Since Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, the U.S. prison population grew from 300,000 in 1972 to a staggering 2.3 million today, disproportionately impacting people of color. Along with the surge in numbers of incarcerated was the adoption of modernist, inhumane design of carceral architecture.
Today, leaders in the field of architecture and restorative justice are challenging the historical contribution their professions have had in the design of inhumane prisons, restoring the roles of individuals in society to foster healing and compassion. They’repushing for new approaches to justice that prioritize care and address the material and social needs that are rooted in interpersonal conflict.
This week, we highlight the work of architects and designers Deanna Van Buren and Raphael Sperry along with youth organizer Jodie Geddes who are on the leading edge of transforming our justice system in truly innovative ways.
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Deanna Van Buren: Designing Spaces for Restorative Justice
In a future without prisons, we confront the social and economic factors that manufacture crime and focus on working with people to restore their place in society. Deanna Van Buren is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Oakland based nonprofit Designing Justice and Designing Spaces, an organization that is working to end mass incarceration by building infrastructure that addresses its root causes – poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself.
Restorative Justice: Healing the Cycles of Violence, Incarceration and Wasted Lives of Youth of Color
For youth in school, infractions highlight a deeper structural need that must be met with a version of justice that interrupts the tragic cycles of violence, incarceration and wasted lives that disproportionately affect youth-of-color. Jodie Geddes, Community Youth Organizing Coordinator for Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), shares in the success of RJOY’s work in West Oakland Middle School which is illustrated by an 85% reduction in violence and suspensions – a task that could have only been accomplished through shifting the focus of justice from punishment to healing.
Architects: Stop Building Prisons! Fighting Human Rights Abuses Within One’s Own Profession
The U.S. is home to the largest prison population in the entire world. With the massive expansion of the American prison system since the start of the war on drugs, architects have been tasked with the job of designing these cruel and inhumane prisons that house a largely low-income population of color. Raphael Sperry is an architect who leads national campaigns with the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADRSR) to ban the design of spaces that violate human rights and to promote restorative alternatives to incarceration.
From 48 Hills.org: “Don’t trust Big Pharma or Western Medicine? Get Vaccinated.” | organizers are tasked with carrying the legacy of the activists who have come before us while protecting our community from the spread of COVID-19. Regular Bioneers speaker Rupa Marya debunks many of the claims about the COVID vaccine and highlights the importance of getting vaccinated.
From Transition US: Regenerative Communities Summit | You are invited to register for the Regenerative Communities Summit Friday, September 24 – Sunday, October 10 convening people from all walks of life to reimagine and rebuild our world.
From The Harvard Crimson: “Harvard Will Move to Divest its Endowment from Fossil Fuels” | Following years of public pressure, Harvard University will allow its remaining investments in the fossil fuel industry to expire, marking a stark twist in a decades-long struggle between students and administration.
Wondering what a world without prisons could look like? Deanna Van Buren is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Oakland based nonprofit Designing Justice and Designing Spaces, an organization that is working to end mass incarceration by building infrastructure that addresses its root causes – poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself.
Recently, Deanna Van Buren spoke with radio host Ethan Elkind on KALW’s STATE OF THE BAY show about her introduction to restorative justice work and how integrating architecture and design at the beginning of these processes can transform the outcomes.
Read on for an edited transcript of their fascinating conversation, courtesy of KALW, or listen to the interview here (beginning at 47:00).
ETHAN ELKIND, KALW: You call yourself a prison abolitionist. Can you explain what that is and how it is you came about doing the work that you do?
DEANNA VAN BUREN, DSDJ: From our perspective, prison abolition means we see a future where we don’t have prisons anymore, where folks are not incarcerated for harm done, where there are alternatives to incarceration that make penal infrastructure obsolete.
How did I come to be doing this work? It’s a long story but here is a short version. I was an architect for a long time, practicing in corporate America and globally, and I heard about a practice called Restorative Justice back in 2007 in Oakland. I was at the Taylor Memorial Methodist Church in East Oakland on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday – I remember the exact moment in time – when Angela Davis and Fania Davis, such great activists, got up on stage and started talking about Restorative Justice, a form of justice that is about repair instead of punishment. In that moment, I made a decision that that was a system that I could support and get behind, and that began the journey of how we can design for restorative justice rather than punishment.
ETHAN: How do you design for restorative justice? What are some of the elements you incorporate?
DEANNA: We design a lot of things, but the restorative justice space is our thought leadership that we’ve been able to develop over time. When we design for restorative justice, we engage the community, we talk to the people who are going to use the space. We ask them, “What kind of environment would you need to face the worst harm that has ever happened to you? What kind of environment would you need to heal from that harm or that harm you might have caused?”
The goal is for people to get diverted out of the court system and into programs like restorative justice or peacemaking. We’ve been able to run restorative justice circles with folks inside of prisons and jails, and in communities of care, and we now understand that spaces for restorative justice need to be local, right there in the community. They can’t be downtown, centralized, like we love to do. They’ve got to be right next door. They need to be domestic in scale. They need to feel non-intimidating, they need to be integrating with the natural world.
These spaces need to have a kitchen – there needs to be food. Nobody goes to the courthouse to get food. Right? But we’re finding that in our peacemaking spaces, people do come just for the food, to be in a place to to break bread. Our restorative justice spaces have a beautiful entry space that feels like a living room. They’re peacemaking spaces that feel protected and private but have views out to nature, cool-off spaces. I could go on. We’ve developed a whole set of design guidelines for what these spaces look like and need to be.
It’s really important that we begin to work in a radically multi-disciplinary fashion, working with artists and architects and designers to access their creative tools and ways of thinking, and work with communities to really imagine these new things. We have to invest in the research and development of these new typologies and prototypes. This process requires democratizing what we do to enable deep community involvement, agency and understanding, even going so far as supporting alternatives to ownership typologies. It’s not just the architecture, but how it gets funded and financed has to be rethought. That’s something we’re really committed to in our process.
ETHAN: It sounds like the process in some ways is mirroring restorative justice with listening and outreach key components. Can you give us some examples of projects that you’ve been involved in with this model and any outcomes you’ve seen to date?
DEANNA: I can give two specific examples. There’s Restore Oakland, the country’s Center for Restorative Justice and Restorative Economics in Fruitvale. They have a dedicated space for restorative justice co-located with food, at a restaurant that trains low-wage restaurant workers to get living wage jobs in fine dining, and community organizing space. So the restorative justice component is a major part of a constellation of uses.
In Syracuse, New York, we did the Syracuse Peacemaking Center, and that project is the best one to look at outcomes because it’s been operating for five years. What happens there is that the elders in the community are moderating quality-of-life crimes. Folks get diverted out of court, they come here. It’s a version of Native American peacemaking practices in a non-Native community for the very first time in the country.
What we found there has been amazing. This house, this old drug house that we converted into a peacemaking space, has now become the heart of the community. Folks are coming by not just for peacemaking but they’re starting to have their quinceaneras there and they’re starting to have their engagement parties there, and they can’t stop the kids from coming by now. They’ve got to expand the program, and now they need more space for peacemaking.
If you think about how to develop both program and place at the same time, and you’re very thoughtful about where it goes and how it looks and feels, and engage the community, you can create a place that has incredible power and transformative power. That’s what a place can do if you do it right.
ETHAN: It sounds like in a lot of ways these are meeting multiple needs, not just in terms of peacemaking but as community centers. Deanna, let me ask you about upcoming projects. Are there any in the pipeline that you’re particularly excited about or that we can look forward to?
DEANNA: We’ve got two. One is in Detroit. We’re working on a creative oasis for social justice called the Love Campus. This will be our first real estate development project where we own it rather than just helping others own it. We will be investigating alternative justice programming there, we’ll have a restorative justice space, there will be an arts and culture anchor in there, youth spaces, etc. We’ll be able to test out and pilot a lot of new programmatic models in the space, which is very exciting for us. Phase one, the Love Building, has already started construction.
The second thing that I think is also very exciting is we are supporting the Alternatives to Incarceration implementation that is happening in LA County, and looking to do another pilot there. I think this is the most cutting edge work in the United States happening right now, really focused on ending mass incarceration along with a focus on youth because California is also committed to ending youth incarceration. We’re excited to hopefully be piloting that first prototype in Long Beach. We think we might call it a “Restorative Care Village”, although we don’t know yet as it is an emergent project.
There is a whole lot of new work to be done and spaces to make, and we’re so happy to be partnering with community organizers and the county to really advance that vision.
ETHAN: Finally, I have to ask about the prospects for criminal justice reform at the federal level. President Biden has made this one of his priorities. Do you see reform happening? And if so, how would you like to see it happen at the federal level to bolster the work that people like you are doing on restorative justice?
DEANNA: Our hope was always to start to see a commitment of tax dollars. Your tax dollars pay for prisons and jails and all that stuff. We pay for that. We need to see a shift in our tax dollars going to build this equitable infrastructure, restorative justice infrastructure. I know that there is a commitment – although it’s not big enough – to begin to end youth incarceration. Being able to incentivize states is where the work really needs to be done, because most incarceration happens at the state level. But if the federal government can incentivize states, monetarily, etc., to close these facilities and really investigate alternatives, that is where we’re looking to pilot with groups who might be ignited by such a move. I know there is some funding looking to come from the federal government to do so.
ETHAN: Thank you so much for joining us on State of the Bay and for all your work on restorative justice.
DEANNA: Thank you, Ethan, I appreciate that. Thanks for having me.
Dale Strickler, a Kansas farmer and agronomist for Green Cover Seed, the nation’s leading cover crop seed company, is a leader in the soil health movement and the author of “The Drought Resilient Farm” and “Managing Pasture.” Strickler was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Director, Restorative Food Systems at Bioneers.
ARTY MANGAN: What role does healthy soil play in making farms more resilient during weather extremes?
DALE STRICKLER: I’m a farmer, and it’s our nature to complain because things are never right. When it rains too much, we’re complaining. If it rains too little, we’re complaining. We’re either getting too much or too little, but healthy soil lets water infiltrate into the ground where we want it and holds onto it longer. Healthy soil increases infiltration and eliminates runoff, so we get fewer floods and fewer droughts, and that eliminates a lot of our problems. We don’t have mud; we don’t have dust. We have moist soil. More days of moist soil make farmers’ lives easier.
ARTY: What are some of the ways to create drought resilient soils?
DALE: The number one soil health principle is to stop tillage. Tillage is the worst thing you can do to soil, other than to cover it with concrete. Tillage destroys soil structure. It oxidizes soil organic matter. It is the exact opposite of the direction we want to go in.
Number two, we need to protect the soil with a covering of plant residue. It’s important, for a lot of reasons, to retain residue on the soil surface. It absorbs raindrop impact to increase infiltration. It also keeps the soil cool. The temperature of bare soil can rise high enough to kill beneficial soil microbial life. We want soils that are full of life because diverse soil lifeforms perform essential functions. By keeping the soil covered so those micro-organisms don’t bake and dry out, water will infiltrate better.
We used to think that organic matter came primarily from the decay of aboveground residue, but, actually, it primarily comes from microbes that live on root exudates, the sugary substances that roots put out into the rhizosphere to nourish the microbes that perform essential functions for plants. The larger the microbial population, the more soil organic matter you get, and the more soil structure you get, the better everything works.
How do you get more microbes? You feed them, but not just one food item, just as you wouldn’t feed people or livestock only one type of food. Plant diversity provides a healthy, balanced diet for those microbes. Grasses produce exudates high in sugar; legumes produce exudates high in protein; while other plants, such as sunflowers, produce exudates high in lipids. Other plants are high in minerals, and, ideally, you want to have minerals, lipids, proteins, fats and sugars all mixed together. Beneficial micro-organisms You get a very diverse diet from diverse plants.
Another factor is that we want to have the root exudates produced as many days of the year as possible. We used to manage farmland by leaving some fields fallow. The thinking was that you don’t grow anything for a period of time to store moisture for the next crop. We thought we were letting the ground rest to build up moisture. What we’ve discovered since is that we weren’t letting the ground rest, we were letting it starve because we deprived all those essential microbes of the exudates that they need to survive.
The industrialization of agriculture has segregated our cropping from our livestock. We’ve moved them apart and put livestock into buildings and crops behind fences to keep livestock out. Natural ecosystems have animals integrated into those systems. You won’t find any natural ecosystem in which animals don’t play a key role in maintaining the system. Microbes need an environment that is warm, moist, and protected from ultraviolet light, something that doesn’t occur naturally on the soil surface. That generally only happens because of animals. If I could, I would invent a machine that would take plant residue – dried leaves low in protein and green material high in protein – and mash it all up, grind it, moisten it, inoculate it with microbes, keep it warm, protect it from ultraviolet light for about 48 hours and then deposit it on the soil surface. And while we’re dreaming, how about making it solar powered and making it so that it replaces itself at the end of its life cycle? And, at the end of its life cycle, we could break it down into edible parts that are delicious and nutritious. Actually, such a thing exists already. We call it a cow. Animals function in the ecosystem as the recyclers of above ground biomass: they convert plant residue into nature’s perfect soil improvement medium—manure.
Those are the principles for creating a healthy soil.
ARTY: How does carbon in soil affect water?
Dale Strickler
DALE: In multiple ways. In order to rehydrate your landscape, job number one is infiltration. When rain hits the soil, it needs to enter into the soil instead of running off, and the soil needs to be able to hold the moisture, and you have to have conditions in which plants can extract the moisture.
How does soil carbon affect that? It’s primarily through soil aggregation that you get infiltration. You get infiltration through pore spaces. Soils without organic matter (organic matter is about 50% carbon) are basically just sand, silt, and clay. Without any sort of organic matter input, soil turns into a compacted hard soil, a concrete like substance. In fact, we make buildings out of soils like that. It’s called adobe. Adobe sheds water. It is basically free of biology.
Soil biology creates aggregates which are soil particles bound together in clumps or little balls. In between all the little balls, there are pore spaces. Those are passages for water to enter the soil. The organic matter will hold as much as 400 times its weight in water depending on what form it’s in. That’s the water holding capacity of the soil.
Finally, we need to be able to get the water out of the soil, and that’s done with plant roots. Roots will only go as deep as they have oxygen penetration into the soil. When you have soil aggregation, which is dependent on carbon, not only is it a passage for water to enter the soil, but it’s also a passage for oxygen to enter the soil. If you have oxygen penetrating the soil, roots can go deeper and deeper. Obviously, the deeper the depth of the root, the deeper in the soil the plants can extract water, and the longer they can continue to grow between rainfall events.
ARTY: What role do mycorrhizal fungi play in the soil?
DALE: Mycorrhizal fungi are naturally occurring organisms found in our native ecosystems. The reason we don’t have mycorrhizal fungi in many places is, again, because of our tillage and fallow practices. Mycorrhizal fungi are obligate symbionts. They have to have a living root as a host. Fallow periods starve mycorrhizal fungi. Part of that hyphae of the mycorrhiza is on that plant root and the rest extends out. There are species that have been documented to have hyphae lengths up to 100 meters long, but most of them are about half-a-meter or about 19 inches in length. They bring water and nutrients back to the plants, sort of like an outsourcing of the root function. It expands the root zone.
The second thing that mycorrhizal fungi do is as their hyphae move throughout the soil, they exude a sticky compound called glomalin, which is the most powerful soil aggregating agent known. So, they build stable aggregates that allow water and oxygen to infiltrate better, so you can get deeper roots. Not only do the mycorrhizal fungi help the roots get water, but they can help the roots grow deeper and allow more rain to enter the soil. Mycorrhizal fungi are paramount. Of all the micro-organisms lacking in our agricultural soils, mycorrhizal fungi are number one. They’re the platform that all other rhizosphere organisms depend on.
ARTY: Do you recommend inoculating with mycorrhizal fungi?
DALE: I do. There are two schools of thought on this question. One is “the field of dreams” idea: build it and they will come: that is, if you create the proper conditions those fungi will show up. But mycorrhizal fungal spores don’t move in the soil. In many agricultural soils, they are at such low levels that it takes a long, long time to build them back. So, I do advocate inoculating. It’s not a perfect system. You will never inoculate your way to soil health, but if you put all the soil health principles together and combine that with an inoculation, then it can be very beneficial. I’ve seen good results from it. I do it personally on my own farm.
ARTY: Industrial farming practices are causing topsoil erosion at alarming rates. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns that at current rates, we could run out of topsoil in 60 years.
DALE: Obviously, you can’t have soil that’s improving if the soil is leaving your property. If it’s ending up in streams and going from the Midwest down to the Gulf of Mexico or from California farms into the Pacific Ocean, that soil does you no good. You have to keep the soil intact in the place where it is. Preventing soil erosion is paramount. The main causes of soil erosion are, again, tillage and fallow practices. We’ve spent thousands of years trying to prevent soil erosion through really expensive methods. We’ve tried to construct big structures to prevent erosion, but, in fact, it’s really simple to control erosion — keep the ground covered and don’t till. It’s that simple.
Cover crops are a fantastic way of protecting the soil and increasing the duration of root exudates in the ground. You can accomplish so many things by just having green plants growing all the time. Whatever your soil problem is, there’s a plant that can fix it. If you look at natural ecosystems, there’s no ecosystem, other than Antarctica, that doesn’t have green growing plants. There’s a plant that’s suited to dry soil, poorly drained soil, salty soil. For every soil condition, there is a plant that will grow in that situation.
The mass Indigenous-led movement against oil pipelines has made a permanent impact in the fight against climate change. Indigenous nations are leading the movement to protect water and hold governments accountable to treaty laws that preserve Indigenous relationships with the environment. In this excerpt from his brand new book, Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing, Clayton Thomas-Muller shares the power and wisdom of Indigenous climate advocacy.
Clayton Thomas-Muller is a citizen of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation. Clayton is the ‘Stop It At The Source’ Campaigner with 350.org as well as a founder and organizer with Defenders of the Land. As an organizer, writer, and facilitator, Clayton is involved in many initiatives to support the building of an inclusive movement globally for energy and climate justice.
No one is helpless. No matter how mismatched the fight, the underdog always has some advantage she can use (and I say “she” deliberately; it’s always the women who first take up the challenge). Even remote First Nations living in the midst of the tar sands development—staring down billions in international capital, a government that had a centuries-old history of mistreatment, and an army of bulldozers and dump trucks the size of prehistoric beasts—had to have some leverage. We just had to figure out what it was.
The clues had been staring us in the face for years. From Brazil to Oklahoma, from Nebraska to Alaska, extractive mega-projects need the machinery of colonialism. They divide and conquer, because they need to. The social divisions within Native communities are not an unfortunate side effect of colonialism. The way Native men and women become addicted to the jobs provided by energy companies, just as their brothers and sisters become addicted to booze and crime, is not incidental to colonialism. It is colonialism. That’s because the colonists and extractive industries need us. They need our acquiescence.
That was our leverage.
In Canada, Indigenous Peoples have a powerful legal regime, through constitutional protection of their treaty rights to hunt, fish, and trap. The reason oil companies love to slap their logos on Native projects is that they know we hold the key to their vaults. Our treaties protect our rights. And our lawyers and activists protect those treaties.
The strategy we settled on was what we called a “rights and title campaign.” We would assert our rights to our territories. We figured that if we started to choke-hold these pipelines, we could keep the tar sands landlocked. Oil that can’t get to market is worth less. If it’s worth less, the return on investment of tar sands projects drops. And it’s no secret that tar sands oil is a high-cost, low-margin investment to begin with. We realized that we could make it a much, much worse investment.
Since those pipelines were heading to refineries south of the border, I organized the first trip of funders and heads of the major national environmental organizations in the United States, and they saw tar sands as a credible way to lubricate the ushering in of a climate change policy in the United States. IEN understood that if we channelled resources to First Nations to support a multipronged strategy of legal interventions in the courts and on-the-ground organizing rooted in ceremony, leading towards mass mobilization, we could eventually defeat Big Oil. We call this the Native rights–based strategic and tactical framework.
At that time, the white environmental organizations in the funding world were uninterested in human rights and were focused exclusively on the climate. So we had a tough go at first. Not all division within the movement is sown by oil giants. I had some powerful people shout at me in front of other powerful people, telling me that my strategy and tactics, and specifically working in partnership with the Aboriginal legal regime, were not effective. Everyone has their own ideas, and every one of them comes with some level of risk. We were attacking the Death Star. There wasn’t much room for error. But we stuck to our plan.
We worked with community leaders from the Mikisew Cree Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and probably a dozen other First Nations from British Columbia, southwestern Ontario (where Enbridge was building its Line 9 crude oil pipeline), and the Lower 48 (where TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline would be part of a massive pipeline from Alberta to Texas).
In the last forty years, there hasn’t been a major environmental campaign won in Canada without Indigenous Peoples playing a significant leadership role. Through the concerted effort of organizing community-based action camps, we taught grassroots community members a baseline of campaign skills to have greater success in their efforts. The legitimacy of Indigenous legal challenges led by tribal councils, tribal governments, and First Nations governments to go into the courts and challenge Canada constitutionally, using our treaties and inherent rights, have had a proven track record. In 2008, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation launched the first-ever constitutional challenge against the Canadian government, the Province of Alberta, and about twenty mining companies for the illegal sale of nineteen thousand tar sands leases on their traditional land. Their argument is that their treaty right to hunt, fish, and trap is being compromised by the encroachment of a toxic industry that destroys the habitat of the animals they subsist upon. When they win that case, it’ll make those nineteen thousand oil and gas leases in their homelands illegal. It’ll send shock waves through investment markets globally, and dozens of other First Nations will launch similar cases using that precedent.
The basis of the Native rights–based approach is the fact that in Canada we live under British common law, which is all about precedent. The reason our First Nations haven’t used our treaties in Canadian courts is because no one nation wanted to establish a legal precedent that would have a broad range of implications on all First Nations people if they were to lose the case. You set a bad precedent on treaty rights, you’re screwed for a long time. But with rock-solid cases where we can demonstrate ecocide and a detrimental impact on constitutionally enshrined and protected treaty rights, the tables have turned.
We knew that we had to organize beyond communities in the tar sands. We knew we had to bring together a great many brightly burning white-hot fires of resistance across Canada—everyday Indigenous people and community activists getting together and taking action. What resulted was the creation of a network called Defenders of the Land, which is the organization that founded Indigenous Sovereignty Week in Canada. Today, Indigenous Sovereignty Week is held in about eight countries and eighty cities. Activities include weeklong decolonization and colonial education curriculum workshops in universities all across Turtle Island and beyond. All of this work was done with very little money.
We won a lot of battles. We moved the most powerful leader in the Western world, President Barack Obama, to reject the northern segment of the Keystone XL pipeline in the name of climate change, in the name of Indigenous rights. (The southern segment, from Oklahoma to Texas, had already been built.) We persuaded the highest office in the United States government, the most powerful military superpower on the planet, to say no to Big Oil for the first time.
In this first of a two-part program, we take a deep dive into regenerative ocean farming, an extraordinarily productive and low-impact way of producing vast quantities of food for a growing population. It has the potential to re-make agriculture from the bottom up, while regenerating oceans, farmlands, farmer livelihoods, and the climate.
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.
This program was made possible in part by Guayakí Yerba Mate, working with Indigneous farmers in South America to grow shade grown, organic yerba mate. To inspire us all to come to life. Learn more about Guayakí’s products and regenerative mission at guayaki.com.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: As climate disruption bears down, our food system is one of our greatest vulnerabilities. Land-based agriculture in its current form will not survive global weirding, bedeviled by extreme heat, droughts, floods, freshwater scarcity, and overall erratic weather patterns that are all over the map – literally. And in many cases, it’s conventional agriculture itself that’s worsening the very conditions that will topple it.
Something’s gotta give. Starting with the underlying paradigm.
In an iconic 1981 essay, the esteemed writer and farmer Wendell Berry wrote that the key to overcoming our escalating agricultural crisis is what he called “solving for pattern”.
It’s a solution that addresses multiple problems at once in a self-reinforcing way by addressing the larger pattern of the entire system. It’s a solve-the-whole problem approach.
What makes Bren Smith’s regenerative ocean farming model innovative is that it solves for pattern. At the same time that land-based farming faces extreme systemic threats, if the fishing business continues as usual, many ocean fisheries are projected to collapse by 2050.
Regenerative ocean farming offers a breakthrough pathway for addressing these twin crises. This type of marine-based farming, known as mariculture, is an extraordinarily productive and low-impact way of producing vast quantities of food for a growing population.
Simultaneously, this regeneration revolution aims to redesign the food economy away from destructive profit-driven practices and agribusiness monopolies in favor of democratizing the food economy.
And that’s just the foam on an ocean of possibilities…
Bren Smith is the co-executive director and co-founder of GreenWave, a non-profit that trains and supports regenerative ocean farmers. We spoke with him in an online conversation.
BREN SMITH: Our land-based food system is being pushed out to sea, right, whether it’s droughts, wildfires, the lack of nutrients in the soil. Like, we’re going to have to get more food from the ocean. I think there’s no question about that. But our oceans’ wild populations can’t bear the brunt of that. Ninety percent of fish stocks are either over fished or fished at their limits. Like we need to actually roll back—the impact of industrial fishing.
Bren Smith
HOST: A fisherman is all Bren Smith ever wanted to be. Born in Newfoundland, Canada, he headed out to sea when he was 14 after dropping out of school. He fished in Gloucester and Lynn for tuna and lobster, and later shipped out to the Bering Sea for many years.
Then the cod stocks crashed. It triggered the biggest layoff in Canadian history with 35,000 people thrown out of work.
Bren watched fishermen wandering the streets like displaced persons – boats beached, canneries dead empty.
He saw that industrial fishing operated by essentially clear-cutting entire underwater ecosystems, while chasing fewer and fewer fish further and further out to sea. He knew there would be no jobs on a dead planet.
That blood-chilling experience jolted his relationship with the sea. He looked to conventional aquaculture, but realized it was the wretched analog of putting Iowa pig farms on the sea.
BS: I mean I was so excited to go farm fish, because I was told this was the future; we were going to feed the planet; and it was just like this hotbed of learning. But then I got out to the farms and it was really, really heartbreaking, using pesticides, antibiotics, fish [SOUNDS LIKE: brakes]. The fish tasted terrible, they looked terrible, and…I think the aquaculture industry at that time, although it’s really tried to make improvements, there are a lot of good folks really trying to innovate, but it chose the wrong thing.
Aquaculture did not ask the ocean: What does it make sense to grow? What it did was it asked the market, and what the market said at the time was everybody likes to eat salmon and tuna. Why don’t you grow salmon and tuna? And what we need to do is flip that and ask the ocean: What does it make sense to grow, what’s unique about the ocean as an agricultural space?
And you ask that, and the ocean says: Why don’t you grow things that you don’t have to feed and don’t swim away. And I think that was then my journey. Let’s grow as many of those species as possible, and that’s how you get to regenerative ocean farming at the end of the day.
HOST: Synchronicity struck. When New York’s Long Island Sound re-opened to oyster farmers in order to attract young people into the shell-fishing industry, Bren started Thimble Island Ocean Farm to grow oysters off the coast of Connecticut. Again, he encountered new secondary problems and had to change course…
BS: God, was I a bad oyster farmer. [LAUGHTER] Like really bad at it. I mean, I killed millions of oysters my first couple of years, because it was psychologically such a different thing. Like I’m a hunter-gatherer in my nature, and suddenly I was floating around in the same 20 acres, you know, supposedly cultivating these little creatures. And I found it boring at first. I was like: Where are the rogue waves? Where’s the excitement? But eventually, I just fell in love, like developing the blue thumb, just really watching the winds and waves on this small patch of water, and just knowing every inch of it every season. There’s a real thrill to that.
You know, I’d been oyster farming for about seven years, was very successful because I was close to New York. It was sort of the emergence of the boutique sort of Brooklyn oyster scene. Right? And that’s where I really learned to think and appreciate food, because I’m both not an environmentalist but I’m not a foodie either, I like to eat at the gas station, is my favorite.
The oyster company was doing really well. And then Hurricane Irene and Sandy came in, and that was two years in a row hurricanes destroying my farm, two years in a row. And one year is one thing. You’re like, Oh, terrible, but let me pick myself up, start again. You get hit two years in a row, 90 percent of your crop gone, over half your gear destroyed, and you realize that this is the new normal.
Climate change at that point was supposed to be a slow lobster boil. It was going to be a 100-year-off problem. And the environmentalists and public policy people were talking about it, like, let’s protect it and save our children. And suddenly I was the canary in the coal mine. It was like, No, this is about my farm, my boat, my livelihood, and it’s right now.
It was depressing. I’ve got to be honest. That moment, I think, was the best moment of my life, where out of the negativity and the hopelessness sort of bred a new opportunity, you know. Our backs are against the wall, very often humans do their best thing. So that’s where I started.
His back to the wall, Bren Smith landed an epiphany.
BS: What I did was, okay, the storm surge comes in, buries all my crop, let’s move off the seafloor and use that entire water column, and let’s grow as many of these species that are similar to oysters as possible.
And we have all these species, there are hundreds of kinds of shellfish, 10,000 different seaweeds that’s possible to grow. I mean, imagine being a chef and finding there are arugulas, tomatoes, kales that you’ve never seen, tasted, or cooked with before. Right? So suddenly what becomes this very depressing story becomes a story like an entirely new climate cuisine, which taps into the creativity, I think, of one of the great culinary moments in American history, which is right now.
The other thing, it’s like, who’s going to eat seaweed. Right? And that’s one of the core questions. Shellfish is much easier. All our collaborative chefs that are making things delicious, like barbecue kelp noodles with parsnips and bread crumbs – like this delicious way to make a vegetable a little unhealthy and also really like unravel our associations with seaweed. It’s just a delicious dish.
You know, as I dove into this, what I found is that, yes, we can do this as food, but tastes change slowly. What’s powerful about kelp is that it can be used in so many different ways. Right now we’ve got a “whole leaf” strategy. And just from my farm, last harvest season, the stems we turned into kelp pickles. The next set of the stem we turned into kelp flour and used it in plant-based burgers as well. Right? So that’s the ingredient. Then we don’t have any waste because we’re planning ahead.
HOST: Beneath the surface, regenerative ocean farming is a real-life Octopus’s garden. At an event hosted by ABC Home in New York, biologist and author Ayana Elizabeth Johnson interviewed Bren Smith and asked him to describe what a 20-acre farm looks like.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Bren Smith
BS: Imagine an underwater garden, right, and you’ve got hurricane proof anchors on the edges, then you’ve got horizontal ropes connecting these anchor systems. It’s just a rope scaffolding system under water. And from there we grow our kelp vertically downwards. Our mussels, our scallops, and lantern nets, and then cages down on the bottom, and clams in the mud. And the idea is just to figure out how many different species we can grow in 20 acres. This is really permaculture of the ocean.
AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON: The mussels grow in a sock. Could you just explain a mussel sock for those who may not be familiar?
BS: Sure. So when we see the kelp, and after we harvest it, there are the little stipes left over on the rope. Right? And mussels love those little stipes that are left over. And—
AJ: Stipes are seaweed stems.
BS: Yeah, seaweed stems. Exactly. And so the mussels stick to all those stems and grow out. We then rip the mussels off, and we put them in these socks. Sort of like make sausages out of them.
And then we hang them back on the kelp line. And the idea is we can use the same gear, we can rotate crops, and just keep growing year-round…
AJ: So you’ve got stuff in the mud, you’ve got stuff on the mud, you’ve got three different things hanging and growing, and then you have different things that you’re growing in different seasons. So, it’s a year-round scenario. How many tons comes out of one of these small farms?
BS: It’s about 10 to 20 tons of seaweed per acre and about 250,000 shellfish per acre.
HOST: Bren Smith shows how we can sustainably harvest massive quantities of protein and nutritious vegetables from the seas in ways that also restore coastlines, communities, local economies and the climate.
When we return, Bren rocks the boat by demonstrating regenerative ocean farming’s mighty potential to sequester carbon and restore ocean ecosystems.
HOST: Regenerative ocean farming is a textbook model of solving for pattern. It flips the extractive paradigm into a paradigm of regeneration – from vicious cycle to virtuous cycle.
One of the biggest challenges farmers have faced for decades in scaling up organic farming is getting enough organic fertilizer and compost. The supply just isn’t there.
Bringing that fertilizer from the ocean to the land can help meet the needs of farmers in an ecologically beneficial way.
Kelp provides rich fertilizer for soils, and healthy feed for animals. Feeding kelp to cows and sheep is not only very good for the animals’ health, it reduces their climate-crashing burps of methane emissions by a jaw-dropping 80 to 90 percent.
BS: I was at the Al Gore’s climate underground, all about regenerative farming. I was the only ocean person there out of like 2-300 people, and everybody was complaining and up in arms about the nutrient crisis. Right? Like our soils are dead and we really need more nutrients. And I was like, I’ve got them all. They’re in the oceans, that nitrogen, and the phosphorous, all the micronutrients. So let’s use things like kelp to soak those up and bring them back to the soil, right? Create a virtuous nutrient loop; let’s build a bridge between land and sea.
There is a long history of using seaweeds as fertilizer and feed. In fact, in the banks on the docks of San Diego in the early 1900s, there were 1500 workers producing fertilizer and feed out of kelp – it was wild kelp at that point – for up to a thousand land-based farms in the Midwest. I say this is something we’ve done, it’s just, you know, corporate, industrial ag, you know, with fertilizer, with soy, with things like that have just pushed it off the table in terms of one of the tools that are out there for farmers to farm regeneratively. So I think there is a huge potential there.
HOST: Kelp can also be made into compostable plastics and biofuels. An area the size of the state of Maine could replace all the oil in the US, according to the US department of energy.
As climate chaos continues stressing terrestrial farming, regenerative ocean farming can mitigate and start reversing some of the most catastrophic effects.
Here is Bren Smith again, with biologist Ayana Johnson.
BS: Our farm, for example, soaks up nitrogen, the seaweeds soak up carbon. Kelp is called the sequoia of the sea. It soaks up five times more carbon than land-based plants. One journalist called it the culinary equivalent of the electric car, which is a beautiful phrase. The farms function as storm-surge protectors and artificial reefs that just attract all these species that come hide and thrive
I mean, my area, when I first came into farm, it was a barren patch of ocean, and now it’s a thriving ecosystem.
AJ: So how big a deal is the fact that as the kelp grows it’s absorbing tons of CO2. Like obviously we need to be drawing down carbon and absorbing it and sequestering it. Photosynthesis is like the most underrated climate solution, in my opinion, so shout out to photosynthesis. [LAUGHTER] How big an impact does it make? Like sure, it absorbs CO2 like all plants do, but at what scale does that help? Because we’ve got a pretty big climate crisis on our hands.
BS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the World Bank did a study, and they said if you take less than 5 percent of US waters, you could sequester the amount of carbon put out by I think it was 120 million cars, create 50 million jobs, and the protein equivalent of three trillion cheeseburgers. Right? So this is scalable.
HOST: All of these benefits make Bren Smith hopeful that regenerative ocean farming can be implemented on serious scales to address climate disruption and ecological degradation – and to solve for pattern in self-reinforcing cycles of mutual benefits.
BS: Kelp is the rainforest of the sea. And the oceans have always played this central, regulatory role on the planet. Right? I think they’ve soaked up 90 percent of the excess heat and 30 percent of the carbon put out by humans has been sequestered by the ocean. And kelp is one of the sort of heroic plants in that process.
We think of it as blue carbon. It just makes it really powerful. So the kelp sequesters carbon. The oysters and shellfish play this really important role in the nitrogen cycle. So an oyster filters up to 50 gallons of water a day, and they feed on nitrogen, that’s what they do. And so that’s incredible, because this sort of Mother Nature’s technology is filtering that nitrogen out of the water column, and land-based farming as well as other things is creating over-nitrification in our oceans. And if you get too much nitrification in the ocean, you get dead zones.
So there are these massive zones all over the globe where nothing is alive. There’s not enough oxygen. Just everything’s been killed off. Oysters are really the sort of warriors against that.
There was a study on the Pacific Northwest that surrounded an oyster farm with kelp, and they found something called the Halo effect. Inside that kelp halo, the acidification rates were much lower than outside. Right? These are just powerful technologies that Mother Nature has given us.
And the kelp grows fast – as much as a foot per day. Its structure fosters a sanctuary for biodiverse marine life without excluding human interaction.
BS: Mother Nature hates monoculture.Right? You grow a single species in density. You know, if you had a kelp farm that was a thousand acres, Mother Nature would attack it. Right? If you just grow salmon, Mother Nature attacks it all the time. What we want to do is mimic and grow all these species together and do what she does well. Right? And the benefit of that is that all the species are working together on the farm, and it creates an entire reef for other creatures. Right? So it’s a foundational system to rebuild reefs, the farms are. That’s sort of a whole package of benefits that the farming model brings.
The other thing is like, we seed the farms, and then all our crops send more seed into the natural environment. We only use native species. And so, yes, we’re farming and harvesting, but we’re overproducing, and so rebuilding that ecosystem all around us.
I think that’s what – one of my frustrations, honestly, with part of the environmental movement is that it’s obsessed with conservation. Right? So we need to set things aside—so like, for example, take the ocean and create marine parks. I think what they don’t understand is that in the era of—Or maybe they understand but aren’t sort of really grappled with is we could set aside the entire ocean as a marine park, and it’ll die because of climate change.
And so instead, what we need is ocean farms and other things that are akin, breathing life back into these ecosystems. So as ocean farmers, we’re actually helping the ecosystem heal and rebuild. And I think the marine park of the future looks like, take 2,000 acres, right? And you’ve got farmers farming on part of it. They’re doing reforestation on another part, just planting kelp and shellfish, right, with the same skills they have, but not harvesting it. Then you’ve got artisanal fisheries and eco-tourism, and that’s what a marine park of the future, as opposed to this place where you’re never allowed to go and we just slowly let die.
HOST: By mimicking nature’s playbook, we can help nature heal itself – and set in motion a virtuous cycle of regeneration. In this paradigm, human beings are no longer the bad guys.
In truth, Indigenous peoples have long held this kind of knowledge.
When the Europeans first set foot on North America – what the First Peoples call Turtle Island – they saw a vast, undisturbed wilderness of endless bounty. In reality, there were about 100 million Native Americans living there in a vast thriving landscape they actively cultivated with extraordinary sophistication, including farming ocean oyster and clam beds.
The Coastal Miwok in what’s now San Francisco’s Bay Area maintained clam beds for centuries. Then the Forest Service declared the area a preserve and told the Miwok people they couldn’t harvest clams anymore.
The Miwoks asked: “Don’t you understand? The clams know we’re coming. If we don’t come, they’ll die.”
The Forest Service summarily dismissed their plea. Then the over-populated, untended clam bed began to fail and died.
What the Miwok had been consciously doing was the equivalent of weeding a garden. They had sustained the beds year after year for centuries.
GreenWave’s regenerative ocean farming model further serves to detoxify waters. Since so-called “waste” doesn’t exist in nature, it becomes a game of mixing and matching organisms to create desirable food webs. It’s a process to clean water and soil that’s called bioremediation.
As a powerful bio-accumulator, seaweed absorbs pollutants as well as excess nutrients. For decades, the mining industry has used bio-accumulator plants to remove heavy metals from sites poisoned by surface mining. It’s then possible to reclaim and recycle the metals from the plants.
BS: So we really see our farming working in multiple ways. We have farming for food, and the key is shellfish are the most traceable regulated food in the country, because it’s a live product. So we’ve incorporated our seaweed into that regulatory regime. Like you wish your arugula was as traceable as our seaweeds and shellfish. So regulation traceability has been key on that.
We also grow in polluted waters on purpose, just to soak up heavy metals, to rebuild those reefs. So we had a farm with Dr. Charlie Yarish in the Bronx River, for example, and that was just to do ecosystem services, right, to rebuild that. We’ve got another farm we’re working with the Port of San Diego in California.
And then the other thing is like we can just—the same skills for farming are required for food as they are with reforestation. So because we can use our seaweeds to draw down that carbon, if we even say someday we can’t eat it, it still has a role. Like we need to create the hatcheries and the skills to get people out there replanting the world’s rainforests underwater essentially.
As public policy moves forward, if it moves the wrong way, maybe someday I’ll just be the Johnny Appleseed of kelp out there all day. That’s fine. I still get to die in my boat, right, and that’s the goal. But hopefully society will get its act together before that.
HOST: After decades of destructive farming practices and inaction on changing misbegotten policies and practices, global weirding is escalating the stakes. Massive change and mounting ecological disruption are inevitable. It’s not a question not of “if” everything’s going to change – but “how”.
In this time, says Bren Smith, it’s all power to the imagination and all hands on deck.
BS: I feel desperate at a personal level, and I think a lot of folks I know, that we need a new story to tell ourselves, right, for this new era. Sort of we’re saying goodbye to one world, and we’re just in a period where we’re being introduced to a whole new one.
I think there’s opportunity out in the ocean in a major way. Forty percent of our country lives on the coastal communities. Like head out to sea and get to work. And that doesn’t mean, you know, like I do, farming in the winter and breaking ice off the gunnel. Go into public policy and help us shape really progressive powerful legislation that protects communities. Right? Go build a hatchery in your basement to create a community garden locally, right, where you’re welcoming folks out to grow their own food. Start clam gardens so community members can come down, harvest the clams, and feed themselves. Be a place for food security.
There are a lot of ways to engage. And certainly there are just so many open questions and challenges that we face in this industry, that we need all sorts of creative thinking.
HOST: Bren Smith is riding historic tides of change. In part two of this program, we explore the once-in-a-civilization opportunity to use regenerative ocean farming to remake the food economy – from the bottom up – the bottom of the ocean.
Guest Post by Gowan Batist, Owner of Fortunate Farm in Mendocino, CA
This piece was originally posted by Rural Coalition and has been reposted with permission. Find the original post here.
A few weeks ago, an odd request appeared on an online farmer discussion group to which I belong. A lawyer was soliciting white farmers to join a lawsuit fighting a new USDA loan forgiveness program aimed at helping minority farmers, claiming it unfairly excluded white farmers… like me.
This program, open to Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander farmers, was intended to help relieve the financial barriers to farm ownership created by generations of discrimination, the legacy of both enslavement and genocide, and these farmers’ exclusion from government programs that helped build generational wealth for their white counterparts.
When we started our farm eight years ago, we used a Farm Service Agency loan. Without that government support, we wouldn’t have been able to start our business. Like most small-scale farmers, we worked hard and saved carefully. But our story also happened within the historical context of privilege. While it’s true that the new loan forgiveness program―the one this lawyer was asking me to fight against―won’t ease my debt, it also will not saddle me with more either. In fact, it doesn’t directly impact me one bit. Except that everyone benefits from each step we take toward equity, including the future of American agriculture.
My vision for American agriculture includes an America where the people who own the farms more closely represent the people working on them or those eating the food we farmers grow. Today, over 98% of farmland in America is owned by white people. Meanwhile, over the last 100 years we’ve witnessed the loss of more than 90% of Black owned farms. This doesn’t even account for the even greater loss of food-producing land by Indigenous peoples. Two years ago, when white farmers received 99.5% of the multi-billion dollar subsidies doled out by the federal government to make up for a trade war with China, why didn’t this lawyer come asking my BIPOC counterparts to stand up against that inequality?
I invite every farmer who looks like me to stand up for equity and demand the reinstatement of this program. None of us want to be judged for the racism of our ancestors, but that demands that we cease to perpetuate it and work to correct injustices where we can. If we truly want to live in a just and fair world as white farmers, we have to celebrate structural steps towards creating wealth for others. Part of justice and fairness is looking honestly at how the past shapes the present, and then taking actions to shape the future. It’s often said that good farmers think not in seasons, but in generations. We, of all people, should be able to recognize long-term impacts. Acknowledging the reality of past injustice and taking tangible steps to rectify it is not discrimination against white people; it’s simply welcoming our BIPOC brothers and sisters in agriculture to the table.
One week after this lawyer came looking for disgruntled plaintiffs, we got the news: they’d succeeded. At least, temporarily. While the litigation carries out, all payments to recipients of the program have been stopped. I fear that in the span of these misguided lawsuits, we’ll begin seeing exasperated farmers give up. They’ll let their farms, which could have been saved, go under while they wait for government assistance. During our farm’s escrow, our USDA loan also hung in the balance. It was during the 2013 government shutdown, when political theater got in the way of providing basic public services. I will never forget the stress of that time. It’s a deep disservice to put farmer’s through the uncertainty of the program’s future now, especially in light of the disproportionately high toll of COVID-19.
I have been inspired by the brilliance, creativity and generosity of many Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander farmers throughout my career. People from these groups have taught me to farm in the field and classroom. They have written books, given talks, and taught classes, motivated me on social media and in the community. I’ve seen many successes, but I’ve also witnessed their immense struggle for access to land. I want Black, Indigenous, and all farmers of color to benefit from the same programs that I did. It will only make the agrarian community stronger.
I urge anyone reading this to take action beyond my words. Seek out and listen to the stories and perspectives of the people directly impacted by this lawsuit – their experiences should be at the center of this conversation.
Editor’s Note: Since the initial publication of this essay by Rural Coalition, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed an amicus brief on behalf of 25 groups in federal court in Wisconsin to allow the distribution of $4 billion in loan forgiveness set aside by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to correct decades of injustice, systemic racism and admitted discriminatory behavior by the federal government.
As our chance to take meaningful action on climate change diminishes, the call for the Rights of Nature to be legally recognized is growing among community activists, lawyers, scientists, government leaders, Indigenous people, and everyday citizens. Rights of Nature advocates are creating new laws that recognize natural ecosystems as subjects with inherent rights, and appealing to courts to protect those rights.
Craig Kauffman is an associate professor of political science at University of Oregon whose research focuses on the structure of authority that determines climate change policy. Pamela Martin is a professor of politics at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, and the executive director of the United Nations Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development in Georgetown, South Carolina.
“Water is life.” It gives life for all of us: humans, fish, trees, deer—indeed, all living beings. Yet the totality of this statement and the deep understanding of our connection to the planet gets lost in everyday life—in city planning, economic development, and the choices we make as individuals, governments, and communities to allow our natural world to be depleted and destroyed. In 2019, the United Nations (UN) scientific body charged with studying Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystems, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), issued a report concluding that human activity is driving the mass extinction of animal and plant species at a greater rate than ever before in human history. Existing environmental and human rights laws are clearly unable to provide for ecologically sustainable development or the health and well-being of many communities. The IPBES report notes that “goals for . . . achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative change across economic, social, political, and technological factors”; it defines the needed change as “a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values”.
With the onset of climate change, prospect of mass extinction, and the closing window of opportunity to take meaningful action, a growing coalition of activists, scientists, lawyers, policymakers, and everyday people from around the world are calling for Rights of Nature (RoN) to be legally recognized in order to stimulate and guide this transformative systemic change. They are creating new laws that recognize natural ecosystems as subjects with inherent rights (implying humans’ responsibility to provide for their well-being) and are appealing to courts to protect those rights. By January 2021 at least 178 legal provisions recognizing RoN (e.g., constitutions, laws, regulatory policies, and court rulings) existed in seventeen countries spanning five continents, and thirty-seven more legal provisions were pending in ten other countries.
Initiatives also exist to recognize RoN in international law, including the UN’s Harmony with Nature Programme and the proposed Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature 2010). RoN is supported in UN reports and General Assembly resolutions,1 in Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato si’, and in the policy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (2016). It is recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2017) and acknowledged by the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations General Assembly 2015b), the Convention on Biological Diversity (Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity 2012), and other international texts related to sustainable development. In fifteen years, RoN has gone from being a radical idea espoused only by a handful of marginalized actors to a legal strategy seriously considered in a wide variety of domestic and international policy arenas.
Children and young people are a major part of the struggle to prevent ecosystem destruction, and they represent a hopeful future. In 2018, twenty-five Colombian young people, ages nine through twenty-five, sued the Colombian government to stop deforestation in the Amazon rain forest that was contributing to climate change, arguing that this violated their rights to a healthy environment, life, health, food, and water. The case made it to the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia, which issued a groundbreaking ruling. Commenting that environmental degradation—not just in the Amazon but worldwide—is so significant that it threatens “human existence,” the court declared the Columbian Amazon a “subject of rights,” and ordered the government to develop an action plan to reduce deforestation to zero, with measurable strategies, and to restore the forest (Corte Suprema de Justicia de Colombia 2018). Like water, the forest is life.
Colombia’s court ruling reflects a growing recognition that human rights, like the right to a healthy environment—which is recognized by more than ninety countries—are dependent on the well-being of ecosystems that provide the conditions for life. For this reason, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2017, 28–29) recognized that protecting RoN is important for protecting not only the Earth’s biodiversity but also the human right to a healthy environment.
Much is written on the philosophy and legal doctrine behind RoN, but few studies analyze the politics behind its creation and implementation or its effects on the politics of sustainable development. This book seeks to fill that gap. It tells the story of how community activists, lawyers, judges, scientists, government leaders, and ordinary citizens from around the world formed a global movement to advance RoN as a solution to the environmental crises facing the planet. It analyzes their efforts to use RoN as a tool for constructing a more ecocentric sustainable development paradigm capable of achieving the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development “in harmony with nature” (United Nations General Assembly 2015b). This book tells the story of RoN not only as a transformational norm that goes beyond traditional human rights, like the right to live in a clean environment, but also its influence on new governance models that recognize a needed shift in institutional organization and laws in order to live in harmony with Nature.
We dedicate this book to those RoN defenders, advocates, scholars, and citizen participants who are creating transformational normative and institutional change at local and global levels. Such transformation weaves Western and non-Western (including Indigenous) ways of thinking and being into legal frameworks to lead sustainable change. We hope that our in-depth analysis of RoN laws, activist networks, and policy and governance outcomes provides a platform from which to engage serious discussions on aligning our legal and governmental institutions with our planetary needs and provides pathways for communities who are or will be organizing around such norms and legal provisions.
Recent employment numbers in the U.S. have economists puzzled. Job vacancy numbers are sky high right alongside a high unemployment rate. Businesses want to hire, but the labor market seems to be sitting on the sidelines. The pandemic disrupted many parts of our lives, and while some things are (hopefully) returning to normal, others could stand to shift entirely. Leaving aside all the political football about unemployment benefits, one basic fact is that inequality has never been higher in this country – and while Bezos is taking his rocket ship to space and thanking consumers, working class wages haven’t come close to keeping pace with inflation for many years. Could it be that folks aren’t going back to work because the jobs and work on offer aren’t worth doing?
As the page turns on summer towards Labor Day, we’re diving into just a few of the radical shifts in jobs and the economy that are coming our way. From humane workplaces that build community to the movement for Solidarity Economics to the necessary Just Transition underway as we move to a clean energy economy, what we do for work and how we go about doing it has never been more important.
Creating Intentional Communities in our Workplaces
In an ideal work environment, people are treated as valued equals, working in safe and emotionally well-regulated workplaces. This pandemic has daylighted the ruthlessness that we have come to accept as part of work culture. Through the lens of the emotionally well-regulated social structure, we can plot a course to a healthy social and emotional ecosystem where people and projects can finally thrive.
Karla McLaren, M.Ed. is an award-winning author, social science researcher, workplace consultant whose trailblazing work on empathy is transforming workplaces. In this article, Karla highlights the problems inherent in todays’ work culture and uses transformative conceptions of emotions to introduce new understandings of the workplace.
Register for Bioneers 2021 before Monday, September 6th to take advantage of the low price!
Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter
Economists often defend our current economic model and it’s disastrous effects on our planet and marginalized communities by appealing to a normative concept of “humanity”. It is assumed that exploitative and narrow class interests that arise at the expense of the earth and community is human nature. However, as the world fell into isolation and uncertainty brought on by a global pandemic, humanity showed itself capable of uniting and showing compassion for others. With the pandemic came a moment of pause – a space in which we glimpsed the possibilities of what the future can hold.
In his latest book co-authored with Chris Benner, Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter, Manuel Pastor offers a powerful blueprint for an equitable future. In this excerpt, Manual defines the possibility and urgency of solidarity economics guided by principles of mutuality and solidarity.
Just Transition: A Workforce Development and Jobs for a New Clean Economy
With the given climate, the task most imperative to regaining the possibility of a liveable future is to transition from a fossil fuel based economy to a global economic system that runs on clean energy. However, this transition doesn’t come without risk when considering the numerous working-class families and communities whose livelihoods have grown to depend on jobs provided by the fossil fuel industry. Without a plan for an equitable transition that centers working class and marginalized communities, we risk replicating the unjust structures that we are trying to dismantle.
In this panel from Bioneers 2019, four leaders answer the question, “What does a Just Transition Mean?” They outline the need for and progress towards proactive labor policies to ensure an equitable future for families and communities.
A Caring, Sustainable Economy for the 21st Century
Ai-jen Poo, one of the nation’s most effective and dynamic young labor leaders, presents the vision of Caring Across Generations, a new national coalition of 200 advocacy organizations working together for a dignified quality of life for all Americans. Its purpose is to transform some of our most fundamental social and economic challenges – jobs, long-term care and immigration – into opportunities for innovation and solutions that benefit everyone. Ai-jen Poo is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a non-profit organization working to bring quality work, dignity and fairness to the growing numbers of workers who care and clean in our homes, the majority of whom are immigrants and women of color.
We know that the climate imperative in front of us is to transition as rapidly and comprehensively as possible from a fossil fuel based economy to a global economic system that runs on clean energy. Among the thornier questions involved in this shift is how the bold new economic visions for this large-scale transformation can support working-class families whose livelihoods are currently tied to the fossil fuel-based economy.
“Just Transition,” is the phrase frequently invoked as the answer to this question. In this panel from Bioneers 2019, four leaders answer the question, “What does a Just Transition Mean?” They outline the need for and progress towards proactive labor policies to ensure an equitable future for families and communities. With:
Vien Truong, Climate Justice Leader and Principal of Truong & Associates.
Demond Drummer, Co-Founder and Executive Director of New Consensus and key architect of Green New Deal.
This is an edited transcript from a panel hosted at the Bioneers 2019 Conference.
VIEN TRUONG: I’d love for us to start with a basic question: How do we understand what Just Transition is?
LARRY WILLIAMS: Every community has their own specific set of challenges so communities will also define what a just transition looks like to them.
Larry Williams
People are surprised to hear that Just Transition originated in the labor movement. For some workers, “Just Transition” means their job is going to get taken away.
Some communities and families depend on jobs within the fossil fuel industry or resource extraction in general. The question we must answer to create a just transition is: How do we end the exploitation of our planet while ensuring that we’re not putting the livelihoods of communities and families at risk in the process?
SARAH WHITE: I think that we tend to think about Just Transition in a very narrow way as the impact on resource-dependent communities, framed as, “What happens in California to oil and gas workers if we become carbon neutral?” And that is a big question.
But we also have to ask it as a larger question for the entire transition to a low-carbon economy: How do we transition into a carbon neutral economy in a way that is just? How do we ensure that workers whose jobs may be going away or transforming are included – but also all of those people who’ve been excluded from the economy right now are also included? What does it mean to build a new clean economy that includes people who have been excluded from opportunity in communities which have borne the heaviest burdens of climate change to date? It’s not only energy sectors either. We’re talking about a transition that looks at jobs in sectors including land, water, waste, industry, transportation, health, education and more.
Sometimes I hear language around Just Transition and I worry that people think we’re simply going to take these dirty jobs and swap them out for new green jobs. The labor market does not work like that. Ultimately, it is looking at an entire diversified economy, and how we build it, and how we bring people onto it.
I define Just Transition much more broadly than most. A Just Transition is about building a clean economy with an equity lens.
LARRY: When I hear transition, I ask: Transition from what? If you read W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, you know that after slavery, reconstruction was a failure. Reconstruction was supposed to be an effort to move from a slavery-based plantation economy to a worker-ruled democracy. Today, we still see African Americans without jobs, doing labor in prison creating solar panels. If we’re not careful, we can risk repeating this history.
VIEN: Larry, can you talk about the work that you’re doing, whether with the Sierra Club or union based or other places? How do we actually create more opportunity and access to communities that have not been part of the conversation?
LARRY: In order to have the skills necessary to build this new economy, for well-paid high-road jobs with health insurance and transferable career prospects, you need to have a base of training.
This comes with challenges because clean-energy partners are very skittish about the labor movement. They believe that costs are going to be higher if their workers are unionized. But a workplace that invests in its employees will have consistent productivity and low turn-over; in the long run, you’ll actually spend less money. We put our livelihood into the work we do so we need to think about sustainability. Wages have been stagnant for the last 60 years despite productivity rising and despite the wealth of the rich going up.
Sarah White
SARAH: Part of my job is figuring out how to get the timing right so that we have the workforce we need to build this new economy, but we do not do what we did 10 years ago, which was to train a bunch of people for jobs in an imaginary green future, which did not arrive on time, and so did a disservice to a lot of people by training them for jobs that didn’t exist or jobs in a dead-end industry, career-wise. We don’t want solar sweatshops – just because it’s green doesn’t mean it’s good.
We have an equity and climate jobs agenda in California, and one piece of that is looking specifically at how to build training partnerships across the sectors I mentioned earlier, including energy, transportation, land, water, waste, housing, etc. The answers come from working regionally and locally, from communities. The answers are not handed down by the state, no matter how much experience we have.
VIEN: Larry, you are talking about “high-road jobs” – good pay, benefits, can support a family. I can imagine that if I were hearing about developments that might be a threat to my job, I would be scared. What are you hearing in your conversations with labor members? What should we know about where the anxieties are, and what kind of solutions they’re hoping to hear from us?
LARRY: If we’re being honest with ourselves about our movements, they’re all borne out of exclusion. Whether it’s women, people of color, Indigenous people, these movements started as exclusive movements and that can be found true today. 2017 was the first year that three out of four people who joined a union were under the age of 35. As the country becomes more diversified, so is union membership. One of those ways we’re working to get leadership to reflect that diversity is by organizing, educating people to know that they have a fundamental right to join a union. Some of the work entails challenging the white supremacy that has historically barred people from joining these unions and becoming leaders.
If the labor movement is successful in making the transition to a more inclusive formula, the problem will solve itself, because we realize that we literally can’t build a movement for a just economy without building a movement for environmental justice, racial justice, etc.
VIEN: We are now dealing with a country that is very divided, and some argue that this last Trump election was the backlash against where our future economy was headed. Especially in coal country where they feel like they are being left behind.
Vien Truong
I will say that when I was CEO and president of the Dream Corps, I used to have a team called the Love Army. Our first campaign was to fight with United Coal Mine workers and because we didn’t confront them with the blame of pollution, we were able to work together to actually make calls to the Congress and successfully got 22,000 coal mine workers healthcare and pensions.
It wasn’t about helping the companies, it was about helping the people – that’s what this Just Transition is about. How do we make sure that we always keep in mind that it’s real people that we’re fighting for?
Demond, I want to turn to you. You have perhaps the hardest job right now in crafting the Green New Deal, and everybody’s paying attention to it. I bet you have a bunch of people who are coming in and wanting to help you – “help you” – with thinking about various components, various parts of the economies. How have you been navigating unions, diverse communities and government interests? How are you navigating the balance of that in the crafting of this new deal?
Demond Drummer
DEMOND: We’ve always believed that the Green New Deal was bigger than one politician, one organization or one movement. It’s a movement of movements. We see our role as the “taking-it-all-the-way flank of the movement. We are going to advance the most aggressive and bold visionary version of what the Green New Deal can be.
I don’t want people to walk away thinking that New Consensus is the one organization working on the Green New Deal. We’ve seen a number of groups take on the Green New Deal and pour their values and vision into that frame and that’s become part of a national conversation we find ourselves in the center of.
There are people starting Green New Deal movements and conversations in local communities, in states – the list goes on and on. This is a national conversation, and we need to treat it as such. Everybody should be working on The Green New Deal.
VIEN: I completely agree with that. I want to close by saying how much I appreciate the work that you all are doing. Thank you all for giving an empathetic ear to people who need it. I hope that you lead with compassion in the spaces that you are operating in. I thank you for helping us fight for a just and sustainable future.
In defense of an economy that destroys the planet while marginalized communities languish in the corners of society, economists often appeal to a normative concept of “humanity.” It is assumed that exploitative and narrow class interests that arise at the expense of the earth and community is human nature. However, as the world fell into isolation and uncertainty brought on by a global pandemic, humanity proved itself capable of uniting and showing compassion for others. With the pandemic came a moment of pause – a space in which we glimpsed the possibilities of what the future can hold.
Manuel Pastor is a professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California whose research focuses on issues facing low-income urban communities and the social movements seeking to change those realities.
Dr. Chris Benner is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Rooted in an urban political ecology approach, his research examines the relationships between technological change, urban and regional development, and structures of economic opportunity.
In their latest book, Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter, Pastor and Benner offer a powerful blueprint for an equitable future. In this excerpt, they define the possibility and urgency of solidarity economics guided by principles of mutuality and solidarity.
Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter is available for preorder here.
So what do we mean by solidarity economics? As suggested earlier, we see three fundamental and interlocking premises: (1) our economy is not some abstract natural phenomenon driven by immutable forces, but rather created by people through collaboration as well as competition; (2) when we recognize and reinforce those collaborative elements, we end up with not only better social outcomes but also better economic outcomes; and (3) because some people benefit from the current system and would seek to divide us, social movements for change are critical to economic success, both because they can help shift power and because they can help build and broaden our sense of mutuality.
The first premise, increasingly emergent in the realm of behavioral economics, has to do with the conception of human nature. The general assumption by most economists since Adam Smith has been that people act purely (or at least largely) out of self-interest. For neoliberals, the good news is that the market will coordinate all that selfishness to a blissful outcome, and so limited government is the best recipe. On the left, there is often a similar take on what drives economic behavior, with the caveat being that bliss is not likely to be distributed justly; as a result, the state must act to constrain the worst instances of selfishness and so, corral our economy into serving the common good.
But as became evident in the COVID-19 crisis and in many other disaster situations, people also act out of impulses of solidarity with one another. And this is not just in moments of stress; care for one other is as much an impulse as is fear of the other, and generally the world goes better when this, rather than fragmentation, is the norm. The challenge, as articulated by economist Sam Bowles in his brilliant book The Moral Economy, is that we have structured our economic and political systems to either reward or tame self-interest rather than to promote our connection with one another.
To be fair, traditional economic models do not deny that people have impulses for mutuality, but they assume that these impulses are expressed outside the economy – in family life, neighborhoods, churches, charity work. But assuming that people check their humanity when they enter the economy creates highly problematic blinders: the resulting economic models make invisible the unpaid labor of mostly women in the home and community; they undervalue the essential human interactions in caring work that stretches across much of our service economy; and they ignore the ways that collaboration is an essential part of innovation, teamwork, and many other economic activities.
Traditional economic models are also often blind to the ways our economy is rooted in the places we live and work. Much of economic activity is rooted in locally serving industries, and in fact, the vast majority of our economy is rooted in creating, maintaining, and improving the social and physical environments in which most people live. Most work cannot happen without workplaces, even if those workplaces are home offices for some, and overall our economy cannot exist without the ecosystems on which we depend. Yet traditional economic models largely neglect our connection to place and planet, as well as our connection to each other.
Of course, one person’s (or group’s) mutuality might be another person’s exclusion. As critical race theorist john powell has suggested, our current system has devised and perpetuated in- and out-groups, often by race and place, to determine who can belong in our circle of solidarity. This sets boundaries around who should benefit from job security and social support, and who should be thrown to the market wolves – as well as which places will be thriving, gentrifying, or dying. The challenge is that when wolves are left to prowl, it is dangerous for everyone; accordingly, challenging structural racism and broadening the circle of belonging in our economy is actually in the common interest.
Manuel Pastor
This sets the stage for our second major premise: that building on a spirit of mutuality can actually lead to broader prosperity, a point also made by Heather McGhee in her brilliant new book The Sum of Us. We recognize that this runs straight up against the traditional economic perspective that inequality is necessary to incentivize and facilitate a strong economy – the classic equity–efficiency trade-off. But as we discuss in more detail in chapter 2, high levels of income disparities, racial segregation, and social fragmentation actually tend to limit the sustainability of income and job growth, both nationally and regionally.
More broadly, the evidence is increasingly mounting that our current scenario of economic inequality, structural racism, and environmental destruction is suboptimal for nearly all of us. By contrast, recognizing and reinforcing mutuality could have benefits in many spheres. If we supported the collaborative elements necessary for innovation to flourish, and reduced the unequal private appropriation of the commons, we would increase investments and steer innovations toward the common good. If we recognized collaborative contributions to our economy through a social wage, it would help reduce the tremendous economic burden of poverty, poor health, and homelessness. If we extended our sense of mutuality to the planet and future generations, we would have a healthier environment and prevent being overwhelmed by the economic costs of environmental pollution and climate-change-driven disasters.
Dr. Chris Benner
And this gets to our third premise: we will only get to that better world through active organizing that seeks to rebalance power. Mutuality and cooperation may be the goal, but getting there will require the antagonistic friction of politically defining who benefits from current arrangements and determining how to diminish their influence in order to promote the interests of the many. This dialectic of embracing mutuality as a goal and movements as a strategy is a difficult balancing act – but it must be done if change is to take place.
And this presents another challenge to conventional wisdom: economics as a discipline often proceeds as though empirical research documenting problems and outlining solutions is enough to lead policy makers to decide on a more inclusive course of action. But this perspective – thinking that racial differentials, wealth disparities, and environmental destruction are problems to be corrected – is misplaced. Such “problems” are not bugs in the system but rather features of an inequitable structure of domination that can only be disrupted by the efforts of social movements to enact solidarity at scale.
This emphasis on movements is also deeply tied to the idea of a frame, the concept with which we began this section. The newest theories of social movements talk about the importance of the construction of a shared identity through narrative understanding. We need an economic policy package, to be sure, but we also need a story. Neoliberals have a convincing one, a vision that always comes back to individuals, freedom, and markets (even if the actual results are inequality and disadvantage). We need a tale that resonates, that draws on the deep human sense that we can get through most anything if we band together, and that becomes a sort of mental default so that any economic question about a social challenge that gets asked gets a new sort of answer: mutuality and movements.
As students begin to return to classrooms, teachers and administrators are tasked with balancing young people’s education alongside a truly monumental set of obstacles – a global pandemic, political infighting, structural educational inequities and a mounting climate crisis. At the same time, nurturing leadership in young people has never been more important, and supporting the incredible educators who do this essential work is the pathway forward.
This week, we are excited to highlight the one-of-a-kind Bioneers Indigeneity Curriculum project which provides free and cutting edge cultural educational resources for educators. We also learn from youth who are walking the walk, pointing out the connections between educational equity and climate justice. And, as the delta variant emerges, we revisit the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative, which has been instrumental in supporting schools to get education outdoors.
While overall public awareness of contemporary Indigenous issues and experience is severely lacking, appropriate educational materials are in even shorter supply. To meet this need, the Bioneers Indigeneity Program, with the support of dedicated and visionary funders, has developed Indigeneity study guides and lesson plans aligned with national standards for grades 9-12+, inspired by the conversations in the annual Bioneers Indigenous Forum. These curricula offer educators an invaluable toolkit for teaching these incredibly essential concepts in the classroom.
With curriculum bundles on topics including (most recently): “Three Sisters,” “The Real Thanksgiving,” “Water is Life,” “Alcatraz,” “Borderlands,” and “Honoring Women,” this body of work represents a unique opportunity to bring Indigenous-created curriculum into both formal education and non-formal learning environments. Each curriculum bundle includes teacher instructions, activities, assessment, and additional materials for a week of instruction aligned to the lesson’s theme. These curricula can be accessed free of charge on our dedicated Indigeneity Curriculum webpage.
How Equity in Education Can Foster Youth-Led Climate Advocacy
A clear distinction between who produces the astronomical amounts of pollution affecting our climate and who bears the brunt of its impact arises as young people push for equity in education to highlight holistic understandings of climate change. Earlier this year, a group of students led an effort in San Mateo County to rally their school district to pass a Climate Emergency declaration. After successfully organizing for the resolutions approval, the students developed climate action plans for their district. In this new interview, Lilian Chang and Katinka Lennemann, two of the students behind the effort, speak about the role of education in the push for climate justice.
The single most-read article on Bioneers.org in 2020 was an interview we conducted with the founders of The National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative, based on the straightforward idea that fresh air and outdoor learning could allow students to return to school in the midst of a pandemic. Co-founded by Green Schoolyards America; the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley; San Mateo County Office of Education; and Ten Strands, the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative has developed a community of practice and curated a very practical library of ideas and resources designed to support you in using the outdoors for learning during the pandemic and beyond.
Conversation with Oglála Lakȟóta Elder Basil Brave Heart: Part 1 | Basil Brave Heart is an Oglala Lakota combat veteran, Catholic boarding school survivor, author and retired school administrator from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In part one of this interview with Hilary Giovale, Basil shares reflections about Lakȟóta lifeways and the impacts of boarding schools.
Good Fire: Indigenous Cultural Burns Renew Life | In this interview, we speak with Bill Tripp, Deputy-Director of Eco-Cultural Revitalization for the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, about the role of fire within Indigneous cultures as a way of caretaking land. As climate-induced fires destroy land across the U.S., Indigenous knowledge may be a guiding force in rekindling an old kinship with fire.
Rick Nahmias is an award-winning photographer and author of The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers, which documents the hardships of the marginalized lives of the people who feed the country. He’s dedicated to food justice and the idea that access to healthy food is a human right. These principles led him to start a grassroots neighborhood food recovery program donating backyard citrus fruit to local Los Angeles food banks and to ultimately found Food Forward. Since 2009, Food Forward has recovered over $271 million worth of good food headed for the landfill, and fed millions of people in eight counties in Southern California, seven other states and tribal lands in New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma. Those efforts have had a significant climate impact. The food recovered avoided 50,000 metric tons of Co2 equivalent by redirecting surplus food from the landfill where it is a major emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas more damaging than Co2.
ARTY MANGAN: Your interest in food justice and hunger goes back to your book: The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers. How did that project lead you to your work alleviating food insecurity?
RICK NAHMIAS: After The Migrant Project, food justice became my way to plug into the bigger issues of justice, as someone who cooks, someone who grew food, someone who had been in the fields, someone who had the privilege of being a white male and being able to use that opportunity to bring people’s eyes and ears to a story that we all are affected by.
I continued doing photography and in 2008- 2009, and I was doing volunteer work on the Obama campaign and on Proposition 8, a California state initiative to ban same sex marriage. Prop 8 passed and it invalidated my marriage along with tens of thousands of others. I had a bizarre political/emotional whiplash; on one hand, I felt so good about a new leader, but I also felt like shit about my fellow Californians who just nullified my right to love somebody and build a life with the person I choose. It made me reevaluate my life.
I was done with eight years of having a lot of anger fuel my work, which was the only silver lining of the Bush years. It gave me something to push back on as an artist politically and as a citizen. After that, I needed to do something that was out of a place of generosity. I needed it to be smaller and more local because these huge state and national initiatives were draining. I felt like a grain of sand on the beach, so to speak. I really didn’t see how I could help those issues.
So, I planted that seed in my head and at the same time, unfortunately, my dog was aging quickly. We would take slower and slower walks around the neighborhood, and I started noticing this abundance of fruit on trees all around my home that were going to waste, mostly citrus, but other fruits too. At that time, the Great Recession began to take hold. I thought, what if this fruit, which is in massive abundance, could get to a food pantry through the hands of volunteers to help bolster the dry goods that were coming out of food banks, which notoriously struggle trying to obtain fresh produce. I put an ad out on Craigslist. I enlisted a friend who had two fruit trees. Six people responded to my Craigslist ad, and one of them actually showed up the day of the event. She and I, over the next three weekends, harvested my friend’s backyard. We came away with about 800 pounds of citrus, which went to a food pantry about two miles away. It was just kind of the right idea at the right time and it exploded from there.
The food pantry was very grateful, and basically said, “More, please.” It was the first time in my life that there was a tailwind to an idea. There was also a live fourth dimension I was working in. I wasn’t a photographer with a bunch of glass and metal between me and my subject. It was an immediate take-fruit-off-tree, put-in-box, give it to people. There was the sense of a virtuous circle in which I became the change-maker, which is timeless; it’s biblical, literally and figuratively. It is all about sharing and giving and gifting with nothing in return but the endorphins. And it was simple, and simplicity was what I wanted after several years of very complex logistics with photography, fundraising, and managing exhibitions and putting books together. It was, what I call, fruit therapy. You get up in a tree and become a 5-year old again. At the end of it, you have half a dozen boxes of fruit that you get to give away to people. There was no downside.
So it became my hobby and the hobby of a bunch of other kind of kooky people, and we became like a little tribe. We’d do potlucks together. We’d go out on fruit adventures in different parts of Southern California that we heard had an orchard. We would do all kinds of stuff together, and it built this community that just became this wonderful flywheel of enthusiasm and passion that multiplied. At the end of our first year, we had 100,000 pounds of backyard harvested fruit by hand. That’s a lot of fruit. Maybe not for a professional in the field, but for a bunch of middle-class white people who don’t do this professionally and just did it on the weekends, it was a lot of food. We realized there was so much more that could be done. So that’s the genesis of it.
Photo by Serena Creative Courtesy of Food Forward
ARTY: You mentioned food justice as one of your motivations for this work. How do you define food justice?
RICK: Food justice is ensuring that everybody has access to healthy, affordable food, period. It’s making sure that one’s economic place in our society is not an arbiter about how, when, and what you get to eat. It’s making sure that everybody gets fed.
Hunger is not a supply problem, it’s a distribution problem. It’s something within our means to eradicate. And that may sound very pie in the sky, no pun intended, but it is really true when you look at how much is grown in our fields and how much is left behind. It’s really a shameful equation.
Food justice is when you feed people, you empower them. When you starve them, you keep them down. There’s been a lot of talk in this last year around different types of justice – racial, social, etc. To me food justice overlaps with racial justice. I’ve had to remind people, even within my organization, that what Food Forward does is a racial justice action, because the food we are giving away is nourishing people who are fighting on the frontlines of racial justice struggles. Without the nutritious and healthy food that we’re giving away, they would have to seek food in other places. So we’re enabling their physical health which enables them to continue to fight. It’s an indirect correlation, but I think it’s very much there. But to be clear, I do not put Food Forward out as a racial justice organization.
ARTY: What are some of the communities that you serve, and what’s the scope of hunger in those communities?
RICK: Los Angeles, even as recently as the 1940s and ‘50s, was the largest agricultural producing county in the country. It now has the largest food insecure population in the country. What’s even more shameful is that Los Angeles has maybe the largest number of farmers’ markets of any city in the country, over 200 weekly. We have more food flow through the LA County area – whether it’s our highways, the ports, the northern part of the county where some of the food is grown, the wholesale terminal in downtown Los Angeles – than any city in America, maybe North America if you don’t count Mexico City. How is it that we have more hungry people than anywhere else in the country?
I want to look at this problem from every area of need. I want to know the mostly Hispanic immigrant families in Pacoima who are food insecure; I want to be able to touch the low income senior LGBTQ community in Hollywood, because they’re food insecure; I want to be able to reach the low income Asian restaurant worker community out in the San Gabriel Valley; I want us to reach farm workers in Ventura County who are food insecure and so on. Food Forward has always taken great pains to be as diverse and inclusive regarding whom food insecurity affects and whom we can back up in the sense of giving food to. We supply food to well over 350 direct service agencies. We’ve come out of a crazy year-and-a-half where we grew our produce distribution mostly through our wholesale program. That program distributes produce to eight counties in Southern California, plus seven additional states, and tribal lands reaching all the way to the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. We take great pains to lower any barriers.
We’re a business-to-business operation, for the most part. It’s very rare that we do in-person distributions anymore. Those are mostly done by our partners, and that’s purposeful because we want to empower them and not try to duplicate the muscles they’ve developed. From being in the trenches for 12 years with them, we know their biggest stumbling block is having a fresh produce pipeline. So, we make sure they are getting a free diverse menu of produce on a regular basis.
ARTY: On the global scale, there’s enough food for everyone, and yet there’s something like two billion people who are food insecure to some degree. Why is that? What’s wrong with the system?
Photo by Vanessa Bly courtesy of Food Forward
RICK: The cynic in me knows that there is definitely political will behind a lot of this. If you keep people hungry, you keep them quiet, you keep them docile. Right? It’s very hard to have a social uprising or political uprising if you can’t feed yourself or your children. It also means you’re spending a lot of time looking for food rather than challenging political stances or unfair policies. I believe there is truth to that.
I also believe that there is a lot of shame around food insecurity, and that a lot of the faces of people who are food insecure are still hidden. You see a lot of food insecurity in seniors, and, in many cases, single dwellers who are shut-ins who are no longer able to provide for themselves and are reliant on programs. You also see a great lack of nourishment and food insecurity in schools.
We don’t value the true cost of what it takes to create the food, and that’s why we are wasting a ridiculous amount of it from the farm level all the way to the consumer. The two-sided coin that Food Forward is most concerned with is food waste and food insecurity. Our solution solves both problems at the same time. In the last term of Obama, the federal government began to talk about food waste as an issue. But for four years the last administration went silent on the topic.
We hope to holistically educate people that when you throw away a box of strawberries because they got moldy in the back of your refrigerator, you’re throwing away the fertilizer that was produced to cultivate them, you throw away the water, you’re throwing away the fuel for the truck that brought them to your store, etc. It’s not a single bit of waste; there are dozens of elements that go into a single clamshell of strawberries that you’re throwing away. If the gravitas of the problem in its various realms – environmental, economic, social, biological – were truly brought out to the public, you’d see a lot less waste and you’d see a lot less food insecurity.
ARTY: At the farm level, is it overproduction that drives some of this waste?
RICK: We’re told that on average, a farmer will grow twice as much food as they need to break even. And they’ll harvest only what they can sell. So, there’s a huge amount of loss in the fields because of the lack of economic incentive to harvest the food that farmers don’t have a market for. There are these ridiculously wasteful products like romaine hearts; about 90 percent of that plant is left in the field and only the romaine hearts are sold. They chop off everything that’s not a romaine heart. In what world does that make sense?
ARTY: There is so much surplus in the fields, but only a very small percentage of that actually gets donated through systems like yours. How can more of that food be redirected so that more hungry people are fed?
Photo by Jeffrey Dawson courtesy of Food Forward
RICK: It starts with building relationships between the source and the end user, and trying to mitigate as many midpoints as possible. I believe that farmers want to feed folks. Yes, there are a lot of big, corporate farmers, but most farmers are growing food because they want to feed people. It’s probably heartbreaking for a farmer to plow a field under. We meet up with farmers at the farmers’ markets every week to connect them with folks whom they can help feed with their surpluses.
Our farmers’ market program has become a model for a lot of organizations. We’ve given them our handbook. The farmer has driven two hours with the produce that they’ve pulled out of the ground just hours ago, and maybe only three-quarters of it sells. The last thing they want to do is throw the remainder out. We show up with the endorsement of a local farmers’ market manager. They see our volunteers, they see our boxes, and in that moment, they can choose to either cart that extra produce home or throw it away, or better yet, give it to an organization that feeds the hungry. Right there, you’re making a direct connection from the heart. That connection can get lost when there are too many layers of logistics and monetary issues in between.
The more that we, as a society, can craft direct connections between food sources and food consumption, the more you can mitigate hunger.
ARTY: Are there policies that are in your way, and if you could change things, how would you change them?
RICK: There are some good policies that are coming into law very soon in California banning food scraps being thrown into the trash; it requires individuals and businesses to recycle food scraps and organic waste so that it can be composted. Hopefully we’re going to see some success with that. But that addresses the back end of the problem.
On the front end, a big impact could be made by widening tax deductions and making it easy for farmers to get the same tax deduction that Chipotle gets when they donate a burrito. Businesses get the full retail value of the burrito deducted from their taxes. Why is it that the farmer can only deduct a fraction of the market commodities price on what they donate? Why don’t you reward him or her at the same level that you do a retail partner? If that injustice was corrected and if there was parity there, I think you’d see a greater desire to move that produce out of waste streams and into hunger streams.
ARTY: What can people do at the individual level?
RICK: I like to say, “eat with intention.” What that means is a very personal thing, but come to your food as kind of a sacred ritual and as something we, most Americans, are lucky to have three times a day. Not only knowing and honoring that, but understanding how do I, as an individual, mitigate waste in my own space. There is so much you can do to move the needle as an individual and then collectively. It all starts with the intention of wanting to mitigate my food waste by 50 percent in the next month or year. You make that choice and you make it happen. Don’t wait for someone else to do it for you, because it’s one of the easiest things you can do yourself.
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