This video shares ideas for how to be a good ally to Indigenous Peoples through open and honest dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners in philanthropy, and social justice and environmental activism. Information shared by the panelists provide a pathway for building successful cross-cultural collaborations in philanthropic giving, environmental campaigns, and forwarding Indigenous rights.
Introduced by Cara Romero and Kenny Ausubel. Moderated by Alexis Bunten. With: Clayton Thomas-Muller, Stop-it-at-the-Source Campaigner of 350.org; Mitch Anderson, founder and Executive Director of Amazon Frontlines; Hernan Payaguaje (Seikopai) Executive Director of the Ceibo Alliance; May Boeve, Executive Director, 350.org; Edgar Villanueva, Chair of Native Americans in Philanthropy; Hilary Giovale, a 9th generation American settler and philanthropist committed to healing historical divides.
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.
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children,” affirms the Oglala-Sioux version of a belief common to several indigenous cultures. To David Brower, the “archdruid” founder of Friends of the Earth, and other environmentalists, “stealing it from our children” better characterizes modern humans’ degradation of the earth. The only hope, Brower declared nearly 50 years ago, is “what young people can do before older people tell them it’s impossible.”
The youth-led climate strikes in September that drew some 4 million marchers worldwide demand a far broader concept of democracy if the environmental goals they advocate are to be won. The climate-strike revolution represents a huge new step for human rights that expands hierarchical oppressions to include the dimension of future time. The young are a distinct class because they, not the old, will face climate change’s worst devastations
“We will be known as the solution to the climate crisis,” 17-year-old Nadia Nazar, co-founder of the youth-led climate activist organization Zero Hour, said this September in Washington, D.C. Later that week, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations General Assembly. “You have stolen my dreams,” she said, relegating older generations to past tense. “All you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
Climate-change activism is not new, but the role of youth in it today is. Today’s youth reject the idea that they are junior auxiliaries to adult movements. They challenge the traditional rule of older people over the young, and, most radically of all, uphold the interests of future generations as equal to those of present ones. They find true elder wisdom manifest in hard science and lambaste the old as immature and selfish for rejecting that science. “Why do we have to clean up the mess that past generations, and your generation, has left us?” Nazar interrogated Congress members in February.
We oldsters may insist our developed, executive brains, moral reasoning, maturity, empathy, realism, and access to the wisdom of the past entitle us to decide the best interests of the young. But are elders really equipped to face the new challenges climate change brings?
Climate-change activism is not new, but the role of youth in it today is.
In a fascinating paper reinterpreting past research, professors Tomas Paus and Howard Sercombe find that youthful and aging brains really are different, though not in the us-versus-them way pop-media depicts. The wide-open neural connections in adolescence foster broader, more flexible thinking, while the “pruning” of neural pathways as adulthood progresses renders adult brains more efficient for a narrower range of tasks. Teenagers’ experimentations appear scattered and impetuous to elders while specialized, staid adults whose experience and efficiencies were vital to human survival in past millennia now appear overly rigid to youths.
These differences would seem to suggest that as rapid social and technological changes accumulate, generational power realignments are at hand. Youthful thinking across multiple dimensions is better at imagining innovative policies to adapt to future contingencies; elder thinking is suited to resolving the practicalities. That’s why elder-dominated media and leaders fixate on the short-range dollars-and-cents costs of change, while the climate-strike youth focus on the long-term price of inaction.
Yet, biology is not determinism, age influences but does not dictate mindset, and a generational war distracts us from pursuing crucial opportunities. We know 16-year-olds who would make great 75-year-olds, and vice versa. Ideally, old and young thinking works together.
Unfortunately, intergenerational cooperation hasn’t happened; even Democrats have been slow to the cause. “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy.” That wasn’t an oil-state Republican talking, or someone from 1975. That was former President Barack Obama in 2012—after fossil-fuel’s damage was abundantly clear. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton waffled before cautiously opposing the Keystone Pipeline, a dirty-oil mega-project NASA’s James Hansen warned would spell “game over for the climate.”
Now, the divisions have become more serious. Climate politics reveals that as Democrats become more forceful on the issue, a far-right, nationalist upsurge is waging an all-out war on today’s young and the future. Powerful industry and right-wing forces invoke horror at conveniences and pleasures lost. Curtailed air travel! Tinier cars! No more hamburgers! Rightists seek retreat to enclaves insulated from the social changes they hate. Moderates are squeezed between climate-change activists brandishing science and a reactionary opposition brandishing denials and political threats.
The potentially effective Green New Deal proposal led in Congress by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Sen. Edwin Markey is mired in squabbles over its costs. Meanwhile, Miami Beach is spending $500 million to raise that small city’s streets 2 feet, a temporary fix for rising seas. How much will it cost to permanently raise or move many thousands of low-lying communities?
Younger generations are going to have to step up. Even American teenagers may be ready. Six out of seven youth ages 13 to 17 told a recent Washington Post-Kaiser survey, “human activity is causing climate change,” and four out of five called it a “crisis” or “major problem.” Majorities feel afraid, motivated, and angry. Among high school students, 40% say they have taken steps to reduce their carbon footprint, and one in four say they have participated in direct action.
Young people see future-facing issues such as climate change, gun violence, human rights, proactive government, and globalism more clearly than older leaders.
While the survey reveals disappointing levels of confusion, it’s that activist fraction that will spearhead change. Even in oil-marinated Oklahoma, climate-change protests driven by high school and college students increased tenfold in size from last spring’s to September’s marches (I was at both and counted attendees). In a state whose leaders hold literal “oilfield prayer” days and fracking to extract natural gas releases greenhouse-promoting methane, youthful activists at least can laud their elders for one development: wind turbines now supply 43% of the electricity sold in Oklahoma.
“Adults won’t take climate change seriously,” wrote the lead organizers of US Youth Climate Strike, all of whom are ages 13 to 16. “So we, the youth, are forced to strike.” That’s a sentiment shared by many youth activists. But what does that mean? Even in its current state of fractionalized organization, youth-led activism is a formidable threat. Forty-two percent of the world’s population is 24 or younger. They will have to persuade older government, corporate, and institutional leaders to take dramatic action—or find ways to override them. Coming confrontations are likely to realign power relationships in unheard-of ways.
In the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, the most obstructionist nation under the presidency of Donald Trump, voters under age 25 (including young Whites) voted against anti-environment Republicans by 2-1 margins. And while a large majority of White voters ages 45 and older voted Republican, that still leaves a substantial number of even this conservative cohort to be potential allies of the young.
Young people see future-facing issues such as climate change, gun violence, human rights, proactive government, and globalism more clearly than older leaders but are denied pathways to power on account of their age. Extending voting and office-holding ages to 16 or even younger is crucial to bringing future-focused issues to the forefront. In an America whose leaders increasingly reject even short-term investments to fix bridges and fund schools, winning tough action on long-term threats like climate change demands a revolutionary reimagining of innovative solutions.
“We are on the verge of developing a new kind of culture,” Margaret Mead predicted in 1977 as her long anthropological career ended. “In this culture, it will be the child—and not the parent or grandparent—that represents what is to come.” Without decisive action, environmental degradation “will soon make our planet uninhabitable,” yet “the elderly are no longer the custodians of wisdom or models.” If climate-strike youth and their allies are to save humanity and vital ecosystems, prepare for changes in power dynamics beyond what we’ve ever seen.
MIKE MALESis a senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, the principal investigator for YouthFacts, and the author of five books on American youth.
As the president of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, as well as the non-profit Beyond Benign, John Warner is on the forefront of designing chemical products inspired by nature and designed to do no harm to people or the planet.
John Warner examines the toxic character of chemistry and reflects on his own path into the field of industrial chemistry and then asks why we don’t look to nature, the most brilliant chemist there is, for the chemical solutions to our modern problems.
At the beginning of the 20th century, untempered industrialization and rampant deforestation prompted the conservation and preservation movements.
The creation of Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks at the end of the 19th century, the creation of the National Audubon Society in 1905, the passing of the Weeks Act (creating the National Forest system) in 1911, all were part of the political movement to preserve the natural world from the onslaught of commercialization and the plundering of natural resources. Similarly, to save our children, the first summer camps were founded in the 1880s and ’90s. The founding of the American Nature Study Society in 1908, and the founding of the Boy Scouts in 1910 and the Girl Scouts in 1912, were part of a social movement to preserve the virtue of children’s contact with nature. In the article Why Fear of Big Cities Led to the Creation of Summer Camps, Natalia Petrzela writes that parents had become concerned that “[a] new generation of children… were missing out on the character-building, health-promoting experiences of hardy rural life: some even mentioned the peril of ‘dying of indoor-ness.’”
Riding on the heels of industrialization and the sprawl of suburbanization, the new anxiety at the beginning of the 21st century is digitalization. A Kaiser Family Foundation report found that many elementary school-age children spend as much as eight hours engaged with screens each day (computers, television, iPhones, gaming consoles) and maybe 30 minutes outside in the natural world. Similar to the response to industrialization at the beginning of the 20th century, the nature-based education movement in the 21st century intends to extract our children from the clutches of computerization.
Today, the average 12-year-old will wake up, check social media on the phone while still in bed, watch TV in the kitchen while eating breakfast (maybe), listen to music with headphones on the school bus. In school, they’ll do three hours of smarter balanced testing on a school computer and then, as a break from testing, watch an on-line video about predation in Africa. Maybe they’ll go outside for 20 minutes of recess. After school, they’ll spend two hours playing Overwatch, a team-based shooter game, with friends. Maybe, they’ll have dinner with their parents, and then after dinner do an hour of homework on a laptop before re-watching a couple of episodes of Game of Thrones or other trending series.
“Join me on a ramble to visit two of the hopeful places where children play joyfully in nature, and freedom rings.”
As reported in Children’s Environmental Health in the Digital Age, addiction to the digital world is causing numerous forms of health problems for children—greater rates of depression, more social isolation, lack of physical development and increases in obesity, increased rates of myopia, increased learning deficits in preschool children, decreased vitamin D because of lack of sunlight exposure, premature thinning of the neocortex. Sigh. Parents are freaked out about their children becoming digital addicts, and they’re avid about finding educational alternatives that set their children on a different path.
In the face of all the bad news, the nature-based education movement makes me hopeful in spite of it all. Before our young children are falling asleep with their iPhones or Androids, before they have hordes of Instagram followers, before they are hypnotized by their Netflix accounts, let’s saturate them in nature. Let’s help them create an environmental identity before they have a social media identity. Let’s send them to a nature preschool or forest kindergarten. Let’s create communities that have a preschool to high school commitment to nature connection.
When my book Beyond Ecophobia was published in 1996, nature-infused education was in its infancy. Today, 28 years later, it has grown up, it’s moving out of its parents’ homes, and is setting up camp in rural towns, suburbia, and urban centers around the country and the world.
So take my hand and join me on a ramble to visit two of the hopeful places where children play joyfully in nature, and freedom rings. We’ll go first to the fringes of Chicagoland, about an hour west of downtown. The Natural Beginnings Early Childhood Program offers immersion in almost 400 acres of prairie, woodland, and gentle creeks for 3- to 6-year-old students in the Kendall County Forest Preserve.
Pirate Treasure
One of the defining aspects of nature preschools is that the educators are committed to playing and working outside with children for most of the school day. The outdoors is, much of the time, the classroom, far from the fluorescent-lit, plastic-toyed, germ-laden air of the indoors space. Like the post office motto, “Neither rain nor hail nor sleet nor snow nor rain nor heat of day nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” these teachers and children are out in all kinds of weather. Contrary to the notion that, “Oh we have to keep the children inside when it’s rainy or they’ll get sick,” nature preschool teachers believe that having the children outside in all weathers builds children’s immune systems and makes them healthier.
So it was on a winter outing on the northern edge of the forest preserve when Megan Gessler and her students stumbled upon a geocache, a metal box sequestered in an oak tree crevice, filled with gold and silver coins. “Pirate treasure!” the children all surmised. The children assumed pirate names, Captain Orange Hissing Cat and First Mate Purple Coneflower, adopted pirate jargon, “Where we be going next, Captain Megan?” and speculated that there would be more treasure stashed around the preserve. “Maybe over on the other side of that crick,” a child speculated. Captain Megan wondered how they could get across the creek without icy cold water filling their boots, and the crew pondered for a while and decided they needed a raft for the crossing. (Ah, the spirit of Huck Finn is alive and well.) Seizing on this great problem-solving opportunity, the captain promised they’d figure out how to make a raft.
The next day, back at the indoor classroom, the crew decided to glue together a lot of big sticks they’d collected the day before. With a whole mess of glue. Which really didn’t work. And so they trundled off to a nearby stream to think through this engineering challenge.
In an article authored by Gessler that will be in my upcoming book, The Sky Above, the Mud Below, she describes how the children were energized with ideas. “We talked about the size of the raft needed and the scale of the sticks that could hold them. How many students would be on the raft at once? What size logs? How many logs? What would hold them together?” It was almost as if she could see their minds whirring with activity, she writes.
Can you see what’s going on here? Discovery of the geocache initiated a pirate fantasy that the teacher embraced wholeheartedly. The outdoor setting, more rich in exploratory suggestiveness than the indoor setting, prompts the children to want to find more treasure, on the other side of the stream. Gessler realizes this is a grand opportunity for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) learning, and challenges them with a real problem. How can we get across? This is what Thoreau meant when he talked about seeing castles in the air and building foundations underneath them. This is what early childhood education is supposed to be.
Remarkably, and with the right materials (hammers, nails, bandages, fabric scraps) and teacher guidance at the right points, the children manage to create a raft about six feet long by two feet wide over the next few days. Another problem then presented itself—how to get the raft to the creek? It was ungainly and heavy and the creek was ¾ of a mile away along a rough trail.
They tried to use a wagon, but the raft was too long to fit. So, they used the teacher’s heavy backpacks to weigh down the front of the raft on the bottom of the wagon while the students who walked behind the wagon held up the other end. Once they got to the creek, they placed the raft across it at a narrow point where it became more like a bridge because of the low water level. Success! It worked! They beamed with delight at their own triumph!
Needless to say, this couldn’t have happened in the church basement preschool. Or even in the university lab school early childhood center, unless the teachers and children were outside in the winter, open to the prompts of children’s imagination in the ever-changing forest. And there’s no sacrifice of classic academic goals. The conventional aspirations to literacy and math readiness, learning to get along with classmates, developing creative thinking are all happening. But there’s also scientific thinking, bonding with the natural world, and the development of grit, perseverance and resilience. And not a digital device anywhere in sight.
Oh sure, you’re thinking, hope for middle class, suburban White kids, but what about economically disadvantaged students of color? This same form of nature preschool is happening across America in rural and urban areas.
Tiny Trees Preschool operates in nine different urban parks in Seattle, giving urban children “the gift of a joyfully muddy childhood.” In New York City, Brooklyn Forest offers parent/caregiver and young child programs in Prescott and Central Parks. Hot tea and freshly baked treats are part of the program to assure coziness in the outdoors. Way down south, Peruvian-born Patricia Leon directs the Miami Nature Preschool amid the live oaks and Spanish moss of a downtown park surrounded by hustle, glitz, and traffic. It’s a place “that preserves the raw essence of childhood.” In Atlanta, Turning Sun Preschool offers a full spectrum, 6 months to 5 years, 8 a.m to 6pm program, that embraces “the natural world and our local community, which means we go outside every day, rain or shine.” And they use public transportation to get to parks, museums and playgrounds around the city. To paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, we got ourselves a movement here.
Nature Kids Lafayette: From Preschool to High School, From Backyard to Back Country
Let’s take another field trip to Lafayette, Colorado, a suburb of Boulder, a place that offers lower home prices and rental costs for lower-wage workers in the area. As a result, Lafayette has a higher percentage of community members who identify with non-dominant groups, particularly Latino-identified community members. Lafayette has the schools with the highest rate of free and reduced lunch and the highest number of students of color in Boulder County.
In 2014, Thorne Nature Experience worked with two dozen other environmental non-profits to conduct a countywide needs assessment. A salient finding was that the Latino community was being significantly less served than the White community. In response, Thorne, in collaboration with the city of Lafayette, Boulder Valley School District, and a dozen nonprofits initiated a groundbreaking (literally and figuratively) program to address these environmental injustice issues. Nature Kids/ Jóvenes de la Naturaleza Lafayette is designed to connect Latino youth and their families to nature and the outdoors with preschool to high school, backyard to back county, family-integrated environmental education and outdoor recreation programming. They’ve raised nearly $10 million, with seed funding from Great Outdoors Colorado, to make it all happen. It’s the kind of whole system kick-in-the-butt initiative that makes me hopeful.
Keith Desrosiers, director of Thorne, describes the problem.
“Poverty in Boulder County, and especially in Lafayette, is largely invisible. It’s hidden behind fences in trailer parks and low-income housing developments,” Desrosiers explains in a video about Nature Kids. These neighborhoods are often devoid of nature and vegetation and lack adequate sidewalks and street crossings for children to safely walk or bike to school, never mind access a park, a trail or open space.”
The solution is complex, multifaceted and aspirational. First, they’re going to change the infrastructure in the Latino community around one of the elementary schools so children can safely walk/bike to school, and completely naturalize the school grounds. In addition, they’re taking a cradle-to-grave, all-hands-on-deck approach toward providing outdoor programming, led as much as possible by Latino community members.
Carlos Lerma, Lafayette resident and Community Programs Manager describes, also in the Nature Kids video that some of the infrastructure changes that insure that all Lafayette youth live with a safe, 10-minute walk to nature.
“We designed the Nature Kids/Jóvenes de la Naturaleza with the help of the community to take away any physical, cultural, and economic barriers that keep so many of the youth that live in my community from participating in traditional recreational experiences,” Lerma explains. “Nature Kids plans to build five nature play areas, six gazebos, four pedestrian crossings, and over 2 miles of trails. The highlights of these capital projects are the $1 million nature play area and neighborhood connector trails at Alicia Sanchez International Elementary School.”
In addition, there are 82 different programs—environmental education in elementary schools, after school programs, newly designed middle and high school courses, field trips, summer camps, a youth advisory board, family camping weekends, job training initiatives, backpacking trips, wildlands restoration projects. It’s a mind-boggling array of opportunities offered by 27 collaborating organizations designed to deliver more than 500,000 hours of programming to participants from 2017 to 2022. Those are some big numbers!
One example—students in a class at Centaurus High School learned about wildfire prevention and then participated in a fire mitigation project at Cal-wood Education Center in the Front Range mountains above Boulder and Lafayette. They thinned trees to create a defensible space in the forest, built slash piles and stacked wood.
Teacher Erin Angel commented that, “It was hard work, but it felt good to help take care of that beautiful area that has become special to us.” Young children are tromping in streams, teenagers are becoming mentors, and families are going on their first camping trips ever in state parks. And yes, recognizing the importance of helping young children bond with the natural world, Thorne is also starting a nature preschool. And so we’ve come full circle.
When I walked into the Thorne Nature Experience building in May 2019 to work with the board of directors on their next 5-year strategic plan, I was met just inside the door by Dr. Oakleigh “Oak” Thorne, the institution’s founder, with a pair of male and female lark buntings in his clasped hands. He is the youngest 91-year-old I’ve ever met. The birds were calm, mostly because Oak knows exactly how to hold them, but also perhaps because the birds sensed that he is a gentle, kindred spirit.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers, That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops—at all,” begins the poem by Emily Dickinson. That’s what’s happening out there in the meadows in nature preschools and along the neighborhood trail to Alicia Sanchez Elementary School. There’s a little bit of hope perching in the souls of children, and we’re counting on that little bit of hope never stopping at all.
Oak founded what was then called Thorne Ecological Institute way back in 1954, and he’s been a leader in the open space and nature education movement throughout the west. At Thorne, he still runs the bird banding program where children as young as 12 can learn to net, band and release songbirds. What a treasure to hold delicate, wild, quietly pulsating life in your own hands.
It’s similar for me. As Wendell Berry evokes in the poem, The Peace of Wild Things, “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,” I think of joyful preschool pirates tromping in the Illinois woods and, “For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
DAVID T. SOBEL, M. ED.is a Senior Faculty in the Education Department and Director of the Center for Place-based Education at Antioch University New England. His writings examine the relationship between child development, authentic curriculum and environmental education. His published books include “Children’s Special Places,” “Beyond Ecophobia,” “Mapmaking with Children,” “Place-based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities,” “Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educator,” Place- and Community-based Education in Schools with Greg Smith,” and “Wild Play: Parenting Adventures in the Great Outdoors.” Look for David’s new book “The Sky Above, the Mud Below,” in 2020.
In this video, Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy shares her story about how the Hoopa Valley Tribe revilitalized women’s coming-of-age ceremonies. Through the flower ceremony in particular, young women are honored at a time when the broader American society sends them messages that they are “lesser than” males. Dr. Risling Baldy explains how this tradition prevents teen suicide, educates young women about domestic abuse, and addresses patriarchy.
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.
This article contains the content from the 2/26/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
“The problem is that Western thinkers tend to consider intelligence as a human exclusivity.” —Jeremy Narby, anthropologist
“We’re just one member of the democracy of species; the Earth does not just belong to us.” —Robin Kimmerer, Potawami Indigenous ecologist
Humans are a part of nature, not apart from it. Our innate capacity for intelligence suggests the same is true for the rest of our interconnected web of life. As researchers study the natural world, we find our notions of consciousness expanding.
This week, meet thought leaders whose work is transforming our curiosity about intelligence in nature into a full-fledged field of research — with deep implications for the future of our relationship with the natural world.
Casey Camp-Horinek: Aligning Human Law with Natural Law
According to Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca), for as long as Mother Earth and Father Sky have blessed all life on Earth with sustenance, there has been a Sacred System honored by all species. Only humans have strayed wildly from these original instructions to live in harmony with all and to recognize our place in the Great Mystery. Now, she says, in this crucial moment, we must find our way back to balance if we are to avoid the unraveling of the web of life.
This brand new Bioneers Reader features some of the world’s foremost thought leaders, sharing their research and observations about nature’s intelligence. We’re excited to share a selection of the groundbreaking concepts buzzed about within our community, in a beautifully-designed package that’s free to download. Don’t forget to share this reader with your friends and family!
Cutting-edge research is increasingly rediscovering what our ancestors understood: the animal, vegetal and fungal realms are teeming with organisms that make conscious decisions and respond intelligently to their surroundings.
In the Bioneers “Intelligence in Nature” media collection, we feature leading bioneers in this field who are using modern science to shed light on kinship and interconnectedness within the web of life.
Lab-Grown Food: Ecological Savior or Empty Promise? | Arty Mangan, Director of the Restorative Food Systems program at Bioneers, explains how the technological novelty of lab-grown food might outweigh its benefits for the Earth.
Every Seed Has a Story | Originally posted on the Food Tank website, this article tells the story of northern Ugandan women working together to save, use and sell their traditional seeds.
The Ecology of Awakening | Kerry Brady, the co-founder and Director of Ecology of Awakening, explains that as we confront humanity’s demise, we must deconstruct “our ways of being and belonging to the world” in our attempt to re-align on the path forward.
From Yale E360: “Ecopsychology: How Immersion in Nature Benefits Your Health” | Health experts and government officials are trying to bring more nature into people’s lives, as a growing body of research proves that exposure to the natural world benefits our wellbeing.
A collection of keynote presentations from the Bioneers 2019 Conference are now available on LinkTV. Listen to the inspiring words of speakers like Bill McKibben, Eve Ensler, Terry Tempest Williams, and more.
With climate-driven disasters becoming the new normal, building resilience is the grail. Communities around the world are developing models created out of practical necessity. We hear on-the-ground stories from two different communities building resilience in the wake of serial disasters. Estrella Santiago Pérez and her innovative community rights organization ENLACE have helped organize a collection of marginalized neighborhoods in San Juan, Puerto Rico to overcome the twin catastrophes of Hurricane Maria and a failed government. And far away in the fire-ravaged communities near California’s relatively well-off wine country, Trathen Heckman helped lead the nonprofit grassroots group Daily Acts to build a resilience network from the ground up with engaged citizens action, civil society groups and Sonoma County government agencies.
Featuring
Estrella Santiago Pérez, J.D., is the Environmental Affairs Manager for the Corporación del Proyecto ENLACE del Caño Martín Peña, a groundbreaking urban land trust project, which has organized a large, hitherto disenfranchised “informal” settlement in a polluted section of San Juan, Puerto Rico, into an exemplary self-governing entity working to clean its environment and develop a vibrant, resilient, socially just, sustainable community.
Trathen Heckman, founder/Director of the NGO, Daily Acts, serves on the boards of Transition U.S. and the California Water Efficiency Partnership and is on the advisory board of the Norcal Community Resilience Network. Trathen lives in the Petaluma River Watershed where he grows food and medicine.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Monica Lopez and Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Producer: Teo Grossman
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
Music
Our theme music is co-written by the Baka Forest People of Cameroon and Baka Beyond, from the album East to West. Find out more at globalmusicexchange.org.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: The Seven Sisters Oak Trees in Louisiana are famous for their ability to withstand even the fiercest hurricanes. How do they do it? Their roots grow together to weave an entire community of resilience. As a community, the Seven Sisters Oaks can withstand huge shocks.
It’s an apt metaphor for the rising movement to build community resilience from the ground up.
Resilience enhances our ability to adapt to dramatic changes. It’s the capacity of both human and ecological systems to absorb severe disturbance yet still retain their basic function and structure.
And – in the face of radical climate disruption and ecological collapse, structures and institutions can also just crumble. This destruction also releases tremendous amounts of bound-up energy and resources for reorganization and renewal. Novelty emerges. Small changes can have big influences.
With climate-driven disasters becoming the new normal, communities are caught in the collision between the state of nature and the nature of the state. They’re developing models created out of practical necessity and founded in greater self-reliance and self-determination.
In this program, we hear on-the-ground stories from two very different communities building resilience in the wake of serial disasters. To overcome the twin catastrophes of HurricaneMaria and a failed government, Estrella Santiago Perez and her innovative community rights organization ENLACE have helped organize a collection of marginalized neighborhoods in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
And far away in the fire-ravaged communities near California’s relatively well-off wine country, Trathen Heckman helped lead the nonprofit grassroots group Daily Acts to weave a resilience network from the ground up where engaged citizens and civil society groups coordinated with badly strapped Sonoma County government agencies.
This is, “Community Resilience: When the Love in the Air is Thicker than the Smoke.”
I’m Neil Harvey. I’ll be your host. Welcome to The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
The most ferocious storms we experience on Planet Earth are rated Category 5. Only 35 have been recorded since the 1930s, but in 2017, two Category 5’s formed back-to-back over the Atlantic and bore down on vulnerable Puerto Rico with the fury of the new abnormal. Storm surges flooded communities and knocked out power and most services to over a million households, while slamming neighboring islands, too.
The storm surge poured sewage into Puerto Rico’s waterways and reservoirs, forcing many residents to bathe and drink from contaminated water sources. It took nearly a full year before power was fully restored to all communities. Yet a year later, tens of thousands of residents continued to live with tarps for roofs, while lacking the most basic medical facilities and public services.
According to Estrella Santiago Pérez who co-directs the ENLACE community organization, an even worse underlying disaster compounded the climate-fueled storms. She spoke at a Bioneers conference.
ESTRELLA SANTIAGO PÉREZ: Disaster is not only climate events, it’s not only the hurricane, it’s also government disaster, it’s also human-made disasters. And when we talk about disasters, we can not only focus on the event itself, we have to focus on what’s the infrastructure.
Imagine yourself, if right now happens a fire or a hurricane or an earthquake and you lose energy, you lose water, what would you do? How would you recover from that? We need to start thinking about that, because it happened in the U.S. soil, in Puerto Rico.
Just to give you an idea, Hurricane Maria caused—it wasn’t the disaster itself, it was everything that happened afterwards. We have over 4,000 deaths. And I include in that number the father of a coworker who was dependent on oxygen, he couldn’t get a diagnosis because all of the medical offices were… [TEARING UP] Sorry…
All of the medical offices were closed because we had no electricity, so he couldn’t get a proper diagnosis in time. And the oxygen, you know, it depends on electricity. And then you had all the neighbors had electric generators with fumes that affected his health, and he died. And like him, we had thousands of people that died. All we got in response was a paper towel tossed at us. And we are U.S. citizens.
HOST: In truth, Puerto Ricans are at best second-class citizens because the island is a territory of the United States, not a state. With no vote in Congress, it’s essentially a colony, and its people have a long history of activism against this injustice. In recent years, Puerto Rico’s beleaguered economy became the object of both severe so-called “austerity measures” imposed by the US government, and in turn a juicy target for rich hedge funds looking to exploit its vulnerability. Sometimes called “disaster capitalism,” it describes a vicious cycle of starving the island’s budget, slashing services, and capitalizing on the twin disasters of economic distress and extreme weather events.
The people said no. After 15 historic days of massive protests, as the New York Times reported in 2019, “From the ruins of the storm rose a grassroots movement that unseated a governor.” What emerged is called “la revolucion de verano” – the “summer revolution.”
ESP: FEMA… I mean, to apply for FEMA assistance you have to have a phone or a computer. So imagine, even I – that I am privileged enough to not be affected by the hurricane, I lived for over 80 days without electricity. So imagine our communities, having to apply for the only assistance they can have, because they have no insurance, through a phone or a website when we didn’t have any telecommunications. So we had to set up centers with the help of different organizations that donated solar power, and we helped over 600 families fill out their applications.
One of the anecdotes I like about this is we have a newspaper come by to ask people about how they felt after the hurricane, and they asked a kid: What’s the best thing about having a community center near to your house that has solar energy? And you would have think that he was going to say, I can play with my Gameboy, I can charge my cell phone or use my computer. He said…[TEARING UP] Sorry… He said, The best thing is that I can talk to my father that lives in the Dominican Republic. And he hadn’t talked with his father for two months because there was no electricity or phone.
HOST: The Summer Revolution birthed “people’s assemblies” – citizen groups that had a different vision for Puerto Rico: adequate affordable housing – localized renewable energy – protection for their neighborhoods against huge commercial developers – support for local food producers to offset reliance on offshore suppliers – and a host of other issues. They called it “auto-gestion” self-management, and it was not entirely new.
Residents tapped into the resilience networks that had already been built over years of organizing around the Caño Martín Peña – the channel that runs through the San Juan Bay Estuary. Dense neighborhoods had formed along its banks since the Great Depression when unemployed sugar cane workers filled mangroves with debris to create foundations for their homes along the channel’s edge. Despite decades of marginalization, the resilient community they’d built together provided critical relief to residents during the first months after the hurricane.
ESP: So they took the lead, and during those first months we managed to remove vegetative material that was blocking the access to houses, and which posed a very high mobilized over 600 volunteers, including people from the U.S. that didn’t even know anything about Puerto Rico and flew down just to help us. We received a lot of donations. Our office became a center for distributing donations throughout the communities. We have community leaders like Doña Gladys. She lost her roof, cooking for people in her communities, even when herself, she suffered damage for the hurricane.
We had over 800 tarps distributed. The first tarps that were distributed were donated by different organizations, and distributed by the same residents, and even installed by the neighbors and other volunteers. And we delivered over 1,700 goods. And this is critical. Puerto Rico is an island. We import over 85% of everything that we eat. Imagine having a hurricane, having supermarkets with no food and not being able to have food come by the US, and then as a US territory, we have the Jones Act, which means that everything that goes to our country has to go first through the US. So if you have a country close by like the Dominican Republic that want to provide aid, they have to go all the way to the U.S. and transfer that into a U.S. ship and go back into Puerto Rico. And that caused a lot of delays among other issues. So definitely there were weeks in which families had no food, no electricity, no water.
So definitely Hurricane Maria show us that having an organized community is critical for disaster response, especially in areas that are marginalized or that are forgotten by the entities. Community resilience is happening right now. This is not new. Our communities are very resilient. Marginalized communities have been resilient, even from before the development of this new concept, because they have had to, because nobody has been there to help them.
First, social ties save lives. Building community and social capital creates enduring relationships that preserve cultural memory, in the same way that seeds regenerate a forest after a fire.
Second, government usually works best when it’s closest to the ground. In other words, empower local communities to solve their own problems.
Third, resilience arises from decentralized infrastructures, such as increasing localized clean energy grids and food production.
Well before Hurricane Maria, Estrella Santiago Perez and her neighbors safeguarded their community from displacement by establishing a 200-acre Land Trust involving about 2,000 residents. It’s the only one in Puerto Rico, and it won the 2016 United Nations World Habitat Award.
ESP: It was a conversation with the residents of these communities, which are approximately 26,000 residents, about what way they could protect themselves from gentrification. And basically in 2004, a law was created that creates the land trust, and through that law, over 200 acres of public lands that were owned by different agencies and in which thousands of families were living historically were transferred into that land trust.
So the land trust exists as a nonprofit with perpetual life, and it manages all of these 200 acres of land for the benefit of the communities. So, you know, each family living in the land trust lands are members of the land trust and are actively participating in the decision-making processes.
And the benefit of this land trust is that if there’s a family that needs to be relocated because they’re leaving any of the projects that are going to be implemented in the communities, they have the ability and the right to choose to move within their own communities in lands of the land trust. So that way we are preventing a speculation of the land, and we’re also preventing displacement and gentrification of our communities.
So it was a process. It was definitely something that was discussed and designed by their own communities as part of that citizen participation and empowerment process. But the idea is that this land trust can become a pilot project or a model for other communities that are also facing similar issues of displacement and gentrification. Community members of the land trust, have traveled to places like Brazil to speak to other communities about the benefits of the land trust.
HOST: The land trust has been crucial in protecting families from displacement and gentrification. Many families on the island don’t have the funds to rebuild, and often disaster recovery funds can’t be used in areas prone to flooding. Some residents also lack clear title to the land that their families have inhabited since the early 1900’s. These circumstances can push families out and make way for speculators to swoop in and buy property at fire-sale prices.
Another crisis for Caño Martín Peña communities that’s compounded by climate disruption is toxic flooding resulting from blocking the free flow of water. The combination of untreated sewage and stagnant waters has developed into a recurring cycle of flooding events and environmental health harms for Caño residents. Even before Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Rico already had the worst rate of drinking water violations of any state or territory in the nation, along with 18 Superfund sites, including the former US Navy bomb testing range on the island of Vieques. Just add water…
ESP: What we’re trying to do is use the funds that have been assigned for Puerto Rico for disaster recovery. The communities organized themselves and designed a plan which includes all of the projects that are needed for them to fix all of these environmental issues.
We’re working together in the implementation of these projects. Opening the channel. We have a channel that’s blocked, so we have to restore that tidal connection. But we also have to connect the families that lack a sewer system to a proper and adequate infrastructure. And we have to also fix the stormwater system in our communities because it’s carrying combined storm and raw sewage discharges
And one of the main components of this comprehensive development plan is relocating families that are living right now within the Caño Martín Peña into decent safe and sanitary houses within the communities, because we don’t want to have a displacement of communities, like happens in other areas. What we want is to be able to provide housing opportunities for families within their own communities for those families that need to be moved due to the different projects that are contained within the comprehensive development plan.
And this relocation process is done with a relocation committee that’s comprised by community leaders, so it’s a very sensible process.
There can’t be a just and equitable disaster recovery if you’re not including the communities in the decision-making processes, and in the solution process. So we have to have them engaged.
HOST: Estrella Santiago Perez says it’s critical to empower communities to hold relief agencies accountable for their actions. Yet in reality, facing a failed state, they’re really empowering themselves – again, “auto-gestion” – self-management.
When we return, the biggest and most destructive fires to hit California test the resilience of community networks built over time by local organizations, and out of the ashes, they’re forging what they call “disaster collectivism…” I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
You can see and hear more from the guests in this program, and explore more Bioneers radio programs, podcasts and videos online at bioneers.org. For information on attending the National Bioneers Conference, please visit bioneers.org or call 1-877-BIONEER.
TRATHEN HECKMAN: And so how I woke up to the fires was Chris and Hanna are really good friends of mine. We used to share land together, and they moved to Santa Rosa about six months before. And so I hear this pounding on the door at three in the morning, and we’re a little confused as to why they’re standing there. And they have their cat. And they basically made it out of their house with just their cat, and got in their cars. And they got to some friend’s house in Coffey Park, and they stayed there for a short amount of time when they recognized they all had to leave. And they basically had to leave their cars in the street and just run.
I remember, kind of the most terrifying thing to me was so much devastation happened so quickly, and I was listening to the TV and I hear the head of fires for the state on the TV, and he basically says it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And people – we just didn’t even have a reference for what that meant.
HOST: Trathen Heckman founded and directs a sustainability organization in Sonoma County, California called Daily Acts, which works to embed resilient systems in local communities. In 2017, the Tubbs fire ravaged the region — at the time, it was the largest wildfire in California history. Nearly two-hundred fifty separate fires raged out of control. Trathen Heckman spoke on a panel at a Bioneers Conference…
TH: The next morning, a nonprofit organization, lots of volunteer staff, we wanted to plug in and we wanted to do stuff. But we didn’t really know – I actually had the cell phone number of the woman who heads the health department for our county, which is emergency services. I called her up. I’m like, Ellen, what do we need to do? Where do we plug in? How can we be of help? They, of course, were overwhelmed doing a phenomenal job but just totally buried. So most people in organizations were on their own to figure out what do we do, how do we plug in, how do we make a difference.
HOST: Once again, a community was trapped between the state of nature and the nature of the state – or more precisely, an overwhelmed state. And once again, social ties saved lives.
When disaster hits, “first responders” are just as likely to be friends and neighbors as they are to be paramedics or police. Daily Acts was already deeply embedded in the community. So, when the fire hit, the group activated its networks. They used tried-and-true community organizing methods, going door to door to check on people’s needs. They used social media wherever they could find power and internet connectivity. But there was also a spirit in the air…
TH: People were just organizing and stepping up and doing what they could, but in addition to the organizing that was happening, this meme started to spread – The love in the air is thicker than the smoke. And you started to see it everywhere, and it was really representative of the level of community spirit.
I’ve been an organizer for a long time, and I’ve never felt anything like the generosity and the courage, and the openness, and the creativity, and the inclusivity that we saw that occurred during the fire. So in this ultimate tragedy, it is phenomenal how people come together and step up.
With a plan already in place to build more resilient systems before the next disaster hit, the partnerships Trathen Heckman and Daily Acts had forged with hundreds of groups and local government agencies paid off.
TH: And so for a lot of years we’ve been building the social infrastructure and the cross sector/cross issue collaborations in our community, which is really critical. The things you could do in advance of a disaster, to build relationships with your agencies, with your cities, with your other partners, your schools and churches, because I did a presentation at a climate conference – I got to sit next– so the guy who’s the head of emergency response for our county, and he basically said, “We’re very limited on staff. In a real disaster we’re protecting infrastructure. Most people are on their own.” And that’s going to be true in most places. And so for the community to get more connected and skilled on the ground, but then also build those relationships with agencies is super important, so when disaster does hit, then you have a lot in place.
HOST: Unlike Puerto Rico, Sonoma County is comparatively affluent. Like Puerto Rico, it too faces gaping inequities. The consequences of disasters cascade along pathways defined by race, class, ethnicity, and immigrant status – so an equitable recovery requires a participatory process that’s inclusive of all community members.
How do communities ensure that everyone has a seat at the planning table?
TH: The fires came on Sunday, and what about Saturday’s problems? What about the equity crisis? What about the housing crisis? We’re losing people from our communities, and so how to keep our working class community there – people who work in restaurants, our organic farmers and folks who’ve been living their values in stewardship but don’t make a lot of money. There’s a huge risk right now to losing a lot of the people that really make our community what it is, and the economy. The fires came on Sunday, and what about Saturday’s problems? What about the equity crisis? What about the housing crisis? We’re losing people from our communities, and so how to keep our working class community there – people who work in restaurants, our organic farmers and folks who’ve been living their values in stewardship but don’t make a lot of money. There’s a huge risk right now to losing a lot of the people that really make our community what it is, and the economy.
Basically within the first week, a number of people got together from, again, government business agencies and launched an organization called SOCO Rises, which is about placing equity at the center and bringing community voice into the response and recovery process.
At the same time, a number of grassroots organizations got together and trying to think of instead of disaster capitalism, what does disaster collectivism look like. And so a lot of the organizations didn’t even have budgets, and we not only hosted a fundraiser, but then we started the Just and Resilient Future Fund to kind of flip the script on who raises money and who distributes money to get the grassroots at the table, both bringing in resources and deciding how they’re directed.
And one of the critical things is that for people to get back in their houses, you have to have your landscape designed according to new water and sustainability requirements, and it feels like kind of the straw that broke the back for folks. And we can install these more drought and deluge and climate resilient landscapes.
We’ve got a big circle of concern and circle of influence. Like, start with your health. Start where you live – rent, own, apartment, whatever. Start with your neighbors. Building household and neighborhood scale community resilience, that’s a cornerstone of more resilient communities, of building that social cohesion. From there we can get civically engaged and we can create a bigger transformation. And so my last comment is just, you know, at the end of the day to take heart, and take part, and take action.
HOST: Trathen Heckman and Estrella Santiago Pérez know that like the Seven Sisters Oak Tree, our greatest resilience dwells in community – and the way we’ll hold it together is to hold it – together.
James Nestor is a journalist and author who has written in major publications such as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Dwell Magazine. The author of the 2014 book Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, Nestor is especially fascinated with exploring life underwater — and gave a fascinating keynote address at the 2016 Bioneers Conference:
To take his fascination to a new level, Nestor has teamed up with a marine scientist and professor, David Gruber, and an aerospace engineer, Jean Koster, to establish CETI (Cetacean Echolocation Translation Initiative), an independent research project focused on studying and attempting to comprehend sperm whale clicks. Recognizing that traditional marine biology had limited means and methods for studying these animals, Nestor hopes this research will lead to important breakthroughs, the likes of which haven’t been seen for upwards of 50 years.
“What we found is there’s a gap between what’s happening in marine biology and interspecies communication in the academic world and the private world and the technology world,” says Nestor. “We’re trying to bridge the private world and all of these amazing emerging technologies with marine biology and marine science to try to do something big. Will it work? Maybe. Will it fail? Perhaps. But no one else is really trying to do this, which to me is insane.”
Bioneers spoke with him about this new venture.
Tell us about the technologies that make now the right time for this type of research.
It’s machine learning, especially, and some A.I. technologies that are currently being used to translate and crack into mouse and bat language. That’s already happening, so the algorithms are all written, and researchers are discovering incredible things. They’re also looking into patterns in birdsong.
We want to use these technologies that exist and are growing and apply them to what could be the most sophisticated form of communication, which is sperm whale clicks. We want to really try to push it and see what happens.
You’re not going to find any marine biologists saying these animals aren’t communicating in a very sophisticated way. We’ve known that for 50 years. We just haven’t had the technology or the means to really research it. Traditional marine biologists conducted research in a boat. They dropped a hydrophone over the side of a boat and collected data that has revealed some incredible discoveries. But it hasn’t been able to crack into these animals’ language. By interacting with these animals face to face, which is what we’re going to be doing, you can really spur them to interact in a way that no hydrophone or person on a boat is going to be able to do. We have video showing that something magical happens when you approach them in peace face-to-face. They want to sit there and interact with you. It’s those interactions that we think are going to provide the best data.
James Nestor
Mechanically speaking, how do sperm whales create these clicks?
They create them in their nose. The sperm whale has the largest nose on the planet. It’s technically a “nose” even though it’s basically the front of their head. They have a chamber inside of their nose, where they vibrate sounds. They click with these two lips and then vibrate the sounds in this hollow area and shoot them out in the front of their head. They can shoot clicks out and form them in highly directional sound beams.
Someone recorded that there were 1,600 microclicks in a single second sent to one sperm whale from the other. An animal is not doing that by accident. That’s not a dog barking. That’s a very deliberate signal. We know they’re able to pick and choose to which whale they’re sending these. If you’re diving with these animals, they’ll sit there in a circle and crane their heads in just the right way to shoot clicks to one another with a clear signal. It’s a pretty mind blowing experience to be in the middle of. To see them conversing. There’s obviously something so powerful there.
What makes sperm whales, in particular, special? Are there other species communicating in the same way sperm whales do?
Yes. Ukrainian scientists at Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University have been collecting data on dolphin clicks and just recently found that they’re using these clicks as a form of data transmission. Not the way that humans use language, but still a form of language.
They were able to reveal that the clicking patterns dolphins used were different depending on each dolphin. Inside those clicks are little encoded packs of information. Words. But I think it’s more than just words — they’re doing more than just communicating a single word. If you think about human language, it’s really clunky. If I mispronounce something just slightly, you don’t understand me. Transmission of data is a much more evolved way of communicating, which is what we’re doing on this phone, and on fax machines, and on email. The study is fascinating. The fact that this is happening right now means to me that when these revelations come out, they’re going to come out fast and furiously.
The reason why we’re interested in sperm whales is dolphins are a lot easier to study. You can put them in a tank and study them up close. They’re small and pretty docile. No one can get near sperm whales. They’re 50 feet long, and these are the world’s largest predators. But by free diving, we found a way of getting very close to them in ways that no one else really has. Sperm whales have the largest brain ever to have existed on the planet that we know of — about six times the size of ours and many times more complex than our own brains. They’ve had these brains for tens of millions of years longer than we’ve had our current-size brains. We know this animal has incredible potential for intelligence. We know they’re communicating. We just don’t know what they’re saying. That’s what we hope to find out.
What else do you hope to accomplish with this project besides just understanding language?
If you want to save the animals of the ocean, give them a name, and show their intelligence. I think that will make it a lot harder for idiots to want to continue killing animals off. At least I hope. I think it’s going to be easier for resolutions to be passed if we can show the incredible intelligence of these animals.
Additionally, tons of whales get hit every year by ship strikes. If there’s a way for us to peek into the language, perhaps we can send out some broadcasting language that warns them not to get close — that ships are coming.
But to me, the real fascination is that we’re talking about the possibility of communicating with another animal on this planet that is communicating in a way that is so much more sophisticated than human language. There could be industrial applications, but the real interest to me is strictly a scientific and curious pursuit. Just to interact with them on a minimal level, I think, would really get people to realize that there’s more happening on this planet than iPhones. There’s something bigger going on here.
Any plans to use this tech to study other species?
Absolutely. We know that orcas use these clicks. We know that dolphins use these clicks. So this could be a lingua franca. Could be. We don’t know. No one’s really studied it. But if we’re able to crack into the communication code of one of these animals, I think it’ll be that much easier to replicate the code of others. Then we’ll be easily able to determine whether all these cetaceans have been communicating for millions of years. I know that sounds way out and pretty spacey, but it’s really not. If you look at the specifics of these clicks and how long these animals have been around to evolve this ability, I think it’s completely possible.
Do you think humans will be able to mimic their clicks to communicate with them?
That’s a big challenge. First of all, we have to figure out what they are. We have to understand whether they’re like fax transactions, which is possible. If you look at one of these clicks, these animals can repeat the same exact click codes down to the millisecond with the same discrete frequencies. If you look at a fax transmission, it’s the same exact thing. So it’s a possibility, we just have to capture them. I know that if we’re able to capture some really clean signals — and considering how sophisticated machine learning and speaker technologies are now — I’m pretty confident that we’d be able to send them back. That’s the ultimate goal: to be able to send them something, and for them to send us something, and back and forth.
It’s like ancient sailors going to some distant island in the South Pacific. How did they communicate? They’d draw out a picture in the sand and say this is where I came from, and the indigenous people would draw another picture saying this is where we are, and this is how we understand the world. I have a feeling we’ll have to start with that before we really understand each other’s languages.
To be clear, there’s a big risk involved with this. Maybe we won’t find anything for a while. But just the fact we know they’re communicating, and we know it’s really detailed and complicated and sophisticated, lends me hope that we’ll be able to really break into something here.
What is your specific role on this project?
I put it all together because I just didn’t see anyone else doing it. I’m not a scientist. I’m not an academic. And I know that very clearly. Luckily, I’ve been able to surround myself with people in the community who are open-minded enough to take this on.
David Gruber is a very well-known marine scientist who’s been studying the communication of bioluminescent animals — the codes in those bioluminescent flashes. Jean Koster is a very well-known engineer who is building a whole drone system to find the whales for us.
How is the project being funded?
What’s interesting is we’re not a traditional academic project, which means we can’t necessarily go to a university and ask for grants. And we’re not a private project, so we don’t want to go the Kickstarter route. We need some funds to come together, and that’s what we’re working on now. It’s all tax-free. None of us are making any money. We’re actually just spending massive amounts of cash and time to make this happen. We put up the CETI website because we had some people express interest in donating to it. For our first phase, we need a certain amount of cash to build this one robot that we plan to send out in March.
We could start applying for traditional grants, but the problem with that is A) it takes a long time, and B) there’s a ton of red tape. One of the reasons marine biologists don’t dive with animals is they can’t. If you’re accepting money from a university, you’re bound to certain restrictions just for insurance reasons. No grad student is going to be told to go dive with a bunch of 50-foot whales. That’s why we really love the autonomy of being this offshoot. We’re free to do what we want, when we want to do it. I think that’s going to allow this to go so much quicker.
The amount of money we’re asking for is not a lot right now. If we don’t get it through the private funnel, we’ll probably have to go the grant route. But we’d much prefer to do this in a different way.
Where will you be telling stories of what you find?
We’ll definitely have an online presence, and it looks like we’ll have a documentary crew together. We’re just now working on this to make sure we’ll be able to show people when we actually start making these breakthroughs.
Environmental literacy and social justice are inextricably linked, and recent changes in California’s curricula fully encourage pedagogical exploration of this linkage. Three new academic content frameworks (in Science, History-Social Science, and Health) promote challenge-based learning, in which student inquiry leads to student action in local communities. Students are also discovering nature-inspired design, i.e. Biomimicry, as part of this process. In this session, a school district representative, a teacher, and a student, share their perspectives about this intersection of environmental literacy and social justice. The panel also leads hands-on immersion into the Biomimicry design process with a focus on ways to apply these methods in our own schools and communities.
With: Beth Rattner, Biomimicry Institute; Juanita Chan, Rialto Unified School District; Kavita Gupta, Freemont Union High School District. Moderated by Emily Schell, Executive Director, California Global Education Project; Caleb Jordan-McDaniels, Redwood High School.
This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.
In northern Uganda, nestled in the Western Rift Valley homelands of the Acholi people, Immaculate Omona grows a local groundnut (peanut) variety called Acholi valencia. High yielding and drought tolerant, this variety reliably provides essential nutrients her family depends on. However, this plant provides more than just food, it also embodies her culture, telling a story of resilience and survival.
For many years the north of Uganda was plagued by a brutal warlord named Joseph Kony. Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) predated on the people of Uganda, abducting tens of thousands of children in his campaign of mutilation, torture, slavery, and rape. His horrific reign of terror led to millions being relocated to Internal Displacement Camps for over 20 years. It is at one of these camps that Omona’s aunt waited for the terror to stop. For these 20 years, she saved a single family heirloom, the Acholi valencia. Every year, she cultivated this plant on the side of the camp, growing enough to keep it alive, furthering the very essential characteristics that make it unique. Even during the war, she understood the significance of this variety and did everything she could to keep it alive.
Vicky Lokwiya
However, it is not just wars that threaten the world’s biodiversity. African governments are giving in to corporate pressure to adopt laws that deny farmers’ rights to save, plant, exchange and sell their own seeds. Well-funded promotion, subsidies, coercion, and advertising are being deployed in an attempt to roll out industrial seeds designed for monocultures and chemicals and to displace farmers’ varieties suited to organic farming. The end goal is clear: to prevent farmers from saving seeds so that they buy corporate hybrid seeds instead.
Today, Omona is committed to scaling up her production and is creating a local market for this variety. Supported by farmers’ organization, the Eastern and Southern African Small Scale Farmers Forum (ESAFF), she has already shared these seeds with many farmers in her community. Omana explained, “we have our seed bank; now we don’t wait for government or private seed companies to distribute seeds which often come too late in the season. We are now planting good indigenous seeds at the right time and getting good yields.” These seeds provide more than just good yields; they weave the cultural fabric of their indigenous community.
Across Africa, this story is echoed as seed saving resists the cultural erosion that industrial agriculture thrives on. Behind every seed is a story. Encoded in their DNA is a rich history of folklore and cultural tradition. With the onslaught of the so-called Green Revolution, these traditional varieties are being lost, forgotten and discouraged by governments and some development NGOs. This has resulted in a form of ecocide where for many crops up to 80% of these local varieties may be lost forever. Seed banks are paramount to protecting this vanishing biodiversity and are the foundation for local food sovereignty. Across the world, farmer organizations, like ESAFF, are critical to building and maintaining these vital seed banks.
A local seed variety is developed by the community for the community, in concert with the needs of the community. As seeds are selected each season to be planted the next year, they are chosen for a reason. That reason might be pest resistance, drought tolerance or high yield. These precious varieties were developed over millennia by unnamed scientists – the farmers – and they hold the answers to growing food with a changing climate and the inevitable extreme weather events that follow. Additionally, these varieties have been a crucial part of local culture, providing a diverse and healthy diet according to local tastes and traditions.
Okra variety: Otigo Tung Lacwar
There is an okra variety called Otigo Tung Lacwar—the horn of the antelope—a drought-tolerant seed that Vicky Lokwiya got from a friend and now cultivates and shares with other farmers. Lokwiya is the secretary of a seed saving group in St Mauritz parish. She has been with this group for 25 years now and is a mentor to many of the members. Watching her walk the farms of her fellow women farmers, she is a living library, remembering every detail about these seeds. She shares this knowledge freely as she walks the living seed banks, inspecting leaves and pointing out how the government seeds—the hybrids—fail to perform. “I think the hybrid seed is the one bringing us diseases we were not suffering from before,” Lokwiya explains. “We had been fooled for so long by private companies and some government officials that our indigenous seed system was backward. Now we have shown them that small-scale farmers can collect, multiply and store seed safely under good quality control.”
The seed savers are organized around village savings and loan groups, where members pay into the collective. To illustrate just how much the group has grown in size and value, she says when they started the members contributed 800 Uganda Shillings in dues for the first year. By the year 2000, the members contributed over 500,000 UGS; today it is close to a million. The money is used to create a collaborative support network for farmers in need, as well as take care of health services.
Group member Beatrice Akello explained how this made a difference, “I used to buy seeds very expensively, yet I didn’t always have money given the other social responsibilities that I have as a widow. Now I sometimes sell seeds. What a good feeling – I am independent!”
Vicky Lokwiya holding turmeric variety Bizali
Before the war, local turmeric was grown in the area called Bizali. It is rich in color and flavor but since the war had been removed completely from the local diet. However, Lokwiya found this variety alive in the bush, after 20 years of being left for nature to maintain. Amazed at how this variety continued to survive, she is now committed to not only growing this crop but educating her community on its various health and medicinal benefits.
After the war, many were given land around 4 kilometers away. Instead of waiting for assistance from the World Food Programme, the community wanted to grow their own, and especially cultivate the varieties that were developed by their ancestors. Unfortunately, unlike the Bizali, many crops were lost forever.
Lokwiya points to a cassava hybrid that the government was promoting and laughs as she compares it to a local variety called Oroo Ki Raa that towers over the hybrid even after a dry year. She notes this cassava variety disappeared during the war, but she has since found it again and is on a quest to promote it to her local communities. Oroo Ki Raa does not get spoiled after six months when the hybrid varieties are already rotten. Instead, it has a rich flavor and is drought tolerant. Lokwiya points out that even if animals eat the leaves, the cassava still produces a healthy crop. Seed saving groups empower women like Lokwiya to increase family food and nutrition security while boosting incomes. Here in northern Uganda, women are on the frontlines of climate change adaptation, working heroically together to meet the many challenges they face by affirming their rights to save, use, exchange and sell their traditional seeds.
Kerry Brady, the co-founder and Director of Ecology of Awakening, is a trauma-informed facilitator and deep ecologist who focuses on supporting the shift in consciousness needed to create a truly regenerative culture.
I find myself gathering resources that speak to themes such as letting go, vulnerability, radical care and staying close to the Earth. As I continue to take in unfathomable stories of burning landscapes, unexplained assassinations, political shams and the pain of those most invisiblized, such as our local homeless encampment here in Sonoma County, I fluctuate, like so many, between anger and despair, shock and the desire to distract. And yet, I return, over and over, to the underlying posture we are invited to adopt as we continue to show up for our world.
The posture is about turning in – tending to ourselves, turning towards our grief, healing our inner divisions and opening to the vulnerability that comes with uncertainty. It’s about moving from struggle and resistance to ‘opening to what is’, staying close to our hearts and each other in the process. I know for me there is a visceral shift that happens when I move from resisting the reality of these times to embracing the fact that we are not actually meant to get out of this mess. We are not meant to get back to where we were, with systems, ideologies and attitudes aimed solely at progress. Something new is being demanded.
We are in the midst of a collective rite of passage that, by default, means we are confronting our demise and cannot hold onto certainty (as if we ever could). As philosopher and teacher Bayo Akomolafe suggests, “Now the transience of nature is calling us into question. It’s like the red carpet is being stripped from under us and we’re being invited to fall like seed into the Earth….If we win at this, we’ve failed. The logic of mastery needs to be composted.“ We are invited to deconstruct – ourselves, our systems, our ways of being and belonging to the world – as we re-align and re-member our way forward.
Photo By Brock Dolman
And this, of course, takes courage, which as research professor Brené Brown reminds us, is inseparable from vulnerability. As she says, there is no act of courage that is “not completely defined by vulnerability.” This is echoed by civil rights activist and faith leader Valarie Kaur who eloquently suggests that “revolutionary love is the call of our time.” The greatest reforms in our history were rooted in love. “Not love as a rush of feeling, but love as sweet labor, fierce and demanding and imperfect and life-giving, love as a choice that we make over and over again.”
When we tend to our hearts, ground in the Earth and let the tears flow, we create more space within to show up for each other and the Earth in a new way. This is the invitation of Ecology of Awakening programs: to reconnect with ourselves, each other, the Earth and the deep time perspective that will carry us through to a new way of belonging, to ourselves and the world. By coming together, in community, and opening to the greater whole, listening and responding to the myriad ways that we are ‘acted upon’ and whispered to in any one moment, we renew ourselves, strengthening our ability to navigate change, building our capacity to be a compassionate and effective presence in these times.
In a Guardian article entitled Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet, George Monbiot expresses his wonderment inspired by a visit to a lab in Helsinki, Finland, where he witnessed a churning yellow froth of soil bacteria powered by hydrogen extracted from water to produce flour. Monbiot claims that, “We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation of any kind for 200 years.” The process, known as ferming, brews bacteria to produce proteins, starches and fats. Monbiot predicts that ferming will solve the ills of our industrial food system and “create astonishing possibilities to save both planet and people.”
When I worked with the late John Mohawk, a Seneca elder and professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he told me that Indigenous people work with magic while Western reductionist science produces miracles. He defined magic as the incredible workings and wisdom of Nature and miracles as the inventions of human ingenuity. Human ingenuity can be amazing, but at times, works against or discounts Nature. The costs of the kind of miracles that exploit instead of work with nature, increasingly outweigh the benefits in human and environmental terms. I’m skeptical of the promises that come with those technologies that manipulate Nature to perform like a machine.
Doniga Markegard of Markegard Grass Fed raises cattle on 10,000 acres on multiple ranches north and south of San Francisco using holistic management practices. She is healing ecosystems, restoring native plants, sequestering carbon and increasing biodiversity while producing healthy food. Markegard accomplishes all this by mimicking the natural patterns of the elk herds that created the fertility in the first place. Should she trade in her cowgirl hat for a lab coat and her coastal prairie for a collagen scaffold (used to engineer “meat” in the lab)?
A question rarely asked in the miracle worker’s quest for novelty is, “What are the unintended consequences?” In holistic management, in the design stage, one is compelled to explore what can go wrong and make sure that the system can accommodate course corrections.
Monbiot seems irrationally enthusiastic about the silver bullet fix that he assumes will result in “the greatest opportunity for environmental restoration in human history.” Frankly, I don’t see examples of reductionist science leading to such optimistic results. Quite the contrary, the technocratic vision of viewing life in mechanistic terms has led to many of the environmental crises that seem so intractable.
In fact, the very problems that Monbiot accurately denounces the current agricultural system as a contributor to – topsoil erosion, air pollution, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, inhumane treatment of animals and climate change – are a result of industrializing the way food is produced rather than designing the farm as a living organism embedded in and in concert with nature.
Regenerative agriculture, of which holistic management is one component, offers a real solution to addressing our climate and environmental crises while producing food by partnering with nature as opposed to lab-food, which is one more way to exploit nature. Cultivating food-producing bacteria in a lab is the same exploitive paradigm as factory farms and concentrated animal feeding operations, except in this case the life forms are microscopic.
No doubt, it takes an impressive amount of scientific ingenuity to harness microbes to produce food for humans. But the real brilliance lies in the wisdom and skill of the soil bacteria that have evolved over millennia in a community of biological cooperation with other microorganisms.
I wonder what Rudolf Steiner would think of the life force and vitality of food produced in a lab? Steiner developed biodynamic farming, which has at its essence the harmonizing of celestial and terrestrial forces that are carried through properly grown food in a healthy environment to nourish not only the body, but the spirit as well. In the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan wrote, “The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.” How can food produced in a lab measure up to those standards?
I have no doubt that if there is money to be made, food produced in a lab will come to the marketplace whether it fixes a problem or not; perhaps there is an application for such stuff that serves humanity, but I’m not planning to make room for it on my plate. My optimism is based on the promise of soil microbes continuing to do their magic in the soil where their brilliance evolved rather than perform miracles isolated in the lab.
The real promise lies not in a technocratic vision of farm-free food, but in a transformation to an agricultural system that enhances life and produces nutrient-dense food. Regenerative agriculture starts with the idea that the soil is the basis for life and that rebalancing carbon – the building block of life – will create the platform for nature’s wisdom to continue to evolve in life enhancing ways.
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