Co-sponsored by the Guayaki Yerba Mate‘s “Come To Life” initiative.
Every great movement starts with the individual, expands into communities, and then blossoms into the collective. As Ghandi once said “Be The Change” you want to see in the world. At Guayaki our mantra is “Come To Life.” In the spirit of that vitality we’ve gathered a diverse and dynamic group of creative individuals who have birthed their own movements across genres, gender, and ethnicities. In this digital round table discussion, we explore the unique backgrounds of some of music’s most inspiring innovators while they share their visions for a brighter world, and the pragmatic and passionate steps we can take to make those visions a reality.
Hosted by Dustin Thomas, Artist and Creative Strategist for Come to Life. With: Alfred Howard, a prolific spoken-word artist, writer, and co-founder of The Redwoods Music; Leah Song of the renowned group, Rising Appalachia; Raury, hip-hop artist, founder of “The Woods” movement; Luke Wallace, Canadian activist and singer-songwriter.
Alfred Howard, a prolific spoken-word artist, writer, and co-founder of The Redwoods Music, a San Diego record label and collective, currently pens lyrics for 8 bands and performs homemade percussion with six. In his early 20s he caravanned with musicians all across the county before finally setting roots in San Diego, where he has become a leading figure in that city’s musical community. He is the author of 2 books, including The Autobiography of No One; writes articles for several leading San Diego newspapers and magazines; and has written lyrics for over 30 released albums.
Raury (i.e. Raury Deshawn Tullis) is a 24-year old American singer-songwriter and rapper from Atlanta, Georgia, known for his eclectic, innovative, experimental sound that mixes soul, hip hop and folk influences. His debut mixtape Indigo Child in 2014, put him on the global musical map, and a number of his songs have appeared in the soundtracks of major movies and TV shows and he has collaborated with many major stars, including Lorde and Macklemore. His albums include All We Need and Fervent.
Leah Song, leader/front-woman of the renowned band, Rising Appalachia, as well as a solo artist, is a singer, multi instrumentalist (fiddle, banjo, guitar), and a musical pioneer across genres and mediums who has had great success and impact in the worlds of folk and roots music, including as founder of the “slow music movement.” She and Rising Appalachia are also committed to and widely respected for deeply integrating activism on such topics as the environment, food justice, human rights and prison reform in their lives and work.
Dustin Thomas, an artist, consultant, and creative strategist based in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, has performed hundreds of shows around the world, and, in his consulting work, has advised campaigns and offered creative direction to brands, funds, and executives with an emphasis on environmental stewardship, cultural celebration, and social justice.
Luke Wallace is a Canadian folk-singer known for his politically charged lyrics and his deep engagement in current social movements, including performing at youth climate and other demonstrations. His message-driven songwriting and powerful delivery have landed him slots at Salmon Arm Roots and Blues, Vancouver Island Music Festival, The Vancouver Folk Festival and an opening slot for the global roots band Rising Appalachia. His 5th, most recent album, released in 2020, is What on Earth.
Many Americans sense that fundamental change is occurring in our country. At one level, the Trump era has undeniably brought intense divisions and trauma, but at a very different, deeper level, in communities nationwide there has been a steady but explosive growth of practical new, transformative and reparative economic, ecological and institution-building initiatives. This outline of a “next political-economic system” is quietly building just below the radar of everyday media awareness, just as what became the New Deal was, in fact, built upon new thinking and experiments developed in state and local “laboratories of democracy” in the decades before Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. This panel with 4 leaders of The Democracy Collaborative, an R&D laboratory for the democratic economy, presents an overview report from the frontlines of this dynamic movement, which promises to usher in a new era of radical, system-altering change.
Hosted by Gar Alperovitz, co-founder. With: Isaiah Poole, Vice President of Communications for The Democracy Collaborative; Johanna Bozuwa, Co-Manager of the Climate & Energy Program; Thomas Hanna, Director of Research and specialist in public ownership.
Gar Alperovitz, Ph.D., co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative and co-chair of the Next System Project, has had a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, professor, scholar, activist, policy expert, and government official. A former Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University, and a founding Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, he has served as a Legislative Director in both the U.S. House and Senate, and as a Special Assistant in the Department of State. The author of many critically acclaimed books, including seminal tomes on economic inequality and atomic diplomacy, his articles are widely published in leading news outlets, and he has frequently testified before Congress.
Isaiah J. Poole, who has 30+ years’ experience in journalism and was a founding member of both the Washington (DC) Association of Black Journalists and the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association, is the Communications Director for The Democracy Collaborative. He was previously Communications Director for People’s Action and for the Campaign for America’s Future.
Johanna Bozuwa, M.Sc., Co-Manager of the Climate and Energy Program in The Next System Project at The Democracy Collaborative, focuses on the transition from the extractive, fossil-fuel economy to resilient, equitable communities based on climate justice and energy democracy in her work. Her writing has been widely published including in The Nation, The Hill, and Progressive Review. She has organized around climate justice in both the U.S. and the Netherlands, from campaigns to eliminate the social license of fossil fuel companies such as Shell to fights for utility justice and public power.
Thomas M. Hanna, Research Director at The Democracy Collaborative and a leading expert on democratic models of ownership and governance, is the author of several books, including, most recently: Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States. A dual U.S./UK citizen, he has advised the UK Labour Party and has served on the advisory boards of several national and international initiatives, including two European Research Council-funded research projects.
Although the New Deal of the 1930s rescued many from poverty and laid the foundation for a social safety net, it was also deeply flawed in that it excluded Black Americans and people of color from many of its programs. As the vision for a Green New Deal to tackle the climate emergency and restructure our economy has evolved, it is imperative we avoid the errors of the past. The rising calls for a Red New Deal inclusive of Native America and a Blue New Deal for our threatened oceans and coastal communities have arisen. In this truly original and dynamic session, we learn about these emergent, interweaving movements with some of their thought leaders.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is Vice President of Policy & Strategy at Data for Progress, and Narrative Change Director for the Natural History Museum. A Fellow of the Type Media Center and NDN Collective, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and other publications. Julian grew up in Oakland, California and is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie.
Vien Truong, J.D., one of the country’s leading, award-winning experts and strategists on building an equitable green economy, has helped develop numerous energy, environmental, and economic policies and programs at state, federal and local levels and advised on billions of dollars in public investments for energy and community development programs, including co-leading the coalition to pass the law creating the biggest fund in history for the poorest and most polluted communities in California. Vien currently advises lawmakers, universities, foundations, and organizations on developing inclusive workforces, sustainable economies, and equitable environmental policies; directs the Climate Justice efforts for Tom Steyer PAC; and supports the climate efforts of the California Business and Jobs Recovery Task Force. Previously President/CEO of the Dream Corps and Chair of Oakland’s Planning Commission, she also serves on the boards of the California Endowment and Ceres.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a Brooklyn native marine biologist and policy expert, is founder and CEO of Ocean Collectiv, a strategy-consulting firm for conservation solutions, and founder of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank focused on coastal cities. Her mission is to build community around solutions for our climate crisis. She is co-editor of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, a brand new anthology of wisdom by women climate leaders.
Sikowis(aka Christine Nobiss), a member of the Plains Cree/Saulteaux of the George Gordon First Nation in Canada, grew up in the city of Winnipeg but has been living in Iowa City for 15 years. A dedicated activist who writes, speaks and organizes extensively on Indigenous, climate, environmental, and political issues, she founded Great Plains Action Society in 2015. Sikowis holds a Masters Degree in Religious Studies from the University of Iowa and is a mother of three.
A food sovereignty movement is sprouting on the trail of colonialism and white supremacy, which have unknowingly planted the seeds of their own unmaking. This multigenerational movement is being led by colonized people uprooting global systems of privatized land ownership and environmental degradation. In confronting this system of exploitation, we can transform the underlying relationship of extraction to one rooted in kinship and reciprocity.
In this panel conversation from the Bioneers 2020 Conference, BIPOC leaders share food sovereignty strategies rooted in cultural knowledge, as well as the rematriation of land and dignity to colonized people who overwhelmingly represent the number of exploited laborers working on stolen land. Moderated by Naima Penniman, an artist-activist and educator, with: Rowen White, a Mohawk farmer and seed keeper; Reverend Heber Brown, a community organizer and social entrepreneur; and Leah Penniman, a farmer and food justice advocate.
NAIMA PENNIMAN: Peace and greetings. Welcome to the BIPOC Leaders Share Food Sovereignty Strategies panel. I’m honored to be moderating this conversation with our incredible panelists—Rowen White, Reverend Heber Brown, and my dear sister, Leah Penniman. Before I introduce them, I will share a little about myself and where I think we’re headed.
I am the daughter of Reverend Adele Smith-Penniman, a Haitian/Black American spiritual leader and civil rights activist, and Keith Penniman, an environmental activist and librarian of European descent. And like so many of you, I am a lifelong lover and defender of the Earth, devoted to healing injustice for all her inhabitants, and am giving my all to do my small part. I’m honored to serve as Program Director at Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous community training farm, and also a founding member of Wild Seed Community Farm and Healing Village. I’m also an artist and poet. You may have heard my poetry before. You may also have seen my sister Leah Penniman’s soul-stirring keynote earlier today that still has me swirling with conviction and possibility. I’ve been part of Bioneers for several years, and I’m incredibly grateful for this community of visionary “solutionaries,” so I want to give a warm, heartfelt welcome to everyone who is listening and to thank you for taking time to show up and listen in to this important discussion.
I’m thrilled that we’re having this conversation today about strategies for food sovereignty, (which is deeply connected to seed sovereignty and to land sovereignty) because it’s hard to think of anything more important than figuring out how we can nourish all members of our communities in a time of immense food insecurity; how we can feed ourselves without trashing the planet; how we can restore Black and Indigenous land stewardship; how we can create safety and dignity and pathways to leadership for Latinx agricultural laborers who grow the majority of the food we eat in this country; and how we can restore and protect a diversity of seeds for future generations. All these struggles are crucial to our collective survival and the health of our shared planet.
And if there was ever a time where the cracks in our industrial food system were laid bare, it is now. We need to be living into the solutions and taking the lead from Black, Indigenous and other people of color on the frontlines whose labor and brilliance have too often been ignored, exploited, subjugated and co-opted, if we are going to be able to define pathways forward.
I have immense respect and gratitude for each of our panelists for their enduring devotion and leadership in these realms, and I will introduce them now, one at a time, and then pass it to them for brief opening words. Rowen White is a seed keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, and a passionate activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty. Rowen is the founder and Director of Sierra Seeds, an innovative, California-based organic seed stewardship organization, and the Program Director for the Indigenous Seed Keeper Network, which is an initiative of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance.
ROWEN WHITE: Greeting, relatives. My name is Rowen White. My Mohawk name means “She Carries the Snow.” I’m a farmer, seed-keeper, mother, storyteller, and a passionate activist for the dignified resurgence of the relational foodways of Indigenous Peoples. I come from a small community called Akwesasne, which is right on the New York/Canadian border. In fact, the border crossed us, so to speak. We have relatives to the north and south of that medicine line, and we’ve been in relationship with the land here on Turtle Island since time immemorial, so I’ve sought to apprentice myself to the Earth, to my ancestors, my living elders, my children, and to the amazing network of people that I have the honor and privilege of working with to work on finding my way home back to a sense of what it means to be a modern Indigenous farmer and woman who is both a good future ancestor and a responsible descendant. It’s a real honor to be here amongst so many wise visionaries and good people.
NAIMA: Thank you so much, Rowen. Next is Reverend Heber Brown, a multiple award-winning community organizer and social entrepreneur who is the Senior Pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland, and the founding Director of Orita’s Cross Freedom School, which works to reconnect Black youth to their African heritage while providing them with hands-on learning opportunities to spark their creativity and build vocational skills. In 2015, Reverend Brown launched the Black Church Food Security Network, a multi-state alliance of congregations dedicated to creating a grassroots community-led food system. Reverend Brown, thank you for your work and thank you for being here.
Rev. HEBER BROWN: Thank you so very much. I’m a third-generation Baptist preacher and returning grower. This year has slowed me down enough to invest in the quality time that I needed, my soul needed, with the land, even as we do the important work of the Black Church Food Security Network, which essentially is working to remember the Black Church to our agrarian and land-based legacies, and in addition organize and marshal the resources of Black church spaces in the direction of food and land sovereignty, which has a long history there. I’m excited about ways that our team can steward that history and also in an Afro-futurist kind of way, look on how to build an additional room onto that legacy as well, so I’m really grateful to be part of this conversation.
NAIMA: Now I have the honor of introducing Leah Penniman, who I can testify is a phenomenal sibling in addition to an incredible mother, daughter, and ancestor-in-training. Leah is the Co-Director and Farm Manager at Soul Fire Farm and has over 20 years’ experience as a soil steward and food sovereignty activist. She’s worked at the Food Project Farm School and Many Hands Organic Farm, Youth Grow, and with farmers internationally in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico. Leah co-founded Soul Fire Farm a decade ago with the mission to reclaim Black and Brown people’s inherent right to belong to the Earth and to have agency in the food system. Leah’s areas of leadership at Soul Fire include farmer training, international solidarity, writing, speaking, making it rain, and anything that involves heavy lifting, sweat and soil. And her book, Farming While Black is a love song for the Earth and her peoples. Welcome, Leah.
LEAH PENNIMAN: Thank you, dear womb and soul sister, and thank you Reverend Brown and sister Rowen. I have a deep heartfelt respect for both of you and all that you have taught me, both through our relationship and through your example in the world. And Naima, I was going to say pretty much the exact same thing you said about our parents, so I’m going to extend the calling of lineage by inviting in, in this moment, our ancestor Mary Jane Boyd, our grandma’s grandma and her own grandmother, Susie Boyd, who was one of the thousands of women from Dahomey who had the audacious courage to braid seeds of okra, cow pea, millet, black rice, and egusi into her hair before being forced onto a transatlantic slave ship, believing that we would exist to inherit the seed. And I also want to call in our Grandma Mi Brown Lee McCullough, one of the six million Black folks who were refugees during the Great Migration, fleeing white racial terror that dispossessed them of lands. Our grandma held on to the agrarian tradition that she had learned in Rock Hill, South Carolina by keeping a strawberry patch and a crabapple tree in her yard on the outskirts of Boston, and that is where Naima and I first learned to garden, to preserve our own food, and to listen to what the earth had to tell us, so a big shout out and much gratitude to our lineage.
I was reminiscing with Naima yesterday about when we were very, very small children, how we thought that we had invented a religion of Earth reverence, and among our spiritual practices was to go outside and hug Grandmother Pine and imagine that our exhale of CO2 would be absorbed by her and returned to us as oxygen, and that in this embrace, we would have a mutually supportive exchange of life-giving gases. This is, you know, 4 and 5-year-old Naima and Leah, and while our activism has matured, I guess you could say, and become more strategic in terms of the way we engage with policy and institution-building and healing from trauma, and frontlines work, etc.; that fundamental yearning for intimate connection with the earth remains unabated.
NAIMA: Ashe. Thank you, Leah, for drumming up those memories and for calling upon our ancestors. We call upon all of our ancestors to support us in these beautiful and challenging conversations that we’re about to enter into. May they help to guide us. I give thanks to my ancestors, to your ancestors, to all of our ancestors. Ashe.
So I’m going to start it off with a big question for each of you: What is wrong with the food system, and what are some of the strategies and community solutions that you are engaged in to intervene? Rowen?
ROWEN: That is a big question. I think all of us ask big questions here in this circle, which is a blessing and a curse sometimes, but I think we find our way through by the hope that this work brings.
I’m here representing Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, which is a national organization. There are over 560 unique tribal nations across Turtle Island with so many magnificent and exquisite kin-centric relational foodways, and every single one of these communities has endured the ongoing assault of the violence of settler colonialism that has resulted in catastrophic land loss, cultural memory loss, dislocation, assimilation, acculturation, and genocide. But amidst that there have been countless courageous ancestors and foresighted elders who took seeds into buckskin pouches when they were put on trails of tears and relocated from the lands that held their umbilical cords and their ancestors’ bones and bodies, and they shared this cultural memory and these seeds down the generations in subversive and revolutionary ways. We Indigenous Peoples are woven into a tapestry of story and identity, and we’re nothing without a sense of who we are, which includes the foods we eat and the relationships we have to those who sustain us.
So we’ve endured countless atrocities over the last 500+ years, but these ancestors that I speak of and invoke and call in, they sowed seeds of resilience and vitality into the very blood and bones of our bodies. Some of those memories and those seeds and those prayers have lain dormant inside of us over the last many decades and centuries, and what we all are collectively working on now is a dignified resurgence of those traditions: those seeds are finally sprouting in this time.
We’re seeing a multigenerational movement of Indigenous seed-keepers and fishermen and foragers and hunters coming together, knowing that our strength is in our ability to restore vital kinship and trade routes, our intertribal connections. One of colonialism’s tools was to divide and conquer, to cause us to fight among ourselves, but now we are coming together and rising up. The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance has been around since 2015, but it is riding upon a movement that has been sprouting for generations, but hidden. Now is the time it’s ready to sprout, and here we are. We have vibrant Indigenous food sovereignty bubbling up all over. We are working with a cartography of kinship and trade routes and connections and relationships in a vibrant seed-to-table approach to help create mentorship opportunities and to grow the vibrant food sovereignty initiatives that are needed.
We use a number of different tools. We seek to support, empower, and uplift emerging multigenerational leadership that draws on the inherent strength of our ancestral wisdom and traditions but also embraces the resilience, wisdom and dynamic capacity of our peoples to adapt. We work with those emerging leaders, by, for example, teaching them how to host community listening sessions and to do seed sovereignty assessments. We create mentorship opportunities for seed-to-table projects in which farmers can connect with Indigenous chefs. We are looking at regenerative Indigenous cooperative economic development models that align with our cultural values instead of having to rely on extractive, exploitative capitalist models. We are reclaiming “Indigenomics,” as my sister Lyla June calls it.
We often say in our circles that we carry our nations as we carry our children. At the very heart of the work that we do, we center culture, spirit, and emotional, mental and physical well-being. We work together to uplift one another. We are catalyzing the inherent resilience and creativity of Indigenous peoples to dream a future of food sovereignty that is in solidarity with our Black and Brown brothers and sisters.
Rev. HEBER: When you asked what was wrong with the food system, my brain did something interesting: it actually inverted the question and asked: What’s right with the food system? And it’s difficult for me to find anything right with it when I think about the exploitation, the pursuit of excessive profit instead of people’s well-being, the model of control over others instead of one of relationship and solidarity with others; when I think about its impact on the Earth and the soil and the ways in which local communities are suffering; when I think about the ways that the food system has been used as a tool of racism and white supremacy both here and around the world. As I have studied this system more and more, I have come to feel that gradualist approaches to tweaking and reforming this system are a dead end.
I’m inspired by so much of what sister Rowen has shared. We at the Black Church Food Security Network seek to honor that part of our story that precedes the enslavement of African people. We have a relationship with land and soil and water that precedes our enslavement by Europeans in this country, and I love being in my position as a pastor so that I can help create space not only for the study of that history, but also for a re-engagement with sacred scripture. So many in the church read scripture with a capitalistic Westernized white lens and miss so much of what is a dynamic agrarian story. We preach about, for instance, the parable of the mustard seed. We’ve been preaching and singing about that parable in Black churches for years, but a whole lot of folks who’ve heard the sermon or sang the song have never seen an actual mustard seed.
We’re in a position with the Black Church Food Security Network to remember and reintroduce and reconnect our folks with that sacred history and to marshal the resources of Black church spaces. Black churches have been in this country for 300 some years, since the late 1700s with the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and other independent Black Baptist churches. We’ve had these spaces that are autonomous, have some economic strength, and are places of culture and advocacy, places that have great distance from the domination of local white power politics and racism, so we just need to see what we can do with the kitchens, the land, the church vans, the classrooms that the Black Church is currently stewarding, and what it looks like when we are pollinators and connecting all of this together.
LEAH: My personal hypothesis is that the food system is working as it was designed, which is to concentrate wealth, power, and resources in the hands of the few at the expense of most of us, and that its DNA is fundamentally stolen land and exploited labor, so we need a complete redesign.
I’m going to share with you a quote from Wendell Berry that I’ve been meditating a lot on: “The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land to a people he considered racially inferior. In thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of meaningful contact with the earth. He was literally blinded by his presuppositions and prejudices. Because he did not know the land, it was inevitable that he would squander its natural bounty, deplete its richness, corrupt and pollute it, or destroy it altogether. The history of the white man’s use of the earth in America is a scandal.”
We can’t divorce the way we treat the Earth and the people of the Earth. Farm workers, as they’re called (who are really agricultural experts, i.e. farmers who happen to be employees), are 85 plus percent people of color, mostly Spanish-speaking and born outside the borders of the so-called United States. A lot of them are Indigenous people. And in this time of COVID, when we say that the people who grow food and process food are essential, what the society is saying is that their labor is essential but not actually the lives of those who tend and till the earth. We’ve had over 900 COVID outbreaks in meat-packing and processing plants. We’ve had over 200,000 cases of COVID amongst farm workers. There are high levels of homelessness among farm workers and children out of school going to work in the field with their parents. 50% of farm workers are not authorized to work, so they’re not receiving the unemployment benefits that have been part of the stimulus packages, and they’ve even been excluded from the free COVID testing.
Certainly, we at Soul Fire Farm are engaged in the small and humble ways that we can be engaged: we do doorstep delivery of food, build urban gardens, train farmers, do root cause advocacy for justice for Black farmers, etc., – but to really transform the food system in the ways that we need to, we have to have a holistic picture. There’s a very powerful metaphor for this in the form of the four wings of transformative social justice depicted as a butterfly. Butterflies cannot do what they do without all four of their wings. When we talk about social change and social transformation, these four wings are: resist, build, heal and reform. Resist refers to that direct confrontation of injustice, with boycotts, civil disobedience, protests, non-cooperation, walkouts, strikes, all the forms of non-cooperation with oppression.
Then there’s the wing of reform. Those doing reform work are some of the most courageous folks in some ways, because they’re going into the belly of the beast, into these institutions to do policy change, to transform public schools from the inside out, to run for elected office, to work within the published media with all of its complexities and problematic ways of being, etc. The builders, which is where we at Soul Fire Farms squarely put ourselves, are the ones who are creating institutions that strive to represent the world that we want to create, such as freedom schools, land trusts, seed-saving networks, co-ops, churches, farms, community clinics, sanctuaries. The final wing is healing, because there’s no way we can go through centuries if not millennia of land-based oppression and not be scarred, not to carry this trauma in our DNA, which sometimes results in lateral violence among ourselves, impeding our own progress, so we also need therapy, ceremonies, plant medicines, stories, art, vigils, prayers, all of these aspects of healing. There is no way that one individual or one organization or one strategy is going to win this. We really need to figure out how to collectively make our butterfly fly with all four wings working together.
NAIMA: Reverend Brown, could you share a story of a specific experience that gave you hope around the power of community-owned or community-controlled food systems.
HEBER: I decided to establish a garden on the 1500-square-foot front yard at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church here in Baltimore. The way it happened was that I didn’t know the first thing about growing anything and had never thought of gardening, but I saw members of our church, folks I share a life with, going in and out of the hospital for diet-related reasons. And we were priced out of getting anything that the health food stores had. That made me mad. There was nutrient-rich food not far from us, but we could not get what we needed for our people to stay healthy, so I came back to the church full of divine discontent, and I saw our front yard in that moment, and I said, you know what, if we can’t afford what they’ve got, guess what, we’re going to grow what we need ourselves, so that’s how it started. But I didn’t know the first thing about growing food, and it was a senior member of our congregation, Maxine Nicholas, who said let me help this boy out; he got heart but he don’t know what to do.
Maxine grew up in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina with a bunch of brothers and sisters on a farm, and she’s the one who transformed that space and helped me to see it was so much bigger than what I thought. She took 1500 square feet and started leading the effort to grow tomatoes, herbs, okra, and so many other things. She showed me that there were people right around us, in our community who had the skills and knowledge. Maxine Nicholas has passed, but she is a dynamic ancestor and a patron saint of the Black Church Food Security Network.
NAIMA: Sister Rowen, could you share a story with us as well?
ROWAN: We’ve been working over the last decade on an intercultural seed “rematriation” project involving Indigenous people and non-Indigenous seed-saving organizations. Many important species that were part of our Indigenous cosmo-genealogies, plant relatives that have been with us since the dawn of time, have, through displacement and acculturation, left our communities. Our food systems were violently dismantled, and a number of these seeds moved outside of our communities, but some of us are hearing the message from our ancestors that the revitalization of our culture is inextricably linked to the revitalization of our foods, so we’re calling on the spirits of these seeds who are like long lost prisoners of war who were taken from our communities, and we are now inviting them to come back home.
We found an old plant relative from the Taos Pueblo at a seed bank in Iowa. It had been there for multiple decades and it had been long gone from the Pueblo. The foundation of food sovereignty is seed sovereignty. It’s having access to culturally significant varieties that nourish our bodies in ways that modern hybrid and genetically modified varieties can’t. So we forged relationships with the folks at Seed Savers and with the Field Museum and with some other entities, including some universities, in refining these seeds and bringing them home. And in October 2018 under a beautiful snow-capped mountain in Taos in the fall, we had a ceremony in which we officially brought this squash variety back home. We presented a bag of seeds to the elders at the Taos Pueblo. In our traditional cultures we’re bound in reciprocal relationship with these plants, these seeds, since time immemorial, and now those agreements are getting rehydrated. Those plants are our relatives. Many of us even see our people as lineal descendants of those foods who give their lives so that we can have life, so we came into an agreement as Indigenous peoples a long time ago, that the seeds would take care of us and we would take care of the seeds. Because of countless adversities, it’s been difficult to be able to uphold those agreements for a few centuries, but this rematriation is a beautiful, magnificent, healing endeavor to purposely restore into our communities the heart, the spirit, and that holy mother of the wild who wants to nourish and feed and sustain her children, and has never forgotten her agreement to do that.
If you’re interested in learning more about our rematriation efforts, we’re going to be launching an action guide and a video this winter in which we will share a little bit more about how people of all different diasporas can start reconnecting to the seeds of their ancestors in this way and begin to rematriate seeds back home.
LEAH: That reminds me, sister Rowen, of a piece of our own cosmology, those of us who are descendants of Yoruba people, of the first plants, including the tete, which is a type of amaranth, being considered the ancestors of all of us.
For so long and continuing, Black farmers in particular have been engaged in a struggle with the US Department of Agriculture around its long legacy of discrimination and exclusion. Pete Daniel writes in his book Dispossession that during the Civil Rights Movement era the USDA programs were sharpened into weapons to punish people for the audacity of registering to vote, so that has led to a new generation of folks deciding to try to create our own institutions.
In the Northeast, there’s this emerging network, Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trusts, which started in 2017 as a collaboration between Indigenous and Black Earth stewards, farmers, and seed-keepers deeply committed to permanently securing land tenure for folks of all backgrounds who’ve been dispossessed. That is a lot harder than it sounds. One of the projects of settler colonialism has been to divide and distract our communities and to convince us that we are each other’s enemy, so lots of relationship-building and learning one another’s histories and traumas and pains is needed to overcome that.
There is the Black Farmer Fund, which is a finance vehicle finding non-exploitative ways to make capital available in the form of non-exploitative loans and grants to farm and food workers in the Northeast who are trying to be land-based entrepreneurs. There are farmer training programs, such as the rural one at Soul Fire Farm and an urban one at Farm School NYC that are supporting thousands of returning generations of Black and Brown people to get back on the land in a good way.
There is the Corbin Hill Food Project, which feeds 80,000 people every single year in the most vulnerable communities in New York City through a food hub model: they’re able to purchase food from our farmers, aggregate it and distribute it to folks who need it. These, and others, are all part of a very nascent network, but what’s so powerful about it to me is that it’s pushing beyond the idea that any one individual or organization needs to have it all figured out. It’s all about how we can all collaborate and put our puzzle pieces together, so that we can build a food system, from sunshine to plate, with our own institutions coming from a land and food sovereignty frame, building those services for our communities.
NAIMA: Another important question from the audience is: “What are some of the main obstacles to your mission? And how can people who are watching this support your efforts?”
LEAH: Well, the Empire is really powerful, so there are many, many obstacles, and I appreciate how Reverend Brown is getting us focused on our asset-based community development because it can be quite overwhelming. People have asked me: “Do you really believe that we’re going to win?” (mostly in the context of climate chaos), and the honest answer is “I don’t know,” but I think we’re all going to live much more honorably on this great blue Earth if we behave as if we will win, so keeping that hope alive, even knowing that we might not get to the mountain or see beyond it in our lifetimes and thinking in generational rather than quarterly returns is really important.
One of the many obstacles that we face is the savior complex, which is rooted in the idea that we, the folks who are most impacted by these issues of racial injustice in the food system, don’t know what we’re doing or how to solve it, so someone outside of our communities needs to come educate and guide us. They somehow think that people of color communities need someone from the outside to come tell us how to make kale salad as part of our kindergarten curriculum, and that’s what’s going to solve our problems, and they’ll write grants and pay themselves to do that in our communities when in fact we have the institutions, we have the answers, and we have the ancestral knowledge. The problem is that our knowledge is mostly ignored, appropriated, or under-resourced. The solution will come when society is willing to transfer power, dignity, and resources to Black, Indigenous and people of color leadership when it comes to solving these food issues.
ROWEN: I think unfortunately and ironically, Indigenous peoples are some of the most invisible to the national eye even though we are the original peoples of this land. What we also have to remember is that Indigenous peoples as well as Black folk already live in a post-apocalyptic reality. We already survived an apocalypse, so in some ways we are already fortified with the resilience and adaptability we need in the face of climate change because we’ve already been through it and are coming back stronger in lots of ways.
Our communities struggle with resources. We lack the financial capital to rebuild facilities and farms to help us reclaim our food traditions. We’re not stuck in a past reality. We are amazing at carrying our ancestral brilliance forward while also integrating modern tools of science and technology. Indigenous peoples have always metabolized new things that came along and “indigenized” them for the benefit of our people, but too often the grants and funding sources we do have access to have many restrictions on how we can spend those funds, not permitting us to use them on capital investments and infrastructure, for example, and that makes it really difficult. We have massive land loss that has impacted our communities’ abilities to hunt, forage, farm and fish.
Please feel free to visit NativeFoodAlliance.org and all of our social platforms to see what we’re doing. If you have visibility and can help amplify our efforts, if you have access to resources or funds, if you have volunteer skills and you want to get involved, we welcome you, but what we don’t need, as sister Leah said, is saviorism. Our communities understand our vision; we just need the resources to nourish our dreams and visions.
Those of you who are listening to this who inhabit white, cis, hetero male bodies in agriculture, it’s time for you to pass the mic. It’s time for you to listen now, and it’s time for BIPOC people to be able to center our vision and thought leadership on what the future of food can be, because we have this radical remembering of what it was before and we have this amazing capacity and creativity to dream what’s possible on the horizon.
Rev.HEBER: So, you know, it’s not lost upon me how centrally the ancestors have factored into this conversation. One obstacle I encounter is that there are times when I and those I share community with have to resist the driving impulse to consistently push, do, go, out of recognition of how gargantuan the challenges are, but I’m recognizing that this never-ending urgency is one of the characteristics of white supremacy culture that only values productivity. Reflection upon the ancestors is helpful to get away from that mindset. The more we can sit with them and glean from the dynamic wisdom that they have to share with us, the better off we’ll be. Let me invoke a few ancestors whose wisdom I seek to draw upon—Reverend Albert Clay, Jr., Thomas Sankara (editor’s note: influential socialist revolutionary President of Burkina Faso in the 1980s), Kwame Nkrumah (editor’s note: leader of independence movement and first President of Ghana in the 1950s), Queen Nanny of the Maroons (editor’s note: 18th Century military leader of Jamaica’s Windward Maroons, i.e. a community of rebels formed of escaped, formerly enslaved people). These ancestors know the way.
In terms of how to help support our work: BlackChurchFoodSecurity.net is our website. I ditto everything that my siblings have shared about not needing a savior, and I’m not sure if we all want your support. We need to have a relationship first. We need to sit together first. I don’t want to invite somebody in who might have the right check, but they’ve not done some work on themselves. We’ve got to do some journeying together first. If you can commit to do that work and come alongside us, fine, but I’m not here to do that work for you. None of us can do that work for one another.
NAIMA: Is there a lesson or a teaching from your work that you want to pass on that feels especially relevant for these times? Sister Rowen, why don’t you start us off.
ROWAN: What I want to do in this moment is really just call us all in. I want us to all remember that not a single one of us is untouched by the great disconnection of this time but that all of us in this circle, both on the panel and those of you listening, have ancestral brilliance and agreements and memories that run like wild rivers in our blood and our bones. So many of us have ancestors who have endured incredible adversities and prayed that we descendants would have good foods to nourish us and an understanding of the relationships that we need to sustain us, so the time to start is now. It can be something like a tiny little seed. It doesn’t have to be big. If each one of us apprentices ourselves to the land, to a seed that fed our ancestors, to that deep inner knowing, to carve out that space, as the Reverend said, to listen to that ancestral brilliance that is inside of us, then we will spark the revolution that’s needed for us to be able to hand a bundle down to our children that’s better than the one that we received. That’s the call of these times, to become those good future ancestors and those responsible descendants.
Every single one of us in this circle, no matter our skin color or cultural background, has ancestral brilliance inside our body, but there’s been this spiritual virus of selfishness, what some Indigenous people call Wetiko, that has been working its way throughout the globe, getting us to disconnect and think that we can be self-sufficient without working for collective care. Now, on this edge of incredible transformation that we’re in, is the time to reconnect and to remember what really matters.
HEBER: Colonial Christianity has done such damage to the globe and to African people. Christianity has been a handmaiden to white supremacy in so many ways, a perverting of the followers of the way of Yeshua, but it’s important to me to make sure y’all know that I’m not alone, that there are many other pastors, religious leaders, ministers in churches who recognize and acknowledge the historical harm done by Christianity and the Church. This is a time for that acknowledgement, and it’s the time for reconnecting with our great ancestor Yeshua in a way that is not a partner to legacies of domination and exploitation as well. So one lesson I’m learning is that as faith-based organizations, whether churches or synagogues or mosques, as we acknowledge the ways that there’s been harm in the legacies of our churches, that this is an opportunity to be transformed. We preach about repentance and baptism, and this is that opportunity, and I’m inspired by that opportunity and the lessons that I’m seeing and learning from pastors all over the country, and from Black farmers and Black pastors who are pointing to another way that we can pursue.
LEAH: Amen. I have tears in my eyes, Reverend Brown. Naima and I have two preacher parents. And I’ve never said this in public, but one of the reasons I left Christianity is because of exactly what you’re talking about. If I had had a reverend like you in my life who was willing to take accountability for that history and willing to really look at what is that true gospel, I think I would have been in a different relationship with the church.
I had a conversation with our mother recently. She was just heartbroken by the lateral violence in our movement, and she said that the biggest difference she sees between the Civil Rights movement and the movements that we have right now is that she doesn’t see where the love is in our current movement, so I’m going to read a poem that I think speaks to this yearning for us to do our work with love.
This is a Khalil Gibran poem: “And what is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth. It is to build a house with affection, even as your beloved were to dwell in that house. It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit. And it is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit, and to know that all the blessed dead area standing about you and watching. Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, he who works in marble and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone is nobler than he who plows the soil; and he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of a person is more than she who makes the sandals for our feet. But I say not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noon tide that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of the giant blades of grass. And she alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by her own loving. Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy, for if you bake bread with indifference you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half a person’s hunger, and if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels and love not the singing, you muffle a person’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.”
NAIMA: A question from the audience asks how we can integrate food sovereignty and justice into our jails and prisons. Food is medicine, and access to nourishing food is often not an option for our incarcerated siblings, so how do we work to change this while also working for total abolition?
LEAH: Mass incarceration is very much rooted in the history of oppression of Black people. The 13th Amendment has a loophole that allows people to be enslaved if they’ve been convicted of a crime. If you go back to 1865, new laws made it illegal to loiter, which is basically to hang around if you’re Black. They made it illegal to be a vagrant, which is to not have a job if you’re Black; they made it illegal to be not industrious and honest, the punishment for which was to have your children taken away; and, of course, there’s a parallel, horrible genocidal history with Indigenous communities having their children stolen. But this is not over. There are many, many examples of corporations taking advantage of neo-slavery, of prison labor, for example. We need to end that system of neo-slavery. We need to end penal farms and the exploitation of labor. Also, a lot of the food that goes to reservations, to schools in poor communities, to prisons, is throwaway and highly processed food. Changing that is going to require a restructuring of the Farm Bill, of the USDA and of the entire food system.
ROWEN: I’ll just speak to that question from a little bit of a different angle, which is through the lens of healing. Many of our Indigenous and Black and Brown relatives have fallen victim to a very carceral system that’s cruelly unjust. One of my original seed uncles who really took me under his wing and helped me uncover the foods and seeds of my ancestors, actually works in a federal prison across the border in Canada, and he works with Indigenous inmates to restore their connection to their cultural and spiritual lineage, working with them to get their hands in the earth, getting them invigorated to carry those skills and that way of moving in the world once they can move beyond those walls. So I think about creating healing spaces that enable those brothers and sisters to connect in meaningful ways to their cultural inheritance, so that as they move into the world, they’ll be strong in spirit and heart.
NAIMA: (going through audience questions) Folks are really wanting to know how they can support this BIPOC-led movement for food, land and seed sovereignty, and folks want to know if there is an Indigenous-led or land-back organization they can support, and folks who are white and cisgender and want to support these movements, want to know how to go about that without venturing into white savior mode.
ROWEN: NDN Collective is one Indigenous-led group that comes to mind, and NEFOC (Northeast Farmers of Color) is co-led by an Indigenous woman, Stephanie Morningstar. There are a lot of different angles. I grew up in the land sovereignty movement because my father’s an attorney who does work for land and water rights for Indigenous peoples, so there also are legal defense funds such as the Native American Rights Fund and other entities that help to restore Indigenous treaty rights, fishing rights, land rights, and water rights. There’s a lot of advocacy that needs to happen on that federal level to reclaim broken treaties, etc.
HEBER: Regarding how to help without falling into “saviorism,” Leah earlier talked about how, if you are trying to learn about an issue, you go to the affected community, and you sit and you listen. And I think that could be a good start right there: just showing up and establishing relationship, be invited into spaces where your only agenda is to listen, and really listen to what’s already going on in that community. Don’t bring your agenda, don’t bring your project, don’t bring your research, nothing you’re trying to do. That community is already working on stuff. If you are fortunate enough to be invited into circle, listen, and then where your hands can get behind what it is that’s already been established, you can, if invited to, then try to pump some wind into the sails that have already been erected. Start there. And it takes a lot for those who are used to being in control, those who’ve succumbed to the illusion and the fallacy of white superiority, to show up in a different posture, but the more you show up in that posture, where you are not the expert, you are not the thought leader, you are not the person resourcing, supporting, none of that, you’re showing up to listen first and then take instruction, I think more and more those muscles start to get stronger and stronger, and that can ripple out into other aspects of your life as well.
NAIMA: I want to uplift a really incredible resource that Soul Fire Farm developed. It’s the result of hundreds of conversations with Black, Indigenous and other people of color formations, land stewards, agricultural workers. It’s a multi-page document of action steps that are divided into categories from reparations and rematriations to dignity for farm workers, to policy actions, to institutional purchasing power, and things that we can do for our continued self-awareness and education. It’s available at SoulFireFarm.org/take-action. And as Leah said earlier, the food system is the sum of everything it takes to bring sunshine onto our plates, which means that there are so many ways that we can intervene, so many opportunities to really make a difference in healing the food system and redistributing the land, agency and power.
We have time for a couple more audience questions. Here are two: If someone doesn’t have a significant trace of Native blood in their ancestry and feels a sense of loss when it comes to connecting with ancestors, or feels anger knowing their ancestors were probably colonizers, what do they do? So how is it that we can define ancestry, especially for people struggling to connect to theirs? And the other question is how we can best cultivate “beloved community.”
ROWEN: We’re all in a time of reckoning with violence, and not one of us is untouched by the evils of empire and imperialism. BIPOC people don’t get a free pass either. We have plenty of [oppression and things we need to work through because trauma begets trauma. For some white folks you can start by changing and breaking intergenerational curses, working to begin to unpack that superiority and that supremacy inside yourself so that you can become a descendant worth descending from. We have to work on ourselves to digest and metabolize trauma like compost. We have to compost those past failures so seeds can sprout from the soil that runs beneath our feet. We all have some ancestors that were problematic and some that were wise and amazing, and we just have to reckon with that, all of us.NAIMA: Yes. We’re in partnership with the Earth every day to compost and transmute it into something new. Ashe. Thank you all so much. This was incredibly deep, powerful, enlightening, illuminating. I’m so grateful that we’re in this work together, and in this time of intensifying violence and climate calamity, we know every seed saved will set us free. Thank you. Deep, deep gratitude to each of you.
Panelists
Rev. Heber Brown, a multiple award-winning community organizer and social entrepreneur, is Senior Pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, MD, and founding Director of Orita’s Cross Freedom School, which works to reconnect Black youth to their African heritage while providing them with hands-on learning opportunities to spark their creativity and build vocational skills. In 2015 he launched the Black Church Food Security Network, a multi-state alliance of congregations dedicated to creating a grassroots, community-led food system.
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer, mother, Vodun Manye (Queen Mother), and award-winning food justice activist who has been tending the soil and organizing for an anti-racist food system for over 20 years. She currently serves as founding Co-Executive Director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a people-of-color led project that works toward food and land justice, which she co-founded in 2010. She is the author of: Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land.
Rowen White, a seed keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and a passionate activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty, is founder/Director of Sierra Seeds, an innovative California-based organic seed stewardship organization; and Program Director for the Indigenous Seed Keeper Network, an initiative of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance.
Naima Penniman, an artist, activist, healer, grower and educator committed to planetary health and community resilience, is the co-founder of WILDSEED Community Farm and Healing Village, a Black and Brown-led intentional community focused on ecological collaboration, transformative justice, and intergenerational responsibility. She is also: Program Director at Soul Fire Farm, dedicated to supporting the next generation of B.I.P.O.C. (Black/Indigenous/people of color) farmers; the co-founder/co-artistic director of Climbing PoeTree, an internationally-acclaimed performance duo; a Thai Yoga Massage practitioner; and a member of Harriet’s Apothecary, a collective of Black women-identified healers.
This conversation covers groundbreaking new developments in the effort to recognize the legal rights of nature, including in Indigenous communities now drafting and adopting such laws. The panelists discuss why communities and countries around the globe are considering this bold step and why treating nature as a living entity with legal rights can revolutionize life on Earth in a system in which courts can be used to enforce rights of rivers, mountains, and forests. Hear stories from communities on the front lines, as they mobilize to build a new environmental law system that actually protects the planet.
Mari Margil, Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, leads its International Center for the Rights of Nature. Previously Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, she assisted the first places in the world to secure the Rights of Nature in law, including Ecuador. She works internationally as well as with Indigenous peoples and tribal nations to advance Rights of Nature legal and policy frameworks. Mari is a co-author of: The Bottom Line or Public Health and Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence.
Thomas Linzey, Senior Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), co-founded the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and the Daniel Pennock Democracy School (which has graduated over 5,000 lawyers, activists, and municipal officials nationally to fight to elevate the rights of their communities over corporate rights). He is the author of several books, including: Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community; On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability; and co-author of: We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States.
Anahkwet (Guy Reiter), a traditional Menominee from Wisconsin, member of the Menominee Constitutional Taskforce and Executive Director of the grassroots community organization, Menikahnaehkem, is a local organizer, activist, author, amateur archaeologist, and lecturer. He has organized a wide range of events on Menominee culture, spoken at a number of universities, and written articles for Environmental Health News and other publications.
This conversation explores some of the physical, ethical and spiritual ecosystems of our time and considers their interconnections. How might the connective tissue linking nature’s wisdom, quests for social equity and justice, and reverence for the numinous inspire us to co-creatively re-imagine our communities and landscapes, both human and wild? Savor stories that illuminate such inquires, stories arising from the creative life paths that these women have woven to express their unique callings.
Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.
Terry Tempest Williams, a genre-defying, award-winning writer, is the author of some sixteen books, including the environmental literature classic: Refuge—An Unnatural History of Family and Place; and: Red—Passion and Patience in the Desert; Finding Beauty in a Broken World; When Women Were Birds; The Hour of Land; and most recently: Erosion—Essays of Undoing. Her work has been published and translated worldwide. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellow, she is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School. Ms. Williams also has a long history of engagement in a range of environmental, social justice, peace, and women’s rights struggles.
Rachel Bagby, an award-winning vocal and social healing artist with a Stanford law degree in social change, has mentored women leaders and thousands of audience members world-wide to unleash their voices as instruments of transformation. She is the bestselling author of Daughterhood and Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women’s Voices.
Alixa Garcia, born in Colombia, is an award-winning poet, musician, visual-artist, filmmaker, educator, and activist. Her performance work with the duo Climbing PoeTree has been featured in hundreds of universities, conferences and festivals, including at the United Nations and T.E.D.’s Ideas Worth Spreading. Her visual work has been exhibited in major museums and public spaces, including in Times Square and at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. Her latest work is currently being exhibited in the Kunsthal Kade Museum, Netherlands.
In 2018, leading scientists worldwide projected that we have until 2030 to cut global emissions in half, or risk hitting climate tipping points that may be impossible to stop. That same year, Exxon promised its shareholders that it aims to increase oil and gas sales by 25% by 2030. Obviously the Exxons of the world must fail if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change. In this panel, we learn about three astute strategies targeting the oil majors where it hurts— their bottom line and their social license to operate. The goal is an orderly wind-down of the fossil fuel industry within the next twenty years, while creating the political space for a clean energy economy’s rapid spinning-up.
Hosted by Rick Reed, Philanthropic Advisor. With: Sarah Thomas, Senior Advisor to the Funder Collaborative on Oil and Gas; Rebekah Hinojosa, Sierra Club’s Gulf Coast Campaign Representative.
Panelists
Rick Reed, founder/Principal of BeeLine Associates, has been working to advance the common good in groundbreaking ways with a wide range of philanthropic foundations and NGOs for three decades. In the food systems arena, he co-created the Lighthouse Farm Network and the Biologically Integrated Farming Systems Initiative. In the climate domain, he co-conceived and co-established the Re-Amp clean energy network spanning eight states in the upper Midwest focused on ending the region’s carbon pollution, and is currently focused on holding the oil and gas industry accountable for creating the climate crisis.
Rebekah Hinojosa, an artist and organizer from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas currently serving as the Sierra Club’s Gulf Coast Campaign Representative, works with communities along the Texas coastline to stop crude oil export terminals, associated pipelines, and three LNG fracked gas export terminals that would predominantly harm people of color and Indigenous populations.
Sarah Thomas, Ph.D., is co-founder of and Senior Advisor to the Funder Collaborative on Oil and Gas, a philanthropic initiative housed at the Rockefeller Family Fund, which seeks to accelerate an economically and environmentally responsible shift away from fossil fuels. She conducts strategy development and policy research for foundations, private individuals and nonprofit organizations and has assisted multiple collaboratives aimed at enhancing strategic alignment and coordinated action on climate change and social justice.
Movements for transformative justice and abolition have much to teach us about how to heal from harm and violence and rebuild communities grounded in liberation, justice, care and accountability. These movements have long-held visions of a world where each person and community have the basic rights of health, dignity, safety and belonging, without relying on oppressive state systems and punitive justice. They invite us to imagine what is possible when people can self-determine what justice feels like in their own communities, and practice how to build care, accountability, healing and repair on the individual, interpersonal and collective level. In our current moment, people of all ages are lifting up these movements as we all continue to reckon with some of the broken and violent systems of our society. The work to heal these wounds is not new. There is a rich and deep-rooted social ecosystem upon which new life is growing and iterating.
How can the emerging visions and lessons learned support intergenerational collaborations and young movement leaders in their work today? How can the dreams and lived practices of these movements orient all of us towards more agency and healing in our own lives and the work that we do? What insights can these movements offer us in meeting the current moment of reckoning and rebuilding as well as guide us through uncertain futures?
Hosted by Liz Kennedy, Communications Director and Research Fellow at Lead to Life. With: Cory Greene, Co-Founder and Healing Justice Coordinator for How Our Lives Link Altogether (H.O.L.L.A.); Jadyn Fauconier-Herry, a recent graduate of New York University, where she earned her BA in Social and Cultural Analysis; Olka Baldeh, Communications Manager for the Essie Justice Group.
Panelists
Jadyn Fauconier-Herry, a recent graduate of New York University, where she earned her BA in Social and Cultural Analysis with a concentration in theories of Race, Class, and Punishment, aims to honor in her writing and research the work of radical Black thinkers who have come before her and those participating in current struggles and organizing efforts.
Cory Greene, Ph.D., formerly incarcerated himself, is: an organizer with the Formerly Incarcerated Convicted People and Family Movement (a national movement to change the public policy landscape of criminal justice); co-founder and Healing Justice Organizer with How Our Lives link Altogether (H.O.L.L.A.); a national organizer with the Education Liberation Project; as well as a research associate on numerous participatory action research projects. A former National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Echoing Green and Camelback Fellow, Cory’s organizing work has been featured in several documentaries, including: Ava Duvernay’s 13th, From Prison to NYU, and most recently, We Came to Heal.
Olka Baldeh, a Fulani storyteller, poet and nomad, and an environmental justice advocate and anti-police brutality activist for nearly a decade, currently works as the Communications Manager for the Essie Justice Group, a California-based nonprofit that serves women with incarcerated loved ones, and is also the founder of the Black Moon Podcast.
Liz Kennedy, a Detroit-based storyteller and organizer, is Program Coordinator for the Allied Media Conference, where she works to create spaces for artists and organizers to strategize, celebrate, and cross-pollinate across movements and mediums. Liz also works with Lead to Life, a collective of queer artists dedicated to “bridging racial and environmental justice through ceremony and art practice…to decompose systems of oppression.”
The vast biodiversity of our planet is the underlying fabric supporting all life on Earth, but the prognosis is grim: biodiversity rates are continuing to plummet as extinctions of species accelerate. Fortunately, the evidence suggests that there are in fact viable pathways for successful action at a global scale, but only if we mobilize and act decisively and rapidly. In this session, we learn how we can protect and restore 50% of global landscapes while staying below 1.5°C temperature rise in the next few decades. Projects such as the newly launched Global Safety Net provide a roadmap: a bioregional approach combining world-class science, a clear focus on Indigenous rights and stewardship, support for grassroots action, and a vision for transformative philanthropy.
Justin Winters, formerly Executive Director of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, is the co-founder and Executive Director of One Earth, an organization working to galvanize science, advocacy and philanthropy to drive collective action on climate change to forge a path forward to a 2050 in which 100% renewable energy; protection and restoration of 50% of the world’s lands and oceans; and a transition to regenerative, carbon-negative agriculture create a world in which humanity and nature coexist and thrive together.
Carly Vynne, Ph.D, is an ecologist and conservation strategist who seeks out creative solutions for how we can leave more room for nature in a rapidly changing world. She recently co-authored The Global Deal for Nature, which calls for an ambitious, time-bound set of nature-based targets that must be achieved if we are to solve the climate and extinction crises.
Oscar Soria, Campaign Director at the renowned, highly effective, international civic movement Avaaz, is an Argentine human rights and environmental campaigner who has received widespread recognition for his innovative work at the intersection of technology, organizing, and advocacy on social, political, and environmental issues. He previously held senior global roles in Greenpeace and WWF and served in non-executive or advisory roles for the boards of several prominent organizations, including: Oxfam, Amnesty International, and the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities.
Karl Burkart is the Managing Director of One Earth, which supports academic institutions and NGOs working on the cutting edges of climate and energy science, biodiversity mapping, and sustainable agriculture. Formerly Director of Media, Science and Technology at the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Karl’s past projects include: creating the blog, Greendig; producing and writing Planet 100, the Discovery Network’s first online video news show; and leading digital advocacy for the TckTckTck campaign, a global network of more than 450 NGOs working to secure a strong international climate agreement. Karl’s publications include co-authoring the groundbreaking paper “A Global Deal for Nature: Guiding Principles, Milestones, and Targets” in 2019.
Angela Amanakwa Kaxuyana is part of the senior leadership of the Brazilian Coordination of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon (COIAB). At a very young age, in the late 90’s she played a critical role in the struggle of the Kaxuyana, Kahyana and Tunayana peoples that led the demarcation of their lands in 2003. Angela led several indigenous led conservation initiatives and has a degree in Business Administration with specialization in environmental management.
Societal attitudes toward consciousness-expanding substances are changing as the research supporting the pharmaceutical use of psychedelics to treat ailments such as PTSD and anxiety grows. With the impending commercialization of sacred plant medicines come several problems that risk separating this gift from the Indigenous communities that maintain and cultivate a respectful relationship. How do we approach the future of plant medicine to preserve good relations with Indigenous peoples and our planet?
With: Paul Stamets, one of the world’s leading mycologists and the foremost expert on psilocybin mushrooms; Katsi Cook, a groundbreaking figure in the revitalization of Indigenous midwifery and a longtime participant in peyote ceremonies; Françoise Bourzat, a leading expert on psychedelics as healing agents who did 35+ years’ field work with the Mazatec in Mexico. Moderated by J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer.
J.P. HARPIGNIES: Before we start, I feel compelled to say that it’s imperative to always put out some caveats when dealing with conscious-altering substances: these are very potent molecules; they need to be treated with great respect; they are not for everyone; they are contraindicated for certain people; and they are best done in a safe and supportive environment with experienced guides on hand. And they are still illegal nationally and internationally, despite wonderful decriminalization efforts in a number of localities.
We are really in a sea change moment regarding how mainstream society is viewing drugs in general and psychedelics specifically. There are many aspects to this transformative moment, but I want to quickly mention three of them. The first is that it’s become painfully obvious to nearly everyone what a catastrophe the war on drugs has been, what an enormous waste of resources and of human lives. It’s been incredibly structurally racist, hitting black and brown communities particularly hard. And as symbolized by the historic vote in Congress to decriminalize cannabis that occurred yesterday, this is obviously beginning to change. We still have a long way to go, but, mercifully, these attitudes are changing, vis-à-vis drugs in general, and we’re starting to get away from punitive attitudes.
The second factor, which is a very different but a fascinating socio-cultural development, is that we are seeing an enormous growth of new forms of sacred plant subcultures in undergrounds around the world, especially the ayahuasca subculture, which has just taken off to an incredible extent globally. Some people feel that that’s a really positive thing, that it’s giving people access to healing methodologies and to self-exploration tools they didn’t have before. There are issues, though, in these subcultures. One is the thorny question of the appropriation of Indigenous traditions by non-indigenous people, something we’ll get into a little bit later on. There’s also the issue of the over-harvesting of some sacred plants, and there’s the fact that because this movement has grown so much, many of the ceremony leaders are inexperienced, and unfortunately there have also been instances of abuse, especially sexual abuse by some ceremony leaders in these milieus, and that’s a big discussion. It’s not the one we’re going to focus on today, but I did feel the need to not sweep these things under the rug.
The third thing is the one that we’re going to focus most on today: after a hiatus of many decades, there’s been a dynamic resuscitation of scientific research on psychedelics in several countries, and that research is getting really tantalizing results about the potential curative properties of some psychedelics to address really difficult ailments such as PTSD and depression, end of life anxiety, and other conditions. That’s really exciting because so many people suffer from these very hard-to-treat conditions, and I hate to be dialectically Marxist about this, but with any new big development, problems also emerge. One of the issues raised is the risk of the de-sacralization of hitherto exalted spiritual practices. Because psychedelics were developed, discovered, and nurtured by Indigenous traditions for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, in a context of reverence for the natural world in a cohesive cultural matrix, going from that reverent model to a sort of sanitized medical model can be jarring. If a medicalized model of psychedelic use becomes the only socially acceptable one, that will be deeply tragic for many of us with a long-standing interest in these traditions. And even more problematic is the fact that venture capitalists are now pouring into this new field hoping to cash in on what they view as a potential growth industry within the pharmaceutical industry, so the risk of going from reverence to hyper-capitalist commodification is very real and something that we have to be aware of.
But the reality is that the genie’s out of the bottle. We’re not going to be able to turn back the clock. This could be a very good thing because a lot of people could be helped, but it does raise these thorny issues, and there is no better group of people that I can think of on planet Earth to tackle some of these questions than the three folks we have with us today. They come from very different places, but I don’t know three more experienced, more knowledgeable, and more ethical people in this entire domain than the three interlocutors we have with us today, whom I will now introduce.
Most of you know Paul Stamets, one of our greatest mycologists, a brilliant myco-entrepreneur and myco-technologist who has created novel medicinal compounds, discovered hitherto unknown fungal species, created promising technologies to remediate toxins in the environment using fungi, and is also probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet as regards psilocybin. This panel was his idea. It was convened by Paul, so we have him to thank for this opportunity to be in conversation today.
Katsi Cook, a dear old friend and ally of Bioneers going back decades, is a Mohawk from Akwesasne, the Mohawk lands in northern New York State, southern Ontario and southern Quebec along the St. Lawrence River. Katsi is a legendary figure in the revitalization of Indigenous midwifery traditions and has been a great fighter for Indigenous women’s health for decades and decades, and an important researcher in that area. I can’t do justice to the full scope of her work here, but the reason we really wanted Katsi here in this discussion is that she also has long-standing experience with the use of peyote, which will be part of our discussion.
Last but definitely not least is Françoise Bourzat, who also has decades of experience in researching, studying, and teaching about sacred plants. She’s done decades of field work with the Mazatec in Mexico and is a somatic therapist in the Bay Area in California. She’s also written a very interesting book I recommend highly, Consciousness Medicine.
We’re going to begin with Paul because it was his idea to get us here together. And then we’ll follow with Katsi and then Françoise, and then, ideally, we’ll engage in some lively conversation.
PAUL STAMETS: There is, in my opinion, a worldwide revolution, a paradigm shift in consciousness going on. Many of us have been engaged in long struggles in environmental, civil rights and Indigenous people’s movements, and one commonality we have all shared is a recognition of the importance of our ecosystems, of protecting the Earth, the mother that has given us birth, and of thinking downstream for the health of future generations. The Indigenous idea that we must think ahead to the effects of all we do today on the next seven generations is one we have to take to heart with new intensity as we now tackle climate change, biodiversity loss, plant and animal extinctions, and the zoonotic diseases resulting from our deforestation and factory farming methods. The planet is calling out right now, asking us to co-create solutions. We are no longer separated by borders. A virus in China, Africa or Wisconsin can rapidly spread all over the world. That underscores the importance of understanding our commonality of being.
I think the intense rebirth of interest in psychedelics is part of that new consciousness and can play an important part in awakening and spreading it, and this movement is spreading all over the world, fast. And there is, concurrently, a pharmaceutical-ization of psychedelics underway, especially of psilocybin, and this is something that we must come to grips with. No matter what happens with the pharmaceutical interests producing synthetic psilocybin as prescription medicines, 99 percent of the people are still going to use the actual mushrooms. That’s just the way it is. Psilocybin mushrooms can be easily grown at home or in your backyard. They’re grown all over the world. People have been honing their skills at it for decades and growing them for themselves, their families and friends, and frankly, going into a physician’s office and meeting an austere looking professional that’s a stranger to you to get dosed is a pretty steep emotional hurdle to overcome for a lot of people.
That being said, the therapeutic use of psilocybin necessitates having therapists and being very careful and making sure that these substances are used in a responsible way, and that can be good because sacred mushrooms should never be party drugs. I understand the coming-of-age process and the fact that young people want to experiment and change their consciousness. Andrew Weil’s book The Natural Mind was a huge influence on me when I was young, so I get that, but these are very powerful substances that need to be treated reverently.
I have done a lot of research on psilocybin (I had a D.E.A. license for many years). I’ve even discovered a new psilocybin-active species of mushroom. There are, globally, some 216 species we know about in the genus, the taxonomic group Psilocybe, and some 116 of those species are known to have actively available psilocybin. About 25 species grow here in North America, anywhere from Texas to Northern British Columbia, different species in those different ecosystems. Psilocybin mushrooms also contain a number of other active compounds—other tryptamines, baeocystin, norbaeocystin, norpsilocin, etc., but we have found that, while some of these substances might have curative properties one by one (and companies are tempted to isolate those “psilocybin analogues” and use them because they don’t get you high and they’re legal in that form), when they’re stacked together in their natural form, i.e. in dried mushrooms, you get an “entourage effect,” a synergistic reaction that seems to boost neural growth far more than when you try to isolate and separate the chemical components.
We have been doing some very promising research on neurogenesis with Harvard Medical School and with a company that specializes in anti-Alzheimer drugs. We have been growing pluripotent stem cells in our laboratories, using well-established protocols for measuring neurons and their growth, and we have found the entourage effect to be potent. Using the whole mushroom leads to far more neural growth. I personally think psilocybin, used intelligently, will be shown to lead to increased intelligence, creativity, and happiness. People who were in studies using psilocybin mushrooms to help them address such conditions as PTSD and depression often reported that it not only helped them with those ailments, but that it changed their lives more profoundly.
When I told Michael Pollan that psilocybin mushrooms changed my mind, I meant that literally: I think they built new neural pathways in my brain that allowed me to articulate my thoughts more clearly and to become a more creative and more peaceful person. I believe that psilocybin can contribute to creating the paradigm shift we need, can help increase the intelligence of our population, help reduce crime and disease, and help us to face the inevitability of our own death with less anxiety.
Mushrooms and other psychedelics, when used in the right way, can give us a glimpse of the immensity of the universe and can open doors to vast dimensions of consciousness, to the voices of all species and beings asking us to become responsible stewards of life on the planet. In my experience mushrooms tend to increase kindness, empathy, courage, and the desire to serve the greater good, so it is time for a paradigm shift, and I think these sacred medicines can help us. All of us are on this planet together. We are all Indigenous to this planet, though of course First Peoples in many regions of the world are the ones with the longest ancestral knowledge, which we so desperately need to rekindle and propagate if we’re going to get through the crises we face. Now that our society has such a glorious plurality and biodiversity of ethnicities, it’s even more important that we protect these threads of ancient knowledge that were almost cut by invasions, enslavement, disease, wars, religious persecution. When we lose one of the Indigenous elders who carry living links to ancient wisdom, we lose encyclopedias of knowledge. The fact that there are still vibrant Indigenous cultures and peoples and knowledge traditions is a tribute to their extraordinary resilience in resisting centuries of attempted genocide, including weaponized pandemics.
But we can be thankful that some of that ancestral knowledge, including the use of these sacred medicines, has survived and is being passed on, and we have to give something back for those incredible gifts. We have to make sure that these peoples, cultures and plants are protected and treated with respect, and we have to use these plants responsibly. I’m not against the development of pharmaceuticals drawn from psychedelics that can be used in a medical context to treat some diseases, if those can be developed and used responsibly, but psilocybin mushrooms offer within them more components than just one molecule, and my own belief is that they, in their whole, natural forms, will still be the most widely used and most significant way these molecules help our species.
KATSI COOK: Thank you, Paul, brother, for the power of your voice, your intellect, and your sensitivity, and thank you for inviting my comments in support of the fundamental principle that the endangered sacred medicine peyote should be reserved for Indigenous use, especially given the concerns regarding sustainability in this time of climate change and decreasing biological diversity.
In one telling of our Mohawk creation story, when the pregnant Sky Woman pulled on a beautiful yellow flower that grew at the base of the withering celestial tree that stood at the base of the sky world, her action uprooted the tree, and the pregnant Sky Woman fell into the hole left by the uprooted tree and fell to earth to fulfill her destiny to recreate the world. In 1974, on a journey to learn Indigenous midwifery, I followed Beatrice Holy Dance Long Visitor, who later became one of the leading 13 grandmothers, and my well-known sister-in-law, Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook, Beatrice’s daughter, both beloved Oglala Lakota water women in the Native American Church in South Dakota into my first peyote ceremony. I was 23 years old and had recently completed the women’s health training programs at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I was hesitant, but if you want to learn midwifery, you have to go into that teepee, Beatrice told me.
For those of you who want to know more about my relationship with the medicine, I have documented my experiences with and learnings from pejuta wakan (“sacred medicine” in the Lakota language) in the 2007 Bioneers book Visionary Plant Consciousness (edited by JP Harpignies). And if you want to learn about the historic legal struggle undertaken by the Native American Church of North America to support the religious freedoms of Native Americans, I strongly recommend the film, The Peyote Road (Kifaru Productions), which features important spiritual leaders such as Reuben Snake, Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook, my brother, Thomas Kanawaienton Cook, and others who worked to establish the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act of 1978. This act protects the freedom of Native Americans to exercise traditional religions and sacred ceremonial practices, ensuring access to sacred sites and the peyote gardens, possession and use of sacred objects, and the freedom to pray in our customed manner.
We ritualize our life cycle, and maintain cycles of sacred ceremonies necessary to support and maintain life in relationship with pejuta wakan. Almost 50 years ago, I came out of the teepee door in the morning thinking that if my Mohawk people had this medicine, we could heal. Its use is of course very old among certain peoples in North America (Huichols, Tarahumara), but it has become a central sacred plant of many other family fireplaces in North American first nations communities starting more than a century ago, and its use has spread through the North American Indigenous world, especially strongly riding upon the wave of historic Indigenous activist movements such as the Indian Unity Caravan of the 1960s, the White Roots of Peace Communications Group out of the Six Nations Confederacy, the International Indian Treaty Councils and other initiatives.
This “grandfather medicine” continues to connect Indigenous communities across the hemisphere, and the proper holding environment of grandfather peyote is within the cultural context of Indigenous families and medicine societies. There are many protocols and responsibilities for carrying a prayer that first is bundled in a sacred tobacco tie and a kernel of white corn. It’s up to the sponsor of the healing ceremony, held in specific family fireplaces such as the Half Moon fireplace of my Lakota relatives, to determine who will sit among the circle in support of a prayer for a life. Every detail, from the gathering of the firewood to the protocols of the cedar used to the prayers being offered to the preparation of the sacred foods presented by the water woman to people in the morning, has to be done correctly, impeccably. The proper words, songs, instruments, procedures, have to be followed. There are so many essential elements that belong to the ceremonial commitment of the sacrament peyote. It takes generations of knowledge and commitment for it to be used in the right way.
These traditions are our responsibility to carry as Indigenous people because they contribute to our resilience and healing. The prayer ceremonies resemble the process of birth, as the grandmother medicine opens our minds, bodies and spirits to cope with the pains of life. Beatrice Holy Dance Long Visitor explained to me how the medicine first came to the people. A pregnant woman was alone and lost in the desert, separated from her people. Tired, she lay on the earth, and suffered in labor by herself until she heard a voice nearby. Take and eat of me, a small cactus with no thorns spoke to her. The medicine helped the woman birth her child, and the sacred medicine continues to teach and guide us from the fireplaces of those who take care of these ways. Our elders help us to understand these traditions in a wider context. The late Ernest Kaientaronkwen Benedict, a revered Seneca longhouse elder, described the sacred tree of Indigenous cultures: its roots are our ancestral teachings; its trunk our history; its branches the many struggles for the continuity of our lands, jurisdiction, spirituality, languages, and the reproduction of bodies and lifeways. At the top of the tree sits one little yellow flower that represents the light and the life of the tree. It was long withering under the weight of colonization, but our sacred ceremonies have helped keep it alive, and that tree and that yellow flower are once again beginning to shine.
JP: Thank you so much, Katsi, and we’ll get back to some of the themes you raised, because it’s important to drive home just how endangered peyote is as a plant, and why it’s imperative that it be preserved for the use of Indigenous peoples, and what some alternatives might be for non-indigenous folks. I think a lot of people will want to hear about that, but now Françoise,
FRANCOISE BOURZAT: Thank you for inviting me, Paul and Bioneers, including my friend Nina Simons and the whole team there. It’s wonderful being here finally. I’ve been wanting to participate in Bioneers for a long time.
I’m going to talk about sacred mushroom use in the context of the traditional Mazatec healing ceremonies, which I’ve been involved with for over 30 years now. The traditional Mazatec use of psilocybin mushrooms involves an entire cosmology and a set of practices that go way beyond the use of the plant medicines themselves. When I go to Huautla de Jimenez, where the tradition continues and we immerse ourselves in that Mazatec land, what we are really communing with is not so much the mushroom or not only the mushroom, but with the whole life of the village and of the mountains—the entire landscape and its ecology. The practices include the offering of cacao beans, cacao cleansing rituals, the placing of very specific flowers on the altar. When we are invited to respectfully participate in the ceremonies that happen to be, of course, with different kinds (depending on the season) of psilocybin mushrooms, we are participating in a much more expansive cultural and spiritual worldview.
I want to say is that in my dialogue with the Mazatec, they are not so worried about cultural appropriation. What they tell me is that what they are concerned about is that they hope that if we non-indigenous people use mushrooms, that we’re going to use them with respect, with offerings, with an understanding and a learning from their tradition, from the way they talk to the mushroom, from the way they pray and sing, and the way they let themselves be spoken through by the mushroom. They want us to understand that it’s not just about mushrooms. The mushrooms help the Earth and all life speak to and through us. My teacher, who by the way was very close to Beatrice Holy Dance Long Visitor mentioned earlier by Katsi and to several other wonderful Lakota traditional teachers (and they all participated in each other’s ceremonies), often said, and all these other teachers agreed, that it doesn’t really matter what’s in the plate: what’s important is using what’s in the plate to commune with the Earth, to hear her wisdom and to be healed by her.
In the Mazatec and in the larger Mexican culture, communing with ancestors, with the dead ones on the other side of the veil, the other side of this reality of incarnation, is a central practice, and mushrooms can aid in letting us visit that realm of the ancestors where time and space are irrelevant, the eternal space of the soul, and it’s interesting that we are now in this psychedelic renaissance, and one of the main therapeutic uses that is being talked about in the mainstream and that research has been done on is using psilocybin as an ally to help reduce the anxiety of people at the end of their lives, and we can obviously learn a lot about that from those Indigenous cultures who have been exploring this territory for so long.
I just finished an interview with my teacher’s daughter (my teacher passed away a couple of years ago). It’s really important for us to hear the voices of these cultures; in this case for Mazatec healers who have so much experience and wisdom about these states of consciousness to speak to us during this psychedelic renaissance, so that we stay on the right path. For myself, I’ve long tried to be a humble servant of this mushroom and to be a bridge, to try to weave together the traditional practices I have learned from my Mazatec teachers with my Western training in Psychology and other therapies, so that we can bring this incredible tool and create safe spaces to heal people in our own culture. A major part of my work for many years has been trying to create conditions in which we can train psychedelic guides who really deeply understand both the traditional aspects and the modern psychological dimensions of working with such a powerful healing modality here in our own society, now.
And one thing that could get lost with the commercialization and medicalization of psilocybin that’s starting to happen is the principle of reciprocity. What do we give back? How do we thank and acknowledge the Indigenous people who have held these traditions for thousands of years, and how do we include them in this renaissance and make sure they benefit from it as well? I’ve been in conversation with Kat Harrison (who has been very involved in the Mazatec tradition for even longer than I have) and other people in the field to see how we can help support them and help them preserve their cultures. Kat said that she felt the most important thing we needed to help them preserve was their language, for many reasons but also because Mazatec is the language of the mushroom. If it disappears, an enormous amount of wisdom and the key tool to communicate with the spirit of the medicine will be lost. My daughter and I are talking about creating a fund with various Mazatec people who will decide how to utilize the resources to preserve their tradition and improve their access to healthcare and education. So reciprocity has to be a really big part of our use of these plants, and we have to keep it in mind more and more as these commercialization efforts move forward.
We have to be creative to bridge Indigenous practices and the realities of the modern, industrialized Western world. I don’t think we can stop some commercialization of psilocybin because big pharma is coming, and they’re too powerful to stop. And I don’t think originally the intention to create some modern pharmaceutical medicines for people who are suffering intensely was bad. I understand that our society’s medical system is based on a model in which synthesized psilocybin would be the logical product. And I am myself part of a research study in Los Angeles on COVID-related grief right now that is, in fact, using synthetic psilocybin. I’m also involved in a retreat for parental grief in Jamaica in which we are working with whole mushrooms that grow there. I’m going there next week, in fact, to meet the Jamaican physicians we’ll be working with, so I work in different ways, and I don’t condemn the use of modern methods. I think we can work in all sorts of ways to try to make positive change, whether it’s supporting the initiatives to change laws (both Paul and I have been active in Oregon and Canada on that front), or helping formulate modern medical protocols to help treat people with PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc., but we should never forget that mushroom use is above all a vehicle for the expansion of consciousness, and we must never forget the debt we have to the traditions that gave us this medicine.
We also have to make sure that the profit motive doesn’t create more inequality, that it doesn’t deny access to these medicines to those communities who might need them the most but have historically not been sufficiently included in the psychedelic movement, especially communities of color. This is really important.
I think mushrooms can’t be “de-souled,” and many positive things can happen going forward, but we have to work to make sure that even as the world changes quickly in its attitude toward psychedelics, that this healing tool doesn’t lose its connections to Indigenous traditions, and that in the spirit of solidarity and conservation, preservation and support, we communicate with Indigenous people and help them find their way of articulating their own powerful voices, so they can create a solid presence in the world of sacred medicine, even in the face of this new era of commercialization. We have to continue to speak our voice, not to go to war or create conflict but to express loudly and clearly how sacred these plants have been for us and what we have to do so that they’ll be here and sacred in seven generations.
JP: One of the things that comes to mind immediately from hearing you all talk is that it seems to me that what we’re trying to do is find our way to the most ethical and productive relationships that human beings can have with these substances during this time of radical transformation, and it’s pretty clear that we have to view these things case-by-case, situation by situation, plant by plant, and I would immediately put peyote in a separate category, because it’s so endangered and hard to grow and so important to the Native American Church, so that’s one plant whose use should in most instances be limited to Indigenous peoples.
In general, if there is now going to be large-scale use of psychedelics in all sorts of new forms, what are the most ethical forms that can take? And I think it’s going to be a case-by-case, company by company, initiative by initiative, research project by research project, and we’re all going to have to be very vigilant. Paul, do you have any thoughts about what the most ethical and constructive approaches can be?
PAUL: I think there are three clear and different paths here with three of the main psychedelic plants, and they’re quite different. I personally want to advocate that all wild peyote be preserved and held sacred and protected for Indigenous people. I just think at this time, with ecosystems being so stressed and the peyote hunt being so important for First Nations that that resource needs to be protected. I call out to all people who are not in this Indigenous tradition to help protect peyote in the wild. It is indeed very, very difficult to grow, and the wild harvest is so central to the First Nations long-standing traditions, so it should be reserved for them.
With psilocybin mushrooms, though, it’s really different. They’re circumpolar. They grow all over the world. They’ve been used by dozens of cultures that we know of, and probably many more that we don’t know of. I think they can be kind of the bridge that unifies everyone together. We can rejuvenate them. We can grow them. Because they’re saprophytes, they grow in decomposing material. Once you get them in the culture, you can protect them. That’s not saying that myco-diversity isn’t important; it’s very important, but the most commonly used psilocybin in the world is Psilocybe cubensis, which is not remotely in any danger of extinction. It’s very easy to cultivate, so I think that psilocybin is unambiguously the one psychedelic that joins all of us together.
Now ayahuasca is more complicated. I went to Cusco recently, and I saw neon signs flashing for ayahuasca ceremonies—massive commercialization, hordes of tour groups coming to take ayahuasca. Now, on the other side of that equation, a lot of people have benefited from ayahuasca and say it’s changed their lives. I’m not discounting that, but I have great reservations about the commercialization of ayahuasca, and cultural appropriation is also part of that narrative. Psilocybin mushrooms don’t have that problem. They’re much less controversial and much more appropriate for multi-cultural use.
FRANCOISE: I agree with Paul. Mushrooms are easy to grow. They come and go. They’re fast. They’re potent. They’re unifying, but it is true that some people who do peyote or San Pedro do not necessarily find themselves inclined to use mushrooms, because it’s a different experience. Mescaline-containing cactuses are very different in nature as an experience than the mushroom is, so some people might prefer the mescaline-containing cactus experience, so I can see that as a point of discussion.
JP: Katsi, if we all agree that the peyote in the wild should absolutely be protected and reserved for Indigenous use, what do you think about non-indigenous people using synthetic mescaline or huachuma (aka San Pedro, a much faster growing cactus that some Indigenous people in the Andes seem happy to share) instead?
KATSI: There are other medicines throughout the hemispheres that get shared across alliances built in reciprocity at a nation-to nation level, and I think that people are essentially free to explore, but if you take these medicines outside of the safe cultural contexts in which these plant energies made themselves known and built relationships with human beings, you can scare yourself. But I understand that we’re in a time in which we need to restore and build bridges back to Mother Earth, in which the Earth Mother is crying for her children to understand the nature of reality in our umbilical cords to the cosmos, so I encourage people to strengthen their experience at this time.
JP: I want to turn to a few audience questions. Several people have asked how mushrooms might specifically aid in end-of-life anxiety.
FRANCOISE: Clearly there’s so much involved in end-of-life. The mushroom experience connects us with a bigger dimension, with a bigger space, with eternity, with soul, with what remains alive after we die, what continues to exist on the level of essence. It also brings us in the moment, to what is present here and now, to the love that surrounds us and the love that we feel within us. That can be really profoundly soothing and healing and can liberate us from the anxiety, sadness and grief that can be present at the end of life. I took people who were dying and eventually passed away to Mexico, to try to help them release the stress and the anxiety that they were experiencing. They experienced a sense of beauty and oneness, love and light, and freedom from their fear of leaving this earthly plane. It was a very potent and beautiful experience. I think people should have that freedom of choice, to be able to have access to this tool at that last stage of life.
JP: Paul, there’s a question about how to ethically grow mushrooms.
PAUL: Well, first, I think we need to address whether the mushrooms are cultivating us or we’re cultivating them. So many of these psilocybin mushrooms grow on debris fields, and humans are the greatest walking catastrophe I know in creating debris fields on the planet, so it might seem as though psilocybin mushrooms are chasing after us. One particular species, here in the Northwest, in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, I guesstimate about every fourth truckload of wood chips from alder will naturally have psilocybin mushrooms in them, specifically this species, Psilocybe cyanescens, a very potent psilocybin mushroom. Even though we’ve never found it out in the wild, when those wood chips are scattered for landscaping, they come up in profusion. What sparked the psilocybin mushroom movement in the West Coast of North America is that when they started using wood chips for landscaping, these psilocybin mushrooms literally came out of the woodwork, so to speak, and mycologists were blindsided. Mycologists who’d studied them for 40, 50 years had never seen these things before.
But, as to the question of ethical cultivation, it depends. First, how much do you really need for your own personal use? Not that much, and everyone can grow a small amount in the landscape using natural weather cycles if you’re in the right region, or you can do it at home safely and cleanly if you can follow instructions carefully. But when you talk about growing them commercially or supplying a commercial market, there are really big concerns. Many times, there’s not enough air exchange, so molds and bacteria can grow on them. Some people have had adverse reactions as they would eating spoiled seafood. The growers dry them down so the bacteria are still there, and they can produce endotoxins, which can be very, very dangerous, so if we are going to have psilocybin mushrooms available, clinically or by prescription, or for therapeutic use, they have to follow basically GAP (“good agriculture practices”) specifically designed to prevent contamination.
My biggest concern about cultivation is of course the use of synthetic chemicals. It has to be certified organic. It’s antithetical to the entire mushroom spirit to grow them in a non-organic fashion. It’s really important that we have standards to make sure that the mushrooms being consumed are safe, and that by far is the biggest problem with “underground” commercial growers: there aren’t any quality controls; it’s somewhat self-policing because you’re not going to buy mushrooms from somebody who gave you something that made you sick, but nevertheless, you don’t want to be the first person in that experience. So, I think there are some quality control issues that need to be addressed. Growing enough for your personal use in your own backyard or at home, that should be no problem, but growing large amounts for commercial and/or therapeutic purposes has to be under controlled circumstances where there are checks and controls.
JP: Katsi, some people are asking an allyship question, i.e.: what non-indigenous people can do to help protect Indigenous practices, such as the peyote tradition. What is the best way that people can help, if help is needed?
KATSI: Help support Indigenous Rights political movements in general, and specifically support the efforts to protect the ecosystems where the peyote grows in Texas, but also be part of the movements to maintain life and heal Mother Earth and protect all our relatives, plant, animal and human. The kind of consciousness that’s engendered at Bioneers is one example of what’s necessary.
JP: Another question that’s come up is where people can get psychedelic therapy. Where is it available? Obviously this is quite a borderline area because places like CIIS have created psychedelic therapist training programs, but it’s still illegal nationally, so we’re in a very gray area.
FRANCOISE: As of now, the only places where the consumption of mushrooms is actually legal and accessible is the Netherlands and Jamaica, and in Mexico a little bit, in certain limited environments.
JP: What about Portugal?
FRANCOISE: Portugal and the Czech Republic have decriminalized use, but not legalized it. As of now, it’s only legal in Jamaica and the Netherlands on a national level. The legalization of mushrooms in Oregon has opened a door. Two years from now it’s likely people will have access to facilitation of mushroom experiences with guides trained and licensed by the State of Oregon. Part of my goal is to train really good psychedelic guides, and although it can be very much oriented towards healing certain conditions (such as depression or PTSD, etc.), it can also be designed as an experience to explore consciousness. In Oregon, all these different avenues should be available in a couple of years. I imagine that other states will be following the situation Oregon, to see how this initiative works and what the pros and cons turn out to be. If it goes well, I think other states may follow its lead. And there should soon be some exemptions in Canada that will permit some people to be granted access to psychedelic experiences. A lot is happening there. TheraPsil is one very active organization working in Canada to get that right for end-of-life patients.
JP: Paul, we had some more questions about growing mushrooms. What your best advice is for them to get information?
PAUL: Well, there are lots of books out there that have good information about how to cultivate, but law enforcement really looks at intention. If you are intending to make a lot of money by dosing people with psilocybin, without the guard-rails of a therapist or medical community, I think you’re really pushing the envelope and could get in trouble, so people should be very careful about that. If you’re trying to monetize this for personal gain, to make money, then I think it becomes a difficult argument to convince others that you’re actually just doing it for the good of the people.
The training of therapists and physicians to use this medicine is a very legally defensible path that would most likely not be high up on law enforcement’s priority list compared to somebody who’s selling a bunch of psilocybin mushrooms at raves and trying to make money hand-over-fist. I think the intention of the individual participating at this new stage will greatly influence whether the government or law enforcement is going to crack down. They don’t want to have a case in the courts that makes them look bad, so if you’re involved in truly helping veterans and other people with PTSD, etc., that’s a much safer route, but, still, please, be careful. Consult with medical professionals. Create records of correspondence of what your intentions are, create data-sets that clearly indicate your true intentions. And if you know people going into this in a big commercial way in the underground, I pay a lot of taxes, and I resent people making a lot of money and not paying their fair share. We all have to pay taxes to help the poor and unemployed and to have post offices and highways, all that stuff. We all have to step up to the plate and help the commons.
JP: I’m glad to see that psychedelics and civic responsibility go hand in hand. One of the other questions people have is what the advantages of micro-dosing versus “heroic” doses might be.
PAUL: Well, we’re navigating based on the science. We’re trying to do fact-based medicine, and there are both meta studies and clinical studies starting to examine these questions. Some of us are beginning to subscribe to the theory (not yet a hypothesis) that after a major dose, a heroic experience, or at least a solid therapeutic dose, then micro-dosing subsequently may reactivate the same neurological pathways. You may have a neurological memory, and micro-dosing could re-stimulate those pathways. So we think that micro-dosing may, in the long term, have really great benefits. For one thing, you don’t need to be in a clinical hospital environment with the need for medical support. Micro-dosing might be “liberation mycology” that helps you to go beyond working with a therapist, because in a sense your brain and nervous system have already been trained; you’ve been there, done that, but if that theory proves to be true, it would still require that one would have done a bigger dose earlier. I don’t think we know enough yet to know if micro-dosing alone would be as effective.
JP: I’ve heard of “Liberation Theology” and “Radical Mycology,” but Liberation Mycology is a new one on me…
Panelists
Paul Stamets, speaker, author, award-winning mycologist, medical researcher, groundbreaking mycological entrepreneur, and a visionary thought leader in the study of fungi and their uses in promoting human health, ecological restoration, and detoxification of the environment, is the author of six books, including: Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save The World, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, and Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World. Paul has discovered and named numerous new species of psilocybin mushrooms and is the founder and owner of Fungi Perfecti, LLC, makers of the Host Defense Mushrooms (www.hostdefense.com) supplement line. And Paul’s work has now entered mainstream popular culture. The new Star Trek: Discovery series features a Lt. Paul Stamets, Science Officer and Astromycologist(!).
Katsi Cook(Mohawk/Haudenosaunee), from Akwesasne along the St. Lawrence River, a groundbreaking, revered figure in the revitalization of Indigenous midwifery and of advocacy for Indigenous women’s health, is Director of The Spirit Aligned Leadership Program, which works with Indigenous elder women to heal, strengthen, and restore Indigenous communities. A founding member of the National Aboriginal Council of Midwives and the Konon:kwe (“all women”) Council, Katsi has decades of experience as a researcher and a lecturer on Indigenous environmental reproductive health, and she and her husband of 40 years, Jose Barreiro, have 6 children and 11 grandchildren.
Françoise Bourzat, a San Francisco Bay Area-based somatic counselor, teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, runs online courses, lectures in various institutions, collaborates with physicians on a variety of treatment projects, and trains psychedelic guides internationally. She has guided ceremonies with sacred mushrooms in collaboration with Indigenous healers in Huautla de Jimenez, Mexico, for the last 30 years and is the author of: Consciousness Medicine: Indigenous Wisdom, Entheogens, and Expanded States of Consciousness for Healing and Growth.
J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer, affiliated with Bioneers since 1990, is a Brooklyn, NYC-based consultant, conference producer, copy-editor and writer. A former Program Director at the New York Open Center and a senior review team member for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge from 2010 to 2017, he has authored or edited several books, including Political Ecosystems, Delusions of Normality, Visionary Plant Consciousness, and, most recently, Animal Encounters.
In this moment of unraveling, a new generation of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other people of color leaders are generating creative strategic innovations and interventions to combat extractive economic systems and usher in a Just Transition to a new civilization. In this panel, key figures from some of the most dynamic frontline organizations at the forefront of this movement—Climate Justice Alliance, Movement Generation, and New Economy Coalition—share stories and practices. They discuss how they are working to: cultivate local, loving, living, linked communities; democratize the economy (#WealthBack); restore sovereignty (#LandBack); localize control of wealth (#Reinvest); and restore social and ecological well-being ( #JustTransition). A regenerative economy that restores sovereignty and democratizes our economy is crucial to the future of our planet.
Hosted by Natalia Linares, New Economy Coalition. With: Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, Movement Generation; Doria Robinson, Cooperation Richmond & Urban Tilth; Najari Smith, Cooperation Richmond & Rich City Rides.
This is an excerpted and edited version of the session’s transcript.
NATALIA LINARES: Today we will discuss how a new generation of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color leaders are generating creative, strategic innovations and interventions to combat extractive economic systems and usher in a just transition to a new economy. We will be hearing from folks who are working to cultivate local, loving, living, linked communities, trying to democratize our economy, restore sovereignty, localize control of wealth, and restore social and ecological well-being.
I am a communications organizer at the New Economy Coalition, a member-based network representing the solidarity economy movement in the United States. We exist to organize our members into a more united and robust force to accelerate the transition of our economic system from capitalism to a regenerative solidarity economy.
As we “meet” today, we live in a very challenging time: yesterday, a national single-day record of new COVID cases was set. Hospitalizations topped 100,000, more than double the number at the beginning of November, and while 42 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits during this pandemic, American billionaires have seen their wealth go up by over $931 billion. In my hometown of New York City, we are projected to lose one of every three small businesses to this pandemic, and over the next ten years, the most significant transfer of wealth in the history of this world will happen here in America. Baby boomers, mostly white, wealth-owning households, will pass down $68 trillion to their millennial heirs. This is a moment during which we will either course-correct and bring fairness to our economic system or fall further into oligarchy and plutocracy.
But we are here to vision together, to consider what an economy that took care of our communities and our planet and that repaired the ills of colonialism and enslavement would look like.
We at the New Economy Coalition believe that a “solidarity economy” is the means to get to a regenerative economy. There are people worldwide working on building this more sustainable, fair, and just economy. Though unfortunately, we are part of an international movement, the U.S. is right now far behind many other countries in building that new economy. Still, we do have a vibrant history to draw upon: there were many vibrant mutual aid societies after enslavement ended and a big black cooperative movement in the 1930s, and many other collective and democratic ownership initiatives in our history.
In many ways, the solidarity economy involves going back to forms of communal life that our ancestors practiced before colonialism and enslavement. The New Economy Coalition includes a broad spectrum of members: worker cooperatives, community land trusts, affordable housing experiments such as housing cooperatives, participatory budgeting projects, revolving loan funds, etc. I urge everyone to check out what we do at neweconomy.net and on Instagram and to get involved if you can. We host an annual conference called Common Bound, and we release a newsletter every two weeks to keep our members and allies informed about all the exciting projects and experiments happening all over the country.
Today we’re going to hear about some inspiring, very local examples of the sort of work of organizing, community building, and seeding of a regenerative economy happening all around the country. We’re going to start with Michelle from Movement Generation, who will kick us off with an overview of how we get to this regenerative economy via the Just Transition framework.
Movement Generation is a highly influential collective; they are founding members of the Climate Justice Alliance and the Our Power campaign. They have been at the forefront of many significant struggles.
MICHELLE MASCARENHAS-SWAN: Thanks, Nati. So good to be with you all this morning, and a shout out to Bioneers. As Nati mentioned, I’m with Movement Generation, with our Justice and Ecology Project. We are also members of the New Economy Coalition as are the other folks presenting today, and we’re all members as well of the Climate Justice Alliance. I want to start by saying that it’s really the struggles and organizing and experimenting done by frontline communities all across this continent that created this movement and this “Just Transition” framework. We at Movement Generation have just had the honor of being able to help to support and curate and provide frameworks that can be shared across communities.
I want to start out by reminding us that the root of the word “economy” is the same as that of “ecology.” “Eco” derives from oikos, the Greek word for “home,” and just like an ecosystem, which is defined by the relationships between all the species of plants and animals and natural forces (water, wind, climate, etc.) in a place, an economy is really just about the management of our larger home, our society, and the way we organize our relationships in a place, ideally to take good care of the place and each other. But that management of home can be healthy and sustainable, or, as it mostly has been and is currently, it can be extractive, destructive, and profoundly imbalanced and unfair.
Our struggles for ecological justice are about the reintegration of human communities into the web of life, into healthy, thriving ecosystems rooted in mutuality and mutually beneficial relationships. Any economy has basic pillars without which it can’t exist: air, clean water, sunlight, fertile soil, combined with human labor and ingenuity. In the extractive economy, the current dominant system, the purpose of the economy, whatever the mainstream discourse about it says, is in fact the enclosure of wealth and power for the few. This extractive economy is literally powered by burning things up and extracting resources from the earth and waters and from people. Exploitation of people’s labor is obviously the dominant form of extraction, forcing people to act against their best judgment just to keep a roof over their heads, and even getting the masses of people to buy into a system that promises prosperity but is rooted in unjust hierarchy, white supremacy, patriarchy and consumerism, all myths that are completely anathema to achieving a healthy, living world.
Governance in such a system is heavily influenced by the power of wealth. The richer you are, the more decisions you tend to get to make about other people’s lives, and when people resist this oppressive arrangement, they are often met by force, by police or military repression. But this system is inherently unstable, and it’s pretty obvious it’s teetering, so how do we transition to a system that gives us control over our own lives and communities? By creating local, loving, linked participatory economies based on sacredness and caring, rooted in all of our relations and the complexity of life. We have to realign the economy with the powers of Mother Earth and protect and restore biological and cultural diversity. Work in such a system is not about jobs or production but about the constructive social roles we can all play to take care of ourselves and each other.
In this moment we have to expand our roles as regenerative disturbers of this extractive economy, so we can transform it into something different. We have to build soil as we tear up concrete and liberate our collective imaginations. Decision-making needs to happen at the smallest scale at which it makes sense—at the workplace, the watershed, the “trade-shed” and foodshed. Governance has to become about authentic collective self-determination. There are several different strategies the Climate Justice Alliance uses to organize around. One of them is trying to build a visionary and oppositional economy, to seek to change the rules, change the story, move resources to where they are needed and build a movement of movements. The frontline struggle is about democratizing wealth and workplaces, shifting economic control to communities, advancing ecological restoration and driving racial justice and social equity. One of our initiatives is called Reinvest in Our Power, which aims to reclaim stolen wealth and slow and spread it through community-controlled loan funds and other mechanisms to be able to apply that capital towards regenerative community needs.
NATALIA: Thank you, Michelle. Next up is Najari Smith, founder and Executive Director of Richmond, California’s Rich City Rides and former chair of the Richmond Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee. He has worked tirelessly to improve bike infrastructure and to use bicycles to unite neighborhoods and communities throughout the Bay Area, including by creating the biggest bicycle celebration in Richmond’s history. He’s also involved in work around Cooperation Richmond, which we’re going to hear more about from Doria later on. Najari.
NAJARI SMITH: So Rich City Rides started as this crazy idea of a young man who thought that he could reach out and connect with community members by offering bicycle repair outdoors, in a park, as a way of getting to know people and sharing with them his love for bicycles. Bicycles weren’t as popular then, and this small initiative was a part of a larger cultural change, a move in many cities towards regenerative transportation, a different way of engaging with one of our most used assets, our streets and sidewalks.
As those bicycle repair workshops in the park became more popular, more people joined in, and some of them started organizing days during which they would care for the park, and big group bicycle rides also grew out of it. They became a weekly activity that we collectively call “Self-care Sunday” or “Community Care Rides.” And from these rides more ideas emerged: they encouraged a different way of looking at the streets. The rides are great outreach. They’re a form of civic celebration that include music and that draw people in. A lot of people wanted to participate but didn’t have bikes, and we wanted everybody to be able to join in, so we found old bikes and refurbished them, and we’ve been able to provide over 2,000 bikes to community members that way.
One young participant in all this came up with the idea that a vital piece of bicycle infrastructure on top of bike lanes and bike racks, was a bike shop, and Richmond didn’t have a bike shop, so we took this idea and worked with this youth to start the first bike shop in Richmond, but we didn’t just want a standard small business bike shop; it had to embody the larger cultural change toward community and cooperation that the bike rides had.
A number of people who had joined in the rides became advocates for alternative transportation and participated in bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee meetings in the city in Richmond. We took this idea of starting this bike shop cooperative to them, but getting the necessary resources and jumping through all the bureaucratic hoops, especially in a fairly low-income city, was a daunting challenge. We turned to the folks at Cooperation Richmond who provide coaching, capital, and connections to cooperative businesses in Richmond, and thanks to their support, the bike shop in Richmond has been going and growing for the past three years, now with a total staff of six.
This experience of working as part of a co-op has generated ideas among our members for other types of cooperative enterprises that would be valuable assets to the community that could emerge, things such as delivery services, local food trucks, etc. Once people work as part owners of their business, they see the advantages of working with each other to build something that’s good for the whole community. They see firsthand that our powers are magnified and manifested when we do things together.
Cooperation Richmond is one of the many local organizations within the framework of a national financial cooperative called Seed Commons (https://seedcommons.org/) that provides capital through loan funds to reinvest locally. It’s a vehicle to reclaim wealth to meet community needs, pulling from the extractive economy to redirect capital into the regenerative economy, to help shift economic control to local communities, democratize wealth in the workplace, advance ecological restoration, drive racial justice and social equity, re-localize more production and consumption, and retain and restore our culture, because cooperative economics is in fact rooted in our ancestral traditions.
At the Seed Commons, we offer really different terms to borrowers than you find in the extractive economy: you make payments when you’re able; you’re not expected to start repaying until you’re making a profit, and we work with you to help develop and nurture the business in all kinds of ways beyond just providing capital. We don’t ask for these businesses to put up any collateral. Also, within the Seed Commons, everything is community governed. It’s the grassroots member organizations that govern the national fund. It’s bottom up, not top down. Every one of the peer organizations, such as Cooperation Richmond, govern the national fund based on shared principles that include productive sustainability, maximizing community benefit, radical inclusion, non-extraction of course, and building cooperative democratic ownership within the member communities.
Back to the bike shop: thanks to hard work and to Cooperation Richmond’s investments, the bike shop has grown and become more profitable over these past six years. I’m one of the founding members of the Rich City Rides bike shop and our commitment is that this is will be a long-term community asset. We’re committed to having this shop here after we are no longer around, not just thinking about ourselves now, but trying to think many generations into the future.
Another important player in this movement is the Climate Justice Alliance’s Just Transition Loan Fund and Incubator, which supports Just Transition projects through technical assistance, non-extractive loans, political education and financial management skills training. And there is constant communication not just about loans and raising capital but also about sharing services, skills and information across these sets of regenerative economic networks. For example, if some people on the other side of the country wanted to open a bike shop cooperative, we would share everything we could about our experience and what we’ve learned with them. Those sorts of cross connections happen all the time. It’s a great model to ensure that community wealth stays and circulates in a community, and the network has been growing steadily.
NATI: Thank you, Najari. Next is Doria Robinson, a third-generation resident of Richmond, California, Executive Director of Urban Tilth and co-founder of Cooperation Richmond. Doria previously worked on organic farms in Massachusetts and then at Veritable Vegetable, a very big woman-owned organic produce distribution company, so she has a lot of experience in the worlds of organics and of food cooperatives. She’s also a certified Permaculture designer who led the development of Urban Tilth’s three-acre farm in Richmond and a Farm-to-Table CSA social entrepreneur venture that now serves 440 West County families each week.
DORIA ROBINSON: I can’t tell you just how exciting it is to be here at Bioneers. You know, we’re right across the bridge from where Bioneers usually takes place, and for so many years kids like me who grew up in Richmond just would never have had access to the kind of knowledge that gets shared through Bioneers. And for the last 10 years, we’ve been able to bring youth from here to Bioneers, and it really turned many of them on and got them really excited about many different ideas they aren’t usually exposed to, so it’s pretty exciting for me to be on this side of a panel for the first time. I’m feeling really proud right now just to be able to share some of the positive side of our story here in Richmond, because I think so often, if you have heard anything about Richmond, California, you have heard about our troubles, our struggles. You would have heard about the refinery, the biggest point-source pollution of greenhouse gases in the state of California, five blocks from where I grew up. You would have heard about the huge fire at the refinery in 2012 that actually spurred the development of Richmond’s Our Power Coalition and the work that I’m about to share with you today.
For over 100 years, Richmond has been reacting to the impacts of the extractive economy, in our case the petroleum industry, literally stationed right in our front or back yards, in the very air that we have to breathe. We’ve had very little real control over that impact on our lives, and, as in so many other frontline communities, the extractive industries aren’t actually the only stressors. We’re also dealing with a whole slew of injustices: in economics, healthcare, the legal and prison systems, etc.—a whole collection of injustices that all compound each other, so if we want to be able to solve any of the problems we face, we have to adopt a “whole systems” approach.
When the big explosion and fire at the Chevron refinery occurred in 2012, a collection of organizations that had been organized for many years to fight the refinery, to try to keep it accountable, realized that we needed something more than just reaction and resistance: we needed to actually start to articulate an attractive vision of what we wanted to see in our community, not just what we didn’t want to see, so from a group that had originally formed in response to Chevron to try to make them accountable, including of course for the massive impacts of the fire, we formed the Richmond Our Power Coalition. It brought together a whole disparate group of organizations that weren’t all necessarily Environmental Justice-focused and that had different visions for how our community should grow and develop, how our economy should work, how we should take care of our homes, etc.
We rapidly realized that we not only had to keep pushing to change the rules of local politics, we had to also change the story. For so many years our story has been the story of us as victims rather than us as leaders. Of course, we have to focus on moving the money and getting our fair share of resources, because we’re a very low-income community made up of transplants from the South, black folks who moved up here looking for work, trying to escape the Jim Crow South in the ‘40s and the ‘50s, and immigrants from Southeast Asia and other places, so mostly low-income people of color, and we don’t have resources to invest in the changes that we dream of and need. We have been extracted from for sometimes hundreds of years, so we don’t have the capital we need because it’s been taken from us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start with what we have.
So this collection of organizations here in Richmond got together and asked: “OK. How can we not only fight and vision but also start to actually create the economy that we need right here right now?” We had been doing so much work already to fight what was bad in Richmond, even moving forward to start talking about decommissioning the refinery. We know that petrochemicals are reaching the end of their life journey here on Earth, and what will that mean for us being the home of one of the biggest refineries in the state of California? What is that toxic legacy that we should start thinking about now so that when there’s a transition, we can transition in a just way, not just in terms of the direct extractive economy and of resources and energy, but also transitioning away from all those other forms of extraction, such as the way we’ve been treated by the criminal justice system?
And, also of course, we have to do a lot of things at once. We have to keep struggling to change the rules so that we can lift our communities up. We have to fight for healthcare for all, for the rights of nature, to fully enfranchise the vote, for participatory budgeting, for creating a public land policy which allows for unlanded people, like most renters, low-income people in urban centers to gain access to public land and to be able to actually transform their situations and build the infrastructure that they need to thrive.
Changing the story requires action on many fronts, including using communication tools such as podcasts to speak first to ourselves to tell our own story differently, to take back our story from the kind of dominant media that tells us we’re victims, that we’re not capable, that we don’t have good ideas, that our ideas can’t scale, and to retell our own story from a place of power, from a place where we know our own capacity and history and what we could be capable of if some of the systemic, institutional barriers were moved aside.
And we have a large list of concrete solutions that this community is either in the process of putting into place or planning to put into place, from Cooperation Richmond to Rich City Rides (which you just heard about) to a new Richmond land trust that will permit us to create housing that isn’t subject to the commercial housing market, so we can address gentrification and houselessness in an equitable, just, fair and loving way.
And at my home organization, Urban Tilth, because Richmond has so many food deserts, we are working to create a local, just food system that reconnects the urban core with a whole hub of small family sustainable farms that actually need access to markets and are themselves under threat from urban sprawl and development. We’re having a lot of success reconnecting the rural to the urban, creating far more sustainable nodes of local food systems and food exchanges. We’re creating a hub in North Richmond, one of the worst food deserts in our town, where people can access fresh, healthy whole food that has been grown in a sustainable way locally, and bring it straight into their homes to help reduce the incidence of so many preventable chronic diseases that afflict our communities because of poor nutrition and unhealthy air and environments. We are mobilizing the physical tools we have so we can be more resilient.
We’re also talking about creating an energy commission, so we can have more control over our energy sources and build a local distribution network, actually governed by a local commission made up of community members. Another big vision of Cooperation Richmond is to take our main street that has mostly been boarded up for many years. The coming of malls and big box stores destroyed the small businesses there, so we’d like to take back those boarded-up buildings and create more cooperative enterprises that, like Rich City Rides, can be places of inspiration and connection. We are ready to re-imagine our public squares, grocery stores and laundromats, and use public land to create community-based housing initiatives that we need so that the people we grew up with, our elders, some of whom are now living in a ditch in our parks, have a roof over their heads.
We also know we need to work on creating resilience hubs, which is something the Asian Pacific Environmental Network has been spearheading here in Richmond. We know climate change is already here and some of its effects are not reversible, so we need to create plans to be more prepared and resilient when crises hit, since, as a frontline community, the impacts hit us first and worst.
Another really important component of local control has to be a public bank. So often in progressive arenas, people don’t want to talk about money, but money is at this point in history a fuel we need to make and sustain the changes we desire. It’s imperative that our community consciously, pro-actively interacts with the granular details of the economy and finance, of banking and lending and resource and capital redistribution, so public banking has to be a part of what we build.
Of course, this last year has been so challenging. The pandemic has been transformative. For Urban Tilth it has meant that we had to shut down our education and outreach and community engagement programs, but it has also meant that we could hyper-focus on what we could do, which is grow and distribute food. Throughout this whole crisis, we were able to triple our distribution of produce and get it to families that most needed it, keeping them out of long lines at food banks so they could stay home and be safe. We served our seniors and our disabled, bringing food right to their doors, and we were able to keep some of our young people employed doing this work. We were also able to nurture the relationships we had already started to create with our local farmers. We never stopped. We never went down. We never had to pause. Our networks for food were never empty. We had abundance and we had a model that we had been creating for the last 10 years that we were able to scale up pretty rapidly in response to the pandemic.
The biggest lesson we learned was that we need to keep scaling it up. We need to keep growing this model because having these flexible local systems in place can permit us to serve our community during a crisis and keep people employed during that crisis. These are exactly the kind of solutions we need—resilient systems rooted in right relationships and right practices on the land, which includes supporting farmers who already are committed to sustainable agriculture. Land is a big part of our focus at Urban Tilth, and we are not alone. There are a number of different organizations, collectives, networks that are looking at the need to move land back into the hands of the people. There’s a great quote that I ran across recently when I was reading Monica White’s fabulous book Freedom Farmers, about the role that black farmers play and have played over the years in the United States in justice movements. Black farmers and black-landed peoples have played critical roles for movement support. Land is ultimately the basis of all independence, and of freedom, justice, and equality.
There’s only so much you can do to change the conditions of your life if you have no land to call home, if you have no home base. If you’re just moved from place to place to place, you don’t have a place to create that store or business or cooperative. Land is central to transformative change, so in Richmond we’ve been working on this farm for years, but we’re in the process of buying this land from Contra Costa County. It’s currently county-owned land. We’ve made it a community-run hub of healthy food, healthy activity and movement building. It’s a place for people to gather, a place for young people to come and transform their minds and get introduced to all different kinds of ideas and practices, from composting toilets to organic farming to healing herbs, but we need for the community to own that land to have the security of knowing we can’t be driven off it.
And that North Richmond Farm Project is one of many land acquisition and asset-building initiatives that the Richmond Our Power Coalition is taking on. We’re also thinking about our transportation systems. We need to create safer places and safer ways for people to get around. A lot of our people have limited access to what they need. If you don’t have a car (and a lot of our people don’t) and it’s really unsafe to walk because there’s no sidewalk, your quality of life really suffers, so we’re doing working with our local government agencies to create greenways, green transportation infrastructure. And we don’t just want to come up with projects that we get some outside agency to come in and build. This project is based on having a training program that trains local young people from North Richmond and San Pablo who aren’t on a college track to do green infrastructure installation and maintenance as a just transition job. We need to be designing projects that create the opportunities that our young people, adults and families need to thrive. We need to be directly employing them in their own liberation, in the improvement of their own lives and communities.
But I have to return to the truth that none of these visions can become real unless we move the money. Since the inception of the United States resources and capital have been extracted from the hands of the Native people and out of the labor of the bodies of stolen African peoples and out of the bodies of other low-income folks who came over as indentured servants and later immigrants and into the hands of the few. We need that capital moved back into our communities, communities such as Richmond, impoverished coal country communities in Kentucky, Native communities in Alaska and across the whole continental United States, so that we can actually create the change that we need. You cannot create change from goodwill alone. It’s just not real. It’s not what happens. It’s not possible. You can do a lot, but you can’t create the depth of change we desperately need.
And you have to have sufficient resources so that you don’t set yourself up for a self-fulfilling prophecy of funding something just enough to fail. That happens far too often, so in Richmond we’ve created a Just Transition Fund that’s housed by one of our local community foundations to encourage people to support this ongoing work and put money into this fund so that we can build that bank, so we can transform our downtown, so that we can create community solar projects and solarize our seniors’ homes, so we can do the things that we need to do to transition our local economy in a just and equitable way.
And I have to say that I’m just so thankful for visionaries like Kat Taylor, who are in a privileged position of finding themselves with great wealth but also absolutely want to do what’s right. Kat Taylor has this amazing initiative called the Good Life Giving Pledge. She has pledged to give back one-third of her wealth before the end of her lifetime, and she’s started by donating a million dollars to Richmond Our Power Coalition as well as a collection of other projects across the United States. And she’s looking for others to do the same, in our case to find four other people to do what she’s done, so we can have a seed fund of five million dollars to begin this transformative work in Richmond. That is the scale and the type of moving the money that we need, even on a larger scale, to make the impacts at the pace that we need to answer the call of this moment, the call of climate change and climate justice, to begin to address the depth of the need of transformation that we have.
But how do we capture people’s attention? How do we do this work? How do we get people to start to work locally everywhere and then connect our movements so that we’re not working in silos, so that we’re not so hyper-focused on our place that we’re not also seeing the larger global picture? That is the last part of the Just Transition framework—organizing a movement of movements, so that we’re not just working in our silos but connecting initiatives across sectors and communities and regions so that we can reinforce and multiply the power of our work. We need to convene community and regional and national and international people’s assemblies so we can keep activating our communities and sharing our best ideas and strategies. Low-income people of color who have been disempowered for so long are a sleeping giant. If enough of them come together in an organized way, their voices, energy and life-force can transform the world.
That’s why we created the Just Transition Institute, where people can go deeper and learn the truth about our economic and political systems. We have to do a lot of unlearning. Our educational systems are mostly abysmal, especially the public education system, and this is from someone who deeply believes in the principle of public education. Our system has for the most part done a massive disservice to low-income people by not equipping them with the tools they need to thrive, so we have to create our own institutes where we can start to provide an accurate political education, the deeper understanding that our people will need, if we are going to be able to take back our power. Part of that is obviously voter engagement. We need to vote consciously at all levels, but especially locally, because a lot of the decisions that affect our daily lives are made there. We need to get more folks and more communities and collectives and groups to become members of frontline organizations and networks such as the Climate Justice Alliance, The New Economy Coalition, Movement Generation, Communities for a Better Environment, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, the It Takes Roots “alliance of alliances,” the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Right to the City Alliance, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, etc. The more the most savvy and progressive organizations can coordinate and cooperate, working locally but strategizing nationally and internationally, the better chances we will have of achieving genuine transformation.
This is, I believe, the recipe to make the changes that we need to keep life going on Earth. Thank you.
NATI: Yes. Thank you so much, Doria, and Najari and Michelle. We now have time for a few audience questions. The first one is: “With so many small businesses going under now because of COVID, how much are you seeing and leading a regenerative response that could bring many of them back as cooperatives?”
In New York City, where I’m based, an initiative called Owners to Owners was launched this past week. The city government will directly be supporting the transition of some aging baby boomer businesses into worker cooperatives. In our world, it’s a very exciting development that New York City is taking that on. It’s being led by some of the groups you heard about today, such as Seed Commons, and other groups such as the Working World and the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops. By the way, if you’re interested in that, go to the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops website: you can plug in your zip code and see what worker co-ops exist in your area right now.
DORIA: In terms of Cooperation Richmond, what we saw with Rich City Rides, for example, is that during the pandemic our cooperatives saw more business than normal, and I think it’s because people look at them as more than businesses. They look at those cooperatives as community connection points. Rich City Rides was giving out food. It was one of the places where the school district was giving out meals during the beginning of the COVID crisis. Worker-owned cooperatives can play a really different radical role in a community, and I think that our community members recognized that, and they supported those businesses even more through the crisis.
NATI: Another question is: “What are important key strategies in moving the money?”
MICHELLE: The number one thing is to organize. Wherever you are, organize there. We had a success this year in which the Universalist Unitarian Assembly made a big investment in the Seed Commons. Folks in the higher echelons of leadership of that congregation organized and got a result, and we hope that it will help create momentum, so active Unitarians in many places will in turn organize within their local congregations and their families and make other socially positive investments and get active in other ways. So, wherever you are, organize, that’s really important, but ideally you want to do it in such a way that you are creating what we call “permanently organized communities,” not just responding to shocks that come our way, but building the resilient, long-haul systems and institutions that can help us make the kind of deep shifts we need.
NATI: One last question: “What is your relationship to local government? What do you need from city and county governments to do to help?”
I will plug the New Economy Coalition’s publication, Pathways to a People’s Economy, which offers to any interested city or county or state government officials a policy vision of what they can do to help us get to more worker-owned businesses, more community-owned power, etc.
DORIA: One thing I think people and communities really need from their local governments is for local governments to believe in the power and capacity of local people. Much too often local governments look outside of their communities for places to invest, for contractors, for experts. They’re not used to thinking about investing in local residents and in the vision of local people. Their ideas of economic development are to try to attract national chains, big box stores, corporate offices, etc. Too often they look at local residents who’ve been organizing for change as a nuisance. That that has got to change, and to make it change, we have to organize and elect responsive leaders.
NATI: I wish we had more time, but we hope that you will all plug in with us on our social media and websites, and get down with your folks wherever you are. I want to thank Michelle, Doria, Najari and Bioneers and the Bioneers community for having us. Frontlines to the Future is where it’s at.
Panelists
Doria Robinson, a 3rd-generation resident of Richmond, California and Executive Director of Urban Tilth, is a co-founder of Cooperation Richmond, a worker-owned cooperative developer and local loan fund. Doria previously worked: on organic farms in Massachusetts; at Veritable Vegetable, a women-owned organic produce distribution company; at Real Food Company; and at Mixed Nuts Food Co-op. A Certified Permaculture Designer, she also led the development of Urban Tilth’s 3-acre urban farm in Richmond and the Farm-to-Table CSA social entrepreneurial venture that now serves 440 West County families each week.
Najari Smith, Richmond, CA-based founder and Executive Director of Rich City Rides, former chair and still member of the Richmond Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee, has worked tirelessly to improve bike infrastructure and to use bicycles to unite neighborhoods and communities throughout the Bay Area, including by creating the biggest bicycle celebrations in Richmond’s history.
Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, a member of the Movement Generation (MG) staff collective who has been on its planning committee since 2008, has worked for the last 25 years building movement vehicles for frontline communities. Prior to her work at MG, she co-led the Center for Food and Justice, the National Farm to School Initiative, Rooted in Community, and the School of Unity and Liberation. Michelle was also a founding co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and the Our Power Campaign and was recently named an Ashoka Fellow (2017-2020).
Natalia Linares, Communications Organizer at the New Economy Coalition, has over a decade of experience as a cultural organizer, artist advocate, and publicist working to amplify voices from traditionally underrepresented communities. In 2010 Natalia founded Conrazón, an agency for artists and creators invested in new paradigms of heart-centered economic justice in the performing arts and media.
This article contains the content from the 12/3/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Weekend One of the Bioneers Conference is just a few days away!
As we prepare for this virtual gathering, we want to highlight the wisdom you can expect to hear from leaders of the world’s most pressing social and environmental movements — not just the campaigns making front-page headlines, but also the revolutionary ones you may not know about yet.
Our digital platform makes the Bioneers Conference easier to join now than ever before, but “Beyond the Great Unraveling: Weaving the World Anew” isn’t just an online event. It’s an experience to enlighten, inspire and interact. Join us! Click here to register now.
This week, we feature some of the best programming that Weekend One of the Bioneers 2020 Conference will have to offer.
20% Off Flash Sale Ends Tonight!
Are you quick enough to catch this flash sale? Register before midnight to get 20% off your order! But that’s not all…
Every session at this year’s Conference will be immediately available on-demand for Bioneers Conference attendees for the month of December. So if the Conference schedule doesn’t align perfectly with yours, we’ve got you covered — watch a keynote talk again or catch that panel you wished you could have attended. Listen to the entire Conference in the background while you work for the next couple of weeks. Experience Bioneers as it works for you.
Art That Responds to the Times: Wisdom from Rising Appalachia
Rising Appalachia is an American musical group rooted in storytelling and passionate grassroots activism. The band provides a platform for local causes wherever it plays and frequently incites its fans to gather with it in converting vacant or underused lots into verdant urban orchards and gardens.
In this Q&A with one-half of the duo, Chloe Smith, she discusses the role of art and music in social justice movements.
Join Rising Appalachia for a live performance at the Bioneers 2020 Conference this Sunday, Dec. 6! They’re also leading the “Come To Life: Inspiring the Regenerative Movement Through Arts and Activism” panel discussion on Dec. 12. Register now!
New Keynote Speaker: Chloe Maxmin
At Bioneers 2020, Maine State Senator Chloe Maxmin is delivering a keynote address and joining a panel conversation on rebuilding democracy. Register now to watch her speak!
How Indigenous Wisdom Can Help Us Address Today’s Challenges, with Anita Sanchez
Dr. Anita Sanchez is an author whose visionary work bridges Indigenous wisdom and modern life. Inspired by the rich culture of her Mexican and Aztec heritage, Sanchez is helping individuals and organizations achieve transformational, positive change around diversity.
In this interview, Sanchez shares how Indigenous wisdom can help us honor the interconnectedness of life and sustain a more fulfilling human presence on Earth.
Join Anita Sanchez at the Council and Talking Circle Sessions at the Bioneers 2020 Conference. Register now!
Community Conversations at Bioneers 2020
At Bioneers, we have an amazing community – discerning, engaged, committed and reflective. That’s why we’re offering Community Conversations at our 2020 Conference, as an opportunity for us to come together around key topics to talk about what has real meaning and value to us.
Stimulated by a brief ‘keynote’, or “conversation starter”, and captured by a creative ’synthesis’ from talented young spoken word artists, these community conversations offer a place to bring your best thinking forward in creative and innovative ways. Join us, and weave your heart, mind, and voice into the collective braid!
In this essay for Emergence Magazine, Terry Tempest Williams searches for what is revealed when worlds unravel, tracing the entangled nature of undoing and becoming.
In line with the theme of the Bioneers 2020 Conference, she reflects on the state of “permanent emergency” we’re entering, as the intersection of ecological, social and political crises demands the emergence of solutions. She asks: How can we hold the uncertainty at this time of transition and transformation? How can we not be paralyzed in the great unraveling and each play a part in weaving the world anew?
The second annual print edition of Emergence Magazine is available for pre-order now! Order your copy and use discount code BIONEERS15 at checkout to receive 15% off.
The Benefits and Risks of the Mainstreaming of Sacred Plants and Psychedelics
While the Bioneers Conference is above all focused on ecological and social justice domains, the event has always included a strong interest in sacred plant and psychedelic use and its apparent links to enhanced eco-consciousness.
This year’s Conference is no different, featuring two keynote addresses and two panels with luminaries in the exploration and research of visionary plant use. You won’t want to miss this range of programs — including Paul Stamets on magic mushrooms and Katsi Cook on Native American Church peyote ceremonies.
One Earth: Integrating Climate Action and Biodiversity Conservation into a Blueprint for a Livable Planet
In this Dec. 5 panel discussion, climate activists explore how we can protect and restore 50% of global landscapes while staying below a 1.5°C temperature rise in the next few decades. By following the roadmap of new projects like the Global Safety Net, we’ll learn how to make change through a combination of world-class science, Indigenous rights and stewardship, grassroots action and transformative philanthropy.
