Media coverage of the climate crisis has gone mainstream. While today many national and traditional news outlets are covering not only wide-ranging climate activism, but the harrowing repercussions of a planet (and its inhabitants) in peril, Sierra magazine has been on the frontlines of climate- and conservation-focused journalism since the late 1800s.
Jason Mark is the editor-in-chief of Sierra magazine, the renowned national publication distributed by the Sierra Club. Hired in 2015, he joined the editorial team to lead the magazine into a new generation of readers—and present it to a new generation of activists.
Following, Bioneers Senior Director of Programs and Research Teo Grossman chats with Jason Mark about the uptick of mainstream environmental media coverage, what it means for environmental activism as a whole, and how his over-100-year-old publication fits within the new media landscape.
TEO: Can you tell me a little bit about the history of Sierra magazine?
JASON: Sierra magazine started out as the Sierra Club publishing in 1894. We’ve been around for a long time. The founding articles of the Sierra Club state that one of the foundational purposes of the organization was to publish authentic information about the Sierra Nevada and its environs. That’s what launched a quarterly magazine/newsletter just a couple of years after the organization began.
An early edition of the Sierra Club Bulletin. Credit: Sierra Club & Internet Archive
It’s really cool to go back and look at an old edition from the 1890s. It was a mix of science journalism from the Sierra Nevada and other alpine regions. There was a lot of stuff on the Cascades, around Mt. Rainier, about Muir’s travels to Alaska, as well as wild, largely intact ecosystems. It also incorporated adventure writing. Mountaineers and others would come back with their trail reports and send in their stories.
In the early 1900s, it became much more of a political publication as the Sierra Club engaged in its first major environmental battle, which was to prevent the construction of a dam in Yosemite National Park: Today, it’s called the O’Shaughnessy Dam, which flooded the Hetch Hetchy Valley.
The publication stayed in a quarterly format until after World War II, when David Brower took over. Brower was a media and publishing pioneer, and he started to publish four color photography, which in the 1950s and 60s was really cutting edge. Most publications, even big national magazines, just had black-and-white photography. The photography was mostly of wild places, bringing in artists like Elliot Porter and Ansel Adams (of course mostly shot in black and white).
In the 1970s, the publication became the bi-monthly glossy magazine that we have today.
TEO: You took over as Editor-in-Chief in 2015. Did you have any plans going in, in terms of what you wanted to accomplish?
JASON: It’s a real privilege to edit this magazine with this long lineage. When I was hired, I had really clear marching orders from Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, and from the Board to bring the magazine into a new stage of evolution and to transform it into a 21st century magazine. What that means is to have a media enterprise that is completely threading together our long history of print publication but also using all the new tools, most obviously our online edition.
We’re publishing multiple stories daily at SierraMagazine.org in addition to our bi-monthly print edition. That’s really important for us to sustain our relevance and to keep up with the times. My focus is split between sustaining the excellence and the thoughtfulness of our print edition while also ensuring that we’re moving pretty quickly online.
We’ve done some other things too. We launched a full digital edition of the print magazine that goes out to all of our members and subscribers. We have a podcast, and we’re doing a lot of video production. It’s kind of incredible. This is the arena that we’re playing in: There are so many different modes of communications and so many different mediums. We think that to sustain the interest of our current audience and also grow our audience, this strategy is necessary.
In my view, Sierra magazine, our print edition, is for the members that we have. Our online edition is really for the members we aspire to have. It’s great to see that with our online edition, our leading demographic for much of the year has been 25 to 34 year olds. That’s what we want to be doing: attracting and enlisting a new generation of environmental activists and leaders.
Jason Mark
TEO: Where do you see the print and the online package fitting into the larger media ecosystem? What’s the particular niche that Sierra fills?
JASON: That’s a great question. The equally important question for me is: Where do we fit in the overall environmental movement?
There aren’t many other national publications entirely dedicated to environmental topics. Audubon is really the only other NGO-published print magazine at national scale. NRDC shuttered their really excellent magazine, onEarth, a couple of years ago. There’s Orion. But in terms of being at national scale and reaching hundreds of thousands of readers, there’s really only Sierra and Audubon that are focused on environmental topics.
We are trying to speak to what I would call the “ecologically committed.” People like Bioneers attendees who are really passionate and committed to environmental sustainability and social justice. But we’re also trying to reach the environmentally curious: people who are just now tuning into issues around environmentalism and the health and state of the planet. I don’t want to sound self-aggrandizing but we’d like to be kind of the Atlantic magazine of green. A place that’s featuring original journalism but also featuring thought leaders like E.O. Wilson or Naomi Klein or Kim Stanley Robinson. We’re trying to bring in some bigger names to write for us who are offering a bigger-picture vision of where we are and where we’re going.
We’re also providing book reviews and cultural coverage, but all through an environmentalist lens. For the most part it works. We are lucky to grab the attention of the national influencers. A couple of times this year already we’ve gotten mentioned in The New York Times newsletters. It’s wonderful to know the folks at the Times are reading our coverage. Sometimes we’ll see our stories repeated on other national media outlets. It goes to show some people are watching us. That allows us to hopefully, in some modest measure, expand the work outside of the environmentalist community and get it more into a mainstream community.
TEO: I was intrigued to hear you talk about the moment in the early 1900s when Sierra magazine became a political magazine. I hadn’t thought about Sierra in that way. The intention is not just for your audience to read the magazine and continue what they’re doing, but to really galvanize some sort of response.
JASON: Yeah, hopefully after they read the article or put down the magazine, that won’t be the end of their environmental activism.
A fight against a coal power plant, that’s a political battle. That’s not a partisan battle. It may not have anything to do with, at least in this country, the Democrats versus the Republicans, or right and left. It’s about X community, who has the power to decide how energy is generated. That’s what I mean by political. It’s not necessarily partisan in terms of what’s happening in Washington D.C. or the big houses. We do cover those issues, but it’s asking questions about who has power and how it is wielded. How does that power impact not only human communities but all the other communities with whom we’re sharing this planet—other forms of life and beings?
TEO: Less than a decade ago, it was fairly easy to keep up with climate science coverage in the media. Every now and then there’d be a story. Today, it’s totally taken off. Three-quarters of the major papers in the U.S. covered the September 2019 climate strikes in some way on their front pages.
What do you think is responsible for that shift? Do you think overall awareness of climate change drove the increase of coverage or the reverse?
JASON: Yes, there’s definitely more environmental coverage now than we’ve seen in a while, and that’s great. I think it’s kind of a three-legged stool.
1) The planet is sending out distress signals in terms of rising temperatures, declining biodiversity, super storms, and historically unprecedented wildfires. It’s harder and harder for people to ignore those distress signals. The fire alarm is starting to clang so loudly and persistently that you have to be willfully ignorant not to see it.
2) I think people are more attuned. They’re seeking out more information. The curiosity level is increasing among the general public. That is a positive feedback loop with the social movements pushing for dramatic action on climate, which we saw in September 2019 with the truly historic climate marches.
3) I think some of it is a righteous effort on the part of some journalists who self-organize. There’s this initiative called Covering Climate Now, which has mostly been spearheaded by the folks at Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation magazine, along with other partners, and they got I think hundreds of news outlets to sign up for this initiative and to agree to expand their coverage.
I think those are the three factors. Hopefully righteous feedback loops will continue, and not just on climate. It’s important not to let the situation in the atmosphere, as worrisome as it is, crowd out so many other important environmental issues: air quality, water quality, toxins, wildlife and biodiversity. I’m hoping there’s a long-tail effect in which people’s concerns about what’s happening with the atmosphere, with climate and the weather, will hopefully lead to other concerns and interests around the suite of what we call environmental issues.
TEO: One of the hazards of climate change being so big is it does tend to take up all the oxygen in the room, and there are so many other huge stories. What is your perspective on the coverage of the rest of the environmental concerns of the world keeping up?
JASON: Obviously these reports are dire and the indicators are worrisome, but I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re seeing a little bit more of a balance. I think it’s good news that people are paying attention to the bad news.
I’m hoping that we can start to wrap our heads around or break free from what some people call “carbon fundamentalists.” It’s not just about parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is only one part of the overall environmental social crisis. And if we lose sight of the extinction emergency, or if we get sucked into carbon fundamentalism, the danger that I perceive is that we would have an environmental movement that is only committed to saving humans from a crisis that we are self-manufacturing. I for one am not really interested in living on a planet that’s just humans, crows, cows and cockroaches. I want to make sure we are also fighting for a world worth living in, and that is going to involve the whole spectrum of wildlife and ecosystems.
TEO: You mentioned that it’s good news that people are paying attention to the bad news. I’m curious what your take on solutions journalism is, and whether you see that emerging as a new paradigm.
JASON: I love the idea of solutions journalism. We definitely think about that here at Sierra magazine. Sometimes it is just pure play muckraking and trying to shine a light on bad actors. But much more of the time we are looking to tell the stories of creative individuals, communities, and initiatives that are finding new and innovative ways to respond to environmental or social threats. Sometimes it’s as simple as a profile: Here’s an interesting do-gooder, check them out. Sometimes it can be a bit more complicated: Here’s a scientist or researcher who is pursuing this question.
The old journalism maxim is still true: If it bleeds, it reads. People say they want good-news stories, but they will gravitate toward the bad-news stories. That’s true for our own little corner of the media sphere as well. Our story about the bird declines in North America definitely outpaced our coverage of the climate march.
TEO: As an editor and a journalist, I can’t fathom how difficult it must be to handle and report on the sheer quantity of environmentally backwards thinking coming from the federal level recently. How do you handle that?
JASON: It’s hard to keep up with. The short answer is we obviously don’t pick all the stories we want to. We’ve done an OK job, for example, on the Trump administration’s full frontal attack on the California clean air standards and tail pipe standards, but we’ve also kind of dropped the ball on some of those announcements. We do our best to watchdog what’s happening in the public landscape, but we can’t cover it all. The short answer is we do our best and try not to pour too many coals of hot fire on ourselves when we miss something.
Fake news, junk news, viral headlines, scandals and newsroom layoffs. What’s happening in—and to—the news can make your head hurt. But there is a way to build a better, more just and democratic model for journalism than the corporate media of the past. In this panel, we hear from the courageous people doing it. Hosted by Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein. With: Lila LaHood, Publisher, San Francisco Public Press; Nikhil Swaminathan, Executive Editor of Grist; Marcia Parker, publisher of CalMatters.
Monika Bauerlein
MONIKA: I’m Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of Mother Jones. At my talk earlier today, I talked about what has happened to news as an industry in this country, and make the case for why news really cannot be an industry, and instead it has to be a participatory, democratic project. All of these organizations whose leaders are here today are engaged in that kind of endeavor. In fact these amazing journalists have had trajectories that really speak to what’s happened to the news and the media, how we can rebuild it in a better and more vigorous fashion.
NIKHIL: Hi. I’m Nikhil Swaminathan. I am the executive editor of Grist, which is about a 20-year old online environmental news site. We are primarily based in Seattle, although as a national publication we have people all over the place. I actually live in Atlanta, Georgia, though I used to live in the Bay Area. That’s where my story kind of starts, and how I ended up at Grist.
Nikhil Swaminathan
I was working at Al Jazeera America, which prided itself on being the voice of the voiceless. We did a lot of coverage of indigenous issues, community-level issues all around the country, early work on the Flint water crisis, and the opioid epidemic, just to name a few. Some of this comes down to how difficult it is to launch a cable news site or cable news network in 2013, but really relying on the traditional advertising model just wasn’t sustainable. Five days before my first child was born, they announced that we were going under. And luckily my wife worked for Monika, so we had good health insurance. [laughter]
But I had really caught that accountability bug, and being able to tell stories that weren’t necessarily splashy, entertainment that moves units and sells fashion ads. So I was looking for a place where I could continue to apply that kind of work. I took some fellowships afterwards and eventually landed at Grist, leading its environmental justice coverage. It is really, really important work, talking about communities that are on the frontlines of climate change, communities that are experiencing environmental burdens from power plants, from garbage incinerators, obviously Dakota Access Pipeline. Standing Rock is one of the biggest environmental justice stories of the last decade, as is Flint.
The nonprofit news model allows us to do that work, to find readers who will support us in digging into community-level stories, finding the right journalists to tell those stories, and not parachute in some place where they have no idea what the social dynamics are on the ground. And to really tell these difficult stories about how communities that are dealing with public health emergencies are also often the economic engines that sustain their communities.
Working in nonprofit news, relying on readers for funding, relying on like-minded foundations and major donors for money to allow us to do our work has really, really given Grist the opportunity – as I moved to the executive editor position – to grow our environmental justice work, and to continue to lead the conversation on climate change. Because at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do atGrist is give people the fuel to have conversations about this crisis at the dinner table at bars and restaurants, at Bioneers, at the lunch table, and hopefully in the halls of Congress.
Lila LaHood
LILA: Hi. I’m Lila LaHood. I’m the publisher of the San Francisco Public Press. We are based in San Francisco. We do local public interest journalism online and publish. We also have a low power FM station, KSFP 102.5 FM in San Francisco. We share it with another nonprofit organization, KXSF. They have 12 hours a day. We have 12 hours a day. They’re mostly music, we’re mostly talk. It’s a nice balance. Our marquee show there is called Civic, which is focused on local news and public affairs, airing at 8 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday.
The San Francisco Public Press is 10 years old. I helped start it with Michael Stoll, our executive director. He and I vaguely knew each other in grad school and reconnected in San Francisco. Michael had been thinking about this idea of starting a publication. Ideally he wanted it to be a newspaper, but when we got started we thought, well, it’s going to be an online publication very much inspired by public radio – the idea being let’s create the news and put it out there, and if people like it, they’ll support us. And it has worked out that way for us.
Typically public radio stations around the country get support from about 10% of their regular listeners, and that’s something we have found to hold true for us as well. We think of our regular listeners as people who are signed up for our email newsletter, even though many more people see what we’re putting out there and seeing our stories on social media. So then perhaps they see them when they pick up our newspaper in retail locations, or when we’re out at events and handing them out.
We don’t do daily news or breaking news, we don’t have the staff for that. We have six people full time, and a bunch of freelancers. We’ve found that the best way for us to add to the conversation is by focusing on more in-depth reporting and analysis. We often do a lot of document requests. The kinds of stories that are being done by larger organizations like Mother Jones, which have the resources for that on the national level, is not something that’s being done at the local level .
When we got started, it was around the time that there had been a lot of layoffs and downsizing and contraction in the news industry, even here in San Francisco. In fact, we received our first grant and were just getting started. We had no full time employees and were about to hire an editor to manage a whole bunch of volunteers. Then Hearst made a big announcement that they wanted the union to help them get rid of 75 positions at the San Francisco Chronicle, and if they couldn’t get buyouts and early retirements, they might consider selling the paper. If they couldn’t sell the paper, they might shut it down. There was a lot of concern about this. People were asking us, “Are you going to replace the Chronicle?” We looked at each other and said, “No way. That’s not what we’re here for, that’s not what we want to do.” We think it’s important to have a diversity of news sources. We’re fortunate, we have a lot of great local coverage in print, online, from broadcasters, radio, and television doing a lot of the breaking news coverage that we’re not doing. So what we add is more in-depth analysis.
Some of the topics we spend a lot of time looking at are things like homelessness and affordable housing, education, and sea level rise. People had been talking about climate change and sea level rise, but very early on we looked at how it was going to affect the Bay Area. We did an analysis of new waterfront development that was being constructed or had been approved in 2014. At that time, no municipalities around the Bay Area had any regulations about what developers might have to do in light of consensus projections for future sea level rise. After we did this reporting, municipalities started bringing in regulations, and the conversations started shifting.
Then a couple of years later, we noticed a new trend. It was because our reporters spent a lot of time doing document requests, looking at lawsuits, reading the footnotes. They noticed that developers were using the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), as an excuse for why they shouldn’t have to do anything to prepare for future sea level rise. CEQA says we can’t have negative effects on the environment; it doesn’t say anything about what negative effects the environment might have on this development in the future. It was a very interesting project. That’s just one example.
We’re covering a geographic area where people can come together, so we do our reporting, then we host events like panels or interactive workshops to have conversations. We do a lot of nonpartisan election events.
MONIKA: This is all just so incredibly inspiring, and I hope you recognize that even though these folks are very nice and polite, this is actually a revolution in journalism. [APPLAUSE]
These are leaders of three of more than 200 nonprofit news organizations around the country. There’s one where you live, focused on the issues you care about. There’s one representing the community you feel a part of, and if there isn’t, maybe it’s time for somebody to start one. Part of what all of this is about is to build an ecosystem of news to replace the atrophied and withering ecosystem that we’ve had. So with that, Marcia.
Marcia Parker
MARCIA: Thank you. So glad to be here. That applause almost made me cry. I’m the publisher at CalMatters, a four-year-old nonprofit, non-partisan news organization covering state government news. We focus on environmental issues, on education, on health and welfare, and politics. We don’t cover daily or breaking news. Like my colleagues here, we pride ourselves on deep, insightful, explanatory news. That’s our goal.
We were created to fill the void in state government coverage, and that’s because we used to have big bureaus. The LA Times had 15 people in Sacramento, I think they have three now. Sacramento Bee had a huge team. Now they have two or three. These are our partners, we have 180 news partners in the state. We give all our news away for free, pretty much everyone uses our content. We don’t have TV partnerships, but we do have public radio.
One of the other things that makes me happy is the number of individual people who have become members of our organization. So even though we give our work away for free, they’re supporting us in some way, whether it’s $5 a month or $25 a year. We have institutional members too, so nonprofits are engaged and supporting us, we give them space on the site, things like that. We created an election guide, and we had sponsors for that. People are supporting their local, regional, topical, national news organizations. So this is a revenue model that might not have worked even two years ago. It’s growing in a really big way across our country, and that’s really exciting.
I’m also on the board of the Institute for Nonprofit News, which we’re all members of. We’re approving about five new organizations a month now, and lots of those are tiny and hyper-local.
We were at one of our meetings and somebody said there’s a reporter in Flint, Michigan who really wants to start a nonprofit. The whole paper had shut down, and in three months we had her up and running. She got support and toolkit things that she needed, and as a result that community has some news again.
So if you are in a community without coverage, INN can help you get there, even if you just have the idea and don’t really know how to get started. You don’t even have to be a journalist. You can get people who care about making sure your community’s informed, and we can help you get there. [APPLAUSE]
MONIKA: Let’s do a little bit of storytelling, since that’s what we do, and talk about some examples of the kind of work that can come out of this revolutionary model. Part of the goal is to open the box a little bit and tell you some of the crazy stuff that we go through. I have a story that I’ll maybe save for the end, but Nikhil, do you want to start?
NIKHIL: Sure. We had a reporter who was working at Grist who spent a year on and off visiting San Bernadino, California. She grew up about 20 miles away from it, so she had a familiarity with the rhythms of the community. It’s always been a sort of distribution center region. There was a large rail yard and for decades truck and train traffic was coming in and out of this area. There had been reports of childhood asthma, birth defects, cancer. A local group of women banded together after watching what was happening to their children, and started to fight back against this rail yard.
In the midst of all of that, San Bernardino became the first or second biggest hub for the delivery economy in the country. So every year, two or three warehouses were getting dropped in this region, and warehouses are pollution magnets. They bring in trucks, the trucks come in, they leave goods, they come out, they’re bringing out goods. This was an area of the country that desperately needed this industry. Its poverty rate was double what the national average was.
So we were able to give this reporter time to do a full panorama of what was going on, to spend time with a new generation of environmental activists who were fighting this totally new industry that anybody who’s ever ordered anything from Amazon is helping to feed. At the same time, the people that she was talking to – their brothers, their sisters, their mothers and fathers, sometimes their kids – were working for the industry because it was the biggest employer.
This was the type of story where once it was 75% completed, we looked at it and said, we can do this bigger and better. We went to our donor and members and asked for additional funding to make a 2,000 word story into a 4,500 word story. An illustrator created bespoke art and we put some money behind a public relations campaign to help us get our story onto local radio, into LA Times, newsletters, etc.
I want to leave it off there, because I know that Marcia wanted to talk about collaborations and partnerships, which is one of the things I love most about this model of journalism, rather than competition for ad dollars, impressions, clicks, and all this stuff that you need to keep the engine humming. The fuel to run these organizations is totally different, and it allows us to talk to each other and share knowledge, to go to INN and get a leg up, and to work with one another. I’ve done multiple collaborations already with Mother Jones. That’s particularly easy for me to do because it takes place in my household.
There’s a real power to this. You can have these things for regions, cities, neighborhoods. And for topics that Grist address, it allows you to plug in and know that you all have different audiences, funding streams, different members. And we can take our audience and marry it with Mother Jones’ audience and San Francisco Public Press’ audience and make a bigger audience. I’m not a religious person, but this is the closest I’ve gotten to religion in my life. [LAUGHTER]
MONIKA: Well, it is back to the ecosystem metaphor, that’s what we’re talking about. There is an element of living systems, and in living systems parts collaborate to make something larger.
MARCIA: I feel the best thing that has happened is the walls have come down in journalism in the nonprofit sector, and people only care about one thing: informing their communities. So they’re really finding a way to enlarge and expand the audience by working together.
The project I thought I would talk about is called “The California Divide”. At CalMatters, we were asking how can it be true that in a state as wealthy as California we have 20% of our 40 million residents living in poverty, and another 20% at the edge – one healthcare catastrophe away from being there. So we were thinking there’s some reporting that has been done, and we do some, but we thought, you know what, we have to break up the model and rethink this.
So we raised about 700,000, mostly from the Irvine Foundation, and some other donors for this two-year effort to look at and frame the issues of economic inequity in our state, and disparity over these next two years. And we do it with our media partners. We’re raising more to hire reporters to embed in our local communities, especially in underserved communities where poverty’s a huge issue and nobody’s really writing about it.
This is an amazing thing. Right? It takes our media partners being willing to work with us, we’re not competing. It also includes a big series of public events, which we already do now, and also small, town-based events so that we can talk about these issues in these communities.
This is just one level of collaboration. We’re working on raising additional funds for that so that we have ethnic media partners, Asian and black-owned media in the state, and we want to embed them in some of those communities as well so that we can do better. CalMatters will then take all that work and distribute it to all 180 media partners in the state. We have a lot of support right now. This is the model. The walls are down, this is an exciting time.
At this point, more than 13,000 CalMatters stories have been picked up by our 180 news partners in four years, and it’s growing all the time. I just say that because you can see the need is there and there’s an interest, and that’s why they’re running it. Yes, it’s free, so that’s a bigger incentive. I think it’s also because people are hungry for knowledge. All of us.
MONIKA: So if you keep going with the ecosystem metaphor, you’ve seen the specialized organism that Nikhil represents, you have this kind of network effect that Marcia is working on, and Lila, what you’re doing is really sort of at the very grassroots level. You’re like the soil organism almost.
LILA: Yes, and in fact we’ve worked with everyone at this table on some level. So in the print edition, we pick up partner stories, so we’ve had stories from Grist, from CalMatters. We really appreciate that, because especially many of our issues will devote half of the pages to one big topic, which can be very interesting. But we also want to offer our community a range of news stories about issues and topics that we think they would be interested in.
Perhaps there are some authors out there, or people who we’d like to interview for Civic, our radio show, which has opened up our ability to cover more topics in really exciting ways. In-depth reporting takes so long, and even though we’re really proud of the work that comes out of that, we’re not able to put those stories out in front of people more than a couple of times a year. Whereas the interviews we’re doing for the radio show and then podcasting allow us to have these ongoing conversations about important topics in the same way that we would approach these in-depth stories.
I would like to talk a little bit about some of the big projects that we’ve done and what distinguishes the kind of work that we do. We did a series of three big education reporting projects. One looked at the increase in segregation in San Francisco public schools, and we had to do a lot of data analysis to come to that conclusion. It was because of the school’s choice system, which is supposed to help families have more control over where they send their kids, and it was inadvertently causing schools to become more segregated.
Out of that reporting, our lead reporter on that, Jeremy Adam Smith, came across some other interesting information that sent him on another direction for the second story, which was looking at fundraising at PTAs in the schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. What he found that it had to do with the economics of the families in those schools, which was related to the increased segregation that some schools were raising $400,000 a year and some schools weren’t raising anything at all, or negligible amounts. The school district didn’t even know this at the time.
The way we got this information was by gathering the 990s for all of the PTAs that were 501(c)3s, and pulling this together. We live and breathe tax documents, and it was one of those things that nobody would have known had we not pulled that together. It was a lot of work. In fact, Jeremy spoke recently about how for him and the others who gathered that data, there were some arguments and tears through the process, but by the time they got to the end of it, it was really powerful what we were able to reveal.
Some of the other reporting that we’ve done on homelessness and housing crisis, we often take a solutions approach. So solutions journalism is a term you might hear more often. When we’re looking at a solutions approach, we look at a problem that we have in San Francisco and say, well, what’s being done in other places that might work here? Either it’s being done in Portland, or Seattle, or New York, or it’s been done at a different point in time, or they’re doing it in Vancouver. What would it take to apply it here and what benefit might arise out of that?
Or sometimes it’s looking at something like, wow, we have all of these residential hotels, these single room occupancy (SRO) hotels, and one of our reporters figured out that the city had data on the vacancy rates there. We also have data about the number of homeless people in San Francisco and the number of unsheltered homeless people in San Francisco. So our big analysis showed that at the point in time when we did the reporting, there were about 4,000 unsheltered homeless people in San Francisco. There were also about 1800 vacant SRO hotel rooms, and they were vacant for various reasons. Some of them were in disrepair, some were being kept off the market perhaps because the building owners wanted to do something else with the building, to prepare it for sale or convert it to something else. We weren’t making any sort of recommendation about that, but we said, here’s some interesting information for the community to discuss. We really like doing those kinds of stories.
So, that tells you a little bit more about how we do the work that we do. [APPLAUSE]
MONIKA: Well that’s a great story. This information is not ending up in a vacuum. Right? These are ways that policymakers or citizens find out what they can work on. It took me a long time to understand that congressional investigators, for instance, don’t just pick up the phone one morning and say, okay, where might I find a scandal. [LAUGHTER] They read the news and then they dial in on what they might want to know more about, and they basically do the work of reporters over again, but with subpoena power.
That’s actually a world in which we live at Mother Jones. What Lila was saying about compiling all these tax documents, that’s so much of what goes on behind the scenes. They pull every single one of these documents from many, many years, collate all of them, look for patterns, and package it all up and tell a story that somebody who’s not going to put themselves through this misery can understand and can do something with.
Likewise, at Mother Jones, we have a large team of people. We have 20 people in Washington, DC going after scandals and abuses of power, and one of the—this ecosystem metaphor’s going to go totally sideways—like the prey in these nature films where the cheetah just kind of runs after the prey for miles and miles, and hours and hours, and keeps taking a swipe at the prey, and finally they get it. I cry at these nature films. But some stories are like that, they go on over years and years.
One of our reporters was intrigued by a line that was on the president’s financial disclosure that he has to file every year. This is not a president who discloses everything about his finances, as we know, but on this pro forma disclosure, he disclosed a $50 million loan that he owes to Donald Trump. Why, you might say? And that’s what our reporter said. So he spent three years just coming at this story again, and trying to figure out where this money was coming from and where it was going and what it represented.
He would call tax law experts, and building finance experts, and he got it down to where it’s a building related to Trump’s project in Chicago. That would take months to piece together, and then he would go do something else, and he would come back at it, and he would discover that there is a financial tool called Loan Parking that has to do with when you – how do I say this diplomatically? – when you basically don’t want the IRS to know about a transaction that you’ve done. Long story short, it took him three years to piece together a story that makes it pretty much apparent that this particular loan looks a lot like what many tax experts would consider tax fraud. You can read this story in the October 2019 issue of Mother Jones, but it’s the kind of thing that can be incredibly unglamorous, and that also puts you through these ridiculous fact-checking hoops, because we have a big fact-checking team.
We will have fact checkers call people up and say: Is it true that you are completely bald? [LAUGHTER] Or Is the door to your house actually painted purple or magenta? And so when it comes to a financial story like this, they really go down rabbit holes. But the outcome is something that has kind of rippling impacts out there, because it gives people like you, in the case of a school story, like what Lila was talking about, or people in Southern California who want to engage with what the logistics industry is doing down there, the wherewithal to get involved and do something about it.
Do any of you work with youth organizations, youth media organizations in particular? Because there’s a lot of movement there.
NIKHIL: One of my first hires at Grist was an editor who previously worked for youth radio, the NPR Youth Vertical. And one of her charges in coming into Grist was to develop a pipeline of youth journalists around the country, in part because when I was talking about our environmental justice stories, the importance is being able to do community level reporting by people who are familiar with those communities. And one of the ways we thought would be most effective was not to go necessarily to the beat reporter from the daily that shut down, but to find a young person in that community who’s grown up in it, who’s excited, who wants to become a journalist, help them develop skills, allow them to write a few stories about their community.
This is like super fledgling, I’m just telling you what our plan is. But that was the idea behind bringing somebody with that background into Grist, because one of the realities on the ground is that it takes an extremely patient editor to work with a green journalist, and you have to hire for that.
We essentially have a staffer at Grist who is helping to pioneer these sort of talent and identification kind of efforts. So one of the other things we’ve done is convene this group called the Environmental Journalists of Color Network. The idea wasn’t for it to be Grist’s Environmental Journalists of Color Network, it was to just get together people who are already working in the space and saying to them, How did you get here? What did you do? Did you go to J school? Other people had gone to historically black colleges and universities, and then gotten into local media and 10 years went by and now they’re Pro Publica. And so we asked how do we reverse engineer this? How do we start to build that pipeline? How do we get more people writing about this issue or the suite of issues that we think is really, really important? We’re at the beginning of this process, but this thing took off at Society of Environmental Journalists.
LILA: We’ve worked with a lot of young journalists. We used to have a more informal internship program.We don’t have that now because we decided we would rather work with young journalists as freelancers. We’d have an internship program and they’d come to our office and they’d be in the office for many hours a week, and we often felt like it wasn’t a good match on either side, especially because they were often running off to another part-time job, and we thought, let’s work with people as freelancers so that they can work on a schedule that works for them and we’re going to pay them for their work.
We are eager to work with young people who show us they can be dedicated to the process. Sometimes it actually works out well, because we’re not trying to do these quick-turn around stories. So you’ve got young people who have other jobs but want to get more experience in the kind of journalism that we do, and we’re eager to work with them in that capacity and make sure they get paid for their work.
18-year-old Sierra Robinson is a climate activist who practices permaculture on her family’s homestead farm on Vancouver Island. She is also Regional Director for Earth Guardians of Canada and a plaintiff in a climate change lawsuit suing the Canadian Government. Sierra was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Bioneers Youth Education and Leadership ProgramDirector.
ARTY: You have been organizing climate strikes on Vancouver Island.
SIERRA: My Earth Guardians crew is now being led by my amazing co-crew lead Katya. She and I have worked together to help our community plan a giant climate strike, which is on pause right now because of the virus. But we’re still striking weekly on Fridays online by posting pictures and rallying the community.
We worked with our mayor and elders in our community; we tried to include everybody in the planning and conversation. We hosted climate strikes to raise awareness of what’s happening with the climate movement and how it’s impacting our valley and the area around us. We’re encouraging people to start thinking about what their climate story is and how they’re impacted by climate change personally.
We also went to the Cowichan Valley Regional District and got them to declare a climate emergency. It was amazing to actually see things start to come out of our efforts.
ARTY: What have you learned from organizing the strikes?
SIERRA: I learned that it’s not always easy to plan really big things like the strikes, but it’s such an amazing, beautiful feeling to be marching together with hundreds of people. We had like 500 people at one of them. It’s such a powerful feeling to be marching with that many people in a small community who care so strongly and who still show up after the initial strike. They show up for the conversations where we sit down and talk about what needs to change and how we’re going to tackle these issues. It helps an activist or person in general to feel a lot less alone when you know that there’s all these other people who care about the same issues you do and want a better future. The strikes are raising the sense of urgency in people around us.
Sierra Robinson (photo by Jeremy Koreski)
ARTY: As a young leader, what are your biggest challenges?
SIERRA: They vary depending on the month because there’s either crazy big fires or floods that are obviously affecting people in every age demographic. As a young person and an activist, these disasters can really take a toll on my mental health. It’s a learning curve to be careful not to burn yourself out and to remember to put self-care first while realizing that the planet is in a crisis.
When I’m envisioning a future that I want, it’s really hard to balance hope when statistics show that most of the ice caps are melting and the coral reefs will pretty much be gone in a couple of years. All of these crazy statistics are saying the opposite of the future we want. Balancing the reality of how dire the situation is and what you want to see in the world is a lot of weight on somebody’s shoulders especially when you are an activist and passionately care about making the world a better place for people and animals and everything around you.
It’s difficult when you feel a lot of people are working against you. A lot of corporations and industries that have tons of money are greedy and selfish and don’t care about the people or the environments they’re going to impact with their business deals.
There is a lot of online bullying that happens through Facebook, etc. I’ve kind of gotten to the point where it doesn’t bother me anymore, but at first that was something really difficult to navigate.
I’m trying to graduate this year and it’s difficult balancing climate activism and the things I care about with school, which is also important to me. But it feels less important when you’ve got all of these threats hanging over your head, and what might happen if you don’t do anything.
So, the biggest challenges are mental health and sometimes having my voice heard.Being young, people look at me and belittle me a little bit. They’ll be like, “You shouldn’t be worrying about climate change; you should be worried about trying to get a boyfriend.” I’ve actually had people say that to me.
ARTY: Is it your peers who say that?
SIERRA: Not my peers, it’s usually from older generations like my parents’ age. Many of my peers know and recognize that climate change is a big problem, but a lot of them are just really terrified and don’t know how to fix it, so they’re kind of immobilized. I think there’s this misconception that a lot of youth don’t care about climate change, but there doesn’t really feel like there are easy, direct ways that they can create changes. I think that’s more of what it is.
Sierra Robinson (center) with Vancouver Island Earth Guardian Crew
ARTY: What do young people need to help support their leadership?
SIERRA: Youth need more spaces to gather and meet and have these conversations. That’s why I love Bioneers so much. It gives a space for youth to sit down and have difficult conversations about the issues and how we can start to change things now. Sometimes, all it really takes is an inclusive space where people can just sit down, be heard, and get creative together. Youth need people to listen to them more and uplift our voices and support us in the work we do in whatever way they can.
ARTY: Has your experience at Bioneers had any other impact on you?
SIERRA: I’ve been to a lot of conferences where I sat down and listened to a boring lecture with maybe some interesting parts here and there. Usually it’s the same old white men standing in front of the room doing a very similar talk using a lot of numbers and talking about things that are really heavy. It doesn’t feel very connected or grounded. But Bioneers is this really beautiful, diverse, creative, artistic space. Some of the presentations start out with music and songs with people dancing and people singing.
The talks were by youth and elders and people in between, people with different gender identities and different cultural backgrounds. It was really a powerful thing to be able to see all the different perspectives together in a really united space. I knew the people there had similar goals and wanted more equality and safety and health for everyone around them. Of course, being able to hang out with other youth that were so passionate about things was a very beautiful experience.
ARTY: Do you have any advice for young people who are discouraged by the state of the world?
SIERRA: I’d say that I get them and I understand why they’re discouraged. It’s a lot to deal with, it seems like there’s a new issue every day, but try not to solely focus on how terrible and shitty things feel. Yes, there’s a lot going on and we need to acknowledge it and start to work on changing it. We need to start imagining what we do want the world to look like instead of what we don’t want. We can change that mindset to fighting for the future we want and for the beautiful things that we love. Let’s focus on where our passion and excitement and happiness are. Just start tackling the problems in the world, one at a time, through what we’re most passionate about and what our skills and interests are.
If we just do what we love in a way that’s better for the world that’s where we’ll start to see changes fast. People will be more connected and happy, and so many good things will come out of it. So, stay hopeful and don’t be afraid to ask for help. That’s important.
ARTY: You embody all of that. I have some quotes that I want to read to you to get your free association impressions.
ARTY: This is from author Anais Nin, a Cuban/French author, whose writings were influential in the early feminist movement in the 1960s. She said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
SIERRA: Wow. I think that is so absolutely true. A few years ago, when I was 13 or 14 years old, I was terrified of showing up as myself in the world. I was a farmer who loved running around and being crazy, but I was so worried sometimes to speak my mind. At times, I was really loud and outgoing, but I had a lot of people tell me that I was too loud. They were essentially them telling me that I was taking up too much space, being too colorful, too confident or independent.
Women and people in general are put in boxes and given labels. How do you find the courage in yourself to be who you want to be and show up as who you really are? Am I going to have the courage to really believe in this cause and myself? As soon as I tried doing that more – it was a process and is still a process – anytime I do have the courage to show up as myself, huge things start to change around me, more opportunities start to happen. I see the work that I’m doing become more effective. People are able to actually connect to me from an authentic place because all those walls of being fake are down. So, I love that.
ARTY: This is from the poet Maya Angelou, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
SIERRA: Totally. In our movement or in anything that we do, there’s always going to be defeats, but they’re very different from failures. If you’re trying and you’re putting your work and your energy into it, and you care about it with an actual passion not just doing it to get good grades or whatever, no matter what defeats happen – because there will be lots of them – there’s lots of amazing victories to celebrate. It just brings us closer and closer to realizing more effective ways to make change and helps us recognize that we have more space for growth.
ARTY: This one is from Rosa Parks, “I’ve learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear. Knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
SIERRA: In our world, we don’t have a lot of time to be scared. We actually are on a timeline. It is the scariest deadline ever because we don’t know exactly when things will get to the point where it’s irreversible. When we’re talking about climate change or other things, I think that there’s always things we can do no matter what. We can reinvent the way we live by using permaculture or regenerative design work. We need to not be afraid of making people angry. We need to be compassionate and grounded in our work and be kind and intuitive. We need to listen to where other people are coming from and recognize that their cycles of violence are often because they have been hurt in their lives. But we also need to not take any more of the bullshit. We need to not be scared to do what we have to do, but to do it coming from a place of love.
The stories we’re told can determine how we view the world around us, and with the media industry monopolized by an elite few, it’s important to dig deeper than mainstream coverage.
Independent media serves the critical role of providing a platform for underrepresented voices that might be otherwise unheard in mainstream media. By exposing unique perspectives and stories, this free exchange of information makes independent media a cornerstone in the movement to empower the public.
Bioneers has been hosting an award-winning independent radio show and podcast for nearly two decades and we’ve been amazed and inspired by the explosion of really top-notch audio storytelling and reporting projects. Check out nine indie podcasts you should be listening to (along with The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature, of course!). An obviously, this is by no means an extensive list – let us know what you’re listening to!
Drilled Presents: The HEATED Podcast
The HEATED podcast is a 6 episode, limited-run series that shows how COVID-19 and the climate crisis cannot be separated.
In a series of interviews with Bill McKibben, Mary Heglar, Anthony Rogers-Wright, Kate Aronoff and others, HEATED host Emily Atkin connects the dots on how two of the most pressing issues of our time are really one and the same.
All My Relations
All My Relations is a podcast that explores what it means to be a Native person today. To be an Indigenous person is to be engaged in relationships— relationships to land and place, to a people, to non-human relatives, and to one another. All My Relations is a place to explore those relationships, and to think through Indigeneity in all its complexities.
On each episode hosts Matika Wilbur (Tulalip and Swinomish) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), delve into a different topic facing Native peoples today, bringing in guests from all over Indian Country to offer perspectives and stories.
Ear Hustle
The Ear Hustle podcast brings you the daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration.
The podcast is a partnership between Nigel Poor, a Bay Area visual artist, and Earlonne Woods, formerly incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. The Ear Hustle team works to produce stories that are sometimes difficult, often funny and always honest.
The Next System
The Next System Podcast is a biweekly series featuring leaders from academia, politics, business, and the grassroots discussing movements, models, and pathways toward a new system.
This podcast is just one outlet from the the Next System Project, an initiative of The Democracy Collaborative that’s aimed at bold thinking and action to address the systemic challenges the United States faces now and in coming decades.
Democracy in Color Podcast
Democracy in Color, hosted by Steve Phillips, is “a new color-conscious political podcast.” As the 2020 election season heats up, there remain strong differences of opinion about the right strategy for winning in a racially-polarized electoral landscape. This podcast facilitates a candid conversation about what strategies make the most sense. Join Steve for a conversation that is unafraid and unapologetic about grappling with some of the toughest topics in politics.
Intersectionality Matters (Kim Crenshaw)
Intersectionality Matters!, presented by the African American Policy Forum, is a podcast that brings intersectionality to life. Its host, Kimberlé Crenshaw, is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.
Zero Hour Talks
Zero Hour Talks is a youth podcast produced by Zero Hour, a global, youth-led climate activism movement fighting for climate and environmental justice. Its episodes center the voices of diverse youth in the conversation around climate and environmental justice.
This podcast represents a movement of unstoppable youth organizing to protect rights and access to natural resources and a clean, safe, and healthy environment that will ensure a livable future where we not just survive, but flourish.
Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg
Dani Nierenberg is the president of Food Tank, a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.
She hosts the Food Talk podcast as a platform for interacting with farmers, policymakers, co-op owners and others about how we can build a food system based on sustainability and justice, especially in the face of climate change.
MEDIA INDIGENA
MEDIA INDIGENA is a weekly Indigenous current affairs roundtable podcast. Each week, guests from the worlds of activism, arts, academia and beyond join Rick for lively, insightful conversation that goes beyond the headlines to get at what matters most to Indigenous peoples.
Driven by the mission to originate and celebrate a wealth of distinct, Indigenous-led experiences both on-line and off, MEDIA INDIGENA’s larger vision is to catalyze these conversations and connections into community.
Indigenous wisdom has always been central to Bioneers’ mission to address real world issues practically and holistically. Over the past 30 years, we have met this commitment by featuring and amplifying the voices of Indigenous leaders to connect people from all over the world to the intersection of traditional wisdom and innovations inspired by nature.
Bioneers Indigeneity Program Directors, Alexis Bunten (left) and Cara Romero (right)
Indigenous communities—both urban and rural—have been hit extremely hard due to unequal access to health care, lack of infrastructure, inadequate access to healthy food and water, ability to obtain essential goods, and socially-driven constraints, such as stable employment.
Knowledge bearers are speaking out louder than ever before to turn to traditionally healthy lifestyles to increase our baseline immunities. These include eating healthy, organic, non-GMO foods, moving at least an hour a day, staying in warm connection with loved ones, and prayer. They are telling us that we must integrate these traditional lifestyle practices with modern healthcare, and access to essentials.
At Bioneers, we worked swiftly behind the scenes and have already distributed rapid-relief COVID-19 support to our friends in the front lines, who are risking their lives to help Indigenous communities survive the latest pandemic.
I write this piece to share what my colleagues at Bioneers and I have learned about the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on Indigenous communities, from historical perspectives to the current reality, and to offer several ways that you can donate to these efforts.
A Native Perspective
Native Peoples are too familiar with fatal diseases. We see COVID-19 through a lens of genocide and intergenerational trauma. When the Pilgrims first landed on America’s shores 400 years ago, they settled on top of an abandoned Wampanoag village, whose remaining tribal members had fled after a 4 year epidemic introduced by European traders.
Personal experience with epidemics is not just in the distant past. My great grandmother died of a flu introduced to western Alaska that locals called “the great sickness,” which precipitated my grandmother being sent to an Indian Boarding school. My mother contracted TB; my brother almost died of viral meningitis, and I recently recovered from the swine flu. My story is typical for most Native families. Most of us know many people who died of preventable infections, made worse by food deserts, inadequate health care and pre-existing conditions.
Group of students participating in the Bioneers Intercultural Conversations Project
My colleagues and I have spoken to friends, family and native-led organizations from across the country and learned first-hand the impacts of COVID-19.
Many tribes are shutting down roads in and out of reservations, and implementing additional quarantine measures. The impacts in the cities are just as bad as in rural areas. Cities are also food deserts.
People have lost jobs, and are worried about paying bills and purchasing necessary items. There’s not enough food in food banks and pantries, and in some areas, food banks are shut down.
Households have welcomed extended relatives, contributing to food insecurity, domestic violence, and child neglect. Some families cannot go to the grocery store at all because there are too many young children at home without enough caretakers.
Transportation is a huge problem. There are places, especially in the Southwest, where people cannot access fresh, safe water. If a car breaks down, it’s not getting fixed because there is no financial safety net.
Elders are dying of COVID-19. Not only is this a huge emotional loss for their families, but it’s a very grave loss for tribes overall, because elders are often among the last traditional knowledge bearers and language speakers for their communities.
Bioneers Early Covid-19 Response in Indian Country
When COVID-19 reached the US, a friend reached out to Bioneers co-founder, Nina Simons, with a simple question. The friend wanted to support protecting Indigenous elders, but she didn’t know where best to donate the funds.
We realized that with a legacy of bad actors diverting well-intended financial support from reaching Indigenous communities, and with our direct knowledge of trusted organizers, efforts and community care givers, that we were in a unique position to make a difference. In Nina’s words:
I knew how very close to the edge many Indigenous peoples live, in conditions of extreme poverty, in communities horrifically underserved by any support systems, many with no running water or electricity. I also knew how dangerous the loss of Indigenous elders would be, as so many of them are knowledge-bearers, among the few who know their native languages and stories, and wisdom keepers for their cultural traditions.
Some of what Indigenous elders know, I’ve come to understand, including Traditional Ecological Knowledge, involve ways of relating to nature that I believe all humans will need to survive and learn to thrive, as we navigate between pandemics and climate instability.
Immediately, I reached out to my trusted colleagues who co-direct Bioneers’ Indigeneity program, Cara Romero and Alexis Bunten, and asked for their counsel and advice. I also reached out to other Indigenous friends and allies, to ask them for referrals. We came up with a preliminary list of people and organizations we knew could be trusted to serve those who need help most, which I then shared with friends, colleagues and supporters who I felt might be interested and potentially inclined to help.
The three of us went to work, grateful for the opportunity to help those in such dire need, making further phone calls to folks we know, and discerning for each of us which might be highest priority opportunities within the vast amount of need that was rapidly becoming apparent in response to the COVID-19 pandemic reaching Indian Country, both in rural and urban communities.
We were able – in a couple of short weeks – to converge our thinking into a coherent strategy, and get the funds out the door quickly to the places we’d determined were the best reflections of our discernment process.
As a result, we have already distributedsignificant grants and medical supplies to twenty-twoindividuals and partner organizations. Those recipients are making food bags and delivering them door to door. They are gathering funds for gift cards. They are securing and distributing medical supplies. They are making sure that elders have meals, and other essential supplies delivered.
Support Covid-19 Relief To Indigenous Communities
As part of our ongoing COVID-19 response planning, we also conducted a needs assessment survey with Native-led partner organizations, and learned:
At least 75% of families are experiencing some form of food insecurity.
Up to 90% of families are having difficulty accessing necessary supplies (gas, medical equipment, school equipment, safe water, etc.).
Nearly half (40%) of Native youth do not have access to reliable technology to keep up with their education and connect with the world.
Our partners have asked us to continue to organize culturally-relevant events for Native youth and their families, to take our Native Youth Leadership Program online. We asked if Native youth would be likely to join in virtual gatherings —cultural presentations, mentorship events, beading nights, and talking circles — and respondents shared an enthusiastic YES. Over 15 partners indicated that up to 25 youth and families associated with their organizations would very much want to participate.
To this end, we are currently fundraising to provide our Indigenous networks with supplies, inspiring media and curricula featuring Native leaders and access to culturally-based virtual events. Please consider contributing to support Bioneers’ efforts.
We also invite you to directly support the following organizations who are working hard (alongside many others – this is just a selection of worthy endeavors) to address the needs in Indigenous communities:
In the midst of these unprecedented, unpredictable, scary and sad times, we’d like to share how good it feels to be able to assist our friends and families in need.
These times are lonely and sometimes overwhelming, but being able to connect with each other makes a big difference. Hang in there, and we’ll get through it just as our ancestors did–no matter where our ancestors are from, whether in deep time or recently– in order for us to have this precious gift of being here and now.
Without an in-person convening this year, we are pivoting our work toward making more media, virtual events, and learning opportunities for all of our networks.
To support Bioneers efforts on behalf of Indigenous communities as we navigate this unparalleled time together, please click here.
This is an excerpt of a long distance interview that Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies conducted via Skype with Anne Laudisoit, a Belgian explorer, wildlife field biologist and disease ecologist affiliated with the EcoHealth Alliance. She has long tracked emerging and neglected vector-borne zoonotic diseases in a wide range of ecological and social contexts from Tanzania, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Kazakhstan.
An award-winning film directed by Caroline Thirion about Anne’s discovery of a hitherto unknown-to-science band of chimpanzees in a remote unstudied forest fragment in the DRC’s Ituri Province in 2015, “Mbudha: In the Chimpanzees’ Footsteps”, was screened at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.
Since 2015, among other projects, Anne has worked in partnership with Congolese researchers and local villagers to continue exploring this often war-torn area’s flora and fauna and help develop conservation plans for the region.
Harpignies spoke with Laudisoit in late April, reaching her on the banks of the White Nile in Uganda, on the Congolese border. Laudisoit had been in the process of returning to continue her work in Ituri Province when the COVID-19 crisis began shutting down borders and forcing quarantines, and violence (which has only gotten worse since then) flared up again in various parts of the country, including the areas she was slated to work in, so she was unable to enter the DRC and was hunkering down as the only guest in an otherwise shuttered eco-lodge.
She was in a little cabin with only a solar lamp as lighting and a wild elephant (frequent visitors) was chewing bushes only a few yards away behind her little cabin during the conversation.
To learn more about Anne’s work, and the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, visit www.ecohealthalliance.org
Anne Laudisoit is a Belgian explorer, wildlife field biologist and disease ecologist affiliated with the EcoHealth Alliance. She has long tracked emerging and neglected vector-borne zoonotic diseases in a wide range of ecological and social contexts from Tanzania, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Kazakhstan.
An award-winning film directed by Caroline Thirion about Anne’s discovery of a hitherto unknown-to-science band of chimpanzees in a remote unstudied forest fragment in the DRC’s Ituri Province in 2015, Mbudha: In the Chimpanzees’ Footsteps, was screened at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.
Since 2015, among other projects, Anne has worked in partnership with Congolese researchers and local villagers to continue exploring this often war-torn area’s flora and fauna and help develop conservation plans for the region.
Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies conducted a long-distance interview with Anne Laudisoit via Skype in late April, reaching her on the banks of the White Nile in Uganda, on the Congolese border. Laudisoit had been in the process of returning to continue her work in Ituri Province when the COVID-19 crisis began shutting down borders and forcing quarantines, and violence (which has only gotten worse since then) flared up again in various parts of the country, including the areas she was slated to work in, so she was unable to enter the DRC and was hunkering down as the only guest in an otherwise shuttered eco-lodge.
She was in a little cabin with only a solar lamp as lighting and a wild elephant (frequent visitors) was chewing bushes only a few yards away behind her little cabin during the conversation.
J.P. began by asking Anne what the situation regarding COVID-19 was in Uganda:
ANNE: Here in Uganda, there have only been 56 known cases as we speak [editor’s note: as of May 11, case count was 121], and they were forced into quarantine facilities. The government imposed very strict rules quickly, including limits on all transport. There is almost no movement whatsoever except for trucks carrying merchandise, but some people escaped from quarantine and tried to cross borders. That’s a major concern everywhere in Africa, the porosity of the borders (which could help spread the virus).
So far there are clearly far fewer cases (than in Europe), but is it because there have been very few tests done, so we don’t have any real idea of the number of cases, or is it because the population in Africa is much younger on average, so less prone to manifesting symptoms or are asymptomatic carriers?
JP: Is it also possible that it’s earlier in the wave there, or that perhaps the warmer weather is less conducive to spreading the virus?
ANNE: It’s difficult to say. The curve here hasn’t seemed to be escalating like in some other parts of the world, so far, and clearly the first cases were imported, and it took time before there was local transmission. Now there is local transmission, but mostly in cities. We will have to see if it spreads to the countryside or if the government lockdown helped prevent that from happening.
In terms of weather, it is not clear at all because you have tropical countries in Southeast Asia that had big numbers. And in hot parts of the U.S. such as Florida, a lot of people live in air-conditioned houses, so that could change the pattern. It is just too difficult to say right now if temperature is a factor.
JP: Do you think it will be safe enough to go back and continue your work?
ANNE: Well, it’s something that you have to monitor on a daily basis. Besides all the guerilla conflicts in the DRC and in the larger region, in many places in the world there has been a lot of stigma towards foreigners. Rumors start that foreigners are the ones introducing the virus, and this has led to violent incidents. I have friends who have been living for 20 years in India and then suddenly they became targets in their village. This is something that’s being seen in many countries.
But of course there’s a history in the DRC because the latest Ebola outbreak had just ended there not long ago, and that already created a lot of distrust and paranoia, and now local people think foreigners are coming back bringing yet another virus. It triggers a lot of hatred and potential violence, so we have to monitor. I can’t say anything right now about the situation, even in two weeks.
JP: Let’s talk a little bit about one of your areas of expertise—zoonotic diseases. Obviously COVID-19 is one in a collection of zoonotic diseases. Could you explain for people who might not have a good understanding what zoonotic diseases are, how important they are, and how COVID-19 fits into that family.
ANNE: A zoonotic disease is a disease that is transmitted from animals to humans. That’s the classical definition. So you have a lot of these historical diseases like plague, and then you have less-known or emerging diseases such as Lassa fever, Ebola, monkeypox (a smallpox-like disease), and all those bat-borne diseases such as SARS and COVID-19.
JP: And all the influenzas, right?
ANNE: They are not as simple. They often combine different pieces of viruses from different animals, but, yes, of course, they are zoonotic diseases.
JP: A fairly high percentage of human diseases are zoonotic in origin, is that right?
ANNE: Yes. Around 70%, more or less.
JP: Which diseases have you specialized in and where has your research taken you?
ANNE: I’m clearly a specialist of plagues, such as the famous bubonic plague, and I’ve spent more than 10 years of my life trapping rodents around the world and studying their fleas and also studying the dynamics of transmission. But I’ve also studied how people relate to infectious diseases, how diseases are perceived in different communities, so I study diseases and I work with people who are suffering from those diseases. I study how humans and animals interact and the way human behavior affects disease transmission.
I started to work on monkeypox, which is a smallpox-like disease, also a zoonotic disease, but we don’t know which animal is the reservoir yet. It mostly hits the Congo. It’s endemic to Africa but is now (re)emerging in several west african countries. Most of my research has been trying to identify the reservoir of the disease, trying to understand which animals are the carriers and what the relationship of humans to these animals might be: Do they eat them? Do they live close by? Do humans come in contact with them because they encroached a forested environment where these animals live or because they modified the land to grow crops? Those kinds of questions have always been central in my research.
JP: In a way your research combines the scientific lab work and tracking with anthropological or ethnographic work because you’re embedded in the cultures and you’re trying to understand their cultural, personal, and psychological relationship to the diseases as well. Your work is holistic in that sense.
ANNE: It’s interdisciplinary. I’m a scientist but maybe I’m not a traditional scientist in a way, in that I’m not pushing to publish a lot of high-level papers, which might be something that people check on your CV. I’ve always been a field scientist living with the local people, which gives me a very different viewpoint than the researchers who stay in labs and offices – which is part of the work and we need that – but I’ve always realized how important it was to be immersed in the local reality to really understand the way people think and look at diseases.
For example, for diseases, we always picture them as horrible things that attack us, that we have to defeat. We rarely look at the whole human/environment relationship which, if we dealt with it in a positive way, might be a more important path to overall health. That’s the concept of “One Health” that has been emerging in the last 20 years, since the first episode of SARS around 2000, when it became clear there was a need to have a different view to try to bring different disciplines together.
JP: Can you talk about the “One Health” perspective, this idea that to understand disease, one has to understand human relationships to ecosystems and with animals? That approach combines human and veterinary medicine, conservation, and ecology, right?
ANNE: Exactly. It’s an attempt to work toward health for humans, animals and the environment holistically because you cannot disconnect these things. It is sometimes difficult to implement because it might seem very theoretical to people. We scientists have to do a better job to explain more clearly how a one health approach can be implemented.
We are learning more every day about how everything is interconnected, and there is a lot of research and discussion about how to better integrate our scientific, medical, social and conservation efforts because all these separate sectors are working on the same problem but are usually not coordinating. We could get more results with less money spent if we brought them together with coordinated strategies.
JP: In an ideal society in which people took the concept of one health as a guiding principle, would you be sending in teams of people and developing local resources so that people could be studying the ecology while they’re treating diseases, while they’re helping economic development? Would it be something like that, a multi-faceted approach? We’re far away from that, but is that the kind of thing you could envision?
ANNE: That is the kind of model we are working towards. There are projects that have been trying to do that, encouraging people from different disciplines to work together while demonstrating and explaining the benefits of working in interdisciplinary teams.
I can give you a very good example: when you have an outbreak, an epidemic, nearly all the efforts and funds go towards saving human lives, which is understandable, but it’s just dealing with the consequences. Comparatively very few people or resources are devoted to working on the cause, which is the zoonotic source (and the ecological disturbance that led to the transmission). So we are devoting far more energy to consequences than to causes, and there is often a long delay between the time medical teams come in to treat people and the time when biologists and people working on the environmental factors are called in to track down the source. That makes it very hard to understand how and why an epidemic started.
Those of us who work in this field are arguing that we need to get access to the epidemic centers at the same time as the medical teams to give us a better chance of analyzing the source of an outbreak. That would be ideal, but it’s rarely the case now.
JP: Let’s back up for a minute and talk a little bit about previous histories of zoonotic diseases and of epidemics, because obviously human history has been characterized by many episodes of epidemics. Some of them are very famous like the Black Death and others people know less about, such as Justinian’s plague that actually wiped out even more of Europe’s population. More recently we’ve had outbreaks of SARS and Ebola, and people talk a lot about the 1918 episode, which was the last big one that impacted the industrialized world after World War I. What do you see as some of the episodes in previous zoonotic pandemics that might have lessons to teach us about what’s happening now with the COVID-19?
ANNE: Of course, with the Justinian plague and other epidemics until the scientific revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was too early in history for people to know about microorganisms and to know that rats and fleas were the carriers and vectors. But the way people reacted is not as different as we might imagine. The fear of an invisible threat with an invisible enemy is hard for humans to digest and react to intelligently.
One big difference was that there was no social media in these past pandemics, so there was not the same amount of information and disinformation at such speed. People were more fatalistic; they were just waiting for death to come to their households or – if they were well off – to flee far away. They didn’t really know what was happening. They couldn’t explain it. There was no treatment. But they did sometimes seek to blame other groups, so reactions are not all that different today: fears are surging in people’s minds, because it’s an invisible enemy and everybody’s trying to find someone to blame. Many cannot accept the explanation that it just happened because of bats or a virus jumping from an animal to a human. It’s difficult for the human brain to take in, and nowadays we are frustrated when we can’t simply get an immediate answer from a Google search to find an explanation for everything.
JP: We’re in an age where there’s much more information than there would have been, as you said, 100 years ago. There’s an irony there that people are maybe more anxious, but at the same time there’s access to more information. It’s an ironic paradox.
ANNE: I can really talk about that because, given my job, I receive messages about the pandemic constantly. People bombard me with texts, emails and papers and opinions of self-proclaimed gurus on the Internet who have found “the solution,” and I have to navigate through all this and look at the scientific evidence. But the scientific understanding of this epidemic is evolving every day, so it’s not easy, and too much information actually makes it more difficult to deal with and to do your job as a scientist. Doubts come into your mind, and it’s good to have doubts, but it doesn’t help when you have so much information, a lot of it very unreliable, to have to sift through. I am currently working on writing and updating a living paper with scientific facts that we are calling the COVIPENDIUM. I am largely responsible for the animal side of it, and risk of back spillover from humans to animals and back in countries where the virus is circulating.
JP: I’d like to focus on the role of ecological disruption in zoonotic diseases. A common premise suggests that the growing human population along with increasing human incursions into habitats we didn’t normally spend as much time in creates more opportunity for disease transmission, like in the wet markets in Asia. What role does that ecological disruption play and what do you think could be ameliorated to try prevent or reduce these situations?
ANNE: Again, bringing back the one health concept, the fact is that everything is interconnected. If you disrupt one part of the system, you might have unexpected consequences or collateral damage that you didn’t predict. If you have a forest, and you cut that forest and transform that land into crops, what do you do with all the connections between the plants, the trees and the animals living there? Some of that you can see, and some you don’t see, because of course we have all the hidden, microscopic soil interactions and the unassessed consequences on the “micro-biodiversity” once the macro-biodiversity has been evicted. What are the consequences of all those changes?
Especially in forests, where you have a big patch of forest and you start to encroach the edges, then you increase the chances that species will appear in those edges that have never been in contact with each other, and you increase the probability of contact between species that used to be separated. I’m not speaking only about humans. It can be rodents that normally live in your house or in crop fields, and because you bring them closer to rodents that live in the forest, they might actually exchange pathogens or parasites. Those encroachments actually change the interaction between species and might trigger what we call a jump in species and for pathogens to emerge in a new host that might be suitable for that virus, because for a virus, a host is a habitat. Right? We tend to see it as a horrible enemy of ours, but a virus is just looking for a new habitat to breed and to reproduce and expand.
JP: What about the bushmeat trade in Africa? Everyone is talking now about the wet markets in Southeast Asia, because of the probability that that’s how this began, but are some of the zoonotic diseases in Africa transmitted through the bushmeat trade?
ANNE: It’s, again, a difficult question, but yes, the people most at risk of introducing a zoonotic disease from deep in the forest are probably hunters or people logging who have been in contact with species humans were previously not usually in contact with. But the other way around is also true. If you have disturbed so much habitat that you have only a few remaining trees in an area on your farm, then bats that used to roost deep in the forest will only find those roosts in your plot, and they will come there, and if they are carrying disease, they can introduce that disease to your farm. The transmission is not always straightforward.
There is a lot of bushmeat harvesting and, because the animals have been so overharvested and exploited, they are mostly smoked when they reach many cities in Africa. Now we can see there is a trend for these wild species like monkeys or even pangolins, for that matter, to reach the urban markets smoked, because due to deforestation and overhunting the poachers have to hunt them further and further out and travel long distances to bring them to market. So they smoke them in the bush and there is less risk of transmission, but there are some instances, even in New York, in which illegal bushmeat was found in the luggage of travelers from Africa at the airport, and some herpes viruses and simian foamy virus were found in the meat. Whether or not this was infectious, we don’t know, because DNA or RNA is not a proof of infection, but still, this definitely should raise alarm bells. However bats live everywhere and are nearly always sold fresh at such markets, so the best option there is to raise awareness regarding risks and how to avoid becoming infected (e.g. through outreach campaigns such as the Living Safely with Bats publication published in English and Mandarin).
JP: What do you think are some of the strategies that the human species should employ to try to prevent or better manage these types of outbreaks? Do you think further outbreaks are inevitable, and do you want to venture a guess as to which of the candidates of diseases might be the next one? I realize that’s just speculation, but what do you think would be good strategies that we can adopt that are achievable that might help prevent such situations or at least mitigate them?
ANNE: There are a lot of people doing research, asking those sorts of questions right now. There are lots of papers coming out advocating less competitive, more collaborative scientific approaches to addressing these crises. Science is often competitive because people want to be recognized, to publish important papers, etc., so sometimes it’s actually hindering collaboration, but there is a real call now for sharing information much more openly. If we share what we have already done in our labs, what we have learned in the field about potential pandemic diseases, (especially in terms of DNA/RNA sequences, proteins), that will allow everybody to actually assess what is already out there that we know of, and what people have been working on, and not to waste time and effort, so more progress can be made more quickly.
We are already well prepared in some ways. There is a repository of all known DNA sequences (Genbank hosted by NCBI-NIH), a big library that gathers all the known sequences of living beings that is already accessible and public. For the current outbreak, people are using it to track the evolution of the SARS-COV-2 as sequences become available (see the interactive site here). Yet as regards the research being done on particularly dangerous diseases, clearly not everything is published. One reason not to publish such material is that badly intentioned people, such as terrorists or rogue governments, might use that information to make bio-weapons (more here).
In terms of preparedness, warnings were there for this outbreak. There were scientists we worked with who had been studying and warning about the risks of bat-transmitted viruses in Wuhan five years ago, but it just wasn’t taken seriously enough. The attitude seemed to be: it can’t happen to us.
JP: It reminds me a little bit of nuclear power, because nuclear power is the kind of thing that, every rare once in a while, with a Chernobyl or Fukushima, there’ll be an accident, and the consequences of that accident are absolutely devastating. In the case of both of those we’re still seeing dire repercussions today, but because it happens infrequently, then everyone forgets about it and they don’t worry about it until the next one comes. It almost seems, in a very different sphere of human activity, that this is the same thing: because we haven’t had an outbreak as big since 1918 that was really this global, no one was ready even though it was inevitable that something like it would happen.
JP: So a lot of the people who were at the leading edge, the forefront of exactly the kind of research that is desperately needed in this kind of situation, those budgets have been seriously cut or zeroed out in the U.S. by the Trump administration. Cutting the funding of an organization doing such cutting-edge work on the sources of pandemics as EcoHealth Alliance has long done at a time like this seems nothing short of insane to me.
ANNE: It’s true that scientific grants are finite. You get a grant for five years, you renew it, and sometimes it doesn’t get renewed, but cutting funding for EcoHealth Alliance makes no sense. As I mentioned, my colleagues had been publishing about coronaviruses already seven years ago, saying that some coronaviruses closely related to SARS were reproducing in China in bats, and more recently that some people in China were testing positive for coronaviruses. All the ingredients were there to show there was a danger. It was all published and vulgarized in scientific magazines years ago. It was there for all to see, but maybe our species has to hit the wall a number of times to learn the lesson.
In terms of nuclear threats, I think again even though some of us perceive it as a global threat because we have one atmosphere, so one health, most people saw each incident as a local event. People in other countries were not directly hit by the problem. It remains something far away from you and you don’t relate to it. As long as it doesn’t hit you very close, the human brain is like that. It’s necessary protection on one level: you can’t be worried about everything happening in the world, but clearly, we tend to overlook and ignore those threats because they’re happening far away. When it hits you right in the face, then you start understanding the definition of an epidemic. That’s what I’ve been saying since the beginning – now people finally understand what it means to be quarantined, to be restricted in your movement and basic freedoms. We will have a lot of lessons to learn from this crisis, for sure.
JP: Well this one certainly has been hitting everyone enough that if there’s ever going to be a lesson learned about “one health” and global interconnections, this is one that should finally do it. If this doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will.
What do you think are just a few of the main strategies that should be implemented? What would your recommendations be? You talked about trying to coordinate the research and to use a one-health approach, but are there any other things you think should be implemented that would be helpful, besides obviously more funding for the research, more coordination?
ANNE: I think what is often missing – and we have been seeing it even in the projects we’ve been doing – is effective communication. We need to be better at communicating what the real risks are likely to be in a way people can understand. During the crisis there are so many different messages and so much noise that people are unable to understand what’s happening. We need to get society’s major communication channels diffusing the same accurate information, so contradictory messages don’t completely confuse the public. But obviously, politics can get in the way, and we’ve seen a lot of erroneous ideas and information in this epidemic that have made the situation much worse. Communication is key in dealing with epidemics. It’s not only about the science, studying the risk factors and how it emerged, but being able to communicate what we know already and what the best policies and practices are.
JP: Do you worry that eventually if and when we develop a vaccine that we might again go into forgetfulness? I know the 1918 epidemic was pretty rapidly forgotten; it wasn’t even taught about in history classes in schools when I was young. Do you think there’s a risk that they’ll just think now we have the vaccine, so we can forget about this and it will disappear from public discourse?
ANNE: That’s definitely a risk. If we fail to learn our lessons, society, except for the experts, will forget again. We won’t prepare, and then the next one will come along (and it will come along). If we develop a vaccine for this virus, my boss always reminds us that there are probably somewhere around 1.7 million other viruses out there, and you cannot develop a vaccine for every single one that will emerge as a threat. Of course the ideal situation would be to have a vaccine that protects against a whole family of viruses. In this case it would be a pan-coronavirus vaccine, so it could immunize us from all the members of the Coronavirus family. That would be ideal, but it doesn’t exist, and it might not be possible.
JP: Do you feel that there’s been any advancement in terms of getting a concept like one health or ecological medicine, an ecosystemic view of health, in the medical community? Has that penetrated very much? I get the impression you don’t hear a lot from the medical community about this concept. I know at Bioneers we have pushed the idea of ecological medicine for decades, and some people get it, but it hasn’t penetrated very deeply into the medical establishment as far as I can tell.
ANNE: Maybe “establishment” is the right word in terms of human medicine. Human medicine has long been narrowly focused on the health of humans. It has inherited, just like the rest of society, this anthropocentric view that we humans are the best, most noble creatures on Earth, the only ones who really matter, so it has been difficult to work with many doctors, to get them to see that people’s health is linked to the health of animals and of ecosystems, and that’s why we have to work together to prevent habitat and species loss rather than only focusing on trying to save human lives to the exclusion of the larger context. We need to find a way to reframe the issue so they can understand it better, but they are not trained to think about ecology.
Still, there has been progress. In some countries a “one health” approach is getting well accepted, and wherever a one-health approach has been adopted, it’s been beneficial. However, worldwide there is virtually near to zero budgeting for epidemiological surveillance of wildlife, which is key to the “one health” approach. Clearly it is something that will take time to integrate. But the medical establishment isn’t the only problem. Often the conservation/environmental sector doesn’t know how to integrate human health issues into its language and programs, so those organizations need to evolve in their understanding and develop better strategies to factor in questions of health into their work as well.
JP: I think we can end it there. Thank you so much, Anne, for being on the frontlines, doing such critically important work. I hope that you and your colleagues can get more funding and will be listened to in advance rather than after the epidemics begin in the future. And thank you so much for doing this interview. Good luck with the rest of your stay there along the White Nile, and say hi to all the elephants for us.
Doug Fine is an investigative journalist and pioneering voice in cannabis/hemp and regenerative farming. He’s an award-winning culture and climate correspondent for NPR, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. He is the author of Hemp Bound, Too High to Fail, and Farewell, My Subaru. The following excerpt is from Doug Fine’s new book American Hemp Farmer: Adventures and Misadventures in the Cannabis Trade and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.
By
Doug Fine
Six years ago, a bear
fleeing a wildfire in our New Mexico back-yard killed nearly all of my family’s
goats in front of our eyes. It wasn’t the bear’s fault; he was a climate
refugee. It was June of 2013, and drought had weakened the ponderosa pines and
Douglas fir surrounding our remote Funky Butte Ranch. Beetles took advantage,
and all of southern New Mexico was a tinderbox. Ho hum, just another climate
event that until recently would have been called a “millennial” fire.
The blaze cut a
130,000-acre swath that year, poisoning the air before the monsoon finally
arrived about half a day before we would’ve had to evacuate. But it was too
late for the large juvenile black bear, who’d lost his home and his mind. He
didn’t even really eat most of the goats. We lost all but one of the animals
that provided our milk, yogurt, and ice cream.
Baby Taylor Swift survived, but Bette Midler, Stevie Nicks, and Natalie Merchant (who loved meditating with me in the morning) perished, as did the bear several weeks later, care of a Game & Fish marksman, upon going after a dozen of our neighbor’s sheep. Ever since, my sweetheart and I have had to keep a constant eye on our human and goat kids. We react like a frenzied SWAT team to any unusual noise up in the eponymous buttes above our small adobe ranch house. We’ve had our climate change Pearl Harbor—the event that shifted us into a single-minded new normal. If you haven’t had yours yet, you probably soon will.
This is the paramount
reason I’m an overworked employee of the hemp plant: The people I care about
most are one blaze away from joining the world’s 20 million climate refugees.
At least I get the pleasure of putting “goat sitter” under occupation on my tax
form.
There’s nothing like
wildfire-fleeing bears attacking your livestock before breakfast to hammer home
the fact that humanity is in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs. The
conflagration convinced me that I had to do something, personally, to work on
this climate change problem. After some research about carbon sequestration
through soil building, it became clear that planting as much hemp as possible
was the best way to actively mitigate climate change and help restore normal
rainfall cycles to our ecosystem.
At least the fire’s
timing was good. Hemp was de facto legalized for “research purposes” in 2014,
two months before the publication of my earlier book about hemp, Hemp Bound.
I’ve spent the five ensuing years not just covering the new industry but
joining it: developing genetics in Oregon and a farm-to-table product in
Vermont; consulting, filming, and speaking all over the world; working on
university research in Hawaii; and teaching a college course.
But planting hemp and making a living at it can be two different endeavors. My new book American Hemp Farmer blueprints possibilities for independent farmers like myself who’d like to do both, particularly on their own land. If a lot of things go right, an independent farmer (or a farmer cooperative) can make a viable living on a small number of acres. That ain’t exactly the way agriculture has been going for the past century. Just how many acres depends most of all on the part or parts of the cannabis plant you are cultivating (seed, flower, fiber, root). Another variable is whether you’re planning to create a value-added product. A third is if you’re going at it alone or in partnership with others.
Hemp markets are diverse enough that I’ve met farmers who
have developed a viable business plan for a 1-acre harvest at the same time
that there are independent farms in Oregon, Kentucky, Montana, and Colorado
cultivating in the 2,000-acre realm. American Hemp Farmer focuses on a
20-acre enterprise, from soil prep through cultivation and on to strategies for
marketing final products.
Though I still consider myself a hemp journeyman, I’ve
got a dozen crops under my belt, across varied soils, climates, and laws. So my
book explores the most illustrative ways that this plant has put me and others
through the wringer during each part of the season. It also follows the efforts
of several pioneer hemp-farming enterprises to bring the resulting
farm-to-table products to the world.
For those who don’t
want to make a living with hemp work but would like to support the farmers who
do or perhaps grow their own ancient superfood while sequestering some carbon,
the lessons from my ongoing immersion are the same. Plus, for backyard
gardeners and pros, working in a hemp field is the most fun you can have outside
the bedroom.
Even as I relate the
experiences of a half decade in hemp, my book also reflects life unfolding in
real time. That’s because when you’re strapped in for the roller-coaster ride
of a major industry’s first wild years, new realities arise almost daily on all
fronts. In the case of hemp, cultivation lessons, permitting and marketing
rules, and promising markets are all in constant flux. Perhaps most important,
hemp was just fully legalized for commercial purposes in the United States a
few hours before the 2018 winter solstice, the day I started working on this
project.
Thanks to a little
28-page provision tucked into the 807-page, $867 billion Agriculture
Improvement Act (2018 Farm Bill)—which became law while I was extracting our
newest Houdini of a goat kid, Julie Andrews, from the ranch’s winter cover
crop—hemp’s federal oversight has been transferred back from the purview of the
Justice Department to that of the Department of Agriculture (USDA). This is
where it belongs—hemp being just another farm product.
For three-quarters of
a century, cultivating hemp (today meaning nonpsychoactive varieties of
cannabis) had been functionally illegal in the United States. This started in
large part because of a bureaucratic budget shuffle. The guy who ran the
federal alcohol prohibition program during its final stages, Harry Anslinger,
needed a job for himself and existing staff, so he and some friends in the
yellower media set about inventing a problem with one of humanity’s
longest-utilized plants.
Under the 2018 Farm
Bill provision, our public servants at agencies like the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) will chime in on edible products. In fact, FDA honchos
were already issuing menacing memos about being the new sheriff in town, just
minutes after law enforcement agencies such as the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) had been freed to focus on the opioid epidemic and other
real problems.
Those administrative
shuffles mean that, in my book, we’ll have to spend a portion of our hemp year
off the field, learning how to deal with—and shape—all kinds of regulations:
farming regulations, nutritional-supplement regulations, hemp-testing rules.
Another way of putting this is that the entrepreneurs and activists who worked
for decades to bring about this momentous legalization—and who were justifiably
blowing up my phone with a barrage of emoji-laden “Victory!” notes on that
joyous day the 2018 Farm Bill passed—are about to have a “be careful what you
wish for” adjustment. But that’s okay, and to be expected. Collectively we
independent farmer-entrepreneurs (and the customer base that supports us) will
make sure the emerging industry rules work for our farm-to-table craft sector.
That way we can rebuild both soil and rural communities.
As I type here on the
ranch, 10 months after that legalization solstice, the unusually orange orb of
a near-full moon is rising outside my office window as though in
celebration—one more crop has come in. The long nightmare of cannabis
prohibition is over. Its three-generation duration is to our advantage: We can
shape this industry any way we like.
Fred Kirschenmann, a Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, is a persuasive advocate for soil health and agricultural resilience and a farmer of 1,800 certified-organic acres in North Dakota. Dr. Kirschenmann was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director
ARTY: A recent post on the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s website said the world risks a looming food crisis unless measures are taken fast to protect the most vulnerable, keep global food chains alive, and mitigate the pandemic’s impacts across the food system. Is the food system structured to be able to withstand crises like pandemics and climate change?
FRED: Ernest Schusky in 1989 wrote Culture and Agriculture: An Ecological Introduction to Traditional and Modern Farming Systems. Schusky, an anthropologist, asked the question: How have we humans fed ourselves ever since we’ve been on the planet? He points out that humans evolved roughly 200,000 years ago, and for the first 190,000 years, we were not food producers, we were food collectors, we were hunter/gatherers. For 190,000 years, we simply lived in our own bioregions and collected the food from wild plants and hunted animals in the region.
It wasn’t until about 10,000 years ago that we became food producers. He called that slash-and-burn agriculture because what we basically did was collect the seeds from plants that we had been eating, cut down the perennial grasses and trees and burned them, and then planted those seeds. We also started to domesticate the animals that we liked to eat. That’s how we then fed ourselves until the middle of the 1800s.
We started, what I would call, the whole industrialization of our culture by the middle of the 17thcentury. René Descartes said first that we had to become the masters and possessors of nature, and Frances Bacon said we had to bend nature to our will. That kind of relationship and approach to nature began to be incorporated into agriculture basically in 1840.
In 1828, Carl Sprengel came up with the concept of the law of the minimum. How do you get the maximum output for the minimum input? In 1840, Justus von Liebig applied that concept to agriculture in his book Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology. He was the one who first came up with the NPK [nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium] concept: by just putting those three elements into the soil you get the maximum yield and the maximum return. That was the beginning of our input-intensive agriculture.
Ernest Schusky points out that this input-intensive agriculture is going to be one of the shortest periods of how we do agriculture in the timeline of human history. The reason is because all of these inputs that we’re using are old calories and therefore they’re not renewable. At some point, we’ll use them up and then we can’t feed ourselves that way anymore. I would argue that we’re at that point now, where we’re reaching the end of the old caloric era. The best example of how that’s already happening is David Montgomery’s book Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life in which he featured eight farms who recognized that the input-intensive system caused them to lose money. So, they began to transition to a different kind of agriculture where they were using the natural resources of nature to produce their food.
ARTY: How do you define resilience in a food system?
Fred Kirschenmann
FRED: Resilience is a system’s self-renewing capacity. The interesting thing about Justus von Liebig’s book is that 23 years later he published a second book in which he said that he was wrong about emphasizing NPK for maximum return. In his second book, The Natural Laws of Husbandry, he said we have to look at the soil and the self-renewing capacity of soil.
Farmers are in the very early stages of beginning to recognize that they need to pay attention to the self-renewing capacity of soil, which is what regenerative agriculture at its best is really all about.
Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture [under Nixon and Ford], said that farmers had to get big or get out, and that they had to farm fence row to fence row. That became the mission of farmers, and to accomplish that they use those NPK inputs.
As the costs have continued to go up, farmers can’t do that anymore. Take phosphorous for example, only four countries still have rock phosphate, which is the source of phosphorus. In 1960, phosphorous was $60 a ton, now it’s $700 a ton. As they continue to deplete those resources, it’s not unimaginable that at some point in the next 10 years, phosphorus will become $2500 a ton. Economically, that won’t work anymore. We’ll then have to look at how to farm using self-renewing systems, and the soil is the foundation of that.
Farmers like Gabe Brown have demonstrated that managing the soil is good agricultural economics.
Most farmers now are spending almost $4 a bushel to raise corn. Gabe Brown, who is improving his soil’s self-renewing capacity, is raising corn for $1.41 a bushel.
ARTY: Can we move from the extractive industrial system to a biological self-renewing system before the existing system fails?
FRED: John Thackara, who wrote How to Thrive in the Next Economy, points out, based on his travels around the world, that a lot of farmers have already made this kind of transition, and it is mostly smaller farmers. He sees that as a kind of revolution that’s in the process of happening.
I would argue that in the United States we have a bigger problem because of the get-big-or-get-out concept. Farmers now in the United States are almost 60 years old on average, and that means a lot of the farmers are in their 70s or 80s, and they have all operated by this get-big-or-get-out concept. They’re still trying to make monocultures work for them economically. But gradually it doesn’t work.
If you look at farm organizations in Iowa, for example, the farmers who are part of that old system, that get-big-or-get-out concept, are part of the more traditional farm organizations like Farm Bureau, etc. But in the new organization, Practical Farmers of Iowa, farmers are mostly under age 50 and they are not interested in the get-big-or-get-out concept. They’re interested in how to put systems together that are self-renewing and self-regulating.
It’s going to be a long transition. How we make that transition of land ownership, so these younger farmers can get access to land, is definitely going to be one of the big challenges. I think there are going to have to be some government policies to help make that happen.
ARTY: How do you see that transition happening?
During the whole century-long industrialization process, we moved people off the farms into the cities because that’s where the jobs were. But now we’re reaching the point where it’s forcing us to rethink that. How we eat is going to be a part of that.
I know some people who’ve written about the ‘re-ruralification’ of America. As we move into this post-industrial period, the concentrations of people in cities working in factories is not going to be the way the economy functions. There are going to be more people moving out of the cities into more rural communities where they will begin to not only work together in terms of how they can have a productive life, but also how they will eat. I think we’ll begin to see more bioregional food systems and regional economies.
One of the resources I’ve found interesting is E.O. Wilson’s most recent book Half Earth. If we want to truly have a resilient society and a resilient culture and biology, then we have to recognize that wildness needs to be half of how the Earth is functioning. That’s another big transition.
If we want to use nature as the model of how we think about the future, we have to consider that whenever any species reaches a population which puts it out of the self-renewing capacity of its culture, nature doesn’t support it anymore. Humans are probably a part of that. This isn’t saying that we tell people you can only have one or two children. As we do know from many places on the planet, when you empower women, the population numbers go down considerably.
In the longer term as we think about the future, we need to think about what is an appropriate number of humans as a population as a part of a life on planet Earth. Then we can begin to consider having half of the Earth in wildness as E.O. Wilson suggests we need for long-term sustainability.
ARTY: Local food and urban agriculture are often offered as the answer to food security, but don’t we need non-local supply as well to provide a hedge against the disruption of a local food supply?
FRED: We need to transition from having only a very small percentage of the population producing all of the food. As we go through the transition of the ‘re-ruralification’ of America, then there will be more people involved in producing food in their own communities.
In terms of local ecologies, it’s not just the farmers, it’s people in a whole bioregion. They can’t continue to get inputs from outside in order to do what they want to accomplish. They have to use their own resources in their own bioregion and use them in a way that they get renewed in the process of using them. That’s the emerging culture that’s developing.
ARTY: Cities, counties, and states now are all prioritizing resilience planning, but food systems and food security seem to be overlooked.
FRED: If you look at it in terms of the long history, we’ve gone through various cultural changes. I would argue that we’re at a point now where we have to make a new cultural change, and that’s not going to happen in five years.
The most recent IPCC [Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change] report pointed out that we only have about 10 years to make major changes in terms of climate change or else climate change will become catastrophic.
It’s the millennial generation and the younger generation behind them who realize this is their future that’s at stake. They are very passionate and energized about making changes as quickly as possible, otherwise their future is going to be in jeopardy. It’s going to be important for all of us who are part of the older generation to begin to recognize that it’s our children and grandchildren who are at stake. Is that going to motivate us to make the kinds of radical changes that I’ve been proposing? We’ll have to see how it plays out, but I think there’s a possibility it can happen.
We know what we can do and what we need to do. It’s making the transition from the industrial economy, which we’ve shaped for basically 100 years, into the post-industrial economy. Of course, corporations and others have made huge investments in the industrial economy. They want to try to keep that going as long as possible, but they also need to come to an awareness that since we only have 10 years, they’ve got to become involved in the change game as well.
This article contains the content from the 5/07/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
We’re living in an era overwhelmed with disconnection, rage, and grief. Valarie Kaur, founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, has recognized these emotions as the foundation for institutional hate — nationalism, racism, and more — but also as the starting point to break a cycle of trauma.
But love and empathy should play an essential role in work outside of social movements, too. All people can find courage and resilience in love, no matter their background or industry, and this practice can help create a more equitable future for all.
This week, we take a look at the powerful role of love and empathy in overcoming the challenges of life.
Six Essential Aspects of Empathy – A Conversation with Karla McLaren
In this conversation between award-winning sociologist Karla McLaren, M. Ed and Bioneers Senior Producer Stephanie Welch, we learn about Karla’s work to teach us that there are various aspects of empathy and how valuable it is to learn the language of emotions.
New Podcast Episode — Laboring for Justice: See No Stranger
In a world that’s unraveling from climate disruption and gaping inequality, another climate crisis confronts us: the climate of hate and othering. In this new Bioneers podcast episode, award-winning scholar and educator Valarie Kaur says to overcome racism and nationalism, we must not succumb to rage and grief.
As someone who has spent much of her life challenging horrific injustices and intolerance, Kaur learned the lesson that historical nonviolent change-makers understood: Social movements must be grounded in an ethic of love. She founded the Revolutionary Love Project, and has emerged on the national stage as one of the most important voices of the American Sikh community.
See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur: Pre-Order Your Copy!
Bioneers invites you to mark your calendars for June 16, the upcoming release date of Valarie Kaur’s new book, See No Stranger: a Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. Show your love by pre-ordering a copy today.
Enjoy this inspiring passage below:
“You may say: It’s too much — all this grief, all this violence and injustice, it’s too hard. You are right: The mind can comprehend one death, but it cannot comprehend thousands, especially when one’s own community, nation, or ancestors played some part in causing the death. Mother Theresa once said, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’ And so, begin with one.
Can you choose one person to practice wondering about? Can you listen to the story they have to tell? If your fists tighten, or your heart beats fast, or if shame rises to your face, it’s ok. Breath through it. Trust that you can. The heart is a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it becomes.” — Valarie Kaur
Tribal Sovereignty at Risk: Alexis Bunten and Danielle Hill on the recent Mashpee Wampanoag Decision
The U.S. Government kneecapped the federally recognized Mashpee Wampanoag tribe by de-establishing their reservation trust land in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Listen in on this fascinating conversation between Alexis Bunten, co-director of Indigeneity for Bioneers, and Danielle Hill, Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen and co-founder of Wisconsin’s Singing Trees Farm Collective. They discuss how this decision connects to a broader legacy of tribal termination, how capitalism and racism figure into this tragic decision, and much more.
This Is Not a Rehearsal: Handling Grief, Empathy and Hope During the Pandemic
Self-quarantined and isolated in her apartment in Brooklyn, author Hala Alyan is more aware than ever of humanity’s interdependence—suddenly exposed as a raw, pulsing nerve. With all of us inescapably together as we move through this pandemic, how, she asks, can we make room for grief, empathy, and hope?
This story was originally posted on Emergence Magazine. Essay by Hala Alyan. Illustration by Michelle Urra.
For decades, Bioneers has been uplifting solutions and inspiring movements for a more just world. The COVID-19 pandemic has, practically instantaneously, dramatically changed the shape of our lives. While the virus itself is considered “novel,” its emergence, spread and the varied global response has unmasked systemic realities that are certainly less than “novel,” including issues that many in this community have been working on for decades.
Explore this Bioneers media collection dedicated to COVID-19, which features leaders in diverse fields, from medicine to conservation to climate justice and more.
Thanksgiving in the Cosmos: The Next Enlightenment | In this Bioneers audio special for Earth Day, we take an experiential journey into cosmology, consciousness and change. Featuring Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View; and Chief Oren Lyons, Native American leader from the Onondaga Nation.
Time to Rescue Main Street: How Congress Can Reboot the Real Economy | In this open letter to congress, Ellen Brown, founder and chair of the Public Banking Institute outlines four immediate actions that will prevent financial catastrophe in our communities and set them up for future fiscal health.
A Plea: Utopian Aspirations vs Avoiding Catastrophe (Opinion) | “If you’re in the midst of an argument with other passengers while driving directly toward a steep cliff, common sense would dictate that you should all agree to pause fighting temporarily to at least stop, or to turn the vehicle in another direction.” —J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer
Uplifting Youth: An Interview with Irene Juarez-O’Connell of FoodWhat | In this interview with Arty Mangan, Director of the Bioneers Youth Leadership and Education Program, we learn more about Irene Juarez O’Connell’s work as the Programs Manager for FoodWhat, a youth empowerment and food justice organization that was named the California nonprofit of the year in 2019.
This article contains the content from the 5/07/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
The following is a conversation between Bioneers Senior Producer Stephanie Welch and Karla McLaren, M.Ed., an award-winning author, researcher, and pioneer in the study of emotions, self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. McLaren is the author of The Art of Empathy (2013) and The Language of Emotions (2010). Her applied work, Dynamic Emotional Integration®, is taught online at EmpathyAcademy.org. Visit her website to learn more and to find tools, including a vocabulary of emotions and a quiz to see whether you are what she describes as an “empath”.
KARLA: Studying emotions and empathy wasn’t a choice for me. I was abused as a child. I was traumatized, and for a lot of kids who are traumatized, they turn up their ability to read people. Especially if it’s repeated trauma, which mine was. It’s basically a safety measure: read people to know who’s safe and determine when the next problem is going to happen. Then you get yourself ready as much as you can.
I ended up being a very, very, hyper kid – hypersensitive, hyper-angry, just a little whirlwind of a kid. I was just responding to what had happened to me. All my emotions got really revved up. I didn’t feel a little angry, I would feel enraged or sad. I would be in despair. I needed to figure things out or life was just going to keep spinning out of control for me.
So it started when I was young. I was aware of emotions, what we call “hyper-empathic”. I needed to learn how to identify what I was seeing and to sort of put boundaries around it, put it in an Excel spreadsheet, make it all make sense.
Thankfully, it has grown with me. Now when I’m angry, I can get a tiny bit angry. I don’t have to go all the way to rage. So it’s been my personal life’s practice. I was able to open it up and ask, would this work for anybody else? And it did.
Karla McLaren, photo by Michael Leras
STEPHANIE: How do you define the word “empathy”?
KARLA: In research for my book The Art of Empathy, I found that nobody can agree on the definition of the word. Mine is basically “Empathy is your capacity to engage with anything – with emotions, with other people, with animals, with ideas, with cooking, with art.” It’s your capacity to engage and be relational.
A lot of people think empathy is just listening. For me, it is primarily our capacity to read emotions, but it’s also about reading undercurrent, social space, relationships, the sense of place. So there are all kinds of nuanced things you’re picking up with your empathy, which is why a lot of people think empathy is a psychic skill – there’s so much that’s unsaid. Listening for tones, reading the situation. You need to know how that person smiles. You need to know what that person’s signals are. It’s a very full-bodied experience of the world.
STEPH: In your book, you wrote about “empathy deficits”, what is that?
KARLA: An empathy deficit would be either the incapacity or unwillingness to engage. But everybody is empathic in their own way. One of the first things I did with the book was find a way to include all of what I call the “exiles of empathy” – men and boys, autistic people, and people with conditions – I don’t call them disorders, I call them conditions – sociopathy, personality conditions. Because for many people who have sociopathy or personality differences, it was a response to their early life when perhaps empathy was used against them.
STEPHANIE: Can you give us an example of that?
KARLA: Let’s say someone was manipulated as a child into molestation, into a long-term relationship with someone who hurt them. So the person who was being abusive would make the child feel responsible, play up their pain and their need and their problems. That would be using the child’s empathy against him or her, and that child may grow up and think, you know what, people aren’t really worth it; they’re just not worth it.
There’s a lot of decision-making in early childhood – there’s a sort of switch that may or may not turn on for people, or they may actually decide that empathy and engagement with people and that kind of intimacy is too much. So they may turn their empathy towards something else.
So when people say, “This person isn’t empathic”, usually it means “They won’t do what I say”. Well, where is that person’s empathy, where are they engaged? Often it’s with animals or art or science, or philosophy or something. There’s always some place that people are engaged, just maybe not with people.
People are sometimes a giant handful, I support the lack of engagement. [LAUGHS]. But my work is sort of teaching people about empathy as a process that you can learn, and that you have choices about. So if a person has way too much empathy and they pick up everything in the room and they can’t manage themselves, the book would help them calm it down. Or if they can’t get people, they just don’t understand, they’re always sort of putting the foot wrong in their relationships, then the book offers some skills to try to bring that part of empathy up, if they want to.
You also need to know what the names of emotions are. A lot of research shows that the more words you have for emotions, the better you are at working with emotions. On my website, I have a free emotional vocabulary list. I thought, Let’s do it! Let’s make everybody better at emotions.
STEPHANIE: Yes, can you give us an example? Someone may say “I’m angry right now”, but perhaps that’s not the best word.
KARLA: Peevish. Cranky. Critical. Sarcastic. Enraged. Steamed. To have as many words for your emotions as you possibly can so that you can start to think, well, actually how am I? Detached, indifferent, hateful, vengeful, vindictive. You know? There are so many cool words.
It’s important to understand not just that you’re angry, but what is the level of anger that you’re feeling, because then you’ll know, Okay, this was a minor issue here. I’m just a little peeved, or no, I’m full of hatred and I want to set the world on fire. I would say, Okay, that’s a lot of anger right now. So understanding your emotions and how they arise.
When I was little, anger would go immediately to rage, so I had to learn how to work anger at a lower level of activation so that I could start noticing earlier in the arc of anger when I was feeling peevish, cranky, critical or whatever, so that I didn’t get to a place where the anger was so powerful to where I was kind of a weapon. Right? Not many people can deal with intense anger with a lot of grace, they just go off. So grabbing emotions when they’re at their softer, more subtle place is a great thing for everybody to do. Let’s catch sadness before it goes to suicide urge. How would that be?
STEPHANIE: You talk about six essential aspects of empathy, what are those?
KARLA: They are from research, and I had to go to a lot of different fields. What’s funny is that empathy researchers are fighting with each other. [LAUGHS] So I had to look at child development, psychology, social psychology, anthropology, conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology. I went everywhere to see who’s talking about empathy.
Emotion Contagion: I say empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill called “emotion contagion”, or to use a non-research based term, I would say “emotion awareness” – you’re aware that you’re feeling an emotion or that someone is feeling an emotion, or that there is an emotion expected of you. That’s the first step. If you aren’t aware of that, then empathy falls apart right there, because you can’t engage properly.
Empathic Accuracy: This means knowing for yourself and others what that emotion is, what the situation is, what the context is. Let’s say you pick up an emotion, but your empathic accuracy is off, so you’re not in the right emotion. Then empathy would end there as well.
Emotion regulation: This is something we learn before we’re 2 years old, so it’s not difficult. It’s your ability to regulate your own emotions and the emotions of others so that you just don’t go into the emotion with them. So someone’s crying and feeling anxious and stressed about being late, and you start crying and being anxious and stressed. Now you’ve got two people who are anxious and stressed and crying, and nobody is helping the person get where they need to go. So if you can’t regulate your emotions, then empathy would also stop there because you can’t actually do anything for the person.
Perspective taking: This is your capacity to understand, I am feeling this and you are feeling that, so if I want to support you, I need to focus on you and not go into the emotion with you at the same level you are, and just fall apart with you. I need to have regulated my emotions well enough to be able to take perspective and say, Okay, what do you need? Not “It’s all about me”.
Say people who give you a gift that would actually work better for them. They bring you this big wrapped package, and you’re like, Oh my word! What is it going to be this time? It goes in the present area of a closet so that you can re-gift it to someone else because you really don’t need it. So perspective taking is really important.
At each of these places you can spin off, you’re not in the correct emotion, you’re not paying attention, you haven’t taken perspective. So you’re not really able to be fully empathic.
Concern for Others: You actually have to care enough to do something. Have you ever been in a situation where you see someone, you read the emotion, you’re accurate about it, you regulate it in yourself, you think, That’s how that person feels. Don’t care! [LAUGHS] So that’s fine for you. So concern for others is the next step to the full six aspects blossoming of empathy.
Perceptive engagement: In the research, this sixth aspect is called consolation. So you’re walking down a street and across the street from you, a very well-dressed man with a briefcase trips on something on the sidewalk, and the first thing he does is whip his head around to make sure nobody saw him. The empath does not let him know you saw him. Right? You’re like, Look at that lovely bird, and you might keep him in your peripheral vision to make sure he hasn’t really been hurt. That’s why I call it perceptive engagement, because if you perceive truly what the needs of the other are, then your empathy’s going to look a lot different.
STEPHANIE: So sometimes doing nothing is the most empathic thing?
KARLA: Right, if someone is crying in public and they don’t want anyone to know, you don’t go over and say, What’s wrong? Here’s a tissue. Everything they’re doing is telling you, I am trying to disappear at this point. So I might make eye contact for a second, wink, and that’s it.
There’s so much about empathy that people think is a very active thing, that you have to perform empathy, and put on your rainbow empathy cape and tie it on. You see the man trip, and you run across the street, Sir! Sir! I saw you trip! And you’re so empathic and the man is just dying inside because you did the exact opposite thing he needed.
So empathy has a lot of nuance in it. Often if you’re good at it, it doesn’t look like you did anything, especially with children. They’re like, I can do it myself! And you know they can’t. So you just do little things to the side, invisible ways to help the child not hurt himself with whatever’s he’s doing so that they don’t know and nobody knows that you made it possible. We call it “stealth empathy”.
STEPHANIE: One thing that stood out to me as I was doing research about this topic was the feeling that we may have the least empathic president and legislative body, at least in my lifetime and my parents’ lifetime. What harm are we suffering as a society when you have leadership that’s exemplifying the very opposite of an empathic person or body?
KARLA: I’ve been doing a lot of work, a lot of stealth empathy with our president, and he has empathy with very specific things. He has it with money. Right? It’s not with people generally. He may have it with people in his family, or people who are close to him who don’t challenge him. I think he’s also very vulnerable to manipulation.
I look at 17 emotions, and I’m still not sure if he can regulate any of them, and that makes his life miserable and the people around him miserable, and it also makes our country miserable. We went from Obama, who’s one of the most emotionally regulated people I’ve ever seen in my life. I loved to watch him, his emotions, and watch what he said, because it was different. You may have seen Key & Peele [the comedy show], which had Luther, the “anger translator” for Obama, so I wasn’t the only one who saw this.
STEPHANIE: You talk about perceptions about empathy in terms of men and boys. There’s a resurgence of research seeking biological roots for differences between men and women, and even some people arguing that boys and girls should be separated in school because they learn differently. Do you agree that there is a dominant view that women are more naturally empathic and men have less of that capacity?
KARLA: That’s nonsense, but it is the dominant view. Men are brilliant artists and writers, and dancers, and choreographers, and actors, and painters. One of the most empathic things you can do is art or music, or drama, or fiction writing, because you are engaging emotionally with a thing. I would call actors empathy professionals because they engage in emotion contagion constantly, and they transmit emotion to us. If you saw an actor who couldn’t transmit emotion, they would be a hack. If you listen to a musician who couldn’t transmit emotion, you’d say it’s got no duende, nothing going on.
We talk babies out of their emotions. There’s a study where researchers put a baby in pink and when people see the baby, they say, What a sweet little delicate darling sweet bunny baby. Then they put the same baby in blue, and people say, What a strong baby; you’re a strong baby. If the baby cries, they say, Don’t cry, be tough.
Empathy is so misunderstood because there’s the connection to women and to emotions, which we don’t like. Right? [LAUGHS] Well we do, but it’s the lesser of the two, of emotions versus rationality, even though that is not how the brain works. They’re not separate, or men vs. women. We do a lot of damage to men and boys by not teaching them how to work with their emotions, or even how to identify them properly.
STEPHANIE: I hear a lot of discussion about Autism and Asperger’s being perceived primarily as a male condition, but that’s not true, is it?
KARLA: Yes, in the research that I’ve looked at, even when they have the exact same symptoms as boys, girls are not diagnosed as autistic. There’s no test. It’s a group of clinicians getting together and deciding that the person has autism. Girls are generally left out of it, so they’re kind of the silent autistic community.
Simon Baron-Cohen believes autism is the extreme male brain. But that really throws men out the window and treats men as if their brains are unempathic and emotionally incompetent. So I fight with him on that, just in terms of protecting men from that kind of stereotyping. I don’t think this research really bears fruit when you see all the autistic women and girls. They’ve done studies asking do the girls or boys have more testosterone, are they really more male? No, it’s not bearing out. It was just something he floated. But it got taken up because it’s a part of our deep story, that men are one way and women are the other.
One of the ideas about autism is that the person doesn’t have empathy. I worked with a group of autistic teenagers who were going to college, and my job was to support them academically – get them their books, their tutors, learn what classes they wanted, create this whole world around them so that they could go to college and be successful. As a hyper-empathic person, I was really concerned about this job, because I had read everything that said that autistic people are not empathic. Right? They’re little professors. I thought that when I went there to be with them, I would drive them nuts because they were the opposite of me.
After watching them and being with them for about a week or two, I saw their movements and their regular repetitive movements, rocking, their struggle to figure out what humans were doing, and the hard work they were doing to read things. And I went Whoa. Because when I was little, this was me. I said I think these are hyper-empaths.
If we talk about the six aspects of empathy, the emotion contagion is extreme. The emotion regulation isn’t happening. So their experience of neurotypical emotional functioning is that noise-to-signal ratio is much more to the noise. It’s a constant onslaught of other people’s emotions, and not being able to regulate. And if you can’t regulate, then you can’t take perspective and you can’t do perceptive engagement. So it’s not a lack of empathy, it’s hyper-empathy.
So a lot of the work that is done with autistic kids is grabbing their face, forcing them to make eye contact. It treats the child as if the problem is that he or she doesn’t understand human social behavior, and has to be trained. That is abusive if you look at the child as a hyper-empath who needs not to be touched, who needs not to make eye contact if that’s too much.
It took me a while, but I finally did research in the autism community, and things are changing, but we still have the idea that these kids are not empathic when they’re actually hyper-empathic.
I’m seeing that when parents say, “Okay, this is who you are, this is how noises affect you, this is how you like to do eye contact, this is what soothes you, you need to take two hot baths a day, this is who you are”, the kids just flourish, grow up and find their way in the world. Their basic bodily movements and the way that they like to use their eyes weren’t continually being changed and manipulated. But the ones who said, “You can’t have two hot baths a day because normal kids don’t do that; and just get used to the noise and make eye contact with me” and did a lot to enforce neurotypical social behaviors, the child had more of a struggle.
There are many autistic adults running around performing neurotypical, or “normal”, but they don’t know how they feel. They don’t know what’s important to them. So I understand the reason for a lot of this early training, but it is very injurious to a sensitive, unusually hyper-empathic person.
STEPHANIE: It seems there is a real need for people to understand empathy more deeply than we do societally. People talk about our political situation and how they’re experiencing hostility or aggression or racism or sexism, these kinds of things. What do you think the value is for people learning more about and understanding their emotions, and to understand what empathy is on a deep level?
KARLA: I look at emotions as parts of your intelligence, not as the opposite of intelligence. I think it is good when people can understand their emotions and understand what their emotions are trying to tell them, to look at the people who engage hatred for them, because hatred is a powerfully damaging, dangerous emotion.
Carl Jung found a way to work with it, which is called “shadow work”. People are like, I want to achieve enlightenment. I was like, Go look at what you hate and do your shadow work. Boom! You’re enlightened.
We can look at what we hate or what we are being asked to hate. In my liberal Facebook feed, there are a couple of conservatives, but I’m asked to hate Trump every single day. I’m asked to hate him and dehumanize him. So my empathic work right now is, No, I’m not going to. I’m just going to try to just understand him. When I meet someone in my neighborhood who is a Trump supporter, I don’t spill my guts and try to talk down to them. “Well, if you were just intelligent, then you would have voted for Hillary.” Like, I need you to change. Instead I try to understand them.
In order to be a good empathic activist or person in the world, I have to make sure I have my own emotional house in order, and that I know how to regulate my emotions so that I can be present for others. If I’m getting engaged with the hatred and dehumanization of Trump or anybody within the conservative sphere, I’m weaponizing myself and I’m not going to be able to engage with anybody who comes with a conservative idea as a human being. I’m always going to be condescending to them, even if I say things that are nice. I’m going to be less effective politically. Most of my hyper-political friends are saying what you have to do to be effective is to hate. And I was like: How’s that working for you?
STEPHANIE: So you encourage them to do their own shadow work?
KARLA: Yes, because people say, No! He’s not in my shadow, he’s just evil. People are burning out with extreme spikes of intense emotion, and as we all know, it’s hard to manage those. So down regulate. Find the humanity and speak to that. I think that’s going to be the giant movement of our time.
Over the past week, as I surf the waves of emotion and attempt to discern among the suddenly increasing amount of email coming my way, in an effort to both delight myself and share the best of what I see with those I love, I’ve collected various clips, articles and essays I’ve found most enlivening, and supportive of context, meaning-making and narrative. I write to share these with you.
Please feel free to peruse them — or not — as your time and heart/mind permits. No expectation. I offer them in case they may be helpful, with no expectation or pressure, as I know how much this time is asking of so many of us. They are offered with love.
These are the most creative and life-affirming artful videos, featuring some of thebest of human ingenuity, each <6 mins long:
This is a selection of essays and interviews from my recent favorite synthesizer and meaning-maker, Bonnitta Roy:
First, her two essays (part one and part 2) on A Tale of Two Systems, to help remind us of larger context, followed by two video interviews of her, one nearly an hour, and the other 28 mins, for those who like to learn by watching/listening, rather than reading…the beginning of Interview 1 includes some about her Taoist perspective and farming life, which I found fascinating.
This reminds me of many of the ideas, projects and visions I’ve learned through Bioneers — freeing our imaginations to consider significantly new systems — like in Japan, where there’s an online barter system to exchange caring for elders in different places, or the idea of transforming post offices into a community banking system, or malls into community gardens, or many other economic innovations that could shift us meaningfully toward birthing something far closer to a democracy.
