Over the past year, Americans have made great strides in dismantling white supremacy, symbolized, in part, by the taking down of racist statues. We are still far behind other settler colonial nations in indigenizing our street names, but recent events point to a growing awareness and efforts to forward this movement.
In October 2020, the Santa Barbara City Council voted unanimously to change the name of Indio Muerto Street, which means “dead Indian” in Spanish to Hutash st. a Chumash word that roughly translates to “Mother Earth.” A month later, the Phoenix City Council also unanimously agreed to change the name of “Squaw Peak Drive” to Piestewa Peak Drive in honor of Army Spc. Lori Ann Piestewa, the first known Native American woman to die in combat in the U.S. military, and the first female soldier to be killed in action in the 2003 Iraq War.
While leaders in the Black civil rights movement have been renaming and inscribing streets to honor African American history for years, this is a fairly nascent movement in the US, especially outside of areas without significant Native populations. Renaming place names is especially needed in states that are eliminating or trying to eliminate critical race theory in the classrooms.
Indigenizing street names is a critical strategy for raising awareness of the disproportionate ongoing harms settler colonialism imparts on Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups in the US.
I can perhaps best explain why in a personal way. I live on Portola Drive, which connects to Fremont Street. This means that every time I leave my house, I have to see the visual and civil celebration of the Portola Expedition and John Fremont.
The Portola Expedition on 1769-1770 marked the start of the Spanish colonization of California, which brought the first wave of relocation, enslavement and murder of California Indians under the justification of the Doctrine of Discovery.
Ohlone and expedition members viewing San Francisco Bay from Sweeney Ridge on November 4, 1769. Dennis Ziemienski, 2019. source
John Fremont was a major player in ushering in the American colonization and the third wave of genocide against California Indians. (The second wave was when California was under Mexican law.) In 1846, Fremont and his men took control of the California Republic during the Mexican-American war. That same year, He ordered and participated in several massacres of California Indians.
Being aware of my California history, I cannot not think about the valorization of these key moments in the genocide of millions of California Indians. I dream of a day when I live on Wéyotas Drive [source] that connects to Rumsen Street.
Wéyotas, or acorn, refers to the oak trees that grow native here and are a traditional food source for many California Indian peoples, and Rumsen is the name of the people whose ancestral territory I live on and with.
You can be a part of this movement by talking to a friend, sharing this blog, supporting existing efforts to indigenize place names, or learning your history and starting a movement of your own, in consultation with and under the free prior and informed consent of your local tribe of course.
If you feel moved, we’d like to invite you to write a letter to the California State Park and Recreation Commission by September 28 in solidarity with the Yurok Tribe’s campaign to change the name of “Patricks Point” State Park to SuE-meg Village.
According to a release, California State Parks is recommending the commission to approve the changing of Patrick’s Point State Park name to Sue-meg State Park at the Thursday, Sept. 30 meeting. Public feedback on this potential name change will be accepted by the end of the business day, Tuesday, Sept. 28.
Written comments may be emailed to planning@parks.ca.gov with the words “Patrick’s Point Name Change” in the subject line.
The author, Alexis Bunten, PhD, Bioneers Indigeneity Co-Director at Su-Meg Village, Patrick’s Point State Park, CA
After Hurricane Ida rolled through New York, Rebuild By Design immediately put out the call to a network of experts to understand what happened and what needs to be done moving forward. Managing Director Amy Chester wrote the following introduction and we encourage you to explore the full report that they rapidly produced.
– Teo Grossman, Bioneers Senior Director of Programs & Research
Hurricane Ida left a path of destruction and a collective head scratching – wondering what could have been done to prepare, what can be done to help those most affected, and what should be done to prevent a similar event from happening again.
However, we already have the answers. Experts in water management, data, transportation, parks and open space, regional planning, and emergency planning locally, nationally and internationally have been talking about the bold action we need to both prepare and respond to increasing severe climate events. We hope that the death and destruction we saw this month will never be repeated again.
Rebuild by Design asked 20 experts to offer “Concrete ideas of policies and projects that protect our communities from the flash flooding and loss of life which we experienced from Hurricane Ida.” We know this will not comprise all the solutions, but we hope it is the start of an understanding that we know what we need to do – collaborate across government silos, sectors and communities to enact it.
These essays will demonstrate that if we invest in green infrastructure on a large scale, changing the ways our government invests in projects, substantially increasing resources for the creation and maintenance of our green spaces, investing in data and more precise emergency alert systems which can be life-saving, building housing that is both safe and affordable, and doing with communities – from the start, we can thrive in the face of climate change while also creating jobs, increasing physical and mental health outcomes, restoring ecology, improving neighborhoods, and building and rebuilding a City even greater than the City we live in today.
Women comprise the backbone of global food production despite enduring a lack of access to land and food security. Now women are leading the movement against the negative impacts that a male-domionated extractive agricultural industry is having on our climate. By restoring the land through a community-led form of regenerative agriculture, women are transforming our relationship to food and agriculture as part of the global movement against climate change.
A key climate action pathway is where two major solutions overlap: the transformation of global food systems and the empowerment of girls and women. Achieving gender equity at household, community, and policymaking levels makes for improved agricultural yields and social outcomes. Agriculture is responsible for a significant share of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: almost one-quarter when accounting for land clearing. Climatic stresses on agriculture present significant food security challenges to large sectors of the population, especially rural women. In coming decades, adverse environmental and climate factors are expected to boost world food prices up to 30 percent and to increase price volatility. Amplifying the agency of rural female farmers—among the most marginalized groups in society and particularly vulnerable to food insecurity—is essential to building community resilience in the face of climate change. Reaching parity in training, education, credit, and property rights is critical: women own less land than men, while they do around 40 percent of labor related to food production. Just as important is recognizing the value of women’s traditional knowledge of land, farming, and culinary practices and drawing this wisdom into the center of agriculture policy.
Women are the backbone of food systems in many parts of the world, deeply involved in every step of the process, from planting and harvesting crops to the planning and preparation of meals. Yet they receive a small percent of agricultural advisory and support services globally, and their involvement at the production level does not translate to increased food security or financial benefits for them. Nine out of ten nations have at least one law impeding women’s economic opportunities, including access to credit and the ability to own land. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that if women farmers were given the same access to resources that male farmers have, they could increase their crop yields by 20 to 30 percent and reduce malnutrition 12 to 17 percent globally. Boosting the yields of women farmers helps keep forests standing, as farmers are less inclined to expand their crops into nearby forests when their existing land is productive. This solution could reduce emissions by 2 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. It highlights the deep connections between forests and food systems—integrating the two through agroforestry and ecological farming practices has been at the heart of a number of successful regenerative movements led by rural women. These initiatives, aimed at improving food and water security, result in restored ecosystems and demonstrate a powerful, multifaceted response to the climate crisis.
The effects of deforestation and industrial agriculture, compounded by warming temperatures, have resulted in severe drought conditions and food insecurity in many parts of the world. Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement organized women to plant trees on a large scale, restoring land and water resources and galvanizing a resurgence in traditional and organic farming in Kenya. The potency of women’s potential to innovate the food system is rooted in a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of nature and agriculture and a resourcefulness born out of their daily labor to support their families. As Maathai pointed out, women who walk miles to fetch water daily are keenly aware when sources run dry. They are often the first to be involved in assessing changes in the availability and quality of natural resources, and adaptively managing those resources to build resilience in the food chain.
Since 1977, the Green Belt Movement has planted more than 51 million trees and trained tens of thousands of women in trades such as agroforestry and beekeeping, serving as a model for women-led approaches to the transformation of food systems. The Women’s Earth Alliance Seeds of Resilience Project, in Karnataka, India, partners with a women-run seed-saving collective, Vanastree, which means “Women of the Forest.” In a region where chemical agriculture and climate instability are destroying forests, biodiversity, and people’s age-old control over their food sources and medicinal plant traditions, Seeds of Resilience supports women farmers who are promoting forest-based agriculture and small-scale food systems through conservation of traditional seeds. After participating in the year-long training, farmers went on to launch seven community seed banks, which increased seed biodiversity by 43 percent in the region. Women farmers also learned to become successful seed entrepreneurs who now grow and sell seed. These farmers train others to utilize drought and flood-resistant native seeds that secure healthy food and generate income. Earnings are reinvested into families and into training more women entrepreneurs. These seed banks act as a safeguard for preserving and storing critical seed varieties, alongside the landscape, which acts as a seed sanctuary itself.
These movements demonstrate the fierceness with which women are defenders and protectors of local resources, and the exponential effect of women’s leadership on food systems. Encouraging women’s agency at the farm level involves ensuring that education and training are equally accessible to them. This takes the support of both women and men, who must also recognize the benefits of inclusion for their families and communities.
In India, three-quarters of rural women work in agriculture, a sector that has been hit hard by decades of economic liberalization as the amount of arable land has dwindled as a result of government policies that support industrialization and corporatization of farming. In early 2021, women occupied the forefront of one of the biggest and longest-lasting protests in the country’s history, when farmers demanded that the government withdraw legislation that supported corporations at the expense of small-holders. In spite of the patriarchal traditions that have prevented women from achieving equality in agriculture in India, these protests were a rare grassroots uprising in which women and men stood arm in arm, despite an increasingly authoritarian response from government.
In the United States, there is a significant movement of women into agriculture. Family farms always involved women as part and parcel of agriculture, but women are now taking over farm operations or are farming on their own in increasing numbers. Between 1997 and 2017, women as principal agricultural producers increased from 209,800 to 766,500, one of the greatest demographic shifts in agricultural history. Because of resistance, barriers, and sexism in the traditional farming community, women are forming networks and organizations that provide them with safe spaces free from the pressures of “farming like a man.” The agricultural challenges they face are the same for all farmers: commoditized markets, toxic pesticides, depressed prices, and small or negligible profits. They encounter greater difficulties in obtaining loans and working with equipment designed for men’s bodies. What women bring to farming are qualities that emphasize personal relationships, a greater focus on sustainability for oneself and the land, regenerative techniques, networking, and collaborative learning. Around the world women carry forward Native and Indigenous knowledge of the land, climate, and plants, passing it on from generation to generation. For many reasons, women more easily recognize that our well-being is inseparable from the well-being of the soil. The restoration and renewal of farmlands means changing from a male-dominated form of extractive agriculture to a community-led form of regenerative agriculture that includes everyone.
When the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan in 2001 with the stated goal of bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, people who opposed a military reaction to the September 11th attacks found it difficult to voice their opinions. Corporate media outlets were beating the drum for war. They didn’t widely report that the Taliban were willing to give up Osama bin Laden to the U.S. if given proof of his guilt, or that neoconservatives were pushing George Bush, Jr. to implement their plan for regime change throughout the region. And so the invasions and occupations went forward.
After 20 years and $21 trillion spent on the “War on Terror”, a reckoning is revealing what many opponents warned from the beginning: waging war around the world does not make Americans any safer, waging peace does. Representative Barbara Lee of California was one of those opponents. She was the lone voice in Congress who voted against authorizing the President to wage war without Congressional approval. Peabody award winning filmmaker Abby Ginzberg has released her film “Barbara Lee: Speaking Truth to Power” about Representative Lee just in time to amplify this leading voice for global peace and security.
In her film, Abby features many aspects of Barbara Lee and how she came to be who she is today. We learn of her experience with racism as a girl growing up in El Paso, Texas, seeing that from the beginning, she was a fighter. Barbara wanted to be a cheerleader but was denied the opportunity because she was black. So she worked with the local NAACP chapter to integrate her high school cheerleading squad. We also learn about how Barbara got into politics and dedicated herself to her local constituents on a variety of issues.
I interviewed Abby in the flurry of the film’s release and spoke with her about why she chose to direct the film.
Abby Ginzberg
ABBY GINZBERG: Today is September 10th, and we are one day away from the 20th anniversary of the events that led to Barbara’s vote. I would say that the media has kind of woken up to her notoriety around that no vote. It wasn’t planned quite this way, but the film could not have asked to be released at a better time. I’m happy about it.
One of the reasons I made the film is because there were a lot of people around the country who had never heard of Barbara Lee. They may have known that there was one person who voted no on the AUMF (authorization for the use of military force), but they don’t know that she’s an African American woman who represents Oakland, California. So that was one of the reasons I made the film.
STEPHANIE WELCH, BIONEERS RADIO SENIOR PRODUCER: So tell us more about who Representative Barbara Lee is, and about the significance of her vote.
ABBY: Barbara Lee is my congresswoman. She represents Oakland, Berkeley, and San Leandro in the East Bay in California, across the way from San Francisco. She’s been in Congress since 1998 and has been one of its most progressive members.
Rep. Barbara Lee
Obviously, I knew about her “no” vote, and I knew that it was a vote of courage and morality. She was able to kind of take a breath when the rest of the country was in a kind of ridiculously feverish retaliatory mood. I thought her ability to find that peace and calm inside herself, to know what she felt she should do, was remarkable. So that provided some of the initial inspiration for me, but there is a lot more to her that justified doing a profile of her.
Let me say she was not a willing subject. Every time she saw me, I felt like she was greeting her dentist who was there with a drill to do a root canal. I mean, it was ridiculous. She really didn’t want to be followed by a camera. She didn’t want to have a mic on her, etc. So it took her a long time to warm up to the fact that I was going to make this movie come hell or high water, so she might as well cooperate.
What she says about it in retrospect is, “I think it took Abby twice as long to make the film as it would have had I cooperated more fully in the beginning,” which is true. But the timing is right, you know, all things happen for a reason.
There’s a piece in today’s Politico where they interviewed 17 people who were all involved in creating national security policy, etc., in the post 9-11 world, and among the things that they say in retrospect is ‘we wish we had taken a breath’. That was really what Barbara was asking for, if you listen to her speech on the floor of Congress when she is about to vote no. What she is saying is, let us take a moment; this is not the time for Congress to be giving up its war-making authority or its ability to approve war that the president’s trying to get us into. This is a time to take stock of where we are and proceed more deliberately moving into the future. Well, that is not what happened.
What happened is everybody but Barbara voted in favor of giving unlimited military authority to President Bush and to every president since. It’s still on the books. Barbara’s been fighting what started out as a very lone battle to get people to see the error of their ways. She’s finally been able to pass the repeal of the 2002 AUMF through the Democratic House, which is what the Bush administration used to take us into Iraq.
It’s been slow and steady, and as she would say, drip, drip, drip, drip. You just have to keep fighting, and eventually if you’re right, people are going to see the error of their ways and eventually join you. That has been, I would say, the lesson from her position vis-à-vis 9-11. She is not an I-told-you-so person. If you were interviewing her how she feels 20 years later, she would say, “As sad as I did on the day I voted no.” Because we’ve lost so many thousands of American and Afghani and Iraqi lives, and the women that are still left there that we weren’t able to get out, and translators, etc. She’s still mourning for both the lives lost 20 years ago and the mess on the ground that we have walked away from today.
STEPHANIE: In your film, you feature interviews with some of her fellow Congresspeople who didn’t vote with her. They voiced regret looking back now.
ABBY: Yes, and I was surprised. There are two points in the film that I think are worth highlighting there. One is when John Lewis said, I was really worried about her future, but in retrospect, I wish I’d voted with her. I should have been with her. And he voted the right way against the invasion of Iraq. And Lynn Woolsey said, if only one or two of us would have voted with her, it would have defused all this hatred and negative energy that landed in Barbara’s inbox and mailbox and kind of on her head.
It was very scary for her and her family right after 9/11 because people were writing to her and saying things like “You’re a terrible traitor”, “You don’t understand what’s going on in this country”, “How can we trust you”, and so on. She literally had to have 24-hour security services provided for her. She couldn’t travel. She was in Washington for weeks on end before she could come home.
None of it made her feel like she wished she had voted differently. But it took a while before the support letters came in. She received a heavy dose of hate mail and death threats. And her sisters were getting death threats.
Then it got better when people had a little more distance and were able to see that maybe Barbara was actually the one who understood what was going on in this country better than some other people.
STEPHANIE: You show a beautiful scene where everyone comes out in support of her in Oakland. Everybody’s there cheering her on. You’ve been in the Bay Area since 1972, which has been such a nexus for the peace movement. I remember the massive turnout against the invasion of Iraq War, which was unprecedented as it took place before the invasion occurred. We don’t see that level of mobilization against U.S. military action, even though they are engaged in many countries with drone strikes and forcing crippling sanctions on them. What is your reflection on where the peace movement is now?
ABBY: That’s a good question. It’s like, okay, which of the current disasters that we’re living through are we going to be on the streets about next? I just got a thing from the Women’s March saying they’re on the streets October 2nd, you better be with us around reproductive rights. I thought that fight was over back in 1973-74.
I would say that Barbara’s point of view is that we should always try to find a non-military solution to situations in which we claim we have enemies, a lot of people believe that, and after 20 years of not having been able to “eliminate the Taliban,” we need to figure out some other non-violent, non-military answers to the questions of how there’s going to be coexistence in this world without us blowing each other up.
I’m not really in some ways the right person to ask because I’m such a peacenik. Barbara says she’s not a pacifist. I think largely I am. Barbara grew up in a military family, I didn’t. I think I have kind of a little bit less regard for the military than Barbara does. I cut my teeth because I went to college when I was 17 as an anti-war demonstrator against the Vietnam War, and I’ve been in the streets ever since on anti-war issues. We’re in a complicated position when you’ve got a democratic president who’s really trying to kind of do the right thing in term of ending military presence in Afghanistan. Barbara’s very supportive of the idea that we had to get out of there, even though she too would critique how many people we left behind unnecessarily.
I think the peace movement is probably alive and well, and a little bit dormant at this point, but I think scratch the surface of the Bay Area and we’ll be out on the streets next time we have to oppose a military intervention.
STEPHANIE: Being in the Bay Area, you watched Representative Lee’s career, and portrayed beautifully how she evolved over the years, especially her mentorship with Ron Dellums.
ABBY: Yes, I’ve been a constituent of Barbara’s since I moved to the East Bay in 1992, so the entire time she’s been in elected office, she’s had my vote, both in the California Assembly and California state Senate, and in Congress. But you forget who somebody is when they start out, so some of those images of her early in her career, she seems so young and inexperienced. It’s less like a constituent and more as a filmmaker that I was like wow, she was young, and just kind of green about how do you get elected, and how am I going to do this. And I don’t drink, so my mother has to go to the bars with my sister and try to get me a few votes over a couple of beers, or whatever. So I appreciated being able to piece that together without having an active memory of what those days were like.
One thing that I was unhappy about, and there was nothing to do about it, was that once I was ready to interview Ron Dellums, which was sometime in 2018, he was already sick. I didn’t know it at the time. For nine months to a year, I would tell him every time I was coming to DC, and he would write back and say, I really don’t feel up to it. And I would just have to respect that. I feel like I missed my opportunity to get him on camera.
But I had to find a way to put him in the film and to let people know who he was, because for people who don’t know Barbara, they might not know who Ron Dellums is either. She never speaks about him without calling him Our Beloved Ron Dellums, and her mentor, and he really was. Barbara was a young, barely-out-of-college intern in his office where she first cut her teeth, and one of the very few black women on Capitol Hill at that point, and the fact that Ron had total faith in her and would take her anywhere or send her anywhere by herself really enabled her to kind of learn how the game works and to learn how to play it. I had to tell that part of the story, that she learned from one of the best.
One of the things that’s not in the film but I’ve heard her say many times since, is one of the lessons I learned from Ron was not to hit below the belt. Don’t turn people into enemies. If you can oppose somebody or create a point of difference, that’s fine, but don’t go out of your way to “one-up” them or put them down because it will come back to bite you. This is something I knew as a constituent of Ron’s.
He was a statesman. It helped that he was 6’4 and good-looking and had a commanding voice. Barbara is shorter than I am. She’s maybe five feet. She doesn’t have his stature in terms of height or presence or whatever, but she is channeling so many important lessons she learned from him, and that’s made her so much more effective than she might otherwise have been. Because he was somebody who was also said try to find common ground wherever you can with whoever you can. And Barbara’s strategy is, If you can join me in creating an international AIDS program and putting $15 billion into Africa, I’m going to stand with you even if you don’t agree with me on anything else. If you want to stand with me on the AUMF, I will stand with you even though we don’t agree on anything else.
Ron really paved the way for that type of legislative strategy; find your allies where you can and don’t worry about all the other issues that you disagree on.
STEPHANIE: Sadly, those below-the-belt tactics are everywhere in politics today.
ABBY: Yes, but not Barbara. She does not get down and dirty. As a result, she has a level of respect in Congress from others that is very deep. I think the reason so many members of the black Congressional Caucus and well-known members of Congress were willing to be in this film is because they respect her, and wanted to go on record saying that, and they learned from her and admired her, etc. Everybody from John Lewis to Ayanna Pressley to AOC and Gregory Meeks and so on talked to me.
STEPHANIE: You included the wonderful history about her and Oakland politics, just as she was getting started. Tell us about that part of her life and how dedicated she is to her local constituents?
ABBY: Barbara may not be as unique today as she was back then, but there are a couple of things that make her a little different. She went to graduate school as a social worker, and she went to Mills College a little bit later in life, so she probably didn’t start until she was in her early 20s. Barbara was a single mother on welfare with two kids trying to go to college where she did not have enough money for daycare and had to take her kids with her to class. That’s part of the story.
The other part of the story is that she was a local community activist working with the Black Panther party as part of their food program, which she bagged chickens and made sure people had enough to eat, and oversaw the distribution of shoes, bags of food, etc. It was part of what the Black Panther party was doing to take care of people’s needs in Oakland where the government was absolutely not responding at all. That’s how we got the George Jackson Free Clinic and sickle-cell testing and so on. Barbara was there on the ground. She wasn’t a member of the Black Panther Party but she was a community worker with them.
Barbara Lee protesting against nuclear weapons. Photo courtesy of “Speaking Truth to Power.”
That taught her a lot about community organizing, and later it became a really important base for her work on the Shirley Chisholm presidential campaign. It came to her as a bit of a surprise, but Shirley asked her if she was registered to vote, and she says, “Nah, I don’t believe in the system. I don’t believe in the Republicans. I don’t believe in the Democrats. No, I’m not registered to vote.” And Shirley says to her, “Little girl, you can’t even talk to me about working on my campaign unless you’re registered to vote, because unless you’re registered to vote, you’re not playing a real role in all of this.” So Barbara bit the bullet, registered to vote, went on and worked in the Shirley Chisholm campaign, and then became aware of the importance of voting, running for office, having somebody who reflects your values be the person you get to vote for. Because that was not typical back in those days, and I think just by stomping for Shirley and getting people registered to vote so they could vote in the primary where Shirley ran, etc., all that had a profound effect on Barbara and enabled her to see how she could have an inside and outside game at the same time; that she could be organizing and still protesting the things she thought weren’t going in the right direction, or if the Democrats sort of took a wrong position, she didn’t have to go along to get along.
I think the Shirley campaign made a difference in Barbara’s political life, and gave her a vision of what it would mean to run as a black woman. One of the themes that is embedded in the film from the beginning but has now emerged as something people talk about – this is a quote from Ayanna Pressley in the film. “The people closest to the pain should be the people closest to the power.” What that means is if you’re a black woman there are things in your life experience that are going to help you be a better legislator than somebody else who has not suffered being unhoused, who has not suffered ever being on welfare, who did not need a government loan to buy a house, etc. All of the things that Barbara went through helped coalesce around the kind of legislative agenda she first went for and then enacted in the California legislature and then took with her to Washington.
Every time the Republicans try to cut SNAP benefits from food stamp recipients, Barbara is there to say it was incredible help to me; it was a bridge over troubled water. Do not do this. This is not about people looking to be on food stamps, these are people who need help at a certain time in their lives, and if we help them, then what happened to me is I finally get on my own two feet and I’m able not to have to be on food stamps again. She had the food stamp experience. She had a federal loan. She went to college on various loans, etc. She’s a recipient of some government largess that she is fighting like hell to kind of keep in the budgets.
One of the things she is absolutely fierce about is the notion in the new infrastructure bill there should be money for childcare because she knows just how incredibly complicated it was to try to raise her children with no help.
I think it’s critical. But I think you listen differently. I would be fighting for that if I was in Congress as well, but I wouldn’t be able to say, “And when I was a young mother, I couldn’t afford daycare.” I had daycare or I wouldn’t have been able to work. It was as big of an issue in my life as it was in Barbara’s but I had saved enough money that I could actually pay for it.
I just feel like that point about lived experience, having faced challenges, and what that enables you to both say and the moral center that you then bring with you in a legislative body is really important.
STEPHANIE: And working with Bush on AIDS relief, you included that in the film.
ABBY: This goes to Barbara’s willingness to work across the aisle and find common cause around whatever the issue is. One of the things that Van Jones says in the film is, “Her relationship with President George Bush should be one for the history books because she was the only person who stood up against him on the 9-11 AUMF and she is the person who essentially got him to agree to look into and ask for in the State of the Union a $15 billion president’s emergency plan for AIDS relief in Africa.” Van’s point is that it doesn’t matter to her if you’re a Republican or a Democrat if she can get you to do the right policy thing. It was a heavy lift, and it turns out that when Bush decided he was really going to look into this and see if he could really support the creation of this new program, he did it on the low down. People were sworn to secrecy. So the people on his staff and around him in the cabinet who were working on this were not allowed to talk about it.
You meet Walter Jones in my film. He was a die hard NRA supporter, basically a really tried and true Republican, but once he got sick of writing condolence letters to members of his district that were being killed in foreign wars all around the world, he said, “I’ve got to do something about this,” and he essentially joined with Barbara early on, not in the last three years. He said, “I have now seen the errors of my ways,” and as he says in the film, “I don’t blame President Bush, I blame myself.” That’s profound.
She just sent me a picture of Walter Jones that she found where they’re both listening to testimony that related to not supporting this anymore. Kudos to Walter Jones. He’s passed now, but he could not wait to talk to me because he had so much admiration and respect for Barbara, and for their ability to work together even though they were literally coming from the most progressive and most conservative ends of Congress, and they had to meet in the middle.
STEPHANIE: You have the clip of Lynn Woolsey who encourages her to speak up about those experiences.
ABBY: Yes, Barbara had to be pushed. What she would say is this was part of her personal life; she’s not used to sharing parts of her personal life, therefore, she didn’t feel comfortable talking about it. And Lynn Woolsey said, “Well, if you and I don’t talk about it, since we’re the two welfare mothers here, who’s going to?” And that motivated Barbara to just let it go and start talking about it.
STEPHANIE: Also her experience with domestic violence?
ABBY: She was a victim of domestic violence. That led her to want to put the bill in on the Violence Against Women Act in California, and she got Pete Wilson, who was a Republican governor, to sign it. That was important.
Many of the issues that she has been most forceful on have come directly from her own experiences, and the difference between then and now is that she is happy to talk about how those experiences affect how we should be looking at these issues from a social perspective. So kudos to her for feeling comfortable enough to speak out about it.
STEPHANIE: You talk about her work with the Black Panthers, who were opposing police violence and the criminalization of black people, and in the course making your film, the George Floyd murder happened. You were able to include that.
ABBY: Barbara is seen in Milwaukee at a barber shop that employs formerly incarcerated men who’ve been taught barber skills in prison. She and her colleague, Gwen Moore, who represents Milwaukee, are looking for programs that work to lift people out of poverty.
One of the reasons we have mass incarceration in this country today is because of the long sentences that came along with marijuana arrests. And so now, even as we’re going state by state and marijuana is no longer illegal, etc., there are huge numbers of black and brown people who are in prison based on old marijuana laws. Barbara’s been trying to change the rules around cannabis and cannabis legislation and punishment.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee speaks in front of Oakland City Hall, Friday, June 5, 2020, during a solidarity George Floyd protest event. (Photo by Karl Mondon/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images)
And, yes, there’s a direct line between the Panthers calling out all-white racist police people in the city of Oakland whose entire training had been to essentially hate and gun down black people who were all over the city of Oakland, so it felt like an occupied town. And what’s happened with Sandra Bland and George Floyd and the number of other people. I would just say Barbara’s been on the right side of that debate from the beginning. I don’t know if she’s had any position on defunding the police, but she would certainly support alternative methods of intervention when you’ve got someone having a psychiatric break. Don’t call people with loaded guns to try to quell that situation. That’s not who’s needed. And as a social worker, she’d be the first to say you need someone with mental health experience to try to intervene.
So, yes, she’s been on the issue of mass incarceration. She’s certainly been on the issue to try to end police brutality and trying to find better means for dialogue between communities and those who are members of the police force. Oakland’s police force itself has been under a federal order for probably 20 years, and they’re just about maybe to get released from it, but God help us, because I don’t think they’ve totally learned their lesson yet.
And just a shout out to Thelton Henderson who had the Oakland Riders case for so many years. I’ve also made a film about Thelton. One of the things that he did was really forced a level of accountability, whether it was the Oakland Police Department or the California prison medical care system, to show up every month in his office and tell them whether or not they had accomplished the next set of goals, and often they had not. So having a federal judge who’s up to his own neck in trying to monitor the changes that had been part of whatever the judicial decree has been, he’s now retired and I don’t know exactly how the next round of oversight has been happening. But I would say that he, like Barbara, was a true role model in how to affect change. Part of that change is to force accountability, and she was really trying to do that with the Oakland Police Department.
STEPHANIE: I know you weren’t able to include this in your film, but Barbara Lee is also very passionate about environmental issues as well.
ABBY: Yes. What you can’t do in a film is everyone’s issue list. It has to all somehow relate back to the big picture you’re painting. But I would say Barbara is a total environmentalist. She’s championing the Green New Deal, and working hard to support those who are leading the fight.
One of the things that is interesting about Barbara is her ability—and it’s one of the things about what it means to represent Oakland—there is a way in which sometimes what we see in Oakland is essentially the canary in the coal mine. For example, on the AIDS crisis, when everybody thought it was just a white gay male disease, and Barbara was hearing from all members of the black community that it had infiltrated the black community, both men and women, gay and straight, her reaction was, okay, we need to understand there is a race-specific effect here that we need to call out. I tell that story in the film. But it would be true whether it’s about changes that need to happen in the tech industry, she is sensitive to the lack of diversity that is going on in all those big players, between Facebook and Twitter and whoever else. It’s not like she’s looking for the angle, the angle finds her, because it’s going to derive, to some extent, from her community in Oakland.
So the negative effects of climate change, what does it mean that there is more asthma among the African American and Latino community in Oakland? It means there are less protections in terms of air pollution, etc., and we are seeing the effects in the health of young kids. We see this with lead poisoning. The things Barbara is going to call out first are going to be the disparate impacts on communities of color in her district, and from that we often end up with progressive views and legislation and whatever about how to deal with these issues around the country.
For example, in the reproductive rights fight that we’re in the middle of, Barbara is really concerned about how poor women of color are being denied. Correctly, she could assume that wealthy white women are going figure out how to get an abortion even if they have to drive for a day or fly for a few hours or whatever, but what’s going to happen to African American and Latino women in Texas? It’s going to be terrible. That is going to be her focus, because they are the most heavily impacted. So much of her experience is reflected in their experience, and therefore this is kind of the platform that she speaks from.
So, people may know who Barbara Lee is, they may not. Someone just wrote a piece about a Civil Rights icon. Whatever. This is her moment because of 9-11. She was right and so many others were wrong. But she is not in an I-told-you-so moment. She’s in a moment of sad reflection. We should thank her for her vision. She had vision and understood that this would not have a good outcome, and she was right.
“Barbara Lee: Speaking Truth to Power” is available on Amazon Prime.
The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers” recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them. In his book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals how our idea of a healthy landscape is distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers.
Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist who covers wildlife management and conservation biology and holds a master of environmental management degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. His work has been featured in Science, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, VICE, Audubon Magazine, Orion, Scientific American, and many other publications.
The following excerpt is from Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.
Close your eyes. Picture, if you will, a healthy stream. What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle.
It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. It’s also wrong.
Let’s try again. This time, I want you to perform a more difficult imaginative feat. Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past—before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.
What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle. Instead it’s a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks; dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underfoot but sludge. The musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. If there’s a fisherman here, he’s thrashing angrily in the willows, his fly caught in a tree.
Although this beavery tableau isn’t going to appear in any Field & Stream spreads, it’s in many cases a more historically accurate picture—and, in crucial ways, a much healthier one. In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity; you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely for the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creek-side willows. Wood frogs croak along the pond’s marshy aprons; otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. The deep water and the close vegetation make the fishing tough, sure, but abundant trout shelter in the meandering side channels and cold depths. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean captured the trials and ecstasies of angling in beaver country when he wrote of one character, “So off he went happily to wade in ooze and to get throttled by brush and to fall through loose piles of sticks called beaver dams and to end up with a wreath of seaweed round his neck and a basket full of fish.”
And it’s not just fishermen and wildlife who benefit. The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report released by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year. Although you can argue with the wisdom of slapping a dollar value on nature, there’s no denying that these are some seriously important critters.
To society, though, beavers still appear more menacing than munificent. In 2013 I lived with my partner, Elise, in a farming town called Paonia, set high in the mesas of Colorado’s Western Slope. Our neighbors’ farms and orchards were watered by labyrinthine irrigation ditches, each one paralleled by a trail along which the ditch rider—the worker who maintained the system—drove his ATV during inspections. In the evenings we strolled the ditches, our soundtrack the faint gurgle of water through headgates, our backdrop the rosy sunset on Mount Lamborn. One dusk we spotted a black head drifting down the canal like a piece of floating timber. The beaver let us approach within a few feet before slapping his tail explosively and submarining off into the crepuscule. On subsequent walks we saw our ditch beaver again, and again, perhaps half a dozen times altogether. We came to expect him, and though it was probably our imaginations, he seemed to grow less skittish with each encounter.
Like many torrid romances, our relationship acquired a certain frisson from the certain knowledge that it was doomed. Although our beaver showed no inclination to dam the canal—and indeed, beavers often elect not to dam at all—we knew the ditch rider would not tolerate the possibility of sabotage. The next time the rider passed us on his ATV, a shotgun lay across his knees. The grapevine gave us unhappy tidings a few days later: Our ditch beaver was no more.
That zero-tolerance mentality remains more rule than exception: Beavers are still rodenta non grata across much of the United States. They are creative in their mischief. In 2013 residents of Taos, New Mexico, lost cell phone and internet service for twenty hours when a beaver gnawed through a fiber-optic cable. They have been accused of dropping trees atop cars on Prince Edward Island, sabotaging weddings in Saskatchewan, and ruining golf courses in Alabama—where, gruesomely, they were slaughtered with pitchforks, a massacre one local reporter called a “dystopian Caddyshack.” Sometimes they’re framed for crimes they did not commit: Beavers were accused of, and exonerated for, flooding a film set in Wales. (The actual culprits were the only organisms more heedless of property than beavers: teenagers.) Often, though, they’re guilty as charged. In 2016 a rogue beaver was apprehended by authorities in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, after barging into a department store and rifling through its plastic-wrapped Christmas trees. The vandal was shipped off to a wildlife rehab center, but his comrades tend not to be so lucky.
Although our hostility toward beavers is most obviously predicated on their penchant for property damage, I suspect there’s also a deeper aversion at work. We humans are fanatical, orderly micromanagers of the natural world: We like our crops planted in parallel furrows, our dams poured with smooth concrete, our rivers straitjacketed and obedient. Beavers, meanwhile, create apparent chaos: jumbles of downed trees, riotous streamside vegetation, creeks that jump their banks with abandon. What looks to us like disorder, though, is more properly described as complexity, a profusion of life-supporting habitats that benefit nearly everything that crawls, walks, flies, and swims in North America and Europe. “A beaver pond is more than a body of water supporting the needs of a group of beavers,” wrote James B. Trefethen in 1975, “but the epicenter of a whole dynamic ecosystem.”
Beavers are also at the center of our own story. Practically since humans first dispersed across North America via the Bering Land Bridge—replicating a journey that beavers made repeatedly millions of years prior—the rodents have featured in the religions, cultures, and diets of indigenous peoples from the nations of the Iroquois to the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest. More recently, and destructively, it was the pursuit of beaver pelts that helped lure white people to the New World and westward across it. The fur trade sustained the Pilgrims, dragged Lewis and Clark up the Missouri, and exposed tens of thousands of native people to smallpox. The saga of beavers isn’t just the tale of a charismatic mammal—it’s the story of modern civilization, in all its grandeur and folly.
Despite the fur trade’s ravages, beavers today face no danger of extinction: Somewhere around fifteen million survive in North America, though no one knows the number for certain. In fact, they’re one of our most triumphant wildlife success stories. Beavers have rebounded more than a hundredfold since trappers reduced their numbers to around one hundred thousand by the turn of the twentieth century. The comeback has been even more dramatic across the Atlantic, where populations of a close cousin, the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), have skyrocketed from just one thousand to around one million. Not only have beavers benefited from conservation laws, they’ve helped author them. It was the collapse of the beaver—along with the disappearance of other persecuted animals, like the bison and the passenger pigeon—that sparked the modern conservation movement.
But let’s not pat ourselves on the backs too heartily. As far as we’ve come, beaver restoration has many miles farther to go. When Europeans arrived in North America, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton guessed that anywhere from sixty million to four hundred million beavers swam its rivers and ponds. Although Seton’s appraisal was more than a bit arbitrary, there’s no doubt that North American beaver populations remain a fraction of their historic levels. Will Harling, director of the Mid Klamath Fisheries Council, told me that some California watersheds host just one one-thousandth as many beavers as existed before trappers pursued them to the brink of oblivion.
That story, of course, isn’t unique to California, or to beavers. Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. You’re probably familiar with most of the colonists’ original environmental sins: They wielded an ax against every tree, lowered a net to catch every fish, turned livestock onto every pasture, churned the prairie to dust. In California’s Sierra Nevada, nineteenth-century gold miners displaced so much sediment that the sludge could have filled the Panama Canal eight times. We are not accustomed to discussing the fur trade in the same breath as those earth-changing industries, but perhaps we should. The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of countless streams, and imperiled water-loving fish, fowl, and amphibians—an aquatic Dust Bowl. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and the Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. “[Beavers’] systematic and widespread removal,” wrote Sharon Brown and Suzanne Fouty in 2011, “represents the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds.”
If trapping out beavers ranked among humanity’s earliest crimes against nature, bringing them back is a way to pay reparations. Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year.
In this second of a two-part program, we plunge into the mind-bending proposition that we get a second chance to remake our broken food economy. Bren Smith, co-founder and co-Executive Director of GreenWave, has created a revolutionary polycultural farming model that has low upfront costs, is easily scalable, and can help mitigate climate change. It’s called regenerative ocean farming and aims to redesign the food economy away from destructive profit-driven practices and agribusiness monopolies in favor of democratizing the food economy.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: Some historians, ecologists and agriculturalists suggest that the downfall of human civilization began with the invention of agriculture. As our hunter-gatherer societies transitioned into permanent settlements, it wasn’t just the damage they did to the land, which was formidable over long periods of time.
Farming also led to the creation of surpluses – enter the first literal bean counters. Soon wealth began to concentrate at the top of the rising pyramid.
In the 20th century, industrial agriculture morphed into agribusiness. It’s a tightly monopolized, ferociously profit-driven partnership between giant corporations and the politicians who love them. It’s a pyramid scheme of a different kind: crucial federal policies that support and defend corporate hegemony. It’s known as “farming the government.”
Good luck breaking into that game.
Meanwhile, forget the shining Jeffersonian ideal of a thriving nation of independent small farmers. Farmers have devolved in great part into indentured contractors.
Altogether, we’re left with a degraded food system that’s impossibly vulnerable to all manner of climate shocks, market swings and dis-employment.
But what if we had it to do all over again – to start with a clean slate? That, says regenerative ocean farmer Bren Smith, is the twice-in-a-civilization opportunity beckoning us today.
BREN SMITH: I feel like one of the real deficits of our economy right now is the absence of agency. Right? Of just a regular person like me being able to build a small farm, feed my community, just be in a space of hope and solutions.
HOST: Bren Smith is co-founder and co-Executive Director of GreenWave, a nonprofit dedicated to regenerative ocean farming. Its polycultural farming model grows seaweed and shellfish, and it’s the most affordable food production on the planet, and it regenerates marine biodiversity and mitigates climate change. We spoke with Bren Smith in an online conversation.
BS: One of the keys, I think, in the model is that it’s affordable and replicable. Right? The barrier to entry is very low. Low capital costs, minimal skill requirements. Because it takes between $20 – $50,000 a year to start a farm, depending on where you are and the depths. And you can be up and growing your first year.
The key is to grow things that are zero inputs, that take no feed, no fertilizer, no freshwater, of course, no land, and that makes it hands down the most sustainable food on the planet. Anybody that’s growing zero input food I think is going to have a real advantage and opportunity in this new emerging climate economy because freshwater prices are going to go up, feed/fertilizer prices are all going to go up.
And that’s so key, because that low barrier to entry is the secret to replication and the secret to scale. Right? But not scale through a thousand-acre farms run by single companies where all the benefits are going not to the community but to a few people at the top. Instead it’s network production.
HOST: But Bren Smith is at heart an impassioned fisherman. For him, it’s also about right livelihood, independence, freedom, justice, and solidarity with other working fishermen. It’s about making a living on a living planet by spawning a flush of economic coral reefs.
BS: So we think of it as GreenWave reefs, where you have 50 small-scale farms in an area, a processing hub and a hatchery in a struggling community, and then a ring of entrepreneurs doing these value-added products, and just figuring out all the ways to weave these crops into the economy. And then you replicate those reefs up and down the coasts. That allows for massive, massive scale, large climate impacts, but build a regenerative economy to ensure that everybody benefits.
That allows us both to grow huge amounts of food in small areas. My farm used to be 100 acres and now I’m down to 20 acres growing more food than before. But it also has a low aesthetic impact. And I think that’s important, right? Our oceans are these beautiful, pristine places, so the farm’s below the surface, and all you see are some scattered buoys
The other thing is we don’t privatize that space. Anybody in the community can come in, fish, swim, kayak. The best commercial fishing in the area is actually surrounding my farm because the species come to hide and thrive and eat there. My only right is the right to grow shellfish and seaweeds. Everything else is just an open space. I think that’s really important. Like we don’t want to privatize our lands the way we do in land-based agriculture. Let’s really figure out a strategy of collaboration, of protecting the commons instead of privatizing it.
HOST:An enthusiastic World Bank study found that if five percent of US coastal waters were developed to farm seaweed, it could create 50 million jobs and the protein equivalent of 2.3 trillion cheeseburgers.
With low upfront costs, GreenWave’s model is easily scalable.
They’ve created a menu of ways to help farmers who want to dive into the business. It’s particularly focused on lifting the burdens of history – on collaborations with communities that have been historically left behind, shut out, or shut down.
BS: You know, there’s so many folks fighting for reparations on land, right, to get black farmers and Indigenous communities, giving them back their rights to the land. Suddenly in the ocean, this can be right from the gate. This is a huge issue in the US.
So right now, indigenous communities have no right to farm, guaranteed right to farm on the waters outside their towns and villages. So they’re worried all the momentum around this might create the next sort of white land grab. But of the ocean.
So, for example, we just supported the first Indigenous-owned seaweed hatchery in the country, and that was in collaboration with Dune Lankard and a bunch of other, sort of, heroes of the indigenous movement. And that’s so important, right, that indigenous communities own their own seed.
We are partnering with Indigenous communities and leaders like Dune to develop what would be a set of principles and rights of ocean use and farming and preferencing for Indigenous communities.
We’ve got this high touch and low touch program. The high touch targets specifically indigenous communities and fishermen directly affected by climate change. We help permit, we help set up the farms, we develop business plans, we connect and create foreign contracts between buyers and growers, sort of a whole range of benefits.
But then to address the 6,000 people on our waiting list for programming, we’ve developed a platform: a toolkit, where farmers are able to like type in some different conditions, like their depths, their bottom type, lease size, and it actually spits out a full-farm design tied to a budget and a gear list, all these sort of things I wish I had two decades ago.
And then the farmer data dashboard so you can track what’s happening on your farm. And then a digital co-op. So we’re rolling out each piece over the next few years, and I think that’s going to be vital to continue to give people the agency to start this on their own, but tools so they don’t make the same mistakes I did over the years, and increase the chance of success.
HOST: Start-up costs depend on the location, but on average an ocean farmer with 20 acres, a boat and about $20,000 can eventually earn $90,000 to $120,000 per year once the farm matures, while generating approximately 150,000 shellfish and ten tons of seaweed per acre. In other words, you don’t have to be rich to get in the game. And the ocean could care less what race, ethnicity, religion or gender you are.
BS: You know, our farmers are from all walks of life. We have young land-based farmers that can’t afford land because it’s so expensive for land-based farming; we’ve got veterans; we’ve got retired cops and firemen, things like that. One of the farmers that has really risen to the top is Catherine Puckett, and she grows oysters, clams, and seaweeds out on Block Island, Rhode Island. She’s got a pink boat and she’s got an all-male crew, and the male crew hates being on a pink boat. They complain about it all the time, but they’ve got a full-time, year-round job on this island. Usually you have to leave, right, in the winter. And maybe that’s the future of what this Blue economy looks like.
What happens if it’s not just about justice, like equity for women, but women are the architects of this new economy, right, making us white, crusty men work on their pink boats. Like that’s kind of—[LAUGHS] that’s really kind of exciting.
We actually did this listening tour of women. Because I woke up one day. I was like there are so many women, like hatchery owners and farmers, and, you know, doing start-ups. We asked them, like why, what are you doing here? [LAUGHS] And they said, well, in like—its history hasn’t been written yet; it isn’t this calcified thing of a male run industry that we can actually participate and maybe build something different. Right? So it’s not just about food but actually sort of bringing to bear the power, the creativity, the vision of folks that have been excluded.
So one of the things we really care about is, you know, fighting injustice and addressing poverty, making sure the folks that have been left behind by the Industrial Revolution or were systematically excluded, that they are in the front of this Blue revolution. The hatcheries, like land-based infrastructure, is a way to do that. You don’t have to be a fisherman. You don’t have to be someone who’s been on a boat many years to participate in this and to benefit from it. GreenWave’s Hatchery is one of the poorest communities on the East Coast, and we have a new BIPOC program, like a jobs pipeline for folks of color to come in, learn how to run hatcheries. It’s a paid program. You know? There aren’t thousands of people trained in running a seaweed hatchery, for example, so that opportunity to create that pipeline, but create it in the right way has been really key.
HOST: This, says Bren Smith, is the crux of the twice-in-a-civilization moment. But the Blue Revolution is actually the first time we have the opportunity to intentionally build a food system from the bottom up – and to democratize it.
BS: We don’t have to unravel Big Ag. Right? We don’t have to unravel land ownership and all those things. What we can do is start with a clean slate and build it from the bottom up, and embed these principles of justice, like, into the DNA of this new economy. Let’s not privatize seed. Let’s make sure that beginning farmers can access ocean property at low cost.
This sector, as we’re building this economy from the bottom up, it raises all these fascinating issues, like, can we correct injustice of the past by building it right in the ocean. Right? Let’s do agriculture right.
The only way we’re going to do that is if this is not me. Right? I mean, I developed GreenWave as a strategy in planned obsolescence, quite honestly, just because I never planned, never wanted to run a nonprofit. I just want to be on my farm and die in my boat.
HOST: Bren Smith says it turned out that was the right strategy; bringing together leaders from all walks of life to take on building this new Blue Economy, tapping into blue collar innovation. The way he sees it, the models will only get better and better.
BS: I expect in 10 years I’m going to go out to do regenerative ocean farming and it’s going to be, look completely different, right, in all these great ways. And it’s actually a huge challenge, right? There’s a tsunami of interest. But that’s where the power is.
We need all hands on deck, to grapple with the challenge of growing food underwater. It’s the most volatile place to grow food on the planet. We can’t see the crops we grow, And I can’t control my soil, my soil turns over a thousand times a day. So that volatility demands creativity from all walks of life.
And it’s this opportunity to build a collaborative community-based ethic and culture of sharing and cooperation.
HOST: This blue renaissance means developing new economic models anchored in values of economic democracy, justice and collaborative creativity. That’s where the Blue New Deal surfaces.
More when we return…
HOST: The GreenWave model is partly anchored in what are called “anchor institutions.” Unlike the corporate hit-and-run economics that invade communities, pipeline the wealth out, then move on to the next mark, anchor institutions are rooted in community for the long haul. They’re sometimes called “eds and meds” – educational and medical institutions.
In growing numbers of communities in the US, they sign on as stable, long-term purchasing partners that directly support community-based small entrepreneurs, worker-owned businesses and co-ops. The goal is to grow transgenerational community-based wealth and build a more decentralized, democratized economy.
BS: You know, one of the challenges of the food economy, as it’s sort of the farmers’ market, CSAs and the high-end restaurants is that it’s really hard to scale that, and it remains boutique. Right? And institutions are one of the answers to that.
So, you know, Google serves up, you know, over 100,000 free meals a day. And so that’s a key outlet for our crops. Right? Then the hospital economy is incredible. We haven’t done this yet, but I think it’s a huge opportunity. Hospitals are hard at work creating nutrition programs serving good food in order to get people healthy again or keep them healthy. Right? So the good local food we grow needs to be a key to that.
I’m here in New Haven, which is half the city, of land owned, is owned by nonprofits, a university – Yale – and a hospital system, also Yale. And the institutions really need to start playing their proper role and investing in the community. I mean, right now, it’s extremely extractive, and, you know, Yale has one of the biggest—the biggest endowment in the country.
So institutions are a key role for us in the reef model. We work closely with places like University of Santa Barbara, with Woods Hole, University of Connecticut, to keep our farmers ahead of the climate curve. Right? Because our waters are changing so fast. Water temperatures are going up that I need to be growing a whole different set of crops 15 years from now. And the scientists have just been absolutely key to that, I think.
So that’s like in the labs. But then in the cafeterias, we can introduce the entire new young generation of folks to things like sea greens, sea vegetables, the broader palate of shellfish. Those anchor institutions, I think, are absolutely key to our success.
HOST: What may have seemed like a drunken sailor’s dream is getting real. Every coastal state in North America has requested GreenWave’s ocean farms. Humboldt Bay is home to California’s first commercial, open-water seaweed farm. Led by Humboldt State University and supported by GreenWave, this pilot project stands to kickstart an industry where environmental sustainability and economic benefits go hand in hand – along a very long coastline.
Dozens of countries around the world are now implementing the model. As part of its reparations program, New Zealand granted 12,000 hectares to the Indigenous Maori people that can be used for ocean farming.
Needless to say, there’s a clash between these twice-in-a-civilization models – between the past and the future. In the ring, it’s concentrated corporate power taking on the upstart challenger: a democratized, decentralized economy of distributed ownership and wealth.
BS: GreenWave, we view our role as helping build a movement, right, so that there’s just thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people hard at work trying to figure this out, so that’s not about GreenWave controlling or owning or franchising or anything. Those are tools of the old economy. Right? Our model is around collaboration, shared learning, shared innovation. I think that’s going to allow us to replicate and increase that learning curve faster and faster.
And in fact, when we train farmers, they signed a document that says they agree to share all their learnings. And there are farmers that come and they’re like, No, no, I don’t want to do that. So we’re like, okay, great, go succeed. But we really believe that that principle of collaboration, sharing, and community learning is just absolutely vital.
HOST: Bren Smith says that one of the great fears he has is that big, predatory companies will take advantage of the innovation and work that GreenWave and others have done to build hatcheries and processing plants and to stimulate the market.
BS: And now we’re seeing big companies come in, companies like Trident. There’s oil companies getting interested, involved. And like Trident, for example, is leasing grounds to farm in Alaska.
It’s clear to a lot of us and definitely in the ocean space, we need new investment models, right? Our waters are swimming with – let’s call them fuzzy sharks. Right? These folks have made an incredible amount of money on Wall Street, and then are coming to sort of do good, to have legacies, things like that, which is great. Right? And I’ve met a lot of these folks. They need to understand, like if they’re bringing the old models, they’re in climate denial.
HOST: When Bren says “climate denial”, he means that while these companies may acknowledge the existence of climate change, they somehow still believe they can make high returns in the short run using models from the old, extractive, dirty economy. The investment models that Bren Smith favors are not only climate friendly, but farmer friendly as well. For instance, they offer creative repayment options to pay back debt if they need a loan to get started.
BS: So revenue with a cap, right, is one model, where you get like a two percent loan; you don’t pay it back until you start making money, and then you start paying it back, and you fully pay back the loan plus two percent. Like that’s a really food friendly and ag friendly kind of business model. And I think the solidarity economy, the just transition movement have really taught us a lot about how do we match our farms, what we produce, and the value we provide to society, but allow it to scale with the right kind of money in a healthy, regenerative way.
HOST: Fuzzy sharks aside, Bren Smith sees the very real opportunity to tap the ocean for climate solutions. That vision is at the heart of a Blue New Deal proposal that he drafted with marine biologist and author Ayana Johnson and with Chad Nelsen of the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation.
It’s about “reimagining the ocean as a protagonist, as a place where we can build real climate solutions.”
During the 2020 Presidential election, Bren Smith participated in a CNN town hall with candidate Elizabeth Warren. He threw some policy bait in the water.
BS: My oyster farm was destroyed by two hurricanes. Now warm waters and acidification are killing seed coast to coast and reducing yields. Those of us on the water, we need climate solutions and we need them now. The trouble is the green new deal only mentions our oceans one time. This is despite the fact that our seas soak up more than 25 percent of the world’s carbon. So what’s your plan for a Blue New Deal for those of us working on the ocean?
ELIZABETH WARREN: I like that!
BS: How do we make sure that all of us can make a living on a living planet?
EW: So thank you. I think it is a great question and I think he has got it exactly right. We need a Blue New Deal as well. Good for you! [Applause]
BS: You know it is bizarre that the Green New Deal mentions the ocean one time. I mean, we just forget about the oceans when we think about solutions, about policy. It’s all about addressing overfishing and things like that, which are all important.
So yeah, I asked Senator Warren about the Blue New Deal, and the great thing about Senator Warren, she immediately rolled out a plan. One of the key players in that was Dr. Ayana Johnson, who’s a dear friend and inspiration, who helped really shape that piece of policy. And as far as I know, it was the first time the ocean became sort of—it was part of the policy debate and framework. FOX News actually attacked regenerative ocean farming. The first time it had ever been said, and to me—People asked like what are your metrics of success. Well, it was attacked on FOX News. Excellent. [LAUGHTER]
HOST: The goal, says Bren Smith, is to build the principles of justice and ownership into any Blue New Deal policies. One example is ensuring that communities have control over the hatcheries, farms and processing plants that operate locally.
BS: Here in Connecticut, we wrote something called the Seaweed Jobs Bill, which created a framework because there was no law on seaweed farming in this area. So in these pieces of legislation, we can mandate, for example, the farms need to be locally owned, so it doesn’t look like Iowa, where most of the pigs that are raised in Iowa are owned—they’re companies that are out of state. Let’s actually control and limit the size of the farms. Right? A certain amount of acreage. Let’s have leases up for renewal every five to 10 years so there’s a lever of democratic control for communities. So I think the Blue New Deal and the state-to-state work on this opens up an opportunity.
Some of the components are training 10,000 young people to be sort of like a civilian conservation corps, but for the ocean, to plant mangroves, grasses, kelp, shellfish, creating a climate fund that will pay farmers for the positive things they do. Right? For capturing carbon, nitrogen for rebuilding reefs
Food security. So let’s have farmers out planting those public grounds for clams so communities can come out and collect their own food, especially in times like this when we have food system breakdown.
So the Blue New Deal, I think, is a place where the food movement, the agricultural movement can rally behind, and let’s match the energy around the Green New Deal, the vision on agriculture, but let’s do it underwater too.
And so the big question is: Will public policy people get behind us to defend this other vision? The folks that just want to be as extractive as possible, concentrate benefits at the top, have farmers just like as workers working for bosses in the fields. Right? Are we going to let that happen or are we going to be like, we have the control and the power to build something beautiful for once. Right? But we need a movement behind that. Right? We really need them defending this vision and really fighting for it.
HOST: As Bren Smith observes, the challenge is whether the high tide of global regenerative food and farming movements can lift enough public policy boats to launch the Blue Revolution.
If, as the saying goes, the world is your oyster, then it’s high tide for personal agency and collective action to make something beautiful this second time around.
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.
This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
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.
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