Old-growth forests are libraries of ancestral knowledge, with fungi being the biological network that connects it all. Visionary researcher Paul Stamets has spent more than 40 years studying mycelium, its ability to recycle nutrients, and its role in sustaining life from the ground up. He’s now conducting research into the ability of the restorative properties of mycelium to help protect bees from extinction.
Bee populations are declining as they face viruses precipitated by climate change. But Stamets’ groundbreaking treatment, made by bees that sip mycelium droplets, provides nutrients to safeguard bee survival. This finding is an important step towards saving the world’s most important pollinators from the growing threat of extinction. It doesn’t get much sweeter than this.
My favorite hat is a very cool hat, made from the amadou mushroom, which is a birch polypore mushroom. This hat is actually made by some ladies in Transylvania. It allowed for the portability of fire, as you can haul embers — hollow this mushroom out, put embers of fire inside — and carry fire for days.
There’s no doubt that we all are Africans. We migrated north into Europe and we discovered something new called winter. This mushroom allowed for the portability of fire.
This mushroom goes back thousands of years medicinally also. Hippocrates first described it in 450 BCE as an anti-inflammatory. Beekeepers throughout Europe use this for smoking bees. This mushroom in the 1960s was the first mushroom to contain an antiviral substance that was known to medicine.
Well, this mushroom is an example of the thread of knowledge going back to our ancestors, when we were once forest people. Not long ago we were so dependent on the forests, and deforestation is the greatest threat to human survival today.
Another friend of mine is agarikon. Agarikon was first described by Dioscorides in 65 AD as elixirium ad longam vitam, or “the elixir of long life.” It is a resident exclusively of the old growth forests in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Northern California, and now thought to be extinct throughout most of Europe because of deforestation. I believe that agarikon, like amadu, will be extremely significant for human survival.
We have now entered into the sixth greatest extinction event known in the history of life on this planet. But this extinction event is not caused by an asteroid impact, or volcanoes, or earthquakes — it’s caused by an organism, by us. Not only are we the cause of this extinction event, but we’re likely to be its victim.
Deforestation is causing zoonotic diseases to spread. The emergence of Ebola is directly related to deforestation and a clash between bats and humans. This is something that I think is emblematic of the times. When an organism exceeds the carrying capacity of its ecosystem, then disease vectors emanate. This is the way of nature.
I spend a lot of time in the old growth forests, and in these forests are libraries of knowledge. Ancestrally it goes back not only millennia, but multi-dimensionally in ways that we can barely imagine.
The largest organism in the world is a fungus in Eastern Oregon. It is a honey mushroom called armillaria. It covers 2,200 acres. It’s a contiguous mycelial mat, and it’s only one cell wall thick. Think of that: The forests are being governed and controlled by these large fungal mats, and I think we should respect things that are larger than us, especially the largest organism in the world.
The mycelium of these fungi in particular are the grand molecular disassemblers of nature. They’re soil magicians. They’re tenacious. They can hold tens of thousands times their weight. They can hold the soil together, preventing erosion. And then when they stream out and grow course habitats, they control the dissension of subsequent microorganisms that populate the downstream communities that give rise to the plants in the forest that create the debris fields that then feed the fungal descendants.
They’re purposeful in their choosing of microbial allies. They’re commensal.
The mycelium is an extended stomach. They’re externalized lungs, and I believe that these are externalized neurological networks and part of the Earth’s natural Internet that’s in constant biomolecular communication, governing the ecosystem.
The mycelium expresses these little extracellular droplets — in which are acids, enzymes, all sorts of messaging molecules — many compounds that scientists are still discovering that are unique (at least they’re unique to us) and the mycelium transports thousands of nuclide. These bundles of nuclei stream across the networks. And in the hundreds of millions of tips of mycelium in a swath the size of the stretch of my arms is a new insect, a new toxin, a new food source. There’s a reassortment of nuclei in an expression of a new enzyme, a new acid, a new solution to digesting that toxin. What happens?
The mycelium becomes educated. It then captures that new nutrition, and that information genetically becomes resident within the entire mycelial mat. These are self-learning membranes.
More than 90% of plants have mycorrhizal fungi, which extend the root zones hundreds of times, giving them the essential nutrients. But the use of fertilizers now on factory farms defeats the mycorrhizal networks and make a plant become addicted like a drug addict. Depending upon these natural ecological systems is far better.
A resource study came out just a few months ago — and it’s surprising that this study just recently came out — in which six bean plants were individually put into different pots. The first bean plant was exposed to aphids; the plant then produced alkaloids that are anti-aphid. The first plant was the only one exposed; the five other plants did not produce anti-aphids. But when the six plants were joined together in common soil connected by the mycelial networks, when the first plant was exposed to aphids, all the other five plants also produced the anti-aphid alkaloids, thus proving that the root system had a communication pathway to help alert and defend the community from potential pathogens.
Not long ago, our forests of the world had enormous amounts of wood debris. Unfortunately now, the wood debris has been taken out of the forests, and with our current practices, we have a small fraction of the resident wood debris in nature, which organisms depended upon and through which we’ve evolved through the thread of evolution to where we are today. Now we are removing that menu of wood debris from the ecosystem. Organisms have been dependent upon it for millions of years. What do they do?
I want to bring to you to an epiphany that I’ve had that I think is just truly revolutionary. Bee populations are facing stressors that lead to colony collapse disorders, loss of poor bee nutrition, loss of forage lands, parasites from mites that are carrying viruses, and exposure to pesticides. My good friend Louie Schwartzberg has made a short movie about how bees forage several miles away from their habitat. The bees leave these hives and then they don’t come back. And worker bees are at the end of their life when they’re foraging, so when you see bees on flowers, that’s the last week or so of their life. But upon hatching, young bees then quickly become nurse bees and they take care of the brood. Well, when there is a loss of foraging bees, the nurse bees then are prematurely recruited, and as a result, the nurse bees’ population declines and the brood is not taken care of. Mites and other diseases then begin to spiral out of control, and suddenly the whole colony collapses.
So, follow me on this path of a very bizarre set of circumstances. My friend Dusty and I are hiking in the old growth forest in the Olympic National Forest, the south fork of the Hoh. Dusty sees this incredible bear scratch — bears scratch trees for the resin — which had become an entry wound for polypore mushrooms when we came back two years later. So the forest service and the lumber industry hired hunters to kill thousands of bears because they were scratching the trees and hurting their timber interests.
But David Suzuki and others then found out the bears were actually pulling salmon from the stream and bringing sea phosphorus back into the forest ecosystem, thus allowing the trees to grow larger. Humans are so adept at choosing exactly opposite of their best interest.
So, when we went returned to this tree and the red-belted polypore mushroom was popping out, this was exactly the species that the timber industry and the lumber industry was trying to prevent from growing.
But this fungus is very active in breaking down a wide assortment of toxins, including pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.
Meanwhile I had a garden, and in 1984 I had two bee hives. I was growing a giant mushroom in my garden, and one day was astonished to see the bees had moved wood chips away, exposing its mycelium. I looked really carefully and they were sucking on my mycelium. Now, in my garden we have many flowering plants, but a continuous stream of bees — from morning to dusk for 40 days — went to my patch of mycelium and sucked it down.
I thought this was very interesting. I looked at it carefully. I could see the little sweat droplets on the mycelium that they exposed, and they were sipping on them. I thought that was really interesting, so I published this in Harrowsmith Magazine and in one of my books, “Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms.” Virtually everybody ignored me except for one bee keeper in Ottawa. I said, “Well, maybe that’s why bees are attracted to sawdust piles in the summertime.”
But later, an article came out saying that all plants are part fungi and that fungicide use reduces beneficial fungi that are important for bees. Then a series of other articles comes out about a Polyphenol called P. coumaric acid, which controls your detoxification pathways. We use it, bees use it, and all animals use it. So basically without fungi, you don’t have P. coumaric acid, and the bees are dependent upon these fungal compounds that are in decomposing wood for their detoxification pathways. When you remove the wood, their detoxification pathways are turned off, and there is a hyper-accumulation of toxins — fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, and more. The bees develop malaise and are not able to take care of themselves.
So, Louie Schwartzberg knew of my work with insects and fungi and asked, “Paul, can you help the bees?” I told him about the strange experience with bees in my garden, and I started thinking and thinking. I love the brain space between sleep and awakening, and I lay in that state of semi-consciousness and I had this Gestalt-ic experience of connecting the dots. Then I had this epiphany that took me 30 years.
We have now created MycoHoney, coming from mycelium.
The MycoHoney is extremely sweet — a wide assortment of sugars and polysaccharides. Beekeepers typically use 50% sucrose solutions to feed the honey bees. The honey bees are not native to North America, but we have 4,000 native bees, and they also are dependent upon these complex sugars. So we approached several universities with this MycoHoney. When I contacted Washington State University, they said, “Please, don’t go to anyone else. This is too cool of an idea.”
So we started running experiments with bees. First we do a stress test. A hundred bees in a cage are given extracts of the mycelium (the MycoHoney) of different species. We have 500 strains of species in our cultural library, but I focused in on a particular group of polypore mushrooms because I knew from agarikon and from amadu that they had anti-viral properties.
When we started doing this research, it dawned on me that many of these polypores grow on birch trees, and so we have the amadu at the very top, we have chaga, and we have reishi. Now, bees go to scratched trees, only of willows and birch trees and young firs, which the bears also scratch. The red-belted polypore grows on firs, and these three other species grow on birch trees, but that’s specifically the trees the bees goes to sip on the sap and to collect their resins for population — for propolis.
Our preliminary results of a stress test show the effects of the red-belted polypore and the amadu mushroom in being able to increase longevity, which is extraordinarily significant. It means that more of the bees are living and that worker bees can do their job. The nurse bees are not prematurely recruited.
So with Dr. Steve Shepherd and Dr. Brandon Taylor, who I’m working with and as entomologists with 39 years of experience studying bees, I’m unaware of any reports that extend the life of worker bees more than this.
Then we decided to look at the viruses being vectored by the mites. The bees in captivity only live for about four weeks before they succumb to the viruses vectored by the mites. With the absence of access to these fungal constituents that help the detoxification pathway, the viral counts skyrocket. But when feeding them our extracts compared to their sugar control, the viral counts plummet.
A massive amount of viruses will reproduce within the bees without the exposure of the MycoHoney. But as the MycoHoney increases, there’s a radical decline in the viral pathogen payload.
How weird is this? The same mushrooms that can limit bird flu, H5N1, and herpes, can also positively affect bees by controlling the viral burden and reduce them. I think this points to a larger picture. And looking now at the bees in captivity and the survival rate, the red reishi also—and this is significant here in this part of the life span—again, the worker bees were able to do their job, the nurse bees, they don’t have to be prematurely recruited, the colony then is better able to survive.
We have confirmed that we can increase longevity, we can confirm that we reduce the viral payloads, and we know that the varroa mites can be controlled by Metarhizium fungi. Now, we are going to go into thousands of bee hives next fall to try to demonstrate this across many states in the United States and hopefully in many countries.
I really believe the solutions are literally underfoot, and they’re also endemic to our culture. How many of us who read Winnie the Pooh to our children, or some of you young people here, knew about Winnie the Pooh going to rotted logs to go after the bees? I’m thrilled that I made this discovery, and I’m also frightened. How is it today that I’m the first one to have made this discovery? We scoured the scientific literature. We had mycologists, entomologists that have gone to hundreds of conferences, but no one’s ever mentioned this — even a whisper of it. Bees are attracted to rotting logs, specifically for their immunological benefit and ability to up-regulate their immune system, allow them to detoxify toxins, and they allow them to be better pollinators.
30% of our food is directly pollinated by bees. 70% of our food is controlled by pollinators. We are suffering a collapse of our ecosystems, but we can do something about this. I’m proposing we be mushroomed. I’m calling out to all of you as citizen scientists to join in a mycological revolution — to go out and be able to help wild bees as well as the honey bee, and to be able to engage in permaculture practices to return carbon back into the soil, and to build the mycelial networks… because we are far more interconnected with mycelium in nature than we even have a glimpse of being possible.
This article contains the content from the 1/23/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
In order to make meaningful change in society, we must address the root causes of its problems — not just treat the symptoms.
This week, we highlight bioneers who are challenging broken systems with regenerative solutions for a better world.
brandon king: Making the Transition from Extraction to Regeneration
Given the existential threats of climate change, economic inequality and ever-escalating political instability, we need concrete, integrated solutions to our shared problems. An inspiring model of what such an integrated approach could look like is Cooperation Jackson, an emerging network of worker cooperatives and solidarity economy institutions in Jackson, Mississippi, that is implementing a Just Transition Plan to develop a regenerative economy and participatory democracy in that city.
brandon king, Founding Member of Cooperation Jackson, shares his experiences helping to conceive and build these promising strategies. The goal is to show how we can all put our shoulders to the wheel and build a truly just future.
Beyond Capitalism and Socialism: A Conversation On Inventing the Regenerative Economy
As wealth inequality continues to grow, the escalating consequences of traditional economic models that have exploited the Earth and left millions in poverty are pushing us to the brink of transition. But what will the next system look like? How can we build a regenerative system that’s both socially and environmentally sustainable?
In this panel, four citizen leaders challenge the status quo with innovative ideas about what our world looks like beyond capitalism or socialism.
How to Build a New Economy – with Gar Alperovitz and Ted Howard
With growing interest in co-ops, public banking, worker-owned companies and non-profit corporations, could we be setting a new standard for the American ideal, while building a more sustainable economy? This video is part of our Seeding the Field series, which showcases 30 years of transformative solutions.
New from Bioneers.org: Working with Bio-Intelligence of Plants for Healing and Guidance During Insane Times
How can conscious engagement with plants, with which we’ve co-evolved since the dawn of our species, support healing in the physical, emotional and spiritual realms and help mend our separation from nature? Three brilliant herbalists/botanists, long on the cutting-edge of re-empowering the plant-human bond, share their insights.
Co-Founder Nina Simons will appear on Igniting the Worldwide Spiritual Wildfire We Need Now: A Call to Action on Friday, February 7th. This summit, featuring 23 other thought leaders and created/produced by Joan D’Argo, will address this time of rapid global evolution and offer empowering practical tools to make a more beautiful world possible.
Click here to sign up for free access to the summit, Nina’s interview, and a chapter from her Nautilus Award-Winning book, Nature, Culture, and the Sacred.
What We’re Tracking
From Nonprofit Quarterly: “Bridging or Breaking? The Stories We Tell Will Create the Future We Inhabit” | The stories we tell can change how we interact with the people around us, and the two main types of stories — breaking vs. bridging — mean the difference between othering vs. belonging. Written by Bioneers board member john a. powell.
From the African American Policy Forum (AAPF): Intersectionality Matters! Podcast | This podcast brings intersectionality to life with host Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.
From The Democracy Collaborative: “System Change magazine highlights a year of bold ideas” | This new magazine captures the bold ideas and groundbreaking work of The Democracy Collaborative’s leaders, scholars and collaborators in 2019.
This article contains the content from the 1/23/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
As wealth inequality continues to grow, the escalating consequences of traditional economic models that have exploited the Earth and left millions in poverty are pushing us to the brink of transition. But what will the next system look like? How can we build a regenerative system that’s both socially and environmentally sustainable?
In this panel, four citizen leaders challenge the status quo with innovative ideas about what our world looks like beyond capitalism or socialism: Greg Watson, Director of Policy at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics; Christine Nobiss, Indigenous activist and Decolonizer at Seeding Sovereignty; Ted Howard, co-founder and President of The Democracy Collaborative; and brandon king, a founding member of Cooperation Jackson.
From left: brandon king, Greg Watson, Ted Howard and Christine Nobliss
GREG: Today we’re going to discuss the new economy.
I work at the Schumacher Center for New Economics. It’s based on the work of E.F. Schumacher. He wrote Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, which gives you a list of some concepts that are central to economics that matter or where people matter. Schumacher’s work, along with a lot of others, had a lot to do with inspiring the alternative, appropriate-technology movement, which brings us to another place where I used to work back in the 1980s, called the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod.
New Alchemy was a think/do tank based in Massachusetts. And during the ‘60s and ‘70s, when people were very vociferous about what they saw being wrong with society — especially in terms of our ability to meet our food, energy, and shelter needs sustainably — New Alchemy was a place where they said, “Why don’t we start developing real alternatives to the existing economy?”
That led to some really innovative and, at times, funky inventions. Basically we looked at nature as a model for our designs.
What I’ve learned is this: Think globally, act locally. Even as we focus on the local economies, in this day and age, they all have some implications for basic global literacy. And with that, I’m going to present our panelists, leading off with Ted Howard, then brandon king, and then Christine Nobiss.
TED: I want to start with a quote that’s now my favorite quote of all time: “It is easier to imagine the end of our planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.” And that is really true. We’ve got like 12 years to get this climate emergency under control, or we’re going to have a very tough time on this planet. But it’s hard to imagine that we could actually live in a society that isn’t made up of giant corporations, where investors aren’t trying to maximize their shareholder value, where money isn’t incredibly concentrated; that we could live in a system that’s producing other kinds of values, a political economy that’s neither a state socialism, bureaucratic old Soviet Union style nor this out-of-control juggernaut that we have right now.
The president is fond of saying gross domestic product has never been higher, the stock market’s never been higher, and all that’s true. Yet, 47% of Americans can’t assemble $400 to meet an emergency, like their car breaking down or a child breaking their ankle. Three people in America, you know them – Gates, Bezos, and Buffett — own as much wealth as the bottom 160 million of us. We have a system that is very extractive and increasingly concentrating wealth. There has never been a nation as wealthy, as productive – again, not necessarily producing the things we all want – but it is an incredibly powerful machine.
Just as the Great Depression was starting in the 1930s, there was what historians called the “laboratories of democracy,” where people were experimenting with all kinds of incredible things all over the country, like what turned into our Social Security system. I firmly believe we have laboratories of democracy going on right now in America.
So the question is: What is in the way to achieve the kind of next system that could produce more equity, more justice, more wealth equality, and better stabilization for our communities? What’s in the way? I’d say three things:
One is we don’t know a lot of our own history in this country. There is a great article in The New York Times called The City Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Would Have Loved to Live In. This is a story of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which in the first 50 years of the 20th century was controlled by socialist governments. They were called sewer socialists because they attended to the infrastructure people needed. One of America’s great cities had an entire half century of democratic, decentralized socialist history. Most of us think, “will Americans really go for cooperatives?” Well, 130 million Americans belong to cooperatives right now, like credit unions; most of us just don’t know it. One out of every three of us participates in a co-op. So we need to get our understanding of what we’re doing up to the level of reality.
The second thing is there are big concentrated powers and corporations that are going to stand in the way of us getting what we want. We’re never going to deal with climate change as long as the fossil fuel companies are standing in the way. There’s going to need to be a political movement that challenges concentrated power to move us beyond this kind of post-capitalist economy. That’s going to be difficult, and we’re going to need to do it just like the labor movement once did it, and the women’s movement, and the environmental movement, and the movement for black lives. There has got to be that coalescing.
But the real obstacle I think we face is actually inside us. Remember, it’s easier to imagine the end of the planet than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. If you and I lived in Pharaohs Egypt, which lasted a thousand years, it would be totally rational to think that there would always be pharaohs and sphinxes and pyramids, and it would just make sense because it had always been that way. Yet it’s gone, and we now study it. All the other systems come and go. So we need to get our ambition up.
What if the whole economy reflected our values? What if we were the ones, along with our brothers and sisters around the country, that were really on top of a democratic economy? So the real issue is: Can we see ourselves as the actors in history that we are? That we are the people, as Dr. King said, whose job it is to bend the arc of history towards justice? And if we are those people, I firmly believe that at least in the lifetime of some of us in this room, we will see a fundamentally different political economy in this country that can have the most extraordinary values for our people and our planet.
BRANDON: This conversation is about beyond capitalism. I’m thinking about the work that we’re doing in Jackson, and trying to model our work based upon the things we need to survive and thrive. If we’re able to model our work in terms of having our food production taken care of, in terms of having our living spaces taken care of, it’s meaningful because it’s not for someone else…it’s with each other. I think doing these kinds of things helps us delink from the systems that are harming us. If we’re growing our own food, then that means we’re not beholden to capitalist markets that decide that your lettuce costs three cents. It’s an important step to think about the different things we need as humans. What is our given capacity? What can we do? What can we accomplish with our time?
We just recently purchased a plaza space. We named it after Ida B. Wells. And in this plaza space, we hope to construct the co-op grocery, and set up aquaponics. One of the things that we’ve noticed with our farming is that the climate is super unpredictable because of climate change. You could be spending weeks upon weeks of planning, planting, and taking care of your plants, and then you have a drought or a flood, and all of your work is perishable. So how can we, considering climate change, grow food in a controlled environment to ensure that our community has access? Those are things that I think are important to think about.
There are a lot of steps for us to get to a post-capitalist society. There is this looming enclosure of the commons. There is a big wealth grab that’s happening at astronomical rates right now, and that’s also the cause of the warming of this planet.
After Alcatraz, a lot of the Indigenous Peoples who were part of that fight, who occupied that place, went back to their communities and did the same thing. They were able to expand indigenous territory. And those kinds of things need to continue to happen. We need to confront and tackle these harmful systems while we’re building new systems. Because this problem is not going to go away by us just wishing it away. It’s really important for us to deal with it head on.
I think that looks like broad-based organizing, grassroots organizing on the community level, getting everyday people involved and connected. People feel the brunt of capitalism, and they feel the lack of time they have with their family or with their children. They feel the pressure of having to produce, and their money not going as far as it used to go. We feel all these pressures.
The thing that is keeping people from joining us — the collective us — is that people want to see an alternative in real life. They want to see how we’re actually, materially building these systems. Are we shutting down these factories, these coal plants, these extractive plants and just leaving them? Or are we building regenerative energy systems and pulling in the workers who have lost their jobs? Those are things that we should be thinking seriously about, just in terms of building something new. People want to have a network or a safety net to be able to connect with and to feel a part of.
This stuff is an experiment. Like our lives. Not everything is going to be perfect, but we’ve got to try. We’ve got to fail. We’ve got to be comfortable with failing because in failing, we learn. So it’s important for us to have that humility and that understanding that we are on a road, trying to go toward a place that affirms our life and also affirms the life of this planet.
CHRISTINE: I want to start with this quote that was spoken by Peo-Peo-Mox-Mox, which means Yellow Bird, who said, “Goods and the earth are not equal. Goods are for using on the earth. I do not know where they have given land for goods.” . That sentiment really resonates with me because the idea of capitalism or exchange of land for goods was a completely foreign concept to Indigenous Peoples before colonization and genocide occurred.
I work really hard to bring attention to this issue. I talk a lot about colonial capitalism in my work because, in my opinion, it is the problem, hands down. It’s the reason for all of the social injustice that occurs on this planet, and also for climate change, and environmental destruction.
We are essentially in battle with it. Indigenous Peoples have been in battle with colonial capitalism. And I’m going to start from this most recent European colonization around the planet, where this ideology that God gave man dominion over the Earth brought to fruition this idea of capitalism, and then colonialism, and then consumerism, which is in complete opposite to how most indigenous societies have worked everywhere on this planet. I see it as very black and white — two contrasting ideologies. One where the Earth is essentially an object that you can do what you want with; the other where we see Earth as our mother, a relative that you want to keep safe and you want to keep healthy. It’s a very different way of interacting with the planet. That comes with different practices, ideologies, cosmologies, and ways of being that we need to nurture and empower right now if we’re going to turn the tide, or curtail even a little bit of this climate crisis.
I believe that we can imagine a world without capitalism before we imagine the end of the world, only because I come from a very different background where I was told how things were before colonial capitalism took over. I think that the way to fight colonial capitalism is by uplifting and empowering Indigenous Peoples. Period.
I’m also talking about the African American populations, and the Latino/Latina populations. All the populations that are oppressed and afflicted by the self-eating mechanism of capitalism. I believe that the way forward is to get money out of white, elite circles. $60 billion of foundation funding each year goes to 95% white-led organizations, and that means there’s very little left for Indigenous Peoples to do what they need to do to make a difference.
There’s talk about the Green New Deal, there’s all this legislation that people want to put through, yet the real answers actually lie in turning to the Indigenous Peoples of this continent and asking them for guidance on how to move forward. Indigenous Peoples have traditional ecological knowledge that can save the world. Noam Chomsky says it, David Suzuki says it, the Drawdown team says it, and more importantly, our own ancestors and our own people say it. We have answers. We have a different way of living. We have a different ideology that we can use to change or combat what’s happening right now.
But the problem is that even in our climate movements and social justice movements, the liberal progressive people that are running these movements aren’t ready to take on the very uncomfortable conversation that has to be had. Basically that we don’t need all this money going over there, and we don’t need people to be coming into our communities and saving us. We just need them to give the funds directly to our people so that we can do what we need to do.
I can give you a very good example of what’s happened recently with the climate strikes, the Extinction Rebellion, and all these other big NGOs and the millions of dollars that are going into those things. At this particular segment in time, I don’t know that non-violent direct action is doing much. They’re used to it by now — the cops are like, alright, you’re going to go do something for a day, and then you’re going to go back home to your home, and be comfortable, and then come out again. I mean, that’s not really a strike, is it? And you have to ask, what if we were to give this money to Indigenous Peoples so that they could move forward with their amazing projects? And Indigenous Peoples who are already doing green jobs as stewards of the planet, protecting territories and 80% of the world’s biodiversity? What if we were to give the money directly to them so they could continue to do that?
That’s the problem with colonial capitalism. It’s ingrained in our institutions, and it’s a thought process that’s created out of institutionalized racism. Even the people who are trying to make a difference still don’t get it.
I don’t think that these huge environmental organizations should be getting all of this money. I think it should go to the stewards of the land.
I love Greta Thunberg. I think she’s a wonderful person, but that’s a really good example of the centering of whiteness that’s happening right now in this country. We don’t need another white savior. We need to recognize the children in our own backyards that have fought at the frontlines and died at the frontlines to protect their land, and the environment, and the climate, and their people. And that’s not to say that we can’t work together But there have been people doing this here already. Let’s recognize them.
That’s my huge goal. I am very proud to say that I am the lead organizer of the Indigenous track at SOCAP. I’ve really had a great experience working with the organizers of SOCAP and putting together indigenous tracks so that more native people can be at these really wealthy and hard-to-get-to conversations, so that they can start showing people what it is we are doing, and we can get them investing in us.
I think that’s how we can start combatting colonial capitalism: by trusting the Indigenous Peoples on this planet and realizing that it’s not necessarily about what we do, it starts with changing how we think, our ideology, how we view this Earth, and how we interact with this Earth.
That’s why I think it’s highly important that we invest and empower Indigenous Peoples during this really difficult time, where we’re standing on the precipice of disaster. Let’s do something completely different. Let’s stop and look at this history, and say to ourselves: “What did we do? How did we get here?” And that means confronting colonial capitalism. That means going to the places of power.
GREG: How do you respond to the Green New Deal with respect to the notion of going beyond capitalism? Do you all see the Green New Deal as being a vehicle to achieve that?
TED: The Green New Deal is interesting because it brings together both environmental and economic concerns. It talks about full employment and so forth. So I do think that it provides an opening that can help address a number of the inequities in the economy.
But it’s going to take a lot of public money, and how do we ensure that the wealthy corporations don’t end up with all the money to build this “new green economy”? It’s essential to marry the Green New Deal idea with the kind of community wealth building, democratic economy that you talked about.
BRANDON: I agree. I think to have a policy platform that bends to capitalism isn’t going to help us at the end of the day. We have to confront it in a real way, and I feel like it has to be anti-capitalist, because the logic of infinite growth on a finite planet can’t exist, even if it’s green capitalism.
CHRISTINE: I think the Green New Deal is a good start, but I agree with brandon about green capitalism and greenwashing. I don’t think carbon taxing will do much except create unsustainable prices for the people. We talk about trickle-down economics, but what really trickles down is the cost to the people. So the Green New Deal needs a really massive overhaul.
If we are going to move forward with the Green New Deal, it must include a huge social component. Climate change is something ethereal — it’s gases and greenhouse effects and weather — but it’s really our relationship to the land that creates climate change. So the government needs to recognize our sovereignty and allow us to be the stewards we need to be in order to lead the way and build an Indigenous-led regenerative economy.
I think the Green New Deal should have more language about border imperialism, prison pipelines, and all of the other major issues affecting us because we can’t actually make change if we’re living in poverty.
Q&A section:
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Capitalism is defined as an economic system where the imperative is to maintain and grow investor capital. Is it possible to approach capitalism to eliminate the scourge?
CHRISTINE: I rarely use the word capitalism without putting the word “colonial” before it because, in essence, they are one in the same. When you think about what colonialism is, it is capitalism because it’s about going into another territory, taking the land, the resources, and mitigating the local population either through annihilation, assimilation, or slavery. I think people really need to start using the word colonial before they use capitalism, always and everywhere.
TED: I think you’ve put your finger on an essential problem in our system: capital always has greater rights than any other aspect of our society. Our system has a capital bias, so as Greg said, if in our economy we get in trouble or an individual company gets in trouble, the drive and the logic is to preserve the capital and eliminate as much labor as possible because it’s just a cost.
If you go to Mondragon in Spain, which is where one of the most robust worker cooperative business networks is, and you ask them, “What is the difference in your system compared to our system?” They say, “In your system, capital is in first place over labor. So when you get in trouble, you preserve capital and get rid of as much labor as possible. In our system, we know capital is important, but labor is in first place, so our decisions are not about how we preserve capital. They’re about how we keep our people working in decent jobs.” And right there is the difference in two systems.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What would a land reshuffling from colonial ownership look like?
CHRISTINE: I wouldn’t call it a reshuffling as much as just respecting the treaties. Not one treaty has ever been respected or adhered to. Wow, could you imagine if whoever takes presidency at some point decided to really look at these treaties again and see what we can do about it?
Along with that, let’s talk about reparations. Let’s talk about what we should do for these people that have been stolen from another country. Reparations should be a massive thing. There’s enough land and resources here that we can make it work, but it’s going to take us having to change the thought process, the way of thinking of the elites, privileged, and white supremacists. And frankly, in my opinion, that’s going to take a revolution.
GREG: Cuba was identified by the World Wildlife Fund as being one of the few truly sustainable economies and countries. Now that you’re talking about colonialism, Cuba’s environment was ravaged to make way for the dominance of large plantations. And their revolution was an agrarian revolution.
Two things happened: Redistribution of land and a literacy campaign. Children were sent to the countryside to educate the rural population which had not been. And if your motive is wanting total dominance, one of the last things you’re going to do is say “Let’s educate the population.” I do think that there are examples like this — it is never easy. What would it look like here? Another story. But it’s a good question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What role should labor unions play in the destruction of capitalism and the preservation of our climate?
TED: Let me take that. In the United States, our labor movement peaked back in the 1950s, in terms of percentage of the workforce organized, when about 35% of the workers were unionized. We never had the kind of union penetration in the United States that you see typically in countries throughout Europe. Today, the percentage of the private sector workforce that’s unionized is 6% and going down. And the entire labor force unionization, including public employees, is about 11% and going down. This is a really big problem because labor provided an institutional base that had countervailing power to capital, so you could push back. You could get a lot of the social safety nets and so forth that we have in this country, which came out of a lot of pushing by labor. But labor’s been decimated.
Personally, I don’t see that it’s going to come back in the same way that it used to be. I think every place we can unionize, we should, but we’ve got a real problem in terms of this movement for a democratic economy, and that’s building a new power base that can constrain power of capital. Unions are going to be part of that, but they’re no longer the sole answer. We need to look at the kinds of work like Cooperation Jackson is doing in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s starting to build a power base and push this agenda forward.
BRANDON: Back in the ‘20s and ‘30s, co-ops and unions were like homies. They rode side-by-side. I come out of labor, so I feel like I can talk about it. I feel like something that is happening is that unions sort of gave up on the whole concept of taking control over the workplace, actually owning the means of production. I think unions thought, okay, we can get these benefits, we can get less hours, we can negotiate good contracts for our workers, but overall conceded to the whole question around controlling the workplace. Leadership seems to have stopped at that point, but there has to be political will from labor to be able to make that shift.
So we’ve started a union co-op initiative in Jackson. We’re working with workers and organizers just to 1) share that history about the co-ops and the unions, but also 2) figure out how we can revitalize that.
CHRISTINE: We know that indigenous history’s been largely white-washed in this country, so we don’t see the wonderful things that our indigenous nations are doing. Even after our nations and people were shattered and scattered like dust all over this country, we still managed to get together to continue to build, even on different land bases, and continue our ways, even though it’s different. I think about some of our nations with businesses, and how a lot of the people on those nations receive per capitas. It’s a very different way of thinking. I don’t know many other organizations or places where you actually get a big percentage of the profit, not just a share. So it’s a very different way of thinking about being.
I do think that there’s a problem with unions now. I think that some of them have become very problematic in that they’re run by the hetero-patriarchy, and they’re not really looking for the best interests of their community; they’re looking for the best interest of themselves, which is white men in general.
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“No one who isn’t us is going to destroy Earth, and no one who isn’t us is going to save it. The most hopeless conditions can inspire the most hopeful actions. We have found ways to restore life on Earth in the event of a total collapse because we have found ways to cause a total collapse of life on Earth. We are the flood, and we are the ark.” ―Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
Learn more from Bioneers climate solutionaries below.
Isha Clarke: A New Era of the Climate Justice Movement
In her keynote speech at the 2019 Bioneers Conference, Isha Clarke says that to build a successful global climate movement, we must prioritize the voices of those most impacted by environmental injustice. We must also resist efforts to tokenize the term “intersectionality” rather than actually implementing it in our movements and daily lives. What would a movement and a society functioning on a genuine understanding of intersectionality look like?
We talked to Isha a few months ago about adult allyship with Youth vs. Apocalypse, the group she leads to redesign the climate justice movement as a platform for youth of color and Indigenous youth. In that conversation, she said:
“Adult allyship is actually very strong at this moment. Adult organizations will reach out to YvA asking, “What do the young people want to do?” Adult organizers are very much trying to follow the youth. There is still work to be done there too, because, yes, the youth need to be leading this movement, and I’m super glad that people are on board with that, but there’s also a point at which we get stuck … where we can’t do everything. There’s a difference between leadership and carrying everything.
It’s also true that a lot of these adults have been organizing for decades; they have a lot of experience. Young people aren’t disregarding the fact that we’re working with people who have a lot of experience. Youth should be envisioning what moving forward looks like, but with the support of people who have been doing this work, and who may know things that we don’t know. There can be more collaboration. Overall though, we have a lot of adult allyship, and that’s something that is relatively new and it’s working out well for us.”
Bill McKibben: What We’ve Learned About Climate Change in the Last 30 Years
As an accomplished author, activist and co-founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben is a leading authority in the environmental movement. In this keynote speech, he explores: What lessons can we draw from three decades of struggles to address the existential threat of climate disruption? What do our failures reveal about the flaws of our political system and the economic nihilism of the fossil fuel industry? What strategies are most likely to lead to greater success to save our species from itself?
Here’s the latest news from McKibben, who remains one of the most active voices in the movement:
In his best-selling book Falter, McKibben warns us that our “human game” — the complex interplay of experiences across civilizations — may be unraveling because of climate change. Are we approaching “Game Over”? Read an excerpt from the book here.
McKibben penned this essay for The Guardian to emphasize the urgency of acting now, in order to prevent irreversible consequences of climate change. Read more here.
In this New Yorker piece, McKibben criticizes the greenhouse gas emissions — and efforts to cover them up by oil industries — that are driving up global temperatures. Read more here.
McKibben writes another article for the New Yorker, weighing the role of big money and fossil fuel special interests in the climate crisis. Read more here.
Just Transition as an Emerging Movement
A Just Transition affirms, restores and revitalize indigenous lifeways of responsibility and respect to the sacred Creation Principles and Natural Laws of Mother Earth and Father Sky, to live in peace with each other and to ensure harmony with nature, the Circle of Life, and within all Creation.
Learn how Indigenous Peoples are leading the way in a just transition from Indigenous women leaders who are leading their communities away from fossil fuel dependence.
Climate change is more than an “issue.” According to renowned author and activist Naomi Klein, “It’s a civilizational wake-up call delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts.” She says it demands that we challenge the dominant economic policies of deregulated capitalism and bottomless resource extraction. She describes the transnational Blockadia movement that’s opposing fossil fuels and warns about geo-engineering fantasies. Canadian Indigenous leader Clayton Thomas-Muller of Idle No More reports from the front lines of the Native-led rights based movement to stop the drilling of the Canadian Tar Sands.
350.org, co-founded in 2008 by climate activist Bill McKibben, is an international movement of ordinary people working to end the age of fossil fuels and build a world of community-led renewable energy for all.
More from Bioneers Thought Leaders on Climate Justice:
Heather McTeer Toney, leading an environmental inclusivity movement in her work at Moms Clean Air Force, discusses what it means to be an environmentalist today. Read more here.
Mishka Banuri, a youth climate activist, is working to protect the Utah lands she first fell in love with when her family immigrated from Pakistan. Read more here.
In his best-selling books, author and activist Paul Hawken takes a constructive and comprehensive approach to climate change solutions. Read more here.
Listen to youth across the world who are rising up to spur action on climate change.Read more here.
May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, delves into uncomfortable truths about what’s holding the climate movement back. Read more here.
This article contains the content from the 1/9/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
How can conscious engagement with plants, with which we’ve co-evolved since the dawn of our species, support healing in the physical, emotional and spiritual realms and help mend our separation from nature? Three brilliant herbalists/botanists, long on the cutting-edge of re-empowering the plant-human bond, share their insights. Hosted by Kathleen Harrison, plant person extraordinaire, President of Botanical Dimensions. With: Pam Montgomery, world-renowned herbalist, educator, spiritual ecologist, founder of the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries (O.N.E.), organizer of the Green Nations Gathering, author of Plant Spirit Healing andPartner Earth; Jolie Elan; founding Director of Go Wild Institute, deep ecologist, ethnobotanist, and global educator; Kami McBride, author ofThe Herbal Kitchen, with 25 years’ teaching experience, longtime leader of the beloved Earth Connection herb walks at Bioneers.
Listen to the panel, or read an edited transcript below.
KATHLEEN: Welcome everyone. Thank you for coming to this panel on the bio-intelligence of plants. We have with us today three very experienced plant women who each have years and years of learning about plant medicine and practicing it. I’m Kathleen Harrison, an ethnobotanist and founder of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit that’s dedicated to ethnobotany education. We have an ethnobotany library in Sonoma County and offer classes, and tonight my daughter and I will be showing a teaser for a film that we made about my fieldwork with Mazatec Indigenous people in Mexico, in this very room at 7 tonight.
We are living in a period we all recognize as a time of crisis, a crisis in nature, a crisis of course of the climate, and a crisis in culture marked by intense divisions based on suffering, fear and ignorance as well as a widespread sense of being disconnected from nature and disconnected from each other. My approach to this is that I like to look at what we humans know and what we might remember that we’ve known before but forgotten, the wisdom that comes to us from the ancestors, all of our ancestors, all of whom had to be tuned into nature in order to evolve and survive. Their survival got us this far, into this 21st century creative, teaming madness, but we’ve mostly lost the ability to listen and to be connected to all the other life forms that kept our ancestors alive. We have to remember those ancient skills and relearn to weave them into our decisions and our actions.
Every child is born with those instincts still intact. We see it in children, and you might remember it in yourselves when you were little children, but within just a few years we begin to forget. That connection to the world around us sort of gets squeezed out of us. It seems like a magical way of being that only attends early childhood, and then we take our place in this modern, displaced, disconnected culture. But if we can remember to go back to that childhood wonder, the childhood belief that everything is alive and can communicate, and that we have the capacity to hear it; if we can find that little touchstone inside ourselves, we can reawaken that way of perceiving, receiving, and reciprocating with the natural world all around us.
And some of us have. If you’re in this audience, you probably have found some aspect of that consciousness, whether through your love of gardening or in food plants, or in herbal medicine, or through some crisis in your life that required the intervention of plants, or maybe through a powerful experience with a psychedelic plant or mushroom, an experience that made you realize “oh my gosh, they’re all awake and paying attention.” How did I not notice that before? But if we focus solely on the spectacular effects of the big so-called “plant teachers,” we can miss a subtler but more important reality. To mend the world and to weave it together, we need to know how to listen on a daily basis. We need to know how the quieter plants speak, and how all species live in community. We need to remember that we are one little voice and set of ears, one being in that network of all the beings. We need to cultivate the kind of humility that allows us pay attention.
Robin Kimmerer, the Native American biologist and wonderful writer, says: “Attention is the doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, and the doorway to reciprocity.” Leslie Gardner, now passed on, said in her book, Life of Medicine: “One thing seems certain and that is that the plants desire to be in relationship to us, and are taking opportunities to help us recognize the kinship…If you seek it, your own individual path into the garden of the spirit will reveal itself.” And with that, I’d like to introduce our warm-hearted, wise plant women, starting with Pam Montgomery. Pam is an herbalist, author, teacher, and practitioner who has passionately embraced her role as a spokesperson for the green beings, and has been investigating plants, trees, and their intelligent, spiritual nature for more than three decades. She is the author of two books, including the highly acclaimed Plant Spirit Healing: a Guide toWorking with Plant Consciousness. She operates the Partner Earth Education Center in Danby, Vermont where she teaches classes, does plant research, and leads ceremonies. Pam also teaches internationally and is a founding member of United Plant Savers and more recently of the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries, or O-N-E. You can learn more about her work at her websites: wakeuptonature.com and NatureEvolutionaries.com.
Pam Montgomery
PAM:
Why are we here? We’re here because of plants. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for plants and trees. We evolved from them and we have a completely symbiotic relationship with them. When we talk about the intelligence of plants, we’re not talking about the kind of human brain-based intelligence that we are familiar with. Bio-intelligence is on another level. It has to do with the essence of life. We engage with plants for healing and not just physical healing, but emotional, mental and spiritual healing. There’s a vibratory resonance that plants have that we can tap into, and there’s a form of communication through that resonance that we can tap into with them. And plants can help us mend our relationship with all of nature, to come back into the fold and help us be all we can possibly be.
Mostly we just breathe because that’s what we do. We’re not conscious of it. We don’t pay attention to it, but I want you to pay attention to your breath right now, and I want you to be aware that underneath this building and its concrete foundation, below that there’s the earth, and outside that door, there are trees and plants, and I want you to become aware of where your breath is coming from. I want to be aware that all those and all those plants are breathing out oxygen. And I want you to become aware that you are breathing out carbon dioxide. So you are being given your oxygen from the green beings. There’s no other source of oxygen. It comes from ocean plants, trees and grass. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day you’re breathing, and the source of your breath is the green beings, so you’re already in relationship with the plants. You don’t have to work to be in relationship with plants. You just need to bring your conscious awareness to your breath, and you’re in relationship, so be in gratitude. Always remember to thank the plants and trees for giving us life.
As the title of this session suggests, we are indeed living in pretty insane times, and one of the biggest causes of lack of sanity is stress, and stress comes in many forms, but basically it’s when the demands of life exceed our ability to cope with them. There are environmental, chemical, biological, psychological, and existential stressors, to mention only a few. All these disrupt our body’s homeostasis and can lead to really severe, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual imbalances. To understand the effects of stress, we must look at the concept of non-self. Usually that’s an immunological term that describes things such as bacteria and viruses that the body identifies as invaders and activates the immune system to repel them.
However, there’s another aspect to what constitutes “non-self.” We humans evolved for millennia with the natural world, and our bodies recognize features of that natural world as an extension of our self. But our modern world is filled with cars and buildings and noise and dirty air that, deep down, the body instinctually reacts to as “non self” and unsafe. When we walk on concrete with shoes on rather than barefoot on the earth or eat processed food or drink water filled with chemicals, our bodies experience stress. Our co-evolution with the cycles of the natural world has conditioned us to rely on nature’s cues. Right now where I live in the Northeast, in Vermont, the geese are starting to fly south. They flow in those beautiful little Vs, and you can hear them way up in the sky sometimes coming from really far away. When I hear those geese my body remembers that cold weather’s coming and instinctively knows I’d better put on a couple extra pounds just to get ready for wintertime. My body recognizes that sound and reacts to it. The result of losing our connection to nature’s cycles and to living surrounded by “non self” threats is that our body is in a state of almost constant stress.
And these stressful life patterns lead to lack of coherence, erratic signaling, depleted immunity, low vitality, and spiritual malnourishment. Our spirit flame starts to burn a bit low, and we no longer recognize our true, essential nature. This can lead to a lack of sanity when you forget who you are. And when it’s prolonged, you end up in this place of amnesia where you really can’t remember what it means to be close to the earth. You can’t remember that you actually know the language of plants and trees. When you forget all of that, you become insane because you don’t know who you are. And an additional stress factor is that our world is changing more and more rapidly every day. To survive we will need to adapt to our changing environment.
But there is good news. Living organisms can help because they have been adapting for some 3.7 billion years (and land plants for roughly 470 million years). So adaptation has been happening on this planet for a very long time. Organisms and plants have been adapting to continue to provide a life-giving atmosphere through photosynthesis through countless cataclysms. They have been around for a very long time, way longer than we have, and they have that long view that they carry in their makeup, this impulse to sustain life over the long haul. And obviously we humans are pushing the edges of the biosphere, and we all know here that we have to make huge changes to cut the carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere, and we’re going to need all the help we can get. To tap into that wisdom, we need to re-enter the dream of the green beings and remember how to live with Gaia in a sustainable way. We need to begin to remember our wild hearts and our indigenous souls, that part of our self that never left the earth. It’s still here. It’s inside us, and we just need to come back to the plants, come back to the earth and remember that.
Because I am an herbalist, I do want to mention a few specific plants that I really love, some so called “adaptogens,” that I think can really help us cope and return to our true, essential natures. An adaptogen is an herb that helps support the healthy function of every system in the body and protect it from biological, chemical, environmental, and psychological stressors. Such herbs have long existed in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicines and in various folk healing traditions, but the term adaptogen was introduced into scientific literature by Russian toxicologist Nikolay Lazarev in 1948, and the main Russian researcher who worked on adaptogens subsequently was Israel Breckhman. Russian scientists tested 158 herbs reputed in various folklores to be “super herbs” and found a few that really did have a broad range of positive effects on the entire body, and that newly coined term, adaptogen, described this class of herbs.
Breckhman established three criteria to identify an adaptogenic herb. The first one is non-specific resistance, which basically means that the herb has to increase the body’s resistance to broad range of agents, including physical, chemical toxins such as heavy metals and biological threats such as bacteria and viruses. It has to have a non-specific response, so it can address a broad range of stressors. Then it needs to have normalizing action, which means that it seeks to balance the body, to bring it back to homeostasis. Burdock, for example, can be either for hyper- or hypo-thyroidism. An adaptogen would tend to lower high blood sugar or raise low blood sugar. The third aspect of an adaptogen is that it has to have innocuous effects. The herb must produce only minimal, if any, physiological disturbances or side effects. It has to have very low toxicity. These are the three main traits that identify an adaptogen. Also, a true adaptogen is one that modulates the body’s stress response so that it reacts appropriately and helps you cope effectively.
rhodiola rosea
Since 1948 more work has been done on adaptogens, and quite a few have been identified. The most famous one is ginseng, but I want to share two of my favorites with you that are less well known than ginseng. The first is Rhodiola rosea. It grows in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, and for many years, a lot of the original research on it was in Russian and was not translated into English. It was not that well known in this country until recently, and now in the last few years, it’s become quite popular, and it’s really wonderful. It’s also called golden root and Arctic root. There are lots of species in that family, but the one we’re interested in is rosea. Its root has a light pink color, and it smells like roses, hence the name rosea. I take it every day, by the way.
Much of the research in the Soviet Union was focused on boosting the health of cosmonauts in their space program, and it was found that Rhodiola helped them withstand the extreme stresses of weightlessness, lack of exercise, and confinement, and it boosted their mental alertness. This plant does a lot of things. It helps enhance memory, it gives you energy, and it helps you cope. Some people are trying to use it to alleviate Alzheimer’s and other memory and brain impairment ailments. It’s reputedly good at protecting healthy cells for people undergoing chemo or radiation. It really helps with spiritual malnourishment as well. It’s a protector plant.
The other main adaptogen I want to mention is Sacred Basil, otherwise known as Holy Basil or Tulsi, another herb I take every single day. In India, it’s revered as a goddess. Tulsi was a goddess, the legend goes, and she loved Vishnu so much that she turned into a plant so she could be one of the eight sacred herbs that were given to Vishnu every day.
sacred basil
To finish up, what we are seeing on the planet right now is a green revolution, but I’d like to suggest it’s a re-evolution. When we move into right relationship with the natural world around us, we become nature evolutionaries. We begin to live in co-creative partnership with plants, trees, animals, water, air, land, and all the beings of nature that we recognize as having equal rights to thrive. We engage in sacred Earth activism informed by nature consciousness, and we recognize the sacred in all of life and honor it every single day and in all that we do. We engage in cooperation not competition, which includes both/and instead of either/or thinking. This leads to what Julie Morley calls creative synergy, a natural, intrinsic ability to cooperate toward mutually beneficial solutions. When we root our lives in interconnectedness, healing, compassion, listening, transformation, and the bio-intelligence of nature consciousness, a path opens, and we can move toward authentic peace that can live in each individual heart. This is our new story, which is being told here at Bioneers in almost every single presentation we listen to, and as we continue to live this new story, culture shifts and a new paradigm emerges. Thank you so much…and be sure to take your Rhodiola and Sacred Basil.
KATHLEEN: Thank you, Pam. Jolie Elan, our next speaker, is a deep ecologist, ethnobotanist, and educator. She is the founding Director of Go Wild Institute whose educational mission is blending modern science with the ancient awareness that the earth is alive, sentient, and sacred. She has brought her work around the world including the restoration of sacred, forest groves in India, and development of the herbal-medicine sector in wartime Kosovo. Jolie has helped thousands of students bond with our magnificent Earth through her education programs at conservation organizations, field institutes, herbal-medicine programs, and schools from university to elementary level. Jolie is also a certified spiritual director, and mentors people wishing to deepen their relationship with nature and spirit. Even with a master’s degree in forest ecology, oak trees are still her greatest teachers. She’s based right here in Marin County, and you can learn more about her live and online offerings at GoWildInstitute.org
Jolie Elan
JOLIE:
So my love affair with the oak trees began on my honeymoon, and it outlasted my marriage. In 2007, my new husband, David, and I were honeymooning in Napa Valley, and the oak trees were dropping acorns by the barrel-load. You couldn’t step anywhere without stepping on acorns. I knew that the majority of Native Peoples of California ate acorns almost every single day as a staple food, and I’d also tasted acorn food at a workshop, and it tasted like oatmeal mixed with walnuts, and it got me wondering if acorns could make a comeback as the original California cuisine, so David and I gathered 20 pounds in 20 minutes, and my acorn adventures began. And in my wildest dreams, I never would’ve guessed that the oaks would commandeer my life, convince me to do their bidding, heal me in dreams, and open up stores of Earth wisdom that I thought was not accessible to me being non-Native.
When I first started eating acorns, I wanted a gluten-free, viable, local superfood. Don’t we all want that? But I also had other motivations. I had my spent an itinerant activist life living all over the country working on sacred site and environment campaigns, and having committed my life to David, I wanted to commit my life to the land, to the spot-on Earth where I was living.
I knew that it was possible to have really deep, intimate relationships with nature, and I wanted that for myself, and so I figured I can eat my way into the web of life, but I felt a little conflicted. I’m a Jew from New York, and the last thing I wanted to do was appropriate anybody’s culture. My grandma ate chopped liver. She didn’t go for acorns, so I know I’ll never be indigenous to this land, but I was not okay with being a tourist anymore, so I threw myself into the oaks, and I learned everything that I could about them.
If you weighed every single living thing in North America, 20% of that biomass would be oak trees. I had to check that fact. I called the researcher, and I was like, are you sure? And she’s like, yes, I’m sure. And if you go to Mexico, 30% of the biomass is oaks. Oaks are major ecological players around the world. Oaks grow in Central America, in North America, throughout Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and throughout Asia. In many places where they grow, ancient people ate acorns and honored the oak tree before they were domesticating grains. So my great, great, great ancient ancestors were most likely eating acorns in the Fertile Crescent. Maybe your people were eating acorns too. It could be the case.
2,000 years ago, Pliny the Elder, who was a Roman naturalist and general, said acorns constitute the wealth of many nations because they are incredibly nutritious. Just 10 ounces of acorns can give you all of your carbs, all of your fat, and one-third of your protein for the day. The 20 pounds that David and I gathered in just 20 minutes could provide most of my nutritional needs for the month. Acorns are not only nutritious but they’re incredibly abundant. One large, valley oak tree can produce 500 to 1,000 pounds of acorns in a year. Our great California Central Valley that provides one-quarter of all the food we eat in the U.S. used to be a massive oak ecosystem. I cannot even imagine how magnificent that was with all of the wildlife that came in to eat those acorns. It just breaks my heart thinking about it. That acorn crop was estimated to be in the billions of pounds a year. If oaks were solely interested in reproduction, they would be more frugal, but oaks are incredibly generous creatures. They support an entire web of life. If you take the oaks out of the system, everything else goes downhill including the soil that’s held in place by their deep roots.
So the more I learned about oak ecology, the deeper I fell in love with the oaks, and this is one of the ways that we work with the bio-intelligence of plants. We fall in love. That’s the prerequisite. So I fell in love with the oaks, and my friends were getting a little sick of the conversations, so I had to spread the love. At the Go Wild Institute we launched our Wisdom of the Oak program, which is about restoring our relationship to the land and what feeds us, and I love teaching kids in inner city Oakland. We teach all kids K through college, but usually 4th or 5th grade, and I love saying to the kids, what town do you live in? And they’re always so proud. Oakland! And I say, what tree is that named after? And they—you can see it click for the first time ever. And they’re like, oaks.
So we start with a lesson on oak ecology and natural history, and then we go outside to prepare acorn food: we crack and grind and leach acorns. Basically acorns are just like tree nuts, but they’re a little more bitter than other nuts, so they require an extra step to process out the bitterness. You have to wash it out or leach it out, so we do that, and I make little acorn cakes, and I give each kid a little acorn cake shaped like an acorn at the end, and then we share our thoughts.
And there’s usually a kid who says something like, these acorn cakes are good but it seems like a pain, so why would you do that? Why would you make acorn food? And so if there’s a tree in their yard, I point to it, and I say, if we were going to grow wheat right where that tree is, what would it take? And one kid raises their hand to—we’d have to cut the tree down, and then another one says, we’d have to dig up the soil, and it goes on. We’d have to plant our wheat, and then we’d have to water our wheat, which is taking water from our rivers and our salmon. And then once your wheat is growing, all of those animals that are starving now because they don’t have acorns, they’re going to want to eat your wheat, so then you have to protect your wheat. You have to build fences, or you have to use chemicals or whatever means, and you just wait until all the animals die off so they don’t bother you, sort of what happened in the Great Central Valley. Then, once your wheat is ready, you have to cut it, and thresh it, and grind it, and then you have to do it every single year because wheat is an annual crop, so I think it’s easier to eat acorns. So I just ask you why not plant oak trees, restore our vibrant ecosystems, and eat acorns? Clearly, nuttier ideas have taken root in California.
Soon after I started doing their bidding, oaks began to come to me in dreams. In one dream I was inside a massive grandmother oak, and the energy was building from all around, pooling from the land all around, and it was electric. And at point the tree just could not hold that energy anymore, and it flashed as lightning, and I saw it go through the branches and the roots, and in my mind I knew this was restoring the fertility to all the land around. I woke up electrified and wondered what was that? Was that my subconscious or are oaks talking to me? I did some research and found out that lightning is five times as hot as the sun and fixes atmospheric nitrogen that’s usually unavailable and makes it available to the earth, hence making the land fertile again. Oaks have incredibly deep roots that go into the water table, so they’re excellent electrical conductors. An old adage goes “beware of the oak, it draws the stroke.” So, wow, I just dreamt that. I felt that oaks were not only downloading to me in my dreams, they were clearly directing me toward oak knowledge that was encoded in mythology.
Thor, the Norse god, is associated with lightning and thunder. He’s considered an oak god. Zeus, the almighty Greek god, is also associated with oaks as well as with lightning and thunder. Learning this, I began to research ancient cultures’ relationships to oaks. In ancient Greece, some priestesses would listen to the wind rustling in the oak trees, and they would interpret the word of the gods through those sounds. And the word “druid,” the ancient priests of the Celtic people, the word druid comes etymologically from the Old Celtic “deru,” which means tree or oak, and “wid”—to know. So the high, holy people were the ones who knew the oaks.
And the druids, and Zeus, and Thor—they’re sort of foreign to my cultural roots, but oaks play a pivotal role in my Jewish mythology as well. Abraham the father of the Jews, who’s also the father of Christianity and Islam—the Abrahamic religions, first saw what became the Jewish god underneath an oak tree, the oak of Moreh, a teacher oak tree. It was not just some random tree. It was an oracle tree where people had long gone for wisdom and healing. So throughout history, oaks have served as a portal to divine wisdom, to tap into that sacred intelligence of our Mother Earth in many different traditions.
So seven years into my acorn adventures and my marriage, David and I separated. We’d had way too many hard times. I was dealing with recovering from childhood trauma that was laying me low, and I was deeply sad. I was sort of brought to my knees, and then my cat of 21 years died, and it was just super hard. I couldn’t find the ground underneath my feet, and that night I looked at my altar that had my wedding ring and a picture of my cat right next to it, and that night, I had a dream. In the dream I was 6, and I was very scared because I needed to have all my limbs amputated, and so I ran out into this storm and I held onto this massive oak tree. I was crying, and the tree said “Aw, honey, do you see how tall I am?” I looked up, and she was indeed 200 or 300 feet tall. I replied: “Yeah, you’re really tall.” She went on “My roots go down that deep and my canopy is very wide, so you can always come to me in a storm if you need me.” When I woke up, I felt the ground under my feet. I felt solid and less alone. I felt healed, and I thought: “Wow, so that’s what plant-spirit medicine is.”
A few months later, I was hiking on Mount Tamalpais right here in Marin County to go to a meditation retreat, and this little tree got my attention. Trees and plants talk to me a lot. That’s not uncommon for me, but I’ve never had a tree yell at me before. And this one said, “Hey you, hey you.” I turned around, and it was a sapling, tanoak tree, and it was so proud, and it got my attention, and I said, “Yes?” It said, “When you get a chance, will you sit with us please?” What are you going to say to that? Of course, yes, I will. A couple days later when my mind was clear, I sat with the tanoaks, and one thing to know about the tanoaks on Mount Tam is that they’re really, really sick. They have a disease called sudden oak death. Many people say that the tanoaks in Marin might disappear altogether. It’s especially sad because the acorns of tanoaks are the best-tasting acorns I have ever tasted. They taste like butter cookies. They’re amazing, and they were very prized for many of the people that lived among the tanoaks, and now they’re very sick.
When I sat with the tanoaks, my mind got very clear, and I went very deep. And the trees said to me, “We’re really sick. Our wisdom is leaving the planet. We’re so sad. We watched our people die, the people who cared for us, people who loved us, and no one loves us anymore.” And I said: “Oh my God, that’s the so sad. What can I do?” And they said, “Well, you could do a ceremony for us.” And I said, “But I’m Jewish and from New York.” And they said, “Yeah, we’re not really happy about that either, but you’re what we have right now. You’re listening to us.” And I thought about that, and I thought this is a very popular trail I was on. Thousands of people walk on that trail every month, and the trees were probably calling out for decades. Many species are calling to us, saying: “Please help us; remember us. We need you to live in balance with us. We need you to hear us. We have things we need you to hear.”
At this point I don’t really feel like I’m working with the intelligence of the oaks. I feel like the oaks are working with my intelligence, and I feel like the oaks are the ones that got me here to talk to you, that want me to talk to you. The oaks are the ones that got me to stand up here to invite you all to come to the 6th Annual Mount Tanoak Ceremony next Sunday, October 27th. It’s on my website (GoWildInstitute.org); it will be a super beautiful day, so please come join us. It was the oaks that got me to make acorn food initially, and I made acorn crackers for you all if you want to take some on your way out.
Let me end by saying that nature is calling to us all the time, and every time we connect with a plant or an animal, we align with the sacred intelligence of our magnificent, brilliant Mother Earth. It’s a way in. Our Mother Earth is wise and brilliant. The Earth has deep intelligence, and if we can align with that intelligence, we will be part of the Earth healing herself, and we will be directed to do what we need to do.
KATHLEEN: Thank you, Jolie. Our next speaker is Kami McBride. At 19 Kami’s passion for herbal medicine was propelled by an excruciating brain surgery that she needed because of a medication’s unexpected side effect. She started to question her upbringing of using pharmaceutical drugs as a primary approach to health, and quickly felt the calling of the plants. Now, her 30 years of teaching herbal medicine has helped thousands of people learn to use herbal remedies as the centerpiece of their healthcare plan. She’s taught herbal medicine at the University of California School of Nursing, and in a health masters-degree program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She’s the author of The Herbal Kitchen, and her live and online workshops help people revitalize their relationship with the plant world and work with herbal medicine for home-wellness care. Here at Bioneers, she is beloved for leading wonderful plant walks for many years now. She’s based here in the North Bay, and can be reached at KamiMcBride.com. Welcome, Kami.
Kami McBride
KAMI:
Thank you for being here, and I’m really thankful to be part of this panel with these great teachers. I used to go to Pam’s Green Nation gatherings in the mid-‘80s when I was a little puppy dog, and, Jolie, I’m incredibly inspired by your work. And Kat is someone whose work has taught me so much for decades. I’m so grateful to be here.
My grandfather, John McBride was the grandson of Irish-Scottish settlers who settled in Wintu territory in the Vacaville-Davis-Dixon area in the 1850s. They came, they planted wheat, and barley, and they benefitted tremendously from the incredible, abundant place that they landed in. I’ve been trying to unpack that legacy for a long time. That grandfather started one of the first kids’ nature camps in 1969 in that valley, and I went on my first herb walk at that camp when I was 8 years old, and I went on those herb walks until I was 14. But there was a lot of violence in my household, so I have huge gaps of memory. There are big spaces of my life that I don’t remember, but I remember everything about those herb walks. They set me on my path, and throughout my childhood and teenage years, I kept trying to learn as much as I could. I went to the library and found one book on the local wildflowers of the area, and when I became a teenager I went to Berkeley to the used bookstore and was thrilled to find a few books on holistic health and herbs.
Finally, at some point after studying relentlessly for quite a while, I started sharing, and I quickly realized that as I started sharing about herbs and herbal-medicine making, that in our current culture, herbs could easily turn into yet another extractive consumption industry, and that’s not what I wanted to be part of. I kept looking for a wise, elder woman who could teach me the old ways. Unfortunately that never really happened for me in my life, but what I started doing was praying. And I wasn’t raised on prayer. Everyone in my family was an atheist, so I guess I had a clean slate. I didn’t call it prayer at the time. I just started telling the Earth how beautiful she was and started to ask her to please help me, to guide me. I would ask her things like: “Please help me know how to work with you,” “How to do this in the best way,” and “What can I do for you?” And those questions have informed every consultation I have given, every class I have taught. Those same questions have been a guiding force and a grounding of everything I have done in sharing plant medicine for the past 30 years.
And I was guided from the start. I was told to gather women, listen to the Earth, and make medicine. So in 1994, I started my school and I started doing that. And what I learned through listening to the Earth is that she, our mother, is always speaking to us but that we just forgot how to listen. We humans are at the top of the food chain, and over time we got lazy. Our culture just shut down those sorts of experiences of communion with the natural world that they view as appropriate for children’s play but not for adults.
I spend Thanksgiving with this one family every year, and a few years ago, their 4-year old daughter came into the house with a small, green caterpillar that she brought to show her mom and dad, and they were just sort of dismissing her saying, “yes, honey, that’s cute,” but I could see her entire nervous system was just begging for someone to validate her ecstasy of being related to this creature. And when I saw that, I’m in charge of the pies, and I take pie making really seriously, but I stopped what I was doing to try to be with her and validate her feelings of wonder, of love and relatedness to one of Mother Earth’s creatures. We all have those childhood memories, but we have to recover them and re-awaken those senses and nurture them in our children.
I was part of a group of parents at my son’s school that he went to when he was in early childhood. We decided to walk around that school to listen to the land where our children spent a lot of their time. We started where the water came out of the spigot, and we followed the water lines, and we found the source of the water, and we started hearing the water as a group, and after that we were able to bring the voice of the earth and the water to the school board and to the school meetings, and we started making decisions for that school on a much higher level of connection to the land and to each other. So I advise you, if you can, to find your Earth-listening people. If you have no one in your life tuned in to listening to the Earth, find somebody. Whether it’s two of you, or five of you, or nine of you, get together and walk the land that you live on or near, walk around your block, walk near the places where you work, and listen together, because when you listen in a group, it’s far more powerful. Work on your listening skills, and you will get to a point at which you will be able to bring the teachings of the earth into your everyday experience, to help guide and enrich your life.
Close your eyes for a minute. We’re going to go on a little memory walk. This is just about opening to receive, and it’s got its own timing, so it might not come right now. It might come tomorrow, but just begin by bringing your total awareness into yourself, and an easy way to do that is through your breath. Just give yourself the incredible gift of three deep breaths right now, and bring your awareness back to your breath. And just breathe. I’m going to take you on a little walk. No pressures. Imagine yourself on a trail in a forest just walking. Just notice the time of day, maybe the light, maybe you can feel the leaves or sticks crackling under your feet. Just let yourself walk. And just walk until you come to a recent memory. It could have been today, yesterday, the day before, a memory of when something of this Earth—a flower, a plant, a tree, a river, anything—just struck you as so beautiful that you could feel that beauty in your whole body. Stay in that place for a moment. Notice how it feels and notice whatever you can about this place.
And notice how it feels in your body when you feel such love for a place. Say thank you to this place, then put yourself back on that trail, and we’re going to keep walking a little bit. We’re going to walk back in time to another place earlier in your life that called you, that grabbed you, that you were smitten by, and let yourself settle in that memory of someplace on this beloved Earth that awed you by its beauty, and let yourself rest there. What do you notice there? What time of day is it? What do you smell? What are the colors? What is it about this place, and how do you feel here? What does it feel like in your body to feel the love of the Earth and to feel love for the Earth? Once again say thank you and then get back on the trail again.
We’re walking back to an even earlier memory, maybe early childhood, to a time you felt pulled by the Earth. There was something about a plant or a mud puddle or a rainstorm that you could just feel your whole being connected to. Where are you? How old are you? Let this memory permeate your nervous system so you can remember and bring back the feeling of connection. Say thank you again in your own way and then gently bring yourself back, slowly back through these memories into this room.
To be a full human on this planet requires of us that once in a while we lay our belly down on this Earth and listen to what she has to say. She is speaking to us all the time. The message that came to me from the oak outside here before this gathering was “We just want to be loved again. We want you to love us. We want humans to find their hearts again, and remember that we thrive on love just as humans thrive on love.”
AUDIENCE Q+A
Audience member (AM) question: Can you recommend any other adaptogens?
PAM: One that is common and grows all around is Stinging Nettle. I would encourage you to drink nettle tea every day. Ashwagandha used in Ayurvedic medicine is another good one, but I mostly like common herbs that I can grow myself. I advise you to experiment, and when you find a couple of favorites, do those.
AM: What do you recommend for allergies?
PAM: Those adaptogens can be really good for allergies, but it depends on the type of allergy. If pollen allergies? Pollen?
AM confirms that it is pollen, grasses, and all fruits and vegetables.
PAM: Wow. Goldenrod is really good for pollen allergies, and Nettles also.
AM: In that memory exercise, I saw nature as wallpaper.
KAMI: I’ve facilitated thousands of memory walks with people and listened to the go-around afterwards, and one thing I’ve learned is that everybody’s way in is different, and everybody’s doorway is different. You may have an experience that you don’t understand, but the thing is you can dialogue with that experience. It’s not just that you get a message and that’s it. It’s something to be discovered and worked with. You can, for example, gather something that’s symbolic of your experience and put it on your altar and ask for a message to come to you in a dream. It’s a process. You’re building a skill that was shut down and schooled out of you. And sometimes the pain can be so great. We might find an oak tree we feel love for and then see that it’s the only oak tree standing for a long way, and you can feel the clear cut of a whole forest that had been there, and that level of pain can also shut us down once we open up.
PAM: When you’re overwhelmed by the diversity, the texture of everything, if you look in really, really close you might find a doorway, but the doorway can often actually be tiny: a relationship to one place, one plant, one species we really look at, can then open us up to finding a connection to all of nature.
AM: What is the relationship of oaks to wildfires?
JOLIE: Here in California our oak ecosystems evolved with fire, and they also evolved with humans setting fires. Humans had a relationship with the oaks. The oaks took care of the humans with food, and the humans took care of the oaks. And a lot of people say that the reason that we have sudden oak death here is because we’ve taken fire out of the ecosystem. But we’ve taken it out of the ecosystem now for so long and to such an extent that it’s really hard to put it back without catastrophic fires, so we have this problem. If we can reintroduce small, contained fires in the right way at the right time, that would be beneficial for our oaks, but it has to be done very carefully.
AM: How can one develop the skill of plant communication?
PAM: I don’t think communication with plants is a skill set. I believe it’s a basic right, a human right that we have. We inherently know how to communicate with plants and trees because we’re from them. It’s just a remembering process. We’re kin to these plants and these trees, but you have to get to a quiet place and eliminate as much distraction as possible and the static of electromagnetic fields). And then start with your breath, and then you’ll start to hear the messages much more clearly. There are a few chapters in my book about how to communicate, so you can check that out.
KATHLEEN: Thank you all. I’m sorry, we are out of time, but I hope everyone finds that still place and that moment to tune in and explore your plant relationships, and that we see you down the line. Blessings, everybody.
The mark of a good farmer, within conventional farming circles, has long been a “clean field” – bare ground void of any plant cover between the crop rows. Winter fallowed fields also are left exposed without anything growing on them, but that kind of misguided thinking is changing. The fastest growing trend in agriculture is cover crops. According to the 2017 Agricultural Census, cover crop plantings increased by 50 % over the previous 5 years, but there’s a lot of room for continued growth, only about 4% of all farmers in the USA employ this easily adopted practice that supplies a wealth of benefits.
Cover crops reduce erosion, improve water quality, control weeds, attract beneficial insects, and reduce polluting nitrogen runoff into waterways. Plants such as various legumes, grains and grasses that are grown primarily to increase the health of the soil rather than to harvest for market, can provide an economic incentive by increasing yields and provide ecological services by sequestering carbon and boosting fertility. The more extreme and erratic the weather, the more benefits cover crops provide, and the more their advantages increase in comparison to farmland without cover crops.
Cover crops shift the approach to farming from one that emphasizes chemicals to one that emphasizes biology. Through photosynthesis and plant decomposition, cover crops mimic nature’s method of cycling carbon and other nutrients to nurture the synergies among the complex community of organisms in the soil food web.
Tim LaSalle worked in Africa as an advisor to small farmers and as a research coordinator on soils and food security for the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Tim also served as the CEO of the Rodale Institute and more recently co-founded the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative at California State University, Chico. At a Bioneers Regenerative Agriculture field day at Singing Frogs Farm, Tim discussed the benefits of cover crops, “By keeping live roots in the ground, keeping the soil well covered, and growing a lot of biomass, you will capture a lot of carbon in the soil, which will improve the biology and improve water infiltration and water retention to fight droughts. As the biology gets healthier, photosynthetic efficiency improves, which leads to retaining more carbon in the soil. At the ecosystem level, there will be more biodiversity aboveground and a much more biodiverse and healthy soil biome—especially if you plant multi-species cover crops.
“These principles can work and work fast. Are they applicable on large commercial farms? Without question. We were doing cover crop work for years; it’s a matter of not leaving bare ground, keeping something growing on it. That’s a big step forward.
“We find we need less chemicals. Eventually people like Gabe Brown and Gail Fuller and farmers around the country learned that they don’t need to write a check for fertilizer anymore. They don’t need insecticides or herbicides as much. Once the chemicals are out of the system, the biology can flourish even better and the system gets more resilient. That’s exciting for all of us. It’s exciting for farmer profit; it’s exciting from the standpoint of seeing increased yields and better water cycles. We’re not polluting our streams, and we’re not putting excess nutrients in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Paicines Ranch is an exemplary operation implementing regenerative agricultural principles and adapting them to the micro-climate of their diverse 7000+ acres of rangeland, row crops and vineyards. Cover cropping is a key part of their system, and they have also integrated animals into their cover crop rotations. When the cover crop has matured, they bring sheep to eat it down instead using a tractor to mow it. The sheep get fed well and leave behind rich nutrients in the form of urine and manure.
Some farmers think that cover cropping is a long-term investment in the soil and feel that they are not able economically to take land out of production for a future payoff even for one growing cycle. Claudio Nuñez of Paicines Ranch explains how Paicines, by adding animals to the system, changes that,“Cover cropping is the single biggest thing that anybody could or should do. Once you integrate the animal into that, you have a salable lamb harvest. The economic value that was to be realized down the road in a couple of years becomes profitable right off the bat. Integrating animals and cover cropping are probably the two most important aspects of our system.”
Cover crops at Paicines Ranch are healing the land and adding to the economic bottom line in quantifiable ways. Initially the nutritional content – known as the “Relative Feed Value” (RVA) – of the cover crop was insufficient to support healthy weight increases in the animals. The animals only gained a pound per day. But by continuing to grow cover crops, which build healthy soil with more nutrients, the RVA went from 80 to 260 in the third year, a dramatic increase in nutrient density, resulting in an average weight gain per head of livestock of 3.5 pounds per day. Claudio said that, “As the landscape became more functional, the critters gained more weight. That’s dollars baby, sunshine dollars.”
“Sunshine dollars” are one of the benefits of the economy of photosynthesis – using the energy of the sun to transform atmospheric carbon into food that nourishes plants, the life in the soil and livestock, while healing the ecosystem and providing a better livelihood for the farmer.
“The cycle” Claudio said, “becomes pretty virtuous in that we’re maximizing and intensifying the different revenue sources, the fertility, the solar energy capture. It’s more efficient all the way around.”
The USDA NRCS 5 principles for heathy soil are: minimize soil disturbance, keep the soil covered, keep a living root in the ground, provide diversity, and integrate livestock. Cover crops can be a strategy to achieve 4 out of 5 of those principles. Keeping those live roots in the ground creates the nutrient pathways from the sun to the soil and is therefore the foundation for regenerating farmland soils.
Crop rotation was practiced by farmers in ancient Rome, Greece and China. Ancient Middle Eastern Farmers rotated crops as early as 6000 BC. Crop rotations improve soil tilth, reduce pest, weed and disease pressure and increase biodiversity on the farm. By varying the crops planted in the same field season to season, farmers can improve soil tilth (the physical condition of the soil as it relates to plant growth). Different plants have diverse root shapes and sizes that can improve the chemical, physical and biological structure of the soil in a variety of ways.
Crop rotations can also reduce pest and disease pressure because different plants disrupt the lifecycle of certain pests and diseases. A variety of plants provide a wider variety of nutrients to soil life, and different plants take up dissimilar nutrients from the soil. So, rotating crops will help to minimize the depletion of certain nutrients. All of these benefits can help reduce inputs (fertilizers and pesticides) and increase yields. According to SARE (Sustainable Agriculture and Research Education), “Yields of crops grown in rotations are typically 10% higher than those of crops grown in monoculture in normal growing seasons, and as much as 25% higher in droughty growing seasons.” NCAT (The National Center for Appropriate Technology) provides crop rotation tips.
Most of the 10 billion animals that are raised for food annually experience appallingly inhumane conditions. CAFOs – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations – mercilessly treat living beings as if they were lifeless machines. Confined to spaces that cruelly restrict natural movements, these animals live in their own waste. Broiler chickens, for example are bred to grow fast, eat till they are morbidly obese and die young. John Webster, Professor Emeritus, University of Bristol, UK, says that commercially raised juvenile chickens are so overweight that their bones, joints and organs can’t support them. And that they, “are in chronic pain for the last 20 percent of their lives. They don’t move around much… because it hurts their joints so much.”
Innovative farmer Joel Salatin says that chickens have a right to express their “true chickeness.” As sentient beings, animals have rights. The right, for example, to live their lives in a healthy natural environment, even if they do ultimately end up at the abattoir. Regenerative Agriculture animal husbandry practices based on John Webster’s Five Freedoms require that livestock are well fed with their natural diet; do not live in stressful conditions; do not experience pain, hunger, injury or disease due to the system they are raised in; have the opportunity to express their normal species behavior, and are properly sheltered from environmental extremes.
“The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.” …..Franklin D. Roosevelt
FDR wrote those words in 1937 in conjunction with the recently launched effort to create soil conservation districts. By that time, about 35 million acres of farmland in the Southern Great Plains had been decimated by an extended drought and windstorms that blew topsoil away and devastated the lives of rural people. Farming practices, specifically the plow, greatly exacerbated the impact of the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl era.
Some of the most fertile soil in the world developed in the Great Plains as a result of the co-evolution of enormous herds of bison and deep-rooted perennial native grasses that built a resilient soil structure and provided a protective armor over the topsoil, preventing erosion.
Plowing the grasslands to farm left the ground bare and destroyed the ecosystem’s ability to endure weather extremes. We now know that plowing or tilling also releases carbon into the atmosphere and is a very real contributor to climate change.
The Problem with Tillage
Regenerative farmer Elizabeth Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm has parked the plow and is using a no till system on her’s and her husband Paul’s 8-acre farm (2.5 acres under cultivation), “Tillage is when you take a tractor, when you take a rototiller, or when you take a horse and plow and you turn up the soil. You take the soil aggregates from larger sizes down to smaller sizes. There are two negative things that will happen. One is chemical and one is biological.
“The chemical part is that as the soil aggregates are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, the surface area is increased compared to the volume. Tilling also brings oxygen into the system so more oxygen is in contact with the soil, which volatilizes a lot of compounds. Carbon becomes carbon dioxide, nitrogen becomes nitrous oxide, and there are also certain processes that can create methane. Those are the three most potent greenhouse gases. As farmers and ranchers, carbon and nitrogen are the things that we need most in our soil. So, the act of taking them out of the soil and putting them where we need it the least – in the atmosphere – makes no sense.
“The second thing that happens is biological. As the aggregates are broken up, the tilling creates total ecological destruction for the organisms that are in the soil. ‘Tilling the soil is the equivalent of an earthquake, hurricane, tornado and forest fire occurring simultaneously to the world of soil organisms. Simply stated tillage is bad for the soil.’ That quote is from the USDA. This is not some West Coast leftie idea. We know that tillage is bad for the soil, and we need to figure out how to farm and sustain ourselves on this planet in a way that doesn’t do so much damage.”
No-Till Options
If plowing destroys soil health, what alternatives do farmers have? That depends on the scale of the operation. Kaiser describes a few options for the small-scale farm down to the backyard garden.
“There are a lot of options when starting a no-till field depending on what your resources are, what your soil type is, what you’re going to be growing, and how much space you are going to be utilizing.
Elizabeth Kaiser, Singing Frogs Farm
“If you’re already tilling, till one more time, create beds, put compost on top and never till it again. That’s how most of our beds were formed because we were already doing tillage.
“A second way is using occultation, which is more time intensive. Leave whatever is there – the grass, the weeds, or whatever– to decompose in place until you have a clean slate, and then create your beds. To start, we put down landscape fabric over an entire area where there was pretty strong grass and left it for six months. Then we did a slight inoculation with some compost teas to make sure the soil biology was high. We covered the whole thing in straw, and we then pulled up the straw and created beds. We spread a bit of compost on the beds, but not very much and then we were ready to plant.
“The last way is resource intensive. If you have a smaller space or if you want to get going quick, or you have the resources, I highly recommend this. Put down cardboard, build your beds out of two inches of compost, put straw flakes down for pathways, and go. If you’re just doing two beds in your backyard where you have lawn, this is what I recommend.”
No-Till for Larger Farms
But these recommendations, although highly effective, are not practical for larger farming operations. No-till farming systems have been used on medium size and larger farms since the 1940’s and are increasing in favor. According to the 2017 USDA Agricultural Census, over 100 million acres of cropland in the US are no-till. The caveat, however, is conventional no-till farmers use toxic herbicides like Round-Up to kill the cover crop and weeds. Conventional farmers who till also use similar chemicals, but they have the option to use a disc or plow to control weeds. So, no-till does not decrease chemical use and, in some cases, may even increase it.
Organic farmers are highly dependent on tilling because they are not able to use herbicides. The need for herbicides eliminated no-till as an option for organic farmers until the Rodale Institute designed the roller-crimper and made the design available free to farmers in 2006.
No till roller crimper
Designed for use after a cover crop has matured, the roller-crimper mechanically kills the cover crop by rolling over and crimping the stem to break the water flow from root to stem. The timing of this is critical; if done too early, the plant may not die back sufficiently, if done too late there will be too much seed produced and left in the field. The optimum time to pass over the field with a roller-crimper is when the cover crop reaches anthesis – the time when the flower opens when the plant goes from the vegetative stage to the reproductive stage. Once the roller-crimper passes through the field a thick, protective, weed-suppressing mulch is formed, which can be planted through. As that mulch breaks down it feeds soil life and deposits carbon in the soil. Iowa State organic specialist Kathleen Delate’s research shows no statistical difference between the yields of no-till and plowed plots of organic soybeans.
Mowing the cover crop is also an option, but that doesn’t result in the same level of weed suppression as the roller-crimper mower and, in some cases, doesn’t kill the cover crop allowing it to regrow.
The Benefits of No Till
No-till has proven agricultural benefits: less erosion, lower fuel cost due to less tractor use, less soil compaction, better soil moisture, and better soil health. Of course, there is a learning curve to adapt the practice to a specific farm crop and soil and some initial start-up costs, but the past has shown the terrible ecological and economic costs of tilling.
People in the 1930’s who lived through the trauma of, what was at the time, the greatest ecological disaster in the US history, learned the value of soil the hard way. Today topsoil is being lost at an alarming rate threatening global food security. At the same time, we face an even greater ecological crisis – the disruption of the climate due to anthropogenic causes. No-till can help address both of those problems.
Will we make the same mistakes over again or can humanity make the necessary changes to protect life on the planet? Agriculture, a key contributor to climate change, has the potential to be a leader in mitigating the climate crisis. Adopting no-till farming, one of a number of Regenerative Agricultural practices, is a readily available tool to help turn things in the right direction.
“Our soils have a carbon debt; the atmosphere is gushing with carbon. The carbon over our heads is literally in the wrong place.” Rebeca Burgess of Fibershed
Most terrestrial life is dependent on a thin layer of topsoil where our food is grown and where the plant kingdom converts carbon dioxide into life sustaining oxygen. It takes a millennium for nature to produce 1.2 inches of topsoil, the zone where most of the nutrients and biological activity reside. Maria-Helena Semedo of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says that if the current rates of degradation and erosion continue we may only have sixty years of topsoil left. With the possibility of so few harvests remaining, the threat of global food insecurity is a serious concern.
The concurrent climate crisis is in need of real solutions, not to just reduce the increasing damage of ongoing greenhouse gas emissions, but, perhaps even more importantly, to reduce the amount of carbon that permeates the atmosphere.
Carbon is the common element in both crises. In soil there is a deficiency and in the atmosphere an excess. As Rebecca Burgess, Executive Director and Founder of Fibershed, says, “The carbon over our heads is literally in the wrong place.” Carbon is an essential component and building block of healthy soil and soil is a potential superstar when it comes to mitigating climate change.
Carbon Can be the Solution Instead of the Problem
Tim LaSalle, co-founder of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at California State University at Chico, has been an early proponent of the power of soil to draw CO² from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil where it provides multiple agricultural benefits.
At a Bioneers on-farm field day, LaSalle talked about the relationship between the mismanagement of soil and climate, “We have no experience of trying to live on a planet of 350 parts per million (ppm) CO² in the last 400,000 years. There’s been nothing that says this kind of lifestyle, food production, water cycling, weather disturbances will work except below 300 ppm. That’s why in any organizations I work with, I would promote and work towards 280 ppm or less.
“Within a year or two, we really have to turn the trajectory of our climate pathway around, and that doesn’t mean just reducing emissions. As a matter of fact, if we stopped emitting today, the planet would continue to warm beyond habitability. We have to draw down carbon out of the atmosphere.
“If you look at the amount of greenhouse gasses that industry has emitted, it doesn’t add up to what we’ve lost in carbon from our soils. 10,000 years ago when agriculture began, we started to clear forests, disturb grasslands, and eventually invented this thing called a plow that disturbs the soil and releases carbon into the atmosphere. From a legacy level, there’s more carbon in the atmosphere from our soils than there is from our fossil fuels.
“Look up and down the fields in California, in the Midwest, in the East and in the South of this country. When we plow and disc, we lose soil and we lose carbon because carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere every time the soil is turned over.”
Carbon’s Agricultural and Climate Benefits
Carbon makes up approximately 50% of soil organic matter (SOM). Regenerative farmers are placing a focus on increasing SOM because it increases the soil’s capacity to hold water, making it more drought resilient and reducing erosion. SOM is the basis for a healthy soil structure that creates an environment for beneficial soil microbes to thrive and support fertility. As soils are farmed in ways that optimize carbon sequestration, SOM can play an important role in keeping excessive carbon out of the atmosphere.
Raising livestock holistically on 10,000 acres of California coastal prairie, Doniga Markegard is focused on carbon. “It’s all about the carbon cycle. You want more roots, more carbon stored, less carbon in the atmosphere. Each 1% increase in soil organic matter holds 20,000 gallons more water per acre. That’s really key because essentially in the last 150 years, prime agricultural soils have lost 30-75% of carbon, which has added billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that sequestering atmospheric carbon in agricultural soils and rangelands has the potential to return carbon levels to those prior to the Industrial revolution.
In 2015 France launched the 4 per 1000 program at the COP21 Paris Climate Conference to encourage farmers to increase carbon in their soils by .4% per year. If all farmland, pastures and rangeland worldwide accomplished this increase annually, in a matter of a few decades a significant amount of CO2 could be drawn out of the atmosphere and sequestered in soils, increasing fertility and stabilizing the climate.
In 2008 when LaSalle was CEO of the Rodale Institute, he and Dr. Paul Hepperly studied the carbon sequestration data from the Rodale Organic Farming Systems Trials; they found that Regenerative agricultural practices like no-till, applying compost, growing multispecies cover crops, planting hedgerows, not leaving bare soil, and others increase the soils capacity to sequester carbon.
Research Shows How to Optimize Soil Carbon
According to LaSalle, breakthrough research by Dr. David Johnson, a molecular biologist at New Mexico State University (NMSU), has shown how a “healthy soil biome with a fungal dominant community can actually sequester a magnitude greater than what we previously understood was possible, maybe even 10 times as much.” On the NMSU webpage Be Bold Shape the Future, Dr. Johnson writes, “Soils with higher carbon content and larger fungal populations enabled us to double the production in the soil with the same amount of water.”
With higher yields, water conservation, increased resilience to droughts and floods and the power to dial back climate catastrophes, what’s not to like about soil carbon sequestration? But LaSalle points out that there are some skeptics,
“Some people say that the science isn’t peer-reviewed yet. But I am aware of at least three farmers – and I know there are a lot more — who are reporting soil carbon sequestration levels even greater than what Dr. Johnson is showing. Their soil has been tracked, so we have valid affirmation that Dr. Johnson’s test plots in New Mexico are being replicated on-farm at farm-scale right now.
“This is something that scientists should be more inquisitive about, not critical of, and start to replicate trials all over the place in their test plots and with farmers and start to measure the carbon changes. We need this information. We need these practices. We need to start applying them. If we have more to learn, which I know we do, we better get busy.”
Keeping an armor on the soil with living plants, crop residues or mulches protects the soil in a multitude of ways. The cultural practice of having “clean” farm fields with exposed soil had, in the past, been considered a sign of a good farmer, but that misconception is changing thanks to research that shows that a protective covering is a key element of healthy soil practices. Soil armor keeps the soil cool and moist. Bare soils will evaporate more quickly due to exposure to heat and, in the extreme, can reach 140 degrees killing microorganisms.
An armor on the soil prevents erosion from wind and rain. A soil cover buffers the impact of rain – which on a bare soil can cause compaction – and allows rain water to infiltrate into the soil rather than running off. Crop residues and mulches suppress weeds and as they breakdown they recycle nutrients back to the soil.
The leaves of cover crops shield the soil surface, and their living roots cycle nutrients produced by photosynthesis into the soil to sustain the health of soil microbial communities. The Natural Resources Conservation Service claims that healthy soils are covered all the time.
The Regenerative Organic Alliance has developed standards for Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC) that addresses all aspects of regenerative agricultural practices and principles including a section on Farmer and Worker Fairness. The program uses the National Organic Standards as a minimum requirement, but goes beyond organic in some specific areas. Social and economic justice for farmers and farmworkers is one of those. The Farmer and Worker Fairness section contains fair pay to the farmer and a living wage to farmworkers, equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, marital status, religious beliefs, disabilities or political opinions. It recognizes the rights of small farmers to organize to be able to compete globally and for farmworkers to organize and collectively bargain for fair wages and good working conditions. A clean and safe working environment would be ensured by third party audits.
Farmers and farmworkers are exploited by an economic system that places corporate profits over financially equitable and respectful relationships. According to the World Bank 78% of the world’s poor are farmers or ranchers. Most farm workers do not enjoy the same rights as workers in other industries; rights like worker’s compensation, disability insurance, health insurance and the right to join unions and collectively bargain. Federal law does not entitle farm workers to overtime pay and in some cases farm workers are not guaranteed a minimum wage.
By including Fairness in the standard, the ROC places an equal importance on the human aspect of agriculture along with soil health, ecosystem stewardship and climate friendly practices.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), based in Florida where 90% of the tomatoes produced in the US during the winter months are grown, is one organization that has been fighting for fair wages and decent working conditions for farmworkers. CIW has brought to justice those responsible for modern day farmworker slavery, and brutality and sexual harassment in the fields. They have negotiated with some of the largest fast food chains to increase the pay of Florida tomato pickers to raise them above sub poverty wages. Lucas Benitez, the founder of CIW, spoke at the Bioneers Conference about the Fight for Justice for Farmworkers.
