Page 7 – Bioneers

Cowpuppy: What Cows Are Really Saying When They Moo

When neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his wife set out to build a small, regenerative farm in rural Georgia, they didn’t expect cows to become central to his scientific curiosity. But as Berns began caring for a small herd of miniature zebus, he found himself drawn into a deeper exploration of their emotional lives, social intelligence, and communication.

In Cowpuppy, Berns weaves together personal storytelling, careful observation, and accessible neuroscience to reveal a surprisingly rich inner world behind those familiar brown eyes. In this excerpt, he takes us inside one deceptively simple question: What does a cow actually mean when she moos?

You can also explore more of Berns’ work and perspective in our recent conversation, where we dive deeper into animal cognition, interspecies connection, and what cows — and dogs — can teach us about ourselves.

Everyone knows what a cow sounds like. The cow says Moooo! A classic example of onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like its meaning.

Or is it? In English, the cow may say moo, but in French, they meuh. In Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese it’s mu. Welsh cows say the unpronounceable mw. Danish cows go muh, but in Dutch they boe. While most of the world seems to agree on the monosyllabic /m/ sound, to my ear it wasn’t really an /m/ sound, or even one syllable. If we’re going for acoustic verisimilitude, a few languages get pretty close to cow-talk. In Finnish, it’s ammuu. In Bengali, it’s hamba. But I think the closest to what cows really sound like, especially with emphasis on the second syllable, is heard in Tagalog: ungaa; or Korean: eum mae. Of course, my cows were of the Asian variety, so that may have had something to do with the similarity of their vocalizations to languages of southeast Asia—a cattle dialect of sorts.

There is, in fact, tremendous variation in the sounds cows make. Each cow has a repertoire of vocalizations that presumably mean different things, and no cow sounds exactly like another. As in the human voice system, cow vocalizations originate with vibration of the vocal folds of the larynx. The emerging sounds are then modulated by the configuration of the tongue, mouth, and lips. Sometimes a cow will vocalize with her lips closed, in which case it really does sound like mooo. Other times she will keep her mouth open, resulting in a nasal version, like Steve Urkel might do if he were a cow. And then there’s lowing, a deeper, more resonant sound that can be heard at great distance.

It is a generally accepted tenet of biology that the reason animals vocalize is to communicate with one another. But for this to work, there has to be both a sender and a receiver. Although humans talk to themselves, other animals don’t. Even the solitary wolf, seemingly howling at the moon, is communicating with other wolves, who may be miles away. He might be calling for a mate or warning others to stay away from his territory. Vocalization is intentional and meant to convey information to a recipient.

To understand what cows are saying, we have to examine mooing from both the sender’s and receiver’s perspective. What is the sender trying to convey? And what do they expect the receiver to do? If we understood the receiving end, this would open the door to verbal communication, like people have with dogs.

All of my cows mooed, some more than others, and the females were generally more vocal than the males. It wasn’t until the third season that I could say this with some confidence because it wasn’t until then that I had enough males and females to observe. The boys were more physical, but the girls were more vocal. A bit like humans, I guess.

Ethel had always been the most vocal of the herd. She mooed nearly every evening when it was time for the grain. She mooed incessantly at each of her calves until they were a month old, to the point that it appeared they learned to ignore her entreaties. Sometimes I would hear her mooing in the pasture for reasons only she knew. Unless it was repetitive or sounded particularly urgent, I ignored her, just like the rest of the herd did. (Okay, I didn’t really know if the herd ignored her, but there were no obvious reactions from the other cows when Ethel was doing her regular mooing.)

Although Ethel was the most vocal of the herd, the others mooed from time to time, and for a few weeks after Xena’s calf was born, she mooed even more than Ethel. As a first-time mom, Xena did not possess the knowledge and security of a seasoned cow, like her momma, Lucy. Newborn calves don’t do much other than drink milk and sleep. The momma, though, has an increased caloric requirement due to lactation and needs to eat roughly 50 percent more than normal. Poor Xena was torn between filling her belly with grass and checking on her calf. She would graze for a bit with Luna sleeping nearby, but as soon as Xena moved on to fresh forage she would bellow at Luna until she got up and followed her to the new location. Ethel had done the same with all of her calves, but Lucy radiated confidence and rarely needed to moo. Her calves just followed her.

Except when a calf managed to slip through the fence. It was inevitable. Every one of the calves, at some point, found their way to the wrong side of, the fence. They had a tendency to nap beneath the rails while their mommas were grazing, and I think when they woke up, they just rolled the wrong way. Other times, they were curious and squeezed underneath. However they got out, though, the momma went into a tizzy, running back and forth along the fence line, mooing desperately at the wayward calf to get back in, which, of course, they never seemed to figure out. One time, when Tex was a calf, we found him curled up under a tree in the forest. When Lucy mooed, I knew something was up. The only clue to his approximate location was the direction Lucy was aiming her bellows.

The boys’ vocalizations were entirely different than the girls’. They rarely mooed, and when they did, it was a harsh sound, almost like a donkey braying. The only times Ricky Bobby mooed were when he was separated from the herd. This didn’t happen often, just when he was castrated and when he was having his hooves trimmed. I think his braying was more from the pain of separation than the physical pain. BB’s moo sounded more like a grunt, but he, too, did it only when he inadvertently got separated from the herd, like when he lingered in the barn too long and the herd decided to leave. Poor BB would come out and, realizing he was alone, call out for his friends.

These descriptions would seem to imply that cows moo mainly when they’re in distress. Temple Grandin used cow vocalizations as a type of negative metric of how well they were being handled at slaughter. Vocalization is also increased when calves are separated from their mothers (more so with the mothers than the calves). The same is true for dairy cattle. Fo these reasons much of the cattle industry has gravitated toward mooing as a marker of stress. A quiet cow is a happy cow. However, the context of any vocalization must be taken into account. Slaughterhouses and dairies are inherently stressful situations, so any vocalization in those contexts will necessarily indicate physical or emotional stress. What about other, nonstressful situations?

Although my cows vocalized most prominently when they were unhappy about something, they also mooed when they appeared perfectly fine. Like Ethel, they occasionally mooed in excitement when I was about to give them treats or when I was moving them to a fresh pasture. When the mommas mooed at their calves, sometimes they were just saying, Hey! Let’s go! Other times, I think they were teaching the calves what their momma sounded like. Cows identify each other by their signature calls. One study found that three-to five-week-old calves can differentiate recordings of their mothers from other cows. And it’s not just the cows identifying one another. I could do it, too, just as I could identify each of my dogs by how they sounded.

In an effort to understand cattle vocalizations, researchers have put considerable effort into decoding moos. The classic approach was through acoustic analysis, which relied on a spectrogram. A sort of vocal fingerprint, a spectrogram plots how different audio frequencies change over the course of a vocalization. They are especially common in the analysis of birdsong. When applied to speech, acoustic analysis is termed phonetics. The fundamental unit of phonetics is a formant, which describes the frequency of a sound. Speech, though, is composed of several frequencies, each changing in amplitude during the course of a vocalization. The formant with the lowest frequency is called F1, the second F2, and so on. When this type of analysis was done on cow vocalizations, the average F1 was 790 Hz and F2 was 1942 Hz. This combination of F1 and F2 sounds similar to the formants produced when an adult human male makes the long a sound.

While formants describe vowel sounds, speech involves a lot more than that. How a formant is initiated and how it ends determines the basic unit of human speech, called a phoneme. Even though there are five vowels in written English, there are twenty to twenty-four phonemes that describe how to pronounce vowel sounds. For example, in grade school, kids are taught the difference between the short a sound in cat (abbreviated /a/) and the long a of cake (/./). There are another twenty or so phonemes for the consonants. Cattle vocabulary, if there is one, would have to use a much more restricted set of phonemes because cows don’t have nearly the degree of vocal control humans do.

A single cow vocalization lasts one to one and a half seconds, but there are several ways a cow can alter how she moos. Presumably, these alterations are done intentionally and, therefore, contain information that is being transmitted to someone—another cow, a human, or maybe another farm animal. One study found that moos could be divided into open-and closed-mouth types. With mouth closed, a cow produces a lower frequency formant, and these types of moos are more frequent when a momma is near her calf, especially during the first month after birth. With mouth open, the sound projects farther and is a higher pitch. These types of moos are used when momma and calf are separated and the momma is calling for her calf. Further analysis has revealed that individual cows could be distinguished by differences in the formant frequencies—a vocal signature—but only in the closed-mouth moos. The authors speculated that vocal identification is more important when cows and calves are near each other, with open-mouth moos serving as a more general call. Taking this type of analysis one step further, Australian researchers determined that vocal signatures are maintained across different emotional states. Cows were assumed to be in a positive emotional state when the farmer was getting their feed ready and a negative state when they were isolated or denied access to food, but the cows were recognizable by their moos in both positive and negative contexts.

No study has yet been able to differentiate positive and negative emotional states just from mooing. It may be that cows, like most animals, have no need of mooing when they’re happy, instead reserving vocalization for distress and warning calls. But that wouldn’t explain Ethel’s moos during the evening grain. No, vocal decoding is a hard problem. Machine-learning algorithms are just beginning to get a handle on decoding human emotion from human speech.

The difficulty is compounded in domesticated species. Because humans have altered their natural evolution, the vocalizations of domesticated animals may be directed at either their compatriots or humans. Wild animals, in contrast, have no need to communicate with humans, so their vocalizations are directed at one another or occasionally to frighten off potential threats.

In terms of domesticated animals, the most progress in understanding vocalizations is with dogs. Dogs are evolved from wolves, which are famously vocal, and this may have something to do with dogs’ ability to understand human speech, as well as our ability to decipher their vocalizations. Research has shown that people are generally quite good at recognizing some dog emotions from their vocalizations, such as aggressive barks at strangers versus barks when they’re playing, although this ability is largely dependent on a given person’s experience with and thus exposure to dogs. In general, low-pitched barks are understood to be aggressive in nature, whereas high-pitched barks convey a more positive emotional state, like playfulness.

In fact, this high-low vocal rule has been observed in many animals. Harsh, low pitches signal hostile intent, and purer, high pitches mean friendliness. There is a simple explanation for this relationship. Physics dictates that large animals will have lower-pitched vocalizations. To the extent that an individual can vary the pitch of its sounds, lowering the pitch will make them sound bigger and more threatening. Conversely, raising the pitch will have the opposite effect, signaling that they are small—even juvenile—and don’t want any conflict. Although this rule has not been studied with cattle, it likely holds true.

If humans can broadly recognize whether an animal vocalization is hostile or friendly, it is straightforward to program a computer to do the same. It’s really a matter of having a lot of data. An early decoder of dog barks, for example, could tell the difference between barks produced in six situations: playing, fighting, walking, being left alone, being approached by a stranger, and being shown a ball. However, the algorithm required six thousand barks and was about 50 percent accurate (substantially better than guessing, which would be correct 17 percent of the time). To make a moo-alyzer, you would need a comparable number of audio samples, about one thousand per type of moo. Doable, but a person would still need to hand code what each moo represented before training a neural net on the data. One promising approach to decoding cow vocalizations recognizes that moos often occur in sequence, almost like a sentence. Instead of focusing on a single moo, the transitions between open-and closed-mouth mooing suggest a simple way to understand what a cow is saying, especially in the context of mother-calf interactions. In a typical sequence, the momma uses an open-mouth

moo to call her calf and then transitions to closed-mouth when they are reunited.

Mooing isn’t even the whole story of cow communication. Cows make other types of vocalizations more frequently than moos. They grunt and snort. Ethel, as the most vocal of the herd, was a prolific snorter too. She would only do this when her calves were doing something she didn’t like, usually by wandering off too much for her comfort. What was interesting was that Ethel used a graded level of snorting. Mild irritation was signaled by a soft, brief snort. As she became more unhappy, this would increase in volume and stridor to the point of sounding like a grunt. The best way I can describe it is how Marge Simpson sounds when she grunts in disapproval. Although scientists have studied cow mooing, there has been no research on these types of subvocalizations in cattle. However, grunts have been categorized in other ungulates. Deer have been said to emit four types of grunts/snorts distinguishable by their acoustic parameters: the grunt, the alert-snort, the snort-wheeze, and the aggressive snort. All but the alert-snort are produced when deer are near each other, some being affiliative and others aggressive. The alert-snort is a loud propulsion of air by a lone deer warning others within earshot of a potential threat. I heard alert-snorts every day when I walked through the woods around the farm. It seems likely that cows have a similar vocabulary. I would often hear the cows emit brief, high-pitched grunts when they played with each other. This was especially true of the calves, but everyone did it when they got going, like when they played in the sand pile.

There was another type of cow vocalization that I could find no reference to. I call it cooing. This was something all the calves did. When I crouched down and called them over, they would often nuzzle my neck, licking it while making soft snuffling sounds, which sounded like the coos of an infant. It was so quiet, you could only hear it if you were on the receiving end. I assumed the calves did it with their mommas too. Sometimes even the adults cooed. Xena tended to do it a lot when she wanted neck scratches. The coo of human babies is a potent releaser of oxytocin in mothers, and scientists think this promotes and maintains bonds with the parents. I think cows do the same thing, which would explain why I became so attached to them, especially the calves.

What Neuroscience Reveals About Animal Minds

When Gregory Berns joins our call, he isn’t sitting in a lab or a lecture hall. He’s calling from his farm in rural Georgia, and he’s in the middle of a fight against the rapid expansion of massive data centers spreading across the landscape south of Atlanta. Developers are proposing facilities millions of square feet in size, drawn to poorer counties where land is cheap and tax revenue is desperately needed. Once built, the land is permanently altered.

For Berns, a neuroscientist known for putting awake, unrestrained dogs into MRI scanners, the fight against data center sprawl isn’t separate from his research. It’s another expression of the same problem he’s been circling for years: what happens when complex lives — human or nonhuman — are flattened into abstractions, and when systems are designed to ignore what they consume.

Now a Distinguished Professor of Neuroeconomics at Emory University, Berns spent decades studying human decision-making using functional MRI before turning his attention to animals. Around 2011, that curiosity narrowed in on dogs — one of the few nonhuman animals able to cooperate with brain imaging without anesthesia or restraint. What began, as he puts it, as “an idea in search of a question” quickly opened into something much larger. Why stop with dogs? There are roughly 6,000 mammal species on the planet, yet humans have meaningfully studied the inner lives of only a handful.

Today, Berns’ work is driven by a deceptively simple aim: to better understand the interior worlds of other mammals, without harming them, and with animals treated as partners rather than passive subjects. Using noninvasive brain imaging, he explores what behavior alone can’t reveal — how animals perceive, decide, feel, and relate — and what those discoveries mean for the ethical systems humans have built around them.

In the conversation that follows, Berns reflects on what neuroscience can and can’t tell us about animal minds, why individuality is such a disruptive concept in how we treat other species, and how acknowledging animal inner lives challenges the assumptions that underpin everything.

You can read an excerpt from Gregory Berns book Cowpuppy here.

Bioneers: In nonhuman animals, what does brain imaging offer that behavioral observation can’t?

Gregory Berns: For much of the 20th century and even into the 21st, the only way to try to understand what was going on in another animal’s mind was to study behavior. You observe what an animal does and try to infer what’s happening internally. That’s how behaviorism and operant conditioning really took hold, based on the idea that animals learn through simple rules of reward and punishment — carrots and sticks.

But that turns out to be a very incomplete picture. Even with humans, we know we’re not strictly governed by rewards and punishments, and animals aren’t either. There’s ample evidence that many animals build internal models of the world: mental representations of their environment and the other beings in it. They make decisions based on those models. That’s a much more efficient way of navigating the world than constant trial-and-error. Animals are far more efficient than that.

Brain imaging offers a different way in. If an animal can sit still in an MRI scanner, we can start to see circuits in action — not individual neurons, but large-scale patterns of activity related to motivation, perception, and decision-making. And because mammal brains are so similar in their basic structure, we can link what we see in other animals back to what we already know about humans, and cautiously infer what another animal might be experiencing.

A good example of why that matters is jealousy. Most dog owners will tell you their dogs experience jealousy, but for a long time many scientists would say it’s too complex an emotion to attribute to animals.

We designed an experiment to explore that question. Dogs were in the MRI scanner, looking at what appeared to be another dog — a very realistic dog statue — with their owner positioned in between. Sometimes the owner gave the dog in the scanner a treat. Other times, the owner turned and gave the treat to the fake dog. As a control, we also used a bucket, so in both cases the dog wasn’t getting the food, but only in one case was it going to something that looked like another dog.

In some dogs, that situation evoked activity in the amygdala, a brain region associated with arousal and emotional reactivity. And importantly, that response correlated with dogs who had a history of aggression.

The key point is this: The dogs were extremely well trained. They stayed perfectly still in the scanner. Behaviorally, they were doing exactly what we wanted them to do. But beneath the surface, it was bothering them, and that’s something you would never know just by watching the dog. It shows the real limitation of relying on behavior alone to understand what an animal is experiencing internally.

Bioneers: So in brain scans, if the same area lights up in dogs and humans, what can we actually conclude from that?

Gregory: That’s what’s known as reverse inference, and it’s something people in brain imaging argue about a lot. The basic idea is that if you see activity in a particular brain region in an animal, and that region looks structurally and functionally similar to the same region in humans, you can make a cautious inference about what the animal might be experiencing.

But it’s not a certainty. Even within humans, our interpretations change over time. I spent many years studying what we used to casually call the “reward system.” For a long time, when we saw activity in those dopamine-related circuits, the knee-jerk conclusion was that the person was experiencing pleasure. We now understand that’s too simplistic. Those circuits are more about motivation — about something being salient or worth paying attention to — and whether that motivation is positive or negative depends heavily on context.

So when we see similar patterns in dogs, we’re making the same kind of inference, but carefully. You need more context to know whether something is pleasurable, aversive, or something else entirely.

Bioneers: When has your own intuition about dogs not matched what you found in their brains?

Gregory: One clear example came from some of the last experiments we did, where we created movies specifically for dogs to watch in the scanner. We filmed everything from the dog’s point of view — using GoPros, walking around dog parks, showing scenes we assumed dogs would find interesting.

My intuition, very much shaped by being human, was that dogs would be focused on who was on the screen. Is that a dog? Is that a person? Is that someone familiar? But when we analyzed the brain data using machine-learning methods, that’s not what we found.

What the dogs’ brains were really distinguishing was what was happening, not who was doing it. They could clearly differentiate between actions like walking versus eating, but they didn’t strongly discriminate between whether it was a dog or a human performing those actions. It wasn’t who was on the screen; it was what was happening.

That was a good reminder that we’re always at risk of projecting our own way of seeing the world onto other species. I’m human, and I interpret scenes in a very human way. But dogs evolved to pay attention to different kinds of information, and brain imaging can reveal those differences in ways our intuition often can’t.

Bioneers: Affection is something many people feel instinctively in their relationships with animals, especially dogs. How did you translate that intuition into something neuroscience could actually test?

Gregory: Affection was one of the early questions I really wanted to answer, because it’s something dog owners feel very strongly about. We designed an experiment that was essentially Pavlovian. The dogs learned that one signal meant they were going to get a food reward, and another signal meant they were going to get praised by their owner. Then we looked at what happened in their reward-related brain circuits.

What we found was that for about 75% of the dogs, there was equal activation in those circuits when they anticipated food and when they anticipated praise from their owner. To me, that’s about as close to proof as you can get that dogs experience genuinely positive feelings toward their people and that those feelings aren’t purely transactional. I’m happy to call it love.

What’s been even more striking to me, honestly, is my experience with cows. Once I got to know them and they accepted me into their herd, they began offering affection in the same way they offer it to each other: licking, staying close, engaging socially. I can give them treats, but for the most part, that’s not what drives the relationship. It’s not like a dog showing up because it thinks there’s food involved.

In many ways, that makes it feel even more genuine. It reinforces the idea that rich emotional lives, including affection, aren’t limited to the animals we’re most comfortable loving.

Bioneers: Your research shows that individual animals’ brains — even within the same species — can be remarkably different. Why is individuality such a disruptive idea when it comes to how we treat animals?

Gregory: Over the course of my career, I’ve probably scanned around a thousand human brains. And what you see very quickly is that everyone’s brain looks different; it’s like a fingerprint. Even when people are doing the exact same task, the patterns of activity vary from person to person. They’re stable within an individual, but across individuals, they’re remarkably diverse.

When we started scanning dogs, it was the same story. Early on, my students would get discouraged because the data looked so messy. I’d tell them, “Don’t analyze it yet. You need enough subjects to see the pattern.” But the reason it feels messy is that dogs are individuals. Their brains vary just as much as human brains do.

We even saw this in a large study we did with Canine Companions for Independence, where we scanned puppies being trained as service dogs. These dogs were incredibly similar on paper — mostly golden retriever–lab crosses, raised and trained in nearly identical conditions. Even then, their brains all looked different.

Individuality is subversive because it doesn’t fit neatly into systems designed for efficiency. Industrial agriculture, in particular, depends on flattening animals into categories: “cattle” rather than individuals. Once you start thinking about animals as distinct beings with their own inner lives, the whole system becomes harder to justify. You’re less likely to eat something with a name, which is why ranchers traditionally don’t name their cows.

Recognizing individuality forces us to confront the moral shortcuts we’ve built into the way we treat other animals, and that’s deeply uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Bioneers: If we truly accepted that animals have rich emotional lives, what would have to change in our idea of “normal” life?

Gregory: I think, at some level, most people already accept that animals have emotional lives. You’d have to be pretty hard-hearted to deny that. Even the ranchers and cattlemen I know aren’t blind to it, they just wall it off. Compartmentalization is the real issue.

The bigger crisis goes far beyond food. It’s about wild mammals and the sheer amount of space they need to survive. Many species, especially large mammals, require vast, connected habitats. What we’ve done instead is parcel land into smaller and smaller pieces, cut it up with roads, and turn ecosystems into isolated islands. Once animals can’t move where they need to go to find food, mates, or seasonal refuge, extinction becomes almost inevitable.

Urbanization has made this harder to see. About 80 percent of people in the U.S. now live in urban areas, which is a complete reversal from a century ago. Most people are physically and psychologically distant from the consequences of development. Living on a farm has made those connections impossible for me to ignore. You see immediately how one change affects everything else that lives there.

I’m not especially hopeful that this will change quickly. But education matters. Organizations like Bioneers can help bridge that gap by reminding people that we share the planet with these other species — and that the choices we normalize have consequences far beyond our own lives.

Women Weaving the Way Forward: A Conversation with Zainab Salbi

“Women leaders acknowledge how the protection and restoration of nature becomes lasting when it is rooted in people’s wellbeing and livelihoods. For them, conservation is not separate from caring for human life; it is human life. They begin by addressing community needs because behind every degraded ecosystem, they see degraded living conditions, broken relationships, and lost possibilities for dignity and stability. Rather than treating community vulnerability from a charity perspective or means to an end, they address it with care and a clear orientation toward meaningful, lasting results.”

—Women Weaving the Way Forward report from Daughters for Earth

Across the globe, women are leading some of the most effective responses to the planetary crisis, restoring ecosystems while strengthening communities, livelihoods, and cultural connections to nature.

Zainab Salbi has spent much of her life working alongside women in the world’s most complex and fragile environments, from war zones to conservation hotspots. As the co-founder of Daughters for Earth, a global fund and movement supporting women-led climate and conservation solutions, she is helping shift the narrative from one of victimhood to one of agency, resilience, and systemic change.

Her organization’s newly released 2025 impact study, Women Weaving the Way Forward, examines 24 women-led conservation initiatives across diverse ecosystems and cultures. The findings reveal a powerful pattern: When women lead, ecological restoration becomes inseparable from social, economic, and cultural renewal. These projects not only restore landscapes and wildlife, but also strengthen community wellbeing — even as they face persistent funding gaps and gender-based barriers.

In this conversation, writer and community activist Anneke Campbell speaks with Salbi about what her team uncovered, how women are reshaping conservation through holistic, integrated approaches, and what this research reveals about leadership, language, and collaboration in a changing world.

(This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Anneke: What feels most meaningful and exciting to you about this study?

Zainab: The narrative around how women are impacted by the planetary health crisis, particularly climate change and biodiversity loss, is often very prominent and negative. And yet, as someone who has worked closely with women in war zones and conflict settings, I also know their agency is not passive. They are warriors. So I knew there was another story here.

This study looks at the world from a woman’s perspective — not only as victims, but as warriors, as wise women, and as lantern carriers.

I followed my gut and took a leap of faith. I said, Let’s find the women. For three-and-a-half years, we searched globally for women working in conservation hotspots, putting funding behind their efforts and eventually asking: What’s the common thread? We supported 103 projects across seven ecosystems in 11 countries.

We’ve now completed a six-month pilot study that shows us a clear path forward. We’re seeing strong commonalities: Women take a holistic and highly practical approach. They create solutions grounded in common sense, addressing people’s needs at the community level, and weaving environmental solutions together with social, economic, and cultural priorities. Most importantly, they’re producing lasting change and modeling a new kind of leadership in the process.

Anneke: That’s exactly what our newsletter is about: leading from the feminine — and your work shows what that looks like. How did you select the groups you researched and funded?

Zainab: Scientists have already identified which regions, species, and biodiverse areas most urgently need protection, so we’re really just following their roadmap. It’s not controversial. On that map, we overlay where women-led action is happening. That’s the uniqueness of our work: finding the women who are leading conservation projects grounded in biodiversity priorities.

Then we measure the conservation data, as scientists do, and we’re discovering all these powerful byproducts. Suddenly, this work becomes valuable not just for conservationists, but also for economists, sociologists, and women’s rights advocates. We’re tracking how these projects address the economic needs of communities and how they support girls’ and women’s empowerment, which is especially exciting. These women are modeling leadership, addressing behavior change toward nature, and weaving in cultural and traditional stories, which every culture holds.

All of these threads are coming together. And I believe, having come from a different culture myself, that every single culture carries beautiful stories of humans intertwined with nature in a loving way. I still remember those stories from my own grandparents.

Anneke: One thing that stands out in this work is how it challenges dominant, top-down approaches to climate action. Can you talk about how your study rethinks the role of technology, funding, and community?

Zainab: We have to be careful not to generalize, because we’re not denying the value of technical solutions. That said, people are often more willing to take risks when it comes to technology than when it comes to community-based approaches. As a result, the vast majority of climate funding goes toward technical solutions.

One of the key findings of this study is how these women-led projects merge technology with traditional narratives about nature. For example, Lion Guardians blend ancestral Maasai tracking skills with modern tools like GPS and data collection, creating a living, evolving model of conservation that unites heritage and science in service of both people and wildlife. Some technological solutions are excellent; some are not. The problem with focusing only on technology is that it often fails to address immediate community needs, while expecting people to adopt change right away. That’s a very Western-centric — or perhaps masculine-centric — approach.

In the endangered lion conservation project, for instance, the team first had to understand the economic realities driving human–wildlife conflict. What began as a way to prevent retaliatory killings has evolved into active stewardship: Former hunters now track and protect lions, teach coexistence, and mediate conflicts. Another example is the Mara–Meru Cheetah Project, which has trained more than 150 safari guides — who once saw cheetahs primarily as tourist attractions — to understand their behavior, minimize disturbance, and actively contribute to conservation data collection.

Anneke: What you’re illustrating is an incredibly holistic approach that sees all the parts as connected — as they are in reality. What does that mean for how we design solutions and policies?

Zainab: These integrated, woven solutions show that we also need integrated policies. Right now, our policies are deeply fragmented, and we’re calling for integration at every level.

A few years ago, I was very sick, and I experienced this fragmentation firsthand. The heart doctor didn’t want to talk to the lung doctor, who didn’t want to talk to the physical therapist. Eventually, I found an integrative medicine doctor who combined Western medicine with Arabic medicine, Chinese medicine, and naturopathic approaches, and that’s when I finally began to heal.

Anneke: “Integrative medicine for planetary health” is such a powerful concept. But integrative medicine is often expensive and seen as inaccessible. How are you thinking about the economics and what this approach asks us to rethink more broadly?

Zainab: Yes, it is expensive, and that’s an important point. In fact, our focus in the coming months is to deepen our analysis of the economics and deconstruct the dollar impact of this work, so we have tangible evidence. This is not a sentimental study; we’re going to prove its value economically. And we’re doing that while still honoring narrative, spiritual, emotional, and cultural dimensions, rather than imposing an external story. I love that part of this study.

We need new language, new metrics, and new measurements to talk about this existential issue. In this field, you often see spiritual people speaking in spiritual language, and analytical people speaking in analytical language, and it’s very hard to integrate the two. What we’re discovering is that instead of being limited by purely mind-led indicators, we need to dare to introduce new ones — psychological indicators, spiritual indicators — new ways of measuring what protection of the Earth really means.

When we only speak from the heart, it can shut down the mind, because people don’t always trust that language. We need to bring the two together, to marry mind and heart, technical and spiritual solutions, and not separate them. And that’s exactly what these women are doing.

I’ve interviewed many of the women leading these initiatives. They’re not women’s studies scholars, they’re conservationists. And they’ll say, We did this, we did that, and I’ll think, Wow. They’re doing it simply because they’re wired differently, because they see differently — and that difference is needed. So we have to find new language, and we need to be playful in that space, like musicians playing before they find the tune. We need that same openness to discover new ways of talking about planetary health.

This matters deeply to me because I come from another culture. I often ask myself: How do I talk about this issue with my own family when I go home to Iraq? Climate change, as it’s usually framed, is seen as a very Western concept. So what are the real entry points? Scientifically, it’s undeniable. But experientially, how do we open the conversation in ways that resonate across cultures and invite people in?

Anneke: Given everything you’ve learned, how are you hoping to share this work with funders, communities, and the wider world?

Zainab: We’ve entered 2026 at a time when climate change is still being denied by some, and fear around immediate resources is overwhelming concern for planetary health. At a moment when climate change and biodiversity loss demand deeper collaboration, we’re instead becoming more divided and increasing our investments in war.

That said, the hope my team and I are holding onto is at the community level. People are not waiting for governments to act. Communities are stepping forward because they have to. In this chaotic moment, our goal is to use these four years before the world reconvenes in 2030 to reassess global agreements, from climate and biodiversity frameworks to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

We want to double down on supporting these women, because they’re leading us toward a new pathway for action. They’re focused on the how. And that, for me, is the secret sauce.

Anneke: For readers who feel inspired by this work, what actions can they take?

Zainab: This is an invitation. We cannot do this alone. The work becomes most transformative and impactful when we do it together. So it’s an invitation to everyone whose heart is calling to join us in whatever way you know how, and to become part of this movement. Some people know how to communicate, some know how to donate, some know how to bring communities together. The world feels like it’s going mad, but in that chaos, there’s also an opportunity to focus our actions. In the madness, a door is opening.

At a practical level, we’re working to build a $100 million fund so we can continue supporting these women and researching women-led projects. It’s an invitation for women philanthropists — and really for everyone — to participate at any level. I’m not a high donor myself, and philanthropy is not limited to big checks.

We often share the story of the hummingbird: There was a forest fire, and all the animals panicked except for a tiny hummingbird. She rushed to the river, took a single drop of water in her beak, and dropped it onto the fire — again and again. The other animals said, You’re so small. What difference can one drop make? And she replied, I’m doing everything I can. Why don’t you join me instead of criticizing me? Her action inspired the others to bring their own drops of water — for some, a bucket; for others, a tiny drop.

If your heart is calling you to a specific region, we can connect you with women’s groups working there. If it’s a particular species, we can share the women-led projects protecting it. And if you want to be part of this movement, please come with your drop of water so together, we can make a river.

Support Women Leading the Way Forward

Daughters for Earth supports hundreds of women-led conservation initiatives across the globe, protecting ecosystems while strengthening community resilience, cultural continuity, and economic wellbeing. You can explore their work, learn more about the Women Weaving the Way Forward study, and find ways to support women-led climate solutions here.

Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Pass Historic Youth-Led Rights of Nature Resolution

At the Eastern Band of Cherokee Tribal Council meeting on January 8, 2026, the Council read and unanimously passed a historic resolution affirming the rights of the stream system in the Great Smoky Mountains, known to the Cherokee as “the Longperson”.

The Council chamber, an intimate wood-planked room with a horseshoe-shaped table of Council members, was filled with a long line of young Cherokee women representing the NAIWA Daughters (North American Indian Women’s Association). They stood before the podium, ready to testify in support of the resolution they had written to bring before the Council.

Holding two handmade traditional pottery vessels, the young women reminded the Council that the water of the Longperson was one of their relatives. “Before we begin, we wanted to acknowledge that we cannot have this discussion without our relative, Longperson, present. Held in two vessels created by the hands of two beloved women, these waters were borrowed from the headwaters in the National Park, and will be returned to the Oconaluftee River in a water ceremony following the session.”

The youth spoke about the challenges of witnessing the simultaneous erosion of culture and the decimation of the natural world. Jasmine Smith, NAIWA Daughter Co-Founder and Chairwoman, urged the Council to vote on the resolution and to trust the youth, who understand what is at stake. She encouraged them to vote with future generations in mind — those who will look back and wonder how their Ancestors treated the water system: as property or as something sacred.

*Zailiana Blythe, from NAIWA Daughters, speaks to the Council at the podium.*

“Our Ancestors knew that the land and the water are not resources. They are ancient relatives. They understood that when the river suffers, our people suffer. When the land is harmed, our nation is harmed. They understood that without the sacred balance that sustained them, without our land, who are we as Cherokee people? When we forget the land, we forget ourselves. But we stand here today because we refuse to let our people forget. Our Ancestors fought for these places. They protected them. They advocated long before advocacy had a name. They stood beside these rivers and called them Longperson. They prayed for us before we existed. And when we speak today, we do not speak alone. We speak with the fire of every Ancestor who has walked before us. We speak with the strength carried in our DNA. Because this resolution is not just policy. It is an act of remembering who we are as Cherokee people in a commitment to protect what our Ancestors entrusted to us.”

Kyndra Postoak, Rights of Nature Project Lead for NAIWA Daughters, asked “Do we see nature as something we own, or do we view it as something we have the responsibility to protect?” This question to the Council summarized one reason the rights of nature movement is gaining momentum across the globe, as humanity grapples with the disastrous outcomes of treating nature as property.

To many attendees, the Council meeting was a testament to the power of youth organizing with a vision for a new legal paradigm—one where Nature is represented by humans who affirm and guard her rights to survive and thrive once again.

*Elk Wade in Oconaluftee River in the Smok*y Mountains (photo: Kelly vanDellen)

The Longperson stream system in the Great Smoky Mountains is the longest river system east of the Mississippi and permeates the ancestral territory of the Eastern Band of Cherokee people. The relationship between the Cherokee people and the river system is as old as the river itself. The resolution codifies the relationship of reciprocity between the Cherokee and its water relative, while affirming the tribal nation’s sovereignty and the Rights of the Longperson.

The rights of nature resolution is significant for the vast scale of the ecosystem it aims to protect and for the youth of the advocates who are bringing this legal framework to life. The resolution acknowledges the Longperson as having five rights:

The right to exist, persist, and regenerate its vital cycles, structures, functions, and processes free from negative human disturbance, alteration, or destruction.
The right to maintain and restore its natural state and integrity, including the right to be free from pollution, contamination, non-native invasive species, and other environmental degradation.
The right to serve as a home and habitat for non-human relatives, consistent with the ecological relationships established through time.
The right to access and maintain free-flowing conditions, including protection from damming, obstruction, or any alteration that impedes the natural flow of water.
The right to be protected by the Eastern Band of Cherokee under the laws, customs, and traditions of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and to have its rights enforced by the appropriate authorities.

Guided by Elders, Native American Youth are Rewriting America’s Legal Future

This is the second rights of nature resolution drafted and introduced by high school and middle school students. In 2023, a Mashpee Wampanoag youth group, named the Mashpee Native Environmental Ambassadors, presented a Rights of the Herring Resolution, which their Council passed unanimously. This resolution calls for the Tribal Nation to restore and indigenize the streams in Mashpee to ensure the herring’s survival.

Representatives from the NAIWA Daughters of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) were inspired by Mashpee’s work and felt a similar affection for the Tsuwa (Eastern Hellbender Salamander) as the Mashpee felt for the herring. Initially, NAIWA Daughters advocated for Tsuwa rights and protections within the U.S. federal system to secure endangered species status. After consulting with elders and cultural leaders in their community, they decided to turn to their tribal nation’s system to ensure success. In alignment with community support, NAIWA Daughters determined that the foundational EBCI rights of nature resolution should focus on the foundational relative:water. The Longperson’s waters sustain the entire ecosystem that supports not only the Tsuwa, but also all their human and non-human relatives.

In her testimony, NAIWA Daughter Kyndra Postoak stated: “Nature has intrinsic value. Every river, forest, mountain, and creature has a right to exist in balance and dignity. Humans are a part of that balance, not above it. Our communities, culture, and lives depend on healthy, thriving ecosystems. Protecting nature means protecting our children’s future, our identities, and the traditions rooted in the land. This belief is reflected in the work of NAIWA daughters, who actively stand up for the protection of waterways through advocacy, education, and community action.

“We work to defend rivers and streams from pollution and misuse, recognizing water as a living relative rather than something to be owned or exploited. These young ladies’ efforts highlight the deep cultural and spiritual connection between water and Indigenous communities, reminding us that clean, protected waterways are essential not only for ecosystems but for human life, health, and heritage as well. By embracing the rights of nature, we commit to stewardship, to nurture, defend, and restore our relationship with the land and water rather than exploiting or destroying them. The works of groups like NAIWA Daughters show that protecting nature is not just an environmental responsibility, but a moral one. It is an act of respect, persistence, and hope for future generations who deserve a world where rivers still flow clean, and life remains in balance.”

This resolution for the rights of nature wasn’t created overnight. For 18 months, the NAIWA Daughters held community consultation dinners to gather feedback and learn from elders. They tabled at Cherokee events and conducted input surveys to stand beside their resolution. The young women advocated, door-to-door, with Council members to share the heart and purpose of their resolution. When a tribal election occurred, they repeated the process all over again. They gained the support of several Tribal Council members and collaborated with organizations advancing rights of nature policies. They also conducted cleanups and water ceremonies across the country and held sessions with native and non-native allies, culminating in the Council work session to ensure full Council support.

Unanimous Vote for the Rights of the Longperson

When item 18 came up on the docket on January 8th, the entire room recognized the immense heart, soul, and effort the young women had invested in the law and its historic implications. Attendees commented that the room was hot and heavy when the NAIWA daughters gave their testimony. Some said they could feel the presence of Ancestors in the room.

*Watch the* *Council meeting* *and the passing of the resolution. Youth testimony starts at 2:50, item number 18.*

The Council unanimously voted yes with a standing vote and a round of applause. The NAIWA Daughters presented them with gifts of gratitude, shirts and stickers that proudly read “Water Protector” in Cherokee and English across the front.

Drawing on ancestral teachings and a history predating the establishment of the U.S., the young advocates reminded everyone in the Council chamber that passing the resolution helps to revitalize Indigenous law and order—a legal model in which nature is regarded as relative and protected from harm.

Grant Wilson, Executive Director of the Earth Law Center, celebrated the Council’s vote. “This historic resolution holds a mirror to the Cherokee understanding that the Longperson is a sacred, living relative — not mere property — and translates this relationship into a powerful legal framework. The Rights of the Longperson is also another profound example of how Indigenous youth and women are leading the way toward the Rights of Nature and intergenerational justice worldwide… As the global community increasingly recognizes Nature’s rights —now established in hundreds of jurisdictions worldwide — those with the deepest cultural and spiritual connections to the land are often the ones best equipped to give Nature a voice.”

Casey Camp Horinek is an elder of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma, and advisor to Movement Rights, an organization advocating for the rights of nature movement. She thanked the Eastern Band of Cherokee for upholding their traditional ways and for the care they have taken of the Longperson since time immemorial. “We believe this resolution will only strengthen your leadership and guardianship for generations to come. As you may know, owing to global Indigenous leadership, the Rights of Nature is now the fastest-growing environmental justice movement worldwide, with laws in over 40 countries. In passing this resolution, the Eastern Band of Cherokee will join a growing number of Indigenous peoples leading a profound shift in our collective human relationship with the natural world. “

The NAIWA Daughters were clear that they will not let their efforts end with this resolution. They are working with the Tribal Council to create a task force to assess the river’s health and lead policy initiatives that implement the spirit and purpose of this resolution as binding code and law.

They will share their story and efforts to advance the Rights of Nature movement in Indian Country by presenting their work at the next National NAIWA Daughters convergence. Their goal is to inspire Indigenous young women leaders across Turtle Island. Jasmine Smith, Chair of the EBCI NAIWA Daughters, will also be speaking at the 2026 Bioneers Conference Indigenous Forum.

To follow the NAIWA Daughters’ work, you can follow them on Facebook. Contact them at naiwadaughters@gmail.com

To Be Seen by an Octopus: Sy Montgomery on Attention and Kinship

For much of modern history, humans have been taught to see other species at a distance — as resources, symbols, data points, or representatives of a category rather than as beings with inner lives. Science, religion, and culture have all played a role in reinforcing the idea that humans stand apart from the rest of the living world, uniquely endowed with intelligence, emotion, and agency.

And yet, across disciplines and traditions, that story has been unraveling during the last few decades. Advances in animal cognition and plant behavior research, long-term field observation, and new respect for traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge have revealed something both radical and deeply familiar: Other species think, feel, remember, communicate, and relate, often in ways that challenge our assumptions about what intelligence and empathy even look like. Learning to truly see them requires not mastery, but attention.

Sy Montgomery has spent decades practicing and writing about this kind of attentive relationship with other species. A naturalist and author of more than 40 books for adults and children, Montgomery has spent decades observing animals up close, from octopuses and turtles to pigs, dogs, and wild creatures encountered briefly in the field. Her work invites readers into relationships with other species not as abstractions, but as individuals, each with their own ways of being in the world.

In this conversation with Bioneers, Montgomery reflects on how humans lose — and can relearn — that way of seeing; what animals have taught her about empathy, identity, and attention; and why cultivating curiosity and care across species may be one of the most important practices of our time.

Bioneers: So much of your work invites readers to see animals as individuals, not abstractions. How did that way of seeing begin for you, and how has it evolved over time?

Sy Montgomery: I think most of us begin life seeing animals as individuals. As children, that comes naturally. But somewhere along the way, many adults lose that way of seeing. For a long time, science itself reinforced the idea that an animal was simply a representative of its species, not a unique being. Behavioral research used to treat animals that way, and frankly, I think the researchers themselves knew it was nonsense.

That began to change in a very visible way when Jane Goodall went into the field in 1960 and refused to number the chimpanzees she studied. She named them. She recognized immediately that each one had a distinct personality and history. Louis Leakey chose Goodall deliberately — she wasn’t trained as a scientist, and he wanted someone who might see something new. And she did. Today, especially in field biology, the first thing you’re taught is to figure out who’s who. Otherwise, nothing you observe will make sense.

In that regard, I don’t think I have changed very much since I was a child. I’ve always believed animals are individuals. What can be challenging is recognizing individuality in species that are very unlike us — reptiles, or marine invertebrates, for example. But once you pay attention, it becomes undeniable. Every octopus I’ve met has had a completely distinct personality. The same is true of turtles.

There’s nothing special about me in being able to see this. If I can do it, anyone can.

Sirocco the kakapo, an endangered flightless parrot in New Zealand, attempts to copulate with Sy’s head. Photo by Nic Bishop.

Bioneers: Why do you think we lose that way of seeing as adults? What do we gain — or lose — by that shift?

Sy: I think one reason is that it becomes much easier to experiment on animals, kill them, and eat them if we pretend they don’t have thoughts, feelings, or individual lives. There’s a real incentive to strip away individuality and dignity, because acknowledging it would demand responsibility.

A lot of this traces back to René Descartes and the idea that only humans think: I think, therefore I am. That notion flies in the face of both evolution and common sense. Evolution shows us that thinking, remembering, imagining the future, and feeling emotions all offer adaptive advantages. If loving your offspring or your mate helps a species survive, why would those capacities suddenly appear in only one species? That would be absurd.

Even the way we talk about evolution gets this wrong. We still call it a “theory,” though it’s long been proven fact. And evolution tells us we are connected — emotionally, cognitively, biologically. Our science says that. And so do our sacred stories. Every creation story, from every culture and religion, tells us that we are part of a family. We are related. We are similar. And we need one another.

When we forget that, when we deny kinship, we lose not just empathy for other species, but something essential about ourselves.

Bioneers: Have you ever encountered animals you thought didn’t show signs of empathy?

Sy Montgomery: Yes, but I think it’s important to remember that not seeing something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It often just means we haven’t learned how to look yet.

For a long time, people used “bird brain” as an insult, assuming birds were stupid. What that really reflected was our own failure to recognize the complexity and power of a bird’s intelligence. Today, we know that birds like parrots and crows are extraordinarily smart. They make and use tools, plan for the future, and remember past events. Intelligence doesn’t have to look like ours to be real.

The same is true when we talk about empathy. When we don’t recognize it in an animal, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist — it may just be expressed in a way we don’t yet understand. Size doesn’t tell us much, either. A small brain can be incredibly powerful, and intelligence can be organized in ways that challenge our assumptions altogether.

Take octopuses. Their brains don’t resemble human brains at all. You wouldn’t even recognize the structure as a brain if you were looking for something familiar. And yet they are astonishingly intelligent. Or consider sea urchins. They don’t have a brain in the way we define one, but increasingly scientists are suggesting that they are a brain — that their entire bodies process information in a distributed way, rather than in a single centralized organ.

These discoveries invite us to rethink what a “brain” even is, and what cognition can look like. Sea urchins don’t have eyes, yet they can perceive color, sometimes in ways we can’t. Octopuses can change color instantly to match their surroundings, even though they don’t have color receptors in their eyes. For years, people assumed they were colorblind. The truth was that we simply hadn’t figured out how they were seeing.

The lesson, again and again, is to keep looking. To stay curious.

Bioneers: Is there an animal encounter that truly surprised you? Something that defied your expectations?

Sy: My first encounter with Athena, a Giant Pacific octopus, in March of 2011 completely surprised me. I didn’t know what to expect, but one thing I did not expect was for her to seem clearly excited to see me … clearly curious. She looked me in the eye. She reached out and tried to touch me.

That moment knocked me off my feet.

Octopuses are so radically different from us. Half a billion years of evolution separate humans and octopuses. I didn’t expect to be able to read her at all. These are powerful, venomous animals, and yet I never felt fear. I also never felt aggression from her. Even when octopuses grab you, which they sometimes do, it has never felt threatening to me.

What surprised me most was realizing, in real time, that I could understand her intentions. I knew when she was curious. I knew when she was calm. I knew when she was engaged. And I hadn’t gone into that encounter expecting any of that. So I know I wasn’t projecting my own feelings onto her. I simply didn’t anticipate that kind of connection was possible.

To be seen, and to see in return, across such an immense evolutionary distance was thrilling. It changed my understanding of what relationships across species can look like.

Enjoying the company of a pinktoe tarantula at the spider lab of Sam Marshall. Photo by Sam Marshall.

Bioneers: Of all your immersive encounters, is there one animal experience that most changed how you understand yourself as a human?

Sy: I’m not sure I understand myself as a human at all. I didn’t really identify as human when I was a child—I thought I was a horse for a while. My pediatrician told my mother I’d grow out of it, and I did … when I realized I was actually a dog.

I joke about that, but there’s something sincere in it. Animals have always felt like my teachers. In How to Be a Good Creature, which is a memoir told through thirteen animals, I was forced to look closely at what each of those beings showed me about how to live. Animals are already perfect at being what they are. We’re the ones who struggle.

My first dog, Molly, taught me what I wanted to do with my life. She was my older sister, even though technically I was older. I wanted to go into the woods with her and learn how to understand the world the way wild animals do. In many ways, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Other animals have taught me different lessons. Christopher Hogwood, our pig — who lived to be fourteen and died peacefully in his sleep — was a profound teacher. But it isn’t only the animals who live with us who shape us. Sometimes it’s a brief, unexpected encounter in the field that opens a door and changes how you see everything.

What animals have given me, above all, is a way to practice openness and compassion. Not just toward other species, but toward other humans as well. In a time when it’s easy to dismiss people who think differently as evil or stupid, animals invite us to do something harder: to try to understand another being on their own terms.

If you can stretch your imagination enough to consider the inner life of an octopus — an animal with nine brains that can taste and see with its skin — you learn how to put yourself into another way of being. It’s a kind of training in perspective-taking. And it’s a voyage I would recommend to anyone.

Bioneers: In your writing, you balance scientific rigor with deep emotional presence. How do you navigate that line?

Sy: I’m trained first as a journalist, and one of the earliest lessons you learn in journalism is to trust your reader. You don’t try to shove your opinion down someone’s throat. You show them what happened, and you let them come to their own understanding.

So I try to describe what the animal did, as clearly and accurately as I can. And I can also tell the reader how I felt when that animal did it. But I don’t want to draw the conclusion for them. I don’t want to force my feelings onto the reader. I want them with me on the journey and then arriving at their own meaning.

That approach requires restraint. It’s tempting, especially when you care deeply, to tell people what they should think. But I believe readers are far more powerful than that. If you trust them, they’ll often come to insights that are richer and more lasting than anything you could dictate.

My goal is to create the conditions for connection — to open a space where the reader can encounter another being, and then decide for themselves what that encounter means.

Sy exploring the rainforest canopy of Amazonian Peru. Photo by Dave Meyer.

Bioneers: What feels most important to offer young readers right now, especially amid ecological uncertainty?

Sy: I don’t think of children as the leaders of tomorrow. I think they’re the leaders of today. Kids have an enormous influence, not just on their own futures, but on how their families live and even how they vote.

Years ago, a friend of mine who trained educators told me about a study showing that most conservation and environmental information reaching parents didn’t come from newspapers or the internet. It came from their kids. Children go home and say things like, “We shouldn’t kill possums; they eat ticks,” or “We need to stop using plastic bags because they hurt sea turtles.” Kids are powerful messengers.

They also have a natural affinity for the living world. Why wouldn’t they? Humans were hunter-gatherers until very recently, and paying attention to the natural world was once essential to survival. If we nurture that attentiveness instead of dismissing it, kids can become agents of real change.

Every child has some kind of power. Every child has something they love and some talent they can bring to it. What we need to offer them is the truth: knowledge is power, and love is power.

Bioneers: What do you think humans most misunderstand about other species or about our place among them?

Sy: I think we tend to fall into false binaries. Either we assume other species are so unlike us that they fall outside our sphere of care, or we expect them to be so much like us that when we notice a difference, we don’t know what to do with it.

I think the truth is far more interesting. We need to celebrate both our sameness and our difference. I love the ways I’m different from my dog. He can hear things I can’t hear, see in the dark, run faster than I ever could, and experience the world through scent in ways I can barely imagine. That’s a whole sensory universe I’ll never inhabit, and I find that thrilling.

At the same time, there are ways we clearly connect. He understands when I’m happy or sad. He loves affection. I love affection. That shared emotional ground matters, too.

It’s not so different from our relationships with other humans. You don’t want to spend your life in a hall of mirrors with people exactly like you. Difference is part of the joy. But neither do you want to be so alien to one another that connection becomes impossible.

When we approach other species with that mindset — curious, open, and willing to be surprised — relationship becomes a source of delight rather than domination. And that shift changes everything.

Making the Invisible Visible: Photographing Native Bees with Krystle Hickman

Bees are often talked about as a single, familiar species involved in pollination and threatened with decline due to environmental threats, but that shorthand obscures a far more complex reality. American non-native honeybees, which most people think of as “bees,” comprise only a few species, while there are, in fact, more than 20,000 species of wild bees worldwide, most of which are solitary, highly specialized, and deeply tied to specific plants and ecosystems. As climate change, habitat loss, and land-use decisions reshape those ecosystems, many of these native bees are quietly disappearing — often without being noticed at all.

Through photography, observation, and community science, Krystle Hickman has made it her work to change that. Based in Southern California, Hickman documents native bees in gardens, wildlands, and post-fire landscapes, capturing images that are both scientifically useful and visually arresting. In this conversation, she reflects on how she came to focus on native bees, what careful attention has revealed about their lives, and why supporting whole ecosystems — not just individual species — is essential for their future.

Krystle photographing in the Rainforest in Dagua, Valle del Cauca, Colombia.

Bioneers: How did you get interested in photographing bees?

Krystle Hickman: It actually started with a misunderstanding. I saw a quote attributed to Einstein, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live,” and assumed it was real — and that it was about honeybees. Wanting to help, I went out and started photographing them.

Then, by accident, I photographed a bee I didn’t recognize. Beekeepers couldn’t identify it, so I posted it in a group with entomologists and melittologists. That’s when everything shifted. They told me it was a native bee, and they also corrected a lot of what I thought I knew. The quote wasn’t real, and honeybees weren’t the most at risk. Native bees were.

That completely reframed my work. I stopped focusing on honeybees and began documenting native bees instead, first in local gardens and then across Southern California. When I later captured the first known photographs of a living representative of a native bee species long thought lost — and documented behaviors that had never been observed before — I realized this could be more than a hobby. It was a real scientific contribution.

Not long after, I was invited to speak at a conference. At the time, I was working in finance, and I had to choose between staying at my job or following this work. I chose the conference, and from there, everything grew.

"Male Anthophora crotchii on my finger in the Santa Monica Mountains, California." -Krystle

Bioneers: You describe yourself as an artist, photographer, and community scientist. How do those identities come together in your work with native bees?

Krystle: It’s kind of funny because they were originally supposed to be completely separate things, but being an artist really helps me take photos that people want to look at — images that feel beautiful and compelling. At the same time, being a community scientist and conservation photographer means I’ve learned how to photograph bees in ways that are useful for scientific identification.

So I’m trying to hold both of those things at once: creating images that draw in people who might not think of themselves as scientists, while also producing photographs that melittologists and other community scientists can actually use. A lot of these bees are tiny, easily overlooked, and rarely seen. My hope is that by making them visible and showing them as something worth paying attention to, more people will feel curious enough to get involved in community science themselves.

"Female Halictus farinosus (Wide-striped Sweat Bee) in her burrow at the Canyon Hills site in Verdugo Mountains in Sunland-Tujunga, California." -Krystle

Bioneers: What do you wish more people understood about native bees?

Krystle: The first thing is just how many of them there are. Globally, there are over 20,000 species of bees, and honeybees only make up about eight of those. That’s roughly 0.04% of all bee species. So a lot of the information people hear about “bees” actually applies to a very small fraction of them.

Most native bees live completely different lives from the ones we’re used to hearing about. About 90% are solitary — they don’t live in colonies or make honey. Many of them nest in the ground, and many are highly specialized, meaning they rely on specific plants or ecosystems. You can go from one ecosystem to another and find entirely different bees adapted to those places.

Native bees are also important indicator species. Changes in their populations — whether they’re increasing, declining, or disappearing — can tell us a lot about the health of an ecosystem and how it’s changing over time. When native bees start to struggle, it’s often a sign that something deeper is happening with the land itself.

For me, identification is part of how people start to care. Once you realize how diverse these bees are — how different they look, behave, and live — it becomes more than just “saving bees” in a general sense. It becomes about paying attention, noticing patterns, and understanding relationships.

Bioneers: There’s growing conversation about how efforts to support honeybees can sometimes create challenges for native bees. Can you explain what’s actually happening there?

Krystle: A lot of what we’re seeing comes down to ecological imbalance, especially in landscapes that humans have heavily altered.

One of the clearer examples is disease transmission. Honeybees can carry things like deformed wing virus, which they often get from mites in managed colonies. Sometimes honeybees don’t show strong symptoms, but they can still spread the virus when they visit flowers. Native bees, such as bumblebees, can then pick up contaminated pollen and bring it back to their nests, where it affects the developing bees. We’re starting to see impacts from that spillover.

There’s also competition for resources, which becomes especially intense during drought years. Honeybees have several advantages that let them outcompete native pollinators. They can forage earlier in the morning and later into the evening, and many of the honeybees in the U.S. are a mix of European and African subspecies, which means they can tolerate extreme heat — even temperatures over 100 degrees. They also swarm. When they find a good food source, they recruit many more bees to that same patch of flowers very quickly.

Native bees don’t work that way. Most are solitary, many are specialists, and they often rely on very specific plants. So when honeybees dominate an area, especially when resources are scarce, native pollinators can get pushed out simply because there’s not enough left.

What this really points to is the need to focus on systems. Habitat diversity, land management, and restoring native ecosystems matter much more than singling out one species. When ecosystems are healthy and complex, native bees have a fighting chance to thrive alongside everything else.

Bioneers: What’s something you’ve learned about bees specifically because you slowed down enough to photograph them?

Krystle: They have routines. Once you spend enough time watching them, you start to realize they’re incredibly predictable in the best way.

Male bees, in particular, are pretty easy to understand. They’re mostly motivated by eating and mating. They’ll sleep on plants, often right near where females visit, and you can find them at dusk and dawn. If you’re in an area and you see males sleeping nearby, you can usually assume there are female bees around too. What’s really interesting is that they often return to the same sleeping spot night after night.

They also have what I think of as a commute. They’ll take the same route from flower to flower, repeating it over and over again. If you pay attention long enough, you can predict where they’re going to land next. I’ll sometimes choose a flower that looks especially photogenic and just wait, knowing they’ll come back.

Female bees are motivated by something different. They’re focused on collecting pollen for their developing young and nectar for themselves. When you watch them on a plant with multiple blooms, like a salvia, you start to notice patterns in how they move — circling flowers in a certain order, repeating the same sequence each time. Over time, that repetition becomes really clear.

They also start to recognize you. Native bees can be skittish at first, but if you spend enough time in the same place, they get used to your presence. I’ve even noticed behavioral cues that help with identification. There are two genera — Habropoda and Anthophora — that look very similar, and traditionally, you tell them apart by wing venation. But I’ve found that if you stare at a female Anthophora long enough, she’ll actually stare back at you. That behavior has helped me differentiate them every single time so far.

You also see learning happening over a season. Bumblebees and other buzz-pollinating bees vibrate at specific frequencies to release pollen from certain flowers, like tomatoes. Early in the season, they’re not very good at it. But if you keep watching, they get better. They develop skills. Seeing that progression — watching bees learn and improve — is just as fascinating to me as photographing them.

"Male Hesperapis larreae (Creosote Evening Bee) sleeping in Apple Valley, California." -Krystle

Bioneers: You’ve talked about witnessing native bees return after wildfire, and more broadly about how climate change is reshaping their lives. What has seeing all of that up close changed for you?

Krystle: It’s been really reassuring, but also clarifying. One of the clearest examples for me was a friend’s backyard in a chaparral area that she had rewilded with native plants. She wasn’t doing it specifically for bees — she just loved those plants — but once that ecosystem was in place, everything followed. Birds showed up. Pollinators showed up. Predatory insects showed up. It became a healthy, biodiverse system that mirrored native chaparral.

Chaparral ecosystems are built to withstand fire, and many of the species that live in them are too. A lot of native bees are ground nesters, so when fire moves through, it often passes right over them. When the plants return and the flowers bloom again, the bees come back as well. Watching that cycle unfold really shifted how I think about resilience.

At the same time, climate change is disrupting the timing of everything. Bees are tightly linked to plant cycles — there are fire followers, rain followers — and when those rhythms get thrown off, you see ripple effects. In some years, invasive plants like mustard or certain grasses show up in huge numbers and crowd out native plants, and when native plants don’t emerge, native bee diversity drops.

I am seeing some generalist bees adapt faster, even starting to use plants they normally wouldn’t. But the pace of change right now is intense. We’re dealing with climate whiplash — drought and fire one year, heavy rain and early super blooms the next. We’re watching adaptation happen in real time, but we’re also seeing how destabilizing constant disruption can be.

What it reinforces for me is that saving bees isn’t about protecting a single species. It’s about supporting whole ecosystems. When systems are diverse and intact, they have a much better chance of absorbing disturbance and recovering.

"Male Anthidium formosum sleeping on a Centaurea stoebe (Spotted Knapweed) in Sawtooth Range, Idaho." -Krystle

Bioneers: There’s a lot of advice out there about how to help pollinators, and some of it can be confusing. Are there common things you see people doing that are well-intentioned, but not actually helpful for native bees?

Krystle: A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that many “bee-friendly” practices are designed for honeybees, not native bees.

For example, people are often told to leave out water for bees. That can help honeybees, but native bees usually get all the moisture they need from nectar or dew. Adding water stations can actually attract more honeybees and increase competition. Another issue is pesticide use. Spraying at night is sometimes recommended because honeybees are in their hives, but native bees often sleep in plants or nest in the ground, so they can end up more exposed.

What I’ve seen, especially in farming contexts, is that building healthy native habitat reduces the need for inputs altogether. When farmers integrate things like hedgerows and preserved wild areas, a diversity of native pollinators shows up, pest populations are naturally controlled, and yields often improve. Complexity creates resilience — when ecosystems are allowed to function, they start taking care of themselves.

"Male Andrena prunorum (Prunus Miner Bee) on a Helianthus annuus (Common Sunflower) in Lake View Terrace, Los Angeles, California." -Krystle

Bioneers: For people who don’t have access to wild landscapes — maybe just a small yard or even a few plants — what’s the most meaningful way they can support native pollinators?

Krystle: Planting native plants is the single most powerful thing people can do. And I always tell people that nature doesn’t have to be somewhere you travel to — it can literally be in your own backyard.

There are native bees that will show up in residential spaces if the right plants are there. One of the bees I feature in my book, the California poppy fairy bee, is a poppy specialist. If you plant poppies, there’s a chance that bee could show up in your yard. And what’s amazing about that species is that, as far as I know, no one has ever documented one of its burrows. So if you had those plants and took the time to look around carefully, you could actually be the first person to make a scientific contribution just by observing what’s happening in your own space.

With tools like iNaturalist and the cameras we all carry in our pockets, participation is more accessible than ever. You don’t need formal training or expensive equipment. You just need curiosity, patience, and a willingness to pay attention. When people start noticing what’s living alongside them, that awareness alone can lead to real care and protection.

"Female Perdita californica (California Fairy Bee) on a Calochortus lily in Orange Hills Regional Park, California." -Krystle

Bioneers: Is there anything you want to make sure people take away from your work — especially those who might not see themselves as “scientists”?

Krystle: I think it’s really important to remember that anyone can be a scientist. A lot of people hear that word and picture someone in a lab coat, working in a sterile environment, but science can also be you out in your backyard with a camera or a phone, paying attention to what’s around you.

Observation itself is a contribution. Documenting what you see, noticing patterns, and sharing that information can actually help build knowledge, especially for species that are understudied or easily overlooked. You don’t need formal credentials to care, and you don’t need permission to participate.

Curiosity is often where care begins. When people take the time to notice the living world around them, they start to feel responsible for it. And that kind of attention is one of the most powerful tools we have.

All photos by Krystle Hickman.

Making Things Worse Pays Off Now. Cory Doctorow Explains Why.

When Cory Doctorow spoke at Bioneers in 2017, the warning signs were already there. But in the years since, the tech landscape has become more extractive and more brittle at the same time — less accountable, harder to leave, and easier to break.

Doctorow has spent decades thinking and writing at the intersection of technology, power, and democracy. An award-winning science fiction author, journalist, and digital rights activist, he is the author of dozens of books — including the recent nonfiction work Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (read an excerpt here) — and a longtime advocate for an open, repairable, and more humane internet. He works with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, writes the daily blog Pluralistic, and teaches and researches technology policy at institutions including Cornell, MIT, and the University of North Carolina.

What’s shifted in Doctorow’s thinking isn’t just a growing catalog of bad tech behavior. It’s a clearer diagnosis of the conditions that allow those behaviors to win. When competition, regulation, labor power, and interoperability are weakened or removed, the worst incentives inside companies stop being fringe ideas and start becoming the dominant strategy.

And that dynamic doesn’t stay contained within the tech sector. It shows up in environmental destruction and e-waste, in fragile infrastructure and locked-down clean energy systems, in the erosion of worker power, and in the steady narrowing of democratic choice. In this conversation, Doctorow traces how we got here — not as an inevitability, but as the foreseeable result of policy decisions made in living memory — and what it would take to rebuild the collective power needed to change course.

Bioneers: A lot of people talk about “greedy tech companies” or “bad CEOs.” That’s not quite how you frame the problem. What do you think actually changed?

Cory Doctorow: It’s not unusual for the leadership of a company to be greedy. That’s always been true. What’s changed is that firms can now be openly abusive and still thrive. In fact, they can often make more money by making their products worse.

That’s the part people should really be alarmed by. In a healthy system, bad behavior is supposed to be kept in check by competition, regulation, workers pushing back, or customers walking away. What we’ve done over the last several decades is remove those sources of discipline, one by one.

So instead of obsessing over whether individual executives are uniquely awful, which, frankly, is beside the point, we should be looking at the policies and enforcement failures that let this behavior win. When companies no longer fear competitors, regulators, labor pressure, or interoperability, the worst incentives rise to the top. And that’s how you end up with products that are clearly not fit for purpose, but are still wildly profitable.

Bioneers: You coined the term “enshittification” to describe what happens to platforms over time. What do you mean by that?

Cory: I’ve been doing digital rights work for a long time, and a big part of the job is coming up with language people can actually remember: metaphors, framing devices, sometimes slightly rude words. “Enshittification” started almost as a joke, but it stuck because it names something people instantly recognize.

The pattern itself has three stages.

In the first stage, platforms are good to their users. They offer useful features, generous terms, and a decent experience. The goal is to hook people and lock them in.

Once users are locked in, the platform enters a second stage: It makes things worse for users in order to benefit business customers — advertisers, sellers, publishers — who also become dependent on access to those users and get locked in themselves.

Then comes the third stage. The platform starts extracting value from the business customers, too. Because they can’t easily leave, value is withdrawn from both sides and shoveled upward to executives and shareholders.

This isn’t a conspiracy. No one has to twirl a mustache in a dark room. It’s a predictable incentive pattern that emerges when escape routes disappear … when there’s no real competition, no meaningful regulation, and no way out. Once discipline is removed, this behavior becomes rational. And that’s why we see it over and over again.

Bioneers: Do you think companies set out to enshittify their products, or does this happen gradually?

Cory: It’s incremental. Firms are always trying to pay as little as possible for their inputs and charge as much as possible for their outputs. That’s capitalism 101.

What normally constrains that behavior is what economists call discipline: competition, regulation, labor pressure, and the risk that customers will leave. In a healthy system, companies try a lot of bad ideas, and most of them fail. You make the product worse, people bail. Regulators intervene. Workers revolt. Or someone invents a better alternative.

What’s changed is that many of those constraints have been stripped away. When companies no longer fear competition or enforcement, tactics that would once have destroyed a business suddenly make sense.

You can think of it as experimentation under different conditions. If a company tries something abusive and it blows up in their face, that becomes a lesson. But if it works — if profits rise and no one can escape — then that behavior spreads. Over time, the worst incentives win, not because companies suddenly became more evil, but because we redesigned the system to reward them.

It’s not unusual for the leadership of a company to be greedy. That’s always been true. What’s changed is that firms can now be openly abusive and still thrive.

Bioneers: Can you point to a concrete example of how this dynamic plays out?

Cory: A really clear example is Google Search.

By 2019, Google had achieved a roughly 90 percent market share. At that point, you can’t grow by getting more users; you already have almost everyone. But Google still needed to show revenue growth to investors, and that created a crisis inside the company.

What came out in the antitrust cases was an internal fight over what to do next. One faction argued for improving search: making it more accurate, more useful, better for users. Another faction proposed something much simpler: make search worse in a way that shows people more ads.

The idea was to stop “one-shotting” queries. Instead of giving you the best answer right away, Google could force you to run multiple searches, which means more chances to shove ads in your face. From a user’s perspective, search gets worse. From a revenue perspective, it works.

And the reason that faction won is straightforward: Users couldn’t easily leave. Google had locked up defaults on browsers, phones, and operating systems. When competition is effectively neutralized, the risk of users fleeing just isn’t credible anymore.

That’s the key point. When a company knows it can’t easily lose its customers, the argument for degrading the product starts to sound not just acceptable, but smart. And once that logic wins internally, everyone else lives with the consequences.

Bioneers: You’ve said this outcome wasn’t inevitable — that it didn’t have to turn out this way. What made it possible?

Cory: If you look back, there are very specific policy decisions made in living memory that set us on this path. One of the biggest was the decision to stop enforcing antitrust law.

Starting in the 1970s, economists and legal thinkers associated with the Chicago School pushed the idea that monopolies should be presumed efficient. The logic was that if one company dominates a market, it must be because it’s just better. Under that framework, breaking up monopolies starts to look perverse, like punishing success.

Fast forward 40 years and, surprise, we have monopolies everywhere.

That has an immediate effect: Companies no longer fear competition, so they can degrade products without worrying that users will leave. But there’s also a second-order effect that’s just as important. Monopoly makes regulatory capture much easier. When a sector collapses into one dominant firm or a small cartel, it’s far easier for those firms to coordinate lobbying, influence regulators, and bend policy to their will.

And this isn’t abstract. Judges, for example, are required to attend continuing education seminars. In one example, some of those seminars — lavish, industry-funded junkets — offered one-sided arguments against antitrust enforcement. We know which judges attended, and we can see how their rulings changed afterward.

This is how systems get baked in. Not through a single dramatic moment, but through a long series of quiet decisions that tilt the playing field until the outcome feels inevitable, even though it never was.

Bioneers: You’ve also focused a lot on anti-circumvention law and the right to repair. Why does that matter so much?

Cory: Anti-circumvention law makes it illegal to modify, fix, or interoperate with devices in ways the manufacturer doesn’t approve of, even if you own the damn thing.

At the simplest level, it blocks repair. When companies can prevent independent fixes or replacement parts, devices become disposable by design. That drives mountains of e-waste and forces people to replace things that could easily be kept running.

But it goes way beyond phones and laptops. This kind of lock-in makes critical systems brittle. We’ve seen it with medical devices, with infrastructure, and with clean tech — solar inverters, batteries, farm equipment — where cloud control and parts pairing determine whether something works at all.

Once everything is connected to the cloud and legally protected from modification, manufacturers gain terrifying power. They can impose subscriptions after the fact, withdraw features, or just decide that something you already bought doesn’t work anymore.

And here’s the part people don’t want to think about: If companies can remotely disable devices, that power doesn’t stay commercial. It becomes political. We’ve already seen equipment shut down from afar. Once that capability exists, it will be used.

When repair and modification are illegal, systems don’t just get more profitable. They get more fragile.

When a company knows it can’t easily lose its customers, the argument for degrading the product starts to sound not just acceptable, but smart. And once that logic wins internally, everyone else lives with the consequences.

Bioneers: When you talk about “fixing” this system, what does that look like in practice?

Cory: No one is going to repeal the laws of physics. Things will break. The question is whether we’re allowed to fix them.

This isn’t about making executives nice people. It’s about restoring the conditions that punish bad behavior. When competition, interoperability, repair, and enforcement are real, the worst tactics stop working.

Take Adobe’s move to Creative Cloud. People woke up one day and found they had to pay a monthly fee just to access colors they’d already used in their own work. Files broke. Nothing improved; it just turned into a tollbooth. In a functional system, that would create an opening for competitors to step in and siphon users away.

Same with paywalled hardware features like cars where part of the battery you already bought is locked behind a subscription. That shit only works when people can’t leave and when no one is allowed to build tools that undo it.

When escape routes exist, internal power dynamics change. The people arguing to degrade products for short-term profit stop winning every argument. You’ll always have ambitious, ruthless actors inside companies, but they don’t get to dictate outcomes for everyone else.

This isn’t fate, and it’s not the iron laws of economics. We’re living with the foreseeable outcomes of specific policy decisions, made by people who were warned about what would happen and did it anyway.

Bioneers: For people who aren’t tech executives or policymakers, what’s actually within their control?

Cory: The biggest mistake we make is treating this like a personal purity test: thinking that if we make the right consumer choices, the system will magically fix itself. That’s bullshit, especially in monopolized markets.

This is the same lesson people have learned in climate work. You can make thoughtful choices about how you live, but agonizing over them won’t stop wildfires. What matters is acting as part of a polity, not as an isolated consumer.

That means collective action. Advocacy organizations matter. Organized boycotts matter. But a boycott isn’t quietly choosing a different brand at the store. It’s public, collective, and done in solidarity, especially with workers.

The encouraging part is that these struggles are connected. Concentrated corporate power shows up as broken tech, environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and democratic erosion. When you see that connection, you stop feeling alone, and you start building coalitions that can actually change the rules.

Bioneers: Is there anything you want people to hold onto as they leave this conversation?

Cory: Solidarity is the answer.

This isn’t fate, and it’s not the iron laws of economics. We’re living with the foreseeable outcomes of specific policy decisions, made by people who were warned about what would happen and did it anyway.

What’s been taken from us is a sense of collective agency. We’ve been told to act as isolated consumers instead of workers, neighbors, and citizens with shared interests. When that happens, concentrated power rushes in to fill the void.

Rebuilding discipline in markets and technology doesn’t require heroic virtue or perfect knowledge. It requires collective action, enforcement, and the willingness to choose different rules — and different leaders — when the old ones fail. It’s hard work, but it’s not complicated. And it’s still within our power.

Cory Doctorow will be speaking at Bioneers 2026 in March. Learn more and register here.

Beyond the Page: How Bay Nature Connects People to Place

Environmental change doesn’t begin with policy or technology alone. It begins with attention — with the stories we tell, the places we come to know, and the communities we choose to stay connected to.

For 25 years, Bay Nature has been doing exactly that work in the San Francisco Bay Area: helping local people understand, experience, and care for the natural world through deeply reported environmental journalism and place-based engagement. Founded as an independent, nonprofit publication and still rooted in print, Bay Nature occupies a unique position in the region’s environmental ecosystem — not just reporting on the work of scientists, conservationists, and civic leaders, but actively connecting them. As Executive Director and Publisher Wes Radez puts it, Bay Nature serves as “a reminder of why a lot of people are drawn to this work in the first place.”

That connective role has become more complex in recent years, as independent media organizations navigate a rapidly shifting information landscape and increasing economic pressure. Bay Nature, which reaches thousands of highly engaged members across the region, has spent the past several years asking a fundamental question Radez returns to often: How does a small, independent publisher survive and thrive in an increasingly hostile media environment while continuing to produce high-quality journalism?

The answer, it turns out, has less to do with chasing trends than with deep listening. Since joining Bay Nature in 2022, Radez has helped guide the organization through a period of reflection and reinvention — one that treats journalism not as a product alone, but as a living relationship between people, place, and shared curiosity.

In the conversation that follows, Radez reflects on Bay Nature’s evolving role as a regional media hub, what it’s learned by listening closely to its community, and how place-based journalism can help move people from overwhelm to connection, engagement, and hope.

Bioneers: What does building a nature community look like in a diverse region like the Bay Area?

Wes Radez, Executive Director/Publisher of Bay Nature: From a storytelling perspective, it’s really important that we support a wide range of perspectives — and that those stories are told by the people who hold them. That means providing agency, platform, and support so stories aren’t told on behalf of communities, but from within them. Whether we’re centering Indigenous voices, amplifying rural perspectives from the Central Valley, or highlighting lived experiences that don’t always get space in environmental media, the goal is to help as many people as possible see themselves and their stories reflected in our pages.

From a community standpoint, we take the idea of “meeting people where they are” quite literally. The Bay Area stretches from Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz, across ten counties, and while there are shared values that connect people across that region, the way environmental issues show up can look very different depending on where you live. Someone in Berkeley is going to experience and think about these issues differently than someone in Redwood City or farther out.

In the process of spending so much time meeting our community face to face, it’s been really striking to notice that when people come together at our events, even if they’ve never met before, there’s often an immediate sense of belonging. Within minutes, people feel at home because of shared values and shared curiosity.

That’s why creating consistent, place-based opportunities to gather — whether through talks, hikes, or field experiences tied to our journalism — has become such an important part of how we think about community. It’s where stories move off the page and into relationship.

UC Berkeley doctoral student, Trinity Walls co-hosts a spider seeking nature walk with Bay Nature in Berkeley, on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2025. (Photo: Amir Aziz/Bay Nature)

Bioneers: Tell us more about how Bay Nature has adapted to survive and grow in a challenging media landscape.

Wes: I joke that magazine publishing wasn’t in great shape when Bay Nature was founded 25 years ago, and it hasn’t exactly improved since.

During the pandemic, we saw what many organizations saw: a big upswell in interest in the outdoors. People were hiking, reading, and engaging with environmental content in new ways, and all of our metrics were moving up and to the right. Then, as the world reopened in 2020 and 2021, it was like watching the tide roll back out. Engagement dropped, and like many small organizations, we were left with very little room for error.

I joined Bay Nature in late 2022, and the initial charge from the board was to help the organization find a more sustainable path forward. We responded by doing a lot of listening: audience surveys, focus groups, and countless one-on-one conversations. I’ve spent the past few years traveling across the region, meeting people face-to-face and really trying to understand what Bay Nature means to them.

Two insights came through very clearly. The first was that people wanted much more active engagement with Bay Nature. They didn’t just want to read stories; they wanted to hike with us, visit the places we covered, talk directly with scientists and researchers, and experience the work in real life. There was a sense that we had been leaving people at the water’s edge, and they wanted to go further.

The second insight was that our audience already saw themselves as a community, even before we fully understood ourselves that way. People would tell me they’d been “members” for years. Internally, we still thought of them as subscribers or readers, but they felt a much deeper sense of belonging. Recognizing that shift from audience to community became a turning point for the organization.

Bioneers: How did Bay Nature change its model based on what you learned from your community?

Wes: Those insights led us, in January of 2024, to launch a new membership program. For $40 a year, members receive the four quarterly issues of our magazine that we’ve been publishing for decades, along with access to an entirely new events program designed to bring our journalism to life.

What that’s looked like in practice has been a really dramatic shift. Starting essentially from zero, we produced more than 80 events in the past year. And nearly every one of those events connects directly back to a piece of our reporting. It gives people a way to go deeper into the stories, to meet the writers, the scientists, and the experts behind the work, and to experience these places and issues together.

Because the events happen so frequently, something else has started to happen, too: people get to know one another. We get to know them. Over time, through those repeated interactions, real relationships form. What began as reading a story turns into shared experience, and that shared experience becomes community.

Bioneers: Which stories or experiences have resonated most with the Bay Nature community recently?

Wes: One of the most joyful things about this question is that there really isn’t a single answer. There are as many responses as there are members of our community. You can pick almost any environmental topic out of a hat, and on a Tuesday afternoon, we’ll have 100 people show up eager to learn — whether it’s about monarch butterflies, birding, mushrooms, or marine life. What we’ve learned is that Bay Nature is really a constellation of small, deeply engaged micro-communities, each with its own interests and passions.

On a more personal level, one of the things I’m proudest of right now is our journalism itself. For the second year in a row, Bay Nature won multiple Excellence in Journalism awards from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. What made that especially meaningful is that the awards went to some of our youngest reporters.

We run a journalism fellowship program in partnership with the Schmidt Family Foundation, and after the past two years, every fellow who’s come through the program has gone on to continue their career as an award-winning journalist. At a time when journalism needs strong on-ramps more than ever, being able to support emerging writers and send them out into the world with that kind of foundation is incredibly gratifying.

Bioneers: How does Bay Nature help people move from environmental overwhelm to engagement or hope?

Wes: I think it starts by making big, global issues feel as local, personal, and manageable as possible. Climate change and biodiversity loss can feel overwhelming very quickly. But when you bring the focus closer to home, people begin to see where they actually have agency.

A good example is a recent series we did on local native bees. Their habitats are changing in a warming world, and it would be easy to throw up your hands and feel helpless about that. Instead, through a combination of reporting and field-based events, we brought people right down to the level of their own backyards, showing how small changes they could make at home could meaningfully improve conditions for these insects. It took something enormous and abstract and made it tangible and actionable.

The other piece is trust in journalism itself. We’re not an advocacy organization, but we are very aware that we serve a community of people who care deeply and are already engaged in change. We lay out the facts, tell the story clearly and impartially, and then let people and organizations decide how to act on that information. We are reminded that people will protect what they love, and they will love what they understand. Good storytelling is one of the best ways to build that understanding.

It’s incredibly gratifying to see our journalism travel beyond our pages — showing up in grant applications, city council presentations, and policy discussions. While we’re not advocates ourselves, it’s powerful to see information used as an instrument for real-world change. That’s where hope starts to take root.

Bioneers: Has Bay Nature changed how you personally experience the Bay Area?

Wes: Absolutely. For me, the biggest shift has come from spending so much time out in the field: traveling across the region, meeting with community members, and seeing these places up close. As I move through the Bay Area, I find the built environment almost melting away. What comes into focus instead is how present the natural world really is.

Everything we write about — the issues we cover, the actions we highlight — it’s all right there. It’s at the edge of the highway, around the next bend in a country road, in people’s backyards. None of it is abstract or far away. Bay Nature is a deeply local organization, and our journalism reflects that. What we’re writing about is the lived reality of this place.

Experiencing that through my own eyes has reinforced how powerful community-based reporting can be. It’s not just about telling stories. It’s about helping people see what’s already in front of them, and understanding their relationship to it in a new way.

Become a Bay Nature Member to receive quarterly issues of Bay Nature magazine online and mailed to your home, plus live educational talks and naturalist-led hikes that bring its stories to life. Learn more at baynature.org.

Listening Is Not Neutral: New Ethical Guardrails for Animal Communication Technologies

In recent years, scientists have begun using artificial intelligence to analyze animal communication at a previously impossible scale and level of precision. Machine learning models are being trained on thousands of whale vocalizations. Bioacoustic tools are parsing bird calls, rodent ultrasounds, and the complex signals exchanged by bees, dolphins, and elephants. What once required years of human observation can now happen in months or even days.

For the Bioneers community, this moment is not theoretical. Over many years, Bioneers has been honored to host and collaborate with researchers, legal scholars, and artists grappling with what it means to listen to the more-than-human world with care. In 2025, that work came into sharp focus when César Rodríguez-Garavito, founding director of the NYU More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, joined Project CETI founder David Gruber on the Bioneers stage to explore both the promise and the peril of emerging animal communication technologies.

This emerging field of “nonhuman animal communication technologies” is often described in terms of its tantalizing promise. Researchers point to new insights into animal behavior, improved conservation strategies, and the possibility of understanding other species on their own terms. In a moment defined by ecological crisis, the idea of learning to listen more carefully to the living world carries obvious appeal.

But listening to and decoding other species’ communications, especially when mediated by powerful technologies, is not a neutral act.

As these tools advance, they raise difficult questions about power, responsibility, and restraint. What does it mean to translate another species’ communication through human-built systems? When does listening become surveillance, interference, or extraction? And how do we ensure that technologies developed in the name of care do not ultimately deepen harm?

A new report from the NYU More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program suggests that the future of nonhuman animal communication technologies needs to be shaped as much by ethical considerations as by technical capabilities. At stake is not just how much we can learn about other species but whether we are prepared to engage them as kin, rather than resources, in a rapidly changing world.

What Are Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies?

Nonhuman animal communication technologies — often shortened to NACTs — are tools designed to record, analyze, and sometimes respond to the ways other animals communicate. They draw on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced computing to detect patterns in animal sounds, movements, and behaviors that would be difficult or impossible for humans to recognize on our own.

In practice, this can mean training AI models on thousands of whale vocalizations, analyzing ultrasonic calls made by rodents, or studying how birds or bees signal to one another within complex social systems. Most current efforts focus on listening rather than “talking back”: collecting large datasets and using computational tools to better understand how animals communicate with each other in the wild.

At present, the vast majority of NACTs are still in the research phase, developed and used by interdisciplinary scientific teams, but the field is expanding quickly. As interest grows, so does the possibility that these technologies could move beyond carefully controlled research settings into consumer-facing apps that claim to translate pets’ emotions, or into commercial and even military applications that use animals as sources of data, labor, or surveillance.

That distinction matters. The ethical questions raised by careful scientific listening are not the same as those raised by commodification, mass deployment, or use by untrained or nefarious actors. Understanding where and how these technologies are applied may determine whether they deepen our relationship with the more-than-human world or further exploit it.

The Overlooked Risks of “Listening”

The idea of listening to other species carries an intuitive sense of care, but as the MOTH report makes clear, listening through powerful technologies can introduce new forms of harm, especially when those tools are deployed without strong ethical guardrails, and the risks extend far beyond individual animals into the fabric of entire ecosystems.

Physical harms are often the most visible. Collecting data can involve tagging, sampling, or repeated human proximity, all of which can cause injury, exhaustion, or stress. Even noninvasive tools such as microphones or underwater playback devices can contribute to noise pollution, disrupting animals’ ability to navigate, hunt, or communicate. At larger scales, these risks multiply. If NACTs are commercialized or widely deployed, untrained users or military actors could use them to harass, exploit, or weaponize animals, turning living beings into tools for dubious human ends.

Less visible, but no less serious, are mental and emotional harms. Animals subjected to constant monitoring may experience chronic stress or confusion, particularly if unfamiliar sounds or signals are introduced into their environments. Attempts at “talking back” carry their own dangers: Hearing what seems like the voice of a fellow whale, bird, or dolphin — only to discover it originates from humans — could cause fear, disorientation, or grief. The report also raises a profound concern about privacy: What does it mean to extract and store intimate details of animals’ lives when they cannot consent or understand how that data will be used?

Beyond individuals, NACTs can produce relational harms by disrupting social bonds and collective behaviors. Many species rely on communication to coordinate migration, care for young, share knowledge, and maintain kinship networks. Interference, whether through noise, surveillance, or behavioral manipulation, can fracture these systems, weakening communities in ways that are difficult to detect until damage is already done.

Finally, there are ecological harms. Because species are embedded in complex, interdependent systems, disturbances rarely stop at a single animal or group. Disrupted communication can alter predator-prey relationships, migration routes, and reproductive success, triggering ripple effects that cascade across ecosystems. In a time of accelerating biodiversity loss, even small interventions can have outsized consequences.

A Deeper Ethical Shift: From Domination to Kinship

At its core, the debate over nonhuman animal communication technologies is not just about risk mitigation; it’s about worldview. The MOTH report invites a fundamental ethical shift, seeing animals not as data sources or experimental subjects, but as beings with their own lives, relationships, and intrinsic value.

This perspective moves away from anthropocentrism, which places human needs, knowledge, and convenience at the center of decision-making, and toward ecocentrism, which recognizes humans as participants in a wider web of life. From this vantage point, the goal of listening is not mastery or control, but relationship. Listening becomes an act of humility — an acknowledgment that other species communicate in ways shaped by senses, social structures, and intelligences very different from our own.

That distinction is important because technologies are never neutral. Tools designed to “translate” animal communication risk flattening rich, contextual forms of expression into human categories of meaning. When we prioritize what sounds familiar or intelligible to us, we may inadvertently privilege certain species, behaviors, or signals while ignoring or misinterpreting others. In the worst cases, translation becomes a form of extraction: pulling meaning out of animals to serve human curiosity, profit, or power.

The report argues instead for an ethic of kinship — one that asks humans to meet other species where they are, rather than demanding they speak in ways we recognize. This approach does not reject science or technology. It insists that innovation be guided by care, restraint, and respect for the autonomy of the more-than-human world. In a time of ecological unraveling, how we choose to listen may matter as much as what we hear.

Guardrails, Not Brakes: The PEPP Framework

The MOTH report is careful to make one thing clear: It is not an argument against technology. It does not call for halting research or abandoning innovation. Instead, it offers guardrails: ethical and legal principles designed to ensure that new tools meant to help us listen do not end up causing harm.

At the center of the report is the PEPP Framework, a set of principles organized around four core commitments: Prepare, Engage, Prevent, and Protect. Together, they form a values-based approach to the design and use of nonhuman animal communication technologies.

To prepare means grounding research in rigorous scientific design and strong ethical governance before technologies are deployed. To engage means consulting widely — not only with scientists and engineers, but with Indigenous knowledge holders, conservation experts, and others whose relationships with nonhuman life offer essential insight. To prevent harm requires taking precaution seriously, especially in the face of uncertainty, and placing the burden of justification on those introducing risk. And to protect means centering the autonomy, dignity, and best interests of animals themselves.

Across these pillars runs a consistent thread: transparency, accountability, and responsibility. The framework emphasizes that harms should be anticipated where possible, monitored continuously, and urgently addressed when they occur. In doing so, it reframes ethics not as an obstacle to discovery, but as a condition for research that truly serves life — human and more-than-human alike.

Why This Conversation Extends Beyond Researchers

While most nonhuman animal communication technologies are still being developed within scientific research settings, their implications extend far beyond the lab. Once tools exist, they rarely remain confined to their original context.

Funders influence which projects scale and which safeguards are prioritized. Tech companies shape how tools are packaged, marketed, and deployed. Conservation groups may adopt these technologies in the field, sometimes under pressure to act quickly in the face of ecological collapse. Policymakers determine whether meaningful oversight exists or whether a regulatory vacuum persists. And the public, increasingly exposed to simplified or sensationalized versions of “animal translation,” helps determine what becomes normalized, celebrated, or questioned.

The MOTH report argues that without shared standards, these technologies could spread faster than our collective ability to assess their consequences. Consumer apps, commercial ventures, or military uses could emerge long before ethical norms are firmly in place. Decisions made now about governance, accountability, and restraint will shape how widely and how responsibly these tools are used in the future.

In that sense, the question is not whether nonhuman animal communication technologies will affect the wider world, but whether we choose to guide that impact intentionally.

What It Would Mean to Truly Listen

Listening, the report suggests, is not simply a technical achievement. It is a moral practice.

To truly listen to other species may require slowing down rather than rushing ahead, resisting the urge to translate everything into human terms, and accepting that not all knowledge is ours to extract or use. It asks us to recognize that restraint can be a form of respect, and that responsibility grows alongside capability.

At a time when human activity already overwhelms much of the living world, learning to listen differently — with care, humility, and kinship — may be one of the most consequential choices we face. Not because it gives us more control over nature, but because it reminds us that we are part of it.

If these technologies are to help us reconnect with our animal kin, they must be guided by an ethic that honors relationship over domination and listening over mastery.

The Director of New Leaders Initiative on What it Takes to Become a Young Activist

Mona Shomali is the Director of the New Leaders Initiative at Earth Island Institute. Each year the New Leaders Initiative selects six outstanding young environmental leaders and honors them with a Brower Youth Award named after legendary environmentalist David Brower. In addition to honoring and supporting young leaders, Mona is an artist who works with themes such as interracial intimacy and environmental issues. She is also the author of the recently published book Water Mamas. Shomali previously was a professor teaching courses on environmental justice, governance and policy; and indigenous rights in the Amazon at Pace University, The New School and New York University. Mona Shomali was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.

ARTY MANGAN: As Director of the New Leaders Initiative, what inspires you?

MONA SHOMALI: I just gave a speech at the 26^th Brower Youth Awards and talked about why I love my job. I get to suspend myself in a permanent state of believing what’s possible because I am working with youth who are not jaded yet by the realities that can crush dreams as we become adults. They are immersed in what is possible, what pathways can be taken, what frameworks that have not been seen before, what new structures are possible.

The New Leaders Initiative works with young environmental activists who are not just solo practitioners in a lab, but who inspire and lead other youth, and who are in the space where they’re looking for environmental solutions that maybe only youth can come up with.

ARTY: These are definitely challenging times for everyone but especially youth. You mentioned youth leaders “who are not jaded yet by the realities that can crush dreams as we become adults.” That is such an important perspective that youth are able to embody better than older people, and a perspective that the world desperately needs to overcome pessimism. What other characteristics do you see in young leaders that make them successful?

MONA: Vision. I don’t know if it’s taught or if you come into the world with it. Some people just have a vision, and they work towards manifesting it.

We had a winner this last year, Inaam Chattha, who won for his work around climate anxiety, creating a safe space for youth. He noticed people around him had climate anxiety, and he thought, “We are all dealing with climate anxiety. What if I create an organization that gets people together to share their climate anxiety and comfort one another. They can still be a part of the movement, but they will have support.” I loved his project because he had a vision, and he manifested it from top to bottom, he got other people invested. He did this while being in medical school.

These young leaders have personal lives to deal with. When considering someone for a Brower Youth Award, we like to see that they are an active member of society contributing in a way that is challenging.

For example, if we see someone from a red state that is hostile toward environmental protection policies, and the BYA candidate is fighting and trying to pass resolutions and bills in the legislature, that’s the kind of person we’re looking for. They are overcoming serious barriers, which goes back to being a visionary. They need a vision to work through the barriers. That is a characteristic of many of the winners.

ARTY: Interesting that you mentioned overcoming barriers. I looked back over the last nine years or so of the Brower Youth Awards winners, and found that almost 70 percent are people of color. I have to be careful not to generalize, but in my work also, I’ve been noticing a strong emergence of youth of color who are stepping up as leaders, despite the extra challenges that they typically have.

MONA: I see that as a trend also. The Brower Youth Awards reflect trends in the environmental movement. And right now, I believe that there is a trend of people of color joining the movement in a way that wasn’t the case when I was an environmental studies major in 1997 at UC Santa Cruz.

Then it was pretty much exclusively a white department. We had one Mexican-American, there was one other Iranian-American besides me, and that was it; everyone else was white.

Because of urban issues coming into the fold, such as clean water, clean air, and because the movement is encompassing more than just conservation, yes, we’re seeing voices of youth of color emerging in leadership roles.

ARTY: You mentioned climate anxiety. It must be so difficult for a young person to visualize a positive future in the face of the multiple crises happening in the world. Recently you brought together some of your former winners and did a retreat dealing with climate anxiety. What came up during that time?

MONA: The person who led the workshop was a therapist. One of the things that she imparted on us was that climate anxiety, like any other anxiety, has to be dealt with as anxiety. She had a lot of methods and techniques that were clinical that I won’t do justice getting into. But from the youth I’ve spoken to who have less climate anxiety, they are the ones who are not tackling “the world.” They’re tackling their community, their neighborhood, their street, their local watershed. I think those folks are able, not to completely overcome, but to mitigate climate anxiety with local action. Otherwise it is overwhelming. If you look at world climate events, it’s really daunting. So, I think it’s good to make the aperture smaller and just think about what you can do locally where you live. You can get bigger from there, but I think starting where you are in the community you’re in is one way to not be as overwhelmed by anxiety.

ARTY: I work with the Bioneers Young Leaders Program, and that’s one of our themes. As a young person, if you look in any direction, the world needs help, so what are your passions and how can you use those passions to be an activist to help healing. And if you are able to find that path, then in spite of all the craziness that’s going on all around you, that will be your best opportunity to have a fulfilling life.

MONA: Yes. And I think you said something that I normally say when I talk to youth at the career days that I’m doing a UC Berkeley networking event with current students. When I’m in those environments, my advice is to get really good at something and then contribute that to the environmental movement. If you’re a really great accountant, become an accountant for an environmental group. If you’re a really great teacher, teach environmental policy or environmental studies. If you’re a really great litigator, become an environmental lawyer. If you’re really good with your hands, become a biologist and help with species conservation.

There’s really nothing that can’t help the environmental movement. I think what you’ve said that really resonates with me is find your passion, and get really good at it and then apply it to environmentalism.

ARTY: The multiple crises that we live with now is also the opportunity for people to plug in and become skillful, as you say, and help heal.

MONA: Yeah, I mean, we need everybody.

ARTY: Right. Another aspect of your work is the fellowship for UC Berkeley students. Who are those students and what do they do?

MONA: That’s actually one of my favorite parts of my job. I work with undergraduate and graduate UC Berkeley students who are interested in program management and research. They get real life experience working with a non-profit employer to produce a final project deliverable.

For example, starting in January, we will be doing a fellowship with law students for climate accountability, which is an Earth Island project. Six students have been selected and they will be researching fossil fuel companies and building a database, and tracking. I’m really looking forward to the project. It’s really exciting for me because I get to sit in and work with the client contacts.

In addition to the fellowship, we also do a poetry slam for environmental justice every year in collaboration with the Rhoades Foundation for communities and the environment. We usually have about 30 to 40 poets that come to us through Rhoades’ program called New Voices are Rising, which is an environmental justice fellowship. I teach a poetry workshop, and then we workshop poems and perform them on stage with a microphone and a DJ. The slam is a real party, and lots of people come.

ARTY: Earth Island Institute was founded by the legendary environmentalist David Brower, who among many other accomplishments, is credited with preventing the damming of the Grand Canyon. I have a couple of quotes from Brower that I would ask you to reflect on in any way you like. The first quote is: “I’m always impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it’s impossible.”

MONA: As we age, we see more and more barriers and we start to shut down. Our dreams become dampened or less clear. When someone is young, if they can get encouragement, support and scaffolding, and foundational skills then I think it’s harder for their dreams to die.

ARTY: As an artist, how do you think people, as they age, prevent themselves from closing down?

MONA: It’s interesting that you ask that, because I actually think because I’m an artist, I never stopped believing in my dreams. I think artists can remain childlike in many ways. I have a few quotes. One of the quotes is: “Art moves the culture forward.” And “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” So I think art is a part of pushing what’s new, what’s coming down the pipe, not being scared of it, embracing progression in society. I think art is about embracing change.

One thing I’ve noticed as I get older, some of my more serious friends are not as excited about change; they’re not as excited to try on a new hat, try on a new thought, try on a new paradigm shift. I’m so happy I have so many creative friends because I do think that sets us apart.

I think creativity is really central in keeping your dreams alive. Everyone can be creative. Creativity and keeping your dreams alive do go together.

ARTY: My last David Brower quote, and this is consistent with what we talked about in terms of understanding what your passion is and using that to heal the world and heal yourself, is: “Have fun saving the world or you’re just going to depress yourself.”

MONA: I actually struggle with the term “saving the world” because I do think sometimes that lends itself to a bit of Narcissism. I encourage my youth to make a paradigm shift. I think saving the world as a dream can be a little bit problematic. So I usually steer the youth away from that term because of some of the undercurrents of being the savior and saving.

I like to think that the Earth will self-correct, it just might self-correct in a way that is not inhabitable for humans. I don’t think we’re saving anything except our own species; I do think that the Earth has the power to self-correct.

ARTY: What about the part of having fun with your activism or you will become depressed? The statistics of young people, of their anxiety and depression and suicide rates are troubling.

MONA: Most of my friends have teenage kids, so I have a lot of teenagers in my life outside of my job. I think social media has created a lot of issues. There’s a lot of good that’s come out of social media, but I do think it is engineering a very isolated type of person. It’s very hard to have fun in isolation. I believe that social media is basically creating a new type of human, and that concerns me because sometimes when I see teens in a room, they’re not talking to each other, they’re all on their phones.

For leadership week, we bring together this year’s awardees before the Brower Youth Awards ceremony and do activities where we have to take the phone away. We go kayaking and we take the phones so that they don’t get wet. We do a ropes course and we take the phones so they don’t get caught up in the harness and the ropes. We look for activities that are naturally phone free because I’ve seen a lot of isolation from social media use. We jam pack those days with workshops and activities and hikes and meals and discussions. We also have an environmental action through a writing workshop taught by a woman who’s a four-time writer for an HBO series.

Muskan, a Brower Youth Award winner from a few years ago, said it was the best week of her life. This last year, Inaam said that it was one of the best weeks of his life. We have consistently good feedback about leadership week, so we pour more and more resources into it every year.

ARTY: Besides your work honoring and supporting youth leadership, you are an artist and, just recently, the author of a book.

MONA: The book, Water Mamas, is a work of climate fiction, but it is loosely based on my own work doing human rights advocacy in the Amazon. About 20 years ago, I was a case researcher on Sarayaku versus Ecuador. The Indigenous community of Sarayaku sued Ecuador in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for allowing illegal drilling on their land without free, prior and informed consent. After that, I continued to work in the Amazon.

After the Sarayaku, I worked with the Macushi on human rights. I taught a summer abroad program called Indigenous Human Rights in the Amazon. We learned, for example, about how eco-tourism can be a way for Indigenous communities to actualize their rights, their rights to resources, rights to having agency over their lives.

In the book I wanted to explore a tension that I had witnessed, which was environmental science versus Indigenous spirituality. I saw personally that Indigenous mythology was not environmental conservation, but rather it was following spiritual practices and laws that result in good ecosystem management. I wanted to write about how mythology leads to good ecosystem management and can go head-to-head with environmental science.

The book takes place in the not-so-distant future. The Amazon, the Earth’s lungs, are failing, and our lead protagonist is a UN representative who is trying to secure consent from Indigenous communities to start a rain seeding program, which does exist today. It’s used in California. The biggest program is in China. It’s a cloud technology that provides rain. But in the Amazon, there are human rights laws, so the protagonist has to get consent, and some of the tribes do not want to give consent because they fear the manmade rain will hurt their Water Mamas, which are the spirits that live in the forest. So they’re worried about their mythology and their spirituality. The story is a clash of worldviews, Western science versus Indigenous ancestral wisdom with the fate of global climate hanging in the balance.

I used to teach a course in which we talked about the role of culture and natural resource management. I talked about how science is an organized system of knowledge. Western science happens to be the most politically powerful, but there are other valid ways of knowing from cultures around the world. UNESCO, an arm of the UN, recognizes Indigenous knowledge and tries to record as much of it as they can.

How a Healing Crisis Led to Regenerative Agriculture and the Launch of an Ancient Grain Food Business

Crystal Manuel and her husband Jody both come from multigenerational farm families. A debilitating health crisis hit Crystal in the prime of her life, and her remarkable healing journey made them reconsider the risks of exposure to agrochemicals. They transitioned to organic and ultimately regenerative farming practices growing a variety of grains and pulses such as emmer wheat, Spelt, Kamut, Beluga lentils, Red Crimson lentils, Purple Prairie Barley, and Black Chickpeas on their 7400-acre farm which is a mix of cropland and pasture. In the healing process, they also adopted healthier eating habits. Their dedication to eating and growing nutritious whole foods inspired them to start a small business, Gruff Grains, producing Farro, a high protein, nutrient-dense ancient grain. Farrow is the food, Emmer is how it is referred to as a crop in the field. Emmer wheat, one of the earliest domesticated crops, has been cultivated for over 10,000 years and was a dietary staple in the Middle East, Egypt, and Europe. Gruff Grains won a NEXTY Award at the Expo East food show and Crystal won a Maxwell/Hanrahan food award in 2024 for being a whole food educator and organic food entrepreneur.

ARTY MANGAN: How did your health crisis change your approach to farming and impact your life in general?

CRYSTAL MANUEL: I had always been healthy. At the time we’d been married for a few years and had two young children, I got super sick. It happened fairly quickly and unexpectedly, but the doctor I worked with later said it actually took a long time of exposure to toxins to build up to that point.

That sickness literally changed everything. Initially, I was misdiagnosed with adult-onset asthma, but I knew that it was a wrong diagnosis. They wanted me to come back for testing three days after my initial misdiagnosis. I was back home and feeling really sick with a variety of symptoms. I had lost a half-inch swath of hair all around the perimeter of my head. It was so weird. It just fell out. And I had lost 35 pounds in a month. My heart rate was sometimes up to 160 beats per minute. It was complete insanity. I was so short of breath, but that was because my heart was beating so fast. To me it wasn’t making sense.

The day before I was to go to the doctor for the second time for testing, I had nursed the baby and I was laying her down for a nap. I walked down our hallway and I noticed this book on the shelf that had sat there for about three years that my hippie aunt had given it to us as a wedding gift. When she gave it to me, she said: “I know that you don’t know that you need this right now, but you have to promise me you’re not going to toss it into a yard sale box.” For the last 30 years, my aunt had preached that food is medicine, and everybody thought she was crazy. She is my favorite aunt, so I was definitely going to keep the book.

I grabbed that book off the shelf, and read the title, the Prescription for Nutritional Healing, and I thought, “I wonder if I could find some help in this book.”

So, I sat down with the book, with my 2-year-old on my lap, and I started flipping through the pages. On each page is one disease. It talked about the symptoms, and about food and supplements that you could take, and about all the things to avoid. I just sat, flipping pages, looking for my symptoms. On page 211, I found Grave’s Disease, and it described the exact symptoms I had.

The next thing that happened was really wild. I was looking through the section on which supplements to take and which foods to eat to avoid Graves’ disease. The first food listed was cabbage. I can’t even explain to you what happened, but I had an instantaneous craving for cabbage that was unbelievable. It was crazy. I had to have cabbage.

I called Jody and I said, “I know this sounds insane, but I need you to go to town as soon as you can and buy a couple of cabbages and bring them back as quick as you can.” He just started laughing. He thought, “This is the craziest thing you’ve ever asked me to buy for you.”

So he zips to town and he comes back home, and by the time he gets home, I already had a pan of water steaming, the cutting board was out, and I whacked the cabbage in half, and chunked it up, and tossed it into the steaming water. I literally consumed an entire cabbage about 15 minutes later. I have never, to this day, been more satiated from any meal I’ve ever consumed. I’ve had quite a lot of good food fortunately, doing what we do, but that meal was extraordinary. It just felt so good.

That entire experience was a turning point in my life because I realized in that moment that food was medicine. After doing some research, I found that cabbage contains compounds that are very similar to the synthetic components that go in the medication for Graves’ disease. The cabbage is more gentle in the way it responds, but it does the same thing internally that thyroid medications do in terms of calming everything down that’s interconnected with that disease, which is your pituitary gland and your thyroid.

So I ate cabbage, after cabbage, after cabbage. There was not anything in this whole world for several months that sounded better to me than cabbage. It got to the point where I had to force myself to eat other whole foods, but really, all I just wanted was cabbage.

I went back to the doctor the next day, and I don’t know why, but I let him do the test for asthma. He was just so adamant that’s what it was, and I knew it was wrong. The test involved taking some blood. I said to him, “I don’t think I have asthma; I think I have Graves’ disease.” He laughed and said, “You do not have Graves’ disease.” “Well, you’re taking blood anyway, go ahead and test me for it.” So he did.

After the appointment. I drove 15 minutes back to the ranch. By the time I got home, there was already a message on my machine from the lab that said you did test positive for Graves’ disease; we need you to come in immediately. I thought, no, I just diagnosed myself so I’m not going to go back to you.

I ended up seeing a few doctors, and they wanted to remove my thyroid. They said you are advanced, we’ve got to do something quick. Jody pleaded, “Please just listen to them.” I was so sick, but I just kept saying no.

When I asked the doctors what causes an autoimmune disease like Graves’, they said they didn’t know. They wanted to use radioactive iodine to kill off part of my thyroid, or remove it completely. Either way, I would need synthetic medication to mimic the job of the thyroid. But I knew that the cabbage was working, so I said no.

I finally found a doctor who agreed that food can be used as medicine, but everything he knew about it was self-taught. He said, “I didn’t learn anything about this in medical school, but I have studied on my own. I do think there’s something to it, but, I must say, that I’ve never had anybody walk into my office with a holistic nutrition book and claim that cabbage was part of the cure. But I see you’re determined, so if you do as much as you can with food, I’ll do as little as I have to with medicine, and we’re going to see if we can pull this thing off. But here’s the thing: it took you a long time to get sick. I know that you think it happened quickly, but it builds up and when you get to the tipping point, the symptoms appear. To overcome this, if it’s even possible, it’s going to take a while.”

*Crystal and Jody with their son on their ranch in Montana*

He was right about that. It took a little over two years before I was normal again. But I did continually get better, but it was very incremental.

I was super curious about autoimmune diseases and what caused them. I felt that removing my thyroid wasn’t going to fix anything except for an over-active thyroid, but I still wouldn’t understand why I was sick. What would go wrong next if I don’t try to address the root cause?

When I did a search on what causes an autoimmune disease, it listed agrochemicals as one of the known culprits. There were other things on the list as well, but I knew that I had had a lot of exposure to that sort of thing in our farming environment.

We began deep diving into the research, and we learned about the correlation between food and chemicals and pharmaceutical companies. So we immediately began making incremental changes on how we were farming. It took a handful of years to completely transition to organic because when you convert to an organic system, you have to have a three-year transition period on any ground that has been sprayed. So we broke up some virgin ground and had fields that were certifiable right away, but we had to wait for the fields that had been chemically treated in the past to go through the transition period. I got sick in 1997 and by 2007, we had converted everything over to organic.

ARTY: That’s an incredible story in so many different ways. I’m skeptical about Western medicine as well. But it is good to hear that there are doctors who do integrative medicine and will customize a healing regime that’s right for you. So, you changed your diet. You’re not exposing yourself and your family to agrochemicals. How are you feeling?

CRYSTAL: Amazing. After it took those two years to heal, I finally went to the doctor to do blood tests, and he said, “You made it. Everything is perfect. We can stop all medications.” And I’ve never taken them since. That was in 1999.

I can never say that I absolutely know that agrochemicals are what caused my disease, but I do know that I had a ton of exposure to them and that they are linked to Graves’ disease.

A few years after all of that, my Mom encouraged me to get a medical checkup. I was feeling really healthy but I made an appointment anyway. The doctor looked at my chart and said, “I had no idea that you were so sick with Graves’ disease. Whoever did your surgery did an incredible job. Usually you can see the scar.” I just started laughing. I told her that I didn’t have surgery. She said, “I’ve never seen anybody so sick not do surgery for this.” She was concerned and recommended a blood test. A week later she called and said, “What I learned in medical school versus what your test results are saying don’t really match up. I know that you did the medications, but there had to have been something else for you to overcome this. There must be something that’s missing from your chart. What was it? Do you have any idea?” I just started laughing, and said, “Well, yeah, it was cabbage.”

ARTY: That’s such a wonderful story, with a wonderful outcome. Congratulations on the strength of your convictions. Talk about the turning point when you decided to change the way you and Jody farmed.

CRYSTAL: We knew that if we were going to stay in agriculture, we had to grow food organically. That was a pretty bold statement for us to make because at the time, my father-in-law was also working the farm, and he thought we were crazy. None of this made sense to him, and none of our neighbors were organic farmers. You learn when you talk to people who farm organically that that’s usually the case – their neighbors, their family members just don’t understand why somebody would go through what you go through to farm organically because in a commercialized system, everything is easy. There’s a spray or a synthetic fertilizer for any problem that you might have.

My father-in-law thought we were making a very unwise decision. He literally said, “This is never going to work and you’re going to go broke.” But we had to give it a try or otherwise stop farming altogether.

So we went to an organic farming convention, and we ended up meeting the most incredible, outside-the-box thinking people: farmers, gardeners, orchardists. Everyone was so passionate about what they were doing and were so willing to share information. They cared about people, and health, and the food system, and all the things that had been resonating with us. So we knew we had found our tribe.

We started growing lentils for the Timeless food company. Lentils are a legume that naturally put nitrogen in the soil. Liz Carlisle wrote a book called The Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America and we were one of the farms she wrote about. The book got publicity and we started getting calls from companies like Dave’s Killer Bread and Annie’s (the organic mac and cheese company).

Annie’s sent out a whole team of people. At that point we were farming regeneratively. They knew that the regenerative was going to be a trend in the market, and they wanted to be on board with it because of the climate-friendly aspects.

For several years prior to all of that, I had become passionate about education on the health benefits of whole food, so I co-wrote a series of classes. Talking with these companies made me realize I wanted to do something different and I’d always had this entrepreneurial spirit. I told Jody that if we started our own food company, we probably could educate the consumer audience better than other companies because we live and breathe it every day on the farm. That’s how the concept for the Gruff Grains came about. Our tagline is “Nutrient-dense ancient grains for your family’s health.”

We had reached out to Montana’s oldest food company, Cream of the West, a hot cereal company. They started in 1914 by farmers and ranchers who wanted to get healthy food into the hands of people. They agreed to co-pack for us.

With the help of a USDA grant, we developed our product. About six months into the process, we found out Cream of the West–a legacy Montana-based company producing whole grain hot cereals–wanted to sell the company. We panicked; we didn’t want to lose our co-packer. They asked us if we wanted to buy the company. I thought it was crazy–it was a fully functioning company three-and-a-half hours from the ranch. But Jody decided we should do it. So we bought the company.

ARTY: So now you and Jody are growing Farro (which when it is growing in the field is called Emmer) and process it into grits and sell it under the Gruff Grains label.

CRYSTAL: We refer to Gruff as a mission with a brand. What I want to do with that company is explain to people what’s happening in the food industry, specifically concerning grains in the US because that category has been adulterated.

At the turn of the century, when industrial steel mills, which were more efficient, replaced stone mills, they began separating out the bran and the germ from the endosperm. Every kernel of wheat has three components – the bran, the germ, and the endosperm. To make white flour, you strip out the bran and the germ, but the problem with doing that is you take out more than 20 naturally occurring vitamins and minerals, all the healthy oils and fats, and all of the fiber. When they began doing that, people started getting sick with all kinds of diseases – beriberi, Pellagra, anemia, and other things.

In order to remedy that situation, they made a very profitable but unhealthy decision; they created five synthetic vitamins, and added some iron, and put it into white flour so that they would have something to say on the nutrition label, and they could take care of the symptoms of some of these diseases that were arising due to the lack of nutrients in white flour.

Today, there are a lot of people with serious gluten sensitivities who are avoiding wheat altogether and going gluten free. But, it’s not that grain is dangerous in and of itself. If it’s ancient and if it’s grown organically, and if it’s a whole food, most people do not have any problem with it. In fact we have all kinds of testimonies from people who have tried our product–our ancient grain grits made from Farro–saying, “Thank you for helping us understand this. We can enjoy grain again, and we understand how to make better choices.” As a company, this is the kind of information we want to share with people.

Sharing that kind of information is what pumps us up. People are consuming loads of enriched flour; it’s in everything: cold cereals, crackers, fast foods, pizza. It’s almost impossible to avoid enriched flour.

Because everything natural has been stripped out of it, it causes spikes in blood sugar. The nutrients that actually aid in the digestion of the grain have been removed in white flour. Conventionally grown wheat is sprayed with chemicals which end up in the food supply and wreak havoc on the gut microbiome as well.

Enriched flour is linked to a very long list of modern diseases, but very few people are making the correlation that if they switch to whole grains they could achieve better health.

ARTY: Absolutely. White flour is pretty close to white sugar in the way the body metabolizes it, both have empty calories that drive diet-related disease.

CRYSTAL: People are starting to figure that part out, but oftentimes they think they have to avoid grain completely. But, for most people, that’s not necessary. Gruff Grains is grits made from Farro, an ancient wheat traced back to Roman times. For people who want to learn more about Farro and how to cook it, we have recipes on our website.

Our mission with Gruff Grains is to bring this ancient, whole grain to the marketplace with the highest certification possible, that’s why we got the Regenerative Organic certification (ROC). We also want it to be part of the farm-to-fork movement so it has to be traceable back to the farm where it was grown so we can tell the farmer’s story. Most grain goes through a mill and gets mixed together with grains from many different farms.

We also want people to understand what it takes to farm regeneratively. Since we got the Regenerative Organic Certification, we’ve begun working with a number of other food companies. We’re the only ROC farm in the world that grows Kernza, a perennial grain that we contract exclusively with Patagonia Provisions to grow. We’ve also sold crops to Purely Elizabeth’s granola company, and a handful of others. It’s definitely been an interesting journey.

Learn more about Gruff Grains and Farro

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Colorado Mountain Becomes the First Mountain in the U.S. to Own Itself

On June 7, 2025, a quiet but revolutionary shift in law and land took place in Colorado. A Mountain in the San Luis Valley became the first mountain in the United States to legally own itself. Through Sacred Contract’s Land That Owns Itself program, the mountain now holds its own deed, protected from future development or extraction.

The project is part of a growing global movement to rethink humanity’s relationship with nature. While Rights of Nature laws have gained traction worldwide, the recent project represents a new frontier: ecosystems themselves holding legal title to the land they comprise.

One of the legal architects behind this groundbreaking work is Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER) and a founding member of Sacred Contract, a partnership between CDER, Regenerative Earth, and the Center for Ethical Land Transition. Linzey drafted the world’s first Rights of Nature law in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, in 2006, and later consulted with Ecuador’s constitutional convention to help write Rights of Nature into the country’s 2008 constitution. His decades of work have reshaped how communities and governments think about law, property, and the natural world.

We spoke with Linzey about how the concept of land that owns itself came to be, what makes this project unique, and the potential future of this legal experiment.

Bioneers: Thomas, could you provide some background on how the concept of Land That Owns Itself evolved, and how it led to the recent project?

Thomas Linzey: We’ve been involved in Rights of Nature work for a long time. Back in 2006, we drafted the first Rights of Nature law and later worked with Ecuador’s constitutional convention to embed it into their national constitution. Over the years, the work has evolved. About ten years ago, we began experimenting with conservation easements. In places where local governments weren’t willing to pass Rights of Nature laws, we helped landowners incorporate legal rights of ecosystems into their deeds. That way, the land title itself would recognize Rights of Nature, not just the law.

But some landowners pushed us further. They asked: Even if the deed recognizes Rights of Nature, isn’t the land still owned by humans? What if nature could actually own itself? At first, we thought it was impossible. Western law is fundamentally built on the idea that nature is property. That system is so ingrained that people rarely question it.

Still, we took the challenge seriously and spent about a year researching how to create a legal structure that treated ecosystems not as property but as their own titleholders. Out of that came the Land That Owns Itself concept — ecosystems legally holding title to the land they comprise.

In 2023, we tested the idea in Washington State with a two-acre forest parcel. That project succeeded, and if you look in the county deed book, you’ll see the forest itself listed as holding its own deed.

The recent project in Colorado builds on that proof of concept. It represents the first full expression of the project; not only does the land own itself, but it is also guided by Indigenous and local guardians in a majority-led Indigenous council. That makes it a more complete model of how this approach can work in practice, with a majority of the guardians having an ancestral relationship to the Land through their indigenous lineage.

Bioneers: Do you see this concept of Land That Owns Itself as the future of Rights of Nature?

Linzey: Yes. I believe this model has even greater potential than the original Rights of Nature work. For me, it’s also personal. Over the last 30 years, I’ve heard many landowners say, I don’t see myself as the owner, I see myself as a steward. That’s a beautiful sentiment, but in reality, the law says you own that land. You hold legal control. And when you die, it often ends up in the hands of someone who doesn’t share your values. Sometimes it goes to the state and is sold to the highest bidder, and then exploited.

So while it’s nice to think of ourselves as stewards, the legal system doesn’t recognize that. It still positions people as dominant and nature as property. Until we change that fundamental property relationship, the problems remain.

That’s why this model matters. It doesn’t just change how people think, it gives them a legal alternative. If you believe you’re a steward, this makes it real: The land owns itself, and you step into a genuine role as guardian or trustee. It replaces myth with legal reality.

It also expands more quickly than traditional lawmaking. Individual landowners can adopt it for their parcels, and municipalities could even create transition funds to help shift land into this structure. We’re already hearing from landowners with thousands of acres and from older people without heirs who want to protect their land this way.

When it comes to Indigenous sovereignty, the implications are profound. Think about Land Back. Colonizers took Native land and imposed a Western property system — titles, deeds, lines on maps. Today, when land is returned, it often comes back through that same colonized system. It’s essentially saying: We broke it, but we’ll give it back to you on the condition that you accept it in the legal form that we imposed on it.

Land That Owns Itself offers a different path. Many of our clients are tribal governments and Indigenous communities. For them, this model can feel more aligned with their philosophies because it decolonizes the property framework. The land isn’t “owned” in the Western sense. Instead, ecosystems hold title, and Indigenous communities step into guardianship roles. That gives them real decision-making authority without requiring ownership — a concept historically foreign to many Indigenous traditions.

We fully support Land Back as it exists today. It’s far better than the status quo. But we see Land That Owns Itself as a more philosophically consistent way of decolonizing property, restoring sovereignty, and recognizing nature’s inherent rights.

Bioneers: So how does this work in practice, and how will it be sustained over the long term?

Linzey: When the entity is created to hold the deed, it’s the ecosystems themselves — the flora, fauna, climate, and water — joining together to create that legal entity. The ecosystems themselves are the legal members of the entity, with humans then serving as their voices or guardians.

Those guardians sign a legal document that spells out their duties and obligations. When the Indigenous-led guardianship council signed that document for the “mountain that owns itself” in Colorado three months ago, they agreed to very specific responsibilities: recognizing the Rights of Nature, acting in the best interests of the ecosystems, and avoiding any action that would infringe on those rights.

To add another safeguard, we placed an easement on the land before the transfer. That easement sets additional limits on what the guardians can do, so even if they stray from their responsibilities in generations ahead, the land remains protected.

Looking ahead, new guardians will need to step in over time, and an endowment is essential to sustain the work. The vision isn’t just to freeze the land as it is today, but to restore it to a healthier state. Some past activities disrupted the mountain’s ecological balance, and broader restoration projects are still needed, from rewilding to repairing ecological damage.

That’s why Sacred Contract is currently working on a $5 million fundraising campaign to establish a permanent endowment. The fund will support the guardians in their stewardship and ensure that resources are always available for the restoration and long-term care of the land.

Bioneers: Looking to the future, how do you see this concept growing?

Linzey: What excites me is how this model can extend beyond the land parcel, which changes ownership. If a river has recognized rights within one property, in theory, we can enforce those rights upstream against owners outside the original deed. We call that extra-jurisdictional enforcement. It’s a way for small parcels to exert much larger influence over state permits, fracking operations, factory farms — anything that affects the ecosystems tied to that land.

The bigger challenge is cultural. In this country, property ownership is so deeply ingrained that few people even question the concept. For this work to take hold, the critique of property along with the alternative vision we’re building has to grow alongside these projects.

That said, the future is already taking shape. In Colorado, we have two additional parcels near the mountain that we hope to fold into the same structure. The broader vision is what we call “nodes.” The first node is the San Luis Valley, where the “mountain that owns itself” sits at the northeastern edge. The long-term idea is a patchwork of land across the valley, so instead of just a mountain that owns itself, you have a valley that owns itself.

Beyond Colorado, interest is spreading. We’ve been approached by landowners in New York, Vermont, Costa Rica, and the UK. In England, lawyers are already working to replicate the model, and we’re funding a feasibility study there with three pilot projects — one of them over a thousand acres.

The goal is to establish the concept here, then adapt and scale it in other regions. In that sense, the “mountain that owns itself” is not the endpoint, but rather the beginning of something much larger.

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