The Biomimicry Institute has been awarded EUR 2.5 million to lead a multi-year initiative called Design for Decomposition. By embracing true decomposition—the way leaves break down into the soil to build healthy ecosystems—the initiative will demonstrate scalable new pathways for the ~92 million tonnes of fashion waste discarded annually. The initiative is an ambitious follow-up to the Institute’s The Nature of Fashion report in 2020, which identified decomposition as the missing link for the sector.
The initiative begins with a deep dive into biological research about the various types and circumstances of natural decomposition and then matches those approaches to the hundreds of known decomposition technologies to determine which best model nature. In the pilot phase, these approaches will be tested in Accra, Ghana, which receives about 15 million used garments each week, and also in a city like Amsterdam or Berlin with a more established waste management infrastructure. Simultaneously, researchers at Yale will be taking a hard look at what really decomposes and how.
“Determining the rate or speed at which molecules degrade in the environment is of crucial importance to assess risks to our own health and health of the environment. While experiments to assess the biodegradation of chemicals when in the environment have been developed and are routinely carried out, these have several limitations that make it hard to predict the fate of chemicals and materials in the ‘real’ environment,” explained Dr. Paul Anastas, Director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. “Our goal is to close that gap.”
To avert some of the worst effects of a global industry that produces 100 billion garments each year for a population of 7.5 billion, a new approach is needed for the fashion sector. In the last 25 years, the amount of clothing bought in the EU per person has increased by 40%, following a sharp fall in prices. Europeans on average discard about 11 kilos of clothing every year, with some used items shipped overseas to places like Accra but about 87% are incinerated or landfilled, including the donated clothes people were hoping, would have a second owner. But with landfills closing, new ones too costly to make, and incinerators under scrutiny for carbon emissions, a new option—or a very old one—is increasingly necessary.
“Nature has primary producers, consumers, and decomposers, and all rely on dispersal, entropy. Without all three there is no cadence to life,” said Beth Rattner, Executive Director for the Biomimicry Institute. “If the fashion sector is going to be a force for good on the planet, it has to follow the same laws of nature. The North Star is not a shirt that becomes another shirt, but a shirt that subsidizes the regenerative fashion system we all know is possible.”
With catalytic funding from Laudes Foundation, the initiative is part of its fashion materials portfolio, which supports brave, innovative efforts that inspire and challenge the industry to harness its power for good. “Demonstrating that decomposition can put fashion back into natural resource cycles will be a powerful proof point for fashion and its allied industries, and a bold step towards reversing the environmental damage the industry has created thus far,” said Anita Chester, Head of Materials at Laudes Foundation. “We are thrilled to support this consortium led by Biomimicry Institute, and eagerly await the results of their game-changing pilots to scale bio-compatible solutions for the fashion industry at large.”
More than a third of all microplastic pollution—some 500,000 tonnes—is released each year from clothing, most ending up in oceans. Knowing that over 60% of garments are plastic-based and nearly all apparel is made with toxic processes, dyes, and coatings, the foremost question in the initiative is: what will this post-consumer waste decompose into that is not hazardous? All decomposition technologies are being screened through this lens, and the team has engaged toxicology partners from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, University of Ghana, and Yale.
“The end-of-life management of waste is a huge and complex problem that sits at the interface of the biosphere and the technosphere. We must find alternative pathways for handling the myriad of natural and synthetic materials embodied in the products we consume,” said Savanna Browne-Wilkinson of Metabolic Institute. “This is a critical and under-represented part of the current discourse on industrial transformation and will play an important role in how we design a regenerative, inclusive, and circular bioeconomy.”
After proving that advanced decomposition is viable locally, the joint partnership plans to prove that this system change can scale globally.
The OR Foundation, leading the work in Accra, Ghana, sums up the schism humans often experience around what we buy versus our place on the planet: “Waste makes visible our separation from nature, and yet this separation is rarely in focus. We are excited to be part of this initiative, because the goal is not to maintain a false sense of control, attempting to perpetually juggle products above nature, but rather the goal is to work with nature, to find our place within the ecosystem.”
Reflecting on the scale of the problem and the goals of the initiative to address this volume, Edwin Keh, CEO of HKRITA, remarked, “It doesn’t get much more ambitious than this.”
The consortium is looking for more partners, technologies, pilot sites, and funders who want to tackle post-consumer fashion waste. To learn more or contribute to the project, please visit d4d.biomimicry.org.
About the Biomimicry Institute
The Biomimicry Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization founded in 2006 that empowers people to seek nature-inspired solutions for a healthy planet. To advance the solution process, the Institute offers AskNature.org, a free online tool that contains strategies found in nature and examples of ways they are used in design. It also hosts a Biomimicry Global Design Challenge and Youth Design Challenge to support project-based education; a Biomimicry Launchpad startup accelerator program; a Ray of Hope Prize® for developing companies to bring designs to market; and a Biomimicry Global Network that connects innovators across the world.
About Laudes Foundation
Laudes Foundation is an independent foundation joining the growing movement to accelerate the transition to a climate-positive and inclusive global economy. Responding to the dual crises of climate breakdown and inequality, Laudes supports brave action that inspires and challenges industry to harness its power for good. Part of the Brenninkmeijer family enterprise, Laudes builds on six generations of entrepreneurship and philanthropy, working collaboratively to both influence finance and capital markets and transform industry with a focus on the built environment and fashion. For more information visit LaudesFoundation.org.
This piece is written by Alexis Bunten, Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program and guest author Tony Perry, Citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and author of Chula the Fox (Chickasaw Press).
Four hundred years ago, British settlers celebrated their first harvest, made possible through the generosity of the Wampanoag people. Tony and I wanted to truly understand the Thanksgiving holiday from the place where it all happened, so we traveled to Massachusetts to commemorate the day and see for ourselves.
As Native Americans, we have a complex relationship with the holiday. The story that most Americans learn growing up evolved from a myth born at the height of the Civil War. The idea of “Pilgrims” and “Indians” celebrating the harvest together symbolized American unity, but their unity came at the cost of erasing the heavy and sustained price that Native peoples paid. And it erases the fact that Native peoples have endured over 400 years of systematic genocide and forced assimilation, including massacres, “gifts” of smallpox-infested blankets, and boarding schools created to “kill the Indian, and save the man.”
Alexis Bunten
This problematic relationship makes it difficult to embrace the myth. For this reason, Alexis Bunten (Yup’ik and Unangan) initiated a series of events and a campaign to provide Americans with knowledge and strategies to decolonize (and re-indigenize) Thanksgiving. Inspired by this campaign, Tony Perry, a Chickasaw author, envisioned retelling the story, creating a new, more accurate, and inclusive narrative that would ultimately replace this myth altogether. We shared our vision with Danielle Greendeer, a Mashpee Wampanoag citizen and food sovereignty leader, and she agreed to join us as our lead author. A few months later, Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story was born.
Keepunumuk retells historical events through the eyes of the native plants that saved the Pilgrims—namely, the ‘three sisters’: corn, beans, and squash. This story rests on the historical record and Native ways of knowing and being in the world, leaving readers with an emphasis of gratitude for the world around them. Garry Meeches Sr (Anishinaabe) brought the story to life with heart-warming illustrations. We want Keepunumuk to become the default “first story” that American children will hear about the “first Thanksgiving.” At the same time, Keepunumuk will raise questions for their parents and support broader conversations around our nation’s birth as well as themes including mutual aid and traditional ecological knowledge.
The day before Thanksgiving, we visited Plimouth Pautuxet Museums. Given its storied history, we expected to join swarms of Americans in Plymouth to mark the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving. With the critical acclaim and reach of the 1619 Project to bring critical awareness to the American institution of slavery, we imagined that 2021 would be a critical opportunity to reach millions of Americans with the true story of Thanksgiving.
That didn’t happen. Important sites, such as the Mayflower II—an exact replica of the ship that took the Pilgrims (and other settlers) to their new home—and the Plimoth-Patuxet Museum—which offers a recreation recreated period Wampanoag and English communities—were largely quiet.
Tony Perry
Other families were present, but we had no problem getting anywhere or seeing what we wanted. It was an educational and productive visit, and an experience we will long remember. From reading primary sources left behind by the Pilgrims, we knew that upon arrival, the Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag winter caches of corn and beans. So, Tony and I were shocked to learn from multiple interpreters that the Pilgrims were not starving, as is typically told in the “traditional” story American children learn. Nearly half the Pilgrims died of exposure to the cold—not starvation. It turns out that they had plenty of food to last their long first winter. To us, it made the act of stealing the Wampanoags’ winter food store a far worse reflection of the Pilgrims’ moral character!
For us, the question remains: Why was it so quiet? This runs deeper than near-empty car parks at historic sites. Thanksgiving itself received little attention in the media, beyond a few stories—such as this one that questioned the historical narrative and even a couple of dinosaurs, such as the Wall Street Journal and Breitbart that defended the myth. Of course, being in our second year of the pandemic explains part of it, but we don’t believe this lack of interest in the 400 year anniversary of Thanksgiving is due to COVID, especially given that Thanksgiving 2021 brought the highest air travel numbers in the US since early 2020.
We believe it’s more than that. Fundamentally, it’s clear that the traditional narrative has lost its resonance with the wider American public. Stories of “Pilgrims” and “Indians” persisted no doubt, but they were muffled by family gatherings, turkey feasts, and the chance to pause increasingly fast-paced lives. Due to growing awareness of the racism underlying tragic police shootings of Black Americans and uninvestigated murders of Native Americans (MMIW), Americans aren’t putting up with whitewashed and “idealized” histories of our country. Americans deserve and want to know the truth about our country’s origins and history. Keepunumuk offers this to the youngest readers at the start of their learning about our history by exposing them to a Native perspective that doesn’t center Pilgrims or the Wampanoag for that matter but invites readers to reflect upon our gratitude for the plants and animals that make our lives possible.
On Thanksgiving Day, Danielle, Tony, and I attended the 51st “National Day of Mourning” with over 1,000 people concerned about the effects of “Thanksgiving” and its aftermath on Native peoples. Taking place on Cole’s Hill, overlooking “Plymouth rock,” and organized by the United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the event included prayers, speeches, and a march through downtown Plymouth. Although the event was somber, it filled our hearts to see so many diverse Natives and allies in the huge crowd, which was reported as the biggest crowd the event had ever hosted. This was doubtlessly a response to Americans’ growing desire to acknowledge and redress the theft, genocide, and slavery that built so much wealth for white settlers and their descendants.
Indigenous speakers from across the Americas spoke about various pressing issues facing Native peoples, and all peoples. We were particularly taken with the lead speaker, Kisha James, a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag and Oglala Lakota tribes and granddaughter of Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag leader and activist whose 1970 speech denigrating the whitewashed celebration of the 350 year anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival to Wampanoag land was rejected and suppressed by the event organizers.
We were moved to tears of outrage at the injustice the US government continues to impose on men of color through the prison industrial complex when one of the participants read a message to the National Day of Mourning from Leonard Peltier, who is not receiving adequate medical attention in Federal Prison, for a crime of which there is no evidence he committed. We heard firsthand from speakers from tribal lands across the US that are threatened by natural resource extraction, pipelines, and pollution. We listened to an update about the current situation with the Houma people who are still suffering unbelievable, long-term losses in the wake of Hurricane Ida. The event closed as the march came to an end with the crowd gathering to hear a final speech about the MMIW crisis that brought us to tears again.
After the event, Danielle and her husband cooked us an Indigenous Thanksgiving feast in Mashpee, the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe’s hometown. We ate all native foods –duck, turkey, wild rice, squash, mushrooms, succotash, and greens, much of which was grown by Danielle. (By the way, earlier in the week, the New York Times published a beautiful piece on Danielle’s work in the food sovereignty movement, including the story about how she revived the planting of the traditional Wampanoag heirloom corn species.)
As we ate, we realized that most Americans probably don’t know the name of the tribe that taught the Pilgrims how to plant and fertilize the three sisters and that they may even think of the tribe that helped the Pilgrims as “of the past,” or even “extinct” true to the stereotypes that are circulated in schools and popular media. And yet here is a resilient, vibrant, and thriving tribal community that has never stopped living on their ancestral territory and practicing their culture.
Our country is again deeply divided, and it’s time for a new narrative based on both the complexities of history and the hope of a brighter, more equal future. For us, this is the story that needs to be told for Thanksgiving —that, despite 400 years of genocide, the Wampanoag, and Native Americans in general, are here to stay. Practicing our cultures heals us from the ongoing trauma of colonization, and appropriately sharing our cultures with others can help all Americans to recognize the truth of our history of our country’s birth and begin to heal together. This will help us create a new story built on history that also reflects the inclusive society we aspire for.
In this first part of a two-part program, we travel back and forth in time to explore the battle between democracy and plutocracy that goes back to the very founding of the United States.
The extreme concentration of corporate power and the prevalence of monopoly are indeed inarguable. If the solution is once again to throw the tea in the harbor, what does that look like in the 21st century?
In today’s new Gilded Age of rule by the wealthy, rising anti-trust movements are challenging the stranglehold of corporate monopoly.
Thom Hartmann, the top progressive talk show host in America for over a decade, a four-time Project Censored Award-winning journalist, and bestselling author. Learn more at his website.
Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which produces research and develops policy to counter corporate control and build thriving, equitable communities.
Maurice BP-Weeks, Co-Executive Director of ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy) where he works on campaigns to create equitable communities by dismantling systems of wealth extraction in Black and Brown communities.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Producer: Teo Grossman
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
In 1889, Frederick Townsend Martin was known as the “millionaire with a mission.” He had famously turned class traitor, betraying his filthy rich family dynasty. These were his words, later published in his book The Passing of the Idle Rich.
Among my own people, I seldom hear purely political discussions. When we’re discussing pro and con, the relative merits of candidates or the relative importance of political policies, the discussion almost invariably comes down to a question of business efficiency. We care absolutely nothing about any other political question, save in as much as it threatens or fortifies existing conditions.
Touch the question of the tariff, touch the question of the income tax, touch the problem of railroad regulation, or touch the most vital of all business matters – the question of general federal regulation of industrial corporations – and the people amongst whom I live my life become immediately rabid partisans.
It matters not one iota what political party is in power or what president holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can, by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connection, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our state.
Sound familiar?
In truth, the battle between democracy and plutocracy goes back to the very founding of the United States.
THOM HARTMANN: So the American Revolution was triggered by the Boston Tea Party, which was done in response to a tax cut for the largest monopolistic corporation on Earth.
HOST: Thom Hartmann is the number one progressive talk show host in the country and world. He has written and spoken extensively about monopoly, while highlighting solutions to restore democracy in books such as The Hidden History of Monopolies. He spoke online at a Bioneers conference.
Thom Hartmann
TH: Queen Elizabeth I signed the charter for the British East India Company on December 1, 1601 and brought into birth the modern corporation. It was the first of what we would today call modern corporations. And it was modeled on the Dutch trading companies which had existed for about a century before that. And at that time, England was just starting to come up, and the Netherlands were really much more powerful.
And they basically, by the 1770s, had monopolized the trade of most of the world that interacted with Europe, and had very radical laws that had been passed by the British Parliament regulating commerce in the United States. It was, for example, illegal to manufacture fine clothing in the United States. It had to be bought from the British East India company and it had to be manufactured in the United Kingdom.
But one of the other things that they had monopolized was tea, and tea was the drug of choice, along with alcohol, in those colonies at that time, all up and down the eastern seaboard. You couldn’t pass a city block without a tea house. They were the centers of social life and of commerce. And about half the tea sold in the United States was coming from smugglers, and the British East Indian Company was very flipped out about that, and they were hiring people to—in fact, some of the pirates were actually employed by the Brits to stop that trade.
And so parliament passed the Tea Act.The way it worked was when the East India Company imported tea from India into the UK for shipment to us, they would pay tax on it when they brought it into the UK. So they had millions of pounds of tea in their warehouses that they had already paid taxes on. And what the Tea Act did was gave the East India Company this massive rebate on the taxes that they had already paid. So they got this cash—huge cash advance and dropped radically the tax on the tea that they would ship to North America. And this allowed them to compete with the smugglers and try to run them out of business in all these tea shops up and down the east coast, which really pissed off the colonists.
HOST: The British East India Corporation became the only game in town for Colonial tea shops. The Colonists said “enough.”
In 1773, when three British East India company ships carrying tea entered Boston Harbor, the Colonists boarded the vessels and dumped a million dollars’ worth of tea into Griffin Harbor.
TH: And then of course, the Brits in response to that passed the Boston Ports Act that said that no commerce could take place through the Boston port until the City of Boston paid back the East India Company a million dollars for that tea, which of course Boston didn’t do, and that led right to the Boston Massacre, which led right to the shot heard round the world, which led right to the American Revolution.
HOST: From the earliest days of the Republic, there was great concern about corporate power, such as the British East India Company. Corporations were kept on a very tight rein, usually at the state level where they were chartered for limited terms with strict limits. But because the US Constitution exalted property rights above all other rights, and because corporations were the largest holders of property, gradually they began to gain greater and greater power.
The Civil War coincided with the full-throttle economic explosion of the industrial revolution. Central to that revolution were the Railroads, which were like the Internet of their time. Leading their rise were Robber Barons such as Collis Huntington and J. Gould. Their business model was summed up by Huntington: “Anything that’s not nailed down is mine – and anything that I can pry loose is not nailed down.”
TH: The railroad barons basically were trying to grab more and more and more political power, along with the economic power that they already had. They were among the top four oligarchic enterprises in the United States, and monopolistic as well. And they had bribed Stephen J. Field, who was a member of the US Supreme Court, and back in those days, the members of the Supreme Court also did what was called riding the circuit, they were also the chief judge in the circuit court. And Field was the judge in the Ninth Circuit, which was California. And he had been bribed by J. Gould and some buddies. They told him they were going to help make him president if he would help this accomplish.
There were a series of cases – this is just a decade after the 14th Amendment was passed—there were a series of cases that were referred to as the California tax cases. There were seven of them altogether that came out of California and were sent to the US Supreme Court by Field. He sent them from his own court in the Ninth Circuit to himself on the Supreme Court.
And of course, that would require them to be covered by the 14th Amendment, which says persons repeatedly. So in these seven cases – this was one of them; this was the most notable of them that went to the Supreme Court – the railroads lost all seven cases. But this one particular cases – Santa Clara versus Southern Pacific Railroad, where the county sued the railroad and said you’ve got to pay your damn taxes, and the railroad said no way; we’re being denied equal protection under the law – what lawyers will tell you – and it’s fascinating; I get to talk—Actually I’ve given all kinds of talks on this all around the country at various law schools, and I’ll start out by saying, you know, with a room full of law students and law professors, how many of you know that in 1886 in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad corporations were given personhood rights under the Constitution so that they could claim things like free speech rights under the First Amendment, privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment, you know, etc. And everybody’s hand will go up. And, you know, it was in that decision.
Well, it turns out that decision actually the railroads lost. Morrison Remick Waite, who was the chief justice of the court, just dismissed the argument altogether, and Delphin Delmas was the lawyer who was arguing on behalf of the county. He was the guy who saved the redwoods in California. Both of these cases, by the way, he did pro bono. And Delphin Delmas famously said, you know, what, you would give corporations the right to marry? And, you know, he went through all the absurdities of this. And Waite agreed with him.
HOST: The landmark 1886 case called Santa Clara County versus Southern Pacific Railroad has been used ever since as the precedent for granting personhood for corporations.
But the plot thickens…
TH: But weirdly, there was the guy who was the clerk of the court who stayed in Washington, DC all year long, even though the court was only in session three months and the other justices were all out riding the circuit. The clerk of the court, in the head note to that decision – a head note has no legal standing; it’s basically there for lawyers and law students; it’s a short summary of the case – in the head note to that case, he said that the chief justice had asserted that corporations are persons under the law and therefore entitled to equal protection under the law.
So, you know, the Supreme Court never actually ruled that corporations are persons. There have been rulings that danced close to that; they certainly have artificial person status. That was established in 1815 in a case that involved Dartmouth College. But they’ve never explicitly ruled until the 1890s and then into the 20th century when they started simply asserting that it had been done in 1886. And in fact, the Citizens United decision in 2010 cites Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. Falsely, you know, wrongly. So, you know, this is another one of those b.s. stories that gets shoveled to us, and even to our lawyers and law students and that I think could be subject to challenge.
HOST: Right up to the Citizens United decision, an entire body of corporate law has been built on a falsehood, on a lie by a scheming law clerk. Nonetheless, it’s considered settled law.
Similarly, during that infamous period called the Gilded Age around the turn of the 20th century, the robber barons devised the template for the modern corporate monopoly.
At the front lines of that political revolution were the railroad barons. The golden apple was to build the transcontinental railroad connecting East and West. Whoever controlled the railroads would control commerce. The Big Four understood that monopoly was the name of the game.
Along with a shopping spree to purchase state politicians and judges, the Big Four targeted the nation’s capital. Huntington arrived with a suitcase filled with cash. He returned with a portfolio of federal contracts. They included the monopolistic right to build the railroad line connecting West to East; 12 million acres of free land grants; the right to set their own freight rates; and cheap federal loans for his own company to build the railroad, which he never paid back.
The Southern Pacific railroad was universally reviled as the “octopus,” memorialized in the famous novel of the same name. Its iron tentacles strangled all of Western commerce.
Farmers shipping their goods to market were quoted one price at spring planting, then a higher price at harvest. It charged the highest freight rates in the nation — except of course for the “rebates” – or kickbacks – that it secretly gave to other Robber Baron customers such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, thus methodically wiping out smaller competitors. As Rockefeller snarled, “Competition is a sin.”
In industry after industry, the monopolists seized control.
Karl Marx was correct in identifying monopoly as the ultimate logic of capitalism, but he was dead wrong in predicting that the workers of the world would rise up in solidarity against it. It has been capital that successfully organized and globalized.
Fast forward to Amazon. Stacy Mitchell says the railroads are a very apt analogy to Amazon today.
STACY MITCHELL: Originally questions of corporate power were really handled at the state level because corporations generally didn’t—they were chartered at the state level and they generally didn’t, you know, extend beyond state lines. And that changed in the 19th century with the rise particularly of the railroads. And suddenly you had these corporations that became an infrastructure for the entire national economy.
Stacy Mitchell
HOST: Stacy Mitchell has been one of the most effective actors on the national stage challenging Amazon. She’s co-director of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance where she directs the group’s initiative to decentralize economic power and level the playing field for independent businesses.
She has produced many influential reports and articles, testified before Congress, and been seminal in antitrust actions against Amazon. She’s also helped to design local and federal policies and collaborated to build effective coalitions and campaigns.
SM: And you had industrialists at the time who gained control of those railroad lines, people like John D. Rockefeller, part of how he built his monopoly in oil was that he commandeered relationships he had with railroad companies and got these setups where he was able to move his oil to market but his competitors were not.
And that’s what really led to our first national anti-monopoly laws. Even before the Sherman Act, we had laws designed to address railroad power and interstate commerce, and then in 1890 the Sherman Act, which for various reasons never really was fully used. We have some additional laws that come along in the 1910s.
And then really it isn’t until like the Great Depression that we get the fuller realization of our anti-monopoly laws.
In essence, our history’s sort of gone up and down with the degree to which we’ve confronted monopoly power through law. And for the last 40 years we’ve been at a real downward kind of low point where we’ve really largely ignored corporate power and treated it as though it weren’t an issue and it were somehow separate from our politics, separate from our democracy.
And in that space, along have come a new set of companies that have an even more dangerous form of monopoly power than the concentration that we see across farming or retail – Walmart, Monsanto, all of these other big companies, which are hugely destructive.
But the rise of Amazon, Google, Facebook is sort of another degree of monopoly power, and that’s because they function very much like the railroads. They control the infrastructure of commerce and communications, and so they’re able to set the rules. They control who can be on those platforms and how they operate, and they can favor their own products; they can essentially govern us. We should recognize them as a form of private government.
And so the analogy of the railroad is very apt. And also I think the solutions that ultimately came about around the railroad is part of the solution that we need with Amazon.
HOST: When we return, how the modern Robber Barons run the table, and how that table was built on racial capitalism.
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
HOST: The current level of corporate and financial concentration is unprecedented. We’re living on a giant Monopoly board.
Ten asset-management firms manage about $20 trillion globally, an outlandish, unparalleled concentration of capital.
Ten corporations control virtually all US military contracting, half the semiconductor and chip markets, and 73% of global auto sales.
Eight companies own nearly all US broadcast and cable networks.
Five banks control about half of all US banking assets, more than after the bank bailout in 2008
Four corporations own 83% of the beef market, and 60% of the hog and broiler chicken industries.
Three control 99% of the US pharmaceutical market.
Two dominate global aircraft manufacturing.
And one, Google, has up to 90% of online searches globally outside China.
If you’re waiting for a partridge in a pear tree, the list goes on – and on. When people say “free markets,” ask if “free” is a verb.
But Big Tech takes the cake. Or more precisely, they want to have their cake and eat yours too. Again, Stacy Mitchell.
SM: And to understand a little bit more about Amazon in particular, Amazon captures about half of all online spending, but the even more relevant statistic is that about two-thirds of Americans when they want to buy something online they start at Amazon. It used to be that they went to a search engine and they put in what they were looking for and they would run across all sorts of different results, including local businesses also including Amazon. Now most people start at Amazon. And what that means is if you make or sell anything and you want to reach people online, you have to sell on Amazon’s platform, and they essentially control your business. They can levy a toll on you. They can stop you from selling. They set the terms. They decide what we see as consumers, what we don’t see.
And Google and Facebook similarly are these kind of powerful gatekeepers. And that concentration of power means that we have an incredible concentration of wealth with lots of people who are struggling to get by, and who have no control over their own livelihoods. We have lots of communities that have lost their sense of agency and direction. And then we increasingly have these giant companies that, you know, use the incredible power that they have over how our economic systems are run to gain a great deal of power politically and power over Congress, and to really set the rules.
I very much believe that what we need to do is we need to disperse economic power, that we need stronger unions, we need more independent local businesses, we need more cooperatively and publicly owned infrastructure and institutions to deliver what we need, we need more democratic oversight.
The concentration of power in the hands of someone like Jeff Bezos, who is now worth $200 billion, which is extraordinary, is just antithetical to all of those values.
So in all of these ways, I think we need to understand Amazon and some of these other companies as a form of autocratic private government, and the solution in effect is to throw their tea in the harbor.
HOST: In the founding of the United States, part and parcel of the battle between democracy and plutocracy was slavery. Colonial slavery had actually first begun with Indigenous Peoples, and then led to the enslavement of Africans. It formed the foundation of the economy.
Slaves were the country’s single largest financial asset. The profits from cotton catapulted the US into one of the world’s top economies. By the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region.
Maurice BP-Weeks
MAURICE BP-WEEKS: Yeah, it’s another one of those stories about the founding of the country that we learned in school that, you know, usually doesn’t bring up the fact that we had free coerced labor from enslaved Africans for many, many years, which was able to create lots of profit for the country. There’s a key factor, the really key factor of capitalism is a drive to produce the maximum profit by paying as little as possible for labor and materials.
There are a couple of things we can stand in the way of that. One, you know, as Stacy talked about is a form of economic democracy. So, you know, forcing there to be some competitors in your space, so even if you, you know, you try to pay your workers, you know, $5 an hour to maximize your profit, someone else is willing to pay $6 an hour and your workers leave. So there’s some competition to get you to reduce your profit. Or government regulations that stop you from doing things that increase your profit.
So, you know, we all can—we all know a bout collusion and why it’s illegal to sort of go get a group of firms together and all agree that you’re going to charge the same exact price so that you can stay in the market and, you know, take as much from a [INAUDIBLE] group of people as possible. There’s a government regulation against doing that. There were government regulations on the books against forming monopolies. And that’s sort of the other factor that’s sort of pushing things down.
HOST: Maurice B.P. Weeks is co-director of the Action Center for Race and Economy, called ACRE. He works with community organizations and labor unions on campaigns to create equitable communities by ending systems of wealth extraction that exploit black and brown communities. He’s working to dismantle a monopolist system that he calls racial capitalism.
Maurice B.P. Weeks spoke online at a Bioneers conference.
MBP-W: Racial capitalism really is a term that speaks to the real founding – both the evolution and the founding – of capitalism, and just to lift up the fact that the fundamental form that the exploitation takes place is on top of racist ideals and racist profit practices. So in that terms, think of course slavery and the production of crops in the South by Africans, and really global slavery, share cropping, low wage immigrant work, all these things that really at certain—at different points in our economy have really powered our entire economy are built on top of these racist systems of social division.
You can trace some of the same practices that monopoly owners and operators like Bezos do to those same racialized practices that people did in the era of slavery. And that’s what allows us really to correctly charge that their very business model is racist and takes advantage of race in the same way that other economic forms have in the past.
A colleague and friend of mine, Derrick Hamilton, likes to say that the US economy is structured on rules that either privilege or exploit based on race. If we agree that concentration of corporate power is something that is happening in our economy, which I think is of course inarguable, and monopolies are sort of the pinnacle of that corporate concentration, then we must look to them as the ones who are sort of the high-water mark for racially motivated racist undertones, privileging and profiteering. So that’s how we sort of weave together this notion of racial capitalism, some of the drawbacks of capitalism itself, and racial inequality and monopoly.
HOST: The extreme concentration of corporate power and the prevalence of monopoly are indeed inarguable. If the solution is once again to throw the tea in the harbor, what does that look like in the 21st century?
In part two of this program, we look at contemporary solutions and the growing antitrust movement rising both in the U.S. and worldwide.
This has been Democracy Versus Plutocracy Part 1: “Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime”, with Thom Hartmann, Stacy Mitchell and Maurice B.P. Weeks.
Among the most prominent environmental activists of the last century is the late Professor Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement and inspired hundreds of thousands of people around the world to push for environmental progress. In commemoration of the 30th anniversary of her 1991 Goldman Prize win—and the 10th anniversary of her passing—we’re remembering Wangari’s rich background and innumerable contributions to both the environment and human rights.
Determined from the Beginning
Wangari Maathai with the Ouroboros after winning the 1991 Goldman Prize for Africa
Born in 1940 in Nyeri, Kenya, Wangari spent her childhood in the Kenyan countryside and her young adult life in the United States. She studied biology at Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas, then obtained a master’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh. After returning to Kenya and pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Nairobi, Wangari became the first woman in East Africa to receive a doctorate.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, along with teaching at the University of Nairobi and serving as a department chair, Wangari was an active member of the National Council of Women of Kenya, an organized group of rural Kenyan women fighting for women’s rights. Women came to the council in part to search for solutions to the environmental degradation they were witnessing in their villages; deforestation and desertification had caused many of the resources women relied on for food and clean water to dwindle.
Fueled by her knowledge of biology and innate passion for helping others, Wangari decided to take action.
Solving a Problem, Starting a Movement
Wangari had two goals in mind: to help restore environmental resources and give women the ability to support their families in a self-sufficient, sustainable way. To achieve her goals, she came up with a practical but impactful idea: to grow seedlings and plant trees. The trees would counteract the effects of deforestation, bind the soil, and improve rainwater sequestration, in addition to providing food and firewood—and, therefore, a livelihood for local families.
Wangari’s plan inspired the formation of the Green Belt Movement in 1977, an organization dedicated to environmental conservation and poverty reduction in Kenya. As the work of the movement evolved, Wangari realized that the environmental issues impoverished communities faced were a direct result of bigger problems, like governmental corruption and a history of disenfranchisement.
To help address the root causes of these concerns, the organization began leading what is now called Community Empowerment and Education seminars, meetings designed to educate community members about the environment and their civic rights.
Expanding Her Influence
As the Green Belt Movement grew and began to inspire tree-planting missions across the continent, Wangari expanded her focus. A champion of both social justice and the environment, Wangari’s activism sat at the intersection of several different but intertwined causes: environmental conservation, democracy, and human rights.
Wangari used grassroots activism to lead important protests throughout the decades that followed. In the late 1980s, she mobilized her community to oppose the construction of a skyscraper in Uhuru Park, Nairobi’s central public space. Though international investors eventually backed out of the project as a result of her opposition, the Kenyan government and press vilified both Wangari and the Green Belt Movement in the process.
Efforts to thwart Wangari’s influence and activism only intensified. In 1992, Wangari participated in a hunger strike in Uhuru Park to advocate for the release of political prisoners—and the police beat her unconscious. Then, in 1999 she led a protest against the privatization of Karura Forest in Nairobi, during which Green Belt Movement members were beaten by private guards. Despite facing ongoing repression and opposition from powerful actors in the region, Wangari never wavered in her work.
Creating a Legacy
Wangari served on the boards of countless environmental organizations, spoke to members of the United Nations, and represented her community as a member of Kenya’s parliament for several years in the early 2000s. Due to her tireless work as both an environmental activist and humanitarian, Wangari received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.
After winning the prize, she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem, wrote four books (The Green Belt Movement, Unbowed, The Challenge for Africa, and Replenishing the Earth), and continued speaking and advocating for greater representation within the global environmental movement.
Today, Wangari lives on through the countless lives she’s touched, and through the Green Belt Movement, which has continued its work in Kenya and globally through international tree-planting and climate change advocacy. Her daughter, Wanjira Mathai, continues her legacy as a prominent environmental advocate and member of the Goldman Prize Jury.
Every one of us—regardless of geography or background—can honor Wangari’s lifelong work and support her legacy by taking a few simple steps. In her famous “Rise up and walk” speech, Wangari said that we can start by planting 10 trees to offset the carbon dioxide we each exhale; practice the philosophy of reducing, reusing, and repairing; and look for opportunities to volunteer our time and services to our communities.
In a moment that captured the attention of the world, Vanessa Nakate posed in a photo at the 2020 World Economic Forum with fellow youth climate activists. When the photo appeared in media, Vanessa, the only person of color in the photo, had been cropped out. Brushed aside by many as “just a photo”, in her new book, A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, Vanessa Nakate writes about the bigger picture of the global climate struggle often cropped out of the fight against climate change.
Vanessa Nakate is the founder of the Rise Up Climate Movement, which aims to amplify the voices of activists from Africa. Vanessa spearheaded a campaign to save Congo’s rainforest, which is facing massive deforestation.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—or rather, what I wasn’t. It was a freezing cold day in January 2020, and I was scrolling through my social media feeds. I’d just finished lunch with other climate activists, who like me were in Davos, Switzerland, to urge some of the three thousand business leaders, financiers, politicians, opinion formers, celebrities, and other globetrotters attending the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) to get serious about the climate crisis. We’d held a press conference that morning, before which I’d posed for cameras with four other activists, and I’d stepped away from the dining area to find out how the media was reporting our message.
Within a minute, I came upon a link to an article that featured one of the photos that had been taken of us. My heart nearly stopped. It was clearly the picture I’d been in, since you could make out the edge of my coat on the far left of the frame. But I was nowhere to be seen. I’d been cropped out.
I cycled rapidly through my feelings. I was frustrated, angry, and embarrassed. As I looked at the image, it became impossible to ignore that of the five women who’d posed for that photo, I was the only one who wasn’t from Europe and the only one who was Black. They hadn’t just cropped me out, I realized. They’d cropped out a whole continent.
At the press conference that morning in Davos, I’d been the only climate activist from Africa (there were a few others at the WEF itself), and not only had I been cut out of the Associated Press’s photo but out of the AP’s article that reported on our press conference too. “Does that mean I have no value as an activist or the people from Africa don’t have any value at all?” I asked in a ten-minute video I streamed live later that day. I was struck by the cruel irony of the exclusion of the only African from the photo. “We don’t deserve this,” I said. “Africa is the least emitter of carbons, but we are the most affected by the climate crisis.”
For a year, I’d organized climate strikes on the streets of Kampala, the capital and largest city in Uganda, in east-central Africa, where I live, to demand action on the climate emergency. I’d attended international climate conferences and been active online, and now I’d come to Davos to help more people wake up to the truth that global heating is not an abstraction or a theoretical event awaiting the planet in a few decades.
My message was, and is, straightforward: People in Uganda, in Africa, and across what’s called the Global South are losing their homes, their harvests, their incomes, even their lives, and any hopes of a livable future right now.
This situation is not only terrible, it’s also unjust. Although the African continent has just 15 percent of the world’s population, it is responsible for only between 2 and 3 percent of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. The average African’s greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of those of people living in the US, Europe, China, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, or many other countries. An Oxfam study concluded that a person in the UK will have emitted more CO2 in the first two weeks of 2020 than someone in Uganda or six other African countries will in the whole year.
Nonetheless, Africa will, according to the African Development Bank, bear almost half the costs of adapting to the consequences of climate change, and seven of the ten countries most susceptible to the harshest effects of the climate crisis are in Africa: South Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Chad, Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic.
Those with fewest resources and who’ve contributed the least to the crisis are contending with the gravest consequences: more frequent and more serious flooding, longer droughts, periods of extreme heat, and rising sea levels. Increased food scarcity, forced migration, economic losses, and higher rates of death are also disproportionately affecting people of color, not only across Africa and the rest of the Global South, but in the Global North too.
This is my world—a world where Earth’s temperature has already risen 1.2°C (2.16°F) above pre-industrial levels. A planet that’s 2°C hotter is a death sentence for countries like Uganda. Yet, as you read this, we’re on course for temperature rises that are much, much more than 2°C. That means many more millions of people will be displaced and extreme weather events will strain health and economic systems to the breaking point. At the same time, the world’s oceans are being depleted, biodiversity is collapsing, and species are going extinct at a rate greater than since the time of the dinosaurs.
My video response was seen by tens of thousands of people around the world, including many in Uganda, who shared my outrage and disappointment. Like me, they realized that, quite literally, something was very wrong with this picture. Being cropped out of that photo changed the course of my activism and my life. It reframed my thoughts about race, gender, equity, and climate justice; and it led to the words you’re now reading.
In A Bigger Picture, I explain why that photo and that moment mattered, and why it’s crucial that the fight against climate change includes voices like mine. I describe how I first became a climate striker, and my eventual journey to the Alps and what has happened since. I show how what we must call the climate emergency is an immediate, even daily struggle for millions of people, including across Africa, and how the heating of Earth’s atmosphere is connected to everything: economics, society, politics, and many forms of inequality and injustice— racial, gender, and geographic.
Like many of the young climate activists I’ve organized with and been inspired by, I live in a profoundly interconnected world, with instant access to huge amounts of information (and disinformation) and more means of connecting to others than at any time in history. Those of us born at the end of the last century and in the early years of this one have grown up in the shadow of HIV/AIDS, terrorism, financial meltdowns, and huge technological change and disruption. We’ve witnessed greater concentrations of wealth and increased disparities of power. Many of us have experienced firsthand how our planet’s ecosystems are breaking down under climatic stresses unprecedented in human history.
Perhaps more than any other age group, we are questioning the premise of an economic, social, and political model that has led us to a precipice beyond which no economic or governance system will survive. These realities have shaped our recognition that we, and those that follow us, will bear the brunt of several Nakate_A-BIGGER-PICTURE_interior-ARC.indd 4 7/20/21 10:41 AM 5 Introduction centuries of burning fossil fuels and our calamitous failure to leave the remaining carbon in the ground.
A Bigger Picture also showcases the work and perspectives of a fresh wave of activists from a new generation. Many of them focus their vision on and from Africa, a continent that has been ignored, silenced, and exploited for too long. We believe that at the center of this effort must be a genuine commitment not only to environmental, racial, and climate justice, but to the empowerment of girls and women, who are facing the crisis most acutely and are at the forefront of efforts to combat it. Without tackling climate change, we won’t be able to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, or bring about a resilient and sustainable future. I also share the practical solutions that climate activists are applying to support communities in Uganda and other countries in Africa and around the world.
Finally, I offer ideas for how you can become active in addressing the climate emergency wherever you live, and how you can amplify the voices and acknowledge the presence of those who’ve too often been left out of the picture.
I wrote A Bigger Picture in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and, like you, I am stunned and deeply saddened at the loss of so many people in so many countries to the virus. Across the world, families, communities, and nations are in shock and are mourning the livelihoods ruined, the families dislocated, the schooling interrupted or curtailed, and the businesses shuttered. We’re also shaken by other shameful effects of the pandemic: the lack of access to health care and vaccines for people of color; the upturn in the incidence of child marriage and domestic violence; and the delaying of urgent action on the climate emergency. Though these inequities existed before COVID-19, the virus has brought them to the fore and made many of them worse.
In these multiple tragedies, we can find stark warnings and lessons. First, scientists are telling us that zoonotic diseases like COVID-19 will become more common in the future as we encroach on habitats where wild animals live; continue to use, raise, and sell wildlife in close proximity to human communities; and confine billions of domesticated animals in factory farms. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and deadliness of such diseases.
Second, throughout the pandemic, people around the world have paid special care to the elderly, who’ve proved more vulnerable to the virus. We’ve kept them safe by staying inside. But for decades, many people in these generations have made decisions that will leave their heirs vulnerable to the effects of global heating. Third, the pandemic has disproportionately affected those with fewer resources; less access to health care and enough nutritious food; more cramped living conditions; work that makes social distancing difficult; and underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk from the virus. A majority of these are people of color. This, too, echoes the climate crisis.
Finally, governments have been telling us to follow the science on the coronavirus, but they aren’t following the science on climate change. They aren’t moving nearly as fast or as comprehensively as scientists tell us we must to meet—or exceed—the commitments made under the 2015 Paris climate accord. The pandemic has reminded us that climate change is not in lockdown. It has demonstrated that we live in a deeply connected world and that we need one another to survive.
Even though the climate forecasts are terrifying, I still believe we can have hope. We have to. There isn’t any other option. The pandemic has shown that (some) leaders can listen to the science, and the international community can act together with a common purpose. And, no matter how disturbing the present and future may appear, we have neither the time nor the luxury to shut down emotionally, especially those of us who live in countries where the climate crisis is a daily reality.
The stakes could not be higher: unless we take dramatic action now, whatever plans any of us have for the future—whether big or small—will fail. So, join me and some of the many young climate activists in Africa and around the world who are working right now to change that future. Let’s fight together for what is right and what is just.
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.
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