The deep divisions between urban and rural America are becoming a defining force in American politics at the state and national levels. It is clear that we cannot achieve bold, long-lasting legislation without support from rural America. Hear from Chloe Maxmin, a young progressive from rural Maine who in 2018 flipped a Maine House Seat with a 16% Republican advantage, and in 2020 challenged the highest ranking Republican in Maine (and a two-term incumbent) for the Maine State Senate…and won!
Chloe delivered this talk at the Bioneers 2020 Conference, introduced by Nina Simons.
LEARN MORE
Chloe Maxmin, hailing from rural Maine, is a Maine State Senator just elected in 2020 after unseating a two-term Republican incumbent and (former) Senate Minority Leader. In 2018, she served in the Maine House of Representatives after becoming the first Democrat to win her rural conservative district. Chloe is seeking to develop a new politics for rural America, and she and her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, are currently writing a book for Beacon Press about their electoral success and political goals.
In this Bioneers 2014 keynote address, Chloe Maxmin describes her history as a young climate activist. An activist since age 12, she co-founded Divest Harvard to pressure her college to disinvest from fossil fuel holdings, gaining international recognition for her effective activism.
This Bioneers podcast features Chloe Maxmin as well as De’Anthony Jones, a former President of the Environmental Students Organization at Sacramento State, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, hip-hop artist and Youth Director of Earth Guardians. They say there’s no better time to be born than now because this generation gets to rewrite history. It could be known as the generation that brought forth a healthy, just, sustainable world for every generation to come.
This remarkable performance of “I Love America” by Alfred Howard took place at the 2020 Bioneers Conference.
Alfred is an accomplished spoken-word artist, writer, and co-founder of The Redwoods Music, a San Diego record label and collective. He currently pens lyrics for 8 bands, and performs homemade percussion with six. He has written lyrics for over 30 released albums.
As the son of a prolific black female artist, his unique experience of being a black man in a mostly white city, and of suffering from the mysterious illness of Lyme’s Disease, have given him the perspective to write from a place of paradox, humor and humanity.
Alfred grew up a self-proclaimed birdwatching nerd and outsider. In his early 20s he caravanned with musicians across the county before setting roots in San Diego, where he is a leading figure in that city’s musical community. He is the author of 2 books, including The Autobiography of No One.
Special thanks to our friends and Bioneers sponsor Guayaki Tea, whose “Come to Life” artists series produced this video.
This special video by the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company was created for the 2020 Bioneers Conference.
The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company’s extraordinary energy, brilliant choreography and inspired lyrics have been rocking the house at Bioneers for many years. A program of Destiny Arts Center, an Oakland-based violence prevention/arts education nonprofit, the company is a multicultural group of teens that creates original performance art combining hip-hop, dance, theater, martial arts, song, and rap. It has performed locally and nationally since 1993 and has been the subject of two documentary films. DAYPC’s artistic directors are: Sarah Crowell & Rashidi Omari.
For several years, we’ve closed out Bioneers’ keynotes with beauty and grace with performances by The Thrive Choir, an Oakland-based singing group affiliated with Thrive East Bay, a purpose-driven community focused on personal and social transformation. They are composed of a diverse group of vocalists, artists, activists, educators, healers, and community organizers directed by musicians Austin Willacy and Kyle Lemle.
“We Shall Be Known” was written by MaMuse (Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker), a 12-year old musical duo rooted in folk and gospel traditions who have released 5 albums. The women of MaMuse play a wide range of acoustic instruments and are known for their social engagement, uplifting spirit, haunting harmonies, and deeply resonant, life-affirming lyrics.
The Thrive Choir joined MaMuse for this special performance of “We Shall Be Known” at the 2020 Bioneers conference.
An Interview with Luke Wallace, politically engaged Canadian singer/songwriter; conducted by Bioneers Arts Coordinator, Polina Smith.
Luke Wallace embodies a new wave of politically charged folk music, writing the soundtrack for a movement of people rising up to meet the social and environmental challenges of our times. His most recent album, “What on Earth,” is his 5th. He has played at folk festivals all over the West Coast, led many sing-a-longs at Canada’s biggest youth climate marches and performed at climate change events internationally. Known for his catchy songwriting and inspiring musical delivery, Luke sees his role as using his music to amp up and inspire the folks fighting for a better world and as a platform to amplify the voices of communities threatened by unjust resource extraction.
LUKE WALLACE: I’ve been writing songs for as long as I can remember. For me, folk music was a beautiful antidote to the more structured music I was performing in choir and jazz bands in my teen years. I loved, and still love, the freedom that comes with just singing; however, writing and singing about the things most important to me is even more fulfilling.
POLINA SMITH: How has the pandemic changed your trajectory? What have been the challenges and the gifts?
LUKE WALLACE: Like most touring artists, my spring tour plans collapsed in a matter of days. It was a shock, and it took me a while to get out of the depression that followed losing a tour that had taken 6 months of unpaid planning to put together. As with all things, this was a lesson in acceptance, and underneath the frustration I was feeling were deep lessons that I now consider some of the most valuable of my life. Control is something that I often get caught in, and being forced to let go of that control was challenging at first, but is now something that I embrace as best I can.
POLINA SMITH: What are your ultimate dreams and vision for your art?
LUKE WALLACE:I write music to be understood and to heal. I find a real sense of being ‘heard’ when I get to perform and record music. If I’m lucky, this translates into being understood on a human level. When I’m understood on a human level, healing is inevitable, for myself and for the listener. On the larger than personal level, I’d hope that my art could play a small part in humanity’s global awakening to its right place within the beautiful harmony and limits of planet Earth.
POLINA SMITH: What is your perspective on the times we are living in?
LUKE WALLACE: Our dearest mother Earth is giving us a shake. She’s reminding us that when we travel too far from the source of our life and wellbeing, we will experience suffering and disconnection. We are being asked to reconnect, reintegrate and remember where we are from.
POLINA SMITH: What do you believe is the role of art and music in social justice movements and in this time specifically?
LUKE WALLACE: I used to think that music was fuel for the movement, but now I see it a little differently. I see amazing human beings (those on the frontlines fighting to protect the planet) organizing for change and justice, and I see music as an important contribution to those folks’ sanity. To be understood is a gift, and I think music can offer those who are deep in the trenches of justice a moment of rest and reassurance.
POLINA SMITH: What are you most excited about in the Bioneers Conference you are going to be participating in?
LUKE WALLACE:Imagining a new world is exactly what we need to do right now, and the Bioneers Conference consistently brings the newest ideas and ways of being to collective consciousness. I am very excited to hear what everyone has been dreaming up.
POLINA SMITH: Thank you Luke, for sharing your wisdom and music with us, we can’t wait to see you at the conference!
Society is not as far removed from the painful legacy of racism as some believe. After the police killing of George Floyd this summer, the imperative of racial justice has entered mainstream consciousness and made evident the need to actively dismantle systems of white supremacy.
The work of antiracism is necessary, but those who assume it often find themselves feeling overwhelmed by the struggle against deeply entrenched institutions. It’s no secret that the United States is a country with origins grounded in violence and exploitation — demanding deep emotional labor from those who seek to uproot the old system and plant new seeds.
Sheila Diggs
Karla McLaren and Sheila Diggs are colleagues in the study of emotion. Karla is an award-winning author, researcher and innovator in the field of effective communication and empathy. Sheila is an organizational development professional who engages organizations in self-awareness and builds awareness around systems of racial inequality in teams.
In this interview, Karla and Sheila discuss their work, what it means to honor our emotions, and leverage self-awareness for change.
Karla and Sheila are leading an interactive session at the Bioneers 2020 Conference! Register now to attend their Dec. 6 session, “The Emotional Work of Antiracism: How Our Feelings Can Help Us Create A More Just World.”
At the Bioneers Conference, you’ll be speaking on the emotional work of antiracism. How can we transform the feelings that can sometimes intimidate us from this kind of work into the very motivators that drive us to create change?
Karla McLaren
In our work, which is called Dynamic Emotional Integration®, we see emotions as the central motivators for everything we do – all thought, action, choice, and behavior. We trust that the emotions, which are older than human language, carry an ancient form of wisdom that can help us live more grounded and purposeful lives. Each emotion brings us a specific kind of intelligence and awareness, and when we understand our emotions, we can learn to work directly with them.
The emotional work of antiracism requires that we gain more awareness of the white supremacy programming in our culture. This culture has us caught in an insidious dynamic of racist beliefs about superiority and inferiority that many can’t even see. Our emotions are attempting to help us see and address these everyday injustices, but because our emotional training tends to be very poor, these emotions can lead to overwhelm.
Historically, we’ve been discouraged from having conversations about or addressing racism. This avoidance reaches back to the hardened social structures of slavery and Jim Crow. In order to dismantle this programming, we have to come together to talk about and explore our beliefs, assumptions, and biases. These interactions and conversations about racism often evoke powerful emotions that can lead to real change, but instead they mostly stop people from staying in conversations with one another.
These emotions are not to blame, and they’re not the problem; they arise to help us face the problem, and they bring us the precise energy and intelligence we need to deal with the problem. Therefore, we focus on helping people understand emotions, learn their unique language, and develop the skills they need to work with their emotions with competence and brilliance. Our emotions are what will help us become more skilled in our conversations with one another as we work toward antiracism, equality, inclusion, and justice.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of uncertainty and anxiety. As the author of “Embracing Anxiety: How to Access the Genius of this Vital Emotion,” what advice can you give to people for handling this emotion? How can they use their anxiety as a source of intuition and energy, while still making space for grief?
This pandemic has brought a great number of emotions forward to help us, but because most people haven’t learned to see their emotions as important forms of intelligence, many people are feeling this emotional richness as confusion or even overwhelm. It may help to understand the purpose and intelligence in anxiety.
Anxiety arises to help us organize ourselves, gather our supplies, and prepare to complete our tasks and meet our deadlines. In this pandemic, we need the support of our anxiety pretty much every day. However, another important emotion, panic, is also necessary. Panic arises when our lives are endangered, and it helps us make the most intelligent actions to protect our lives. Both emotions are necessary in a pandemic, but most people don’t understand the difference between them or what they do alone or together, so the activation these emotions contribute can destabilize people. In Embracing Anxiety, I help people work with these emotions alone and together so that they can be prepared and protect their lives in ways that work for them and for their emotions.
Grief, as you know, is the emotion that helps us deal with death and loss, and grief is necessary in a pandemic, of course. In emergency situations, which this pandemic has been allowed to become here in the United States, grief may need to take a back seat for a while. The needs of survival should take precedence over grieving our losses, yet it’s also important to make time for grief until this emergency is over. We’ve been offering regular online grief rituals to help people come together to mourn our losses as we continue to protect our lives and the lives of others.
Grief often requires ritual, and a community ritual at that, so we’re doing what we can.
Our country is deeply divided, with political partisanship becoming a statement on identity and morals. What role does empathy play in helping us unify and navigate through these difficult times?
Empathy has been treated as a cure-all, but we don’t see that most approaches to empathy are very robust. For instance, people think that a lack of empathy is what’s wrong with the United States (and other countries), when in fact, we’ve got a ton of empathy happening – it’s just not directed with much skill or maturity. Too much empathy of the wrong kind can be just as much of a problem as too little empathy is.
We have a tremendous amount of in-group empathy that has been weaponized against the other, and here in the U.S., entire political parties have become the other. In-group empathy inside the parties is very strong, but if you try to display empathy for the out-group, you may be attacked by your group. This type of empathy is an immature form, but it is empathy.
Isabel Wilkerson, the African American author of the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, speaks to the necessity of “radical empathy” in dismantling the programming of our white supremacy caste system. Radical empathy requires us to empathize with those who are different from us so that we can re-humanize one another. Wilkerson defines radical empathy as “putting in the work to educate oneself and listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel.”
Navigating through this time means learning how empathy works, and most importantly, that empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill. If people don’t have skills or practices for all of their emotions – especially the powerful ones – their empathy will not be robust, and they’ll lose their capacity to empathize across lines of difference. We seek a more muscular empathy than that – one that can peer into the heart of the other and see the world from within their lives. Only then can we truly address the chasms that have been dug between us, and only then can we address the pain, inequality, and injustice our supposed enemy has brought into the world.
Technology has allowed us to become hyper-connected, on a global scale. But with all this outside stimulus — from social media to the 24-hour news cycle — some people have become disconnected from themselves. How does emotional work help us rekindle our capacity for intuition and a stronger mind-body relationship?
Learning how to work with emotions is everything; it can help people in every conceivable area of their lives, but because our emotional education has tended to be so poor, many people experience their emotions as problems that need to be solved or escaped from. Social media can help us escape, but if we’re connected to our emotions, it doesn’t have to. We can be whole and functional people and use social media intelligently; it doesn’t have to be an escape from our lives.
In your book The Art of Empathy, you refer to emotions as “action-requiring neurological programs.” How can people identify their deepest, most primal emotions, and leverage them with critical thinking and decision-making for a more fulfilled life?
Current neuroscience is showing us that emotions and rationality aren’t separated in the brain or in behavior, which is a wonderfully freeing idea. It means that we don’t have to segregate the contents of our souls or treat parts of ourselves as better or worse. That “action-requiring” concept has been upended a bit since I wrote that book, but we can say that emotions help us create meaning, make decisions, act, and behave. Learning their language means learning how to access our most powerful motivators and the most powerful aspects of human behavior.
Every emotion we have contains a unique form of genius that doesn’t exist anyplace else. Knowing that, we can welcome all of our emotions, as the poet Rumi wrote more than 800 years ago, “as guides from beyond.”
In a time of political upheaval, national unrest, and accelerating climate change, it is important for everyone to find balance in navigating the complexity of our lives today. An increasing number of people are using mindfulness as a way to find peace in the midst of these global and personal crises.
One of the people leading this turn toward mindfulness is Deborah Eden Tull, founder of Mindful Living Revolution, an organization that teaches the practice of conscious compassionate awareness in order to cultivate ecological consciousness toward a sustainable future. Tull is a Zen meditation and engaged mindfulness teacher, public speaker, author, activist, and sustainability educator.
In this interview Tull shares how mindfulness can inform how we find balance during these troubling times, and talks about their upcoming panel session at the Annual Bioneers 2020 Conference. (Register for the Conference here.)
Your teachings focus on “engaged awareness practice.” How can people stay engaged with the world around them during difficult times like these without becoming overwhelmed? Are there times when it’s OK to disengage with the world around us?
Deborah Eden Tull
The purpose of engaged practice is to bring presence, courage, and compassion to every aspect of our lives. There is no island of peace outside of We Consciousness. Rather, meditation helps us to remember the interconnection that is our natural state. The Buddha was a social reformer and taught meditation as a pathway for transformation. Practice reveals unconscious and systemic biases that have confused humanity for generation upon generation… and engaging in practice allows us to release these biases and remember who we really are. It also allows us to cultivate a steadfast compassionate relationship with ourselves and with life.
That said, our collective nervous system has experienced an unusually potent onslaught of trauma this past year. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all that’s going on in our world. When we are present and listening within, we can bring care and compassion to how we take information in and integrate it. We can allow our inner compass or natural intelligence to guide us as we navigate difficulty. When we are not present, it’s easy to get triggered into reactivity, divisiveness, paralysis, overwhelm, anxiety, drama, or disconnect.
It’s a discipline to be conscious of our feelings, emotions, and nervous system as we navigate a disorienting global landscape. Sometimes we need to rest and retreat in order to re-engage from a more centered place. Sometimes we need to set conscious boundaries with the news in order to regenerate or affirm our connection with source.
I’ve witnessed so many people this year deepen their capacity to stay centered and open-hearted in the face of adversity, I’ve also witnessed the collective divisiveness, reactivity, fear, and othering that has been so pervasive in the US. This is a vital time to remember and make the choice in every moment for how we respond to life.
My encouragement is to pause as often as possible, to turn your attention within, and become more aware of and compassionate towards the internal landscape. We can grow our discomfort resilience or ability to stay present through challenge when we bring our hearts to it. We can access a boundless courage that lives just beyond the habit of fear. Rather than get tangled in the drama of the news, we can stay present to the deeper undercurrents of our experience and allow for conscious response to emerge. There has been a lot of toxic information circulating this past year, so It’s important to practice energetic hygiene. This means taking responsibility for cultivating a clear heart and clear mind. Making the changes we need to make as a collective is going to take everything we’ve got and we want to be as centered as we can collectively.
Do you think there are benefits to humans experiencing dark times like these? If so, what might those be?
Here is one of my favorite quotes of all time, which speaks to your question:
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” —Cynthia Occelli
Maybe instead of the word “benefits” we can acknowledge the spiritual opportunity and invitation for systemic change, in this time. It can be easy to remain asleep when life is comfortable. We’re experiencing tremendous disruption, and this is opening many people’s minds and hearts to new ways of being and perceiving. There is an opportunity to learn how to navigate global uncertainty from consciousness rather than through the mind of separation and limitation. There is an opportunity to strengthen our resiliency and turn towards, rather than away from, the unmetabolized grief that has been passed down for so many generations. This grief is the result of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and a disconnect with the natural world. There is an opportunity right now for creative resourcefulness and collaboration. There is an opportunity to release limiting beliefs and open up to fresh possibilities beyond what we could have previously imagined for our world. There is an opportunity to learn to love one another across lines.
One of the only things I trust to be certain in my lifetime is that we’ll be navigating global uncertainty. My prayer is that we do so from center, with fierce compassion and consciousness guiding us rather than divisiveness.
Mindfulness asks us to focus our attention on the present, but so many of humanity’s threats require looking ahead. How do we find a balance between those two needs?
Mindfulness teaches us to rest in presence while we do whatever the task at hand is. Sometimes the task at hand is to look ahead, to vision, dream, or make plans for the future. From presence, we can cast our gaze on the future and see possibility rather than seeing through the mind of limitation and conditioned expectation.
When we go beyond the conditioned mind, we can imagine, create, and receive fresh vision, beyond what we have ever seen or known before. When we are not anchored in presence and the wisdom of our body, we perceive through the limiting lens of the conditioned mind. We are often not even aware of the limiting stories that govern us. From embodied presence, even as we consider the dire circumstances we face today, such as global racial injustice, climate change, species extinction, and the continuing pandemic, we can access the qualities of clear seeing and compassionate action.
Theologian Martin Buber coined the term moral imagination, which means that it is our moral responsibility to access our creative imagination on behalf of the greater good, to create a kinder, more equitable future. In my experience, presence really puts us in touch with our moral responsibility to all beings. It puts us in touch with a much larger and more vast experience of who we actually are, beyond our ego, beyond the limited bubble of separate self. It puts us in touch with a different relationship with time. Beyond the confines of linear time, there is access to our felt connection with our ancestors, and the beings of the future, and the intelligence of the living systems on planet earth.
At the Bioneers Conference, you’ll take part in a panel about leading from the feminine. Why do you think this concept is particularly important right now?
The wisdom of the deep feminine has been rejected and discounted for a long, long time. With the roots of patriarchy stemming back to the inception of agriculture and land ownership, exacerbated by the Cartesian Era, the Burning Times, and the 18th century Age of Enlightenment (which affirmed a bias towards rationalization and further rejected the wisdom of the feminine). Our contemporary systems have all been impacted by this bias. People of every gender, and our relationships with one another, suffer from this often unconscious bias. We cannot access wholeness – individually or as a species – if we continually cut off one half of who we are. We cannot evolve to our full wisdom as a species without the partnership of deep feminine and sacred masculine leadership.
To clarify, by deep feminine, I’m not talking about gender-based cultural archetypes. I am pointing to essential elemental energies of nature, which we all carry. The qualities of receptivity, deep listening, conscious allowing, restoration, and other forms of knowing beyond the rational mind are some examples of what I’m speaking of. We might speak about it as the wisdom of darkness, stillness, and of lunar energy in nature as opposed to the wisdom of light, activity and solar energy.
Today, the dominant paradigm assumes that force is more important than receptivity, productivity more important than attunement, opinion more important than inquiry and deep listening, rationalization better than the intuition of the body, speed more valuable than slowness, competition more valuable than collaboration, to name a few examples of how this bias of yang over yin plays out.
The balance of feminine and masculine, yin and yang, is relevant to all of life. The seed does not remain resting in darkness forever. It eventually reaches out towards the sunlight and begins the process of photosynthesis. There is an opportunity today to move beyond unconscious biases and reclaim the wisdom of deep feminine ways of leadership, so that we can operate in partnership of feminine and masculine.
Nina Simons and I look forward to offering an experiential teaching about deep feminine leadership at Bioneers, and we want to emphasize that we are all called to be leaders in this time, whether we are in professional positions of leadership or whether our leadership is expressed in how we parent or how we relate. As a teacher of dharma and regenerative leadership, I witness people of all genders, reclaiming the wisdom of deep feminine leadership every day, and I feel enlivened to be part of this reclamation.
In 1920, 14 percent of all land-owning U.S. farmers were black. Today less than 2 percent of farms are controlled by black people: a loss of over 14 million acres and the result of discrimination and dispossession. While farm management is among the whitest of professions, farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in “food apartheid” neighborhoods and suffer from diet-related illness. The system is built on stolen land and stolen labor and needs a redesign.
Farming While Black is the first comprehensive “how to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest.
Thanks to our friends at Chelsea Green, you can purchase Leah Penniman’s book Farming While Black (and others!) at a 35% discount. Simply visit the Chelsea Green website and check out using code PWEB35.
As a young person, and one of three mixed-race Black children raised in the rural North mostly by our white father, I found it very difficult to understand who I was. Some of the children in our conservative, almost all-white public school taunted, bullied, and assaulted us, and I was confused and terrified by their malice. But while school was often terrifying, I found solace in the forest. When human beings were too much to bear, the earth consistently held firm under my feet and the solid, sticky trunk of the majestic white pine offered me something stable to grasp. I imagined that I was alone in identifying with Earth as Sacred Mother, having no idea that my African ancestors were transmitting their cosmology to me, whispering across time, “Hold on daughter—we won’t let you fall.”
I never imagined that I would become a farmer. In my teenage years, as my race consciousness evolved, I got the message loud and clear that Black activists were concerned with gun violence, housing discrimination, and education reform, while white folks were concerned with organic farming and environmental conservation. I felt that I had to choose between “my people” and the Earth, that my dual loyalties were pulling me apart and negating my inherent right to belong. Fortunately, my ancestors had other plans. I passed by a flyer advertising a summer job at The Food Project, in Boston, Massachusetts, that promised applicants the opportunity to grow food and serve the urban community. I was blessed to be accepted into the program, and from the first day, when the scent of freshly harvested cilantro nestled into my finger creases and dirty sweat stung my eyes, I was hooked on farming. Something profound and magical happened to me as I learned to plant, tend, and harvest, and later to prepare and serve that produce in Boston’s toughest neighborhoods. I found an anchor in the elegant simplicity of working the earth and sharing her bounty. What I was doing was good, right, and unconfused. Shoulder-to-shoulder with my peers of all hues, feet planted firmly in the earth, stewarding life-giving crops for Black community—I was home.
As it turned out, The Food Project was relatively unique in terms of integrating a land ethic and a social justice mission. From there I went on to learn and work at several other rural farms across the Northeast. While I cherished the agricultural expertise imparted by my mentors, I was also keenly aware that I was immersed in a white-dominated landscape. At organic agriculture conferences, all of the speakers were white, all of the technical books sold were authored by white people, and conversations about equity were considered irrelevant. I thought that organic farming was invented by white people and worried that my ancestors who fought and died to break away from the land would roll over in their graves to see me stooping. I struggled with the feeling that a life on land would be a betrayal of my people. I could not have been more wrong.
At the annual gathering of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, I decided to ask the handful of people of color at the event to gather for a conversation, known as a caucus. In that conversation I learned that my struggles as a Black farmer in a white-dominated agricultural community were not unique, and we decided to create another conference to bring together Black and Brown farmers and urban gardeners. In 2010 the National Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference (BUGS), which continues to meet annually, was convened by Karen Washington. Over 500 aspiring and veteran Black farmers gathered for knowledge exchange and for affirmation of our belonging to the sustainable food movement.
Through BUGS and my growing network of Black farmers, I began to see how miseducated I had been regarding sustainable agriculture. I learned that “organic farming” was an African-indigenous system developed over millennia and first revived in the United States by a Black farmer, Dr. George Washington Carver, of Tuskegee University in the early 1900s. Dr. Booker T. Whatley, another Tuskegee professor, was one of the inventors of community-supported agriculture (CSA), and that community land trusts were first started in 1969 by Black farmers, with the New Communities movement leading the way in Georgia.
Learning this, I realized that during all those years of seeing images of only white people as the stewards of the land, only white people as organic farmers, only white people in conversations about sustainability, the only consistent story I’d seen or been told about Black people and the land was about slavery and sharecropping, about coercion and brutality and misery and sorrow. And yet here was an entire history, blooming into our present, in which Black people’s expertise and love of the land and one another was evident. When we as Black people are bombarded with messages that our only place of belonging on land is as slaves, performing dangerous and backbreaking menial labor, to learn of our true and noble history as farmers and ecological stewards is deeply healing.
Fortified by a more accurate picture of my people’s belonging on land, I knew I was ready to create a mission-driven farm centering on the needs of the Black community. At the time, I was living with my Jewish husband, Jonah, and our two young children, Neshima and Emet, in the South End of Albany, New York, a neighborhood classified as a “food desert” by the federal government. On a personal level this meant that despite our deep commitment to feeding our young children fresh food and despite our extensive farming skills, structural barriers to accessing good food stood in our way. The corner store specialized in Doritos and Coke. We would have needed a car or taxi to get to the nearest grocery store, which served up artificially inflated prices and wrinkled vegetables. There were no available lots where we could garden. Desperate, we signed up for a CSA share, and walked 2.2 miles to the pickup point with the newborn in the backpack and the toddler in the stroller. We paid more than we could afford for these vegetables and literally had to pile them on top of the resting toddler for the long walk back to our apartment.
When our South End neighbors learned that Jonah and I both had many years of experience working on farms, from Many Hands Organic Farm, in Barre, Massachusetts, to Live Power Farm, in Covelo, California, they began to ask whether we planned to start a farm to feed this community. At first we hesitated. I was a full-time public school science teacher, Jonah had his natural building business, and we were parenting two young children. But we were firmly rooted in our love for our people and for the land, and this passion for justice won out. We cobbled together our modest savings, loans from friends and family, and 40 percent of my teaching salary every year in order to capitalize the project. The land that chose us was relatively affordable, just over $2,000 an acre, but the necessary investments in electricity, septic, water, and dwelling spaces tripled that cost. With the tireless support of hundreds of volunteers, and after four years of building infrastructure and soil, we opened Soul Fire Farm, a project committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system, providing life-giving food to people living in food deserts, and transferring skills and knowledge to the next generation of farmer-activists.
Leah Penniman
Our first order of business was feeding our community back in the South End of Albany. While the government labels this neighborhood a food desert, I prefer the term food apartheid, because it makes clear that we have a human-created system of segregation that relegates certain groups to food opulence and prevents others from accessing life-giving nourishment. About 24 million Americans live under food apartheid, in which it’s difficult to impossible to access affordable, healthy food. This trend is not race-neutral. White neighborhoods have an average of four times as many supermarkets as predominantly Black communities. This lack of access to nutritious food has dire consequences for our communities. Incidences of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease are on the rise in all populations, but the greatest increases have occurred among people of color, especially African Americans and Native Americans.
Farming While Black is a reverently compiled manual for African-heritage people ready to reclaim our rightful place of dignified agency in the food system. To farm while Black is an act of defiance against white supremacy and a means to honor the agricultural ingenuity of our ancestors. As Toni Morrison is reported to have said, “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Farming While Black is the book I needed someone to write for me when I was a teen who incorrectly believed that choosing a life on land would be a betrayal of my ancestors and of my Black community.
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer and the2019 recipient of the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. She currently serves as founding co-executive director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a people-of-color led project that works to dismantle racism in the food system. She is the author of Farming While Black (Chelsea Green Publishing, November 2018). Find out more about Leah’s work at www.soulfirefarm.org and follow her @soulfirefarm on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Want more? Buy the book and check out Leah’s powerful Bioneers Conference Keynote Address: Farming While Black: Uprooting Racism and Seeding Sovereignty
The climate change ship has left the harbor, and what confronts us is the urgent need to accomplish multiple goals simultaneously: reducing and then eliminating greenhouse gas pollution; rapidly scaling up drawdown efforts by returning carbon to the soil; and building the resilience and adaptive capacity in our societal systems to face the multi-pronged crises coming our way. And we must do it all with an equity lens at the center. It’s a tall order, but it’s non-optional. Luckily, there are people and projects all over the country and the world providing effective pathways forward for integrated climate action, using “whole problem” approaches. By leveraging collaboration across multiple sectors, these visionary leaders are outlining revolutionary blueprints for the next wave of essential work we need to do.
Moderated by Kerry Fugett, Leadership Institute Manager of Daily Acts. With: Trathen Heckman, founder and Director of Daily Acts; Lil Milagro Henriquez, founder and Executive Director of Mycelium Youth Network; Brett KenCairn, Boulder, Colorado’s Senior Policy Advisor for Climate and Resilience.
Panelists
Trathen Heckman is the founder/Director of Daily Acts Organization, a non-profit dedicated to “transformative action that creates connected, equitable, climate resilient communities.” He also serves on the convening committee for Localizing California Waters and the advisory board of Norcal Resilience Network, and he has helped initiate and lead numerous coalitions and networks including Climate Action Petaluma. Trathen lives in the Petaluma River Watershed where he grows food, medicine and wonder while composting apathy and lack.
Lil Milagro Henriquez, founder (in 2017) and Executive Director of Mycelium Youth Network, an organization dedicated to empowering young people of color around climate change issues, is a veteran of social justice organizing with 18+ years’ experience working on a range of issues, including: access to higher education for low-income people and communities of color; food sovereignty; environmental racism; and labor organizing; among others. She is a current recipient of a Women’s Earth Alliance fellowship.
Brett KenCairn, Boulder, Colorado’s Senior Policy Advisor for Climate and Resilience, coordinates the city’s climate action and climate resilience strategies and leads development of its carbon drawdown focus area. He initiated and now leads a multi-city collaboration called the Urban Drawdown Initiative co-launched with the Urban Sustainability Director’s Network and Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. Previously, Brett founded or co-founded several organizations, including the Rogue River Institute for Ecology and Economy, Veterans Green Jobs, and Community Energy Systems, and he has worked across the western U.S. in community-based initiatives in rural, Native American and other marginalized communities.
Kerry Fugett facilitates and co-creates the Leadership Institute for Just and Resilient Communities at the non-profit, Daily Acts. She previously served as Executive Director of Sonoma County Conservation Action, leading grassroots campaigns to eliminate synthetic pesticides, facilitating coalition building, canvassing to elect environmental leaders, and organizing mutual support during record-breaking fires in Northern CA. One of her main areas of focus is the weaving of antiracism into community-led climate justice movements.
The benefits and risk of the mainstreaming of sacred plants and psychedelics will be a featured topic at the upcoming Bioneers Conference.
Social attitudes and the regulatory landscape regarding drugs in general and psychedelics specifically are in dramatic and radical flux in the U.S. The obvious failure, structural racism and generally horrific social harms of the “War on Drugs” and a growing body of highly credible scientific data on the healing potential of some previously demonized consciousness-altering substances for a range of otherwise hard-to-treat conditions (e.g. depression, addictions, PTSD, end-of-life anxiety, etc.) have led to much greater interest from mainstream media and the broad public, ever more instances of local legalization and decriminalization in cities and states, and now major investments by venture capitalists eager to cash in on the trend.
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. The upcoming online 4-day conference is no exception. Two keynote addresses and two panels featuring leading luminaries with long histories of exploration and research in visionary plant use will delve into both the exciting possibilities of the enhanced availability of these potentially deeply healing molecules in safe contexts, as well as the risks of commercialization and desacralization during this transformative societal period.
Paul will be joined byKatsi Cook, a groundbreaking figure in the revitalization of Indigenous midwifery and a longtime participant in Native American Church peyote ceremonies; andFrançoise Bourzat, a leading expert on psychedelics as healing agents who has done 35+ years’ field work with the Mazatec in Mexico in a panel discussion on “Sacred Medicines, Creativity, Evolution and Paradigm Shifts” on Saturday, December 5th.
Renowned ethnobotanist, activist, Co-Founder of the Amazon Conservation Team and best-selling authorMark Plotkin will be delivering a keynote talk on the second weekend of the conference, focusing on the status of the fires and the battle against COVID-19 in Amazonia, as well as present new strategies and approaches to halting the processes threatening these crucially important ecosystems and the well-being and cultural survival of their inhabitants.
Karyemaitre Aliffe, MD
Sunday December 13th Mark Plotkin will engage in conversation on “Human-Plant Relationships in the Anthropocene” with:Kathleen Harrison, a revered ethnobotanist renowned for her unique explorations of often hidden aspects of plant-human relationships; andKaryemaitre Aliffe, MD, physician-scientist, leading expert on the healing properties of cannabis, who has taught at Harvard and Stanford and has 35+ years’ experience in natural products research.
These should be highly stimulating, thought-provoking additions to the great debates now under way surrounding the fascinating and rapidly changing relationship of our species to “mind manifesting” substances.
Dr. Anita L. Sanchez is an Indigenous consultant and author whose visionary work bridges Indigenous wisdom and modern life. Inspired by the rich culture of her Mexican and Aztec heritage, Sanchez is helping organizations achieve transformational, positive change around diversity, inclusion and engagement. As the author of the internationally bestselling book, The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times, she hopes to support individual wholeness and a collective conscious evolution in partnership with People, Spirit and the Earth.
Bioneers is honored to have Sanchez serve as one of our board members and participate in the Talking Circle Sessions at the Bioneers 2020 Conference. Register now!
In this interview, Sanchez shares how Indigenous wisdom can help us honor the interconnectedness of life, sustain a more just and fulfilling human presence on Earth, and lead a better future together.
In your book, The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times, you detail the gifts of forgiveness, healing, unity, and hope. How do these gifts help create great leaders?
“The leadership systems currently in place too often look at us as our doing, and they say do differently in order to change. But the Indian way says we’re not human doings, we’re human beings. If we want to change the doing in leadership, I need to change my being. And the way to change my being is to change my intent.” —Don Coyhis, Mohican, founder of White Bison, 1993
Look around you. Look at your community, your town, your city, state and country. Look at the world itself. Look at our media, our politics, our businesses, our culture. You will see people acting as if they are separate, alone. You will experience people thinking and behaving in ways that cause needless suffering, further division, and reckless destruction to themselves, each other, and to our Mother Earth. It is time for all of us, particularly leaders, to open our hearts and remember who we are: We are part of One Hoop of Life. Whether you are a leader of your life and a leader in your community, business, and family, these divisive times require decisive action. In The Four Sacred Gifts, 27 Indigenous Elders from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Africa share a call to action that asks all of humanity to receive the gifts that have been offered, and to embody them. The re-emergence of a vibrant community and the experience of belonging requires us to remember how to be in right relationship with people and the Earth. The promise is that when you embody these four gifts, you will create harmony, remembering how “to be” and how “to do.”
The first gift is the power to forgive the unforgivable. The second gift is the power to heal. The third gift is the power of unity. The fourth gift is the power of hope.
Your work with Pachamama Alliance and Bioneers has focused on amplifying Indigenous wisdom to inform leadership in tackling today’s most pressing challenges. How do these organizations align with your values, and what other orgs do you invest your time & energy into?
I am honored to serve as a Board member of Bioneers and the Pachamama Alliance, who align with my values and my commitment to contribute to movements that are life-giving for all my relatives. My why is to inspire people to discover and trust their gifts so that they become a life-giving force for all, people and the earth. This starts with me. My values and my commitment are to being a “whole human being” who understands that I am part of, not separate from, this beautiful planet and all its creatures.
For more than 30 years, Bioneers has provided breakthrough solutions for people and planet. I love our value of “It’s all alive. It’s all connected. It’s all intelligent. It’s all relatives.” For 25 years, the Pachamama Alliance, empowered by our partnership with indigenous people, dedicated itself to bringing forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. Both organizations use insight from their work in partnership with indigenous people to educate and inspire individuals everywhere to be in right relationship with all our relatives in this One Hoop of Life.
I ask to work with conscious business and community leaders who are committed to creating harmony and balance in the world. In addition to my clients, I share my energy with the Evolutionary Business Council, the Transformational Leadership Council and the Association of Transformational Leaders. I sit in circle and support the work of the World Indigenous Science Network, the Tipping Point System – EarthWise Centre, Wisdom Weavers, AISES – American Indian Science and Engineering Society, One Degree Network and others.
Dr. Anita L. Sanchez
What teachings do you lean on as you navigate and adapt to life during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Every day, I am grateful for my indigenous and Mexican roots that support me to remember I am part of the earth, intimately interconnected to people and nature, not separate. My daily practices help me remember that, even in the darkness, there is light, there is much to be grateful for, while staying present to the suffering, too. Each day, it is very painful to see relatives pass to the other camp, no longer physically available to us, and to see the racial and class inequities clearer than ever in terms of access to food, health, education, legal rights, housing, and jobs, to see fear and lies embraced, to see our forests on fire, animals killed, oceans and life destroyed.
I am an extreme extrovert, so I miss the time with my family, friends, and in being in ceremony together. I miss working with my clients to create diverse, equitable, inclusive and life-giving workplaces in different parts of the country and world. However, in our physical separation, we can choose to slow down, rediscover the power of silence – listening to what is going on in our hearts and spirit, which can include deep sorrow, gratitude, and renewed empathy and appreciation for all life around us – two-legged and all our relatives. Conscious, individual and collective, actions are necessary.
How does your unique experience as an Indigenous woman inform the way you approach leadership?
Being an indigenous female-identified person, a woman, impacts everything in how I approach leadership. This includes my world view of everything being intimately interconnected, not separate. As an indigenous woman, I see the reality of the larger society that lives in a world that is linear, separate, Time is not linear – it is circular, and what we are doing in the present impacts the future seven generations. Being a whole human being is to draw not only on the physical, but also the mental – when something shows up at one level, I know to look at all the levels to get better understanding of healing and wholeness.
Rather than looking at everything as disparate parts, I come in and look at the wholeness. I look at the connections. They might be messy connections, but nonetheless, where do they overlap? How are they connected and how are we separating them? I also talk about ‘good medicine.’ The ‘medicine’ is anything we do or say. Good medicine in the community, and in the corporate world, is anything that’s aligning our spiritual, mental, emotional, psychological and physical selves. Bad medicine is where we are tearing that apart. I’m about bridging it, showing another way of looking at things where we are all connected. For each of us, our roles, our actions are a kind of medicine.
People look to you for wisdom, guidance, and consultation. What are some things that you are still learning to explore? Where are you still growing in your thinking? Where do you look to?
“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. Everything The Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round… and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves.” —Black Elk, Oglala Lakota, 1930
No matter how educated we become, how many books one writes, how many seek your presence, it is an honor and a deep responsibility to be a human being in this time.
It is easy to say I’m a great listener, and many come to me for this quality. However, I continue to learn about the power of silence. My uncle always started his talks about the People and how to be a whole Human Being by saying to us children to “listen with the softest part of your ears and with an expanding heart.” He would follow with, “the toughest and most rewarding journeys in life is the journey from the heart to head and back again. I wish you many journeys from the heart to the head and back again in your life.”
Where do I go to seek support in becoming a loving, life-giving force to myself, other people and nature? I turn to my heart, to nature, particularly eagles, mountains, and the rainforest, to my ancestors, to the indigenous wisdom keepers from the Four Directions, and to Spirit – the Great Mystery. I pause to listen and to act from my heart, listening to my spirit and to the earth. I give gratitude for being a human being and I say out loud, “I choose to learn and grow every day.” Every day, I ask for help to grow in my trust in the Great Mystery.
Alfred Howard, a prolific spoken-word artist, writer, and co-founder of The Redwoods Music, a San Diego record label and collective, was, pre-pandemic, pening lyrics for 8 bands and performing 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.
Polina Smith, Bioneers’ arts coordinator, interviewed Alfred about his work and the role of art during these times.
POLINA SMITH: How did your musical Odyssey originally begin?
ALFRED HOWARD: I’ve been playing music for the latter half of my life. When the pandemic hit, I was writing lyrics for 8 bands and performing in 6. That outlet was suddenly gone. Shows and rehearsals were quickly a thing of the past. To be completely honest, I was exhausted at that moment: I’ve been dealing with chronic Lyme Disease for 26 years and that was the first time in almost as long that my life allotted me a break, and after a month away from music, I was excited again to get creative. My newest project was me figuring out how to do that in this new paradigm.
POLINA: How has the pandemic changed your trajectory? What have been the challenges and the gifts?
ALFRED:The pandemic has been a huge motivator for me. This year has been historical in even its most subdued moments. It had a relentless feel to it, as if each headline were in competition with the preceding one. At its best, music is a documentary of a moment. I decided to write and record 100 songs with different voices and musicians from all around the country to encapsulate a unique moment in our history, and I invited my mom, a brilliant watercolor artist, to add a visual element to each song. I thought it would be great to try to add something positive to a year filled with such dire reflections. It’s been difficult to wrangle so many musicians and record with distance as an obstacle. We’re all accustomed to creating in a room together, but art is all about evolution, and “necessity is the mother of invention,” so it’s been a great and benevolent challenge to overcome those obstacles.
POLINA: What are your ultimate dreams and vision for your art?
ALFRED: I just want to be heard. I want my music to offer relief and reflection. Music is medicine and we’re in need of healing.
POLINA: What is your perspective on the times we are living in?
ALFRED: We’re in a moment of change. We’ve had the pendulum swing so far into the darkness that the light feels like an inevitable next direction. This year we’ve been forced to acknowledge some tragedies and inequalities in our nation. We have the chance to not merely acknowledge them, but to address them.
POLINA: What do you believe is the role of art and music in social justice movements and in this time specifically?
ALFRED: Music is the soundtrack to the movement. The two are inseparable. They both motivate the other to push forward.
POLINA: What would your message to young artists be right now?
ALFRED: My message is to create constantly. Hold your creativity up as a mirror to society and paint what you see with whatever medium is at your disposal.
POLINA: Thank you for sharing your words and wisdom with us, Alfred, we can’t wait to see you at the Bioneers Conference!
