How the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Challenging Our Destructive Habits

This is a guest blog written by Suez Jacobson, executive producer of “Wild Hope” and a member of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness board of directors.

For Suez, the COVID-19 pandemic reminds her of many of the ideas in “Wild Hope,” particularly the fundamental truth of our interconnectedness to the natural world.

Early – 6AM – sitting in front of a computer screen of little boxes, half populated with participants’ faces, half not, I had an eerie feeling, wondering if the dark boxes with small names but no faces, those of people with their video connections turned off, might represent the global toll of COVID-19. The gathering of almost 200 people, hosted by FutureEarth, was convened to share ideas about the implications for sustainability that might come from the global pandemic. There were lots of questions, many fewer answers. Would staying at home teach us we didn’t have to fly, didn’t have to commute every day, especially at rush hours, could enjoy more time with family instead of more consumption? Would we localize rather than relying on the high-carbon globalized world for immediate gratification? Would we be pulled into less resource-intensive ways to live?

Things have changed in ways we could never have imagined let alone predicted. We’ve been smacked with our vulnerabilities to natural phenomena that’s out of our direct control. We’ve known, if not overtly at least in our deepest of guts that we don’t have complete control over the natural world even though we are part of it. Fires, floods, hurricanes – the ravages of climate change – remind us of our limitations. But this is the first time in our lifetimes that millions of people’s lives, all around the globe have been dramatically altered all at the same time.  The response is also one we could never have predicted. From “shelter in place” to corporate bailouts to checks for all — radical ideas accepted and legislated even by some people who believe in rugged individualism and a libertarian free for all.

The not-so-silver silver lining is that carbon output has been cut by unimaginable magnitudes, especially in China. (It’s important to remember that much of China’s carbon output is generated satisfying US demand.) But the big question is, “What will happen when we get past this?” Will there be a rebound like no other, a meteoric release of “pent-up” demand, a three-cruise year to make up for lost time? Optimists hope that we’ll realize we can live much lower-carbon-intensive and more satisfying lives. But is that realistic? I don’t know. I’m not that optimistic. We even hear talk from the White House that the economy will get going again, on a schedule, by Easter, regardless of lives that might be lost to the virus. Sounds like a calculated trade, lives of older people in exchange for jobs and rising stock prices. Importantly, this is not a call for a “green reboot,” but for getting back to business as usual – dirty, earth-destroying business. If our priorities are economic growth and stock prices, there will be no long-term future for us as part of the web of life on this amazing planet. Fundamentally, until our relationship with the natural world changes, becomes one based on ethics not exploitation, we won’t behave differently, and we won’t survive.

In 1949 in Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic,” he argued, “A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his [sic] fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.” We’re a long way from 1949 and from thinking of ourselves as part of, rather than m/patriarchs over Mother Earth. But even in 1949 Leopold wrote, “Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail’s pace.” Can a pandemic change the trajectory?

If COVID-19 pushes us to establish familial relationships with our natural world, there will be real change. We will protect what we love, and that will mean permanent positive changes in our destructive lifestyles that have been interrupted by this global pandemic. If not, we’ll be in for more to come. As David Quammen wrote in a New York Times opinion piece referring to population and consumption “… one consequence of that abundance, that power, and the consequent ecological disturbances is increasing viral exchanges — first from animal to human, then from human to human, sometimes on a pandemic scale.”

Read more of the latest Bioneers articles on the COVID-19 pandemic:

Honey, We Shrunk the Planet: Regime Change and Resilience Thinking

The following excerpt is from Bioneers co-founder Kenny Ausubel’s book Dreaming the Future (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

The nature of nature is change. Sometimes it hurtles into fast-forward, tripping radical shifts. Think of it as nature’s regime change. For the first time, people are causing it on a planetary scale.

Andrew Revkin reported in the New York Times that “the physical Earth is increasingly becoming what the human species makes of it. The accelerating and intensifying impact of human activities is visibly altering the planet, requiring ever more frequent redrawing not only of political boundaries, but of the shape of Earth’s features themselves.”

Mick Ashworth, former editor-in-chief of the annual Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, said his staff of fifty cartographers updated their databases every three and a half minutes. Commented the editor, “We can literally see environmental disasters unfolding before our eyes.”

Environmental disasters are almost always human disasters as well. Satellite pictures of Myanmar over the past few decades have recorded the displacement of over three thousand villages of the indigenous Karen, Kachin, and other peoples, dislodging a half million people. The main culprit is the corporate hunger for oil and gas, backed by the ruling murderous military junta (which mercifully seemed to soften its grip on power in 2012).

Google Earth can leave you google-eyed. An overrun resource base is visibly shrinking at the same time our population keeps growing. Honey, we shrunk the planet. The bottom line, of course, is that we’re living beyond our means. Nearly two-thirds of the life-support services provided to us by nature are in decline worldwide and the pace is quickening. We can’t count on the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations. This is new territory.

The big wheels of ecological governance are turning. “Regime shift” is the technical term some ecologists use—for instance, when the climate flips from one state to another. It can be irreversible, at least on a human time frame. These evolutionary exclamation points unleash powerful forces of destruction and creation, collapse and renewal. During these cycles of large-scale creative destruction, we do have a sort of compass. As Charles Darwin observed, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

Change is not linear, and sudden shifts sometimes remake the world in the blink of an eye. We know we’re approaching mysterious thresholds that mark the tipping points of ecological regime change, and we may have already crossed some. The closer we get to each threshold, the less it takes to push the system over the edge, where the degree of damage will be exponentially greater. Societies slide into crisis when slammed by multiple shocks or stressors at the same time. Climate change is propelling both natural and human systems everywhere toward their tipping points.

When huge shocks transform the landscape, structures and institutions crumble, releasing tremendous amounts of bound-up energy and resources for renewal and reorganization. Novelty emerges. These times belong to those who learn, innovate, and adapt. Small changes can have big influences. It’s a period of creativity, freedom, and transformation.

The name of the game is resilience.

It means the capacity of both human and ecological systems to absorb disturbance and still retain their basic function and structure. Resilience does not mean just bouncing back to business-as-usual. It means assuring the very ability to get back. But if ecological regime change happens, resilience means having sufficient capacity to transform to meet the new management. A network of ecologists and social scientists called the Resilience Alliance outlined some of the rules of the road in their book Resilience Thinking.

The first principle of resilience thinking is systems thinking: It’s all connected, from the web of life to human systems—“You can only solve the whole problem,” says Huey Johnson of the Resource Renewal Institute. Manage environmental and human systems as one system. Taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature. Look for systemic solutions that address multiple problems at once. Watch for seeds of new solutions that emerge with changing conditions.

Resilience thinking means abandoning command-and-control approaches. We’re not remotely in control of the big wheels of ecological governance or complex human systems. Greater decentralization can provide backup against the inevitable failure of centralized command-and-control structures. Think decentralized power grids, more localized food systems, and the Internet. Redundancies are good fail-safe mechanisms, not the waste portrayed by thinking focused on industrial efficiency.

The heart of resilience is diversity. Damaged ecosystems rebound to health when they have sufficient diversity. So do societies. It’s not just a diversity of players; it’s “response diversity,” the myriad adaptive strategies for responding to myriad challenges. Each one does it slightly differently with specialized traits that can win the day, depending on which curveball comes at you. Diverse approaches improve the odds. Diverse cultures and ideas enrich society’s capacity to survive and thrive.

Ecological governance is also operating on much grander time frames than quarterly reports and midterm elections. Think dozens, hundreds, even thousands of years. Sustainability means staying in the game for the long haul.

We know some other keys to resilience.

  • Build community and social capital. Resilience resides in enduring relationships and networks that hold cultural memory the same way seeds regenerate a forest after a fire.
  • Empower local communities to solve their own problems. Governance usually works best when it’s closest to the ground and includes all stakeholders across all levels.
  • Beware of systems being too tightly connected, because one shock to a system can cause multiple ones to crash at once.
  • And above all—learn, experiment, and innovate.

The one non-negotiable is to face our vulnerabilities clearly and collaboratively. Windows of opportunity are finite and fleeting. As Yogi Berra said, “I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early.”

With any luck, we may be able to avoid catastrophic ecological regime change by embracing societal regime change.

Learn more from Bioneers co-founder Kenny Ausubel:

At Home Together: Confronting COVID-19 with Solidarity

This article contains the content from the 3/26/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!

The COVID-19 outbreak has forced us apart physically, but it has also brought our communities together in ways we could never imagine. People around the world are supporting their neighbors, connecting digitally in the search for solutions, and shifting to new perspectives.

In the coming weeks and months, Bioneers will be increasingly covering different aspects of the current pandemic, the root causes, systemic impacts and pathways forward via our brilliant community of leaders. Stay tuned to this newsletter, Bioneers.org and our social media channels for articles, videos and announcements about live content. 

Also, from our small Bioneers staff to you, we hope you’re taking care of yourself, your family and loved ones. We hope this newsletter and our content moving forward can provide inspiration, information and connection in this crazy moment. One breath at a time.

What Bioneers Are Saying About COVID-19

For decades, the Bioneers community has been sharing solutions and inspiring movements for a more just world. The recent COVID-19 outbreak has posed a unique challenge: How can we bring people together while keeping them apart?

Following is a collection of what the Bioneers community is saying about COVID-19, featuring leaders in diverse fields, such as climate activist Bill McKibben, ecologist Carl Safina and Dr. Rupa Marya. This is the first edition of our “regular round-up,” and we will continue to share news and information from our community.

Read more here.

COVID-19 is a Wake-Up Call; Don’t Hit Snooze

Ecologist and award-winning author Carl Safina points out the true cause of this pandemic — wildlife markets — and how they represent our broken relationship with the rest of the living world. Safina originally published this piece on Medium.

Read more here.

Community Resilience in Light of the Coronavirus

Carolyn Raffensperger, a lawyer and archaeologist, is the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. She is best known for her work on the precautionary principle, an essential tool for public health that mandates precautionary action to prevent harm in the face of uncertainty.

In this guest post, Carolyn calls on us to face the coronavirus pandemic by empowering our communities, helping others, and caring for our neighbors during this turbulent time.

Read more here.

A Case of the Pandemic Blues

The following essay was written by author and Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies about the COVID-19 pandemic. While calling on the history of past crises and the following trends of elite, corporate profiteering, he reminds us this form of “disaster capitalism” is not inevitable. What happens next is up to us.

Read more here.

More from Bioneers.org:

What We’re Tracking:

  • From Yes! Magazine: “Why Coronavirus Relief Needs to be Permanent” | We need to mitigate the economic impacts caused by COVID-19, but what will that system look like? New, sustainable examples are already emerging.
  • From Bitch Media: “Immunocompromised Teachers Are on the Frontlines of Coronavirus” | COVID-19 is disrupting so much in the world, but life must go on. Those providing essential services, like teachers, are risking their own wellbeing to keep our youngest generations educated and empowered.
  • From Grist: “Why Don’t We Treat Climate Change Like an Infectious Disease?” | The COVID-19 outbreak, which threatens the lives of millions across the planet, has been met with a swift response from governments worldwide. The stakes are just as high for the climate crisis, so why aren’t we treating it as such?
  • From Mother Jones: “Why Coronavirus Misinformation Is Out of Control” | News about COVID-19 seems to be changing by the hour, and this urgency is pressuring people to contribute what they know…even if it might be wrong. Here’s why this trend is so harmful.

This article contains the content from the 3/26/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!

A Case of the Pandemic Blues

The following essay was written by author and Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies about the COVID-19 pandemic. While calling on the history of past crises and the following trends of elite, corporate profiteering, he reminds us this form of “disaster capitalism” is not inevitable. What happens next is up to us.

Author J.P. Harpignies

I was in a bar/music club long ago (so long ago cigarette smoke filled the air and no one thought anything of it) when the musicians on stage introduced their next tune as an old song from the 1920s or 30s called The 1919 Influenza Blues. I still remember some of its striking lyrics: “It killed the rich, killed the poor, and it’s gonna kill, kill some more.” At that point I had never heard of the 1918/1919 “Spanish Influenza,” but, stimulated by the reference, I found some books on the topic, and I was stunned to discover what an extraordinarily devastating global epidemic it had been. I was surprised that such a massively impactful event, one that had killed perhaps a hundred million people, more than any such previous episode, had been largely erased from the collective memory. It had killed far more people than World War I, but that war was still widely taught in high school history curricula while the outbreak was at best a footnote.  

That episode is of course far more widely known now; epidemiologists always hold it up as the reason for their anxiety and hypervigilance when a new flu strain emerges. It is the specter that hangs over every new disease outbreak, because if such a lethal and contagious strain emerged and spread once, it is likely that at some point it will happen again. It’s why Swine and Bird flu and SARS and MERS, not to mention Marburg and Ebola and Zika, Dengue, and Lassa Fever, beyond their very real horrors, elicit even deeper fears initially; the fear that one of them could be the one to unleash a new 1919.  

So while this current pandemic is shocking and bound to have enormous effects on our society, it’s certainly not a surprise. For one thing epidemics have been with us since at least antiquity, from the Antonine Plague in ancient Rome, to The Plague of Justinian that wiped out nearly half of Europe’s population in the 6th Century, and of course the one most etched in our historical memory, the infamous 14th Century’s Black Death, to hundreds of more localized episodes such as the 1616 New England Epidemic that killed up to 90% of the Wampanoag People, to countless outbreaks or endemic diseases around the world, including malaria, smallpox, measles, cholera, yellow fever, and typhus, that have killed millions and millions for centuries, as well as HIV (which has killed more than 30 million globally).

This COVID-19 crisis also wasn’t a surprise because U.S. governments in recent decades have done scenario planning for just such a possibility. From 2005 to 2017 an office in the Department of Homeland Security working with analysts and supercomputers at a number of national laboratories have repeatedly generated detailed analyses of what was likely to happen to transportation systems, hospitals, and social cohesion, if a pandemic hit the country. This even continued the first year of the current “administration” when some civil servants ran a simulation called “Crimson Contagion,” but of course Trump’s hatred of expertise and science led his clique to ignore that work and discontinue the government’s longstanding efforts in this domain.

All that said, there is no denying that this is an immense crisis that will have profound impacts on nearly all of us. While we in the industrialized world have far better medical systems and social infrastructure in place than our ancestors who had to deal with earlier outbreaks did, we are perhaps not as well psychologically equipped to deal with this type of upheaval, because we in the U.S. and Europe and Japan and some other “developed” economies, have, by and large, lived since WWII in an abnormally tranquil period. Yes, there have been a number of brutal wars, but they’ve been on the periphery of the power centers not in their core. Yes, there has been plenty of injustice and inequality and racism and sexism and poverty and alienation and social strife, and the whole thing has completely depended on the unsustainable, perhaps ultimately suicidal burning of fossil fuels, but still, for those relatively privileged populations of the industrialized world, the past 70+ years have been atypical of most human history. It’s been a period free of foreign invasions on home soil, of bloody civil wars, of major famines or plagues.

This led some analysts a few decades back to declare that we had reached “the end of history,” the final triumph of “bourgeois democracy,” a hybrid of “free” markets and at least somewhat of a social safety net, a model that would surely now spread globally and usher in a golden era of peace and prosperity (yes, feel free to snicker). But History, for better or worse, doesn’t seem to have taken kindly to being told it was over. We are now in a position in which we had best try to shape some history or we will just be its victims, because while the climate emergency is without question more existentially threatening to the human enterprise in the medium and long term, this crisis may be the most jarring in a very short amount of time of any in most of our lifetimes. 

There are still many things we don’t know about COVID-19, and I’m not a virologist or public health expert, so I don’t dare make any predictions about its ultimate toll, the number of possible spikes or “waves” of infection. What is clear is that its economic and social impacts are likely to be immensely consequential. This is likely to be far more destabilizing than the financial crisis of 2008/9, and how we react to it will determine the shape of our social order for decades to come. 

One thing is certain: many of the richest and most powerful corporations, financial institutions and individuals will attempt relentlessly and tirelessly to profit handsomely from the crisis, in what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” the use of a major social disruption to swoop in and, in Baron Rothschild’s phrase, the core creed of Wall Street: “buy when there’s blood in the streets.” We saw this in the outcomes of the financial crisis as the biggest banks and companies emerged stronger, with ever more concentrated wealth and power, while many working and middle class homeowners were evicted, and hedge funds bought large swaths of the housing stock in quite a few locales. You can’t really blame capitalists for being capitalists. That’s what the system is predicated upon: “buy low, sell high;” profit from “creative destruction”. It’s the nature of that beast…if it’s not properly reined in and domesticated.  

We have already been seeing the hollowing out of the retail economy as Amazon and online commerce have driven countless mom and pop stores and small and medium-sized companies out of business; and the new indentured servitude of the “gig economy” has further disempowered the workforce. This crisis is poised to radically exacerbate these trends. People in lockdown are ordering more and more food and products online, which may be desirable short term during the epidemic, but many are likely to maintain that pattern, which was already growing exponentially. Unless there is enormous grassroots resistance, when the viral tsunami has passed and the dust settles we are very likely to find ourselves living in a radically altered, drastically impoverished landscape: one with far fewer independent stores and businesses, far fewer small and medium sized cultural organizations, far fewer activist non profits; and ever more obscene wealth and power disparities. 

It is possible, though, that enough people across the political spectrum, already hyper sensitized to the injustices of the bailouts a decade ago, will react strongly enough in this situation to push back against the most blatant of these profiteering attempts. The outcry, even by some on the right, of the horrible optics of Senators Burr and Loeffler’s dumping of stocks just before the epidemic started to spike here in the U.S. while they were downplaying its severity to mirror the Trump party line, may be a hopeful sign that the public is attuned to these issues and will push back hard. I can’t say I’m overly hopeful, but it’s conceivable. It’s also possible that while Biden is of course far from the shining leader one would aspire to in this dire historical moment, if he were to win, a push from below could force him to include figures in the Warren/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party in key economic roles, helping perhaps use this historical opportunity for at least some fundamental structural changes that might start to roll back some of the wealth concentration and monopolistic domination of the economy, the way the great Frances Perkins pushed Franklin Roosevelt’s government to the left on many key issues. Again, I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s worth agitating for in whatever ways we can muster. 

Another existing trend that is absolutely certain to be accelerated, and is in fact already happening, is the use of this crisis to drastically increase governments’ efforts to build out their AI-augmented surveillance, tracking, monitoring and censorship capabilities. For example, using the excuse of the epidemic, the Netanyahu administration in Israel is permitting cell-phone tracking techniques hitherto used by Mossad for specific “anti terrorist” operations to be used on any and all citizens (not to mention that Netanyahu has shut down the courts as a “public safety” measure as they were about to try him for corruption…). Governments around the world see the opportunity to use this public health emergency to fend off threats to their power or to consolidate their grip. Putin seems positively gleeful about the opportunity to use the COVID-19 moment to emulate in Russia the level of control of information the Chinese Communist Party has achieved. In Bolivia elections slated for May have been postponed supposedly because of the virus but really because the interim right wing government is afraid of being voted out of power. This is sure to be only the beginning. We will have to be vigilant here because it is not impossible to imagine Trump trying to pull off such a stunt this coming November. 

I don’t want to sound like a complete pessimist. These trends are very powerful, but they are not inevitable. Major crises tend to have paradoxical effects. I do think the crisis has reduced Trump’s re-election chances, which would be perhaps the only positive outcome of all this (besides the temporary drop in fossil fuel use and pollution globally). I have also heard from some of my family members in northern Italy that support for the far right has decreased somewhat (at least for now) because people suddenly understand that good governance is actually critically important. This epidemic is likely to boost authoritarian regimes in some places, but it could also undermine some authoritarian governments in other regions, as people decide they desperately want dedicated civil servants and competent governance. 

How people respond in a given upheaval is hard to predict and will depend on the duration of the sacrifices they have to make as well as the preexisting social and political patterns in their societies. In general it’s harder to maintain social cohesion if the level of suffering and fear linger for too long. Still, crises also often bring out the very best in people: our capacities for solidarity, mutual aid, compassion and gallows humor come to the fore. Perhaps we can sustain some of those impulses into our struggles to prevent the worst power grabs in the near future. It isn’t going to be easy: many of us will have been severely impacted financially and in precarious situations, and our enemies are deeply entrenched and ruthless, but there’s no excuse not to try.

One irony for those of us who have been working on eco issues and climate for so long is that politicians, even supposed “deficit hawks,” are all on board without any hesitation to print trillions of dollars to avoid a deep depression (which may indeed be the right course IF it’s targeted fairly and intelligently), but they were unwilling to spend even chump change on climate change, ultimately a far more existential crisis for the survival of human civilization and the health of the biosphere’s web of life. This moment is a good time for us to remember that as Bioneers founder Kenny Ausubel loves to say: “Nature bats last, the saying goes. Even more importantly, it’s her playing field. We would be wise to learn the ground rules and how to play by them.” As the biologist and evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, originator of the groundbreaking Endosymbiosis Theory, used to say, human beings will ultimately be likely to have only been a small footnote in the history of microorganisms on this planet. Each one of us is host to several trillion of them on and in our bodies (or they are host to us…).

In H.G. Wells’ 1897 classic, highly influential, early science fiction book, The War of the Worlds, alien invaders from Mars, vastly superior militarily to earthlings, are on their way to fully taking over the planet and wiping out the human race when they are felled by microorganisms on our planet that they have no resistance to and that are fatal to them. Our biosphere’s microbiome winds up saving the day. This pandemic is causing tremendous suffering and is bound to claim quite a few more lives, including, inevitably, some people we are close to and perhaps even a few of us reading this. It will also threaten many of our livelihoods, but perhaps if those of us still standing when it subsides can dig deep to unearth our most primal courage and resilience, mobilize our most noble impulses and work together intelligently, we might perhaps find a way to use this opportunity to start reversing some of the dark trends that have been infecting our body politic in recent years. I can’t say I’m wildly confident, but I hope we surprise me and rise to the occasion.  

More from J.P. Harpignies:

What Bioneers Are Saying About COVID-19

For decades, the Bioneers community has been uplifting solutions and inspiring movements for a more just world. But the recent COVID-19 outbreak has posed a unique challenge: How can we bring people together while keeping them apart?

Following is a collection of what the Bioneers community is saying about COVID-19, featuring leaders in diverse fields, from medicine to animal cognition to climate justice. This is the first edition of our “regular round-up,” and we will continue to share news and information from our community ongoing.


Naomi Klein in The Intercept: Coronavirus Capitalism – And How to Beat It

In this video, author and activist Naomi Klein explains how this time of crisis can — and is — exploited by governments around the world “to push for no-strings-attached corporate bailouts and regulatory rollbacks.” She calls on working class people to pressure politicians for meaningful change, and bailouts not only for big business, but for the people.

“This crisis — like earlier ones — could well be the catalyst to shower aid on the wealthiest interests in society, including those most responsible for our current vulnerabilities, while offering next to nothing to the most workers, wiping out small family savings and shuttering small businesses. But many are already pushing back — and that story hasn’t been written yet.”

Watch Naomi Klein speak about her book The Shock Doctrine and marveling at the Earth.


Bill McKibben in The New Yorker: What Can the Coronavirus Teach Us?

Bill McKibben, climate activist and founder of 350.org, reflects on the economic disruption, human toll and physical shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working and home

While people are home, planes are on the ground and cruise ships are docked at bay, the Earth is slowly healing, but what are less destructive means to that same end? The ability of communities to adapt to new circumstances proves an optimistic reminder of humanity’s resilience.

Read more from Bill McKibben about best-selling book Falter, the magic of nature, and what we’ve learned about climate change in the last 30 years.


Carl Safina on Medium: COVID-19 is a Wake-up Call; Don’t Hit Snooze

Carl Safina is an ecologist and award-winning author whose work revolves around humanity’s relationship with the natural world. In this essay, he points out how the “driving forces of this pandemic include our broken relationship with the rest of the living world.” The deadly source of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, often contracted in wildlife markets and through other methods of capturing and killing animals, is just as much of a wake-up call now as it has been numerous times before.

“What’s needed to reduce the frequency of new diseases adapting to humans from wildlife, farmed wild animals, and farmed domesticated animals is, basically, to stop farming and eating them.”

Read more from Carl Safina about intelligence in nature and what animals think and feel.


Rupa Marya on Medium: List of Personal Things You Can Do to Stay Well in a Time of CoVID19

Rupa Marya is a doctor, professor and leading activist whose work connects medicine with social justice. As a medical provider on the frontlines of the COVID-19 outbreak response, she’s sharing her knowledge in this guide.

These tips cover how to take care of yourself, strengthen your immune system against the threat of the virus, and protect your loved ones.

Read more from Rupa Marya about social medicine and decolonizing healthcare.



Saru Jayaraman featured in FOX 47 News: One Fair Wage Campaign Launches Emergency Fund To Support Tipped Workers and Service Workers Affected

The COVID-19 outbreak has forced many employees to transition to working at home, but some workers — like those in the hospitality and service industries — don’t have the choice. As restaurants and bars close across the country, thousands of workers are being abruptly left without income. Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, is launching an emergency fund for these workers who may not have a safety net to pay their bills or afford the cost of living day-to-day.

“Nationwide, many service workers are paid the federal sub-minimum wage of just $2.13 — which hasn’t been increased in almost three decades,” the article reads. “Seven states have moved to One Fair Wage with tips on top, but everywhere else in America, restaurant workers and other tipped workers rely on tips to feed their families and pay their bills.”

Read more from Saru Jayaraman about fair wages for workers and women in the service industry.


Climate Justice Alliance: Climate Justice Alliance Demands An End to Trump’s Xenophobia and Negligence

Outbreaks of infectious diseases like COVID-19 will become the new norm as the climate crisis worsens, and time is running out to address this root cause and prevent more disasters. In this press release, the Climate Justice Alliance is demanding urgent action from the government in transitioning to a more sustainable society that works for all, noting how the COVID-19 crisis is revealing glaring inequities in our healthcare system, energy infrastructure, and economic protections for workers.

“Coronavirus is here and is a litmus test for how the climate crisis will destabilize markets, open opportunity for disaster capitalism, disrupt global supply chains, and expose inadequate or failing systems like our healthcare system. … Frontline communities have been here before and we know how corporations and special interest groups use people’s suffering for profit.”

Read more about how the Climate Justice Alliance puts community rights above corporate rights.

As We Spatially Separate We Must Also Stay Connected

The following letter was written by Bioneers board member and the Othering and Belonging Institute’s Director, john a. powell, on March 18, 2020. It was originally posted on the Othering and Belonging Institute’s website.

Dear friends,

We hope you are staying healthy and safe during this period of uncertainty as governments around the world take dramatic and unprecedented measures to try to contain the pandemic currently disrupting life on our planet. As has been pointed out in many commentaries on the current situation, the pandemic exposes the inadequacies of our health care system in its ability to respond quickly, effectively, and without consideration to an individual’s insurance coverage, wealth, shelter, or legal status. Disparities in access to critical support services are never more apparent than in times of crisis.

The response to this crisis can easily slip into two opposing narratives. The first narrative is of a deep othering, and the second, of belonging. I am concerned about the language around the calls for social distancing and/or social isolation. There is certainly a public health need for physical distance. But this is not the same as social isolation. What is needed is social solidarity along with spatial separation. There have been more than a few stories stating that isolation comes with a different set of costs.

Before going into some of the things that are being done and not done, I want to thank all of you for what you have contributed and will likely contribute as the situation continues to evolve. Thank you for not simply caring about yourselves, your family, and friends, but for caring more broadly. A part of the challenge with this pandemic is that there are so many uncertainties. Some of this will change as we learn more. It would be helpful if we in the United States understood that we belong to a larger community and we need to learn from each other and share with each other. Despite these challenges, there are things we can do at the Institute. I will come back to some of these later. But first I’ll address what is happening, what is not happening, and what should be happening.

john a. powell

Temporary emergency measures like waiving testing costs for those who feel ill, paid leave from work, and placing moratoria on evictions and utility shutoffs help cushion the impact of the current crisis on everyday people, especially those who are poor. But it is not enough to rely on the good will of employers or government officials to do what is required when a pandemic hits, especially when such measures are piecemeal, insufficient, and exclude many people.

The current situation also underlines the interconnectedness between all of us and our planet. It reveals, as we have been trying to show for many years, that when one person suffers, we all experience the effects of that suffering. We do belong to each other and to the earth. Now more than ever we see how it is in everyone’s best interest, including those who are more privileged, to ensure the well-being of all. Our collective health is only as strong as the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

As an institute working towards the transformation of our societies into places where all people belong, we [the Othering and Belonging Institute] have since our inception advocated that support mechanisms be built into our systems and structures so that there’s not even a question or debate as to whether people will receive care and protection when they need it most. While our immediate attention is focused on protecting those most at risk during the current pandemic, our larger, long term efforts remain to create structures that respond to the needs of all people facing dire circumstances, including forced migrants and refugees, people who are incarcerated, those without shelter, and yes, even those who have some privilege.

In the coming days and weeks, the Othering and Belonging Institute will periodically provide resources, analysis, or recommendations relating to the unfolding nature of this crisis and the response. For example, we are launching a set of maps showing where K-12 students in California who rely on free and reduced-price lunches reside, and another set of maps on seniors in poverty who, depending on the duration of this crisis, may be most acutely in need of nutritional support or access to food. We will also suggest things those of us who are better off, but still not out of the woods, can do for ourselves and others.

Before ending, I want to suggest some things that might be useful for all of us to consider. Our lives and routines have been disrupted, and for how long this will continue, we don’t know. This is likely to come with considerable stress and anxiety, even if we do not get sick. What we do know is that it is important to have habits and routines that are healthy and help us connect to each other. There are things we can do alone like walking or meditation, but we also need contact with others and to engage in activities to take our minds off the constant dread. In short, we need each other. Examples of activities where we can maintain physical distance, but not isolation, could include video chats to discuss good books, movies, and joyous events. There may be large, open physical spaces where people can interact from a distance. For example, this Friday at 6:15pm, residents in my neighborhood have agreed to step out onto our respective porches to say hello. Another idea could be to organize a virtual movie date with your friends.

While self care is important, it is not enough. We need to care for each other. I know we all agree on this principle, but how do we put it into practice? What are some habits and routines that work for you? What can the Othering & Belonging Institute do to facilitate those practices? What do you need to make them happen? We’d love to hear your ideas, stories, and learn about your contributions.

Let’s all do what we can to stay safe, healthy, and take care of each other.

Warmly,

john a. powell
Director, Othering & Belonging Institute
Professor of Law, UC Berkeley

COVID-19 is a Wake-up Call; Don’t Hit Snooze

This piece was originally published by Carl Safina on Medium. Safina is an ecologist and award-winning author whose work revolves around humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Read more from Carl Safina here.

The current coronavirus event — this most globally disruptive pandemic of our lives — is only the latest warning. Luckily, most people who get infected will recover. But we cannot afford to hit the snooze button again. There are good reasons to think that if we get comfortable, something aggressively deadly may, next time around, cause unimagined lethal chaos.

It’s not entirely clear how exactly this virus got into humans. Horseshoe bats harbor a similar type of coronavirus virus that cannot infect humans. Getting from the bats to humans seems to have required an intermediary creature, possibly civets or the strange little scaly mammals called pangolins. But that’s not the point.

The point is: bats, civets, pangolins, and humans have never before been all tangled up. They are now. Humans bring them into wildlife markets where they are killed for table fare and prescribed in baseless medicinal uses. As you know, COVID-19 appears to have originated at a live-animal market in Wuhan, China. There, a newly self-reinvented version of coronavirus stumbled upon a novel way of infecting dozens of workers, in effect striking the match that ignited the current world-rocker. In other words, driving forces of this pandemic include our broken relationship with the rest of the living world.

Humans caused the pandemic by putting the world’s animals into a cruel blender and drinking that smoothie. Playing with fire. COVID-19 underscores, in a very threatening way, the extreme ways the world is hyper-connected, yet so out of touch. Out of touch because this has happened before. Various times. We’ve had various other wake-up calls, and hit snooze.

The coronavirus that causes SARS is thought to have spread from bats to civet cats before the first human patient was infected in 2003. Sounds familiar. Before that, coronaviruses were known to cause, in humans, only the common cold. SARS was the first coronavirus to cause severe symptoms in humans. The kill rate of this coronavirus was around ten percent of people infected. There’s no treatment. After appearing in southern China in 2002, spreading to 26 countries, and killing several hundred people, it mysteriously seems to have gone away. Except — SARS-CoV-2, alias COVID-19 when it infects people, the current pandemic. It has a current kill rate around (a luckily low) two percent. Most lethal of the known coronaviruses is the strain that causes MERS, which seems to have made a hop from bats to camels and then to humans before breaking out in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and South Korea in 2015, with kill rates between 30 and 40 percent. No treatment. No vaccine.

“So the fact that a new SARS-like virus has emerged to cause severe respiratory disease in people,” says University of North Carolina epidemiologist Timothy Sheahan about COVID-19, “tells me this is likely going to happen again in the future.”

Let’s take a quick, horrifying, but partial look at how capturing and killing free-living species has turned lethal for humans as well. An analysis by researchers in the U.K. determined that six out of ten of all infectious diseases affecting people are zoonotic, meaning they can be transmitted between humans and other animals. Of emerging infectious diseases, three out of four are zoonotic. The following examples are only a few of the virus-caused diseases.

Ebola. Several strains exist. Some are benign, others cause hemorrhagic fever; high fevers and bleeding throughout the body, often leading to shock, organ failure and death. Kill rates of the deadly strains have varied from half to ninety percent of victims. The U.S. Centers for Disease control say, they believe that “the virus is animal-borne, with bats or nonhuman primates (chimpanzees, apes, monkeys, etc.) being the most likely source.” Marburg virus also got into humans from captured monkeys. Different Marburg hemorrhagic outbreaks have had a kill rate of 25 to 80 percent. Human Immunodeficiency virus — HIV, which was essentially unknown when I was young — causes the disease AIDS that has killed more than 30 million people and infects many millions more who suffer untold, anonymous misery (it can now be managed with drugs, but not everyone can get or afford them).

Hunting and eating sooty mangabey monkeys and chimpanzees is, “the simplest and most plausible explanation for the cross-species transmission of SIVs to become HIVs.” SIV stands for simian immunodeficiency viruses (though they don’t usually make the monkeys and apes sick). SIV virus strains are closely related to the viruses which, in humans, are called HIV and cause the disease AIDS. In parts of Africa where eating monkeys and apes is common, humans carry SIV infections at rates ranging from two percent of the general population to over 17 percent of people who butcher and handle fresh primate meat.

Those people, one might say, are test tubes for viruses experimenting with a new and potentially very rewarding host: all of humanity.

The 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, most of them younger than 65 years old. It’s kill rate was one one-hundredth the rate of COVID-19’s. To give you some idea of how complicated and strange viruses are, the 2009 H1N1 virus contained genes from North American swine flu viruses, Asian and European swine flu viruses, North American bird flu viruses, and one gene segment originated from a human flu virus. Bird flu in humans, by the way, has several versions. The H7N9 version, from poultry, first sickened humans in 2013. Its kill rate of 20 percent prompted the World Health Organization to call it “an unusually dangerous virus for humans… one of the most lethal.”

And let’s not forget — though we have — that the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, an H1N1 bird flu, infected 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population, killing “at least” 50 million people.

What did we do differently in the wake of these wakes? Mostly we went back to dreaming, assuming that the next pandemic would go away, would be mild.

Virologist Arnaud Fontanet, of France’s Pasteur Institute says that coronavirus is just the latest example of the potentially disastrous consequence of humans consuming virus-carrying wild animals. Francois Renaud, at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research said, “Each time, we try to put out the fire, and once it’s out we await the next one.”

I would prefer that humans find themselves capable of something a little more insightful. Wildlife markets are both horrendous and extensive. Many of the animals have been born in captivity and have known only miserable conditions. Nearly 20,000 farms raise wild animals for slaughter in China. It’s unclear whether making them illegal would make them disappear. The hundreds of thousands of pangolins are all wild-born and their import and sale has been illegal for several years. That doesn’t seem to have made a dent in demand or the rate of their precipitous declines. China has announced a temporary ban and Vietnam has announced closure of wildlife markets. Given the extent, the demand, and the money, will it stop or just go underground? And industrial farming runs constant risk at high volume while creating miserable lives for animals.

What’s needed to reduce the frequency of new diseases adapting to humans from wildlife, farmed wild animals, and farmed domesticated animals is, basically, to stop farming and eating them. That won’t happen any time soon, even as meat-mimicking substitutes gain market share.

Fortunately these diseases seem to sweep through in waves, and many subside. Sometimes “herd immunity” kicks in; when enough people have survived infection and become resistant, the pathogens have fewer opportunities to find new victims. Some of those strains that have gotten out of control have had high rates of infection but low rates of fatality. Others were aggressively brought under control. That’s as luck would have it. But we don’t do enough to change, and we like our snoozing. I wonder what will happen when luck gets bored.

This piece was originally published by Carl Safina on Medium.

More from Carl Safina:

Community Resilience in Light of the Coronavirus

Carolyn Raffensperger, a lawyer and archaeologist, is the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. She is best known for her work on the precautionary principle, an essential tool for public health that mandates precautionary action to prevent harm in the face of uncertainty. Carolyn coined the term “ecological medicine” to encompass the broad notion that both health and healing are entwined with the natural world.

See Carolyn’s Bioneers Conference talk on the precautionary principle here and learn more about Ecological Medicine via the Bioneers book on the topic.

In this guest post, Carolyn calls on us to face the coronavirus pandemic by empowering our communities, helping others, and caring for our neighbors during this turbulent time.

The Germans have a beautiful concept called fore-caring. It was literally translated into English as “the precautionary principle.” The underlying idea of fore-caring is that we can plan ahead for what might be a difficult future. When I lived on our farm in North Dakota, I worked hard to prepare for the difficult winters. We had several. The winter of 1996-1997 we had blizzard after blizzard, flooding and then the fire in Grand Forks that leveled the town.

A series of dreams by Indigenous friends of mine in January and early February of this year sounded a warning that difficult times are ahead. Most of the warnings were about famine. Other warnings told of coming disease or civil unrest—and that was before we knew much about the Coronavirus.

At the same time, I had been in conversations with neighbors about community resilience as well as how we might recover from the political nightmare we are living now. I’d been looking at patterns in the weather and climate both regionally and nationally. My state and many others faced climate related disasters last year. Northern California is now in drought. Disruption of the food supply seemed like a good possibility and, again, that was before Coronavirus.

A difficult future is heading our way. There is a high probability that the effects of the Coronavirus on public health will be amplified by food supply chain disruptions and climate catastrophes such as fires in California or flooding in the Midwest.

We now know (as of this writing) that imports from places like China are down significantly. The ports have seen about a 25% decline in traffic. Pharmaceuticals made in countries like India and China are in short supply. Any further disruption in food supply chains from the Coronavirus could result in food shortages. Couple this with climate disasters and we could be in trouble.

As I look at the likelihood of either crop, garden or food supply chain disruption, it seems possible that the winter of 2020-2021 may be a period of vulnerability.

We can prepare now. We can create community resilience. We can do this by using the precautionary principle: taking action in the face of uncertainty to prevent suffering.

Most cultures have some experience with times of famine. In the United States we had the Dust Bowl which is less than 100 years ago. However, we don’t have many people alive who remember the lessons of that time.

I’ve long collected stories about famine. A Great Plains tribe tells of a people that were starving in winter. A mother sends her daughter to ask a bear for food. The girl travels to the bear’s den and awakens the sleeping the bear. He slashes her hand but she does not give up. She asks him for food. He gives it to her but makes her promise to bring food for him in the spring. The food he gives her keeps the village alive. In the spring she goes back and tends the bear, feeds him. This tale is fundamentally about the reciprocity between us and nature. We will survive if we care for the natural world.

Similarly, the story of Joseph in Genesis 41 of the Bible. “Pharaoh had a dream that no one could interpret for him. His chief cupbearer then remembered that Joseph had interpreted a dream for him when he was in prison two years earlier. So, Joseph was “brought from the dungeon” and shaved and changed his clothes. He then came before Pharaoh and told him that his dream meant there would be seven years of abundance in the land of Egypt followed by seven years of famine. Joseph recommended that “a discerning and wise man” be put in charge and that food should be collected in the good years and stored for use during the famine. This seemed like a good idea to Pharaoh and Joseph ended up with the job (Genesis 41).”

One project I did working as an archaeologist in the 1980s was to investigate the food processing and diet of the ancient Pueblos from 650 to 900 AD. The Pueblos had robust strategies dealing with drought and the long hunger months of winter. Their diet evolved over those hundreds of years. The Puebloans taught me that there is a land ethic and etiquette, a reciprocity with nature that protects both the land and the people. That reciprocity provides the humans with guidance about when to harvest and when not to harvest, how relate to water so you don’t get sick, and so on.

There is a difference between the hunger of poverty when food is abundant but unequally distributed and famine when food is not available for an extended period of time. 

My commitment is to community sufficiency and resiliency rather than self-sufficiency. I am operating under the philosophy that making sure I have enough basic medicines and food to share will reduce the threat of violent civil unrest. My hope is that like-minded people with the money or gardening or other skills will become nodes in our community that can share with their neighbors and friends. This increases the chance of getting through hard times with as little suffering as possible.

Democracy Unchained: Rediscovering the Power of the People

This article contains the content from the 3/12/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!

“Imagine a real democracy – us, we, ours – where all votes are counted. The right to vote in fair electoral districts is guaranteed. Our representatives both in state legislatures and county legislatures and federal government and so forth are diverse.” —David Orr, author and professor

Democracy and its promise of equality have always been seen as a foundation for American politics. But do we really live in a democracy? What does that mean?

This week, we highlight thought leaders who are challenging how we define and perform democracy.

Democracy Unchained: Using “We the People” Power to Rebuild Government

Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People is a collection of essays by visionary political thinkers, in which they tackle our nation’s most pressing problems and provide solutions to revitalizing our government from the grassroots up. One of these contributors is K. Sabeel Rahman, Associate Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School and President of Demos, a “think-and-do” tank dedicated to equity and democracy. Following is Rahman’s essay from Democracy Unchained about how we can build a solid structure of democracy with our own moral values.

Read more here.

David Orr: How the History of Democracy Can Help Us Invent a New One

How do we fix a democracy that has strayed so far from the people it’s supposed to serve? Professor and author David Orr is calling on us, in this unique moment, to create a new one entirely. Orr draws from the warnings of Greek philosophers and the descent of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany to understand the deficits of democracy today, and how we can fix them.

Read more here.

Special Event! The Spirit of Democracy: Re-imagining We the People

Join Bioneers co-founder Kenny Ausubel at the Washington National Cathedral on March 25. This evening of bipartisan hope for the future of democracy will feature leaders such as political commentator Van Jones, environmentalist Bill McKibben, and professor and author David Orr, as they come together to challenge the prevailing narrative that we are hopelessly divided.

Learn more.

More from Bioneers.org:

  • Heather McGhee: A New “We The People” For a Sustainable Future | Heather McGhee is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a public policy organization focused on political and economic equity. In this keynote speech, she explains how deep democracy is the only solution to the crises of inequality and climate change — and how we can achieve it.
  • Terry Tempest Williams: The Open Space of Democracy | In this keynote speech, celebrated author Terry Tempest Williams inspires us to dig deeper than political rhetoric in our conversations about democracy. For her, the test of true patriotism is not what we are willing to die for, but what we are willing to give our lives to.
  • Chief Oren Lyons: The Roots of American Democracy | Iroquois elder and global indigenous leader Oren Lyons describes the authentic origins of the U.S. Constitution in the ancient Iroquois “Great League of Peace.” He weaves the story of the Peacemaker and how leaders are raised and chosen, with decisions based on seven generations and women choosing chiefs.

Bioneers Now on Free Speech TV!

Free Speech TV is now airing a collection of videos from the Bioneers: Seeding the Field series! This independent network provides a platform for voices and stories traditionally excluded from television.

Learn how to tune in.

This article contains the content from the 3/12/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!

David Orr: How the History of Democracy Can Help Us Invent a New One

How do we fix a democracy that has strayed so far from the people it’s supposed to serve? Professor and author David Orr is calling on us, in this unique moment, to create a new one entirely.

Orr draws from the warnings of Greek philosophers and the descent of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany to understand the deficits of democracy today, and how we can fix them. He says that in order to create a government truly of the people, for the people, and by the people, we must reach across partisan divides and build a bridge above the abyss of fascism together.

Read more from David Orr in his recently released book, Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People.

Pronouns are interesting things, and they cause us to do lots of things we otherwise would not do. So when we say I and me and mine, that takes us to markets. That’s the side of us that is a consumer. If you say we, ours, and us, that takes you to a different area where we’re citizens, not just of the United States, but also of a biosphere, and a moralsphere. So for 40 years or longer, we’ve had a war waged against ours and us and we, a war waged against government.

This is the most massive political failure in history. We call it climate change or climate destabilization, but it is chaos in any word. So I want to connect that to a political failure, this failure to do the public business in a way that was transparent and open and competent.

We had the first warning given to a US president about climate change. It was given in 1965. That’s a long time ago. We knew enough in 1965 to develop a day jury, a climate policy binding in law.

Now, here’s the origin of the idea. Lost in the mists of time, we don’t know exactly where the idea of democracy started, probably around campfires in tribal cultures, but in the Western world it started in the agora, the Greek forum below the Parthenon. This is where Socrates and others debated the ideas of democracy, and it wasn’t always pretty. Democracy seldom is. But what they did was to wager a bet that enough people, enough of the time, would know enough and care enough to conduct a public business in a way that was responsible.

And then there was a second proposition that people matter, and that our rights count. As Jefferson put it, unalienable rights that we have to life and certain things that guarantee our dignity and our way in the world. And that we, as people with those rights, should have a say in how we’re governed and by whom. That was the bet.

Did it work? Well, Thucydides wrote here about why it didn’t work in Greece in the Peloponnesian Wars. It falls apart. This is famous classic history. And John Adams, one of the founding fathers, as we call them, said that democracies die by committing suicide, seldom by outside intervention. Read the daily papers.

The next case I want to bring up here is this, the question here is: How did the democracy of the Weimar Republic after World War I, with Goethe and Schilling and great German philosophers, become the world of Hitler and Himmler and Auschwitz? And so how did these people, the most educated people on Earth, fall for Hitler? How did this occur, and what are the lessons we could draw from that in our own life?



Now, my second point: Is the US a democracy?

This was observed in one of the great studies of American democracy by two of the best political scientists. They say that your opinion and mine don’t really matter much. Think of this as the Grand Canyon, a chasm, and on this side there’s us and our public opinion, and on the other side there are laws and regulations and so forth. The bridge that ought to connect what we want as people and the policies that we get is broken, or it’s been turned into a toll bridge.

We favor things like healthcare, climate action, and so forth. But what passes Congress? A $1.4 trillion tax cut for people who really don’t need it. So we don’t get what we want, and democracy is broken.

Is democracy dying? The scholars, the people who study this for a living, believe it is — or at least it’s impaired. Economist magazine lists the United States as an impaired democracy and going south. A poll from the World Values survey shows that virtually in every country, support for democracy is declining. And it would say the same thing for any age group — for the elderly, the middle class, young people — that democracy is failing.


Now part of this goes back to that pronoun issue — I, me, and mine. Political change is where we come together and we say, This is our country, it’s our democracy, it’s our policies, and they do matter.


I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown in 1941 was the wealthiest city per capita in the county. If you go there now, it looks like it was bombed down in World War II. This is very typical of the Rust Belt region. It’s not shiny like a lot of California is. It’s rusted out, burned down, disinvested. We now fly over cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, and Youngstown, Ohio. So if you wonder why there was support for Donald Trump in the last election, a lot of it is found in the failures that we’ve pursued.

As Youngstown was declining, so too were the prospects of each generation. The odds of young people earning as much or more than their parents by 10-year periods is going down. So if you’re a young person in Youngstown or in that Rust Belt, or in a lot of the areas in the United States we mark as a red zone, you don’t see a future that your parents saw. We’ve got to find ways to reach into that red zone, and reach out across these chasms.

But there’s this problem, which we thought we had solved at one time. When Barack Obama was elected president, I assumed we’re going to win; we finally have crossed that threshold into acceptance and diversity. But we found it was a little premature. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks hate groups all across the United States. They’re well armed and they’re not quite with us yet. This is a problem of income. If you want to know why democracy collapses, go back into history: Plato and Aristotle said it collapses because of oligarchy. Democracy becomes an oligarch world ruled by the rich people. And this is what’s happening to the working people, living paycheck by paycheck especially in Ohio or the Rust Belt states, who are losing ground.

The question is: So what? Why don’t we just become an epistocracy and rule by expertise? Why don’t we do what China is doing: surveillance democracy and imprison dissenters? Democracy really doesn’t work, and again, it does seem to commit suicide fairly often. Let me give three reasons why we have to defend democracy, and this is where we’ve got to come together as citizens to understand how we conduct the public business in ways that’s fair and decent and sustainable.

Jim Hansen, the most famous climate scientist in the world, says that you can’t fix climate until you fix democracy. And that’s really inconvenient because we don’t have much time to fix climate. So why do we have to fix democracy? This is going to be an all-hands-on-deck time for us. All of us have got to be engaged. So organic farmers and permaculturists, business people, educators… we’ve got to come together, and we can only do that if our votes matter, if our policies are supported, if we can bridge that gap from this side to that side.

Democracy may be, as Winston Churchill once said, the worst form of government, except for all the others that have ever been tried. But even in its imperfections, it’s the only system of government that says you and I matter.

So what do we do? I want to issue a caution here. I don’t think we ought to be directed solely at Donald Trump, because what he did was to highlight everything that was wrong and had to be fixed. He essentially took a highlighter to everything that we need to undo and redo and rethink.


We don’t need to repair democracy so much as we need to invent the first ever democracy, true democracy.


So this gets personal. After the election of 2016, I went into a deep depression, and I was ready to retire and go off and do what old white guys do: play golf, bowl, things like that. Neither of which I do well. Or with any particular joy. So what we did was to organize a conference. It was like looking through the rearview mirror and thinking: how did we get to the election of 2016?

We had all these gatherings in a new hotel we built as an entirely solar powered, platinum building. We put these wonderful speakers on the stage, and asked each to explain how they would repair liberalism or conservatism. And you know what? The conversation was civil, funny, productive, creative. Imagine that in American politics. It can happen.

Reverend William Barber was like an exclamation mark at the end of the event. When you come to think of what ails us, it may be economics, may be technology, climate change certainly has both of those elements to it, but it’s moral. And William Barber pointed out that this is a moral failure before it’s anything else, before it’s even a political failure.

So the next part of this was pulling together 34 authors and assembling a book: Democracy Unchained. We took Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, and inverted the title. She’s on our advisory board, by the way. And the book comes out in mid-February of 2020.

We’re following that with events. The opening event with authors and others will be at the National Cathedral on March 25th of 2020. Then we do events in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco. What we want to do is start a conversation about how we rebuild American democracy. As you’re bringing this democracy into an emergency room, you’d stop the bleeding and stabilize the vital signs first, then you get to lifestyle changes. But the long-term conversation we must have is this: how do we build a democracy in which all of us do, in fact, matter?

So part of this is trying to restructure government, starting with the words that we use. Let’s reclaim our public language. How did the word conservative become what it has become? Or how did the word liberal become so disparaged? Those are flip sides of the same coin. Everybody in this room, on one issue or another, you’re conservative or liberal, but you’re both. It’s called a thinking person, not a ditto-head.

And then why governments matter. Begin to think about what we do in the public arena. We need government. Not a government that’s been defunded and defrauded and depersonalized and all those things that we’ve done in the past 40 years to disparage government and the idea of public service. We need government, but we need government of the people, by the people, and for the people, that’s transparent and effective.

We need to think through how hard this is going to be, and think of the heroes and heroines in this room, people who have sacrificed and who have risked a great deal. That’s all of you. We’re going to all have to risk, we’re all going to have to sacrifice something to make this dream come true.

Frederick Douglass said power doesn’t give up, never easily. And so it hasn’t. So what does this change look like? It’s the power that we have to be citizens, the power that we have to be foresightful, the power that we have to engage power and tell the truth.

So imagine democracy unchained, from what? All those isms, all those human failures and frailties and sins. Imagine a real democracy — us, we, ours — where all votes are counted. The right to vote in fair electoral districts is guaranteed. Our representatives both in state legislatures and county legislatures and federal government and so forth look like us, they’re diverse. Imagine publicly funded elections. Get money out of politics once and for all. Imagine that you have the same healthcare benefits guaranteed to Mitch McConnell. Imagine a democracy in which corporations are not persons. Imagine a democracy in which ecocide is a crime against humanity and punishable as such. Imagine a democracy where lying and systematic deception is wrong and is a crime, and that includes Facebook, television, all the media. Imagine a democracy that would protect our lands and waters, as my friend and that eloquent writer, Terry Tempest Williams, has said for so long. Imagine our public domain protected by a democracy that is competent and ecologically alert. Imagine a democracy that would protect the global commons. Imagine a democracy calibrated to the way the world works as a physical system. Imagine a democracy in which justice flows down like a mighty river.

Imagine only a government of, by, and for the people in which we have no malice toward anyone, but charity for all.


Circle of Life | Bioneers

Indigenous women hold the knowledge and ability to nurture life, and in many communities they are also the first line responders to environmental and social threats to community wellbeing. This panel will explore: the roles Indigenous women play in supporting and upholding life from birth to death (and beyond); the resurgence of Indigenous midwifery; women’s coming of age ceremonies; and how to make conscious choices to treat food as medicine and our bodies as sacred.

Featuring: Eriel Dereneger, Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy, Danielle Hill, and Sage LaPena.

This presentation took place in the Indigeneity Forum at the 2019 National Bioneers Conference. See more from the 2019 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. Visit the Indigeneity Program homepage.

Democracy Unchained: Using “We the People” Power to Rebuild Government

The presidential election in 2016 represented a tipping point for our nation. The looming threats of climate change and wealth inequality have evolved faster than the safeguards against them, stymied by political gridlock. Americans caught in the middle of a widening gap between left and right are convinced that democracy no longer works for them.

Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People is a collection of essays by visionary political thinkers — such as Maria Hinojosa, Bill McKibben and lead editor David Orr — in which they tackle our nation’s most pressing problems and provide solutions to revitalizing our government from the grassroots up. K. Sabeel Rahman is President of Demos, a “think-and-do” tank dedicated to equity and democracy, and wrote this essay in Democracy Unchained about how we can build a solid structure of democracy with our own moral values.

BY K. SABEEL RAHMAN

Beginning with Donald Trump’s inauguration, concerns about an emerging constitutional crisis exploded into the public consciousness and have only accelerated since. From clashes between the executive branch, the courts, and the legislature, to questions about a special counsel, emoluments, and foreign interference in the 2016 election, there has been a growing concern about the damage the Trump administration has wrought to constitutional law and basic norms of governance. But the conflicts of the Trump era are themselves products of a deeper set of challenges facing twenty-first-century American democracy.

For decades, growing economic inequality has concentrated wealth and opportunity and widened the gap in political influence between rich and poor. The basic constitutional structure of American democracy, from voting rights to redistricting to campaign financing, has eroded over time, creating an increasingly fraught electoral system in which too many Americans are not heard. Technological change has altered the media and communications landscape such that “fake news,” misinformation, and weaponized racism are now even more virulent, corroding the capacity for public dialogue and debate.

This is not the first time American democracy has faced an existential and deeply self-critical moment in its history. The contradictions of a slavery-based democracy, laid bare in the Civil War, sparked a moment of radical, democratic revolution as freedpersons and nineteenth-century Republican abolitionists remade the Constitution and the fabric of the country in an attempt to uproot the vestiges of slavery. The economic upheavals of industrialization a few decades later sparked the rise of the labor movement and bold new experiments with economic regulation and the modern social safety net, culminating in the transformations of the New Deal era. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement revived the unfulfilled aspirations of Reconstruction and the New Deal, challenging the racial caste system that was Jim Crow, winning transformative changes to civil rights and voting rights. Fights for gender equality expanded protections and membership.

Today we live in a similarly transformative moment. And the stakes of this crisis are nothing less than the realization of a truly inclusive, multiracial democracy—the likes of which America has often proclaimed, but never fully realized.

A key part of this fight for a new democracy lies with the Constitution itself and the basic structure of our political, social, and economic life. While the original Constitution enabled basic democratic politics, it also encoded political, economic, and racial hierarchies that cut against the Constitution’s own radical vision of a government built to serve “we the people.” So, the point here is not to venerate the original founding, but instead the most foundational moral values that we seek to live by—and the underlying institutional structures we need in order to make those values real.

Think of constitutionalism as the underlying architecture, or infrastructure, of our shared political, economic, and social life. A solid structure does not mean that every day-to-day problem is fully resolved. But if that underlying structure is unsound—or if it is built where some inhabitants are stuck in worse conditions than others—surface-level changes can only mitigate, but never fully resolve, these pathologies. A constitutional structure also encompasses more than the formal boundaries of the constitutional text itself; like any form of architecture or infrastructure, there is a range of conditions needed for the system to work. Thus, in order to function, a written constitution  also requires a range of critical quasi-constitutional statutes (think of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act), background conditions (like basic social and economic equality, the ability to communicate across divides), and norms and values (like aspirations to freedom, equality, democracy).


At its core, a better constitutional system must accomplish three things.

First, it must structure the allocation of political power in a way that manages to contain and channel political conflict productively. As the framers of the American Constitution understood in the eighteenth century, disagreement and political conflict are endemic; the task of constitutional design is in part to ensure that political disagreements do not become explosive or fracturing—and that, instead, political interests are channeled in ways that promote the common good. That in turn means political institutions  must strike a balance between constraining the coercive powers of government (holding political leaders to account) and catalyzing government action (ensuring that those same political leaders are responsive to the needs of we the people). Constitutional structures— like the separation of powers and checks and balances between the presidency, the legislature, and the judiciary, or the system of federalism and decentralization, and the extensive architecture around voting, districting, and elections—are all part of this basic function. Many of the key challenges facing American democracy in the twenty-first century stem from the basic fact that this political infrastructure does not work. It is too warped by concentrations of economic and political power, by technological change, and by the hijacking of powerful interests that are increasingly able to co-opt the operations of government for their own ends. We need a revised political infrastructure to make this kind of responsive, accountable democracy real.

Second, a constitutional system must ensure equality and inclusion for all members of the polity, securing what the Fourteenth Amendment calls the “privileges and immunities of citizenship” for all residents. One of the driving moral values of our constitutional democracy is the vision that a constitutional structure ought to secure the freedom to thrive as individuals and communities. This vision of economic and social flourishing—and of membership and inclusion—requires more than the formal protections of constitutional rights. It also requires a larger economic and social infrastructure built to rebalance the terms of economic power and inclusion.

Third, a constitutional system must also create a social infrastructure that protects against structural forms of discrimination and exclusion. Racial and gender divisions have been a key fault line where membership in the American polity has been systematically restricted. Race and gender have been a central fault line upon which modern and historical aspirations for American democracy have so often collapsed. For example, in the effort to preserve white supremacy after the Civil War, the radically inclusive vision of civil rights, economic redistribution, and political equality seen in Reconstruction was violently suppressed. Likewise, the threat to traditions of patriarchal rule posed by women’s equality—and the further destabilization of traditional roles of membership and power resulting from movements for LGBTQIA inclusion—sparked powerful political backlashes. The immigration fights of recent decades turn more on racialized fears of displacement than on matters of policy. The ability to ensure inclusion in a multiracial, multifaith democracy requires a particular political, economic, and social architecture that resists efforts to restore old hierarchies—and on the efficacy of government itself, defends rights and inclusion. Dismantling these structural forms of exclusion requires the (re)building of a civil rights infrastructure that affirmatively promotes inclusion and belonging.

Copyright © 2020 by David W. Orr. This excerpt originally appeared in Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People, published by The New Press and reprinted here with permission.