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.
Ellen Brown, J.D.
The same Congress that has insisted we cannot afford a universal basic income, Medicare for All, and other critically needed programs has suddenly discovered it has unlimited funds to ‘do whatever it takes’ to rescue corporations and the stock market. The individuals, local governments, and local businesses suffering the devastating consequences of the shutdown have largely been left out of recent bills. But relief for all is possible, without imposing additional taxes or driving up consumer prices.
In an open letter to Congress, the Public Banking Institute outlines four immediate actions legislators can take to rescue Main Street’s economy and build the publicly-owned, trustworthy financial infrastructure that will keep it healthy long term.
#1: Put real money into the real economy with monthly payments ofat least $1,200 to all US adults, for as long as needed, funded through the Federal Reserve. The same money tree that Congress and the Fed just used to fund a $5 trillion bailout for Wall Street and Corporate America can be used to deliver monthly dividends to the public. The Fed has now agreed to buy Treasury debt via quantitative easing to whatever extent is needed. Why these monthly payments will not result in hyperinflation is explained here.
#2: Put money in people’s hands NOW by direct deposit into either Post Office Savings Accounts or Treasury Direct accounts. People cannot wait months for relief checks. Rent is due now. One in four U.S. households has no access to a bank account, and many are without homes or permanent addresses. PBI Advisory Board member Prof. Mehrsa Baradaran proposes restoring free postal savings bank accounts, available at local post offices, for direct deposit of relief checks. PBI Advisory Board member Prof. Bob Hockett proposes creating new Treasury dollar bills, equivalent to Fed dollar bills, which the Treasury can issue digitally and deposit into Treasury Direct, the Treasury’s existing universal account system, allowing citizens and legal residents to quickly open accounts. These two innovative options allow for immediate payment even to the unbanked, using existing facilities.
#3: Get money to the states through publicly-owned banks. States are facing a tsunami of emergency expenses, collapsing tax revenues, and massive bills for unemployment compensation, pushing state budgets heavily into the red. The Fed is now lending to banks at 0.25%. States can access these 0% loans by setting up their own public banks using their emergency powers, following the stellar example of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. Capitalization (the money needed to start a bank) can be acquired either from funds allocated by Congress to states under the CARES Act or from existing revolving loan funds or rainy day funds. This capital can then be leveraged into 10 times that sum in loans. Public banks could provide the low-cost credit communities urgently need during this pandemic. Like Germany’s public bank KfW, they could grant 1% loans vs. the complex SBA programs charging 3.75%. By eliminating profiteering middlemen, banks can become public utilities that can lend during a crisis to stimulate local economies while generating profits for local governments.
#4: Cancel debts — without impairing the rights of creditors. As PBI Advisory Board member Prof. Michael Hudson observes, “Debts that can’t be paid won’t be.” Moratoria to delay due dates will not be enough. “If the U.S. government can finance $4.5 trillion in quantitative easing, it can absorb the cost of foregoing student and other debt,” writes Hudson. “And for private lenders, only bad loans need be wiped out.” He writes that it is fair to write down debts to the realistic ability of borrowers to pay, without requiring borrowers to forfeit property or degrade their living standards. For the rest, and particularly for debts the government oversees, it could immediately initiate a debt jubilee by moving the bundled securitized debt into a Treasury-owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) like the ones set up in the CARES Act to bail out businesses and financial institutions. The Treasury’s SPVs are a form of shadow bank (explained here), which are capitalized by the taxpayers and should be available to them.
The time to act is now. New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer has said his city will face mass homelessness without a comprehensive plan. Turning the central bank into a true public utility and establishing a stabilizing network of public banks via emergency actions can not only reboot an economy in free-fall but create the trustworthy financial infrastructure necessary for long-term local and national prosperity.
In a world that’s unraveling from climate disruption and gaping inequality, another climate crisis confronts us: the climate of hate and othering. 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 as one of the most important voices of the American Sikh community, and a highly influential faith leader on the national stage.
Featuring
Valarie Kaur, born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which seeks to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social action.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Monica Lopez and Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Producer: Teo Grossman
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
Music
Our theme music is co-written by the Baka Forest People of Cameroon and Baka Beyond, from the album East to West. Find out more at globalmusicexchange.org.
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: Valerie Kaur was born and raised in Clovis, California, where her family had settled as farmers in 1913 and practiced Sikhism, a religion that originated in India.
When a family friend – a Sikh-American father – was murdered after 9/11, her life changed forever. She began documenting hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans, which resulted in her first film, the award-winning Divided We Fall.
She went on to become a lawyer, filmmaker, innovator and activist in the face of a society increasingly divided by “othering” – by the scapegoating and dehumanizing of marginalized people and communities.
She became a highly influential faith leader in the Sikh community and on the national stage. She emerged as an award-winning scholar and educator, gaining multiple degrees in international relations, media, and religious studies from schools including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
In the course of her journey, she experienced a revelation that led herto found the Revolutionary Love Project – a journey she shares in her soulful book titled “See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love”. In the lineage of the visionary nonviolent change-makers across history, she came to understand that movements must be grounded in an ethic of love.
This is “Laboring for Justice: See No Stranger.” I’m Neil Harvey. I’ll be your host. Welcome to The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
VALARIE KAUR: So my story begins in the aftermath of September 11th, in the wake of the horror of those attacks, when hate violence erupted on city streets across the country. Members of my community were killed. The first person killed in a hate crime after 9/11 was Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh father who was killed in front of his store in Mesa, Arizona by a man who called himself a patriot. He was a family friend I called “Uncle”. And his murder—I mean, I was going to be an academic. His murder made me an activist.
HOST: After 9/11, Valarie Kaur joined with her community of Sikh and Muslim Americans to respond to the climate of fear and bigotry that branded them as the enemy. She soon realized that her community’s struggle was part of something much larger. She began working with other brown and black communities across the United States, sometimes while the blood was still wet on the ground.
She believed that each film and each new campaign would make the nation safer for the next generation. But then she saw that a dark wind was blowing harder and harder across the increasingly dis-United States.
Valarie Kaur spoke at a Bioneers conference.
VK: Fast forward to present day…White nationalists declare this presidency as their great awakening. Executive orders and policies rain down on us every day so that it becomes difficult to breathe. And hate crimes have skyrocketed once again.
But now, now I am a mother. Just a few weeks ago, my son was coming home with my father and my mother from a summer concert. My son was sitting on my father’s shoulders, on top of the world, and they were going to grab a ride on a ferry—across the marina to come back home. I mean, he was… Ahh, his childhood has been magical. Until they heard it. “Go back to the country you came from.” My father was hard of hearing, so my 4-year-old son had to tell my father what the mean lady said. When they came home, my parents were shaken. “Didn’t anyone say anything?” I asked them. And they said, “No. There were a crowd of people who watched, who saw, but no one said anything.” Just like last time when my father was walking on a beach with a baby carrier, with my son at his side, and someone called him a suicide bomber. There were no bystanders who spoke up then.
And I’ve had to reckon with the fact that there will be moments on the street or in the schoolyard when I will not be able to protect my son. For Sikh and Muslim Americans today are still seen as terrorists. Just as black people in American today are still seen as criminal. Just as brown people are still seen as illegal. Just as indigenous people are still seen as savage. Just as trans trans and queer people are still seen as immoral. Just as Jews are still seen as controlling. Just as women and girls are still seen as property. When they fail to see our bodies as some mother’s child, it becomes easier to ban us, to detain us, to incarcerate us, to concentrate us, to separate us from our families, to sacrifice us for the illusion of security.
HOST: But make no mistake – she says – it’s a long hard road. It’s a labor – a labor of love.
VK: I realize that I am being inaugurated into the pain that black and brown mothers have long known on this soil, that we cannot protect our children from white supremacist violence, we can only make them resilient enough to face it. And to insist until our dying breath that there be no more bystanders. [APPLAUSE]
I realized that the last time my body has been in this much pain was when I was on the birthing table. Some women are nodding. [LAUGHTER] You see, in birthing labor there is a stage that is the most painful stage. It is the final stage in labor. The body expands to 10 centimeters, the contractions come so fast there is barely time to breathe, it feels like dying. It is called transition. [LAUGHTER] I would not have given it this name. [LAUGHTER] During my transition, I remember the first time the midwife said that she could see the baby’s head, but all I could feel was a ring of fire. And I turned to my mother and I said, “I can’t!” My mother had her hand on my forehead. She was whispering in my ear, “You are brave. You are brave.”
You see, the stage called transition, it feels like dying, but it is the stage that precedes the birth of new life. And so birthing as a metaphor has begun to fill my imagination.
And it has filled my mind and formed a question in me, a question that I have been asking every single day the last two years: What if? What if the darkness in our country right now, in the world right now, is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? [APPLAUSE] What if all of our ancestors who pushed through the fire before us, who survived genocide and colonization, slavery and sexual assault, what if they are standing behind us now, whispering in our ear, “You are brave. You are brave.” What if this is our time of great transition? [APPLAUSE]
My sisters, my brothers, my family, I believe that we are convening right here, right now on this soil at a time when our nation and our world are in transition, for as we speak, in this very moment, we are seeing the rise of far rightwing supremacist movements in this nation and around the world, propping up demagogues, mainstreaming nativism, undermining democracies and politicizing the very notion of truth.
And we know that America right now is in the midst of a massive demographic transition, that within 25 years the number of people of color will exceed the number of white people for the first time since colonization. We are at a crossroads. [APPLAUSE] Will we—Will we birth a nation that has never been? A nation that is multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-gendered, multicultural, a nation where power is shared and we strive to protect the dignity of every person.
Or will we continue to descend into a kind of civil war? A power struggle with those who want to return America to a past where a certain class of white people hold cultural, economic, and political dominion.
HOST: Valarie Kaur says the stakes of the choice we make at this crossroads could not be higher. In a world that’s unraveling from climate disruption and gaping inequality – and a global pandemic – another climate crisis confronts us: the climate of hate and othering. She believes her original premise is truer than ever: United we stand, divided we fall.
VK: The stakes become global when we think of climate change. Right? So those same supremacist ideologies that justified colonization, the conquest and rape of black and brown people around the globe, those same supremacist ideologies have given rise to industries that accumulate wealth by pillaging the Earth, poisoning the waters and darkening the skies. Global temperatures are climbing. The seas are rising. The storms are coming. The fires are raging. And our current leadership is doing nothing to stop it. Humanity itself is in transition. Will we marshal the vision and the skill and the solidarity to solve this problem together?
Is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb? I hear your cheers and I feel your energy, and I want to say yes. I want to say yes. We will endure. But I don’t know. I don’t know.
This brings me to you. You are the community leaders. You are the peace builders. You are the faith leaders. You are the indigenous healers. I believe that you are the midwives in this time of great transition, tasked with birthing a new future for all of us.
And so I’ve come to ask you how will you show up? How will you let bravery lead you? And how will you show up with love? Because love, the greatest social reformers in history have built and sustained entire non-violent movements to change the world that were rooted, that were grounded in love, love as a wellspring for courage, not love as a rush of feeling, but love as sweet labor, fierce and demanding and imperfect and life-giving, love as a choice that we make over and over again.
I believe the only way we will endure, the only way we will stay pushing into the fire, stay pushing into the fire is through love. Labor requires pain and love. That’s why I believe revolutionary love is the call of our times. [APPLAUSE]
HOST: For Valarie Kaur, revolutionary love is the call of our times, but she knows all too well that it’s easier said than done. As communities and societies, how can we harness our grief and rage and practice love?
When we return, Valarie Kaur shares her own difficult but necessary descent through the underworld of her own trauma in her quest to reach the light – to birth a labor of love.
This is “Laboring for Justice: See No Stranger.” I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
As Mohandas Gandhi observed, “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Valarie Kaur began to see that anger is a candle that burns from both ends. Yet she also knew she couldn’t simply suppress or deny these deeply ancient, instinctual drives of the human psyche.
Could she turn the wound into the gift?
VK: Joy is the gift of love. Grief, grief is the price of love. Anger, anger is the force that protects that which is loved.
Growing up in a Punjabi household, I learned how to suppress my rage. Right? To be good, to be loving meant not to be angry, not to show rage. My mother was very sad for many years, but it was just rage turned inward. And oftentimes it would come out in a flash of rage over things that don’t matter. We know we have rage about things that matter, if we have flashes of a rage over things that don’t matter, like spilt milk, the door left open. And so my mother, watching her on her journey, actually gave me permission to start to explore and unleash the rage inside of me. Because when rage is turned inward, you know that it wreaks havoc on the body.
And so I experience a moment of—just an encounter, like many women of sexual assault when I was a kid, and for many, many years, I had a lot of dysfunctions in my body, in my pelvic floor, and I didn’t know how to solve them. I went to every kind of doctor until I met a mentor who worked with bodies, trauma lodged in the body as much as in the mind, and he helped me imagine that moment when the assault took place, becoming a tiger. I was like, okay, I can imagine becoming a tiger. Sure. It’s like the most ferocious animal I can imagine. It’s like, okay now, it’s about to happen, the boundary’s about to be trespassed, what do you want to do? And I said, “Growl.” He’s like, “Fine. Growl.” [LAUGHTER] So I started growling. He’s like, “Okay, what else do you want to do?” I was like, “I want to roar!” “Okay, roar. What else do you want to do?” “I want to show my fangs.” “Okay, show your fangs. “ “What else do you want to do?” “I want to tear into him!” “Okay, tear into him.” And before I knew it, in my mind, I’m like ripping into this boy’s body, like just tearing, shredding the clothes, and it’s like, “No, but I’ve reached the skin.” “Go deeper.” I am just letting myself experience violent even murderous rage inside of myself. And I was resisting. “No, keep going, let it run its course.” And afterwards, I was like, “Tommy what happened.” He’s like, “Well, where is your assailant?” And I’m the tiger, and I’m sniffing the floor, and there are just bloody clothes on the ground, and I look up, and there he is. But he’s not this monster who has power over me. He’s a frail, wounded kid whose parents were dysfunctional, whose father was an alcoholic who beat his mother. I mean, he himself was so wounded, but he didn’t know how to love. I could see his wound, only after going through my rage, letting it run its course. I could reclaim the fight impulse in my own body.
What Tommy did is he gave me a safe container for my rage- violent vicious rage. And once we have safe containers for our rage, then maybe what’s left over is the kind of outrage that allows us to wonder again about the people who hurt us, that allows us to ask ourselves: What are the cultures and institutions that authorize them to hurt me? Maybe that’s how I fight. I don’t try to tear apart my opponents or unseat bad actors from power, as if that’s enough. Maybe that’s how we fight.
HOST: Valarie Kaur transformed her rage into outrage. Her outrage guided her to deconstruct the culture and institutions that sanction othering, scapegoating, and dehumanization.
Her outrage led her on a quest for healing and reconciliation, and a set of practices to live by. Her journey resonated with the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
VK: Revolutionary love is the choice to enter into labor, for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves. The first practice – See no stranger. All the great wisdom traditions of the world carry a vision of oneness, the idea that we are interconnected and interdependent, that we can look upon the face of anyone and say as a spiritual declaration and a biological fact, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.”
Yet brain imaging studies tell us that the mind see the world in terms of us and them. In an instant who we see as one of us determines who we feel empathy and compassion for, who we stand up for in the streets and at the polls. Authoritarians win when the rest of us let them dehumanize entire groups of people. But we can change how we see. We can expand the circle of who we see as one of us. Love begins with a conscious act of wonder, and wonder can be practiced. Drawing close to another person’s stories, listening to their stories turns them into us. And so I ask you whose stories have we not yet heard? Whose stories we hear determine whose grief we will let into our hearts. Who have you not yet grieved with? Because who you grieve with, who you sit with and weep with determines who you organize with and who you will fight for.
HOST: The practice of wonder is the first step. Then, she found, truly hearing someone else’s story and letting their wounds into your heart opens the way to a second practice.
VK: Tend the wound.Now how do we fight even our opponents with love? It’s tempting to see our opponents as evil, but I have learned that there are no such things as monsters in this world, only human beings who are wounded, people whose insecurities or anxieties or greed or blindness cause them to hurt us. Our opponents – the terrorist, the fanatic, the demagogue in office – are people who don’t know what else to do with their insecurity but to hurt us, to pull the trigger, or cast the vote, or pass the policy aimed at us. But if some of us begin to listen to even their stories, we begin to hear beneath the slogans and sound bites. We begin to understand how to defeat the cultural norms and institutions that radicalize them. Loving our opponents is not just moral, it is pragmatic. It is strategic. It focuses us not just on removing bad actors, but birthing a new world for all of us.
So the first act in loving one’s opponents is to tend to our own wounds, to find safe containers to work through our own grief and rage so that our pain doesn’t turn into more violence directed outward or inward. Then in our healing, at some point, if and when we are ready, we may be ready to wonder about our opponents.
Now, I know this is hard. It took me 15 years to process my own grief and rage. When I was ready, I reached out to Balbir uncle’s murderer and listened to his story. It was painful, but I learned that forgiveness is not forgetting, forgiveness is freedom from hate. And white supremacists, they carry unresolved grief and rage themselves, radicalized by cultures and institutions that we together can change.
HOST: Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiveness is expanding our circle of concern to encompass Dr. King’s “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
VK: This brings me to the third practice: breathe and push. [LAUGHTER] Our social justice leaders – Gandhi, King, Mandela – they tell us a lot about how to love others and our opponents, but not so much about how to love ourselves. This is a feminist intervention. [CHEERS] For too long have women and women of color specifically been told to suppress our rage and grief in the name of love and forgiveness. No more. The movement can no longer happen on our backs or over our dead bodies. In all of our labors, the labor of raising a family, or making a movement, or birthing a new nation, we need people to help us breathe and push into the fires of our bodies and the fires in the world.
And so I ask you, How are you breathing right now? Who are you breathing with? Breathe with the earth and the sea and the sky. Breathe with music and movement and meditation every day. Breathe to summon the ancestors at our backs, for when we breathe we let joy in. These days, even on the darkest days, I come home and my son says, “Dance time, Mommy?” [LAUGHTER] I’m like, “Ohh…” We turn on the music, and I kind of sway like this, but pretty soon the music rises and my son says, “Pick me up, Mommy,” and I throw him in the air, and my little girl, now 11 months old, we twirl her up in the air and suddenly I’m smiling and suddenly I’m laughing, and suddenly joy is rushing through my body. When we breathe we let joy in. And joy, joy reminds us of everything that is good and beautiful and worth fighting for. How are you protecting your joy every day?
Love must be practiced in all three forms to be revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community. And so this is my invitation to you all. The Revolutionary Love Project has built a powerful, formidable community in the last few years, a coalition of artists and activists, educators and faith leaders committed to showing up in our lives and in our movements, in 2020 and beyond, with revolutionary love.
I ask you to join us. Are you in? [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] [APPLAUSE]
Here’s the truth: The labor for justice lasts a lifetime. There is no end to the labor. That’s what I’ve learned. But I’ve learned that if we labor in love – love for others, love for our opponents, and love for ourselves – then we will last. I want to last. Let us last.
For some day, we will be somebody’s ancestors. They will gather here in this room, and if we get this right, they will inherit not our fear but our bravery. [words from her language] Thank you. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
HOST: Valarie Kaur… Laboring for Justice: See No Stranger.
Humor me as I engage in a clumsy metaphor: If there are
several of you who have profound political differences arguing vociferously
about your competing worldviews, but you all happen to be in a vehicle that’s
heading directly toward a steep cliff, common sense would dictate that you
should all agree to stop your fighting temporarily to at least stop, or to turn
the vehicle in another direction. Once you’ve done that, then by all means resume
your passionate philosophical and socio-political struggles. And even if you
think the trajectory your entire society is on is the equivalent of a dive off
a cliff, there is a difference between a years-long, fairly slow roll, and an
immediate plunge. The immediate plunge eliminates any future hope of achieving
any of your ideals.
It is true that at their core all political tendencies are
informed by utopian visions of what an ideal society would look like.
Historically the classical left tends to be more obviously utopian, often
following in Rousseau’s footsteps, believing human beings are fundamentally
good but that perverse social structures and hierarchies poison their behavior.
In that tradition an ideal society is therefore one that seeks to unleash human
goodness and creativity by eliminating overly authoritarian constraints and
selfish, materialistic incentives.
But even philosophical pessimists on the traditional “old school” right who draw on such thinkers as Hobbes and Burke and believe that people, left to their own devices will lead lives that are “nasty, brutish and short” (Hobbes’ famous formulation), offer their vision of an optimally functioning society (a highly structured one that strictly controls and canalizes base human impulses with clear hierarchies and robust policing). In my view, it’s still a variant of utopianism because they offer it as the best model that can be achieved, given their pessimistic view of human nature.
So, all political worldviews are informed by their utopian
underpinnings, but once one engages in political struggles in incredibly
complex human societies, things get messier. In any broad political movement,
some people gravitate to more purist stances that hew to the core utopian
vision of their political tradition; others are attracted to more pragmatic
approaches they feel will yield more short term, tangible benefits. Those poles
and that core tension are inevitable in every political tendency. It can
engender healthy, productive debates and actions at times, and rip movements
asunder at others.
I’m not interested in taking one side or another in that eternal push and pull. The one point I want to make in this little spiel is that there are certain critical, pivotal moments in the trajectory of a nation — or in this case, of the whole species — during which the historical imperative demands that utopian aspirations be temporarily put aside to avoid collective disaster.
There were communists, centrists, right wing nationalists, and even royalists working together in the Resistance in France during WWII. Once the war ended, the political fights resumed with all their acrimony. In 2002, when the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Penunexpectedly made it to the second round of the French presidential election, an unparalleled unified response of people from across the political spectrum from Maoists to Catholic conservatives and almost everyone in between all flocked to the polls and gave Jacques Chirac 82% of the vote. Many of them held their noses and voted for a center-right candidate they had no resonance with because the alternative was catastrophically toxic. And this is the French who are infamous for their incessant political kvetching, frequent strikes and riots.
And does anyone outside of historians remember who ran against Mussolini in 1924? It would be hard to argue that having elected a potted plant or an insect would not have been a far more desirable outcome.
I would argue that we are in an even more consequential moment this electoral year. What happens here will have enormous global implications. Yes, climate change poses an existential threat to civilization and the resilience of the biosphere; yes, the extreme social inequities both within societies and between the industrialized world and the “global south” are infuriating and need to be fought. But if the last wobbly remnants of democracy, of the infrastructure for effective, rational governance, and of free media are swept away by authoritarian cliques and the total consolidation of oligarchic rule, then any hope to address those other issues will be eliminated for a very long time.
I understand that it is hard to get enthusiastic about geriatric, centrist candidates who aren’t authentic climate or social justice warriors, but I urge everyone, especially the young, to please become very passionate about avoiding disaster, so that we will have the opportunity to return to fighting for our utopian aspirations. Thelma and Louise may have been attractive, romantic characters, and I know that we may, pace Jim Morrison, “want the world, and want it now,” but if we collectively drive off that cliff in November, we may pass the fail-safe limit, and history, if there’s anyone left to write it down the line, will be very harsh in its judgment.
J.P. Harpignies is a long-time Brooklyn resident and has been working with Bioneers since 1990. He is the author of several books includingAnimal EncountersandPolitical Ecosystemsand served as the associate editor of Bioneers titles, Ecological MedicineandNature’s Operating Instructions. J.P was previously the director at the New York Open Center and founder of the Eco-Metropolis conference.
Irene Juarez O’Connell is the Programs Manager for FoodWhat, a youth empowerment and food justice organization that was named the California nonprofit of the year in 2019. Irene was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Director of the Bioneers Youth Leadership and Education Program.
Arty: How are you coping through these challenging times?
Irene: My job at FoodWhat keeps my creative juices flowing and helps me stay positive. When we got the official notice that schools would be closing, we came up with – in what felt like a blessed brainstorm – a social media campaign to take all of our programming that we would normally be doing with the youth on the farm and translated it to our social media on Instagram. The staff is filming videos of ourselves leading workshops. It’s really been a lot of fun because on Instagram you can go live, and people can come in and engage with you in real time. It’s kind of a bummer that we can’t be with the youth in person, but It’s pretty sweet that we can still connect with them.
Arty: What attracted you to work with youth?
Irene: I was working at the Resource Center for Nonviolence [in Santa Cruz], which I loved. It opened me up to so many movements and ideologies. I realized that, at age 22, I was the youngest person there and the only intern who was under 40. I was like, “Where are the young people? Where is the next generation who will be reading these books and sharing these kinds of conversations?”
So at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, I helped start a youth program called Project Regeneration. Every January for Martin Luther King weekend, we put on a big youth day in conjunction with the NAACP and other local organizations. That’s how I first came in contact with FoodWhat.
At the same time that I was working at the Resource Center, I was also working for Barrios Unidos as an outreach specialist in the high school. In the morning, we served breakfast and we provided food in the afternoon. During lunch, we were a space where youth could hang out and feel safe and feel their identity and culture reflected and affirmed. That was so important for me having gone to a high school with predominantly Latinos and Mexicanos, where being Latina was kind of looked down upon. There was a sense that it was inferior somehow. There was a lot of discrimination and white supremacy, frankly.
Having that space at Santa Cruz High opened me up to how incredible the young people in the community were. From that opportunity, I got a chance to work inside the juvenile hall with Barrios Unidos. Twice a week I led circles on culture and spirituality. I saw my role as offering hope to the young people inside, offering stories, art skills, activities and history lessons. I was really just someone to talk to who had a heart and was willing to listen. I realized that this is what I want to be doing. I feel grateful to be someone who young people tend to trust and want to open up to. I slowly saw that as a gift that not everyone had. I wanted to be able to do what I could to leverage power systems or create access points, but more than anything to just be present for young people particularly those who felt like they were alone or those who were feeling like the world had turned its back on them.
After three years in the juvenile hall, I found out about an opening at FoodWhat, and I thought, wow, what an amazing program. I get to do the same kind of outreach, but on a farm and with food. And hopefully work with young people before they get inside the juvenile hall, which is what we have been able to do. We have been able to work with the probation department to create diversions. We’re still just getting our relationship going, but they really love FoodWhat. They see the value in a young person participating in FoodWhat as opposed to sitting in a cell. To me that feels really amazing. FoodWhat has given me the perfect avenue to embrace that gift and share it.
Arty: That’s an impressive trajectory and resume of service. Tell me more about FoodWhat. What do you do? Why do you do it?
Irene: Our program is designed to work with juniors and seniors in high school. That tends to be a critical age for young people as they are transitioning out of high school and into either college, or community college, or the workforce. There are a lot of youth-serving programs in our county, however, there seems to be a gap across the board for young people ages 18-25. There’s not a lot of programming out there that directly serves that age group. We find that’s one of the most critical times in someone’s life when they’re beginning to make formative decisions about the trajectory of their lives. So, we work with that age range.
Our process is based in an empowerment setting because we want youth to choose to do our program; we don’t want it to be mandated. From the very beginning, we frame it as a choice.
We give presentations in schools to share what we’ll be doing in our spring program – one hour of cooking, one hour of farming and one hour of a workshop.
We emphasize to the teachers that the folks we want to make priority are the ones who are experiencing the most struggle. We don’t want the A+ students. We want the ones who are falling through the cracks, or who are struggling with attendance, or are in the foster system, or are on probation, or are in recovery, or experiencing any kind of barriers or challenges at home. There is a learning curve for some of the teachers. At first, many of them say, “Oh, that person’s never going to follow through,” or “You’re not going to want to deal with that person.” We have to pause them and say, “Wait, tell us more about that young person. We want to work with that person.”
FoodWhat creates a different paradigm from the classroom setting. Partly that has to do with the fact that the program is on the farm. We have two farm sites, one at the University of California, Santa Cruz on the CASFS Farm. Our other partner location is Live Earth Farm in Watsonville. Starting in the spring, about 75 students come once a week for three hours for 11 weeks. It’s a lot of young people, a lot of stories to remember, a lot of names, but it’s a lot of fun.
We also offer a robust eight-week summer program that is a paid job. We’re doing a lot of farming, we’re cooking with professional chefs from across the county, we’re doing workshops, we bring in partners, we’re doing field trips, and we participate in a youth summit.
About midway in the summer, the students have the opportunity to apply for fall jobs so they can continue on with adjusted hours, considering most of them are back in school. They can choose what aspects of the farm or what aspects of FoodWhat they want to focus on. We offer around 10 different jobs including catering and culinary. We also offer farm management for those who enjoyed being on the farm and want to learn more about agriculture. We have a flower business; we cultivate, harvest, arrange, and deliver bouquets for local businesses in town. And we offer an event-planning job. There’s a range to allow for the myriad of interests and the gifts that the youth have.
We also take them to Bioneers. They are always excited about an opportunity to go camping. For many of them it’s their first time camping. It’s a critical opportunity for us because at that time in October it feels like a turning point where the relationships between staff and the youth who attend really blossom and deepen in ways that don’t normally happen. For those of us who get to camp and cook and experience the world that is Bioneers together, it really helps to build a deeper relationship and trust with the young people.
In the winter, when the farm is under cover crop and kind of asleep for the season, we roll out our community educator’s program, which is an opportunity for young people to share our FoodWhat workshops with other youth groups, peers, and other high school students. Those workshops range from Trace Your Taco, where students talk about the conventional, industrial food system through the lens of a Taco Bell taco. Another workshop is called What You Think, What You Drink, where youth share how to read the labels of sugary drinks. Fast Food Jeopardy is about the fast food industry.
There’s a long trajectory throughout the year. It is a graduated leadership model. The farming and the food content is the vehicle for the space. Some people consider FoodWhat a job-training program, some people consider FoodWhat a farming program or a cooking program, but it’s really hard to pin down the one thing that FoodWhat is. What we like to say is that we’re a space to uplift the well-being of youth and community in our county. Food is just a way to get youth present and engaged, but more than anything, we want to create a space that youth feel safe in and affirmed in.
Arty: I went to a FoodWhat celebration dinner a few years ago. In the testimonials from the youth, the thing that seemed to be consistent throughout their stories was that FoodWhat had become family. In some cases, they had never before had a positive relationship with an adult.
Irene: Absolutely. It’s real. It’s very sweet to see youth build family within FoodWhat. We never say, “Okay guys, we’re your family now.” Because family holds so much weight and can be a very challenging thing for so many. Youth decide for themselves that they see FoodWhat in that way. It goes beyond any particular staff member. I think it really has to do with the memories and the experience they cultivate during their one-year cohort, their physicality experience on the land, and the physical space they can come back to. Anytime they want to come to the FoodWhat office, we all put down our work and focus on that person. That kind of space is something they continue to come back to, even years later.
We have an annual alumni gathering, and some people are coming back 10 years later, and they have kids and spouses. This space is so impactful that they want to bring your family here. It’s been really remarkable to witness and be part of.
Arty: Can you share a story of a youth who was challenged coming into the program and some years later has put their life together in a positive way?
Irene: Jo Jo is now 27 or 28 and has a daughter. She now works for the Farmers’ Market Association as their accountant. She’s also running the summer camp with Life Lab. It’s so amazing to see Jo, who when she was in the program was deep in struggle when she was 16 or 17. Now she’s totally blossomed into a young professional who’s running programs and as an accountant for the farmers’ market. We had a series of conversations with panels of youth sharing their experience. Her level of insight, reflection, self-awareness and maturity about her journey blew me away. She attributed the pivot point in her life to FoodWhat.
Arty: You mentioned Bioneers. Has Bioneers impacted you as an educator/mentor?
Irene: Huge impact. It taught me a lot. I feel there’s been so many life-learning moments at Bioneers. I am in awe of the expansiveness of the Bioneers network, the level of expertise that was present in the rooms, and the whole breadth of topics that were covered. It was really affirming for me because so many of the things that are talked about at Bioneers are things I care passionately about. Bioneers was very eye-opening; it was very motivating and inspiring. It helped me put language to things I couldn’t quite express.
It actually helped me reflect on how I personally show up in a space, things I’m personally drawn to learn, and how to create a supportive experience for the young people that I’m bringing. As much as I get out of it, my priority is to make sure the young people I’m with are feeling safe and that they’re feeling welcomed.
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.
Author Hala Alyan
Two years ago, I had an ectopic pregnancy. It was sudden and unexpected, and left me reeling. It happened during this time of year. The weather was slowly turning. The days suddenly getting longer. I sat in our new backyard and read and deep-breathed and cried. I scooted my chair to chase the sun across the lawn. I watched spring outside my living room window, the women in their sundresses and sandals. Their joy felt a lifetime away from my bitterness. I waited. I waited to see if my body would erupt.
This is what these days remind me of. These days of waiting and foreboding. I sit and wait. But there’s one difference—this time, the whole city’s doing it with me.
Even this is hopelessly human. To connect with any pain, I have to turn self-referential. To understand a global pandemic, I have to make it about me.
One of the things I like least about myself is how insular I am in grief. I give way pretty easily to self-pity and defeatism, like an overbaked cake crumbling under the slightest fork. During the ectopic I felt hard-boiled in rage—I felt worlds removed from everyone I knew. I watched the world in a daze. Those women in sundresses weren’t just a different species; they were a different timeline, future or past, clearly not inhabiting the same days as me. How, then, to make sense of something happening to everyone? There are no women in sundresses. The eruption we are all dreading is already rupturing, and no border—neither physical nor intrapsychic—can separate me from others right now.
Never in my life have I been so brutally aware of interdependence. I imagine I’m not alone in this. All day I think about my body in relation to other bodies. Everything is a calculation of intersection nowadays. The delivery box I touch has been touched by the mail carrier. By a worker at the warehouse. By anybody they’ve touched. Every subway pole is marked by the ghosts of hundreds, thousands, of hands. The stranger whose hand my husband shook at a wedding in Providence weeks ago has intersected with the dog walker of my coworker’s neighbor. We are all suddenly sleeper cells. Nobody is impervious. Nobody can buy their way out of it. (Though certainly those without resources will suffer more.) We are all in an elaborate, complicated ballet with everyone else, and the only thing more astonishing than this new reality is that it isn’t new at all. Only our awareness of it is.
The days blur together in self-quarantine. One evening, my husband and I curl on the couch and discuss the situation. What good might come from this, we ask. It is the question of the lucky, I know. The question of privilege. Of those with jobs easily made remote and healthcare and savings accounts. Even being able to philosophize about bright sides implies the luxury to catch one’s breath. Implies some pockets of calm and quiet and reflection. I’m not an ER doctor. Or a mother of five in a refugee camp. We live in a two-family house. We have our leather couch. Our dog. Our backyard, which catches and releases the sun. We are merely lucky and grateful and afraid.
I’m not an optimist by nature. I’m inclined to distrust and catastrophize. I have a body that tends towards adrenalized, a mind that tends towards obsessive, and when I have too much free time I spiral. It’s strange that, in this time, I’d be looking for silver linings. I’m about to finish my nineteeth day of self-quarantine. My parents flew in from Beirut hours before the travel ban was enacted. I have still not seen them. Every day, for at least a few hours, I feel a pressure akin to brick mount in my chest. I’ve noticed it eases during meditation, which indicates anxiety. I live in Brooklyn, in the current epicenter of the outbreak, and every single morning I flinch when I look at the news. The air is sharp with anticipation and dread. We are here—we are told by the governor, by scientists—for a good, long while. We are to remain indoors with our tap water and canned goods. With our unease and traumas. Our sorrows. Our selves.
Still, I ask that question. What good?
I’ve turned to meditation in earnest this year, a year that’s been marked by chaos, my Jesus year, a year that was already difficult and now feels absurd. In meditation I’ve thought often about abundance, how it exists in times of absence or suffering or resistance, how we can sit with dialectical truths about loss and rebirth at the same time. What good. This kind of experience has never occurred in my lifetime, but history has been around longer than thirty-three years. And the best indicator of the future, as the psychology adage goes, is the past. To look for hope, we must look to our history, to other moments when the world hurt together, to the fertility of those times.
The history of quarantine began during the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century, a practice to protect coastal cities like Venice. Ships remained anchored for forty days before the sailors entered the cities. The world was already entwined by then: trade and expeditions and colonization. In the intervening centuries, the world has only gotten smaller. What took years to travel from one shore to another now takes a six-hour transatlantic flight. The truth is humans have been spreading sickness to one another since the beginning of time. This only makes the xenophobia and nationalism in the political rhetoric around this recent outbreak more frustrating. Historically, colonizers brought the sickness, a quieter, more furtive form of invasion, decimating Indigenous communities.
Think of those sailors, I tell my husband. I tell myself late at night. I imagine their coughing and loneliness, the slapping of water around them. Look at your bookshelves, I tell myself. Your stupid phone. Your pantry.
What I want is to talk to those sailors. To those alive during the Spanish Flu epidemic, which lasted two years and resurged after each summer. But also, I want to talk to my great-grandparents, to the generations who lived through genocide and immigration. Never before have I been more acutely aware of the role of elders, a population that capitalism—and, by extension, our culture—tends to overlook and undervalue. Nowhere does our history exist more vibrantly than in those who lived it. I want to line up my ancestors. I want to know how they survived. This part of the world knows shelter. It has been sanitized for several generations; even its wars are fought on others’ soil. I think of the millions—past and present—pressed in basements with flashlights and stale water, waiting for bombs; my own mother in Damascus after the Kuwait invasion, awaiting my father’s arrival for weeks. The time passed, she tells me. The time always passes. The secret to endurance, it seems, is to get good at waiting.
I am neither historian nor forecaster, and I can barely fathom what the implications of this crisis will be—I close my eyes and distantly envision healthcare reform, better international communication; perhaps this is wishful thinking. But I know every universal calamity, from world wars to crashed markets, has its legacy. Technological advances. Globalized economic markets.
This pandemic seems to have at its core a lesson of kinship. What do we owe each other? What do we owe strangers on the other side of the world? Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world, Nadeem Aslam notes. Like reluctant marriage partners, we’re in this—together—for better or worse. It’s been easy to forget that. It likely won’t be as easy after this.
Empathy is a powerful potion, not for the faint of heart. Empathy requires opening yourself to suffering. I wonder what muscles of empathy will be built through this experience—towards those who struggle with their health, those who are imprisoned, those who get detained fleeing calamity. Those living under occupation. (Even now, even in lockdown, even in the heart of the outbreak, such comparisons feel repugnant; we are empathizing with their status quo, and for many of us, from comfortable houses with stocked refrigerators and uninterrupted electricity. To consider these places are also experiencing what we are—Gaza has approximately twenty available ventilators for two million people—is incomprehensible even to the most open and empathic of hearts.) But the thread has been pulled ever so slightly, and for many of us, our togetherness is suddenly exposed, a raw, pulsing nerve.
As a therapist, a friend, a person, I’ve noticed a trend. The pandemic isn’t necessarily creating fears for people. It’s instead serving as a flashlight—illuminating people’s unsteadiest, half-finished parts. It’s showing us where our work remains. People talk about their ex-boyfriends, their long-resolved eating disorders, their childhood secrets. I don’t know why this is coming up for me right now, I keep hearing. But it makes sense. Much of the world is on lockdown. There’s nowhere to go, which means there are fewer places to hide from ourselves. From our fears, our sorrows, our obsessions. Modern life is one, long, built-in distraction, to say nothing of movement. Earlier generations spent their lives mostly at home, in their village, with their tribe. But modernity—and modern money—is marked by mobility: eating out in restaurants, going to bars, vacationing in foreign cities. Those distractions have abruptly ceased. As Blaise Pascal declared centuries ago, All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, and we’re all, like it or not, being furnished an opportunity to remedy that.
I like my distractions as much as the next person. I’m afraid of too much “empty” time, of being alone for long stretches, losing my routine and habits; this feels like suddenly being thrust into an exposure experiment without any scaffolding. This is not a drill. This is not a rehearsal. My life, along with billions of others’, has been interrupted. But this is the best-case scenario. As my mother says, God willing, health. God willing, safety. So if God wills those things, then I’m curious to see: What will it be like to be robbed of all that scaffolding? In the end, will it be less theft than education?
There is something about the pandemic that reminds me of diaspora. The way everything becomes makeshift—makeshift traditions, makeshift remembrance. There are suddenly no physical markers of familiarity, and, just as in the diasporic experience, in the absence of the familiar, you create ritual wherever you are. The world has shuffled indoors, and amid all this isolation, community is springing up everywhere. From the university to the Islamic Center, from the writing groups to the social clubs, the experience of going remote has distilled—underscored—the value of these connections. All over the world, the arts endure—late night hosts doing monologues from their living rooms, master cellists livestreamed in front of empty auditoriums. With the physical mosque no longer an option, people haven’t stopped praying. They’ve just learned to pray from afar. They’ve learned to create a different kind of mosque.
Some things we learn only by remove—if you want to know how much something matters to you, take it away. If you want to know the role community plays (or doesn’t) in your life, take it away. See what you miss. I’m on week three of self-quarantine, and I miss the subway. I miss my family, even though we’re within miles of each other. I miss the soft, warm fold of bodies on game nights, how we’d pile on the couch together, blissfully unaware of our closeness, taking it for granted, my brother’s girlfriend braiding my hair. I miss Washington Square Park, the L train platform benches, the easy knocking into one another on crowded streets. I wonder if social norms of closeness will change after this. I wonder what it will take to casually fold our bodies into another again.
Listen. The virus is not a blessing. It is not a personal awakening. It is a virus. It is indifferent to epiphanies. A pandemic that is wreaking havoc on systems that—at least in the United States—should have done far, far better. Reflecting on how the pandemic is impacting the ways we love and connect and cope—this too is hopelessly human, a way of trying to impose control, through perspective, if nothing else. I know the truth is that we are limply powerless in the face of what is happening. These are real people who are dying. Every siren that pierces the air in Brooklyn is attached to a person, an address, a family, a whole library, as the saying goes, that will be burned to a crisp if they die. I know this. I don’t want to know this, but I do. And beneath this public, shared grief are millions, billions, of private griefs, too. Cancelled weddings. Missed deathbeds. Griefs that have nothing to do with the virus and happen to be coinciding with it. Miscarriages. Divorces. All those dreams—new job, a transcontinental move, trying to conceive—deferred. The work of being human never stops.
Still…there’s something starkly moving about a global hurt. We are so driven and primed to think of ourselves as nations and individuals; we are fed so much messaging about borders. But what happens when we are devastatingly, unequivocally, reminded of our alikeness? Tell me there isn’t something achingly exquisite about scientists—from every corner of the globe—frantically working for one united goal. Tell me this hasn’t reminded you of how honorable and ancient the role of healer is. Yes, I want nothing to do with this pain sometimes—there are moments I feel myself closing off. Taking stock of my life. My safety. That of those I love. I want to wall myself off. In those moments, I would marry any border in the world. But it doesn’t work. The scarier thing, the truer thing, is not to look away. To be with the suffering. Regardless of where they are in the world, countless people are wondering if the tightness in their chest is worry or virus, if their loved ones will be okay, if they are the only ones feeling this lonely, this overwhelmed, this unsettled. That kind of kinship can’t be feigned.
I hear about a friend afraid of giving birth in this time. I hear about another finding out she’s pregnant. Another can’t stop cleaning her front door. Another nurses a broken heart in quarantine. All through Brooklyn, the ambulances come and go like birds with no migration pattern. Every morning, I hold my phone to my ear and listen to the voices of others. Their joys aren’t exactly mine; nor are their griefs. And yet—even with all this distance, it doesn’t feel so distant. There are no other timelines. I feel stapled to this moment, to the present. I can almost taste the whiskey my friend pours in Beirut. I can step into the dread of giving birth in an emptied room, the mewl of an infant’s first cry rippling through the air. These are the things I want; these are the things I fear. And I can feel them in other people. I see my mother’s face on video. I hear the sirens. The airplanes. People leaving. People returning. It doesn’t feel that far away anymore.
The US Government kneecapped the federally recognized Mashpee Wampanoag tribe by de-establishing their reservation trust land in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This decision is especially poignant because 2020 marks the 400 year anniversary of the arrival of the pilgrims, who settled on top of an empty Wampanoag village, abandoned because up to 90% of the tribe had died of a similar epidemic introduced by European traders that ravaged the community from 1616-1620.
Despite this devastating loss, the Wampanoag still helped the Pilgrims to survive, and they still remain on their ancestral homelands, now threatened by the US Department of the Interior.
Listen in on a fascinating conversation with Alexis Bunten, Co-Director of Indigeneity for Bioneers and Danielle Hill, co-founder of Wisconsin’s Singing Trees Farm Collective and Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen. In this 35 minute conversation, Alexis and Danielle discuss how this decision connects to a broader legacy of tribal termination, how capitalism and racism figure into this tragic decision, and much more.
In this interview, science writer David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, speaks about the root causes underlying the current pandemic and explores the ways in which viruses are embedded in the same systems of ecology and evolutionary biology that we are. As we disrupt wild ecosystems and shake these viruses free, COVID-19 offers an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with the natural world.
Emergence Magazine: David, thank you very much for joining us this morning. The coronavirus is what is known as a zoonotic virus. Could you start off by explaining what a zoonotic virus is and how it ended up infecting humans in a market in Wuhan, China?
David Quammen: Well, a zoonosis is an animal infection that’s transmissible to humans. That can be a virus or a bacterium or any other sort of infectious bug, but a zoonotic virus is one that comes out of a nonhuman animal and somehow passes into humans. If it takes hold and can replicate and cause disease and transmit, then we call that a zoonotic disease. Sixty to seventy percent of our infectious diseases fall into that category, some of the old plagues and some new plagues like this one.
How does it happen? Well, all animals, including wild animals, carry their own, in some cases, unique viruses, a great diversity of viruses. We don’t have any idea really how many viruses are out there. Animals, plants, fungi, all those cellular creatures, carry viruses. Viruses are not cellular. They’re just little capsules containing genetic information that can replicate themselves in the cells of other creatures.
When a virus passes from a nonhuman animal into a human, we call that moment “spillover.” Hence the title of my book.
The animal from which it comes, in which the virus lives sort of inconspicuously, we call that the reservoir host or the natural host. I usually call it the reservoir host. So you’ve got a reservoir host in China, probably a horseshoe bat. It’s carrying a coronavirus that has never been seen in humans before.
That bat is captured, probably, live and put in a cage and taken to a wet market in the city of Wuhan, China. I think now we know that was the Huanan Wholesale Seafood market, but it was selling much more than seafood. I’ve been in some of these markets and I’ve seen that they sell wild animals. They sell domestic animals. They sell seafood. There are live animals in cages, sometimes stacked on one another, all kinds of wild birds, as well as domestic poultry. There are reptiles, turtles, sometimes snakes, bats, pangolins, civets, pigs, all in a great mixing bowl.
What seems to have happened in Wuhan—we don’t know for sure—but what seems to have happened is that a virus from a horseshoe bat spilled over into probably some other kind of an animal, got amplified in that animal, and then that animal was sold, was butchered, somehow infected maybe a few dozen people, and those people became the primary contact cases. And then, from them, it found itself with the ability to spread from one human to another and spread out into the community of Wuhan.
This was all going on in December of last year and on New Year’s Eve the alarm bells rang at the WHO, the CDC, and elsewhere for some friends that I know in the scientific world, and the word was that there was a new disease, an infectious disease, spreading in Wuhan, China, suspected to be a virus. The virus was not yet known. The origin was not yet known, but it could be a big one. That was New Year’s Eve, and we have seen it unfold from there.
EM: As far as I understand, the virus was actually detected in a cave in Yunnan, a thousand miles from Wuhan, back in 2017, and you’ve written about this. If it was detected back in 2017, why wasn’t something done about it?
DQ: Well, because lots of viruses are detected in other creatures. Some of them look dangerous. Some of them look innocent. There are scientists who do that. There are not many; there are not enough. There’s not enough funding for them to do it as much as would be good. I’ve recently talked to a scientist who is organizing a global initiative called the Global Virome Project to try and do more of that.
But when scientists spot a new virus and there’s reason to suspect that it could be dangerous, then they publish that, and they alert people to that. And that happened. I think the virus was detected maybe in 2015. In 2017, the scientists publish a paper saying, here’s a new coronavirus. We found it in horseshoe bats in a cave in Yunnan. It could be dangerous. It’s not identical to the original SARS coronavirus from 2003. It’s distinct from that, but it has characteristics, judging from its genome and judging from the fact that it is a coronavirus—it could be dangerous.
So the scientists did their job. They published that paper. What happens then? Well, essentially nothing happens then. What should happen? Well, there should be a system for people responding to that threat. There should be closures of the wild animal markets in China. There should be preparedness around the world. There should be a readiness to take the genome of that virus and turn it into test kits quickly, produced en masse, available around the world. That’s all expensive stuff for something that might happen and might not happen and because it’s expensive and it might not happen, policy makers, leaders, legislators are reluctant to pay for it.
EM: Right, and once a virus leaves its reservoir host, as far as I can understand, it can mutate and mutate quickly. Could you talk a bit about this?
DQ: That’s right. And that’s especially true of coronaviruses and several other groups of viruses. Some viruses evolve much more quickly than others. Some people don’t even know: a virus, is it alive or not? Well, that’s a philosophical and semantic discussion, but does it evolve? Yes, it replicates itself. It carries either DNA or RNA and replicates itself using the same genetic code that the rest of the world uses. So, in that sense, it’s closely connected to life, even if it’s not alive. Viruses evolve, but some viruses evolve much more quickly than others, and the reason for that is differences in their genomes.
Some viruses carry a genome composed of the DNA double-helix molecule that everybody knows about, which replicates itself rather accurately and stably. And when it makes a mistake with the letters of the genetic code while replicating itself, there is a proofreading mechanism so it can correct itself. So double-strand DNA, double-helix viruses tend not to evolve very quickly.
There are several other different kinds, one of which is a single-stranded RNA virus. RNA is another genetic molecule, closely related to DNA, but a little bit different. And a single strand of it, when it replicates itself, tends to make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes are not corrected. So as a virus replicates, it is producing imperfect copies of itself. It’s producing a population of variant offspring that differ from one another. So you’ve got a population of variant individual virus particles inside a host, and they’re competing with one another for resources, for the opportunity to replicate further.
What do you have when you have a population of variant individuals competing with one another with differential success of reproduction? That’s called evolution by natural selection. Darwin 101. And that’s what leads to fast adaptation of coronaviruses, because they are single-stranded RNA viruses.
EM: Zoonotic viruses can often live within their animal hosts without causing any harm, but it is when they spill over into an amplifier host, an animal amplifier host and/or humans, that they manifest as diseases. Why is this?
DQ: Well, it’s because the virus gets a new opportunity in a new environment, and if it’s lucky, and if it’s adaptable, it finds that it can replicate abundantly in that new environment, that new host, and if it evolves further it can even transmit from one individual of that new host to another.
Maybe the old host has an immune system that has adapted to that virus over time and that virus has adapted to the immune system, so that in the old host, the reservoir host, it lives chronically at low levels of replication, but over long periods of time. That is a type of genetic strategy, not a conscious strategy, but it is a strategy, and it works. The virus maintains itself in the reservoir host population over long stretches of time.
Then, suddenly, it gets a new kind of opportunity, a new kind of host, and it finds that it can replicate abundantly in this new host, and hey, look, with a few more adaptations, a few more mutations, a little bit more natural selection, it can jump from this new reservoir host, individual number one, into individual number two, number three, number four. If it does that, it is seizing an opportunity. It doesn’t have purpose. It just has the ability to seize opportunity. If the new host is Homo sapiens, if it’s us humans, then that virus has seized a huge opportunity for vast evolutionary success because it can replicate quickly, spread from individual to individual, ride on airplanes, get around the planet in twenty-four hours, spread to more people and become possibly the most successful and abundant virus in the world. And that’s what happens with pandemics.
That’s what happens with the pandemic flu. That’s what seems to be happening with this, and that’s what happened with the primary virus that causes the AIDS pandemic, a virus called HIV-1 group M, that results from a single spillover from one chimpanzee into one human, in the southeastern corner of Cameroon back in 1908, give or take a margin of error. All of this is known from good molecular work, and I’m jumping around here, but it’s worth following this through.
That virus—infecting one human from one chimpanzee—has spread around the world now and killed thirty-three million people, going on thirty-four, and infected millions more. That’s a very successful virus.
EM: You’ve talked about how human beings as a relatively young species are more susceptible. Can you talk a little bit about this?
DQ: We are more susceptible because these viruses are new to us. As I say in the book, everything comes from somewhere. Our viruses that cause our infectious diseases generally come from animals in the relatively short term, because we are a relatively young species. There are a few viruses that have been in humans for so long that they have evolved away from their origins, and they are now distinct from whatever animal virus they originally descended from.
Smallpox is one example, and polio is another example. And it’s no coincidence that those are two of only very few, severe infectious diseases that we have been able to eradicate or very nearly eradicate from humans. We’ve eradicated smallpox from humans. There are no current smallpox cases on the planet. It’s not circulating. Smallpox virus only exists frozen in a few laboratories.
The last I’ve heard we have nearly eradicated polio from the human population, but there are a few places, like Afghanistan, I think possibly Nigeria, where there are difficult political and military situations, where there are still little flare-ups of polio and it hasn’t been eradicated yet, but almost. Why can we do that? Well, because there is no animal host for polio or for smallpox anymore. Those are purely human viruses now.
EM: In Spillover you write about how zoonotic diseases exist within, and are part of, a broader ecosystem than just their hosts. Can you talk about why this is so important?
DQ: Do you mean the ways in which human disruption of ecosystems brings us into contact with these viruses?
EM: Yeah, it seems like that’s what you were talking about as one of the main causes that we’re dealing with.
DQ: Absolutely, so the spillover of these diseases into humans and the spread into pandemics, it’s essentially an ecological and evolutionary process. That’s actually one of the reasons why I wrote Spillover. It’s my usual beat, ecology and evolutionary biology.
I got interested in infectious diseases, emerging viruses like Ebola, and then I found, lo and behold, this is all about ecology and evolutionary biology. On the ecology side, there are many, many diverse species of animal, plant, bacteria, fungi, and other creatures living in our diverse ecosystems. Each of those carry viruses. Each of those may carry its own unique viruses. Scientists are just trying to find out how many viruses are out there.
When we humans come in contact with those animals and plants and other creatures, we expose ourselves to those viruses, in particular when we come in contact disruptively, when we go into those diverse ecosystems, those tropical forests and those savannahs where there is great diversity, and we start killing animals for meat. We start cutting down trees for timber. We build timber camps. We build mining camps. We harvest the wild animals further to feed the laborers in the timber camps and the mining camps. Or we capture the wild animals and ship them away live, or dead, to be consumed by other people elsewhere.
Doing all that, we disrupt those wild ecosystems. We essentially—this is sort of a metaphor—we shake those viruses loose from their natural hosts and give them the opportunity to seize on a new host. And there we are: humans. In some cases then, those viruses seize a new ecological situation, a new environment, namely a human body, and then comes evolution. If they have a high intrinsic capacity for evolution, then they are all the more likely to adapt to us and become our diseases and sometimes our epidemics and pandemics.
EM: I think you said a virus is interconnected with other organisms at the scale of landscapes. That really struck me, because it forces us to think about a virus not just contained within a creature, say bats, which seems to be the culprit here in the coronavirus, but in relationship to a much broader web of life.
DQ: Right, yes. I mean, they are ecological creatures with niches and with the capacity to evolve, and generally they have their natural environments, but all of those creatures are connected to one another in intricate webs of interaction. We humans are part of those ecosystems too. I mean anciently we have been. I’m not saying that these wild ecosystems have been wilderness in the sense that we used to think about it, the absence of humans.
All of these places, or almost all of them have had human populations too, but living with very low impact, at very low population densities, living, to some extent, in harmony with the rest of the ecosystem, living off of it, harvesting animals and plants for food or for medicine, but not causing great disruption, and living in small groups of people that are not closely interconnected with big groups of people elsewhere.
So what has changed in the modern world is that there are more of us, more interconnected, causing more disruption. Everything has been scaled up. Now we’re the most dominant animal on the planet, arrogating to ourselves a huge proportion of all the resources, all the energy, all the protein, and making ourselves important and strong, but also making ourselves a huge target for these creatures that need habitat, that need environments, that need ecological niches in which to continue living.
EM: Zoonotic viruses have been around for a very long time, as you’ve said, but in the last fifty years we’ve really seen an emergence of many, many more in a short amount of time. You said that we’ve always been existing in spaces, but not to the level of disruption that we’re dealing with right now, and so this emergence of so many viruses is directly in correspondence with the increase of disruption to many environments in terms of ramp and scale.
DQ: Right, and as I say in my book, there’s been a drumbeat of these new emergences of viruses from animals that infect humans. Mapucho in Bolivia 1962, coming out of rodents. Marburg in 1967 in monkeys that were shipped from Uganda to Marburg, Germany, for use in medical labs. Ebola emerging for the first time we know of in 1976. AIDS, HIV, getting recognized for the first time in 1981.
It goes on. In the late 1980s, there was something. In the early 90s, 1992, we became aware of hantavirus coming out of rodents in the Southwest, the Four Corners area of the US. Bird flu emerging in Hong Kong in 1997. In 1998, it was Nipah virus in Malaysia, coming out of bats, getting into pigs, and then getting into people, killing people.
On and on. SARS, 2003, also coming out of a bat. MERS, 2012, another coronavirus in the Arabian Peninsula, coming out of bats, getting into camels, going from camels to humans. Zika virus, another new one in 2014.
On and on, and now here we are with COVID-19 in 2020.
EM: One thing that really struck me when I was reading Spillover is how you talk about the fact that these viruses are really part of a larger pattern that reflect what we’re doing and aren’t just happening to us. It seems like, in the last few weeks, with all the news about the coronavirus swamping everyone’s world, there hasn’t necessarily been a discussion that looks to any of these root causes that you’re describing, the discussion generally suggests that we are the victim here rather than playing an active part.
DQ: Right, there hasn’t been enough discussion of that. People are alarmed. People are scared. People are angry at one another. Some people are angry at the Chinese. Other people are angry at public health services. We’re all angry at Donald Trump.
There’s not enough time. There’s not enough bandwidth or air in the room for discussion of root causes. With the hospitality of people like you, Emmanuel, I’m talking about it to whoever I can. The fact that these things are part of a pattern, I just described that pattern, and that, yes, we need to flatten this curve. We need to deal with this pandemic. We need to take the public health measures that will bring this thing under control. And that’s still some ways off.
We need resources. We need money. We need will to do all the things that are necessary. And I hope we will. I think we will eventually get this thing under control and put this fire out. But as I’ve said before, when we get this thing under control, when we get the fire put out, we should celebrate for five minutes, and then we should start thinking about and planning for the next one, because there will be a next one.
EM: Your op-ed in The Times back in January—when this was mostly confined to China and a few other countries, or at least appeared to be—talked about this, the short-term response and then the longer term mortal challenge. In that piece, you outlined a list of all the long-term challenges we’re dealing with that, in a sense, were many of the major ecological issues of our time, as well as issues related to poverty and inequality.
So as much as this virus may wake people up to our interconnectedness and vulnerability, it seems like it’s a monumental challenge that we’re facing to address a potential next big one that might come up in a few years or continue to come up year after year.
DQ: It is a monumental challenge, and there are things on the scientific and public health side that I listed in that op-ed and that one can list: better viral discoveries so we know what’s out there and might come into us, better diagnostics so that we can produce test kits very quickly, better public health reactions, more resources, more excess capacity for our hospitals, et cetera, that prepare us to respond to these things. Coherent, internationally collaborative plans for assessing to what extent you want to cut down air travel and to what extent you want to continue to let expertise flow between one country and another. All of that.
But even beyond that—which is very expensive, and all that stuff, and will require really taking this kind of threat seriously—all of that is essentially reaction, and there needs to be pro-action too. And that’s even more difficult because it involves essentially reimagining, rethinking, and re-feeling our relationship with the natural world.
All of the things that we do that cause the disruption, that shake loose these viruses, that give them the opportunity to get into us, all the draw that we put on resources around the world. It’s not just Chinese people who want to eat bats or pangolins. We can’t just demonize them.
There is enough responsibility to go around. Anybody that has a cell phone or a laptop is a customer for minerals such as coltan, which is essential for making tantalum capacitors in computers and cell phones. Where does coltan come from? One of the major sources is in the southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there are mining camps dragging coltan out of the earth, laborers working there adjacent to rich tropical forests that contain Eastern lowland gorillas and all kinds of species of bats and other creatures.
What are those people in the mining camps eating? Well, they’re probably eating bushmeat. So, if we buy a cell phone, we’re purchasing coltan, and therefore we are drawing tighter this web of disruption. We are pulling viruses toward ourselves, maybe not as obviously and directly as consumers of bats in China, but nonetheless we’re part of it. We’re part of that intricate web of responsibility, and therefore we need to think about all of our consumer choices, all the choices we make: what we buy, what we eat, how much we travel, how many children we have, all of those things.
We need to be thinking deeply about them, not just for getting control over climate change, which is the other huge problem looming there, but also dealing with this problem of zoonotic diseases and bringing all of these things closer to ourselves by our patterns of dominance and consumption.
EM: It also sounds like, yes, this is a disease stemmed from a bat transferring the disease to other animals and being eaten by those animals or being eaten itself. But even if that didn’t occur, if this disease was discovered in a cave years earlier, it would have found another way to get out.
DQ: It may well have found another way to get out, yes. I haven’t been to that particular cave. My friend, Peter Daszak, who’s president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York, one of the important organizations working on this, he is a co-author on that paper in 2017. He may have gone to that cave, or some of his colleagues from the Wuhan Institute of Virology clearly went to that cave to research, to sample bats, to find out what was there.
Humanity, generally, is bound to be moving closer and closer to that cave. China’s population is not growing very quickly anymore but it’s huge and it’s consuming resources. Our population in the US is not growing quickly anymore but our consumption continues to grow. And the global population does continue to grow. So even a population of bats in a cave in Yunnan—it’s only a matter of time before we come knocking on their door, wanting what they have.EM
You talk a lot about population growth in the book and that being one of the big factors pushing all of this forward at such a quick pace.DQ
Yes. I mean that’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room, population growth. It’s not just a matter of population growth. It’s certainly not a matter of demonizing some parents in Mozambique or Angola who have eight children. People tend to do that. “Oh, you know, there are people in Africa still having eight children.” But those eight children that may be living in a village in Mozambique, maybe only five of them are going to survive to adulthood and those five will consume less of the earth’s resources in their lifetimes, probably by a large factor less, than a single American child growing to adulthood and consuming much more.
So it’s not just sheer population. The impact of humans is population multiplied by consumption equals impact, and so we all own a share of that chain of responsibility too.
EM: There was a line toward the end of your book that really struck me. You talk about the fact that human population growth is itself an outbreak, and that all outbreaks come to an end.
DQ: Yes, that’s when I go into the analogy of populations of certain kinds of forest insects that break out into huge abundance, population outbreaks. In this sense, the word outbreak is not a disease term, but it’s a term that ecologists use to describe one of these sudden, huge population explosions of an insect, usually a forest lepidopter, a moth—for instance, tent caterpillars. Tent caterpillars are the larval form of a particular kind of moth, and they live in forests, including forests around here where I am, in Bozeman, Montana, and they’re invisible for years at a time. They’re there in very low population abundance.
But then suddenly there’s a good year or two years in a row that are good. The temperature is right, the moisture is right, the winter is not too harsh, and they’re laying maybe 200 eggs. A female lays 200 eggs. Maybe she has two clutches in a season. Maybe most of those survive, so suddenly there’s a huge population outbreak of tent caterpillars, and you see these silk tents on the limbs and branches of all your trees, and the caterpillars are out there defoliating the trees. The trees look like they’re in the middle of winter. These are mostly hardwood trees and the leaves are all gone. You can hear the crunch, crunch, crunch of the chewing and the pooping caterpillars, raining down their poop on your town and taking away the foliage from your trees. People say, “Let’s get some insecticide and stop this and poison them before they kill all our trees.”
The smart people that work on these, the entomologists who study forest insect outbreaks like this, say, “Listen, don’t worry about it. Just relax, because this population is going to crash, if not this year, next year, because it always happens.” And they’re right. The populations do crash, and they disappear almost magically. But what causes the crash? We now know that it’s viral plagues.
They carry their own kinds of viruses at low endemic levels, but when their population explodes and they live at such high densities, then they pass the virus from one to another, and the virus kills them and explodes out of them and infects another caterpillar, and pretty soon the whole population has crashed and they disappear.
I met a scientist who studies this, a wonderful guy named Greg Dwyer at the University of Chicago, and I asked him, “First of all, are we humans an outbreak population?”
And he said, “Oh yeah, we are.” And other ecologists agree.
We don’t multiply as fast as tent caterpillars, but a hundred years ago there were only about two billion humans on Earth, now there are almost eight billion, so in a hundred years we have quadrupled our population. That’s an explosion. That’s an outbreak. And we’re taking so much in the way of resources. Our population is still increasing. So, “Yes,” he said. “We are an outbreak population.”
I said, “Okay, question two. Does that mean it’s inevitable that we’re going to crash? A viral plague is going to eliminate ninety or ninety-nine percent of us from the planet just the way it happens with tent caterpillars?”
And he thought about it very carefully, and he looked at his mathematical models. And then he said to me, “No, I don’t think it’s inevitable.”
Why? Because we have something called heterogeneity of behavior, and that’s a very important parameter in his models. If the insect population has some kind of heterogeneity of behavior, some flexibility, some ability to respond differently to different conditions, to avoid danger, then the population, according to his models, doesn’t crash. It gradually tapers off as fewer of them get sick and die as they replicate, but not so quickly, and they just sort of die back to the level at which they were living, essentially, in harmony with the forest.
He said, “Because we humans have heterogeneity of behavior, I don’t think we’re going to crash. I think we have the opportunity for a slower response to the threat of pandemic.”
Heterogeneity of behavior in humans, of course, means that we can think, we can respond differently, we can create scientific solutions, vaccines, and therapies. We can adjust our behavior. We can consume less. We can pass regulations. We can adapt to the situation. We can do that. So essentially what he was telling me is that the good news, from him, is that humans are smarter than tent caterpillars, and therefore we’re not doomed, necessarily, to a total population crash.
EM: In the book, you say that Zoonotic diseases “remind us, as St. Francis did, that we humans are inseparable from the natural world. In fact, there is no ‘natural world,’ it’s a bad and artificial phrase. There is only the world. Humankind is part of that world,” as are all the viruses and carriers.
It seems like there’s a tremendous opportunity to think about how we can transition out of this outbreak as a human population to a space that lives in harmony. I’m really curious to hear your feeling about that, what your take is on that. How optimistic are you?
DQ: There is an opportunity. I am not an optimist by disposition, but I’m stubborn when it comes to hope. I think that hope is not a psychological condition. Hope is an act of will. And therefore I think we have a responsibility to be hopeful that we can do things that will make the final result at least not quite as bad as it might have been otherwise.
And with this thing, this hideous pandemic that we’re in right now, this scary thing that may take many, many lives, but in the meantime is also destroying people’s jobs, disrupting cultures and economies around the world, it’s a bad thing. The former mayor of Chicago, back when he was chief of staff for Bill Clinton, that guy named Rahm Emanuel, when he was working for Clinton, he famously said, “We should let no crisis go to waste.”
There’s wisdom in that, and I think that’s the case here. We should not let this crisis go to waste. We should use it as an opportunity to demand from ourselves and demand from our leaders substantive change, real, drastic change in the way we live on this planet, while we still have time.
EM: Well, David, thank you so much for joining us today.
DQ: You’re very welcome, Emmanuel. It’s good to talk with you.
Sara Kuo and Kalpana Narlikar are members of Sunrise Movement Bay Area involved in organizing online trainings and actions around the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day taking place on April 22-24th, 2020. Sara Kuo (age 25) is temporarily sheltering-in-place in Oakland, though typically works in Richmond and lives in El Cerrito. Kalpana Narlikar (age 14) is sheltering-in-place in San Francisco where she lives with her family. They were interviewed by Maya Carlson, the Bioneers Youth Leadership and Education Manager.
Maya, Bioneers: How did you get involved in Sunrise Movement?
Sara, Sunrise Movement Bay Area: I heard about Sunrise through my friend Abby. We did a fellowship together, and went to art builds with Sunrise. It wasn’t until Sunrise held a Leaders of Color Training that I found that Sunrise cares about frontline communities and folks of color. That was really demonstrated by the community they had built. I fell in love with Sunrise ever since.
Maya: What is your role within Sunrise Bay Area?
Sara: I run trainings, doing outwardly-focused presentations either in high schools or in our general orientation teaching Sunrise theory. I’m actually doing my fourth week of Sunrise School, which is an online community-building experience. It’s completely free for youth who are feeling uncertain about what’s happening right now. We have a crash course on what’s happening with the Green New Deal in the time of Covid-19, Movement Building 101, and Deep Organizing in the Face of Uncertainty. There are many tracks and it’s super interactive. I’ve built really fulfilling relationships there with folks all across the country.
Before Covid-19 happened, I was doing a lot of solidarity relationship building with other organizations as well.
Virtual Zoom Interview, April 17th, 2020
Kalpana, Sunrise Movement Bay Area: I found out about Sunrise when my dad sent me an article about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez going to their sit-in outside of Pelosi’s office, and then I hovered on the national mailing list for a while. When I visited family in India, I was looking at all the inequality there and I got really sad. I had been angry for a long time, but that was the first time I got really sad and I wanted to do something. So when the December Climate Strike came up, I emailed Sunrise Bay Area and asked how I could help. They sent me the membership form and I signed up!
Maya: How have you been involved since joining?
Kalpana: I’ve gotten people from my school to come to actions, and recently I’ve been involved in the Earth Day planning team.
Maya: What are some of the actions Sunrise Bay Area organized around Earth Day this year?
Sara: We had a bunch of lead-up events to Earth Day. One was the last in a series with #CAYouthvsBigOil, which is the youth leg of the Last Chance Alliance. This was supposed to be a physical tour. We were going to put folks in buses, starting from Los Angeles and the Empire region, driving up into the Central Coast and Central Valley, then the Bay Area and Richmond, ending up in Sacramento. But we came together and still made it work [online]. We’ve had a really good turn out virtually, still having those regions hold workshops and panels, talking about environmental justice and how this crisis has affected folks regionally. The workshop was on the Green New Deal and a Just Transition in the time of Covid. It focused on Richmond, CA with organizers from labor movements, Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and Communities for a Better Environment. This was a lead-up event into Earth Day actions.
Kalpana: We also had an art build over Zoom. One of the art team leads was Bob Ross who taught everyone how to paint banners with materials they have at home. Then folks dropped them from their windows and posted pictures on social media. This is something Megan and I brainstormed a few weeks ago.
We have three events on Earth Day, one on each of the days of the [Future Coalition] national livestream, starting on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2020. The first event of ours is a panel on a Green New Deal for Public Health, which looks at how a Green New Deal would be beneficial for public health. This is important because clearly we’re in a pandemic. The second one, which Sara can speak more to, is about the Green New Deal and a Just Transition.
Sara: The Green New Deal and a Just Transition event on April 23rd will be a rerun of the conversation hosted by CAYouthvsBigOil about Richmond, CA. The culminating ask of CAYouthvsBigOil is a letter to Gavin Newsom asking him to Stop Drop and Roll.
Stop new fossil fuel projects at this time. California needs to lead the way by ending new permits for oil and gas extraction, as well as fossil fuel and petrochemical projects.
Drop existing fossil fuel production and set a national and global precedent by becoming the first oil-producing state to announce a phase-out of existing production in line with the Paris Climate Goals, and with a just and equitable transition that protects workers, communities, and economies.
Roll out a set-back limit by creating a 2500-foot health and safety buffer zone between fossil fuel infrastructure and homes, schools and other sensitive areas.
In addition to Stop Drop and Roll, this petition is asking Governor Newson what his plan is for a Just Transition. During this call, we’re going to have a couple of interactive breakout rooms to ask folks what a Green New Deal looks like in their communities, as well as what a just transition needs to look like, especially in frontline communities. Then we’re going to have them write that in a letter to Governor Newsome
Kaplana: There is one last day, which will be our action on Friday, April 24th, Calling For Change. We will be calling and emailing representatives like Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, and Gavin Newsom, as well as local state representatives asking them to support a People’s Bailout because we need to bail out people, not corporations, particularly people who are being hurt the most at the moment. We’ll be doing this in shifts all day from 9am – 5pm.
Maya: These actions are so relevant all of the time, and particularly so during a pandemic when we’re collectively in a massive public health crisis and we’re seeing corporations getting billion-dollar bailouts. Are there particular overlaps that you are seeing between Covid-19, climate change, and the Green New Deal?
It’s also scary that the EPA has stopped enforcing environmental laws and fossil fuel industries are carrying on unabated. That’s why we have to actually invest in people and not corporations!
I do feel hopeful though. Covid-19 is forcing us to go into a recession in which millions of people will lose their jobs, and we’ve seen that the only real way to get out of a recession is through economic stimulus. The Green New Deal is what we need to get out of the depression we’re heading into. It has never been clearer for us to fight for what we’ve been fighting for. As devastating as these effects have been, my hope is that we rebuild better. What we were before was not working for so many people. We need to rebuild in a way that prioritizes frontline communities and actually creates a livable future.
Maya: Has this pandemic changed the way that Sunrise is approaching its tactics or audiences?
Kalpana: At least for Earth Day the audience that we’re targeting has been broadened because a webinar has a wider potential audience than an action where people are marching with us. We are not changing our values or our goals, we’re just trying to communicate them to more people.
Sara: We were planning a strategy retreat right before lockdown and this was a really big question of ours – how [Covid-19] changes our goals. It does shift a lot. Sunrise’s north star is mass non-cooperation and it’s been sad to see a lot of our big actions dampened by this. One of the lead organizers in CAYouthvsBioOil said that in another timeline, he would be getting arrested in Sacramento on Earth Day!
But having things online does make actions more accessible to everyone. There are plenty of folks who just can’t show up physically and there is a place for them in our movement as well.
I would agree with Kalpana that shelter-in-place doesn’t change our baseline goals, but it does change how we’re going to get things done. We do so much community building, modeling of an interdependent organism, and caring for one another. Some of those things just can’t be conveyed over the internet like cooking for people, making art with people, and singing with each other.
We’ve rethought a lot of our tactics. We can still go to actions like the drive-through actions, not just [Sunrise] but other folks showing up at Santa Rita jail and jails in San Francisco. There are absolutely still things you can do! We can’t go door knocking, but we can still phone bank. We just have to think more creatively.
Maya: Why, on a personal level, do you both feel that being a part of a mass movement for climate justice is important to you and your community?
Kalpana: As a young person thinking into my future and not being certain about whether there will be one that will be livable, is something that’s weighed on me. I’ve been thinking about this since I can remember. Something amazing about Sunrise, not just any mass movement but Sunrise, is the human connection. I’ve really found a family of people who can understand my fear, because they have the same fear. They understand my pain because they have the same pain. To be able to connect with people who feel the same way, want to do something about it – and are actually very good at doing something about it – has been an amazing and beautiful experience. I think there is an immense relief that comes out of acting when you’re really afraid or angry or sad because then you feel like you’re actually doing something. Even if we don’t get out of this, I can feel like I did my best and I know people who did their best. That’s something that’s really important to me.
Sara: That spoke so beautifully to how I feel. Before Sunrise, I didn’t really think that there was a lot of hope. I was already organizing in frontline communities, doing infrastructure equity and working with unincorporated “disadvantaged communities” there. I grew up in an unincorporated “disadvantaged community” in Southern California where we experienced fires and my brother had severe asthma. It always felt like we were doing stuff, but for what? We were an organized community, but to what end? I would still be doing it, showing up, doing community meetings, going door to door, and getting people involved in civic engagement. But I didn’t really know until I heard Sunrise Movement’s theory of change that we’ve done this before. It’s super possible! That was wild to me! I still remember the first day I was sitting in that training like “Oh my god! We could actually do this, and that’s wild!” That hope is what keeps us going and what is the underlying fabric of this community.
Maya: Thank you both for those answers, I could feel the heart-felt care in both of them! It was great to talk to you both and I look forward to seeing you online for Earth Day!
This article contains the content from the 4/21/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.
In 1970, 20 million Americans demonstrated in the streets for greater protections for our planet, spurring (among other things) the modern environmental movement along with the creation of some of the most influential bipartisan national environmental policy ever enacted. Was it “successful”? It’s a real question, but it may not be the right question. Fifty years later, the legacy of the movement to launch the first Earth Day and the influence of that movement, culturally and politically, still reverberate.
In this edition of the Bioneers Pulse, we’re honored to feature the voices of several elders from that original Earth Day movement alongside some of the inspiring and active next generation frontline activists we’ve seen.
Solving the Dual Crises of COVID-19 and Climate Change
“Nearly every aspect of our lives has been affected by the coronavirus,” writes Molly Morabito, a member of Sunrise Movement’s Bay Area chapter. “But although the societal and economic effects of coronavirus are severe, they are likely to be temporary. The existential threat posed by climate change, on the other hand, will continue to worsen. Responding to this moment as a movement requires us to understand the link between these crises — and how by responding to one, we can help solve the other.”
Listen to Newly Released Edition of “Four Changes” by Gary Snyder
In July 2016, Jack Loeffler recorded Gary Snyder reading his updated version of ‘Four Changes’ in his home. This recorded version was prepared for and included in a major exhibition held at the History Museum of New Mexico at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe.
The exhibition was entitled ‘Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest’, and Snyder’s rendering of ‘Four Changes’ aptly conveyed how deeply the counterculture movement helped nurture the emerging environmental movement. The impact of this manifesto is as powerful today as it was a half century ago and could not be more timely.
Mishka Banuri: A First Generation Immigrant’s Perspective on Youth Climate Justice
A first generation Pakistani immigrant, Mishka Banuri moved to Utah when she was 12 years old and fell in love with that state’s wondrous mountains, aspen trees and red rocks, but she saw many of those sacred lands despoiled by the greed of extractive industries.
In this keynote address, she talks on the importance of preserving natural lands and her experience as a youth organizer.
Earth Day, White Privilege and Decolonizing the Mind
Arturo Sandoval, founder of The Center of Southwest Culture, was a member of the first national Earth Day organizing team. He was a leader in the Chicano civil rights movement in the 1970’s and continues today to work for environmental justice, human rights and community-based economic development. Sandoval was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director.
Erosion and Evolution: Our Undoing Is Our Becoming
Erosion and evolution. Shadow and light. Death and rebirth. These are some of the strands that acclaimed author, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams weaves together in the face of today’s broken world. Standing in the lineage of the greatest nature writers, she links her deepest inner experiences with the state of the web of life. In this podcast, Williams asks: How do we find the strength to not look away at all that is breaking our hearts?
From April 22 to 24, youth and adult activists are coming together for Earth Day Live, a three-day live stream focused on climate action. The live stream will include training sessions, performances, and appearances to keep people engaged, informed, and inspired, with speakers including celebrities, politicians, scientists, and youth activists.
How the Tale of Finnegas Can Help Guide Us Through the Global Pandemic | In the time of this great, strange plague, writer Paul Kingsnorth returns to the Celtic tale of Finnegas, the woodland hermit who devoted his life to catching and eating the salmon that contained the wisdom of the world.
A Message of Wisdom from the Elders in the Time of Pandemic | Ilarion Merculieff, an author and Indigenous activist of the Unangan people, draws on his elders’ knowledge to offer encouragement and empowerment during the difficult times of the coronavirus pandemic.
Defeating the Pandemic Means Confronting Ageism and Ableism | Author Ashton Applewhite touches on how our social biases — especially ageism and ableism — can affect how we operate during the pandemic, especially when determining who gets life-saving care.
Principles for a #JustRecovery from COVID-19 | Bioneers is proud to have signed onto the following open letter, launched by our friends at 350.org, which demands a Just Recovery as the nation and world consider how to rebuild systems and economies.
Bioneers Indigeneity Now on Free Speech TV!
Free Speech TV is now airing a collection of Bioneers videos featuring Indigenous activists, voices and knowledge from around the world. In celebration of Earth Day, these segments will revolve around issues of climate change for the next week.
2019 commemorated the 50-year anniversary of the 19-month Native American student occupation of Alcatraz. This video presents Indigenous activists from three generations who were on the frontlines at Alcatraz, Standing Rock, and other Indigenous Rights struggles, as they discuss their visions for the next 50 years of Indigenous activism.
Featuring Julian Noisecat, LaNada War Jack, Clayton Thomas Muller and Ras K’Dee.
Indigeneity is a Native-led Program within Bioneers/Collective Heritage Institute that promotes indigenous knowledge and approaches to solve the earth’s most pressing environmental and social issues through respectful dialogue. Visit the Indigeneity Program homepage.
Arturo Sandoval, founder of The Center of Southwest Culture, was a member of the first national Earth Day organizing team. He was a leader in the Chicano civil rights movement in the 1970’s and continues today to work for environmental justice, human rights and community-based economic development. Sandoval was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director.
ARTY: You were part of Denis Hayes’ team that produced the first Earth Day in 1970. What was that experience like?
ARTURO: It was my first time organizing on a national level. I worked with a very bright team. It was lots of work. It was very exhilarating. It completely exceeded anything we hoped to achieve. It was like holding onto the tail of the tiger. We were basically just trying to stay out of the way of a freight train coming down the tracks because the response to the first Earth Day was so overwhelming. It was huge. It was just unbelievable, and took everything we had to just try to connect the dots and get information out to the people and not get in their way.
ARTY: In conjunction with your national organizing, you led a march in Albuquerque.
ARTURO: I wanted to make sure that people of color were featured in some way in the national coverage. So I worked with my colleagues at United Mexican-American Students at the University of New Mexico (UNM). We organized a march to South Barelas, which is a Mexican neighborhood where they had built the solid waste plant. Every day a film of dry material from the plant would cover everything, and it smelled really bad. I thought it would be great if we could get national coverage to focus on that issue.
We marched to the plant, and we were successful in getting the City of Albuquerque to move the plant much further south into the valley. People tell me that that was the first national environmental justice march led by people of color in the U.S.
ARTY: As a leader in the Chicano civil rights movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s, how were you received by white activists? Did you come up against white privilege or even overt racism?
ARTURO: I don’t think I ran into overt racism, but I do think there was a very East-West Coast culture that emerged. I think the conservation movement is also very classist in that the majority of environmental activists that I interacted with were middle-class and upper middle-class. I came from a working-class background. As a Chicano, I was definitely a fish out of water. Basically, I did feel clear class differentials. I felt the class difference, and I did feel marginalized.
I wanted to engage people in action for the health of the planet and hoped that they would also include people in that concern. I saw that it was the same basic enemy that we were fighting in both areas. I believed, and I still do, that the people who are racist and who exploit the working people, who exploit black people, Chicano people and Mexicans are the same people who were/are dumping heavy metals into our rivers and our lakes and polluting our air. I saw Earth Day as an extension of my civil rights work and as an opportunity to bring Chicano rights to a national audience. I thought maybe through the lens of environmental action and conservation that we could open the door to a broader discussion about the impacts of exploitation – not just of the planet, but also of people – and to help people see it was basically one in the same issue. That was my hope.
But generally, Chicano activists and black activists were not drawn to the first Earth Day because they were so deeply engaged in their own local issues. They were fighting for survival, so it was difficult for them to add Earth Day activities to their existing workloads.
Arturo Sandoval (3rd from the left) with the first Earth Day organizing team in 1970
ARTY: What do you think needs to happen in the environmental movement today to make it more inclusive?
ARTURO: After Earth Day, there was a succession of a lot of national federal legislation – maybe 20 or 30 federal acts – enacted specifically to protect the environment, Clean Air and Water Acts. That success in many ways ended up causing a long-term issue for environmental groups. It led them to believe that being primarily composed of white middle-class and upper middle-class citizens was enough to get the job done, that they did not need to change their approach or their tactics. Nor did they need to reach out to working people, to rural people, to Chicanos and Mexicanos, and African-Americans. They really never made it a fundamental value of their work or strategy to try to include these groups. We’re paying the price for that now under the current regime in Washington, because we do not have the connections to the vast majority of these working people to get them to support us against what’s happening right now, which is a complete dismantling of all the victories we had in the 1970s.
I think that was a failure of the environmental movement. I engaged enough with the Environmental Grantmakers Association, and I know enough about national conservation groups to know that they’re still, unfortunately, over 90%-95% white middle-class. They’re a very East-West Coast-oriented culture, and they have done very little to broaden their base to working-class people and to African-Americans and Mexicanos. They have not done enough to get the message out on how the environment impacts us all as humans. That’s why they are really getting hammered in the national political arena at this time. They don’t have the deep, broad based coalition they need to fight off what’s happening in the Trump administration.
ARTY: You’ve said that racism, environmental justice, and colonization are connected.
ARTURO: I work with indigenous communities and Chicano communities in the greater Southwest. I believe that the reason that poor people and working people are poor is because they’re at the center of the current capitalist system. Without them, we couldn’t have extremely wealthy people. They’re not on the margins of what’s happening in this country, they’re at the very center of it. Because we train them through education and we fill their heads with a colonial model that puts them in a one-down position, they come to believe it. They internalize the belief that they are poor because of their own shortcomings.
Frantz Fanon, the French-trained psychiatrist, wrote about this in the 1950’s when the Algerian revolutionary movement was underway. It’s not easy reading, it’s all about colonization and how to decolonize yourself. We were reading him in the ‘60s in the Chicano movement as a way to begin that process of decolonizing ourselves and to understand how colonization works and how colonization also dehumanizes the colonizer.
People of color, working people need to decolonize their minds, and they have to ultimately own their own lives, to take active steps to take control of their own lives. The only way they can do that is through study, reflection, and work.
Education teaches us not to passively accept the current status quo and the economic system, and to challenge the idea that the political system is the best system in the world. The reality is it’s one of the worst systems because it depends on exploiting the planet and the planet’s resources and ultimately destroying the planet. It also destroys people and cultures while it’s doing that.
You can’t separate issues of colonization and environmental justice from each other. Everything is tied together. People have to be engaged in these conversations. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary. Until people like me, who offer themselves as community organizers, are constantly questioning what we’re doing and until we continue to learn and decolonize ourselves and become better humans, we’re never going to transform our communities, nor the larger society.
ARTY: About 10 years ago, I invited you to address the Bioneers staff on issues of diversity and oppression. One thing that you said that really stuck with me was, “The system is set up for the average white guy to succeed, but not for the average brown guy.”
ARTURO: The system in the U.S. is set up so that within all the systems – the economic system, the social network system, education, the churches – if you’re a white man or white woman in society and you have average intelligence and you can spell your name correctly, you can have a pretty good life by just being very average. You can have a career. I’ve seen this over and over again where white people end up making really good money with a bachelor’s degree. It’s easy for them to get degrees, they can afford college. Everything’s set up so that if you’re just an average white boy and you’re just average going through the system – you just show up at school, take a bath every day, pack a lunch, or your mom packs you a lunch and you go through the process – your odds of having a very high-quality life and a good life are almost guaranteed.
But if you’re a working class Chicano or an African-American, you have to overcome incredible obstacles that are not there for the average white person, because the system is set up to exclude you. You have to put in extra effort. As a result, we have high levels of failure in our communities, not because we’re dumber, not because we’re inherently inferior, but because the system is set up on purpose to make sure that we don’t succeed and that the average white guy does. That’s still true.
ARTY: Most white people are blind to the advantages the system gives them.
ARTURO: I experience microaggressions everyday and in every way. I’ve had a couple of conversations just in the last two weeks with white friends of mine, who I love dearly. I’ve known them for 30 or 35 years, maybe. But they don’t see me. They do not see what my capabilities are, even when I offer my services to them. They don’t see my talent. They see a Chicano guy that they like and that they hang out with, but is really not serious or does not have enough skills or talents to be taken seriously. And these are people who I consider very good, long-time friends of mine. But it’s that blindness that occurs to middle-class white people. They literally don’t see me. They are examples of a systemic issue.
ARTY: How does your work today integrate environmental and social justice?
ARTURO: We’re working on four major fronts now at the Center. Through our community development center, we’re trying to create economic parity for indigenous and Chicano/Mexicano communities through a number of economic models that don’t require mainstream capital because we don’t have access to it. So, we’ve been doing a lot of organic farming co-ops especially in New Mexico where Native Americans are in a unique position of having aboriginal rights to irrigation, and the long-term Chicano-based land communities are second in line for use of that water. The downside is we’ve let that land go fallow or we’re growing small-scale alfalfa, which will not bring you a 21st century income. So people aren’t interested in doing that work if it’s not going to give them enough money to send their kids to college.
We’re getting them to convert what they’re doing from alfalfa to organic produce because organic produce can generate a 21st century income. That’s number one. Number two, we want them to be healthy. You can’t be healthy intellectually if you don’t start out healthy physically. I read a Harvard study way back in 1967 that stuck with me. It said if the human body doesn’t get the right nutrients in the first three years of life, it doesn’t matter what happens after that, they won’t be able to develop intellectually. Our organic farming co-ops are selling 100% of our produce to local schools. We’re trying to feed our kids to keep the brains in shape physically so hopefully they can develop them academically as they grow older.
We’re trying to create justice by creating income and also by providing the most basic necessity – healthy food. We just started doing some of that work in Northern Mexico in Chihuahua.
The Story Riders program works with urban indigenous, Chicano, and Mexicano fifth-graders. We teach them bicycle safety and repair. We provide bicycles and they ride along the Bosque trail. They meet cultural elders, they meet artists, Latino and Native American scientists from Sandia Labs. They meet all kinds of people that in a cultural context give them STEAM and STEM education programming in the Bosque. That’s a way to build their self-esteem and also start building their capacity to be academic.
I want to make sure that we assume 100% responsibility for our own communities, and that we are responsible for our own well-being. We have to build capacity in a co-intentional way with our community to find our own liberation, to build our own smaller-scale internal structures, and to define our own economic, spiritual, and political independence. I think we can do it through developing co-ops.
Most of the economic models that we use for organic farming are all cooperatives because co-ops are communal models and they spread the wealth out horizontally instead of vertically. I also think cooperatives are really back to the future. Indigenous communities are used to clans and kinship, and that’s how they still operate. In the land-based traditional Chicano communities, land grants and acequias are our communal models. Finally, co-ops are pre-figurative models for a post-capitalist society, if we’re thinking far enough into the future, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
In the time of this great, strange plague, writer Paul Kingsnorth returns to the Celtic tale of Finnegas, the woodland hermit who devoted his life to catching and eating the salmon that contained the wisdom of the world.
I would like to tell you a few things about this virus and the lessons it should teach us, all the things we should be learning. I would like to add my voice to the crowd and be heard above it.
I would like to say: fish have returned to the Venetian canals now that humans have stopped polluting them.
I would like to say: the clouds of air pollution over Italy and China have dissipated since people were prevented from causing them with their cars, planes, factories.
I would like to say: up to 80,000 premature deaths which would have been caused this way have probably been prevented in China by the shutdown of the economy.
I would like to say: carbon monoxide levels in the air above New York have collapsed by 50 percent in a single week.
I would like to say: Nature recovers swiftly when we stop our plundering of Her bounty.
I would like to say: lift your gaze, humans.
I would like to say: we can learn from this, we can change.
I am squatting in the sun on this day of the spring equinox, it is a cold sun, I am down by the pond with my children, we are watching the tadpoles squirm free of their jelly under the leafing poplars. The world is turning.
Today is the day when shafts of dawn sunlight illuminate the passages of the old Neolithic tombs at Carrowkeel, at Loughcrew, at Newgrange. Today at Stonehenge, at Wayland’s Smithy, at West Kennet, all across these Atlantic islands—today is the day the light of Sky pierces the darkness of Earth. Today is the day that aérios meets chthón.
Neolithic : we think we know what this word means, but it is just another one of our categories. When we say Neolithic, we mean: forgotten people, unknown people, the first farmers. When we say Neolithic, we mean: who were they and what was their world and how was it so different from ours under this same sky?
Their world, the world of those people long supplanted, was a world of tombs; a world of great barrows raised on high downs, barrows that became the pregnant belly of Earth, barrows into which, each equinox, a shaft of sunlight would pierce, enter the womb of the Mother, seed new life each spring.
I am writing this on the day of the equinox in the time of the great, strange plague.
I would like to say, as if I could tell you: This was what they knew. That each spring, Sky must meet Earth, that there is no life without both Sky and Earth, without both chthón and aérios. That if you live without one or the other, you will build a world that is bent on its axis, and that world may seem whole but will be only half-made, and one day it will fall over and you will fall with it.
I would like to say: well, we had it coming.
The Irish writer John Moriarty wrote a lot about chthón. His life’s search was for ways to re-embed us in what we have lost, to take us around and down again, to correct the Western Error. In his autobiography, Nostos, he writes:
Chthón is the old Greek word for the Earth in its secret, dark, depths, and if there was any one word that could be said to distinguish ancient Greeks from modern Europeans, that word chthón, that would be it. Greeks had the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the pieties and beliefs that go with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the wisdom that goes with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the sense of spiritual indwelling that goes with the word, we haven’t. In the hope that they might continue in the goodwill of its dark but potentially beneficent powers, Greeks poured libations of wine, of honey, or barley-water sweetened with mint down into this realm, we don’t.
I would like to say that we forgot all about chthón, we with our space stations and our stellar minds, our progress and our clean boots, our hand sanitizers and our aircon units, our concrete vaults and our embalming fluid; that for a short period we escaped into aérios, or thought we had, and now we are going to have to go underground again, and you can be sure we will be dragged there by the Hag against our will, and we will fight and fight as the sun comes down the shaft and we see again what is carved on the stones down there.
You can forget about chthón, but chthón won’t forget about you.
I would like to say that I know what to do about all this, or what to learn. I would like to teach it to you so that you may learn too. I would like to be a prophet in a time when prophets are so sorely needed.
Unfortunately, I am not qualified for this role. I don’t know anything at all, and I am learning, painfully, that this was my lesson all along.
I don’t know anything at all.
My society does not know anything at all.
All the things I was brought up to label as learning : my A-levels, my Oxford University degrees, all the books I have read and written, all the arguments I learned how to formulate, all the ideas I learned how to frame, the concepts I learned how to enunciate. All this head-work, all these modern European ways of seeing, understanding, controlling, managing, directing the world:
Nope.
None of that was it.
One of the best-known myth cycles of Celtic Ireland is the life story of the great warrior Finn McCool. Finn, in his boyhood, was apprenticed to an old woodland hermit by the name of Finnegas. Finnegas had spent his life fishing for an elusive salmon which dwelt in a pool under a group of hazel trees. The hazel trees contained a great old magic, and when their nuts dropped into the pool and were eaten by the salmon, they imparted to it all the knowledge and wisdom of the world.
Up from the earth the wisdom came, through the trees, down into the water, and Finnegas knew that if he could catch and eat the salmon then all that wisdom would be his.
One day, to his great joy, Finnegas finally caught the salmon. He laid it upon the ground and instructed Finn, his apprentice, to cook it for him while he took a walk in the woods to collect himself, to prepare for his great moment.
Cook the salmon, he instructed Finn, but eat none of it.
Yes, master, said Finn.
When Finnegas returned and looked into Finn’s eyes, he saw immediately that everything had changed. He saw that the catastrophe had occurred.
Did you eat the salmon? he demanded. No, master, replied Finn. But …
Cooking the salmon, Finn had seen a blister appear in its flesh. Perhaps wanting the meal to be perfect for Finnegas after his years of labor, he had pressed the blister down with his thumb and in the process had scalded his hand with hot oil from the cooking fish. Instinctively, he had raised his thumb to his mouth to suck away the pain.
In Finn’s eyes now, Finnegas saw all the wisdom of the world, and he saw too that it was Finn, and not he, who was destined for greatness. Finnegas saw that his life’s dream, his life’s work, was not what he had thought it was. Everything he had learned, the moment he thought he had prepared for:
Nope.
Eat, master, said Finn, offering the fish to Finnegas, for this was your work. But Finnegas refused. No, he said. No, the fish is yours, Finn, and some part of me always knew it would be so. Yours is the work, Finn. My work was to prepare for it. Eat the fish, and use well what you learn.
Maybe we thought we would one day eat that salmon, you and I. Maybe we thought that if we worked hard enough, learned enough, we could catch it and learn from it, we could save the world, change the world, teach the world some lessons.
I thought that once. I probably learned it at university. Now I think that I, we, our generations, those of us brought up within the machine, brought up to breathe with it, rely on it, those of us tamed and made by it, those of us who crushed the world without thinking—the wisdom to come is not ours.
We will never escape what we have made and what made us. We are not equipped.
We are not the people who will eat the salmon. We are not Finn.
But perhaps, if we’re lucky, we could be Finnegas.
Perhaps, if we’re lucky, we could lay some ground for what is to come.
Yours is the work. My work was to prepare for it.
You cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. You cannot use your arguments and your concepts to access the chthón. You cannot use your Oxford University degree to build a world which regards Oxford University degrees with the bafflement they deserve to be greeted with.
It is good to learn how little I know, and how little we matter.
Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.
We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to.
But Earth does, and it will.
It turns out that we were never in control at all.
Control is what civilizations do. Perhaps it is what they are. Perhaps it is their central story. If we can control the world, we can protect ourselves from the darkness it contains. We can protect ourselves from what lies under the ground, in the tombs. Who doesn’t want to be protected? But who, in the end, can ever be?
Later in his autobiography, Moriarty writes that he is attempting to walk into culture. Into a culture so sure of itself that it wouldn’t ever need to become a civilization.
Cultures like that have existed before. They will again. But not yet. And when they come, people like us will not make them. We can’t. It is not our work.
Who knows what happens next? Maybe the virus will come and carry me away, me with my weak chest, me with my winter coughs, deepened every year by the damp Atlantic land I am grounded in, and there will be nothing to be done about this. Then my atoms and light will go back where they came from, or forward to somewhere else, and this is the way of things, and when exactly did we forget that? When exactly did we decide that our tiny little temporary mass of atoms, named and suited and given a role, pumped up with words and stories, should have any right at all to persist in its small form when all else is change and motion?
Nothing matters at all, and this is why everything does.
Look: the sun pierces the tunnel; the belly of the Mother is seeded again as another year begins. Something will be born when the summer comes. You do not need to catalogue it, understand it. You do not need to learn anything at all from it.
You can just watch it come.
Cultures that last are cultures that do not build. Cultures that last are cultures that do not seek to know what cannot be known. Cultures that last are cultures that crawl into their chthón without asking questions. Cultures that know how to be, that look at the sun on the mountain, and say, yes, this is the revelation.
People last when they do not eat apples that were not meant for them, when they do not steal fire they do not understand. People last when they sit in the sun and do nothing at all.
Let us learn from this! we say. Let us take this crisis and use it to make us better! Better people, more organized people, wiser people. Sleeker people, more efficient people. Let us become sustainable! Let us learn to tell new stories, for the old ones are broken now!
We should be saying: stories were the problem. We should be saying: no more stories, not from us.
We should be saying: break the stories, break them all. Nothing of this should be sustained.
We should be saying: no more normal. Not now, not ever.
We should be saying: we could die any moment, and this has always been true. Look at the beauty!
We should be saying: see the sunlight crawl down the passage of the tomb.
We should be saying: something is about to be illuminated.
