executive Director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, an architecture and real estate development firm innovating in the built environment to end mass incarceration; and serves on the national board of Architects/ Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility.
Raphael Sperry, an architect, sustainable building consultant, and human rights advocate, examines how engaged scientific, technological and design professionals can ensure the careful weighing of social justice, public health and environmental impacts becomes a cornerstone of all decisions made in their disciplines.
Restorative justice is a perspective that can transform society and our justice system. By promoting healing over harm, its practices can bring communities together in the mediation of conflict. This video features Fania Davis, co-founder and director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY).
The perspectives and experiences of Indigenous peoples are especially critical in the fight against climate change and environmental devastation. First, it is estimated that 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity is found in the lands of Indigenous communities, who have historically proven to be the best protectors of their ecosystems. These lands are also often some of the Earth’s most important carbon sinks, so the health of those regions is crucial to our collective survival, and supporting these frontlines groups in defending their rights and territories has to be central to any credible global climate strategy. On top of that, the rest of humanity has a great deal to learn about how to live in balance with the natural world from the traditional ecological wisdom of many Indigenous peoples. Finally, no one has more experience surviving apocalypses and providing models of resilience in the face of dire crises.
Julian Brave NoiseCat, an activist and one of this era’s most brilliant emerging progressive journalists and thinkers, lays out the case for the moral imperative to assure that Indigenous voices have a central role in humanity’s struggle to address the existential climate crisis.
Julian Brave NoiseCat delivered this talk at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
A prolific, widely published 28-year-old Indigenous journalist, writer, activist and policy analyst, Director of Green New Deal Strategy at Data for Progress, Julian Brave NoiseCat has become a highly influential figure in the coverage and analysis of Environmental Justice and Indigenous issues as well as of national and global political and economic trends and policies.
In this keynote address to the Bioneers 2020 virtual conference, leading Indigenous educator Cutcha Risling Baldy provides 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.
In this podcast, we learn how a new generation of First Nations activists is protecting traditional territories and sacred sites from harm and renewing Indigenous land stewardship.
Although the New Deal of the 1930s rescued many from poverty and laid the foundation for a social safety net, it was also deeply flawed in that it excluded Black Americans and people of color from many of its programs. As the vision for a Green New Deal has evolved, it is imperative we avoid the errors of the past. The rising calls for a Red New Deal inclusive of Native America and a Blue New Deal for our threatened oceans and coastal communities have arisen. In this truly original and dynamic panel discussion, we learn about these emergent, interweaving movements with some of their thought leaders.
Edgar Villanueva and Hilary Giovale share an ancestral bond that is far from unique, but one that is rarely acknowledged. Edgar is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. For generations, his family has lived in the same region where Hilary’s ancestor received a land grant after his family migrated from Scotland in 1739. Now 280 years later, Edgar and Hilary reach across the Thanksgiving table to bridge the painful colonial gap.
Edgar
As a Native American, I’m often troubled by the way that Americans approach Thanksgiving. By holding onto an idealized image of a harmonious feast between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag, we’ve overlooked the brutality that Native people have faced since the arrival of Europeans. For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and remembrance—a reminder of the genocide of our people, the loss of our way of life, and the theft of our ancestral lands.
We cannot change the past––but by changing how we tell the story of the past, we can avoid repeating a history that erases the trauma Indigenous peoples have experienced. While traditional decolonization hinges on returning stolen land and autonomy to Indigenous peoples, today our lives as Indigenous peoples and settlers are so intertwined that decolonization is more complex.
I propose seven steps to healing: grieve, apologize, listen, relate, represent, invest, and repair. I initially developed these steps in relation to my professional field of philanthropy, but they are also applicable to a personal process of decolonization.
By opening up dialogue and rejecting colonial divides, we create genuine mutual understanding.
The first step to healing is acknowledging our nation’s violent history and taking time to grieve what happened. Without grieving, we simply cannot move forward. Then, we must apologize. This means a genuine acknowledgement of past wrongs, with an outward focus on the impact these actions had on others. This step of healing helps to build the foundation for reconciliation.
Once we have grieved and apologized, it is time to listen. Listening means being open, empathetic, attentive, and considerate. One simple way to listen is to follow Indigenous accounts on social media. Some of my favorite Indigenous-run Instagram accounts are @indigenousgoddessgang, @lilnativeboy, @seedingsovereignty, @indigenousrising, @repdebhaaland, @_illuminatives, @ndncollective, and @project_562. Listening is a way to learn more about the issues affecting our community—most of which, like lack of economic opportunity and poor mental health, are a direct result of colonization.
If we listen openly and empathetically, it naturally leads to the next step of healing: relating. By opening up dialogue and rejecting colonial divides, we create genuine mutual understanding. The Native principle mitakuye oyasin (all my relations) is the idea that our interdependence as human beings is inescapable. When we understand this, we can truly heal together.
The final step of this healing process is to repair. Reparations are the ultimate way to build power in exploited communities.
Once we relate, we must represent. That means restoring power to Native Americans in the decisions that affect our communities. It’s a difficult change to make, particularly for those who stand to lose power. But that discomfort is part of the healing. Representing means voting for Indigenous leaders, holding the government accountable for their broken treaties, and supporting movements that fight against racist and demeaning depictions of Native Americans.
The final step of this healing process is to repair. Reparations are the ultimate way to build power in exploited communities. For Native Americans, that means ensuring land and water rights, returning sacred ancestral lands, and providing adequate resources to our communities. This includes giving Indigenous communities full property rights on our reservations, rather than letting the government hold them “in trust,” preventing us from putting the land to use by selling it, buying more, or borrowing against it.
When we all take these steps to heal, we can both address the harms of the past, and stop the cycle of harm that continues because of the lasting legacy of colonization. It’s a process that requires the collective involvement of our country as a whole. This Thanksgiving, I encourage everyone to take time and begin this process of healing—recognize the hurt that was caused by colonization in order to bridge colonial divides and look forward to a new and more equitable future.
Hilary
European-descended settlers have unique opportunities to bridge the colonial gap. It can begin by simply changing how we introduce ourselves. The first time I said out loud, “I am a ninth-generation American settler. All my life, and ever since 1739, our family has been living on stolen Indigenous land,” my worldview started changing dramatically.
Within White settler culture, our identities as settlers tend to be invisible to ourselves. We are entangled with systemic White supremacy and national mythologies designed to keep us comfortable and complicit. Many of us have developed multi-generational bubbles of denial and amnesia about the genocide, broken treaties, and stolen land that enabled us to stay. Our opportunity is to willingly pop those bubbles so we can collectively decolonize and make repairs.
European-descended settler families and communities need to begin our own healing work, together. Our social conditioning makes it tempting to rush into “doing something” right away, but our first step in bridging the colonial divide can simply be feeling the discomfort of the true history, and being open to learning: how has this history benefitted us while inflicting unbearable trauma upon Indigenous peoples?
Facing history and being willing to grieve helps settlers develop the capacity to apologize. Apologies for historic harm are quietly taking place throughout the United States. My grieving process included writing an ancestral apology letter to Edgar, which opened healing potential for us, our families, and our extended networks.
When settlers commit to our own process of healing and decolonization, it becomes possible to build bridges toward Indigenous peoples and communities.
Though it seems counterintuitive, embarking on our own healing process as settlers helps us bridge the colonial gap. This Thanksgiving, I recommend groups of settler friends and families acknowledge their settlerhood out loud to each other, followed by a prayer or a moment of silence.
Around the Thanksgiving table, ask questions. Where did your people come from, and why? What types of oppression or poverty did your family face in the time before and during migration? Did your ancestors choose to leave behind beloved lands, families, languages and cultures, or were they forced? Prepare some of your ancestral foods for the Thanksgiving feast. Honoring our settler ancestors can restore their humanity, which in some cases was compromised through dehumanizing acts of colonization and enslavement.
Beginning this Thanksgiving, and continuing throughout the year, settlers can learn which First Nations previously and currently inhabit the land on which they live and gather. Honor the Indigenous ancestors, as well as their surviving descendants. Amongst family and friends, share Indigenous stories and histories.
When settlers commit to our own process of healing and decolonization, it becomes possible to build bridges toward Indigenous peoples and communities. We can seek opportunities to visit Indigenous-organized events and spaces, listening far more than we speak, believing what we hear, and allowing ourselves to be quietly impacted by what we observe.
It is not the task of European-descended settlers to become white saviors and “fix” colonial damage within Indigenous communities. But, we can learn to join in solidarity by supporting the work already being envisioned and led within Indigenous communities. Follow Diné speaker Lyla June Johnston’s guiding question: “How (if at all) can I help?” Listen and act accordingly.
Sharing food, handshakes, and conversation creates the universal human glue of empathy and compassion. Cultivating relationships across difference facilitates our ability to invest resources, time, and energy in Indigenous communities, and generates the collective will to make reparations.
When we build bridges from the ashes of the colonial gap, the ensuing relationships are things for which we can really be grateful at Thanksgiving and beyond.
Both Edgar and Hilary are long-time Bioneers Conference participants. Watch a video of them discussing How To Be a Good Ally. Read more about Hilary’s work here. Read More about Edgar’s work here.
Hilary Giovale is a community organizer, philanthropist, and author of a forthcoming ethnoautobiography about her process of decolonizing and healing from whiteness.
Edgar Villanueva is the founder and principal of Decolonizing Wealth Project and the author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance.
The idea that a river or other natural feature is a living being, imbued with the right to live and thrive is nothing new to Indigenous Peoples around the world. In this episode with Matriarch Casey Camp-Horinek, we talk about how a burgeoning indigenous-led Rights of Nature movement has the potential to protect ecosystems from destruction by granting legal rights to nature itself, and how many tribes are uniquely positioned for leadership to institute and uphold the Rights of Nature because of their sovereign legal status.
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
Additional music provided by Nagamo.ca, connecting producers and content creators with Indigenous composers.
Transcript
CARA ROMERO: Hi, Everyone. Welcome to the Indigeneity Conversations, our native-to-native podcast dialogues from Bioneers. I’m Cara Romero, co-host and also co-director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program alongside Alexis Bunten.
ALEXIS BUNTEN: Hey Everyone. Today we’re going to be speaking with Casey Camp-Horinek about her remarkable work in the tribal rights of nature movement. It was such a great conversation that we’ve made it into a two-episode podcast. This is part one.
Casey is a shero of ours and an incredibly powerful matriarch and elder. She’s a leader in the global, Indigenous led, Rights of Nature movement. Casey’s tribe, the Ponca Nation, was one of the first tribes to really adopt Rights of Nature law in the United States.
CR: In this conversation, you’ll hear from Casey about her personal history as well as our shared beliefs that rights of nature initiatives are important and protective of all peoples.
We also discuss our native led Rights of Nature initiative within the Bioneers’ Indigeneity Program. We’re working to support many tribes through the research and development of methodology that would assist councils, attorneys, and community organizers in self-determining how to adopt Rights of Nature into tribal governance.
So now let’s go to our conversation with Casey. We began by asking her about her life’s journey and path, and what brought her to the work she’s doing now.
CASEY CAMP-HORINEK: I want to back up just a bit and just genuinely say how good it makes me feel, sincerely, deeply that you are here and doing what you are doing, because as a matriarch, and you know my joke is about raising all of my young people after graduating from MIT – Matriarch in Training – my daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters, and you. And I feel really good about that. It’s an important part of our being.
Casey Camp Horinek at the 2019 Bioneers Conference. Photo by Alex Akamine.
As an elected official, as an ambassador for the Ponca tribe, my main role is being that – matriarch to a [inaudible] clan of people, of being a traditional drum keeper for the women’s society, the only existing women’s society of the Ponca Nation, and to have the honor of carrying on the ways of my women folks that have taught me how to move and to be flexible, to be resilient, to be inventive and to understand that our mother, the Earth, has consistently evolved in her needs and in her nurturing us, and to the needs of all that is, not just human life, but you as a part of nature, not separate from and that’s very important to internalize. We humans are nature.
And so to fast forward through my lifetime of being a young brown girl that lived in poverty and so rich in culture. We grew up being transplanted to various cities, part of the relocation process of the ‘50s. I was the youngest of six. And we transitioned through—I know I went through 12 different schools. We survived because we come from survivors. And we knew how to do it. We knew how, in the generations before us, how to adapt to the cold and to the heat, and to the hunger and to the plenty.
And so the same was true when we were workers in the San Joaquin Valley when I was a young girl. The same was true when we lived in Kansas City, when we lived in Washington state, when we transitioned from place to place when my parents were looking for work and we all worked together. And as an adult coming into the American Indian movement in my youth, and fulfilling that empty spot inside me that had been trained by what they used to call the dominant society – and I’m over that; I know who we are [LAUGHTER] so I no longer consider that foolish time when we tried to be the round peg fitting into their square, linear world. And the American Indian movement, which my brother, Carter Camp, was the leader in, had awakened something that the Native youth movement also had, in saying that we exist proudly, strongly, and we will pull all of the generations around us back into cultural wholeness by rejecting those things that were killing us spiritually, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
We didn’t even think of the word activist. We were only doing what was necessary as Ponca people. But Julie, our oldest, her first real chance was [SINGING – Que viva le , Que viva viva] And that came from after Wounded Knee joining with Cesar Chavez marching through the San Joaquin Valley, with Joan Baez leading us in that chant. Powerful time.
Fast forward again into this century, and being an elected official not because I really wanted to be in political office, but because it was necessary. When my people asked me, I’m bound to do it. It is part of our teachings. And so I went into office.
We passed within the first few months a moratorium on fracking and injection wells, because as sovereign people, we can demand that within our territory, and we did. And it still exists. A resolution against KXL coming through our territory
And during that period of time, I had been being educated about this underlying movement within this protection of our Mother Earth called Rights of Nature. Traveled to Ecuador, looked at their constitution, and several other events. And eventually, through that guidance that only the Great Mystery can guide you through, came up with this understanding of how we should be responsible to protect our generations and our people who are existing under environmental, genocidal onslaught by Conoco-Phillips, Phillips 66, and a myriad of other things, that if we enacted this statute – we wanted to get it into our constitution –and that’s coming up; we’ll talk more about that – that we could hold them responsible, not just in federal or state courts, which has been really a joke for Indigenous People, but in the court of the Ponca people. And it’s an interesting path to be going down. I’m very grateful for the guidance and for those who walk before me, and all of you who are leading this wonderful new way of looking at things.
So I’m thanking you for that question. And there’s nothing going to have a short answer.
CR: That was beautiful. Thank you, Casey. I just wanted to return the love and admiration for you sharing time with us today, speaking about such important issues. We’re all kindred spirits, and I think that that’s so important. All of our tribes can be so different, but where I find more and more we unite in our existence, in our struggles.
And this Rights of Nature movement has been such a profound area for me to learn about as a young Native woman. Bioneers has a long history working and educating Native and non-Native folks on Rights of Nature law. And our CEO and founder, Kenny Ausubel, in 2006 invited attorney Thom Linzey to the Bioneers main stage to give a keynote on Rights of Nature. And through these keynotes that Bioneers does, there’s always this daisy chain of events, and that really led to that amendment to the constitution down in Ecuador inserting Rights of Nature into law and governments in South America.
And it really got Alexis and I to be able to meet other Native people that, like us, learned about this through Bioneers and thought this might have really profound application in tribal governments.
I, like you, have served on tribal council as an elected official. It was something that I never thought I would find myself doing. It was something that I was asked to do by an elder when I was just 30 years old. And I’m so glad I did it. I learned more in that three years on tribal council than I feel that I had learned in my whole life. My background is as an artist, as an activist, and, like you, and very ontologically tied to my homeland and my lands of the Mojave Desert in California.
I think it’s no coincidence at all that our landscapes are something that we’re deeply connected, inseparable from, ontologically tied to, part of our spirituality. And so that we feel from birth and through our teachings that we are supposed to protect these pristine areas, and we have intricate understandings of our ecosystems. And I would say whether we’re in our ancestral homelands, I know that those ties can be very strong, but even if we’ve been removed to other areas, I feel like that blood memory comes through, that need to protect our landscape.
The other thing that I learned on tribal council was kind of pulling on what you were saying before, that this is really a square peg in a round hole. And our tribe, like many others, is—has adopted what’s called a 1934 IRA constitution [The Indian Reorganization Act]. And for our audience—for our audience, these tribal constitutions were boiler plate constitutions that were adopted in the years immediately following the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. They were forced on us by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, also called the BIA, in order to garner our federal recognition during these eras. And these are called model 1934 IRA constitutions. These constitutions, as you can imagine before forced on us by the BIA, were lacking in so many areas. They were lacking in separation of powers; they were lacking in no tribal courts are mentioned. And we need secretarial approval to breathe in these constitutions. And so, this was something that we really learned as we govern our people in modern times, is we have kind of this useless document, in my opinion, that we’re supposed to govern our people in a fair and equitable way, and there’s no mention of landscape. There’s no mention of culture in these 1934 IRA constitutions.
And so, I think for me, one of the most exciting things about following the Rights of Nature movement and following Ponca Nation, and Ho Chunk, and White Earth and Yurok, beginning to adopt these Rights of Nature laws and policies into these documents, we’re seeing how disempowered we’ve been. Right? We’re always learning all the unfair hands that we’ve been dealt with through colonialism. And we are constantly learning ways to re-empower ourselves. And for me, Rights of Nature is something so exciting because it’s a chance to put into words, to put into our governance, our true beliefs of what you were talking about – our spiritual connection to the landscape, and how we’re bound by our teaching and by all that we’ve inherited throughout the millennium, this ability to protect our landscape from—or like you said, that she’s supposed to able to protect themselves—or protect herself.
Alexis, would you like to follow-up with that a little bit more?
AB: So what non-indigenous people in this movement say is that it was often started by an important article called Do Trees Have Legal Standing? written by a legal scholar named Christopher Stone in 1972. But of course, that was not the start of the movement, and the movement had no start, because Rights of Nature is inherently about what Casey said, that we are nature; nature is protecting itself, and that indigenous values and ways of relating to the planet and understanding that we can’t frack, we can’t continually extract, we have to take care of it so it can take care of us. Nature is the boss, not us. These are indigenous ideas, and these are what is encapsulated in Rights of Nature law when it’s passed, when it’s put into the Western or dominant – I don’t like that word either, Casey – when it’s put into that code, it’s a way of indigenizing the law that is enforceable by the military powers we have in this world, essentially.
So there was the 1972 article, but before that we had indigenous worldview since time immemorial. And even for people who are descendants of colonizers, descendants of immigrants and settlers in settler colonial nations like the US, Cara mentioned blood memory. At some point back in their ancestry, everybody lived indigenous ways of life with nature, prior to capitalism, prior to feudalism, prior to this excess greedy accumulation of wealth, and the one percent getting richer and richer and richer off the backs of all of us through things like fracking, extractive industries, large industry that pollutes. The biggest contributors to greenhouse gases are just a few corporations in the world, and yet we’re told to recycle. So we need to look to our indigenous worldviews around Rights of Nature.
In 2008, Ecuador added Rights of Nature protections to its constitution. That was absolutely monumental. And depending on who you talk to, it was or wasn’t indigenous led, or maybe a partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous people. But what we’re seeing right now in the US with the tribally led Rights of Nature movement is that it truly is tribally led, going through votes, going through traditional means of governance through consensus. And what Casey has shown us is that if you adopt it as your tribal law before you stick it into your IRA constitution, that’s just done so that we can communicate with the US federal government and make sure that they don’t back up those industries that extract and frack. We have to play on their terms, but we play on our terms as well.
As I mentioned earlier, Casey’s tribe was the first to adopt Rights of Nature law. It was customary law, which was traditional law before these constitutions were placed upon us as a form of further assimilation. But since then, there have been moves. Cara mentioned the Ho Chunk. They voted to make an amendment to their tribal constitution. And as Cara said, it does have to go back to the feds and back. Takes about a year at least to ratify. We did see in 2019 the White Earth band of Ojibwe adopted the Rights of Manoomin, wild rice, which was amazing. And also in 2019, as Cara mentioned, the Yurok tribe recognized the personhood of the Klamath River. And Rights of Nature is just one in a series of fights the Yurok tribe has had for decades now to protect the river since it’s been dammed, since it’s been polluted, since it’s been over-fished. And these are multi-pronged strategies.
CR: Alexis, thank you so much for covering some of those current events happening with Rights of Nature globally. Casey, this question is for you: Can you explain to the audience about the difference between customary law and laws set forth in tribal constitutions?
CCH: One is real, one is not. That’s as simple as it gets right there. So let’s start first with what’s called the BIA. Of course, in the AIM days we called that Boss Indians Around, but now we don’t even call ourselves Indians. Right? Now we’re—Maybe I can call it Boss Indigenous Around instead. But the BIA itself was created under the war department of the United States, and if one understands that concept, then you understand all the rest of it, all of the various acts, the forest removals, the boarding schools, the Relocation Act, the ICW Act [Indian Child Welfare Act] , the forced sterilizations, on and on and on, things that were—have been part of the fabric of how we have had to work through by finding these things called Rights of Nature or whatever it is that we’re using to exert sovereignty.
I believe that if one looks at the laws created by the Boss Indigenous Around people – I don’t know how to say it; the federal government of the United States – it was meant to eradicate us. From the time that Columbus came on the shores using the doctrine of discovery in order to murder and—and claim what the Great Mystery had in place here on Turtle Island or what is presently North America, however you want to use the term, for us among the Ponca, we can tell you where we originally came from and beyond that, the Star Nation that engendered us, when, and how, and what our track was across this—what they called the North American continent, and to the place that the Great Mystery asked us to caretake. Then we can chronicle where we were removed to and what happened to us there, my mother, being the first generation born in captivity in a POW camp called a reservation that we could not leave or we would be killed doing so.
Those laws created this BIA that created these things called constitutions that in theory sounded alright to them when they were looking at the Six Nations confederacy that had the original form of the constitution that they emulated. But when it was put on us, and I do mean put on us, because we had to carry the burdens of it through several generations, it was to create a way to further destroy and erode the culture in every single form. And the way to create—a way to buy votes, for instance, when we didn’t have that system at all.
I remember a sweet auntie of mine that was telling me about one of our corrupt politicians that had come to her home. And she said, you know, it’s amazing, because we only live a half a mile from the voting place there at the tribal affairs building, but he gave each one of us $20 for gas money. And she was so sweet it didn’t occur to her that that was bribery. You know?
But that constitution that was forced on us, that IRA governmental constitution, left us open to all of the things that would kill us – spiritually more than any other way, culturally to follow that – and to lend us the idea and the mindset that what was going on with people like the Trump government is acceptable, because we ended up with our own mini-Trumps – m-i-n-i Trumps, and m-a-n-y Trumps – in the manner in which they often looked at how our people could survive, because these were the survivors of the boarding schools that were running for office. They had already been subjected to being kidnapped, and they were already part of that syndrome of trying to survive through learning those ways and following those ways.
Traditional law, the original law, the natural law that was in place underneath, through, and part of this, has been the way that the Great Mystery set in place; is to honor all that is, participate in all that is. And, you know, and the simple way one recognizes that if one walks in the snow, one gets cold, that the water has frozen. If one walks in the summertime, then it’s a different season and a different way to understand how to live within the natural laws at that time.
And so those traditional laws, for the Ponca at least, were to recognize all things without ageism, without sexism, without aggrandizing those that took, but aggrandize those that gave. The society, the women’s society that we’re part of – Pa’thata – is an offshoot. We had four warrior societies for women society warriors, and those were when our men folks came back from the hunt, they came back from wherever they were in warfare, because we did have our territorial spats, you know, but when they brought things home, they brought the deer, and the buffalo, and the hides, and the blankets or whatever it was. The women, who were the caretakers of the entire village during that period of time, understood what was needed, and they provided a space, and a song, and a drum, and a dance that was to honor those things that had been brought, because those goods had value, intricate value in their life itself. Maybe it was even a pot that was a water carrier. That was important. But they also knew where the need was within the juvenile population, within the elders, within widows, within men who were raising their children alone, within the babies who were born with super special needs, or within those families – we have a family here called the others, used to be raises the others, and they were the ones who took in the orphans. And we knew who needed what. And we dispensed things and dispersed things. Those are the ways that you understand who your natural leaders are.
In our ways, we used to recognize what children’s special gifts were, and those children were allowed to express those gifts within every council that happened, not obtrusively, but respectfully, elders who had special gifts, elders who did not, it did not matter. We didn’t have a word for homeless. We didn’t have a jail. We did have rules so that if a man did not treat his wife correctly, if he was a woman beater, or someone who was abusive, he had to leave. He was not ever going to get to return to his family. Conversely a woman who did not take care of her children. Those had their own ways of understanding. Women had a time that they were set aside and honored at their monthly time when they were in tune with the moon mother and had their special strength of gift happening to them. All of these things that created a system that worked, and created a system where all was valued, whether that intrinsic value was that of a stone – because I know the story of my mother’s auntie on a forest removal, bringing four stones from our ancestral lands so that our piece of the Earth we were supposed to caretake came with us, and our ceremonial fireplace was cared for. The fire itself had its place in our—and the people who were the caretakers of that.
So the difference between IRA and traditional value system governments are not even in the same planet. They don’t even have this—the ability to tell you the sameness much less the difference in them.
And so the idea of these constitutions being revamped with what we call the Immutable Ponca Rights of Nature is something that we understand has to be built with the framework of understanding that as a sovereign people, everything has to be built inside that. Every bit of caretaking that it took even to put in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People has a certain framework that exerts sovereignty. And that’s where Rights of Nature is in my mind, is not only that tool to help us deal with the fossil fuel industry and those polluters – unfortunately rancher/farmers that have become killers of the Mother Earth instead of understanding sustainability also have to be held accountable for the poisons they put into the waters. All of those things come around to understanding the oneness of all and the allness of one that has to be not rediscovered but recognized.
CR: We have the right to self-determine. We have the right to amend our constitutions to include Rights of Nature governance into law. We have the ability to learn about those frameworks that you’re talking about and learn what tools we do have available. And I believe, along with Alexis and many others working on this Rights of Nature initiative, that with those existing frameworks, and with those existing tools, we have the ability to self-determine and include Rights of Nature law into our constitutions.
I think that this is something that’s painfully missing from our present-day ways that we interact with each other legally. And for me, a place to leave a mark for our future generations in our constitution that really describes who we are as a people, to be able to adopt Rights of Nature law into our constitution really puts it in our constitution what our future generations could and should be able to look to for ways that we believe in governing ourselves and taking care of our ecosystem.
So I just wanted to share a little bit about organizing back home and learning about Rights of Nature. I went home and I went to our cultural center, which is a place where culture bearers and activists gather to talk, to talk story, to talk in a very casual way. It’s often around a potluck. That’s how we get people there, is through food. And we started talking about Rights of Nature, and I began to survey my community about Rights of Nature, just asking elders, asking youth, asking people that are my age, what if you could protect in perpetuity would you protect. And we had these incredible conversations that we had not had in my lifetime in a very long time, maybe within small individual families. And all the answers were the same.
We wanted to protect the Colorado River. We wanted to protect our beautiful, pristine aquifer. We wanted to protect our resident animals, our flora and fauna. We wanted to protect our air quality.
And I went to my tribal council each month and I reported out – right, this is just self-organizing for other people that live in small tribal communities like my own, I got on the tribal council agenda, and oh man, I’m always scared to talk in front of tribal council; I’m always scared to talk in public usually, but we have to do these things even if we’re scared. Right? And I went and I reported out what all of the people in our community were saying about what they wanted protected in perpetuity. And the tribal council one by one came and thanked me.
They thanked me because I think that they’re there to steer, but that the laws are supposed to come from the people, that we’re supposed to be organizing within and amongst ourselves. Maybe that’s a place where our customary laws can come in. And we came to a little bit of an impasse with my tribe on this idea of if we were going to adopt the language that we had come up with ourselves into a preamble in a constitution, and then an amendment for our tribal council to then have to uphold that preamble that said this is who we are, this is what we believe, these are all the things that we want to protect in perpetuity, the impasse came about whether we think that language is the most powerful and the most effective. So right now we’ve taken a pause and we’re consulting with lawyers, right, because we really want whatever we adopt into our constitution to be the most powerful language that can be upheld in tribal court, that can be upheld as those jurisdictions [INAUDIBLE]. So that’s kind of where we’re at.
CR: So that’s the first part of our conversation with Casey Camp Horinek. In part two, we talk to Casey about the journey her tribe is on to adopt rights of nature into their legal framework. And why rights of nature is so aligned with indigneous worldview.
AB: Yes, and you can hear and see more from Casey by going to our website bioneers.org. We have other episodes there to listen to and share, and we also 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
CR: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Indigeneity Conversations. It’s been a pleasure to share with all of you today. Many thanks and take care!
“Once again the brilliant advocate of ‘bi-cognitive’ consciousness, with his usual crystalline clarity and scalpel-sharp precision, Jeremy Narby continues his unique lifelong exploration of how the tension between scientific and shamanic paths to knowledge can trigger penetrating new insights. In dialogue with his deeply informed, profoundly sophisticated interlocutor, Shawi healer Rafael Chanchari Pizuri, Jeremy dives into rarely discussed aspects of traditional Amazonian plant usage and the most updated scientific research on the topic, offering a much-needed corrective in a field recently deluged with far too many half-baked, overly romanticized takes on shamanism.”—J. P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer
Rafael Chanchari Pizuri
For Indigenous societies across the globe, plants that are considered poisonous, harmful, and even criminal serve as medicines and sources of deep contemplative wisdom. Although Western medicine treats tobacco as a harmful addictive drug, tobacco bridges the physical and spiritual realms. Along with ayahuasca, tobacco forms a part of treatments designed to heal the body, stimulate the mind, and inspire the soul with visions.
…Amazonian people tend to view tobacco as a medicine. The anthropological literature abounds with statements to this effect. For the Huni Kuin people in Brazil, tobacco is “the quintessential healing substance.” For the Matsigenka people in Peru, “tobacco is a medicine in the fullest sense.” More generally speaking, tobacco “is the shamanic plant par excellence in South America … without which no shamanic activity can take place.” Blowing tobacco smoke on a patient or applying tobacco juice to the part of the body that appears to be suffering is “the most common healing practice … in the whole Amazonian region.”
However, it is important to note that Amazonian people tend not to make a radical distinction between “medicine” and “poison.” Some Amazonian languages use the same word to refer to both concepts. From their perspective, tobacco fits the bill as both a toxic plant and a medicinal one; as Rafael Chanchari says, tobacco has two souls, one for medicine, the other for malice.
This aligns with the ambiguity of the first known uses of the term pharmakon, from which we get the words pharmacy, pharmaceutics, and pharmacology. In ancient Greek, pharmakon can refer to a remedy or a poison. Paracelsus famously made this point by distinguishing poison and cure by dose…
That’s how it is with plant teachers. They are powerful, dangerous entities. One can establish alliances with them, and work with them prudently and respectfully, but one never masters them. At best, one can avoid being mastered by them….
This short book lays out two ways of considering psychoactive plants. Integrating these two approaches into a coherent and holistic understanding is a complex undertaking. I do not wish to tell readers how to proceed on this count because it is important to allow people to reach their own conclusions according to their views of the world. But I can give a testimony about how I deal with the question on a personal basis.
…I was educated in rationalism and materialism. To this day, if I want to understand something — a virus, a plant, a vaccine — I look into what science says about it. I want to know about the molecules I take into my body, and if possible, what they do once they’re inside.
And because I take molecules seriously, I know that there are many things science does not understand. Scientists may have determined that nicotine plays an important part in tobacco’s activity, but they have no clear idea about what goes on in the body, brain, and mind of a tobacco shaman who is “turning into a jaguar.”
Having had the privilege of spending time with Amazonian people, I know they have deep knowledge about plants, bodies, and minds that they express in personalized terms, rather than in molecular ones. Time and again I have found that taking their views seriously leads to verifiable and useful knowledge. Now I consider indigenous Amazonian knowledge as a coherent way of knowing that can be used in parallel to science.
I compare using these two systems of knowledge to speaking two languages. As a bilingual person, I know that English allows one to say things that French does not, and vice versa…So thinking the world in English or in French is not the same, even for someone fluent in both languages. Of course, translation from one to the other is always possible. But exact word-for-word translations tend to sound strange, and translators face the dilemma of making less-faithful choices to convey the rhythm or emotion of the original — meaning that translation can border on betrayal. And some things simply do not translate at all. None of this means that one language is better than the other, just that speaking both well, and going back and forth between the two, takes constant practice…
The same is true when it comes to combining science and indigenous knowledge. Since 1990 or so, the scientific view of plants has moved away from a strictly materialist and mindless perspective, and scientists now recognize that plants perceive, communicate, decide, learn, and remember. They may not be ready to personify plants just yet, but they have moved closer to the indigenous view of plants as intelligent entities. So do plants have personalities? For instance, does tobacco really have a “mother”? Many years ago, I had great difficulty taking the notion of “the mother of tobacco” seriously. But I no longer see a problem in considering that the plant has something like a powerful personality. In my experience, consuming tobacco was like meeting a fiery person. As a young anthropologist, I found that a single dose of strong tobacco impacted my personality: it made me feel warm, powerful, predatory, and wise — and in such a deep way that I can summon those feelings decades later and tap into them. I do not ask anybody to believe that tobacco really has a personality. Nor am I sure that I believe it really does either. In fact, I am not that interested in belief. But I do think that considering tobacco as if it has a personality is interesting, and probably not that far off the mark.
The final day of the 2021 Bioneers Conference is coming to an end, and we’re beyond inspired by everything we’ve learned and every Bioneers in our community.
Appropriately, today’s speakers reminded us of the importance of drawing connections and honoring life’s intersections. Just as we all came together this week to grow — by attending the Conference or simply by reading these emails — nature relies on points of connection, exemplified by the mother trees in old-growth forests studied by keynote speaker Suzanne Simard. Effective movements rely on intersectionality and ensuring no group is left behind, which keynote speakers Manuel Pastor and Alexia Leclercq expertly spoke about. It is clear now more than ever before that we need each other. Our connections are our strength.
Following are some of our key takeaways from today. Thank you deeply for your support of this year’s Bioneers Conference.
SAVE THE DATE FOR BIONEERS 2022!
Bioneers is excited to announce the dates for our return to a live in-person gathering, May 13-15, 2022. Please save the date and sign up below for more information and to be notified when the program is announced and registration opens!
KENNY AUSUBEL – The Sting: The Role of Fraud in Nature
Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel’s address is a highlight of every Bioneers Conference. The full text of his talk from today is now available to read online. You can find it here.
LESSONS, IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
“First, we need to center the struggle for racial equity and against racism. Second, we need to craft a new economic story that can become common sense, a new economic story that recognizes our mutuality, a new economic story that motivates us for social change. And third, we’re only really going to get there if we commit to social movements for change.” -Manuel Pastor; Director | Equity Research Institute, USC+ Solidarity Economics
“Nature is sending us extravagant distress signals these days. Earth is a hot mess. From COVID to climate catastrophe to fascism, the perils of disinformation are a matter of life and death. … We’d better get really good, really fast at reading Nature’s mind. The stakes are too high to keep drinking the collective Kool-Aid.” -Kenny Ausubel; Co-Founder | Bioneers
“Forests are so important globally because even though they only cover one-third of our land area, they store between 70 and 80% of the carbon in the terrestrial systems. They’re home to 80% of the species. They provide 80% of our clean water. They provide the oxygen we breathe. They are absolutely fundamental to our life support systems. And so saving these old-growth forests now is the number one thing that we need to do.” -Suzanne Simard; Professor of Forest Ecology | University of British Columbia
“Social justice is climate justice because the root cause is the same. If we don’t center social justice in the fight for climate justice, we won’t get anywhere.” -Alexia Leclercq; Co-Founder | Start: Empowerment
“Being wealthy within some of our nations meant that the more you gave the wealthier you were. I think that confuses people sometimes. It’s foreign to settler mentality. We need to build an Indigenous-led regenerative economy built on compassion.” -Sikowis Nobiss; Founder | Great Plains Action Society
“We need to prioritize nature-based solutions instead of grey infrastructure. It’s integrating community at every level and it also starts with looking at solutions that center restoration and regeneration first before we build a bunch of stuff on top of it.” -Ariel Whitson; Director of Education and Community | TreePeople
“The first time I spoke before my City Council about climate change, I told them I was scared. Then others started coming up to me and saying they were scared, too. I realized we’re not alone facing systemic injustice, and that’s what gives me hope.” -Artemisio Romero y Carver; Co-Founder | Youth United for Climate Crisis Action (YUCCA)
From top left and clockwise: Rising Appalachia, Nalleli Cobo, Manuel Pastor, Suzanne Simard
CAMPAIGNS TO FOLLOW AND SUPPORT
Support Start:Empowerment, a BIPOC-led social and environmental justice education non-profit working with schools, teachers, community organizations and leaders to implement justice-focused curriculum and programming. (Mentioned by Alexia Leclercq in her keynote address.)
Learn more about the importance of mother trees for forest and environmental preservation with The Mother Tree Project. (Mentioned by Suzanne Simard in her keynote address.)
Take an interactive tour through LA’s urban oil drilling sites and their impact on the children, families, and Angelenos who live near them. (Mentioned by Nalleli Cobo in her keynote address.)
Become a community forester with TreePeople and create your own tree-planting events. (Mentioned by Ariel Lew Ai Le Whitson in the panel Biophilic Infrastructure: Letting Nature Lead the Way)
Find action tools to help make sure your campus is herbicide-free. (Mentioned by Mackenzie Feldmanin the panel Our Power: Exemplary Young Activists—the 2021 Brower Youth Awards Winners.)
Support Climate Resolve, which is tackling climate change, creating a thriving California and inspiring others to act. (Mentioned by Natalie Hernandez in the panel Solidarity Economics: Our Economy, Our Planet, Our Movements.)
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The following talk was delivered by Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
The Sting
Biomimicry, the design science of “innovation inspired by nature,” is unearthing untold treasures from nature’s playbook that we can emulate for our technological and industrial operating instructions. But naturally, as human beings, we’re meaning-making creatures who are suckers for a good story or metaphor.
Kenny Ausubel
It’s seductive to search the biomimicry database for lessons we can apply to human social relations. Some call it “social biomimicry.”
After all, who can resist the metaphor of geese that fly in a V formation and rotate the lead goose to lighten the load of bucking the most severe wind resistance?
Or the Seven Sisters oak trees in Louisiana that can withstand fierce hurricanes because their roots grow together to make an underground community of resilience.
These natural-world metaphors are “megaphors”—archetypal ecological parables for how we might better organize ourselves as societies and with each other.
The problem is: Every species is unique and uniquely fitted to its context, place, and time. People are not geese or oak trees. And frankly, even as seriously weird species go, human beings are . . . well . . . special.
Yet we are amazing mimics, and surely we can learn a riff or two from the symphony of life. But looking around at the dreadful state of the world, you have to wonder: Is there some deeper form of social biomimicry already in play that we’re not seeing?
Indeed, it’s slyly hiding in plain sight. You might call it the role of fraud in nature.
Nature wrote the playbook on deceit. From horny toads to Wall Street, nature is a hall of mirrors of lying, cheating, and camouflaging. After all, if force doesn’t work, trickery can do the trick. Shady practices can give any organism a winning edge in the ruthless struggle for survival and reproduction that powers evolution and adaptation.
As David Livingstone Smith observed in his book Why We Lie, “Lying is a natural phenomenon. The biosphere teems with mendacity. Deception is widespread among nonhuman species, perfectly normal and expectable.” Human beings, says Smith, evolved to be “natural born liars.”
Among our closest cousins, the monkeys and apes, deceit is pervasive. Their brains grew in direct correlation with the size of their groups. Smith suggests that “double dealing and suspicion might have been the driving forces behind the explosion of brainpower.”
In turn, the prized neocortex of the Homo sapiens brain—our much vaunted thinking capability—also grew in direct correlation with the size and social complexity of our groups. Then came language. The rest is hearsay.
Nonhuman primates use extensive grooming rituals to establish stable social bonds, cliques, and power structures. With Homo sapiens, language replaced public grooming with private gossip. As the psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald suggests, we may have developed language because we “needed to gossip, forge alliances, win friends and neutralize enemies.” We spend 80 to 90 percent of our conversations talking about other people. Two-thirds of that is about our immediate social networks.
The war of words exponentially escalated the arsenal of deceit, espionage, and manipulation. Evolution has favored these traits.
As Smith observes, “From the fairy tales our parents told us to the propaganda our governments feed us, human beings spend their lives surrounded by pretense. . . . The founding myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the story of Adam and Eve, revolves around a lie . . . Eve told God, ‘The serpent deceived me and I ate.’”
From faked orgasms to laugh tracks, from bots to financial fraud, from the white lies of social graces to political spin, Homo sapiens—Wise Man—might more accurately be dubbed Wise Guy in a Tony Soprano kind of way. After all, humans are a predatory species, and our main prey is our own kind—for the usual suspects of sex, food, survival, or status.
And of course here in the US, we are legend as a nation of hustlers. So says historian Walter A. McDougall, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom Just Around the Corner. Of course, he says, being hustlers has a positive side—a nation of “builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organizers, engineers and a people supremely generous.”
But, McDougall points out, “Americans have enjoyed more opportunity to pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in history. No wonder American English is uniquely endowed with words connoting a swindle.”
Here’s just a sample of some of the verbs he lists, starting with the Bs and Cs: “Bait, bamboozle, bilk, bite, blackmail, bleed, blindside, bluff, buffalo, burn… caboodle, cheat, chisel, clip, con, connive, conspire . . . ”
Now, the list goes on—and on—but it looks to me as if he missed one of the supreme swindling Cs: corporation. Because, if you’re looking to defraud, delude, double-cross, dupe, embezzle, fleece, gouge, hoodwink, hornswoggle, mislead, mug, rig, rip off, sandbag, scam, screw, shaft, shortchange, snooker, or just plain sucker the public in the Grand American Tradition, you’ve got to have a corporation.
Mimicry is one of the best tricks in the book, and perhaps we’re hardwired to mimic nature’s bag of tricks without even knowing it. So, let’s go back to nature for some master classes on the sting.
If you want to observe one classic sting in nature, check out bee orchids. To attract male wasps to pollinate them, the orchids not only impersonate an insect sex goddess, they exude a fragrance even more bewitching than the real sexual attractant of the females they’re mimicking.
The male wasps, which mature a month before the females, lurch from orchid to orchid, looking for love in all the wrong places. Meanwhile they spread the wily orchids’ pollen in fruitless grand rounds of aptly called “pseudocopulation” that don’t get no satisfaction, at least not for them.
That pseudocopulation brings to mind the CARES Act. Designed to look like one of the sexiest government programs ever conceived, the $2.3 trillion legislation was actually packaged by the financial masters of the universe to spread the nectar of wealth mightily among the rarefied orchids of high finance. Led by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, aka the King of Foreclosures, the Act leveraged $454 billion dollars in free business-rescue cash by ten-fold through the Federal Reserve.
While the average American got a stingy $1,200 handout, the Fed appointed BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and “shadow bank,” to dole out somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion to bail out really Big Business from a foul portfolio of toxic assets, including Blackrock’s own. Meanwhile they ferociously capitalized on a fire sale of distressed Main Street businesses left to twist in the wind.
As Matt Taibbi put it, “The financial economy is a fantasy casino where the winnings are real, but free chips cover the losses. For a rarified segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain.” Pseudocopulation indeed.
Back a little closer to home with our nearest primate cousins, David Livingstone Smith observes this: “Nonhuman species have their own version of fire and brimstone preaching.” Using these “ritualized signals of displays,” we seem to be aping our ape kin to manipulate others.
We deploy the same techniques of “redundancy, rhythmic repetition, bright packaging and supernormal stimuli”—running a relentless sensory overload loop of brassy ads for cars, phones, political candidates, and ideologies.
Take bright packaging. Recent research has identified conspicuousness as a key strategic defense against predators. It’s called “signal extravagance.” Flashy conspicuous prey are flaunting the fact they’ve survived encounters with predators, who therefore tend to avoid them. A bright butterfly that’s toxic or distasteful to birds soon generates imposters among its kind. They imitate its colors and patterns in a kind of visual identity theft.
Signal extravagance brings to mind Agent Orange, aka Trump L’Oeil. He has flaunted his technicolor toxicity to deter countless lawsuits against his chem trail of criminality. His conspicuous political extravagance has attracted a coterie of troll models. Republican imposters and Foxy media hacks have adopted the predator-proof poisonous colors of the too-mean-to-fail defense.
Then again, keeping a low profile also has potent advantages. Another popular form of mimicry in plants and animals is crypsis, the art of concealment. Many plants and creatures have evolved to blend in with their surroundings—mimicking a stone, piece of coral, a branch, or bird droppings.
Crypsis is the name of the game for Dark Money gone gonzo. As much as $36 trillion dollars of dark money is stashed in offshore black holes. Corporations use them to dodge an estimated $245 billion to $600 billion a year in taxes. The kleptocrat laundromat casts a cloak of invisibility around buried treasures that now exceed 10% of global GDP.
An estimated $1 trillion dollars a year exits the world’s developing countries in laundered money and tax avoidance. Untraceable shell companies are behind the majority of clandestine investment linked to Amazon deforestation, illegal fishing, and other high crimes against nature and humanity.
As the Pandora Papers revealed, the new American industry of impenetrable trusts rivals even the opacity of offshore shell companies. Alaska, Delaware, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Dakota are the new Cayman Islands Family Tax Vacation. There the trusts conceal and protect assets from creditors, taxing authorities and foreign governments. Best of all, the trusts can be passed down from generation to generation as a dynasty trust – a kind of a plutocratic seventh generation fund. It adds a whole new meaning to “Trust me.”
But of course, going back to nature, you can also trick the tricksters—as does the highly intelligent octopus Thaumoctopus mimicus. T. mimicus is able to shape-shift and shade-shift into a Lady Gaga wardrobe of disguises. It can disappear itself into the exact pattern and coloration of its surroundings. It can scare off predators by taking on the appearance of the highly toxic lionfish. If attacked by a damselfish, it morphs one of its arms into the visage of the fearsome sea snake that eats damselfish.
Which brings to mind that ultimate shape-shifter and master of disguise. Like T. Mimicus, Big Tech has customized deceit. Their manipulation machines personalize information microtargeted just for you.
Perhaps it’s Amazon’s God’s-eye view of the economy that alters prices based on your purchase history by predicting the maximum you’re likely to pay.
Or perhaps, as Shoshana Zuboff puts it, “We thought we search Google, but it searches us.” Google has designed its business on predictive data extraction that it uses to glean and sway our thoughts, feelings and desires. As one data scientist put it, we write the music and people dance to it.
Or perhaps it’s Facebook’s algorithmic muscularity that prioritizes divisive, polarizing and hateful content to entrain our attention. It works especially well for demagogues, while marginalizing the voices of the marginalized.
As Barry Lynn puts it, “The problem with personalized discrimination is that, even as it empowers the masters of these corporations to atomize prices, it atomizes society at the same time.”
These wealthiest corporations in the history of the world are the overlords of surveillance capitalism. Their success, says Zuboff, “depends on one-way mirror operations engineered for our ignorance, and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism and mendacity. They exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits. They manipulate the economy, our society, and even our lives with impunity, endangering not only individual privacy, but democracy itself. We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we may not have both.”
As Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works,” warns: “When you take away truth, and you can’t speak truth to power, all that remains is power.”
Of course, from an evolutionary perspective, lying is a double-edged sword. On the plus side, self-deception is especially valuable when lying to others because we convincingly believe our own hokum.
We also lie to ourselves to diminish stress. Inevitably, we’re the heroes of our own stories, and of course we all know that every one of us is above average. Then again, research on depressives has found they may suffer from a deficit of self-deception.
On the downside of self-deception, Big Oil is the slipperiest. Feigning ignorance may be the worst scam of all – gee, who knew?!
An internal 1988 memo from Royal Dutch Shell projected that climate impacts from burning fossil fuels could include “significant changes in sea level, ocean currents, precipitation patterns, regional temperature and weather.” The changes would impact “the human environment, future living standards and food supplies, and could have major social, economic and political consequences.”
Shell concluded this: “By the time the global warming becomes detectable, it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.”
While raising the height of its offshore platforms against rising seas and bigger storms, Shell then joined with other fossil fuel companies who also knew. They formed the Global Climate Coalition, which powered up the most catastrophically successful disinformation campaign in history.
Today, the energy sector is ranked dead last among major sectors in the US economy. It knows it’s an industry with a vanishing future. As a result, fossil fuel propaganda pivoted from denial to delay. Hey, let’s talk 2050.
Its advertising is misdirecting us with five messages: Redirect responsibility – it’s consumers’ fault. Push non-transformative solutions. Emphasize the downside of action as too disruptive. And just plain surrender and adapt – it can’t be done quickly.
Oh, and by the way, it will adversely affect marginalized communities. Greenwashing has a new friend called “wokewashing.”
The conundrum is that nature does not gladly suffer fools, errors and delusions. Self-deception may prove to be our evolutionary Achilles heel.
Yet some part of our brain seems designed to act as an unconscious mind reader. We pick up reality-based signals even as we up the ante in the Olympics of deceit and self-deception.
Deep inside, we all possess a bullshit detector. That may be what saves us.
Nature is sending us extravagant distress signals. Earth is a hot mess. From Covid to climate catastrophe to fascism, the perils of disinformation are a matter of life and death.
As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, “Pursuing profit as the ultimate goal of all our activities will lead to a mass-extinction event. We are operating a multi-generational Ponzi scheme.”
We’d better get really good, really fast at reading Nature’s mind. The stakes are too high to keep drinking the collective Kool-Aid.
You can’t fool Mother Nature. That ain’t no lie. Trust me.
This piece was adapted from a 2011 Huffington Post article by Kenny Ausubel.
As the second day of the 2021 Bioneer Conference winds to a close, we’re reflecting on the necessity of balance. Today, we heard leaders talk about the importance of finding balance within ourselves as well as working toward balance as a society and planet. We’re grateful for their words of wisdom.
Following are some of our key takeaways from today.
NINA SIMONS: From Discipline to Discipleship: Cultivating Love, Collaboration & Imagination
The full text of Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons’ keynote address from this morning is now available to read online. You can find it here.
LESSONS, IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
“Colonial capitalist cosmology is driving damage around the globe in ways that are making a healthy life for humans impossible, and that damage will continue until the cosmology and the systems it imagines into reality are abolished and replaced with ones that recognize our interconnectedness and ones that center care.” -Rupa Marya; Faculty Director | Do No Harm Coalition + Founder | The Deep Medicine Circle
“Those of us who want to help make positive change in the world have got to grapple with the vast imbalance of the power differentials we face. Our class and racial inequities are so systemic and so ingrained that no matter how hard I try, I continue to discover my own blind spots and embedded patterns of white supremacy and privilege. It’s excavation work we’ve got to be willing to undertake, no matter how uncomfortable it is, as the need is so urgent and great.” -Nina Simons; Co-Founder | Bioneers
“There might be ways that our humanity and our collective future can be brightened if you have it in your heart to believe that the civilizing mission was wrong, that the St. Joseph’s missions of the worlds had it all backwards, that in fact, in the long run, it’s all of you who have something to learn from all of us; that maybe America, Canada and the so-called ‘civilized’ world should become just a little bit more indigenous rather than the other way around.” -Julian Brave NoiseCat; Director of Green New Deal Strategy | Data for Progress
“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 creating the change that we deem necessary in our local communities. There has never been a large successful movement for change without young people.” -Alexandria Gordon; Student Organizer | Florida PIRG Students
“It is not okay to assign saving the world to 17-year-olds as if it’s some kind of homework problem. They cannot do it themselves. They need the rest of us backing them up, and in particular, I think, they need those of us in the baby boomer and silent generations, those of us above the age of 60.” -Bill McKibben | 350.org + Third Act
“I think we have to uplift the complexities of our people and realize that they’re not just one thing. That person selling drugs has a story. We have to uplift that story and not just condemn people.” -Jason Seals; Professor of African American Studies and Chair of Ethnic Studies | Merritt College
“People who have been oppressed have had to struggle to survive, and that struggle has also informed us as women as to what the imbalances are. Where the challenge is. It is time to hear and learn from all the unseen and unspoken and unheard. That includes the voice of Mother Earth and nature. It is the time of women rising.” -Osprey Orielle Lake; Founder and Executive Director | Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International
From top left clockwise: Bill McKibben, Rupa Marya, Julian Brave NoiseCat, Alexandria Gordon
CAMPAIGNS TO FOLLOW AND SUPPORT
Support The Deep Medicine Circle, a WOC-led, worker-directed nonprofit organization dedicated to repairing critical relationships that have been fractured through colonialism. (Mentioned by Rupa Marya in her keynote address.)
Ban fossil fuel advertising and sponsorships by signing this Greenpeace petition, which has almost reached its goal. (Mentioned by Michelle Jonker-Argueta in the panel Tell it to the Judge, Big Oil)
Download the Student PIRGs activist toolkit, which provides the basic tools to run strong campaigns and win victories for students and the public interest. (Mentioned by Alexandria Gordon in her keynote address.)
Get involved with Third Act, a new campaign that invites people over 60 to harness their collective power to impact major movements. (Mentioned by Bill McKibben in his keynote address.)
Read this 2021 report that details the gendered and racial impacts of the fossil fuel industry in North America and complicit financial institutions. (Mentioned by Osprey Orielle Lak in the panel Nature + Justice + Women’s Leadership: A Strategic Trio for Effective Change)
Support Data for Progress, a multidisciplinary group of experts using state-of-the-art techniques in data science to support progressive activists and causes. (Mentioned by Julian Brave NoiseCat in his keynote address.)
By supporting Bioneers, you’re supporting an entire community of diverse leadership who are realizing breakthrough solutions. Every gift – large and small – really counts. Monthly giving and multi-year gifts assure our long-term impact. Future generations are counting on us.
