Co-Ops, Capital and Inclusivity: The Blueprint for Building an Economy for All

Democracy isn’t just for politics — it’s for the workplace, too. And it’s desperately needed in an economy that exploits the wellbeing of workers and the environment just to maximize profits, where we all end up footing the bill. That’s why Ted Howard, co-founder and President of the Democracy Collaborative, is leading a national conversation on developing a more inclusive, just and equitable economy.

In this interview with Bioneers Senior Producer Stephanie Welch, Howard discusses the power of worker cooperatives, examples of what a new economy could look like, and how society can make these practices stick.

STEPHANIE WELCH: Could you describe your work at the Democracy Collaborative?

TED HOWARD: At the Democracy Collaborative, we think of ourselves as a laboratory for the birth of a new economy in America, beyond state socialism and beyond the kind of hyper-casino capitalism we have. We’re an action-oriented think tank, so we conduct policy research, publish reports, and do a lot of work on the ground. At any one time, we’re working with 25 cities around the country.

We’re living through a time when there’s a lot of pain in our communities. At another time in our history, the Great Depression, we also went through an economic crisis and then, as now, that pain generated a number of economic experiments. Historians talk about that period when Hoover was president from the crash in October 1929 until March of 1933, before Roosevelt came in. Nothing was being done by the national government because of the ideology of the Republicans at the time, which was to let the market take care of things. So communities began experimenting because they had to. In California and Alaska, people started pooling their money to take care of seniors, because there was no safety net. 

When Roosevelt came in and the politics changed, there was a new opening for new solutions. They looked at those experiments in Alaska, California and elsewhere, and they scaled it up and turned it into the Social Security system. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) ame out of efforts for rural electrification. There were many other local experiments that became part of the fabric of the country at the highest level.

STEPHANIE: What are some examples of the initiatives that you and other groups have created in Cleveland?

Ted Howard

TED: The Cleveland Foundation, the oldest community foundation in the country, came to us and said, We know you’re not from Ohio, but we like your ideas about the basis of a new economy that’s more equitable, more inclusive, more place-focused, more sustainable environmentally. Would you come here to Cleveland and help us create a strategy? They gave us a grant, and I headed up a team that worked for about six months to devise a new form of economic development strategy for Cleveland. 

Most economic development in cities is a partnership between local businesses, mostly large businesses, and the city government. Usually business is the priority and the relationships tend to be based on subsidies and tax benefits as incentives to attract them from another city. The problem is that companies aren’t very loyal. When those tax breaks go away in six or seven years, they get up and move somewhere else. So economic development tends to be a zero sum game. 

We at the Democracy Collaborative suggested that instead of trying to attract businesses to leave other cities and throw their people out of work, let’s leverage the resources we already have that are underutilized. Many cities have a legacy of a strong manufacturing base and what are called anchor institutions that persist over time – large hospitals, universities, cultural centers – what economists call “sticky capital.” They’re rooted in the community, while most businesses come and go. 

They spend a lot of money – $3 billion in goods and services in just three of these institutions. Let’s work with them to drive contracts locally, put the money in the community and put people to work, create businesses that are linked to those contracts, and so forth. That became the basis of the Evergreen Cooperative Network. 

STEPHANIE: What role does democracy play in the cooperative and these other initiatives?

TED: The idea of democracy in the workplace is very, very important to the future of the country. The problem is that no one’s born knowing how to be a democratic actor. We have to learn the arts of democracy. I remember when we actually taught civics in school, but that’s no longer the case and is a detriment of the country. But there are a lot of other places you can learn about democracy, or the lack of it. One of those is in the workplace. 

In most companies, we tend to hang our democratic rights at the door when we punch in. We’re there for eight or nine hours and we’re working for someone else. It’s a very top-down, hierarchical system. We don’t have a stake in the company, we work for someone else and we don’t really have democratic participatory rights. 

A worker cooperative is a very different kind of company. Every person who works in the company has an equal share of the company. In Cleveland, Ohio we’ve created two very large scale industrial laundries that provide goods and services to the hospitals. Every person who works in there either has one share of the company or is on a trajectory to be voted into the company and become a shareholder. This means the workers who work in the company can elect members of the board of directors. They determine who gets accepted into the company. They have access to the open-book financial management so they can see how their company is doing. They can vote themselves profit shares over time. 

Another benefit is that it addresses the problem with companies leaving the city. If 50 or 100 people own the company they work in, it’s very unlikely they will get together and say, let’s send our jobs to Phoenix and cash out. 

Another reason cooperatives work well is that is a good way to provide jobs for people who’ve been left out of the economy. For many people, it’s very difficult to be part of the economy – people who have been unemployed for years, or who are on public benefits, or who’ve dropped out of school in eighth grade, or a single mom, or someone who’s come out of prison – it’s very difficult for them to get into the economy, and if they can, they usually get a very minimal wage. 

When we created Evergreen, our mantra was a job alone is not enough. If you’re hiring someone from a really asset-poor background, you need to not only pay them a living wage, you need to find a way to supplement their income so they can start to build their own household wealth. In a worker co-operative, outside investors aren’t siphoning off profit. The profits stay in the company and workers get bonuses. For example, the laundry workers in the Evergreen Cooperative who’ve been there the longest received a bonus this year of $5,000. In a community where the median household income is $18,500, that can be a life-changing amount of money.

STEPHANIE: How does the Evergreen Cooperative recruit their fellow employees to ensure they are reaching out to the people who can benefit most from the structure? 

TED: There’s such a desperate need for work in our community. When we opened the laundry a number of years ago, we didn’t advertise, we just opened the facility. But this was one of the only new businesses that had come into the community in years. Within one month of opening, we had 500 people apply for work. They now work with a group called Towards Employment, which is a community nonprofit. Their tag line is “From Poverty to Paycheck.” It trains workers from the local neighborhoods to be ready for this experience, and we’ve had a very, very good experience with them.

STEPHANIE: What would you want people to most understand about cooperatives?

TED: One thing people often assume is, “well, these worker co-ops are kind of nice, almost cute. But they can never really get to scale.” So one thing I’d want people to know is that cooperative forms can really move to substantial scale. 

The best example is the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain, in the Basque country. They built their first co-op in the 1950s with five people in it. Today, they are a network of over 100 worker cooperative businesses producing over 20 billion euros in yearly revenue, employing about 75,000 worker owners and members of the co-op. They’re the seventh largest corporation of Spain, with the third largest bank that they own. So it’s really moved to scale. 

In the United States, we’re not as big in this sector as many other countries. The largest co-op in the country is Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx. They’re 30 years old and they have about 2500 workers, so it’s a substantial company.

The other thing I’d want people to know is the principle is very important: In a country like the United States, the primary thing that drives our decision-making in our form of capitalism is the rights of capital. By capital I mean the money that investors own in a company. Labor’s in second place, and is simply considered a cost on the balance sheet. 

When our economy gets into trouble, like a recession, or an individual company gets in trouble, we cut labor costs because the value and priority is to maximize the profits for shareholders. Get rid of as much labor as possible to preserve this kind of “divine right” of capital. 

In a worker cooperative, labor is in first place over capital. It’s not that the capital’s not important, but the rights of labor and keeping people employed are what drive decision-making. So in Mondragon, when they have a problem in a company and need to close it, they don’t just let everybody go, they absorb the workers into more successful cooperatives in the network. The point is to keep people employed, not maximize the value to investors. So it’s a very, very different principle. 

That’s one of the principles we talk about in the Democracy Collaborative, we talk about a “democratic economy”. Labor is in first place in our decision-making over the rights of capital, and broadening ownership is inherently more democratic and stabilizing. 

We’ve been sold this mythology about business: large corporations are more efficient; if people work in co-operatives, they’ll lose their incentive; what really makes the economy run is entrepreneurship; if we just grow the economy, the benefits will trickle down to those who are most in need. 

In fact, the data show over and over again that alternative forms of businesses, more democratic enterprises, are actually more stable, more productive, fail at a much lesser rate than the other kinds of companies. If you look at the continuum of what we call “community wealth building institutions and mechanisms”, we have co-ops, employee stock ownership plans, land trusts.

One example is the subprime mortgage crisis. Cleveland was one of the cities that was targeted. There are still 15,000 abandoned houses that need to be taken down because people were sold these bogus mortgages and they went under. During the crisis, the default rate in community land trusts where the land is owned by a public-benefitting corporation was less than 1/10th what it was for traditional bank finance mortgages. 

In terms of employee ownership, there’s a great deal of academic study of co-ops, especially employee stock ownership plans. During the recession, employee-owned companies shed labor at far less than 1/10th of what the corporate sector did because of their commitment to keep people working. The buildup of retirement accounts in an employee-owned company compared to a similar company in the same sector but traditionally owned is—for the workers is more than 2-and-a-half to one, the workers’ retirement accounts are that much bigger. Of course, there’s more satisfaction, there’s more productivity.

STEPHANIE: What is the Healthcare Anchor Network?

TED: Well, we don’t have a national health service in this country. What we have is a system that consumes close to 20% of our gross domestic product, and costs continue to escalate, but there’s a very interesting development that my organization’s been highly involved in. 

It wasn’t long ago when hospitals and health systems all over the country didn’t take their local communities into account at all. Their business model was to passively receive sick people and try to make them better, but it’s much more advantageous all the way around if they create healthier populations that don’t need to use their services all the time. This is called intervening in the social determinants of health. 

It’s often said that your zip code has a greater impact on your health than your genetic code. Only about 20% of what makes up the health of a community in our country is related to the quality and access of healthcare. The rest is the social determinants of health: income levels, housing, the local environment. In Cleveland, Glenville is a neighborhood I lived in until recently. It is an African-American neighborhood, mostly low-income, and the average life expectancy for a man there is 68 years. Eight miles due east in a white suburb, the average life expectancy for a man there is in the mid-80s. That’s a very significant difference in life expectancy.

We realized a few years ago that a number of health systems started to get serious about this and wanted to change their business model to benefit their community. We created something called the Healthcare Anchor Network. It has 45 of the largest health systems in the country involved in it. Together they have about 1.2 million employees, $50 billion of annual purchasing, $150 billion of endowments and so forth. We work with them to localize all that economic activity to create healthier communities so that people are healthier. They’re creating local jobs like in Evergreen where the hospitals are customers of the cooperative businesses, investing in housing in their communities, creating low-interest loan funds for local businesses owned by women and minorities so they can expand and hire more people, so it’s really a way to take these anchor institution assets and deploy them for the benefit of the community.

This whole idea is growing very rapidly and is playing out in communities all over the country. We have 45 systems in the Healthcare Anchor Network, and they represent more than 1/10th of all the hospitals in the country. There are about 5,000 hospitals in total nationally, and they represent 600 of them. Similarly, we have a network of urban-based universities that are doing the same kind of thing.

Ultimately we will need something beyond these individual systems doing the right thing. We actually need a national system in which they can participate, but it is night and day from what they were doing just five or six years ago.

STEPHANIE: The Democracy Collaborative was asked to participate in an experiment in Preston, England. How is that going? 

TED: Preston is one of the most interesting “next system” community wealth strategies that I’ve seen and participated in. It’s a city that was poorer than Cleveland when I first visited in 2013. It was called the suicide capital of England because of the level of despair, the lack of jobs, alcoholism, and so forth. 

Now, they’re leveraging all of the different assets that they have at their command – the city council, the University of Central Lancashire, the housing authorities, and so forth – and they’re moving all their contracts back into the city to bring money to the economy. So far, about $100 million of money that used to leave their system is coming back in. 

They also created an incubator for new cooperative businesses that the university is helping to jumpstart so they’ll have a cooperative economy. They’re building a public bank that will be capitalized by the reserves of the city and the County of Lancashire. They’ve taken a hundred million pounds of public employee pension funds that used to go to things like hedge funds and invested it locally in Preston. So they’re building layer after layer. The end result is that in just six years, Preston was listed by PricewaterhouseCoopers as the most improved city in England in 2019.

STEPHANIE: The mythology around our hyper-capitalist economy is so strong, what will it take for these sorts of projects to get a foothold in our system in the U.S.? 

TED: We need to understand that we’ve got a systemic crisis on our hands, and it requires a systemic approach. We live within a system, a political economy. In our country it’s called capitalism or some people say it’s casino capitalism or hyper capitalism, or the neo-liberal economic order. In order to bring about the kind of world we want, we need to stop thinking that it’s simply a question of who gets elected. It’s very important that we vote, and I vote every time I can, but it’s not simply a question of better policy. If we don’t start to deal with things right at the heart of the system, and change that, then we’re never going to get to where we want.

The biggest impediment we have is not the power of the large corporations that will fight to hold onto what they have. That is a problem, and there needs to be a political movement to challenge that power, but ultimately the problem is our own lack of imagination. The problems look so big, the challenges so huge, a lot of us just give into despair. Somebody said our problems are way too big to allow us to be pessimists. We’ve got to get our ambition up that a new system, a new order is possible. 

On the back of the dollar bill, the founding fathers put a phrase novus ordo seclorum, which is the new order of the ages now begins. That’s what they thought America was at that time. We need to get our ambition up to something like that.

STEPH: What are the next big, bold steps that you believe could get us where we need to be?

TED: First of all, on the ground level we need to start to deploy not just cooperatives, but also land trusts, social enterprises, public banking, a whole range of initiatives that can contribute to the rebuilding of our communities. 

We also need to get ready for the next big financial crisis and collapse. Economists on the right and left are all saying it’s coming. Banks are over-leveraged and bigger than ever. The last time this happened with the 2008 crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank stepped in and used quantitative easing to create three trillion dollars to bail out the banks, along with AIG, the insurance company, General Motors, and others. At that point, the American public owned these entities because they were socialized by the U.S. government. The problem is that once those companies recovered, our government gave them right back to their original owners. 

What do we do the next time the banking crisis happens? Are we just going to do the same thing? Or are we going to step in and maybe take these banks into public ownership? 

At the Democracy Collaborative our paper The Crisis Next Time discusses a new approach to deal with financial crises. We need to work at the grassroots level as well as the national policy level.

STEPHANIE: These are big changes that need to happen and I think it’s difficult for people to see how these massive changes can come to fruition.

TED: This is what Dr. King said about bending the arc of history toward justice. What we’re talking about is bringing the principles of democracy to the economy. We’re talking about fundamental change to our political economy and transformation in terms of who owns this economy in the largest empire, if you will, in the history of the planet. These things don’t happen fast. We’re talking about 20, 30 years of evolutionary change. Some immediate changes can be made, but we need to stay in this for the long haul. 

We’ve been educated to think that there are only two choices: You either like centralized state socialism like they used to have in communist countries, or you like this hyper-capitalism dominated by giant corporations like we have. What we’re arguing is, no, no, no, there are many different ways of approaching this. Rapid changes can be made, as the case of Preston shows, like some of the things we’ve done in Cleveland show. 

It will ultimately require the kind of experiments we’ve been talking about; it will require forming a new political base of power that can challenge the large concentrated corporate interests. The labor unions are down to 6% of workers, so we need a new base of collective power. We need really new, innovative outside-the-box proposals, that’s why the Green New Deal is so interesting. We need a fundamental reorientation. 

So it’s a very exciting time. There are certain times when ideas really matter in the grand mix of things, and I think this is one of those times. 

Interview with Merlin Sheldrake, Author of Entangled Life

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a pre-doctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. He is also a musician who performs on the piano and accordion.

On July 7th 2020, Bioneers Senior Producer, J.P. Harpignies, interviewed Merlin about his new, highly acclaimed first book, Entangled Life. Watch the video here or read an excerpt from the book here.

J.P. HARPIGNIES: One of the most extraordinary things about your book, at least for me, was your explanation of how important fungal species were to creating the biosphere as we know it, making it possible for plants to come onto dry land. And to this day, you say that 90% of plant species depend in some way on a relationship with fungal species to survive or to function. So my first question to you is: How is it, given how fundamental these fungi are to life on Earth, that so little is known about them in so many domains; that there are still so many mysteries about them; that there are so few people studying them; and that so little money and research is being done compared to fields such as neuroscience or physics? Because if we literally don’t understand the ground beneath our feet, shouldn’t we be studying this domain more intensely? Why do you think we’re not?

MERLIN SHELDRAKE: It’s a good question, and a really important one for us to reckon with, because our neglect of this kingdom of life is causing us to do harm to the biosphere, and ultimately to ourselves. I think there are a few reasons for this neglect. One of them is that most of fungal life is lived hidden from our view. We see mushrooms that pop up above the ground, but fungal life is lived either as single-celled yeasts which are invisible, to our eyes at least, and otherwise as mycelial networks, which live their lives entombed in their food source and out of our sight. It is only relatively recently that we have developed technologies that allow us to study fungal diversity and behavior. For example, DNA sequencing allows us to profile microbial communities in the soil and in animal and plant tissues, and has played a big part in the current revolution in our understanding of microbes.

And then there are disciplinary issues. Fungi weren’t considered to be their own kingdom of life until the ‘60s. Viewed as a type of plant, they were lumped in with the plant sciences. There are departments of animal sciences, departments of plant sciences, but no departments of fungal science. This taxonomic wrinkle has led to an entrenched disciplinary bias: mycologists have long existed in dusty corners of plant sciences departments which has restricted their access to funding and students.

And there are other reasons. There’s a cultural suspicion of fungi in many parts of the world. You don’t find it so much in East Asian countries – China and Japan, for example, which are historically mycophilic…

JP: Ah yes, Wasson’s famous distinction ofmycophobic and mycophilic cultures.

MERLIN: Absolutely. I don’t think this is a distinction we should use to govern our lives in a major way, but you definitely see cultural aversion to fungi and you see cultural attraction to fungi in some parts of the world.

JP: And Anglo Saxons have historically been somewhat mycophobic, so because so much science is done in English these days, that could be another reason, right?

MERLIN: Exactly. So there are these various reasons, but thankfully it’s starting to change, and hopefully we’re going to see a much bigger investment in the fungal sciences, with more young people getting excited about fungi and deciding to go into do research on fungal subjects.

JP: The next thing I wanted to discuss with you is the fact that lichens became a sort of gateway to symbiosis as a concept in Western science. It’s really the first organism that forced science to reckon with the fact that there existed something that wasn’t actually a discreet organism, but a symbiont. And then in recent years, very recent years, we discovered that it’s actually a more complex symbiont than we even thought. So could you talk a little bit about symbiosis and lichens?

MERLIN: Of course: lichens are iconic organisms because of this, I think, and they’ve been  gateway organisms for our understanding of reciprocal and mutually beneficial interaction in the natural world. Before the realization that lichens were symbiotic organisms, within the modern European sciences at least, if a microbe lived in close contact with another organism it was thought of as a germ or a parasitic agent of disease. So when the botanist Simon Schwendener came up with the “dual hypothesis” of lichens, as he called it, he was laughed out of the house because it seemed preposterous that organisms could share bodily space in a mutually beneficial way. A few years later, Albert Frank, another biologist, coined the word symbiosis to describe the living together of fungus and of algae – the photosynthetic component in lichens. Frank intended the term symbiosis to describe the living together of different organisms in a way that didn’t presume the relationship to be either parasitic or mutually beneficial: symbiosis could mean parasitism and it could mean pathogen, but it could also mean something more than that. This opened up new biological possibilities, and soon afterwards, new symbiotic discoveries were made: the symbiotic nature of corals and other sea organisms, and of plants and mycorrhizal fungi, for example. It’s a good example of the way that words do conceptual work for us.

JP: Yeah. New words can open up the possibility of seeing things we couldn’t see before. I wanted to explore metaphors a bit with you. You talk a lot about this sort of battle of metaphors in this realm. We went from a kind of very primitive Social Darwinism that thought everything in nature had to be a fierce competition. It was all “red in tooth and claw,” and then this idea that symbiosis in nature was possible emerged. We already see that in someone like Alexander von Humboldt in the early 19th century, and then with Kropotkin, with Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902, and then more recently even some New Agey, sort of cuddly, friendly views of nature.

With some contemporary forest ecologists such as Suzanne Simard who study the relationships of trees with mycorrhizal networks, we get some family metaphors. They discuss “communities of trees,” “mother trees” that share nutrients with offspring, and so on. So there’s this whole battle of metaphors, and it seems really important. We can’t live without metaphors, but at the same time they can lock us into constrained ways of seeing the world, whether we are rabid Social Darwinists locked into this idea of social competition, or we can go too far the other way and think everything is warm and fuzzy in nature. You have some really fascinating parts in the book about metaphors, so I’d be curious to hear you share your thoughts on that.

MERLIN: I think it’s most helpful to think of collaboration as always an alloy of cooperation and competition. Think of families, think of jazz bands – all kinds of collaborations. There’s always a bit of cooperation, a bit of competition. These dynamics are basic facts of our social lives. If we think of collaboration as always being some sort of blend of cooperation or competition, then we can enter a bigger room, and don’t have to remain locked into a dualistic framework, squabbling about whether nature is fundamentally competitive or fundamentally cooperative. In any case, it can be helpful to think about competition in new ways: the word comes from the Latin “to strive together,” for instance.

Metaphors are a non-negotiable feature of our lives, whether we’re scientists or not. We have to use metaphors to understand and process and discuss ideas. Certainly, in the sciences they’re essential given that most of science has to do with phenomena which are out of the reach of our immediate senses. We are always striving to understand, striving to describe, striving to come up with images for things we aren’t able to detect directly. We may as well make peace with the fact that we will always need metaphors, and then work out how we can use metaphors to our best advantage. For me, the main thing is to remember that our metaphors are metaphors, to remember that we’re telling a story, and to remember that there are different stories we can tell. Ideally, it strikes me, we want a plurality of stories about various phenomena.

JP: It’s what the Buddhists call “not mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.” Right?

MERLIN: Yes. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called it “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” which happens when we mistake our maps for reality. All these metaphors help us to see in different ways. As long as we remember that they are metaphors – and that there are a variety of metaphors on offer – we can do our best to ensure that we have a balanced narrative diet.

JP: Well that’s the hard part because both the rigid scientific establishment forgets that at times, and then the counter-culture or the “radical mycology” wing, which we’ll get into in a little bit, also forgets that, so sometimes people can get trapped in their own maps, I think. But certainly a lot of interesting metaphors come up in the mycelial world: the “wood wide web” is one. Paul Stamets actually calls it “the mycelial Internet,” I think. And then there are also metaphors borrowed from neuroscience, e.g. that mycelia are like neural connections. They’re all useful, but some people do go overboard and identify with the metaphor so much that it becomes limiting, in my view.

MERLIN: As we all do. I think it is actually helpful to use fungal networks themselves as metaphors to understand other phenomena. If we flip these roles, we can see mycelial networks as metaphorical feedstock for other discussions.

JP: That’s a very good launching place for my next question. Mycelial networks are a great gateway, again to use that term, to understand that nature can no longer be understood as a competition between discreet species with precise boundaries. It’s so clear from your book that there are these incredibly complex networks in which it becomes impossible to differentiate species with absolute clarity. Everything is part of an active, functioning whole system that’s ever shifting in its boundaries.

It reminded me a bit of the Buddhist idea that there’s no “Self” as we normally think of it. Whenever we think of our self, we think of our body, but we’re actually breathing in other species all the time. And now with the discovery of our internal microbiome, we know that we co-exist with all these colonies of bacteria and viruses, without which we couldn’t function. Or we think of our minds and our ideas as our own, but obviously they came from elsewhere, from our education, families, communities, etc.

So it seemed to be very similar, this idea that once you really look at the fungal world, it’s impossible to think of it as anything but this incredibly complex, shifting system in which it’s very hard to differentiate a particular species. I guess that all of Ecology teaches us that more and more, but the fungal world seems to be really the poster child for that fact. And it’s amazing how little we understand about it, getting back to the first point we discussed. What are your thoughts about that?

MERLIN: One of the fascinating things about fungi is that they form literal connections between organisms. Ecology deals with interactions between organisms, and the ways that all organisms are open systems in constant interplay with their surroundings, whether they be other organisms or bio-geochemical cycles or physical features of the world. Fungi form actual physical connections between organisms, for instance in the case of the ‘wood wide web’, making literal this fundamental feature of ecology. They make it very obvious and easy for us to understand the interconnectedness of the natural world. So I think fungal networks are a great reminder, a kind of mnemonic, of this basic feature of life and of the physical universe.

JP: I wanted to jump into another fascinating aspect of your book. You have one foot in each of two different worlds, one very firmly planted in rigorous science and academia. You have a doctorate in tropical ecology and your academic and scientific credentials are tip-top, and your book has an almost 50-page bibliography and as many pages of detailed notes, so you’re obviously an extremely serious and rigorous scientist, but you have also had, from your childhood, a unique exposure to the counterculture. You describe in your book the scientific work that’s being done in the academy, but also this very fascinating, very dynamic movement of sorts of “radical mycology,” which includes people like our good friend Paul Stamets, and Peter McCoy. I was wondering if there’s any tension there for you, because these are two very different worlds and an enormous amount of great interest is happening in that radical mycology world, but often with a type of enthusiasm and linguistic exuberance that academics tend to frown upon. How do you reconcile that tension?

MERLIN: It’s an interesting question. We often think of academia as an inward-looking community of scholars who talk with each other and not so much to the outer world, but the development of the natural sciences over the course of the last few hundred years has been driven by amateurs, or passionate enthusiasts. The word amateur comes from the Latin “to love” – I don’t like to use the word amateur in a derogatory way. Much of human inquiry into the natural world has been conducted by amateurs because for much of the history of science there have been no other ways to do it: there haven’t always been university departments where you could go and make this kind of investigation. Darwin is a great example. He performed experiments with earthworms in his garden and raised pigeons, and regularly corresponded with pigeon breeders and pigeon fanciers. He grew different varieties of apples in his garden, and he competed with his cousin every year to see who could grow the biggest pear, which became a source of much family entertainment. In the fungal sciences, amateurs have played essential roles because mycology hasn’t had a formal disciplinary home for that long. The American Mycological Society was only founded in the ‘70s, for example. This is very recent.

I use the concept of radical mycology, which is Peter McCoy’s term, to describe people who are trying to use fungi to produce radical solutions to many of our big problems. You can see them as part of a larger dynamic within the natural sciences, people who are doing their own investigations outside the purview of formal university departments. So I don’t really see so much of a tension. I just see them contributing different types of knowledge and expertise. In many cases, radical mycologists can be more wild and free in their experimentation.

JP: They’re also very result oriented. They want to use their work for mycological bioremediation of toxins, to create non-toxic packaging and materials, in the case of Ecovative. And of course to perfect ways of getting high…which we’ll get into in a minute. It’s certainly a fascinating world. I loved a quote in your book in which you cite some academic mycologist complaining about his students, saying, “We don’t know what to do; we want to study yeasts, but these young people want to save the world.”

MERLIN: Yeah, that was a professor talking to Paul Stamets, actually. And he said, “Paul, what do we do?” I think that really sums it up. It’s exactly what you describe, but it’s funny because there would be few academic mycologists who would argue with the fact that their student recruitment numbers have gone up hugely because of the work of Paul and others, these myco-evangelists, you might call them, who have spread a passion and enthusiasm for fungi.

JP: It’s probably one of the few fields of study in which that peaceful coexistence is possible, perhaps because it was so marked by its historical foundation by inspired amateurs, as you described. This is an aside, but your writing really has the quality of those great 19th century naturalist-generalists. A part of it might be your family background steeped in an excellent British erudition and broad intellectual vision. I admire that in your writing, its elegance, rich with literary and philosophical references. There is a quality of your writing that is in the best possible sense, reminiscent of the 19th century Von Humboldt type of naturalist, except you’re obviously equipped with much better microscopes and DNA analysis, so it’s the best of both worlds in that sense.

Anyway, another thing I want to get into, because I think people will be very interested in it, is a little bit of your personal story and how it relates to the whole psychedelic aspect of this. I love the anecdote you tell of being 7 years old visiting Terence McKenna in Hawaii with your father. You had a bad cold, and you were in bed, and Terence McKenna came in the room, and you thought as he started mixing up herbs that he was preparing something to help you heal, but of course Terence, completely obsessed as he was with psychedelics, was actually mixing up a bunch of Salvia divinorum. I thought that was so typically Terence. I love that story.

So you have this unique back-story of having been introduced to many of these radical mycological figures in the psychedelic domain from a very young age, yet you describe your entry point into psychedelics, at least in the book, with an LSD experience in which you were trying to find some creative way into a particular research project you were doing. Had you not had a bunch of experience with psilocybin before that? Or, were you, because of some of the people you had known, reticent to get too deeply immersed in that world? To the extent you’re comfortable discussing it, what is your psychedelic trajectory?

MERLIN: Good question. Terence was a big figure in my life and had an amazing ability to tell stories. As a very charismatic and powerful teller of tales, he left a big impression on me. So, yes, I’m definitely interested in these subjects. When I was a teenager, there was a big magic mushroom boom in England and Holland, because a loophole in the law made it possible to sell magic mushrooms openly, so long as they were fresh. This boom lasted about two years, then the government closed it down. But in this period of time, I did experiment with them because you could just walk down the High Street and there were vendors selling them in crates, perfectly legally. People were writing about them in ways they hadn’t been able to write about them before, and there was a period of psychedelic experimentation on a national scale. So I participated in that, and it ignited an interest in these topics and in these subjects and substances, and their power to change the way that we think, feel, and imagine.

JP: I knew Terence also, and Terence was one of the great storytellers, as you say. Perhaps he had the greatest gift of gab of just about any human being, but many of his ideas, in my view, especially some of his more ambitious philosophical ideas, like the “stoned monkey theory” of evolution, were on shaky ground. You seem to take a very friendly and open-minded but skeptical view of some of those ideas, and you point out, interestingly, that psilocybin mushrooms developed psilocybin millions of years before there were hominids walking around.

That raises a whole issue, because I think that the psychedelic world has a tendency, perhaps because of the nature of psychedelic substances themselves, and perhaps because of the nature of that particular subculture, to be very passionate, enthusiastic and exuberant linguistically. One example is that quite a few people have experiences in which they feel that they’re relating to an alien intelligence, to “plant intelligence” in their journeys. It’s a very powerful, subjective feeling for many people, but that’s hard to reconcile with a more dispassionate look at the natural world. Do you have that problem, trying to reconcile your subjective experiences with your more cold-headed observations of the natural world?

MERLIN: I think the dynamic you describe reflects a bigger dynamic within the natural sciences which struggles to reconcile the existence of consciousness and subjective experience at all with the materialist, unconscious, purposeless universe, which we’re told is the basic fact of existence. Within the natural sciences at large, this tension is sometimes called the “hard problem of consciousness.” How can subjective experience exist at all, given that matter is feeling-less, purposeless, meaningless, and supposedly lacks every kind of quality that characterize conscious experience? The existence of consciousness is a great puzzle. You can experience consciousness from the inside only, by definition. So these subjective experiences in a psychedelic setting are remarkable and puzzling, but so are subjective experiences in any setting, and that helps me ground my thinking about psychedelics because it makes it all seem a bit less peculiar. I mean, it makes the psychedelic states of consciousness seem less peculiar relative to non-psychedelic states of consciousness, but it makes consciousness overall seem more peculiar.

JP: Do you have any sympathy for pan-psychic philosophies that feel that consciousness is embedded in the universe at every level? There’s a long tradition of that in the West in very many different forms.

MERLIN: I do. I find it very hard to imagine how we could go from meaningless, purposeless, quality-less, feeling-less, experience-less matter into rich, subjective lived experience, unless some of those qualities were a fundamental feature of the matter and energy that make us up. So I do have time for it. I think it’s a fascinating field of inquiry, and one that’s really starting to help us to contend with some bigger questions about the natural world and our place in it.

JP: Another great passion of yours, which there are some great stories about in the book, is your love of fermenting. You’re a great fermenter. I especially love that story about stealing Newton’s apples to make hard cider. You also tell a great anecdote about being very young and your father explaining decomposition to you when you wondered where the fallen leaves in your yard went to, and how that was foundational in your interest in the natural world. But where did that passion for yeast and fermentation come from, and has it gotten you in trouble at all?

MERLIN: I think an interest in decomposition – Why do things change? Why do things transform? How does a log turn into soil? When I found out about decomposition, it was just huge news. We live in a space that decomposition leaves behind. And so the organisms that decompose the world are fundamental to everything we know and everything we can do, but we see it most of all by what is left behind, the empty space that is left behind, the negative space that is left behind. So it’s sometimes hard for us to notice. Learning about decomposition was a big moment for me, and it continues to drive my interest in microbes and fungi and these other organisms that decompose and rearrange the world. That’s partly why I like fermentation. It’s a fascinating process because you are essentially domesticating decomposition. You’re taking a bio-geochemical process and housing it in a jar in your kitchen in a way that you can not only see, not only smell, but taste. It’s easier to taste that than to taste soil or to taste a rotting log. We’re encouraged not to do that as children. So I see fermentation is a way to notice, to know with as many senses as possible, this transformational power of microbes and microorganisms. I think that this underlies my fascination with fermentation, aside from the amazing flavors and the health benefits. Another reason is it connects us with our history because fermentation has been a big part of human life for as long as we can know, because before fridges, how do you preserve food? Almost all those preservation techniques were fermentative ones.

JP: But it hasn’t gotten you in trouble? You haven’t found yourself inebriated occasionally or caught stealing fruit from famous people’s gardens?

MERLIN: Well, it depends. After the Newton cider, I made another one with my brother, Cosmo, and my father. We wanted to make a cider out of Darwin’s apples. We’d call this one “Evolution,” so we had to go and get some of Darwin’s apples.

JP: But not his pears?

MERLIN: No, not the pears. There are apples growing in the grounds of his garden, and so we had to go there and get the apples, and that involved a little bit of—My father had to stay by the gateway to the orchard and stand watch and distract any possible witnesses.

JP: You were committing historic scientific crimes, stealing from Newton and Darwin!

MERLIN: I know. We were scrumping. It used to be a bigger crime because cider had value, but now most of the time these apples just fall onto the ground and rot, so I don’t feel like I’m in a terrible moral quandary. But, yes, you’ve got to be a bit careful about whose apples they are.

JP: Even though in Newton’s case, the story of the apple falling from the tree inspiring the discovery of gravity appears to be nonsense…

I’ve been very impressed with how favorably your book has been received, because sometimes it’s very difficult. My friend Jeremy Narby’s book Intelligence in Nature, which I think made some really fascinating points that dovetail with much that is in your book and was quite rigorous, did not get taken seriously by the gatekeepers when it came out, and I know your father back in the day was sometimes not treated well by the scientific establishment, quite unfairly in my view. But perhaps the times have changed. I’m impressed that the world is so open to your take on things. You are a great ambassador. You have really found a way of being very delicate and very diplomatic, while still being fully immersed in all the aspects of the topic. Have you been surprised by how well it’s done and how great the reviews have been? Or were you expecting it all along?

MERLIN: No, I definitely wasn’t expecting it. I had no idea what to expect, and so I was very encouraged to find this friendly and warm reception. It’s encouraging to me because it’s a subject I’m so interested in, and it’s nice when people can share your interests, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book. So on a very homely level I’m happy that people also could get keen about this subject.

But I think it’s a lot about the time we’re in. We’re in a time of great crisis. Of course, we’ve been in crisis for a while, but something is shifting in people’s awareness of the many social and environmental injustices that we are perpetrating and being harmed by. So I think there’s an openness to revisiting and re-examining some of the concepts that we use to structure our understanding of the world we live in, and I think fungi can provide a helpful way into this revisioning. Fungi can change the way that we think, feel, and imagine, and help us enrich the concepts we use to organize the world.           

On another level, it’s a very fungal moment for us. ‘Network’ has become a master concept, and partly because of the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web and the way our lives have become continuous with these digital network systems, network science is being used to make sense of almost everything you can imagine. And fungi are ancient living networks, at least a billion years old, and they oversee all these astonishing phenomena, and illustrate the foundational nature of networks, and the network nature of the universe. Perhaps this is another reason why people are interested in fungi at this moment.

Of course, there have been many people talking very passionately about fungal lives for much longer than me. Paul Stamets is a good example. Peter McCoy is another. But there are many, and so I feel like I’m just adding to the conversation that was already going on.

JP: I think that’s right, but I think because they’re so passionately in the trenches, there’s something about your book that provides a sort of an overview of the whole topic from many different angles that’s very useful and hadn’t been done before. Of course we love Paul and his genius and all his immense contributions. How can one not love Paul?

MERLIN: Absolutely. He’s been a big inspiration.

There’s that great line from the naturalist and conservationist John Muir, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” When you study fungi, because they live their lives wrapped around other organisms and embedded within features of the natural world, it’s really like that. You can’t think about fungi without thinking about other organisms. Grow a fungal network in one situation and another situation, and they’ll be different, so you have to think about context; you have to think about interactions; you have to think about symbiosis; you have to think about the interconnections between things when you think about fungi. So for me, fungi were gateway organisms, a gateway life form, a way into thinking about life and ecosystems in general. What was fun for me in writing the book was following these threads and finding myself in a completely different place than where I started. That’s part of why I think fungi make such good explanatory aids and such good model organisms for us to learn to understand and re-imagine.

JP: Maybe they’ll be the gateway to the triumph of whole systems thinking. Maybe it will be via fungi that humanity will have no choice but to accept a more complex ecological view of the world.

The Great American Sci-Fi: Utopia or Dystopia?

As a science fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson is an expert in imagining new ways the world could work. These possibilities are more important now than ever as global society reaches the brink of collapse, but we’ve reached a crossroads on our path toward dystopia.

In this speech, Robinson discusses the urgency to take collective action. By using our technical capacity, social skills and knowledge, we have the ability to create a sustainable and just civilization for all life. We have the inherent power to address poverty and injustice. So why hasn’t this happened yet? Robinson says we’ve yet to rethink the multi-generational Ponzi scheme on which the world economy operates, which borrows from future generations at an unforgivable cost: the planet itself.

The sustainable and just civilization that we all hope to create cannot be built using a capitalist economy. That’s good news and bad news. It’s a little terrifying, because capitalism is not just the law of the land but the global order, and we’re in it: it’s massively entrenched and backed by laws and armies. So, if you agree with what I’ve said, then it’s right to be a little terrified.

Economics as a study of the capitalist system, which is mainly what it is, is very proud of our economy’s supposed “cumulative equilibrium,” which is basically the grand total of all the supply-and-demand questions being made in the market and decided by the market. But if you examine it more closely it’s a deal between buyers and sellers in which everything is always underpriced. The buyers are in a bind because they are generally poor and need to pay the least they can to get what they need. The sellers are in a bind because they are competing with all the other sellers and need to hit the lowest price. So they price things as low as they can so that they don’t go out of business, and in the end, they price things lower than the things actually cost to make.

This looks like a recipe for bankruptcy, and many businesses do go bankrupt, but they get away with it by ignoring some of the costs that they’ve incurred, and by shoving other costs onto the future. So, because labor, which really means people, can also be bought at the cheapest amount available in the world market, the result is that sellers are selling things for less than it costs to make them, buyers are buying them for less than they cost to make, and in a sense there’s a collusion between buyers and sellers to make sure the hidden costs, the deferred costs, the denied costs, the “externalities,” will be shoved onto future generations.

Normally what that would be called is a Ponzi scheme, and it’s a little bit funny to think that the world economy would be illegal if it was run this year in the state of California, but it’s not that funny because we’re in it and it’s the law everywhere. So we are stealing from the future by way of a multi-generational Ponzi scheme, and every year we overuse the natural resources of the planet in terms of what can be replenished by the biosphere’s natural actions, by about August of every year. As that goes on, the whole biosphere gets degraded, and yet there is no cost associated with that in the marketplace. People who are fooled by a Ponzi scheme do not get their money back, and the people who are fooled by this Ponzi scheme, many of whom are not even born yet, are not going to get their planet back.

Kim Stanley Robinson

So, this is serious because it’s not just a loss of our finances, it’s a loss of our bio-infrastructure. If everybody on the planet were to live at Western levels of consumption, which many are aspiring to do, we would need two or three planets to support it, so we’re already in a crash, and it’s taking the form of a mass extinction event. There’s violent climate change and ocean acidification that could kill the life in the oceans, and sea level could rise very rapidly. The last time we were in these climatic conditions in the Eocene, sea level rose some 15 feet in a single century, and it isn’t quite clear why that happened, but it’s pretty obvious that melting ice masses in Antarctica and Greenland were involved.

We can burn about 500 more gigatons of carbon before we have in essence cooked the planet and tipped it over into such a degraded state that it will be very difficult for human communities to live. And yet we have already located and identified 2,500 gigatons of fossil carbon that’s in the ground of the world. Now, fossil fuel companies have listed all 2500 gigatons of that carbon as assets, and nations have listed them as national resources, offshore or onshore, so there will be corporate leaders and political leaders who will be trying to burn that carbon before the unburned carbon becomes what they would call in economic terms “stranded assets.” And the monetary value of the 2,000 gigatons of carbon that we can’t burn, I recently calculated to be at current prices about $160 trillion. This is of course a completely artificial number, because it’s like trying to calculate the monetary value of a poison. I mean, you do have to pay money to buy a poison if you need it, but as the poison is administered to the patient and it begins to die, naturally the monetary value of the substance will change over time.

But $160 trillion is a lot of money. And there are going to be people, well-meaning people, who, out of fiduciary responsibility (if they’re executives) or out of some sense of duty to their constituents (if they’re politicians), are going to be trying to burn their trillion or two of that carbon and then hope that other people can cope with the problems that are created later on as a result. So, there are going to be well-meaning people trying to burn all that carbon for the entirety of this century, and what that implies is an absolutely huge and ongoing political battle. We will be fighting for control of governments, in hope that by controlling governments we can escape the oncoming disaster.

Now, having described this rather terrifying situation, I think it’s very important to point out that we also have the technical capacity, the social skills and the knowledge to create a sustainable and just civilization for all eight billion people on the planet, and all the rest of the biosphere’s living creatures, including the large mammals that are most endangered. It’s not fantasy to say that; it’s an extrapolation of already existing things that we know. The technology is not the hard part. It’s already invented, but we have to pay ourselves to install it fast. So, again, that’s an economic question, and it doesn’t work in capitalism. We have the means right now to arrange for everybody alive today to have adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and healthcare, within the biosphere’s carrying capacity. One of the oldest maxims in the English language is “enough is as good as a feast.” In fact enough is even better than a feast, because feasting makes you sick.  We can create enough for every living creature.

Even within the context of our existing capitalist system, the UN has done an incredible job with its Millennium Development Goals in raising the well-being of many of the poorest people on the planet. About a billion of them have gotten to at least the next step up in the last 10 or 15 years, but this was not a capitalist accomplishment. This was in fact charity. It was using the surplus and doing work that is not paid for in the usual profit system. But what’s interesting is that this success is a proof of concept that it could be done.

So, again, it’s an economic problem, meaning it’s above all a political problem. For example, many people worry that there are too many people on the planet, and this is an open question, but one thing’s for sure, wherever women have their full set of legal rights and equal opportunities, the population growth rate immediately stabilizes, flattens and sometimes even drops below the replacement rate. Social justice is in fact good environmental policy, it is a kind of technology, in that it is a political software, critical to human survival. And the hyper-consumption of the rich and the deep poverty of the poor are among the worst environmental impacts of any human activities, so solving inequality is not just the right thing to do; it’s the optimally survivable thing to do.

Next spring, E.O. Wilson will publish a book in which he suggests that we humans should occupy only half of the Earth’s surface. It’s called Half Earth. Rapid urbanization is already collecting people into rather tight knots around the planet, so in a sense the process has already begun. If half of the land surface of the Earth was given back to wilderness or parks, or at least unoccupied or non-human spaces, habitat corridors could be built and the rest of the mammals and living things on the planet could prosper. Life is robust, and if we were to create this sort of system in an orderly fashion as quickly as possible, it could be part of the solution. This plan of Wilson’s could make a sustainable world for all living creatures. This is a utopian vision, and I’m very happy to think of E.O. Wilson becoming a utopian science fiction writer. He has often dismissed science fiction in his writings, but now he’s writing it himself, and I’m happy to welcome him. It’s a very good crowd that he’s joining.

So we can describe a utopian vision that addresses poverty and biodiversity and injustice which is realistic given our technology, our social skills, and the physical resources of the whole biological community of Earth. But we’re also at a very peculiar moment in history in which a disastrous future, a dystopia, is also quite possible, and we’re in many ways on a course toward that bad future. If we continue to do what we’re doing now, we’re headed that way. The possibility for utopia is still here: we are powerful thinkers, and we can think our way out of this crisis by using such technologies as language, the rule of law, the scientific method, and justice.  Because technologies don’t just involve machinery. Technology is the full spectrum of ways we organize our relationship to the physical world. We’ve been technological since before we were even human. Pre-humans were using stones and fire to get along in this world, and probably clothing. So there’s no problem with technology as such, as long as it’s used as a force for good. The concept of technology has to be expanded to include all our systems for coping in the world.

But what do we do with a vision of a distant utopia when we see the situation that we’re in right now? What can we do right now to bridge that vision with our current reality? What steps can we take in the present that get us to this positive future we can imagine? Well, first we have to keep in mind that the solution is going to take decades, generations, and we can’t let that discourage us. We have to take the steps that are necessary now. It’s a scaffolding theory, like a coral reef. You build the scaffold you can in this current situation, and then hope the next generations can keep building on that scaffold and raising the level of discourse and activity to achieve a higher level of interaction with the planet.

So what do we do right now? First we have to fight austerity policies. Austerity measures merely increase the power of the oligarchy on this planet to continue their destructive ways. Actively opposing austerity has to take place within the battleground where we’re fighting over these ideas—in government, and democratic control of government. We have to reclaim government as a representative of the people rather than the oligarchs. Ever since the 2008 crash, it has been revealed that the neoliberal privatization of everything that was the rage since the 1980s was a disaster. So a first step is just a return to a Keynesian understanding that government needs to regulate business, rather than the opposite, and as governments create money, to create and spend money appropriately to meet human needs. 

What that would mean now, among other things, is a carbon tax, of course, one that rises over time on a regular rate. It’s obvious and necessary. Secondly, there should be a high-frequency trading tax so that every time there are a million trades per second, if a small percentage of that is going into the public coffers, then even though there is a basic stupidity to finance, at least it would be funding the public good. A living wage for all could be financed by (those sorts of taxes), and a living wage for all would help create sustainability and wellbeing, so this is another obvious idea. The full employment that will result from a governmental job guarantee is the best way to distribute a living wage for all; there’s lots of good work to be done. And then lastly, and I think very powerfully, not only should we return to the type of progressive taxation that was enacted by the New Deal into the Post-War period, but as (the French economist) Thomas Piketty advocates, we should tax capital assets as well. Taxing capital assets intelligently would be one of the greatest “horizontalizations” of wealth, and as positive for the public good as FDR’s GI bill, and it might be even more transformative than that, because what all these things together would lead to is in effect a kind of social democracy, such as what we see in Scandinavia, but ideally even more equitable and sustainable than the currently existing Scandinavian model.

Fortunately, since 2008 the window of acceptable discourse, meaning what people can talk about in America without being immediately disregarded as, say, a science fiction writer from Mars, has shifted markedly to the left. We even have a socialist running for president and polling quite well. So, if we could pull all these strands I’ve described together into a new form of social democracy, we could move on to something we could call “post-capitalism.” A market of some sort may always exist, because we need to trade, but it could be so sharply regulated that it could exist on what economists call the margin, suitable for the toys, but not for the necessities of life, which should all be public utilities and part of a job guarantee and a living wage. A market would still be there for people who want to play that game, like playing rugby or tackle football or anything testosterone-fueled and exciting for those who like that sort of thing. That’s what capitalism should be in a post-capitalist world: a marginal thrill.

It’s also important to point out that this new system needs to be global. We shouldn’t be fighting the concept of government, because government should really be the people’s company; and we shouldn’t be fighting the concept of globalization, because unless this whole better system is global and enforced by international treaty, then bad actors can simply move their capital assets elsewhere. And although America is still by far the largest agglomeration of capital on this planet, and if things happen in the United States it will lead the way, just the way that California tends to lead the United States, there would still be tax havens and flags of convenience that capital could flee to; so if we only made these reforms at the national level, they wouldn’t succeed. A global system is good if the rules are good, and a global system is bad if the rules are bad. Right now the rules are bad, but they can be changed, because they are based on laws and treaties, and laws and treaties can be changed, and are changed all the time.

It’s true that it’s easier to fight to change laws on the local and national levels, because that’s where we the people have at least some leverage over laws and politicians, and it’s really at the international level where the Davos-style stateless elite technocrats have taken over; but they too are ultimately responsive to people power. And so we can work on it at all three levels, but we should never demonize the global level as such, because post-capitalism needs to be a world system.

So this is above all a political fight that will last the entirety of this century. All of us alive here are going to be involved in this fight for the entirety of our lives, so we have to pace ourselves for the long haul. We have to have a lot of faith that young people will come in and devote mega hours to the battle. We have to wage wave attacks: wave after wave has to go out there and sacrifice countless hours to things like stupid small meetings in order to make change, because that’s how change happens.

The greatest American utopian science fiction story is this one: That government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this Earth. That story contains a future tense, and an imperative. It’s a science fiction story. It’s a utopian story. What Lincoln was saying to us was an injunction, and even a command. Democracy only exists when people go out and make it happen, especially when there are very powerful forces with a lot of money trying to buy up that very same government that we call democratic.

So, in this battle, we have to settle in for the long haul, do what can be done in the day to day, while also keeping in sight the long-term vision of a planet where we actually are in balance with the natural forces and can work with them to everyone’s benefit. Since it’s possible, then we need to do it. It’s a matter of responsibility to the children and the people not yet born.

Rights of Nature – Codifying Indigenous Worldviews into Law to Protect Biodiversity

In deep contrast to the “human vs. nature” dichotomy underpinning much Western thought, Indigenous Peoples share a worldview that humans are a part of nature’s interconnected systems. It’s not surprising that Indigenous Peoples are at the forefront of a growing movement to acknowledge the legal “Rights of Nature.”

Below is a conversation from the 2017 Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, CA featuring world-renowned Indigenous environmental leaders, who share their approaches to this game-changing strategy for protecting Mother Earth and Indigenous rights.

Hosted by Kandi Mossett, (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), Native Energy and Climate Change Organizer, Indigenous Environmental Network. With: Maui Solomon (Moriori), attorney, Chairman and CEO, Hokotehi Moriori Trust; Kealoha (Hawaiian), Hawaii’s Poet Laureate; Tony Skrelunas (Diné), Native America Program Director, Grand Canyon Trust; Tom Goldtooth (Diné/Dakota), Executive Director, Indigenous Environmental Network; Leila Salazar-Lopez (Chicana/Aztec), Executive Director, Amazon Watch. Introduction by Alexis Bunten, Bioneers Indigeneity Program Co-Director.

Alexis Bunten

ALEXIS: The idea that nature is a living being is nothing new to Indigenous and other traditional Peoples around the world. While the Western philosophical system is underpinned by the idea that humans are separate from nature and in dominion over it, indigenous philosophical systems tend to conceive of humans as a part of nature and in relationship with nature. So as such, it’s our job to help maintain that balance. And perhaps no one else better understands that the current legal system is designed from the bottom up to exploit nature than Indigenous Peoples, because we grow up with it and we live with it every day.

So for me, I grew up with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which was enacted in 1971. It established native corporations to manage $963 million, in trade for giving up our original aboriginal customary title to the land. We’re doing the best we can with the settlement, but I think it was a pact with the devil, because we played into the Western system of law that considers nature as property, and it totally goes against our native worldviews.

Rights of Nature is a growing movement, though, to create a new system of legal policies that recognize nature’s right to exist as it is. Communities, tribes and nations are enacting it right now, and it’s being tested in court, and we’re seeing more and more victories.

In the U.S., more than three dozen communities have now enacted Rights of Nature laws, with communities now joining together in several states to drive rights through state constitutional amendments. The Ho Chunk Nation, who is working with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, is the first tribe in North America to adopt rights of nature into its tribal constitution. This is a starting point. An intertribal effort can be part of a larger strategy to engage hundreds of communities into a long-term struggle over land use, community economic green development, and self-determination.

Until we’re able to shift mainstream perceptions of nature from something to be exploited to something to be protected for the benefit of generations to come, this strategy could at least buy us time to protect parts of the planet from immediate threats.

Today we’re going to hear from tribal leaders and experts from six different Indigenous Nations about how the Rights of Nature fits into indigenous worldviews.

We’re going to hear about some of the legal pathways that tribes have taken to incorporate indigenous customary or traditional law and philosophy into the law, the potential and the pitfalls for it to be implemented, and what’s actually been done inside and outside of the U.S. so far.

I’ll turn it over to Kandi, who will be moderating this discussion.

Kandi Mossett

KANDI: Thank you. There are some really amazing things that have happened in this past year when it comes to the rights of nature.

I am going to turn to Tom and Kealoha first: What does the rights of nature mean to you, and specifically from an indigenous perspective?

Tom Goldtooth

TOM: I’m the director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and we were given a mandate by youth and elders in 1990, and ’91, and ’92, and ’93. Those were the formative years in the development of a new entity to defend the sacredness of our Mother Earth, our Father Sky, and all other parts of our creative principles. Creation and the creative principles of life itself.

In those early years, our task was to put together a structure that links to what we now call frontline communities, and to address the issues of how racism in this country does not protect our homeland and our people. It’s been a long struggle leading to something that has become very popularized at Standing Rock: concepts of Mni Wiconi and water as life.

Why is it that, after all these years, we’re still fighting for not only our rights, and for the consciousness of Mother Earth as a conscious, living, intelligent entity? The dominant society doesn’t understand this.

I often hear tribal grassroots people, traditional leaders, women and our youth saying, “I’m here to speak about the water; I’m here to speak about the trees. They don’t have a voice that dominant society can hear, so I’m here to speak for them.” That’s helped me to understand the concept.

The Indigenous Environmental Network is a member of the Global Alliance on Rights of Nature, which is predominantly a non-indigenous entity forming. But how does this movement fit with our indigenous articulation? I consulted with our different elders and people who are knowledgeable: Is this something we take part in?

I feel that we need to be involved with a global initiative because we don’t have political power. Corporations have more legal standing than Indigenous Peoples do. If the non-native people are starting to understand and come full circle to understanding their place in the cosmos, their understanding of their worldview that embraces something that Indigenous Peoples relate to, then that is a tool for us to take part in. This is a way to lift up and have a new legal paradigm, a new legal system that moves away from a property rights regime.

Kealoha

KEALOHA: Aloha. I’d like to start off with a quick poem to just sort of frame my vision for the rights of nature. It goes:

Listen to the wind.
You can hear the world breathing if you just listen.
These breezes whisper melodies of different lands,
Transcribed through time.
They are like wind chimes.
Swirling energy carrying seeds of wisdom,
You can hear them as they blow through leaves of ancient trees,
These breezes,
Breathing and exhaling,
Telling the stories of this world for an eternity.

Listen to the sea.
It is the lifeblood of this planet,
Pumping and pulsing through every crevice,
Connecting the nations of this world through its embrace-tracing patterns,
And the sands of our birth lands,
Crashing on shores,
Expanding past horizon,
Reaching deep into the depths of our imaginations.

Listen to the land.
It is the Earth’s belly,
Rumbling and turning as tectonic plates shift.
We sift through its soils,
Break into primates giving birth to life,
Giving birth to us.
We are grateful.

For every gift Mother Earth gives, we live.
Because the life of this land is perpetuated in righteousness.
We are blessed to see her beauty,
Taste her elegance,
Smell her power,
Touch her essence.

This world becomes a miracle when you take time
To just listen.

Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. We as homo sapiens have been around for a couple hundred thousand years. We’re just a little blip on the Earth, and in the grand scale, if you zoom out, she doesn’t care about us. She’ll shake us off like fleas if she chooses. She’s seen meteors, comets and asteroids bombarding her, lava pools scattered throughout the world, hot temperatures, cold temperature, the extinction of 90% of the species on Earth. She’s seen a lot.

And as much devastation as we think we are doing, it pales in comparison to what she’s capable of. If you took us off this planet, the Earth would regenerate itself and look as if we weren’t here in what, 100 years? A thousand years?

In my mind, when we talk about rights of nature, I feel like it’s a great mechanism to address the real issue, that it’s not about just the Earth, it’s about our relationship to the Earth. And it’s about trying to create a circumstance where we can figure out how to survive on this blue dot for as long as we can. We’ve got a limited amount of time here, and that’s the game, to figure out the right relationship with which we can interface.

Considering nature as a living, breathing entity is nothing foreign to Indigenous Peoples from all around the world. We’ve figured out how to adapt and change our ways to establish our indigenous niches throughout the world, and it just took a bunch of time.

And when I look at these relationships, if we’re considering nature as a living, breathing thing, which it is, then when we start to look at different species and how they interact, there are two ends of the spectrum.

On one side you’ve got parasitism. Like mosquitoes on us, or like fleas on dogs. Where the parasite consumes the host and negatively alters it. I feel like the way that we live our lives today, a lot of us, we’re a little bit more on that side of things.

And on the other end is commensalism. This is when an organism benefits from another organism, but that organism that it’s benefitting from is not affected. For example, birds building their nests in trees. They don’t really affect the tree in a negative or positive way, but the bird is provided with structure for its house.

And I feel like from an indigenous perspective, us Indigenous folks found a way to be more on the spectrum of commensalism. We were able to interface with nature, gather what we needed to survive, but didn’t affect it in a major, significant way.

So when we talk about rights of nature, in my brain it’s about shifting our perspective to skew more toward commensalism. That way, we can learn how to create a relationship where we are able to survive, but aren’t affecting our nature in a negative way, because if we do, the consequences are we perish.

KANDI: Thank you for that, Kealoha. That was really interesting. And then Tom, of course, thank you. I’ve been working with IEN for 10 years, and it’s nice to hear it from this fresh perspective as we continue to talk about the rights of nature.

One of the questions that I often have too, which I want to pose to you, Maui: How can the rights of nature help us to assert our rights as Indigenous Peoples?

Maui Solomon

MAUI: Warm greetings to you all. I’m from the Moriori tribe, and my island is Rekohu, known today as the Chatham Islands, about 500 miles east of New Zealand.

That’s where my ancestors—Rekohu was one of the last inhabitable islands in the Pacific to be settled 1,000 years ago. So it’s the terminus of Polynesian navigation and settlement.

Rekohu. Image credit: wikimedia commons

I want to talk today not so much about human rights or birth rights, I want to talk about birth responsibilities and human responsibilities. There’s too much focus on rights. We need to think about what our responsibilities are.

As a Moriori person, we’re born with a responsibility to look after Pāpātuanuku, Mother Earth. The name of the placenta that connects a newborn baby to its mother is called whenua. Whenua is also the name of land. So our placenta has the same meaning as land.

When that placenta comes out of the mother, you take it and bury it back on the land. And so for all time you are connected to the land. I’ve done that with my children.

So when I’m born, whether I know it or not, I have a responsibility to look after that land. And I also have a responsibility because in my personal genealogy, I see Ranganui, the sky father, and Pāpātuanuku, the Earth mother. Then there’s Tane, the god of the forest, and Tangaroa, the god of the sea. They’re all of my ancestors. I’m born with a responsibility to look after those things.

I was 23 when I started on this road. It’s been a long journey, and for me I got involved in this struggle because my people were considered for 70 years to be extinct. We’d lost our lives, our land, our liberty, and our language. And we were extinct. Or that’s what was taught in New Zealand schools, and generations of New Zealanders still believe that. But here I am.

So the message is: Never give up hope. You can always make a change, even if you’re considered not to exist. You can always come back.

Now I want to say to the young people: sometimes these things can be so, like, “Oh, these things are too big; what can I possibly do?” What you can do, young people, is plant a tree. Find a little bit of ground and plant a tree and water that tree. It’s the most satisfying and most important thing you can do in your lifetime. Because you get to see that tree grow, your children will get to see that tree survive, and their children and their children. So it’s important to plant trees.

I’ve been asked to talk about legal systems. New Zealand has recently acknowledged the Wanganui River as a legal personality. Well, it’s always had a life to the people of the Whanganui River, but now it’s recognized in law.

On Rekohu, we’ve gone from being a people who are “extinct,” to soon being the single largest landowner again, back in our tribal territory after 30 years. So from having no land, we’re now going to be soon the biggest landowner. And we’re recognized by the government, by all tribes, and by the international community. We’ve used direct negotiation and direct action to show that it’s not impossible for these things to happen.

I’ve been an attorney at law for 30 years, so I’ve fought some hard battles in the courts and tribunals, including internationally. We’re in the process right now of settling claims through the Treaty of Waitangi. We’re going to get a whole lot of our sacred lands back as government reserves, so we will become the guardians and the owners in a Western sense, but we’re reconnected to our whenua, reconnected to our land. And it’s our obligation as traditional guardians of that land to restore its cloak.

So through taking action, you might not get the outcome that you’re seeking, but you will influence policy and change.

KANDI: Thank you for that, Maui. And I think what you were describing really is the process of decolonization. And people hear that word and think, “Oh, that’s too big, that’s too scary. I don’t know what it means.” I could literally break it down to: It’s planting a tree. You know? As a step in the right direction. It’s just really amazing to bring it back full circle to what it all means.

And I do want to pose a question to Tony here, specifically on next steps in our communities that we can take for responsibly using rights of nature in our communities.

Tony Skrelunas

TONY: The question is: How do we go about it? I want to approach it from three angles. In 2009, I sat down with my assistant Deon and our program manager, and we said we have to help tribes develop efforts to protect the environment, to preserve their lands, their sacred areas, and to work with them. But we didn’t want to do it the Western way, by going to the tribal chairman and to the tribal attorneys. We wanted to follow a traditional process, and I think that’s something to really think about here: When you look at the rights of nature, what is the vehicle that you’re going to use?

Grand Canyon

In our thinking, we said we can’t use a Western system of government. The Diné government was formed in 1923 when the federal government really needed somebody to sign off on exploration of oil and coal. Also at that time, the whole United States policy was acculturating the Indian. So that’s when our government was formed, and still to this day, you talk to our tribal government officials and a lot of our bread and butter is still coal mining, power plants, oil and gas. So we have to get out of that framework, and we have to think about something that is a more tribal process.

So what we looked at was, well, how are these natural Indigenous laws made? How were those teachings actually created throughout our society, the thousands and thousands of years that we’ve existed?

We studied a lot of that. You don’t have to depend on government to do this stuff. You have to think back to even a hundred years ago. Our tribal peoples would come together over a problem, observe it and talk it through with some elders and highly responsible people, come up with a solution, then share that solution with the greater population through stories, poetry, songs, dance.

So if we go back to that as tribal people in our discussions about rights of nature, how then do we select the representatives that are going to come together?

And in our effort, we found people that were the master planters, the people that are teaching the kids about traditional dances, the traditional cultivation techniques, the master hunters. Those are the people that we brought together, not government people. And a lot of fantastic work has resulted from that.

There’s a lot of ways we can incorporate the rights of nature into the future of our communities, economy and conservation. We look a lot of time from the Western perspective, but when we look at our tribal perspective, our peoples migrated. In our traditional lens, we didn’t own land. So those are some of the things that I just would like to add to the discussion today.

KANDI: Thank you for that, Tony. I think there’s about 568 federally recognized tribes in the U.S., and many more that aren’t federally recognized. So we’re all different.

Now I want to go to Leila. Could you talk to us about all the amazing work that you’ve been doing, and share with us the experiences that you’ve had in implementing the rights of nature?

Leila Salazar-Lopez

LEILA: Thank you. So much has already been said but I really want to share what is happening with the rights of nature in Ecuador. I come here in a humble way to share the work that we’re doing at Amazon Watch, which is to protect and stop the destruction of the Amazon, and we can’t do any of that without Indigenous People.

The only way to really save the Amazon is to stand with Indigenous People. They have been defending the Amazon for thousands of years, and that’s the way it will be protected.

And for those of you who don’t know, the rights of nature is actually in the constitution of Ecuador. If any of you have ever seen what’s written in the constitution of 2008 in Ecuador, it’s pretty amazing and inspiring, and forward-thinking. I just want to read a couple of the articles in the constitution, and share with you a little bit about some victories, but also some threats, and the long way that we have to go so that this can actually be implemented.

The Rights of Nature in Article 71 says nature or Pachamama, “Mother Earth, where life is reproduced and exists, has a right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and processes in evolution.” Article 72 says nature has a right to restoration. I think this is really important because a lot of times we hear corporations say that land is degraded, so let’s plant palm oil plantations. That land is degraded, so let’s build homes over there. That land is burnt. I’m thinking about our fires right now, like what are you going to build there next? Let’s think about that.

Not just in Ecuador but around the world, many laws sound beautiful, like the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That’s a beautiful document, which took 30 years of struggle from initial little meetings and working groups. I’m sure some of our elders here were a part of those meetings, and worked very hard to get almost 200 countries to sign onto this. There was a lot of resistance, a lot of struggle to get this in place.

But is it being implemented? Not really. That’s the same thing with the Rights of Nature in the Constitution of Ecuador.

There are auctions for the last remaining resources in Ecuador. I’m talking about major giveaways to the oil and mining industries. There was an oil auction a couple of years ago, where literally 21 oil blocks overlapped with protected areas and Indigenous People’s territories, without the prior informed consent of the people.

And because they have been resisting these threats for over 525 years, the Indigenous People in the Amazon basically said no. We will not allow the oil companies and the government to come onto our land and take the oil.

The Ecuadorian government says that might be your territory, but the sub-surface mineral rights are ours. And they have signed the UN Declaration, but they were still violating the rights of Indigenous Peoples, the rights of communities, the rights of nature.

Luckily, people resist. There was a lot of on-the-ground resistance. There were international campaigns to stop the eleventh round. And I’m happy to say that because of this unified effort from the international community, everywhere the Ecuadorian government went to auction to basically sell off their remaining resources — from Quito to Texas to Canada — we were there.

And I’m not just saying Amazon Watch. I’m saying the Indigenous People of the Amazon were there. We were there supporting and accompanying them to make sure that their voices were heard, so they could speak for themselves. And I’m happy to say that that eleventh round oil auction was a flop.

So we’re constantly reminded that we are the best protectors of Mother Earth, best defenders of Mother Earth, and we have to listen. We can protect natural sacred areas, and win.

James Nestor: How Breathing Exercises Can Change Your Life

Breathing is an essential function for our health and wellbeing, an exercise so basic to sustaining life that we do it without even thinking. But it’s also a lost art. Humans have forgotten how to breathe correctly, so the journalist James Nestor traveled the world to find out where we went wrong.

In his new book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, Nestor tells the tale of exploring ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, the smoggy streets of São Paulo and beyond — all to learn the hidden science behind ancient breathing exercises. Nestor expounds on conventional wisdom and years of research to draw new, revolutionary conclusions about the healing power of breath.

Following is an excerpt from Breath, reposted with permission.

I’d like you do something. Please take a breath. As you breathe in, I’d like you to consider that the air now passing down your throat into your lungs and bloodstream contains more molecules of air than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. We each inhale and exhale some thirty pounds of these molecules every day—far more than we eat or drink. And the ways in which we take in that air and exhale it is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise, or whatever genes we’ve inherited.

James Nestor

This sounds nuts, I realize. But this is exactly what neurologists, rhinologists, and pulmonologists working at some of the most prestigious research institutions are now showing there. Honing this air, these zillions of molecules we take in and push out can help us live longer and healthier lives.

The ancients have been onto this for thousands of years. From the Greeks to the Buddhists, Hindus to Native Americans—they all considered proper breathing as essential to health. As far back as 400 BC, Chinese scholars wrote several books on breath, believing it was both a medicine, or poison, depending on how we used it. They named their restorative breathing practice qigong: qi, meaning “breath,” and gong, meaning “work.” Put together, breathwork. “Therefore, the scholar who nourishes his life refines the form and nourishes his breath,” says a Tao text. “Isn’t this evident?”

This message hasn’t seemed to have made it to the modern world. Up to 80 percent of us today are breathing inadequately. Twenty-five percent of us suffer from serious overbreathing. Fifty percent snore on occasion and about a quarter suffer from the chronic nighttime asphyxia known as sleep apnea. Up to a half of us habitually take in breath from our mouths. The consequences of this poor breathing are wreaking havoc on our health. Hypertension to neurological disorders, asthma to metabolic diseases can all be either exacerbated or sometimes even caused by poor breathing habits.

But improving breathing habits can have a significant impact on our well-being. In some cases, simply changing the way we breathe can blunt the symptoms of so many modern chronic diseases. New York psychiatrists and authors, Dr. Richard Brown and Patrician Gerbarg, found patients who practiced these slow-and-low breaths could blunt the symptoms of anxiety and depression. It even helped 9-11 survivors restore lung damage caused by debris, a horrendous condition called ground-glass lungs. Where all other therapies failed, breath offered significant improvement.

If we keep building healthy breathing habits we can help reverse that list of modern day maladies that now affects the majority of the population: all that asthma, those allergies, and even autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes and psoriasis.

Take, for instance, Carl Stough, a New Jersey choral conductor who in the 1950s and 60s developed a deep, diaphragmatic breathing method to help singers improve the resonance of their voices. Using the same practice, Stough treated emphysemics at the largest VA hospitals on the east coast. Several of these patients had been bedridden for years, giving a steady diet of antibiotics and oxygen, but to no avail. Many were close to death. Stough rehabilitated the patients by teaching them how to breathe properly. He showed them how to develop their shirking lungs and atrophied diaphragms, which at the time, was supposed to have been medically impossible. X-rays proved it, and patients who had been left for dead walked out of the hospital.

Anyone could benefit from improving breathing, to extending those inhales and exhales a little longer and to take in less air more slowly. Stough proved it when he went to train the U.S. men’s track and field team in preparation for the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Within a few sessions, the runners were breaking records. Under this tutelage the team went on to win a total of 12 medals, most gold, and set five world records in the greatest track performance of an Olympics. The Americans were the only runners to not use oxygen before or after a race, which was unheard of at the time. They didn’t need to. Stough had taught them the art of breathing.

Then there was Katherina Schroth, a teenager living in Dresden, Germany, in the early 1900s who’d been diagnosed with scoliosis and left to live the rest of her life in bed or rolling around in a wheelchair. Over five years Schroth developed and used a technique called “orthopedic breathing.” She too did the “impossible”; she stretched and breathed her spine straight, then went on to teach hundreds of others to do the same. After decades of derision by the German medical establishment, Schroth was awarded a medal for her contributions to medicine. This teenager left to live a short life bound to a wheelchair died just three days shy of her 91st birthday.

There were dozens of others: a French hairdresser who recovered from lung disease and went on to run 150 miles in the Sahara Desert at the age of 68; an anarchist opera singer who (according to her notes) hiked alone through the Himalayas for 19 hours at a time without food or water, using only her breath to keep her warm and nourished; a Ukrainian cardiologist who found a way to inhale and exhale in ways to reduce or effectively “cure” patients of chronic asthma. Their discoveries were equaling amazing, and there were piles of research—videos, X-rays, data sheets—proving their claims.

So, why haven’t we heard of these people and why aren’t we all using their practices? For some reason, in some way, Stough, Schroth, and almost every other breathing researcher I’d come across was largely ignored during their lives. Several were censured. When these people died, whatever ancient secrets they’d unearthed were scattered and forgotten. This went on for decades.

The researchers I worked with over years who studied breathing have come to believe that at least some of the resistance had to do with the medicine itself: air. Many scientists of the past have pooh-poohed the idea that we might affect the structure of our bodies, bones, and tissues right down to the cellular level by just changing how we inhale and exhale. Even today, even with reams of literature now proving its efficacy, healthy breathing isn’t taught in medical school. Few doctors have even heard of it, and the dozens I talked to over so many years were increasingly bitter about it. They wanted to help their patients. Recently, many have begun to come back to breathing.

If there’s anything good to have come out of his foul Covid pandemic, it’s that it’s made us more acutely aware of our breathing. Hospitals are now using breathing techniques to help patients better overcome the symptoms of viral pneumonia. Even more recently, hospital staff have stopped laying patients on their backs—which makes it more difficult to breathe—and started laying patients on their sides or stomachs.

These practices, like all the other breath practices used by Stough, Schroth, and all the other respiratory researchers over the 20th century, are nothing new. They’ve been with us for hundreds, even thousands of years. They’ve been inscribed within the statues of the Indus Valley since at least 2000 BC. They’ve been refined by Chinese doctors centuries later. They’ve been codified and organized in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali after that and practiced by tens of millions of Buddhists, yogis, and monks for the past two millennia.

It’s a technology that modern scientists at Harvard, Stanford, and other esteemed institutions are just now rediscovering and proving to be profoundly beneficial to our health, happiness, and longevity. And to think, it’s all been just under our noses the whole time.

More from James Nestor on Bioneers.org:

More on breathing from James Nestor:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-S3Zm7A2b9/
Breathing scoliotic spines straight
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-fef13gnyR/
Why we have crooked teeth and how that affects our breathing
https://www.instagram.com/p/B_xiHEJgOCx/
French hairdresser heals himself then heats himself with breath

Entangled Life: Fungi, the Great Biosphere Builders

Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin Sheldrake is a young biologist and author of the new book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. In Entangled Life, Sheldrake shares the wisdom he’s learned from studying fungi — a diverse kingdom of organisms essential to how our world and minds work. Fungi plays many crucial roles in our ecosystems, as food and medicine and decomposers and recyclers. Sheldrake takes us on a worldwide exploration of these applications, challenging our very notions of interconnectedness and the intelligence of nature.

Visit the Bioneers Intelligence in Nature Media Collection to see an interview with Sheldrake by Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies, or read a transcript of the interview.

The following is an excerpt from Engangled Life, reposted with permission.

Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been—and continue to be—a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around five hundred million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve their own. Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi—from the Greek words for fungus (mykes) and root (rhiza)—which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the “wood wide web.” This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships.

To this day, new ecosystems on land are founded by fungi. When volcanic islands are made or glaciers retreat to reveal bare rock, lichens (pronounced LY ken)—a union of fungi and algae or bacteria–are the first organisms to establish themselves and to make the soil in which plants subsequently take root. In well-developed ecosystems soil would be rapidly sluiced off by rain were it not for the dense mesh of fungal tissue that holds it together. There are few pockets of the globe where fungi can’t be found; from deep sediments on the seafloor, to the surface of deserts, to frozen valleys in Antarctica, to our guts and orifices. Tens to hundreds of species can exist in the leaves and stems of a single plant. These fungi weave themselves through the gaps between plant cells in an intimate brocade and help to defend plants against disease. No plant grown under natural conditions has been found without these fungi; they are as much a part of planthood as leaves or roots.

The ability of fungi to prosper in such a variety of habitats depends on their diverse metabolic abilities. Metabolism is the art of chemical transformation. Fungi are metabolic wizards and can explore, scavenge, and salvage ingeniously, their abilities rivaled only by bacteria. Using cocktails of potent enzymes and acids, fungi can break down some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, from lignin, wood’s toughest component, to rock; crude oil; polyurethane plastics; and the explosive TNT. Few environments are too extreme. A species isolated from mining waste is one of the most radiation-resistant organisms ever discovered and may help to clean up nuclear waste sites. The blasted nuclear reactor at Chernobyl is home to a large population of such fungi. A number of these radiotolerant species even grow toward radioactive “hot” particles, and appear to be able to harness radiation as a source of energy, as plants use the energy in sunlight.

We all live and breathe fungi, thanks to the prolific abilities of fungal fruiting bodies to disperse spores. Some species discharge spores explosively, which accelerate ten thousand times faster than a space shuttle directly after launch, reaching speeds of up to a hundred kilometers per hour—some of the quickest movements achieved by any living organism. Other species of fungi create their own microclimates: Spores are carried upward by a current of wind generated by mushrooms as water evaporates from their gills. Fungi produce around fifty megatons of spores each year—equivalent to the weight of five hundred thousand blue whales—making them the largest source of living particles in the air. Spores are found in clouds and influence the weather by triggering the formation of the water droplets that form rain and the ice crystals that form snow, sleet, and hail.

Some fungi, like the yeasts that ferment sugar into alcohol and cause bread to rise, consist of single cells that multiply by budding into two. However, most fungi form networks of many cells known as hyphae: fine tubular structures that branch, fuse, and tangle into the anarchic filigree of mycelium. Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency. Water and nutrients flow through ecosystems within mycelial networks. The mycelium of some fungal species is electrically excitable and conducts waves of electrical activity along hyphae, analogous to the electrical impulses in animal nerve cells.

Hyphae make mycelium, but they also make more specialized structures. Fruiting bodies, such as mushrooms, arise from the felting together of hyphal strands. These organs can perform many feats besides expelling spores. Some, like truffles, produce aromas that have made them among the most expensive foods in the world. Others, like shaggy ink cap mushrooms (Coprinus comatus), can push their way through asphalt and lift heavy paving stones, although they are not themselves a tough material. Pick an ink cap and you can fry it up and eat it. Leave it in a jar, and its bright white flesh will deliquesce into a pitch-black ink over the course of a few days (the illustrations in this book were drawn with Coprinus ink).

Radical fungal technologies can help us respond to some of the many problems that arise from ongoing environmental devastation. Antiviral compounds produced by fungal mycelium reduce colony collapse disorder in honeybees. Voracious fungal appetites can be deployed to break down pollutants, such as crude oil from oil spills, in a process known as mycoremediation. In mycofiltration, contaminated water is passed through mats of mycelium, which filter out heavy metals and break down toxins. In mycofabrication, building materials and textiles are grown out of mycelium and replace plastics and leather in many applications. Fungal melanins, the pigments produced by radio-tolerant fungi, are a promising new source of radiation-resistant biomaterials.

Human societies have always pivoted around prodigious fungal metabolisms. A full litany of the chemical accomplishments of fungi would take months to recite. Yet despite their promise, and central role in many ancient human fascinations, fungi have received a tiny fraction of the attention given to animals and plants. The best estimate suggests that there are between 2.2 and 3.8 million species of fungi in the world—six to ten times the estimated number of plant species—meaning that a mere six percent of all fungal species have been described. We are only just beginning to understand the intricacies and sophistications of fungal lives.

Copyright © 2020 by Merlin Sheldrake. This excerpt originally appeared in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, published by Penguin Random House and reprinted here with permission.

Merlin Sheldrake, Author of Entangled Life speaks with J.P. Harpignies

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science.

He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a pre-doctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. He is also a musician who performs on the piano and accordion.

On July 7th 2020, Bioneers Senior Producer, J.P. Harpignies, interviewed Merlin about his new, highly acclaimed first book, Entangled Life. Read an excerpt from the book here.

Visit the Bioneers Intelligence in Nature Media Collection to see an edited transcript of this interview, as well as an excerpt of Entangled Life.

The Apology: Love Means Having to Say You’re Sorry

They say love means never having to say you’re sorry. But what if that popular aphorism from the 1960’s is wrong and that love precisely means having to say you’re sorry? Can an apology release the trauma, grief, rage and disfigurement arising from past abuse? But what if the perpetrator does not apologize? Can you still resolve or reconcile the trauma and hurt? How?

These are some of the agonizing questions that the artist, playwright, performer and activist Eve Ensler, now known as V chose to face to resolve her own relationship with her abusive late father. She did it by writing a book, The Apology.

In writing it, she tried to imagine being her father. Who was he? What allowed him to do such terrible harms? Could she free herself from this prison of the past? Could she free both of them?

Featuring

  • V (formerly Eve Ensler), Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and one of the world’s most important activists on behalf of women’s rights, is the author of many plays, including, most famously the extraordinarily influential and impactful The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed all over the globe in 50 or so languages.

Credits

  • Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
  • Written by: Kenny Ausubel
  • Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
  • Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
  • Producer: Teo Grossman
  • Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

Music

Our theme music is co-written by the Baka Forest People of Cameroon and Baka Beyond, from the album East to West.  Find out more at globalmusicexchange.org.

Additional music was made available by:

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

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Transcript

NEIL HARVEY, HOST: Love means never having to say you’re sorry.

But what if that popular aphorism from the 1960’s is exactly wrong? What if love precisely means having to say you’re sorry?

Can an apology release the trauma, grief, rage and disfigurement arising from past abuse?

Can an apology free both victim and perpetrator from the prison of unresolved past harms? 

Can an apology lead to the forgiveness that allows for genuine transformation?

But what if the perpetrator does not apologize? Can you still resolve or reconcile the trauma and hurt? How?

And can an apology close one door and open another – unearthing yet deeper layers of pain and grief yet to be healed?

These are some of the agonizing questions that the artist, playwright, performer and activist Eve Ensler, now known as V chose to face to resolve her own relationship with her abusive late father. She did it by writing a book, The Apology. 

In writing it, she tried to imagine being her father. Who was he? What allowed him to do such terrible harms? Could she free herself from this prison of the past? Could she free both of them?

This is “The Apology: Love Means Having to Say You’re Sorry”.

I’m Neil Harvey. I’ll be your host. Welcome to The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature. 

V: This is an offering, not a prescription. If it doesn’t work for you, release it. If it does, excellent. When I use the word woman, I mean to include women – straight, gay, bi, trans, non-binary, queer, gender queer, agender, and gender fluid. [APPLAUSE]

HOST: V has spent most of her adult life working tirelessly to end violence against women and girls. She founded V-Day and One Billion Rising, which have become global forces to prevent the 1 billion women and girls around the world from the physical and sexual violence that plagues this half of the world’s people.

For V, this struggle is profoundly personal. She directly experienced that violence beginning from her early childhood. She spoke at a Bioneers conference.

V: I was sexually abused by my father from the time I was 5 until I was 10. Then physically battered regularly and almost murdered several times until I left home at 18. Some place deep inside, I believe my father would one day wake up out of his narcissistic, belligerent blindness, see me, feel me, understand what he had done, and he would step into the deepest truest self and finally apologize. Guess what? This didn’t happen. And yet the yearning for that apology never went away. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve rushed to the mailbox, believing that finally today there will be a letter waiting, an amends, an explanation, a closure to explain and set me free.

It’s 31 years since my father died. For over 22 of those years, I have spent and been a part of a glorious movement to end violence against women, struggling day in and day out to put an end to the scourge. I’ve watched as women break the silence, share their stories, face attack, doubt, humiliation, open and sustained shelters, start hotlines. I’ve been part of a movement that is 70 years old, began by African American women fighting off their rape of slave owners and white supremacists. I have witnessed the recent powerful iteration of Me Too. I’ve seen a few men lose their jobs or standing, a few go to prison, a few faced public humiliation, but in all this time, I have never seen or heard any man make a thorough, sincere public apology for sexual or domestic abuse. [APPLAUSE] In 16,000 years of patriarchy – and I have done a lot of research – I’ve never read or seen a public apology for a man for sexual or domestic abuse.

It occurred to me there must be something central and critical about that apology. So I decided I wasn’t going to wait anymore, that I was going to climb into my father and let my father come into me, and I was going to write his apology, to say the words, to speak the truth I needed to hear. This was a profound, excruciating, and ultimately liberating experience. And I have to tell you, I learned something very profound about the wound.

I don’t imagine there’s anyone sitting here today that doesn’t have a wound that they carry, that has in some ways defined or guided or determined your life.

And what I learned writing this piece is that when we sit outside the wound, the radiation pours down on us, but when we go through the wound, it’s very, very painful, and it feels as if we might die, but as we keep going and going and going, we come to a point of ultimate freedom. I’ve learned about what a true apology is.

We teach our children how to pray. We teach them the humility of prayer, the devotion of prayer, the attention required, the constancy, but we don’t teach our children how to apologize, or maybe they get to say an occasional meager, “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” or “I’m sorry if you feel bad,” but what I learned writing this book is that an apology is a process, a sacred commitment, a wrestling down of demons, a confrontation with our most concealed and controlling shadow.

Photo credit: Nikki Ritcher

HOST: But what exactly is a true apology? What does it take to truly inhabit another person’s interior life – to know their wound?

V: I learned that an apology has four stages, and all of them must be honored. The first is a willingness to self-interrogate, to delve into the origins of your being, what made you a person who became capable of committing rape or harassment or violence, to investigate what happened in your childhood, in your family, in this toxic, toxic culture.

In my father’s case, he was the last child, the accident who became the miracle and he was adored. But I’m here to tell you, adoration is not love. Adoration is a projection of someone’s idealized self-image onto you, forcing you to live up to their image at the expense of your own humanity. My father, like many, many boys, was never allowed to be tender, vulnerable, full of wonder, doubt, curiosity and yearning. He was never allowed to cry. All of those feelings had to be stifled, pushed down, and in doing so they metastasized, and eventually became what he called the shadow man, this buried creature who later surfaced as a monster.

The second stage of an apology is a detailed accounting and admission of what you have actually done. Details are critical because liberation only comes through the details. Your accounting cannot be vague. “I hurt you,” or “I’m sorry,” or “I’m sorry if I sexually abused you” just doesn’t do it. Those words don’t mean anything. One must say what actually happened. “Then I grabbed you by your hair, and I beat your head over and over against the wall.” This investigation into details includes unmasking your real intentions and admitting them. “I belittled you because I was jealous of your power and your beauty, and I wanted you to be less.”

Survivors, and I know there are many here today, are often haunted for years by the why. Why would my father want to kill his own daughter? Why would my best friend drug and rape me? There is a difference between explanation and justification, and knowing the origin of a perpetrator’s behavior actually begins to create understanding, which ultimately leads to freedom.

HOST: V found that, although knowing the origin of a perpetrator’s behavior can create understanding that can lead to freedom, it doesn’t make the behavior any less repulsive. On the other hand, not facing it would keep her trapped in the cage of the victim-perpetrator paradigm that her father had designed.

V: One of the hardest things about writing this book was how deeply I didn’t want to feel my father’s pain. I didn’t believe he had earned the right from me to feel his pain. But to be honest with you, I have remained connected to my father since the time of the abuse through my rage. I was a permanent victim to his perpetrator. And I just want to say about my anger, I was very able to be compassionate to so many people in my life, in all sorts of countries and places, I always had compassion. But I found the way I talked about white men very dis-compassionate. I found it in anger, and I listened to myself. There was a part of me that I just wasn’t happy with. I was stuck in a paradigm I realized that my father had designed. And as my father’s mother says to him in my book, anger is a potion you mix for a friend but you drink yourself. Feeling my father’s pain and suffering, ironically, released me from his paradigm.

The third stage of an apology is opening your heart and being, and allowing yourself to feel what your victim felt as you were abusing her, allowing your heart to break, allowing yourself to feel the nightmare that got created inside her, and the betrayal and the horror, and then allowing yourself to see and feel and know the long-term impact of your violation. What happened in her life because of it, who did she become or not become because of your actions?

And the fourth stage, of course, is taking responsibility for your actions, making amends and reparations where necessary, all of this indicating you’ve undergone a deep and profound experience that has changed you and made it impossible for you to ever repeat your behavior.

What and why should one want to undergo such a grueling and emotional process? The answer is simple: freedom. No one who commits violence or suffering upon another, or the Earth, is free of that action. It contaminates one’s spirit and being, and without amends often creates more darkness, depression, self-hatred and violence. The apology frees the victim, but it also frees the perpetrator, allowing them deep reflection and ability to finally change their ways and their life.

My father, in my book, wrote to me from limbo, and it was very strange. I have to tell you, he was present throughout the entire writing of the book. He had been stuck in limbo for 31 years. I truly believe that the dead need to be in dialogue with us, that they are around us, and they are often stuck, and they need our help in getting free.

With this exercise, I believe now that my father is free. And because he was willing to undergo this process, he’s moved on to a far more enlightened realm.

As for those of you who cannot get an apology from your perpetrator, I believe that writing an apology letter to yourself from them is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done, and it can shift how the perpetrator actually lives inside you, for once someone has violated you, entered you, oppressed you, demeaned you, they actually occupy you. We often know our perpetrators better than ourselves, particularly if they are family. We learn to read their footsteps and the sounds of their voices in order to protect ourselves. By writing my father’s apology, I changed how my father actually lived inside me. I moved him from a monster to an apologist, a terrifying entity to a broken little boy. In doing so, he lost power and agency over me. [APPLAUSE]

We cannot underestimate the power of the imagination. And I just have to say in these times that we are living in, our imagination is our greatest tool. It is shifting trauma and karma that has numbed our frozen life force, and in the deeper and more specific my imagining and conjuring in this book, the more liberation I experienced. When finally at the end of the book my father or me, or me or my father, or both of us as one – I’m so not clear who wrote this book – my father says to me, “Old man, be gone.” It was exactly like the end of Peter Pan. Do you remember when Tinkerbell says goodbye and goes [MAKES SHOOSH SOUND] into the ethers? My father was gone, and to be honest, he hasn’t come back.

HOST: From monster to apologist. From terrifying figure to broken little boy. Free at last – even when it meant writing the apology herself – to liberate them both.

When we return, V’s descent into the hidden depths of what saying you’re sorry really means took her somewhere she did not expect to go – to her mother – Mother Earth.

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

As V freed herself from the psycho-spiritual cage of her father’s abuse, she began to wonder: What other apologies need to be made? Where else can the alchemy of apology create healing in this broken world?

V: I think often we are survivors of all kinds of things, whether it’s racial oppression, or physical oppression, or economic oppression, or sexual violence. We’re told that we have to forgive and get over it. I don’t really believe that the mandate is ever on the victim to forgive, ever. But I do believe that there is an alchemy that occurs with a true apology, where your rancor and your bitterness and your anger and your hate releases when someone truly, truly apologizes.

People have asked me throughout the tour of my book, “What will it take to get men to apologize?”  This is the $25 million question. And I have to tell you, it’s a question that is underlying everything that we are experiencing on this planet right now. Our entire country rests on unreckoned landfill. That’s why it so easily becomes unraveled. Think of the massive apology and reparations due the First Nations people for the stealing of their lands, the rapes, the genocide, the destruction of culture and ways. [APPLAUSE]

Think of the apology and reparations due African Americans for 400 years of diabolical slavery, lynchings, rape, separations of family, Jim Crow and mass incarceration. [APPLAUSE] I honestly believe that apologies, deep, sacred apologies are the pathway to healing and inviting in the New World.

HOST: If deep sacred apologies are a pathway to healing and inviting in a new world, what about the world itself – the natural world that gives us life – that’s literally our home. V delivered this apology to Mother Earth at the Bioneers Conference.

V: So as I was preparing this talk, something miraculous and difficult happened. I realized there was an apology I needed to make, an apology that would force me to confront my deepest sorrow, my guilt and shame, an apology I had been avoiding since I moved out of the city to the woods where I now live with the oaks and the locusts and the weeping willows, Lydia, the snapping turtle, running spring water, foxes, deer, coyotes, bears, cardinals, and my precious dog Pablo. This is my offering to you this morning. It is my apology to the Earth herself.

Dear Mother, it began with the article about the birds, the 2.9 billion missing North American birds. The 2.9 billion birds that disappeared and no one noticed – the sparrows, the blackbirds, and the swallows who didn’t make it, who weren’t even born, who stopped flying or singing, making their most ingenious nests that didn’t perch or peck their gentle beaks into moist black earth. It began with the birds. Hadn’t we even commented in June, James and I, that they were hardly here? A kind of eerie quiet had descended. But later they came back, the swarms of barn swallows and the huge ravens landing on the gravel one by one.

I know it was after hearing about the birds that afternoon I crashed my bike, suddenly falling and falling, unable to prevent the catastrophe ahead, unable to find the brakes or make them work, unable to stop the falling. I fell and spun and realized I had already been falling, that we had been falling, all of us, and crows, and conifers, and ice caps, and expectations falling and falling, and I wanted to keep falling. I didn’t want to be here anymore, to witness everything falling and missing and bleaching and burning and drying, and disappearing and choking and never blooming. I wanted—I didn’t want to live without the birds or bees, or sparkling flies that light the summer nights. I didn’t want to live with hunger that turns us feral and desperation that gives us claws. I wanted to fall and fall into the deepest, darkest ground and be still finally, and buried there.

But Mother, you had other plans. The bike landed in grass and dirt, and bang, I was 10 years old, fallen in the road, my knees scraped and bloody, and I realized even then that earth was something foreign and cruel that could and would hurt me because everything I had ever known or loved that was grand and powerful and beautiful became foreign and cruel and eventually hurt me. Even then, I had already been exiled, or so I felt, forever cast out of the garden. I belonged with the broken, the contaminated, the dead. Maybe it was the sharp pain in my knee or elbow, or the dirt embedded in my new jacket, maybe it was the shock or the realization that death was preferable to the thick tar of grief coagulated in my chest, or maybe it was just the lonely rattling of the spokes of the bicycle wheel still spinning without me. Whatever it was, it broke, it broke inside me. I heard the howling.

Mother, I am the reason the birds are missing. I am the cause of salmon who cannot spawn, and the butterflies unable to take their journey home. I am the coral reef bleached death white and the sea boiling with methane poison. I am the millions running from lands that have dried, forests that are burning, or islands drowned in water. I didn’t see you, Mother. You were nothing to me. My trauma made arrogance, and ambition drove me to that cracking, pulsing city, chasing a dream, chasing the prize, the achievement that would finally prove I wasn’t bad or stupid or nothing or wrong.

My Mother, I had so much contempt for you. What did you have to offer that would give me status in the marketplace of ideas in achieving? What could your bare trees offer but the staggering aloneness of winter or a greenness I could not receive or bear. I reduced you to weather, an inconvenience, something that got in my way, dirty slush that ruined my overpriced city boots with salt. I refused your invitations, scorned your generosity, held suspicion for your love. I ignored all the ways we used and abused you. I pretended to believe the stories of the fathers who said you had to be tamed and controlled, that you were out to get us.

I press my bruised body down on your grassy belly, breathing me in and out, and I inhale your moisty scent. I have missed you, Mother. I have been away so long. I am sorry. I am so sorry. I know now that I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal, pistol, and stamen. I am branch, and hive, and trunk, and stone. I am what has been here and what is coming. I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder. I am impulse and order. I am perfumed peonies and a single parasol tree in the African savannah. I am lavender, dandelion, daisy, dahlia cosmos, chrysanthemum, pansy, bleeding heart, and rose. I am all that has been named and unnamed, all that has been gathered, and all that has been left alone. I am all your missing creatures, all the sweet birds never born. I am daughter. I am caretaker. I am fierce defender. I am griever. I am bandit. I am baby. I am supplicant. I am here now, Mother, in your belly, on your uterus. I am yours. I am yours. I am yours. [APPLAUSE] Thank you.

Why Outdoor Education May Be the Key to Reopening Schools Safely

I was camping with my family in the mountains in Colorado’s Front Range when we crossed a COVID-19 milestone: 100 days since the schools closed and our family began the now all too familiar shelter-in-place routine that much of the country is just beginning to emerge from, for better or worse. I’m fortunate enough to live in a place where there are ample outdoor recreational opportunities and getting outside has been unbelievably essential to my children’s physical and mental health throughout this time. Without school and friends, simply going for a bike ride has turned into a can’t-miss activity. 

Back in range after the weekend trip, I checked my email to find two messages from my state and local leadership in my inbox. The first was from the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment titled, “Risks & Benefits of Everyday Activities.” Among the suggestions (airline travel: higher risk, camping: lower risk) was general guidance suggesting, “Outdoor activities pose less risk than the same activity indoors.” As epidemiologists increasingly understand the transmission modes of the virus, it is becoming clear that for aerosolized viral particles, dilution is the solution.

The second email was from the local school district, outlining the various scenarios on the table for re-opening in the fall. Like many other districts around the country, all of whom are under tremendous pressure to re-open, the vision for the school year would be focused on transforming the school building and experience by halving class sizes, alternating schedules, mandatory mask wearing, physical distancing and minimizing transit/mixing between individual students and between groups of students, including eliminating activities like lunch in the cafeteria, visits to the library and the opportunity for recess. Elementary school was being re-envisioned as, well, something else, more aligned with a correctional facility than a comfortable learning environment.

How did it come to this? While the State of Colorado was branding their COVID response, “Safer at Home and in The Great Outdoors,” their school districts developed plans to pen children and staff inside poorly ventilated classrooms. Following official guidance, outdoor restaurants are taking over what were formerly known as streets and parking lots, religious institutions are gathering on lawns instead of sanctuaries. Why aren’t schools following suit?

As it turns out, I’m not the only one asking the question. There’s a rapidly growing movement underway to support schools to do just that. I spoke with Sharon Danks, CEO and Founder of Green Schoolyards America, and Craig Strang, Associate Director for Learning and Teaching at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, CA. Alongside several other core partners, Danks and Strang have been assembling research, policy and guidance to help rapidly create pathways for US K-12 public schools to transition to a model of education where outdoor learning is Plan A.

According to their research, a swift move into outdoor learning may well be the only way that school districts can reopen safely with maximum enrollment while minimizing risk. For anyone who has been paying attention to the scholarship in the past several decades, outdoor learning and exposure to nature is not simply a nice idea. A cascade of physical, emotional and academic benefits accompany even basic outdoor activities, like recess. For purposefully built models of outdoor and experiential learning, the results are even greater. I spoke to Sharon and Craig via Zoom and an edited version of our conversation is below.

Photo by Drew Kelly Photography

SHARON DANKS: We know that being outside is good for kids in general, and there’s a 30+ year old movement in the United States for outdoor learning, hands-on play and discovery based on the research about the benefits of nature to children’s health – mental health, physical health, and the learning that they do in a hands-on way outside.

Sharon Danks

At the same time, we know that greening our cities, adding trees and plants, helps the ecology of our neighborhoods. Public schools manage a vast amount of land and we’re working to make these landscapes part of the climate solution, reforesting these urban public lands which addresses both large-scale climate change as well as neighborhood-scale microclimates where children are present.

This is the basic context we started from: our work using school grounds as a benefit for children’s learning, health, engagement, quality of life, and ecological system services, and community access to open space all together.

We’re troubled by the solutions being presented. The National Council on School Facilities estimates that school buildings in general only have space for about 60 percent of their enrolled students in their classrooms if they’re asked to be six feet apart. School HVAC systems are not set up to have good air quality circulation.

It is essential that we consider the outdoor landscape as an asset to help kids spread out and to be in environments that are healthier for them in the process. The key idea is that outdoor school grounds and even nearby parks can be used as places for classes to meet, allowing education to continue in person.

CRAIG STRANG: We know from the experiment that we ran this last spring that distance learning and home learning is hugely problematic on a large scale with kids of all ages, but in particular for young kids, and especially for kids within communities of color. In California, we estimate that 40-50 percent of all the K-12 students in the state never logged on, didn’t have a formal learning experience for three or four months. The idea of being able to deliver distance teaching to kids on a large scale two or three days a week, or five days a week, is hugely damaging within communities of color and low-income communities. The digital divide has never been addressed in this state or in the country.

Craig Strang

At the same, communities of color have been historically been excluded from outdoor spaces and access to outdoor learning and recreation opportunities – national parks, state parks, local parks, jogging in your neighborhood, you name it. That lack of opportunity has also been exacerbated by shelter-in-place mandates. If your home is in a community designed without local parks and outdoor spaces within walking distance, then what?

On top of that, COVID-19 has hit Black and Latinx community much harder than the white community or other populations. There are double, triple, quadruple impacts that are really causing harm and damage in communities of color.

There wasn’t a lot of time to plan for high-quality distance learning, so there’s no expectation that it should have been great right out of the gate. I’m sure that in the fall it will be better than it was in the spring, but even the better version will be disproportionately damaging to our most vulnerable communities.

Think about it this way. Getting kids back to school in classrooms would be vastly beneficial to distance learning, and having kids learning outdoors would be even more vastly beneficial than having them in classrooms face to face. There’s plenty of research proving that kids learn more and learning is accelerated outdoors. Even limited opportunities matter: when kids come back into a classroom from an hour outdoors, they’re focused, calmer and more able to absorb content. Now add the health benefits, decreased anxiety, addressing ADHD issues, depression issues, all kinds of learning challenges, all of those things are mitigated by spending time outdoors and connecting with the natural world.

We really think that the solution that Sharon is proposing, to green and create outdoor learning spaces on school yards, and take advantage of local and regional parks within walking distance is not just a Band-Aid to put on top of a horrible situation during COVID-19. This is an opportunity to showcase and shine a light on the best possible learning environments that kids could have, which we’ve not been able to achieve pre-COVID-19. We’re really hoping that we can take advantage of this opportunity, and that what we learn from it will have a lasting benefit to our school system and communities for decades and decades, not just until there’s a vaccine.

SHARON: Investments made now will be useful later. California has 130,000 acres of school ground land at 10,000 schools. In general, these publicly owned lands are vastly underutilized for kids and communities. We also have access to neighborhood parks in a lot of our cities when school grounds are not viable. Schoolyards are our most visited public parks, essentially, and we haven’t yet funded them to live up to that potential. It is about investing in the future while meeting today’s needs to get kids outside.

Photo by Thomas Kuoh Photography

An Improvement, Not a Detraction: How Outdoor Education Could Work

TEO: What would a school day actually look like if we leveraged outdoor education as a pandemic response?

SHARON: The idea is to use the outdoors as an asset with many different potential permutations and scales. We’re advocates of a large-scale approach, but we recognize that this is going require flexibility.  

We’ve been walking through some case studies with school district partners to think about how they might use their own environments. In circumstances when school buildings have classroom doors that open directly to the outside, it’s very easy to move furniture outside. You can just put it on the shady side of the building and have your class outside. One school we were talking with was interested in having a single teacher inside supervising children in breakout groups moving between the inside and outside so that they would essentially double their classroom size, because they have big windows and they can see the immediate outdoors.

All the modeling suggesting six feet of distance between students in the classroom is predicated on the idea that kids will stay in their seat for eight hours a day. We know that is not going to happen. Even if we’re thinking of this indoor six-foot model, we need our kids to be able to spread into outdoor spaces.

A lot of districts are anticipating being able to host 50% classroom capacity. We’re exploring how a school might place the remaining students in the environment outside, either at parks or at school grounds, in order to potentially serve all enrolled students.

For schools that are modeling 100% capacity, an idea might be that these class clusters are sitting on a combination of existing infrastructure that schools have in their yard and new straw bales and logs and camping chairs and seat cushions, or whatever arrangement of furniture they’d like to have from inexpensive to more of an investment. There are a range of possibilities. They might be sitting under an event tent like you might have at a wedding or a carport or a yurt. There are many choices for outdoor shelter, for shade, and for rain that would place them out into the landscape.

Climate is another factor. In Southern California, it may be too hot go outside until November, so they’re looking at how an outdoor plan specifically from November to May. Schools with colder climates might have the reverse pattern, staying until it’s really bitter cold or outside until there’s serious thunderstorms and wind. The question we’re asking how does the outdoors become Plan A? How can we get everyone outside as much of the time as possible, looking at indoors and as backup plans rather than the other way around?

CRAIG: We would advocate for adapting instruction to the opportunity that the outdoors provides, which is usually an improvement, not a detraction from teaching and learning. This requires providing opportunities for teachers to improve their practice at outdoor learning, providing them with resources, while also infusing schools with educators who are skilled at outdoor learning. We think there’s a ready workforce that’s available and in desperate need of gainful employment that could be redeployed to solve this huge problem that the schools are facing of not being able to bring enough kids onsite.

The outdoor education, outdoor science, environmental education community has been hugely impacted by COVID-19. In a recent national survey, 30 percent of environmental education and outdoor science programs say that they are highly unlikely or certain not to reopen if social distancing stays in place and they can’t run programs at their sites through the end of the year. Only 37 percent of all the programs in the country say that they’re likely to reopen after January 1. Between 30 and 63 percent of all the programs in the country are likely not to come back.

About 1,000 organizations respond to the survey, which is just a fraction of all the programs in the country. Those 1,000 organizations said that they have 30,000 employees that will be laid off and furloughed. We think that there’s an opportunity there for a partnership, to redeploy those 30,000+ outdoor instructors who are trained, skilled, passionate, dying to work with kids again outdoors, and put them to work solving this problem that schools have that otherwise is insoluble. Even if they can expand their space capacity, schools cannot realistically expand their personnel capacity, particularly in an era of budget reduction. Schools have a personnel problem and there’s a workforce currently ready and waiting and trained up. We need to find the mechanism to put them together.

These instructors that could be redeployed could be working with kids and providing extraordinary experiences and outdoor learning, while also modeling, demonstrating and providing guidance to classroom teachers who don’t feel as comfortable in those outdoor settings, helping them to slowly, over time, adjust their instruction for the long run. It’s not a simple solution, and there are a lot of barriers, but if we could make it work it would be an extraordinarily mutually beneficial relationship. As crazy as an idea as it is, I don’t think it’s any crazier than saying that kids should be home three days a week doing distance learning while their parents are at work, and trying to figure out how to get their laptop to work, and doing worksheets and online quizzes for three or four hours a day in the best-case scenarios.

Photo by Drew Kelly Photography

Is Outdoor Education Feasible?

TEO: Public K-12 education can be compared to a massive ocean liner, where making a course correction is not a quick endeavor. It really feels that we don’t have that kind of time right now. However, we just witnessed a dramatic shift, where the entire K-12 education system went online within a matter of weeks. Clearly there were problems and it didn’t work very well, but it probably worked better than people thought it might.

CRAIG: On February 15th of 2020, distance learning was not a very high priority in our schools. If you came forward and said, “Hey, I have this great idea. I think that our schools would be a lot better if we could have some kind of distance learning thing that would individualize and allow kids to learn at their own pace, and all these great things,” people would tell you that you’re crazy, we can’t afford that, we don’t have the resources, we can barely support classroom instruction.

As you just said, overnight it became a priority. And we did it. We didn’t do a perfect job of it, but it became a priority, and as soon as it was a priority, we had the resources to do it.

The question is: What are our priorities? If it becomes a priority, the resources materialize. The core always has funding. It’s all the peripheral things that get cut back when times are hard. There’s a re-framing that needs to happen. This is a better solution, and this should be prioritized. It’s not supplemental. This is the solution.

People talk about the funding. If it’s a priority, I think we can work it out. People talk about teaching credentials for outdoor ed instuctors. There are solutions for that, especially given that the workforce that we’re talking about is trained and skilled and has been working in the field for a long time. Many states have emergency credential-waiver processes. Many schools have systems where if the students that are not with a credentialed teacher are within sight or earshot of a credentialed teacher that can supervise, that’s okay. Some of these of barriers can be addressed with the wave of a hand.

SHARON: Education is not an island, it’s the linchpin to the economy. It allows parents to go back to work, particularly parents of younger kids. The cost of not having 100 percent of students at school is extremely high and is more than enough justification for an investment in people and place to make this happen, even without considering the amount of learning loss and expanding inequality.

We know that outdoor learning is an effective and feasible solution that’s been tried before. It’s what happened in the tuberculosis epidemic and the Spanish flu epidemic 100 years ago. It’s also happening around the world. Other countries are looking at the same approach, including Scotland and Italy.

Under the re-opening conditions that are being envisioned, it’s arguably less complicated to have kids sitting in outdoor environments than it is having them sit in indoor environments. If they’re on the inside of a building, it might require three or four times the janitorial staff to wipe surfaces down, to sanitize everything the kids touch, every time the kids come and go and there’s a new group in, everything has to be cleaned. There’s a lot of installation of barriers and upgrading of HVAC systems that needs to happen. Outdoor education requires the kids and supplies outside. In a lot of ways this is much simpler and cheaper than the solutions that are being proposed on the interiors.

This is not to say there aren’t complications. Questions around permitting outdoor structures and bathroom access and lunch service and more require logistics integration planning that needs to happen, but I would not say that they’re barriers. We need to un-silo some of those thinking processes and bring them together to make them function smoothly. That’s the work that we’re doing right now.

Next Steps

TEO: You had a large kick-off event in early June and 1,000 people attended. I assume that the end goal is to provide road maps and resources for communities all over the country who want to rapidly implement this approach?

SHARON: There has been a groundswell of interest that we’re trying to harness. The we in this is Lawrence Hall Science collaborating with Green School Yards America, San Mateo County Office of Education and Ten Strands together alongside a whole network of partners joining us from around the country.

We’re channeling those efforts into 11 working groups that will be working over the summer in their own areas of expertise to weave together some ideas, strategies, frameworks and guidance around the following:

  • Plans to ensure equity
  • Outdoor classroom infrastructure
  • Park/school collaboration
  • Outdoor learning and instructional models 
  • Staffing and formal/nonformal partnerships
  • School program integration (with PE, recess, before/after care)
  • Community engagement
  • Health and safety considerations
  • Local and state policy shifts
  • Funding and economic models
  • Community of Practice for Early Adopters

The first 10 are setup to produce materials that can be downloaded for free by districts across the country to help them not to reinvent the wheel. The 11th group is one that doesn’t want to wait for the end of the summer for it to happen, and would like to move forward and work it out with us.

We want to invite people who are interested in joining us to look at the website and fill out a survey of how they’d like to be involved.

TEO: I think that’s the next logical question. What are the next steps if somebody really wants to get involved in this particular project and process you’re hosting? And what are the strategies that you would recommend in terms of reaching out to school districts to try to make this part of the thought process?

SHARON: It is fundamentally a collective impact problem. These are problems that are too big for any single organization to solve, so we’re trying to be the backbone to a process that allows many people from many fields to contribute ideas so that individual districts and states don’t have to do it themselves.

But we also want to inspire people to go back to their own areas and support their own school districts armed with the collective thoughts from the group, and ready to work in an organized.

CRAIG: On a larger scale, we’re hoping that every individual person who has a relationship with any school or school district – whether it’s because you have kids there or you’re an educator in some other sector, or in any way intersect with the work of schools – that all of those people will go back and raise this as a possibility to be considered, and point to the resources that are being developed.

The biggest challenge that we’re facing is where we started in this conversation, that there is an accepted paradigm pointing towards one solution:  fewer kids at school for fewer hours a week. What we’re experiencing is that schools that conceive of or become aware that there’s another possibility are generally pretty receptive to the idea, but they just hadn’t thought of it or didn’t realize that there were resources available.

That level of awareness on a large scale is what’s needed reach the tipping point. It can’t be just an individual outdoor garden coordinator at one school trying to figure it out on their own, and everybody thinks they’re crazy. Right? We need parents and superintendents, and classroom teachers, and business people all going, “Oh yeah, I heard about that! Let’s make it happen.”

SHARON:  We need to ask ourselves what kind of experience we want kids to have next year? What kind of experience do we want the adults in the schools to have next year? How can we make it safe, positive, and welcoming? Kids are coming back to school holding onto a lot of trauma from this year, and they’re going to need to be in a nurturing, supportive, calming environment when they come back. Being asked to sit in your chair inside in the same spot the entire school day with a mask on is not going to help. There is a need for us to focus on the outcome we want to see for kids, and to generate and create the environment that will bring about that shift in experience for children.

Advancing the Legal Rights of Nature in a Time of Environmental Crisis

The first “rights of nature” law was enacted in a Pennsylvania community in 2006, followed two years later by Ecuador’s enshrinement of that principle in its constitution, the first country to do so. This discussion covers how Indigenous people, communities, countries, and courts have continued the struggle to secure the highest legal protections for nature and how you can become part of this growing movement. With Mari Margil, who was Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund at the time of this conversation and a leading figure in the global movement to enshrine Rights of Nature in jurisprudence; and Bill Twist, Co-Founder and CEO of the Pachamama Alliance. 

Mari Margil

MARI: My name is Mari Margil with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. I’m pleased to be sharing the stage today with Bill Twist of the Pachamama Alliance.

What we’re hoping to do today is share with you how the Rights of Nature movement has developed and evolved. Let’s get started, Bill.

BILL: Thank you. Mari really knows this subject inside out. Pachamama Alliance had the good fortune to be involved through Bioneers originally, but then be involved with rights of nature being introduced into the Ecuadorian Constitution in 2008. So I’m going to be the historian, telling the history of how this got started and where the movement around rights of nature exists right now. And then Mari will spend more time filling people in on some of the specifics of what’s going on around the world.

Bill Twist

In 2006, Thomas Linzey, who’s the founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund spoke here at Bioneers, talked about work that they had done, where they had introduced a Rights of Nature provision in rural Pennsylvania, and it had been passed. The first time ever that legal language had been put in place anywhere actually enshrining nature as a rights-bearing entity.

And out of that Thomas did a democracy school, and it’s something that the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund had developed as a way of presenting rights of nature within a legal environment. And someone who works with me had showed me the handbook for this democracy school. I read through the handbook and I thought, God, this is amazing, this thing about rights of nature.

Pachamama Alliance had been working for years in Ecuador, with Indigenous People. Ecuador was writing a new constitution from ground zero. And I remember being inspired by the Democracy School, and thinking, if the United States could write a constitution from ground zero, what would we do? We would put rights of nature into it. We were trying to get rights of nature in it.

Ecuador’s really unique in that it’s a country with a huge indigenous population. Its vision for itself is really grounded still in indigenous cosmovision. So the work that was being done around the constitution was to put a constitution in place that enshrined this idea of sumak kawsay, which in Quichuan language means harmony with nature. It’s like mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship. That’s the vision of this country.

So I thought, they’re writing a new constitution, they should put rights of nature in it, which I knew nothing about. And so I called Thomas Linzey out of the blue and said, “Hey, I’m Bill Twist. I’m working down in Ecuador. Why don’t you come down to Ecuador and work on putting rights of nature in their constitution?” And basically he said, “I’ll come down there if you can get people who are in the process, who are really playing in this process, to understand it, and want to be engaged in the conversation.”

So I went back to the groups that we were working with in Ecuador and was able to get people involved, talking with Indigenous People, talking with people who were involved in the constitutional process who got really intrigued by the idea. And out of that, Thomas did come down. And then Mari came down with Thomas. And CELDF played a critical role in crafting language, working with the constitutional assembly process, and putting the language in place, this strange idea that nature should have rights and we should put it into a form of jurisprudence.

One of the biggest hurdles to get over was the indigenous opposition to the idea in Ecuador. It just sounded crazy to them. It sounds like another white man’s idea of how to deal with the world that was just so totally off, that nature needed to have people say it had rights. To them, it’s clear nature is a living being, it’s a subject. The whole world is this animated place that they’re living in. And so to think that we were going to make that right and to honor that understanding that they already had, that we needed to put it into our legal system just sounded crazy. So they were one of the biggest hurdles initially. They were really strongly opposed until they saw – and I think it occurred fairly quickly to them – that the biggest threat to their world was this structure of rights that had been created and imposed on them, and the thought that we could create property, and we could create rules as to how you could use property. So when they saw that it was almost like a skillful Aikido move, to use the tool that was being used to destroy the world and to deny them rights, to put rights of nature into that structure of jurisprudence, they could see this is actually a really smart thing to do. And the indigenous movement got behind it.

Thomas and Mari played a huge role down there. They participated in the constitutional assembly drafting process, and there were big rooms of people, all the delegates, and Thomas and Mari were drafting and diagraming, but there was something really special. Thomas and Mari and CELDF was a key part of this, but it couldn’t have happened anywhere but in Ecuador. The country has such a strong history and its vision for the country so deeply embedded in honoring and protecting the natural world. The people who were running the constitutional assembly, this man Alberto Acosta, is a brilliant economist, environmentalist, and he was the president of the constitutional assembly, and he picked up on this idea. He’s the one who really skillfully got the Indigenous People involved, got the business community involved. So there wasn’t any place else in the world where it could have happened. The conditions were absolutely right in Ecuador, with the indigenous vision and really skillful people who were part of the constitution assembly.

So the rights of nature did get enshrined in that constitution. Since then there have been a number of cases brought in Ecuador, some that were ruled against, some that clearly should have been ruled in favor of rights of nature were ruled against. The government asserted national security interests to ignore this provision of the constitution when it dealt with a big, huge mining project. The mining project still hadn’t happened, but the case was lost. There’s been a number of cases won, and Ecuador has been just a great example and a great building block for this movement.


I wanted to share one of the things that happened after the rights of nature did get passed in the constitution in 2008. This was just an isolated example in Ecuador. There had been some discussions in Bolivia about rights of Mother Earth, but it hadn’t turned into actual law yet. There had been some proposals to introduce the idea of universal rights for Mother Earth at the United Nations, but it hadn’t been accepted yet. But Thomas and Mari had been doing work on rights of nature, even before Ecuador, around the world. They had a real network of people in Australia, South Africa, India, Europe, United States that had been working on this idea of rights of nature, all inspired by Ecuador.

Thomas Linzey had the idea that what we really need to do is to pull this together as a movement somehow. He called together a group of people together to have a meeting in Ecuador, and so in 2010, there was a meeting in Ecuador. Mari was at the meeting, Thomas was at the meeting. There were about 25 of us who were there to create what’s now known as the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. And it was really Thomas’ idea that we need to build on what had been created with the constitution in Ecuador.

The meeting was at Hacienda Manteles at the foot of Mama Tungurahua—Tungurahua is a huge, active volcano in Ecuador. And when we were there, it was an absolutely crystal clear day, and so we were right at the foot of this volcano that was letting steam off. It wasn’t pouring out lava, fortunately, but it was letting steam off. There was this huge energy field that we were in.

So, we the people and organizations meeting at the Hacienda Manteles at the foot of Mama Tungurahua from the 2nd to the 5th of September (“the Founding Members”); Recognizing that we are all part of an indivisible living Earth community of interrelated and interdependent beings; Conscious of being complemented by the presence of the lizard, the hummingbird, water, fire, earth, moon, sky and other beings to create an integral Earth Community.

I love that. So there were Indigenous People who were part of this, and they insisted that we weren’t just some human beings trying to do something, but it was the spirit of nature itself working with something significant. Ancient native communities have always defended Mother Earth’s rights, because those rights are innate to their cosmovision.

Motivated by our love of Mother Earth and all beings and by a vision of creating societies that live in harmony with Nature and are socially just and spiritually fulfilling. . .Believing that the universal recognition and implementation of the rights of nature is essential to achieve that vision and to avert catastrophic harm to humanity and life as we know it; We hereby establish the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.

It was a significant moment. I remember we had a discussion then, and people were saying, this idea — rights of nature — had been now in the constitution of Ecuador; this is an idea whose time has come. Remembering the famous Victor Hugo quote, that nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. And we were having this discussion about whether this is an idea whose time has come or not.

I remember saying, it’s not yet. It’s not an idea whose time has come. When an idea’s time has come, it has an energy of its own. And it was clear that the people there needed to be still driving this.

The real question is: How do you make an idea’s time come? And I remember talking about that with the people, and I’d be like, what are we going to do with this? We’ve got to do something with it.

Mari and I were in Ecuador just a couple of weeks ago at the 10th anniversary of the rights of nature being put into Ecuador’s constitution. And a lot of the same people who had been at Manteles were there, and this conference was amazing. It was just a really compelling, exciting conference as to what’s happening around the world with regards to rights of nature.

So I just wanted to report that where it is now, I think it is an idea whose time has come. It’s something that is really picking up momentum. It’s so consistent with the understanding that’s emerging in the world now, that the world is not out there as some object and we’re over here. Rights of nature is something that has to be an integral part of the way we deal with the world. So that’s the historical update of where we are now. Thank you.


MARI: I’ll pick up on where Bill left off: this idea of a time whose come. And I think you know an idea’s a good one when you say it and other people end up picking it up and thinking it’s theirs. We’re starting to see that happen. People who were not touched by us in any way, or members of the Global Alliance in any way, are just picking this up on their own. You begin to see that, indeed, it is an idea whose time is coming or has come.

What we’re starting to see is that it’s not just people, not just civil society groups or Indigenous organizations and tribal nations, all of whom are engaging in the rights of nature — we’re also starting to see governments and courts on their own begin to pick this up.

I think part of the reason they’re starting to do it is that we’re in a time of environmental crisis. We have ecosystem collapse occurring. Today the rate of species extinction is 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than natural background rates. And of course climate change, which is related to everything, is accelerating far faster than even the most optimistic scientific models predicted. So we’re in a time of overlapping environmental crises that are fueling each other. And so a need for a fundamental shift in human kind’s relationship with the natural world is building, this understanding that we need to make a significant change in how we govern ourselves toward the natural world.

Now 10 years ago in Ecuador, these crises were also happening, and 12 years ago in Tamaqua Borough in Pennsylvania, which Bill talked about. Tamaqua was the very first place in the world that passed a rights of nature law, and we were involved in that. And now today across the United States, there’s more than three dozen communities that have established the rights of nature in law.

And that work is growing, much in the footsteps of past people’s movements in this and other countries. We’re starting to see this build up from the grassroots in the United States, which is a very different pathway than what Ecuador took. Ecuador obviously put it into their national constitution, an extraordinary achievement, and it’s opened up so many doors to this idea coming, but here in the United States we understand that we can’t walk into the halls of Congress and say, “Hey, we need a rights of nature constitutional amendment.” That’s simply not going to happen. But what we are seeing is the ability to to build it upward from the grassroots, starting with lawmaking locally and driving upward to ultimately affect national constitution change. So not only do we have communities in 10 states across this country with rights of nature laws in place, we’re also now having those communities join together in what we call community rights networks, in places like Oregon, Ohio and New Hampshire. People are joining together to advance constitutional amendments into state constitutions, so that would help enshrine rights of nature at the state level. That, I think, is the pathway we’re seeing to build rights of nature in the United States.

Today in countries around the world—Ecuador the exception—nature is treated as rightless. It has no legal rights. It’s treated as property or an item of commerce. The law sees things in a binary fashion, either as rights bearing or rightless. Rights bearing is generally treated—we call them persons. You and I are persons, corporations are persons, other entities happen to find us being legal persons under the law. So you’re either a person with rights or you’re not. Nature is in the rightless property bucket, which means that we can’t today go into court of law here in the United States and say, I’m defending the rights of a river or the rights of a forest because there are no rights that exist for those ecosystems within our structure of law. The courts can’t defend those rights because they don’t yet exist in written law.

So today we regulate the use of nature. That’s why we can frack through aquifers. That’s why we can blow the tops off of mountains in West Virginia. That’s why we’re able to do these massive corporate water withdrawals by bottled water companies, because our environmental laws regulate the use of the natural world. That’s a very anthropocentric view of nature. And the major US environmental laws – Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act – now in place 40 or 50 years, those have been mirrored around the world. So we have structures of law around the world which are all based on the same framework, the same premise of how nature is something other than rights bearing.

And the result of course is what we’re seeing, which is ecosystem and species collapse, we’re seeing climate change advance, and all of these different indicators that we are now worse off environmentally speaking than we were two generations ago. And something fundamental needs to shift if we’re going to make any kind of change. This is that kind of shift.

And in one of the rooms that we were in in Montecristi meeting with delegates to Ecuador’s constituent assembly, we also met with lawyers who were advising them on how to draft their new constitution, and it was a both fascinating and frustrating conversation. I say that because we were introducing this idea to them, explaining how it had begun to advance the United States, and they said, “Well you can’t do that.” And we said, “Well, what do you mean?” And they said, “You can’t do that; nature doesn’t have rights; you can’t put rights of nature into the constitution.” And we said, “Well, why not?” As Bill said, they were starting from ground zero, blank page, why can’t they do anything the hell they want? And they said, “No, you can’t do that; that’s not how nature is treated under legal systems.”

And so we had to have a really frank conversation about past people’s movements. We talked about how abolitionists in the United States, in England and other countries, their goal was to move that which was treated as property under the law, i.e., enslaved people, transform them from being property to being rights bearing. And how the suffrage and women’s rights movements in different countries transformed women, which were treated as property of their husbands or fathers, transformed them from being considered property under the law to being rights bearing. And so nature today is in that same bucket. It needs to be transformed into being rights bearing to gain the highest level of legal protection that we have in our laws, which are legal rights. Our highest protection of the law is legal rights that you and I all have in the United States under the Bill of Rights. And sometimes it might feel like we don’t have them, but they’re at least on paper, people.

So that’s really the conversation that we had to have, not only with the lawyers, but with the delegates as well, which is how to transform something. It’s been done before. The body of legal rights has grown; it’s expanded to include people who were not considered to be people, who were not considered to be rights bearing, to move them into that category of being a rights holder. And so we had that conversation.

Bill told the story so beautifully about what happened in Ecuador. And today, Ecuador indeed is the first country in the world to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution. Bolivia came next. They have their law of the rights of Mother Earth. And now we have other things that have happened as well. I wanted to share some of that with you.

So one of the ways that we know an idea’s time has come is when others are picking up that idea and considering it and taking it as their own. In 2016, Colombia’s Constitution Court, their highest court in that country, was considering a case for Rio Atrato (the Atrato River) which is a heavily devastated ecosystem due to mining and other activities. The river basin is home to Indigenous Peoples who are being severely impacted by the pollution and impact on the river. And they were considering a case about protecting the river. In Colombia, there was no national rights of nature law. And the constitution court of Colombia essentially looked outside of the national boundaries of their own country, and they took in what’s happening within the international community. What can we look to to help protect this river, because clearly conventional environmental laws are not doing the job. And they, for the very first time, recognized that an ecosystem in Colombia has legal rights.

It’s extraordinary because they’re not basing it on their own national law. Instead they speak about looking out to the international community and seeing what’s the best thing happening out there that we can bring here at home. And so I wanted to read you just an excerpt from that very long decision, but it’s a terrific decision. The court said that the Rio Atrato possesses rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration.” And the court explained its decision this way: “A new legal approach has been developed at the international level whose central premise is the relationship of profound unity and interdependence between nature and human species, a new socio-legal understanding in which nature must be taken seriously and with full rights. That is as a subject of rights.” And they went on to say: “It is the human populations that are dependent on the natural world and not the opposite, and that they (meaning us)—they must assume the consequences of their actions and omissions with nature, with the aim of achieving a respectful transformation with the natural world and environment as has happened before with civil and political rights.”

Rio Atrato. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

So the court not only is taking rights of nature in, they’re putting in the context of other people’s movements as well, that had to transform those considered rightless to become rights bearing.

In some ways, the constitution court of Colombia has done a better job than some of the Ecuador courts at explaining why rights of nature is important. Bill explained how the prior presidential Correa administration didn’t really embrace the rights of nature when it was put into Ecuador’s constitution. There’s been essentially a void. There was no legislation in Ecuador to say how are we going to implement this constitution provision; what steps do we need to take? And in the void, all of these pieces of litigation have gone forward, but fortunately we’re also beginning to see some movement into things like their environmental code of regulations. They are starting to see the rights of nature move its way into that. They’re starting to see it move into procedural law. This stuff takes time to develop and evolve, and Ecuador is not only a great example but also a laboratory that other places, other communities, other countries are looking to.

And I can tell you that the moment Ecuador occurred – so September 28th, 2008 – we started getting phone calls from different places. The first call that we got was from Nepal. They had a constituent assembly in place, just like Ecuador had. They were coming out of a civil war and were beginning to draft a constitution, which was put into place in 2015. Nepal, of course, is home to Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, and as you may or may not know, the Himalaya is the fastest warming mountain range on Earth. The Himalayas are in the north of Nepal, so literally everything is downstream from that. With the erratic rainfall coming from climate change, with this melting that’s causing glacier bursts, and with climate refugees, you have all these problems that are occurring in a very agrarian society so dependent on water that they said: “We need really to do something about climate change here; can rights of nature apply?”

We have been working there for almost 10 years now, and have been there a number of times to meet with their constituent assembly when it was drafting the constitution. And now since their Constitution is in place, we’ve met with members of parliament on climate change to talk about establishing the rights of nature in Nepal’s Constitution — particularly rights of the Himalaya, so that the Himalaya have the right to be free from human-caused global warming pollution, and the people of Nepal have the right to a climate, a healthy climate free from human-caused global warming pollution.

Nepal is becoming a real frontline leader within the global grassroots, and some smaller nations that don’t have much political strength are joining forces to say we have to fundamentally shift our relationship with the natural world and advance rights of nature, right to climate, right of the Himalayas. That work has been going on for almost 10 years now.

The Himalayas

Other places are advancing rights of nature today. In India, last year a state high court in the state of Uttarakhand issued two decisions and a third one this year on the rights of nature. Much like in Colombia, there’s no national rights of nature law in India. And so the court, very similar to Colombia, looked outside of its own national boundaries and said, “What’s going on out there that we can bring here?”

And what they did is recognize that the Ganges (or Mother Ganga, as they call it) and the Yamuna Rivers have legal rights to protection, conservation, restoration. This was a necessity because conventional environmental laws were unable to protect those rivers which are facing significant devastation. This year on the Fourth of July, they issued a third decision, and that decision recognized rights of the animal kingdom, rights of species within this state in India. And so we’re starting to see that evolution in jurisprudence in that absence of actual lawmaking. They’re taking law from other places and putting it in place, which is extraordinary.

We’ve been working there on a national law, to write the national Ganga River Rights Act. We think those court decisions from the high court are going to boost that effort to put through national legislation, which the court said was necessary to happen nationwide. So that’s building.

Another place in which we’ve been doing work is Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef on Earth – you can see it from space – is dying. We teamed up with the Australia Earth Laws Alliance, which has been working on bringing rights of nature to Australia, to develop the Great Barrier Reef Rights campaign. We developed model local, state, and national constitution frameworks to recognize rights of the reef: Model laws that people can take in their community, in their state of Queensland, and then at the national level to recognize fundamental rights of the reef and the people of Australia to a healthy, thriving reef ecosystem.

All of this work has been very much about people. It’s very much, some have said, a codification of indigenous values. Indigenous Peoples were extremely involved and pivotal in Ecuador. They’ve been very involved in work in other places like Nepal, like in India. They’ve been involved in the Great Barrier Reef campaign in Australia. They’ve also been very involved and active here in the States.

We began working with the Ho-Chunk Nation which is based in Wisconsin, formerly known as the Winnebago, to move rights of nature into their tribal constitution. Several years ago they took a first vote on that. Just three or four weeks ago in September, their general council took another vote on it to establish and enshrine the rights of nature in their tribal constitution. They need to take a second vote to ratify, but if in fact it is ratified, they become the first tribal nation in the United States to codify the rights of nature in their constitution.

Other tribal nations are moving this forward. Bioneers has hosted us to do a Rights of Nature and Indigenous Rights workshop, which we’ve been doing in different parts of the country with different tribal nations. We’ve done one on the White Earth reservation. We did one last year with the Grand Canyon Trust, their intertribal conversations groups with tribes throughout the Southwest, around the Colorado River Basin. So there’s growing interest. And I think Bill said this best, they’re using the law that’s been used against them, using it to actually protect themselves in the places where they live, and the lands they depend upon.

I’ll finish with saying that the rights of nature as an idea whose time has come, and I’ll just quickly run through a few more developments.

  • In 2017, in Mexico City, they established a constitution that says that a rights of nature law needs to be passed here. So they have set up the need to establish a rights of nature law within the city of Mexico City, which we’re beginning to work with folks on.
  • In Northern Ireland, we’ll be heading there in January to do a rights of nature workshop and begin to meet with communities who are very much frontline resistance against things like industrial farming and fracking, which maybe we don’t associate with that part of the world, but it’s very much occurring.
  • In Sweden, we continue to work with folks there to bring this idea into the country, and meet with members of the Green Party, for example, who are members of parliament to bring this idea into parliament. In the northern part of Sweden, where the Sami indigenous people are primarily based, they have a Sami parliament which is not recognized by the Swedish central government, the central government, as really having any legal authority. Nonetheless they, earlier this year, endorsed the Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth because they said, we’re going to do this anyway, even though we don’t essentially have legal authority here. They’re the first Indigenous Peoples within Europe to do so.
  • What’s been happening in New Zealand is also very much involving Indigenous Peoples there. What they have done with several different ecosystems, including the Whanganui River, is recognize that those ecosystems no longer have human ownership, that they are entities unto themselves with certain rights unto themselves. They’re saying that the ecosystems have what they’re calling legal personhood.

And so there’s a lot developing in different parts of the world. We’ve also been talking with people in Africa, other people in Asia, in Philippines, in Pakistan, other places which I think are all seeing this crisis developing and are all saying we need to do something fundamentally different in our relationship with the natural world.

Rights of Nature laws tend to include rights like the right to exist, the right to thrive, the right to water for an ecosystem, the right to evolve, to be restored. This is a somewhat different take on it, but it’s recognizing certain rights of ecosystems and with that essentially a shared management of the ecosystem by Indigenous Peoples and the central government, which is a completely new way of thinking about how to manage ecosystems, and that ecosystems are rights-bearing entities on their own.

The World’s Leading Entheogenically-Inspired Artist Shares Stories about His Creative Journey

An edited excerpt of a talk given by Alex Grey at the 2003 Bioneers Conference

Alex Grey is a NY-based artist who has achieved worldwide renown, especially for his extraordinary x-ray-like portraits of the human body’s physiological and energetic systems and for his search for a common mystical experience underlying all the world’s spiritual traditions. He has also courageously and unhesitatingly acknowledged his deep debt to vision-inducing substances in helping shape his artistic vision.

Alex bonded with his life-long partner, the artist, Allyson Rymland Grey in Boston in 1976 when they had a life-changing, joint, simultaneous entheogenically induced mystical experience, which transformed Alex’s agnostic existentialism to a radical transcendentalism. The Grey couple continued to take “sacramental journeys” on LSD. For five years, Alex worked in the Anatomy Department at Harvard Medical School preparing cadavers for dissection while he studied the body on his own. He later worked for Dr. Herbert Benson and Dr. Joan Borysenko as a research technologist at Harvard’s Department of Mind/Body Medicine, conducting scientific experiments to investigate subtle healing energies. Alex’s anatomical training prepared him for painting the Sacred Mirrors series of paintings and for working as a medical illustrator.

Alex’s paintings, which have appeared as album art for such leading musicians’ as the bands TOOL, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana, have been exhibited throughout the world and are chronicled in a number of monographs: Sacred Mirrors:  The Visionary Art of Alex Grey, Transfigurations, and Net of Being. He is also the author of The Mission of Art and co-editor of a book about the conjunction of Buddhism and Psychedelics, Zig Zag Zen.

In 2004, Alex and Allyson Grey founded the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in New York, a cultural center and refuge for contemplation that celebrates a new alliance between divinity and creativity. A five-year installation of Grey’s best-loved artworks was exhibited at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, CoSM, in New York City from 2004-9. The Chapel moved to its permanent home in Wappinger Falls, New York in February 2009.

In this talk, Alex recounts some of the artistic experiments from a “middle period” that bridged some of his earlier, truly transgressive work with social awareness and his nascent spiritual awakening. He then goes on to describe some of his later, now famous works and how the psychedelic experience informed their creation.

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, alexgrey.com

ALEX GREY: A few years back in New York, I was sitting in a pool of black, tar-like liquid in a performance called “The Beast.” As people entered the space they would see a hydrogen bomb blast projected on one wall that was to my side. If they wanted me to, I would stamp their hand with the number of the beast – 666. Quite a few people wanted me to stamp their hands, and a few of them wanted me to stamp their foreheads. About ten feet away from me was my painting called “Nuclear Crucifixion.”

My wife, Allyson, joined me in another performance piece I called “The Wasteland,” in which we represented the nuclear family. On each one of the seats there, we had written “Mr. and Mrs. X were on their way to dinner when they were surprised by a nuclear blast. They arrived at a dinner table in hell to feast on money.” We sat at the table, drinking “blood” and eating “money,” and there was an alarm bell going off in the heart of a skeleton in the piece and bomb blast sounds in the background. As the clock approached nuclear midnight, Mrs. X got up (Allyson was a gifted bulimic for years) and she puked up the money onto a table. Then she jammed her fingers down my throat and I did the same.

Another piece I did was called “Human Race.” I had had a vision of a piece involving a machine/vehicle of sorts that had a motor and a wheel and a little clutch that was a kind of hand throttle that would engage it to the side in such a way that it could go round and round inside a room. I put steel rods down into concrete in the floor to anchor the thing. The audience was sitting about a foot and a half away from the wheel as it came around, and when I started it up, the engine had a little trouble starting. When it finally did, I lay down in the contraption and it started going round. I originally thought this would kind of be a boring piece in which I would just go around and around. There might be noxious fumes that would eventually drive the audience out, or it would run out of gas. Either of those endings would have made a point. I wasn’t sure how it would end. But the wheel started picking up way more speed than I had anticipated, and it then occurred to me I hadn’t put a brake on the thing. It got going faster and faster until it was going really fast. I guess I should have paid more attention in physics in high school. It sheared the steel rods right off, and pulled itself right out of the concrete and went careening toward the audience. Fortunately, I was able to fall off of the thing and stop it before it hit anyone. Everyone jumped up in wild applause, thinking that’s what it was supposed to do.

We later did several pieces that were early attempts on our part to look at different religions, trying to get to some essence in all of them. In one called “Burnt Offering” I read scripture from three different holy books from three different traditions, the Baghavad Gita, the Bible and the Koran. Then I set them all on fire in a kind of totem urn, then after they had burned down a bit, I mashed their ashes together and then rubbed it on my body. After I was ashen, I lit seven skulls and a skeleton behind me. Another of these, in about 1982, was called “Prayer Wheel,” named after the Tibetan device that can be either large or handheld and is spun as a way of generating good will and furthering your own spiritual evolution. It was a piece about the life cycle. I imagine all of us, somehow, as this combination of polarities: male and female, between birth and death, and so on, so to embody this I tied a skeleton on my back while Allyson carried a baby doll, and we were painted gold. This is a way to look at the soul externalized, that’s why I painted us gold, to represent something of great value. As we walked we intoned the national mantra of Tibet (“Oh hail the jewel in the lotus”—the jewel is our spiritual essence). I tend to have visions of these things and do them, and then years later I start to think that they’re about something.

In another of these pieces, “Living Cross,” Allyson and I were once again trying to bring together the polarities, referencing different world religions. We used universal symbols, the yin/yang symbol, the cross, and the Star of David, to highlight polar opposites: heaven and earth, matter and spirit, etc. We made a giant cross out of 500 apples and lay in the center of it surrounded by roses. Above us was this angel of death and transcendence while Gregorian chants were going on in the background. We used apples again (about 5000) to make a 55-foot effigy of a goddess on the ground outside at Lincoln Center. I did a hundred prostrations at the foot of the Goddess as Allyson was in its heart center nursing our daughter Zena. It was up for about an hour or two; then we boxed all the apples and donated them to homeless shelters.

To me, most of the time, babies imply some kind of hopefulness. I created a piece called “Heart Net” that represented this. It had many flowers creating a heart shape and an eye in the center that was crying into a pool that a child looked like it had crawled out of. People were encouraged to write prayers or good wishes for the planet, their own healing, loved ones’ healing and so on and hang them on the net. This was at the American Visionary Art Museum. A Buddha figure was positioned at the top, so it was going from the earth to a transcendental realm. A world map was painted on the wall and by the end of the year the piece was up, thousands of prayers had accumulated on the heart net.

Heart Net, alexgrey.com

I made an eleven-foot high (with a six-foot wing span) sculpture called “World Soul” that took two years to finish. It’s a hybrid, divine mutant, multi-faced, hermaphroditic kind of character, perched on the world globe. It has a fish tail, claw-like paws grasping the earth, and eagle wings. You can look at it as a kind of shamanic combination of the various elements, wings indicative of the super conscious, perhaps. After an exhausting day of teaching, I was standing on a subway platform and sort of saw this thing in a vision on the platform, and I thought: “Oh, what a nice painting image,” but then it opened up its wings and turned around and I could see it was a sculpture. It points to its own heart center, which is a mirror, saying: “See yourself reflected in me; I am you.”  It has eyes above, seeing all around. One of its faces has a wrathful aspect, but in front it has a peaceful aspect and cradles new life, an infant. Years after examining this sculpture, I’ve come to regard the infant as a symbol that implies: “ Consider the generations to come before you ruin this gem of a world.”  Before we welded the head onto that bronze piece and sealed it, I encased a number of things inside its heart: written prayers of many different world religions and shamanic invocations, objects that had been blessed by different religious leaders, and a number of plant and other entheogenic substances and medicines from all around the world as well. This is a trick I learned from some African sculptures whose creators also sealed magical elements inside of the figures to bring them to life.

Not all my projects are on that level of intensity. High Times asked me to do a poster for their “Cannabis Cup,” an event in Amsterdam in which the best pot in the world is judged and awards are given out. My wife and I were invited to be celebrity judges. We’re still recovering. It was a difficult job, but someone had to do it. Obviously, entheogens have been central themes in my work and life.  I did a painting portraying Adam and Eve as early humans eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the forbidden fruit as an entheogen. The earliest religious books ever written – the Vedas – contain hundreds and hundreds of references to hallucinogenic plants that would allow one to see God, and we know of the shamanic use of consciousness altering plants from all over Central and South America and the world. I hope that in the future our society will once again find a place for those of us who are called and attuned to their gifts to be able to partake of the power of entheogens in our spiritual lives without risk of harassment and incarceration.

The Sacred Mirrors series, which is now my most well known body of work, began out of a performance called “Life Energy” we did in 1978. I had this idea that I needed to look at life energy in various ways. We did a series of performances exploring that concept, and as part of this process we created two charts of human figures – one was of the nervous system and the other was of auras, chakras and meridian points. We demarcated a little zone in front and suggested that people stand in front of the charts and see if they could identify with the figure and use it as a mirror to start to imagine the systems in their own bodies.

At the end of the performance, I executed a rat to show the passing of life energy. We really felt like we had lost all of our friends because of that. It didn’t go over too well at all. But as Allyson and I were walking home and a little despondent, she said:” You know, Alex, people really liked the charts. You should do a whole series based on them.” That was the birth of the Sacred Mirrors. It evolved, and eventually I did an exhibition at the New Museum in New York with life size pieces that were roughly six-foot high figures in five-foot wide frames, ten and a half feet high. They all had stained glass in them. There were 21 of them. The idea was to trace the body-mind-spirit trajectory.

The first one called “The Material World” was made of dozens and dozens of mirrors that were sandblasted with the periodic table of the elements and a figure filled with biochemical data about what goes into a human body. This was a representation of the first step on the journey, the material plane of elements and chemistry. It had a rather elaborate frame that Allyson and I had carved that was packed with many symbolic elements. On one side were representations of biological evolution and on the other side technological evolution. There was a kind of big bang at the bottom of the frame and then evolution ascended narrowly up the sides. At the bottom there was a globe with a DNA chain rising out of it that had unicellular life forms, algae and little flagellates and things, and it moved up to the higher mammals. At the top were the elements of the polarities of male and female. The eye of God or eye of the cosmos or eye of the spirit, whatever you want to call it, was in the very center to express the universe’s coming to be aware of itself, the evolution of consciousness.

I basically taught myself anatomy by painting the skeletons and bodily systems in the Sacred Mirror pieces. I wanted people to be able to stand in front of them and start to feel the systems in their own bodies and their infinite complexity and relationships with each other. The eyes are always open and staring, so one can have a focal point to fix upon when standing in front of each piece. The first few pieces look below the skin, inside the body, at the skeletal, nervous, lymphatic and other systems. The next few have skin, and once there is skin on the body, you’ve got specific gender and race. There are portraits of male and female humans of various races, painted on linen. I called this part of the series the “Mind Area” of the Sacred Mirrors because the mind is constantly differentiating between self and other. All of these differences are visible, but in the context of the Sacred Mirrors what is suggested is that we see ourselves reflected in each other.

After the “Mind Area,” the series leaves the purely physical realm and takes us to the layer of subtle anatomy with representations of the invisible psychic energy system with various chakras and acupuncture meridians and auras and chronic energetic wisps surrounding the figures. These were painted in 1980. The series then continues into a look at the “Spiritual Energy System,” and we see the increasing breakdown of the boundaries between the self and the surroundings. After that comes the “Universal Mind Lattice,” a depiction of an acid trip experience that my wife and I had back in 1976. I met my wife while I was tripping. For us LSD served as a kind of magical elixir that brought us together, and in those days we would lie in bed and take a mega-dose and put on blindfolds to see what would happen. On one of those forays the physical reality I was familiar with completely dissolved. We became toroidal fountains of light interconnected in an omni-directional field that extended boundlessly. It seemed like every other being and thing in the cosmos was one of these fountains of light, these cells of energy, and the energy that was going through all of us was the same, and the energy was love. We were part of a vast love circuit made of the same stuff, yet each of us was a distinct point in this field. You could stare endlessly into space and see that everyone and everything was connected, even though you were unique. It was truly one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had and one of the most beautiful.

I took off my blindfold and Allyson was staring at me. She said: “I was in the most amazing place,” and she started drawing, and she drew exactly what I had seen. Even though we had both had blindfolds on and hadn’t communicated, we had shared an identical vision of the same transpersonal reality at the same time. It totally changed our work. From then on we wanted to make art about interconnectedness. The “Universal Mind Lattice” tries to capture that vision.

Universal Mind Lattice, alexgrey.com

After the Universal Mind Lattice, the next few pieces try to reference the void and clarity at the core of all the different mystical teachings. Most all of them point to a space beyond depiction, which I try to suggest symbolically. I wanted to bring in the elements – fire, water, earth, air – and the Kalachakra, the Tibetan Buddhist symbol of the wheel of time and the principle of the transmutation of the elements by the principle of emptiness. I also did a version of Avalokiteshvara, the thousand-armed Buddha of active compassion because I thought it made a nice segue from the pieces about “voidness” and clarity. All those hands are reaching out like activists. It’s the activist Buddha with an eye of unobstructed vision in each palm so it can see what needs to be done around the world to relieve suffering and help living beings.

By playing with different mystical traditions and bringing them into the Sacred Mirrors, I’m hoping to point beyond dogma and trying to look for some common threads, so also I did a picture of Sophia, the goddess of wisdom. There aren’t that many conventional portrayals of Sophia, so it was kind of up to the imagination to bring me one. It came out as an archetype of the feminine aspect of the godhead that is made out of eyes. I love eyes. The eye is a symbol, to me, of awareness. If you’re going to make art about consciousness, how do you do it? Consciousness has no color; it has no weight or form, so I use symbols, and multiple eyes point to infinite consciousness. The final piece in the Sacred Mirror series is called “The Spiritual World.” It is, in fact, an actual mirror. When you stand in front of it, depending on where you’re standing, a sun that I’ve sandblasted in the center radiates out from your heart. The whole point of the Sacred Mirrors is to help us see ourselves and each other and the world as a reflection of the divine.

Besides the Sacred Mirrors, I’ve done a number of other paintings that look below and beyond the skin at human physical and energetic systems. I painted a series that seeks to depict the spiritual and esoteric dimensions of the human trajectory from conception to death. It begins with “Kissing,” which shows two very physical bodily systems embracing, the coming together of mortal flesh as genitalia, bones, muscles and nervous systems entwine, but it also points to an infinite element of consciousness. Along with eyes, I like to use gold and golden flames to indicate consciousness, so I placed bands of golden infinity symbols looping through the minds and hearts of the lovers in that painting. Vortices shoot out from the lovers, alerting the souls in the other dimensions that this might be their opportunity for incarnation. Various mystical systems describe souls hovering and looking at couples mating, hoping for the right opportunity for physical incarnation. The painting draws from the Tantric tradition the image of the lovers connecting with each other not only through the skin but, in a sense, fusing together at the heart level and dissolving into each other.

The result of that intense fucking is in the next painting in that series, which depicts pregnancy and uses a lotus as a symbol of the soul. Quite logically, a really dynamic painting called “Birth” follows. In it I tried to capture the incredible channeling of almost explosive energy that goes through a mother during childbirth as well as the ultimate compassion inherent in giving birth, which I use Tibetan seed syllables that say, in essence: “Here is a birthing Buddha” to express. A painting about nursing once again captures the physicality of the act but alludes to subtle fields of interconnectedness between mother and child that forge invisible but powerful emotional and spiritual bonds. My daughter, Zena, is the subject of that and several other paintings at different stages of her life. The Dzogchen teachings in Tibetan Buddhism state that our inherent Buddha nature is one of primordial perfection, but that it gets more or less obscured. It’s sometimes easier to see it in children and the young. I tried to express different ideas relating to family bonds, the passing on of culture and knowledge and the development of conscious awareness in those paintings with Zena.

I’ve also done paintings that deal with archetypal figures and themes. One is “The Painter” which depicts a sort of cosmic funnel of inspiration entering the artist’s brain, a phantasm suggesting that he better get to work because he’s not going to be around here forever, and a peanut gallery of demanding critics including Van Gogh, Michelangelo, William Blake, Rembrandt, Frida Kahlo, and other renowned artists in the background. I do tend to pack in a lot of symbols, so that piece also refers to the paintbrush as a spiritual tool, referencing the image of the Tibetan Vajra scepter, and there are allusions to prehistoric and other artworks to imply that our individual creative energy draws from a collective field of humanity’s shared consciousness and traditions.

Art has been for me a way to integrate both the most difficult and the most uplifting material in my life. I don’t feel complete unless my art can express that full emotional range. I experience darkness and the shadowy sides of life all too often. Those are components of all great works of art, no matter how exalted, and that’s why I point to them in my work as well. I depicted the dying process in two pieces, “Caring” and “Dying” (in which consciousness is again symbolized by eyes, one of my recurring motifs). A 1989 painting called “Gaia” contains (unfortunately realistic) depictions of the planet’s current environmental and political crises. It has many dark elements, and one background detail I had forgotten but was later jolted to re-discover is an image of two airplanes flying over the twin towers…

Another category of my paintings depicts the human spiritual quest. One if these called “Holy Fire” portrays a pilgrim on a mountain receiving divine grace in the form of a lightning bolt into his heart and his physical body melting into a sun-like form or radiant fire. It describes the dislodging of the identity from the material body. Another called “Nature of Mind” follows a pilgrim on life’s path and portrays a number of episodes in that journey, from the discovery of sacred texts to the appearance of a teacher to an experience of enlightenment to a return to society to share his newfound wisdom.

Though this is not a fashionable view today, I think that is one of the artist’s functions as well: to fearlessly probe behind appearances and illusions in a quest to experience clarity and universal truths and to then seek to communicate those experiences. I will end with this statement from my book The Mission of Art, which captures some of what I feel art can be:

“Art can be a form of worship and service. The incandescent core of an artist’s soul, a glowing God’s eye, infinitely aware of the beauty of creation, is interlocked with a network of souls, part of one vast group soul. The group soul of art beyond time comes into time by projecting symbols through the artist’s imagination. God’s radiant grace fills the heart and mind with these gifts of vision. The artist honors the vision gifts by weaving them into works of art and sharing them with the community. The community uses them as wings to soar to the same shining vistas and beyond. Translucent wings team with eyes of flame on the mighty cherub of art. Arabesques of fractal cherub wings enfold and uplift the world. The loom of creation is anointed with fresh spirit and blood…Transfusions from living primordial traditions empower the artist – shaman, yogi, devotional prayer – all break through with the visionary cure and take the artist to the heights and depths needed to find the medicine of the moment, a new image of the infinite one, the God of creation manifesting effulgently, multi-dimensionally, with the same empty fullness that Buddha knew and the same compassionate healing that Jesus spread. Krishna plays his flute, the Goddess dances, and the whole tree of life vibrates with the power of love. A mosaic and tile maker, inspired by Rumi, finds infinite patterns of connectivity in the garden of spiritual interplay as the World Spirit awaits its portrait.”

A version of this presentation appeared in Visionary Plant Consciousness Edited by J.P. Harpignies, published by Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company, ©2007. All rights reserved. http://www.Innertraditions.com  Reprinted with permission of publisher.

Plant Messengers: A Diverse Panel of Experts on Psychoactive Plants

A Gem from our Vaults: A Historic Session from 1992

The following are edited excerpts from “Plant Messengers” a panel held at the 1992 Bioneers Conference.

This panel has to be one of the most remarkably diverse and unusual gatherings of experts on psychoactive plants ever assembled on one stage: Andrew Weil, MD, perhaps the world’s most famous holistic/integrative physician; Marcellus Bear Heart Williams, a Muskogee medicine man and member of the Native American Church; Edison Saraiva, MD and Florencio Siquera de Carvalho, two of the earliest representatives of the Uniao do Vegetal Brazilian Church to visit the U.S.; Kathleen Harrison-McKenna, an intrepid ethnobotanist, artist and plant woman extraordinaire; and Dennis McKenna, Ph.D. and Charles Grob, MD, two of the world’s leading research scientists studying psychoactive plants.

Dr. Edison Saraiva: I am a physician and homeopathic doctor in Brazil, and I work in the area of eco-toxicology, the toxicity of the environment as it affects human beings, and I also do research on nutrition. I’m part of the Uniao de Vegetal church. I have been drinking hoasca (aka ayahuasca and also called vegetal) for eighteen years. During this time I’ve lived partly in the Amazon area and I’ve worked with the ministry of the interior of a regional area of northwestern Brazil. Throughout these eighteen years, I’ve been drinking the hoasca tea, and I find it helps me to balance my governmental work and my inner life. It is interesting how one can inhabit these two different realms of reality and maintain excellent mental health. The hoasca, when well administered, brings the ability to transform the subtle, non-material world into something very palpable.

Kat Harrison: I’m the President and Project Director of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit organization I co- founded for the purpose of collecting, protecting, propagating and understanding plants of ethno-medical significance (including shamanic plants) and their lore. Part of my intent is to broaden our cultural definition of what healing is and what healing plants are, what medicine is, and to incorporate the shamanic plants into categories our culture is gradually accepting in terms of herbal medicines. Botanical Dimensions operates an ethno-botanical garden in Hawaii and another in Peru. I’ve explored these various plants and substances extensively over the last twenty-some years in several cultures throughout the Americas.

Dennis McKenna: I’m also associated with Botanical Dimensions as a research director. If you look at cultures in which shamanism has a strong tradition, almost invariably you find that that tradition is centered on the use of one or more powerfully psychoactive plants. I did my graduate research in ethno-botany in Peru in the early ‘80s, studying ayahuasca, and I came away from that experience with the intuition that this was really a very interesting drug or plant complex, and that it and the methods of the traditional healers who used it were worthy of investigation from both a medical and an ethno-botanical point of view. I found that many of the ayahuasceros I encountered in my field work, who had used ayahuasca on a regular basis, some for most of their adult lives, far from being what we think of as impaired by drugs, were actually extremely mentally well balanced, physically healthy people who were extremely high functioning and actually seemed to have derived a lot of benefit from their incorporation of ayahuasca into their lives.

I realized that we didn’t really know anything about the pharmacology of this drug in humans. We knew a great deal about the chemistry of the plants and their effects on animals, but animal models are not really adequate to describe how these things work in humans. I had long wanted to do a biomedical study of long-term ayahuasca users, but it simply wasn’t feasible to do such a study with traditional indigenous populations or jungle dwelling mestizos, the main users of these substances, so I had put this idea on the back burner until last year when I was invited by Edison and the Uniao do Vegetal to attend a conference in Brazil that they organized to give a paper on my chemical and pharmacological work on hoasca. I realized when I was there that the membership of the Uniao could provide an ideal group to study. Many of them were urban professional people who could be monitored and interviewed and could have medical tests performed with their full consent, and who would understand the value of the research. I broached the idea to Edison and some of his colleagues, and I was a little apprehensive because they regard hoasca as a sacrament, so I was worried they might feel I was being blasphemous in some way, but I found in them an extreme attitude of openness and a desire to understand their sacrament on all levels from the biophysical to the metaphysical. They were enthusiastically receptive to the idea.

So we began working together and I thought I would come back to the U.S. and write a grant and submit it to NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse-the government agency that funds these kinds of studies. I started to write the grant. I worked on it for a year or so, and as I was working on one of the final drafts, I was reading it through and I realized that NIDA would never go for it. I realized that the only chance to fund such a project was to find some private individuals with resources whose lives had been touched by shamanic plants who would be willing to fund this sort of research, and lo and behold a couple of very generous individuals, one of whom is Jeffrey Bronfman, came forward. We picked Dr. Charles Grob from UC Irvine Medical School to act as the principle medical investigator, and we are now ready to initiate a pilot study on the biomedical effects of ayahuasca in people who have used it for many, many years.

Charles Grob, MD: I’m a psychiatrist at UC Irvine. I have had a long-standing interest in the potential medical and psychiatric application of psychedelic drugs. In fact, that is a good part of the reason why I decided twenty years ago to go to medical school. I felt that in order to do that sort of research, I had to get unimpeachable credentials. When I made that decision to go to med school twenty years ago, I figured that in about five years the country would come to its senses and we would be allowed to do sanctioned research the way it should be done, but here we are, twenty years later, and we are barely now on the verge of perhaps being able to resume some serious research on psychedelic substances.

Most people don’t realize that some 35 years ago psychedelic drugs were one of the hottest topics of study within psychiatry. It was widely felt at the time that they might hold an important key to really understanding how the mind works, to understanding psychopathology and to developing new treatments that could help people overcome some mental afflictions and live healthier, more fulfilling lives. I think that potential is still there. Tragically this research was blocked twenty years ago and it has not been allowed to go forth, but I think that is starting to change, though still very slowly and hesitatingly. I had submitted a protocol to do a study on MDMA, which may have considerable therapeutic potential. After a long series of drafts of a protocol, we submitted a proposal to the FDA and the decision there was very encouraging. They essentially felt that this was a worthy area of study and basically should be treated no differently than any other drug. Perhaps we are starting to see a slight paradigm shift, so I was very excited when Dennis asked me if I wished to join him as a co-investigator on the Hoasca Project. Ayahuasca has been used as a medicinal remedy and shamanic plant for thousands of years. It has enormous potential. Our study is essentially designed to look at both the physiology of experienced users when they imbibe the substance and at the biochemistry, particularly as it relates to neurotransmitter function and psychological effects. It is our hope that with the preliminary data that we can gather with our initial trip and work in Brazil that we might be in a better position to approach our own government, NIDA or other government agencies, to approve and support further research here.

Andrew Weil, MD: I am from the University of Arizona College of Medicine. I am a botanist and practicing physician. I practice natural and preventive medicine. My main interest has always been teaching people correct uses of plants and the most profitable uses of plants, and I include shamanic plants in that. I’ve always been interested in the healing potentials of the psychedelic plants and drugs, not just in psychiatric medicine, which is what most of the literature has been about, but in clinical medicine as well, because I have seen remarkable examples of healings from chronic pain syndromes in autoimmune disorders in connection with psychedelic experiences, and I think it’s a shame that physicians are denied the right to experiment with and use those drugs clinically, especially since from a medical viewpoint most of these are among the safest of all known drugs in terms of toxicity. Most of the things that we routinely dispense to patients are much, much more toxic than the true psychedelics.

I am also interested in magical plants other than psychedelics, and an example of one that I have had a long history of involvement with is coca leaf. I think the history of coca is the most flagrant example of the way in which we have gone wrong in our relationships with plants. Coca is the sacred plant of a large population of Native Americans in the Andes. The religious and sacramental significance of coca is enormous in these cultures. If you are in the area where coca is used and watch Indians in an unobtrusive way, you will often see them when they first begin to chew coca take three perfect leaves and put them together in their hand and then blow on them and whisper a prayer to the leaves before they put them in their mouths. There is a tradition of divination involving reading coca leaves in the Andean highlands, done mostly by women. You cannot get the power to read coca leaves in this way, they say, until you have been struck by lightning and survived. These are just a few examples of how central to the spiritual life of Andean culture coca is.

When the Spanish Conquistadores came to the New World, their immediate reaction to coca (and to most everything else associated with Indian life) was that it was satanic and should be suppressed. They tried to do that initially, but then they discovered that Indians worked better if they gave them coca. They enslaved a lot of the Indians and put them to work in mines and found that selling coca to them and profiting from the sale of it as well as getting enhanced labor was in their own selfish interest, so for the next couple of centuries, the only interest that Westerners had in coca was that it was a tool to get more work out of Indians. It wasn’t until about 1869 or 1870 when an Italian neurologist wrote an essay about coca, pointing out that it had very unusual, interesting properties that Europeans got interested in it. Within a year of that, cocaine was isolated from coca, and all scientific interest shifted to cocaine in the belief that all of the active properties of coca leaf were to be found therein in a form far easier to measure and study that in the whole plant. We are paying dearly for that reductionistic mistake to this day. It has led to an epidemic of cocaine use in the world created entirely, initially, by the medical profession, which handed it out as a panacea thinking that it had no downside. Eventually the problems caused by its abuse led to a great public outcry against cocaine, and the medical profession then had the same response it has had for a century or so to every psychoactive drug that it has initially mis-prescribed: it deflected any blame for its prescribing practices and labeled coca an inherently bad substance with no redeeming qualities. When you do this and a drug is banned, instantly a black market comes into existence to supply the thousands of people who have been addicted to it by doctors.

The laws against cocaine drove out of circulation the safe form of that plant, the leaves, which have medicinal properties and are not very prone to abuse as they have low addictive potential, and they created an enormous black market in cocaine. Massive efforts are made to eradicate the plant in the area where it grows, so there has been a constant, bloody, destructive war against coca growers (and the ecosystems in which they live) in the Andes stimulated by the international narcotics control bodies, with the U.S. at the helm. Clearly, this war suppresses Indian peoples. The chewing of coca is a very powerful symbol of Indian identity in these regions, so the people who want coca to go away really want Indians to go away, or they want Indians to turn into us, though the rationale is always posited in medical, psychiatric Terms.

The quality of scientific research on coca’s supposed harm in the Andean areas has been dismal. To cite only one example, in the late ‘60s, the United Nations sent a team of Canadian psychologists into Andean villages to administer standard Western intelligence-scale tests to Indians to “measure” their intelligence. They somehow concluded from the results of this culturally absurd, racist exercise in bad science that coca caused mental deterioration and brain damage, and this was then used as a further rationale to step up the war against the coca leaf. The shame of it is that coca leaf has a whole range of interesting therapeutic qualities not attributable to cocaine alone but to a wide range of chemicals found in the whole plant. You lose positive aspects of the plant in transforming it into cocaine. I think of all the many cases I have looked at of magical plants and relationships that people have formed with them, I have never seen one in which it is so obvious what our culture has done wrong, and the scale on which the mistake has been made and the costs of it, both to us and to the native populations that originally knew how to use this leaf, are just flagrant and horrible and tragic. It would be wonderful if we could shift that.

Marcellus Bear Heart Williams: I have an adopted son named Johnny White Cloud who couldn’t be here today and asked me to come to say something about the Native American church and peyote. So far chemists have found more than 59 different alkaloids in peyote. It has very complex kinesthetic, olfactory, visual and auditory properties. There is a long history of pre-Christian use of peyote. It came to the United States from Mexico, and Indians in the Southwest began using it centuries ago, but not in an organized church context. Different people began to investigate its use in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries because white settlers who thought Indians were pretty crazy to begin with were really worried about those crazy Indians getting even more loco by eating that loco stuff.

Early in the 20th century, James Mooney, the historian, was taken into some of the peyote meetings. He advised the Indians that they had something really good going on. He told them: “If you want to protect your peyote ceremony, charter yourselves as a church, because before too long the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs, but we say BIA stands for “bossing Indians around”) will try to stamp it out, and not only that, but missionaries will also come and try to stamp it out.” The Indians took his advice. On October 10, 1918, at my Uncle Bob Cook’s place in Oklahoma, the Native American Church was chartered.

We had used this peyote long before then, and many of the old timers who have kept traditional ways still address the supreme being by the same name that they used before white men came to this continent, but one of the main leaders who helped found that church back in 1918 had become Christianized into the Methodist faith, and he said we should keep our Indian motifs, the teepee and our traditional paraphernalia in our ceremonies, but that he had been fasting and praying and eating peyote and drinking peyote tea and he had received guiding visions about the structure of the church. It would be called the Native American church and it would also incorporate Christian teachings. Because he was a respected leader, people went along with his vision.

In this church many miraculous things have happened over the years. A lot of psychological and spiritual power seems to evolve within a circle as we do our ceremonies, and people have been cured of serious illnesses. Many, many people have straightened out their lives and stopped drinking. It is not the peyote itself. The peyote is only used as a focal point for the power of the creator. We don’t worship this herb. We acknowledge it as a gift from the creator through which we manifest many positive forces that can help us heal emotional, physical or spiritual illness.

Florencio Siquera de Carvalho: I am a very simple person. I have lived most of my life in the forest. I have learned a lesson that has been very important for me: I know that I don’t know anything. I am a member of the Uniao do Vegetal and I hold it and all its members very dear to my heart. I have been drinking ayahuasca tea for more than thirty years. I leave it up to your criteria, you who are well studied and knowledgeable about many things, to judge whether this tea has or hasn’t been beneficial for me. We use this tea for mental concentration and to cure illnesses of all types. One of the illnesses that the vegetal has cured the most is the fighting amongst neighbors. It has brought people to join their hands together to be friends and brothers. For this reason, I am proud to be a member of this sacred organization, the Uniao do Vegetal, and I don’t consider this particular pride to be a human fault.

Audience Questions and Panelists’ Responses:

Q: How might we use these plants therapeutically outside of a traditional ritual context?

Andrew Weil: One of the problems that happened with early LSD research was that researchers who took LSD themselves and had positive experiences with it and understood its potential to alter consciousness in ways that could serve healing, conducted studies and published their results, but then other people who had never taken LSD and didn’t understand the way it worked and thought of it as a magic bullet went about administering it in other circumstances without attention to set and setting and didn’t get the same positive results. That kind of controversy in the literature, I think, scared a lot of other researchers away from attempting to use LSD therapeutically. The point is that these drugs in themselves don’t have absolute properties. They can have certain positive therapeutic properties if they are used in the right context and if the expectation of both the patient and the doctor are supportive. That is difficult at the moment to explain to many physicians and many psychiatrists who think that the magic is all in the substance. It’s a matter of training people to use these things correctly. The first prerequisite is having the experience yourself and in the right sort of context so that you can transmit it to other people. There’s no substitute for that.

Q: I was wondering if anyone who’s involved with the Hoasca Project has thought of the idea of using it as a possible therapeutic tool to help rehabilitate prisoners and criminals.

Dennis McKenna: Certainly part of the objective of the project, which is a long-term process, is to look at many potential therapeutic uses. I think it would be great if you could use it to treat, for example, chemical dependency. I think it might have great possibilities in that realm, but the initial objectives of the project are more modest than that. Basically nothing is known about the pharmacology of ayahuasca. We are trying to get some baseline data, some limited amount of information about how it acts on human physiology and on human cognitive functions. Once we have that, hopefully, out of that will emerge some suggestions, some ideas as to where to go. In other words, the data sort of defines itself. The way that science works is that you do experiments, you get results, you look at the results and then you try to ascertain what the next logical question to be answered is. But because of the political and regulatory climate in this country we are a long way from being able to use ayahuasca or any other traditional consciousness altering substances in that sort of human research here, especially in prisons. That doesn’t mean that that sort of thing can’t be pursued in Brazil where religious ayahuasca use is now legally recognized or in other countries where there is more openness to such research.

Marcellus Bear Heart Williams: We in the Native American Church really have to hurdle the FDA to get peyote in to our church members who are in prisons, but our ceremonies have helped reform quite a few criminals. I’ll give you an example. Roland Hague was a notorious troublemaker who did drugs, stole cars, robbed banks and went to prison. Even his mother had given up on him. But when he came out, somebody brought him to the church, and he never went back to drugs or crime. He is now a very respected member of the Cheyenne tribe. There is no doubt that it can turn things around.

Dr. Edison Saraiva: In Brazil we are already working all the time with ex-prisoners among our members in the Uniao, getting excellent results with their rehabilitation and social re-integration, and we would like to be able in the near future to also work with prisoners while they are still behind bars.

Q: I’m wondering what you think will happen with the use of ayahuasca analogues in North America. I’ve heard people have discovered high amounts of DMT (editor’s note: dimethyltryptamine-the most active hallucinogen in the ayahuasca brew) and harmaline (the other main chemical component of the tea) in a variety of plants that are indigenous to our region.

Kathleen Harrison: It’s true that upon hearing about ayahuasca in the last decade or so a number of inquisitive North Americans have looked into what might be here in our territory that would have the same components. There is a lot of searching and experimentation going on with several plant species. I think some of the amounts of active components that have been reported are exaggerated, but people could probably come up with a contemporary North American botanical analogue to ayahuasca, and what would happen with it would really depend, as always, with the attitude people prepared it with and how they approached the experience. Such people would be wise to model their use on the indigenous traditions that have a long history of using these substances to build respectful, reciprocal relationships and to achieve healing on many levels. That’s the reason that I have spent so many years studying these cultures and traveling to experience the way that different indigenous people use their shamanic plants. If we use these sacred plants, we have to do it right.

Panel Biographies

Marcellus Bear Heart Williams, (1918-2008), born in Okemah, Oklahoma, was a full-blood spiritual leader of the Muskogee-Creek Nation trained in the traditional ways of his tribe. Highly regarded as a healer and counselor, he was also a respected leader of the Native American Church, Sun Danced with both the Northern and Southern Cheyenne people, and was an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church. Bear Heart was asked to be one of the spiritual counselors for the firemen and their families after the Oklahoma City bombing tragedy and put down prayers with the Fire Department at Ground Zero, New York in November, 2001. Bear Heart helped thousands of people over the course of his life and his book and is the author of The Wind Is My Mother.

Charles S. Grob, M.D., a professor of Psychiatry and Bio-behavioral Sciences and Pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine and Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, conducted the first government-approved study of MDMA, and was the principal investigator of an international biomedical psychiatric research project in the Brazilian Amazon of the plant, ayahuasca. He has also conducted investigations into the effects of psilocybin on anxiety in terminal cancer patients. Dr. Grob has published numerous articles in medical and psychiatric journals and collected volumes, and is the editor of Hallucinogens: A Reader. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute.

Kathleen (Kat) Harrison is an ethnobotanist, artist, illustrator, and photographer who researches the relationship between plants and people, with a particular focus on art, myth, ritual, and spirituality. Kathleen has taught at the California School of Herbal Studies, Sonoma State University, and the University of Minnesota (with field courses in Hawaii), and has done fieldwork in Latin America for several decades. She is the co-founder and Director of Botanical Dimensions in Occidental, CA (http://botanicaldimensions.org/), a nonprofit foundation whose aim is to preserve plant knowledge as it pertains to medicinal and shamanic usage. Kat Harrison’s is a unique voice in ethnobotany. She brings deep integrity and fearlessness and a lovingly intense, profound intelligence to the study of medicinal and sacred plants and human cultures.

Dennis McKenna, Ph.D., is a renowned ethnopharmacologist who co-authored, with his brother Terence, a classic in the field of psychedelic literature, The Invisible Landscape, which recounted their wild adventures in pursuit of Amazonian hallucinogens in 1971. He co-stars in Terence’s later book, True Hallucinations, which further describes that fateful trip. Dennis earned his Master’s degree in botany at the University of Hawaii in 1979 and his Doctorate in botanical sciences in 1984 from the University of British Columbia. In the early 1990s he held positions at Shaman Pharmaceuticals (Director of Ethnopharmacology) and the Aveda Corporation (Senior Research Pharmacognosist). In 1998 Dennis co-founded the non-profit Institute for Natural Products Research (INPR) to promote research and scientific education with respect to botanical medicines and other natural medicines. Dennis is also a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute and serves on the advisory board of the American Botanical Council. He has served as a board member for Botanical Dimensions and as well, he is the editor-in-chief of The Natural Dietary Supplements Pocket Reference and Botanical Medicines: The Desk Reference for Major Herbal Supplements and the author of countless scientific papers. From 2004-2008, he was Principal Investigator on a project to investigate Amazonian ethnomedicnes as potential treatments for cognitive deficits in dementias and schizophrenia funded by the Stanley Medical Research Institute. In 2010, he served as co-Principal Investigator for the Botanical Dimensions/UNAP Digital Herbarium Project, a three-year project to scan and digitize the 100,000+ specimens in the AMAZ Herbarium at the Universidad Nacional de la Amazonía Peruana (UNAP) in Iquitos, Peru. His most recent book was a memoir: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna.

Edison Saraiva, MD., a Brazilian physician and homeopathic doctor and a specialist in eco-toxicology and nutrition who worked with the Brazilian Ministry of the Interior in the northwest Amazon for many years, is a long time member of the Uniao do Vegetal church which uses ayahuasca as a sacrament.

Florencio Siquera de Carvalho, now deceased, a humble man with very little formal education who endured intense poverty and suffering in his life, most of it lived in the Amazon jungle, became an important spiritual teacher in Brazil’s Uniao do Vegetal church, which uses hoasca (ayahuasca) as a sacrament.

Andrew Weil, M.D., trained at Harvard Medical School, was already well known in 1992, but he subsequently became the most famous pioneer of holistic/integrative medicine on the planet. He has impeccable mainstream medical credentials, but he also has a Harvard degree in botany, and, like Wade Davis, was a student of the amazing pioneer in Ethnobotany, Richard Evans Schultes. He worked for 13 years on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and traveled extensively throughout the Americas and Africa in the 1970s studying indigenous and folk medical healing traditions. He has become famous with books on natural medicine such as Natural Health, Natural Medicine; Spontaneous Healing; Eight Weeks to Optimum Health; and Eating Well for Optimum Health, but he has also long been one of the sanest voices on drug use in our culture in controversial books such as The Natural Mind and From Chocolate to Morphine. Dr. Weil went on to found and direct the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he also holds the Lovell-Jones Endowed Chair in Integrative Rheumatology, and is Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health. The Center is the leading effort in the world to develop a comprehensive curriculum in integrative medicine. Graduates of that program now serve as directors of integrative medicine programs throughout the United States, and through its fellowship, the Center is now training doctors and nurse practitioners around the world.

A version of this presentation appeared in Visionary Plant Consciousness Edited by J.P. Harpignies, published by Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company, ©2007. All rights reserved. http://www.Innertraditions.com  Reprinted with permission of publisher.