Food Waste: A Major Contributor to Climate Change

Dana Gunders was one of the first people to raise the alarm about how much food goes to waste and the subsequent impacts on our environment, food security, and the economy.  As a Senior Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, she authored the landmark report about food waste, called Wasted and testified before Congress on the topic. She is the author of Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook and currently serves as the Executive Director of ReFED, a collaboration of businesses, nonprofits, foundations, and government leaders that analyze the problem of food waste and develop practical solutions. Dana was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.

ARTY MANGAN: Before 2012, there were very few people aware of the issue of food waste until you wrote a report about it. How did you get interested in the topic?

DANA GUNDERS: I was working on a sustainable agriculture project at the NRDC, and I was put in charge of the waste group, which was looking at plastics waste in farming. But as part of that research, I started stumbling upon the numbers of how much food was going to waste. We were trying to get farmers to be five or ten percent more efficient with their water and to use a little less fertilizer, but on the other hand almost half the food grown was not being eaten. I thought it was crazy that that much food was going to waste and no one was talking about it or working on it. That lit my fire on the topic.

ARTY: How is food waste defined?

DANA: There’s still not full agreement on how to define it;  at ReFED, we define food waste as any food that goes to the landfill, incineration, down the drain, or does not get harvested. But we use the term “surplus foods,” which we define to be any food that goes unsold or uneaten across the food system including in homes.

Where does that food go? Only about three percent gets donated; most of it goes somewhere else whether it’s composting or anaerobic digestion or some of the waste destinations that I mentioned. Even if something is being recycled or composted, that’s not necessarily the best use of that product. So, we want to frame how much is surplus in the first place and then look at where it’s going.

ARTY: How much food is wasted?

DANA: At ReFED, we have done an updated analysis, and our estimate is that about 35 percent of food falls into that surplus category of being unsold or uneaten. When you look at just what’s going to the landfill or incineration that is about 24 percent.

ARTY: The book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plans Proposed to Reverse Global Warming places  food waste near the top as a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. What are the impacts of food waste on climate?

DANA: The impacts are enormous. In their most recent analysis, Drawdown ranked reducing food waste as the number one solution to climate in one of their two scenarios. It takes a huge amount of resources to produce food, especially beef and dairy products. They have a really high greenhouse gas impact in their production. So, when we don’t use those products, all of that goes for naught. When food goes to landfills – in the US, food is the number one product entering landfills – it decays and produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

The World Resource Institute predicts that we will need 56 percent more food in 2050 than we need today. Where is that food going to come from? Will we cut down more rainforests and native grasslands in order to plant more food, or will we just make better use of the food we’re already growing? By reducing food waste, we can reduce the amount of land that needs to be converted for agriculture and that is an important climate benefit.

ARTY: What are some of the other resources that are squandered when food is wasted?

DANA: Agriculture is the number one user of water around the world, so when we use water to grow something that doesn’t get eaten, it’s a huge waste. Our estimate is that for the US, the equivalent of about 14 percent of our freshwater goes to wasted food. 

ARTY: I would guess that very few people know that food is the number one thing going to landfills. It’s an interesting commentary on our society. In a sense, affluence encourages waste. In what way does our culture encourage food waste?

DANA: In many different ways. In the US, food is a lower percent of our budget than in any other country. So, from a strictly financial incentive perspective, we don’t have the same incentive to conserve food as in other places. 

Another is that we place a huge value on choice and on variety in our culture. The cost of that in terms of how much food we need to keep around so that we can have that choice and have that variety is enormous. The average grocery store carries about 50,000 different products, and they do that so you can walk in and have your choice any time of day. At its core is our expectations as consumers. 

In our culture, we don’t have a mindfulness towards waste or wasting less than we do for some other issues. If I were to walk down the street and throw out a half sandwich on the sidewalk, people would think I was crazy, but if I throw it into the garbage, they wouldn’t think much of it. Littering has a really tall profile in our consciousness, but throwing food out doesn’t. We need to become more mindful as a society around the value and impact of what we’re throwing out. 

ARTY: What are some of the practical strategies for reducing waste at home?

DANA: My favorite statistic that has been proven in several different studies is that 75 percent of Americans say they waste less than the average American. They don’t think they do it. The challenge is to convince people to manage their food with a mindset of not wasting.

The other challenge is that you really have to think upstream because once you have a rotten tomato or a science experiment in the back of your fridge, it’s too late. The way that you reduce waste is to actually manage your food better from the start. And that begins with shopping. 

Strategy number one is to be realistic when you’re shopping. Shopping is the point when you commit to the food. Many of us are aspirational when we’re in the grocery store. We are going to eat better, we’re going to cook more, we’re going to feed our kids better, and then the realities of the week happen and some of the food doesn’t get used. So, being realistic when you’re shopping about the specific week ahead of you is a helpful way to reduce what eventually gets thrown out. 

The best strategy is to plan your meals and to use a shopping list. That is extremely effective in wasting less food. It’s also a tall order for some people, so if that’s not you, then just taking a look in your cart before you check out and make sure you have an actual time you can imagine using that food that week. The number one strategy is to be realistic when you’re shopping.

A second is to freeze your food. The freezer is like a magic pause button, and you can freeze so many more things than you may realize. Fresh bread does really well in the freezer, especially if you slice it. Then you can take each individual slice out and toast it when you are ready to use it. Pasta, pasta sauce, cheese if you shred it, eggs if you take them out of the shell and scramble them but don’t cook them, milk as well. Leftovers, maybe you cooked too much and you ate some the next day, but now you’re sick of it. Just throw it in the freezer and take it out a week later. 

Number three is understanding the dates on food – “sell by”, “use by”, and “best by.” Many people misinterpret those dates and throw food out prematurely. Those dates are not about the safety of the food and they’re not federally regulated. They’re a message from the brand that this food is at its top quality until that date. But they are not meant to say the food is bad or will make you sick after that date. Typically, if the food looks fine, smells fine, tastes fine, even after the date, it’s okay to consume.

The exceptions to that rule are those products that pregnant women should avoid, which are deli meats, ready-to-eat sandwiches, and sushi-type products. 

ARTY: What are some of the ways state or federal policies unintentionally result in food waste?

DANA: Many food safety laws are creating quite a bit of waste. For instance, you can’t donate anything that’s been out for more than four hours. Food safety laws tend to be very local per state, so it varies, but generally speaking, the food safety rules are very cautious and very broad. If anything is left out for four hours or needs to be maintained at X temperature, and if it’s been three degrees below that, then you can’t donate it or sell it.

We now have a lot more precise technology to monitor temperature exposure of foods than we used to, but I don’t think the food safety laws have caught up with that. They are still very broad; I think there’s an opportunity for the rules to be more precise by monitoring temperature. 

Around the country, different states have different rules. One of the most egregious is Montana, which requires a sell-by date on milk that is 12 days after it’s produced, whereas most milk gets a date that’s between 21 and 28 days after it’s produced. Montana also requires milk to be discarded after that date. So, you have a huge amount of milk going to waste in Montana because of that law.

Mislabeling – labels have to be right, and so they can cause waste if, for example, the label didn’t include an allergen that was supposed to be included. 

ARTY: What are some current policies that are successfully reducing the problem? 

DANA: One of the key policies that we think is very low-hanging fruit is a federal law that would standardize date labeling to address some of the confusion and create two labels; one that indicates the date about the quality of the food and a second that indicates the date about the safety of the food.

There have been bills introduced on this. They include a clause that says that no state can restrict the sale of any product because of the quality date. If it’s just about the quality of the product that’s not going to make anyone sick, there should be no reason that you can’t sell that product even after the date. 

It also enables education of consumers on what these dates really mean. If you see a date that says “best before” or “best if used by”, those are recommendations. It’s not about the safety of the food. If it looks fine, smells fine, tastes fine, then you can eat it. But if you see a label that says “use by” – which is currently proposed – that indicates that there’s an increased risk if you consume the food after that date, so be more careful. Right now, we can’t say that definitively because there’s no common definition  or common usage around the country. 

There are two federal bills that were recently introduced; one is called the Zero Food Waste Act – introduced in both the House and Senate – that puts funding into state and local and even nonprofit efforts to reduce food waste in a variety of ways. The second one is called the Compost Act, which provides funding for composting and infrastructure. We’ll see where they go.

ARTY: Beyond policies, are there any other innovations in the food system that would reduce food waste?

DANA: We talked about grocery stores having to manage 50,000 different products; that’s a big data problem. The application of machine learning is doing a very good job of identifying patterns for each of those products that perhaps the human buyers can’t do as readily. They track sales impacts, for example, if cheese is on sale, you may wind up selling more pears. Things like that help make inventory control more efficient and reduce waste. 

There are some apps that have been sweeping across Europe and now in the US as well that help both grocery stores and restaurants do flash sales via the app for products that they’re about to throw out or take off their shelves. For example, the restaurant that has six sandwiches at the end of the night leftover can now sell them via this flash sale app rather than throwing them out. Similarly, grocery stores, right before they’re about to take a product off the shelf, can do a flash sale via an app. The businesses don’t feel like they’re cannibalizing their own sales, but rather feel like they are bringing new people into the store. 

There are hyper-spectral imaging technologies now that can very quickly evaluate how ripe a fruit is. It essentially sees inside of foods and so you can tell if an avocado or strawberry has been bruised, or has a longer shelf life, or if it’s riper than you think it is, etc. That information can then be used to route some products to shorter shelf life destinations and other products to longer destinations.

There are also innovative business models such as Imperfect Foods and Misfit Markets, and Full Harvest that are creating an alternative marketplace for some of the excess produce and other foods as well. 

Over the pandemic, we saw those companies really shine because they can take just about anything and offer it up on their sites and send it to you. When the pandemic first hit, they were selling popcorn because all the movie theatres had closed down and the distributors were sitting on extra popcorn. Imperfect Foods was able to sell the popcorn in bags to people in their homes. They were able to also take something like 40,000 extra cheese and cracker trays from United Airlines and sell them. That level of flexibility in a business model is really useful when it comes to reducing food waste.

ARTY: How is ReFED addressing the problem?

DANA: One of the biggest challenges on this topic is people don’t know what to do, they don’t know where to start, and they don’t know what’s going to be most effective. We provide data to help people identify and prioritize actions that they can take to reduce food waste. That looks very different if you’re a farmer or if you’re a restaurateur or somebody in your own home. So, we try to quantify the impacts of different solutions.

Our work really has three components. One is to provide the data and insights that will help drive action. The second is to bring more capital and innovation into the space, private investment, philanthropic and public funding that can help scale up solutions. The third is to engage stakeholders. We really try to be a hub and connector in this space to help convene and drive action, because there’s so many different entities from municipal governments to private investors to food companies working on the topic.

Bioneers Indigeneity Education Takes Off

Indigeneity is a Native-led Program within Bioneers that promotes Indigenous approaches to solve the earth’s most pressing environmental and social issues. The program produces the Indigenous Forum, original media, educational curricula and catalytic initiatives to support the leadership and rights of First Peoples, while weaving net- works, partnerships and alliances among Native and non-Native allies. The program’s educational initiatives are truly one-of-a-kind, yielding resources and experiences that provide deeply meaningful cultural and cross-cultural education to students and teachers around the country.

INDIGENEITY CURRICULUM

To support the use of Bioneers’ original content in the classroom, we’ve developed study guides and lesson plans aligned with national standards for grades 9-12+. This curriculum offers educators an invaluable toolkit for optimizing the educational potential of evergreen Bioneers media.

We created our first educational study guides in 2015 on topics including “Biocultural Conservation in the Amazon” led by Chief Almir (Surui Tribe), and “Survive and Thrive” based on the teachings of John Mohawk (Seneca).

We expanded these efforts in 2017 through the establishment of the “Indigeneity Learning” curriculum. Units are organized thematically, covering topics including, Cultural Appropriation, Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change, and Native Americans and Racism. Each unit includes full educator support materials including a lesson plan, scripted teacher presentations, original media featuring Indigenous subject matter experts, additional readings, discussions, activities, and assessment.

In 2018, we piloted this curricula with high school students from across the U.S. Our evaluation showed significant learning and transformative growth among students of all backgrounds. Students demonstrated a more sophisticated understanding of Indigenous topics, an increased ability to empathize, and a greater ability to articulate complex issues from a cross-cultural perspective.

In 2020, we developed four curriculum bundles on the topics of “Water is Life,” “Alcatraz,” “Borderlands,” and “Honoring Women.” Each curriculum bundle includes teacher instructions, activities, assessment, and additional materials for a week of instruction aligned to the lesson’s theme. We also created a training for students of all ages to learn about Allyship with Indigenous Peoples. These curricula can be accessed free of charge on our dedicated Indigeneity Curriculum webpage. In 2021, we plan to add four more curriculum bundles to the collection.

This body of work represents a unique opportunity to bring Indigenous-created curriculum into both formal education and non-formal learning environments.

INTERCULTURAL CONVERSATIONS

Intercultural Conversations (ICC) is an educational exchange between 20 Native American and 20 non-Native, diverse youth. Participants meet once a month to discuss thematic topics presented in Bioneers Indigeneity media in a “talking circle” format.

Between these meetings, facilitators present accompanying lesson plans that equip them to teach Indigenous topics in the classroom through a “train the trainer” model supported by Bioneers Indigeneity staff. Months of learning and dialogue culminate with in person cultural exchanges on the Navajo Nation and at the annual Bioneers Conference.

Intercultural Conversations Curriculum employs a transformative approach that enables students to view concepts, issues, and events from multiple perspectives. Instead of being treated as passive learners, youth participants are engaged as change-makers, and supportively encouraged through Indigenous pedagogies.

Through this process, youth participants experience profound personal development in their ability to relate to and empathize with others, understand complex issues, and communicate cross-culturally. 2020 marked our 4th year and cohort for the Intercultural Conversations initiative.


How Equity in Education Can Foster Youth-Led Climate Advocacy

Frustration often serves as the impetus for youth-led activism as lawmakers continue to ignore the impending climate crisis. As marginalized communities experience a disproportionate impact on climate change, youth are bridging the understanding between climate change and climate justice. Young people are pushing for equity in education to uplift holistic understandings of climate change.

Lilian Chang is a freshman at UC Berkeley interested In legislative change or data science and how we can incorporate technology into environmental and social justice. She is excited to be a part of the advocacy scene at Berkeley. 

Katinka Lennemann is a high school senior who plans to continue her work in climate activism after entering college.

First published on ca-eli.org

How did you first get involved in the movement for climate justice and what accomplishments have you seen through your advocacy and leadership in San Mateo county? 

Lilian: Education plays a key role in cultivating my climate justice journey. It wasn’t until I took an AP environmental science class during my sophomore year of high school that I truly understood the devastating consequences of climate change. I started connecting those concepts to real life and feeling empowered to look at what I can do as a youth in the community to make a change or impact, considering my future and also the future of our planet.

Although it seemed daunting at first to look at a solution for climate change, it opened my eyes to see all the things that contribute to it. For me, looking at the waste culture on my school campus was the most visible aspect. I started by creating a green team on our campus and looked at ways to reduce waste, consumption, and how to tackle contamination in our school. From there, I continued working to create assessments to develop solutions. That work led me to different assemblies and programs and I eventually reached out to the office of education for mentorship. I collaborated with other schools to create a waste coalition before creating a proposal for our district with some concrete solutions to improve our waste management culture. However, it was at this time that the COVID-19 pandemic had begun and the superintendent set our proposal aside. 

Fortunately, I also was serving as the vice chair on the San Mateo County Youth Commission and served as the chairman of the Environmental Justice Committee where the climate emergency declaration began. 

Our enthusiasm and initiative around sustainability left a big impact on the superintendent. Through our work, we were able to bring all of the stakeholders together, including student advocates, teachers, the superintendent, and other faculty within our district. Our work was a foundation for a leadership and sustainability model that paved the way for the further development of advocacy and change down the road.

Katinka: It was the drought here in California that really affected me. I’ve seen how my own backyard changed – we can’t grow grass anymore and it gave me a sobering sense of what was happening. I was also aware of my daily carbon footprint and that individual action to reduce it blossomed into a desire to create a larger impact on my community.

Through this program, I completed a community impact project and, together with a partner, set up an edible school garden at Arbor Bay, which is a small school in San Carlos that serves kids in special education. Youth Climate Ambassadors kick-started other work for me in climate justice by connecting me with other students who were doing similar community impact projects as well as with mentors from the San Mateo Office of Education and Offices of Sustainability who hosted the program. 

At the end of last year, I worked with a group of students to declare a climate emergency in my school district. It was not easy because policy-makers were hesitant and it was a long process, but we succeeded. It couldn’t have happened without the work of the San Mateo Union High School District who catalyzed other school districts to do the same. 

What distinguishes the role that youth play in the movement for climate justice? 

Katinka: I think idealism is one thing that sets youth apart and gives us the ability to pursue what others may think impossible. As youth activists, we have the drive to make a change because we are fighting for our future. Because we are young, we are most aware of the impact of climate change on the planet. It’s a bleak future that we are heading toward, and youth are motivated more than anyone to change it. The consequences of climate change, dire as they may be, serve as strong motivators for those of us who cannot bear the thought of the future we’re headed toward.

Lilian: For many youth, our passion for climate justice becomes frustration that gets funneled into activism. We are frustrated with politicians and adults who are in positions of power. At the same time, I feel optimistic and empowered with what youth are trying to accomplish. It is common for us to see performative action from policymakers. Youth are ready to see systemic change rather than just declaring a special day for bees or something. We need to dismantle the systems that do not serve us or our planet. Youth are innovative, tech-savvy, and passionate, and that’s what sets us apart. And I’m always inspired by all the other youth around me and the stories that they bring to the table. 

How do you see the relationship between environmental education and climate justice?

Katinka: In general, society seems to lack an understanding of how climate change and climate justice are related. A holistic environmental education needs to have a component of climate justice because the two are inseparable. We need equity in education because there’s a big difference between who creates greenhouse gases and who’s going to bear the brunt of its impact, and that needs to be acknowledged. Upper-class white Americans will not experience climate change in the same way that communities of color will. 

The disproportionate impact of climate change is also a matter of empathy. Can we change how we are working, how we are using the environment, how we are living as a society in order to save others even if we aren’t the ones being directly impacted? 

Lilian: Education was the starting point of my climate justice advocacy. That’s why environmental literacy and climate justice should be standard in schools; not just in science class but in history as well. The history of the exploitation of minorities and marginalized groups is also a history of climate change because the same political systems that underlie marginalized communities are also responsible for climate change. Education is a starting point for awareness and also a way to empower changemakers. 

What are some actions that would help address climate change and climate justice, and who are the key actors in taking those actions? 

Lilian: At the decision-making level of leadership, we’re looking at our politicians and policy-makers and the impact they have in either staying complicit or making real systemic changes. I know the shifts that need to happen may seem daunting to some, but people need to wake up to the immediate need for that transformation and listen to young people. Real change takes both grassroots movements and competent policymakers who listen to the people they serve, and there must be a bridge between those two communities. 

Katinka: Policymakers are key in spearheading efforts toward any change. On a political level, we need to realize that we all share the same planet and we will all experience the impact of climate change and we need bi-partisan action for us all to be a part of the solution. 

On a more individual level, choosing to shop for sustainable brands also can be a message back to the people in power. Big companies like Coca-Cola or Nestle can see that consumers want sustainability and change. That supply and demand feedback can be super helpful in encouraging action against climate change. We need to combat the mindset of disposable waste and shift toward thinking regeneratively about how we consume products. 

How do you hope the climate movement evolves over the next five years? What do you hope happens and what do you want to see changed?

Lilian: The next few years are critical in terms of our climate and how it will look depending on the actions we take now. We as a global community are reaching that point where we are seeing the real consequences of climate change and realizing we need immediate action. That’s why we focused on issuing a formal declaration of climate emergency.  

From a micro perspective, we will be building climate action plans and goals to drive action. On a bigger level, we need systemic shifts so we aren’t still relying on fossil fuels or on corporations and companies that are exploiting our earth. We need to dramatically and immediately shift those systems and create new jobs in renewable energy and think about ways that we shift the culture within our education system. 

Within these next few years, I hope we reach a point where we do see those radical shifts and a mindset change in people, so these conversations can focus on different perspectives on ways we can mitigate climate change. 

Katinka: Enough people have accepted that climate change is real and it is going to impact our future, but we need to bridge the disconnect between the dire future we are headed toward and the need to take collective action. There is a deadline on this and action is urgent. We have to drastically change methods of production  to prevent an environmental catastrophe. I’m hoping to see more collaboration and cooperation on all levels with people and organizations that are trying to combat climate change. I hope policy-makers actively seek to work with environmental groups rather than lobbyists. 

Conversation with Oglála Lakȟóta Elder Basil Brave Heart: Part 2

By Hilary Giovale

Oglála Lakȟóta Elder Basil Brave Heart often has a twinkle in his eye and a funny story to share.  A Catholic boarding school Survivor, Korean War combat veteran, author, retired school administrator and addiction counselor, Basil lives in a cozy trailer tucked into rolling hills on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, a place with a 53.75% unemployment rate and the lowest life expectancy in the United States. Also known as Prisoner of War Camp #334, Pine Ridge was established in 1899 when the United States Government forced Basil’s ancestors onto reservations.

I am a ninth generation European-descended settler living next to a sacred mountain of kinship on Diné, Hopi and Havasupai land. As a mother, dancer, philanthropist and writer, I’m dedicated to a process of decolonization and reparations that has been guided in part by Indigenous mentors and friends.

During the summer of 2018, my young son and I were invited to spend a few days amidst the fragrant sunflowers, sage, and pine trees on Basil’s land.  At his suggestion, we visited the Wounded Knee Memorial to honor the Lakȟóta ancestors who were massacred there on December 29, 1890. Basil related: beginning in 1938 and continuing throughout his childhood, his Grandma Lucy taught him to extend unconditional love and forgiveness to the wašíču (fat taker) soldiers and settlers who disrupted and disparaged his ancestors’ lifeways so painfully.  Grappling with the unsettling reality of my own ancestors’ colonialism, Basil’s stories sparked my curiosity – who was this man?   

Over time our friendship deepened to bridge tremendous divides – of culture, generation, gender, class; of the oppressor and the oppressed. In the summer of 2019, we worked together on an international Ceremony for Repentance and Forgiveness, which brought together people whose ancestors were impacted by both sides of wars, genocide, enslavement, and other human rights abuses throughout the world.

As an octogenarian and beloved Elder, Basil’s rich life experiences offer illumination. For forty years, he has been teaching about the current paradigm shift to restore the sacred natural order of the universe. Part One of this interview shares Basil’s reflections about Lakȟóta lifeways and the impacts of boarding schools. Part Two covers his perspectives on war, healing, and patriotism. 

Basil: What I experienced as a combat veteran in the Korean War goes to the wounded healer principle.

Hilary: Please tell us about it.

Basil:  For years, I was held hostage by the hideousness of war. Because I felt guilt and shame, I didn’t want to talk about it.  I was afraid to be seen as someone who was deranged and participated in something hideous, and I was afraid of triggering the flashbacks.

Now, I want to talk about some things that happened 69 years ago, things that rearranged my whole being – my mind, my heart, my soul, and my physical self. It was like putting an egg in a skillet and scrambling it. It started as a perfect yellow center bright as the sun, with whiteness all around it. Then it was sculptured to become something different.

During the Korean War, I was stationed in Beppu, Japan, which was a station for special operations. It was a weekend and we were downtown drinking, ready to have a real good time. But all of a sudden, some military police came into the bar and said, “Back to camp.” And we knew that if we didn’t follow orders, we could face severe consequences. One guy took a fifth of whiskey and we headed back.

In camp, they were issuing real ammo, real grenades, and C-rations, which could last us three of four days. We packed up all of our clothes and put them in foot lockers, took our beds down, and stacked the mattresses. And it grabbed me: something was about to happen and I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into. I had just turned 18.

While we were loading the truck, there was a brief moment where the mailman said we’d received some mail. I opened a letter from home and learned that my Grandma Lucy, who taught me so much as a child, had died. I had to numb that right away. I put it on the back burner so it wouldn’t become part of what we were about to do.

We went to the airport and they issued our parachutes. General Westmoreland came in a Jeep, and he issued us silk camouflage parachute scarves. Then we knew that we were going to be jumping into enemy territory. We were trained to be paratroopers, and we were also trained to be killing machines.

 

We loaded the planes. There must have been 150 or 200 planes. It was a whole regiment, with probably 100,000 paratroopers. We were in props – two propellers on each side – with a total of 32 paratroopers in each plane, fully loaded with ammo and grenades. They started the props, and the plane started to shake. My adrenaline kicked in so strongly that it altered my mind.

They told us that we were going to be flying over the Sea of Japan and that there would be a storm. We had a device called a Mae West, so in case we hit the water, we wouldn’t drown. Then they said we’d be flying over shark-infested waters, and there would be junks below, which were small enemy boats disguised as fishing boats. The junks had rocket launchers inside and they could take us down at any time. We took off, and out the window I could see a number of planes taking off on either side of us, and an amazing amount of planes going airborne behind us.

The plane started to shake up and down. I thought, “Well, if this plane goes down, I  could drown or be eaten by a shark.” I experienced a fear that took me to the wall. I was trapped. There were no prayers, there was no refuge. There is a psychological center that helps us deal with unbelievable fear like this. Everything mentally shuts down for a while.  

The next thing I remember, we had landed on a beach. And they told us we were at a Chinese prison camp, and that we were going to rescue a general who had been taken prisoner. We went into the prison camp. Big mistake. They used smoke grenades so we couldn’t see where we were going. We couldn’t see our own buddies in front of us. We opened fire and killed our own men.  

When we realized what had happened, a group consciousness took over that was beyond normal human anger. It was rage. Rage is a dangerous place to be because you’re operating on an energy that is uncontrollable. All of the teachings you have received to be a good person, to not hurt others, not to kill people – you go right past them.

A lot of people took their machetes out. We were doing things that were beyond human understanding; things I never thought we could have been capable of. Arms and legs were thrown into a huge pile. Someone put gas on it and lit the pile. That haunted me for forty years. It was the beginning of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is like a wall between your thinking and your emotions.  

Afterwards, we went back to our pup tents and they issued us some beer to calm us down, because our adrenaline couldn’t have been any higher. We were laughing about what we did and drinking beer. We were wiping our bayonets that had blood on them, cleaning our weapons. That’s really strange, to laugh at something so horrible. That’s PTSD.

Now, I’m going to say that PTSD has its purpose. I think it prevents you from going insane, because if the emotions about what you did flooded into your awareness, they could take you out.  

The next thing that happened is that we were taken to a guinea pig outpost. If there was an attack, we would be wiped out first. We were told not to stand up because there were snipers that could attack us anytime. 

Every night, we went out to capture prisoners. We would get to our destination and lie in a kind of horseshoe formation. We had to lie back to back so we could see what was going on.  We were sweaty, and we were in a place with horrible mosquitos. We couldn’t slap ourselves to kill a mosquito. We had to slowly kill the mosquitos in total silence. The enemy knew we were out there, and sometimes started dropping mortars on us. Most of the time they missed us.  

One time, something delayed us, and we didn’t get back to the bunkers before daylight. The sun came up and they started shooting at us. As soon as people got hit, our buddies who were in the trenches jumped up and ran after our buddies who were hit. Some of them got hit themselves, but they managed to drag their buddies back to safety. When you train for combat, that’s part of it – always have your buddies’ backs.  

When they brought some of these guys back to the trenches, a medic was trying to save one guy, who got hit pretty badly. It had rained that night and it was muddy. And his blood was seeping into the mud. It was like watching divine madness – the madness of watching our buddy dying and the madness of us trying to kill the enemy. The madness of trying to save his life there in the mud, blood, and shit. No one can tell me that the Divine manifests itself just as a sunset or a rainbow, on top of a mountain or inside a church. 

And it went to something I heard later: a veteran is someone who writes a blank check to the United States of America, including his or her life.

Hilary: The United States government has treated Lakota people horrifically. It’s still going on. How do you reconcile what this country did to Indigenous peoples of the continent?  How are you not angry?

Basil: I’ve been asked before, “Why in the hell were you fighting for this country after what they did to you?” And I know they did that to me, but everything that my people taught me about forgiveness, bravery, and a commitment to serve took over.  

When I was 17, a recruitment officer came around the boarding school. It was a metaphysical breakthrough in disguise. I needed to get away from the way I was being treated at school, with my language being taken away and the way I was being told to change my relationship with the Divine.  

Hilary: That’s powerful. What I’m hearing is that your experience at boarding school was so painful that you enlisted in a war to free yourself.

 

Basil: There’s a psychologist named Erik Erikson who coined a metaphor – he said that sending Native American children to boarding schools put rickets in the childrens’ souls. It was like taking calcium away from the bone structure. When you do that, people begin to collapse; they become crippled human beings at the mercy of their captors. After a while, you identify with your captors; you believe you are what they are telling you. I didn’t want Stockholm Syndrome to define me. It felt good finding my way out of that prison.

There was a rite of passage my uncle took me to when I was five years old. It helped awaken some archetypes: the healer, the sacred clown, and the warrior. The call to protect is what drove me to go to war. I wasn’t glorifying or honoring the war.  I was honoring the warrior principle I was taught as a child, about the poles of the thípi being the Masculine, which is protection.

If you see an old person getting beat up, or a young person being abused, or someone being taken advantage of you say, “I’m not going to just walk by and let this thing happen.” No, you respond. The best of you reaches out to make a difference when someone is doing something that is not congruent with who you are.

Hilary: You embraced your ancestral archetypes and reclaimed your own soul from the jaws of a machine that was trying to erase you.

Basil: That’s right. And as the war continued, I saw many of my buddies get killed. What I got out of that was never to get close to anybody. I was afraid to love and be loved. How could anybody love me if they knew that I was a killing machine?

The medicine I used to make myself feel better was alcohol, a trickster. It made me feel good for a little while. But it didn’t last. I almost committed suicide. I went into treatment for PTSD. Eventually, I got sober and began doing healing work with veterans myself. 

Hilary: Basil, I’m grateful for your healing, this story, and your life. You have an American flag hanging on your wall. Do you still consider yourself a patriot?

Basil: Being a patriot means love for country. And I want to define that. The Earth doesn’t belong to us; we belong to the Earth. My relationship with patriotism centers on my love for the Divine Creation of the Feminine and Masculine. I’m still a patriot in the sense of defending my people. To me, patriotism is about transforming from a killing machine into a warrior who protects the elderly, the disabled, the oppressed, the women, and the future generations.  

I hope I wasn’t disrespectful with some of the language I used to describe what I saw and experienced. A lot of the combat veterans are still suffering from PTSD, and on many occasions they will only tell another combat veteran. I hope something in what I shared will help a veteran or a veteran’s family to honor and be proud of those who served their country, and what they went through.  

Hilary: Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us.

The Planet Is Inflamed — And So Are We

As smoke from western megafires forces much of the country to remain indoors this summer, the relationship between environmental degradation, climate change and human health is increasingly clear and present. Recall David Suzuki’s memorable message from the Bioneers stage, “We are the environment, there is no distinction. What we are doing to our surroundings, we are doing directly to ourselves… You can’t draw a line and say the air ends here and I begin there. There is no line.”

At the same time, recent research by leading scholars and doctors points towards the health impact of racial discrimination, police violence and even the legacy of colonization. Taken together, the story is one of a human experience that should be seen as an integrated whole — and drives home the reality that our bodies, our communities and our biosphere are deeply entwined. 

This week, we highlight leaders who are making these integrated connections visible and offering essential next steps. 

This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!

As The World Burns | Rupa Marya

From a surge in mass uprisings in response to systemic racism, a rise in inflammatory illnesses like gastrointestinal disorders, and an increasing number of climate refugees – our bodies, society, and the planet are inflamed. Rupa Marya, physician, activist, and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, teams up with the New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel, to reveal the links between health and structural injustices. In this excerpt from their book, INFLAMED: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, Dr. Marya calls for a diagnostic understanding of inflammation and offers a new deep medicine that can heal our bodies and our world.

Read more here.

Dr. Rupa Marya at the 2021 Bioneers Conference

Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF and Faculty Director of the Do No Harm Coalition, Dr. Rupa Marya is one of the nation’s leading figures working at the intersection of medicine and social justice. At the Bioneers Conference in November, Rupa’s keynote address, titled “Deep Medicine and the Care Revolution,” will draw from insights in science, medicine, and ecology and will outline why it is time for us all to join the Care Revolution.

Register here.

California Indian Genocide and Resilience

“The point is that we started re-emerging out of the ashes, and I still believe we’re in the ashes phase. We are trying to shake loose out of this repressive historical traumatic experience and embrace our spirituality and the beauty of our spirituality, and the oneness that I heard spoken to today. It made me cry sitting in there. Everybody’s starting to get it. We are one.” – Tolowa culture-bearer and public school teacher, Loren Bommelyn

California Indians have survived some of the most extreme acts of genocide committed against Native Americans. In this historic conversation, four California Indian leaders share the stories of kidnappings, mass murders, and slavery that took place under Spanish, Mexican and American colonizations — and how today’s generation is dealing with the contemporary implications.

Watch here.

Public Health/Planetary Health/One Health

The current global pandemic has revealed stark structural injustices embedded deep in our society. Our approach to health has neglected the relationship between socio-economic conditions, planetary health, and public health. As a virus that was transmitted from non-human animals to humans has placed the entire world on high-alert and has disproportionately affected communities of color, it is time we reevaluate the relationship between planetary health and public health. In this Bioneers 2020 conversation moderated by J.P. Harpignies, two prominent leaders in the field of health –– William B. Karesh, Ph.D., Executive Vice President for Health and Policy at EcoHealth Alliance, President of the World Animal Health Organization (OIE) Working Group on Wildlife Diseases and Howard Frumkin, Professor Emeritus, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington School of Public Health –– discuss the inseparable connection between public health and planetary health. 

Watch here.

Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves | FREE eBook Download

Ecological medicine is a unifying field that embodies the recognition that human and environmental health are one notion, indivisible. In light of the pandemic, we’re releasing a FREE downloadable PDF of our 2004 Bioneers book: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, which could hardly be more relevant right now.

Download here.

Conversation with Oglála Lakȟóta Elder Basil Brave Heart: Part 1

By Hilary Giovale

Oglála Lakȟóta Elder Basil Brave Heart often has a twinkle in his eye and a funny story to share.  A Catholic boarding school Survivor, Korean War combat veteran, author, retired school administrator and addiction counselor, Basil lives in a cozy trailer tucked into rolling hills on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, a place with a 53.75% unemployment rate and the lowest life expectancy in the United States. Also known as Prisoner of War Camp #334, Pine Ridge was established in 1899 when the United States Government forced Basil’s ancestors onto reservations.

I am a ninth generation European-descended settler living next to a sacred mountain of kinship on Diné, Hopi and Havasupai land.  As a mother, dancer, philanthropist and writer, I’m dedicated to a process of decolonization and reparations that has been guided in part by Indigenous mentors and friends.

During the summer of 2018, my young son and I were invited to spend a few days amidst the fragrant sunflowers, sage, and pine trees on Basil’s land.  At his suggestion, we visited the Wounded Knee Memorial to honor the Lakȟóta ancestors who were massacred there on December 29, 1890.  Basil related: beginning in 1938 and continuing throughout his childhood, his Grandma Lucy taught him to extend unconditional love and forgiveness to the wašíču (fat taker) soldiers and settlers who disrupted and disparaged his ancestors’ lifeways so painfully.  Grappling with the unsettling reality of my own ancestors’ colonialism, Basil’s stories sparked my curiosity – who was this man?   

Over time our friendship deepened to bridge tremendous divides – of culture, generation, gender, class; of the oppressor and the oppressed.  In the summer of 2019, we worked together on an international Ceremony for Repentance and Forgiveness, which brought together people whose ancestors were impacted by both sides of wars, genocide, enslavement, and other human rights abuses throughout the world.

As an octogenarian and beloved Elder, Basil’s rich life experiences offer illumination. For forty years, he has been teaching about the current paradigm shift to restore the sacred natural order of the universe. Part One of this interview shares Basil’s reflections about Lakȟóta lifeways and the impacts of boarding schools. Part Two covers his perspectives on war, healing, and patriotism. 

Hilary: You were born in 1933. Could you tell us about your birth?

Basil: For us, the birthing ritual is the first rite of passage.  We are birthed into the physical world through the Feminine.  We are taught that the womb is a compassionate, safe, space where we are immersed in the sacred liquid called water and sacred spinal fluid.

From the moment my mom announced her pregnancy, my grandparents and aunts were singing prayers with her, to align us with the spiritual frequency of the sacred natural order of the universe.  Everything was sacramentalized during my birth, which happened at home.  There was azílya (smudging) throughout the space.  My grandma selected a woman to reach into my mouth symbolically; this was to open the portal of the Creator’s breath.  My grandpa held me and prayed to the six directions, introducing me to water, wind, light, sky, flowers, trees, the four-leggeds; the stars.  He gave me the name Matȟó Wakhéya (Bear Looking After His People).  My mother nourished me with sacred milk.  The breast is life. 

Hilary:  How exquisite.  As you were growing up, what did your grandparents share about Lakȟóta life prior to the reservation being established in 1889?

Basil: My grandparents were put on a reservation by genocidal policies of the United States government.  My grandpa used to talk about the nomadic life our people lived before.  There was a vastness to how his grandparents and other relatives lived. None of my ancestors went to school or ever read a book. They did not speak English. But their teachings were unbelievably profound.

My grandpa talked about how the Black Hills are a sacred, pristine place the Creator intended for ceremony. My relatives would talk about the hunting of buffalo, elk, and deer.  They shared teachings about the thípi (house; conical tent). The poles represent the Masculine energy of protection. The canvas is a buffalo hide representing the Feminine. The family is held together by the Feminine. The sticks that hold the canvas together are the values of love, compassion, and forgiveness.

My grandma taught us spiritual ecology. She told us about the different herbs and how they heal. She taught us not to take everything, not to break anything. When we harvested cherries and plums, we didn’t break the limbs off the trees. We learned to respect the trees, because they are our relatives.

My grandma prayed every morning, with the firewood and the water. She said, “All Creation sings.” The central prayer was that we would survive and help create a peaceful, safe place for the people to live.

When I was little, I would take soup, coffee, or frybread to my grandpa, who lived in a little house out back. I’d wait outside the door, and I could hear him talking to someone. He said, “Come on in because your relatives are here.” So I would go, and he would tell me to sit down.  He said, “These are your relatives sitting here.” You know, I didn’t see them, but yet I did. We were brought up to know that there is just a thin veil between the physical world and the spirit world. I didn’t feel it was weird.

My relatives talked about a different time, before the arrival of the colonial warriors. They were called wašíču (fat taker), which is a metaphor for someone who steals the fat of the buffalo.  wašíču does not mean “white;” it refers to a consciousness that takes without permission, irreverently. It’s connected to the Doctrine of Discovery and the idea that everything here is ours in the name of God, and we have the right to kill everything in the name of God. This is colonialism, but it also goes to a corporate way of thinking – using laws to take things – at any cost. It amazes me to the depth of my soul how the Lakȟóta people used our divine language to describe it that accurately.

My family talked about how the government issued smallpox-infested blankets to the Lakȟóta people; how the buffalo were killed and left rotting all over the prairie; how the sacred horses were stolen and killed; the massacres that took place; the denigration of our women and little girls. All of these things were deeply painful. It was unbelievable, because at the same time, the Lakȟóta people embodied a powerful spiritual gift: living in a forgiving way, surrendering to the Divine. All of these things I’m talking about were continuous teachings in daily life.  

Hilary: You’re a Catholic boarding school Survivor. Would you like to share about that?

Basil: My parents took me to the Holy Rosary Mission boarding school in August of 1939 because it was the policy of the United States government that all children had to be brought to school, under threat of severe punishment. There were some intrusive things that happened. I’ll describe it now using language I did not have as a child.  

The nuns wore black. They had a kind of white covering on the inside of their face and neck, and a black covering that went over the white thing, so you could see only their face and hands.  And they had something hanging on their side, like a rope around their waist that had a cross at the end. I didn’t know what that meant. And so that was very strange.

The priests also wore black. And there was a kind of plastic white thing around their neck. They had wooden beads hanging down by their side with a black thing like a cross. It wasn’t rounded, it was elongated. So I didn’t know what that meant.

They took us to a classroom and said we would be attending school. I had difficulty understanding because my first language was Lakȟóta. I was scared to ask questions. They told us we would all have haircuts because it would make us good people to have short hair. It would help us become what they were teaching us to become in their way of life.

Eventually they took us to the church. There was a time to kneel down, a time to stand up, and there were special gestures we had to make. Someone said prayers with his back toward us. I looked on the wall and there was a man with long hair hanging from a cross. I thought, “They told us a little while ago that they were going to cut our hair, but now they are talking reverently about this man with long hair, and saying he gave his life for us.” They tried to explain that we were sinful, and this man died to take our sins away.

I came from a caring, loving home and community, and this was an unfriendly place. I felt betrayed. I didn’t trust these people. They didn’t feed us enough and they yelled at us. They made us stand in line and march. I was not going to be able to participate in ceremonies anymore. I learned to shut off my feelings and go numb. The pain was always there, but I couldn’t feel it as much when I numbed it.

One time I was talking to my friends. A nun overheard, grabbed my ear, pulled me out of the pew, and brought me to the back. It really hurt to be shamed in front of my peers. Little did I know that shaming was going to be in the classroom, the dining room, the playground and in church. It was a way to constantly emphasize that we were sinful. They told us the way we prayed was not good and our prayers didn’t count, because the man on the cross wasn’t part of our ways.

So what I did is I listened, but I didn’t take it in. In the summers I went home, and I told my grandma about it. She said, “Well, I know they’re not feeding you very good, but don’t hate them. Live in the forgiving way that I taught you as a child.” And so that’s what I did. It was a challenge, but you know, I’m grateful now because that challenge manifested into something deep inside.  

Another very difficult experience was in the dormitory. After they turned the lights out at 8:30, a door would open and someone would come in. This dormitory was very old and you could hear the floor squeaking with the person’s footsteps. One night, I heard whimpering, muffled crying.  It was like someone put their hands over the person’s mouth. And after a while, I figured out that this guy was coming in and taking a little boy to the back room. As time passed, I heard some of the boys say, “A man came and took me out of my bed; it was not good.”  

We never talked about this. We didn’t tell our parents. This was a deep intrusion, a deep shaming, a way of treating a human being that causes what I call trauma – mentally, physically, and spiritually.

But let me go to what was one of the most devastating things: when they told us we couldn’t speak our language. At that time, I didn’t have a full understanding cognitively and spiritually, but as I look back at it with some of my research and education, it was like doing a lobotomy on our brains to remove a piece of who we were.

What would have happened to the priests and the nuns if their language was taken away and they were required to speak Lakȟóta? I always wonder how they would have navigated their social and spiritual orbit. Having your language forcibly taken away is a very difficult neurological intrusion.

Mark Twain said the solution to the Indian problem was to educate them to death. I think what that meant was to take our language away, teach us how to read left to right, and take away our circular way of thinking. With that kind of education, you’re moving your focus from the right hemisphere, which is a spiritual center, to the left hemisphere. When you do that, you lose your connection, and you’re trying to adjust to a linear and secular way of communicating. I believe that’s what he meant.

I still see the effects of our language being taken away. Language is the divine sound of the Creator responding to our voice of petition and prayer. Right now, I’m working with some physicists and linguistic scholars to understand how deep this is. The Lakȟóta language uses 140 sounds. Sound is frequency, and frequency goes to vibration. The Lakȟóta word for vibration and connection to the universe is Tákuwakȟáŋškaŋškaŋ (Sacred Movement). It means something in sacred motion that is uncreated, infinite and unnamable. It’s who we are.

I was very fortunate that my grandparents only spoke Lakȟóta with me when I went home in the summers. Somehow, the neurological pathways were still there. Later in life, when I got sober from alcoholism, my Lakȟóta language awakened big time. It was almost like I’d been speaking the language the whole time.

So it was huge what they did to us. They were raping our being. There was human abuse and pervasive shame. That’s the central piece for me in what the boarding school did.

Hilary: Human abuse and pervasive shame…what was the purpose of shaming people so deeply? 

Basil: Well, remember the policy of genocide is to eliminate. We didn’t think like them or live like them. Was the shaming to convince us that the way we pray, eat, and live was absolutely not good? It was a way of taking our spirit hostage, taking us out of the deep center and the primary essence of who we are.

There was something I heard for the first time at school: if you do it this way, you will be rewarded. If you don’t do it this way, you will be punished. When I translated this to my grandma, she said “That is unbelievable. I cannot allow you to think that way. The Divine doesn’t punish or give rewards. The Divine is unconditional love. Remember you came from your mother’s womb, and the womb is compassion.” I repeated this to the priest and he said no.  That is wrong. 

In these conditions, you almost dissolve who you are. The shame and blame took me to a place of spiritual pain.  

Hilary: Shame can be so painful. I felt intense shame for years after I learned about my family’s history as settlers. Do you think shame can be used constructively, toward healing?

Basil:  Remember that one of our basic, neurological cosmologies is non-duality. And non-duality doesn’t embrace reward or punishment. My grandma said there’s a veil, a very thin veil between what they did to you and the Divine. So you just have to step into the Divine. The shame you just moved out of is going to teach you the difference between the two. How am I going to know goodness if I don’t know shame?  

When you learned about what your ancestors did, what hurt you the most?

Hilary: My sense of innocence was wounded.  

Basil: When something touches the innocence at the center of your being, it’s a deep wound. But we can become wounded healers. How can you be a healer who has not experienced a wound? You don’t learn it from books. You have to experience it.  

Hilary: That’s true. Shame became a catalyst to discuss this history. That openness has brought healing. It hadn’t been addressed for nine generations in my family. 

Basil: Your people are Celtic. You come from a culture, if you go back through the centuries, that also had their language and their soul connection. The Celtic and the Lakȟóta are twins.  The more you research your ancestors’ culture, the more you’ll find that.

Hilary: Thank you for sharing that. The wašíču consciousness is not who we always were. Basil, do you have any thoughts about the hundreds of unmarked children’s graves that were recently discovered at the residential schools in Canada?

Basil: We are living in a time when we have to look at everything – the divine nature of our being as well as the divine madness of our being. The abuses of the boarding schools must come to light now; we need to see all of it. I think that the churches need to make an effort to provide ways of healing. Native people and church representatives could come together at centers that incorporate Western healing and Indigenous ceremonies such as the sweat lodge.  I would welcome building a center like that on my land.

Read the second part of this interview here.

As The World Burns | Rupa Marya

From a surge in mass uprisings in response to systemic racism, a rise in inflammatory illnesses like gastrointestinal disorders, and an increasing number of climate refugees –– our bodies, society, and the planet are inflamed. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the diversity of the microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain’s development to our immune system’s functioning. With the climate crisis unfolding every day, the ecosystem we share slowly degrades along with our collective health. 

Rupa Marya, physician, activist, and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, teams up with the New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel, to reveal the links between health and structural injustices – and to offer a new deep medicine that can heal our bodies and our world.

In this excerpt from their latest book, INFLAMED: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, Marya calls for a diagnoses to the inflammation of our planet and collective health.

Rupa Marya spoke about deep medicine at the Bioneers 2021 Conference. Watch her keynote address: Deep Medicine and the Care Revolution.

Excerpted from INFLAMED: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Published by Farrar Straus and Giroux, August 3rd 2021. Copyright © 2021 by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. All rights reserved.

Your body is inflamed. If you haven’t felt it yet, you or someone close to you soon will. Symptoms to look for include uncontrolled weight gain or unexpected weight loss, skin rashes, difficulty with memory, fever, trouble breathing, and chest pain. Inflammation accompanies almost every disease in the modern world: heart disease, cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s, depression, obesity, diabetes, and more. The difference between a mild course and a fatal case of Covid-19 is the presence or absence of systemic inflammation. 

Your body is part of a society inflamed. Covid has exposed the combustible injustices of systemic racism and global capitalism. Demagogues around the world kindle distrust and hatred. Governments send in the police to impose order, monitor lockdowns, enforce a return to work for those who comply and incarceration for those who do not. From the United States to South Africa, India, Brazil, and China, people suffering oppression set tires and cars and gasoline alight on barricades. The petrochemistry of our protest reflects the materials that we have on hand. Everything we’ve made, we’ve made from fossil fuels: energy, food, medicine, and consumer goods. The world has been organized to burn. 

As a consequence, the planet is inflamed. Global temperature records are being broken, forest fires have turned from annual to perennial events, oceans are rising, and storms have become bigger and stronger. This is the epoch of endless fire. Human destruction is tearing apart the web of life, shredding the network of relationships between organisms and places in which our lives are embedded. Inflammation is a biological, social, economic, and ecological pathway, all of which intersect, and whose contours were made by the modern world. 

Inflammation is triggered when tissues and cells are damaged or threatened with damage. A complex and intricately coordinated response of the immune system, inflammation mobilizes resources to ultimately heal what has been injured. In a healthy, balanced system, once the mending has occurred, inflammation subsides. When the damage keeps coming, the repair cannot fully happen, leaving the inflammatory response running. A system of healing then turns into one that creates more harm. 

As we explore inflammation in this book, we will sometimes use the language of the body in analogy. So: salmon are to rivers as hearts are to blood vessels. They both function as nutrient pumps in systems of circulation. We sometimes proceed by simile: dams are like vascular obstructions. We’re not above metaphor. Trade routes, for example, are colonialism’s arteries, moving people, capital, goods, and diseases around the world system, and connecting bodies, societies, geographies, and ecologies. The metaphor helps us to show that inflammation is systemic and that the systems are linked. But we aren’t making a literary argument so much as a medical one. The inflammation in your arteries and the inflammation of the planet are linked, and the causal connections are becoming increasingly clear; your physiological state is a reaction to social and environmental factors. Racial violence, economic precarity, industrial pollution, poor diet, and even the water you drink can inflame you. 

These connections are not new or even our own. Indigenous people have been articulating them for the past six hundred years, in an ongoing global resistance to the destruction of their ways of life. Abolitionists have been articulating them since 1619. From the Global South, traditions of healing have survived successive waves of colonial destruction. Our work stands on the shoulders of movement workers and visionary thinkers from the past and our contemporaries, from the agroecological farmers of Amrita Bhoomi, in Karnataka, India, to the lived and theorized struggles for abolition of Angela Davis. We are duly inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s braiding together of science and story and the border-smashing articulations of Miles Davis and Frantz Fanon. Our analysis has been shaped by organizing with communities in struggle, and by the stories of patients who pointed the way to the connections we explore. We acknowledge and honor those people whose legacies of resistance have shaped our own understanding. To this foundation of knowledge that precedes us, we hope to contribute a political anatomy, one that can help identify the root causes of humanity’s shared pathologies, in our bodies and in the world around us. 

Consider the case of Shelia McCarley. She was born on the outskirts of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on land that had once been Cherokee, a tributary of the Trail of Tears. Power lines strung along the Tennessee River during the New Deal era allowed industries to flourish and gave Alabamians work for a dignified wage. Meanwhile lax regulations permitted the industrial effluent to flow into the Tennessee River. McCarley grew up in Florence, drinking water drawn from the family well. On the weekends, she’d eat catfish pulled from the river with her own hands, fish that had lived and died in water tainted with mercury and “forever chemicals” like PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl substances.

Found in everyday items like waterproof jackets, nonstick pans, and firefighting foam, PFAS are a family of five thousand “forever” chemicals, so called because they accumulate in our bodies and environment and never degrade.7 They are behind a range of health problems including cancer, thyroid disorders, and immune system disruption.8 Failure to regulate industrial production has led to their widespread presence in drinking water.9 Corporations like 3M, which has a production plant on the Tennessee River, spent decades and 7 dollars covering up the negative health and environmental impacts of these chemicals before finally agreeing to settling $35 million for putting PFAS into the water.

When she was in her forties, McCarley left Alabama for California. Early in middle age, her health began to deteriorate. Her face became covered with rashes, her hair started falling out, and her joints swelled. Her body seemed to be attacking itself. At fifty-nine, she was transferred to University of California, San Francisco’s Parnassus hospital; her chart declared she was suffering from an autoimmune disease called lupus. 

But something wasn’t right. She had some of the classical signs of lupus, like a rash and low counts in her blood cell lines, but the panel of tests that are diagnostic for the disease came back negative. Her illness was a mystery to the hundreds of health care workers who attended her at one of the world’s most sophisticated hospitals. Rounds of steroids and other immune therapies did nothing. The most seasoned clinicians and investigators entertained rare and esoteric diagnoses but found no clear match-up with McCarley’s course. 

The one thing that every physician who saw her agreed on was this: the markers for inflammation in her body were as high as they had seen. It was as if she periodically went into septic shock. Sepsis affects an estimated 30 million people every year worldwide, killing 5 million of them, with the largest burden in the Global South. The acute inflammation of sepsis is directly responsible for at least 20 percent of all deaths worldwide. Typically in septic shock, a person’s body sets off intense inflammation in response to an infection or trauma. Body temperature spikes to a fever to fight the offender. It can then plunge into hypothermia as the body fails to correct the offense. White blood cell counts peak and plummet. Blood vessels relax, leading to a dangerous drop in blood pressure. To compensate, the heart beats faster; sometimes people breathe faster, too, and become disoriented. 

McCarley had a broad range of symptoms. She appeared to be infected, but no one could find an offending microbe. In the intensive care unit, she received drips of antibiotics and pressors, medication to stop her blood pressure from dropping. After a few days, she seemed better. In addition to quelling infections, antibiotics can also tamp down inflammation. As her symptoms lessened, she was taken off the antibiotics and removed from the ICU. Soon enough, her symptoms returned, so she was readmitted until she’d recovered enough to be released again. The cycle repeated: into the ICU and on a drip, symptoms abated; removed from the ICU, symptoms returned. All the while, there was no evidence of any infection or autoimmune disease. 

By the fifth month, she began to despair. She was tired of being poked and prodded, of being offered a glimpse of recovery, only to have it snatched away when her symptoms returned. She asked her doctors to change her goals of care to no longer prolong her life and to allow her to die. 

The treatment kept her alive, but eventually it broke her. 

McCarley’s autopsy revealed that over the course of five months, the marrow in her bones had been replaced almost entirely by activated macrophages. In a normal body, these white blood cells engulf bacteria, viruses, and our own sick or dying cells. But something had triggered her macrophages to go into overdrive—very likely the toxic exposures she grew up around in Muscle Shoals. As the activated macrophages multiplied in her bone marrow, they pushed out other important cell lines, leaving no lymphocytes to respond to infection and no platelets to help clot blood. McCarley became vulnerable to infection and bleeding. She died from both, overwhelmed by inflammation. 

To many of the nurses and doctors who still turn over her case in their minds, McCarley was killed by her body’s own response to her environment, poisoned by the ongoing exposure to the modern world. But we will never know. Causal relationships are a hardwon scientific prize. It’s impossibly difficult to isolate the reasons why McCarley’s macrophages behaved the way they did. Over a sufficiently large population, however, it’s possible to see patterns emerge. In 2012 a quarter of all human deaths were traceable to environmental factors in the air, water, and soil. 

Each toxin works on our body differently. The European Chemicals Agency suggests that there are over 144,000 human-made chemicals in the world today, few of which have been around for longer than a generation or two. The body doesn’t have that many tricks to rid itself of chemicals that cause harm. The fallback is to activate its own mechanism of damage control and repair. 

But inflammation itself isn’t a disease—it’s a sign of a larger problem. From McCarley’s devastated bone marrow to the clouded lungs of Covid patients, the source of inflammation is more than a virus, or even the poisons with which we humans have contaminated our air and water. To understand why we are sick in the ways we are, we must understand more fully what’s driving this phenomenon. What we need is a diagnosis.

Good Fire: Indigenous Cultural Burns Renew Life

Bill Tripp, Deputy-Director of Eco-Cultural Revitalization for the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, is a forest management specialist and the lead author of the Karuk Eco-Cultural Resource Management Plan and co-author of the Karuk Climate Adaptation Plan. His work involves developing partnerships and strategic action plans to enable large landscape collaborative management throughout Karuk Aboriginal Territory and beyond. Bill is featured in the film the INHABITANTS: An Indigenous Perspective which follows five Native American tribes as they adapt to today’s climate crisis by restoring their ancient relationships with the land. Bill Tripp was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.

ARTY MANGAN: Bill, what watershed do you live in and what is it like there?

BILL TRIPP: I live in the Klamath River Basin near the confluence of the Salmon River. It is extremely rural and mountainous terrain with a primarily forested setting surrounded, for the most part, by multiple wilderness areas.

ARTY: Would you explain the Karuk concept of pikyav?

BILL: In the Karuk language, pikyav means “to fix it.” When we say we’re practicing pikyav, it means that in our lives and work we’re striving to fix the world and make it a better place. In the context of our world renewal ceremonies, which we refer to as pikyávish, we enact our ceremonial practices in a way that they’ve been done for millennia, and work with the spirit beings of this place to help renew the world and to remind ourselves of who we need to be in order to fix it.

ARTY: The Karuk have a tradition of using fire to manage the forest. How do you view fire and what is your relationship to fire?

BILL: Fire is that which renews life. A lot of people have been conditioned to look at it as a threat and something that’s scary, something to avoid, whereas in my worldview, that’s not necessarily the case. If you can’t learn to live with fire and learn how to work with what it is and what it does to help maintain all the things needed for survival in a place like this, then basically you’re working against it, and if enough time goes by, it will work against you. Things in nature have a tendency to win.

We’ve always used fire in this place so we can have food, medicine, basket materials and a whole suite of other things. We can use it to fashion boats and keep ourselves warm and cook food. Fire is central to human culture in general. Many factions of society have been removed from it, but it’s painstakingly obvious that removing the relationship of people with fire from the forest has led to a situation that makes it hard to live in places where fire thrives.

ARTY: I have heard the terms “prescribed burn” and “cultural burning.” Is there a difference?

BILL: When talking about prescribed fire, people would say that you need to have a burn plan and a burn box and that you have to go through certain trainings. All of that professional development structure is built around having justifications to cover yourself in the event of liability if something goes wrong; whereas cultural burning isn’t based on some arbitrary practices that people constructed. Cultural burning is a practice developed by people who have been in a place a very long time, who know their surroundings intimately and know that you need to do specific things at specific times for a reason, so when it’s time, you just go do it. It’s a cultural norm. It’s something that happens at regular cycles based on a consistent application of standard principles.

ARTY: Are there certain times of the year that you would not do cultural burns?

BILL: Every place is different. The biophysical settings of each place are different. In Karuk culture, the only time of the year we wouldn’t use fire for anything but heating and cooking would be when the birds come back and start to build their nests to a time in mid-to-late June, when Pleiades appears  again in the morning sky. Lightning has a tendency to start fires at that time. That’s really the only time of year, culturally, that Karuk people didn’t use fire, except for heating and cooking. We didn’t just go start fires in the middle of summer for any random reason, but if there was a lightning strike or something going on out there, in order to keep things from building up a head of steam and aligning with wind shifts and whatnot, it would be a time to go out and put a point of fire in a strategic spot so things can burn out by the time that wind shifts.

There were a number of things like that that were traditionally done to keep the fire away from the villages. For the most part, within two miles of a village, there would be burning intensely in the fall and early spring so that most of the fuel would be consumed and wildfires couldn’t come down right into the village. But it would depend on what kind of resource you’re burning for and what kind of vegetation you’re working with. You can go out into a black oak woodland and burn that after five or six days of sun in February. You can go out after a day of sun in February and burn buckbrush, so that very volatile fuel would be gone in the summer. With two days of sun, you can burn the top inch of pine needles and you can reinforce the edge of your manzanita stands with a backline by doing that. You can go into different vegetative assemblies and burn at times when nothing else is going to burn. By burning “mobile” types of fuels such as buckbrush, pine and black oak leaves in the spring, you create features that can stop fires in the fall, so in the fall when we burn, for example, a tan-oak stand on the other side of the ridge, the fire will be contained.

ARTY: Cultural burns prevent major fires and keep fires out of settled areas, but are there other purposes to them as well?

BILL: Yeah. A lot of people assume that Indigenous Peoples only burn next to their villages, but they also managed hunting grounds farther away. A lot of hunting grounds are further away, and a lot of the foods were gathered and processed up in the high country in the summer, which is when the lightning happens. Burning off places up there  great benefits for large ungulates and contributes quite nicely to the food web ecology. There’s a plethora of species in those fire-adapted environments.

There are also a lot of invasive grass species around these days, and native grasslands are getting encroached upon. Dry grass is very receptive to inverse when a wind-driven fire is occurring. If you go into grassy areas at the end of June, when there is still high humidity at night, you can wait for the sun to leave the river and then light the fire and guide that fire around through the grassland. Once you start getting into 10, 11, 12 at night, nothing will burn anymore. A lot of the bigger woods are too wet to burn completely, and the grasses just burn away fast and then go out. The fire can’t go on day-after-day-after-day because those grasses will just suck up that moisture at night to the point where they won’t burn anymore. What you’re left with is a place that’s completely void of fuel for the rest of the summer, and there are other native plants that need that fire at that time of year, and they benefit from that fire and then stay green further throughout the summer.

ARTY: You obviously have a very deep knowledge of fire. How did you learn it, and has this traditional knowledge been unbroken, or was there a time when people weren’t able to burn because of laws that prohibited it?

BILL: Laws are laws. People created those laws for one reason or another, but not everybody paid attention to the law. Out here, people kept burning and still burn. They don’t burn at the scale that they should be burning, but they make sure to do some of the burning that needs to be done.

And if you ask me, there are some gray areas in the law. I’d like someone to show me on the books right now today where it’s illegal for Indigenous Peoples to implement cultural burning practices. I don’t think that intent is anywhere in the law. Maybe there was in the Act for the Governance and Protection of the Indians back in 1850, which was blatantly tied to racist origins. I’m sure people today would question the relevance of that law.

People assumed cultural burning was illegal, but continuous use and occupancy is a real thing. We still use fire. We still occupy our original homelands. We still utilize the resources that are out here in our aboriginal homelands and we simply wouldn’t survive out here if we didn’t, but these days the laws would make it pretty much impossible to do it. You can burn at this time of year, they say, but you can’t burn at night. Well, if the right conditions don’t come in until about an hour before sunset, it looks like I’m not going to be able to do anything if I’m going to sit here and follow the law made by somebody who doesn’t understand. So, I don’t follow laws. I do it when I know that traditional law says it’s time to do it. Last I checked, there needed to be a treaty before any rights could be taken. All our rights to do these things are retained. There are laws that say you shouldn’t do it, but there are also laws that say we have every right to do it. So, I guess it’s all subject to interpretation.

ARTY: How old were you when you first became involved in cultural burns?

BILL: I was 4 years old. My grandma gave me some stick matches and told me to burn a line in the black oak leaves from one point to another point and then turned around and went back in the house. It was one of those days where the very top layer of the leaves was dry, but the bottom layer wasn’t, and it was hard to get a fire to move from one leaf to the next leaf. I had to rearrange the way the leaves lay. After lighting each individual leaf, I was running out of matches. I was only a quarter of the way finished with the job.

I recognized that I was going to have to do something different because my current trajectory was not going to get me to my goal. I couldn’t just simply light every leaf, but if I lit one leaf and had that connected to 30 or 40 other leaves that were in a line, then the fire would move from leaf to leaf. With a little piece of cardboard, I could fan it and the wind would blow it from leaf to leaf. So, on a micro scale, I learned about the factors that influence fire behavior. I ended up using all those matches, but I did what she asked me to do. That was my grandma’s way to measure whether or not she was going to teach me something about fire, and so she did. By the time I was 8 years old, I was burning things that were little bit drier, out of the shade that would carry the fire by itself a little bit better. I learned when to recognize when it was safe and when it wasn’t, and what time of day to do it.

ARTY: When you do a cultural burn, how does that affect the salmon?

BILL: It can affect salmon in a lot of different ways; it depends on the wind and what type of cultural burning you’re doing. We have world renewal ceremonies and specific ceremonial burning practices that are supposed to occur on or around the full moon in August and the new moon in September. We do a landscape-scale burn on Black Mountain in August. It’s done at times of northeast wind events, but it’s done on the leeward side of the slope from the wind, so it’s sheltered by the mountain. If you’re doing an annual burn, there’s only so much fuel that can grow up in a year, but any kind of brush and plants that are re-sprouting could get scorched by the burn if there’s wind blowing through the fuel that is available, so it’s a fuel-limited system that actually needs wind at that point to be effective. That scorches off all the small plants that are growing up and that are using surface water. It creates smoke that can reduce the solar insulation that heats the water and the river, and it creates particulates that cloud up the holes in the leaves and needles that trees use to breathe. It reduces their efficiency and evapotranspiration. They still pump water up to the surface level of soil at night, as trees normally do so they have something to use during the day. So, they’ll pull the water up at night and distribute it into the surface soils. But during the day if there’s smoke, evaporation and transpiration are reduced. When that happens, more water stays in the soil that can then runoff into the streams. That can increase the flow in the streams. The increased flow combined with the reduced water temperature can be enough to move your main river temperatures from lethal to stressful, and even to the point of being safe for fish to enter the stream and begin to run much earlier than they otherwise would.

ARTY:  What is the Karuk practice or ceremony of “calling the salmon up the river?” 

BILL: During the world renewal ceremony, our medicine man does a belly flop at the mouth of Camp Creek. When the medicine man does that belly flop, it’s supposed to make a big, loud noise, which represents the lightning and thunder. The splash is supposed to create ripples that go down the river from the mouth of Camp Creek. But how do you translate that action and the prayer that’s made in that action into a biophysical reality? The medicine man does that belly flop based on an indicator that someone at the top of the mountain is also keying in on. At the exact same time that belly flop takes place a fire is lit at the top of the mountain. The fire that burns the top part of that watershed creates a pulse that happens day-to-day. Trees pull water up, but they don’t use it, so the water flows off. That creates a diurnal fluctuation shift ever so slightly in that watershed in Camp Creek, and that’s enough to send a signal or a ripple, if you will, on a 24-hour time scale, down the Klamath River from Camp Creek to the estuary where the salmon are.

ARTY: Which is a about a hundred miles away, right?

BILL: It’s quite a few miles away. A lot of times the sandbar seals off the estuary from the ocean at the mouth of the Klamath River, and so fish don’t even have access. Even a little fluctuation and flow has a tendency to eat away at sand, even if it’s ever so slight. That would theoretically help to chew its way through the sandbar to give the salmon access before the rains come; it also changes that temperature and flow regime enough to where salmon can feel comfortable coming into the river, hence calling them into the river.

ARTY: Setting the conditions that welcome the salmon.

BILL: Yes, and then that’s backed up by the next burn a few weeks later at the new moon in September. After that is when fire is coming back into the hands of the people for the most part, and a lot more burning in the tan oaks and those types of areas really start to scale back up again as we move into fall.

ARTY: What is the relationship between the Karuk and salmon?

BILL: Salmon is a staple food for us. It’s one of the healthiest fats a person can take in. It’s brain food. It’s one of the best food sources that we have. All of our ceremonies revolve around it to one degree or another. We have acorns and we have salmon, everything else is a bonus. Those two things can sustain life into perpetuity. Those are the two things that are supposed to be primary components of our diet. We don’t have access to them like we should. We have a serious problem with things like adult-onset diabetes and heart disease and other diet and lifestyle-related problems because our access has been altered by colonial society.

ARTY: How are the salmon runs doing in the Klamath River?

BILL: Salmon runs are not doing very well. I’ve always wanted to believe in my heart that we would never see what we are looking at with climate change. But I know deep down that a lot of species are in peril right now, and it’s going to get worse if we don’t do something about it, and salmon is not just a staple for humans. The nutrient density that they supply to the entire forest system is phenomenal. You can’t imagine it by looking at the run you see today, but if you can imagine a time when a river was just black with fish for months on end. There were a lot of bears and a lot of other animals taking those nutrients up the hill.

ARTY: When you were a kid, did you see runs like that?

BILL: There were a few years when I saw runs that gave me the visual I needed to be able to actually imagine what everyone told me it was like even a few decades earlier, but I’ve only seen the river completely black with fish two or three times in my life. But older folks said then that that was nothing compared to what it once was.

If we can restore watersheds and restore some of these processes that create the conditions for species to survive, there’s nothing that says that places can’t be repopulated by salmon.

Creating Intentional Communities in our Workplaces

By Karla McLaren

All workers deserve to be treated as valued equals, and to work in safe, humane, and emotionally well-regulated workplaces. But this disastrous pandemic has shown us that this isn’t the reality, and many of us are viewing the workplace with new eyes now. Many people are choosing to continue working from home (if they can) and many businesses are struggling to find people who are willing to put up with low wages and substandard treatment; we’ve seen the workplace for what it is, and many of us are rebelling.

Karla McLaren, M.Ed.

Disasters will do that; they’ll uncover what’s true about relationships, families, groups, workplaces, governments, nature, and the world. Though they’re shocking and painful, disasters can tell us what’s true. If we pay attention, we can rebuild after disasters with a new awareness of our problems and a new dedication to recovery and healing, to the protection of nature and all living things, and to the soul of the world. 

During this disaster, I wrote a book about the necessity and power of emotions in the workplace (The Power of Emotions at Work: Accessing the Vital Intelligence in Your Workplace). I was so excited to write about the brilliance of emotions and how they contribute to the health and success of every social group and every workplace. Certainly, I was aware of the many serious troubles in the workplace, but I was so happy to be able to share my vision of a healthy new workplace and explore the ideas I’ve gathered in many decades of studying and consulting in the workplace. Then, the Covid-19 pandemic began – and the extensive troubles in the workplace became all too clear to everyone.

This pandemic has daylighted what had been swept under the rug of our constant activity and productivity. And we’ve started to ask the hard questions: Are we cared for as workers? Or are we replaceable cogs in an uncaring machine? Is our health and safety considered essential? Or do our employers have to be publicly shamed into treating us with even a minimum level of respect? Does our workplace deserve our time and dedication? Or have we been throwing good effort into bad businesses for no reason?

We’re seeing the dehumanizing story of the workplace very clearly now. But there is another story underneath this one that can help us understand how we got here, and how we can learn to create humane and functional workplaces with the support of something we all have but have been taught to ignore: our emotions.

The Unworkable Idea at the Center of the Workplace

Most of us have been fed the absurd idea that the workplace is a rare setting where emotions are unwelcome, illogical, unprofitable, or even unprofessional. We’ve also been taught that people can and should be treated as emotionless cogs in a machine, as numbers in a spreadsheet, or as consumers and cheerleaders of corporate vision statements. But what has this done to us?

I studied research that clearly shows the workplace to be a five-alarm fire of psychological and physical harm that affects more than 60 percent of all workplaces. This research, which I gathered across countries and across time, doesn’t point to problems with individual types of workers or industries; it points to widespread and fundamental problems at the very center of our workplace model. Or perhaps I should say at the foundation of our workplace model, because these problems stem from a terrible decision that segregated us from ourselves and undermined our workplaces: we fooled ourselves into believing that emotions had no value at work.

We wrongly thought of emotional skills as “soft skills” and kicked the emotions out of our factories, our offices, our workplaces, our boardrooms, and our working lives (or we thought we did) – and in so doing, we created an inhumane and emotionally unlivable environment that doesn’t truly work for anyone. As such, we haven’t learned how to make the workplace a healthy social and emotional environment where each of us can do our best work in an atmosphere of respect, professionalism, kindness, laughter, and community.

Removing emotions from the workplace (or blaming people for their natural emotional responses to unhealthy workplaces) was a wildly irrational idea that never worked anyway. Emotions are everywhere in the workplace – they never left because they cannot leave – they’re essential to every aspect of what it means to be human and what it means to work. Emotions are inseparable from human beings and human groups.

Emotions Are Vital Aspects of Thinking, Acting, and Working

People once believed that emotions were the opposite of rationality, or that they were lower than or inferior to our allegedly logical processes. But decades of research on emotions and the brain have overturned those outdated beliefs, and we understand now that emotions are indispensable parts of rationality, logic, and consciousness itself. In fact, emotions contain their own internal logic, and they help us orient ourselves successfully within our social environments. Emotions help us attach meaning to data, they help us understand ourselves and others, and they help us identify problems and opportunities. Emotions don’t get in the way of rationality; they lead the way, because they’re vital to everything we think and everything we do.

When we can learn how to listen to emotions (ours and everyone else’s) as uniquely intelligent carriers of information, we can learn how to build healthy and well-regulated social and emotional environments at work – not by ignoring or silencing emotions (you can’t), but by listening to them closely, learning their language, and creating a communal set of social and emotional skills that everyone can rely on. This work is not difficult at all, but it’s unusual in an environment that wrongly treats emotions as soft, irrational, or unprofessional – and wrongly blames individuals for their normal and necessary responses to profoundly unhealthy workplace environments.

Building a Healthy Workplace with the Help of Emotions

So, how do we move from this tragically failed model – which is all that many of us have ever known – to one that helps us do our best work in a healthy, emotionally well-regulated, and functional environment?

 

The answer lives in our workplace communities and in our emotional responses to the workplace as it is. The answer is in our workplace already. It’s staring us right in the face; it’s the emotions! Luckily, we don’t have to do anything special to welcome emotions into the workplace (or even to make room for them), because emotions are and always have been in the workplace.

All of the things we need to create healthy, efficient, and worthwhile workplaces are there already, and while our current workplace model is inhumane, most of us were never fooled by it, and our emotions certainly weren’t fooled by it either. They’ve been reacting and responding appropriately to the trouble all along. The keys and the tools we need to cultivate healthy workplaces are already there.

Cultivating Emotionally Well-Regulated Social Structures

Each of us is unique and our needs vary, but over the decades I’ve identified key features that emotionally healthy relationships, workplaces, and social structures share. Your interior emotional awareness and emotional skills are a vital part of your health and well-being, but one of the most important supports for your emotional health is to be a part of emotionally well-regulated relationships and social structures.

Well-regulated social structures create healthy environments for people and their emotions, and they help individuals and relationships flourish. These social structures can be partner relationships, family groups, work environments, therapeutic relationships, or support groups, and though the setup of each social structure will be unique and based on the needs of the individuals within them, there are broad similarities.

Here are nine aspects that emotionally well-regulated social structures share. These aspects should be present and available to anyone and everyone in the social structure, regardless of position, seniority, or power:

1. Emotions are spoken of openly, and people have workable emotional vocabularies.

2. Mistakes and conflicts are addressed without avoidance, hostility, or blaming.

3. You can be honest about mistakes and difficult issues without being blamed or shunned.

4. Your emotions and sensitivities are noticed and respected.

5. You notice and respect the emotions and sensitivities of others.

6. Your emotional awareness and skills are openly requested and respected.

7. You openly request and respect the emotional awareness and skills of others.

8. You and others feel safe enough and supported enough to speak the truth even if it might destabilize relationships or processes. 

9. The social structure welcomes you, nourishes you, and revitalizes you.

If you have one or more of these emotionally well-regulated relationships or structures in your life already, congratulations! Your social structure is your ecosystem, and its health directly affects your health and well-being. If your relationships and social structures are healthy, supportive, respectful, and revitalizing, then your life and your work will feel, if not exactly easy, then at least doable, hopeful, and worthwhile.

But if the social structures in your life are draining, unsupportive, emotionally destabilizing, or filled with conflict, then your life and your work will be much harder than they need to be – and your emotions will react accordingly. For instance, you may find yourself disengaging or feeling frustrated, fed up, sad, angry, depressed, and so on. You may find that you’re losing your motivation, seeking distractions and comfort anywhere you can find them, heading toward burnout, and planning your escape. As you should.

 

All of these healthy emotional responses to unhealthy social structures are necessary, and it’s completely natural for you and your emotions to essentially go on strike when your social conditions are unsupportive or abusive. In fact, I’d be deeply concerned about you (and your emotions) if you didn’t react and protest. Your emotional reactions to unhealthy situations not only protect your mental and emotional health, but they can help you identify problems and understand exactly what’s wrong. In addition, each of your emotional reactions can inform you in a unique way, because each of your emotions contains a specific type of intelligence that helps you understand your world.

Emotions aren’t the problem and they never were the problem; emotions point to the problem. Our emotions help us understand the world, respond to the situations we find ourselves in, and figure out how best to respond. Our job is not to suppress emotions, manage them, blame individuals for having them, distract ourselves from them, throw techniques or meditation practices on top of them, or spew them all over the place. Our job is to learn to listen to emotions, respect them, work directly with them, and access their irreplaceable genius so that we can build healthy social structures that work – whether we’re working from home, in a business with three workers, or in an organization with thousands of workers. We all deserve to work in healthy social and emotional environments, and we’re all a vital part of building and sustaining them.

Through the lens of this emotionally well-regulated social structure, we can plot a course toward intentional communities: healthy social and emotional ecosystems where people and projects can finally thrive. 

The World Underground: Wisdom from Life Beneath Us

We humans tend too often to look only at the surface of things. It turns out, however, that all of life on Earth actually depends on the extraordinarily dynamic life hidden beneath our feet, in the incredibly complex interrelationships of plants, bacteria, fungi, insects and minerals that make our continued existence aboveground possible.

This week we share the work of some of the world’s leading specialists on different aspects of those amazing underground ecosystems, including Suzanne Simard, Anne Biklé, David R. Montgomery, Dr. Daphne Miller, and Merlin Sheldrake.

This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!

Finding the Mother Tree: Suzanne Simard and Forest Wisdom

In nature, trees are linked to one another by a single tree that acts as a central hub. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, refers to this tree as “The Mother Tree.” In her new book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, Simard explores the communal nature of trees and their shared network of interdependency. Read this excerpt from the introduction to her book, titled “Connections.”
Read more here.

Suzanne Simard at Bioneers 2021

Suzanne Simard is a world-renowned expert on the development of sustainable forest stewardship practices and is at the forefront of research on plant communication and intelligence. Register for the 2021 Bioneers Conference to hear Simard speak alongside other leaders in the Bioneers community.

Read more here.

Got Dirt? Get Soil! Ditch the Plow, Cover Up and Grow Diversity 

Institutionalized farming practices have degraded soils across the U.S. and globally. Once bare of protective vegetation, cultivated soils can erode over centuries to limit the lifespan of entire civilizations. We face a fork in the road: collapse or regeneration? Biologist Anne Biklé and geologist David R. Montgomery show how solutions residing in nature surpass our conception of what’s even possible. Their groundbreaking work on the microbial life of soil has revealed its crucial importance to achieving truly sustainable agriculture.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

How Soil Health Affects Human Health: An Interview with Dr. Daphne Miller

Science is uncovering the inseparable nature between agriculture and medicine, which can create new possibilities for both human and environmental health. Dr. Daphne Miller is a physician, professor, research scientist, and founder of the Health from the Soil Up Initiative. In her book Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up, she shares lessons from inspiring farmers and biomedical researchers. In this interview with Bioneers, Dr. Miller explores the intricate connections between soil, food, nutrition and personal health. 

Read more here.

Merlin Sheldrake, Author of Entangled Life, speaks with J.P. Harpignies 

Fungi provide us with a key to understanding our planet as they sustain nearly all living systems. By nature, the existence of fungi challenges our concepts of individuality and intelligence. In this interview with Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies, the brilliant biologist/ecologist Merlin Sheldrake discusses his highly acclaimed book — Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures — and its exploration of fungi as the cosmic connectors of our world. 

Watch the conversation here.

Using “ancient wisdoms and techniques” can lead to carbon-neutral buildings says Yasmeen Lari

Having built over 45,000 homes from lime, mud and bamboo, Yasmeen Lari designed some of Pakistan’s landmark buildings such as the Finance and Trade Centre. In this article from Dezeen, Yasmeen talks about how traditional materials and construction techniques can help eliminate carbon emissions. 

Read more here.

Introducing the 2021 Bioneers Conference: Between Worlds

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? 

That’s the crucible we will face over these next several years: The inevitability of massive change clashes with the rickety systems and structures of a misbegotten civilization that in most cases is provoking the very conditions that are toppling it. 

Something is dying and something is being born. The past is meeting the future with great force. This cusp marks what Joanna Macy calls “the epochal transition from empire to Earth community.”  

The outcome is deeply uncertain. How will the arc of the moral universe bend, and who will bend it?

Slouching toward sustainability will not turn the tide. Only immediate, bold and transformative action will enable us to make the leap across the abyss. The solutions are largely present, or we know what directions to head in. The solutions residing in nature surpass our conception of what’s even possible. The genius of human creativity married with fierce determination is up to the job.

For over 30 years, the Bioneers conference has illuminated the ley lines of the transformative change that restores nature and our relationship with it – and that now more than ever showcases the social movements that are the irresistible force reimagining and co-creating the next world. Taking care of nature means taking care of people – and taking care of people means taking care of nature.

Bioneers 2021 will make the connections from ancient wisdom of forests to the visionary struggles of Amazonian First Peoples to protect the rainforest – from the movement for solidarity economics to Ecological Medicine and health equity – from the genius of the biophilic design revolution to designing nature-based infrastructures  – from the Green New Deal to regenerative agriculture and the power of soil to sequester carbon – from multicultural healing, eco-feminism and a culture of pluralism to the dismantling of corporate power. In interactive sessions in smaller groups, you can also connect with other inspired Bioneers around some of the topics you most care about.

The solutions and models that Bioneers has been showcasing for 30 years are ready for prime time, and it’s the now-or-never moment to adapt, scale and spread them. If we successfully navigate this crucible, we will change the trajectory of civilization onto a life-enhancing path and a viable future.

In this time, we’re all called upon to be leaders. Please join with us at the Bioneers 2021 virtual conference to experience how some of the wisest among us are bridging the space between worlds. As Robbie Robertson put it, “When you get your heart beating in the right direction, that’s when you make a real connection.” We invite you to join forces with the Bioneers community of leadership to make this revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart. See you there.

REGISTER TO ATTEND THE 2021 BIONEERS CONFERENCE NOW.

Redesigning the Food System for Health, Inclusion and Climate Resilience

Gary Paul Nabhan, Ph.D., a world-renowned, Arizona-based Agricultural Ecologist, Ethnobotanist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother and author whose work has focused primarily on the interaction of biodiversity and cultural diversity in the arid, bi-national Southwest, is considered a leading pioneer in the local food and heirloom seed-saving movements. Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director, interviewed Gary Paul Nabhan at the Bioneers Conference.

ARTY MANGAN: Gary, what kind of impacts do you think climate change is having on agriculture today?

GARY PAUL NABHAN: We are already seeing many conventional crops hit their thresholds of heat tolerance and salt tolerance. We’re seeing longer and more frequent droughts than ever before, and these are affecting not only crops but also all the wild creatures that flow into fields because there’s nothing for them to eat out in wildlands. We are already beginning to see trends that, I believe, will, in our lifetimes, change agriculture to the extent that future agriculture will look nothing like what we know it as today, so climate change is disrupting, damaging and in many ways completely undermining the current way we farm.

It’s been clear that conventional agriculture has been dysfunctional for a number of decades, and at one level we’re going to see a complete breakdown or collapse of that conventional agriculture. At another level, I’m hopeful because I think many of the solutions that have been waiting in the bullpen, so to speak, will be employed and evaluated in many different ways by many different people and adapted to the particularities of the hyper-local. 

ARTY: Where should look to find the knowledge we need to adapt to the unprecedented challenges posed by climate change?

GARY: We have to go back to our roots and back to the roots of what agriculture was like in other cultures and at other points in time, not to culturally appropriate what we see in other cultures but to use the concept of biomimicry as a lens through which to look at what has been possible and plausible and practical in other climates and in other times (especially drier ones for us here in the Southwest). That’s the base that we can build on, so we’re not starting from scratch. We have diverse cultures and problem-solvers all around the world who’ve been thinking and reflecting on and experimenting with components of solutions, and now it’s time to design the entirety of food systems so that they can deal with multiple problems at the same time. It can’t be a piecemeal approach anymore. To just cite one example of that: I’m working with my dear friend Patricia Colunga on the role of succulents in agriculture—agaves and prickly pear and many other cam plants [crassulacean acid metabolism] that have tolerance to all the types of stresses that we’re facing. Pat has a beautiful phrase that I love, “Our future is ancestral.” 

ARTY: In a conversation I had with ethnobotanist and farmer Miguel Santistevan about traditional agriculture in New Mexico, he said that in the Española Valley, farmers would look up to the Southern Rockies. If they saw that there was a heavy snowpack, that would determine that they would grow crops that year that need a lot of water, such as corn, which can be stored for a number of years, and squash, which could be stored for a number of months. If it was a meager snowpack, they would grow more drought-tolerant crops such as lentils and garbanzo beans, which also could be stored for a number of years. In that way, they ensured food security based on the changing conditions of nature year-to-year.

That’s a very different approach than agriculture driven by a market-based economy, which says that no matter what the conditions are, you will grow what the market demands. Do you think we will have to change agriculture from a strictly market-based approach to a more ecological approach?

Gary Paul Nabhan

GARY: That’s a great conversation that you and Miguel had. One thing that it highlights is that Traditional Ecological Knowledge can be used in a prescriptive or diagnostic way. In other words, the real beauty of what Miguel has absorbed from his forefathers and ancestors is a working framework that endures beyond the short-term gains of the market economy. Most traditional agricultural systems evolved incrementally, iteratively, over many years. The principles are embedded in them, but only a small handful of the practitioners, such as Miguel and one of our mutual mentors, Estevan Arrellano could really articulate those principles.

Now our climate has shifted so dramatically that we can’t rely on the specific material touchstones of the old systems. We have to look more deeply at their deeper underlying principles, and we have to design food systems for three things that we’ve never intentionally designed them for in the past. One is land health and resilience (and by land, I mean land and water and the soil microbiome). The second is human health and our resistance against diseases of oxidative stress, including diabetes, that are plaguing just about every region in the arid and semi-arid zones of this planet. And the third is inclusive human well-being, which means that if we have high-yielding crops that are nutritious, we’ve still failed if we haven’t raised up the poor in our communities, reduced the disparities, created a food democracy where everyone has a role and a say in what happens, and created livelihoods in the devastated rural and Indigenous communities from coast to coast. Most agricultural planning has gone only towards getting high-yield crops on a minimum input and has never addressed these larger health and community well-being issues.

Our health centers deal with human health but seldom have they reached into the deeper well-being of the whole community let alone issues of agricultural ecology. Our community development activists might be very good at organizing a food democracy but may not know how agroecosystems work or how our human gut microbiome works. So, we need to design holistic future agriculture and food systems that simultaneously deal with those three fundamental needs of humans: to live in a healthy place, to have a healthy body, and to interact with others in a healthy community. 

ARTY: Would you give an example of some of your projects that work toward those goals?

GARY: In Arizona, we’re building on the designation of Tucson as the first “city of food cultures” in the U.S. honored by UNESCO. Using the unique wild foods and desert-adapted heirlooms that have been part of a multi-cultural patrimony for decades­–not the ones that belong to a particular tribe or immigrant group–we’ve seen 150 new healthy food products from these wild native plants and desert heirlooms emerge out of 50 new micro-enterprises since we got this designation.

In the foodshed surrounding Tucson, we’re taking a step back from just dealing with sustainable agriculture in a vacuum to restoring the soils of our tributary watersheds of the bi-national Santa Cruz River. We’re doing land restoration both on rangelands and farmlands, including planting hedgerows for pollinators and native plants, especially legumes, that renew soil health and attract nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizae. By doing that, we’ve created about 70 new jobs in the last eight years in the very little town of Patagonia, Arizona. 136 youth have been involved in a five-week summer program called Earth Care Youth Corps, and about 35 people are working year-round in these projects, which are a major source of new livelihoods in an impoverished community of 800. Those livelihoods remind even the most conservative people in a rural community that our only option isn’t extractive economies such as mining or natural gas, or other exploitative activities; regenerative agricultural rangeland use and eco-tourism generate more jobs than they destroy.

ARTY: Are there state and federal policies you would you like to see implemented that could help support this kind of work? 

GARY: I’m really concerned about who wins and loses with climate change. In most states, we still have institutional racism. I’m not talking about calling any political leader a racist. I’m talking about embedded structural racism in our agricultural institutions. Even the federal government has admitted that there are more vestiges of structural racism in our agricultural institutions than anywhere else. For example, in Arizona, we’ve never had a Native American, a Hispanic American, an African American, or an Asian American on the board of our state agricultural commission after 110 years. And yet the primary demographic of farmers and ranchers in Arizona now is Indigenous women. Arizona is second of all states in the number of women farmers when we count Navajo women who do sheep herding and gardening. We’ve never provided opportunities for them. They were denied loans because they don’t own their land. They’re farming and herding on collective lands.

We have to provide resources for them because immigrants and the Native peoples in our country have a wealth of knowledge and skills and talents to help contribute to this redesigning of our agricultural system we so desperately need. If all the money is still going to the status quo conventional farmers who haven’t innovated in decades, we all lose. The elderly white farmers lose out too because we will all need those innovations to have a healthy food system.