An interview with Chloe Smith, multi-instrumental musician, co-leader (with her sister, Leah Song) of the American musical group, Rising Appalachia, conducted by Bioneers Arts Coordinator, Polina Smith.
About Rising Appalachia: Rooted in various folk traditions, storytelling, and passionate grassroots activism, the band routinely provides a platform for local causes wherever it plays and frequently incites its fans to gather with it in converting vacant or underused lots into verdant urban orchards and gardens. In a time of social unraveling, Rising Appalachia’s unique interweaving of music and social mission and old traditions with new interpretations exudes contagious hope and deep integrity.
POLINA SMITH: What was the genesis of Rising Appalachia?
CHLOE SMITH: The group arose out of a combination of what our family passed to us musically and culturally, our rootedness in community, our burning impulse to self-expression, and the bridge between sibling brains.
POLINA: How has the pandemic changed your trajectory? What have been the challenges and the gifts this crisis has brought you?
CHLOE: We had been aiming to take a sabbatical in 2021 anyway, so we are taking this year as an early sabbatical and mostly using this time to rest our bodies from the rigors of touring (which we had been doing a lot of for years) as well as to write new material. Leah and I have been in a songwriting class since March with a few other women in our music circle, and that has proved to be immensely nourishing in these times. It’s given us an incentive to write but not to rush to perform. Artists need that cave from time to time.
I believe we all know the challenges of the times, especially for those parts of the entertainment industries that rely almost completely on live shows for revenue streams. Leah and I have also been apart this whole time, which has been challenging. Still, we try hard to be optimistic for the sake of moving the needle upwards when so many people are down. It’s an ebb and flow for all of us, with good days and bad days. The silver lining is that we are each forced to rethink how we were working in this world and whether or not it was sustainable for our bodies, our resources, our families, and the world. I believe there will be some poignant innovation coming out of this time.
POLINA: What are your ultimate dreams and vision for Rising Appalachia?
CHLOE: We don’t have any ultimate goals or visions, to be quite honest. We make art to respond to the times, to reflect our inner and outer world, to be an extension of our souls and spirits. There has never been an endgame or final place we were reaching towards, simply a following of a golden thread along life’s many routes.
POLINA: What do you believe is the role of art and music in social justice movements in general, and in this time specifically?
CHLOE: To add umph and spark to movements, to bring people together, to try to make sense of the times as well as to continue the conversation that has been happening through art for millennia. In the time of the pandemic, art is still finding its way to come through and make us laugh, cry, and remember our place in the grand scheme of things. There is so much noise and news and chatter, some of it really important but it’s wildly distracting as well. Perhaps music can bring us to our center throughout these hard times and strengthen our missions with a little bit of magic and a sprinkle of soul.
POLINA: What are you most excited about your participation in the upcoming online Bioneers Conference?
CHLOE: The cross pollination: it’s always been fascinating for us to collaborate with people outside the art sphere, to see how creativity can lend a hand to design and science and education and justice and all the things Bioneers works towards. Rising Appalachia has always thrived in diverse spaces where music is not the main focus but an accent to a larger conversation.
POLINA: What would your message to young artists be right now?
CHLOE: Stay in charge of your art, stay ahead of it. Don’t pass it up or pawn it off for money before you can really comprehend what it is that you want to do or say. True art is quite radical and untethered. Make sure you have learned some ropes of the world, some business skills and some honing of craft. Then, if you want to build a team, you can do it with backbone and experience.
POLINA: Thank you so much Chloe, for taking the time to speak with us, we can’t wait to see you at the Bioneers Conference and to continue to follow your extraordinary journey!
Psilocybin mushrooms have been used for millennia by several cultures from Europe to Mesoamerica. More than 116 species have been identified thus far in the genus Psilocybe alone. New scientific evidence is pointing to the fact that, not only can they be psycho-spiritually transformative, but they are capable of stimulating neurogenesis, i.e. the growth of nervous system tissue. These recent discoveries show psilocybin’s potential for helping address such conditions as depression and anxiety, but perhaps as well to help prevent dementia, Alzheimer’s and other neuropathies. In fact, they may increase intelligence. But these exciting new findings have generated a rush of investors seeking to corner medicalized psilocybin, which raises the question: Should psilocybin mushrooms come to market as People’s Medicine or Profit Medicine? Paul Stamets, one of the world’s leading authors, inventors, educators and entrepreneurs in the field of mycology, and very possibly the planet’s foremost expert on psilocybin mushrooms, shares his thoughts on the latest research and the rapidly evolving landscape of psychedelic medicine.
Paul Stamets delivered this talk at the 2020 Bioneers Conference, introduced by Kenny Ausubel.
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Paul Stamets, speaker, author, award-winning mycologist, medical researcher, groundbreaking mycological entrepreneur, and a visionary thought leader in the study of fungi and their uses in promoting human health, ecological restoration, and detoxification of the environment, is the author of six books, including: Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save The World, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, and Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World. Paul has discovered and named numerous new species of psilocybin mushrooms and is the founder and owner of Fungi Perfecti, LLC, makers of the Host Defense Mushrooms supplement line. And Paul’s work has now entered mainstream popular culture. The new Star Trek: Discovery series features a Lt. Paul Stamets, Science Officer and Astromycologist(!). Learn more about Paul Stamets at his website.
In this Bioneers video, Paul Stamets shares how fungus extract can be used as medicine for bees to help save their dying colonies in a way that connects us back to the Earth.
In this episode of The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature podcast, Paul Stamets reveals astonishing evidence of how nature’s solutions surpass our conception of what’s possible to radically restore ecosystems and human health.
Explore more from Paul Stamets and other experts. These remarkable video and audio presentations, essays and interviews cover a wide spectrum, including: emerging scientific research, the history of psychedelics, their use as healing agents, and their socio-cultural impacts.
Underrepresented populations, including BIPOC and gender non-conforming people, are often on the frontlines of justice movements. Existing at the compounding intersections of state violence, these groups have developed an adaptive ability to see the world with astonishing moral and political clarity. They are illuminating new ways toward liberation in which everyone benefits, and yet they remain the least funded. What does it mean when the majority of philanthropic funds go toward white-led organizations? How can philanthropy pivot to support initiatives from more diverse groups?
Vanessa Daniel is the founder and Executive Director of Groundswell Fund and Groundswell Action Fund, two organizations that support grassroots organizing led by gender non-conforming people and women of color. In the following keynote address, edited for length and clarity, Daniel forces us to reckon with the urgency of the current moment. Her call to action is simple. We can no longer afford to wait — the time for change is now.
Vanessa Daniel
We are in an important time in history for donors and foundations to give boldly to support social justice movements, and to heed the call of grassroots leaders like Ash-Lee Henderson of the Highlander Center and the Movement for Black Lives, who says to us: “Fund us like you want us to win.”
The clock is running down on our planet, so winning is not some theoretical political scorecard, it’s about whether humanity survives or not. And as someone who leads a foundation that’s trying to heed that call, I’m really excited to dig into thinking about how we can all do that in philanthropy.
I truly believe that humanity has every single thing that we need to build a better world. We have all the resources we need to ensure that every single person has enough food, housing, education, medical care, a planet to inherit, and opportunity. We have an embarrassment of riches in our social justice movements, and grassroots leaders who are so clear on how we get there.
One of the most stunning gifts that humanity has been given and that we must turn toward in order to survive is the leadership of women of color and transgender and gender non-conforming people of color. These are the people who have lived their lives at the sharpest cross sections of oppression and, as a result, have developed an adaptive ability to see the world with 360-degree vision.
360-degree vision is about the ability to see and to tackle any issue with an intersectional lens, that dismantles white supremacy, patriarchy, extractive capitalism and colonialism simultaneously. 360 vision reveals the solution to any issue that it examines. For example, take the issue of gun control: Through an intersectional lens, we are able to see that banning assault rifles is good, but it’s not enough when the majority of mass shootings are carried out by white men with a history of battering women, and white nationalism. We have to dismantle white supremacy and toxic masculinity in this country; for youth of color who are living in this pressure cooker of poverty, police brutality and deportations, we have to demilitarize our communities in order to see the violence abate.
We can look at the issue of climate change through that lens and understand that strategies of parts per billion carbon reduction are insufficient, that we really need a just transition that’s grounded in the wisdom of Native environmental protectors, grounded in the health and well-being of jobs for people who are in frontline communities, that that’s what’s needed to save and to come back into right relationship with our planet.
When we turn to reproductive freedom in this country, we understand that the legal right to access for abortion is critically important. But it’s not enough when millions of people can’t access that right because they’re poor, an immigrant or transgender. We have to expand access and public funding for abortion, but that alone is not enough. We also have to end the violence happening to communities that’s preventing people from having kids, environmental pollution that’s causing poor reproductive health outcomes, mass incarceration, and discrimination in our medical systems.
In every single social justice movement, there is a set of organizations with this kind of lens, and overwhelmingly they’re led by women of color, and transgender, and gender non-conforming people of color, and they’re like bright flashlights. They’re shining a light on the way to freedom for all of us. We all benefit when they’re able to shine the light brighter. And funders and donors have a role to play in supporting them to do that.
I lead two public foundations. One is Groundswell Fund, which is a 501(c)3, and the other is Groundswell Action Fund, which is a 501(c)4. They are both grand experiments in building community across race, class, and gender. We have 500 mostly white women, individual donors, and 40 private foundations, who are giving us resources that we will distribute to the grassroots. But the people who decide where the resources go, the people who created and run Groundswell, are women of color and transgender people of color who come out of grassroots organizing.
Because we decide, we have created an irrigation system for movement over the last 10 years that now moves those resources to 150 organizations that are doing intersectional organizing, and that are mostly led by women of color, with a particular focus on folks who are Black, Indigenous, and transgender. We’ve been able to accomplish some things we’re proud of, moving over $65 million to the field, including early support for many of the organizations that were so critical in states like Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania in this election.
What unites us as a community is one thing: We believe that the full truth is important and human beings will neither realize freedom or survive if we tell half truths. If we tell the truth about climate change, we must also name the existence of patriarchy; if we tell the truth about capitalism, we must also name the impact of white supremacy; if we tell the truth about LGBTQ+ rights we must also name the caustic effects of xenophobia. We must tell the whole truth, and that work begins by lifting up the truth tellers, the people who are brave enough to break the spell of denial that so many progressive movements have been under and are keeping us from winning.
Lesson number one that we learned at Groundswell is this: The way all people get to freedom is by following the people who know the way. It was Latinx and Native people who flipped Arizona when other people thought it was impossible. One of our grantees, Luca, together with their coalition partners, knocked on 1.5 million doors. They registered 200,000 people to vote. Their executive director shared with us through tears after the election what it was like to see people coming back day after day to canvass voters, after burying loved ones to COVID. After losing jobs in this economic environment and being crammed multiple families in single apartments.
The Navajo Nation, which was most impacted by COVID, turned out at an incredible 89% to vote. API people in Pennsylvania made 1.3 million calls to people in 10 languages, voters who’ve been ignored by so many other electoral operations. And Black women, the backbone of our democracy and the vanguard of social justice movements who, even after the theft of the governorship of Stacy Abrams through horrendous voter suppression two years ago, picked themselves back up and through sheer grit and determination, fighting for their lives and the lives of their children, made a way for their state and for our country.
Here is something philanthropists must reckon with: What does it mean when the political and moral clarity of Black women is unparalleled by any other group in this country, and yet they are one of the least funded groups? What does it mean when Native people, who were responsible for the margin of victory in so many states, remain largely invisible to electoral donors? The margin of victory that people of color created in this election with women of color at the helm is not identity politics, it’s math.
What does it mean for the hope of freedom for all of us when the majority of philanthropic dollars continue to go to white people and organizations led by white people, when white women voted in even larger proportion for Trump after four years of seeing what he was capable of? What does it mean when white men, who are responsible for leading us into pretty much every disaster we are in as a country and as a planet, supported putting Trump back in the White House more than any other group and supported more than any other group putting a rapist on our Supreme Court? What does it mean when that is the group that receives the vast majority of philanthropic resources?
What does it mean when donors think the electoral playbook that most white liberal organizations use is the one that works? This election was a total repudiation of a conventional voter engagement playbook, and by extension, most of the philanthropic dollars that support it. The victory against Trump occurred in spite of, not because of, dollars wasted on targeting white swing voters. It occurred in spite of dollars wasted on parachuting GOTV infrastructure into states six weeks before an election with a plan to pull it right out the day after, in spite of millions of dollars spent on ads to project messages that were polled and tested and found to be safe with voters. It was a victory won by organizers of color, particularly black women who had the good sense to throw that playbook out and organize in the way that they know works: building relationships with voters year round, year after year, on the issues that their communities care about, using bold messages that really resonate with their people. And most of all, they’re tackling problems in an intersectional way.
So lesson number one is to support, fund, follow the people who know the way. Lesson number two is to open the flood gates. Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party and the Movement for Black Lives says it so beautifully. He says “Biden is a doorway, not a destination.”
When Obama won, progressives took our foot off the gas. We mistook access for power. We mistook representation for power. We made a mistake, we missed an opportunity, and we can’t afford to do that again.
There’s no more time that’s been added to the clock of the planet, to reproductive freedom of women, trans and gender non-conforming people in this country, to the possibility of our democracy. Time is running out. Movements cannot downshift; they have to floor it with bold public pressure for decisive action on climate change, and racial, gender and economic justice. And funders and donors have to show up and open full throttle with the scale of resources that’s required to allow them to do that. Our imagination and our giving cannot be calibrated to what’s possible and seems radical to the very low bar that we’ve been at. It must be calibrated to the bar that we have to reach to save our planet.
We need to ditch the payout. We need to spend down. We need to cut the red tape to make it easier for grantees to apply for funding. We need to stretch beyond 501(c)3 voices to support people of color-led 501(c)4s and political PACs that are rooted and organizing year round in their communities. We need to be prepared to ignore financial advisors when they tell us that it’s time to pull back because there’s a recession coming. We need to understand that they may have a myopic fixation on the stock market, but that we see a bigger picture about saving our planet and the window in time in which we have to do it. We need to be prepared to tell them they’re no such thing as a rainy day fund because the rainy day is now.
In closing, I want to remind us that it’s an opportunity that we have now. Fund the people who know the way to freedom. Open the flood gates for flexible, general support and ongoing funding to deep organizing led by people of color, and particularly women of color, transgender and gender non-conforming people of color.
There’s no one coming to save us. Every one of us who’s alive now, who’s able to take action, we are the team on the field. There’s no guarantee that in 30 years some future generation is going to have the time left on the clock of the planet to do what we were too afraid to do, to be bold where we were timid, to act where we hesitated. This is our moment. This is it. This is our shot. Let’s be brave and make it count.
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Vanessa Daniel, a former union organizer and longtime social justice activist, is an award-winning innovator in the field of philanthropy. She founded and is Executive Director of Groundswell Fund, the largest funder of the U.S. reproductive justice movement, and of Groundswell Action Fund, the largest U.S. institution helping fund women of color-led 501c4 organizations. Groundswell, among other achievements, is the country’s only fund dedicated to supporting access to midwifery and doula care for women of color, low-income women and transgender people; and funds a women-of-color-led Integrated Voter Engagement training program as well. Vanessa also serves on the board of the Common Counsel Foundation.
This Bioneers podcast features courageous and eloquent women environmental and social justice leaders – journalist Rose Aguilar, biologist Sandra Steingraber, and reproductive justice advocates Vanessa Daniel and Eveline Shen – sharing their stories of how the leadership of women is changing the story and the world.
Read Groundswell Fund’s blueprint for removing barriers that reproductive justice organizations face, enabling these organizations to strengthen and scale their work.
Mari Margil and Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, leading figures in the global movement to recognize the legal rights of ecosystems and nature, share exciting recent developments in that effort. They highlight breakthroughs in tribal nations, communities, and countries around the world. They explain how advancing the rights of nature in legal codes and constitutions can lead to a radical transformation in humankind’s relationship with the natural world.
Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil delivered this talk at the 2020 Bioneers Conference, introduced by Kenny Ausubel.
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Mari Margil, Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, leads its International Center for the Rights of Nature. Previously Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, she assisted the first places in the world to secure the Rights of Nature in law, including Ecuador. She works internationally as well as with Indigenous peoples and tribal nations to advance Rights of Nature legal and policy frameworks. Mari is a co-author of: The Bottom Line or Public Health and Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence. Learn more about Mari Margil.
Thomas Linzey, Senior Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), co-founded the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and the Daniel Pennock Democracy School (which has graduated over 5,000 lawyers, activists, and municipal officials nationally to fight to elevate the rights of their communities over corporate rights). He is the author of several books, including: Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community; On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability; and co-author of: We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States. Learn more about Thomas Linzey.
Nature is not our property. Communities are now passing legislation to recognize the legally binding rights of nature. In this Bioneers video, we show how this spreading network is honoring and upholding the personhood of the environment, instead of the personhood of the corporations destroying it.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have long been held as the inalienable rights of the American people. Then why is it that corporate personhood consistently overrides the legal rights of citizens? And what about the rights of nature? Do rivers, mountains, whales or ecosystems – have inalienable rights that guarantee their interests? In this Bioneers podcast, Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil describe breakthroughs on the ground that are redefining democracy. In the 21st century, is it time to move from a Declaration of Independence to a Declaration of Interdependence?
The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights offers trainings on democratic rights and community rights, and the rights of nature. The workshops are available for communities, NGOs, lawyers, academics, activists, and government officials around the world. Learn more.
In a world on fire with multiple, epochal crises, how do we nurture hope, build power and contribute meaningfully? How do we catalyze and sustain the personal and collective transformations this immense planetary challenge calls for? Though the problems seem larger than life, our greatest power may in fact lie in our closest communities, in small daily acts of courage and conviction, in small groups of unstoppable world-changers, and small gardens that revitalize communities and reconnect us to nature’s operating instructions.
Trathen Heckman delivered this talk at the 2020 Bioneers Conference, introduced by Kenny Ausubel.
Good morning, Bioneers!
It’s easy to get overtaken by the power of Big these days. With so much that feels crushing in this time, we lose sight of the power of our small daily actions. But can small make a big enough difference in this time?
Around 25 years ago, I began to wake up to the painful state of people and the planet we share. The people i’ve met who felt the hurt the most were somehow more alive than just tapped into that pain. They were developing regenerative farms, protecting forests, and establishing gardens. When I attended my first Bioneers conference I got my heart, mind, and paradigm cracked open being with thousands of world-changers.
It was a tragedy that transformed my experience in meeting these people into my own initiative when I lost my mother after 9/11. These painful experiences and their innovative power inspired me to start Daily Acts. I started Daily Acts around the idea that we could change the world in a garden by reclaiming the power of our daily actions. Despite a large amount of hurt in our lives and our world, there are amazing spaces all around us where things we nourish will grow.
Daily Acts started with sustainability tours to expose people to the many facets of a better world being born. These tours led us to do skill-building workshops with greywater, where we installed the first permitted household greywater system in our community. This greywater project paved the way for California’s state graywater policy.
Next, we partnered with the City of Petaluma to plant a garden. At that time, the best practice for municipal water conservation was to tear up thousands of years of topsoil and take it to a landfill where it emits greenhouse gases. Instead of doing that, we suggested we plant a food forest.
A food forest is an edible ecosystem that saves water, harvests rain, builds soil, sequesters carbon, grows food, and has many other benefits. We got the approval to move forward with the project and it led to planting another public food forest in a different city. We started working on civic incentive programs to spread these landscapes through numerous communities. Within a couple of months, 350.org had its first day of global climate action, and Daily Acts helped mobilize hundreds of volunteers. We transformed the city hall landscape in a day, moving mountains of mulch, and saved a million gallons of water.
As the climate crisis continued to grow, we realized that we use our gardening initiative to call attention to climate change and community-based solutions. In partnership with dozens of agencies, businesses and organizations, the community we were organizing rose to the challenge and planted 628 gardens in a single day.
The power of our small community scale efforts began to culminate into institutional change that began when we got the water department thinking about food and community engagement and the health department thinking about climate, water, and the local economy.
At this point, Daily Acts had been an organization for about a decade. As a result of the power of community, we are primarily volunteer-powered with two-three staff. When small groups think and act like a garden, or an ecosystem, they can engage a wide range of stakeholders towards a larger goal.
Daily Acts keep evolving our efforts in education, collaborative action, community mobilizations all through tapping into nature’s most common pattern that Bioneers knows so well: nurturing community through networks. We started getting engaged in coalitions and utilizing another systems change strategy of working at a range of scales, and we were working from local to international with grassroots groups.
Daily Acts leadership institute was brought into existence through fostering collaborative partnerships with local, grassroots, national, and international groups. We refused to lose sight of leadership in our community and led a 500-persons fellows’ network.
In 2017, my wife and I woke up to the news of the North Bay fires which devastated Northern California. We jumped into action, and we immediately started convening and connecting with dozens of organizations, businesses, and agency partners. Within a couple of weeks, we’d helped launch three new initiatives: protect watersheds, bring community voice and equity to the forefront of the recovery conversation, and launch a grassroots fund with half a dozen partner organization to raise and distribute over $300,000 to undocumented workers, family farms, and grassroots organizations. The government is often siloed and unprepared for such devastation. Our job was to connect community members, agencies, and departments as part of our philosophy of thinking and acting like a garden ecosystem.
On the one-year anniversary of the North Bay fires, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dropped its most alarming report yet as the global youth climate movement rapidly emerges and demonstrates the power of small. Locally, Daily Acts helped launch Climate Action Petaluma to work with our city and our community to prioritize equitable climate action. In working with the city, Petaluma became the first city in Sonoma county to declare a climate emergency. The declarations of climate emergencies spread rapidly through most of the other cities in the county. Within six months, we helped create the first county climate action policy commission at the city scale. A third of the commission came to be led by women of color including our vice-chair/ friend/ ally, Black First Nations Climate Justice organizer, Kailea Frederick.
Daily Acts, along with dozens of volunteers, worked with our climate action commission in Petaluma and created a bold draft climate emergency framework. We are lucky to have climate champions on the council, including our vice mayor who is a former Daily Acts staff. This work is about understanding the urgency of climate truth, the needs of the current moment––especially those on the frontlines. We must get better at pulling our levers together to affect more significant change because this is the most significant decade that humanity has faced.
We come together to nourish, connect, and uplevel. Early next year, Daily Acts is launching a funding campaign to finish a book we are writing on these solutions. We will be expanding our leadership institute to partner with groups like Bioneers to support and train more leaders, organizations, and communities. We need to help them be as transformative as possible to partner widely and push for more bold climate action and policy.
It’s vital to know that nonprofits play an essential role in the transformation required because significant social change happens through collaborative action. I have two calls to action for you all: to take this Bioneers moment and spread this inspiration with others. Secondly, join us and help spread and support significant transformations through small solutions by going to Daily Acts website and staying in contact with us.
In a dark and stormy world, we need good companions and a good compass. These are the incredible Daily Actors I feel blessed to work with the most amazing women. Our compass starts with our heart because this is how we find the bright beacons to guide us. In reclaiming the only power we have––that of our daily actions––we nurture community because these are nature’s operating instructions.
When we do these things consistently, we can build the resilience of remaking our lives and the world through an infinite procession of small actions and efforts because the power of small is much more immense than you think. However, we have to believe, and we have to invest, and we have to keep leaning in. Daily Acts exists in part because of the Bioneers’ community of changemakers’.
The last thing I want to say is thank you all so much, Bioneers, for inspiring us to continue to step into the moment. Take heart, take part, and take action!
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Trathen Heckman is the founder/Director of Daily Acts Organization, a non-profit dedicated to “transformative action that creates connected, equitable, climate resilient communities.” He also serves on the convening committee for Localizing California Waters and the advisory board of Norcal Resilience Network, and he has helped initiate and lead numerous coalitions and networks including Climate Action Petaluma. Trathen lives in the Petaluma River Watershed where he grows food, medicine and wonder while composting apathy and lack.
With climate-driven disasters becoming the new normal, building resilience is the grail. Communities around the world are developing models created out of practical necessity. In this Bioneers pocast, we hear on-the-ground stories from two different communities building resilience in the wake of serial disasters.
Daily Acts inspires individuals to reclaim the power of their every daily action to create a regenerative, resilient and just world. Visit dailyacts.org to access DIY resources, webinars, and more.
In recent years, political polarization and a sense of “othering” has been immensely apparent, both in ideology and physical manifestations, such as the border wall. It’s time for collective healing. But this will take more than proclaiming individual stances against systems of oppression. The current moment demands we unite and actively work to dismantle those systems — not merely disapprove of them.
john a. powell is the Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. In his keynote address at the Bioneers 2020 Conference, powell challenges us to think beyond individualized practices of bridging across differences, which ignore the structural injustices we live in.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
john a. powell
I live in Northern California where breathing can’t be taken for granted these days. In the last few years, we have experienced days when wildfires made it too difficult to breathe. The COVID-19 virus robs those of us of the ability to breathe. And of course George Floyd and Eric Garner became famous because they were not allowed to breathe. You might ask: “What does that have to do with me, and what does it have to do with Bioneers?” In my mind, one thing that Bioneers represents is the coming together of different communities that share a grounding in the Earth and in nature. It’s a bridge that affords the possibility for everyone in all expressions of life to belong.
But why aren’t bridges in our society working better now? Instead of building bridges, we’ve been building walls, and we’ve been fracturing. We’re seeing demonstrations in the streets. After the election, many of us were celebrating, but half the country is still mourning. So how do we actually heal? It seems to me that bridging is the key to healing. At the Othering and Belonging Institute, we are very concerned about that process of healing, and the good news is that we’re not the only ones. A lot of people want the country and the world to heal. A recent survey found that 70 percent of Americans—Democrats, Republicans, Independents, people who are not political at all—want the country to heal. They want to stop the polarization. But how do we do that? We may feel that we’re too small as individuals to control anything except our own lives, but I want to challenge us on that.
Bridging is basically a process in which we recognize another person’s humanity. In South Africa there’s a Zulu word, sawubona, which means “I see you,” and a Bantu term, ubuntu, which means: “I am because you are.” In other words, “We recognize our deep interrelationship.” And there’s a lot of research suggesting that when people are seen, they start to heal. Just being seen, just being recognized is a deeply loving and healing event. And all over the country we’re seeing people engaging in this process of bridging that calls on us to see each other, to recognize each other. This has a political, cultural and certainly a spiritual dimension.
My assumption is that many in the Bioneers community are already leaning into some practice involving mindfulness, be it meditating, mindful eating, dancing, connecting to the Earth, etc. And I think those types of activities are critical in order to heal ourselves and heal each other, but I also want to push us to go beyond that, because what we found at the Institute is that while people gravitate towards bridging and belonging, they tend to do it in such a way that it becomes a very individualized practice. In these contexts, you often hear people say that in order to do something on the outside, you must first fix the inside. It suggests that bringing people together so that they can see each other is enough, but while it is critical, it’s not enough.
Let me offer you two examples to illustrate this. One is from a classic that isn’t widely read anymore called Native Son by Richard Wright, published in 1940. The main protagonist in Native Son is someone named Bigger Thomas, a very poor young African American in Chicago who gets a job with a white family as, among other things, a chauffeur, driving the family around. When the family’s daughter returns from college, because she’s very liberal and about the same age as Bigger Thomas, she and her boyfriend basically say “We want to recognize your humanity, Bigger. We don’t believe in all this hierarchy, that you’re the chauffeur and we’re the passengers. We’ll sit up front with you; we’re not going to sit in the back.” What they don’t realize is how uncomfortable this makes Bigger; that Bigger is extremely discombobulated by having these two rich white people sit up in the front of the car with him. Even though they’re trying to exercise a sense of goodwill, they’re not acknowledging the cultural and structural impediments that make it very hard for Bigger to really connect with them.
Later in the book, they’re driving around and the white couple are getting hungry, so Bigger asks “Would you like me to take you some place to eat?” And their response is yes. And Bigger says, “Where?” And they say, “Take us to your favorite place.” This mortifies Bigger. He says, “No, I can’t do that,” but they say they want to see where he eats and to eat what he eats. Eventually Bigger agrees, and, of course, not only are they the only white people in this place, they’re the only rich people, and the whole place is abuzz. They’re doing it with good intentions. They’re trying to connect, to recognize Bigger. They’re trying to bridge, but they fail to recognize that the social structure and culture make it hard. Without addressing culture, social structures and power imbalances, bridging is very, very hard.
Let me give you a more recent illustration, from a 2019 movie I recommend called Knives Out. In this movie, the action centers around a very rich family, and there’s a caretaker from Latin America who takes care of the head of the family who has become a fixture in their midst. And at one point, there’s a conversation among the family members about undocumented immigrants, and she’s very uncomfortable because not only is she an immigrant, but her mother, who lives with her, is undocumented. And she needs this job. She can’t afford to live without this job, and at a certain point in the conversation, the family members turn to her and ask “Marta, what do you think? What’s your feeling about undocumented immigrants?” And she’s mortified. What should she say? She needs her job. She loves her mother. One of the family members recognizes that this is putting her in a totally awkward situation because of the power imbalance, because of the culture. She cannot have an authentic conversation with them unless they begin to address these deep structural issues.
And this gets replicated over and over again in our lives. It’s not enough to just say “I’m a good person. I don’t see hierarchy. I don’t see differences.” Those differences are real. They’re not biological, but they’re nonetheless real, and we can’t just engage in internal work to fix these problems. These problems are inside and outside. We live in stories and stories live in us. We live in structures and structures live in us. And we have to actually be attentive to how those structures make bridging, make the ability to see each other difficult.
But there’s another, opposite, perspective that is taken by some people who are engaged in social justice practice. They would agree with the critique I just made, and they would say: “Yes, before we can do anything, we have to fix the structures. First of all, you have to get rid of capitalism; you have to get rid of white supremacy.” I think this is leaning too far in the other direction. If we have hundreds of preconditions before we can actually come together authentically, before we can bridge; if all of those power imbalances, all of those structures, all of those cultural impediments have to be removed first, that will never happen, so we will never come together.
So here’s the dilemma: if we come together while all the oppressive structures are in place, things won’t go smoothly, but if we wait until all those structures are addressed, we never come together. What we advocate at the Institute is that we begin with short bridges but at the same time that we pay attention to structure and culture. We engage in practices that center our bodies, minds and hearts, but we also recognize that we’re a part of the world. It’s an iterative process. It’s not one before the other. We have to do both at the same time and to reject the duality between the inside and the outside, and we’ll make mistakes and conditions will change, and that’s part of the process.
I think the Bioneers community is very well situated to begin that process, and I challenge you all to be ambassadors to help the world heal, to help us bridge. Some people are leery of bridging because they think that, first of all, if there’s any bridging to be done, it needs to be done by those who are in power, and that’s not entirely wrong. If you have more power, you have more responsibility, but all of us have some power, some agency. It’s not symmetrical, but all of us can potentially engage in bridging. We have to start where we are, recognizing that things are not perfect and they never will be, but that we can begin to do the work.
There’s also an understandable reluctance to bridge with, say, a member of the KKK or an ardent Trump supporter or someone who hates black people, who’s xenophobic, etc., but again I say start with short bridges; start with things that are easier; start with things that are closer to home. Don’t start with the most difficult. And bridging doesn’t mean we agree with someone. It’s not predicated on the notion that I’m going to convince you or you’re going to convince me. It’s predicated on seeing each other, on being present, on listening, and on compassion, which means to suffer together. And research shows that when we can do this, when we can be fully present with someone else, it not only transforms them, it transforms us, so even though we’re not doing it for the purpose of changing a person, it can actually be a very effective change agent.
Bridging is one of the most effective tools for us to heal the world and create a world in which we all belong, but belonging requires that we co-create, and co-creation requires agency, power, love and responsibility. We are all responsible. Responsibility is different than guilt or blame, so we don’t dwell on guilt or blame, we dwell on responsibility. All of us are responsible for creating and co-creating a world and a future where everyone belongs, and we all belong to the Earth. And that is the challenge I want to leave with you, Bioneers: be ambassadors for bridging and creating a world where we all belong. Thank you.
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john a. powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley; previously Executive Director at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State, and prior to that, founder/Director of the Institute for Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, has also taught at numerous law schools, including Harvard and Columbia. A former National Legal Director of the ACLU, he co-founded the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the boards of several national and international organizations. His latest book is: Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.
In this 2017 Bioneers keynote address, john a. powell explores how we can better understand the spaces we currently inhabit and strategize to co-create alternative spaces where real healing can truly begin.
In this Bioneers podcast we ask: Can humanity overcome divisions such as race, class, nation, religion, and gender roles to come together to solve the planetary emergency that threatens our common home? Civil liberties and legal scholar john a. powell and social justice advocate Grace Bauer show how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of “beloved community” can overcome conflict, separation and the burdens of history to transcend our fear of the “Other” and work together to heal our societies and the Earth.
Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, john a. powell’s meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation.
THE SEEKERS is a collection of interviews with famous artists and musicians, threaded together by personal anecdotes and insights about the origins of creativity itself. By unraveling the transformative experiences that have shaped his worldview for more than 50 years, John Densmore shares extraordinary insight around the power of embracing our own imaginations.
Okay, Joseph Campbell isn’t a musician per se, but if, as I’ve said before, a sentence reads like a musical question, Campbell’s writing is a symphony.
I didn’t know him well enough to call him “Joe,” unlike my friend Phil Cousineau, who edited the companion book to The Hero’s Journey, a documentary film on Campbell’s life. My first encounter with the man who inspired George Lucas to write Star Wars was at the Jung Institute in West Los Angeles, where Campbell was giving a lecture with slides. Although I’d read Hero with a Thousand Faces, I was new to the world of mythology. What I didn’t know was that I was meeting a teacher who would feed my spirituality big-time.
What I took away from Campbell’s talk was that many similarities exist between the world’s religions. This was in the old days before there was the internet to connect the global village. So how did these connections come about? Well, Mr. Campbell hinted, perhaps all the world’s mythologies have so much in common because they are true. Maybe mythologies point to threads that link us all. After all, such connections exist in the biological world. At a Bioneers Conference, I heard the mycologist Paul Stamets speak about the underground network of bacteria worldwide. We’re walking on a fungi internet! As the slogan for that conference put it: “It’s all alive, it’s all connected, it’s all intelligent, it’s all relatives.”
When I was a kid, I asked my parents, if there is only one God, why are there so many religions? My mom, who went to mass every Sunday, said that there were many wonderful religions, but that not all of them got you into heaven. I was young then, and she later rescinded that idea. Still, that kind of early experience may partly explain why a lot of my friends are Jewish: I was developing a preference for outsiders, and Jews were “the chosen few.” There’s wisdom on the edge. “Joe” could name all the world’s faiths and tell you how the religious deities arose. Even with his sense of the parallels between religions, Mr. Campbell, like my mom, was a devout Catholic. Another expert in comparative religions, Huston Smith, also thought that you needed an old school tradition to anchor your psyche. Even though the esteemed Mr. Smith imbibed lysergic acid with the likes of Ram Dass and Aldous Huxley, he still clung to his Christian faith.
I have found that after my own direct experience with the quantum world through psychedelics, organized religions seem dated. Still, I’m actually a little jealous of the security that my mom and Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith got from being wrapped in the arms of Jesus. I just can’t accept it myself. As a musician, I know Jesus is definitely the lead singer, but clearly Buddha is on drums. And Allah is probably the lead guitarist, milking those strings for all he’s got.
I’m not making light of these visionaries here; I really do borrow from all the world’s great religions, and get fed various ingredients. It’s similar to my love of world music, which feeds me sounds from all the various cultures. Even if I don’t understand the language being sung, I still get the essence of the culture. In religion, Hinduism’s multi-limbed gods of jealousy, wrath, sex, and so on, have helped me feel like I’m not crazy for having those feelings myself. I find the likenesses between belief systems reassuring, but in the end I prefer a patchwork cosmology.
I had heard that Campbell was taken to a Grateful Dead concert and saw some magic there, even though he had said that rock music never appealed to him. “They hit a level of humanity,” he noted, “that makes everybody at one with each other.” I don’t know if Mr. Campbell knew the quantity of drugs being taken at these concerts, but I agree that “this awakening the common humanity is a quite different rhythm system from that of marching to the bugle of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’!”
The Hero’s Journey premiered at the Directors Guild in Hollywood and Iwas invited to be on a panel after the screening. My anticipation doubled when I realized that the chair with my name on it was right next to the chair for “The Man.” I knew the maverick scholar was in his eighties, but didn’t know that this would be his next-to-last public appearance.
It was a very warm discussion, mainly full of accolades about the mythologist. I commented that “I didn’t know I was performing at a Dionysian festival rite when playing drums with The Doors until I read this guy.”
“This religious system has to do with the awakening of your nature, and that’s the one that your art,” he retorted, pointing at me, “is operating on.”
That felt good to hear. Later he complimented my clan again: “I think that the Grateful Dead are the best answer today to the atom bomb.”
Ietef Vita, also known as DJ Cavem, is a pioneering hip hop artistusing his craft as a platform to make social change and encourage healthy living. Influenced by his grandfather’s experiences as a Black Panther in the 1960s, his mother’s dedication to healthy food, and the Rastafarian concept of living off the land, he’s developed a record label and created his own seed company that supplies urban farmers.Vita coined the popular term “eco-hip hop” in 2007 to describe the interdependence of spoken word and progressive activism, and it’s sprouted into a global movement.
In this interview with Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Program Director, Ietef Vita discusses his journey toward healing — both collectively and personally — through artistic expression and food justice activism.
Ietef Vita
ARTY: What have you learned from your grandfather about his experiences as a Black Panther?
IETEF: My grandfather was born on a plantation in Arkansas. At age 17, he was a part of the Great Migration. He became an artist and lived in Harlem up the block from Miles Davis and was good friends with Dizzy Gillespie. That influenced me to be more out of the box.
He was involved with the Panthers and the culture that was happening around and during the birth of my mother in 1968. My mother was born when Dr. King was assassinated. In Oakland, California there was the rise of the Black Panther Party. They were adopting ideas about food, clothing, shelter, cooperative economics and having protection for your family. The Black Panther Party was running a breakfast program. I completely understand all that. That ingrained in me the importance of community development. It’s important to feed the community, which is why my record label, while not completely influenced by the Black Panthers, respectfully reveres where they come from and their efforts to create the community engagement around the nation that was so powerful.
ARTY: When you were younger, you went to Africa with your mother. How did that experience shape you?
IETEF: I first went to Africa when I was a teenager. I went to Senegal. At that age, I didn’t really understand the difference between living in America with racism and having to deal with fascism on the other side of the world. Like straight up, there it’s not about skin color; it’s about how much money you have. Walking through Gorey Island kind of transformed me. Going through the House of Slaves immediately struck me hard. I don’t think I cried like that since I was a kid. I was kind of a tough teenager, but that had a great impact on me. It was so impactful that I gave up gang-banging on the spot. So, experiencing Africa helped me understand what I needed to do when I came back to the States.
I also went to Uganda and studied indigenous agriculture and agronomy and taught at three different primary schools in Kampala, Uganda. The impact of hip hop brought me to the Motherland to teach waste diversion, composting, and how we can give back through art and culture.
Traveling was an educational project for me. It wasn’t like most people when they go to the other side of the world to try to enjoy life and take pictures. For me, it was really hard walking through the slums. I ran out of money by the time I entered the slum because I had given it to the first kid who asked. It transformed my idea of what a ghetto is and how fortunate I was living in America instead of living there.
I’ve been to Africa multiple times since my youth, and I definitely will continue to go back to my Motherland in the west part of the continent as a deep repatriation.
ARTY: How has racism impacted your life?
IETEF: Growing up in the inner city of Denver — the wild, wild West — I’ve been bumped a couple of times as a teenage high school kid just trying to make it through to adulthood. Most of the time, the police would mess with me. I didn’t grow up being chased by Ku Klux Klan like my grandfather did; my grandfather on my mother’s side had a cross burned on his property.
But when I think about living in Colorado, there’s a lot of cellular memory that I have to heal and do some past-life regression. I understand the deeper part of my personal anger has to deal with fighting for freedom. At the same time, I realize that there’s a mental perspective. You can be free in your mind at any time. That’s why I’ve been working so much on internal healing by doing yoga and gardening for my mental issues of dealing with racism because it’s not going to stop. You’ve just got to learn to heal yourself from within.
Black, brown and Indigenous people in America have to live within the chaos of this country. It’s not holding our tongue; it’s healing ourselves after battle and dealing with toxicity.
Have I been indulging in metaphysical healing because of racism? Yes, I have. I feel like the best way to battle it is on an internal level because you can’t just sit and live with the concept. Just look up the word black in the dictionary; do you want to live with that? So yeah, man, I’m going to leave it at that.
ARTY: You coined the word eco-hip hop. How did that come about and where has it taken you?
IETEF: Environmental hip hop was a concept that was birthed from conversations that were happening in hip hop but weren’t consistent. For example, there was a song called Green Eggs and Ham by A Tribe Called Quest; there was Be Healthy by Dead Prez. But when it came down to consistently talking about food justice and environmental justice, I didn’t feel like there was a platform or a genre for me to categorize myself.
I was not only thinking about how to utilize hip hop to support the community to create waste diversion programs and green and black cooperative economics, but also how to utilize hip hop to redefine wealth. The way I’ve been doing that is working with friends and family in the culture for the past 15 years developing a record label that distributes seeds as albums. We’re the first certified USDA organic hip hop record label. Plant Based Records is the home of environmental hip hop. Our goal is to show people how to grow food and also to be a part of nature. So, the music reflects that conversation, that lifestyle. We try to keep our music videos as ethically and environmentally responsible as possible.
Eco-hip hop stands for higher inner peace helping other people. It’s about how to stop gang violence and create art for social change. Of course, hip hop is being utilized to market sex, drugs and violence, but we can easily utilize it to promote beets, kale and arugula.
ARTY: What does food justice mean to you?
IETEF: Food justice is a dream. We’re still trying to get that. We’re working on food sovereignty. Justice hasn’t happened yet. What food justice looks like, what it feels like to me is a grow-oasis where people have a traceable source to their food, where we have fresh water to harvest, where there is community trade to supply resources, and we need to re-invigorate saving seeds in our community not only through art, but also from a perspective of how it really impacts life.
I’m plant-based. I think there needs to be a conversation about appropriation and neo-colonial veganism needs to step out of the way.
ARTY: What do you mean by neo-colonial veganism?
IETEF: I’ve been a vegan for 20 years. I feel like there is a style of what that is. Like, I was introduced to a plant-based lifestyle through Ital and the concept of the Rastafari’s eating off the land. I didn’t even know the word vegan. I was just going to the farmers’ market and the Asian market trying to find tempeh and produce.
I understand that there is a difference between eating a plant-based diet and eating high-processed, chemical, GMOs. Let’s go ahead and separate the two. There’s plant-based and there’s vegan. You know what I’m saying?
Association with the word vegan is no different than the way that urban culture associates with sustainability. It doesn’t really look like a thing people of color can really assimilate or make economic value off of. I think there is an aspect of veganism that no one is down to address yet, which is there’s some elitism in the vegan world.
People in the hood want solar panels. Can they get them? Not all the time. That doesn’t mean that they don’t want to support the industry? You’ve just got to think about readily available access; you’ve got to think about the concept of economic development, and why that plays a big factor into redlining communities.
Gentrification sometimes impacts a community in a way that doesn’t really show that community renewed in the way that it should be. You get farmers’ markets and yoga parlors, and the liquor store turns into a wine cellar. Everything changes when a community is gentrified. Urban communities that have historical references, lose their tone, touch, feel and look overnight to developers.
That’s no different from what happens in the food industry when white bread is pushed regardless of it’s nutrient qualities. I think it’s really important to address how to decolonize our kitchen, and remember the indigeneity of how to stay in biomimicry with the Earth. I’m taking this to the hood, because ain’t nobody got time to play gentrify, especially when the inner city’s trying to garden.
ARTY: What is the Culinary Climate Action Initiative?
IETEF: Culinary Climate Action is the concept at the forefront of Recipes for Resistance, which is a workshop that started in Oakland, California with my brother, Bryant Terry. I’ve been producing workshops nationally to show people how to go to the farmers’ market, make yourself some food, and store it and potentially propagate it. I showcase how you can use the alkalinity and the electricity of plugging copper wires into fruits and vegetables and making beets and then performing lyrics on top of that. That is a concept that was pretty much put together with my brother Detour Thomas Evans. It was the beginning of Plant Based Records. It started off by making beats out of beets. And from there, we were like, “Yo, we need to drop seeds and drop albums.” And here we are.
Recipes for Resistance is a project that brings the music into the schools and puts it in the hands of the people who I feel are in decline. It’s about making fruits and vegetables more available to our brothers and sisters. At Inner city corner stores, all you can find is processed food. It sucks, but we see it all the time. So, it’s about creating farmers and normalizing the idea of eating locally grown food, which is weird and sad that we even have to do so.
I think that the best way to tackle it is to sequester carbon in urban atmospheres by growing food and harvesting the nutrients. The soil in cities is not being turned all the time like the plowed field that gets turned like 25 times a year for growing corn and soy or whatever.
I think it’s important to show the patience of growing food. That’s what we’re trying to do with the young people. And they’re really vibing with that.
The next thing that’s really happening is my wife and I just started a non-profit organization called Vita Earth Foundation. Our goal is to seed urban farmers. We’ve been working to seed BIPOC communities with organic seeds.
It’s been so weird, Bro. This COVID-19 thing was such a weird thing. We were expecting to go on tour. Started our first show out on tour with Xiuhtezcatl. We played the Mercury Lounge, played in Montreal, played Montana, and then rocked Berkeley, California. Got out of town right on time before they shut us down. We played at the Cornerstone and got out.
I thought I was going to be on tour giving out seeds from the previous album, Biomimicz, which is the album dedicated to biomimicry. Our goal was to go on tour and hit up the nation and just seed the whole city. Well, not only did we have the pandemic, but then we had civil unrest. I sat down and watched through the screen people burning down their grocery stores. I’m like, “Yo, how are they going to get food?”
Luckily, months before the pandemic, we shipped seeds to Minneapolis to some urban farmers. They had kale in the ground in spring and were able to start feeding the community in mid-June during the George Floyd riots. I’m talking about the impact of the record label being able to feed the community and supplying food to the co-ops during times like that. The conversation gave birth to our foundation’s first campaign, which was to Seed Urban Farms. So far, we’ve given out around ten thousand packets from Chicago to Cincinnati to Minneapolis, all the way down to Virginia. We’re a black-owned seed company/record label. It’s kind of a weird collage, but people get it.
The incredibly challenging crises we are currently engulfed in (the pandemic, unemployment and food insecurity for millions, persistent structural racism, political instability, plutocratic consolidation, and of course climate change) have an upside: they are stripping away illusions to starkly reveal the profound flaws in our societal systems and current paradigms. Kenny Ausubel, CEO and Co-Founder of Bioneers, suggests that the vast global movements offering the most positive responses to these threats are pointing the way toward the new equitable and life-affirming civilization we must now collectively give birth to.
As humans, we are not separate from the world around us. Our health is directly tied to the environment of which we’re a part, and we’re already seeing the consequences of continuing to degrade our climate through industrialization and the continued pursuit of wealth.
Planetary health is an emerging field that addresses these concerns, and doctors, scientists and activists are starting to pay attention. The new book Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves provides an overview of this approach — which considers threats to our ecosystems as threats to our own wellbeing, with an emphasis on solutions — and serves as a guide on how to respond.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, …it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
By many metrics, there has never been a better time to be a human being. Indeed, the past 70 years have seen almost unimaginable improvements in global human wellbeing. Between 1940 and 2015 the percentage of adults around the world who could read and write doubled, from 42% to 86%.1 In 1950, there were 1.6 billion people living in extreme poverty and 924 million people not in extreme poverty. By 2015, there were 733 million people living in extreme poverty and 6.6 billion people not living in extreme poverty.2
In other words, in 65 years the percentage of the world’s people living in extreme poverty dropped from 63% to 10% despite a near tripling of the global population. In 1950, global life expectancy was 46 years. Sixty-five years later, it was 72.3 And during that same period, child mortality dropped from 225 per 1,000 to 45 per 1,000 (Figure 1.1).4 These are unprecedented achievements in human history.
But there may never have been a worse time for the rest of the biosphere, at least since human beings began walking the planet. On March 17, 2019, a male Cuvier’s beaked whale washed up in the Philippines dead. It was still immature, and, wondering what could have killed such a magnificent creature capable of diving to depths of nearly 3,000 meters and normally living up to 60 years, scientists performed a necropsy. Inside the whale’s stomach and intestines, they found 88 pounds of plastic garbage. As of 2015, the inhabitants of 192 coastal countries are responsible for dumping roughly 8 million metric tons of plastic waste into the world’s oceans every year.5
The same extraordinary scientific and technological developments that have pulled humanity out of poverty, increased our life expectancies, and driven unprecedented gains in human development in less than a lifetime are also fueling an extraordinary ballooning of humanity’s ecological footprint. The combination of rapid human population growth with even steeper increases in per capita consumption are driving nearly exponential growth in human production and consumption of everything from motor vehicles to synthetic fertilizers, paper, and plastic to water and energy use (Figure 1.2).
As a consequence of this explosion in human consumption, measures of our impacts across the planet’s natural systems—loss of biodiversity, exploitation of fisheries, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, acidification of oceans, or loss of tropical forests— show similarly steep accelerations since the 1950s and 1960s (Figure 1.3).
The impacts of people on our planet’s natural systems are now immense. To feed ourselves, we have turned 40% of Earth’s land surface into croplands and pasture.6 We use about half the accessible fresh water on the planet, mostly to irrigate our crops,7 and we exploit 90% of monitored fisheries at or beyond maximum sustainable limits.8 We have cut down roughly half the world’s temperate and tropical forests and dammed more than 60% of the world’s rivers.9 And we are crowding out the rest of life on our planet. In May 2019, 145 authors from fifty countries released the Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. After reviewing 15,000 articles over 3 years, they concluded that roughly one million species are facing extinction, many within decades.10 Already, we have reduced the numbers of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes who share the planet with us by more than 50% since 1970.11
These are, indeed, the best of times and the worst of times. But at the heart of the field of planetary health is recognition that the wellbeing of humanity and the degradation of the rest of the biosphere cannot remain disconnected for much longer. The scale of the human enterprise now surpasses our planet’s capacity to absorb our wastes or provide the resources we are using. Human activities are driving fundamental biophysical change at rates that are much steeper than have existed in the history of our species (see Figure 1.3). These biophysical changes are taking place across at least six dimensions: disruption of the global climate system; widespread pollution of air, water, and soils; rapid biodiversity loss; reconfiguration of biogeochemical cycles, including for carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus; pervasive changes in land use and land cover; and depletion of resources including of fresh water and arable land. Each of these dimensions interacts with the others in complex ways, altering core conditions for human health: the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we can produce. Rapidly changing environmental conditions also alter our exposures to infectious diseases and natural hazards such as heat waves, droughts, floods, fires, and tropical storms. These changes in the conditions of our lives ultimately affect every dimension of our health and wellbeing, as illustrated in Figure 1.4. Planetary health focuses on understanding and quantifying the human health impacts of these global environmental disruptions and on developing solutions that will allow humanity and the natural systems we depend on to thrive now and in the future.
An Interview with Daria Halprin, somatic/expressive arts therapist, author, teacher, dancer, actress, and co-founding Director of Tamalpa Institute; conducted by Bioneers Arts Coordinator, Polina Smith.
POLINA SMITH: Daria, could you tell us a bit about the history of Planetary Dance?
DARIA HALPRIN: It is a story that has evolved over time. Here are the highlights:
From 1979 to 1981 six women were murdered on Mt Tamalpais in Marin County, California. These tragedies threatened the sense of safety in our entire community. Mt. Tamalpais is a beloved part of our landscape, a place where for generations families have hiked, picnicked, celebrated holidays and held special ceremonies together. The mountain is considered sacred by Indigenous peoples in this region and beyond. The park service finally had to close down the trails because people could no longer safely hike on the mountain.
My father, the environmental designer Lawrence Halprin, and my mother, the dancer Anna Halprin, often collaborated on various projects combining art, the environment and community activism. During the time of the murders, they were collaborating on a series of workshops and performance rituals called A Search for Living Myths. They decided to include a participatory ritual to enact the reclaiming of the mountain. The ritual performance was carried out over several days, culminating in a community walk, and prayer offerings on the trails of the mountain.
What was important about the ritual was that it was created in response to a collectively experienced trauma. It took feelings of helplessness and rage and brought the community together in an act of courage and resilience to collectively confront the tragedy and reaffirm life.
POLINA: So how did it evolve after that?
DARIA: Anna and her work were well known and a magnet for artists, students and healers – people from around the world with diverse interests and backgrounds. Word of the Mt. Tamalpais ritual spread, and the renowned Huichol teacher, Don José Matsuwa, [it was said he was 109 years old} came to visit Anna at our family home and dance studio. He told Anna that her ritual had been successful, and that she needed to repeat it for five years.
Anna committed herself to holding the event yearly for five years, but she made some artistic changes to the original piece as she developed a more expansive vision. Those changes evolved into the Planetary Dance. She named the new ritual Circle the Earth, with a vision to expand beyond Mt. Tamalpais and Marin County, creating a peace dance that would travel to communities around the world. There would always be the underlying, universal theme of dancing for peace, but there would also be a particular theme that each group in each locale would choose, depending on what was happening in that community. It was designed to be a form of engaged art activism.
The centerpiece of the dance is the Earth Run. It draws from Indigenous dance and ritual traditions. There are three concentric circles that move clockwise and counterclockwise around a group of drummers. The outer circles are the faster runners. The inner circle surrounds the drummers and is for slow walkers, elders and those with physical limitations. Drummers hold the center and drum for the entire run.
The ritual begins with words of welcome, reflections on the theme and the community challenge. There are artistic offerings in the form of song, poetry, and blessings. Participants each declare an intention with a shout, arms and hands shooting into the air. They each dedicate the run to a person or an issue that matters to them, for example: I run for my granddaughter and for the equal rights of all women and girls.
As the ritual draws to a close, participants kneel to the ground to symbolically plant their dedications into the earth. They then sit back to back in silence and share their experiences. A group procession out of the space marks the conclusion of the ritual, and then the community celebrates and socializes.
The Planetary Dance has taken place in over forty countries every year since 1985. It has become one of the traditions of Tamalpa Institute and its student body. We celebrated our 40th Planetary Dance this year. This is also the year Anna turned 100 years old, and many Planetary Dances were performed in her honor.
With the onset of the pandemic, we were not able to hold our annual Planetary Dance in person on the mountain. I decided to take it online. With my son, Jahan Khalighi, and supported by Tamalpa Institute and the Planetary Dance committee, I facilitated our first online presentation of the ritual in July on Anna’s birthday in acknowledgement of Black Lives Matter.
POLINA: How did that work logistically?
DARIA: It was difficult to imagine how we would capture a sense of ritual and a genuine feeling of embodied community connection in a virtual format. I called in a group of Planetary Dance artists to film their offerings which transmitted the soul and spirit of the dance. In addition to extensive pre-production planning and technical maneuvering, what made the project possible was the shared passion and desire to be together in community around a global challenge that we all cared about deeply.
Close to one thousand people participated online. They did the ritual in pods, in families, and in partnerships. They did it solo in their backyards, in their bedrooms, and in their living rooms. We had a nursery school teacher participate with her class of little ones running around outdoors. It was a remarkable experience. I felt how blessed we are to have this extraordinary resource to connect to each other virtually through time and space. Everyone brought a sense of gratitude to the ritual – gratitude to have a way to be and to act together in the creative spirit of community during the COVID pandemic, and to run in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement.
POLINA: With your online workshops and trainings, and with the Planetary Dances, are you able to get people from different places, people who normally wouldn’t be able to attend?
DARIA: Yes, and that is exciting. Initially I was deeply concerned for the work of Tamalpa Institute and how we would sustain it. It seemed like an insurmountable loss not to be able to be in person in our studio, near to nature at the base of Mt Tamalpais. I could not begin to imagine how to engage in embodied movement work and expressive art therapy without the pivotal element of in person exchange and group interaction. I really wondered how we would find the depth, the mystery and magic that we experience when we move, when we make art and process together in our studio. The learning community and group life is central to our work. I worried that the life changing challenges, insights and resources we encounter when working together would be missing.
The change from in person to online hasn’t been easy and it certainly is a significant change, but it has yielded unexpected gifts. Accessibility and diversity have increased. People who had not been able to participate before because of time, distance, finances, etc. are now able to participate at different levels of engagement. We are reaching many more people in our workshops and training programs than previously, and we are learning how to translate and deliver our work in a new kind of studio space. I am surprised and touched witnessing how committed, focused, and expressive people are in our online offerings. It’s as if a wave of determination and commitment has brought us closer together with greater appreciation. I can see that our practice in somatic expressive arts makes us resilient. It’s a new kind of magic.
POLINA: Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing, growing up in this extraordinary family with all this visionary work around you?
DARIA: My life was infused with an immense amount of creativity, art and cultural engagement. My father, Lawrence Halprin, was a landscape and environmental designer. His environmental philosophy, his thinking on culture, nature and social systems, his innovative workshop model and approach to collective creativity were profound influences on his field, and on my world view and my work. I was trained in integrative dance and performance by my mother, Anna Halprin. Both my parents worked internationally. Throughout my childhood I toured as a performance artist, and traveled with my father on his working trips in Europe and the Middle East. Raised in the creative work of both my parents, I was shaped and educated by their collaborations connecting environment, dance, performance and community workshopping. This legacy has informed my work as an artist, teacher and therapist. I have felt a great responsibility to carry it forward, and also to shape an approach and body of work that forges pathways bridging the expressive arts, education, somatic psychology and community healing. My interests and calling drew me to psychology, to research how we embody personal, cultural and family narratives. I wanted to explore and develop an approach using creative arts and group process as a form of individual, group and community therapy.
POLINA: You have had such a deep history in socially engaged arts. What role do you think art can play in social justice movements today, and how can it best do that?
DARIA: When we started in the 1960’s we were outliers.Today the work of healing artists is blossoming and I see that the impact and value of art as a healing force is much more widely appreciated, accepted and has joined many like minded fields.
When we’re in trouble as individuals and communities we lose connection with soul. Expressive art reconnects us to our soul and to the soul of the world. Dance and the expressive arts are a universal language that crosses boundaries and bridges differences. It inspires and teaches us how to express ourselves honestly and communicate nonviolently. In art we are able to symbolically and metaphorically dance with the shadow and the difficulty of being human. Art shines light on the darkness.
Since the beginning of time and in all cultures art, has been used for healing, to affirm community, and to navigate the great mysteries of nature and the universe. It has that power in our lives today. We need to find ways to translate that power to meet the challenges, the realities and the existential threats of the modern world and modern people.
I believe that art as a community participatory experience is a way for us to learn about what it means to be a human being in relation with other human beings, in relation to our environment.
POLINA: What does it mean to be a human being?
DARIA: Wow, well that is the perennial question. To lean into an artist’s perspective, I am reminded of the Leonard Cohen quote, “Don’t try to make the perfect offering, there are cracks in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” I think of being human in that way. We are cracked, and when we are able to dance artfully with our experience, we become more human. We need embodied ways to live with the cracks and in the cracks. Art can help us do that. This being human is painful and joyful. The expressive arts can provide us with a way to explore that question. It provides us with a healthy way, and a healing medicine that permits us to be with the full spectrum of what it means to be a human being.
POLINA: What is your perspective on what it means to be an ally and how we can do that well?
DARIA: I am asking myself that question, more than feeling that I have answers to it. I’m learning to listen more carefully, to examine my own privilege, my concepts around helping and my implicit biases. I am learning more about the issues I need to understand, and what kind of meaningful ally-ship I can offer through the Tamalpa Institute. As I searched for a way to create allyship, I felt compelled to do something to reach out further beyond the walls of the Tamalpa studio and bring the work we had developed into more diverse community settings and underserved populations. I wanted to create an initiative that would actively engage and support students of our work in service around the globe.
I initiated a branch of the Institute called the Tamalpa Art Corps. The ArtCorps program supports scholarships for people of color and community activists to train at the Institute, and provides supervision mentorship to develop and implement fieldwork projects around a specific social issue. For example, we sponsor students from our training programs to take our work in dance and expressive arts therapy to India every year to work with child survivors of the sex trafficking industry.
I feel committed and excited about passing the torch of the work that Anna and I have developed to a next generation of socially engaged somatic educators and healing artists.
POLINA: What is your vision for the future of the Institute?
DARIA: I believe that it is important for the work at Tamalpa to continue to evolve and change with the times. While it is rich in legacy and has held a unique and pioneering place in the field of dance and expressive arts therapy, I would like to see it forge new paths, and build new bridges into diverse communities. I hope the next generation of leaders will use our work to ask relevant questions, and create embodied participatory rituals and art works that meet the challenges ahead.
POLINA: On an ending note, Daria, I’m wondering if you have any advice to young artists during this time?
DARIA: Be careful of burnout. Very often in the process of being a working artist, we don’t carve out enough time for ourselves to do our own art and to keep growing as artists. Immerse yourself fully in your own art. What helps me find ways to be present with myself and to be present for others is to use my art for my own soul searching and healing. I encourage artists to practice their own soul searching art. That will teach them how to be with other people and serve in an authentic embodied way.
Collaborate. Find your community so that you’re not alone with the weighty responsibility of being a socially engaged artist. As elders, many of us are aware from our own life experiences that turning the kind of work you believe in and love into right livelihood is a challenge. Young artists need to figure out how to sustain themselves. There is strength and support in numbers. Find your colleagues in the mission.
POLINA: Thank you so much, Daria. Is there anything else you would like to share?
DARIA: Well, I would like to share a taste of the artistic offerings of our online Planetary Dance. I want to keep expanding the community circle and invite people to visit the Tamalpa Institute website, to see what our work is and what offerings we have. Now that we are online, it is very easy to join and participate.
Thank you Polina for inviting me to lead Planetary Dance at Bioneers last year, and to join again this year in this way. Its an honor to join the Bioneers community.
POLINA: It was such a gift to be able to participate in the Planetary Dance last year at Bioneers.
DARIA: I’m glad. I look forward to the day when we will do it again in person.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PLANETARY DANCE AND TAMALPA INSTITUTE:
“Paying an undocumented person half the value of their work, extracting all you can get from them to take care of your homes and families, and then deporting them is an American math story gone wrong.” -Alejandro Fuentes-Mena
In this moving performance from the 2020 Bioneers Conference, Alejandro Fuentes-Mena, Motus Theater’s Undocumented Autobiographical Monologist, offers a reflection on true value.
Motus Theater‘s mission is to create original theater to facilitate dialogue on the critical issues of our time. By telling “moving stories that move us forward,” Motus Theater uses the power of art to build alliances across diverse segments of our community. Its most recent work is: UndocuAmerica, an autobiographical storytelling project that aims to interrupt dehumanizing portrayals of immigrants by sharing the personal stories of undocumented leaders. The UndocuAmerica Monologues were created in a 17-week collaborative process between Motus Theater’s Artistic Director, Kirsten Wilson, and undocumented community leaders with D.A.C.A. (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).
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