Page 55 – Bioneers

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.

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: 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.

The Great Systems Overhaul: Remaking the Future

It is growingly apparent that environmental devastation and the societal inequities that many people experience are systemically rooted, and our approach to addressing them must be on par with their scale. Innovative leaders are approaching societal and environmental challenges by honoring the interconnectedness of some of today’s most pressing challenges, allowing for solutions that get to the root of those challenges. Systems change, a term we delve into in this week’s newsletter, asks us to confront the structural patterns that underly the issues we’re working to solve.

This week, we highlight thought-provoking ideas on systems change from leaders — including systems theorist Joanna Macy, scifi writer Kim Stanley Robinson, scientist Fritjof Capra, and representatives of the forward-thinking Garfield Foundation — hoping to take on these issues at the systemic level.

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

What We Mean When We Say “Systems Change”

The dire inequities of the systems that govern us have only been made more apparent in recent upheavals and a global pandemic. What does “systems change” mean to us? Very rarely do the words come with an explanation of their underlying assumptions, and when they do, we’ve found that people use them with different meanings in different contexts, leading to confusion. Here’s what we mean when we say “systems change.”

Read more here.

Joanna Macy: Entering the Bardo

In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo refers to a state in which one finds oneself entombed between the states of death and rebirth. In the bardo, gaps of grief and despair appear and interrupt the perceived continuity we expect of our lives. Within the bardo is where the most remarkable change is possible but requires radical attention and acceptance. In this article, Buddhist teacher and systems theorist Joanna Macy describes the bardo we are experiencing, characterized by societal upheavals, racialized violence, and lives taken by COVID-19. Joanna takes this moment to reflect on the possibility of rebuilding through a radical reckoning with the bardo.

Read more here.

The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s talent as a science fiction writer allows him to imagine new ways that the world could work. These possibilities are becoming increasingly important as we have reached a crossroads in our path toward dystopia. In this essay from a Bioneers Conference appearance, Robinson takes a systems perspective on economics, calling on us to rethink the multi-generational ploy for power and profit, which borrows from future generations at an unforgivable cost.

Read more here.

Ecological Literacy: Teaching the Next Generation About Sustainable Development

Ecological literacy nurtures and expands the development of youth’s understanding of the world and its interdependent relationships. As we move toward harnessing a more sustainable relationship with the natural world, ecological literacy lays a solid foundation for remaking our future. Fritjof Capra is a scientist, activist, educator and author of numerous books including “Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World”. In this excerpt from his book, Capra advocates for a shift in how we think about the environment to recognize the collective interactions that sustain the environment.

Read here.

Remembering Jolie Elan

Jolie Elan was the founding director of the Go Wild Institute and passed away in November of 2020. Jolie’s passing reminds us of the people she’s affected as a life-long activist, spiritual counselor, and environmentalist. We join the Matthew Wood Institute of Herbalism in remembering her legacy that lives on in her work. In this episode of the Bioneers podcast, Jolie Elan speaks on the healing force of nature in collaboration with other climate leaders.

Listen here.

Joanna Macy: Entering the Bardo

By Joanna Macy

First published in Emergence Magazine.

We are in a space without a map. With the likelihood of economic collapse and climate catastrophe looming, it feels like we are on shifting ground, where old habits and old scenarios no longer apply. In Tibetan Buddhism, such a space or gap between known worlds is called a bardo. It is frightening. It is also a place of potential transformation.

As you enter the bardo, there facing you is the Buddha Akshobhya. His element is Water. He is holding a mirror, for his gift is Mirror Wisdom, reflecting everything just as it is. And the teaching of Akshobhya’s mirror is this: Do not look away. Do not avert your gaze. Do not turn aside. This teaching clearly calls for radical attention and total acceptance.

For the last forty years, I’ve been growing a form of experiential group work called the Work That Reconnects. It is a framework for personal and social change in the face of overwhelming crises—a way of transforming despair and apathy into collaborative action. Like the Mirror Wisdom of Akshobhya, the Work That Reconnects helps people tell the truth about what they see and feel is happening to our world. It also helps them find the motivation, tools, and resources for taking part in our collective self-healing.

When we come together for this work, at the outset we discern three stories or versions of reality that are shaping our world so that we can see them more clearly and choose which one we want to get behind. The first narrative we identify is “Business as Usual,” by which we mean the growth economy, or global corporate capitalism. We hear this marching order from virtually every voice in government, publicly traded corporations, the military, and corporate-controlled media.

The second is called “The Great Unraveling”: an ongoing collapse of living structures. This is what happens when ecological, biological, and social systems are commodified through an industrial growth society or “business as usual” frame. I like the term “unraveling,” because systems don’t just fall over dead, they fray, progressively losing their coherence, integrity, and memory.

The third story is the central adventure of our time: the transition to a life-sustaining society. The magnitude and scope of this transition—which is well underway when we know where to look—is comparable to the agricultural revolution some ten thousand years ago and the industrial revolution a few centuries back. Contemporary social thinkers have various names for it, such as the ecological or sustainability revolution; in the Work That Reconnects we call it the Great Turning.

Simply put, our aim with this process of naming and deep recognition of what is happening to our world is to survive the first two stories and to keep bringing more and more people and resources into the third story. Through this work, we can choose to align with business as usual, the unraveling of living systems, or the creation of a life-sustaining society.

Over the last couple of years, a number of us involved in this work have recognized that, given the pace of the Great Unraveling, we are heading toward economic and, indeed, civilizational collapse. Our thinking was aided by the Deep Adaptation work of Jem Bendell, which seeks to prepare for—and live with—societal breakdown. I’d also like to acknowledge the earlier contributions in French-speaking Europe of Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens—whose prescient work focuses on collapse and transition and is only just now coming out in English.

Since the present world economy has been unable to cut greenhouse gas emissions by even the slightest fraction of a degree, it now seems obvious that we cannot avoid climate catastrophe. Many of us had assumed that the Great Turning could forestall such disintegration, but now we have come to recognize the Great Turning as a process and a commitment to help us survive the breakdown of the industrialized growth economy. The motivation and skills we gain by engaging in the Work That Reconnects provide the guidance, solidarity, and trust needed to make our way through this inevitable breakdown.

There are many dimensions to this work that address the psychological and spiritual issues of the time, and I have found a fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science: much of the Work That Reconnects has been informed by Buddhist teachings. I now think of the Great Turning as somewhat like bodhicitta, the intention to serve all beings. This is the mind state of the bodhisattva—the being who, in their great compassion, delays nirvana in order to address the world’s suffering. I remember my Tibetan teachers telling me that bodhicitta is like a flame in the heart, and often I can feel it there.

It can seem pretty clear now who is holding up Akshobhya’s mirror—it is COVID-19. The coronavirus has come upon us fast. We knew nothing of it just a short while ago. First it made us pause so we could take in what the mirror is reflecting. We’ve been so busy and distracted in our different versions of the rat race that we haven’t been able to pay attention to our actual situation. We had to cease our rushing about in order to see who, what, and where we are.

COVID-19 reminds us that apocalypse—in its ancient meaning—connotes revelation and unveiling. And what has it unveiled? A pandemic so contagious that it immediately revealed our failed health care system and our utter interdependence. The need to prioritize the collective nature of our well-being dramatically rose to the surface, especially within our country, which is the most hyper-individualized country in the world. As Malcolm X put it, “When we change the ‘I’ for the ‘We,’ even Illness becomes Wellness.”

The patterns of contagion then cast a spotlight on what we most need to see: nursing homes, where old people are warehoused; the meatpacking industry, so dangerous to the crowded workers, so cruel to the animals, so costly to the climate; prisons, where millions are locked away, now becoming petri dishes of contamination; the fault lines of racial inequality in our society, now laid bare in the pandemic’s disproportionate impacts on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Sixty percent of the cases are African-American—thanks to pre-existing conditions fostered by inequities in health care and environmental racism.

On top of that, the killing of George Floyd has not only revealed the racism and brutality of our police culture, but aroused unparalleled protests, sweeping the country and calling for the defunding and even abolition of police departments and unions.

Globally as well as in the US, many of us are discovering a new solidarity in our determination to move beyond the sick racism we’ve inherited. In this Uprising, I am inspired by the courage, creativity, and perseverance of those engaging in public demonstrations, who are influencing many civil servants to take action—members of city councils, agencies, and even police departments. It is no wonder that the bardo represents a place where the unknown, even the inconceivable, can happen and where we who enter are profoundly changed.

When we dare to face the cruel social and ecological realities we have been accustomed to, courage is born and powers within us are liberated to reimagine and even, perhaps one day, rebuild a world.

Do not look away. Do not avert your gaze. Do not turn aside.

Advocating for the Environment: Using Power for Good – Susan B. Inches

By Susan B. Inches

Using power for good is the basis of environmental advocacy. I heard this theme many times at Bioneers conferences: speakers such as Julia Butterfly Hill, who sat in a giant sequoia for two years and succeeded in saving it; to Paul Hawken, who recently completed Drawdown, a project that measures the impact of 100 climate change strategies. George Lakoff’s Bioneers presentation of the strict father and nurturing parent worldviews changed how I see the world. Performing poets and musicians at Bioneers inspired me. All of these presenters knew how to use their power for good!

I’ve been an environmental advocate for about 30 years, organizing coalitions and lobbying at the state and local level. I realized that through trial and error, I had learned what works and what doesn’t in advocacy. I’d become an expert on policy change.

So when I found myself at home during the pandemic, I decided to share what I’ve learned with others by writing a book. My new book, Advocating for the Environment, How to Gather Your Power and Take Action, has recently been published by North Atlantic Books.

In the book I show ordinary citizens how they can speak up and become effective advocates. Strategies for addressing climate change, environmental justice, and other pressing environmental issues are in there. There’s no other book like it!

My book is available at your local bookstore or online. I’m so pleased that Bioneers is sharing the excerpt below with the Bioneers community.

-Susan B. Inches, Author

Understanding how power works and using it for good is at the heart of effective advocacy. It makes the difference between feeling helpless about environmental degradation and taking action based on a vision of a better future. I’m talking about using power to defend wildlife, preserve forests, clean the air and water, stand for a more equitable society, overturn power abuses, and heal the planet. I’m talking about using power as a tool to work for the common good. I’m talking about using power in ways that respect the worth and integrity of people and all other life on the planet.

When it comes to power, I’m a pacifist. Property damage, smear campaigns, and even negative ads attacking someone’s character are forms of violence. If your goal is to bring about a more peaceful, compassionate, and healthy world, then it’s counterproductive—even hypocritical—to use violent means. The kind of energy people put into the world matters. If you want a more peaceful world, you are not creating it when you use weapons, whether they are guns or words.

Nonviolent direct action is aligned with this view. When people choose to break the law or put themselves in harm’s way without violence, there is power in that choice. By not using violence, protesters are taking the higher moral ground, which challenges the morals of opponents and has more power than devolving to violence.

Nonviolent direct action shows opponents that activists are fully commit- ted to their cause. They are so committed they are willing to put themselves at risk. This, along with the unpredictability of nonviolent campaigns, scares the daylights out of opponents. A typical response is: “If there’s a group pro- testing in my office today, what will they do tomorrow?” Nonviolent direct action gets attention and cracks open the door to new conversations.

At the same time, environmental advocates can understand why some protesters become violent. Many marginalized groups have used nonviolent direct action campaigns for decades and continue to be ignored and abused by those in power. Their frustration sometimes results in resorting to violence to bring attention to their issues. Advocates should never con- done violence, but we can strive to understand the pain of being ignored and silenced.

Student and community advocates have great power. By their presence in the legislature, city council, or town committee, they are sending the message that this issue matters to them. Just by their presence, they’re saying: “When I could be enjoying myself with family and friends, I choose to be here to speak on this issue.” This is using power for good.

Advocates and activists start from a place of power just by showing up. But just showing up isn’t enough to effect change. Advocates and activists need to use their power to organize, strategize, and work with decision makers to move their issues forward. Later chapters in this book explain how to build powerful campaigns that succeed in making change happen.

Your Personal Power

You may not feel powerful. In fact, the majority of people feel powerless when it comes to global problems—climate change, toxic pollution, poverty, war, inequality.

Everyone feels moments of doubt and vulnerability. But, as we discovered in part I, your personal story of connection with the earth, your life experience, your knowledge, and your values are the roots of your personal power. You can let these roots nourish you as you step forward and speak your truth.

Young leaders across the country are speaking with grace and authority on climate change. Anna Siegel is a fourteen-year-old climate leader in Maine whose conviction grew from her love of wild animals. Her speeches on climate change are powerful because they come directly from her heart.

Autumn Peltier grew up in Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory in northern Canada. When she was eight and attended a water ceremony with her family on a First Nations reserve, she saw a sign warning that the drinking water was toxic and unsafe to drink. She decided then that she needed to speak out for the people and the water. “Water is sacred, water is life,” she says. “Mother Earth doesn’t need us; we need her.” Now in her teens, she has presented hundreds of speeches nationally and internationally and has been appointed chief water commissioner of the Anishinabek Nation. She was inspired by her great-aunt Josephine Mandamin, an advocate for the planet’s water. Peltier’s power comes from a place of deep conviction.9

Your personal power comes from your faith and convictions. I don’t necessarily mean religious faith; I mean the faith that comes from what you deeply believe. I believe that no matter how poorly people behave, they have a good heart underneath. Although I have discouraging days and fearful thoughts, I also believe when people clearly see the choices before them, they will choose life. This is my faith in people. I draw on my faith to get through the tough times. You can too.

Staying Grounded

With continuous media attention to violence, accusations, and emotional turmoil, it’s hard to stay grounded, confident, and calm. In recent years, I’ve found I need to focus more deliberately on maintaining my sense of calm and clear headedness than I used to. You may be finding this, too.

I once had an office three blocks from the State House. As a professional advocate and lobbyist, I walked to the Capitol almost daily when the legislature was in session. As I walked, I would set aside my insecurities, personal agendas, and worries. There was a row of sweet lilac bushes along the sidewalk on my route. I would let my worries go as I stopped to smell them. By the time I opened the heavy doors of the State House, my attention was fully focused on the subject of whatever meeting I was about to attend. I was fully present and mentally prepared.

At first I was unaware that I performed this ritual. Only upon reflection did I see how important it was. As I walked through the echoing State House hallways, people would stop and give me the information I needed without my having to ask. Or I might stop and ask someone a question, and they would give me a full explanation. My open and listening attitude allowed me to easily discover and take in the important information I needed to do my job.

You could also initiate a ritual that will help you be fully present in the meeting spaces where advocates do their work. You could try some deep breathing as you travel to your meeting. Breathe from deep in your belly, and feel your breath as it goes in and out. Focus on your breath for at least five minutes. You might park a little farther away or get off the bus or train at an earlier stop, and then notice everything around you as you walk to your meeting. Give yourself a moment to relax and focus your energy. Listen for the birds. Watch the people. Do some stretches to the sky before you enter the building. Do the same thing before and after (and sometimes during) virtual meetings: step outside for some fresh air, breathe deeply, touch your toes, and reach to the sky. It will help.

Some years ago, I was engaged in a contentious issue. The public meetings I attended were hostile. Citizens were angry at and distrustful of state staff, who were trying to gather information. The leader of my team meditated before each meeting to help stay calm as she led the group. I struggled with the hostility. After a two- or three-hour meeting, the tension felt like a toxic substance in my blood. I would go for a walk or run both before and after the meetings to shake off stress. I kept a pair of running shoes in the trunk of my car so I could get some fresh air and calm down before the two-hour drive home. This helped.

You, too, should monitor your body and do what you can to manage the stress that will come up in your advocacy work. Public meetings can be long and tiring. City councils, town select boards, and legislative committees want everyone to be heard. This leads to lengthy meetings, often held in stuffy, crowded rooms or in tedious virtual meetings—a recipe for stress. I highly recommend finding the combination of exercise, fresh air, meditation, stretching, or yoga that works for you.

At stressful meetings, it also helps to refocus and remember the reasons why you’re there. This will connect you with your heart and why you took on this responsibility in the first place. Another helpful technique is to clarify your desired outcomes prior to every meeting. Here are some examples:

Do you intend to connect with a particular decision maker?
Are you representing a group or a certain point of view? Are your talking points clear?
Are you showing up to support specific partners? Who?
Do you hope to solidify a relationship with another advocate or advocacy group?
Are you looking to find out what position another group is taking?
Are you watching for threats to your cause?
Are you sizing up decision makers’ responses?

You should ask yourself these kinds of questions as you mentally prepare for a meeting. If possible, you should write down a list of your desired outcomes prior to every meeting. If you can stay clear about your specific purposes for that meeting or that day, you will remain in a position of power and do a better job of representing your issue and your people.

What We Mean When We Say “Systems Change”

Bioneers is pleased to be running this guest essay by Motaz Attalla, Jennifer Berman, Jessica Conrad, Ruth Rominger, and Eleni Sotos from the Garfield Foundation.

This piece is excerpted from a two-part interview series published on the Garfield Foundation Medium channel. You can access the series in full here.

What does “systems change” mean to us? It’s a question our team at the Garfield Foundation often returns to after having first asked it in the early 2000s. That’s when we began experimenting with different forms of investment and collaboration grounded in systems thinking. Now, as we look back on 2020, it’s no surprise that the tone of the question has changed, gaining gravity and priority.

On the one hand, the relentless tragedies of 2020 revealed in full contrast how inequitable our systems truly are. They also raised people’s awareness about how dire the need for systems change has become on many levels—and about the systemic nature of society’s problems. One of the many stark inequities that emerged last year is the fact that, nationally, COVID-19 cases and deaths of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color exceeded their proportional share of the population. The roaring public discourse about racial injustice has made it easier for more people to connect dots between what’s currently unfolding in the public health system and the consequences of systemic racism in other realms, including the US criminal justice, public education, and economic systems, to name a few. In a word, the current landscape shows just how interconnected our issues are. At the same time, it’s exposing people to the language of system change.

Meanwhile, we are noticing a greater number of organizations in the social sector describing their approach as systemic or in service of systems change. We also see more and more practitioners building new relationships, developing shared language, refining and diversifying practices, and sharing their experience of leading projects using systemic approaches. They are purposefully collaborating to build the emerging field of systems change practice.

It seems very likely that the events of 2020 contributed to and accelerated these shifts. Yet as these dynamics unfold, we are also noticing that the terms—systems change, systemic, systems approach, et cetera—aren’t yet well defined in broad use or within the field itself. Very rarely do the words come with an explanation of their underlying assumptions, and when they do, we’ve found that people use them with different meanings in different contexts, leading to confusion.

With the language of systems change now firmly in the zeitgeist of the social sector, and growing in use in the general public, we see an opportunity to help clarify the definition and practice of systems change. Anyone who follows our work knows that we believe that the practice of systems change offers immense opportunities for solving society’s toughest challenges. Our hope is that by helping people align around what systems change means, we will strengthen the field’s ability to develop and share systems change practices with more practitioners and organizations to create greater impact. Given that a systemic approach requires intentional work at multiple levels—from the micro to the macro—we also intend to bridge these concepts from the social sector to everyday life. The work we’re talking about here is more than just collaboration and strategy setting within organizations or networks. It’s about our individual mindsets and values and how we act on them. In every interaction. Everyday.

With these intentions in mind, here I speak with a few members of our program team to explore what systems change means to us and how we apply the concept in practice through the foundation’s activities and in the way we live our lives at home.

For those who are less familiar with our ethos, approach, and programs at the Garfield Foundation, here are a few broad strokes comments about our work by way of context: Our purpose is to support changemakers seeking transformational solutions to complex social and environmental problems. Through our programs, we support the development of networks like the RE-AMP Network and the Cancer Free Economy Network with technical assistance from our team, access to consultants, and grants for establishing network leadership, strategic action agendas, collaborative capacity, and distributed network infrastructure. We also make grants to practitioners to develop applied systems thinking and analytical tools, trainings, and experiments that contribute to building the field of systems change practice. Through these collaborations, we seek to create impact far greater than we could ever hope to create on our own.

— Jessica Conrad

JESSICA CONRAD, STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER: The word “system” is thrown around all the time, and people use it in reference to so many different things. What type of system do we focus on in our collaborative work with partners?

RUTH ROMINGER, COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS PROGRAM DIRECTOR: The word “system” can be used in reference to many different types of systems, from simple to complicated to complex, including everything from mechanical systems to complex social, environmental and economic systems.

When we use the terms systems change or systems approach we are talking about complex adaptive systems, which are made up of many parts that all do different things and connect and influence each other in multiple ways. Through their web of relationships, the parts of the system create a whole that is itself different from any single part. This is where the common phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” comes from. I would add that the whole is not necessarily greater in the sense of being better than, but that it’s different in kind from any of the parts themselves.

MOTAZ ATTALLA, PROGRAM OFFICER & TECHNICAL ADVISOR: There’s an example I use when I think about systems. I remember Eleni once went to a meeting, and when she described our approach to someone she met there, she said, “You know, we focus on systems change. That’s our guiding strategy.” To which the person replied, “Oh, great. Us too! We’re focused on changing the foster care system.”

We often hear people talk about changing the criminal justice system, the health care system, the education system, the foster care system. Yet I think when people name those systems, they’re generally referring to the current institutions and regulations that form the structural layer of a sector (or system). The focus is on how it operates to deliver a service or function and, naturally, impact a lot of people’s lives. But these institutions and regulations aren’t the system in its totality. When we consider a system, we look both deep and wide. We look at the structural layer—organizations, policies, laws, and other forms of infrastructure—and we also look beneath and within the structures at the mindsets, values, and beliefs that individuals or groups of individuals hold (known as mental models). As the deepest layer of a system, mental models are the bedrock upon which a system is built. The most important part of this is looking at the relationships between all these different elements—that’s where the real story is.

When we at Garfield think about systems, we think across all the layers of the Iceberg Model and about how they influence each other. We think about mindsets and paradigms, specific behavioral patterns, as well as relevant structures, regulations, and institutions (many of which might exist beyond a given sector or field or institution), that all underlie a given event.

RUTH: In the context of our work, we don’t say to ourselves, “Oh, we’re going to change this system.” We’re not talking about a hospital system or a computer system. We’re talking about complex layers and relationships that together have particular qualities and behaviors. When we talk about changing a system, our focus, or subject of inquiry, is the outcome we want to change. We focus on what is creating the current problematic outcome and then define the outcome we want to see. What is the ultimate result we want? So instead of saying we are working on the healthcare system, we might say, how do we create health and wellbeing for everyone? This way, we look at as many different factors as possible that affect people’s health, not just the formal health care system.

We focus on changing behavioral patterns and relationships to create different outcomes. This means, no matter what the specific problem is, it’s about creating different outcomes that improve the health of people and the planet. When we say something that grand, it really involves looking at all the different factors that create an unhealthy planet and society. We look at the interaction of all the layers across the Iceberg—the mental models, underlying structures, trends or patterns, and events—and how they add up to declining ecosystem health and ruptures within the fabric of society. With this framing, we can then look for what might be possible to change by aligning multiple actions among many stakeholders.

Our projects take on issues within systems that are in and of themselves very complex—like the problem of human-made toxic substances that degrade our health. Of course no one set out with the intention of making chemical products that would accumulate in our systems and make people, and whole populations, sick. People believed that they were trying to meet a need or improve existing products. People either weren’t aware of the unintended consequences of the chemistry, or didn’t take them into consideration. The combination of these consequences has resulted in a problem for the health of people and other living things on the planet.

Problems like this require systems thinking. We need to look at how all of those decisions have added up over time to this problem that no one party in the system could create alone. This is why we use methods that have been evolving in the field of systems change practice to influence behavior at multiple levels within a system to affect social change.

ELENI SOTOS, SENIOR PROGRAM OFFICER: I understand your point about unintended consequences in the context of toxic chemicals, and I also want to acknowledge some systems are created that yield intentional outcomes in which there is little or no concern for the harm created. For example, white people very intentionally created slavery, redlining, and many other forms of oppression. Racial inequality is absolutely intentional. In this case our system is producing an intended outcome.

JESSICA: A very important point, thank you for raising it, Eleni. I think we’ve begun wading into territory I suggest we explore next, which is what systems change means in the context of our work.

RUTH: In the field, the term “systems change” has become a term of art. It refers both to the practices and frameworks people use, and to a shared understanding of how complex systems change. We don’t use it as a generic term for any type of social change activity.

JEN BERMAN, PARTNERSHIPS & TRAINING OFFICER: The term is being used by lots of different people in different ways. In my mind, systems change is about seeing how multiple influences—which we typically think of and respond to as separate entities—build on each other and create unintended consequences or outcomes. It’s about understanding how the underlying connections, dynamics, and patterns within a system create the current realities we experience. And it’s about working to change those underlying dynamics, instead of just responding to what is right in front of us.

RUTH: And it’s a field of practice now.

JEN: Right. The field of systems change is a collection of tools, methodologies, frameworks, and mindsets that people are applying in their work to co-create different outcomes. Systems change is both a process and an outcome.

ELENI: Taken together, the theory and the practice that we’re talking about are now seen as a change process.

It’s also important to note that use of the term “systems change” is everywhere now. So many organizations say that their mission is to foster, fund, or in some other way advance systems change. Yet many organizations seem to believe they can do it on their own without trying to understand how their work connects to the larger system, or without working to develop a shared understanding of the system’s dynamics with other stakeholders.

JEN: In our work systems change requires multiple organizations with different perspectives to come together to create a more comprehensive picture of the system (at a deeper level) than any single organization might have on its own. Then they agree on where they collectively want to go and where and how to intervene to change the underlying dynamics.

JESSICA: We’re already talking a little bit about what it means to act systemically. Let’s go there. What does it mean to put theory into practice—to act systemically?

MOTAZ: As I was thinking about this, I found myself checking against how my family and I operate at home. It’s a complex emergent environment, where there are different actors and pressures and things to be solved or changed, especially during COVID time. In my family, the hard part about integrating multiple perspectives, as Jen just shared, is making space for the kids’ perspectives. This is an analogy. For me to act systematically at home is to really think about their perspectives. If one of my kids, who is very young, does something really disruptive, to act systemically I need to recognize that she’s just trying to survive. So that tantrum, or that disruption, is an expression of something deeper.

To act systemically is to recognize the conditions that the kids are in. It’s to recognize that the conditions are making them act a certain way. It’s about going deeper into the mindsets or maybe the underlying structures and patterns that cause an event (in this case the disruption) to happen. So much of the pressure I’m experiencing around the event of the systems breakdown in the family—parent burnout, kid boredom, et cetera—has to do with the wider problems of the education system, which are structural.

One point of intervention for us as a family is to organize with other families within the public school system to co-create new solutions for childcare and education during the pandemic. At the same time, we can experiment with a new arrangement of who does chores—what makes sense for who to do and when—so we can take better advantage of our scarce time and energy resources. Acting systemically might mean creating shared agreements and checking in every few days to see if it still makes sense to continue the agreement. Essentially creating new structures.

All of this has parallels to the kind of systems work that happens in the domain of the social sector. Acting systemically in this context is about engaging different voices, thinking across the multiple levels of an issue, taking a learning orientation, leaning into a more iterative and experimental approach. It’s about recognizing that a problem may have to do with a very deeply rooted structure or a centuries old mindset. It involves checking regularly to see if our practices are still relevant, if a process is starting to create different outcomes in the direction of a desired future, and so on. This is really what acting systemically looks like at the operational level.

RUTH: Some of what resonates for me within your comments, Motaz, is that acting systemically is about being able to see the context in which events are unfolding and understand that the context has evolved over time as a result of many different influences. This helps us realize that we can affect the system (or the current problem) if we understand that it is made up of all of these different dynamics. When carefully considering the context—what’s influencing the problem or the situation you have—so many new options for intervening become available.

JEN: The school analogy is a really good analogy, Motaz. I think there’s a tendency to think, both as individuals and as organizations, that a problem is “up to us” as individual actors to figure out, and that once we figure it out, we will know what the solution is. In an organizational context, we might think our organization knows best what to do, and we’re going to convince everyone that they should jump on our bandwagon. Acting systemically, on the other hand, means partnering with others to bring in multiple perspectives and harness collective intelligence. That way we can better understand both what is currently happening, and that bigger context you’re talking about, Ruth.

ELENI: I would also add that traditional philanthropy often encourages what you first described, Jen, by asking organizations what distinguishes their work from other organizations. This incentivizes individual action that appears promising, innovative et cetera, however it doesn’t serve systems change, due to its separation from all the other work going on alongside it. The work of systems change requires everyone in the ecosystem—funders, advocates, practitioners, all of us—to change our mindsets and approaches.

JESSICA: Thanks, everyone, for the rich discussion and reflection. There’s so much here—and so much more to continue probing together.

We acknowledge that we’re offering our experience in thinking about the language and practices of systems change—not the only experience. We are confident that we have blind spots. We hope you share what our reflections bring up for you so that, collectively, we might bring about greater clarity for all.

Restoring the Ecology and Culture of the Atlantic Forest with Yerba Mate

Stretching out along the east coast of South America, spanning four countries, is an extraordinary tropical forest ecosystem. Charles Darwin, on his voyage of the HMS Beagle in 1832, overwhelmed by its magnificence wrote, “No art could depict such a stupendous scene.”

The Mata Atlantica or Atlantic Forest is one of the most ecologically diverse ecosystems on earth. It is home to 20,000 species of plants, of which over 9000 are found nowhere else. 450 different tree species have been found in just one hectare. Thousands of species of birds, mammals and amphibians, many which are endemic, make their home in Mata Atlantica.

The Atlantic Forest is still revealing its inimitable wonders; between 1990 and 2006 over a thousand new flowering plants were discovered. As recently as 1990, a new monkey species, the black-faced lion tamarin, was also discovered. Considered one of the world’s richest and most endangered forests, it has been identified in a study published in the journal Science Advances as one of the priority tropical forests around the world for conservation and restoration because of its biodiversity, climate mitigation and water security benefits.

Black-faced lion tamarin. Photo by Leonardi, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

But the Atlantic Forest is under threat. Of the original 1.3 million square kilometers, only 7 % remain. 11,000 species of plants and animals are considered threatened by a colonial legacy and the current economic system that does not value a standing forest or respect the rights of nature “to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions and its evolutionary processes (Constitution of Ecuador, Article 71).”

Exploitation of this global treasure started in the 1500’s when the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began logging and exporting timber to Europe. Later deforestation accelerated in order to grow coffee, sugar cane and graze cattle exacerbating the ongoing destruction by the timber and wood pulp industries. Today monocrop GMO soybean production is a growth industry on cleared land that was once capable of supporting an astonishing diversity of life. Clearing forests for agriculture is currently one of the largest causes of deforestation.

Yerba Mate

Yerba mate is a tree native to the Atlantic Forest that can grow 50-foot tall and live for 100 years. Its small red berries reveal its membership in the holly family, but it is its caffeinated leaves that are prized for their health benefits and mental and physical stimulating effects.

But unfortunately, this native tree is being used to further contribute to deforestation. As demand for yerba mate grows, domestically and globally, agribusiness is clearing land to plant yerba mate in the sun in monocrops where the flavor quality and nutrient contents are lower, but yields and profits are higher.

Guayakí Yerba Mate (a Bioneers sponsor) has a different business plan. They call it Market Driven Regeneration™. They work with small farmers and indigenous communities sourcing forest-grown, organic, fair trade yerba mate, and restoring cleared forest land using yerba mate as the economic and ecological driver. As California’s first B Corporation, Guayakí has a triple bottom line making them accountable economically, environmentally and socially.

Currently, Guayakí is supporting the regeneration of 352,000 acres with shade grown yerba mate. Vicente Romero Riveros is a Regenerative Production Technician who works for Guayakí in the Mata Atlantica in Paraguay. He describes how a triple bottom line informs his approach to agroecology, “Our farming practices consist of a series of activities under strict principles that guide us in community work, in harmony with nature, and promoting a new form of farming that values the importance of organic agriculture and sustainable production.”

Vicente Romero Riveros, Regenerative Production Technician in Paraguay

Working with Indigenous Communities

One of those communities is the Aché Kuetuvy who were forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland in the subtropical humid forest of northeast Paraguay in the 1970s, but managed to return in 2000. Historically, the Aché were enslaved and victimized in a genocide campaign that brought them to near extinction.

Today, Aché teams, who work for Guayakí in the forest stewarding and harvesting shade grown yerba mate, make a “living wage” significantly higher than the average farmer in the region. Market Driven Regeneration™ is establishing the economic value of a standing forest and stemming the tide of its destruction. Equally important, this work has provided the Aché the opportunity to thrive in their traditional cultural environment and puts forest stewardship in the hands of people who, for millennia, have proven they know how to live and care for that environment in ways that that allow it “to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions and its evolutionary processes.”

In a Guayakí produced video, Margarita Mbygwangi, an Aché leader and long-time partner of Guayakí, said “For me there is life in this forest. I feel a very strong energy here and developing our traditions of our wild fruit and food keeps us healthy and our grandchildren healthy as well.”

In a written interview, I asked Guillermo Garay, also a Regenerative Production Technician who works with producer communities in Paraguay, how Fair for Life, the fair trade organization that Guayakí works with, benefits those communities.

“Guayakí gives back 10% of all purchases of yerba mate to communities in the form of a fair trade premium to invest in social and/or environmental projects. These projects include improvements of community roads to facilitate access to schools and health centers, food and nutrition programs, food sovereignty, construction of schools for communities, drinking water, and more. The use of Fair Trade Premiums is decided by a fair trade committee made up of the producers themselves, where constant community dialogues lead to the best use of the funds.”

Guillermo Garay, Regenerative Production Technician Paraguay

The article Green Gold: Making Money (and Fighting Deforestation) with Yerba Mate (Harvard International Review, May, 2020), in reference to criticism of neoliberalism and exotic marketing by white-owned businesses, said that critics “ignore the lengths companies like Guayakí and Mi Mate have gone to consult the indigenous communities involved, fund projects of actual interest to the community, and pay far more than market price for mate.”

Regenerative Agriculture and Agroforestry

A fundamental tenet of regenerative agriculture and agroforestry is the concept of learning from and working with nature. Guillermo Garay said, “We consider yerba mate to be our tool for conservation of these areas, and through this, keep providing benefits to maintain forests…

Yerba mate’s natural habitat is the Atlantic Forest and it was always under the shade of native tree species within an environment of high biodiversity. This means that plants in these conditions grow healthier and stronger, with less problems of [pest] plagues and diseases, which affect conventional plantations that do not have a natural balance… When you take a plant out of its natural habitat and incorporate it into a system which is not favorable for the plant, this reduces its quality and lifespan.”

Vicente Romero Riveros added that “Shade grown systems protect the soil, minimizing erosion and provide higher amounts of organic material on the ground, allowing for a permanent organic mass in decomposition. In the same way, the forest cover protects the yerba mate from the wind, maintaining humidity and biological interaction. With the production of conventional yerba in the sun, producers are looking for higher amounts of sunlight and leaf production per hectare, but in doing so are not taking care of the quality of the plants, wildlife, and biodiversity. In conventional growing of yerba mate in the sun, the plant is affected more heavily by the consequences of climate change like drought and heat.”

The Ethics of Business

When working in complex socio-ecological landscapes like the Mata Atlantica, agroecology is not only good business, it can help achieve the other two bottom lines of social benefit and ecological responsibility. Studies have shown that growing yerba mate in the forest is an effective strategy to maintain bird species diversity as well as support amphibian and reptile species richness. Guayakí’s Iguazu Agro-ecology Foundation in Argentina captured images of a jaguar never seen before in the region. Top predators like jaguars are essential to ecosystem balance and health.

In a recent interview with Ann Armbrecht, author of The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry, I asked her if a business could be ethical while operating in an unethical economic system. Her book is her journey to find the answer. The reality is that it’s difficult. There are many pressures to compromise, cut corners and do anything you can to stay in business or, on the other end of the spectrum, extract inordinate and unethical profits at the expense of culture, community and environment.

In response, she gave this example, “Mike Brook, from Organic Herb Trading Company (OTHC) in the UK, talked about the cultural relationship they have with producer groups. OTHC doesn’t want to be the “white trader” coming in and imposing their quality control standards and values without understanding and respecting the relationship and the needs of the growers and collectors.”

Relationship is paramount to ethical conduct. Are we taking care of each other and our world? Are we in right relationship with culture, community and environment, not just our own but those of others? Can that be the guiding principle to stanch the momentum of the corporate dominance and destruction? It can be done and is being done by companies like Guayakí and others.

The Aché people have a strong community ethic of caring and sharing. Aché children have a lot of latitude to roam and play without a great deal of parental restriction. If they show up at a neighbor’s house they will be fed and loved. Almost crushed by the greed and madness of colonialism and capitalism, the Aché people once again have the opportunity to be in right livelihood with their beloved homeland by working with their cultural plant in its native environment. As Margarita Mbygwangi said, “There is life in this forest.”

Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

Ann Armbrecht is an author, filmmaker and the Director of the Sustainable Herbs Program. Since her time studying with legendary herbalist Rosemary Gladstar, who emphasizes a kin-centric relationship with plants, Ann has explored the nature of plants as living entities rather than merely inanimate objects to ingest. Her recent book The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry took her on an international journey to investigate how the commodification of herbal medicine affects the essence of plants. Ann was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.

ARTY MANGAN: Ann, what is the origin of your quest to find out how to maintain the “aliveness” of medicinal plants as they travel through global supply chains?

ANN ARMBRECHT: It really began with my experiences in Nepal. I’d been to Nepal right after college for a year-and-a-half working with Tibetan refugees, and I really wanted to get back there, so I entered an anthropology graduate program that would make that possible, and I wound up getting a doctorate in anthropology in large part just because that helped me to get back to Nepal, but to be honest I was never interested in anthropology as an academic career. And I felt a huge tension between academia and the experiences I had living in a rural village in northeastern Nepal for two years, the way people there related to the natural world and to plants. In rural Nepal everything I had learned with my head at the university got turned upside down, and I couldn’t find a home for my changed worldview when I came back to Harvard.

With herbal medicine, the way Rosemary Gladstar teaches it, intuition and a sense of the sacred are central. Ceremony is part of that, but it goes deeper. It’s not superficial ceremony. It’s about an invisible world beyond what we can see with our naked eye that we can have a relationship with. I had experienced and encountered that in rural Nepal. It just made everything much richer and more meaningful, but that’s really hard to discuss in an academic setting and be taken seriously.

ARTY: In the book, you use the words laral, charwa, and viriditas to describe some of the intangible essences or the qualities of “aliveness” of plants.

ANN. Yes, charwa is a word the Yamphu tribe in Nepal use to describe the essence they perceive in grains that were handed down by their ancestors. Their priests and shamans talk about “seeing double”—being able to see both the world of the ancestors and the world of the living. They go on a spirit journey into the world of the ancestors and bring back baskets of charwa that they pour into the grain bin, but it’s an invisible, ineffable substance that they are convinced makes grain last a long time, longer than the same kind of grain that doesn’t have that ancestral charge, the charwa added to it.

I came across the word laral in the work of literary philosopher Robert Pogue Harrison who was drawing on the work of the renowned mystical poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The word comes from Lares, one of the household gods of the ancient Romans. Laral also pertains to an invisible relationship, an immeasurable quality, but one you know when it’s there or not.

The herbalists I respect most talk a lot about the importance of the intention you put into plants when you harvest them as a key factor in the potency of the medicine, but these same herbalists sometimes recommend products that are bought and sold in large amounts on a global supply chain. I wanted to see if you could still find those intangible, invisible but crucial qualities in plants once they are put into a global supply chain and how that energy might express itself under those circumstances.

Ann Armbrecht (center) conducting interviews at Infusion, Brisitol, UK

ARTY: Historically, the global medicinal plant trade paralleled colonialism. You mention in your book that the Portuguese, the first global maritime spice traders, set the tone early when they secured their control over the spice trade in India with cannons.

ANN: Yes, and those patterns have had lasting outcomes. Countries that are no longer colonies are still selling their products predominantly to the countries that colonized them. Those trade relationships emerged out of exploitative terms and prices that were set when the colonies had no say about the practice of extracting resources from their lands, and the imbalance in the power dynamics hasn’t improved all that much. I feel that current conversations about sustainability should grapple with those exploitive trade relationships and how hard it is to change them. And that’s not just the botanical industry, but the botanical industry is implicated because the spice trade was to a large extent what launched colonialism.

But the history of plant use is complex. For example, the ethnobotanist Claudia Ford did extensive research on the many uses of cotton, and she came across very credible historical accounts of how slave women had used cottonseed to induce abortions after being raped by plantation owners, who saw those women as property and wanted to increase their property by having more slave children. So, even though the desire for cheap labor to harvest cotton was a major factor driving the slave trade, enslaved women also found ways to use the plant, in the form of cottonseed, to resist oppression. Meanwhile the owners hired doctors who used other plants, such as Black-haw (Viburnum prunifolium) to try to prevent the abortions and miscarriages these women were trying to induce.

ARTY: The doctors of the “Eclectic” movement in the 1800s and early 1900s developed an American medicinal herbal body of practice based on what they had learned and borrowed from a number of other healing traditions, including some Native American, African, European, and perhaps Asian approaches as well. Medicinal herbs were a regular part of those doctors’ practices, but using plants as medicine fell out of favor in the 20^th Century.

Removing weeds from a comfrey field in Bulgaria. Photo by Willow Fortunoff

ANN: Paul Starr’s book, the Transformation of American Medicine, traces that history in great detail. There were a lot of different contributing factors. In the early 1900s, you could go into any pharmacy and there would be plant liquid extracts made by Parke Davis and Lily and other major companies, but that died out with the germ theory of disease as the main framework for looking at illness, and people wanting a quick fix. Penicillin and other antibiotics were discovered and produced at a time when many people were dying in surgery from infection. The ideas of the “silver bullet” cure and “better living through chemistry” became dominant. Herbal medicines didn’t taste good and weren’t seen as modern.

The famous herbalist David Winston, who is an authority on the Eclectics, also says that they didn’t modernize or catch on to the new discoveries in the way that they might have, so part of their decline was perhaps self-inflicted. Medical historians often point to the Flexner Report, which, in 1910, derided and rejected botanical therapies, as the main reason why the use of herbal medicine declined. Following that report, for example, industrialist John D. Rockefeller only funded medical schools that taught allopathic medicines (and insisted they eliminate traditional herbal and natural remedies from their curricula), but there were a number of things that contributed to traditional herbal medicine falling out of favor.

ARTY: Today, plant medicine seems to have made a comeback. It’s a multi-billion dollar business globally (almost $10 billion in the U.S. alone), and thousands of different species of plants are sourced internationally. In your research, you found a great deal of variance when it comes to processing standards. What are some of the things you found?

ANN: Ideally, you want to know that the company you buy from knows where the herbs they are selling are from and that they have a direct and, one hopes, ethical relationship with the people they buy them from, but sadly that’s not the norm. We saw a lot of carelessness and a wide range of standards. We saw sacks that weren’t labeled, so the herbs from one sack could mix into another sack. You think you’re getting ashwagandha, but you might be getting something else. One buyer said the trader told him he was getting chamomile from Hungary, but there was an Egyptian newspaper in the sack. There were many terrible stories about things found in sacks of herbs. In some places, there was a lack of rodent control. There were sacks of herbs open to the air, so who knows what could get into them. Herbs that are stored in the open air with temperature fluctuation are going to take in moisture and then dry, which will reduce the medicinal constituents. You want a company to measure the micro-compounds in plants, so you know you’re getting vibrant plant material that will have a beneficial effect, but I found that that’s exceedingly rare.

When the Eclectics died out, the whole supply chain and the knowledge of the supply chain and quality control died with it. With the Eclectics, there was rigorous quality control and knowledge about how to evaluate quality. That died out in the U.S., but fortunately it didn’t die out in Germany or Europe, or India or China where there are long traditions of sourcing botanicals for their systems of medicine. They have different grades of quality and often the top-quality herbs stay in their own countries and the lower quality stuff is exported to the U.S. That’s changing some now with more awareness here, but it’s still a factor; we have a long way to go.

Sorting dried FairWild certified bibhitaki fruits, Western Ghats, India. Photo by Ann Armbrecht

ARTY: What are some of the most important aspects of the supply chain process that help ensure the quality of medicinal herbs and herbal products when they get to the end user?

ANN: It starts with the plants in the field where they’re growing: they should be harvested at the right time. Knowledge about the plant is especially important with wild-collected plants. You want collectors who are knowledgeable and can identify the correct plants and are harvesting from areas that are clean or as clean as possible. Harvesting plants at the right time when their active constituents are at their highest concentrations is crucial. All the traditional systems of medicine specify when the constituents are the most potent. In some Tibetan systems, whether it’s growing on the north side of a slope or the south side of a slope can affect the optimal harvest time. It can be quite detailed.

Then you want to get it to the next stage as quickly as possible. If it’s to be dried, you don’t want to leave freshly harvested plants in stacks. You need to get them into the drying process or into extraction as quickly as possible. Herbs need to be dried at the right temperature and for the right amount of time. If it’s under-dried, microbes can grow; if it’s over-dried, the constituents are lost. How it’s stored is also crucially important. You want to make sure it’s stored in clean sacks in which nothing has been stored before. The storage facility temperature should not fluctuate a lot. There should be good rodent control, and if it’s a dried material, it should be cut in as big pieces as possible for as long as possible because that preserves the constituents longer.

ARTY: You wrote that “the landscape becomes a product governed by the logic of capital, no longer attached to place.” You quote Craig Holdrege, co-director of the Nature Institute, who states: “There are no characteristics without context.” Can you talk a little bit about the importance of a connection to place?

ANN: Well, for example, herbalists recommend Echinacea or Elderberry to get rid of a cold as if there was a generic plant identical in all places. What I understand Craig Holdrege to mean is that place and context matter a lot: nettles that are collected from wild certified collectors in Eastern Poland are not the same as nettles from a certified organic small farm in Vermont. Each one has its own story of the place where the plants are from. Personally, I don’t take a lot of herbal products. I grow some herbs and use those, or I take herbs that I know where they’re from. That way, I have a relationship and for me that relationship relates to the laral concept. It’s not just a product I’m taking and then going about my day. I pause and think about that relationship. I think that connection matters.

ARTY: One of the questions that you pose in the book is: “Can a company be ethical in an unethical economic system?” What are some of the strategies that some of the ethical companies employ to work respectfully and fairly with all aspects of the supply chain?

Harvesting catnip, Trout Lake Farm, Washington. Photo by Bruce Yolk

ANN: One thing about the botanical industry that surprised me is how fragmented it is. Small-scale companies don’t have the resources to invest in the source community, so many companies work with middlemen, groups that buy from a variety of growers and collectors and then sell to the brand companies, who then produce the finished product. That said, even brands that don’t have a direct connection with growers and collectors can still find ways to value them.

Mike Brook, from Organic Herb Trading Company (OTHC) in the UK, talked about the cultural relationship his firm has with producer groups. OTHC doesn’t want to be a “white trader” coming in and imposing its ideas about quality control standards and values without understanding and respecting the needs of the growers and collectors. Things like upfront payments, fair pricing and contracts can be the basis for a respectful relationship, even if there is not a direct connection with the growers and collectors of the plants.

A person I spoke to at a large botanical farming co-op that we visited in Germany said what makes a difference is when the buyer isn’t just chasing the cheapest price year-to-year from different suppliers but commits to working with them for a while to develop a relationship, to develop a commitment to troubleshooting problems together. In that sort of situation, if a botanical doesn’t pass the quality control standards, the supplier and buyer can work together with the collector or grower to figure out how to improve the system and help the farmers get the resources they need to improve.

ARTY: You write about how one company, Traditional Medicinals, went beyond the standards you just mentioned and worked to help improve the lives of families in an Indian village where they source from. You describe how Traditional Medicinals co-founder Nioma Sadler noticed the women (and girls as young as 2 years old) carrying water all day from a community well to their homes. She told her husband and co-founder Drake Sadler that they shouldn’t return unless they could do something to improve the water situation and the lives of the women there, so Traditional Medicinals helped fund the installation of over 300 underground rainwater catchment tanks and named them after the women of the households.

ANN: So much of that was Nioma’s personality and how she developed relationships with people in that village, especially the young girls. It makes good business sense because if you’re sourcing a botanical from a community where all the farmers are totally stressed, they’re going to cut corners in growing the crop.

I spoke with a producer in the country of Georgia who said: “The wild collectors care about what they need to do to make a living. If you want them to care about biodiversity, you need to help them make a good enough living so that they can take care of biodiversity by not overharvesting.” From a business point of view, if you care about the quality in the short term and having a raw material in the long term, it makes sense that the communities and the environment are healthy. Unfortunately, not many companies seem concerned with that.

I was struck by how many companies have many people in their marketing departments and only one or two in sourcing who are getting to know where the plants actually are from and what the conditions of the communities the growers are living in actually are. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement.

My objective in writing the book was to help readers see the system from the perspective of the different people involved and the different stakeholders. The Sustainable Herbs Program is initiating conversations to bring together different voices beyond those who have often been the only ones we hear from. We are connecting producer groups from Croatia, Georgia, Peru, Nepal and India with companies in the U.S., Germany and the UK to speak about issues around wage, income, and soil health to bring more depth to conversations around sustainability rather than just throwing the word around.

Herbal medicine can be a container for a right relationship with the Earth. Robin Kimmerer talks about honorable harvest, and a person who works for a long-time German trading family talked about the concept of the “honorable businessman.” Both of those concepts make me think about the cultural container of our relationship. Capitalism tends to be just about price, and it seems that the botanical industry, which is rooted in traditions of right relationship, has the potential to be ethical in an unethical economic system. I don’t know if it is possible, but if any industry should be leading the way, I feel like the botanical industry should be because relationship with the plants should be at the heart of it.

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