In this address from the Bioneers 2020 Conference, Bioneers CEO & Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel discusses the converging awakenings that took place in 2020 and how we can use what we’ve learned to move forward.
I’d like to talk with you about the upside of the downside.
There’s a supreme poetic justice in a virus hacking a rogue civilization on a collision course with nature and the human experiment. You can’t gaslight a virus. The ground truth of our biological interdependence with the natural world has disrupted the delusion of our separation from the web of life and each other. It has exposed the hungry ghost of insatiable greed devouring people and planet.
Kenny Ausubel
The only way to solve a pandemic and the concatenation of crises we face is through massive cooperation. As a society and civilization, we’re being compelled to change our pronoun from “me, me, me” to “we.”
Nature is deregulating human affairs faster than a lobbyist can buy a politician. We’re in the endgame of the Dim Ages: the clash between the state of nature and the nature of the state. Our civilization is a failed state. The big wheels of transformation are turning. It’s emergence in an emergency.
The contagion is apocalyptic in the original meaning of the Greek word: “A revelation, an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known, and which could not be known apart from the unveiling.”
It’s unveiling the truth that our human health is dependent on the health and integrity of our ecosystems. The contagion originated from relentless human incursion into shrinking wildlife habitats, where unfamiliarity breeds contempt. It was driven by a voracious market economy channeled through a misconceived food system.
It’s unveiling the misbegotten paradigm that exalts the growth economy over the wellbeing of people and the natural systems on which all life depends. As Hazel Henderson said, modern economics is “a form of brain damage. It’s nothing more than politics in disguise.”
The contagion is revealing the wisdom of the Precautionary Principle: “Better safe than sorry” — “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” We know that $1 spent on disaster prevention will save $7 in later damages.
It’s unmasking the fatal logic of a for-profit health care system. Tying Wall Street profits to human health is a prescription for disaster.
It’s exposing how huge the “precariat” is — the vast masses of humanity who live on the precarious edge — one step away from freefall. It’s revealing the extraordinary kindness and compassion of most people, and the expanding circle of heartfelt concern for the most vulnerable.
It’s showing a world where “I Can’t Breathe” became a meme for everything from Black Lives mattering to raging climate-induced mega-fires and COVID masks.
It’s unveiling how the temporary reduction of human activity allowed nature to begin to regenerate. Blue skies brightened Beijing, and for the first time in memory the Himalayas were visible from New Delhi. It’s a glimmer of what a restored world could look like when we change our way of living. Yes, when.
It has accelerated the decline of the fossil fuel industry and its political power, and sped the hegemony of clean energy.
It has spotlighted the democracy theme park, exposing the sharp teeth of raw power that talks democracy, until it gets into the hands of the wrong people – in other words, the people.
It unveiled the banality of evil, a full-blown kakistocracy — rule by the worst. They set up a roach motel in the White House.
When Jared Diamond examined the ecologically-driven demise of Mexico’s Mayan civilization, he identified the final unraveling thread: political leadership. He wrote: “Their attention was evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all these activities.” Sound familiar?
It’s laying bare disaster capitalism’s Shock Doctrine: Never let a crisis go to waste. Corona capitalism is engineering the biggest heist in history, with corporate concierge service from the Fed already amounting to between $4 to $10 trillion.
Simultaneously, Corona capitalism is precipitating a deliberate extinction-level event of small and medium-size businesses – with cascading dis-employment that will exceed the Great Depression. When it’s safe to go out again, we will find a world of giants and dwarves.
Wealth in the U.S. was already over two times as concentrated as imperial Rome, which was a slave-and-farmer society. If billionaires were a nation, they’d be the world’s 3rd largest country. They want to have their cake and eat yours too.
It’s “make feudalism great again.” Talk about a marketing challenge.
It’s Boom and Doom — the terminal convulsions of an oligarchic economic system bedeviled by $100 trillion dollars of stranded oil assets and the impossibility of unlimited material growth on a finite planet. The Hummer of plutocracy has gone off road. The system is the crime.
But make no mistake. Above all what COVID is unveiling is a sneak preview of what climate chaos is going to unleash. Climate resilience is about to become the central organizing principle of everyone’s lives. One thing is for sure: The twin crises of climate chaos and extreme inequality will keep getting worse fast — and people will keep rising up in ever bigger numbers, demanding and making change.
With breakdown comes breakthrough. The Great Unraveling is clearing the space for renaissance and regeneration. The game now is to grow the upside of the downside. The stone age didn’t end because people ran out of stones. Initiatives that may have seemed radical or impossible not so long ago now appear within reach.
As Naomi Klein wrote, “The real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system — one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power.”
Our movements are starting to prevail, which is why the corporate class has resorted to a hostile takeover of government. Its broker is the Republican Party. Its platform is so extreme that the closest analog in the West is Germany’s fringe AfD, a proudly white nationalist, xenophobic party with neo-Fascist ties. But even the AfD aren’t climate deniers, and the biggest difference is that the GOP is a mainstream party. Our political duopoly now consists of a democratic party and an anti-democratic party.
This reactionary whiplash is trying to misdirect our attention from the head-spinning ravages of corporate economic globalization by serving up the noxious cocktail of racism, xenophobia and othering in order to divide and conquer. One fear has been that the regime would start a war. It did: a civil war than had never actually ended.
It’s an ideology that W.E.B. DuBois described in 1910 as ‘the new religion of whiteness — the ownership of the earth forever and ever.’ As Pankaj Mishra wrote, “The religion of whiteness increasingly represents a suicide cult.”
So what’s the upside of the downside?
COVID has hammered the already failing business model of the fossil fuel industry into survival mode. It would tank even faster if not for federal subsidies. At the same time, its political power is waning, and it faces mounting legal liabilities for knowingly poaching the planet and lying about it. Perhaps it’s time for corporate capital punishment for the crimes of capital.
COVID is simultaneously quickening the transition to the inevitable clean energy revolution. But that is not enough — because we’re already in sudden-death overtime. The movement for drawdown is gaining traction to actually reverse climate disruption by bringing carbon levels back down to pre-industrial levels.
All the top practices and technologies are already commonly available, economically viable, and scientifically valid, including such cornerstones as regenerative carbon farming and food systems, ecological land management practices, and the empowerment of women and girls.
Because this is the last stand for many landscapes, standing for the land before it’s too late is paramount. Inspired by E.O. Wilson’s “Nature Needs Half” initiative, the One Earth project has mapped global, regional and local ecosystems to identify and prioritize key bioregions to support carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. Our One Earth friends presented a panel last weekend on this work, including a globalocal app.
It’s no accident that 80% of the world’s biodiversity is on Indigenous lands. Indigenous leadership is both lighting the way and may be the key to the survival of our species.
It’s objectifying and commodifying of nature that have led us to this climate emergency and Age of Extinctions. It’s high time to expand our view of personhood to the natural world — not to corporations. We need to institute legally enforceable Rights for Nature.
The global movement for Rights of Nature is rapidly beginning to take hold in numerous countries. It flips the paradigm from nature as property to nature as rights-bearing. Over three dozen US communities and five US tribes have now enacted such laws, with many more moving to get involved.
In this past election in Florida’s conservative Orange County, home to Orlando and Disney World, a citizen-driven rights of nature ballot initiative passed with a jaw-dropping 89% of the vote. (Much of this success is thanks to Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil who will speak on Sunday.)
The climate emergency is the biggest political failure in history. It’s fundamentally a crisis of democracy and leadership. 2020 has seen democracy both under siege and surging.
Black Lives Matter became the biggest movement in US history, with unprecedented numbers of white allies stepping up, while a swarm of diverse social movements is converging to reclaim the many facets of the jewel of democracy. The forefront of this leadership won the 2020 US presidential election. It came from women of color and communities of color, First Peoples, and the swell of young people demanding that society wake the frack up and start acting like grownups.
At a historic threshold when the country is projected to become majority-minority in about 15 years, multi-cultural society is here to stay. The last gasp of the current political regime is like the Japanese soldiers in World War II still fighting on an island who didn’t yet know the war was over.
Millennials are the most diverse and largest generation in American history, and also the most progressive. By 60-80%, young people want climate action, support same-sex marriage, recognize racial discrimination as the main barrier to African Americans’ progress, and believe immigrants strengthen the country.These are the frontline leaders who are showing us how to make America grateful again.
Ecological healing and social justice are one notion, indivisible. A Green New Deal can and must coalesce all these priorities. It can put everyone in the country and around the world into a great green employment project that achieves meaningful living wage jobs, and environmental and social justice. This time around, a truly new deal will lift the burdens of history. We’re living through the re-birth of a nation.
And breaking news: The IMF concluded that saving the planet would be cheap or might even be free. Such a deal!
If building resilience is the goal, the priority shifts from growth and expansion to sufficiency and sustainable prosperity. We know that real wealth creation is based on replenishing natural systems and restoring the built environment, especially our infrastructure and cities. It’s based on investing in our communities and workforce.
In the face of the unraveling of economic globalization spurred in part by COVID, and a federal government that’s now a smoking ruin, the upside of the downside is greater decentralization against the inevitable failure of centralized systems. Think distributed power grids and more localized foodsheds and economies, which are the kryptonite of global markets. Economic re-localization creates three times as many jobs, earnings, and tax collections — as well as far greater security.
We can supersede the false binary of capitalism and socialism, and instead create a mixed economy in service to the common good, climate action and equity. It’s an economy that prioritizes security, intergenerational community wealth creation, and much more widely distributed ownership. There’s actually no precedent or grand model for this next economy. Nor has anyone figured out how to create genuine democracy at large scales. That’s up to us, and from here on, it’s jazz.
In closing, as my friend David Orr recently said to me, he’d be quite optimistic — IF we had another 50 years. The crucible is whether we can fast-forward this transformation in record time, and Beat the Reaper.
The word “crisis” comes from the Greek word krino. It means “to decide.” We need to decide what kind of future we want – and act like our lives depend on it – because they do. Slouching toward sustainability will not turn the tide. Only immediate, bold and transformative action will enable us to make the leap across the abyss. It’s now o’clock.
“If we appear to seek the unattainable, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” So wrote Tom Hayden in the Port Huron Statement in 1962. Now more than ever, we need to imagine our way out of the unimaginable.
As mythologist Michael Meade reminds us, “The deepest power of the human soul is imagination. When human beings bring imagination to the situation, we join the agents of creation.”
As the deep ecologist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy puts it, “We are part of a vast, global movement: the epochal transition from empire to Earth community.”
The best way to predict the future is to create it. That’s what we’re here to do. All power to the imagination.
We’re headed for the greatest, noblest, messiest, most meaningful AHA! of all time. To get there, we need to navigate anew our relationship with money, financial markets and the limits of economic growth. Which would be scary, if it weren’t for all the beauty and community we can find on a parallel path.
What will a full-fledged nurture capital sector look like a generation or two from now? What role do local food systems and small organic farms in reshaping society? And who was Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, anyway?
In his latest book, “AHA! Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over,” Woody Tasch outlines a roadmap of systemic change through reimagining the role of capital and philanthropy in our society. The tangible impacts of investing capital into local agriculture can guide us toward affecting profound changes in our world. Below is from the prologue to Tasch’s book.
In 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote the bestseller Future Shock, heralding an era of unprecedented innovation and acceleration. We couldn’t quite know how right he was, although the resonance of his message was ineluctable. Now, on the back end of 50 years of just that—unprecedented innovation and acceleration, in every sphere of life—we are trying to find our way from the Age of Ones and Zeros to whatever comes next.
What comes after future shock? Shock of pandemic. Shock of supply chain. Climate shock. Cyber shock. Actual shock and virtual shock. Shock of billions and trillions. Shock of Us and shock of Them. Shock that after all that future shock, fear, hatred and vilification are shockingly stubborn.
We are called to a new era of pragmatism, at the level of household, community and bioregion, pushed by the immediacy of crisis and pulled by the long-term need for systemic change.
We are called to a new era of peacemaking, at the level of. . .well, that’s where poetic possibility and lively seriousness come in, the place where sapiens flirts not only with disaster, but also with philios.
The urgency of the current moment is overwhelming. Our ability to respond effectively depends on our understanding of the words the current moment. What do they mean? The moment the number of COVID-19 cases spike? The moment the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashes? The moment fish are spotted swimming back up commerce-free canals in Venice? The moment before protest erupts? The moment global population peaks? Or, as Gregg Easterbrook wrote in A Moment on the Earth, “the juncture at which a profound positive development of history began: the moment when people, machines, and nature began negotiating terms of truce”?
Fish are back in the canals. On March 19, 2020, BBC talk show host Stephen Sackur had the following exchange with Laurence Boone, chief economist of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development:
Sackur: When the coronavirus crisis is over, what will we have learned about globalization? Globalization as we’ve known it in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and into the 2000s—it doesn’t look sustainable going forward.
Boone: When we get out of this, there will definitely be a large amount of thinking and revision about the way the world has been functioning economically over the past decades. . .
Sackur: There is an extraordinary thing that has happened since the coronavirus crisis really hit the world economy. We have seen a phenomenal improvement in the air quality that has been recorded in China. We’ve even seen fish coming back into the canals in Venice. . .
Boone: I think the shock is so big that we will learn a lot of lessons. . .You are very right to point at climate. Reduced biodiversity with climate change may also be responsible for how fast the virus may have spread. . .This will lead us to rethink some of our economic model.
Woody Tasch
Suggestions of systemic change are not infrequent these days. Inboxes are full of messages about the opportunities and learning that lurk within the current crisis. There is talk from political leaders of economic transformation. The Secretary General of the United Nations calls for “a new economic paradigm.” Bloggers write of “imaginal cells” beginning to hatch a new cultural vision. The poetry of an Italian priest is recited during a CNN Coronavirus Town Hall. The words sacred and songs have been spotted swimming in schools towards the tributaries of hope.
**
Something else happened in 1970.
Americans in hundreds of communities took to the streets on the occasion of the first Earth Day. Estimates put the national number at around 20 million. Systemic change was what we were after, then, too. It remained elusive in many of the ways that count.
The arcs of population, consumerism, militarism, industrialism, urbanism, technological adventurism, racism and economic growth are exceedingly difficult to bend. At the level of institutions and systems—the daily spectacle, “move fast and break things” and change elections notwithstanding—almost impossible to bend.
What if, in addition to efforts to bend the practically unbendable at the level of institutions and systems, we were to put more effort into mending the eminently mendable at the level of foodshed and watershed?
What if—because I believe Thoreau said, “It’s better to move a pile of stones than solve a moral problem,” although I cannot retrieve that citation—we were to decide that local investing could be as powerful as global protesting?
What if we discovered ways to navigate back and forth between the trillions of dollars coursing through the global economy every day and the trillions of micro-organisms in each handful of fertile soil?
It’s comforting to think that economists and financiers and CEOs and shareholders and politicians may change their stripes in the wake of the current pandemic. But we mustn’t kid ourselves. Turn that stripe-changing intention inward.
When fear is compounded by fear, financial crisis by biological crisis, biological crisis by racial crisis, does the same law of human nature apply? Or is this “this time” really different? Are we on the cusp of systemic economic change and millions of life-altering changes of heart, when the pandemic passes and the stock market goes back up? Or, as the bard so sagely put it, is the past prologue, even in the age of black swans, rogue algorithms and rampaging viruses?
Woody Tasch is the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green). Since that book was published in 2009, more than $75 million has been invested in over 750 small organic farms and local food enterprises via volunteer-led groups in dozens of communities in the U.S., Canada, Australia and France. He is former treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and Chairman and CEO of Investors’ Circle. Utne Reader named him “One Of 25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Tasch is also author of SOIL: Notes Towards the Theory and Practice of Nurture Capital (Slow Money Institute, 2017). The full text of AHA!: Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over is available free at beetcoin.org/publications.
This article contains the content from the 12/09/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Weekend Two of the Bioneers Conference is just a couple days away, and we’re profoundly grateful to be able to come together in community and shine a light on pathways forward.
We invite you to this virtual gathering, where innovative thought leaders will uplift solutions on embracing Indigenous allyships, finding balance between identity and activism, building political peace through conversation, and more.
If you’re not already signed up, click here to register now — or grab yourself 20% off by telling your friends first. Attendees will have on-demand access to recordings for their registered sessions throughout the month of December!
This week, we feature some of the exciting programming that Weekend Two of the Bioneers 2020 Conference will have to offer.
If you can’t attend live, we’ve got you covered: Attendees will have on-demand access to recordings from the sessions for which they register throughout the month of December.
While farm management is among the whitest of professions, farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in “food apartheid” neighborhoods and suffer from diet-related illness. The system is built on stolen land and stolen labor and needs a redesign.
The book Farming While Black is the first comprehensive “how-to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color.
Read more here. Leah Penniman is delivering a keynote address and participating in a panel discussion at the Bioneers 2020 Conference this weekend. Register now with code LEAH20 to receive a FREE copy of her book “Farming While Black,” while supplies last!
Speaker Spotlight: Mark Plotkin
Mark Plotkin, Ph.D., a renowned ethnobotanist who has studied traditional Indigenous plant use with elder healers in Central and South America for 30+ years, is also an award-winning author and activist who’s worked with global conservation organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International. He is the co-founder and President of the Amazon Conservation Team, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the biological and cultural diversity of the Amazon.
Mark Plotkin is delivering a keynote address and participating in a panel discussion at the Bioneers 2020 Conference this Sunday, Dec. 13. Register now!
New Pathways for Old Wisdom: Mari Margil on the Rights of Nature
The inherent autonomy and agency of the natural world is an old wisdom being threatened by humanity’s disconnection from nature, as well as an extractive economy and the laws that protect it.
Mari Margil, Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), is leading the movement to gain legal recognition of the rights of nature. In this interview, Mari speaks on the challenges to her work and how anyone can get involved.
Mari is delivering a keynote address with her colleague Thomas Linzey and participating in two panel discussions on the rights of nature. Join her on Dec. 13 at the Bioneers 2020 Conference. Register now!
Conscious Music is the Soundtrack of the Movement: An Interview with Alfred Howard
Alfred Howard is a prolific spoken-word artist, writer, and co-founder of The Redwoods Music, a San Diego record label and collective. In his early 20s, he caravanned with musicians all across the county before finally setting roots in San Diego, where he has become a leading figure in the local musical community. He is the author of 2 books, including The Autobiography of No One; writes articles for several leading San Diego newspapers and magazines; and has written lyrics for over 30 released albums.
In this Q&A, Howard discusses his work, how he’s pivoted in the face of COVID-19, and the role of art in overcoming difficult times.
This Saturday, Dec. 12, join Howard for the panel discussion, “Come To Life: Inspiring the Regenerative Movement Through Arts and Activism” at the Bioneers 2020 Conference. Register now!
Reweaving Our Relationship with Women, Native Peoples and Nature
Living in the global urgency of a pandemic, climate change, and political corruption can make it hard for people to imagine a bright future. However, there are those who dare to envision more beyond our current state of affairs.
In this address from day two of the Bioneers 2020 Conference, Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons talks about the importance of women and Native leadership to illuminate a bold and ambitious vision we can share together.
In this Dec. 12 workshop, award-winning Indigenous writers will tackle topics about changing non-Native narratives and taking control of their representation, including: what makes writing “Indigenous;” how they honed their craft; and ways that they try to make their writing speak truth to power. For allies, there is no better time to learn about the Native literary explosion and how important it is to support Indigenous artists.
“Folktivism” for the Earth: an Interview with Musician Luke Wallace
Luke Wallace embodies a new wave of politically charged folk music, writing the soundtrack for a movement of people rising up to meet the social and environmental challenges of our times. In this interview, Luke explores his music as a platform to amplify the voices of communities threatened by unjust resource extraction.
Luke will be joining the panel discussion, “Come To Life: Inspiring the Regenerative Movement Through Arts and Activism,” on Dec. 12 at the Bioneers 2020 Conference. Register now to join him and fellow engaged musicians in this session, produced in partnership with Guayakí Tea and their “Come to Life” music venture.
This article contains the content from the 12/09/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
The inherent autonomy of the natural world is old wisdom — an unspoken truth that Indigenous communities have held for millennia — but it’s now being threatened by an extractive economy and the laws that condone it. As global society accelerates toward irreversible damage to our climate, people are fighting for the legal recognition of the rights of nature.
Mari Margil, Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), is one of the leaders guiding the movement and codifying a new pathway for how humans relate to the natural world. In this interview, Mari speaks on the challenges to her work and how anyone can get involved.
Watch Mari’s keynote address with her colleague Thomas Linzey at the Bioneers 2020 Conference here.
You often refer to Ecuador, the first country to codify the rights of nature into their constitution, as leading by example. How have you seen this struggle evolve since then?
In addition, we have submitted proposals for reform of existing environmental laws to have them protect the rights of nature, which the Biodiversity Commission of Ecuador’s National Assembly included in its new report. The report is the first draft of legislation being provided to the full Assembly for its consideration.
How does the rights of nature movement relate to the current climate crisis? What gives you hope as we move forward?
The rights of nature movement is very important with climate – and we are building a right to a healthy climate provisions into new rights of nature laws. In places like Nepal, for instance, we are working to advance a right of the Himalayas to a healthy climate – the Himalayas are the fastest warming mountain range on earth. This is shifting the understanding of climate change from simply a human problem to a problem that all of nature faces. And with that, that this is a human and nature’s rights crisis.
What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve encountered in the legal struggle to recognize rights of the natural world?
There are many that seek to continue with business as usual, in terms of how humans have treated nature – which has been one of use and exploitation, with environmental laws legalizing harm of nature. The consequences are many, including the destruction of ecosystems, accelerating species extinction, and of course, climate change. The status quo cannot hold. The struggle for change comes up against the powers that be that don’t want change, because they profit and grow powerful off of the current system.
How can the individuals reading this article contribute to the rights of nature movement, in the context of their own communities?
It’s really just about helping ourselves understand how the existing system works. It treats nature as existing for human use. Our environmental laws are protecting our use of nature. That’s led to profound impacts globally.
People who aren’t lawyers, academics, or scientists have moved initiatives forward in their own communities and on a national level. We share those stories, do workshops, and meet with people one-on-one to talk through these concepts and what’s happening. We discuss how others are moving for a change, developing strategies and learning how to answer tough questions.
Everybody starts in that same place of the fundamental sense that something is wrong and something needs to shift. I take great hope and inspiration from that because people are doing something that’s really difficult. People are willing to step outside their comfort zone because they know something terrible is happening to the planet, and we need to do something really dramatic to make change.
I think people should take hope knowing that other regular Joes just like them are doing something, that they can do it too, and that they don’t need to be any kind of professor, expert, or lawyer. Anybody can do this.
The recent two-day global forum that CDER presented brought together leading experts and communities around the rights of nature movement. What were your takeaways?
We are so pleased that Bioneers was a co-sponsor of the Global Forum. All panel sessions can be found here. Each speaker illuminated the fact that there is such an amazing amount of work being done to advance both the human right to a healthy environment and the right of nature to be healthy. These rights are related and support each other.
As we saw in the different campaigns presented at the Global Forum, we have a collective, growing understanding that fulfilling the human right to a healthy environment depends on the environment being healthy. That sounds like a simple idea, but is essential.
Living in the global urgency of a pandemic, climate change, and political corruption can make it hard for people to imagine a bright future. However, there are those who dare to envision more beyond our current state of affairs.
In this address from day two of the Bioneers 2020 Conference, Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons talks about the importance of women and Native leadership to illuminate a bold and ambitious vision we can share in together.
Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons
This spring, as the multiple systems that supposedly held us unraveled – and the full scope of the uncertainties we face sank in, the webs of connection to the people and places who I hold dear were what held me.
To tend to my heart, I’ve tried to accept and express waves of emotion as they arose, and paused inwardly to celebrate moments of progress, joy and breakthrough. Like the embodied moments of overwhelming relief as the results of our last presidential election emerged. I was awash with humility and gratitude for the women of color – the leaders, organizers, and their communities – whose skill, perseverance, leadership and drive deserve credit and our thankfulness for that outcome.
I’ve felt elated to see the immense global protests after George Floyd’s murder, and outraged by the bald-faced greed, criminality and accelerated destruction of immigrants and wildlands, incarcerated peoples, birds and waterways. I’ve savored the space at home to nourish Kenny and my personal partnership. To enjoy the stillness of no travel, and the beauty of the land that holds us.
To nourish my mind, I’ve deepened my learning about social healing, about historical cycles of disruptive change and pandemics. I’ve oriented myself towards a longer time perspective, recognizing that the scope of change we face will require a marathon from us all.
I’ve tried to understand the apparent insanity of our twisted remains of a culture, while cultivating an eagle’s eye long view. To care for my spirit, I’ve invited connection with ritual, nature and ancestors. My mother left this life last year, and when I ask her, she reminds me to live juicy, stay soft, create beauty and dance.
This year, what’s emerged most strongly for me is a profound and deepening commitment to the health, sovereignty, world-views, traditional ecological knowledge, healing and ally-ship with Indigenous peoples.
I’ve long appreciated that Native peoples are incredibly strong, resilient and innovative. From historical genocide, theft of ancestral lands, forced relocation, and Indian residential schools to present day unequal access to health care, education, missing and murdered women, and voting access, they have survived and thrived.
From Bioneers’ beginnings in 1990 in the Southwestern US, (and thanks to Kenny’s vision), our organization has been informed and guided by the voices, experience and wisdom of Native peoples.
In 1992, I heard Petuuche Gilbert, who was then a Governor at Acoma Pueblo, say in a panel of Indigenous elders about the anniversary of Columbus arriving at this land: “500 years ago you came, and we welcomed you with open arms. If you came again today, we would do the same.”
I was gobsmacked, as I felt the authenticity and truth of his words, though they seemed to contradict the history of violence I knew his people had endured. I began to understand then how much I might learn from Native peoples about how to be a human being.
Over these thirty years, I’m grateful to have learned from many Native mentors, board members and friends. Living in the land of the Pueblo peoples, I’ve experienced tribal ceremonies, feast days and the wealth of creative expression that emerges from the hearts, cultures and hands of so many First Peoples.
I’ve also begun learning about the serial and ongoing efforts at genocide, culture and language demolition, and forced sterilization and relocation that our government has inflicted on Indigenous peoples. I’ve learned how systematically and globally extractive industries have targeted Native lands and reservations for mining and drilling, and how destructive that’s been to their waterways and the man-camps to their women, damaging all the peoples’ health, cultural traditions, pillaging sacred sites and attempting to uproot languages.
I’ve witnessed the systemic sub-standard and inadequate health care, lack of fresh food and water, jobs and schools that plague many Native communities and create pre-existing conditions, all of which have rendered the COVID virus more deadly and destructive for them.
When the pandemic first hit, I was thankful to be a bridge for generosity and caring for some whose suffering from extremes of poverty, rural distance, poor health and intergenerational trauma was worsened by the virus.
Academics call it ‘pro-social’ behavior, acting to benefit another or others. I call it heart-centered leadership, and practicing right relations. When COVID19 began, an opportunity emerged to provide tangible support where it was greatly needed. A friend asked me where to give resources to support Native peoples (and especially elders) through the pandemic.
I met with my colleagues Cara Romero and Alexis Bunten, the gifted and committed leaders who co-direct Bioneers’ Indigeneity program, and we came up with a list of trusted allies and friends, focusing on the places we knew best and that we knew were hardest hit.
Then, our list attracted caring donors who gifted us some funds to distribute. Because of our abundant relationships, throughout Turtle Island and even globally, we were able to send checks – mostly directly, person-to-person, to support families in rural areas to access food and water, and to help protect elders and culture-bearers.
Alexis also attracted a grant from Google to gift tablets and ipads to some of the Native youth she works with, to aid in their home schooling. (Do you know that 40% of Native kids in this country don’t have access to technology or wifi for school or connecting?)
All of this adds up to a reality that few are aware of that we’ve got what’s sometimes been referred to as ‘third world conditions’ widely prevalent among Native communities throughout Turtle Island.
At the same time, I’ve seen that within this country are hundreds of sovereign nations that are immensely wealthy in cultural resources and traditional knowledge. Some of their languages, traditions and knowledge systems are held precariously by a scant few esteemed culture-bearers and elders. I’ve explored the wisdom of Traditional Ecological Knowledge or TEK, which are Indigenous ways of being in right and sacred relationship to the elements of life – to fire, land, air and water. For example, witnessing the skills of dryland agriculture, and of adapting seeds to survive through droughts, I’ve understood how vital they will be for all of us in the years ahead as the climate crisis worsens and Earth becomes hotter and dryer.
I know that any quest to learn to live in a regenerative way ecologically has to begin by learning respectfully from what our Native relatives have known for millennia.
I’m acutely aware of the need to remain culturally humble about how much I don’t know. Please understand – I’m mindful of the dangers of cultural appropriation, and I’m not aspiring to ‘nativism’ or any kind of white savior stuff or copy-cat environmentalism. My intent is to share my heart’s commitment in hopes that you may be sparked to join me in it. Thankfully, all of my previous callings coexist well with this one. As I’ve worked with diverse women visionaries and changemakers over these many years, it’s been the perseverance, truth-telling and unshakable stands of women from many of our most marginalized communities that have often inspired me the most.
And, as we turn toward rebalancing the deep feminine and masculine within ourselves, and in our organizations and our institutions, prioritizing connection over task or goal, leading from the heart, listening more than speaking, honoring the need for healthy cycles, and integrating our full humanity into our collaborations, we’ll be so much better able to sustain our efforts joyfully for the long work ahead.
To many Native peoples, nature is sacred and nothing is harvested without first receiving permission, and offering gratitude and reciprocity, or giving back. Mother Earth is seen as female, and there’s an understanding that what we’re doing to the Earth, we’re also doing to women, and vice versa. When I looked for an example of a society where women are honored and treated with equality, I found it in the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Six Nations. Seeing how respectfully women were treated in their confederacy inspired the US women’s suffrage movement which was launched in Seneca Falls, NY, in the early 1900s.
As Chief Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper for the Iroquois Six Nations, tells it: the Haudenosaunee were instructed by the peacemaker hundreds of years ago that – “since the Earth is female, the women will be in charge of the Earth, land, life and water. The men would be responsible for fire and energy, and the balance. The combination of male and female necessary to bring forth life was seen as fundamental, so great care was taken to maintain that balance.”
In their matrilineal culture, since the women are in charge of life, they raise the leaders and govern the families. The women select the chief, after observing the boy children from a very early age to see which of them has the qualities needed to lead the people. And the women of their longhouse have the authority to rescind the chief’s leadership, if he’s not doing a good job. Imagine if this country worked like that?
Thankfully, this year, with leadership from the Indigenous and Black women, young people and communities of color, perhaps we finally are beginning to head in that direction.
May we be bold, resolute, forthright and strategic,
Integrating the power of prayer, ceremony and ritual,
In demanding the systemic change and cultural repair
Our future vision, the climate and the health of the whole requires.
May we advocate for the voiceless among us,
For the finned, feathered and furred,
For the plant people and fruitful funghi
And for the many – like the whales –
Whose voices we have yet to understand,
That their habitats and wildlands
May regenerate to shelter and renew them.
May we practice fierce compassion,
Cultural humility, forgiveness and kindness,
Connecting locally, inwardly and more deeply
To strengthen ourselves,
And help to heal our relationships with mother Earth,
Since the founding of the U.S., a core battle has raged between two irreconcilable forces—democracy and plutocracy. Wealth in the U.S. today is over “two times as concentrated as in imperial Rome, which was a slave-and-farmer society.” If billionaires were a nation, they’d be the world’s 3rd largest economy. Today, mammoth monopolies have once again captured the government and rewritten the law to amass the greatest concentrations of wealth and power in American history, but strong anti-trust movements are rising to break up monopolies, change the law, democratize the economy, and institute democratic governance. Along with efforts afoot in Congress, some of the most important and successful initiatives are now happening at local and state levels. Learn about the deeper history of this clash that has led us to today’s plutocracy and about the movements and political strategies now gaining momentum to reclaim democracy and distribute power and wealth building.
With: Thom Hartmann, author, broadcaster and scholar; Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, author, and formidable campaigner to break up Amazon; Maurice BP-Weeks, Co-Executive Director of ACRE (Action Center for Race and the Economy) who works with community organizations and labor unions to create equitable communities by dismantling systems of wealth extraction that target Black and Brown communities. Hosted by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and co-founder.
Panelists
Thom Hartmann, the top progressive talk show host in America for over a decade and a four-time Project Censored Award-winning journalist, is the author of some 30 books, including the international bestseller, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight (about the end of the age of oil), used as a textbook in many schools and colleges. Thom, a former psychotherapist and entrepreneur, has also co-written and been featured in 6 documentaries with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.
Maurice BP-Weeks, based in Detroit, has many years’ community organizing experience in such areas as housing, policing, incarceration, corporate accountability and education justice. Co-Executive Director of ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy) where he works with community organizations and labor unions on campaigns to create equitable communities by dismantling systems of wealth extraction in Black and Brown communities, he also serves on many boards, including those of: Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, National Institute for Money in Politics, Investors Advocates for Social Justice and the National Black Workers Center.
Stacy Mitchell, the Portland, Maine-based Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which produces research and develops policy to counter corporate control and build thriving, equitable communities, has written extensively about the dangers of monopoly power, including for The Atlantic, Bloomberg,The Nation, and The New York Times. She’s the author of a book, Big-Box Swindle, and several influential reports, including “Amazon’s Stranglehold” and “Monopoly Power and the Decline of Small Business.”
The second day of the Bioneers 2020 Conference delivered essential calls to action for a brighter future paired with beautiful performances and a healthy dose of democracy.
Following are some of the ideas and takeaways Bioneers introduced at Conference Day 2.
ACTION ITEMS
Lessons, in Their Own Words:
“At the heart of this decolonization has to be land return. We don’t need to think about that as the last step, like after we’ve decolonized our minds, our curriculums, our statues, our books, our movies, our TV shows, our clothing, then maybe we’ll finally get to the return of land. I say let’s start with the return of land and know that it’s possible, and it’s powerful, and that it’s going to be the thing that changes the world.” -Cutcha Risling Baldy; Co-Founder | Native Women’s Collective
“This idea we share with all life on Earth is a tendency toward democracy – a tendency toward fairness. Still the story we’ve been telling ourselves for thousands of years is ‘people are bad, and democracy is abnormal.'” -Thom Hartmann; Progressive Talk Show Host
“Fund the people who know the way to freedom. Open the floodgates for flexible, general support, ongoing funding to deep organizing led by people of color, and particularly women of color, transgender and gender non-conforming people of color. …There’s no one coming to save us. Every one of us who’s alive now, we are the team on the field. There’s no guarantee that in 30 years some future generation is going to have the time left on the clock to do what we were too afraid to do, to be bold where we were timid, to act where we hesitated. This is our moment. This is it. This is our shot.” -Vanessa Daniel; Executive Director | Groundswell Fund
“For a long time we’ve assumed that huge conglomerates and monopolies are the price of business. But what we’ve done in reality is create policies that benefit these businesses enormously. It’s not just about calling these companies out for their bad behavior, it’s about recognizing that this is our government. We have to think about, what does a democracy look like that actually serves the people?” -Stacy Mitchell; Co-Director | Institute for Local Self-Reliance
“Transformative justice means replacing a gun with an ecosystem; with our friend groups, partnerships, and neighbors.” -Liz Kennedy; Communications Director and Research Fellow | Lead to Life
“May we advocate for the voiceless among us, for the finned, feathered and furred, for the plant people and fruitful funghi and for the many – like the whales – whose voices we have yet to understand, that their habitats and wildlands may regenerate to shelter and renew them.” -Nina Simons; Co-Founder | Bioneers
Campaigns to Follow & Support:
Join the movement to return stolen land to Indigenous Peoples. LANDBACK seeks to defund and dismantle white supremacy and to return all public lands back into Indigenous hands. (Mentioned by Cutcha Risling Baldy in her keynote presentation, Indigenous Voices for Decolonized Futures)
Support the U.S. movements for reproductive and social justice with Groundswell Fund, which resources intersectional grassroots organizing and centers the leadership of women of color – particularly those who are Black, Indigenous, and Transgender. (Mentioned by Vanessa Daniel in her keynote address, How Does Humanity Get to Freedom? By Following the People Who Know the Way)
Learn more about the rampant injustices created by mass incarceration by supporting Essie Justice Group, a nonprofit organization of women with incarcerated loved ones. (Mentioned in the panel Dreaming Transformative Justice: An Intergenerational Dialogue)
Help seed the solidarity economy by getting involved with the New Economy Coalition, which exists to organize its member organizations into a more powerful and united force, in order to accelerate the transition of our economic system from capitalism to a solidarity economy. (Mentioned in the panel Frontline Leadership to Transform the World)
Support the EcoHealth Alliance during a year when the need couldn’t be clearer. EcoHealth Alliance is a global environmental health nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergence of disease. (Mentioned in the panel Public Health/Planetary Health/One Health)
Pledge to fight Native erasure and illuminate the vibrancy of Native voices, knowledge and the importance of the issues Natives face. Sign the IllumiNative pledge. (Mentioned in the panel The Power of Matriarchy: Intergenerational Indigenous Women’s Leadership)
READ NINA & KENNY’S DAY 1 OPENING REMARKS
Holding It Together by Holding It—Together
“It’s all alive—it’s all connected—it’s all intelligent—it’s all relatives.”
Following are Bioneers Co-Founders Nina Simons and Kenny Ausubel’s opening remarks for the Bioneers 2020 Conference.
Since many of you are experiencing a Bioneers conference for the first time, we’d like to share a bit about where we’re coming from and who we are as a community. We are living through a transformative moment of systems crash. We’ve reached the biological high noon of a losing confrontation with our planetary home.
We’ve also reached the breaking point of the clash between democracy and plutocracy. The two are intimately related.
We stand at the threshold of a pivotal passage in the human experiment: To reimagine how to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other, and future generations.
To move from breakdown to breakthrough, the coming years will be the decisive turning point in the viability of human civilization. The future of life on Earth is at stake. It requires the reinvention of everything.
The good news is that we’re witnessing a profound transformation taking hold around the world. It signals the dawn of a human civilization that honors and imitates the wisdom of nature’s design sophistication. After all, nature has 3.8 billion years of R&D under her belt. Nature has done everything we want to do, but without destroying the planet or mortgaging our future.
This historic shift to become an ecologically literate and socially just civilization heralds a declaration of interdependence. Taking care of nature means taking care of people—and taking care of people means taking care of nature.
It’s a revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart. The solutions residing in nature surpass our conception of what’s even possible.
Nature has a profound capacity for healing, and we can act as healers in a regenerative process of supporting nature to heal itself. It’s a partnership, and we’re the junior partner. Together, we can heal our relationships with ourselves, each other and the Earth.
It’s true that what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves—but equally important, what we do to each other, we do to the Earth. We will have peace with the Earth only when we practice justice with each other, which is a process that never ends.
This transformation is rooted in values of justice, equity, diversity, democracy, inclusion, mutuality, respect and peace. It is grounded in valuing and bridging our differences.
In the early 1970s, facing the specter of a world on a collision course with nature and each other, we began asking ourselves what we could do about it. Were there real solutions? One, by one, we came across remarkable individuals who appeared to have come up with fundamental solutions to many of our most pressing environmental and social crises.
A pattern emerged. They approached these challenges with systems thinking because, just as everything in the web of life is connected, human systems and natural systems are one interdependent system. They took a “solve-the-whole-problem” approach, spanning the rich arc of the human endeavor.
These people had peered deep into the heart of nature and living systems in search of cues and clues. The most basic question they asked: How would nature do it? They found endless solutions.
We came to call them “bioneers”—biological pioneers who looked to nature as source, not resource. Of course, the original Bioneers are Indigenous peoples – the old-growth cultures who’ve long held this knowledge for how to live on Earth and with each other for the long haul.
Because the only constant in nature is change, resilience is the grail—enhancing our ability to adapt to dramatic change and restructure our ways of living in concert with natural systems and with respect for human dignity.
The heart of resilience is diversity. In nature, diversity is the very fabric of life.
Damaged ecosystems rebound to health when they have sufficient diversity. So do societies. It’s not just a diversity of players; it’s what ecologists call “response diversity” —the myriad strategies for adapting to ever-shifting challenges. Diverse approaches improve the odds. Diverse cultures and ideas enrich society’s capacity to survive and thrive.
Independent of its utilitarian value to people, diversity is also the sacred tree of life with intrinsic value and the right to life.
This journey ultimately led us to found the Bioneers conference and organization in 1990. The intent was to connect and highlight the visionary work of these leading social and scientific innovators with breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet. When people understand real solutions exist, it leverages the momentum for change.
What quickly became clear was that the solutions to our environmental and social crises are largely present—or we know what directions to head in.
Bioneers became a living co-creative system, a celebration of the genius of both nature and human creativity.
For the past 31 years, we’ve acted as a kind of star search for social and scientific innovators who are both visionary and practical. We’ve provided a platform for them to connect, and we’ve become a media amplifier for their voices. Often these are the greatest people you’ve never heard of, including those who are often the most marginalized and least often heard, including First Peoples, people of color, women, and young people.
In essence, we communicate, connect and catalyze solutions-based work that educates and inspires leadership and engaged action, year ‘round.
Over the years, Bioneers has grown into a community of leadership in a time that we’re all called upon to be leaders. The complexity of the world’s challenges today is so vast that they can be solved only through extensive interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration and a spectrum of approaches, cultural perspectives, and ideas.
Humility is our constant companion in the recognition of how little we know—or perhaps can know. We’ve served as a trellis on which countless leaders and movements have grown and grown together. We are a network of networks and a big tent featuring diverse movements.
At Bioneers, cross-pollination is a way of life—where the power of connection and collaboration generates engaged action, innovation and greater power to affect change. At the end of the day, it’s about the symphony, not the soloist.
In 1990 when we founded Bioneers, it was a hopeful time of a national and global awakening to the interconnected crises of the destruction of nature and the extreme concentration of wealth and power that are antithetical to democracy and justice. But at this teachable moment of wide awareness and calls to action to avert these looming crises such as climate change, powerful corporate interests stole the slim sliver of time we had to jump-start the transformation and avert the Great Unraveling.
As a result, the world has been slouching toward sustainability—at least until recently. In truth, although it’s one minute to midnight on the ecological clock, and too late to avoid large-scale destruction and disruption, we can still dodge complete cataclysm if we act boldly and quickly.
Around the world, the transition off fossil fuels is irreversibly underway, along with countless other basic changes in how we organize human civilization and relate to one another. From here on, the challenge is to alter the “mindscape” and to shift our structures, cultures and lifeways to fast-forward the transformation. It begins with a change of heart that celebrates the unity and intrinsic value of all life.
Over and over, it’s the story of how great a difference one person can make, and how community makes the difference. In community lies our resilience. As Sarah Crowell of Destiny Arts puts it, “The way we’ll hold it together is to hold it—together.
Perhaps above all, the real story of this time is the power of social movements, which is also the story of Bioneers and of this conference.
In 1990, Bioneers put forth the proposition that in great measure the solutions were becoming visible, if you knew where to look for them. Thirty-one years later, it’s impossible to keep up with the avalanche of strategic and systemic solutions, creative responses, and the dramatic shifts occurring in global consciousness.
Over these 4 days of the Bioneers conference, we invite you to experience a kaleidoscope of solutions, models and innovators with breakthrough solutions for people and planet. We’ll explore the vibrant landscape of transformative social change—a living embodiment of weaving the world anew.
It’s primarily the swelling social movements of the past decades that have valiantly held the line against the doom machine. Now is the time for us to translate these movements into systemic change.
Ideas that may have seemed radical not so long ago now look like a big “duh.” Although it’s not going to happen overnight, there’s much that can happen quickly, especially at local, municipal, state and regional scales—where horizontal alliances from the bottom up are beginning to go to scale.
And, as we tend to our actions in the world—building power, reaching across divides and making real structural change—we need also to tend to our inner states. To shedding the false narratives and identities that limit our best flourishing and that of others.
We can unite ecology and economy, equity and democracy around values founded in the “we” —shifting from a ‘me’ culture to one that lifts each other up, shares power and values all of life. As Heather McGhee says: “We need a ‘we’ to survive.”
The critical human transformation we’re making is from tribalism to pluralism—from anthropocentrism to kinship with the entire web of life. The Mayan people call it “a world where many worlds fit.” In john a. powell’s words, it’s a world that moves from othering to belonging.
These are some of the worlds we’ll be exploring together over these coming days. We are so grateful you’re choosing to join us to explore and co-create this revolution from nature and the human heart.
It’s all alive—it’s all connected—it’s all intelligent—it’s all relatives.
The first day of the Bioneers 2020 Conference, presented science that opened our eyes to new possibilities along with ideas and inspiration for transitioning into a new year with strength, perseverance and an unwavering insistence upon amplifying underrepresented voices in important conversations.
“You have power,” said activist and organizer LaTosha Brown. “How can you use your agency, our collective power, to make the change that we all deserve?”
Following are some of the ideas and takeaways Bioneers introduced on day 1 of the 2020 Conference.
ACTION ITEMS
Lessons, In Their Own Words:
“The complexity of the world’s challenges today is so vast that they can be solved only through extensive interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration and a spectrum of approaches, cultural perspectives, and ideas.” -Nina Simons; Co-Founder | Bioneers
“What is so extraordinary about these [psilocybin mushroom] medicines is their widespread effects address issues not being addressed by conventional medicines, especially with PTSD and addiction.” -Paul Stamets; Mycologist and Author
“I believe that when it comes to safeguarding and building democracy, most Americans have had the leisure to do the bare minimum. The last four years have revealed that that is no longer enough. We’re now posed with the challenge of getting Americans from all walks of life to roll up their sleeves and step into a different level of engagement.” -Bakari Kitwana; Executive Director | Rap Sessions
“Whenever there is a threat to justice or to democracy for some of us, it makes all of us vulnerable. You cannot advance democracy in our country if you don’t deal with ground zero and places that are impacted most.” -LaTosha Brown; Co-Founder | Black Voters Matter Fund
“Whether we are rich or poor, whether we live in the city or in the forest, we all have one planet.” -Oscar Soria; Campaign Director | Avaaz
“I try to translate progressive values into a different context. There is a way to strip down the framing of policies that have become divisive and rebuild them to be relevant, inclusive and compelling.” -Chloe Maxmin; State Senator | Maine
“Change happens through community organizing. It’s how we treat each other at the dinner table. It’s inside of you already.” -Tia Oros Peters; CEO | Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples
Campaigns to Follow & Support:
Sign the petition calling on world leaders to support a Global Deal for Nature that protects and restores half of the Earth’s lands and oceans. (Mentioned in the panel One Earth: Integrating Climate Action and Biodiversity Conservation into a Blueprint for a Livable Planet)
Learn more about (and even participate in) the world’s first mobile microdosing study, which is a correlational study on the effects of microdosing psychedelic substances on cognitive performance and mental health. (Mentioned by Paul Stamets in his keynote presentation, Psilocybin Mushroom Medicines: A Paradigm Shift in Global Consciousness)
Learn more about how Artificial Intelligent technology can be used for the social good with AI for People. (Mentioned in the panel Racial Justice Beyond Trump)
Help make sure that those most excluded from democracy are at the center of transforming it with Groundswell Action Fund, which strengthens U.S. movements for reproductive and social justice by resourcing intersectional electoral organizing led by women of color, low-income women, and transgender and gender non-conforming people of color. (Mentioned in the panel If Women Led the World: Midwifing the World Anew)
Get involved with One Earth, an organization on a mission to stay below 1.5°C in global average temperature by shifting to renewable energy, protecting and restoring nature, and transitioning to regenerative agriculture. (Mentioned in the panel One Earth: Integrating Climate Action and Biodiversity Conservation into a Blueprint for a Livable Planet)
Support our friends at Destiny Arts Center: Founded by Black and Queer dance and martial artists in 1988, Destiny uses movement-based arts to uplift youth voice, supporting pathways for young people to express themselves, advocate for justice and equity, fight against the systemic racism that continues to impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and build a community where everyone feels seen, valued, and free. (The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company were featured performers today.)
In the words of the great climate scientist James Hansen “We can’t fix the climate until we fix our democracy.” That does not mean, however, a return to some mythical past, but taking a large step toward democratizing society and organizing governance according to the “original instructions” drawn from the best practices of earlier systems and of our own most compelling visions of the future. The Haudenosaunee (Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy) is one example of effective democratic governance. Franklin Roosevelt’s proposal for a “Second Bill of Rights” (1944) is another, one adapted to industrial democracy. We do not lack for powerful ideas and practical examples, but fulfilling the promise of democracy in our time will require systemic changes that: (a) serve the public good, not the interests of the powerful and wealthy; (b) render the economy subservient to society, not its master; and (c) extend unalienable rights and due process of law to future generations and nature.
Monika Bauerlein is the award-winning CEO of Mother Jones, one of the most important and impactful investigative journalism institutions in the U.S. Born in Germany but widely traveled, she had an extensive journalistic career as a writer and editor until coming to Mother Jones in 2000. Under her and now Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery’s leadership, MOJO has become one of the rare success stories in contemporary independent journalism, winning three National Magazine Awards.
David W. Orr, a Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics (Emeritus) at Oberlin College, is a pioneering, award-winning thought leader in the fields of Sustainability and Ecological Literacy. The author and co-author of countless articles and papers and several seminal books, including, most recently, Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency, he has served as a board member or adviser to many foundations and organizations (including Bioneers!). His current work is on the state of our democracy.
Oren Lyons, a Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan who serves as a Member Chief of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs and the Grand Council of the Iroquois Confederacy (i.e. the Haudenosaunee peoples), is an accomplished artist, social and environmental activist, and author; a Professor Emeritus at SUNY Buffalo; a leading voice at the UN Permanent Forum on Human Rights for Indigenous Peoples; and the recipient of many prestigious national and international prizes including The UN NGO World Peace Prize. Oren also serves on the boards of several major nonprofit organizations and social enterprises; is founder and Principal of One Bowl Productions, a purpose driven film and TV production company; and is an All-American Lacrosse Hall of Famer and Honorary Chairman of the Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team.
Chloe Maxmin, hailing from rural Maine, is a Maine State Senator just elected in 2020 after unseating a two-term Republican incumbent and (former) Senate Minority Leader. In 2018, she served in the Maine House of Representatives after becoming the first Democrat to win her rural conservative district. Chloe is seeking to develop a new politics for rural America, and she and her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, are currently writing a book for Beacon Press about their electoral success and political goals.
Within most Indigenous communities of the Americas (and of the world) the cultural and societal responsibilities of womxn play a crucially important role in maintaining the wellbeing of the community—including the ecosystem. Their intimate relationship to Mother Earth ranges from the exchange of water in the birthing process to the role of decision-making within families and clans to ensure a healthy future for subsequent generations. In these especially challenging times, the coming together of Indigenous womxn in leadership is more critical than ever for all people and all cultures to re-evaluate their responsibilities to respect and protect the sacredness of Mother Earth. Hear three inspiring Indigenous women discuss how matriarchy, the sacred feminine, and Indigenous ways play an important part in their leadership.
Hosted by Cara Romero, Bioneers Indigeneity Program Director. With: Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca), Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), and Naelyn Pike (Chiricahua Apache).
Panelists
Casey Camp-Horinek, Environmental Ambassador of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma and Hereditary Drum-keeper of its Women’s Scalp Dance Society, elder and matriarch, is also an Emmy award-winning actress, author, and internationally renowned, longtime Native and human rights and environmental justice activist. She led efforts for the Ponca tribe to adopt a “rights of nature” statute and pass a moratorium on fracking on its territory. She has traveled and spoken around the world.
Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), is the founder and Executive Director of IllumiNative, the first and only national Native-led organization focused on changing the narrative about Native peoples on a mass scale. Crystal built IllumiNative to activate a cohesive set of research-informed strategies that illuminate the voices, stories, contributions and assets of contemporary Native peoples to disrupt the invisibility and toxic stereotypes Native peoples face.
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Program Director of the Bioneers Indigenous Knowledge Program, previously served her Mojave-based tribe in several capacities, including as: first Executive Director at the Chemehuevi Cultural Center, a member of the tribal council, and Chair of the Chemehuevi Education Board and Chemeuevi Headstart Policy Council. Cara is also a highly accomplished photographer/artist.
Naelyn Pike, a 21-year-old Chiricahua Apache, is a lifelong fighter for the rights of her tribe and other Indigenous peoples. She follows in the footsteps of her renowned grandfather, the founder of the Apache Stronghold, dedicated to the protection of Apache sacred sites and Indigenous rights. Pike, the youngest Indigenous girl ever to testify in front of Congress, continues to fight for environmental sustainability and Indigenous rights at the local, state, and national levels.
The current global pandemic has revealed stark structural injustices embedded deep in our society. Our approach to health has long neglected the relationship between socio-economic conditions, planetary health, and public health. As a virus that was transmitted from non-human animals to humans has placed the entire world on high-alert, it is time we reevaluate the relationship between planetary health and public health. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the injustices that have forced communities of color to bear the brunt of the pandemic. This brings us to the central question: How do we rise to the challenge and radically restructure our entire approach to health?
Moderated by J.P. Harpignies, this Bioneers 2020 conversation brings together two prominent leaders in the field of health. William B. Karesh, Ph.D., Executive Vice President for Health and Policy at EcoHealth Alliance, President of the World Animal Health Organization (OIE) Working Group on Wildlife Diseases and chair of the IUCN Wildlife Health Specialist Group. Howard Frumkin, Professor Emeritus, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington School of Public Health, co-editor of the new groundbreaking collection Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves (Island Press).
J.P. HARPIGNIES: Let me begin with something painfully obvious: we’re all currently obsessed with COVID-19, as we have absolutely no choice but to be, given how dramatically that virus has impinged on all our lives. And one of the most painful aspects of this crisis, besides of course the immeasurable amount of death and suffering and economic hardship it is visiting on so many people, is that it’s also starkly revealing some of the most glaring injustices and deep structural flaws in our society.
We all know that we live in a system that’s a weird mix of plutocracy and democracy, and that the rich and the middle class have had better health outcomes and better healthcare as well as better educational opportunities and legal representation if they need it compared to people at the bottom of the social order. But even the most cynical among us have to be stunned by the extraordinarily disproportionate amount of suffering that’s been visited on the most disenfranchised communities, especially communities of color.
One thing this crisis is clearly revealing is the extent to which human health is inextricably linked to social conditions, to the social order, to socio-economic factors. We have to hope that our society will take this as a wake-up call and that we will start addressing these gross injustices in the years ahead, not just in our public health system but in the broader society.
With that said, it is also important to understand that there are broader questions than just the socio-economic ones I just mentioned. This should be painfully obvious because COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease (and we have one of the world’s leading experts on zoonotic diseases here with us today) meaning it is a disease transmitted from animals to humans (as are so many of the epidemics and pandemics in human history, from the Black Plague through Ebola and SARS and MERS, and of course the common flu, etc.). COVID-19 being a zoonotic disease is an indicator that human health is inextricably linked to the health of the ecosystems in which human beings live, to the health of other species, to the health of the entire biosphere. That is part of what we’re going to be discussing today, this broadening of the concept of what human health is.
About 16, 17 years ago, we at Bioneers made an early effort to wrestle with this question. We published a book, a collection called Ecological Medicine in which we attempted to gather a number of voices from disparate fields who were all pointing arrows to this idea of a need to broaden the concept of public health. In that book we highlighted people from environmental justice movements, chemists working on toxicity in the environment, people working on eco-psychology, people working on urban design and architecture as they relate to health, leading advocates of the Precautionary Principle, activists with Healthcare Without Harm, etc. Since the publication of that text, other thought-leaders have come forward to refine and deepen that understanding and to come up with actual plans of action, and we have two of the most illustrious figures in those efforts with us today.
I’ll start with Professor Howard Frumkin, a physician, epidemiologist and Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington, who has held many major leadership positions: he led the Our Planet, Our Health initiative at the Wellcome Trust and served as Dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, Director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC, and Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University. He’s served on countless boards and advisory committees for all sorts of governmental, scientific, professional, and academic institutions and is the author or co-author of some 250 papers and nine books, including Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-Being and Sustainability. And one reason that we really wanted Howie on this session is that he co-edited a book, just put out by Island Press called Planetary Health, and in that text we recognized a much more refined and all-encompassing effort at doing what we had attempted in our book Ecological Medicine nearly 20 years before, so we felt we absolutely had to have him here, and I recommend that book highly to everyone.
I’ll now move on to our other interlocutor, William (“Billy”) Karesh, an absolutely legendary figure, one of the leading experts in the world on zoonotic diseases and on the relationship between human health and animal health. He is the one who is credited with coining the term “One Health,” which has become a very important concept, precisely pointing the way at this deeper understanding that human health is inextricably linked to ecosystem health. Billy is Executive Vice President for Health and Policy for EcoHealth Alliance, a leading organization working on zoonotic diseases. He’s also part of the USAID emerging pandemic threats PREDICT-2 program, an incredibly important initiative (which of course the Trump administration defunded as soon as it came to power, simply because it was the most important and most significant group of people working on zoonotic diseases on the planet…)
Billy is also a member of the World Health Organization’s IHR Roster of Experts. He’s the President of the World Organization for Animal Health Working Group on Wildlife, and is involved in more projects than I have time to list. I really want to drive home that Billy is not an armchair theoretician: he is the one who traced the origins of bird flu and collected a sample of a virus from a wild swan that was then later used for the human vaccine worldwide. He has led projects in over 45 countries from Argentina to Zambia. His team proved the connections between Ebola outbreaks and the use of bush-meat in Africa; found the MERS Corona virus in camels in the Middle East; and the closest relative of the COVID-19 virus in bats in Asia. His is truly an extraordinary record.
So I can’t think of two people better suited to helping us expand our understanding of public health. We’ll start with Howie.
HOWIE FRUMKIN: It’s really an honor to be here, and to be here with Billy. I think we’ll do a nice one-two punch. I’ll focus on some broader themes in planetary health, including climate change, and Billy will talk about zoonotic diseases and spillover, and I think this will be a nice comprehensive overview of links between our planet and our health.
I’m going to speak from the perspective of the emerging field of Planetary Health, and I’ll start with some history. I’m going to take you back to the year 1860. England is exploiting coal on a very large scale, and around the same time, the Drake Well, the first oil well in the U.S., was drilled in Pennsylvania, all that helping initiate the Industrial Revolution. Those two places in the mid-19th century mark the beginning of the modern planetary health story. A massive upscaling of the use of energy worldwide began then. Within 50 years, fossil fuel was exploding, and our species was using far vaster amounts of energy than had ever been the case in human history.
That enabled us to do a lot of things. One of them was to reproduce. An extraordinary post-Industrial Revolution population explosion began. We’ve also seen a huge increase in economic activity. GDP, not the best measure of human success and prosperity, but a good measure of throughput of energy and materials, skyrocketed too. In fact, almost any indicator of the human enterprise—water use, transportation, the damming of rivers, travel, the number of McDonald restaurants, you name it—almost any indicator has been skyrocketing in a phenomenon since the second World War called “The Great Acceleration.”
That led to extraordinary improvements in the human condition. On average, this is the best time ever in human history to be alive. During this great acceleration, illiteracy, infant mortality and poverty have gone way down, and life expectancy has gone up, and that is all good, but those gains have come at a high cost. The use of energy and the technologies enabled by that energy have led to major alterations in the Earth. The chemistry of our atmosphere now has far higher levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and methane; the pH of the ocean is different; the use of land around the planet is different; the availability of water and soil is different. All in all, the planet we inhabit is not our grandmother’s planet.
40% of the Earth’s ice-free, non-desert surface has been appropriated for agriculture; 46% percent of the world’s original forests have been cut down (and that deforestation is continuing to rise in many parts of the world); about half the world’s freshwater is being appropriated, mostly for agriculture; 60% of the world’s rivers are now dammed; more than 90% of fisheries are exploited beyond sustainable limits; and we are losing species at about a thousand times the baseline rate of species loss. All of that has led to what’s now being called the Anthropocene, a geological epic characterized by human control and influence on the entire planet’s patterns. That has also given rise to the notion of planetary limits, the idea that if we push these limits, if we push climate change beyond a certain point, if we keep pushing ocean acidification and species loss, that will induce irreversible and disruptive changes in Earth systems that will in turn induce immense human suffering.
How do all these planetary changes relate to human health? There are two main frameworks that can help us understand those links. One is the notion of ecosystem services. Natural functions support human well-being in countless ways. To mention only a few, through nutrient cycling and soil formation, they provision us with food and fresh water. They regulate phenomena, such as climate and flooding, that would otherwise threaten us, and they offer us cultural services such as aesthetic and recreation services. So intact planetary systems deliver ecosystem services that protect and advance our health, and disrupted planetary systems threaten us, and as disruptions to planetary systems increase, impacts on human health increase.
This is a reframing of insights that we’ve had for decades and really for centuries if we look back to Indigenous knowledge, but the modern notion of Planetary Health as a field arose in 2014 with a declaration in The Lancet, the prestigious medical journal. The essence of it is that we have to understand the total interdependence of human systems, including health, with natural systems. One example of how this plays out is climate change. Increasing emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels have led to planetary disruptions including rising temperatures, sea level rise, weather extremes, and all the other physical features of climate change. And Increasing summer temperatures cause heat stress, cardiovascular problems, diminished work capacity and so on. Sea level rise and severe weather cause a rise in both short-term acute fatalities and injuries and long-term consequences, including on mental health. Warmer weather leads to higher levels of ozone in the air causing respiratory and cardiovascular problems. Allergenic plants such as poison ivy thrive under conditions of high CO2 and warmer weather, so allergy attacks shoot up. Infectious diseases, both vector and water-born, become more prevalent. Disruptions to the water and food supply threaten nutritional status in many parts of the world; etc., etc.
And actually this is an oversimplification of the problem because many of the impacts of climate change occur indirectly through complicated pathways mediated by environmental and social factors, leading to a wide range of disparate challenges, such as, say, increasing food prices and changes in microbial ecology, and all of them generate large-scale health impacts. Seemingly separate things can be completely interrelated and in complex relationships. Take heat: in many parts of the world people are being exposed to levels of heat both acutely through heat waves and long-term through a new, much higher average temperature than that to which they had been accustomed. Heat waves are catastrophically bad: people die, especially the very young, the very old, the poor and socially marginalized, and people with certain medical conditions. The numbers can be frightful—70,000 deaths during the 2003 European heat wave; 54,000 during Russia’s 2010 heat wave; uncounted thousands in India during each of several recent summers. People can adapt to heat, but only to a point, and in many points of the world, the Arabian Gulf as a prime example, levels of heat are reaching the point that exceed human adaptive capacity.
But it’s not just that people die during heat waves. Heat threatens health in numerous, far less obvious ways. During periods of hot weather, episodes of violence increase. Suicide rates increase during hot weather. Kidney disease increases during hot weather, especially among outdoor workers who don’t have access to plenty of fresh water. Food borne and water borne infections increase because it’s very hard to keep food and water sanitary and disinfected when the weather is very hot. Sleep disturbances are more common in hot weather, and sleep disturbances in turn increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, mental health problems, and other health outcomes. Abnormal birth outcomes increase during hot weather. Academic performance among children in schools decreases during hot weather, as does work performance. People exercise less during hot weather, and sedentary lifestyles, as we all know, are a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, cancer, depression, and other conditions. Workers are affected in several ways. One is that the risk of injuries increases during hot weather; workplace injuries rise dramatically. And perhaps more importantly, work capacity decreases, aggravating poverty and all of the health consequences that flow from poverty.
So heat, as you can see, takes very complex multifaceted pathways in its health impacts, but heat is just one of the many ways climate change and environmental degradation affect human health, and very, very deeply embedded in all of this an equity concern. The wealthiest among us globally have much larger carbon footprints than the poorest across the board: the food we eat, the housing we inhabit, the goods we buy, the way we travel. So the responsibility for climate change should rest with those who are well-off and intense consumers of goods and energy, but in fact the consequences of climate change fall disproportionately on those who are poorest. This is a justice issue that exists both within countries and between countries.
This is all grim news to hear, and there is no doubt these are major challenges, but there is also some good news. To preserve planetary systems, combat climate change, stop biodiversity loss and so on, we need a green economy based on clean energy, well-designed cities, healthier diets and green chemistry. If we take steps toward each of these improvements, we will radically improve health as well.
Clean energy reduces air pollution and delivers less heart and lung disease. Well-designed cities with ample green spaces, good public transit including pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, deliver substantial health improvements. Healthy diets with less meat and more organic food help the planet while resulting in less heart disease and cancer. Green chemistry, i.e. designing chemicals that are not bio-accumulative, not persistent in the environment and not toxic also reduces the incidence of many illnesses, so there is no question that tackling the planetary crisis will also deliver far-reaching, widespread health benefits,
Despair is an occupational hazard for anybody who thinks seriously about planetary changes, but we need to fight despair because it’s immobilizing and doesn’t accomplish anything at a moment when we have to be about accomplishing a lot. We have to embrace hope ourselves and we need to inspire hope in others. Fortunately, there is a lot of basis for hope. Green technologies are advancing. We’re developing better battery storage and ever more efficient and cost-competitive renewable energy sources. Policy is maturing too: we’re seeing carbon pricing and other very far-reaching policies around the world. Activism is blossoming. Public opinion is shifting. Change is happening around the world, and Planetary Health offers us a new, solutions-driven, people and equity-centered, systems-based framework to achieving far better human health and well-being. We are looking to the future to try to design enduring and sustainable solutions. For those who would like to learn more, here are links to the first textbook in this new field we just published (https://islandpress.org/books/planetary-health), and to the Planetary Health Alliance (https://www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/planetary-health).
BILLY KARESH: Some of our work over the years has been looking back at what causes and what drives emerging infectious diseases. A large proportion of these emerging infectious disease are zoonotic (i.e. linked to animals), but not all of them are. We try to do thorough analyses and get an objective look at the distribution of where emerging infectious diseases have happened over the decades, but it’s hard to get really objective data, because a lot of the information is biased: it depends on where research is done, where there are academic institutions and good hospitals that can perform good diagnoses and do solid reporting.
But as we look at the underlying risk factors and at what the correlations with specific diseases are, we are still able to start to tease out what’s behind these emerging infectious disease events. We study non-infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance patterns globally as well, but right now I’m just going to talk about emerging infectious diseases. One thing we’ve seen is that in the last 50 or 60 years or so land use in many places has changed a lot, mostly due to the expansion of agriculture and the food industry. International travel and commerce have also grown immensely, and that combination facilitates the introduction of new diseases or of old diseases into new places. It’s not our grand and great-grandparents’ planet anymore. What we’re doing now is dramatically different, and the places where there’s been the most disruption and change are the ones at greatest risk for disease emergence and where we need to focus our energy.
Where the greatest risks are is where we need to focus our surveillance activities, so a lot of our efforts have been in hot spots of emerging diseases. I’ll use the current COVID-19 pandemic as an example. In looking at Corona viruses we’ve found that they are related to the first SARS virus. COVID-19 is actually technically SARS COVID-2. These types of viruses are found in bats throughout Asia, so a lot of our work in the last several years has been in China with Chinese colleagues. We’ve so far identified about 500 different Corona viruses in bats in Asia, over 100 of which are closely related to SARS. And these viruses have been circulating in bats for millennia. They’re completely natural.
Our approach is to systematically first look at animals and, in this case, identify the viruses in bats, and then go out and work with local communities to sample people to see if they have been exposed. What we have found is that a significant percentage of people already have been exposed to this group of Corona viruses, and this has been going on for years. Somewhere between a half of a percent to three percent of people in Southern China alone where we were working had antibodies to these viruses—that’s somewhere between 3 and 20 million people we estimate already had antibodies to these groups of viruses before the pandemic began. This exposure had been a long-term, very natural process, but there were more and more people in these regions, and these humans are disrupting habitats and coming into contact with wild animals more and more, and all it took was that in one of those infected people that virus mutated and became transmissible from human to human, just like HIV/AIDS virus, which we knew originated in animals and got into people and at some point became transmissible from human-to-human.
At this point I’d say that COVID-19 is no longer a zoonotic disease. It has zoonotic origins, but it’s now a human disease, and we’re not sure when that happened. It could have been recently or it could have been decades ago. We know that bats have these viruses and where those bats live, and where the most human beings are likely to come into contact with bats, so we map the “hotspots” of the places where the risks are highest of those viruses getting into people. That’s where we focus our efforts to get out there and reduce the risk, reduce the burden of disease and reduce the risk of new pandemics.
One of the things we’ve been doing is getting out into hotspot communities and doing direct education, informing people how to live safely with bats. We can’t just sit here at home and wait for the next pandemic and then wait for somebody to come up with a vaccine, and then wait for somebody to pay for that, and wait for it to be distributed, and then hope people actually will take the vaccine. If we can make more of an investment upstream, in prevention, in community engagement, in teaching people how to reduce their risk, we could save many lives and a lot of money. For example, a lot of people farm bat guano, bat feces, as fertilizer. If people are going to do that, they need to be educated to be able to do it safely to reduce their risk of infection. Some people eat bats. Some people go in caves where bats live for tourism. There are things we can do to reduce exposure through education. We can’t prevent every infection, but we can reduce risk.
We did some work last year about global health security and where the investments go. We looked across a stream of activities at a global scale and broke down health security into prevention, detection, response, and recovery. Nealy all the money goes to response. If you look at all the big organizations in this domain around the world, you see that everybody loves to do response to emerging disease outbreaks. Everybody shows up. Everybody watches the fire. Everybody comes to watch the building burn down. All the firemen are there. Everybody’s there, but there’s very little investment in prevention. There’s a little bit spent in early detection but very little for prevention or for recovery, which is typically ignored too. After the outbreak, after the disease, everybody goes home. The local people are left poorer than they were before, with fewer resources than they had before, and they’re left on their own for recovery. In fact, though, recovery is really the first step for prevention for the next one, the future outbreak, so we’re trapped in a circular pattern.
As Howie mentioned, changes in land use, in the way we’re doing agriculture, ecosystem deterioration and climate change are all linked to negative health outcomes. In the healthcare/medical community we’re kind of at the end of the garbage dump. We’re dealing with the sick people at the end of a process, but it’s always a better idea to try to stop problems at their source instead of always responding when the damage has been done. A solution for traffic fatalities is not necessarily more emergency rooms, it’s better engineering for traffic flows and car safety, better laws and regulations. The way a road is designed can save lives. We need to think that way about planetary health.
There’s been a lot of talk about wet markets and the wildlife trade, which we know are sources of infectious zoonotic diseases, but hundreds of millions to probably billions of people on a weekly basis are getting their food from this type of system, which are without doubt breeding grounds for infectious diseases and can lead to pandemics. We know poultry markets are linked to pandemic influenzas. People buy bats to eat at markets, and we know they’ve been linked to Ebola, henipaviruses and the corona viruses we’ve been talking about. Given how many people depend on these markets globally, closing them is not feasible, so we’ve been seeing what we can do to reduce their likelihood of being sites that spread novel infections. We’ve been working on how to bring refrigeration to these markets in super energy-efficient ways, including with new technologies such as cold storage that uses frozen liquid natural gas that uses zero electricity; and, relatedly, working on radically reducing food waste (which can reach 30 to 40 percent) in this system. These measures are win-wins that combat climate change, boost livelihoods, improve health overall, and reduce the spread of novel zoonotic viruses.
We need more of these sorts of solutions, and now in the 21st Century, we’ve got a new generation of people who are really thinking big about how to solve some of these problems, but we have to understand that these diseases don’t just emerge mysteriously. Their emergence and spread are the result of what we are doing on this planet. We broadly know what their sources are, and we know which industries and economic sectors we need to engage with do something about it.
The world is really different than it was for our great-great-great grandparents. The world used to be a mostly a place covered by vibrant ecosystems filled with wild animals. The planet was mostly covered with forests and grasslands and deserts, while today the planet is mostly covered with humans and livestock, so we should not be surprised that we are seeing changes in disease patterns when our planet is so different than when we humans evolved to live on it.
It doesn’t matter to me whether we frame these efforts as “One Health” or “Planetary Health.” As long as people are trying to do something positive that will have a real impact, I’m happy. On our end, we’ve been doing a lot of work with the World Bank to help people think through how to get different sectors and all the confusing world of intergovernmental organizations and national governments’ various branches and all the planning tools and funding sources and regulatory environments coordinated and aligned enough to get the right projects and initiatives up and running without interfering with each other or duplicating efforts. It’s definitely confusing, but I’ve been really working with the Bank to provide clear roadmaps and a new series of assessment tools that countries and organizations can use to find the right entry points to get engaged in the most productive ways depending on their capacities and domains of expertise.
And countries are doing this. We’ve worked with Zambia and Zimbabwe, for example, to name just a couple, on biodiversity strategies, antimicrobial resistance plans and their national disaster risk assessments, so they can link these strategies and get all the parts of their governments and civil societies and international organizations all working together in a coordinated fashion to achieve their goals.
JP: Thank you Howie and Billy for those thought-provoking presentations. Now we’re going to tackle a few questions from the audience. The first is about the problem of trying to choreograph the type of holistic coordination of many varied fields you both described as being essential to solve our problems in the context of the intense specialization into highly siloed fields that characterizes modern society.
BILLY: Specialization is of course necessary in an advanced society. If I ever needed brain surgery, I would like a really good brain surgeon, not a podiatrist, performing the operation. But to solve bigger, large-scale problems, we need somebody or something to force us to work together. I’m not big on building bigger bureaucracies, so maybe it’s just a heightened awareness and openness about building partnerships, and I do see that happening. When we started with One Health and Planetary Health, we were successful at getting physicians and medical professionals more engaged in these efforts, but we’re still missing the engineering side. I think we need more engineers and designers involved as well as more risk-reduction experts from the insurance industry. Buildings don’t burn down as quickly anymore in developed countries because we designed better materials and smoke detectors and building and fire codes and insurers won’t cover you if you don’t build that way. We need to apply some of that sort of thinking to the problems we’ve been discussing, and I do see it happening. I see this next generation just bubbling up here in the 21st Century that I think is really ready to take on these issues and to work together. They are reaching out to each other and developing new types of networks and partnerships, so I have a lot of hope.
HOWIE: I completely agree. Education matters a lot. I think we ought to be developing educational strategies that help people think upstream, think like systems thinkers and go into whatever specialty they choose, but with a broad appreciation of how what they do can connect with other goals. We need to think about new measurement tools as well. GDP, for example, as a standard measure of prosperity, measures all the wrong things. If we can go toward composite indices that measure things like biodiversity, the quality of air and water, reported levels of happiness among people, life expectancy, etc., those are better measures of societal success, and if you go that way in your measurement, you have no choice but to think like a systems thinker and aim for composite multi-sectoral solutions.
JP: Some audience members are asking what they can do in their own lives, such as avoiding consuming palm oil or hardwoods from tropical forests, or how to go about mobilizing others in their professions or communities, and so on. Can either one of you offer what you think are some of the most tangible things that people at large can do to help contribute to these initiatives?
HOWIE: There’s a very interesting debate going on now in the environmental world, and to some extent in the health world, about whether individual behavioral changes are the right way to go or if they don’t matter because only complete system change can save us. Those who believe we need radical system change sometimes argue that it’s pointless to focus on choosing what you eat and consume or how you travel, because those individual choices at the end of the day won’t be enough to bring about the system change that we need. My own view is it’s both/and not either/or.
People in their personal lives can make a lot of choices: eating less meat; buying renewable and sustainable products and materials; traveling by bicycle or foot instead of by internal combustion vehicle; and so on. Those are choices that if aggregated over entire populations, especially high-consuming populations such as here in the U.S., will make a difference. They’ll drive demand for more virtuous options; they’ll drive innovation; they’ll reduce consumption. But at the same time one of the most important things you can do is to vote (and agitate and advocate) for political and corporate leaders who are more likely to make systems change. 350.org’s campaign to get the banks to divest from fossil fuels and all the campaigns to elect leaders committed to actually addressing climate change, these are extremely important. Each of us exists as an individual making personal choices, but each of us also exists as a citizen obligated to push for system change as well.
JP: Do either one of you have any thoughts about the new administration? Are you hopeful?
BILLY: Yes, many of the people in the new administration were working very seriously on pandemics and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and on climate issues in the Obama administration. It’s certainly no time to be complacent, but these folks are on it.
HOWIE: There are indeed very good people coming into position in the new administration. I think we can be really confident. That said, you know, government is big and government is siloed, and so it’s difficult to implement cross-cutting solutions. I think one of their biggest challenges will be to bring about action not only in the misnamed Department of Energy (it’s more about nuclear weapons than energy; we could use a real energy department), but we will also need climate action in the departments of Transportation, Agriculture, Health, Housing and Urban Development, etc. One of the big challenges will be getting the whole of government working on coordinated, integrated systems-based solutions to the climate and environmental and health crises.
BILLY: I agree completely. Government has traditionally been very siloed. I’m hoping maybe we get some new thinking this time. Agriculture is a great example of that: agriculture is major generator of carbon emissions and one of the main drivers of both climate change and the spreading of emerging diseases. Traditionally our USDA has been there to support large U.S. agricultural industries and export crops. When our country deals with the UN on agricultural issues, it’s almost completely focused around bolstering domestic farm profits by selling more of our crops abroad, not on climate and food security, let alone emerging diseases or deforestation or overfishing. All that is agriculture and the food system. We are the largest donors to the international agricultural and food agencies, so there’s no reason why we couldn’t ask for better systemic thinking on how funds are used, and to offer some leadership on climate there, instead of just pushing our corn and cows on the global market, but it would require a major change of direction for the USDA.
HOWIE: A related issue is equity, global equity, not dictating what other countries do but sensitively and collaboratively moving towards solutions, and we have to do the same thing domestically. We have to be very aware of the disparities in our society, of racism, of inequities, and of how all of the health impacts we’ve talked about fall disproportionately on those who are least fortunate and suffer discrimination. So solutions must include the engineering solutions Billy mentioned but also social solutions and changes in the way we think, so that we can move toward a society that is lower consuming, more equitable, more future-oriented, and more about stewardship and solidarity than about conquests and profit.
JP: Do you have any thoughts on how to contend with the intense resistance of entrenched interests, be it the fossil fuel industry or agribusiness or big pharma, that have been really Machiavellian in their relentless stymying of progress on so many fronts and have waged enormous disinformation campaigns?
BILLY: I think consumer choices can make a big difference because businesses are in business to make money, and so as consumers start want different products, businesses will have to come around. We’ve seen that with the enormous growth of the organic food in the past 20 years ago. The same will happen with electric cars. I have faith in the new generation, and they are entering the energy field, so I think there’s a lot of hope.
HOWIE: I’m a little less sanguine. I think that the persistent disinformation as we saw in the tobacco industry and then in the fossil fuel industry needs to be countered, not just by increasing consumer demand for better products, but also by direct confrontation. The campaigns to disinvest from fossil fuels, to force investors to reckon with climate risks as they make investments, to stop the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure—those are all in my opinion as important as changing consumer demand for products. We’ve now also seen a lot of disinformation with COVID. The entirely unregulated and remarkably large-scale and rapid distribution of disinformation on such platforms as Facebook and Twitter really is a problem. I don’t know the answer, but I think we will probably need some regulation of social media, maybe even the re-operationalizing of how we protect and defend freedom of speech in a world where speech is a very different process than it was at the time the Constitution was being written. Disinformation will somehow need to be addressed.
JP: Do you have any closing thoughts, any closing words of wisdom to offer?
BILLY: Try to get engaged. Try and contribute a little something, even if it’s not your full-time job. Align your individual behavior and attitudes with your highest ideals and talk with your friends and family, and spread the word about the solutions we all need to work on together to get to. Health, for example, doesn’t belong to the medical community. It belongs to all of us, to society, and we have to start thinking about it with an all-of-society approach, in which everybody gets to participate.
HOWIE: I’d say be hopeful, don’t despair. We need all of our hope. We need to roll up our sleeves and move toward a better future. And there’s reason for hope, so this is not just a fatuous piece of advice, Evidence-based hope is a powerful thing. And think as broadly as you can. If you’re a health professional think about other things than health. If you’re an engineer, think about other things than engineering. All of us ought to be looking for the broadest solutions that we can. Think upstream. Look for cross-cutting co-benefits. Think about the future. Be a good grandparent. Above all, have hope.
Panelists
Howard Frumkin, MD, MPH, Dr.Ph, a physician and epidemiologist, Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington, previously led the Our Planet, Our Health initiative at the Wellcome Trust. His many other positions have included: Dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, Director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC, and Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University. He has served on the boards or advisory committees of a wide range of leading scientific, professional, academic and governmental institutions and is the author or co-author of over 250 scientific journal articles and nine books, including Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-Being, and Sustainability; Environmental Health: From Global to Local; and most recently: Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves (Island Press, 2020).
William B. Karesh, Ph.D., a leading global expert on infectious diseases, wildlife and the environment, is Executive Vice President for Health and Policy at EcoHealth Alliance, President of the World Animal Health Organization Working Group on Wildlife Diseases, chair of the IUCN Wildlife Health Specialist Group; and serves on the WHO’s International Health Regulations Roster of Experts focused on the human-animal interface and wildlife health. Currently EPT Partner Liaison for the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT-2 program, Dr. Karesh coined the term “One Health” in 2003 to describe the interdependence of healthy ecosystems, animals and people and has pioneered solutions-oriented initiatives with this concept as the guiding principle in programs under his direction in over 45 countries from Argentina to Zambia. He has published 180+ scientific papers and written for broader audience publications, including his highly acclaimed first book for a general audience, Appointment at the Ends of the World.
J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer, affiliated with Bioneers since 1990, is a Brooklyn, NYC-based consultant, conference producer, copy-editor and writer. A former Program Director at the New York Open Center and a senior review team member for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge from 2010 to 2017, he has authored or edited several books, including Political Ecosystems, Delusions of Normality, Visionary Plant Consciousness, and, most recently, Animal Encounters.
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