Compared to ecosystems on land, oceans don’t generally receive their due in the climate change conversation, but phytoplankton generate 50 to 80% of the world’s oxygen, and new research reveals that oceans’ role in carbon sequestration is much larger than previously realized, so marine environments turn out to be at least as crucial as terrestrial ones, and probably more so, in regulating climate. How we treat our oceans may well determine the ultimate survival of our species.
This week we highlight the work of some leading scientists and activists working to protect and restore marine habitats.
This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Turning the Tide: Commercial Fishing & Ocean Conservation
In this article, marine ecologist Rod Fujita speaks about the importance of aligning the value of conservation with the value of people who make a living on fishing. Despite the history of conservation and the role oceans play in biodiversity, a small percentage of oceans are protected from commercial exploitation.
In a new series of community conversations, Bioneers is offering a community of dynamic and reflective learning around deep and engaging topics to discuss issues that impact our planet. Collaborate with the Bioneers community on the second Thursday of each month, starting with a conversation about water. In exploring #bluemind science and practice, we learn about creatively and collaboratively solving problems through the wisdom of water.
The first conversation begins June 10th with Wallace “J” Nichols, Ph.D.
Fall In Love With Water: A Million Blue Mind Marbles
Scientist Wallace “J” Nichols, teacher at Bioneers’ first Community Conversations event (above), has used blue marbles to connect his audiences to deep gratitude and a love for water.
This New Tool Maps and Tracks Coral Reef Bleaching
Within the past 10 years, most of the planet’s coral reef population has been affected by bleaching, with many areas dying due to bleaching events. Preserving and protecting Earth’s coral reefs is enormously important: Healthy reefs are relied upon by a quarter of all the fish in the ocean, they protect coastlines from erosion, and they provide food and jobs for hundreds of millions of people.
She is the Ocean is a documentary that explores the lives of nine astonishing women from the four corners of the globe who share in their love for the Sea. In showing how it has shaped and given direction to their lives, She is the Ocean captures a love so profound that these women have chosen to make the Sea the center of their physical, philosophical and professional lives. She is the Ocean is available to stream on all of your favorite platforms!
Saving Our Water Planet | Alexandra Cousteau discusses what we must do to conserve earth’s waters and shares her initiative to inspire and empower individuals to protect our oceans and the communities that rely on them.
The Seaweed Rebellion: Saving the Earth by Saving the Oceans | Ocean defenders Michael Stocker, Anne Rowley and David Helvarg illuminate the peril of noise and plastics pollution and the promise they see in the Seaweed Rebellion to save Mother Ocean, and ourselves.
Preserving and protecting Earth’s coral reefs is enormously important: Healthy reefs are relied upon by a quarter of all the fish in the ocean, they protect coastlines from erosion, and they provide food and jobs for hundreds of millions of people. Coral reefs throughout the world are threatened by increasing stressors — including rising ocean temperatures, pollution, and changes in tides and light levels — causing a catastrophic process called bleaching.
Coral reef bleaching occurs when reefs discharge the algae living in their tissues, which causes them to turn white. While coral bleaching doesn’t always result in the death of coral reefs, it does leave them significantly more stressed and vulnerable.
Within the past 10 years, most of the planet’s coral reef population has been affected by bleaching, with many areas dying due to bleaching events.
The Allen Coral Atlas: Mapping Reefs for Faster Action
When bleaching begins, but before reefs start to parish, conservationists and scientists have an opportunity to take swift action to protect coral reef populations from significant losses. The trick is identifying when a bleaching event has begun — something made much simpler by a new project called the Allen Coral Atlas.
“With pin-point precision, the Allen Coral Atlas maps can show changes among the world’s massive reefs at a level of detail of just a few square meters. Users can download habitat maps, satellite imagery, and ocean depth data from the interactive map. With this information, reef scientists and managers can spot threats and head off risks with innovative solutions.
Not only are the global maps providing big-picture intelligence, but also the new technology will make it possible to detect subtle changes to reefs over time. Previously, science was focused on the large-scale bleaching events after the fact. Now researchers will be able to see changes at the sediment level before a catastrophe happens. Quickly identifying and acting on potential threats to reef ecosystems can save these underwater habitats. Future applications of the atlas technology will include robotics, artificial intelligence and new satellites to further expand the platform’s capacity.”
Whenever I hear something that rings true and comes from two distinct traditions, I pay attention. Many years ago, a friend of mine related to me a Buddhist metaphor about the interconnectedness of life that suggests that every ant had been your mother in a past life for so many cycles that the milk that fed you from her breast would fill the ocean. Of course, it’s hard to take that literally, but the allegory did make me think about the kinship of life.
So, when I heard Valentin Lopez, Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, speak at the 2021 EcoFarm Conference during a workshop on “Regenerative Agriculture: Equity and Inclusion” about how all life is interrelated from an Indigenous perspective, it struck me that the worldview he was sharing reflected on the Buddhist perspective.
I have been involved in organic/sustainable/regenerative/agro-ecological food and farming movements for a long time now, and I’ve recently been doing some writing about Regenerative Agriculture and the importance of biodiversity. The idea that life on earth is built on the diversity of species and driven by their interactions, cooperation and competition is certainly far from a foreign concept to me, but these Indigenous and Buddhist teachings make me feel that even those of us with a firm grasp of the scientific underpinnings of biodiversity may still be missing something essential. That rational understanding doesn’t go far enough in driving home viscerally just how fundamental our kinship with the natural world is. It doesn’t capture how our loss of spiritual connection to the web of life has inevitably led to the catastrophic, tragic loss of biodiversity our species is now causing.
In his talk, Valentin Lopez explained that it is our sacred responsibility to care for all living things, and he also offered an Indigenous perspective on true wealth:
“Creator gave us the responsibility to take care of Mother Earth. We took that obligation very seriously. We learned how to take care of the plants and the birds and the fish. How to take care of the migration patterns and how to take care of the fog and how to take care of the shadows. Those were all our responsibilities. That’s what our ancestors looked at as true wealth and riches for thousands of years. Today people look at wealth as how much money they have in the bank or what kind of car they drive or what neighborhood they live in or what kind of shoes they’re wearing. They consider that true wealth; that’s totally baffling to the Amah Mutsun and most Native Americans. To our ancestors, true wealth was two things. The first is Indigenous knowledge that was passed down from generation to generation to generation about how to take care of Mother Earth and all living things. Do you know how to take care of the bears?
On California’s Central Coast, the grizzly bears and all bears in our territory did not hibernate. There was no need to hibernate because the climate was so mild, so we had the responsibility to ensure that there was a reliable food source for the bears in all four seasons. We had to learn what plants the bears need for food for the summer, the winter, the spring and the fall. That was important to us. We had to know the ceremonies to pray for balance in the four seasons. Indigenous knowledge includes our places of power and the ceremonies to call back the migrating geese, to call back the migrating salmon.
The second thing that was important to our knowledge and riches was relationship. Do you know how to ensure that your relationships are sincere and honest? Do you have truthful honest and healthy relationships within your family? Do you have those relationships with your neighbors, and the neighboring tribes, etc. It’s important to teach people how to find a mate and to be responsible adults.
And it went much further than that. Do you have strong relationships with the insects, with the four-leggeds, with the birds, with the fish? Those are sacred relationships we all have. We recognize them as our relatives. They have the same mother and father as we do. Our father is Father Sky; our mother is Mother Earth. The same is true of the deer, the rabbits and the birds. They have the same mother and the same father. They are our relatives; we have to take care of them with love, with care. We have to sing to them; we have to talk to them; we have to listen to them.
And finally, we have a relationship with Creator. Do you have a strong relationship with Creator? Does Creator listen to your prayers? Does Creator talk to you? Do you listen to Creator and hear what he is saying? Those qualities, the knowledge of our ancestors and having those healthy, strong relationships are what gave true wealth to our people. That’s what was passed down generation to generation. That’s what all of us need to go back to—knowing how to take care of Mother Earth and having those relationships with all living things.”
Valentine Lopez offers us profound teachings. Caring for Mother Earth, who feeds uncountable life-cycles, and all her manifestations – even the ineffable entities of fog and shadows – is our sacred responsibility. Gaining the knowledge to be in right relationship with all of life, is the path to true prosperity. Those are the real treasures that we risk losing.
Ocean conservation is a practice that extends back into history for generations. Our planet’s oceans sequester carbon at scales akin to the rainforest. Despite the history of conservation and the role oceans play in biodiversity, a small percentage of oceans are protected from commercial exploitation.
Rod Fujita is the co-founder and Director of Research & Development for the Environmental Defense Funds Oceans Program. As the lead senior scientist, Rod has spent over 30 years leading a team of scientists and policy experts to identify marine conservation problems and design solutions to protect the planet’s oceans. Rod is the author of the 2003 book, “Heal the Ocean: Solutions for Saving Our Seas”.
In this article, marine ecologist Rod Fujita speaks about the importance of aligning the value of conservation with the value of people who make a living on fishing.
What follows is an edited excerpt from a Bioneers 2019 panel titled “Large-Scale Landscape Conservation and a Global Deal for Nature”.
If you love life, you’ve got to love the ocean. All life comes from the ocean. The ocean still hosts the most phyletic diversity: the big groups of body forms and species on the planet. For the longest time, the oceans seemed far too vast for mere humans to perturb in any way. But we’ve somehow managed, just in the last hundred years, to fish down great stocks of fish that were once described as so thick you could walk across the backs of the cod in New England. We’ve managed to extinguish whale species that were super abundant, roaming the oceans. We’ve even managed to alter the food webs and the life support systems, and the very chemistry of the oceans themselves. It’s remarkable.
There have probably been ocean conservation heroes among us for centuries, maybe millennia. Maybe it was the first native Hawaiian who built a fishpond: an extensive watershed seascape management system, elegant in design, regenerative in nature, that restored the landscape, protected the water quality, grew all the crops people needed, and resulted in abundant fish without catching too many. Or maybe it was a Polynesian leader, who declared the first taboo on harvesting vulnerable animals that are highly valuable, like trochus, giant clams, and sea cucumbers. That led to an extensive and sophisticated system of regulation thousands of years ago intended to preserve the species of the ocean, and to make sure that the regenerative processes that maintain biodiversity and the flow of goods and services that support human well-being continue.
Well, it took a while, but 3,000 years later, modern society has kind of caught up to that traditional wisdom. I first woke up to this in the 90s, when I was starting my career, with headlines announcing crashing fish stocks, the demise of the tunas, the swordfish, the marlin, one after the other. I got activated like a lot of my colleagues at that time to protect the ocean. Our first instinct was to create protected areas like our ancestors did on the land, the people who started the wilderness movement, the people who created these really wonderful national parks, sometimes described as America’s best idea.
We started to try to create marine parks and adopt that same model of terrestrial conservation to the ocean. It was challenging because the ocean looks like a mirror. It’s hard to see the ravages that are going on under the waves. You just see the sky – it looks beautiful. But meanwhile, the underwater landscape was being trampled by trawling. It was being dynamited. It was being overfished. The wetlands were being destroyed for marinas. But it’s hard to see all that.
Also, the boundaries of these marine reserves were difficult to see and enforce. At least at a national park, you’ll see a sign that says: This is a national park. In the ocean, you can’t put up signs.
Despite these difficulties, it soon became clear to most people that if you stop killing things in an area of the ocean, they can flourish. And it sounds simple, but it took me years to convince governments in the United States and all around the world of that simple truth: If you don’t kill things, they can grow and prosper. That’s the theory of marine reserves.
Because the science was clear, and because we had learned something from traditional wisdom, this movement caught on. So 30 years later, we’ve got about 17,000 marine-protected areas covering the surface of the ocean. We’ve got about 8% of the ocean’s surface under protection. It’s creeping up there to the percentage of the land that’s protected. It sounds impressive, but when you really get down to looking at how these marine-protected areas are functioning, are they actually prohibiting killing? Are they actually preventing pollution? Are they actually preventing oil and gas extraction? The answer is no, not really.
Less than 2% of those 17,000 marine-protected areas are functional. It’s not scaling. 8% is not enough, and 2% is definitely not enough if we’re going to save the ocean.
The ocean is one of the great reservoirs of carbon and one of our great saviors from even worse climate change, along with the rainforest. The rainforest and the ocean take carbon out of the atmosphere, put it into the soil or put it into the deep water where it stays for centuries. It’s our salvation. And we’re going to need to protect more than 8% of the ocean to restore that function and keep it alive.
So how do we do that? The first step toward a cure or a solution is really a good diagnosis. We can make an easy diagnosis and say, well, fishermen are rapacious; people just want to damage the ocean for their own greedy motives. But in my experience, a lot of the people want to do the right thing. Consider the possibility of creating a marine reserve where people are impoverished, and where fishing is the employer of the last resort if you don’t have an education. These people have to feed their families. The proposition that we’re giving these folks is, “Hey, why don’t you stop fishing so that stuff can grow, and so that I, in the United States, can enjoy the biodiversity?” It’s a terrible value proposition, and that’s why conservation is not scaling in the ocean.
To reverse that, we have to align people’s incentives and their needs with the conservation proposition. We can do this. We have to embed these marine-protected areas within areas that are secure, that are reserved for the use of the people who are paying the conservation price so that they can reap the benefits of their own conservation action. That’s the key: The people who pay the cost need to get the benefits. Those benefits can’t be externalized to privileged folks who are not paying any costs but get all the biodiversity and goodies.
Here’s a quick story about how this can be put into action: There are some countries where this is happening apace. We work in Belize, a little country in the Caribbean, that has responsibility for about a third of the Mesoamerican reef system, which is the second largest reef system in the world. This is a tiny little country with very low capacity, but they created nine large marine-protected areas in these territorial waters. As of five years ago, only about 2% of that area was off limits to extraction, and the fishermen were dead set against expanding that protected nucleus.
This dynamic continued, with the fishermen opposing expansion and the environmentalists saying, “Yes, let’s expand it.” Until they created what’s called a territorial use right for fishing. It turns out the reason the fishermen were opposing these no-take reserves is not because they’re not interested in stewardship. They understand that if you stop killing fish when they’re spawning, the young fish will grow up. If you stop killing the young fish, they will grow up. They get it. It’s just that they were asked to pay the costs of not fishing while illegal fishermen from other countries and other places were coming and taking the fish. Again, it was a terrible value proposition until the Belizean government secured the fishermen’s right to claim the benefits of their own stewardship activities, and that turned the tide. It completely changed the political dynamics, it aligned the economics and the incentives with conservation, and Belize just tripled the size of its no-take reserves this last year.
This article was originally published in One Earth by Justin Winters, Co-Founder & Executive Director of One Earth.
What does a healthy ecosystem look like? What does it sound like? Does a vision come to mind of a lush jungle, teeming with vibrant flowers, chirping birds, and howling monkeys? Or perhaps, brilliant corals against ocean waters filled with schools of fish and the sound of whales calling in the distance? We often think of nature as very remote and separate from people, but in reality, some of the ecosystems that are the richest in biodiversity are also the richest in cultural diversity.
Take the Amazon region; to a visitor this immense rainforest may seem wild and untamed, but over 400 unique Indigenous peoples live here. Each group has their own language, dialect, style of dress, art, and music. For over 8,000 years they have tended and actively encouraged the diversity of plants and animals of the Amazon, and they have cultivated hybrid plants that are used for both medicine and food. There are 16,000 different tree species in the Amazon, and over 40,000 plant species. As many as three out of every ten species on Earth are found here. It has taken scientists hundreds of years to document the incredible richness of this bioregion, and still every year more species are discovered.
It is the cultural and biological diversity of the Amazon region that has created one of the most powerful engines in the fight against climate change. According to the Global Safety Net, a peer-reviewed paper that documents the full spatial extent of the world’s natural lands, 85% of the Amazon is of vital importance for biodiversity and our global climate system, locking away an estimated 150 billion tonnes of carbon. The rainforest here also creates its own weather, recycling water 5 to 7 timesbefore it completes a single hydrological cycle. This system has kept the region from turning into a savanna landscape and made it exceedingly rich in beta diversity (or complexity), which is why it is able to absorb 10-15% of our carbon dioxide emissions every year. Without the Amazon, our global climate system would collapse.
The ‘Global Safety Net’ for the Amazon: 85% of land is important for the preservation of biodiversity and carbon storage. Credit: Karl Burkart, One Earth
It’s important to point out that as much as 50% of the Amazon’s remaining intact forests are on Indigenous lands, and it is precisely these areas that harbor more biodiversity and store more carbon than any other. Historically, the guardians of the Earth’s most biodiverse lands have been Indigenous communities. These cultures understand that humans are a part of the ecosystems in which they live, not separate from them. Tending to their lands and waters for millennia, Indigenous peoples have passed down traditional wisdom and land management practices from generation to generation. It is their way of life that helps to make these places so vital for the preservation of all life on our planet.
In 2014, I was fortunate enough to visit the western Amazon region and meet several of the Indigenous leaders and communities that are now part of the Ceibo Alliance in Ecuador. Witnessing how oil extraction efforts lead by the world’s wealthiest corporations had destroyed Indigenous peoples’ lands, made their water toxic, and sickened and killed multiple generations was both eye opening and deeply disturbing. People simply cannot fight for their rights or defend their lands when they lack access to basic necessities like clean water, and when they are suffering from poor health due to decades of deep injustice and human rights abuses.
Following that journey, the foundation I was leading at that time made a seed grant to Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance to support Indigenous-led efforts to install clean rainwater catchment systems providing hundreds of families with clean water. From there, and with sustained grant support, their efforts scaled to include territorial mapping and monitoring, partnership and coordination with other Indigenous groups across the region, and groundbreaking legal efforts that ultimately led to formal protection of 700,000 acres of rainforest in 2019. Just last year, Waorani leader and Ceibo Alliance co-founder Nemonte Nenquimo, was recognized by Time100 and the Goldman Prize for this remarkable work. Supporting emerging models of Indigenous-led conservation like those led by Nemonte, is not only the morally right thing to do, but it is a central solution to both protecting biodiversity and solving climate change.
It is more important than ever to respect and support the diverse cultures which have helped to preserve these priceless ecosystems. The complex web of life in places like the Amazon have helped to regulate our global climate system for tens of thousands of years, enabling humanity to evolve. But right now, the web is unraveling, with many Indigenous peoples facing growing pressures from extractive industries like mining, drilling, logging, and industrial agriculture. Tragically, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, deforestation in the Amazon spiked in 2020.
While the Amazon rainforest is the largest on Earth, there are vitally important forests and other natural ecosystems on every continent that harbor both cultural and biological diversity and are essential if we are to have a chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C and rebalancing our global climate system. There are over 5,000 Indigenous and tribal groups around the world, occupying 35-40% of the world’s remaining natural land — from the Sámi in northern Europe and the Tlingit in Alaska, to the Maya in Central America and the native peoples of the Colorado Plateau; from the Zulu, Masaai, and Himba of Africa to the Bayad, Durvud, and Khalka of Mongolia; from the hundreds of unique ethnic groups in Indonesia to the aboriginal peoples of Australia, Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Papua. These cultures hold the most ancient lineages on Earth, as well as the largest stores of biodiversity and carbon.
Every day more and more governments are waking up to the vitally important role that Indigenous peoples play. Just recently after 20 years of negotiation, the government of Peru announced it will establish a landmark Indigenous reserve for uncontacted peoples. We need more success stories like this one. A new UN Report has highlighted the powerful role that Indigenous peoples play in securing the ecosystem services that make life on Earth possible for all of humanity:
“These peoples are rich when it comes to culture, knowledge, and natural resources, but some of the poorest when it comes to incomes and access to services, and among the most affected by the pandemic, healthwise and economically. Supporting them to protect and manage their forests could help to create or recover hundreds of thousands of jobs in forestry, agroforestry, tourism, education, and cultural activities, and to avoid new pandemics, as well as providing other social, environmental, and cultural benefits.” — Forest Governance by Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, FAO
The report puts forward a clear agenda for action, all within a framework of respect for Indigenous and territorial peoples’ right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent:
Recognize collective territorial rights
Compensate communities for environmental services
Support community-led forest management
Revitalize ancestral knowledge & traditional practices
Working with the global human rights organization Avaaz, One Earth helped to launch a petition with over 150 Indigenous and environmental organizations calling for a “Global Deal for Nature” — setting a global target of protecting the world’s remaining natural lands and prioritizing and Indigenous-led conservation agenda under the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. In order to create the rapid and radical transformation needed to preserve our shared planet, we must ensure that every culture has a seat at the table. Representation is key. The solution to tackle the climate crisis is, at its core, intersectional. By protecting cultural diversity, we protect biodiversity. The only way to thrive is together.
The nutrients in fruits and vegetables have declined in the past 50-70 years. People may be getting enough calories but could still experience hidden hunger – a lack of essential nutrients. Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed Dr. Gladis Zinati of The Rodale Institute to discusses how soil health and farming practices affect human health.
Dr. Zinati, a soil scientist and director of the Vegetable Systems Trial , evaluates the impact of cropping systems and management practices on nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, vegetable nutrient density and plant resistance to pests. She has 30 years’ experience and holds undergraduate degrees in General Agriculture and Agriculture Engineering; a M.S. in Horticulture from the American University of Beirut; and a Ph.D. in Soil Fertility from Michigan State University.
ARTY MANGAN: According to the “2014 Global Hunger Index” (compiled by the NGO Concern Worldwide) 2 billion people world-wide suffered that year from hidden hunger. What is hidden hunger?
GLADIS ZINATI: First, let’s define hunger. Hunger is usually understood as the lack of food, but according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, hunger is defined as undernourishment, i.e. when a person is getting less than 1800 kilo-calories per day. But hidden hunger has to do with more than just the number of calories consumed. Deficiencies in micronutrients and vitamins are also forms of hidden hunger.
Why is that important? Because a deficiency in minerals and vitamins in the food we eat will ultimately weaken our immune system. In this era of the COVID-19 pandemic, if your immune system is already compromised or impaired, then your susceptibility to a disease caused by a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 (or many other diseases) is much higher. Deficiencies in minerals and vitamins not only impact our susceptibility to viruses, but also, in the long term, they can result in serious, long-term physical and mental disabilities, so to authentically address hidden hunger, we need to look at how we can improve not just the quantity of food but the nutrient density of foods.
Dr. Gladis Zinati
ARTY: USDA trend data from 1950-1999 demonstrate a decline in the protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, vitamin A, riboflavin and vitamin C content of somewhere between 5% and 35% in a number of vegetables and some fruits. Similar declines were seen in corn and soybeans. A 2004 study by Donald Davis at the University of Texas attributed the decline in food crop nutritional density to seed breeders breeding for size, growth-rate and pest resistance while ignoring nutrition. Others say that the excessive application of synthetic nitrogen increases plants’ production of sugars at the expense of other nutrients. Irakli Loladze of Arizona State University has claimed that as CO2 levels are rising with climate change, plants are making more sugars and diluting other nutrients. What do you think of those studies, and what do you think are the main causes of nutrient declines in food?
GLADIS: There are many factors that play a role in the decline of nutrients in food. As you mentioned, seed breeders have been breeding for bigger sized fruits and vegetables. When breeders breed for plant growth, the plant takes up more water and nutrients from the soil and becomes bigger, and when you apply more synthetic nitrogen, which is readily available to the plant, the plant taps into it and grows vigorously. Plants photosynthesize more and produce more sugars, and those sugars, in the form of carbohydrates or other starches, increase at the expense of minerals. This is called a dilution effect. When you apply increased water and nitrogen; fats, proteins and carotenoids increase, but the ratio of minerals decreases.
Organic systems depend on biology. Naturally occurring nitrogen is not like the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers used in conventional farming systems; it is more mediated by biology. It needs to be digested first and then expelled by microorganisms before plants can take it up. There is a slow release of the nutrients, so the plant will not grow too vigorously or abruptly; it will grow over time, and not at the expense of the minerals. And if you have increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, which, of course, we have been seeing in the last decades, that also increases the amount of sugar that the plant is making, at the expense of nitrate, magnesium, iron or zinc.
ARTY: How does the health of soils affect nutrients in food crops?
GLADIS: Soil health is absolutely critical: it determines the availability of nutrients and plants’ capability to extract those nutrients from the soil. If the soil is not healthy and has poor drainage due, for example, to a plow layer that has compacted the soil creating a surface of only 0 to 20 centimeters, then the root development of the plant cannot penetrate vertically, and they will grow horizontally instead. As a result of the stress of compaction, a plant’s roots will be denser, but they will be deprived of any nutrients below that compacted layer compared to a similar plant grown in another environment that is not compacted and where the roots are able to get nutrients at the deeper levels of their growth.
Another example of how soil health affects the nutrients in crops has to do with organic matter. As soil health decreases, the organic matter pool also decreases, negatively affecting the microbes in the soil (which are of course essential to plant growth). Disruption of those biological processes by excessive tillage, herbicides, fungicides and synthetic fertilizers reduces the amounts of nutritional elements taken up by the plants. And if your soil is not covered with cover crops, there will be a greater possibility of erosion, and the soil-dwelling microbes will be deprived of access to roots to work with, also lowering soil nutrients. Increasing the density of plants-per-acre with cover crops not only reduces erosion but also optimizes soil health.
ARTY: Can you describe the work you’re doing with the Rodale Vegetable System Trial?
Organic versus conventional farming trials at Rodale Institute
GLADIS: The Vegetable Systems Trial is a long-term comparison side-by-side of organic and conventional cropping systems on the same soil type and under the same climate conditions.
Every year I grow five crops: a tuber such as potato; sweet corn, which is botanically classified as a fruit; green beans or winter squash; and a leaf crop such as lettuce. The project has two major goals. One is to provide, over time, rigorous data for growers to have viable economic options for long-term sustainability when growing vegetable crops. The second and main focus is to compare and understand the impacts of conventional vs organic cropping systems and management practices. How do they affect plant health in regards to pests and nutrient uptake? How do those systems compare in how they affect the soil environment in regards to nutrients and microbes? How does the application of herbicides such as glyphosate impact plant health and soil health?
Ultimately, the goal is to find how all this links to human health. We want to provide that information to the public, to medical doctors, governments, and policymakers. In the future, we would like to see more Vegetable System Trials across the nation in different regions to look at how, under different conditions, such as different climates and soil types, the data will vary.
ARTY: What have you found so far about nutrient density when you compare organic to conventional crops?
GLADIS: We have a long-term plan for the Vegetable Systems Trial. We just harvested a fourth growing season, so it is pretty early to draw any definitive conclusions, especially when looking into nutrient density. When I look at certain minerals and vitamins, I sometimes see that organic is higher than the conventional, and sometimes I find that there is no difference, but it is still early. We really need a minimum of five to ten years of data to pinpoint the trends and to confidently track how nutrient density is changing with time.
ARTY: There are conflicting studies about the nutrient density in organic food. In 2008, Dr. Charles Benbrook (who at the time was Chief Scientist of The Organic Center) and scientists from Newcastle University published in the British Journal of Nutrition a meta-analysis that found higher levels of antioxidants and polyphenols in organically produced food, but a 2012 Stanford University study claimed that there was “no strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods,” even though “organic produce had higher levels of health-protecting antioxidants.” Why do you think people are coming to different conclusions?
GLADIS: People come to different conclusions because of the sources of data, the time spent on the data, and the number of studies that they looked into to do the meta-analysis. If the systems are different or the experiments or trials have been done under different conditions, you may get different conclusions. All of that may play a role in people coming to different conclusions.
I agree with Charles Benbrook and his colleagues who say that with organic food you may expect more antioxidants and polyphenols. In the organic systems, especially if you are using a less harsh pesticide than a conventional pesticide, you are allowing more of the pests to survive. In nature, plants often react to pests by producing antioxidants in the same way human beings’ immune systems, when we are exposed to foreign bacteria or viruses, secrete enzymes and other compounds to trigger our immunity. A plant will produce more antioxidant and polyphenol compounds. Pests are really helping the plant produce those compounds. In the conventional chemical system, you spray the plants every time you see insects and pests, so you kill the natural predators and you eliminate the plant’s need to produce an immune response. It’s also true that plants under certain natural stresses, such as occasional drought or extreme temperatures also may have more antioxidants and polyphenols compared to plants that are irrigated.
Rodale Institute Farm In Pennsylvania photo by Cynthia van Elk
ARTY: There is a conversation around bacterial-dominant soils vs fungal-dominant soils. Some people advocate for fungal-dominance. Do you have an opinion about that?
GLADIS: It really depends on the conditions of the crop and the conditions of your soil. You want the fungi and bacteria ratio to be balanced. Some people think more fungal dominant soils will provide more of certain nutrients and compounds that are mediated by the fungi, and that they will protect the plant against some pathogens. In general, if your crop is short term, you really need bacterial dominance, but if it is long-term, such as perennial crops and orchards, it will make more sense to aim for fungal dominant soil because those plants often need continuous access to these compounds from the fungi.
ARTY: Do you ever inoculate your soils with mycorrhizal fungi?
GLADIS: Usually we don’t inoculate with mycorrhizal fungi because 80 percent of plants already have an association with mycorrhizae. If your soil has not been impacted much by pesticides, herbicides or tillage you will definitely find mycorrhizal fungi there already. In the four years of the Vegetable System Trials, we haven’t inoculated. However, we just got funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture to start a new trial, and we are in fact going to compare inoculating with certain mycorrhizal fungi species versus not inoculating in a few plots, most likely in sweet corn in the conventional and organic fields. We want to see how the management practices will impact the plants that are inoculated versus the ones that aren’t, and we want to see if the nutrients will be denser. We want to see if the plant will grow faster. We want to see if the plants make a better rhizosphere root system with the inoculation of mycorrhizae. We want to see if the yield would be different, and if there will be a difference in pest resistance.
ARTY: So far, has your research with the Vegetable Systems Trial given you any surprises?
GLADIS: In the Vegetable Systems Trial we started with an organic soil that had been certified for 20 years. Now that the soil has been used in our trials to compare the organic and conventional systems, we found a decline in the percent of organic matter in the conventionally-farmed fields that is happening faster than we expected in only 3-4 growing seasons. I am eager to see how those things will shape up in five years and ten years, so that we will be able to provide rigorous information to growers to show them that even if you start with good soil, i.e. you have a good level of organic matter to start, but you don’t manage it well, you can reduce your soil organic matter pretty quickly.
Suzanne Simard is a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia, and an innovative scientist at the forefront of plant communication and intelligence. Simard’s research highlights the ways trees communicate with each other to warn about danger and share nutrients in critical times.
In nature, trees are linked to one another by a single tree that acts as a central hub. Suzanne refers to this tree as “The Mother Tree.” In her new book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, Suzanne Simard explores the communal nature of trees and their shared network of interdependency. Described as a “scientific memoir,” the following is an excerpt from the introduction to her book titled “Connections.”
For generations, my family has made its living cutting down forests. Our survival has depended on this humble trade.
It is my legacy.
I have cut down my fair share of trees as well.
But nothing lives on our planet without death and decay. From this springs new life, and from this birth will come new death. This spiral of living taught me to become a sower of seeds too, a planter of seedlings, a keeper of saplings, a part of the cycle. The forest itself is part of much larger cycles, the building of soil and migration of species and circulation of oceans. The source of clean air and pure water and good food. There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance.
There is an extraordinary generosity.
Working to solve the mysteries of what made the forests tick, and how they are linked to the earth and fire and water, made me a scientist. I watched the forest, and I listened. I followed where my curiosity led me, I listened to the stories of my family and people, and I learned from the scholars. Step-by-step—puzzle by puzzle—I poured everything I had into becoming a sleuth of what it takes to heal the natural world.
I was lucky to become one of the first in the new generation of women in the logging industry, but what I found was not what I had grown up to understand. Instead I discovered vast landscapes cleared of trees, soils stripped of nature’s complexity, a persistent harshness of elements, communities devoid of old trees, leaving the young ones vulnerable, and an industrial order that felt hugely, terribly misguided. The industry had declared war on those parts of the ecosystem— the leafy plants and broadleaf trees, the nibblers and gleaners and infesters—that were seen as competitors and parasites on cash crops but that I was discovering were necessary for healing the earth. The whole forest—central to my being and sense of the universe—was suffering from this disruption, and because of that, all else suffered too.
I set out on scientific expeditions to figure out where we had gone so very wrong and to unlock the mysteries of why the land mended itself when left to its own devices—as I’d seen happen when my ancestors logged with a lighter touch. Along the way, it became uncanny, almost eerie, the way my work unfolded in lockstep with my personal life, entwined as intimately as the parts of the ecosystem I was studying.
The trees soon revealed startling secrets. I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy and wisdom that can no longer be denied. I conducted hundreds of experiments, with one discovery leading to the next, and through this quest I uncovered the lessons of tree-to-tree communication, of the relationships that create a forest society. The evidence was at first highly controversial, but the science is now known to be rigorous, peer-reviewed, and widely published. It is no fairy tale, no flight of fancy, no magical unicorn, and no fiction in a Hollywood movie.
These discoveries are challenging many of the management practices that threaten the survival of our forests, especially as nature struggles to adapt to a warming world.
My queries started from a place of solemn concern for the future of our forests but grew into an intense curiosity, one clue leading to another, about how the forest was more than just a collection of trees.
In this search for the truth, the trees have shown me their perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations. What started as a legacy, and then a place of childhood home, solace, and adventure in western Canada, has grown into a fuller understanding of the intelligence of the forest and, further, an exploration of how we can regain our respect for this wisdom and heal our relationship with nature.
One of the first clues came while I was tapping into the messages that the trees were relaying back and forth through a cryptic underground fungal network. When I followed the clandestine path of the conversations, I learned that this network is pervasive through the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links. A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.
The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin.
The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children.
The Mother Trees.
When Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do.
How is it possible for them to send warning signals, recognition messages, and safety dispatches as rapidly as telephone calls? How do they help one another through distress and sickness? Why do they have human-like behaviors, and why do they work like civil societies?
After a lifetime as a forest detective, my perception of the woods has been turned upside down. With each new revelation, I am more deeply embedded in the forest. The scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: the forest is wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing.
This is not a book about how we can save the trees.
Alixa Garcia has been part of Bioneers’ world for many years. As half of the dazzling and prolific duo Climbing PoeTree, she contributed immensely to our keynotes each year, inviting hearts and spirits to soar in connection with nature, while speaking truth to power about the injustices and harms we face. Alixa is an artist/activist highly accomplished in multiple art forms, as you’ll see if you google her. She is an acclaimed visual artist, a poet and songwriter, a filmmaker, curriculum developer and graphic designer. And she has a heart deeply infused with love a yearning to keep learning and a deep dedication to healing what’s unjust and been broken. Can you tell how much I love and admire her?
This love song to humanity weaves her brilliant poetic synthesis of where we’re at with C. Wood’s soothing voice in an anthem to our resilience and buoyancy as children of Mother Earth. It reminds me to practice releasing old structures and surrendering to what is while maintaining purposeful focus, discerning action, love and resolve as we move through the uncertainty of such big and long overdue change.
-Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons
Following is a press release detailing Alixa García and BraveWater’s new song, “Fall Like Rain.”
Alixa García and BraveWater (aka C. Wood) release their lilting, lyrical, love song to humanity, “Fall Like Rain”, due to drop May 14th on all major distribution platforms. “Fall Like Rain”, produced and engineered by David Williamson of DWP Sounds, is the first single to be released off of this duo’s debut album, IMAGINAL, due to release in 2022.
“Fall Like Rain” is an anthem of inspiration for these hard times. A ballad of remembrance. A lullaby to get us through the complex and complicated. “It’s a soft song with a hip hop sway to pick up the spirit and sooth the mind,” says García. “It was first born a week before the pandemic came to transform us all”.
Wood explained, “Alixa and I went deep into a lava tube, carved out by a rushing volcano, on the sacred Hawaiian land of Big Island. We lit candles and sang together, drawing inspiration from the dark earth-womb around us. The chorus had come to me seven years ago, but the rest of the song had been waiting for this moment with Alixa, before it began to emerge.”
García went on to say “As the weeks unfolded, we thoughtfully sculpted this song as everything came to a sudden halt. The words are a love song for the world and a personal mantra to keep rising and falling, like rain.”
BraveWater
While it is García’s first time working with Williamson, it is the third time for Wood by way of songs “Dusty Road” and “Shell Point”. May 14th will mark the second song released by García and Wood together, the first being “Dust” a song they co-wrote and released on Climbing PoeTree’s 2017 album, INTRINSIC.
President Biden’s Earth Day announcement of new 2030 climate goals represents a major turning point in U.S. climate policy. It is easily the most ambitious commitment this country has made, but the jury is still out in terms of both the climate reality and the political reality. Perhaps the most important question, however, is not if we can accomplish these audacious goals but how. As it turns out, answering this fundamental question is what leaders and activists have been outlining at Bioneers Conferences for decades. And, Bill Gates’ desire for fancy new technology notwithstanding, the vast majority of what we need is very much already in existence.
Among the pathways forward are transforming how we power our economy, how we design communities, how we move around the world, how we grow food and how we care for our landscapes, all with a clear racial justice and equity lens. Undergirding everything is the need for the effective grassroots organizing and movement-building that brought us to this point. And, at root, a reckoning with the very economic system that delivered climate change is coming hard and fast.
In this newsletter we highlight just a few of the projects and solutions that will need to be leveraged if we’re to achieve our climate goals.
This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Agriculture
Managing the Soil for Carbon is Good for the Climate – Whendee Silver
As our colleagues at One Earth have outlined, “shifting from a carbon intensive food system to regenerative, carbon-negative agriculture” is one of the single most important steps we need to take. Dr. Whendee Silver of UC Berkeley is researching the bio-geochemical effects of climate change and human impacts on the environment, and the potential for mitigating these effects. Whendee is currently working with the Marin Carbon Project to establish a scientific basis for carbon farming practices that, if implemented globally, could have a significant impact on mitigating climate change.
Putting Carbon at the Center of Agricultural Policy | In this interview with Calla Rose Ostrander, environmental consultant to the Marin Carbon Project, she discusses the transformation of carbon as an agricultural force.
Vice To Virtue: From Carbon Crisis to Carbon Farming | Carbon is often portrayed as a threat to life as excess amounts enter our atmosphere. In this episode of the Bioneers podcast, we speak with Calla Rose Ostrander and John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project on using carbon as a force for creating sustainable agriculture.
DESIGN & INFRASTRUCTURE
Photo copyright Al Braden
Want to Build Back Better? Look to the Outdoors
Amidst the recent (and infuriating) debates about the definition of “infrastructure”, there was a very noticeable gap in public conversation. The reality is that the wetlands, meadows, forests, prairies and other landscapes are perhaps the most important “infrastructure” that we’re not talking about. This is not hippy-dippy hyperbole: California, the sixth largest economy on earth, has officially recognized forests and meadows as key infrastructure since 2016. In this article Jackie Ostfeld, Director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All Campaign, explores the importance of investing in green infrastructure. The natural infrastructure of the outdoors is vital to building a strong economy and livable communities.
As Bill McKibben recently noted, the price and efficiency of solar and wind continues to plummet so drastically that politicians literally cannot keep up. A recent report suggests that the total amount of land required to power the entire world on clean energy is less than utilized for fossil fuels today. It’s time for a large scale swap, which is already rapidly underway.
Danny Kennedy, CEO of New Energy Nexus and Managing Director of the California Clean Energy Fund, draws from lessons learned over decades as an activist and entrepreneur on the frontlines of the global energy transition.
Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap | Because costs continue to slide with every quarter, solar energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels almost everywhere on the planet by the decade’s end. (From The New Yorker)
More From Bioneers:
An Interview with Filmmaker Mark Kitchell
Award Winning filmmaker Mark Kitchell has produced an iconic body of work, including his landmark feature documentary “Berkeley in the ‘60s,” “A Fierce Green Fire,” chronicling the origins and evolution of the environmental movement, and “The Evolution of Organic,” a first-hand account of the birth and growth of the organic movement. We spoke with Mark about his films and upcoming projects.
Join over 30 of the world’s most extraordinary leaders for a crucial conversation about our planet and building a sustainable future. This online summit, featuring our very own Nina Simons, is free and will take place from May 11th-17th. Learn about connecting with the healing power of the natural world and opening up to the lessons of nature.
Award Winning filmmaker Mark Kitchell has re-released his films, offering the opportunity for fresh looks at his well-loved classics: Berkeley in the Sixties, which was nominated for an Academy Award, won top honors and is one of the defining films about the protest movements that shook America during the 1960s; A Fierce Green Fire is a big-picture exploration of the environmental movement, grassroots and global activism spanning five decades from conservation to climate change. Evolution of Organic, which is the story of the organic agriculture movement, told by those who built it. You can watch the films by visiting Mark’s website, and also watch trailers, deleted scenes and bonus material on his YouTube Channel.
NOTE FROM KENNY AUSUBEL, CEO & CO-FOUNDER OF BIONEERS: I first met Mark Kitchell in the later 1980’s when we were both on the film festival circuit. He was premiering his landmark feature documentary “Berkeley in the ‘60s” while I was premiering my feature doc “Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes a Crime”. I was blown away by his exceptional film and filmmaking. On top of that, he was a lovely human being who was in the game for all the right reasons.
Mark has gone on to produce an authentically iconic body of work that is seamlessly aligned with Bioneers world. It includes “A Fierce Green Fire,” another deeply thoughtful, evergreen film chronicling the origins and evolution of the environmental movement, and then “The Evolution of Organic”, which is the first-hand account of the birth and growth of the organic movement by the true visionary creators.
Mark has perfect pitch for choosing not only subjects of enduring importance, but also for masterful storytelling. I’ve watched each of the films several times, and periodically I revisit them.
His new epic work-in-progress “Cannabis Chronicles” comes at a time when a responsible, accurate and dynamic documenting of this next critical cultural, medicinal and agricultural wave is of the first importance.
Mark is also innovating around new models of distribution, and he deserves huge kudos for breaking new ground not only for his own films, but for so many other nonfiction filmmakers. You can now watch these enduring classics on multiple channels and platforms.
I strongly encourage you to watch Mark’s entire opus, and to alert all your friends and relations to do the same. Amid all the nonsense and chatter out there, these films carry the ring of truth on some of the most crucial topics of our times. And you will feel better about the world after watching them.
– Kenny Ausubel
BIONEERS: Congratulations on the re-release of your films! There are so many issues in them that are relevant today. What made you decide to re-release them?
Mark Kitchell
MARK: The launching of the Films of Mark Kitchell began with restoring Berkeley in the Sixties, my masterpiece, which had been looking worse and worse. Thirty years of degrading video masters, and I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. So we went back to prints and digitized it from film. Then it was colored, and master colorist Gary Coates did a fabulous job. Thirty-one years later it finally looks like the film I intended to make.
Then I took back my two films from my distributor, Berkeley in the Sixties and A Fierce Green Fire. I decided I was going to do my own DVD, because there are still a lot of people who want DVDs. Then I also started a YouTube channel to release some of the archival gems and deleted scenes from Berkeley in the Sixties and other films. The films are on four streaming channels for rent or for sale. On YouTube we’ll do short-term stuff and try and build. And then I have my website where we’re selling downloads and DVDs.
Berkeley in the Sixties captures the decade’s events – civil rights marches and the Free Speech Movement; anti-Vietnam War protests and the hippie counter-culture; the rise of the Black Panthers and the women’s movement – in all their immediacy and passion. Dramatic archival footage is interwoven with eighteen interviews and songs from the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Country Joe and the Fish and The Band. The Village Voice called it “probably the best documentary on the Sixties to date!”
BIONEERS: Berkeley in the Sixties was nominated for an Academy Award and has been widely distributed. What stands out to you in that film that would enrich our understanding – especially young people – of the history of the free speech movement?
MARK: The Free Speech Movement is like a perfect Greek tragedy. It unfolds with such ineffability and such perfect clarity. The velvet glove comes off and they really nail ‘em. You can see how Clark Kerr in that movie damns the protests and students. It’s astonishing the way he actually damns himself. I like people to see the awakening to protest, and I think they learn a lot, going back and seeing the demonstrations against the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where they’re washed down the stairs, yet they don’t go away.
The Civil Rights Movement was so electric with energy in 1963 and 1964 in the Bay Area. They were sitting in and shop-ins at the Lucky supermarket in Berkeley and sitting in at the hotels and the auto showrooms, closing down the Cadillac dealership. It’s fabulous for people to learn all that and see all that, and get them excited.
I remember when I went out with Berkeley… in the early ’90s to places like Dallas, and students then were really eager for a movement. They were asking how can we build a movement like this in these times? And it was a burden to me because I didn’t really know. I didn’t have a good answer, except to say that the movement in Berkeley kind of came out of nowhere. It can happen overnight.
BIONEERS: Many people who watch the film will know the people and groups you feature, but many young people may not be familiar with them. Who stands out to you as someone who has a lot to teach us considering how movements have evolved since the ‘60s?
MARK: Jentri Anders. She is the hippie in the piece who goes back to the land, up to Humboldt County, and even writes a book about it, Beyond Counterculture. She’s an anthropologist, and a real idealist. In fact her life was kind of a series of living in goat shacks and 12x7x6 boxes, and in and out of marriages and relationships, trying to live that counter-culture vision, that ideal that she had. It turned out to be pretty hard but she never gave up.
The ones who were dearest to my heart at the center of it all are Frank Bardacke and Jack Weinberg, who were both leaders of the movement. Jack was inside the car in the Free Speech Movement, and Frank Bardacke dropped out of Harvard and came to Berkeley when he saw the HUAC demonstrations, protesting the film that HUAC made, Operation Abolition, about how it was a communist conspiracy. That ended up recruiting a lot of people to Berkeley. Frank was one of leaders of Stop the Draft Week. He was one of the Oakland Seven and was put on trial and acquitted. He was one of the people in Berkeley who most bought into People’s Park, and the idea that the counter-culture could be revolutionary, and that they were founding mothers and fathers of a new counter-culture, a new society. Those were brave things. At one point in the film, he’s talking about how ’68 it looked like it was a revolutionary time, and then he looks at the camera and says, “We were wrong. You know, everybody can be a little wrong sometimes (laughs.) And it looked like it had a lot of aspects of a revolutionary time.”
BIONEERS: How do you think Berkeley in the Sixties could help people who are working to revive a strong anti-war movement?
MARK: One lesson is to learn how it grew in stages. At first merely coming out against the war and marching was a big statement. That was a function of the anti-war movement in the early days, as Jack Weinberg says, “to break that consensus.” By the time you get to 1967, there were a few big marches in New York and San Francisco in the spring, and nothing changes. There’s a big lesson, and it feeds right into the film Berkeley in the Sixties because that’s the turning point from protest to resistance. Many Berkeley radicals, Frank Bardacke and Jack Weinberg among them, were determined that they had to up the stakes and make the cost of pursuing the war abroad the ungovernability of the society at home. And they succeeded, they shut down the Oakland Induction Center for a day, they threatened chaos in the streets, and they managed to force J. Edgar Hoover to tell President LBJ that he could not guarantee domestic security if they tried to get a million more men to serve as soldiers for Vietnam.
I think the anti-war movement was ultimately successful. They succeeded in putting limits on the war. So maybe it’s a lesson about it feels like you’re losing over and over, but in fact, you’re having impact, and even winning. It’s never as clean as that, but they did succeed in putting limits on America’s imperialistic foreign policy in the period after World War II in the height of our empire. So I say just keep going.
We are putting up archival gems that we found, but could not use in the film, and also deleted scenes. One of the deleted scenes about the anti-war movement is really interesting. You know, there were teach-ins on the Berkeley campus and there’s a debate that featured Arthur Goldberg, who was the US Ambassador to the United Nations. He’s debating Franz Schurman, a professor on the Berkeley campus, and it was held in the Harmon gym. They demanded that everybody be quiet, that there be no cheering, clapping, and so on, and at the end of the debate, they asked people to quietly stand if they were in support of the US position, and a few people stood. And then they asked people who were against to quietly stand, and the whole place stands up. It’s a powerful moment.
Then there’s the Robert Scheer campaign. Bob Scheer was the editor of Ramparts magazine. He was a really important early radical, and one of the first people to turn us on to what was going on in Vietnam and fight it. He ran for Congress in 1966 as an anti-war candidate, and that’s an interesting scene. One of the lessons in that scene is for John Gage, who’s our straight guy, you know? He and another person go out and work one or two precincts around Lake Merritt one weekend before the primary election, and were able to swing that precinct from 20% to 45% in favor of Scheer. So he learned a big lesson about the importance of electoral politics.
John Gage then works on the Bobby Kennedy campaign in 1968 in California. Of course, we all know what happened was that Bobby Kennedy won the primary and was assassinated. So Gage goes to Chicago, the 1968 Democratic Convention, as a delegate.
I urge people to check out our YouTube channel to see the deleted scenes and archival gems.
A Fierce Green Fireis a big-picture exploration of the environmental movement, grassroots and global activism spanning five decades from conservation to climate change. Inspired by the book by Philip Shabecoff, the title comes from pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold — who saw a fierce green fire in the eyes of a wolf he’d just shot and awakened to an ecological perspective.
BIONEERS:A Fierce Green Fire covers many topics and issues. Which ones stand out for you since your film was released?
MARK: It’s kind of amazing how across three films, you know, I’m telling more stories about people winning victories than I am about people losing, and sometimes they’re doing both at the same time, but it ultimately, you know, that’s politics. Those are good lessons to learn.
Love Canal’s a great story. It’s a story that’s not as well-known as it should be, and Lois Gibbs is a heroine fighting 20,000 tons of toxic waste. And they win too. She’s the reason why Love Canal got solved, because you need that quality of leadership and confrontation and community response. That story really engages people.
The Sierra Club’s beginnings and its rise is sort of a story of dams, and it begins when the City of San Francisco proposed to build a dam, a water reservoir in a national park, in Hetch Hetchy, a valley that’s on the same scale and order as Yosemite Valley itself. John Muir, who was kind of the leading voice of the early Sierra Club, fought it for 12 long years, and without getting into the details they ended up losing. The dam was built, and Hetch Hetchy was flooded. You could say that Muir died soon after of a broken heart. But the Sierra Club, you know, licked its wounds and kept on fighting, and they knew they were in the right.
Then in the ‘50s, there came another dam in another national park, and this one was really out there. It was a Dinosaur National Monument on the border of Utah and Colorado. This was part of the Colorado River project where they were going to build 12 dams stair-stepping all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Dinosaur Monument is another beautiful sandstone canyon, and they were going to store water there for power. They had just hired David Brower, and Brower was a man on fire. And they took that battle to the government. They took it to Wayne Aspinall, the congressman who was the head of powerful interior committee and those mountain states Congress people, and they managed to turn around Mike Mansfield and force a lot of politicians to give up. So they eventually won, and they made a deal that they would not oppose other dams further down the Colorado River.
Of course, that meant that they had agreed to the construction of Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam. That became the thing that Brower regretted the most, that he had agreed to sacrifice Glen Canyon to save Dinosaur, and he never really forgave himself. But it motivated him into that fight for Grand Canyon. They started constructing a couple of power dams and planned to dig a tunnel that would go under the north mesa of Grand Canyon, 100 miles downstream, and they were going to take the water out of the Grand Canyon and use it to provide power for Phoenix, Arizona.
David Brower, as seen in A Fierce Green Fire
They won that fight and banned dams forevermore in the Grand Canyon. At that point the Sierra Club was the leading voice of conservation, people were focused on parks and sea shores and wild rivers and national forests, and just everything. That was the high tide of conservation, at the end of the ‘60s going into the ‘70s and Earth Day. So that was what really propelled the Sierra Club into what it’s become today.
BIONEERS: How do you feel this film can help inform people who want to know more about the roots of this conservation movement?
MARK: Well, in some ways the conservation movement is the whitest and most conservative and mainstream part of the environmental movement. And it’s the part that a lot of people are willing to fight for and fund. Conservation got a lot of traction, probably because it was in everybody’s backyard. It’s grown and grown, and has become not just about parks and places for people to play, but it’s about saving wildlife, saving habitat, and it’s just so enduringly popular. You know? I think it’s good for people to understand when they’re talking about the Bear’s Ears or banning fracking on public land, that’s coming out of this fight to save wild places. That was kind of a desperate battle at the beginning. You know?
One of the stories we could have told was about the battle to save the redwoods. Now there’s a story where they lost and lost and lost, and they thought they won, but what they won was cut-over forest for the most part. There are a lot of conservation battles that are pyrrhic victories.
I can’t read about the Amazon without being heartbroken because it looked like they saved it. It looked like Chico Mendes and rubbertappers and the Indians, and the international movement to save the Amazon, it looked like it succeeded, but here we are back again. Logging and clearing land for soy production are kind of relentless.
There’s a saying about conservation that you have to win a dozen times to get a bill like the Redwood National Park passed, but you only need to lose once and it’s over, and they’re cutting the trees. It was always a much harder lift to get something positive approved, like the Alaska Wild Lands Act, which was a million acres? A million square miles, something like that. All those things are difficult to pass, so it’s much easier for presidents to declare a national monument or something like that. And these go back and forth. Like the Bear’s Ears in Utah, and the Grand Escalante Staircase national monument. That’s a place I really love. And so it’s good to see that once again they’re going to save it.
Evolution of Organic brings us the story of organic agriculture, told by those who built the movement. A motley crew of back-to-the-landers, spiritual seekers and farmers’ sons and daughters reject chemical farming and set out to explore organic alternatives. It’s a heartfelt journey of change from a small band of rebels to a cultural transformation in the way we grow and eat food. By now organic has gone mainstream – split into an industry oriented toward bringing organic to all people, and a movement that has realized a vision of sustainable agriculture.
BIONEERS:Evolution of Organic is another film that really stands out right now, with the rapid growth of the organic food movement, and beyond to permaculture, regenerative agriculture, holistic approaches to food, land, soil, and connecting all these issues. People fought very hard to get organic and other standards in place, and continue to fight to protect those standards. What stands out for you in that film as you re-release it?
MARK: There’s a women-owned collective, Veritable Vegetable. They’ve been distributors to the organic market since the very beginning, since it was wooden shelves with a few cardboard boxes and not much else. And Bu Nygrens is particularly good about this. She talks about how organic standards were dismissed as child’s play at first, that there was no scientific evidence, that there was a lot of cheating, and we couldn’t trust the government to set standards. So they really had to create their own standards, and then they had to enforce them. Of course, it was the USDA finally coming aboard, I think in 1990, and it took 10 years to establish the USDA standards. There was a big argument, they wanted to include in the organic standards things like genetic modification, sewage sludge, and irradiation.
So they had to fight hard, and it’s a testament to the power of that movement, how more and more people came to it. You’d be hard-pressed to find a movement that’s made it as far into mainstream culture as organic agriculture, and it’s clearly an outgrowth of the ‘60s movements.
There are some brilliant people like Amigo Bob Contisano, who just passed away, who was really like a Johnny Appleseed to the movement. He would find out about stuff someone was doing over here, and go tell people over there. He was spreading, disseminating technology and resources and advice and so on. He was doing this for pot growers as well.
He talks in the film about how he started this business in the back of his barn, where he needed phosphate, and the only way you could buy phosphate was by the ton. So he bought a railroad car of phosphate and started selling out of the back of his barn. There’s another great story about natural pest control, and there’s an unsung hero at UC Berkeley, Dr. Robert Van Den Bosch, a pioneer in the field. He went to Iran and found a parasitoid wasp that ate aphids. Actually what it did was it laid its eggs in the aphids, and as the eggs grew, they would eat the aphids from the inside out. How cool is that? [LAUGHTER] They did the experiments on Amigo’s ranch because it was one of the only ones in the Central Valley that wasn’t sprayed with pesticides to within an inch of its life — and they found it worked. It cost $5,000, he says, and they haven’t had a problem with aphids since.
Another story I tell is about how organic went from being this sort of hippie peripheral world of grungy stores to beautiful lettuces and cuisine and Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. There was a time when if you wanted organic food you had to go to Chez Panisse. Right? Not like today. An important part of how organic grew was that mainstream farmers started to take it on, and this was in the ‘80s. One of the real pioneers was Steve Pavich, who lived down in Delano, a grape growing family. He went to Fresno State and learned how pesticides were going to lead to nirvana; then he got home and tried it, and within a season, it was a failure. He says they were just pouring pesticide on top of more pesticide in this already depleted ground. He was a real pioneer. They must have put in almost 10 years before anybody would really buy their grapes as organic. Before that they had to sell their grapes as conventional.
BIONEERS: Chemical companies never seem to give up trying to discredit claims made by the organic food movement. Where do you see the movement now considering their constant disinformation on its benefits, both for human health and for wildlife and the environment?
MARK: Well, basically the big companies are eventually going to make the change from chemical-based pesticides and fertilizers to biologically-based ones. Monsanto has a farm out in Hawaii where they’re experimenting with biological controls, and that indeed is the wave of the future, and a much better way to go. But what’s making people in the organic movement really uncomfortable and unhappy is the industry is coming in and they’re saying, okay, we won’t base it on chemicals anymore, we’ll base it on biological stuff. But it’s the same industry and it’s the same mindset and it’s the same approach to agriculture industry. You know? It’s kind of yeah, they got it, but they didn’t get it. And the problem hasn’t gone away so much. And so that’s another thing.
BIONEERS: Can you talk about your latest project?
MARK: Yes, while I was making Evolution of Organic, everybody kept saying to me your next film has to be about cannabis, about marijuana. We weren’t even calling it cannabis then, because that was the time, what 2016 to 2018 when it had been fully legalized and was coming online, and everybody was full of that sense of here comes legal marijuana, and somebody has to tell that story. So I said I will. I couldn’t believe, once again, nobody had beaten me to this incredible, amazing, powerful, important story. I guess I make histories of social change movements, and so it was this, okay, here’s your next one.
So I started reading and writing, and we went up and we interviewed some people. I first wrote it up as a five-part series that’s meant to be the big picture history of the world’s favorite illegal drug and all the movements to legalize it and all that. But then in the course of the pandemic, I decided I’d better make a stand-alone film. The first idea was the Emerald Triangle, which is Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity Counties in far northern California. That’s the heartland of cannabis. I decided I would do a stand-alone film about the heartland of cannabis. It’s got this fabulous dramatic arc of rise and fall and rise again. You know? Because it starts with the hippies going back to the land, and they sort of transform home grown into the best herb in the world. There were guys who went to Afghanistan and sewed indica seeds into their clothes and smuggled it in, brought it to the Emerald Triangle.
And just as the Emerald Triangle is becoming an outlaw nation, with an economic basis in growing pot, and they’ve learned how to avoid the cops and it’s looking like they might realize some of their ideals for a new alternative society — then comes CAMP in 1983. That was a federal/state/multi-agency invasion that goes on for almost twenty years, where they invade the Emerald Triangle with helicopters and soldiers dropping down lines and eradication squads, coming in illegally, arresting people and taking them away, and confiscating their gardens.
It’s another great story and so full of irony and unexpected twists and turns. The Emerald Triangle, that community, that outlaw nation, managed to survive everything except legalization. [LAUGHTER] You know? Only two or three percent of the growers up there can afford to go legal because it’s so much regulation, so much cost.
Some of them just stopped growing, but there’s a lot of people up there still growing and still illegal, and the underground market, the black market is still three or four times the size of the legal market, and there’s lots of reasons why things didn’t work out right. Hopefully New York, which just legalized adult use, will learn from all these things.
BIONEERS: Then there is the injustice of people spending time in prison right now for nonviolent possession or sales of something that is now legal.
MARK: That’s become an issue that kind of was totally off the map. Now, in some ways it’s the most important issue, and the driving issue. It certainly was when Washington state legalized. That was the key thing, and that battle was led by people at the ACLU. It was a great mistake and it has to be corrected.
Reprinted withpermission from Sierra Club. This article originally appeared on the Sierra Club website.
By: Jackie Ostfeld, Director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors For All campaign, and Founder and Chair of the Outdoors Alliance for Kids.
President Joe Biden recently unveiled his American Jobs Plan, a $2 trillion proposal to upgrade our country’s infrastructure, create jobs, and address climate change. It’s an ambitious proposal to upgrade the vital foundations of our economy and society that have been neglected for years.
Among the provisions addressing things like public transportation, clean water, and electrical grids are two easy-to-overlook but essential items: plans to maximize the resilience of land and water resources and mobilize the next generation of conservation workers. Together, these two proposals are as key to building and maintaining resilient infrastructure as any road or bridge project.
You might wonder what the outdoors has to do with infrastructure. It’s a fair question, especially after fossil fuel companies spent years defining infrastructure exclusively as what moves cars around. But infrastructure is more than roads and bridges. It’s an interconnected web of structures that undergird the healthy, sustainable, and resilient economy and society we need to thrive, including the “natural infrastructure” of public lands and waters, cultural and historical landmarks, and green spaces. Without the outdoors, our infrastructure is incomplete, and right now, two things are clear: We need more of these spaces, and those we do have are neglected.
Natural infrastructure is essential to the long-term resiliency of these big construction projects. Green spaces and parks help prevent damage to the brick-and-mortar systems we use to transport goods, get to work, and send our kids to school. Additional green spaces can mitigate erosion and improve runoff, helping reduce the effects of climate change-related flooding, which can be devastating to coastal communities. More tree-studded parks would not only absorb the carbon responsible for warming, but could also lower ambient temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, helping prevent unnecessary wear and tear on roads, sidewalks, and other elements of our transit system.
The natural infrastructure of the outdoors is also vital to building a strong, thriving economy. The American Jobs Plan aims to create millions of new jobs across many sectors. The outdoors can play a major — and cost-effective — role in creating those jobs. According to a recent study, investments in protecting nature create more jobs than other types of infrastructure spending because the majority of the investment goes into labor instead of capital expenses.
Moreover, the outdoors is essential to making our communities livable and enjoyable. The COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that the outdoors isn’t just a nice thing to have around. It’s essential to physical and mental health and a key part of building healthy and resilient communities. Unfortunately, green spaces aren’t accessible to all communities.
When green spaces are available, they aren’t always in good condition. Before Congress took action this summer, our national parks alone had a multibillion-dollar backlog of unfulfilled maintenance projects. Add in state and local parks, and those figures become astronomical.
The American Jobs Plan begins to address this by calling for a Civilian Climate Corps, and similar plans are popular on Capitol Hill. Rep. Joe Neguse and Sen. Ron Wyden proposed a similar program to help take care of our public lands and waters. Their proposal would establish a $9 billion program focused on restoring public lands and creating jobs with good benefits for young people. It would also invest billions to address the maintenance backlog on our public lands, creating jobs and expanding access to nature for all. Finally, they call for an investment of $500 million in local park projects, strengthening the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership program, and removing the sunset provision for the Every Kid Outdoors program, which makes it easier for children and families to access our national parks.
The American Jobs Plan is the most ambitious infrastructure proposal in decades, and its proposals for upgrading our natural infrastructure are a good start. But Congress must do more. We must invest in a Civilian Conservation Corps that not only protects the outdoors, but makes access universal and brings a young and diverse generation into close contact with nature. We must reimagine hiring practices at the Department of the Interior to transform what has long been one of the whitest departments in the federal government into an entity as diverse as the lands it manages. And we need to invest in our communities and their green spaces, so neighborhoods have more parks than parking lots.
Infrastructure is more than roads and bridges, and we cannot “build back better” unless we include the natural infrastructure of the outdoors. Doing so would not only create thousands of jobs; it will also help address the climate crisis, while preserving the best of our green spaces for future generations, from the scenic views in our national parks to the laughter of children at play in our neighborhood parks.
Carolina Putnam is the founder and Director of Reviveolution, based in Peru that works with an intercultural team of Indigenous wisdom-keepers, inspiring leaders, and global pioneers committed to a socially and ecologically thriving world. Their on-the-ground projects involve ecological regeneration, organic farming, food security, community-centered initiatives, holistic land practices, eco-cultural education and the protection of Indigenous wisdom traditions. Born and raised in Louisiana, Carolina has been living full-time in Peru for the past 8 years. She is deeply passionate about the exploration of human potential and deeply committed to creating healthy lands, communities and ecosystems through intercultural engagement.
In this interview, Arty explored with Carolina: her “middle way” approach to farming and land management that combines ancient Indigenous wisdom with some modern technologies; some of her specific projects; the joys and difficulties of trying to be a cultural ally in someone else’s culture; and her relationship with a Q’ero maestro.
ARTY MANGAN: Carolina, could you describe where you live and work?
CAROLINA PUTNAM: I live in the Cusco Region of Peru in the famous Sacred Valley. I was adopted into a family of the Q’ero nation for the past seven years, and I live in a town called Huaran, a farming community of mostly Quechua families, but that also includes a small group of expats (not tourists) who live there permanently. There are about 450 families in our watershed, which ranges in elevation from around 14,000 feet on the top of the glacier down to about 9,700 feet and which has many ecological “floors.” We live close to the river, where it’s very biodiverse. We can plant both highland crops such as potatoes and some subtropical fruits and avocados.
Huran watershed
ARTY: Has the pandemic impacted your community?
CAROLINA: Not too badly, in terms of the virus itself. Initially one person contracted the virus, and it spread to 10 people, but that was the extent of it. Part of it might be that we are fortunate to have access to clean water and diverse foods that keep our immune systems strong, but the local leaders responded very quickly, creating barricades and closing the entrances to the community. Community members took turns watching the gate to ensure no tourists or even people from Cusco or Lima could come up into the community or into the adjoining mountains. We have a lot of elderly people and Indigenous communities that don’t have access to healthcare and medicine, so it was important to do as much as possible to keep the virus out, and the way the community responded was very effective in ensuring that the virus didn’t spread.
ARTY: You’ve integrated some of the Indigenous practices you’ve learned in Peru into your own personal life. Are you concerned that you might be engaged in some form of culture appropriation?
CAROLINA: I was being trained by my maestro without realizing it. I brought him around the world for seven years to intertribal gatherings and inter-religious peace conferences, and by being his assistant, translator and facilitator, he taught me his ceremonial ways and his Indigenous principles and life values in an organic process, by osmosis, in the same way that he learned from his maestro.
I didn’t know there was a global conversation going on about appropriation because I was in my own little bubble with him. It’s important to speak from experience, to tune in to ourselves deeply and to be super honest. If you have received teachings from an authentic Indigenous source, and you develop a strong relationship with the Earth and with the natural elements and can share teachings from your own experience and can see the benefit it provides others, I think that it is likely you will have a positive effect.
Carolina Putnam with Maestro
ARTY: When you were traveling with the maestro and learning from him, was that a formal apprentice relationship?
CAROLINA: He didn’t say, “You’re my apprentice.” The way it happened was natural. There was never a point where he said, “Here’s your initiation” or “Here’s the next step.” I was traveling with him; I was translating; I was facilitating. We were sharing the ceremonies and sharing the teachings on a daily and weekly basis over and over. For me it was about integrating and strengthening my relationship with life, with nature and with Pachamama.
Over time, I would say to him, “Hey, we’re working with more people now, and it’s getting a little heavy in my body; it’s draining me.” And he would say: “It’s time for you to have a karpay,” and he would then give me a very specific ceremonial empowerment and transmission designed to strengthen me and strengthen my resolve with nature, so that when we were serving other people, I would have the fortitude and resilience to be of service in those ceremonies.
ARTY: Coming out of the ceremony, did you feel different or do things differently after that?
CAROLINA: Yes, but it takes time. It’s like planting a seed. You’re recommitting. We work with the spirits of the mountains called Apus and with Pachamama, and each ceremony strengthens one’s commitment and one’s bond with them. And honestly, it would often create chaos at first because a lot of things need to be shed in order for the next thing to emerge. It would help break down some things in life that were no longer needed, so that I was able to rise to the occasion. It’s not a magic pill. It required a deeper commitment on my part, like strengthening my practice, strengthening my prayer, strengthening my offerings on a daily basis, and continuing to listen and being attentive to the way nature speaks. Looking back over the seven years, it completely rewired my brain over time. I see and navigate life in a completely different way now, not so much in a logical manner, but more in observation and listening to the messages that come through the life-force.
Sacred Valley, Peru
ARTY: What are the most important considerations coming from a different culture and becoming an ally to indigenous people?
CAROLINA: Definitely respect, but that respect goes two ways. There’s often a tendency to over-romanticize what it means to work with an Indigenous community or an Indigenous maestro or maestra. The first recognition is that we’re all human and that there are different expressions of being human. So, I think that the respect has to be mutual, but to be able to do that requires deep listening and observation and being willing to understand information coming through different formats than the ones we’re used to.
For example, if I ask my maestro a question point blank, he often doesn’t answer, but if we’re on a walk and it’s casual, and we’re sharing some coca leaves together, he might suddenly have a story that addresses that question. He’ll give me an answer through storytelling or through a metaphor. In the beginning of that experience, my brain would say, “I don’t really understand what he’s saying,” but if instead of trying to get a dictionary answer right away, I allow that transmission just to sink in as I go about my day, then suddenly it would awaken when it was time for me to understand. I had to learn to understand and listen on a different level and to realize that that sort of information is transferred in different ways.
It’s important to have respect for the place where I’m arriving and to try to understand deeply what’s going on without pushing my own ideas or agenda, but it’s also important to me to respect my own culture and where I come from. There was a time when I really believed that everything about being an American was totally wrong and that I had to give every little bit of my past identity up, but over time a middle path emerged. I could see that this could be a beautiful collaboration. He had so many skills and so much wisdom to share, but I also had skills, resources, and abilities from my background that I could bring to the table that could be mutually beneficial.
You have to be willing to go through a lot of hashing stuff out. There were many moments and periods that were really hard to navigate, but I had to be willing to come back to the table over and over again and to say, “Hey, sorry about that; we just crossed some cultural boundaries. Let’s sit down, chew some coca and figure out how to move forward.” You have to be willing to keep coming back to the table over and over again when you run into communication problems.
Carolina Putnam with local Q’ero women
ARTY: Did you experience any cultural discomfort living in the wider community?
CAROLINA: Yeah. Definitely. In the farming community that I’m currently in, we had some uncomfortable situations during COVID. Even when I come with the best intention and feel that I communicated as clearly as possible, sometimes I brush up against past traumas without realizing it. At first, I didn’t understand the enormous extent of the history of unfulfilled promises that created such a deep mistrust of foreigners. It took a lot of willingness to come back and apologize (even when I didn’t believe I was wrong) and to keep repeating that I was here to listen and working hard to learn to listen more deeply in the moment. I had to keep asking what I did that wasn’t ideal in a situation, and to keep reminding everyone that we were all in this together, that we have the same intention: we want to see this entire watershed have food security. We want to see the people thriving, so please show me how I can do it better to bring that vision to fruition for all of us.
ARTY: That’s interesting, the idea of saying you’re sorry when you don’t feel you did anything wrong. You have to be totally open and receptive to developing a better understanding.
CAROLINA: Right. I’m a young Caucasian female from another country, and I’m speaking to men and women who are older than me and have been through incredibly tough situations in order to be on that land. I had to come to understand that in their culture with elders, you listen. I had to try to see all the subtleties of the intergender relations; the dynamics of different families and farmers’ relationships to each other, some going way, way back; the leadership structures in the community; etc. There’s a lot you have to learn when you work interculturally.
Farm in Huran
ARTY: It’s thanks to the remarkable Permaculture teacher Penny Livingston that we’re having this conversation. When she wrote to me about you, she said that you were regarded down there as a “chakaruna”—a “bridge person.” What are you bridging?
CAROLINA: Well, I don’t know if I’m succeeding, but my intention and focus is to re-center Indigenous values and principles in such a way that we can work with them effectively in the modern world. In our current project called Hampi Mama, which means “medicine mother,” we’re working with Indigenous women combining the growing of botanical medicines with a model of land regeneration. The project is Indigenous female-led, because in my experience, when women are positioned in a place of decision-making, they make choices that increase the health of the land, the community and future generations.
They themselves already have the wisdom of how to farm the land, where the medicines are, what they’re used for, and how they’ve been used traditionally. What they’ve asked from me is to help them create business models with which that wisdom can thrive in the modern world and support the expansion of a network of organic farmers. The Indigenous women and their families want access to modern communications tools to expand their learning, to share best practices between farmers and with educators, and achieve sustainable, viable, healthy livelihoods. They want a quality of life that includes sending their kids to college, ensuring that their community has access to healthcare, information networks, and educational opportunities.
Farmers work really hard from 5 AM to 5 PM. Some of them don’t even know that just one watershed over, a 20-minute walk, there are other groups of farmers also working on food security, food systems transformation and organic farming. They often don’t know about each other. Because I have a computer and I’m zooming online and I’m part of that regenerative network, I can contact the head of another organization of farmers nearby and say, “Hey, let’s get together and see how we can set up peer-to-peer learning,” if that’s what they’re requesting. I can help bring in connection to a larger context.
It was really nice to see the smiles on their faces when I shared that other people in the region and beyond were looking at how their community responded to COVID as a model of local resilience. They had no idea that people were looking for models for how to respond, or that there were other ways people responded. It was just so natural to them, and the way they did it was brilliant, but they were thrilled to learn they had become role models. So, I work to connect the network on a regional scale and more toward a global scale by exchanging information, resources and ideas.
Maestro in a choclo corn field
ARTY: On a podcast you participated in, the hostess was romanticizing about traditional ways, and you said the folks in your community might want other options than planting potatoes in the snow in sandals. You mentioned that a middle way emerged in your approach.
CAROLINA: Yes, there’s a conversation going on globally about returning to ancestral ways, and that’s mostly positive, but, hey, just to give one example, some new techniques of farming organic potatoes produce more potatoes using a smaller amount of land with less inputs. Knowledge isn’t static. Farmers have always exchanged information to learn new ways to increase their livelihoods, and there is no reason for that to stop now. If there are viable, sustainable, healthy new techniques that can permit farmers to keep farming but boost their production and their soil fertility and their connection to supply chains, it can be really helpful to incorporate those methods, as long as it’s the farmers themselves who make those decisions freely.
The middle way I advocate is a both/and. Yes, it’s first about learning the ancestral ways of a deep connection of living with a breathing planet because ancestral ways teach us how to work with nature most harmoniously in a very local landscape. But it’s also about bridging the best of new technologies back to these communities, so their wisdom can continue to move forward. Without some of those technologies in that middle way, they may have to stop farming and drive a taxi and send their kids away from the farm.
For those of us who grew up in a modern, “developed nation” context, it’s not about dropping all the skills that we’ve learned around technology and research. Some of those skills, used right, can be really helpful in helping us all weave a new way forward, so, basically, what I’m saying is that integrating the grounded Indigenous spiritual, ancestral understanding that we’re part of a living, breathing organism with modern skills can feed the health of the whole system.
Quechua medicine woman, member of the Hampi Mama botanical sanctuary
ARTY: What are some of the practices you’re introducing to local farmers?
CAROLINA: The Hampi Mama botanical sanctuary we’re currently working on is a land project mainly involving three female Quechua herbalists, one 74 years old, one in her late 30s, and the other in her early 30s. As we plant native Andean medicines, we’re doing different soil regeneration practices with mixed species of carbon material, nitrogen fixers and wildflowers to restore soil life. We’re making Bokashi and compost teas with native microorganisms, and showing a model of waste management by installing an Ecozoic toilet.
We are in the center of an area where most people are monocropping and using chemicals, so our practices of water conservation with a small constructed wetland is unique in the region. I’m calling it “essence agriculture.” We love medicine and it makes us really happy to plant things we love and fill a gap in the local market and supply chain. We’re showing that we can do agriculture on a small-holder, family-size farm in a way that brings joy to us while restoring native habitat and diversifying nutrition, and we are sharing these methods in a local organic farmers’ association.
During the quarantine for the Covid-19 pandemic, we were in one of the strictest military-enforced lockdowns in the world. The military was on the road with big guns. You had to have permission slips to leave even to get food. It was pretty intense. One of the first things that happened is that local leaders came together, and we collaborated with them to ensure that food could get to the top of the mountain where a lot of the food supply had been cut off. Many of the farms there have been selling the crops they produce and then buying food in the market. But we weren’t allowed to leave and go to the market, so we had to figure out what to do locally. The local leaders created a chain of food that brought emergency food baskets with staple foods like rice, salt, oats and some legumes on 20 horses up to the top of the glaciers and around the community.
The local expats created an online delivery system. On the delivery form, you could check off if you wanted to make a donation. Those donations would go to the emergency food baskets. They ended up creating a closed circuit where organic food was getting delivered to all the expats, and then the donations ensured that food was distributed all the way up the entire watershed. That food chain was a local emergency response, but out of that the organic farmers’ association that I’m involved in got started, and 40 farmers decided that they needed to think about the long term. If we’re not selling our food, but eating it locally, then we don’t want to be using chemical inputs, so a lot of them were willing to shift their gardens and farms from chemical agriculture to organic. During the lockdown, I helped organize over 20 workshops with the farmers, some of which included Penny Livingston and an amazing local teacher named Mauro Escalante who works with Sacha Munay. Farmers came to learn practices of soil regeneration, working with organic amendments, how to create biocides as a quick response, but ultimately how to increase the soil quality. Together the farmers created eight tons of bokashi, an amazing super compost. They made enough to share with the broader community and to start transitioning all of their farms to organic. This exchange of education and peer-to-peer learning is still going on.
ARTY: What a great response to the emergency! Penny also told me about how you grew Choclo corn organically, which most people thought could not be done.
CAROLINA: When we first got the land, we grew Choclo corn [a popular traditional local variety] organically. The first round was a bit smaller than the norm, but the second round was really beautiful. The corn was just as big as the corn grown by farmers using chemicals. We hosted a concert with Rising Appalachia in 2019. It was an intercultural exchange. Penny with two of the local leaders and educators shared information about compost tea and other techniques, and we brought all the corn off of my land and served it for lunch for around 200 farming neighbors. They tasted the corn and said: “It’s so sweet; I can’t believe you grew this organically!”
ARTY: What are the other programs of Reviveolution?
CAROLINA: We run different intercultural exchange programs throughout the year. Obviously, during COVID they were temporarily halted, and we were focusing more locally. Throughout the year we host programs for international guests. Rather than only going around to sacred sites and such–which is amazing if people want to do that– we create experiences for intercultural exchange. At the foundation we always share the Andean spiritual practices and ceremonies for connecting with the living Earth. We complement this with other aspects of Andean livelihood. Sometimes we’re farming together, and sometimes we’re doing ancestral arts and weaving. Other times we have a focus on herbalism. It’s an opportunity for our wisdom-keepers to learn ways from around the world, as well as pass on their traditional ways. And we are fundraising to support the expansion of these localized efforts and of food system transformation across our region.
(Reviveolution is a 501c3 fiscally sponsored project, and all donations are tax-deductible.)
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