2019 commemorated the 50-year anniversary of the 19-month Native American student occupation of Alcatraz. This video presents Indigenous activists from three generations who were on the frontlines at Alcatraz, Standing Rock, and other Indigenous Rights struggles, as they discuss their visions for the next 50 years of Indigenous activism.
Featuring Julian Noisecat, LaNada War Jack, Clayton Thomas Muller and Ras K’Dee.
Indigeneity is a Native-led Program within Bioneers/Collective Heritage Institute that promotes indigenous knowledge and approaches to solve the earth’s most pressing environmental and social issues through respectful dialogue. Visit the Indigeneity Program homepage.
Arturo Sandoval, founder of The Center of Southwest Culture, was a member of the first national Earth Day organizing team. He was a leader in the Chicano civil rights movement in the 1970’s and continues today to work for environmental justice, human rights and community-based economic development. Sandoval was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director.
ARTY: You were part of Denis Hayes’ team that produced the first Earth Day in 1970. What was that experience like?
ARTURO: It was my first time organizing on a national level. I worked with a very bright team. It was lots of work. It was very exhilarating. It completely exceeded anything we hoped to achieve. It was like holding onto the tail of the tiger. We were basically just trying to stay out of the way of a freight train coming down the tracks because the response to the first Earth Day was so overwhelming. It was huge. It was just unbelievable, and took everything we had to just try to connect the dots and get information out to the people and not get in their way.
ARTY: In conjunction with your national organizing, you led a march in Albuquerque.
ARTURO: I wanted to make sure that people of color were featured in some way in the national coverage. So I worked with my colleagues at United Mexican-American Students at the University of New Mexico (UNM). We organized a march to South Barelas, which is a Mexican neighborhood where they had built the solid waste plant. Every day a film of dry material from the plant would cover everything, and it smelled really bad. I thought it would be great if we could get national coverage to focus on that issue.
We marched to the plant, and we were successful in getting the City of Albuquerque to move the plant much further south into the valley. People tell me that that was the first national environmental justice march led by people of color in the U.S.
ARTY: As a leader in the Chicano civil rights movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s, how were you received by white activists? Did you come up against white privilege or even overt racism?
ARTURO: I don’t think I ran into overt racism, but I do think there was a very East-West Coast culture that emerged. I think the conservation movement is also very classist in that the majority of environmental activists that I interacted with were middle-class and upper middle-class. I came from a working-class background. As a Chicano, I was definitely a fish out of water. Basically, I did feel clear class differentials. I felt the class difference, and I did feel marginalized.
I wanted to engage people in action for the health of the planet and hoped that they would also include people in that concern. I saw that it was the same basic enemy that we were fighting in both areas. I believed, and I still do, that the people who are racist and who exploit the working people, who exploit black people, Chicano people and Mexicans are the same people who were/are dumping heavy metals into our rivers and our lakes and polluting our air. I saw Earth Day as an extension of my civil rights work and as an opportunity to bring Chicano rights to a national audience. I thought maybe through the lens of environmental action and conservation that we could open the door to a broader discussion about the impacts of exploitation – not just of the planet, but also of people – and to help people see it was basically one in the same issue. That was my hope.
But generally, Chicano activists and black activists were not drawn to the first Earth Day because they were so deeply engaged in their own local issues. They were fighting for survival, so it was difficult for them to add Earth Day activities to their existing workloads.
Arturo Sandoval (3rd from the left) with the first Earth Day organizing team in 1970
ARTY: What do you think needs to happen in the environmental movement today to make it more inclusive?
ARTURO: After Earth Day, there was a succession of a lot of national federal legislation – maybe 20 or 30 federal acts – enacted specifically to protect the environment, Clean Air and Water Acts. That success in many ways ended up causing a long-term issue for environmental groups. It led them to believe that being primarily composed of white middle-class and upper middle-class citizens was enough to get the job done, that they did not need to change their approach or their tactics. Nor did they need to reach out to working people, to rural people, to Chicanos and Mexicanos, and African-Americans. They really never made it a fundamental value of their work or strategy to try to include these groups. We’re paying the price for that now under the current regime in Washington, because we do not have the connections to the vast majority of these working people to get them to support us against what’s happening right now, which is a complete dismantling of all the victories we had in the 1970s.
I think that was a failure of the environmental movement. I engaged enough with the Environmental Grantmakers Association, and I know enough about national conservation groups to know that they’re still, unfortunately, over 90%-95% white middle-class. They’re a very East-West Coast-oriented culture, and they have done very little to broaden their base to working-class people and to African-Americans and Mexicanos. They have not done enough to get the message out on how the environment impacts us all as humans. That’s why they are really getting hammered in the national political arena at this time. They don’t have the deep, broad based coalition they need to fight off what’s happening in the Trump administration.
ARTY: You’ve said that racism, environmental justice, and colonization are connected.
ARTURO: I work with indigenous communities and Chicano communities in the greater Southwest. I believe that the reason that poor people and working people are poor is because they’re at the center of the current capitalist system. Without them, we couldn’t have extremely wealthy people. They’re not on the margins of what’s happening in this country, they’re at the very center of it. Because we train them through education and we fill their heads with a colonial model that puts them in a one-down position, they come to believe it. They internalize the belief that they are poor because of their own shortcomings.
Frantz Fanon, the French-trained psychiatrist, wrote about this in the 1950’s when the Algerian revolutionary movement was underway. It’s not easy reading, it’s all about colonization and how to decolonize yourself. We were reading him in the ‘60s in the Chicano movement as a way to begin that process of decolonizing ourselves and to understand how colonization works and how colonization also dehumanizes the colonizer.
People of color, working people need to decolonize their minds, and they have to ultimately own their own lives, to take active steps to take control of their own lives. The only way they can do that is through study, reflection, and work.
Education teaches us not to passively accept the current status quo and the economic system, and to challenge the idea that the political system is the best system in the world. The reality is it’s one of the worst systems because it depends on exploiting the planet and the planet’s resources and ultimately destroying the planet. It also destroys people and cultures while it’s doing that.
You can’t separate issues of colonization and environmental justice from each other. Everything is tied together. People have to be engaged in these conversations. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary. Until people like me, who offer themselves as community organizers, are constantly questioning what we’re doing and until we continue to learn and decolonize ourselves and become better humans, we’re never going to transform our communities, nor the larger society.
ARTY: About 10 years ago, I invited you to address the Bioneers staff on issues of diversity and oppression. One thing that you said that really stuck with me was, “The system is set up for the average white guy to succeed, but not for the average brown guy.”
ARTURO: The system in the U.S. is set up so that within all the systems – the economic system, the social network system, education, the churches – if you’re a white man or white woman in society and you have average intelligence and you can spell your name correctly, you can have a pretty good life by just being very average. You can have a career. I’ve seen this over and over again where white people end up making really good money with a bachelor’s degree. It’s easy for them to get degrees, they can afford college. Everything’s set up so that if you’re just an average white boy and you’re just average going through the system – you just show up at school, take a bath every day, pack a lunch, or your mom packs you a lunch and you go through the process – your odds of having a very high-quality life and a good life are almost guaranteed.
But if you’re a working class Chicano or an African-American, you have to overcome incredible obstacles that are not there for the average white person, because the system is set up to exclude you. You have to put in extra effort. As a result, we have high levels of failure in our communities, not because we’re dumber, not because we’re inherently inferior, but because the system is set up on purpose to make sure that we don’t succeed and that the average white guy does. That’s still true.
ARTY: Most white people are blind to the advantages the system gives them.
ARTURO: I experience microaggressions everyday and in every way. I’ve had a couple of conversations just in the last two weeks with white friends of mine, who I love dearly. I’ve known them for 30 or 35 years, maybe. But they don’t see me. They do not see what my capabilities are, even when I offer my services to them. They don’t see my talent. They see a Chicano guy that they like and that they hang out with, but is really not serious or does not have enough skills or talents to be taken seriously. And these are people who I consider very good, long-time friends of mine. But it’s that blindness that occurs to middle-class white people. They literally don’t see me. They are examples of a systemic issue.
ARTY: How does your work today integrate environmental and social justice?
ARTURO: We’re working on four major fronts now at the Center. Through our community development center, we’re trying to create economic parity for indigenous and Chicano/Mexicano communities through a number of economic models that don’t require mainstream capital because we don’t have access to it. So, we’ve been doing a lot of organic farming co-ops especially in New Mexico where Native Americans are in a unique position of having aboriginal rights to irrigation, and the long-term Chicano-based land communities are second in line for use of that water. The downside is we’ve let that land go fallow or we’re growing small-scale alfalfa, which will not bring you a 21st century income. So people aren’t interested in doing that work if it’s not going to give them enough money to send their kids to college.
We’re getting them to convert what they’re doing from alfalfa to organic produce because organic produce can generate a 21st century income. That’s number one. Number two, we want them to be healthy. You can’t be healthy intellectually if you don’t start out healthy physically. I read a Harvard study way back in 1967 that stuck with me. It said if the human body doesn’t get the right nutrients in the first three years of life, it doesn’t matter what happens after that, they won’t be able to develop intellectually. Our organic farming co-ops are selling 100% of our produce to local schools. We’re trying to feed our kids to keep the brains in shape physically so hopefully they can develop them academically as they grow older.
We’re trying to create justice by creating income and also by providing the most basic necessity – healthy food. We just started doing some of that work in Northern Mexico in Chihuahua.
The Story Riders program works with urban indigenous, Chicano, and Mexicano fifth-graders. We teach them bicycle safety and repair. We provide bicycles and they ride along the Bosque trail. They meet cultural elders, they meet artists, Latino and Native American scientists from Sandia Labs. They meet all kinds of people that in a cultural context give them STEAM and STEM education programming in the Bosque. That’s a way to build their self-esteem and also start building their capacity to be academic.
I want to make sure that we assume 100% responsibility for our own communities, and that we are responsible for our own well-being. We have to build capacity in a co-intentional way with our community to find our own liberation, to build our own smaller-scale internal structures, and to define our own economic, spiritual, and political independence. I think we can do it through developing co-ops.
Most of the economic models that we use for organic farming are all cooperatives because co-ops are communal models and they spread the wealth out horizontally instead of vertically. I also think cooperatives are really back to the future. Indigenous communities are used to clans and kinship, and that’s how they still operate. In the land-based traditional Chicano communities, land grants and acequias are our communal models. Finally, co-ops are pre-figurative models for a post-capitalist society, if we’re thinking far enough into the future, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
In the time of this great, strange plague, writer Paul Kingsnorth returns to the Celtic tale of Finnegas, the woodland hermit who devoted his life to catching and eating the salmon that contained the wisdom of the world.
I would like to tell you a few things about this virus and the lessons it should teach us, all the things we should be learning. I would like to add my voice to the crowd and be heard above it.
I would like to say: fish have returned to the Venetian canals now that humans have stopped polluting them.
I would like to say: the clouds of air pollution over Italy and China have dissipated since people were prevented from causing them with their cars, planes, factories.
I would like to say: up to 80,000 premature deaths which would have been caused this way have probably been prevented in China by the shutdown of the economy.
I would like to say: carbon monoxide levels in the air above New York have collapsed by 50 percent in a single week.
I would like to say: Nature recovers swiftly when we stop our plundering of Her bounty.
I would like to say: lift your gaze, humans.
I would like to say: we can learn from this, we can change.
I am squatting in the sun on this day of the spring equinox, it is a cold sun, I am down by the pond with my children, we are watching the tadpoles squirm free of their jelly under the leafing poplars. The world is turning.
Today is the day when shafts of dawn sunlight illuminate the passages of the old Neolithic tombs at Carrowkeel, at Loughcrew, at Newgrange. Today at Stonehenge, at Wayland’s Smithy, at West Kennet, all across these Atlantic islands—today is the day the light of Sky pierces the darkness of Earth. Today is the day that aérios meets chthón.
Neolithic : we think we know what this word means, but it is just another one of our categories. When we say Neolithic, we mean: forgotten people, unknown people, the first farmers. When we say Neolithic, we mean: who were they and what was their world and how was it so different from ours under this same sky?
Their world, the world of those people long supplanted, was a world of tombs; a world of great barrows raised on high downs, barrows that became the pregnant belly of Earth, barrows into which, each equinox, a shaft of sunlight would pierce, enter the womb of the Mother, seed new life each spring.
I am writing this on the day of the equinox in the time of the great, strange plague.
I would like to say, as if I could tell you: This was what they knew. That each spring, Sky must meet Earth, that there is no life without both Sky and Earth, without both chthón and aérios. That if you live without one or the other, you will build a world that is bent on its axis, and that world may seem whole but will be only half-made, and one day it will fall over and you will fall with it.
I would like to say: well, we had it coming.
The Irish writer John Moriarty wrote a lot about chthón. His life’s search was for ways to re-embed us in what we have lost, to take us around and down again, to correct the Western Error. In his autobiography, Nostos, he writes:
Chthón is the old Greek word for the Earth in its secret, dark, depths, and if there was any one word that could be said to distinguish ancient Greeks from modern Europeans, that word chthón, that would be it. Greeks had the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the pieties and beliefs that go with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the wisdom that goes with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the sense of spiritual indwelling that goes with the word, we haven’t. In the hope that they might continue in the goodwill of its dark but potentially beneficent powers, Greeks poured libations of wine, of honey, or barley-water sweetened with mint down into this realm, we don’t.
I would like to say that we forgot all about chthón, we with our space stations and our stellar minds, our progress and our clean boots, our hand sanitizers and our aircon units, our concrete vaults and our embalming fluid; that for a short period we escaped into aérios, or thought we had, and now we are going to have to go underground again, and you can be sure we will be dragged there by the Hag against our will, and we will fight and fight as the sun comes down the shaft and we see again what is carved on the stones down there.
You can forget about chthón, but chthón won’t forget about you.
I would like to say that I know what to do about all this, or what to learn. I would like to teach it to you so that you may learn too. I would like to be a prophet in a time when prophets are so sorely needed.
Unfortunately, I am not qualified for this role. I don’t know anything at all, and I am learning, painfully, that this was my lesson all along.
I don’t know anything at all.
My society does not know anything at all.
All the things I was brought up to label as learning : my A-levels, my Oxford University degrees, all the books I have read and written, all the arguments I learned how to formulate, all the ideas I learned how to frame, the concepts I learned how to enunciate. All this head-work, all these modern European ways of seeing, understanding, controlling, managing, directing the world:
Nope.
None of that was it.
One of the best-known myth cycles of Celtic Ireland is the life story of the great warrior Finn McCool. Finn, in his boyhood, was apprenticed to an old woodland hermit by the name of Finnegas. Finnegas had spent his life fishing for an elusive salmon which dwelt in a pool under a group of hazel trees. The hazel trees contained a great old magic, and when their nuts dropped into the pool and were eaten by the salmon, they imparted to it all the knowledge and wisdom of the world.
Up from the earth the wisdom came, through the trees, down into the water, and Finnegas knew that if he could catch and eat the salmon then all that wisdom would be his.
One day, to his great joy, Finnegas finally caught the salmon. He laid it upon the ground and instructed Finn, his apprentice, to cook it for him while he took a walk in the woods to collect himself, to prepare for his great moment.
Cook the salmon, he instructed Finn, but eat none of it.
Yes, master, said Finn.
When Finnegas returned and looked into Finn’s eyes, he saw immediately that everything had changed. He saw that the catastrophe had occurred.
Did you eat the salmon? he demanded. No, master, replied Finn. But …
Cooking the salmon, Finn had seen a blister appear in its flesh. Perhaps wanting the meal to be perfect for Finnegas after his years of labor, he had pressed the blister down with his thumb and in the process had scalded his hand with hot oil from the cooking fish. Instinctively, he had raised his thumb to his mouth to suck away the pain.
In Finn’s eyes now, Finnegas saw all the wisdom of the world, and he saw too that it was Finn, and not he, who was destined for greatness. Finnegas saw that his life’s dream, his life’s work, was not what he had thought it was. Everything he had learned, the moment he thought he had prepared for:
Nope.
Eat, master, said Finn, offering the fish to Finnegas, for this was your work. But Finnegas refused. No, he said. No, the fish is yours, Finn, and some part of me always knew it would be so. Yours is the work, Finn. My work was to prepare for it. Eat the fish, and use well what you learn.
Maybe we thought we would one day eat that salmon, you and I. Maybe we thought that if we worked hard enough, learned enough, we could catch it and learn from it, we could save the world, change the world, teach the world some lessons.
I thought that once. I probably learned it at university. Now I think that I, we, our generations, those of us brought up within the machine, brought up to breathe with it, rely on it, those of us tamed and made by it, those of us who crushed the world without thinking—the wisdom to come is not ours.
We will never escape what we have made and what made us. We are not equipped.
We are not the people who will eat the salmon. We are not Finn.
But perhaps, if we’re lucky, we could be Finnegas.
Perhaps, if we’re lucky, we could lay some ground for what is to come.
Yours is the work. My work was to prepare for it.
You cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. You cannot use your arguments and your concepts to access the chthón. You cannot use your Oxford University degree to build a world which regards Oxford University degrees with the bafflement they deserve to be greeted with.
It is good to learn how little I know, and how little we matter.
Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.
We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to.
But Earth does, and it will.
It turns out that we were never in control at all.
Control is what civilizations do. Perhaps it is what they are. Perhaps it is their central story. If we can control the world, we can protect ourselves from the darkness it contains. We can protect ourselves from what lies under the ground, in the tombs. Who doesn’t want to be protected? But who, in the end, can ever be?
Later in his autobiography, Moriarty writes that he is attempting to walk into culture. Into a culture so sure of itself that it wouldn’t ever need to become a civilization.
Cultures like that have existed before. They will again. But not yet. And when they come, people like us will not make them. We can’t. It is not our work.
Who knows what happens next? Maybe the virus will come and carry me away, me with my weak chest, me with my winter coughs, deepened every year by the damp Atlantic land I am grounded in, and there will be nothing to be done about this. Then my atoms and light will go back where they came from, or forward to somewhere else, and this is the way of things, and when exactly did we forget that? When exactly did we decide that our tiny little temporary mass of atoms, named and suited and given a role, pumped up with words and stories, should have any right at all to persist in its small form when all else is change and motion?
Nothing matters at all, and this is why everything does.
Look: the sun pierces the tunnel; the belly of the Mother is seeded again as another year begins. Something will be born when the summer comes. You do not need to catalogue it, understand it. You do not need to learn anything at all from it.
You can just watch it come.
Cultures that last are cultures that do not build. Cultures that last are cultures that do not seek to know what cannot be known. Cultures that last are cultures that crawl into their chthón without asking questions. Cultures that know how to be, that look at the sun on the mountain, and say, yes, this is the revelation.
People last when they do not eat apples that were not meant for them, when they do not steal fire they do not understand. People last when they sit in the sun and do nothing at all.
Let us learn from this! we say. Let us take this crisis and use it to make us better! Better people, more organized people, wiser people. Sleeker people, more efficient people. Let us become sustainable! Let us learn to tell new stories, for the old ones are broken now!
We should be saying: stories were the problem. We should be saying: no more stories, not from us.
We should be saying: break the stories, break them all. Nothing of this should be sustained.
We should be saying: no more normal. Not now, not ever.
We should be saying: we could die any moment, and this has always been true. Look at the beauty!
We should be saying: see the sunlight crawl down the passage of the tomb.
We should be saying: something is about to be illuminated.
This letter is reposted with permission from Wisdom Weavers of the World. It features the words of Ilarion Merculieff, an author and Indigenous activist of the Unangan people, who draws on his elders’ knowledge to offer encouragement and empowerment during the difficult times of the coronavirus pandemic.
Ilarion Merculieff
As the whirlwind grows and gets stronger… stay in your center, because when you get caught up in the whirlwind, it will be difficult to get out of it. Stay in your center, no matter what happens around you.
We are seeing the emergence of a virus, which is something that always existed in nature, but nature has been so disturbed by humans, that what was unnoticeable before, becomes noticeable.
It is a warning from Mother Earth that what we are doing has reached a point that humans need to wake up from this deep sleep of unconsciousness.
The Elders say that we live in a reverse or inside-out society, where the mind now tells the heart what to do, when traditionally we had the heart tell the mind what to do.
Today, the world is focused on the use of one’s mind as the source of all intelligence, when we know that the intelligence lies not only in the head, but the entire body, which is informed by one’s heart.
Logic and reason does not work where the spiritual is concerned…only the heart works. And yet the world is trying to solve illnesses, fears, wars, injustices, destruction of Mother Earth and many other similar things using logic and reason, the source of these great imbalances we face as humans.
This is why things are getting worse instead of better if we look at our history as human beings. We cannot solve problems with the same consciousness that created these problems in the first place.
This pandemic is an opportunity, a challenge, and a warning – to stop what we have been doing… to find real answers.
It is causing us to slow down in many ways in order to listen to the inner, not the outer voice. This pandemic is causing us to slow down to Mother Earth-based pace so that we can hear what she is saying.
The Indigenous peoples of the world have predicted what we are experiencing now and ask that the world change to listen to one’s heart now. The heart is the only place that guides us impeccably and the place to find one’s own answers and act on them.
Stop listening only to the outside and give priority to what your own heart tells you. The heart never acts out of fear, and it is the only place that exists in the infinite present moment. It is the place that the world’s sages have spoken of time and time again, a place of truth.
Know that fear will only fuel the pandemics of the world and anything else that we choose to focus on in reaction to events in our lives. The Elders say fear is the most powerful form of praying for things you DON’T want.
We must dream the world we wish to see, not in reaction to anything. To do this will require great courage to trust in ourselves, our fellow humans who dare do the same, in life, in the universe, and the Great Spirit that Lives in All Things.
Trust completely, not with the mind, but with the heart. If you are present in this moment, in your heart, and trust, all will take care of itself. This is part of what nature has taught Indigenous peoples.
Aang waan (hello my other self),
“Kuuyux” Ilarion Merculieff on behalf of the Wisdom Weavers Heart-Council Team
This article was written by Molly Morabito, a member of Sunrise Movement’s Bay Area chapter. Republished from Medium with permission from the author.
We need a Green New Deal now more than ever to address the short and long term crises our country is facing together.
As a climate activist, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a global crisis that would upend the world.
I pictured a planet ravaged by floods, superstorms, and catastrophic fire. I imagined a global economy disrupted by food shortages and the devastating costs of climate-caused disasters. I questioned the ability of societies to respond to forced migration and climate refugees, the increasing loss of homes and livelihoods. I knew that climate change would be the defining global crisis of my lifetime. I just hadn’t really expected there would be another.
The moment I got the first news notification about COVID-19 on my phone back in January — ‘Officials report outbreak of highly contagious virus in Wuhan City, China’ — my stomach dropped.I remembered the devastating Ebola outbreak, the terror and loss from avian flu and SARS. But those outbreaks had been contained, I told myself. This would be the same. I live in the Bay Area, working in clean energy research and organizing in my free time with the Sunrise Movement. A virus in Wuhan City, China seemed so far away. I put my phone down and went back to work, dismissing the strange feeling in my gut that something about this was different.
A mere two months later, the entire world is now reeling from the new strand of the coronavirus and the dangerous disease it causes. World governments have varied in their response, but most have now enacted unprecedented measures in an attempt to slow transmission of the highly contagious virus — including travel bans, school and business closures, and orders to physically distance from others for the foreseeable future.
This is a moment of great uncertainty, fear, and sorrow. Global stock markets have seen huge declines since the outbreak began, as multiple industries around the world grind to a halt and as trade and manufacturing slows. The world’s economy is projected to grow at its slowest rate since 2009, and experts predict the unemployment rate could skyrocket to 30 percent by the end of the second quarter, which starts next week. A global recession that will rival the economic downturn during the 2008 financial crisis has been predicted to start this year.
This is also a moment of unprecedented opportunity. Our country will recover from this pandemic and the economic crisis it is causing — but we have to decide as a people what that recovery will look like. We can use this moment to lead the country out of difficulty in a direction that ensures a better future for our families, our country, and our planet. Or we can let the wealthy and powerful rebuild the same systems of inequality and environmental degradation that helped exacerbate it in the first place.
Nearly every aspect of our lives has been affected by the coronavirus. But although the societal and economic effects of coronavirus are severe, they are likely to be temporary. The existential threat posed by climate change, on the other hand, will continue to worsen. Responding to this moment as a movement requires us to understand the link between these crises — and how by responding to one, we can help solve the other.
In many ways, the COVID-19 crisis is a wake up call for how devastating the effects of the climate crisis might be.
The climate crisis has far-reaching impacts on the natural world that is putting key social and economic systems at the risk of collapse. ( Image source: edie newsroom)
The link between climate change and COVID-19 may not be obvious at first. Though climate change has been declared a global emergency, the world has largely failed to respond in the same way it has to the COVID-19 crisis. While the effects of climate change are also devastating, they are somewhat slow-moving, allowing us to psychologically adjust even as the situation worsens, making it feel like less of a threat. In contrast, the visible effects of coronavirus escalate every day, increasing our understanding of the risks involved.
Despite this difference in our perception of risk, the climate crisis threatens the very same things that are threatened by COVID-19 — the health and safety of our loved ones and our communities and the stability of our economic and political systems. If left unmitigated, climate change may even exacerbate both the likelihood and severity of future pandemics.
A warmer climate can dampen immune responses and changing seasonal patterns make it harder to predict the impact of viruses. Viruses that originate in animals and insects (including COVID-19, Zika, Ebola, SARS and MERS) can also be expected to spread as global warming drastically alters natural migratory patterns and human-caused habitat destruction forces wildlife into closer contact with human beings. Climate change contributes to the further spread of airborne diseases that travel great distances by changing weather patterns. And there is very real potential for melting permafrost to unleash terrible pathogens into the world, some of which may be even more deadly than what we’re facing now.
In addition to increasing our vulnerability to pandemics, the main causes of climate change — extracting and burning fossil fuels for energy — pose their own significant public health risks. Extracting fossil fuels leads to chronic health disorders in workers, in addition to releasing toxins into the air and water. 12.6 million Americans are exposed daily to toxic air pollution from active oil and gas wells, and air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes 8.8 million deaths each year. These impacts are disproportionately concentrated in communities of color, making them more vulnerable to the risk of respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19.
Climate change is also likely to disrupt the global economy on a scale equal to or worse than what we’re seeing with the COVID-19 crisis. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2020, which surveyed 750 financial and economic experts worldwide, climate-related issues dominated all of the top-five long-term economic risks in terms of likelihood and impact. The Department of Defense calls climate change a ‘threat multiplier’ because its impacts increase the risk of political and economic instability, leading to a higher chance of global conflict.
Responding to the COVID-19 crisis is also an opportunity to make us more resilient to the threat of climate change.
This is a huge political moment. Responding to COVID-19 and the disruptions it has caused will require a monumental response from federal and state governments. We need a mass mobilization of resources that can regenerate our economy while also ensuring a just recovery that supports the most vulnerable among us first. To have any chance of withstanding the global crises to come, we need a stimulus and relief package that addresses the intersecting issues of environmental degradation and economic inequality. And that’s exactly what a Green New Deal can provide.
The Green New Deal is not just a response to climate change. It is a crucial step to ensuring that we build an economy that works for everyone — prioritizing investments that put people back to work in high-paying union jobs, rebuilding our country in a way that ensures it can continue to thrive for generations to come. This begins with a just recovery, putting those who have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 crisis (including workers who have spent their lives working in the fossil fuel industry and are now facing severe layoffs) at the front and center.
It also represents a chance for our country to enact a massive (and long overdue) build-out of renewables and energy storage, focused on distributed generation, that will help us better withstand the climate crisis while also putting people back to work. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps employed hundreds of thousands of Americans working together to pull our country out of an equally devastating economic downturn. Now is a perfect time to build out a similar program, providing livable wages and benefits for people to help build affordable housing, improve green infrastructure in local communities, and retrofit and electrify old buildings.
To ensure that our country doesn’t backslide into an unsustainable dependency on fossil fuels, the climate movement and its allies must work to ensure that our lawmakers don’t cut any breaks for polluting industries. Money from government bailouts should serve fossil fuel workers, not their executives. Any government aid to other sectors that contribute to climate change — airlines and cruise lines, for example — should come with conditions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., new efficiency rules, speeding up the retirement of older, more polluting crafts) and increase sustainability practices. This is an precedented moment for lawmakers to redefine ‘business as usual’ in some of our most polluting sectors. We can’t let them miss it.
And just like the climate crisis, our response to COVID-19 must acknowledge that not all communities are impacted the same way. The coronavirus has exposed the inequities in our socioeconomic systems, the weakness of our safety systems, and the tendency to leave the most vulnerable exposed to the greatest risk. Communities made vulnerable through practices of racial segregation, forced migration, and other forms of oppression and discrimination should be the first to receive economic relief and the resources they need to rebuild their communities. The Green New Deal is about rebuilding our economy in an equitable way, and it is our job as a movement to make this a key tenet in responding to both COVID-19 and the climate crisis.
Even at the personal level, this moment has shown us there is power and impact to be made in how we respond individually. Physical distancing has forced millions of us to significantly change our lifestyles and consumption habits. This is really, really difficult — and it can be a really good thing for our planet. Many of the practices people are enacting around the world in response to COVID-19 — shopping local, buying and wasting less, restricting how often we travel — are ones that climate activists have been advocating for a long time. Suddenly, millions around the world have altered their daily routines in ways that seemed unthinkable mere weeks ago. Though motivated by tragic circumstances, this rapid shift is a testimony to people’s ability to act in the interest of the collective good. It’s also proof that individual actions and consumption patterns do matter — they scale up to powerful, transformative social change.
I can certainly acknowledge that these changes were not wanted, and we will all experience them differently based on our personal circumstances. But for those to whom this represents a slight difficulty (rather than a devastating consequence), perhaps there is room to find some value in these new changes. Spending time close to home may help us get to know our neighbors and local business owners, how to show up in new ways for our communities. We may start thinking more carefully about how much food we buy, what we use it for, and whether we let it go to waste. Perhaps we finally take up gardening, start growing our own food, and become more resilient to any future disruptions to global supply chains.
For me, this time is teaching me to find new appreciation for a slower pace of life: long, aimless walks through a deserted neighborhood; the sound of birdsong. I know that the social disruptions caused by COVID-19 will eventually end. But the new habits and appreciations we form now could continue to last. And maybe that would be a good thing for the planet.
This is a painful moment for all of us. But our collective response to the dual crises of COVID-19 and climate change doesn’t need to be alienating or scary — it can be an opportunity to come together to fight for a livable present and livable future for us all.
Here are five things you can do right now to help make that a reality:
This article was originally published on the PBS site Next Avenue and This Chair Rocks.Click here to learn more about Ashton’s anti-ageism message.Featured photo credit: Adobe.
Author Ashton Applewhite
Why is coronavirus spreading across the US? Not because a virulent virus jumped from an animal into a human. Not because of China, or selfish youngers and clueless olders. COVID is spreading because the virus is new and contagious and because we live under a system that picks profit over people at every turn. The pandemic has exposed our shredded social safety net as never before, and a hospital system crippled by decades of cost-cutting, underfunding, and chronic understaffing by underpaid workers to benefit profiteering corporations.
This is playing out nakedly on Twitter at the moment. The hashtag #NotDying4WallStreet is trending as people recognize the implications of President Trump’s calls to end the lockdown soon, which infectious disease experts strongly recommend against. #GrandparentsShould is trending too, in response to the suggestion that grandparents should sacrifice themselves for the good of the economy. (Sample tweet: #GrandparentsShould stop voting for Nazis who want to kill them off to give the stock market a boost.)
Never have ageism and ableism been so glaringly exposed.
We olders are more at risk from COVID19. That’s biology, not bias. Our immune systems are weaker, our lungs less elastic, and we’re more likely to have underlying conditions—such as heart disease, lung disease and diabetes—that make us more vulnerable to other illnesses and slower to recover. This doesn’t mean that the day someone turns 65, they’re at higher risk. It also says very little about what any given individual is up against when it comes to getting sick or getting better. Underlying health plays a much bigger role than age does. And while older people do have more health issues, plenty are in excellent health and plenty of young people are immune-suppressed and/or live with chronic disease.
The most dangerous manifestation of ageism during the pandemic is the suggestion of an age limit for medical treatment, so it won’t be “wasted.” A public health emergency can indeed make it necessary to allocate resources by health status. That’s triage. I wrote earlier, “Allocating resources by age, under any circumstances, is not triage. It is ageism at its most lethal.” I’ve since come to understand that when hospitals get completely overwhelmed, as has happened in Italy and is likely in the US very soon, people on the front lines have to make hideous decisions, very fast, about which of the many people in dire condition are likely to benefit most from getting, say, the only available ventilator. These decisions involve a complex ethical calculus, delineated in this Ars Technica article and this GeriPal podcast. Age is way quicker to assess than health status, and advanced age is a clear disadvantage under these circumstances. Boom. Such decisions are tragic, horrible, wrong, and—under these conditions—sometimes necessary. I sure don’t envy the heroic people making them in hospitals today.
In every other context, it’s up to the rest of us to push back against every form of social bias. Are testing and outreach prioritizing men over women, white people over people of color, youngers over older, cis people over trans? Are we including the most exposed—not just olders but people with disabilities and those who are homeless or incarcerated—in our efforts? We are engaged in a massive collective experiment to protect the vulnerable, whoever they turn out to be. It’s high-stakes, and it’s as intersectional as it can get. We are truly all in this together.
Let’s also ditch the generational finger-pointing and place the blame where it belongs. If we didn’t have a government controlled by corporate interests like Big Pharma and insurance companies, and it had invested in decent healthcare for all, supported public hospitals, not fired the scientists trained to deal with outbreaks, gave a damn about the most vulnerable, and not ignored the coronavirus threat for months, there might be enough ventilators to go around.
This article was originally published on the PBS site Next Avenue.Click here to learn more about Ashton’s anti-ageism message.
Kenny and Nina and the entire staff and board of Bioneers send our deepest heartfelt wishes for you and your family and community health, safety and well-being during this time.
For the health and safety of us all, we’ve concluded that we
need to suspend the 2020 Bioneers conference. Between the unknown timelines of
both the coronavirus and the current economic reality, postponing the event
sooner rather than later feels like the right thing to do. For so many of us,
the gathering is the most inspiring, soul-nourishing and catalytic moment in
our yearly cycle, and we most certainly aim to be back in 2021 for a powerful
reunion. And the work does not stop in between, to say the least.
At this inflection point of transformative systems crash
that, as Bioneers, we all knew was inevitable, now more than ever it is vital
that we spread the voices of the Bioneers far and wide. As it turns out, we’re
well fitted to meet this moment.
Bioneers at heart has long been a media company. We were
already in process to expand our digital presence to include new live and
interactive online events, and now we’re accelerating that process. We’re also
exploring adaptive versions of an online “conference” later in the year.
There’s no one-to-one replacement of the live act but there are creative and
innovative ways to maintain and deepen our connections virtually that hold
great promise and may well expand the reach of the conference experience far beyond
the thousands who gather in California each year.
In reality, our media reaches exponentially more people than the conference. Over the past three years, because of your generous support, we’ve dramatically expanded our distribution and reach. The Bioneers Radio Series is on nearly 200 stations with 100,000 listeners weekly and passed half a million podcast downloads last year. Our keynote videos regularly feature on two national TV channels and on social media with an estimated 4 million viewers weekly. We’re moving strongly into video, having launched a short video series, “Seeding the Field,” that went viral, with more on the way. Bioneers.org traffic has exploded as we continue to publish between 3-5 new pieces a week. We encourage you to check out our current series focused on coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and check out the free download of the Ecological Medicine e-book, which couldn’t be more timely.
Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll let you know as
specific projects and events crystallize. We invite your participation and
support to amplify our collective efforts. We’re tripling down on disseminating
the most groundbreaking solutions, initiatives and ideas from so many of our
greatest visionary leaders from diverse communities, fields of endeavor, and
walks of life.
In this vortex moment of massive change, we need to
radically magnify our influence with the medicine the Bioneers community
brings. And above all, we wish all of you as much resilience, fortitude and mutual
aid as humanly possible to ride out this head-spinning swerve.
With Our Deepest Love and Gratitude,
Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons and the entire Staff and Board
of Bioneers
In July 2016, Jack Loeffler recorded Gary Snyder reading his updated version of ‘Four Changes’ in his home. This recorded version was prepared for and included in a major exhibition held at the History Museum of New Mexico at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe.
The exhibition was entitled ‘Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest’, and Snyder’s rendering of ‘Four Changes’ aptly conveyed how deeply the counterculture movement helped nurture the emerging environmental movement. The impact of this manifesto is as powerful today as it was a half century ago and could not be more timely.
Four Changes at Age 50: A Celebration on the Environmental Movement’s First Manifesto of Contemplative Ecology
Introduction by Diana Hadley, Jack Loeffler, Gary Paul Nabhan and Jack Shoemaker
In the months before the first Earth Day in April 1970, mention of a prophetic manifesto seemed to crop up in nearly every serious discussion of what the nascent environmental movement should be and what values it should embody. That manifesto was conceived and shaped in the summer 1969, as poet Gary Snyder toured a number of college campuses around the United States and then entered into deeper discussions with a number of other poets, visionaries and activists in the San Francisco Bay area. Affectionately called “Chofu” by other radical environmentalists during that time, Snyder gradually refined their collective vision into a ten page draft document that became what we now know as Four Changes.
Several features of this manifesto were then, and still are, unique in the canon of writings considered foundational to the environmental movement. Snyder’s literary gifts shine through the manifesto with prescient, poetic and playfully comic qualities to them. The tone seemed as fresh and as “out of the box” as Leaves of Grass must have sounded when Whitman first sowed it onto the American earth a century earlier. The manifesto called for a radical shift in our relationship with the planet through changing the way we perceive population, pollution, consumption, and the transformation of our society and ourselves. In this manner, it foreshadowed later expressions of ecological thought that we now call contemplative ecology and deep ecology.
While it was in many ways anchored in Buddhist teachings, it was also precise in its understanding of modern ecological science and respectful of the place-based wisdom of the traditional ecological knowledge of the many indigenous cultures of the world. It did not privilege Western science over other ways of making sense of the environment, but welcomed dialogue and integration of many distinctive expressions.
Four Changes was also rooted in a mature understanding of the political ecology of power dynamics and disparities in access to resources that were ravaging our planet, its biological and cultural diversity. Parts of it were so pertinent to these issues that it was read into the Congressional Record onApril 5th, 1970— two and a half weeks before Earth Day flags were unfurled all around the world. In that sense, it was perhaps the first robust articulation of what we now call a yearning for environmental justice. Still, the tone was hopeful—that humankind could learn to respect, learn from and embrace the other-than-human-world. As Snyder later paraphrased one of the tenets of Four Changes, “Revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited classes: animals, trees, water, air, grasses.” It is time to heed the call of the prophetic Four Changes.
Audio Transcript +
POPULATION: THE CONDITION
Position: Human beings are but a part of the fabric of life — dependent on the whole fabric for their very existence. As the most highly developed tool-using animal, we must recognize that the unknown evolutionary destinies of other life forms are to be respected, and we must act as gentle steward of the Earth’s community of being.
Situation: There are now too many human beings, and the problem is growing rapidly worse. It is potentially disastrous not only for the human race but for most other life forms.
Goal: The goal would be half of the present world population, or less.
ACTION
Social/Political: First, a massive effort to convince the governments and leaders of the world that the problem is severe. And that all talk about raising food-production — well intentioned as it is — simply puts off the only real solution: reduce population. Demand immediate participation by all countries in programs to legalize abortion, encourage vasectomy, sterilization (provided by free clinics), and try to correct traditional cultural attitudes that tend to force women into childbearing, remove income tax deductions for more than two children above a specified income level, and scale it so that lower-income families are forced to be careful too, or pay families to limit their number; take a vigorous stand against the policy of the right-wing in the Catholic hierarchy and any other institutions that exercise an irresponsible social force in regard to this question; oppose and correct simple-minded boosterism that equates population growth with continuing prosperity; work ceaselessly to have all political questions be seen in the light of this prime problem.
In many cases the governments are the wrong
agents to address. Their most likely use of a problem or crisis is another
excuse for extending their own powers. Abortion should be legal and voluntary.
Great care should be taken that no one is ever tricked or forced into
sterilizations. The whole population issue is fraught with contradictions, but
the fact stands that by standards of planetary biological welfare, there are
already too many human beings. The long-range answer is a steady, lower
birthrate, area by area of the globe. The measure of optimum population should
be based on what is best for the total ecological health of the region,
including its wildlife population.
The Community: Explore other social structures and marriage forms, such as group marriage and polyandrous marriage, which provide family life but many less children. Share the pleasure of raising children widely, so that all need not directly reproduce in order to enter into this basic human experience. We must hope that no one woman would give birth to more than one child or two children, during this period of crisis. Adopt children. Let reverence for life and reverence for the feminine mean also a reverence for other species, and for future human lives, most of which are threatened.
In Our Own Heads: “I am a child of all life, and all living beings are my brothers and sisters, my children and grandchildren. And there is a child within me waiting to be born, the baby of a new and wiser self.” Love, lovemaking, seen as the vehicle of mutual realization for a couple, where the creation of new selves and a new world of being is as important as reproducing our kind.
POLLUTION: THE CONDITION
Position: Pollution is of two types. One sort results from an excess of some fairly ordinary substance—smoke, or solid waste—that cannot be absorbed or transmuted rapidly enough to offset its introduction into the environment, thus causing changes the great cycle is not prepared for. (All organisms have wastes and by-products, and these are indeed part of the total biosphere: energy is passed along the line, refracted in various ways. This is cycling, not pollution.) The other sort is powerful modern chemicals and poisons, products of recent technology that the biosphere is totally unprepared for. Such are DDT and similar chlorinated hydrocarbons—nuclear testing fallout and nuclear waste—poison gas, germ and virus storage and leakage by the military; and chemicals that are put into food, whose long-range effects on human begins have not been properly tested.
Situation: The human race in the last century has allowed its production and scattering of wastes, by-products, and various chemicals to become excessive. Pollution is directly harming life on the planet: which is to say, ruining the environment for humanity itself. We are fouling our air and water, and living in noise and filth that no “animal” would tolerate, while advertising and politicians try to tell us “we’ve never had it so good.” The dependence of modern governments on this kind of untruth leads to shameful mind-pollution through the mass media and much school education.
Goal: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams.
ACTION
Social/Political: Effective international legislation banning DDT and other poisons — with no fooling around. The collusion of certain scientists with the pesticide industry and agri-business that is trying to block this legislation must be brought out in the open. Strong penalties for water and air pollution by industries — “Pollution is somebody’s profit.” Phase out the internal combustion engine and fossil fuel use in general, do more research into non-polluting energy sources such as solar energy and the tides. No more kidding the public about nuclear waste disposal: it’s impossible to do it safely. So nuclear-power generated electricity cannot be seriously planned for as it stands now.
Stop all germ and chemical warfare research and experimentation; work toward a safe disposal of the present staggering and stupid stockpiles of H-Bombs, cobalt gunk, germ and poison tanks and cans. Provide incentives against the wasteful use of paper, and so on, which adds to the solid waste of cities, develop methods of re-cycling solid urban waste. Recycling should be the basic principle behind all waste-disposal thinking. Thus, all bottles should be re-usable; old cans should make more cans; old newspapers should go back into newsprint again. Establish stronger controls and conduct more research on chemicals in foods. A shift toward a more varied and sensitive type of agriculture (more small scale and subsistence farming) would eliminate much of the call for blanket use of pesticides.
The Community: DDT and such – don’t use them.
Air pollution – use fewer cars. Cars pollute
the air, and one or two people riding lonely in a huge car is an insult to
intelligence and to the Earth. Share rides, legalize hitchhiking, have hitchhiker
waiting stations along the highways. Also — a step toward the new world – walk
more; look for the best routes through beautiful countryside for long-distance
walking trips: San Francisco to Los Angeles down the Coast Range, for example.
Learn how to use your own manure as fertilizer if you’re in the country, as the
far East has done for centuries. There is a way, and it’s safe.
Solid waste – boycott bulky wasteful Sunday
papers which use up trees. It’s all just advertising anyway, which is
artificially inducing more energy consumption. Refuse bags at the store and
bring your own. Organize park and street clean-up festivals. Don’t work in any
way for or with an industry that pollutes. Don’t be drafted into the military.
Don’t waste.
(A monk and an old master were once walking
in the mountains. They noticed a little hut upstream. The monk said, “A
wise hermit must live there” — the master said, “That’s no wise
hermit, you see that lettuce leaf floating down the stream, he’s a
Waster.” Just then an old man came running down the hill with his beard
flying and caught the floating lettuce leaf.) Carry your own jug to the winery
and have it filled from the barrel.
Our Own Heads: Part of the trouble with talking about DDT is that the use of it is not just a practical device, it’s almost an establishment religion. There is something in Western culture that wants to totally wipe out creepy-crawlies, totally, and feels repugnance for toadstools and snakes. This is fear of one’s own deepest inner-self wilderness areas, and the answer is, relax. Relax around bugs, snakes, and your own hairy dreams. Again, we all should share our crops with a certain percentage of bug life as “paying our dues.” Thoreau says, “How then can the harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first fruits but his last fruits also.”
In the realm of thought, inner experience,
consciousness, as in the outward realm of interconnection, there is a
difference between balanced cycle, and the excess that cannot be handled. When
the balance is right, the mind recycles from highest illuminations to the muddied
blinding anger or grabiness that sometimes seizes us all. That is the
alchemical “transmutation.”
CONSUMPTION: THE CONDITION
Position: Everybody that lives eats food and is food in turn. This complicated animal, the human being, rests on a vast and delicate pyramid of energy transformation. To grossly use more than you need to destroy is biologically unsound. Much of the production and consumption of modern society is not necessary or conducive to spiritual and cultural growth, let alone survival; and is behind much greed and envy, age-old causes of social and international discord.
Situation: Humanity’s careless use of “resources” and its total dependence on certain substances such as fossil fuels (which are being exhausted, slowly but certainly) are having harmful effects on all the other members of the life-network. The complexity of modern technology renders whole populations vulnerable to the deadly consequences of the loss of any one key resource. Instead of independence we have over-dependence on life- giving substances such as water, which we squander. Many species of animals and birds have become extinct in the service of fashion fads — or fertilizer — or industrial oil. The soil is being used up; in fact, mankind has become a locust-like blight on the planet that will leave a bare cupboard for its own children — all the while in a kind of Addict’s Dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress — using the great achievements of science to produce software and swill.
Goal: Balance, harmony, humility, growth that is a mutual growth with Redwood and Quail — to be a good member of the great community of living creatures. True affluence is not needing anything.
ACTION
Social/Political: It must be demonstrated ceaselessly that a continually “growing economy” is no longer healthy, but a cancer. And that the criminal waste which is allowed in the name of competition — especially that ultimate in wasteful needless competition, hot wars and cold wars with “communism” (or “capitalism”) — must be halted totally with ferocious energy and decision. Economics must be seen as a small sub-branch of Ecology, and production/distribution/consumption handled by companies or unions or cooperatives with the same elegance and spareness one sees in nature. Soil banks; open space; logging to be truly based on sustained yield (the US Forest Service is sadly now the lackey of business). Protection for all predators and varmints. “Support your right to arm bears.” Damn the International Whaling Commission which is selling out the last of our precious, wise whales! Ban absolutely all further development of roads and concessions in National Parks and Wilderness Areas; build auto campgrounds in the least desirable areas. Initiate consumer boycotts of dishonest and unnecessary products. Establish Co-ops. Politically, blast both “Communist” and “Capitalist” myths of progress, and all crude notions of conquering or controlling nature.
The Community: Sharing and creating. The inherent aptness of communal life — where large tools are owned jointly and used efficiently. The power of renunciation: If enough Americans refused to buy a new car for one given year it would permanently alter the American economy. Recycling clothes and equipment. Support handicrafts — gardening, home skills, midwifery, herbs — all the things that can make us independent, beautiful and whole. Learn to break the habit of acquiring unnecessary possessions, a monkey on everybody’s back — but avoid a self-abnegating anti-joyous self-righteousness. Simplicity is light, carefree, neat, and loving — not a self-punishing ascetic trip.
(The great
Chinese poet Tu Fu said, “The ideas of a poet should be noble and
simple.”) Don’t shoot a deer if you don’t know how to use all the meat and
preserve that which you can’t eat, to tan the hide and use the leather — to use
it all, with gratitude, right down to the sinew and hooves. Simplicity and
mindfulness in diet are the starting point for many people.
Our Own Heads: It is hard to even begin to gauge how such a complication of possessions, the notions of “my and mine,” stand between us and a true, clear, liberated way of seeing the world. To live lightly on the Earth, to be aware and alive, to be free of egotism, to be in contact with plants and animals, starts with simple, concrete acts. The inner principle is the insight that we are interdependent energy-fields of great potential wisdom and compassion expressed in each person as a superb mind, a handsome and complex body, and the almost magical capacity of language. To these potentials and capacities, “owning things” can add nothing of authenticity. “Clad in the sky, with the Earth for a pillow.”
TRANSFORMATION: THE CONDITION
Position: Everyone is the result of four forces — the conditions of this known-universe (matter/energy forms, and ceaseless change); the biology of his or her species; individual genetic heritage; and the culture one is born into. Within this web of forces there are certain spaces and loops that allow to some persons the experience of inner freedom and illumination. The gradual exploration of some of these spaces constitutes “evolution” and, for human cultures, what “history” could increasingly be. We have it within our deepest powers not only to change our “selves” but to change our culture. If humans are to remain on Earth they must transform the five-millennia-long urbanizing civilization tradition into a new ecologically-sensitive, harmony-oriented, wild-minded scientific/spiritual culture. “Wildness is the state of complete awareness. That’s why we need it.”
Situation: civilization, which has made us so successful a species, has overshot itself and now threatens us with its inertia. There is also some evidence that civilized life isn’t good for the human gene pool. To achieve the changes, we must change the very foundations of our society and our minds.
Goal: nothing short of total transformation will do much good. What we envision is a planet on which the human population lives harmoniously and dynamically by employing various sophisticated and unobtrusive technologies in a world environment that is ‘”left natural.” Specific points in this vision:
A healthy and spare population of all races,
much less in number than today.
Cultural and individual pluralism, unified by
a type of world tribal council. Division by natural and cultural boundaries
rather than arbitrary political boundaries.
A technology of communication, education, and
quiet transportation, land-use being sensitive to the properties of each
region. Allowing, thus, the Bison to return to much of the high plains. Careful
but intensive agriculture in the great alluvial valleys; deserts left wild for
those who would live there by skill. Computer technicians who run the plant
part of the year and walk along with the Elk in their migrations during the
rest.
A basic cultural outlook and social
organization that inhibits power and property-seeking while encouraging
exploration and challenge in things like music, meditation, mathematics,
mountaineering, magic, and all other ways of authentic being-in-the-world.
Women totally free and equal. A new kind of
family — responsible, but more festive and relaxed is implicit.
ACTION
Social/Political: It seems evident that there are throughout the world certain social and religious forces that have worked through history toward an ecologically and culturally enlightened state of affairs. Let these be encouraged: Gnostics, hip Marxists, Teilhard de Chardin Catholics, Druids, Taoists, Biologists, Witches, Yogins, Bhikkus, Quakers, Sufis, Tibetans, Zens, Shaman, Bushmen, American Indians, Polynesians, Anarchists, Alchemists . . . the list is long. Primitive cultures, communal and ashram movements, cooperative ventures.
Since it
doesn’t seem practical or even desirable to think that direct bloody force will
achieve much, it would be best to consider this change a continuing
“revolution of consciousness” which will be won not by guns but by
seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that
life won’t seem worth living unless one’s on the side of the transforming
energy. We must take over “science and technology” and release its
real possibilities and powers in the service of this planet — which, after all,
produced us and it. More concretely, no transformation without our feet on the
ground.
Stewardship
means, for most of us, find your place on the planet, dig in, and take
responsibility from there. The tiresome but tangible work of school boards,
county supervisors, local foresters, local politics, even while holding in mind
the largest scale of potential change. Get a sense of workable territory. Learn
about it and start acting point by point. On all levels, from national to
local, the need to move toward steady state economy, equilibrium, dynamic
balance, inner growth stressed must be taught – maturity, diversity, climax,
creativity.
The Community: New schools, new classes, walking in the woods and cleaning up the streets. Find psychological techniques for creating an awareness of “self” that includes the social and natural environment. “Consideration of what specific language forms — symbolic systems — and social institutions constitute obstacles to ecological awareness.” Without falling into facile interpretations of McLuhan, we can hope to use the media. Let no one be ignorant of the facts of biology and related disciplines; bring up our children as part of the wildlife. Some communities can establish themselves in backwater rural areas and flourish — others maintain themselves in urban centers, and the two types work together — a two-way flow of experience, people, money, and home-grown vegetables. Ultimately cities may exist only as joyous tribal gatherings and fairs, to dissolve after a few weeks. Investigating new lifestyles is our work, as is the exploration of ways to explore our inner realms — with the known dangers of crashing that go with such. Master the archaic and the primitive as models of basic nature-related cultures — as well as the most imaginative extensions of science — and build a community where these two vectors cross.
Our Own Heads: are where it starts. Knowing that we are the first human beings in history to have so much of our past cultures and previous experiences available to our study, and being free enough of the weight of traditional cultures to seek out a larger identity – the first members of a civilized society since the early Neolithic to wish to look clearly into the eyes of the wild and see our selfhood there, our family there. We have these advantages to set off the obvious disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are — which gives us a fair chance to penetrate some of the riddles of ourselves and the universe, and to go beyond the idea of “human survival” or “survival of the biosphere” and to draw our strength from the realization that at the heart of things is some kind of serene and ecstatic process that is beyond qualities and beyond birth and death. “No need to survive! In the fires that destroy the universe at the end of the kalpa, what survives?” — “The iron tree blooms in the void.” Knowing that nothing need be done is the place from which we begin to move.
This article was written by Mari Margil, executive director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. For years, Margil has dedicated her work to upholding environmental protections internationally and advocating the rights of nature.
Republished from Common Dreams with permission. Featured image by Banaras Khan/AFP for Getty Images.
Mari Margil speaking at a Bioneers conference
I first traveled to Nepal in 2012 to meet with members of the Constituent Assembly drafting the country’s new constitution. The central question we discussed was how to tackle global warming from a Rights of Nature perspective.
Home to Mt. Everest, Nepal has witnessed the Himalayas become the fastest warming mountain range on earth. The kind of change that is needed is obviously significant, and over the years, our discussions have shifted from what the United States should do (“get your country off our back” was a common refrain), to what smaller nations like Nepal must do in the wake of the growing climate crisis.
Toward the end of that first stay in Kathmandu, a taxi strike took place. It was only then, as the heavy air pollution cleared, that I was able to see the Himalayas from my hotel room.
Today we are witnessing something similar in India, China, and elsewhere. With the disruption of everyday life occurring from coronavirus, air pollution rates are dropping fast.
Without the disruption of a taxi strike or the coronavirus, something that shifts our perspective, it can be difficult to see the world differently. What’s right in front of us can seem so concrete that it can be challenging to imagine that another reality is possible.
However, in these pandemic days (daze?), our reality seems to shift daily—even hourly. As we read more headlines about falling pollution levels and other environmental effects, what seemed impossible becomes imaginable.
Thus, disruption—in our individual lives, such as moving or getting a new job—and in our collective lives, such as a global pandemic—can provide a window of opportunity to change our habits and make positive change.
The courage to go first
The pandemic notwithstanding, times of great disruption are not always brought about so abruptly. People on the frontlines of social justice movements struggle for years, decades, even longer, to make the great changes in society that are needed to expand freedom, rights, and protections. They mobilize to create the conditions for significant shifts in society and law.
In social change movements those who “go first” often show the rest of us that a new reality is possible.
We can glimpse that new reality in something as simple as sitting on a stool. In 1960, four young black men sat at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Their refusal to give up their seats helped reveal to the nation the injustice of Jim Crow segregation.
Their willingness to “go first” led others to follow. Within two months, sit-ins had taken place in over 50 cities in 13 states. The Greensboro Four—Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil—together made visible a path that others could then walk.
In 2008, I went to Ecuador to meet with the elected delegates to the Constituent Assembly who were drafting the country’s new constitution. We discussed the Rights of Nature—this need to change how nature is treated under the law—from something whose use and destruction is to be regulated, to a living entity in need of protection and respect unto itself.
Ecuador is home to remarkable, biodiverse ecosystems, from the páramo high up in the Andes to the Galapagos islands.
When the people of Ecuador approved the new constitution in September 2008, it was a landmark moment in the budding Rights of Nature movement. For the very first time anywhere in the world, a country had enshrined constitutional protection of nature—or Pacha Mama.
In the face of overlapping environmental crises—including extinction rates far beyond natural background rates, to climate change—this brave willingness of a nation and its people to “go first” revealed that it is possible to change how we treat nature, from an object of human exploitation to a subject with legal rights of its own.
Within weeks, I spoke with people in India, Nepal, and other countries who were interested to find out how they could follow in Ecuador’s footsteps.
Today, many of us did not envision that we would ever be under “stay at home” social distancing orders. Maybe the shutdown in Wuhan was too distant to seem a possibility. Perhaps it was measures first taken in northern Italy that brought that idea a little more into focus. By now, the cascading events that have led to a practical global shutdown have brought into view a different world, at least for a while.
Social movements often bring into sharp relief prejudice and destruction that is otherwise camouflaged. In so doing, such movements force our realities to shift, and we are left to wrestle with what we do with that new understanding.
At this moment, in this time of disruption, as we are able to see the possibility of change, the question before us is what we will do.
A Special offering from Bioneers – for this, our time.
The world has entered a period of radical creative destruction — of breakdown and breakthrough. The very fate of human civilization hangs in the balance. Where have we gone so wrong? Could it be our cosmology itself, our view of our place in the natural and cosmic order? As author Richard Tarnas observes, “World views create worlds.” Is a fundamental transformation of our civilization’s world view the gateway to our survival and flourishing as a species? In this Bioneers audio special, we take an experiential journey into cosmology, consciousness and change, with: Chief Oren Lyons, Native American leader from the Onondaga Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy; Richard Tarnas, the author of Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View; and featuring music from Shaman’s Dream and Blue Tech.
Featuring
Chief Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan, Onondaga Council of Chiefs of the Hau de no sau nee, or Six Nations — Onandaga, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora. He has been very active defending indigenous rights in U.N. forums around the world, and is a principal figure in the Traditional Circle of Indian Elders, a council of grassroots leaders of North American Indian nations.
Music by Shaman’s Dream and Blue Tech, from the CD Prana Pulse.
This is a Bioneers Audio Special. Visit our radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear our regular program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
CHIEF OREN LYONS: The Question: How do you teach seven billion people to respect their relationship that they have with the Earth? Soon, now…
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: The world has entered a period of radical creative destruction — of breakdown and breakthrough. The very fate of human civilization hangs in the balance – an unprecedented planetary emergency. Has the apparent success of the modern project of “human progress” also precipitated our downfall?
As the wheels of the modern project of “human progress” come to a halt, we MUST contemplate this dawning age of biology and carefully reconsider “Who are we? What are we here for?” – our cosmology. Where have we gone so wrong? Could it be our cosmology itself, our view of our place in the natural and cosmic order?
As author Richard Tarnas observes, “World views create worlds.” Is a fundamental transformation of our civilization’s world view the gateway to our survival and flourishing as a species?
In this Bioneers audio special, we take an experiential journey into cosmology, consciousness and change – with Richard Tarnas, the author of Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View – and Chief Oren Lyons, Native American leader from the Onondaga Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.
I’m Neil Harvey. This is Thanksgiving in the Cosmos: The Next Enlightenment.
Richard Tarnas
RICHARD TARNAS: Why is cosmology important? Cosmology is important because it is the container for everything that happens in a civilization. Our understanding of ourselves as human beings in the cosmos, our…our psychology, our strategies for how we relate to the larger community of life, all this is shaped by our cosmology in very fundamental ways.
And it’s been characteristic of our cosmology since the extraordinary convulsion of the birth of the modern era, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, that there has emerged a fundamental separation of the human being from the cosmos, from the rest of nature, a sense of a separation between what in philosophy we call like the Cartesian subject, the monotheistic rational heroic solar ego in the larger matrix of nature.
And that separation has created what can perhaps best be summarized as a disenchanted cosmos, that is a cosmos that has been neutralized of all—of all spirit and soul, of all interiority.
Chief Oren Lyons
CHIEF OREN LYONS: Talking here about cosmos, cosmology, …and I represent the Onondaga Nation so I speak rather specifically, you know, about the Iroquois, the Hau de no sau nee. Yeah, it’s Hau de no sau nee, which means the people of the long house. It’s…it’s a league—called the great league of peace. It’s old compared to other nations. It’s over a thousand years old. And the structure that we use today is the same structure that was given to us a thousand years ago.
So, it’s Indian country. We talk about Indian country, and it’s a big country.You know, on this whole Turtle Island that you’re sitting on right here. It’s all Indian country. And old, old people. Been here a long time, still here, and still carrying on ceremonies. Thanksgiving and the cosmos. What is the cosmos? You know? We all have our stories. Everybody has their stories. And I just always wanna hear a nation’s story. And when I hear the story, it’s amazing what it says. You know, if you’re talking to the Coast Salish people up there along the coast, they’ll talk about the clams, it’s in their cosmology. Salmon, or Lakota talk about the buffalo—[Lakota term]. Or the Hau de no sau nee will talk about peace.
RT: Imagine that you’re the universe and you’re being approached by two suitors, that is two ways of knowing you. And one suitor looks upon you, the universe, as being intrinsically incapable of any spiritual depths or of any meaning or purpose, of any conscious intelligence. All of that is see—the suitor looks upon himself as being the only being capable of that, and looks upon you as being something that is best understood in such a way that he can better exploit your resources for his own self enhancement. And so, the purpose of knowledge is prediction and control.
The second suitor looks upon you, the universe, as being at least as intelligent and spiritually profound as he might be capable of—he or she, and in this perspective this approach, this suitor looks upon you as being…a being that is best approached not through a narrow rationalism but through a capacity for an empathic, imaginative aesthetic, intuitive somatic, as well as reason and sense. All of this has to be brought, not to predict and control but rather to better overcome the barrier between self and world, human and nature, so that a larger creative potentiality can emerge out of this coniunctio, out of this sacred marriage.
If you’re the universe, who would you open up your deepest being to?
OL: Our story begins beyond the stars, way beyond the stars, before there was an Earth here, when this planet was a ball of water. That’s how our story starts in the sky world, when things were over there. Beautiful story—sky woman, Turtle Island. Strong cosmology.
And we were always relating, you know, our story is always about relationship. And so, as it goes, how the Earth came about on the back of a turtle, and how we got our names, and how we got our designations. Identity is so important, to have an identity, to have and know who you are. Fundamental peace to know who you are.
Our families, large extended families were named after the natural world here. See? This is my family right here. You see it? Othahyǫnih. The wolf. My family is the wolf. And things going pretty hard for my family out there these days in Minnesota and Montana, Canada and Alaska. Yeah, pretty hard for…And we have other families—the turtle, the eel, deer, bear, snipe, hawk, beaver—these are families. And why? Why? Well, it’s quite simple. We’re related. We’re closely related. So, just by the designation we’re tied to the Earth. We’re reminded all the time that this is our relation, this is our relative. We have a very large family, a very extended family. It goes around the world.
RT: But our civilization has by and large entirely bought into the first suitor’s approach that has brought about the reality that we see before us today, because a disenchanted, objectifying cosmology essentially empowers the utilitarian mindset whose highest value is profit and power.
And as a result, there’s a kind of spiritual emptiness in a disenchanted universe that the people attempt to fill that spiritual void with whatever they can, and if all they know is a materialistic universe, then consumerism is the strategy to fulfill that emptiness. So, we have a kind of techno-consumerist frenzy that is cannibalizing the planet…and because we can never get enough of what we don’t really need, we have this situation that we see before us today.
OL: …We’re tied to the Earth.
You’re included. Human species. We’re a species, we’re not races. We’re black, we’re white, we’re red, yellow and everything in between. We can exchange blood. We’re family. We’re brothers and sisters. And we have intellects. It’s why we talk about psyche and cosmology. We have intellect. We kind of bounce it around a lot, you know.
But our cosmology tells us how we’re related and how we came about, and how important it is to maintain this relationship.
And so my question to you, ponder and think about and come back with an answer, how do you teach seven billion people to respect their relationship that they have with the Earth? Soon, now…why? Well, we’re facing a crisis.
HOST: Onondaga Chief Oren Lyons and author Richard Tarnas, recorded at a Bioneers conference. This is “Thanksgiving in the Cosmos: The Next Enlightenment”, an audio special from Bioneers.
RT: So, in the modern cosmos, if you perceive any meaning and purpose, whether it’s in something that’s happening outside of you in nature, whether it’s a—if you see meaningful patterns that perhaps nature is representing and communicating to the human being through the flights of birds or the movements of the planets or the cycles of the sun and moon, from the modern perspective you’re simply projecting human meaning onto the non-human world. That’s what disenchantment is. It’s a way of turning the world into an object. It’s having an I:it relationship with the universe rather than an I:thou relationship.
That’s been very empowering in certain respects for the human being. Suddenly the world is ours to manipulate and rationally comprehend, predict, explain, control, exploit. But at a huge price, a price of spiritual alienation, but also at a price that can be seen in the external world in our time, and that is the great ecological catastrophe that we are grappling with.
OL:How do you teach seven billion people to respect their relationship that they have with the Earth?
RT: The world is deep, deeper than day can comprehend, as Friedrich Nietzsche said so eloquently. There’s more going on than just that one light of the solar egoic consciousness might be seeing. The night sky with the many lights, the night sky ruled by the moon that allows us to see the whole of space rather than just the very clarified part that’s visible during the day. That larger whole allows us to entertain other possibilities.
I think we, today, are recognizing that a profound change is taking place, and I want to argue that what we have seen in the last century in particular is not just a horrific, tragic error, ’cause after all, so much that is noble and precious has taken place, that is also connected to the modern project and to the autonomy, that has been part of what has emerged in the modern world, the autonomy, even the spiritual freedom, as well as intellectual and moral. Many positive qualities are there, and…I believe that in some sense we can look at what has taken place as a so many of the symptoms of our time and of the last century resemble a kind of initiatory crisis.
OL: We have good relations with the Maya. We have old relations. We’ve known them for a long time. So, I asked one of the leaders one time. I said, Well, what’s happening in 2012? And he says, The calendar’s coming to an end. I said, And then what? He said, Well, we’ll make another one. [LAUGHTER]
He says, However, there’ll be a period of enlightenment. And I thought about that. I said, What do you mean by that period of enlightenment? He’s talking about Long Island, and here is this businessman who works in New York, and beautiful day, and decides he’s going to take his boat, go out and do some fishing instead of go to work. So he does. It’s right there, way out in Montauk, tip of Long Island, sitting out there fishing. Bright sun, hot day. I’m gonna go swimming. So, he jumps off the boat and swims around—pretty big boat, you need a ladder to get back up. There it was, the ladder’s there and he’s floating around the water. Beautiful. And he drifts a little ways from the boat, but not far. And turns around and he sees a fin, a gray fin coming directly towards him about three feet out of the water. Oh, shit, he says. I shoulda went to work. That’s a period of enlightenment. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE]
RT: The dark night of the soul, the sense of a deconstruction of the old identity, the crisis of meaning, the encounter with mortality on a planetary scale, all these resemble closely what happens in indigenous rights of passage, in the death/rebirth mysteries, in what Jung would call the individuation process, what often happens spontaneously in near-death experiences.
The separation from the community in our case, in the modern human case, it’s been a separation from the entire community of being itself, from the universe, from the cosmos. And it’s as if the universe itself is putting us through some kind of initiatory death/rebirth process, even as we ourselves are co-creating it, helping to constellate it.
OL: Here we are. It is a period of enlightenment, calendar’s changing, and things are happening, as you well know. So, here we are gathered,… and it means you gotta bear down now. And all you kids out—all the young people out there, gonna need your legs, gonna need your strength, and…ourselves, we have to take a good look at ourselves and say, How are we gonna manage these next years coming? And what about the kids, and seven generations, as our leaders have been told?
The instructions we got, one of the instructions, one of many, “when you sit and you counsel for the welfare of the people, think not of yourself, nor of your family, nor even your generation. Make your decisions on behalf of the seven generation coming. Those faces looking up from the ground, layer upon layer…make your decisions on their behalf. You yourself will have peace.”
How do you teach seven billion people to respect their relationship that they have with the Earth?
RT: I think in some sense the universe may have been constellating painstakingly and painfully a partner to reconnect with the soul of the universe in a new way, not only rediscover that soul of the universe, but to reconnect with it. Not only to reconnect with it but to forge a new relationship to it that builds upon everything that has been learned in these thousands of years and in the period of the modern and post-modern.
OL: So, we have to be adults, don’t we? We have to grow up, get rid of your toys, trim down. Talked to Ted Turner one time and I said, Ted, we’re headed for a storm. I said, What do you do? He says, “Trim your sails, Man; trim your sails and head her into the wind and ride it.” And that’s where we’re going. So, learn to trim your sails, and we’ll see how good sailors we are. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Indigenous leaders from islands across the Pacific Ocean share first-hand observations of the effects of climate change and explore how Indigenous traditions and knowledge can launch innovative solutions and inform policy.
Featuring Maui Solomon (Moriori/Kai Tahu), Indigenous Rights Lawyer and Indigenous Rights Activist, and Executive Chair of Hokotehi Moriori Trust; Sven Haawkanson Jr. (Sugpiaq), Associate Professor of Anthropology and Curator of North American Anthropology, Burke Museum, University of Washington; and, Kupuna M. Kalani Souza (Hawaiian) Executive Director, Olohana Foundation, National Distaster Preparedness outreach specialist, and certified FEMA instructor.
This presentation took place in the Indigeneity Forum at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.
Indigeneity is a Native-led Program within Bioneers/Collective Heritage Institute that promotes indigenous knowledge and approaches to solve the earth’s most pressing environmental and social issues through respectful dialogue.
Indigeneity is a Native-led Program within Bioneers/Collective Heritage Institute that promotes indigenous knowledge and approaches to solve the earth’s most pressing environmental and social issues through respectful dialogue. Visit the Indigeneity Program homepage.
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