Terry Tempest Williams is a writer, educator, and environmental activist known for her lyrical and impassioned prose in such creative nonfiction books as Refuge — An Unnatural History of Family and Place; The Open Space of Democracy, Finding Beauty in a Broken World; When Women Were Birds; and Erosion: Essays of Undoing. A Recipient of Guggenheim and Lannan literary fellowships, Ms. Williams’ work has been translated worldwide, and she is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School. On the occasion of the publication of her most recent book, The Glorians — Visitations from the Holy Ordinary (Spring 2026), she responded to Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons’ questions as they engaged in a deep conversation.
NINA: I’ve always admired and respected deeply the ways that your life weaves together your art, your passion, your activism, and your spirituality. I wonder if you could tell a story of an event that you feel integrates these elements?
TERRY: Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find. I believe the power of art — be it literature, paintings, music, or dance — has the capacity to bypass rhetoric and pierce the heart. Especially now. I see an influx of students coming to the Harvard Divinity School not to become a priest or pastor or a scholar in religious studies, but rather they want to sharpen their skills and commitment to their crafts as artists. One artist in particular comes to mind: Maisie Luo. During the pandemic when galleries were largely closed, she committed to weekly “Art Walk Outs” whereby she would take one particular painting on a walk to the beach; to Rodeo Drive; or to the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger. She wanted people to notice the paintings and feel something at a time when many of us were looking away from all that was breaking our hearts.
When she returned to school, she had a dream: A dolphin inquired about the rise of the oceans and what their path might become in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A Northern Right Whale was also in the dream, carrying that same query. At that time, in 2021, it was estimated that there were only 300 to 400 Northern Right Whales left. When Maisie awoke, she made a vow to chart the future sea rise so the dolphins and whales could find their way.
Maisie bought an 8-foot door and turned it sideways and painted a Northern Right Whale beached, tangled in fishing net with a small portrait of herself kneeling trying to untangle what was binding the whale to shore, making the cetacean unable to swim freely. Maisie invited Brooke and me to join her on this “Art Walk Out.” She had found from scientific mapping how the sea would rise and how far it would inundate Cambridge. Harvard Yard would be underwater.
Together, we carried the whale up Massachusetts Avenue, past the Cambridge Commons and cemetery, across the street through Harvard Yard, stopping momentarily in front of the John Harvard bronze statue. Dozens of students walked by us, not one student stopped to ask about this beached and confined Northern Right Whale. It was a disturbance. We continued carrying the whale past the Memorial Church, past the Museum of Natural History to the Divinity School. Once inside, we continued to carry the painting up two flights of stairs to the Associate Dean of Faculty and Students, Janet Gyatso’s office where the netted Right Whale was met by another Northern Right Whale breaching in a moment of joy. A few days after this Art Walk Out with Maisie Luo, NPR reported that several whale calves had been born, a shift in the lack of births in the past few years. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Who can know the power of one heartfelt gesture made on behalf of another?
Nina: You’ve written and thought a lot about The Open Space of Democracy, including in a past talk at Bioneers. Now that our democratic institutions and norms are under such severe attack, and many of our cultural delusions shattered, revealing both the beauty of some of our people’s values, commitment and kindness, (think of the courage, and determination of the people of Minneapolis) and the rot that’s always been at the roots, how might you imagine that we’ll survive this painful yet perhaps necessary chapter?
TERRY: We have made the mistake of confusing democracy with capitalism and have mistaken political engagement with a political machinery we all understand is corrupt. It is time to resist the simplistic utilitarian view that what is good for business is good for humanity in all its complex web of relationship — including the web of life for all species. Ecology reminds us again and again that the ecotones are where diversity flourishes — the edges where the forest meets the meadow; where the tides rush up to dune grasses on a sandy beach; where the edge of the river becomes a tributary that refreshes the wetlands. We, too, can be edgewalkers finding what binds us together rather than what tears us apart in these moments of great and grave uncertainty.
The human heart is the first home of democracy. My edgewalking is the richest in the places I call home: the red rock desert of southern Utah and the shores of Great Salt Lake. Here, I see the beauty of erosion and retreat, both makers of beauty that take us to the essence of things. Wind, water, and time create arches in sandstone; the retreat of a saline lake is inspiring the rise of unlikely allies who are committed to bring water to Great Salt Lake. Change is growth. We are growing and it is not easy. For me, there is something deeper than hope, and that is engagement. We are creating, together, a new way of being. Nature is in constant upheaval and renewal, as we are. This can be its own form of grace.
Nina: So what counsel do you offer, as you’ve witnessed so much ecological harm and destruction to wildlands and species in your life — to all of us who are feeling the immense grief of experiencing so much loss in this time? How do you manage to reclaim your sense of purpose and capacity to act on behalf of what you love and feel devoted to?
TERRY: In the summer of 2024, our small community in southeastern Utah experienced 5 flash floods in a matter of weeks. Depending on our state of mind and frame of reference, those floods could be viewed as floods of devastation or floods of re-creation. I choose to see the latter. It has also been a physical point of reorientation as a community. We are asking different questions: Instead of asking, “How can we protect our individual property — and build berms and dams around our homes?” We are asking, “Where does the water want to go?” And can we imagine and create a community-wise climate plan for both the present and future?” We all grieved our loss of the land as we knew it. The floods carved a canyon in our backyard, 40 feet long, 12 feet wide, 10 feet high. Two years later, another flood and wild winds have filled it. We are in dynamic times, uncertain times. And regarding the Earth, that is always the way, it continues to be under construction as we are. I take comfort in this, even among all we are losing. The Earth will survive us. We are the ones being baptized by fire.
Grief is love. They are siblings. When we agree to open our hearts, they will be broken. The question then becomes “How do we live and love with a broken heart?” When we feel those sharp aches of grief, that is what love feels like — one cannot live and love without the gravity of grief. One informs the other. We can engage. We can choose to not look away. There is still so much beauty that remains. If we are present, we will know what to do. For me, we do our most beautiful work together in community because it asks that we listen to one another. And in these acts of listening, we expand our frames of reference. Empathy is fostered. New ideas emerge, even in conflict, especially in conflict. In community, we are engaging with shared imaginations — and suddenly, we see more possibilities than obstacles. What is possible becomes what is necessary. We evolve. We are evolving together now in our brokenness and love.
Nina: I learned from a traditional Peruvian ceremonialist named Oscar Miro Quesada these nine words, which have had a profound effect in informing my life, ever since. They are “Consciousness creates matter. Language creates reality. Ritual creates relationship.” If language creates reality, then we who are alive in this precipitous and remarkable time will need to create or adapt some new or old words to reinvent a cultural reality that works for all of life. So please tell us about your new book, The Glorians — how it came about, why it’s the book you had to write now, and what the word means to you.
Terry: One week after the world was in lockdown on March 13, 2020, due to a global pandemic, The Glorians came to me in a dream. The dream I had was this:
I was walking through Harvard Yard. It was fall. The trees were resplendent: red maples, bronze oaks, yellow ash. I knew I had to get to the tower (there is no tower) and as I walked toward it, I saw there were two ways to get to the top: a direct staircase at the front of the tower; and a spiral staircase on the side. I chose to take the spiral staircase on the side. When I got to the top, I realized I was standing in the ruins of Cassandra’s Temple. I had the distinct feeling I had forgotten something. I heard my name called. I turned — and there was a woman professor with students behind her who had come up the direct staircase. The gate was locked in front of them.
“Terry — “ she said. “Do you remember the vow you made to us?”
“Remind me,” I answered.
“Your vow is the epic documentation of the Glorians.”
And then, I woke up.
What is a Glorian? This is the question I have been holding and paying attention to for the last six years. It is not so much something to be defined, as that which is calling to be noticed, the joy of being met when our focused attention merges with another. These are not distant deities, but the holy ordinary, often-overlooked presences — animal, plant, memory, moment — that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world. A Glorian can be an ant ferrying a blossom to its queen and as commonplace and startling as a night sky of stars. It is that moment when time stops and we are present to something so much larger than ourselves.
I believe the Glorians are reaching out to us, inviting us to engage. They remind us of the power of contact between species and the meaning of reciprocity. They are calling us to attention, not as an army, but as fellow inhabitants of our sacred, threatened home — and the profound courage and awareness it will take to dream a more cohesive future into being.
At a time of political fragility, wars, climate chaos, and seeking beauty and a calm heart wherever we can find it, the Glorians are with us. This book is my own spiritual awakening to a life of greater intention in the midst of epic changes. I am seeking grace.
Visionary agricultural innovator Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin unearths a startling natural-world template for building a global movement that puts the chicken at the heart of bioregional food systems. These Poultry-Centered Regenerative Agroforestry farms can both renew the land and ultimately support the hundreds of millions of small farmers who produce 70% of the world’s food.
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Featuring
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, is an award-winning agroecology innovator, co-founder and CEO of Tree-Range® Farms, a pioneer of the “Poultry-Centered Regenerative Agriculture System,” founder of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, and owner of Salvatierra Farms LLC, a 63-acre regenerative poultry farm in Northfield, MN.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): Why did the chicken cross the road?
If you pose that timeless riddle to the agricultural innovator Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, he might say something like this:
The chicken crossed the road to fulfill its ancestral blueprint to escape from predators in the shady multi-tiered canopy of shrubs and nut trees where it first originated as a jungle fowl, and where it can safely eat and contribute to the circles of energy flows that fertilize and regenerate the landscape – just by living out its natural lifeways.
Reginaldo says that this natural-world template provides the foundation for a bottom-up economic system big enough to challenge the ecologically and economically extractive monopoly of industrial agribusiness. The model supports the vision of democratic ownership and cooperative governance of bioregional food systems. One critical design criterion was that the system must fit within the farm blueprints of the nearly 700 million small farmers who produce up to 70% of the world’s food on land averaging 60 acres.
Instead, today they live like indentured servants in a system that demands cheap, fast food and is controlled by giant global corporations. All of this comes at the expense of real nourishment and resilience coupled with the destruction of the very ecosystems on which we depend to feed the world.
So how does the chicken get us to this other side?
From Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin’s youth in Guatemala, agriculture seemed to be his destiny. He spoke at a Bioneers conference.
Reginaldo Haslett Marroquin speaking at Bioneers 2025. Photo by J.R. Sheetz
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin (RHM): I was 4 years old when the civil war started in Guatemala. We moved to the northern rainforest at that time. The militarization of the country really limited a lot of what we could do, and so we were literally confined to going to the school, which was also heavily militarized. Going back home, and then going to the forest, about an hour and a half away, where we grew our crops. And that really was my childhood—going to school and doing those things, and in the middle, playing soccer and doing all the things that kids do with the dream of going to the Escuela Nacional Central de Agricultura, the National School of Agriculture.
And so I worked since I was like 13 or so, I worked really hard. This was a scholarship-based boarding school. It was funded by the military a long time before any of the war started. And it was literally a public school dedicated to agriculture, and very strict, and very famous, coveted place where if you graduated from that school, you literally had a—you know, came to occupy this new space in the country because you would be respected, you had the knowledge, you got the—all of those things.
And so I really—I liked agriculture. I was also involved in it, but I wanted to conclude in there. That really where my life circled around that.
Host: After graduating from the esteemed Central National School of Agriculture, Reginaldo continued his studies at San Carlos University in Guatemala and then in Minnesota, where he has lived since 1993.
Throughout his life, he has focused on cultivating what he calls “the Indigenous intellect.”
RHM: I have always felt like I’m one of the wealthiest people on the planet, and I mean it not the way we understand wealth, necessarily, but from the perspective of, am living to the optimal potential that the geo-evolutionary blueprint of the Earth gave me to live with? Am I using everything I was made with? And if that’s true, then you are one of the wealthiest people on the planet. All the money in the world won’t do that for you. It can only be done from within.
I was raised to think beyond the immediate concerns. And one of the fascinating things that that does to your mind is that you learn to see things as a whole.
Systems, like in the U.S., if you look at the food and agriculture and beverage, is somewhere around 9-point-something trillion dollars. At the top there’s like 10 sectors that control 90, 95 percent of everything. Tyson alone controls 75 percent of the poultry in this country, Cargill 90 percent of the grain or something like that. That means like, how the heck did we get there to begin with? Well, we got there because we gave up ownership, control, and governance of the—one of the most important things in our planetary survival systems, which is food, water, and those things that are essential to our bodies to live. That is the foundation.
So I get to the U.S., and there’s this mass scale system. I studied it very thoroughly as a system—looked at every part that makes it – beef; pork; poultry, so you’ve got turkey, chickens and eggs; dairy, you’ve got the cows out there; grain sector; corn and soybeans dominating it; and then you’ve got other sectors. You’ve got fruits and vegetables, and all of these are within a very large pyramid. And within that context, we also have this mass accumulation of ownership, control and governance because it’s all part of that top. Right?
On the bottom of it is over 32 million people who provide everything that the pyramid needs to create that illusion that we call cheap food, and also to create the illusion that this is what’s feeding the world.
Now that lie is really right in your face if you use the Indigenous intellect, you see it straight up. There’s nothing hiding it. What we call the Indigenous intellect – which is formed through the innate intelligence we are born with, aggregating, observation, storytelling, listening, and telling them and experiencing life, and doing it in a real way. That’s what creates the Indigenous intellect. When you use that Indigenous intellect, you can be self-assured you’re on the right path.
Host: Reginaldo says the first thing to understand is that life on Earth is about flows of energy that come from nature and the cosmos. Those circles of continuous creation regenerate and renew life, creating conditions conducive to life.
RHM: As farmers, we are probably in the best place to understand that everything is energy, and all we do on a farm is– steward, cherish, manage, work with, relate to, however you want to call it. We are really relating to this space we call a farm, which lives inside a larger regional ecosystem, which lives among hundreds of thousands, millions of ecosystems across the planet, altogether forming the planetary ecosystem.
Reginaldo in the field. Photo by Leia vita Marasovich.
Now back to the farm where we go and maybe raise a chicken, plant a carrot, whatever we do, all we are doing is watching and hopefully caring for the biophysics and the chemistry that is going to get involved so that life can express itself in a different way. And at the end of the day, that is energy that, through the living processes, becomes expressed in the form of a carrot, a chicken, an egg, whatever it is. We don’t produce anything; we simply steward the processes by which that-that energy is transformed. That energy is only edible to us in a little blink of an eye of the processes of energy transformation, which is when we harvest it. That apple became an apple. We harvest, eat it, and it’s gone again.
Host: At the base of these energy flows is photosynthesis, nature’s magic trick of capturing sunlight to create life and make food. Plants absorb light and use it as an energy source to combine atmospheric carbon and hydrogen from water to form carbohydrates to feed the plant. Some of that carbon is sent into the soil where it builds soil health, creates climate stability, and feeds more carbon-based life forms.
On the farm, animals are essential to the regenerative process. Reginaldo compares their role to a planetary digestive tract.
RHM: It’s pretty much every species that depends on that photosynthesis in order to take—you know, get food, fiber, protein, minerals, whatever it needs, whether it’s bison eating the grasses or antelopes eating the leaves in the grass in the, you know, high plains, or whatever animal—literally the output of photosynthesis needs to go into a chewing, a biting, chewing, digestive mechanism before it—that energy can be turned into molecularly appropriate levels of energy that the microbes, the fungus, and everything else in the soil below are able to biophysically and chemically process so that it becomes again this source of energy for photosynthesis.
And so from the three of those, the animal is the more important. Photosynthesis without animals is just a lot of carbon sitting there.
Host: After a decade of R&D, Reginaldo founded the Regenerative Agricultural Alliance in 2018 with a clear strategic goal: to create a regenerative systems change model for one sector of land-based agriculture that could precipitate both an ecological and social transformation. That model is grounded in poultry farming, referred to as Poultry-Centered Regenerative Agroforestry, or PCRA.
Chickens are ubiquitous globally and fit in most cultures and ecologies. Their short lives, economic cycle, and ability to provide healthy protein of eggs and meat can impactfully address global hunger and rural poverty. The model is scalable to become a coordinated system of large-scale networks of small farms and infrastructure.
Video by Tree-Range Farms
According to the United Nations, there are over 700 million farms globally that operate on under 60 acres – and every one of them could integrate poultry into their operations. Because this small-farm sector delivers 70 percent of the world’s food, it offers high-leverage systemic opportunities – from abundant healthy food production and regenerative land management to social and economic equity for the farmers and the larger food infrastructure.
At the base of the PCRA model is the return of the domesticated chicken to its ancestral blueprint. So naturally, Reginaldo and his colleagues looked back at the lifeways of its ancestor: the jungle fowl from Southeast Asia’s rainforests.
RHM: So jungle fowl, if you were into something regenerative, ask the species. Ask the oats, ask the trees, ask the chickens, ask and listen, and learn to learn so you may acquire the right knowledge to do things with the Indigenous intellect as opposed to just the stuff that we have been forced to memorize during the process of domestication we have gone through that we call education. It’s good for knowledge and facts, not very good for education. It’s very good for domestication, and so we are domesticated. And so we’ve got to un-domesticate ourselves, decolonize our minds, and decolonize knowledge and methodology so that then we can properly use all of this amazing stuff we went to school for.
So, jungle, ancestral, ancient chicken doesn’t like the outside, can’t be in an open area with sun. It goes toward the trees for the shade. You know, you take all of that profile, and now you can start saying, alright, so if I take the chicken, and my goal is to return it to its ancestral blueprint so that it will optimize energy transformation as a foundation.
Host: When we return, Reginaldo refines the chicken’s ancestral blueprint to create a “greenprint” for transforming agriculture into a cycle of regeneration and equity…
To learn more about how restorative food systems can be a source of community wealth building, right livelihood, and health for people and land, you can subscribe to the Bioneers Food Web newsletter at bioneers.org
Host: Alongside the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance team, Reginaldo designed a sophisticated shrub and tree canopy system that incorporates all the ancestral elements for a symbiotic and regenerative habitat for chickens to thrive.
First, they start chicks in a barn where they get protection from heat, cold, wind, and predators. A month later, the chickens are put in a rotating paddock system where they range on the land, safely enclosed. The paddocks mimic their ancestral habitat, the jungle, with multi-layered stories. Then the team selects the botanical and vegetable species specifically for the nitrogen-cycling capacity, and they customize the plants to each unique place and conditions.
In this metaphor, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin explains how the intelligence of nature and coevolution provide multiple benefits for both plants and animals. The innovation in this model mimics ancestral blueprints by bringing together domesticated chickens and Hazelnut trees.
RHM: And sometimes, many thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, the chickens and the hazelnuts had a gathering, and they discussed their symbiotic relationship, and the hazelnut said, I need a lot of nitrogen to produce nuts because, for the most part, my nuts are always empty because I don’t have enough.
And the chicken said, well, listen, when the hawks come around, and the eagles and stuff, they get me very easily because the canopies here are kind of shrubbery and not very good.
So the hazelnut said, you know what? Instead of like the European cousins that created these trunks and became trees, we’re not going to do that, we’re going to be shrubs. And so they started to develop these shrubs. And we will make sure that as we do that, no hawk, no eagle, no predator that will eat you can perch on top. We’ll make it multi-layered so that we can create 100 percent cover and nothing can see you.. And that’s what they did!
Host: Following the ancestral blueprint, the whole becomes far greater than the sum of the parts.
RHM: And guess what happens when the chickens are out there having a good time and a hawk comes by, and he goes like, oh! And he runs under the tree. Well, as they scare them and all that, just like other species, they poop. And that’s what the tree wants.
So when you ask the tree, and you do some research, you find out that they can take 350 to 400 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Their roots can actually travel seven-and-a-half feet in each direction, 12 feet up and 12 feet down, creating this mass-scale network for capturing energy and transforming it into this absolutely nutrient-dense, superb food.
Take a sample of our hazelnuts now that we have raised them with chickens for 15 years. The list of nutrients is endless. And that’s because the chickens are there. Without the chickens, for example, we don’t have chickens in some of the experimental plots, the hazelnuts are producing half as many, and 35 percent of the nuts are empty. And with the chickens, they are producing twice as many hazelnuts. They are heavier because they got more dense, more nutrients and all that. And only five percent are empty.
And when the hazelnut weevil came and started boring holes into the nuts, the scientists that were working with us said, oh, these are all the recipes that we can use to control the weevils. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. We can’t control the weevil. The weevil will control itself. Let’s just give it time. Two years later, a mass scale population of these black-and-yellow spiders rose up, and now we have weevils, spiders and everything, and only about five to ten percent damage. It’s not a problem as long as you don’t make it a problem.
Host: Reginaldo says that once you apply the Indigenous intellect, nature’s principles guide the way for how to grow a production system that optimizes regenerative energies.
The farms that produce the Tree Range Chicken brand grow plants to attract vital pollinators. They cultivate the healthy garlic that chickens love. They grow beans using only on-farm inputs, such as chicken manure mixed with organic matter. Now the economics are ready to branch off the farm into the supply chain and the larger food system.
Salvatierra Farms chickens
RHM: We are starting to do it now at a significant scale, significant scale that we can take a whole farm and fertilize it with this in one year, so that is all the input that they need. And so those are outputs of the system – valuable economically.
Hazelnuts – we have been producing hazelnuts now for five years. About 7,000 new trees are about to enter into production, and every year we are planting thousands every fall and spring. We’ve got our own nurseries now. We tested 250 vegetables to see if they will grow 100 percent with just these inputs, nothing else, not even insecticides or herbicides or anything, just this mix that we are talking about. And have successfully achieved results.
We measure everything, of course. I mean, if you don’t measure, you can’t manage. The best bean plant for black beans came out of Nicaragua national Central University – 100 beans on average per plant, about 30 pods, 35 inches high, planted about eight inches apart, 36 between rows. Okay? These beans came out of the same germplasm or genome. We’re now harvesting plants with up to 75 pods, over 250 beans per plant.
And it is 100 percent with no other input than the feed that came into the chicken, that came through the chicken, that became poop, that was mixed with organic matter that went into the bean field. We already invested in that input.
And now that we added grain producers to the ecosystem of enterprises, now it’s just starting to circulate in regions instead of just the farm. Now we can start talking about systems change.
Host: Reginaldo and his team steadily refine economical methods of raising the chickens. Those numbers must and do respect the ecological boundaries of the land and forage so that they regenerate. The regimen employs crop rotation and perennial cover crops. A basic unit of farmland is increments of 1.5 acres – a small-but-mighty challenge to the agribusiness imperative of “get big or get out.”
Reginaldo says the model can be adapted for any community based on factors such as climate and what plant species are native to the area. In his native Guatemala where the model is spreading, the protocols include bananas, yucca, yams, and a dozen other forest species that enhance productivity. They must also fit local market demand, provide food security, and renew perennial cover to the land.
To compete with agribusiness, the decentralized system has to be able to grow big enough. Today, an expanding network of over 40 farms is raising chickens in alignment with the Poultry-Centered Regenerative Agroforestry blueprint. The chicken from many of these farms is brought to market under the Tree-Range® Chicken brand, providing the backbone for a regional system-change throughout the Midwest.
RHM: Building the farm, the unit, the farm, all of those, is not sufficient. If you want to achieve some system level outcomes, you’ve got to start thinking bigger than that. So we launched a nonprofit. It’s called the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, so we could coordinate curriculum, training, development, training teams, training farmers, further doing research and development, and all of that. We are now one of the leading institutions globally doing this kind of work.
With the nonprofit in place, then we went over and bought a poultry processing facility in Iowa because we needed a poultry processing facility. And then after that, we launched a brand. It’s called Tree-Range Chicken, and that brand is under Tree-Range Farms. You can look it up. You can buy it anywhere in the country. It’s distributed for us by 99 counties out of Iowa.
With all of these pieces in place, we launched a transportation company that is within the ecosystem that takes the chickens from the farms to the plant. We are about to make a decision on whether we build our own freezing warehouses now, out of Alberta Lea or Rochester, one of these places. We entered into partnership with the state. They finance the development of the concept[?] for industrial development park.
Every time we do this, more chickens are produced, more people are eating this kind of chicken, more farmers are involved, more of this ecosystem is formed, and more acreage and change keeps happening. That is how we chip at the bottom of the pyramid. We’re well known even though economically we’re not really that large. We barely sold $1 million worth of chicken. But we have moved over $10 million of resources and there is over 34 million of property, plants, and equipment in the system.
Salvatierra Farms chickens during paddock establishment
So the ecosystem as a whole includes up to 20 enterprise sectors. One of them is the production of chicken on the farm. There are processing facilities now that we are developing for further processing, so bringing in grinding and mixing. We’ll be bringing oil extraction for the hazelnuts, elixirs and medicine for the elderberries, cough syrup. I mean, garlic salt, because garlic and chickens go together so perfectly. If you look at the profile of nutrient demands from garlic and the nutrient profile that supplies the chicken, it’s like 1:1.
So once we do this, then we start thinking about regions so that we can then take back the ownership, control and governance of at least one sector.
If we can do this, then every other sector can be done the same way. And if other sectors are doing the same thing, along with us, all we have to do at a certain point is come together, and that is a real coup. That’s the kind of coup I would like to see in my lifetime.
Host: Balancing environmental, financial, and social well-being is a core holistic management principle. Regeneration, with all of its environmental and climate benefits, also needs to elevate the people who work the land.
RHM: We start with the farmer. If the farmer doesn’t get a margin, it isn’t worth it. It is the blood of the system. If we can’t codify that properly, forget about the rest of it. And so we did that first. And from there we built the margins for the other operations to at least break even.
In this world, we don’t have to create profit in the way the extractive, colonizing linear mind understands profit. For there to be profit in the traditional way we understand it, somebody’s got to give it up. You’ve got to take it from someone. But in the context of quality of life and regeneration, why would I need a profit if I pay myself well, I cover all my expenses, I have a community, I’ve got food, shelter, and all of that was paid for as part of the process. What is the meaning of profit in that context? And this is the ancestral Indigenous way of thinking and relating, and this is why, especially the U.S., tried to obliterate the Indigenous communities across the world, because they—an Indigenous mindset is—you can’t colonize it. There’s no space for it.
Host: The final goal of the system is ambitious: to produce and distribute 440 million meat chickens or around 5% of the market, Reginaldo believes a tipping point can be reached at around 1% of the market. From there, the system can accelerate and reach scale.
As Chief Systems and Strategy Innovation Officer, Reginaldo is turning his attention to the people who are still connected to the land and committed to protecting and regenerating it – hundreds of millions of small farmers the world over, as well as the 370 million Indigenous people who still occupy a fifth of the total global landmass. He believes they are our best hope.
What Reginaldo describes is a direct challenge to the ferociously profit-hungry pyramid of industrial agribusiness.
So how does the chicken cross THIS road?
RHM: This is how governance structure resembles our ancestral community-based systems where you place all the stakeholders in the circle. They are the guardians of the system. In this case, you could use the poultry producers. Or you put the poultry producers in one section, the grain producers in another, the investors in another, customers in another, and you make it about everyone. You can do whatever you want with this. The diagram is a mental construct of how we’re supposed to organize governance.
And then each one of those affinity groups elects representatives, and then those representatives become concentrically part of our permanent governing structure.
So… I hope that you won’t walk away thinking what we do is chickens. Chicken is the center of a large-scale, fully developed, systemically structured discipline, launched and managed, scientifically verifiable process by which we can change systems.
We can’t recruit you; we can’t do anything except be there when you’re ready. And that is the best way to build an insurgency. It’s completely voluntary, it’s completely self-driven, it’s completely about passion…Circles need to birth out of each region for us to make this change happen.
Host: Reginaldo Haslett Marroquin, “How the Chicken Crossed the Road to Build a Regenerative Food System”.
Yurok Attorney Amy Cordalis is one of many Indigenous leaders who have fought for the un-damming and healing of the majestic Klamath River Basin, spanning Oregon and California. She tells the story of the decades-long struggle to remove dams that have choked the life flow of the river and severed salmon migratory routes, and how a combination of traditional ecological knowledge, environmental law, and old-fashioned diplomacy helped remove 4 of 6 dams and ushered in a $515 million settlement agreement to restore the river and riparian lands.
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Featuring
Amy Cordalis (Yurok Tribe member whose ceremony family is from Rek-woi at the mouth of the Klamath River), a devoted advocate for Indigenous rights and environmental restoration as well as a fisherwoman, attorney, and mother deeply rooted in the traditions of her people, is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group and leads efforts to support tribes in protecting their sovereignty, lands, and waters, including the historic Klamath Dam Removal project.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Britt Gondolfi and Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): In this episode, we hear from Yurok Attorney Amy Cordalis, one of many Indigenous leaders who have fought for the un-damming and healing of the majestic Klamath River Basin spanning Oregon and California. Amy’s Yurok Nation was instrumental in removing 4 of 6 dams that choked the life flow of the river and severed the migratory routes of salmon for over a century.
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Reconnecting The River”.
Amy Cordalis (AC): On my home waters on the Klamath River in Northern California, six hours from here north—and that is still California—we are engaged in the largest river restoration project in history. 2025 is year zero, the first year after a revolutionary change in the Klamath system, the removal of four dams in 2024 facilitated by a $515 million settlement agreement that equally values the rights of nature, Indigenous Peoples, and businesses, signed by two tribes, several NGOs, Oregon and California, and a power company. [Applause]
Historically, the Klamath was the third largest salmon-producing river in the lower 48 states. It is Indian Country top to bottom, and I am from the very mouth of the river from a village called Requa, where my family has been since the beginning of time. But through time, the basin has been colonized and developed.
Host: Amy Cordalis is a Renaissance woman; an attorney, fisherwoman, organizer, author, mother, and matriarch, she has spent the last 20-plus years in the fight of her life to restore her beloved Klamath River. She grew up fishing on the Klamath, and her family comes from a long line of Yurok people who’ve struggled tirelessly to protect it, alongside generations of other Indigenous tribes.
For over a century, hydroelectric dams blocked the once rushing, life-giving waters. They strangled its natural flow and starved the landscape it nourishes. They decimated the thriving salmon population on which the people relied.
The first dam was constructed in 1911, called Copco. It seemed as if every decade brought yet another dam. Built without fish ladders or passages, they cut off essential lifeways for Salmon and Salmon people throughout the vast basin. The federal government first took control of the dams for hydroelectric power. It decided how the river would flow and who would receive water allocations. Invariably, it favored the interests of industrial farming and big business over the health of the river and the tribes who depended on it for their sustenance and lifeways.
In 2002, then Vice President Dick Cheney dealt a near-fatal blow to the river and the salmon. He granted farmers the overtly political favor of water diversion in the upper Klamath. By 2020, the river was dying.
Amy Cordalis spoke with us at a Bioneers conference.
Amy Cordalis speaking at Bioneers 2025. Photo by Nikki Ritcher
AC: I was the Yurok tribe’s, my own tribe’s, general counsel, and things on the Klamath River were really bad. The river was sick, water was extremely polluted, There were, behind the dams, toxic blue-green algae blooms every year that would move through spillways around the dams, downriver, and annually, it would make it so by late summer, you couldn’t swim in the river because it was so polluted.
And I have actually—there’s like a little scar right here from this rash I got when I was just fishing in the Klamath. And the water was so polluted that it would cause a rash. It would kill your dog if your dog got in and drank a lot. Water temperatures were really hot.
The fish were sick. We had high rates of fish disease, and our baby salmon were dying at horrific rates. You know, and when the babies don’t make it, then that means they don’t become adults and they don’t come back and then spawn. And that was happening year after year. And so we were really losing the genetic diversity of our salmon runs.
And so, previous generations of my family had fought for salmon rights, you know, and every generation of Yurok people, Karuk people, all the people on the Klamath River—and I mean this is true for probably every Indigenous group—you know, every generation fought since colonization. Right? Fought for our resources, our land, our water, our cultural natural resources, our sovereignty. And so when we were in the fight, it was almost like, well this is just our duty, this is how we live.
Host: Advocating for salmon, the Klamath, and Indigenous fishing rights runs deep in Amy’s family. During the fierce fish wars of the 1970s when the federal government was challenging Indigenous people’s rights to fish, her family took a stand.
Her great uncle was arrested 19 times for exercising his fishing rights. He filed one of the major lawsuits that affirmed the Tribe’s rights to fish.
Her grandmother and great-grandmother famously won a tug-of-war with a fish net against armed federal agents. As the agents attempted to rip the fishing net from their hands, her great-grandmother began to sing. A massive flock of birds answered the call of her song. It spooked the federal agents and they let go of the net.
Amy grew up with these stories. So it was only natural that her first job with her Tribe was working with their department of fisheries to count the Salmon and monitor the health of the river. In 2002, she was out on the river tallying fish when a Yurok relative called from the shore. “The fish are dying! You need to get up-river! Quick!”
What Amy was about to witness would change her life – and Yurok history.
AC: The colonization of the river took a toll. The Klamath River suffered from the largest fish kill in American history in which 70,000 adult salmon died on the Klamath River. The fish kill was caused by excessive diversions for agriculture at the top of the river, made at the order of the then Vice President Dick Cheney over the objection of federal scientists. The move was an act of ecocide against my people.
I was working for tribal fisheries then, and I will never forget the salmons’ dead bodies lining the banks of the river, three to four layers deep, and it smelled like a war zone.
Host: Witnessing the death of the Salmon was at once traumatic and galvanizing. In her memoir, The Water Remembers, Amy Cordalis describes her feelings that fateful day.
“I was devastated. It was a hopeless feeling. I felt marginalized, like no one cared… They took the water and killed the salmon.
“While my family had fought for our rights to the land and fish, they’d never thought they’d have to fight for the water, or the River’s right to survive because it was unconscionable to harm the River’s life force in my culture.
“It was clear now that my generation’s fight would be to preserve the resources upon which the Nation’s legal rights were exercised: the salmon, water, and the River. This meant we had to fight to save the salmon by restoring the River’s health, because a fishing right is no good if there are no fish. We could not continue our fishing way of life on a dying River.”
AC: It was, from our perspective, an act of ecocide against our people. And as a result, flows on my reservation at the bottom of the river, right when a very large fall Chinook salmon run came back to the river, the flows were the lowest they’d ever been on record, and it was hot. And so the water got warm and polluted, and a fish disease called ich spread through the entire salmon run and killed them.
And I just remember thinking we’re still under attack. And then I strongly felt my great grandma who had passed a couple decades before, just sort of move through me, and was like: You need to go to law school to prevent this from ever happening again.
Host: Amy dove deep into Indian law to understand how tribes viewed the treaties and how they interpreted case laws and federal statutes that apply to Indians.
While she was in law school, the movement to remove the dams on the Klamath was gathering force.
Permits for 4 of the 6 dams happened to be up for review. If they were approved, it would mean another fifty years, a death sentence for the river. Challenging the permits presented the perfect opportunity to call for the impossible: remove the dams. A coalition of Yurok, Klamath, and Karuk people – along with various non-profits – began the fight.
While Amy was studying for the bar, the final environmental impact statement was released. The verdict? The dams, lacking fish passageways or fish ladders, were violating the federal government’s trust responsibilities to the Indigenous communities.
Simultaneously, Pacific Corp, the owner, calculated that it would be more expensive to build fish ladders than to dismantle the dams. What once was impossible was suddenly a desirable scenario for the company’s bottom line.
After decades of fighting, a breakthrough started to take shape. The Native American Rights Fund invited Amy, fresh out of law school, to be a staff attorney.
AC: It was just a fight. It was like a hardcore fight. I think I was really lucky because you know I was representing my own tribe, and so I had a baseline cultural knowledge about what it is to be a Salmon person.
And one of the things I really tried to do was listen carefully to Yurok leadership, because that’s who I was representing, and hear them. Right? And so I could use all of that to create these arguments about what the rights actually meant from the tribal perspective.
So me and my generation coming into that fight, we stood on the shoulders of the ancestors because they had won in a lot of ways. I think about the early 1900s up until really like 1975, the federal government was just trying to assimilate Indians. 1975 marked a really big shift in federal Indian law policy from assimilation to self-determination. But even after 1975, when that act was passed, the federal government still wasn’t asserting or protecting Indian rights.
And so, our people, that generation, they were really out there just trying to assert the rights, even though many of those rights were established in the treaties and had been good law since the 1800s, and as a treaty were the supreme law of the land, our ancestors just had to fight to say that those are still good.
Amy Cordalis in regalia. Photo by Matt Mais/Yurok Tribe
They’d have to go down to a meeting with the state or the feds, and were always running out of gas money, and they wouldn’t have money for food, and they didn’t have a hotel to stay in, and they’d have to basically buddy up with someone to even get a meal paid for, and then sleep in their car. You know, you put on top the extreme racism that they were dealing with in those times.
So I always felt grateful, to be honest. I felt grateful that I had those basic needs met and not that we had a lot of money, but we had money for hotels. We had money for food, which was a privilege the previous generation didn’t have.
Host: It took years of back-and-forth negotiations and gnarly impasses before a settlement agreement to remove the dams would be reached. By the time the Yurok Nation was nearing the finish line, big changes were taking place: Amy became the Yurok Nation’s lead attorney, and Pacific Corp was acquired by the famed billionaire Warren Buffett.
The company almost backed out of negotiations at the last minute because it feared any liability from the dam removal process. The Tribe invited representatives from Warren Buffett’s company to join them on a boat ride up river to a sacred area called Blue Creek.
There they were met by Yurok protestors. They let the corporate executives know their mind: They would never ever stop fighting for the removal of the dams. There on the banks of the Klamath River, the ground shifted.
On the plane ride home, Buffett’s team called Amy. They were going to work hand in hand with the Yurok Nation to make sure the dams came down.
AC: And a lesson I learned from working with Yurok elders is that to create change, you have to see it, you have to believe in it first. And for many Indigenous leaders on the Klamath, they had the audacity to be the first to call for dam removal, because they had heard stories from their elders about what the river was like pre-colonization, pre-dams. They could see it.
Since time immemorial, the river and its creatures have supported us, and we have the great privilege of being their beneficiary, but that comes with a corresponding duty to steward and protect the river. We exercised our responsibilities with strategic precision. History, precedent, money, power, and time were all against us. One of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffet, who owned the dams, was against us. We failed over and over again. Yet somehow, we prevailed.
In using this example, we can see that the overall health of our nation and our people and our ecosystems can be uplifted, and that allowing more voices and perspectives to contribute to our democracy is not only good for people but also the planet and business. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Indeed, working together with our allies—there was not one single champion of Klamath dam removal. Instead, there were hundreds of champions working in big and small ways over 20 years towards dam removal, proving that what you do matters, and how you use your life force makes a difference.
Host: We’ll return after a short break.
Host: From the fish kill in 2002 to 2020, when the Memorandum of Understanding was signed to remove four of the six dams on the Klamath, the movement never relented… Again, Amy Cordalis.
AC: So between June 2023 and September 2024, we removed these four dams. [CHEERS] After 100 years of these dams blocking the life blood of my people and the Indigenous Peoples on the Klamath River, the river flowed once again. [APPLAUSE] Dam removal was completed on time, within budget, and consistent with the terms of their permits.
So through dam removal, we removed over 441 feet of steel, rock, concrete, clay, rebar. With Iron Gate dam alone, 100 million cubic yards of dam material was removed in 25,000 truck loads, with 40 yards’ holding capacity. The material that once blocked the river’s flow was recycled, returned to the earth, or repurposed.
The magnitude of this work is impossible to describe in words. So, although it won’t do it total justice, I have a short clip, and it has explosions. [LAUGHTER] [EXPLOSIONS] [APPLAUSE]
It’s real, it’s real, it’s all real.
Yes, so, I will never forget watching the river reconnect. On a very cold September morning we gathered at the base of the former Iron Gate dam with my sister, friends, and colleagues, and we watched as an excavator scooped up some of the final remains of the dam. And with each scoop, we saw from behind the dam, just little sparkles of water, and another scoop, and more water, and another scoop, and more water. And eventually, the water behind the dam flowed over and reconnected with itself below the dam. Yeah, the river was free.
And I cried. I cried because my ancestors had fought for this moment. My colleagues, friends, and I had fought and sacrificed for this moment. And I like to think that the emotion I was experiencing was the release of the intergenerational trauma that had been suffered by my family since colonization.
And then there was this deep sense of healing. I thought if this river, my ancient relative, can heal, so can I, and so can humanity. We just need to follow the river’s lead.
It was magical. It was like this magnetic force just reconnected the water. It was like feeling the lifeblood of your people flow again. I jumped in the water. It was cleaner from a data perspective, right? But it felt so much cleaner swimming in it, you could feel its vibrancy; you could feel like its life force, its pulse.
I’d swam in the Klamath my whole entire life, and I swear it told me: I am different. I’m stronger now. And it was like yes, you are.
Host: In 2019, the Yurok nation passed a landmark Rights of Nature law recognizing the rights of the Klamath River to exist, thrive, and persist. The Yurok Nation maintained that they had a right to fish on the Klamath and that the Klamath had the right to heal.
Combining traditional ecological knowledge with Treaty law, environmental law and good old-fashioned diplomacy, the Yurok Nation was able to negotiate a $515 million settlement agreement to restore the Klamath River.
By 2025, over 2,000 acres of riparian land had already been reseeded with native plants in what will be the biggest-ever such restoration.
AC: Klamath dam removal has already proven that nature-based solutions work and are profitable. We brought over $515 million into our community and to the local economy. And notably, our strongest partners were not federal agencies, and we didn’t use federal funding for dam removal, which demonstrates that it’s possible to accomplish these types of goals with little federal support. [APPLAUSE] Yeah…
In June 2024, 2800 acres around the former Copco 1 and 2 dams were returned to the Shasta Tribe, the area’s original inhabitants. [APPLAUSE] 20,000 acres in the former hydroelectric project area will be restored through multi-million dollar restoration projects. In the former dam reservoir reach area, over 19 billion—billion with a b—native seeds have been planted, and hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs. [APPLAUSE]
In October of 2024, the leader of the fall Chinook salmon run was spotted on sonar technology passing the Iron Gate dam site. By November, thousands of salmon had gone past the former dam sites for the first time in 100 years, [CHEERS] and they spawned. [APPLAUSE]
Migrating Chinook salmon. Photo: GeorgeColePhoto / Shutterstock
Host: The fight continues to remove the remaining two smaller Keno and River Link dams in the upper Klamath. Unlike the hydroelectric dams, these provide irrigation and flood control and are owned by the federal government. Many tribal members and their allies would like to see them removed to restore the Klamath completely to its precolonial state.
To celebrate the reconnection of the river that has taken place, an intertribal group of youth embarked on a 30-day journey and kayaked hundreds of miles to honor their ancestors and mark a new chapter in its story of healing and reconciliation. Their ceremonial journey inspired international recognition for the world’s largest river restoration project and this monumental victory for Indigenous-led ecological justice.
Amy’s nieces and nephews participated in the youth paddle. She says this was the first time since European contact that Indigenous youth were able to enjoy the river without having to fight.
AC: The Klamath dams embodied the legacy of the dark underbelly of the founding of this country that supported the colonization and industrialization of nature at the expense of Indigenous Peoples, the environment, and marginalized communities.
The ecological consequences of colonization, while devastating, need not be permanent. Dam removal sends a clear message—Indigenous rights, leadership, and lifeways are not obstacles to progress, they are critical tools to sustaining life. [APPLAUSE]
And we can no longer afford to destroy Indigenous rights and their resources in service of power and money, in part because over 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is on Indigenous lands. Yeah. The Yurok and Karuk, along with the other Indigenous Peoples in the Klamath Basin, were guided through dam removal by the worldview that supported world renewal by restoring balance between nature and humans.
In Yurok, there is a myth: The sun and the moon are lovers. The dawn is their favorite time because they are together in the sky. The new day is their baby, it is a gift to us. That is why it is called the present. We must be thankful for the present, to honor the sun and the moon and the power of love. We will forgive the past by giving up hope that it could’ve been different. We will let go of the burden of the past. We will believe in our collective ability to solve the most pressing problems of our time, because we have seen it on the Klamath, because the fish have shown us the way.
And having witnessed this historic effort, I believe that all of us have ancestral knowledge in our blood about what it was like to live on a healthy planet, and that medicine is still in me, in you, it’s in all of us. And whatever your project is, whatever your it is, together we can restore the balance, and we can renew the world. Wok-hlew’, Wok-hlew’,Wok-hlew’[WORDS IN HER LANGUAGE] [APPLAUSE]
Forests are not collections of individual trees. They are living communities shaped by cooperation, memory, and cycles of renewal that stretch across generations.
In her new book, When the Forest Breathes, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard deepens the groundbreaking work that transformed our understanding of forest ecosystems. Expanding on the research she first brought to wide public attention in Finding the Mother Tree, Simard offers both a scientific and personal vision for how forests regenerate and what is lost when we disrupt the relationships that sustain them.
Drawing from decades of research, as well as close collaboration with Indigenous communities whose stewardship practices long recognized forest interdependence, Simard challenges the industrial model of forestry that treats trees as isolated competitors. Instead, she reveals a dynamic system in which older trees support younger ones, nutrients and information move through underground fungal networks, and kinship influences growth, resilience, and survival.
The excerpt below brings us into a striking thread of this research: the discovery that Douglas fir seedlings recognize and benefit from growing near their relatives. Through the work of her former graduate student, Simard illuminates how trees adjust their behavior based on who surrounds them, reshaping how we understand competition, cooperation, and regeneration in forest systems.
At a moment when wildfires, drought, and extractive practices threaten forests worldwide, this passage underscores the book’s central insight: that resilience is rooted in relationship.
After making Mum coffee and toast, I walked home, where Amanda and Eva were waiting to celebrate the publication of Amanda’s first paper. They’d brought a six-pack of Amanda’s favorite ale and a bag of chips, and Eva had brought her new border collie pup, Tia. For as long as I’d known her, Eva had been dreaming of getting a dog. But a graduate student’s life is anything but stable, so she’d made herself wait until the conditions were right. Now she and Tia were inseparable.
Amanda had been keeping a grueling schedule. Just back from playing baseball in Japan, she was heading to Golden to collect more soil carbon data before the snow flew. The ground was almost frozen and the days were getting short.
“I’m really proud of you, Amanda. It’s not easy juggling all this,” I said, as I poured the midday beer into three tall glasses.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, her cheeks dimpling. Her walnut-brown hair was tied up in a bun, nothing fancy, but ready for action.
“I have it pretty easy,” she added. “Other people are doing much more than me.”
I hid a smile. I was pretty sure this wasn’t true. I poked her.
“I don’t know anyone else who got their master’s and their PhD while playing baseball in the world championships,” I pointed out.
“Yeah! Cheers, Amanda!” Eva said. From her place at Eva’s feet, Tia looked up to see what all the fuss was about.
We held up our glasses, swigged our beers.
I thought back to celebrating my own first discovery with my doctoral adviser, David Perry. After finding that carbon-13 and carbon-14 transmitted between birch and fir, we’d shared a glass of whiskey in his office. I recalled how excited we’d been at the finding that the two species were trading photosynthetic carbon back and forth in a reciprocal relationship, and that a greater amount of carbon flowed from nutrient-rich paper birch to the more acidic Douglas fir, especially when the fir was shaded. This was the first sign that the trees were in direct communication through underground channels, forming a robust, interdependent network.
Despite her humility, I knew Amanda was pleased to be celebrating this moment. It had taken her a decade to complete her graduate studies—from her twentieth year to her thirtieth—and we were finally toasting her first dispatches to the world. In her new publication, Amanda reported her clearest, most profound finding: interior Douglas fir seedlings were larger and had more foliage when growing in the neighborhood of kin Douglas fir seedlings rather than strangers. It didn’t matter if those strangers were other Douglas firs, or some other species entirely.
This finding alone was astounding. It meant that trees recognized other trees that were their relatives and benefited from growing near them. This complemented Amanda’s earlier master’s research. She’d found that seedlings establishing next to older kin rather than strangers not only had more productive traits, but greater mycorrhizal colonization rates, presumably because they had access to the established mycorrhizal network of the older sibling.
The older trees, with more resources, were connecting with and nurturing their younger siblings.
These discoveries were breathtaking. Not only did they fly in the face of modern forestry practices, but they corresponded with thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge on the importance of kinship among living beings.
Over the previous three decades, a common forestry practice in the dry Douglas fir forests had been clearcutting followed by planting. This was done to generate more profit and reduce planting costs, speed up rotations, and reduce uncertainty compared with selective harvests reliant on natural generation. That’s why the companies were clearcutting the Douglas fir forests in Nlaka’pamux territory, Dave Walkem’s ancestral home. These tree farming practices meant the next forest could be cut faster and more money could be made sooner.
Getting rid of the old trees, they believed, also reduced risk of wildfire and the spread of bark beetles. The mother trees were thus sent to the mills, and new seedlots of seedlings were planted to replace them. But these planted trees fared poorly in the arid environments, often succumbing to heat, drought, or frost. Nursery-grown trees were bred for rapid growth and straight trunks, rather than belowground traits or adaptive cues enhanced in the presence of relatives that could increase survival. Perhaps because of this, their rooting responses were not finely attuned enough to cope with extreme drought in June, or their needles were too sparse to withstand a sudden frost in July. Natural regeneration around parent trees, with their locally adapted seeds, adaptive cues to relatives, and guerrilla root systems, was proving more successful.
But there was even more to this story. Amanda wanted to know how kin selection played out in more diverse forests, such as those in Prince George, where she’d grown up. There, she’d seen Douglas fir growing alongside lodgepole pine, spruce, and aspen. Could a tree’s neighbors—their species, density, or even the soil in which they grew—affect how well Douglas fir related to its own kin?
As pitcher and captain of her team, Amanda knew that camaraderie affected the performance of all the players. Just like she did in our lab, she would boost the morale of the group, and this increased cooperation while working together on one another’s projects in the woods or in the greenhouse. Her natural intuition led her to ask questions about how the whole forest influenced kin relationships.
Amanda designed her experiments to look deeply into what diversity in the forest meant to relationships among kindred trees. She planted Douglas fir seedlings in mixed neighborhoods of kin seedlings, stranger seedlings, and a different species altogether, lodgepole pine. She found that the trees were able to adjust their behaviors based on the complexity of their quarters. Even in mixed stands, kin seedlings preferred to grow near kin, but they performed better in the neighborhood of lodgepole pine than around other Douglas firs that were unrelated to them. They responded to neighbor identity by adjusting their mycorrhizal status, slenderness, foliage, and fine root allocation. In these mixed stands, the kin seedlings were able to integrate their complex environments and respond in different ways to enhance their performance.
This made sense—interactions between kin depended on who their neighbors were. In this case, the pines were smaller than the firs and less competitive, and this enabled kin to thrive in their siblings’ presence.
Cristina Jiménez Moreta moved to the United States from Ecuador at five years-old with her family. At seventeen, she became a youth organizer in the movement for immigrant/migrant rights. She is a founding member of United We Dream and was instrumental in getting the DACA act passed in 2012, the first major immigration policy victory in over 25 years.
Anneke Campbell: In your memoir, Dreaming of Home, you describe your inner journey moving from fear and shame about being undocumented to speaking out and recognizing migration as a story of love and courage.
Cristina Jiminéz Moreta: I grew up with a lot of fear that my family could be separated by ICE and that I could be deported, that my parents could be deported when they went to work. There was shame about migrating, shame about being Latina in the United States, being a person of color.Therefore, I never spoke about my undocumented status or my experience because I was living in hiding and in deep shame, that somehow my parents and I had done something wrong for coming here to seek a better life, because that’s what we are told.
After 9/11, as a kid growing up in New York City, this fear of deportation I lived with became even more imminent because I started seeing ICE agents in my neighborhood in Queens. Our country turned immigration into a conversation of threat to our national security. And when I started seeing people so close to me being deported, the fear wasn’t just a shadow over me, it became very real.
That is when I met everyday Americans, immigrants and non-immigrant, who were fighting against these unjust deportations. Joining in their efforts led me to realize I wasn’t the only one, and that this was more about systems and laws we had no control over that impacted our family’s lives and had forced us to flee. And I experienced that in solidarity with others. Not only could I be protected because people would fight for me, but I also realized that I did not have to live in shame and fear.
So this was the transformation for me, engaging with others in advocating for communities facing deportation and then having the experience that we could create change, we could win. In silence we lose. We could be deported and nobody would know. But in community, there would be people that have my back, that would try to find me in jail, try to get me released, and fight for my family to be able to stay.
Anneke: So much of what you’re saying resonates with all that’s going on today. How did you find the courage to come out as undocumented and proud?
Cristina: I still held a lot of fear, but courage is really about taking action in spite of your fear. So I remember meeting María Gonzalez, one of the first young people, a high schooler, who was facing deportation with her family to Costa Rica. She started publicly coming out in newspapers and engaging in advocacy with members of Congress, asking to stop her deportation and that of her family. I thought that could be me. And like María, there were many other young undocumented people across the country who shared their stories, thereby confronting the rest of us with what are we going to do? Keeping people in the shadows and in hiding through the fear of deportation contradicts the values of a country where all of us are supposed to be equal and free.
Anneke: So you were inspired by others and community solidarity made you feel at least the possibility of safety and power. That must be true today, right?
Cristina: This is what you see in Minneapolis and across the country. Silence does not protect us, community does. Masked ICE agents with weapons can kill people. Immigrants and non-Americans alike can disappear. But in community, we get to protect one another. I mean there’s thousands of stories of neighbors that protected students and parents and children and friends and colleagues and care workers and landscapers and construction workers.
So seeing people taking action and a sense that we are interconnected and can do more to care for one another has been such a huge inspiration, and a source of hope in this moment. Rene Good and Alex Pretti knew the profound value of being there with your neighbors, the value of bearing witness and recording what’s happening. That is what’s saved the country from being fully lied to by the administration as to the actual facts of these events. So from bearing witness to exercising our constitutional rights of recording what law enforcement and ICE or Border Patrol agents are doing, to defending and protecting and caring for one another, that is what we all can do.
Anneke: Thanks for answering that question before I asked it! We have beautiful examples right in front of us that show us what to do. You’ve also said there’s never been a movement that hasn’t had young people at the front. How did you start organizing young people?
Cristina: There was a collective, and a generation of young undocumented people and our allies, many of them educators, many of them U.S. citizen friends, siblings, family members, labor organizers, and other social justice organizers who came together around fighting deportations. So we started building relationships with people in Florida, people in California, people in Texas, becoming not only friends, but really supporting each other in the different fights against deportations or for our right to pursue higher education, to follow our dreams. Young people who were ready to go to college were denied an education because their state barred them, even if they had done everything to be the strongest candidates.
We met through advocates that had been working on access to higher education and immigration reform, both at the state and the national level. Like Josh Bernstein, who’s a friend and huge ally, a lawyer who directed policy at the National Immigration Law Center and was one of the first drafters of the Dream Act in the early 2000. Many of us met at conferences and training programs hosted by UNIDOS, and by Community Change. Both of these national organizations have a rich history of training community organizers and developing leaders. They gave us the first set of tools to start doing things on our own.
They connected us with leaders from the civil rights movement, getting the exposure and skills that allowed us to gain confidence to lead campaigns. And this confidence and leadership growth enabled us to find our voice and start saying we need to play more of a role in the strategy. But many of the established organizations felt like maybe we were too young and inexperienced, so we started realizing that we needed our own space where we could make decisions.
For instance we realized that the Dream Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for young undocumented people as a standalone bill, could have a better chance of moving forward in Congress than a bigger, more complex package of immigration reforms. It wasn’t to say that we young people didn’t want comprehensive reforms, of course we did. But our assessment was that we just didn’t have the power to win that, so it made sense for us to focus on a more narrow set of options we could fight for. In that debate, we started having tension and disagreements with the older generation of leaders who had been in the game longer, and many of them professional advocates and lawyers, who had a different view about what the conventional wisdom believed possible.
Anneke: Was it painful to disagree with these elders who had supported you?
Cristina: Yes, it was painful for me as a young person to hear folks say things like, young people don’t know what they’re doing, they lack sophistication, or they are just thinking about themselves. Some of them told us that it would be impossible to stop deportations, but then we did. And they would say it will be impossible for you to share your story and not be deported. And then we shared our stories and some of us were targeted, but others were not. So we were constantly testing our power.
And we pushed DACA into law, which was a huge accomplishment. But there was the human complexity in the moment, which was that these older leaders were our mentors and supporters who had made it possible for young people like us to get training, to ensure that we were able to travel to D.C. So in retrospect, I wish we had had the tools and the emotional and spiritual capacity to navigate disagreement and conflict in a way that could have been more generative. That said, many of us have continued to do the work together over the years.
The reason why I keep naming that you have never seen a successful movement where young people have not been at the center is that we question the conventional wisdom and always ask the question: why not fight now for what we need? You know, young people usually play this role of impatience and wanting change to happen fast. And I think that is such a positive force that helps propel movement and inspire people with the imagination of what’s possible.
Anneke: You describe yourself as a strategist. What actually is a strategist?
Cristina: I love this question, and I will start with the framework that I use to train new generations of strategists and movement leaders, along with my colleagues Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Liu at CUNY, at the State University of New York, and their book, Practical Radicals, which I highly recommend.
It starts with the vision. Let’s start from a place that you are able to name, how the world should be. And we anchor in that vision. Once the vision is clear, then we have to answer the question: how do we get there? And the answer is that the strategy is the bridge to get to your vision. And what makes a robust strategy is to have a sober analysis of conditions. Because what may be a good strategy today may not be a good strategy tomorrow. What were really good strategies, say, under the Obama administration as it relates to immigration work, are not going to be the same ones that make sense today, right? So a strategist is always attuned to how the conditions have shifted and the environment has shifted. And how does the current environment create openings for change?
Then there’s the question of power and what is power. Often we are trained to think of power in just one form. People power is very important. But it’s not the only one. So part of what I have been working on in becoming a better strategist is to think about economic power, electoral and political power, people and community and solidarity power, spiritual power, collective care power. And if we think about all of those sources of power, then you can think if I have that vision and I need to develop a strategy, what are the different sources of power that I need to build and or flex to be able to get to my vision?
I always bring people back to the Montgomery bus boycott. As one of the best examples to think about all of these forms of power, the solidarity power that led black folks to be able to go without using the busses for over a year and still go to work and still move around town, the kind of collective care that they needed to not only give each other rides, but to make sure that people had food, to make sure that people had lawyers when they were targeted by police and by law enforcement or elected officials. The economic power of understanding that this town moves with our labor, and with our dollars, and being clear that withholding that was going to create a disruption and a weakening of their opposition, which led to many in the business class to start saying, we may have to change our minds. So I name this as an example because it’s such a good reminder that we need to think about all the different sources of power and leverage that we have.
So in this moment, we need to flex our electoral power. We need to flex the power of taking care of one another, to show up for communities, to defend our neighbors. But we know that that’s not going to be enough, right? To stop the massive level of violence perpetrated by this administration and the deployment of thousands and thousands of agents that can go and target communities. And so we need other strategies, right? Economic power. There are these corporations and actors that are benefiting from detention and deportation money. How do we use our consumer power to stop that? To stop shopping at Home Depot or Target. And the more the people can experience their power in different ways, the closer that we can get to realizing our vision.
We don’t think enough about spiritual power, about how we are connecting with one another. And how joy and culture and belonging become such a critical ingredient for us to be able to keep up the fight.
Anneke: Like Bad Bunny’s half time show at the Superbowl? What an uplift!
Cristina: Yeah, that was incredible. Our artists in our communities and those thinking about spaces and experiences of joy, and belonging are just critical. In this moment of rising authoritarianism, actually, I think that the strongest antidote is the power of belonging in community together. And the cultural power that brings us joy, that strengthens our spirits to keep going.
Anneke: How do you stay resilient in these circumstances that have gotten so extreme?
Cristina: There’s no recipe that works for everybody. I tell people I have learned by making mistakes, by really working myself to the ground and feeling so depleted that I cannot give more. That’s not good for ourselves, or the work that we are doing.
Also, now, as a mother, I need to spend quality time with my son. I also know that I don’t thrive in isolation, that I need to be in community and with friends. I need art in my life and culture. I have found that 3 or 4 times a month, if I go to a show, a theater performance, anything related to art, even a dance class, that works for me. I have to strive for that balance. But if I tell you that I’ve got it figured out, I wouldn’t be honest. Because when we go into a moment of crisis when a member of our community is facing deportation, let’s say, or has been disappeared or put in detention, you go all in. And you may miss meals and you may not sleep as much. But then what do you do the next day, or next week to care for yourself?
Anneke: I am so glad you will be at the Bioneers conference to share your wisdom and heart at this time when we all need to hear it.
Across the Northern Hemisphere, species are shifting their ranges: flora and fauna are moving north, and marine life is moving toward cooler waters as ecosystems track a warming world. But what about humans?
In North: The Future of Post-Climate America (Oxford University Press), urban planner and climate adaptation scholar Jesse M. Keenan argues that climate change is already influencing how and where Americans live—not through a single dramatic exodus, but through the less obvious but nonetheless potent mechanisms of housing markets, insurance pricing, infrastructure investments, and institutional constraints. (Read an excerpt from North here.)
Rather than offering a speculative vision of the future, Keenan examines the forces already in motion and the difficult tradeoffs they demand. Bioneers spoke with him about adaptation, governance, inequality, and why climate change may be less a moral story than a structural one.
Bioneers: What made you write North now?
Jesse M. Keenan: For me, this book is the culmination of almost 20 years of work. A number of years ago, I became deeply curious about the idea that climate change would alter how and where we live through the mechanisms of the built environment—housing, real estate, infrastructure—the systems that shape the material dimensions of our lives.
At the time, there was exactly one scientific paper on the topic of how a warming climate alters how you pour concrete. As I ventured into researching the relationships between climate change and real estate, people said I was crazy. But from my prior work in post-disaster reconstruction and housing markets, it seemed intuitive: If we stay on the course we’re on, this isn’t going to end well.
North isn’t a distant projection of the future. It’s about the mechanisms already in motion—economic signals, institutional constraints, physical risks—that are accelerating difficult decisions about where and how we live. The book is really a treatise on adaptation. Human mobility is simply the lens through which we can see it unfolding.
Bioneers: Why “North”? And what does ecological range shifting teach you?
Jesse: The title North isn’t meant to be taken literally in terms of cardinal direction. Rather, the title is rooted—at least in terms of my inspiration—in ecological range shifting. Across the northern hemisphere, we’re observing flora and fauna moving north for more suitable environments—so why wouldn’t humans, as part of complex socioecological systems, also move north?
Of course, humans are different. Technology and institutions act as differentiators. We can build air conditioning. We can harden infrastructure. We can subsidize public investments and extend insurance. We can adapt our environment in ways other species cannot. At the same time, there are limits to our ability to adapt.
So “North” becomes less about a simple directional shift and more about the broader mechanisms through which environmental change interacts with economic systems, governance structures, and human decision-making. It’s a metaphor for movement—not just geographic shifts, but institutional, financial, and social transformations already underway.
Bioneers: How do we measure climate-driven mobility, and can we actually quantify the climate signal?
Jesse: It’s important to start by saying that climate is very rarely a unilateral driver. It’s one of many factors shaping how and where people live. That said, climate is on the table, and in many cases, it’s a significant component, especially as it interacts with chronic economic stresses, such as housing affordability and the cost of living.
There are several ways researchers try to measure how climate change influences human mobility and immobility. We can observe long-term out-migration patterns after floods, fires, or storms. We can utilize interviews and survey-based research in receiving communities—asking people what factors shaped how and why they ended up where they did. Some social scientists are even using agent-based models to attempt to simulate mobility patterns based on people’s emerging behaviors and preferences.
But the research still has a long way to go to understand the role that climate plays in shaping our mobility patterns. Human mobility is remarkably predictable in some ways. We follow fairly consistent demographic patterns. Yet, climate motivations are much more nuanced. They vary by geography, by culture, by local belief systems, and by things like the emotional attachment to place. The power of affective reasoning that shapes why people remain in high-risk areas, even under dangerous circumstances, is extraordinary.
Today, much of the movement we’re seeing is also fairly localized, insofar as people often are simply moving from one part of town to another. They are not necessarily moving across the country. At the same time, it’s not just displacement. There are multiple cohorts on the move: yes, some are involuntarily being pushed out of high-risk areas, but others are voluntarily on the move because of the opportunities—as they perceive it—to lower their risk exposure.
For instance, we can say more confidently that those with increased measures of wealth and labor mobility fall into this category of preemptive movers. Simply put—the capability to move is shaped by money and labor skills, and many rich people are deeply engaged in building transgenerational wealth outside of the ravages of high-risk areas. That introduces a dimension of economic inequality into the story, particularly in the context of the growing inequalities that may arise in high-risk sending zones as wealth and jobs move elsewhere. At the same time, many people remain deeply tied, emotionally and culturally, to place. That tension between mobility and immobility is central to understanding what’s unfolding.
Bioneers: Why do people stay in risky places even when it seems irrational? What’s driving that push and pull?
Jesse: A central argument in the book is that the market economy is shaping our future pathways more than we recognize. We tend to think democratic institutions decide who gets protected and who doesn’t—that we collectively choose the winners and losers. But in many cases, market economies are already making those decisions for us.
At the same time, those signals are often clouded. Public institutions are frequently disincentivized from fully acknowledging climate risk. Local governments want to preserve their tax base. They want to maintain stability and economic output. State insurance regulators have historically faced pressure not to incorporate forward-looking climate risk into pricing because of what that would mean for consumers and the subsequent political backlash.
So, you have this tension: Markets are beginning to send signals about risk, but public institutions often resist passing this information on. That resistance isn’t always malicious. It’s often about institutional self-interest and survival. But the result is that information gets blurred. People rebuild. Risk persists. And, in some high-risk places, the status quo is maintained longer than it probably should be.
Bioneers: You’ve argued that public institutions are falling behind. What does that look like in practice?
Jesse: Adaptation is difficult politics because it inevitably produces winners and losers. Mitigation—decarbonization—has a clearer moral arc, a precise empirical measure, and a broader political appeal. Adaptation, by contrast, forces hard choices about where to invest, where not to invest, and who bears the costs and burdens of resource allocation. That makes it less politically advantageous, especially for leaders who are beholden to the status quo.
At the federal level, adaptation policy has often been relegated to a marginal issue despite the vast macroeconomic and social welfare implications. It’s sometimes folded into other frameworks, such as environmental justice, rather than advanced directly and explicitly. No politician wants to stand up and tell people that their community is in a location where no amount of money or engineering could possibly ensure their ability to stay in place in the long term. At the state level, there are similar constraints in terms of the political headwinds. As a consequence, the most acute pressure is on local governments.
In the United States, we have more than 90,000 governmental entities. Many are small, fragmented jurisdictions operating under strong home rule traditions. They are often the least equipped—lacking technical expertise, fiscal capacity, or institutional bandwidth—to confront complex multisector climate risks. Yet, they are the ones left holding the bag.
There’s also a disclosure trap wherein once a municipality formally acknowledges certain physical climate risks, it can trigger regulatory and economic obligations to do something about the problem. But many local governments simply don’t have the fiscal capacity or political support to do much of anything. Transparency can create liabilities they cannot afford to meet.
The result is a governance system that is fragmented, under-resourced, and structurally outdated for the scale of the challenge. It’s not always about ideology. It’s often about institutional capacity, and the gaps there are significant, particularly when the municipal bond market is racing ahead to price climate risk.
Bioneers: If public institutions are lagging, what role is the private sector playing in shaping adaptation?
Jesse: Markets economies are certainly shaping the flow of capital in ways that shape what public institutions can and cannot do.
When a local government goes to borrow money, credit rating agencies and investors are asking questions: Have you considered the physical risks to this infrastructure? What happens to your revenue if flooding disrupts operations? How will climate impacts affect your long-term debt obligations? Those pressures influence where public investment flows and how projects are structured.
There are positive aspects to this accelerated market adaptation. Risk is being priced and analyzed more rigorously. But there’s also a more troubling trend: what I call the ‘climate intelligence arms race.’ Increasingly, proprietary climate risk analytics are creating asymmetries of information. Firms develop highly sophisticated models, but the insights are often well out of view of the general public.
As I document in the book, there are cases where a local government used proprietary climate analytics for planning purposes, realized a particular area faced significant risk, and then discovered it could not publicly disclose that information because of licensing constraints of the proprietary information. That creates a profound tension. The public is left without full transparency about risks that directly affect them.
At a basic level, markets operate on information. But when that information is unevenly distributed or intentionally limited, people cannot make informed decisions about where and how they live. That asymmetry shapes outcomes just as powerfully as policy does. In this sense, there are real limits to the idea that consumers can adapt by listening out for market signals about climate risk.
Bioneers: What would “getting it right” look like? Are there places doing this well?
Jesse: Progress is happening, but unevenly. Jurisdictions with resources, political will, and institutional capacity are moving forward. Larger cities tend to have the expertise and fiscal tools to invest in adaptation. They’ll continue to make strategic investments.
The deeper challenge lies in smaller cities and rural counties that lack capacity. They often don’t have climate specialists, resilience planners, or the administrative bandwidth to pursue funding effectively. Even when federal programs exist, they can be complex and expensive to navigate.
What we need are stronger regional governance models that build capacity across jurisdictions. In Massachusetts, for example, the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program supports local governments in assessing risk and collaborating regionally. This is critical because some states like Massachusetts have tiny townships that are a relic of colonial era governance and are not up to the task with managing infrastructure and climate change problems that extend well beyond their limited jurisdictions. Out of necessity, the commonwealth plays a constructive role in filling institutional gaps while preserving local engagement.
But there’s a tension. States are increasingly centralizing authority. In some cases, that can result in strengthened coordination in the hands of state administrators who use state funding to incentivize local adaptation investments. In other cases, state legislators can suppress local innovation and climate action, such as what we see in Florida, where cities like Miami and Tampa have lost many regulatory tools that are critical for moving people and a tax base out of harm’s way. So “getting it right” isn’t just about funding. It’s about institutional design and whether governance structures are modernized to meet the scale of the challenge.
Bioneers: In the book’s closing argument, you suggest we need to stop moralizing climate change. What do you mean by that?
Jesse: For too long, climate change has been framed primarily as a moral imperative—as a question of what we ought to do, grounded in what we perceive to be the morally righteous outcome. That framing has a certain power for political mobilization, but it can also obscure the realities of adaptation.
Adaptation is messy. It involves tradeoffs. It creates winners and losers. Sometimes that means protecting people over protecting the environment. It forces tough decisions about who is protected, who relocates, where capital flows, and how institutions respond. Those outcomes are contested. They’re not grounded or guided by a moral consensus.
If we’re going to be successful in advancing environmental quality and social welfare, we need more robust public conversations about that messiness and who is really making the decisions that shape what comes next. Step one is acknowledging that markets are moving faster than democracy can keep up. This means we need to fundamentally rethink the nature of what it means for the public sector to invest in our future.
Constantly projecting adaptation as some kind of universally positive outcome that will manifest in the future if we truly believe in the righteousness of our cause fundamentally overlooks the fact that the processes of adaptation (and maladaptation) are already well underway all across America. We need to be more attentive to how climate impacts people’s everyday lives—their cost of living, job prospects, health, and family relationships. When we communicate in a way that acknowledges those lived realities in blue and red states alike, we can build a broader and more diverse coalition for the stewardship of our future. I don’t make the argument that we should empower markets to shape the future of post-climate America. I make the argument that this is already happening.
What if the next great American migration isn’t dramatic at all?
Not a single moment of collapse. Not a headline-grabbing exodus. But a steady, uneven reshuffling—guided less by ideology than by insurance rates, mortgage markets, infrastructure investments, and the invisible signals of risk.
In North: The Future of Post-Climate America(Oxford University Press), urban planner and climate adaptation scholar Jesse M. Keenan examines how climate change is already reshaping where and how Americans live. Rather than speculating about distant futures, Keenan focuses on the mechanisms already in motion—and the difficult tradeoffs and inequities embedded within them.
In the excerpt below, he begins with a personal story: evacuating New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Ida while preparing for the birth of his first child. From that intimate moment unfolds a larger argument about mobility, governance, markets, and what he calls America’s emerging era of “climigration.”
The following excerpt has been published with permission from the Introduction ofNorth: The Future of Post-Climate America(Oxford University Press, 2025) by Jesse M. Keenan.
Driving North from New Orleans
This book explores how climate change is shaping the physical and demographic future of the United States. It is an exploration of an emerging geography of risk and opportunity that arises from the shifting landscape of people, economies, and ecologies. While some will seek to preserve the status quo, others will relocate as a territorial adaptation to climate impacts that are increasingly rendering parts of this country uninhabitable, too risky, or too expensive for permanent settlement.
My own story of moving north started when I decided to move south to New Orleans, Louisiana. As people have done throughout history, people move because they want a better life for themselves and for their families. They want a better education, more accessible healthcare, lower levels of pollution, cheaper housing, and greater connections with their community. Sometimes, they even want nicer weather. This is where any exploration of American mobility starts.
I had an uneasy feeling that moving to New Orleans would change my life. It was an almost sadistic sense that I would be on the frontlines of climate change. After receiving recognition for my work in climate adaptation research and public service, journalists often asked, Knowing what you know, why would you ever voluntarily move to New Orleans? As this book will explore, people are complicated.
In the summer of 2021, my wife and I found out that we were expecting our first child. Instantly, all my calculations about New Orleans and climate risk seemed irrelevant. As we processed our future, Hurricane Ida was brewing in the Atlantic Ocean. As the hurricane approached the Gulf Coast, we had little time to decide whether to evacuate. If you wait until it is too late, then you run the risk of being trapped in another Katrina-like inundation event. In the heat of a late August night, we decided that we needed to pack our most important belongings and evacuate the next day. I was concerned about my wife’s health, as well as the health of our unborn child. Disasters have been well observed to have negative health outcomes for mothers and children alike.
As we were leaving New Orleans driving north over the causeway across Lake Pontchartrain, the local radio station that had long served as a lifeline for the city’s diaspora (WWOZ 90.7 FM) was playing Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” With storm clouds in my rearview mirror and sunshine ahead of me on the mainland, I felt guilty. I felt like I was leaving my neighbors with one less extra hand to clear debris and one less bag of rice to make jambalaya to feed the block. I felt that I had betrayed my implied oath of loyalty to the city that I loved.
We drove for hours through blinding bands of wind and rain. The car bore the weight of our possessions, and my body bore the weight of our uncertain future. On our first night as evacuees in Florida, I signed the contract for this book. Over the coming weeks, we would migrate north from state to state avoiding COVID outbreaks in search of prenatal blood work and healthy food. We finally found refuge in Philadelphia—with nothing more than what we could fit into a mid-sized sedan. I was relieved that my son would not be born in New Orleans, a city destined to be overwhelmed by climate change. From one perspective, I figured that getting official records for everything from a birth certificate to school transcripts might be a challenge in the future. From another perspective, I wanted my son to be born in a place that he could return to at the end of his life and find solace in the continuity of the endurance of human progress.
How and Where People Will Live
The central thesis of this book is that people will shift how and where they will live in the face of climate change in the United States. Climate impacts and economic stresses are already pushing people from their homes and communities. At the same time, the prospects of lower levels of risk, more moderate weather, and a more financially sustainable way of life are pulling people to relocate. By internalizing a recognition of the risks (push) and opportunities (pull) of climate change, America is poised to enter an uncharted post-climate era.
This book provides evidence that this new era is rapidly approaching. Climate change is already altering the quality of the American way of life.
This book outlines how climate impacts shape vulnerabilities in populations and the built environment, and how the behaviors of households, markets, and governments are sending signals about the capacity of society to adapt. Across these perspectives, this book explores the dawning of a new era defined by the promise of a more sustainable way of life for those on the move and the peril of those left behind.
This book is not just a collection of scientific observations and projections about America’s future. It is also a projection of optimism about America’s capacity for decarbonization, environmental stewardship, and population mobility. This book is built on years of public service advising federal and state policy makers; interviews with public-, private-, and civic-sector stakeholders; and even random unsolicited calls and emails from strangers. What these people often share in common is an unrecognized optimism in an otherwise dark time.
Our popular imagination for what America’s future could look like in the face of climate change is disproportionately shaped by a latent fear of the unknown. Scholars and the general public often fail to articulate how necessary adaptations will not only shape our daily lives, but how they will also reformulate a geography of risk and opportunity. We tend to focus on a constant projection of how climate change will destroy our lives without seeking to understand how we can advance a more sustainable future in the face of what we leave behind. Our default projections are constrained not only by a lack of imagination but also by our intellectual ordering of society’s priorities for housing, human health, education, economic opportunity, and mobility.
This book explores how climate change is already shaping the future course of America for centuries to come. It is about the push and pull factors that are shaping our decisions. The original idea for this book came from a simple but flawed premise—flora and fauna are moving north (in the Northern Hemisphere), and so too will people and firms. Here, range shifting is not deterministically limited to mere ecological systems but rather to a full spectrum of chaotic pathways across a wide range of economic, environmental, and cultural geographies. The idea of moving “north” is both a literal reference to cardinal direction and also a metaphor for the relocations of those who will move in any direction to get out of harm’s way. This book explores a series of behaviors, pathways, and scenarios that culminate in the proposition that America is on the verge of a great domestic climate migration (hereinafter, climigration) that may very well reshape everything from our physical landscape to our electoral politics.
There is not only an opportunity for climate migrants (hereinafter, climigrants) to build new communities, but there is also an opportunity to double down on our commitments to reduce our carbon footprint and to promote the accessibility, affordability, and sustainability of the built environment. We—as a society—have at least two major paths forward. In one scenario, climigrants who are economically mobile and have the means and resources can recreate their carbon-intensive settlements in the relentless exurban expansion of lower-risk places. Another scenario suggests a more orderly set of policies and behaviors that is sensitive to the environmental carrying capacity of a new sustainable frontier in “receiving zones,” as well as the trash, pollution, and social inequities of what we leave behind in our “sending zones.” Indeed, both scenarios may occur simultaneously depending on where you live and who you are. This book picks up on how these scenarios may play out for a wide variety of stakeholders. Along the way, there will be winners and losers. Understanding what you have to lose is the first step toward understanding what you have to gain.
Scientific evidence is increasingly supporting the theory that the Earth is alive and replete with intelligence. In fact, the wild diversity of earthly organisms exhibits the characteristics that human beings attribute to personhood. How is it then, by the law, that a corporation is a person, but nature is not? What if we expand the anthropocentric boundaries of our systems of laws, rights and responsibilities to encompass ALL living beings? How would this new legal story affect our relationship with our vast other-than-human Earth family? In this episode, we imagine a planet with rights for all, with visionary lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito.
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Featuring
César Rodríguez-Garavito, a Professor of Law, Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and founding Director of the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Program and the Earth Rights Advocacy Program (all based at NYU School of Law), is a human rights and environmental justice scholar and practitioner whose work and publications focus on climate change, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and the human rights movement.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
Producer: Cathy Edwards
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): Plants perceive the world around them. They learn, remember, and communicate. They can see what color your shirt is.
Dolphins and many other animals recognize themselves in mirrors, demonstrating self-awareness. Pigeons have a better memory for paintings than college students do. Sheep have better memory of human faces than humans do. Single-celled balls of mucus called slime molds efficiently solve mazes.
Once you entertain the prospect that as human beings we’re part of a vast pulsing symphony of intelligent organisms, it radically alters the concept of human rights. Anthropocentric laws promoting fair and just societies become meaningless if the living earth is dying because we’re treating it as an inanimate object to be exploited at will.
It’s increasingly clear that animals, plants, fungi, forests, waters and ecosystems need to be legally recognized as subjects, not objects. That intersection of human and natural law is the leading edge of environmental protection – and human self-interest.
What’s old is new again. Indigenous societies have long recognized and respected the rights of other-than-human life, and they say these rights come with responsibilities. Western law is beginning to wake up to this paradigm shift. From rivers, mountains, and critters being granted legal personhood – to the legal paradox of an ecosystem owning itself – the burgeoning movement to recognise the rights of nature is now the fastest growing environmental movement in history.
At the forefront is lawyer and NYU professor César Rodríguez-Garavito. He spoke at a Bioneers conference.
César Rodríguez-Garavito (CRG): The first time that I encountered the idea of rights of nature, I was deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I was working with the Indigenous Peoples of Sarayaku. Ecuador had recently become the first country in the world to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution. [APPLAUSE] Yeah. And the Sarayaku had been essential in shaping that idea. It was there that I had a chance to sit with Don Sabino Gualinga, who at the time was the yachak or shaman of the community.
We sat by the Bobonaza River just days before the Sarayaku won a historic legal victory. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in the favor of the Indigenous community and ended a two-decade-long struggle to stop oil extraction in the territory. The territory today is still free from oil extraction. [APPLAUSE]
But Don Sabino didn’t speak to me about rights, he spoke about life. I remember him saying, “the forest is alive, the rivers and the mountains are alive; they are people, just like us.” And he said this in a voice so soft that it felt like an invitation to listen to the voices of life all around us.
Los Cedros Reserve, Ecuador. Photos courtesy of NYU MOTH Program
Host: On that landmark occasion in 2012, César was working with the Sarayaku people to help them implement their legal victory. As a lawyer, he was already involved with Indigenous communities around the world, where he focused on how oil drilling, mining, and pollution violated their human rights.
But for Don Sabino and the Sarayaku, it wasn’t just a matter of their own rights. They understood themselves as part of nature, as part of a far larger other-than-human community that also had intrinsic rights.
CRG: Back then I was fully immersed in the work of human rights. I would go to places teeming with life, not only in the Amazon but also working with climate refugee communities from coastal areas of Bangladesh, or with the victims of violence in the armed conflict of my own native country of Colombia.
To me, nature felt more like a backdrop to the real work at hand, which was defending human communities. And also, I have to confess that the idea of rights of nature initially baffled me. I didn’t really know what to do with it, what to think of it.
And yet, it stayed with me over the years; like a seed planted in Sarayaku, it grew. But it didn’t grow only in my own work and my own experience, but across the world. Today, there are more than 500 initiatives protecting the rights of nature around the world. Rivers have been granted rights in countries ranging from New Zealand, to Peru, to Spain. Courts have recognized the rights of animals on most continents, and entire ecosystems have been protected as legal subjects.
Host: One of these rights of nature rulings was a historic decision to protect the old-growth forest of Los Cedros in Ecuador, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. In 2021, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador recognised it as a subject of rights and banned mining there.
Alongside judges, advocates and forest guardians, César helped monitor the implementation of this ruling. Spending time in the forest, he saw – and heard – what rights of nature feels like in its natural habitat.
CRG: I want you all to hear what a rights-bearing, breathing, living cloud forest sounds like. [LOS CEDROS AUDIO PLAYING]
Los Cedros cloud forest. Photo by Robert Macfarlane. Source: Emergence Magazine
Host: The first time César visited Los Cedros, he traveled with musician Cosmo Sheldrake who weaves the sounds of nature into his compositions. This is his recording.
CRG: I wonder if you figured out what those flapping sounds were at the beginning of the clip. Those are the bats that would fly around us at night. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] And perhaps you also heard the Toucan Barbets, the howler monkeys, the crickets and the trees that compose the orchestra of the forest at dawn. By the way, Cosmo insists to this day that he can hear my faint snoring in the background in that little clip. Which I, being a lawyer, I roundly deny, and I’m sure that no one here picked up any noise of that sort. [LAUGHTER]
But it’s not just Indigenous Peoples or professional listeners who are engaged in this exercise in paying close attention to the more-than-human world. We’re in the midst of a planetary listening exercise. Botanists are busy studying how plants emit sounds, how insects pick them up, and how those insects, like moths, make decisions based on that information. Marine biologists and technologists are busy revealing the languages of whales and other species.
Host: César was deeply inspired by what he was learning from working with communities in the Amazon. It was compounded by the mushrooming scientific evidence of nature’s genius.
CRG: That’s been a huge influence on me, as I try to make legal sense of the new science on…how plants communicate with insects, and the science that has been produced about how bees communicate with each other in highly sophisticated ways through dance.
And what you realize in reading the science and talking to these scientists, is something very similar to what Don Sabino Gualinga was saying to me 15 years ago, that everything is alive; there’s intelligence in the forest; there’s intelligence in the trees and the animals of the forest. But this is not just metaphoric. It’s beyond doubt that many animals, even plants, and now mycologists are discovering really fantastic capacities of fungi to solve problems. If intelligence is defined as a capacity to solve problems, definitely fungi and slime molds have intelligence.
So definitely all that inspiration coming from the sciences has given a big impetus to the idea of rights of nature in that now the invitation is to match those discoveries or those rememberings with the legal tools that would speak to those realizations with the appropriate words and the appropriate legal doctrines.
Host: A rich cauldron of epiphanies was brewing there in the Amazon – a blend of traditional Indigenous knowledge, paradigm-busting science and artistic alchemy.
César became convinced that the law needed to join the conversation. In 2022, with colleagues at NYU, he founded the More than Human Life programme – or MOTH.
MOTH is a collective not just of lawyers, but also Indigenous leaders, artists, judges, philosophers, writers, and storytellers – all working passionately to advance the legal standing of the more-than-human world.
CRG: I’ve never in my professional life seen such fascination, such longing for an idea. And to me, the question is why? Why is it that so many people feel drawn to this idea? One obvious answer is because we’re desperately looking for tools, for new ideas to defend the more-than-human world in the face of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. But what I hear underneath the fascination with the rights of nature is the need for new stories about our relationship with the more-than-human world, and law is a very powerful storytelling device.
Law is the language that we use to tell right from wrong, and to determine who counts as a citizen and as a subject of rights. And human rights is a particularly compelling story. In fact, I think it’s the most powerful story through which we have imagined and fought for a world where every human being is worthy of equal respect and consideration.
The problem with the traditional human rights story is that in our effort to reconnect with one another, we saw it as necessary to disconnect with the web of life. We anointed ourselves as the sole citizens of the Earth. We label every other form of life as aliens without rights, and we built moral and legal walls to keep them out. So as we become more attuned to the voices of the more-than-human world, we’re starting to respond with a different story. I call this the story of more-than-human rights.
Host: The ecologist and philosopher David Abram coined the phrase “more-than-human” to challenge the illusion that humans are separate from or above nature. This worldview recognises humankind as an integral part of nature, entangled in symbiotic interdependence with all life.
César saw the transformative potential for the law.
CRG: We need to conceive of human rights as being entangled with the more-than-human rights world, meaning that without a breathing and thriving planet, human rights cannot exist because we all depend on that web of life. So these are not two different enterprises.
The more-than-human rights story is actually a pretty old story. It’s a story of interconnection that is alive in Indigenous worldviews, but it’s also alive in the origin of our own Western words. One thing that I love about the origin of the word human in human rights is that originally it comes from the root, from the Indo-European root that means soil or earth. The same root gives us humility, humble and humbling. So human rights quite literally mean earthlings’ rights.
So my invitation with the more-than-human rights story, it tries to move the ethics of human rights in the direction of reciprocity, in the direction of interrelation with the more-than-human world. And it’s one that also is concerned with responsibilities as much as with rights.
Rights are oftentimes seen—and in the U.S. that tends to be the case—as kind of sovereign entitlements of the individual. What I’m suggesting, and many others have suggested, and definitely Indigenous Peoples like the Sarayakus have suggested, is that we see rights as being intrinsically tied to responsibilities, because in the end we are responsible for everyone’s well-being. And so that dance, that going back and forth between rights and responsibilities, is what I want to help reestablish through the story of more-than-human rights.
Host: After the break, we’ll hear about tools the MOTH program is deploying to put ideas into action.
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Host: The More than Human Life program taps into what founder César Rodríguez-Garavito calls a ‘planetary listening exercise’. Deep listening and innovative thinking are foundational. So is action.
CRG: We at MOTH learn by doing. We try to be resourceful. We come up with solutions that sometimes feel unfamiliar, even weird. Weirdness is something that we embrace because the weird today is the mainstream tomorrow.
Host: One idea for a more-than-human rights case came from another visit to that same Los Cedros cloud forest to which Ecuador’s Constitutional Court had granted rights. César made the journey with a group from the MOTH Collective, including the musician and sound recordist Cosmo Sheldrake. Naturally, a song was born.
[SONG OF THE CEDARS AUDIO PLAYING]
CRG: This song was composed in a matter of hours. We were there in the high camp of Los Cedros and we were accompanied by writer Robert Macfarlane, and also by our dear colleague and friend Giuliana Furci, a mycologist from Chile. And then what we decided is, when we saw that Rob was jotting down some lyrics, we added some words, and then Cosmo put music to it, and mixed some of the sounds of nature. And right there, we realized that the forest was a co-author of the song, that there was no way that could have come together without the forest being an active force in the composition of that song.
So we decided that we would do the logical thing—find a legal translation for that idea, that a forest is a co-author of art. And we filed, officially, a petition before the copywriter authority of Ecuador, asking that copywriter authority to acknowledge five co-authors of the song: the four of us and the Los Cedros Forest. And we’re saying that since the Constitutional Court of Ecuador had declared the forest as a subject of rights, it’s only logical that there should be consequences, including the possibility that the forest be a co-author of the song. If the copywriter authority denies our petition, we’re prepared to take it to court, to ask the court to extract the consequences of its own decision to declare the Los Cedros Forest a subject of rights.
Host: The MOTH project is also using its legal repertoire to protect sperm whales, in collaboration with scientists from Project CETI.
[WHALE AUDIO PLAYING]
Sperm whales talk with each other using intricate patterns of clicks called codas. Project CETI is conducting research to decode these codas, using advanced bioacoustic technology and artificial intelligence.
Although the idea that these tools could help us understand and perhaps even talk back to another species is compelling, the endeavor demands careful due diligence of the risks.
CRG: When we started to ask these questions of the legal implications of all this science and these findings, I realized that we really are on the cusp of an immense legal world. So if, as CETI has already established, sperm whales do have complex patterns of communication and even languages, that already, without any additional findings, allows us to make really powerful arguments for the enforcement of existing laws. And I’ll give you just one example.
Sperm whales’ lives depend on being able to hear each other. So the amount of ship traffic, the plans for deep sea mining, interrupts and masks the voices of sperm whales. So the clicks, they cannot hear each other’s calls, they cannot hear each other’s voices across the ocean, so this interrupts and disrupts their basic conditions of life.
And that is torture. We’re making an argument in the paper and then in the future legal actions that this amounts to torture and cruel punishment, and cruel treatment.
But this is all reliant on the science of the perceptual world of animals. Once we understand those perceptual worlds better, we’re better as humans to be able to articulate how our incessant activity interferes with their perceptual worlds, and how those interferences amount to basic violations of dignity and well-being.
Host: Knowledge that unlocks the perceptual worlds of other species obliges us to protect their rights during the research itself. It also invites us to make amends for the heedless harms caused by our less-than-human behavior. In other words, we need a code of ethics grounded in the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.
Our responsibilities would become even sharper if, in the future, we can actually begin to understand the content of their communications.
César imagines whales issuing restraining orders to humans: clean up your act, leave us alone, and give us safe migration routes free from your human cacophony.
CRG: There’s serious risks and challenges. I’ll just mention a few. One is the manipulation of animals for profit and other forms of exploitation, right? Tourism operators would love to have some sort of playback device that attracts the whales to the boats. And then imagine what you can do with other animals, and with elephants, poachers can use this technology.
The second one is that these studies can be very invasive. It can be seen as a form of surveillance, 24/7 surveillance.
Then, what’s going to happen with all this data? Since we human beings haven’t been very good at regulating circulation of our own data, imagine what can happen with the data of non-human animals.
Host: The “move fast and break things” approach to decoding animal communication is guaranteed to further disrupt and damage their precarious existence. Consequently, MOTH has worked with Project CETI to draw up new legal and ethical guardrails that prioritize the whales’ interests and minimize the risk of harms.
César has come full circle. He’s concluded it’s imperative to broaden human rights legislation to include the more-than-human world.
CRG: The international human rights architecture was born in 1948, with the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights. We recently celebrated the 75th anniversary of that architecture, and there was reason for celebration. But if you juxtapose that timeline with a timeline of what geologists call the great acceleration, the burning of fossil fuels and the explosion of human population and urbanization, it tracks very closely the same timeline.
And this is not to blame the human rights story, it was not human rights that destroyed the Earth, but it is to realize that the project is anthropocentric just as our technologies and economies were centered in human beings to the point of annihilating countless species.
And when you look at the technical tools, for example, of Constitutional law or IP, intellectual property law, you see that there’s very little space for the recognition of the agency and the intelligence of non-humans.
I think that this is such a complicated moment in human history because we’re getting a much more granular view of more-than-human life. At the same time as we’re unleashing the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. So holding those two realities is very, very difficult for human beings, emotionally, cognitively. And I think that this disconnect is unsustainable, that no human being can bear to witness the suffering of the more-than-human world while knowing so much about it.
One of the ways one can deal with this is to disconnect from all of that and, you know, just spend time on social media. The proposition coming from the more-than-human rights story is completely the opposite. Right? Because technology and our tools also have the capacity to reconnect us with the more-than-human world.
So the project here is to re-member, many of these words and many of these ideas have the prefix re, r-e, at because this in Latin means going back, to go back. But a reconnection and a remembering that hopefully imagines futures that reaffirm our belonging on Earth, and our embeddedness in the more-than-human world.
I want to be clear. We must continue to advance the rights of humans. Human rights is a project that needs to be sustained, especially now that it is under threat around the world. Yet how we treat each other is intimately related to how we treat the Earth. We’re capable of violence, discrimination and exclusion to the more-than-human world because we’re capable of it within our human societies. We’re capable of treating each other unjustly, even cruelly, because we learned to treat other forms of life that way.
As we continue the indispensable work of protecting the rights and dignity of all human beings, I want you to listen deeply to the voices of the more-than-human world that are becoming louder and louder. And I hope you’ll join this planetary listening exercise, and the effort to respond with stories of responsibility and reciprocity, to protect the more-than-human world.
Host: César Rodríguez-Garavito, “More-Than-Human-Life: Advancing Rights for the Natural World.”
What does it mean to be conscious — and who, exactly, gets to claim it?
In A World Appears, Michael Pollan takes readers on a sweeping exploration of one of science’s greatest mysteries: how subjective experience arises, and what it reveals about our place in the living world. Blending neuroscience, philosophy, plant biology, psychology, literature, and psychedelic science, Pollan traces the emerging edges of consciousness research, where long-held assumptions about mind, matter, and intelligence are being quietly upended.
The excerpt below invites us into one of the book’s most provocative frontiers: the growing body of research suggesting that intelligence — and perhaps even consciousness — may not belong exclusively to animals with brains. By exploring the work of plant neurobiologists who are studying cognition and problem-solving in plants, Pollan challenges us to reconsider the boundaries we draw between humans and the rest of nature and what those boundaries say about ourselves.
Are Neurons Overrated?
In Martin Amis’s 1995 novel, The Information, we meet a character who aspires to write The History of Increasing Humiliation, a treatise chronicling the gradual dethronement of humankind from its position at the center of the universe, beginning with Copernicus. “Every century we get smaller,” Amis writes. Next came Darwin, who brought us the humbling news that we are the product of the same natural laws that created nonhuman animals. In the last century, the formerly sharp lines separating humans from other animals—our monopolies on language, reasoning, toolmaking, culture, self-recognition, and consciousness—have been blurred, one after another, as science has granted these capabilities to our fellow animals.
Calvo and his colleagues in plant neurobiology are writing the next chapter in “The History of Increasing Humiliation.” Their project entails breaking down the walls between the kingdoms of plants and animals, and it is proceeding not only experiment by experiment but also term by term, beginning with intelligence and culminating with consciousness, that supposed pinnacle of what it means to be human.
Calvo is more equivocal on the question of plant consciousness than his Italian colleague Stefano Mancuso. A plant scientist at the University of Florence, Mancuso is perhaps the field’s most impassioned spokesman for the plant point of view. A slight, bearded Calabrian in his sixties, he comes across more like a humanities professor than a scientist. His somewhat grandly named International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, a few miles outside Florence, occupies a modest suite of labs and offices in a low-slung modern building on campus. Here, a handful of collaborators and graduate students perform the experiments Mancuso dreams up to test the intelligence and possible consciousness of plants.
When he gave me a tour of the labs a few years ago, he showed me maize plants, grown under lights, that were being trained to ignore shadows; a poplar sapling hooked up to a galvanometer to measure its electrical response to environmental stressors; and a chamber in which a PTR-TOF—an advanced type of mass spectrometer—continuously reads all the volatile compounds emitted by a succession of plants, from poplars and tobacco plants to peppers and olive trees. Plants emit volatile chemicals for a range of purposes: to signal distress, to alert neighboring plants to threats, to thwart or poison herbivores, and possibly even to soothe themselves (many plants emit ethylene, an anesthetic gas, for reasons not well understood).
“We are making a dictionary of each species’ chemical vocabulary,” Mancuso explained. He estimates that a plant has three thousand molecules in its vocabulary, while, he pointed out with a smile, “the average student has only seven hundred words.”
When I asked Mancuso for an example of an experiment that unequivocally demonstrates plant intelligence, he sent me an astonishing video tracking the root of a corn plant as it navigated a maze where a quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer had been hidden in a far corner.
“This is the standard way to measure intelligence in animals,” he said. “You put a mouse in a maze and measure the time it takes to find the cheese or the number of wrong decisions taken. Here, I prepared a maze adapted for roots with a cheese equivalent—ammonium nitrate.”
I clicked open the video and watched as the white tip of the plant’s taproot wormed its way down through the maze, turning this way, then that, finding the most direct path to the prize.
“If the root were a mouse or a dog or you,” Mancuso told me, “there would be no doubt that you or the dog or the mouse are intelligent.”
Early in our conversations, I asked Mancuso to define intelligence.
“I define it very simply,” he said. “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.”
This is a basic biological function, Mancuso believes, found throughout the natural world, though there is no reason to believe it should manifest the same way in plants as it does in people. As with reproduction, another basic biological function, different species have hit on very different ways to achieve the same result. Consciousness, he believes, is no different: a basic biological function that can take many different forms.
In place of a brain, Mancuso explained, what we should be “looking for [in plants] is a distributed sort of intelligence, as we see in the swarming of birds.” In a flock, each bird has to follow only a few simple rules, such as maintaining a prescribed distance from its neighbor, yet the collective effect of a great many birds executing a simple algorithm is a complex and supremely well-coordinated behavior. Mancuso’s hypothesis is that something similar is at work in plants, with their thousands of root tips playing the role of the individual birds—gathering and assessing information from the environment and responding in local but coordinated ways that benefit the entire organism.
The more I read about roots, the brainier they seemed. In addition to sensing gravity, moisture, light, pressure, and hardness, root tips can also sense volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, microbes, various toxins, and chemical signals from neighboring plants and fungi. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it. They will seek out a buried pipe through which water is flowing, even if the exterior of the pipe is dry, suggesting that they can somehow “hear” the sound of flowing water. Roots can tell whether those nearby are self or other and, if other, kin or stranger. Normally, plants compete for root space with other plants, but when researchers put four closely related Great Lakes sea rockets (Cakile edentula) in the same pot, the plants curbed their usual competitive behavior, sharing territory rather than seeking to take it over.
Somehow, plants gather all this information about their environment and then “decide”—some scientists deploy the scare quotes, indicating metaphor at work; others drop them—in precisely what direction to deploy their roots or leaves. Once the definition of behavior expands to include such things as a shift in the trajectory of a root, a reallocation of resources, and the emission of a powerful chemical (actions either invisible to an animal or so slow as to be imperceptible), plants begin to look like much more active agents, responding to environmental cues in ways subtler or more flexible than the word instinct would suggest. To plant neurobiologists, the intelligence exhibited by plants in the face of so many different and constantly shifting environmental variables indicates that something more than genetics is driving their behavior—something more like a mind. Yet in the absence of a nervous system, how can that possibly be?
“Neurons perhaps are overrated,” Mancuso told me. “They’re really just excitable cells.” Plants have their own excitable cells, many of them in a region just behind the root tip. Here, Mancuso and his frequent collaborator, František Baluška, a cell biologist and plant physiologist at the University of Bonn, have detected unusually high levels of electrical activity and oxygen consumption, as we might find in neurons. In a series of papers, they’ve hypothesized that this so-called transition zone may be the locus of the “root brain” first proposed by Darwin. (The idea remains unproven and controversial.)
That plants do all they do without brains—what Scottish plant neurobiologist Anthony Trewavas calls their “mindless mastery”—raises questions about how our brains do what they do. When I asked Mancuso about memory in plants, which his laboratory has demonstrated through experiments with Mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant of Gagliano’s study, he speculated about the role of calcium channels and bioelectric fields. He reminded me that mystery still surrounds the question of where and how memories are stored in human brains. “It could be the same sort of machinery.”
The hypothesis that intelligent behavior in plants may emerge from a distributed network of cells exchanging signals might sound far-fetched, but the theory that intelligence, or consciousness, emerges from a distributed network of neurons is not so different. Most neuroscientists would agree that brains, when considered as wholes, function as command centers for most animals, but within the brain, there is no command post; rather, one finds a leaderless network. So the sense we get when we try to imagine what might govern a plant—the sense that there is no there there, no wizard behind the curtain pulling the levers—may apply equally well to our brains. The singular self that we experience as real and imagine to be located somewhere behind our eyes, deep inside our skull, actually has no known physical address in our gray matter.
Posted with permission from A World Appears by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press, 2026).
Plants make up over 80% of life on earth. No animal would exist without plants’ ultimate magic trick of turning sunlight into food. Today, scientists are unearthing a wild, weird world of vegetal genius. But how can we truly understand beings so radically different from ourselves? We consider the emerging science of plants from the vantage points of philosophy and ethics, with Harvard scholar Rachael Petersen.
This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.
Featuring
Rachael Petersen, MDiv, Former Program Lead for Harvard’s Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative, an interdisciplinary exploration into how cutting-edge science on plants is challenging our notions of mind and matter, previously worked for a decade in environmental policy, with expertise in climate mitigation, forest protection, and Indigenous rights, conducting fieldwork in the Amazon, Borneo, and Arctic Canada. She served as Senior Advisor to National Geographic Society and founding Deputy Director of Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
Producer: Cathy Edwards
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey (Host): If you sit patiently and watch the parasitic vine called “dodder,” you won’t see it grow. To animal eyes, it looks still and immobile.
But speed things up with time-lapse photography, and it’s an action movie. The vine seems to sniff the air to locate its host, then lunge toward it, snake-like. It’s as if it’s seeking it out – as if it’s making conscious choices.
The roots of the word “intelligence” come from Latin: “to choose between.” Is this vine’s apparently purposeful action just the illusion of intelligence? Or does altering the playback speed give us a window into vegetable time – into perceiving this plant’s intelligence, even consciousness, in action?
Over 2,000 years ago, the iconic Greek philosopher Aristotle posited a “hierarchy of living beings” with humans at the top, and plants near the bottom. The botanical legacy of this idea has circulated down through the centuries, mingling with Christian theology, to deeply inform Western science and philosophy.
It’s by no means a universal worldview though. Most indigenous and traditional land-based cultures have long revered plants as valued kin and teachers. And in recent decades, mounting evidence is revealing mind-bending examples of plant ingenuity. Aristotle’s idea of plants as lower beings is starting to wither.
Rachael Petersen (RP): For centuries, Western science has cast plants as the inert backdrop of human drama. They are silent, passive, inert. Plants, many of us have been told, lacking a brain or a nervous system, are relegated to the realm of the unconscious, what Aristotle deemed a kind of defective animal. But a growing body of research is challenging that narrative.
Host: As the timelapse of the dodder vine illustrates, what we observe is constrained by our own limitations and biases. Scientific pursuit begs philosophical inquiry. What do we really know about plants? How do we know? Are we even asking the right questions? And if plants are conscious, what are the ethical implications?
These are questions that Rachael Petersen has been exploring in an initiative called “Thinking with Plants and Fungi”. She spoke at a Bioneers conference.
RP: So what if plants were not mere furniture for the theater of life, but actors in their own right, making decisions, responding, perceiving and communicating?
Recent scientific discoveries have revealed these astonishing capabilities of plants. They are now making mainstream notions that years ago were preposterous, which is to say that plants are behaving, communicating, cooperating in ways that are previously unimaginable.
I think it’s important to say, that this research in many cases resonates with ancient wisdom that has been safeguarded by Indigenous spiritual and folk traditions throughout the world—Yup, [APPLAUSE] offering an opportunity for those of us in sort of Western scientific and philosophical positions to reflect on the biases of our ways of knowing.
I just got back from the forests of British Columbia, and was chatting with a hereditary chief there, and he says, “You call this science, we just call it common sense.”
Host: Author Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi botanist. In her best-selling book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” she highlights the esteemed status of plants in Indigenous cultures. She suggests that to harvest these botanical relatives, the honorable protocol is to introduce ourselves, ask permission, and give thanks for what they give us. According to this worldview, humans are interwoven with plants in an intricate tapestry of reciprocal relationships.
And over the past few decades a maverick vanguard of scientists has begun to re-evaluate our human relationship with plants. Growing evidence points to plants’ mind-blowing intelligence, and the distinct possibility they may be sentient.
RP: So we know now that plants communicate. When under attack by herbivores, many plants emit chemical distress signals that recruit insects to come and neutralize their enemies, what scientists poetically call plant bodyguards.
Plants also recognize their kin. As the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has popularized, mother trees nourish their offspring through vast underground mycorrhizal networks, sending sugars and nutrients to shaded seedlings to ensure their survival.
Plants can be said to learn and remember. Monica Gagliano has done these incredible experiments with the sensitive plant. When you touch them, they close immediately, so they’re the darling children of plant science because you can watch them react – and she has done these experiments where she has shown that they can remember. They learn associatively to identify threats, and that that memory lasts for a long time, sometimes longer than an animal study, so really remarkable.
Host: These kinds of experiments are sometimes associated with a movement called “plant neurobiology.” That name is provocative. Plants don’t have neurons. But they do transmit chemical and electrical signals throughout their cells, as they sense and respond to the world around them. Is that similar to neural processes in animal brains? And if so, might plant consciousness arise without neurons?
It’s a controversial field. Most scientists still contend that plant responses are automatic, mechanically hardwired by evolution.
Here, things get decidedly philosophical.
RP: These discoveries and how we interpret them are not only reshaping our understanding of plants, but they are challenging the long-standing categories we have used to make sense of life itself, determining who or what is conscious, isn’t just a simple scientific task. It is a profound philosophical and anthropological question.
Questions that have haunted philosophy for millennia, you know, what is mind. How far does it extend? And most fundamentally, is consciousness just some sort of byproduct of our fancy neuronal wiring? Or is consciousness perhaps the very substrate of materiality, of reality itself?
Host: Consciousness is notoriously hard to pin down. In a famous essay, philosopher Thomas Nagel asked ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ It’s tough for us to imagine a life of flying, hanging upside down, and navigating by sound. But even if we can’t experience a bat’s inner world, that doesn’t mean they’re not conscious. And the more we learn about other-than-human animals, the clearer it becomes that consciousness extends way beyond humans.
So what about plants? They have their own versions of our senses, plus many more. They communicate, solve problems, and remember; but without a brain. If it’s hard to conceive of a bat’s inner world, how much harder is it to imagine a blackberry’s?
Rachael is convinced that engaging with plants on their own terms requires more than science alone – which is why her Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative found a home in the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. She spoke with Bioneers producer JP Harpignies.
RP: People say, at a divinity school, why would you be thinking about plants and fungi at a divinity school? And my response to that is typically the questions that the science is provoking, namely what is the nature of mind, how far does it extend, is matter truly inanimate, as many Western thinkers have told us, that really gets to the core of questions at the heart of many religions, which is to say: What is the nature of reality? What do we owe one another? Who do we even consider to be one another? So I think in some ways we’re really fortunate to be a divinity school where we’re able to kind of flirt with these different tools we have at our disposal, from theology, and philosophy, and ethics, to really get at this question from a 360-degree perspective.
Host: Whose idea was it to use the terminology thinking with plants and fungi? That’s an unusual construction, I think.
RP: So that phrase comes originally from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and his anthropological fieldwork, his ethnographic fieldwork, he was looking at the kind of relationship between the local groups he was studying and the particular animals that were really important for them to eat, both kind of culturally, spiritually. And he said these particular animals aren’t just good to eat, they’re good to think with.
So he was kind of looking at the ways in which people’s relationships with animals wasn’t necessarily just material or even nutritional, there was something happening in the way that people were forming relationships with these animals. They’re good to think with, not just good to eat with.
And so I sort of borrowed that phrase from him in a nod towards, you know, we’re not thinking about plants, we’re not thinking for plants, we’re not thinking on behalf of plants, we’re trying to think with them; we’re trying to revitalize thought itself by really decentering the human.
But this actually started very humbly three years ago. A colleague of mine and a friend, Natalia Schwein, she’s a PhD candidate at Harvard, and an herbalist as well. She and I were introduced and we just decided to start a reading group, and we started with books like Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano, and we were really overwhelmed by interest. We called it the plant consciousness reading group. And you would think at a place like Harvard, that would, you know, provoke a lot of eye rolling. But we had evolutionary ecologists there, we had primatologists there, we had artists there, we had students from the Divinity School there. At the time, David Abram was a scholar in residence, so he joined, Michael Pollan joined. And it was really a vibrant conversation and one people were hungry to have.
A field trip organized by TWPF. Left: Mark Worthing and Britton Jacob-Schram of Awi’nakola take the researchers on a hike through a local forest, teaching about native plant knowledge along the path. Photo by Ashley Zigman. Right: Harvard students inspect the moss and flowers on a fallen tree in the old-growth forest in Goldstream Park in Victoria, British Columbia. Photo by Jeffrey Blackwell.
In part, what I was noticing was a lot of people in that conversation were often finding themselves in positions of having a deep intuitive relationship with plants in some way, or feeling plants were teachers or kin. And I think many of them wanted to make sense of that, and to try to revitalize frameworks that could help them hold this new-found and deepening relationship they had to the more-than-human world.
And I do think science is one way. It’s one door you can open into awe. It’s not the only door, but I think we found, in that group, the more we kind of interrogated the science, the more we unfolded all these questions that people cared about in terms of ethics and philosophy and religion.
Host: Rachael recognized these deep yearnings. She herself first became intrigued about an altered approach to understanding plants after the many heart-breaking years she spent working to protect nature.
RP: I got my start working in environmental policy in the D.C. world. At a pretty young age in college, I became a militant atheist humanist who was obsessed with the environmental crisis and in D.C., joined this incredible project called Global Forest Watch where we were monitoring deforestation in real time using satellite imagery and AI, and I thought I’m going to—I’m going to help save the forests, if I could just see in real time painful pixel by pixel where they’re being cut down, finally we can work with governments and companies, and local communities and journalists to raise the alarm and change something.
And I guess two things happened. One is that from my perspective, at least at the time, there was very little good news. It’s very painful to watch the world die in real time from space and consistently see, you know, governments and companies failing in their promises to reduce deforestation.
Also, what I found kind of strange at the time – I think this is changing quite a bit now – but even though I had this sense that all of us who were working on forest conservation had a deep connection with nature, deep personal connection, no one ever talked about it. Right? And there’s an interesting sort of moral injury, I think, at play when you have this deep personal connection to the living world and to ecosystems, and yet you totally bifurcate yourself when you go to work. And I found that to be an increasingly painful situation to be in.
And I think when you’re a kind of rationalist atheist humanist, you’re fighting the good fight and losing it consistently, I think despair starts to feel like a very rational position. So, yeah, I suffered quite a bit of depression and burnout and had a kind of last-ditch effort to address that through enrolling in a clinical trial for depression, using psychedelics at Johns Hopkins. So, you know, thank you mushrooms.
And part of that experience really felt like a religious conversion. It felt like, yeah, a conversion from being a materialist, rationalist atheist humanist to being someone who had more capacious metaphysical commitments. And that sort of led me down this path of being curious about the nature of reality and being curious about these landscapes that I love so dearly, and yet I felt like I hadn’t really gotten to know on their own terms.
Host: And did plants come up in the experience, in the mushroom experience, or…?
RP: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I processed a lot of eco grief in my—In my experience, that was a huge theme, sort of mourning and also feeling reassured by the very beings, the plants, that I felt like were being destroyed.
Host: So to use a cliché, you sort of came into contact with plant intelligence on some level, or…
RP: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I don’t think people need to have those experiences, per se. My friend Natalia, who I mentioned, who helped co-found this initiative, you know, she’s an herbalist and she always says psychedelic plants are the ones who are screaming at us, but we can learn to hear the voices of the quieter plants as well.
Host: After the break, we’ll hear how this transformative experience gave Rachael Petersen new eyes with which to look at plants and those who study them.
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After realizing that purely rationalist approaches to plants didn’t yield sufficient answers, Rachael Petersen started to search elsewhere. Many belief systems do encourage empathy with plants. That approach is generally anathema to the dispassionate methodologies of Western science. But Rachael did find historical exceptions.
RP: I’m constantly looking for forgotten ancestors in Western science because we’ve been told that it’s a horrible tradition, it’s horrible to nature, but there are people who had different ways about how to do it. And the German polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he had this beautiful phrase. He described zarte empirie, which meant delicate empiricism. But I like to translate it as tender empiricism. So he described science as a form of tenderness, where you make yourself radically subjected to the knowledge of the other.
Host: As well as being a botanist, Goethe was a poet, novelist, and philosopher. Perhaps it was this artistic and holistic perspective that elicited his tenderness towards the subjects of his scientific study.
This wasn’t the prevalent approach at the time – nor today. The Scientific Method strives to be objective, even though true objectivity is impossible. And reductionist approaches break the whole into parts and reduce all phenomena, including consciousness, to the mechanical workings of basic physical components.
Another historical figure pushing against these ideas was the 19th century German scientist, Gustav Fechner.
RP: He actually first trained as a physician, and then he decided to become a physicist and a psychologist. In his early days, he was studying, okay, if I, you know—if I stimulate your skin, like how long will it take for you to feel a reaction? So sort of what is the relationship between outer and inner, which is a theme that will continue in his work, but he was looking at that mathematically and scientifically.
But in his journals, in his diaries, you see that he is burning out, he’s becoming disillusioned with reductive materialism. He had read a lot of German idealism and what’s called Naturphilosophie in his young days and fell in love with this kind of sweeping view of science as being artistic and spiritual.
And as reductive materialism is on the rise in Germany, he’s becoming more and more depressed. So he has this breakdown. He actually goes blind for three years, doesn’t leave his house. He has these custom goggles made out of metal, crafted for his eyes because he can’t stand the feeling of a blindfold. And one day he walks out into his garden, and he takes off this blindfold, and he claims he saw the soul of a plant, and that this experience was healing for him. He got his sight back, and he sits down in 1848 to pen this book, Nanna, or On the Soul-Life of Plants, which I translated. It had not been translated into English before. And it’s a beautiful sweeping love letter to plants, arguing that they have souls. If you look at the way he uses the word soul, it tracks onto how we might use consciousness today.
And I became very interested in him because he’s trying to defend this notion of soul at a time when the sciences are really trying to reduce everything to chemicals and electrical signals. And plants, for him, were a gateway drug into a panpsychist understanding of the world as kind of enchanted and ensouled.
You know, there’s a lot of people who tell this very…partial story about Western science and Western philosophy, that it is violent and bad towards nature. You know, science is a way to torture nature and under duress to get her to reveal her secrets. Absolutely, Western science has not been great in terms of treating nature as something to be revered.
But I’m really interested in finding these little cracks where the light gets in, these people who were disparaged in their day and forgotten, but who show us how to resist the dominant modes of thought at the time, which is something I think we need to learn from.
Host: Rachael Petersen refers to this as “re-weirding” the Western canon: finding scientific ancestors who inspire different ways of thinking about plants and our relationship with them. Indeed, Charles Darwin himself questioned the idea that plants are inanimate.
Today, scientists investigating sentience in plants are regarded as controversial outliers.
One such contemporary outlier is Paco Calvo, who directs the Minimal Intelligence – or MINTlab in Spain. He looks for evidence of plant consciousness by using timelapse photography and electrical sensors.
Observing bean plants growing up a pole, he found a spike in electrical activity when the plant lunges for the pole – just as neurons use electricity to transmit information in a human brain. Interpreting this as a sign of possible sentience, however, has proved contentious.
RP: It still remains controversial. In fact, there was an article published in a scientific journal that was pushing back against the scientist Paco Calvo in Spain and his work in the MintLab. And the rhetoric they were using in that article was like […] science that is claiming that plants are intelligent or conscious is finding its way into mainstream articles, and this could…you know, kind of influence potential science—students of science in the wrong way. And I look at the vehemence of that rhetoric and it’s quite pronounced, and it makes me curious. Is this really about an issue around replicability or rigor, or is there something else going on?
Host: Paradigms die hard. Yet this is how science operates: scientists expect their work to be scrutinized and challenged. Paco Calvo himself agrees we need “eternal vigilance” when drawing analogies between plants and animals, to avoid getting “carried away by their implications.”
Rachael believes there’s another reason to be cautious when leaning into these analogies.
RP: One issue that I have with this whole plant neurobiology conversation is that the whole kind of argument of the science is to say that plants don’t require a nervous system to be conscious. Right? But they call themselves neurobiology. And a lot of their experiments, they’re often pointing out the similarities between plants and animals by saying, look, plants have the same neurotransmitters as animals do.
And I guess what I’m driving at is this plant neurobiology movement is doing kind of what the animal studies movement did in trying to make animals as similar to humans as we possibly can in order to afford them moral considerability. Right? So the more like me you are, the more morally I will consider you to be worthwhile.
And I’m more interested – and this is why I’m obsessed with Fechner, he has this beautiful line, “perhaps it is not what I share with another person that gives them a soul, but what I don’t share that gives them a soul”. And I think ….If you have a moral heuristic that’s based on sameness – are you similar to me – that can create problems. But I think what’s so beautiful about plants is they invite us into a relationship premised on difference, potentially. Maybe they’re just so frickin’ weird and different that that in and of itself is a reason to extend them moral considerability. And it certainly is a reason to have awe and humility when looking at them.
Host: It requires daring leaps of imagination to comprehend these ineffable other lives, and it also requires humility. To truly value plants, we may need to tackle a deeply-held bias: our human supremacy complex.
RP: There is this throughline from Abrahamic religions informed by certain readings of Genesis that said God created Earth for our—you know, it is our dominion, it is for our use. And then you have the development many centuries later in what’s known as scholasticism where you have all these Medieval scholars who were reading Aristotle for the first time, who also had this idea that there’s a typology of souls with human being at the top, and they sort of inflect that with Christianity. And that later infuses the scientific revolution. And there’s this throughline that humans are at the top in terms of this ladder that leads to God, this idea that we are more perfect or more capable of becoming perfect than other beings – animals and certainly plants.
Some people perceive that by elevating plants, we are demoting the human. Right? So there’s this kind of reactionary thing that’s saying this conversation around the intelligence of nature is just another effort to make us feel bad about being human. And I do think in this conversation around the Anthropocene and climate change, there certainly has been a message that to be human is bad because look at what we’ve done to the planet.
I actually don’t think that by elevating the intelligence of nature we’re demoting the intelligence of the human by any means. I think that the invitation here is one of awe, it’s one of wonder, and I think there can even be a reflexive move where we say, wow, how cool is it to be human, that we can even sit here and have this conversation about the intelligence of nature.
And I hope that people see that by attending to plants, by attending to their unique intelligence and forms of sentience even, that doesn’t mean we have to disavow the human or say to be human is bad. It just means that we’re inviting everyone into a more kind of weird and multiple form of reality, a reality that’s peopled by more than just people.
Host: Rachael Petersen, “What if Plants are Conscious?”
Photo: Lakeview Middle School in Watsonville, CA, surrounded by farmsthat use pesticides
At a Pesticide Reality Tour last May, Dr. Ann Lopez stood next to legendary farmworker activist Dolores Huerta, Lopez’s inspiration for her work to elevate the lives of farmworkers. Dolores Huerta, ever the activist at age 95, was there to support the Campaign for Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) co-founded by Lopez to eliminate the exposure to toxic pesticides that farmworkers endure with devastating regularity.
Seventy percent of the population of the farming community of Watsonville, CA, where the rally was held, is Latinx, many of whom work in the local berry fields in the Pajaro Valley that straddles the Santa Cruz and Monterey County line. In this agricultural region, like many others, pesticides are routinely sprayed around schools and homes. Each year, one million pounds of pesticides are applied to farmland in Santa Cruz County, 67% of which are toxic fumigants that become airborne and can travel for miles.
One of these pesticides, chloropicrin, is banned or restricted in Europe. The chemical is injected into the soil as a sterilizing fumigant before planting a crop. In the First World War, it was used as a poison gas and recently there have been allegations that it is being used by the Russians in the war against Ukraine.
The European Union’s Food Safety Authority has established that chloropicrin is toxic when inhaled and causes severe eye, skin, and respiratory irritation. Some studies have indicated that it could also cause DNA damage.
Lopez, a biologist turned farmworker advocate, addressed the gathering about the dangers of pesticides with a tone of indignation, “I’m sick and tired of meeting families that have at least one kid that has some anomaly that will probably affect them for life including brain cancer, bone cancer, ADHD, and learning disabilities. It was shocking to go house-to-house and meet these families and almost everyone has some child that has one of the serious anomalies…. Mothers sent me pictures of their children just before they died.”
Lopez’s ire is not solely based on anecdotal evidence. The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has identified 13 pesticides correlated to the onset of childhood cancer between birth and 5 years old, when the mother lives within 2.5 miles of pesticide application while pregnant.
Dr. Lopez pointed to the fact that Latinx school children are 3.2 times more likely than white students to attend schools with high exposure to hazardous pesticides as an example of environmental racism. Children and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of these agricultural toxins.
Ernestina Solorio has been working in the farm fields since 1993, even when she was pregnant with her two youngest children who have been diagnosed with ADHD, have learning problems and suffer from depression. Holding back tears as she addressed the CORA rally in Spanish, Solorio said, “Both of them are constantly going to medical appointments and counselors and psychologists. It is very difficult to see that they are not getting better or making any progress. If I had known about the chemicals in the field, I would have chosen not to work there. The difficult thing for me is that my lack of knowledge now results in my kids’ suffering. My 18 year old asks why he can’t be normal. The owner of these fields should have some conscience and think about the kids and how much they suffer… Driscoll’s should have some conscience and change those farms to organic for the kids and the farmworkers and the community.”
The CORA campaign is primarily targeting Driscoll’s, a family owned company that began in the early 1900’s in Watsonville and is now the largest berry grower in the world with farms in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Baja California, Chile, and Peru. CORA is promoting organic and regenerative farming as the remedy to the tragedy of farmworker families’ exposure to toxic pesticides that destroy health and even take lives. Fifteen to twenty percent of Driscoll’s production is currently organic, however, 9 of the 11 schools in Pajaro Valley are adjacent to conventional farms that use toxic pesticides and the 2 others are only a couple of blocks away from farms that use chemical sprays.
Driscoll’s position is that they are in full compliance with state and federal pesticides laws. But evidence is mounting that those laws are woefully insufficient to protect the public’s health. Ultimately, CORA wants to see the more than 25,000 acres of farmland in the Pajaro Valley farmed organically. In the short term, their campaign is focused on having the fields near homes and schools converted to organic farms in order to protect the health of children and the wider community.
What rational sense does it make to spray food with poison? And yet that is the prevailing method in which food is grown commercially with the exception of a small percent of crops that are grown organically. Chemical pesticides (the suffix “cide” means killer) leave residues on foods that we consume daily. The USDA found that more than 75 percent of fruits and over 50 percent of vegetables contain pesticide residues.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determines what level of those pesticide residues are “safe.” The standard they use is that the pesticide will not cause “unreasonable adverse effects to humans or the environment.” Determination on whether a pesticide meets that standard is based on research done by the same chemical companies seeking approval for their products. The registration process can take 6 to 9 years, at a cost of millions of dollars. So, companies have substantial incentives to get their products approved and are assisted by a cadre of lobbyists.
According to the Environment Maryland Policy and Research Center, “Big agribusiness corporations have invested millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying to defend agricultural practices that pollute America’s rivers, lakes and ocean waters and to defeat common-sense measures to clean up our waterways.”
Over the years, some government agencies, such as the Public Health Service and Fish and Wildlife have found evidence that pesticides negatively affect human health. After the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal book ,Silent Spring, which sounded the alarm on the harms of pesticides, President John F. Kennedy directed the President’s Science Advisory Committee to investigate. The Committee found that pesticides cause environmental contamination and are potentially dangerous to other living organisms, including humans.
Prior to 1962, the government regulated pesticides mainly to verify that chemical preparations were effective, and were less concerned with issues of safety. But with the publishing of Silent Spring, and with support from the Kennedy administration, legislative action to evaluate pesticide safety began. Numerous laws have passed regulating pesticides since then, but do they go far enough to ensure public and environmental health and safety?
Approximately 800 chemicals are approved for agricultural use currently. More than 8 billion pounds of pesticides are used globally every year with the U.S accounting for roughly 11 percent, or more than one billion pounds despite evidence of their association with cancer, and neurological and pulmonary diseases. The soils of 80% of global farms contain pesticide residues. A report from Systemiq titled “Invisible Ingredients: Tackling Toxic Chemicals in the Food System” estimates that the global healthcare cost due to pesticide exposure is $816 billion.
Why, if the EPA’s standard of “unreasonable adverse effects” is being enforced, has
Bayer/Monsanto had to pay out $11 billion dollars in settlements because the courts determined that the herbicide Roundup caused cancer (Bayer still faces another 60 to 70 thousand more Roundup lawsuits)? Why have 25 countries banned or restricted Roundup? And why, if their product is safe, has Syngenta paid $187.5 million in 2021 to settle claims linking its herbicide paraquat to Parkinson’s disease? This is by no means a comprehensive list, just prominent examples that lead one to question the EPA’s rigor in adhering to its own standard.
Even though strong evidence that harm to environmental and human health from pesticides exists, can a case be made that the benefits of pesticide use outweigh the risks? The argument is that pesticides protect crops from damage and disease and without them we would not have a stable food supply. But data from The Rodale Institute contradicts that argument. Rodale has conducted 40-year side-by-side commodity grain trails comparing organic production to conventional (chemical) farming. The research revealed that, “Organic systems produce yields of cash crops equal to conventional systems. However, in extreme weather conditions, such as drought, the organic plots sustained their yields while the conventional plots declined. Overall, organic corn yields have been 31 percent higher than conventional production in drought years.”
How Did Pesticides Become Acceptable?
By some accounts, pesticides have been used for thousands of years. There is evidence that sulphur was used to control pests in ancient Sumeria 4500 years ago, obtained by heating up the mineral pyrite, an iron sulfide, to release the sulphur. Mercury and arsenic salts were introduced later, and the insecticidal properties of chrysanthemum flower extracts (pyrethrum) were discovered around 2000 years ago. As industrialization progressed, much of the source chemicals were waste products from mining and manufacturing such as arsenic, mercury, sulphonic acid and lead in the forms of dusts, granules and sprays. Even some fertilizers were made from industrial waste. By the late 1800s through the early 20th century, kerosene was used for controlling pests like fruit flies, leafhoppers on farms and fleas on pets in homes. Lead arsenate and calcium arsenate were widely used on larger farms by 1900, and were still in wide use till the 1940s and not banned by FDA until 1988. Needless to say, those make up a highly toxic arsenal, even more hazardous than most modern chemicals.
In the latter part of the 19th Century, American farmers experienced an atypically high pressure from pests. This created an opportunity for chemical companies to push their products as scientific breakthroughs that were superior to biological controls and nature-based strategies.
But in the 1890s, a number of poisonings led to opposition to these substances. In 1903, Great Britain set limits for residues in food and drink. American chemical companies fought regulation and for 60 years, US regulators failed to support limits even though dozens of reports of serious food poisonings were reported in both US and Europe.
Organic farming pioneer, Will Allen, in his comprehensive book War on Bugs, tells the story of the evolution of pesticides and how the public came to accept them with the help of an unlikely player, popular children’s book author, Dr. Seuss.
Illustration by Dr. Seuess appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1928
In the early 1900s, nearly 40 percent of Americans were farmers (today that number is less than 2%). Farm journals, at that time, were influential sources of information read by a large portion of the population and even used in some schools as reading material. The majority of advertisers in those journals were chemical companies. So the journals were eager to tout the benefits of the products that provided their main income stream while minimizing their toxic impacts.
By the 1920s, chemical companies, seeking ways to expand their markets into households, promoted the concept of “chemical cleanliness” to rid the home of insects and rodents. In 1928, cartoonist Theodore Geisel, was hired by Standard Oil to promote its pesticide Flit. Geisel later gained fame under the pen name Dr. Seuss, as the author of the loveable and whimsical children’s books such as The Cat in The Hat, Green Eggs and Ham and many others. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Geisel’s humorous advertisements made Flit a household name. Geisel’s cartoons, which appeared in thousands of magazines and newspapers, were, in fact, advertisements promoting the pesticide. One such cartoon showed a family scene with the caption: “Don’t worry Papa, Willie swallowed a bug, so I’m having him gargle with Flit.” Standard Oil’s advertising campaign was successful in convincing the American public to embrace pesticides as safe and a normal part of homelife. In War on Bugs, Allen pulled no punches assigning culpability to Geisel, “Seuss helped Americans become friendly with poisons.”
Beating Swords into Plowshares: Wartime Chemicals Repurposed for Agriculture
With America’s entry into World War II, there was a sudden demand to supply the military with a wide variety of critical needs. Chemical companies and other industries retooled factories producing peacetime products to supply the materials needed for war. Everything from synthetic rubber and plastics to explosives and pesticides. American soldiers were equipped with an individual supply of DDT for delousing, and killing bed bugs and malaria carrying insects. DDT was acclaimed for its role in controlling a typhus outbreak during World War II in Naples, Italy when American forces deloused a million Italians with DDT powder.
Post war, companies such as Dow, DuPont, Standard Oil, Monsanto and others transitioned their factories back to products for families, farms, and industry. Ammonium nitrate, used extensively during the war to make bombs, was converted into nitrogen fertilizer. Nerve gas developed by the Nazis became the basis for many pesticides.
As the chemical industry moved into the post war boom era, they were riding high in both profits and public approval, widely admired for the scientific breakthrough that led to an era of “better living through chemistry” thanks to the “miracles of science” (a couple of advertising slogans promoted by Dupont).
Challenged by an Unlikely Antagonist
But the industry’s prosperity and favorable reputation would face a serious challenge from an introverted marine biologist and best-selling author known for her lyrical nature writing.
In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson revealed the shadow side of the so-called “miracles of science” by describing how the widespread, indiscriminate use of pesticides entered the food chain. With a particular focus on DDT, she explained how it was poisoning ecosystems and killing fish, birds and insects as it persisted in the environment long term and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage.
Carson, deeply distraught by how man’s war against nature was upsetting the ecological balance with grave, long-term effects, wrote, “Intoxicated by his own power, mankind seems to be farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of nature and of the world.”
An organized campaign by the chemical industry called Carson a hysterical woman (the use of “woman,” as well as “hysterical,” was also meant to be a discrediting pejorative by the chauvinistic, male-dominated science world).
Silent Spring, which has sold over 2 million copies and has been translated into 16 languages, awakened public environmental consciousness and led to a domestic ban of DDT. Carson’s book is not only credited with starting a movement to regulate pesticides, it is widely acknowledged, along with the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that killed thousands of wildlife and polluted 35 miles of coastline, as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was formed. The NGO, National Resources Defense Council, also founded the same year, has been heavily involved in legal battles to restrict harmful pesticide use.
The Green Revolution: Some Promise, but Ultimately a Flawed System
Despite the momentum to create a sane and safe approach to agrochemical use, a countervailing movement had been gaining favor around the same time. The high-yielding hybrid seeds of the Green Revolution came with the promise of “feeding the world.” Credited with saving one billion lives from starvation, Norman Borlaug, acknowledged as the “Father of the Green Revolution,” was given the Nobel Peace Prize. But the overlooked caveat of Green Revolution technology was the fact that the hybrid seeds are highly dependent on synthetic, petroleum-based fertilizers to obtain those high yields, as well as pesticides due to their inferior resistance to pests and diseases compared to more traditional crops.
Hybrid seeds were the central element to the new intensified farming system that also included monocropping and mechanization. But over time, the flaws of that system began to reveal themselves. Monocropping encouraged greater pest infestations requiring more applications of pesticides. Chemical fertilizers and plowing destroyed the health of the soil, which resulted in weakening the immune response of plants. And due to heavy, repeated applications of pesticides, insects over time became resistant.
Pesticide Action Network (PAN) describes the declining benefits of the Green Revolution in this way, “In 1982 the luster of the Green Revolution was beginning to fade. The promised dramatic increases in yields from ‘miracle’ hybrid grains that required high inputs of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides failed to deliver and were revealed as campaigns to sell technology to growers who couldn’t afford it.”
Despite the growing evidence of the flaws of the system, it has endured as the dominant agricultural paradigm often driven by inflated claims. The next evolution came in the 1990s with Genetically Modified (GMO) crops. After decades of industry promises of unrealized future innovation and aggressively promoting their technology by monopolizing the seed markets for corn, soy, canola, cotton and sugar beets, their main success is producing herbicide resistant corn, soy, and canola. The technology allows the farmer to spray over the crop killing the surrounding weeds but not the crop itself. Monsanto/Bayer leads the way with Roundup Ready seeds. Tests have shown that these crops often contain higher residues of glyphosate than non GMO seeds of the same crops. The price of this “success” is the billions of dollars of legal settlements that Bayer is paying to victims who have contracted cancer due to exposure to glyphosate.
In the 1990s and beyond, chemical companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, DuPont, and Bayer bought up seed companies. By the 2000s, five of the world’s seven largest seed producers were chemical companies who viewed seeds, not as the foundation of a healthy food system, but rather as a mechanism to sell more chemicals.
As a result, we live in a chemically saturated world. The EPA has approved over 80,000 chemicals with hundreds of new ones added each year. In a small test, the Environmental Working Group tested umbilical cords gathered by the Red Cross and found on average 200 chemicals including pesticides. When it comes to chemical pollution, agriculture is not the only source, but it is the most dominant, fouling the air, polluting waterways, soils, people and wildlife.
Grass Roots Action Fills in Where the FDA Falls Short
With ubiquitous chemical contamination and increasing evidence of its harms–cancer, neurological, reproductive and endocrine systems disorders–why does it appear that the EPA seems too often to favor industry interests over public safety?
The undisputable fact is that there is a “revolving door” between industry and FDA through which former chemical industry personnel go to work for FDA and former FDA employees go to work in the chemical industry. The opportunity for conflict of interest is a genuine concern.
In the absence of rigorous regulatory agency oversight to sufficiently safeguard public health, where do we look for answers?
The first line of refuge for personal health is organic food and Certified Organic Regenerative (ROC) foods. Regenerative agriculture is the evolution of organic farming which emphasizes soil health, healthy ecosystems and highly nutritious food. However the term “regenerative” is used in different contexts and if it is not labeled ROC, you cannot be sure that it has not been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides. Unfortunately, organic food does generally cost more and that can be a barrier for some.
The Environmental Working Group has a downloadable PDF titled “Clean Fifteen and Dirty Dozen.” If you can’t buy organic food, this guidelines lists the 15 foods that carry the lowest pesticide residues and the 12 foods to avoid that have the highest amount of pesticides.
Other organizations are working to transform the food system to one that is free of toxic pesticides.
The Center for Food Safety takes legal action against the FDA and the big agriculture companies such as Monsanto, and is an excellent source for pesticide information.
Beyond Pesticides works with local groups to promote organic land management practices that embrace a precautionary approach by eliminating toxic pesticides.
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the first national environmental advocacy group to focus on legal action, has taken the first Trump administration to court 163 times and been victorious in 90% of the cases.
No one is more vulnerable to pesticide exposure than farmworkers and their families. The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has identified 13 pesticides correlated to the onset of childhood cancer between birth and 5 years old, when the mother lives within 2.5 miles of pesticide application while pregnant. Farmworker families suffer disproportionately high rates of debilitating, pesticide-related diseases that are devastating families. A small, grassroots organization, Campaign For Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (CORA), is challenging the largest berry grower in the world to initially transition all of their berry fields near schools to organic and ultimately to convert their entire production to organic farming to eliminate these avoidable and tragic health risks.
The name Silent Spring is a metaphor for a time when the environment becomes so toxic and deadly that many species are wiped out and the sound of the songbird ceases. Rachel Carson found the war against nature to be incomprehensible and questioned its irrationality, “How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?”
