Long-time members of the Bioneers Community may recall hearing from Biomimetic inventor and scientist Jay Harman over the years at Bioneers Conferences. Jay and his company Pax Scientific have just announced a new product, poised to transform a key component of the industrial world that we all interact with daily, whether we realize it or not: the fan.
Jay Harman fell in love with skin-diving and fishing when he was 10 years old. As he says, “When I saw the efficiency and power of how fish swim, compared to my clumsy efforts, I was captivated and knew I’d learn from nature the rest of my life.”
And learn he has. Jay recognized that nature always uses whirlpool shapes, or vortices, to swim and fly and move liquids and gases – and nature sips energy, while humans guzzle it. His self-admitted obsession led to years figuring out how to reverse-engineer a whirlpool so he could recreate nature’s efficiencies. That led to the founding of PAX Scientific, an engineering firm that applies natural geometries to improve industrial equipment. Jay has spoken about his developments and inventions at PAX Scientific in severalappearances at the Bioneers Conference.
For over 20 years PAX has worked behind the scenes to help change the industrial world to more efficient design. For example, with the power of just three light bulbs, a four-inch by six-inch PAX mixer can circulate 10 million gallons of stagnant drinking water (like a football field, 30-feet deep). It’s now the number-one specified product in North America for maintaining drinking water quality in the municipal distribution system, with thousands of installations.
But Jay and his team are impatient to make change happen faster, especially with the news that July 2019 was the hottest month in recorded history.
When it gets hot, people turn on fans. But fans are running around us all the time – using 22% of the world’s electricity. That’s a staggering number. Generating the electricity to run fans dumps as much CO2 emissions into the atmosphere as all of the world’s cars, and fan design hasn’t fundamentally changed in 100 years.
PAX’s calculations showed that it’s possible to save a billion tons of CO2 emissions every year from more efficient fans. They got to work and designed Flair, a new fan that uses up to 85% less electricity and quietly circulates air to increase comfort and reduce heating and air-conditioning costs year-round. That’s important, because air-conditioners and heaters are heavy users of power, consuming nearly 50% of household energy. The problem is that in the winter, expensive heated air accumulates near the ceiling while you sit in colder air, and in the summer, cooler air sinks to the floor while you sit in warmer air. Flair’s ring-vortex circulation destratifies the air, so you can change your thermostat and save more than 25% of your heating and cooling costs per room.
Rather than selling the Flair design to a big manufacturer, PAX decided to take it to the people. As Jay says, “The world needs urgent action, but it’s hard for big corporations to change quickly enough to mitigate climate change. No matter how well-meaning the CEO or VP of Sales is, or how much he or she loves their grandchildren or nature, climate isn’t in their companies’ mandate, objectives, or priorities. By launching Flair through a crowd-funding campaign, we can show big manufacturers that people want high-quality, super-efficient products. Our campaign runs through the end of October, and it’s a great chance to make a real and practical step to combat climate change.”
Bioneers Senior Producer Stephanie Welch spoke with director Louie Schwartzberg about his documentary film, Fantastic Fungi: The Magic Beneath Us. The film features mycologist and author Paul Stamets, and an all-star team of professional and amateur mycologists, artists, foodies, ecologists, doctors, and explorers joined forces with time-lapse master Louie Schwartzberg to create this mind-bending film about mushrooms and their mysterious interwoven rootlike filaments called mycelium.
STEPHANIE: You have a long history with Bioneers and I’ve seen your work for years. It’s really beautiful and moving. What drew you into working in time-lapse photography?
Louie Schwartzberg
LOUIE: When I graduated from UCLA, I moved up to Northern California. I wanted to shoot high-quality resolution film, but didn’t have the money. So I retrofitted old Mitchell cameras that were built in the ‘30s and figured out how to adapt a still-camera lens to the front of it. A friend of mine who made electric guitars for the Grateful Dead helped me build a motor that ran on batteries, so I was able to take a camera outdoors.
I started to chase the light, shooting time-lapse clouds, sunsets, and fog rolling in and out. It took me a month to shoot a roll of film. But most importantly it fed my sense of wonder. It’s hard to imagine what a flower looks like as it opens and closes, or for clouds to morph in front of your eyes. Those rhythms and patterns touched the deepest part of my soul, and I just wanted to keep broadening my horizons and perspective by seeing things through different scales of time. How does a redwood tree look in life? How does a hummingbird look in life, which is the opposite scale of shooting in slow motion?
Then you realize how looking at things through a human point of view is really limiting. Looking at things at “24 frames per second” is a narrow window of reality. There are all kinds of reality based on, in a sense, different metabolic rates of different animals and critters, because we all move at different frame rates. Being able to see that light move at different scales of time. One extreme would be geological time, millions of years, billions of years. Then you look at the time span of a fruit fly, which might be a day or two. It’s all valid.
STEPHANIE: Is it true that you are currently filming 24 hours a day?
LOUIE: Yes. I’ve had cameras rolling in my studio 24 hours a day, seven days a week, nonstop for 40 years. Every day I shoot about a second worth of screen time in a 24-hour period. There are computers triggering the camera to frame a film. For the last 10 years, I’ve been shooting in 3D. There are grow lights that go on and off, photo lights come on during the exposure. I’m shooting plants, flowers, mushrooms, things decomposing. It’s just a way to see things that humans really can’t see. The most precious thing in life is time. So now that I’m shooting digitally and money isn’t a constraint of shooting film, time is the most precious commodity. I just love making the invisible visible. It still fills me with wonder. I think when they asked Albert Einstein his definition of God, it’s a sense of wonder.
STEPHANIE: What were the visual aspects of the world of mycelium and fungi that inspired you to embark on this film?
LOUIE: Visually what inspired me to shoot the mycelium is because it’s a network. The underground mycelium network is a network, and we see that pattern in the circulatory system and nervous system of our bodies. It looks like the branches in a tree. It looks like the neurological pathways in your brain. It looks like the Internet. It looks like the galaxies in the cosmos. This networking pattern is an archetype that exists throughout the universe, and the fact that it lives underground in the shared, gorgeous, communal internet that enables trees to communicate with each other, to share nutrients, to foster ecosystems to flourish, for me that’s like nature’s operating instructions.
STEPHANIE: How long have you known Paul Stamets and how did you meet him?
LOUIE: I met Paul 13 years ago at Bioneers at one of his earliest talks. At that time, I was working on my film Wings of Life, which is about pollination. It’s a film that Disney Nature released, with Meryl Streep telling the story from the POV of a flower making love with bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies. I call it ‘a love story that feeds the earth’.
Then when I heard Paul’s talk. I realized if plants are critical for our survival, the only solar collectors that can turn light energy into food and fuel and medicine, what do they need? They need soil. Where does soil come from? It comes from the largest organism on the planet. It’s only one-cell thick. It’s inside my body and on every continent. It’s the fungal network, the fungal kingdom. It blew my mind.
I invited Paul to my room and I showed him some of my time-lapse mushrooms on my laptop. That was the beginning of a really beautiful, budding relationship that is a great example of how science and art can work together with the intersection being wonder to help people understand nature’s intelligence.
Paul Stamets & Louie Schwartzberg
STEPHANIE: What is your favorite thing about mushrooms after working on this and learning so much about them?
LOUIE: There are lots, I never knew that it could be the greatest natural solution for climate change. The reason why there’s carbon under the ground is that we have decomposed organic matter called coal and oil. We’ve dug it up and we’ve burned it and put it into the atmosphere. There’s a way to clean that mess by plants and trees absorbing CO2, storing the carbon underground and giving us the oxygen we need to breathe.
In the film we see a CO2 molecule going into a leaf, oxygen being released, and the carbon traveling down the trunk of a tree into the roots, into to the tip of the root, into the mycelium network, where the carbon is sequestered for thousands of years, and to be used as a building block for a new plant to grow. Many scientists believe that if we stop putting fossil fuel pollution into the atmosphere, that the Earth could actually clean the atmosphere on its own in five years, in that symbiotic relationship – photosynthesis with plants and trees, and the mycelium network under the ground. That’s what they do, they sequester carbon.
STEPHANIE: You talk a lot about the intelligence of nature in your work. What is it about the intelligence of nature that you’re hoping people will understand from this and other films that you’ve made?
LOUIE: Learning about nature’s intelligence opens you up to the idea that everything is interconnected. The fact that it’s all one and all connected is no longer a ‘new age hippie’ idea. In my movie, we talk about the science that proves it. Mycelium network under the ground is a shared economy that brings trees together into one real, giant, symbiotic, shared economy– one not based on greed, but based on the idea that when things are shared, everybody flourishes, and communities survive better than individuals.
That is such an important message to understand how nature works, and maybe more importantly, to understand how we could organize our social structure and our politics. Communities connecting is the way for things to be successful. That’s why I’m embarking on a self-distribution platform. Instead of being seen on a streaming platform alone on your digital device, we want people to gather in real time and make those connections. If you’re interested in permaculture, the environmental movement, foraging foods, psychedelics, let’s all interconnect. It’s really the model of Bioneers. You have all these different pillars, from social justice to biology to environmental consciousness to politics. It all overlaps. Having everyone connect, network, and enable each other to be successful is I think nature’s operating instructions, a term that I think Kenny Ausubel coined.
STEPHANIE: In your film, you mention how many ancient cultures and Indigenous Peoples have cultivated deep relationships with mushrooms and plant allies with deep healing properties. Western culture is catching up to a certain extent, learning about the benefits. But as we face so much environmental destruction and climate chaos, talk about conservation and efforts to save the habitats where all these species flourish.
LOUIE: Exactly. The worst thing that’s happening I think with the degradation of the environment is we’re losing species at a frightening rate. Maybe by 2040 or 2050, we might lose half the species on our planet. The sad thing is it took billions of years for these incredible, complex DNA molecules to be created and evolve through the process of evolution. What’s scary is that we know we’re losing certain species, but we don’t even know all the species we’re losing because we haven’t identified them all yet, especially in the world of bacteria, the fungi, insects. This is a critical concern, and I think that’s why we have to work as hard as we can to bring harmony and balance back into nature to slow down this degradation of the environment.
Anything that is a living thing, now that we can kind of understand the idea, that in reality everything is connected. If it’s all connected, then it’s part of me, it’s part of the link that supports my life. And I support other life. The loss of any species is a loss to everybody. So it’s critical.
A lot of these plants and sacred medicines have been a spiritual gateway for man to be able to expand consciousness. You have to ask yourself the question: Why did that happen? Why is it there’s a molecule in psilocybin that can fit a receptor in the brain that triggers serotonin to go through your body and to be able to open up pathways and neurological journeys that don’t exist any other way? Perhaps it could with some deep form of meditation that takes 30, 40 years to achieve, but what a miracle it is if you can perhaps experience something similar in one day.
STEPHANIE: I recall seeing many of your images projected onto the Vatican, and you show some of that event in the film.
LOUIE: Yes, it was a giant event organized by Louie Psihoyos, who enlisted a number of filmmakers to project their content on the Vatican in support of the Pope’s encyclical supporting the environment. We projected on the Vatican the day before the vote for the Paris Accords for climate change.
That was an extremely emotional experience for me, because my parents were both Holocaust survivors. I thought about the fact that the Vatican was silent during World War II and the round up of Jews in Europe, as well as Rome and Italy. Then I looked over my shoulder and I saw 50 giant projectors with a million lumens of light ready to shine on the Vatican, to shine light into the darkness, and that filled me with hope – that change is possible. You’ll see the reaction shots of people in the film, and nuns who are praying to the mushrooms on the Vatican. I thought that was a brilliant judo move.
STEPHANIE: Is there anything you wanted to add about the film that you want people to know?
LOUIE: I love making the invisible visible, and I think that my own mushroom journey has taught me that. You want to turn people on to what you’ve learned and what you’ve experienced, and the film itself I think is an immersive experience, because people say it’s gorgeous, it’s beautiful, but it’s more than that. Beauty is nature’s tool for survival because you protect what you love. So by appealing to the heart, I think the film will help people make the right choices to create a sustainable, healthy, living planet, not only the planet but also a healthy, living, sustainable human structure or social fabric.
There’s a shift of consciousness happening right now that makes it right for this film to emerge, because the film is also about hope. It speaks to the critical time in history we’re facing right now, but at the same time it’s inspirational, it’s hopeful, and in the face of the dark political times we’re going through, we need that.
A giant shout out to Bioneers for fostering this communal effort for 30 years, building community, creating the network, taking the mycelial network that’s below the ground and bringing it above ground. That is nature’s operating instructions.
With a wide scope and penetrating lens, Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel grapples with the existential crisis now facing human civilization. He shares both his deep faith in the power of human creativity and grassroots movements and honest appraisals of the enormous challenges we face and the short time we have to address them. With his usual inimitable style that seamlessly juxtaposes heartfelt passion, scathing humor and moments of ecstatic inspiration, Kenny tackles climate, inequality, the imperative of the Green New Deal, and Mayan wisdom, to mention only a few topics, ultimately exhorting us to rise to the occasion and trust that we have the capacity and vision to birth a new world.
More than half of all plastic in existence was produced in the last 15 years, and this accumulation is only getting worse as plastic pollution threatens the health of the planet. Highly-durable plastic litters everywhere – from the bottoms of oceans to the tops of mountains – and won’t degrade for another 400 years. This problem will be with us for a while, but so will the growing movement for a systemic shift in how we think about packaging and waste in for sustainable future.5 Gyres, an ocean conservation nonprofit, is one of the movement’s leading organizations.
Read on for a conversation between Anna Cummins, Co-Founder of 5 Gyres, and Teo Grossman, Senior Director of Programs at Bioneers, about leveraging the problem of plastic pollution with solutions that could lead us to a cleaner world.
TEO GROSSMAN, BIONEERS: As consumers and individuals, we’ve all been learning more and more in recent years about the scale of plastic pollution in the environment. When coverage first started to spike, I thought initially that this was great news, the result of the heroic efforts to get the word out about plastic pollution by entities like 5 Gyres and other groups. Unfortunately, it also turns out that there’s simply vastly more plastic than ever before. I’ve read reports suggesting that half of all plastic ever produced has been manufactured in the past decade or so. Scientists are now including plastic pollution as one of the geological markers for describing “The Anthropocene” along with nuclear fallout measurements. It’s a bleak way to start here but what is the scale and extent of the problem we’re facing?
Anna Cummins, 5 Gyres
ANNA CUMMINS, 5 GYRES: Yes, awareness has exploded in the last couple of years, which is good news, and there are also some dangers associated with that growth. But the increases in production are terrifying. What you’re referring to with regard to manufacturing is true. It gets even worse if we look towards the future, which brings up a whole other issue in terms of the connections between plastics, fossil fuels and climate change.
Right now there are predictions coming from the Center for International Environmental Law that the industry is investing upwards of $200 billion in ramping up the production of plastic by 40% in the next decade through building 300 new petrochemical facilities in the US alone, or expanding some of the existing facilities. Plastic is really what’s driving that increase. If we don’t get a handle on stopping the production of plastic, then no bag ban, no straw ban, no amount of single-product bans are going to make a dent.
It is a little bleak in that respect, but I would say on the flip side there is now a movement that is really paying careful attention to this. We’re seeing the movement becoming much more organized and starting to engage in more intersectional collaboration, connecting with the anti-fracking movement, connecting with the justice movement, really looking at how plastic is not just about downstream impacts – plastics getting into fish and us eating fish – but it is an entire pipeline and there are potential human health impacts along that whole pipeline.
TEO: Much has been reported lately on the “end of recycling.” Are we really at risk of consumer recycling going away or being much less effective?
ANNA: There’s been this myth for a long time that the ultimate solution to plastic and our consumption is recycling. It is a myth that we have bought hook, line and sinker. It’s a very convenient narrative for industry to really push consumers as responsible for what to do with their waste, while abdicating themselves as producers from the responsibility from making products that have some value at the end of their life cycle. The problems with recycling have just really heightened lately with China’s recent decision to stop taking our dirty plastic. For a long time, we just shipped all of our plastic to China and to other countries, to Vietnam, to India. China recently said, Enough! We’ve had it with your low-value plastics. That is creating a ripple effect across the whole industry, and there isn’t a clear solution to what’s going to happen to our infrastructure in this country.
The truth of the matter though is that we’ve created products, especially plastic bottles and beverage containers, that had no design in mind for recycling. We’ve gotten really, really good at making tons and tons of cheap plastic water bottles, but we have not gotten good at how we recover and how we “recycle” those products. And I say “recycle” because most of those products are, in reality, downcycled, if at all. The vast majority go to landfill or escape in the environment.
For example, of the one billion or so beverage containers that are produced every single day, we recycle/recover around 30% of that. That means the vast majority, about 700 million, are going to landfill and out into the environment.
What we really need is not just innovation in packaging to make it perform better and to make it more resistant and flexible, but we need radical innovation in how we design materials, how we recover, and how we truly recycle them so that we can create a closed loop, which we’re nowhere close to.
Another approach to this glut in this increase in plastic production would be to actually mandate recycled content thresholds. If we demand that companies by 2025 or by 2050 incorporate 75% or even up to 100% of post-consumer recycled content in their packaging, then they’re going to have to get much better at getting their products back. That’s an example of producer responsibility where you’re really mandating that companies innovate.
TEO: Tell us about some of the specific projects, campaigns, collaborations that are progressing forward, giving you reason to think that we’re going to be able to make a dent here.
ANNA: We’re seeing some really encouraging results from some of our partners in Southeast Asia working on community participation in zero waste. We have a partnership with some groups like the Global Alliance of Incinerator Alternatives. They’re scaling up zero waste techniques in cities, and getting huge reductions in the amount of plastic that is either going to landfill or escaping out into the environment. I think that’s really good news.
We’re working on a project in Los Angeles called Trash Blitz. The idea is looking at cities as centers for waste. We’re really trying to get a handle on understanding where and what the hotspots of plastic pollution are in a city like Los Angeles. We’re not just looking at shorelines and the sea surface, but inland and airborne and rivers. The goal is to get a sense of the location and source of the priority problems in a city — and then translate that data into a policy response.
We’ve been doing something like that in San Francisco through a two-year project called the San Francisco Microplastics Project, looking at sediment, sea surface, biota, fish stomachs, etc., to find out what all the primary problems with microplastics are in the San Francisco Bay. Again, the intention is to determine how can we use that data to inform solutions at the city level. We’re hoping that we can create models for protocols that we can spread to other cities, since we’re not seeing a whole lot of federal action these days. We need to look at cities as the center for solutions.
TEO: It sounds like you’re working to develop solutions on all sides of the issue. Working with cities on zero waste policies while pressuring producers on the other side to stand down production.
ANNA: It really depends on what we find. So say, for example, in the San Francisco Bay we find that microfibers are the most prevalent contaminant. That’s really useful information we can provide to the city to say we need to get a handle on microfibers are getting into our waterways. When I’m talking about microfibers, I’m talking about microplastics that come from synthetic clothing in the washing machine.
There’s no one single solution to this issue. We’re going to need to change textiles. We’re going to need to change our washing machine infrastructure to actually filter out these microfibers. But that’s just one example of how we can use data to drive upstream solutions and figure out where the policy approaches are going to be most effective.
TEO: How much impact has the Ban the Bag legislation and straw phase-out efforts had? Given the scale of the pollution, are these symbolic victories (meaningful in their own right) or will they really have an impact?
ANNA: That’s a great question and one we’re really grappling with as we look at the predicted production increases that I mentioned before. If plastic production really does ramp up by 40% in the next 10 years, is it going to matter if we ban bags and straws and forks, not just in California but in the entire country?
I do think it matters. I think it sends a signal to the industry in general that consumers, citizens, are starting to take note of plastic, and they’re starting to demand action. Is it going to make a dent in that kind of production? Probably not, but coupled with more collaboration with the fracking movement, with climate activism, we’re really on the cusp of making an impact.
Here’s another example. In my city of Los Angeles, we have the largest urban oil field in the country. There are some amazing activists that are working on pushing for a 2500-foot buffer zone between oil drilling activities and residences. That’s a great example of something that you wouldn’t necessarily think of as a plastic pollution solution. It’s not banning bags or straws, but if that succeeds, it’ll shut down about 80% of the oil activity in Los Angeles, and because plastics are made from fossil fuels, there is a direct correlation there.
I think these product bans are important, but if we don’t start reaching across the movement aisle and engaging with new partners, then we’re not going to make a dent.
TEO: You’re seeing this movement evolve into a truly intersectional effort by partnering with groups that are working on eliminating fossil fuel extraction and burning, partnering with social justice and public health movements. Are you seeing success in terms of that concept being picked up, understanding that global plastics pollution and global carbon pollution are basically driven by the same 50 or so global companies?
ANNA: This is an exciting new development, seeing some of those intersectional connections starting to align. I think we have a long way to go still. Where I’ve seen that be most effective is through partnership with Break Free from Plastic.
I went to a meeting last March in Houston with a number of plastic pollution groups who work on more consumer facing issues and environmental justice groups that work on toxics and fracking issues. It was an incredible coming together where we realized that there are all these connections, all these synergies, and that we’re ultimately all fighting for a just transition off of fossil fuels. The only way we’re going to be successful against such a huge and well resourced industry is if we are able to strengthen this movement.
TEO: What does success look like in 15-20 years, if everything goes right?
ANNA: First, we shut down the expansion and the building of new petrochemical plants in the US and stop making so much plastic. If we could figure out a way to use the plastic already out in the world, there’s no reason we should be drilling for new sources of materials to make more plastic. That would be a huge success, getting away from fossil fuel-based materials period. Obviously we need to do this not just for packaging, but for our transportation and for so many of the things that we do. We need to move to renewable sources of energy.
Second, if we can curb or stem the flow of plastic pollution from land to sea, we could actually see a huge dent in ocean impacts, because plastics don’t stay in the ocean. There’s a lot of talk of going out to the ocean to clean up plastics. My husband Markus Erikson has been working on a lot of research with ocean modelers, and showing that it gets kicked back out. It’s not staying in the ocean. It washes back up on shorelines, it sinks to the sea floor, it gets eaten by fish and sequestered in fecal pellets. So it doesn’t stay in the ocean. If we could actually stop the amount of plastic flowing out to sea, we could see a huge difference in our ocean environment.
The plastic-free movement is booming worldwide as people search for ways to reduce their carbon footprint. Although the market is growing for reusable, sustainable alternatives to single-use plastics, a comprehensive overhaul of the plastic supply chain is the most direct way to affect meaningful change.
At the 2018 Bioneers Conference Anna Cummins, the co-founder and Global Strategy Director of 5 Gyres, hosted a conversation with Shilpi Chhotray of Break Free from Plastic and Conrad MacKerron of As You Sow on our worldwide plastic problem and some ways in which we could make progress toward solutions. This conversation is excerpted below, beginning with introductions from Shilpi and Conrad.
SHILPI: I am the senior communications officer for Break Free from Plastic, and I’m embedded at the Story of Stuff project in Berkeley. Break Free from Plastic is a movement of 1,300 groups working around the world at all points in the plastic pollution supply chain. This is the first time colleagues in the United States and Europe are working with colleagues in China and Southeast Asia to truly understand and listen to what’s happening on a peer-to-peer level.
There is still a lot of blame in the mainstream media blaming Southeast Asia for the plastic pollution problem. The issue with this narrative is that companies headquartered in the Global North are the corporations creating this problematic plastic packaging in the first place, knowing very well that waste management infrastructure looks quite differently in that part of the world than it does here. And actually, we’re not doing a great job with our own waste management, given only 9% has been recycled since the 1950s.
Break Free from Plastic is in the general mindset that just figuring out what is out there is not enough. We also need to figure out who is creating what ends up clogging our storm drains and tainting our oceans. This allows us to understand where plastic begins and where it ends. Sometimes plastic pollution can seem very heavy, convoluted and complex, but our message is very simple: To stop plastic pollution, stop making plastic.
CONRAD: I’m a senior vice president at As You Sow. We’ve been around for 25 years. We’re a nonprofit based in Oakland, California, and we use shareholder advocacy to promote corporate social responsibility in a variety of social and environmental areas. That work includes engaging companies directly as shareholders, starting dialogues on a variety of issues, sometimes filing shareholder proposals and having those voted on at the annual meetings of large companies, and encouraging our peers to vote their proxies.
I’ve started a waste program at As You Sow. We have what I consider to be really embarrassing recycling rates in the United States. Why can’t we even recycle half of our aluminum or glass? In a country so technologically advanced and sophisticated, we still cannot recycle. These materials are all recyclable, and yet we can’t do it because of poor infrastructure, lack of will, and lack of funding.
A few years ago, we decided to find out how much all of this material that is going into the landfill is worth, and we couldn’t find any numbers. The EPA didn’t have it. We couldn’t find any states that did. So we decided to find out ourselves. We found that there’s $11 billion of value in the packaging that’s landfilled routinely in the United States, and about $8 billion of that is plastics.
Part of the problem is a lack of resources. Even the corporate groups say that you probably need a billion and a half of investment just to fix what’s wrong with curbside recycling. We have outmoded material recoveries facilities, which is where they take your curbside recycling. And a lot of cities are just underfunded.
On the more positive side, because of the work that’s been done in the last three or four years by great groups like the Break Free from Plastic and 5 Gyres, you do have a real critical mass building. We had 200 nations pledge to eliminate plastic pollution at a UN environment assembly. 50 countries have banned some form of plastic bags. Nine countries have banned some form of Styrofoam packaging.
Folks often say, “Well, plastic’s so cheap.” It’s really hard to think about how to replace it because the alternatives like glass and aluminum and fiber, they’re all more expensive and they produce more carbon emissions. But when you talk about the price of plastic, it does not factor in things like the enormous subsidies to the oil and gas industry. Even the chemical industry now admits that plastic every year does $139 billion of ecosystem damage, and about $13 billion of that is estimated to be in the marine area.
When we talk about plastic being cheap, we don’t think about the externalities. Once those are factored in, and companies are forced to pay more of that, which we hope will happen, plastic won’t be such a cheap option.
So what do we do? We engage. The first thing to ask companies to do is pretty simple: Make all your packaging recyclable so that at least if you want to, you can put it in the recycling bin.
We also think polystyrene foam has proven itself to be a bad actor. It’s very hard to recycle. It does an outsized portion of damage with the ocean because it crumbles so much and fish see it as food. We don’t need it. Let’s just get rid of it.
We need to redesign non-recyclable pouches and sachets that Shilpi mentioned to be recyclable. Then of course, the harder, bigger job: transition to reusables and renewables, refillables, and then have some transparency around how much plastic companies are actually using.
I’m very proud that in the last year, the interests within our investor/shareholder community has really exploded. We now have 30 investors with a trillion dollars of collective assets under management who are excited, and we are going to be starting dialogues this fall with four huge companies: Proctor & Gamble and Pepsi-Co here in the U.S., and Nestlé and Unilever in the UK.
Harmful Waste: To Ban or Not to Ban?
ANNA: We’re struggling with this right now in Southern California, where a lot of us are working on banning polystyrene and Styrofoam. We all know it’s a problem, but the question is: What do we replace it with? It’s really unsatisfying to go from something that’s bad to something that’s a little less bad. And unfortunately, that’s what we’re looking at right now.
Ultimately, what we want is systems change, where instead of everything being available to us in a disposable takeaway, we look at different delivery systems. For example, in the UK, there’s a company called Cup Club that’s just starting to try to scale. Instead of walking around with your paper or disposable cup, you can basically rent or lease a reusable cup from one place, get your coffee, and drop it off at the next place.
We struggle with the alternative for water bottles, too. There’s just water and boxed water, and better boxes and all these other alternatives. I grew up without plastic water bottles, and we drank out of the drinking fountain, and no one passed out from dehydration because they didn’t have their little bottle with them.
It’s going to take us time, though, to transition from where we are – this culture of convenience – to a more reasonable system. So in the meantime, we absolutely need alternative materials.
That being said, there’s a ton of greenwashing with the bioplastics that are on the market right now. Most of them fall woefully short of what they’re advertising. Ideally, we go to fiber-based compostable materials and we can create more of a closed loop. And then we can create compost, regenerative agriculture, fix the soil, carbon sequestration, and all that good stuff.
CONRAD: Here in the U.S. we’re very spoiled. We have a developed, mature recycling system, even if it doesn’t work well. In developing countries, there are literally millions of people who are living on the edge who collect bottles for a living. We need to respect what’s going on there, and if you suddenly ban certain products because they’re not perfect, you’d be taking away those livelihoods. They actually thrive on an admittedly flawed system. That’s one of the complexities I just wanted to point out that makes it hard to make a sweeping ban.
How Effective Is Our Recycling System?
ANNA: It’s really hard after decades of being told that recycling is an environmentally friendly thing to do to—for us to say “don’t recycle.” But it does bring up a really important question: We’ve gotten really, really, really good over the last 30, 40 years at making super efficient processes. Beverage containers, for instance: We’ve gotten better at making trillions of them. We haven’t invested to the same extent in innovation around our infrastructure for recycling. We haven’t paired designers together with recyclers to talk about how can we create a closed loop. So the system is broken.
CONRAD: The plastics recycling industry estimates that 30% of materials that are collected for recycling have to be rejected because the industry has chosen to put these fancy shrink-wrap labels on them. You’ve seen this, like on Gatorade. Those make the recycling process very difficult. You can imagine the competing powers within a company of wanting to advertise the heck out of their stuff and put fancy labels on it versus doing what the environmental people in the company may say.
SHILPI: China has decided not to take the world’s waste anymore in an effort to protect their own environment and their people, which is really great, because it’s focused the rest of the world—it forced us to figure out what to do domestically. We really need to face the facts about what’s going on in our own country. One thing I do want to say about recycling is that it still comes from fossil fuels. Even if we figure out the recycling issue, there’s a whole other piece to this, which is human health and climate change.
Alternative Materials and Solutions: The Good and the Bad
SHILPI: In looking at bioplastics, we asked a lot of sectors what they think about it, and there is a concern about using natural resources that can also be harmed or depleted if we go that route, especially if you’re talking about mass scale.
In my other life, I work a lot in seaweed and regenerative seaweed systems, and there is a big push for marine algae to be used as bioplastics. I am not about that if it’s going to be ravaging the ocean ecosystem. Not all aquaculture systems work in this arena, so we need to be looking a little bit more holistically when we talk about alternatives.
ANNA: There’s a big push to “leash the lid” right now. But that water bottle, once the lid is off, is made from a kind of plastic that’s going to sink. If you talk to Sylvia Earle or James Cameron or other people who’ve gone down to the ocean floor, they will tell you that, especially in the Mediterranean, the floor is littered with those bottles.
CONRAD: Because of all the concerns about straws in the last six months, wheat straws have become one of the alternatives being tested and publicized, but a lot of other materials are as well. Wheat seems like it’s pretty benign, so that’s great. A lot of it has to do with supply, though. When you think about it, if Starbucks wanted that alternative material, they’d need several billion of those straws suddenly. Then it goes back to the land issues. So it’s complicated.
ANNA: What if all of us – plastics people, climate change people, food sovereignty people – dedicated 1% of our time and resources to campaign finance reform? How else are we going to wrest ourselves from corporate control in order to be able to get rid of subsidies, make products their real cost, and make companies pay for the externalities. I don’t see that happening unless we shift the way corporations control our policymakers.
CONRAD: These companies pay much more attention to their customers than to groups like us. Let’s be honest. Go into Starbucks and say, “I’m tired of seeing all this crap,” or “Why don’t you offer me a mug?” That needs to happen. We need to organize as consumers.
ANNA: There are some great case studies showing that restaurants, when they switch from disposables for dine-in to reusables, can save anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 a year. For small restaurants, that’s considerable, just by making that switch and not investing in disposables.
Also, if we create policy that mandates a significant mandatory threshold content for recyclable material, that can start to even the playing field so that virgin plastic isn’t as artificially cheap as recycled material. If we enforce that, then companies are going to have to get a hell of a lot better at getting their materials back. So that’s a policy tool that we’re looking at in Los Angeles, and hopefully in San Francisco.
FOR NEARLY THREE DECADES your recycling bin contained a dirty secret: Half the plastic and much of the paper you put into it did not go to your local recycling center. Instead, it was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China.
Around 1992, US cities and trash companies started offshoring their most contaminated, least valuable “recyclables” to a China that was desperate for raw materials. There, the dirty bales of mixed paper and plastic were processed under the laxest of environmental controls. Much of it was simply dumped, washing down rivers to feed the crisis of ocean plastic pollution. Meanwhile, America’s once-robust capability to sort, clean, and recycle its own waste deteriorated. Why invest in expensive technology and labor when the mess could easily be bundled off to China?
Then in 2018, as part of a domestic crackdown on pollution, China banned imports of dirty foreign garbage. In the United States, the move was depicted almost as an act of aggression. (It didn’t help that the Chinese name for the crackdown translated as National Sword.) Massive amounts of poor-quality recyclables began piling up at US ports and warehouses. Cities and towns started hiking trash-collection fees or curtailing recycling programs, and headlines asserted the “death of recycling” and a “recycling crisis.”
But a funny thing happened on recycling’s road to the graveyard. China’s decision to stop serving as the world’s trash compactor forced a long-overdue day of reckoning—and sparked a movement to fix a dysfunctional industry. “The whole crisis narrative has been wrong,” says Steve Alexander, president of the Association of Plastic Recyclers. “China didn’t break recycling. It has given us the opportunity to begin investing in the infrastructure we need in order to do it better.”
“That’s the silver lining in National Sword,” adds David Allaway, a senior policy analyst for Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality and the coauthor of a surprising new study that demonstrates the ecological downsides of pursuing recycling at any cost (see “When Recycling Isn’t Worth It“). “China finally is doing the responsible thing, forcing the recycling industry to rebuild its ability to sort properly and to focus on quality as much as it previously focused on quantity.”
Paradoxically, Allaway says, part of America’s trash problem arose from people trying to recycle too much. Well-meaning “aspirational” recyclers routinely confuse theoretical recyclability with actual recycling. While plastic straws, grocery bags, eating utensils, yogurt containers, and takeout food clamshells are all theoretically recyclable, they are almost never recycled. Instead, they jam machinery and lower the value of the profitably recyclable materials they are mixed with, like aluminum cans and clean paper. In addition, Americans are notorious for putting pretty much anything into recycling bins, from dirty diapers to lawn furniture, partly out of ignorance and partly because China gave us a decades-long pass on making distinctions.
“We need to recycle better and recycle smarter,” Allaway says, “which means recycling only when the positive environmental impacts outweigh the negative.”
MARTIN BOURQUE is the executive director of the Ecology Center, the nonprofit that handles curbside recycling for Berkeley, California. During the early days of recycling, in the 1970s and ’80s, he says, US consumers routinely cleaned their recyclables of food residues and separated materials. Berkeley residents originally sorted recyclables into seven categories, including by color of glass.Plastic objects without a recycling symbol are not recyclable.
That system changed in the 1990s, when a rapidly industrializing China started to aggressively import mixed paper and plastics from western countries to get feedstock for the products that it was manufacturing and exporting back to those same countries. This coincided with a consolidation of the US trash business into the current dominance of a few large corporations, which were happy to let China do all the work. US trash collectors and recycling facilities found that they could elevate quantity above quality and make more than $20 a ton doing so.
Offshoring cut labor and transportation costs and reduced the need to update sorting and cleaning machinery. Cities and waste companies abandoned methodical curbside sorting in favor of the far cheaper and now predominant single-stream method, in which all recyclables go into one bin that’s picked up by one trash truck. Only minimal sorting by the collectors was required, as different kinds of plastic (including types that can’t be recycled) could be packaged into giant, stinky bales. People felt virtuous throwing most everything into the recycling bin—never suspecting that the system was guaranteed to contaminate and render useless much of it.
Mixed paper could be bundled in the same way, much of it contaminated from mingling in the bin with dirty dog food cans and worse. These bales would be taken to the nearest port and loaded onto container ships bound for China—4,000 containers a day prior to 2018. Other countries did the same, and by 2016, China was importing more than half of the world’s plastic and paper trash.
As much as 30 percent of those single-stream recyclables was contaminated by nonrecyclable materials, Bourque says. Many of the bales of plastic sent to China were worthless and were never even recycled. Instead, they ended up polluting land and ocean outside China’s impoverished, unhealthy “recycling villages,” the shantytowns full of mom-and-pop recycling businesses that lined the edges of China’s big port cities, reeking from caustic chemicals and burning garbage.
Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia scientist and a leading researcher on the extent and origins of ocean plastic pollution, has visited these villages and seen their dire conditions. “They were given no infrastructure to work in or to manage discards from the recycling,” she says. A 2015 study coauthored by Jambeck found that 1.3 million to 3.5 million metric tons of plastic flowed into the ocean from Chinese coastal sources each year.
Don’t try to recycle anything smaller than a credit card.
But now China has a burgeoning middle class and its own growing consumer economy with its own waste and recyclables, leaving little appetite for trash from other countries. Jambeck is among those who believe that National Sword’s import ban, along with China’s efforts to clean up the recycling villages and construct clean, state-of-the-art sorting and recycling facilities, is helping to stem a crisis more than it is causing one. “China’s regulatory action exposed a sore that was already there,” she says. “People weren’t noticing since it had a bandage on it.”
As early as 2013, China began warning US recyclers that it intended to address its own environmental problems and would limit contamination of recycling imports to 0.5 percent. (The mixed bales of paper and plastic the United States was shipping to China typically had 30 to 50 times that level.) But few believed that China would carry out its threat, so when the new rules came, US recyclers were caught with their polyester pants down, incapable of cleaning their recyclables enough to meet China’s new standards, let alone those of US manufacturers seeking recycled feedstock.
The lack of preparation for China’s import ban created pain and chaos in communities across America. Some recyclers, predictably, began searching for countries desperate enough to fill in for China. Vietnam, Malaysia, and others did so for a time, only to be overwhelmed by the stinking tide. (Vietnam and Malaysia have since shut the imports down.) Prices for recyclables dropped to a fraction of what China once paid, often far below the cost of gathering and shipping the material. Bales of mixed paper that previously sold for $155 a ton could barely fetch $10. “What this crisis is really about,” says Vinod Singh, outreach manager for Far West Recycling in Portland, Oregon, “is shifting from the artificial situation China created, in which recycling more than paid for itself as a commodity, to the new reality of recycling as a cost.”
The economics were shocking. Stamford, Connecticut, went from earning $95,000 from its recyclables in 2017 to paying $700,000 in 2018 to get rid of them. Prince George’s County, Maryland, went from earning $750,000 to losing $2.7 million. And Bakersfield, California, swung from earning $65 a ton for its combined recyclables (glass, plastic, paper, metal) to paying $25 a ton. “Recycling facilities seemed to be spinning gold with China dominating the market,” Singh says, “but it was an illusion that could not last.” Remove contents, such as food waste, from containers before recycling.
Some communities started sending their overflowing recyclables to the landfill, as happened in Portland and elsewhere in Oregon, or to be incinerated at waste-to-energy plants, as in Philadelphia. Many localities were forced into a combination of rate increases for collection (most ranging from $2 to $3 a month for homeowners) and limiting curbside recycling of plastics to two or three types instead of all seven—a route taken by Hannibal, Missouri, among others. Some towns stopped recycling glass and shredded paper as well; no one wants to pay for used glass, it seems, and shredded paper confounds sorting machinery. Columbia County, New York, will charge residents $50 a year to be able to bring their recyclables to a drop-off depot. And some communities that had curbside programs have ended them altogether, including Deltona, Florida; Enterprise, Alabama; and Gouldsboro, Maine.
Kerry Getter, CEO of Balcones Resources in Austin, Texas, lays much of the blame on the big public companies, such as Waste Management and Republic Services, that do both landfilling and recycling for many communities. Those companies sold cities and towns, he says, on a recycling strategy that focused heavily on two commodities—contaminated mixed paper and mixed plastic—that only China wanted. Today those same companies are demanding rate increases to continue curbside recycling.
“There was a lack of investment in infrastructure,” says Alexander of the Association of Plastic Recyclers. “Now we’re trying to deal with a 21st-century packaging stream based on 20th-century infrastructure. There’s a strong market out there still for recycling, but we need the capability to produce good, clean material.”
SINGH HAS SEEN the recycling-in-crisis narrative repeatedly in his career. “We were dead in 2008 too,” he recalls. “We’ve reincarnated many times.”
Far West has weathered the recent turmoil fairly well, Singh says. At the plant, materials are separated, cleaned, and baled for sale to manufacturers: newsprint to paper mills, cardboard to box makers, aluminum to beverage-can makers, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic to makers of water and soda bottles, and—until last year—bales of every other kind of plastic, unsorted, to China. Retaining its ability to sort materials enabled Far West to survive.China’s decision to stop serving as the world’s trash compactor forced a long-overdue day of reckoning—and sparked a movement to fix a dysfunctional industry.
Berkeley’s recycling program has survived as well, Bourque says, because it resisted the easy path of single-stream collection. Instead, Berkeley residents continued to sort, albeit more simply than in the past. Its curbside bins have two compartments: one for paper, one for everything else. This minimizes the contamination from food residue and liquids from bottles and cans that makes recycling paper difficult if not impossible. Berkeley’s solution is elegant and simple—the Ecology Center’s recycled materials are among the cleanest and most sought-after in the business, Bourque says.
“Our focus is keeping material clean and separated, and asking residents to do just a little bit more,” he says. “It saves a lot of money for everyone.”
The recycling operations that have thrived and remained profitable are those that have catered all along to domestic markets wanting clean, high-quality plastics and paper. Balcones Resources—which serves Austin, Dallas, and Little Rock, Arkansas—diversified and broadened its services. It also bought updated optical scanners that help separate plastics and reduce contamination as well as enable the plant to market over 15 grades of recycled paper instead of the usual two. Most of them, Getter notes, have maintained their price since the National Sword regulations kicked in.
The Closed Loop Fund, a $100 million effort by a number of large companies to boost recycling, is providing no-interest loans and investments to municipalities seeking to upgrade their facilities, as Balcones did. So far the fund has invested $43 million in upgrades in Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. A similar effort, Circulate Capital, funds projects in Asia, with the intention of stemming the tide of ocean plastic pollution.
Improved facilities won’t mean a thing, of course, unless US consumers improve their recycling hygiene. Portland, Oregon, is one of many communities focusing on educating residents on how to recycle properly. Cleveland; Reno, Nevada; Newton, Massachusetts; and California’s Marin County are now warning or fining homeowners and businesses for putting dirty or incorrect items in recycling bins. The goal is to avoid contaminating valuable materials in recycling bins with unrecyclable junk—plastic bags, plastic wrap, soda straws, and bottle caps being among the worst offenders. Clearer, standardized messaging on bins is a proven method of reducing contamination, but many cities and towns persist in using their own complex and confusing labels.Plastic bottles are the only dependably recycled plastic items.
Contamination isn’t only about carelessness. It’s also driven by the constantly changing packaging done for marketing purposes by major consumer brands—changes that are often done with little regard for whether the new packaging can be recycled. The Association of Plastic Recyclers called on manufacturers to voluntarily ensure that new packages and containers can be recycled, but a lack of progress on that front has led to legislative proposals in several states. Washington is considering a product-stewardship bill that would require manufacturers to oversee end-of-life management for all sorts of plastics, recyclable or not, and California is pondering a similar measure. The European Union has had an Extended Producer Responsibility program in place since 1994, which encourages the use of low-impact and highly recyclable packaging by making manufacturers financially responsible for packaging waste. The program is funded by $3.5 billion in annual fees from manufacturers and has resulted in a 65 percent packaging-recycling rate in the EU.
A reborn US recycling industry will need domestic markets for clean, sorted recyclables. CarbonLite Industries, a leading US recycler of plastic beverage bottles, turns 4 billion plastic bottles a year into pellets that are turned back into drink bottles. (The more common process is to turn plastic bottles into carpet or clothing.) CarbonLite is a principal supplier for Nestlé’s US operations, which use the pellets to produce bottles that are either 50 percent or 100 percent recycled and can continue to be recycled many times with little degradation. “We are truly closing the loop,” says Jason Farahnik, director of brand partnerships and resin sales at CarbonLite.Bottle bills are the single most effective means of boosting recycling; it’s no coincidence that the states that have them also lead the nation in recycling rates.
Demand is so high that CarbonLite’s two current plants can’t keep up. A third plant is due to open in late 2019, and a fourth one on the drawing board will bring the company’s recycling capability to 10 billion bottles a year. That’s still a pittance compared with the 140 billion bottles produced every year for US consumption, but the demand for recycled content for those bottles means there’s a lot of room for growth. One factor hampering that growth is that too many beverage bottles are ending up in landfills rather than in the recycling stream.
We already know the solution to that one. Today Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee, and West Virginia are considering joining the 10 states that already have container deposit laws, a.k.a. bottle bills, which require refundable deposits on all single-use beverage containers (plastic, glass, or metal). Bottle bills are the single most effective means of boosting recycling; it’s no coincidence that the states that have them also lead the nation in recycling rates. The beverage industry has historically opposed such legislation, including attempts to adopt a national bottle bill.
“RECYCLING IS SUPPOSED to be the last resort after reduction and reuse,” says Bourque, and Berkeley’s Ecology Center continues to find innovative ways to push the issue, most recently in a new city ordinance to take effect in January 2020 that will impose a 25-cent charge on all disposable cups sold in the city, including coffee cups. “Why are people sitting around for hours in coffee shops drinking out of paper cups?” Bourque asks. “It’s absurd when reusable ceramic cups are such a better option.” In addition, disposable utensils, straws, and napkins in eating establishments and coffee shops will be available only upon request or at self-serve stations; takeout food must come with compostable containers and utensils; dine-in food must be served on reusable dinnerware.
“This ordinance is focused on upstream impacts,” Bourque says. “It brings reuse back in a big way. If you reuse more, then what’s left really is recyclable and gets recycled.”
This article was originally published by SIERRA Magazine, in the July/August 2019 edition with the headline “You Can’t Recycle Garbage.” This article was funded by the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All campaign.
David Allaway is a senior policy analyst for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the coauthor of a controversial report that challenges many long-held assumptions about recycling and environmental impacts. (For more, see “Stop Obsessing About Recycling.”) To help us further unpack its findings, he agreed to answer some questions.
Edward Humes: Your study has surprised the world by showing that for single-use packaging containers and foodware, the recyclable choice is not always the environmentally superior choice—that, in fact, about half the time it is worse for the planet. It didn’t occur to most of us to question the assumption that recycling was always the greenest option. What led you down this path?
David Allaway: Back in 2004, we commissioned our first life-cycle assessment to evaluate methods of using less packaging. We asked, “Is it better to ship in a recyclable cardboard box or a lightweight shipping bag?” The shipping bags might be paper, might be plastic, or might be a plastic-paper blend—typically difficult to recycle. The cardboard boxes are easy to recycle. We had no idea what the answer would be.
We found that the shipping bags almost always resulted in lower environmental burdens than the cardboard boxes, simply because they used so little material. This is the first time we had seen some analysis, some quantitative evidence, that maybe recyclability was not a universal good. In 2008, we commissioned two more studies that also showed that popular attributes such as recyclability and compostability weren’t always the lowest-impact options. And then we just sat with this discomfort for about 10 years. But this inconvenient evidence just ate at me.
Then in 2016, I was at a conference of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and heard a number of executives from Fortune 500 companies take to the stage and say that they were no longer doing these sorts of life-cycle assessments for packaging. Their marketing departments didn’t appreciate the complexities, and their customers were demanding that the packaging just be recyclable. So that’s what they were going to do—just make all packaging recyclable and no longer fuss with understanding the carbon footprint or the amount of water consumed or the toxicity impacts. Just make it all recyclable, placate the customers, and all would be good.
That really didn’t sit well with me. I started thinking of these studies we had done 10 years earlier, and I got to wondering: Has anyone ever gone through the hundreds of life-cycle assessments (LCAs) out there systematically and asked, “Do these popular attributes of recyclability and compostability consistently and reliably point in the direction of low-impact materials?” That was the start.
How did you go about answering that question?
Think of it this way: What if you are a packaging designer or a brand owner or a customer and you’re choosing between two different materials? What if you could get your wine in a glass bottle or an aseptic carton—similar to a juice box. The glass bottle typically contains recycled content. The aseptic carton rarely contains any recycled content. When you compare dissimilar materials, is recycled content a meaningful indicator—a proxy—for low environmental impact? Almost everybody uses such attributes as proxies. We assume, we intuit, that if you buy a material that contains recycled content or is recyclable or compostable or bio-based, then it’s inherently eco-groovy, it’s an ecofriendly choice. That’s what this study is evaluating. Is that assumption valid? Are these attributes reasonable proxies?
What the data tells us is that if you are comparing different packaging materials that perform the same function, the one that has more recycled material does not necessarily have the lowest environmental impact. Sometimes it does have the lowest impact overall, sometimes it doesn’t. In slightly more than half the comparisons, it doesn’t. And that’s what runs contrary to popular wisdom.
Can you give an example?
So you are a reader of Sierra magazine and you’re standing in an aisle at Whole Foods, choosing between tuna in a plastic pouch versus tuna in a can. The can is steel and highly recyclable. The pouch is a plastic laminate that is difficult to recycle and likely will be disposed of in a landfill. And you say to yourself, “I’m going to buy the item that is easier to recycle, because recycling is good and garbage is bad.” You’re making decisions based on one piece of the life cycle.
But in almost every measure of environmental impact, from climate and eco-toxicity and pollution and so forth, the pouch has lower impacts. As long as it ends up in the landfill and not the ocean, the pouch is the better choice. What our study tells us is that if you base your choice solely on the attribute of recyclability, half the time you will choose the higher environmental impact. This tells us recyclability is not a very useful indicator if we are trying to avoid environmental harm.
Are you saying we should start recycling less and landfilling more as a green strategy, or that we should continue recycling but be more selective about it?
Recycling done well is a good thing. Nationwide we’re at about a 30 percent recycling rate. There have been studies that have shown that if we can get to 50 or 60 percent, there are more environmental benefits to be had. There are lots or recyclable, high-quality, recoverable materials currently being burned or buried that we should be recycling. So we need more recycling. We need better recycling. The problem begins when some cities or states or the advocates and industry take a leap of faith and say, “We should make everything recyclable. And then we would recycle more and achieve the benefits of recycling more materials. Because that would be entirely eco-groovy.”
This is intuitively entirely reasonable. But it fails to look at the big picture. It’s simply taking solid-waste avoidance and putting it on a pedestal, saying, “That’s the problem we have to solve, the problem of garbage.” But the problem of garbage is this country is very small when you compare it to the environmental impact of producing all the stuff that becomes garbage. If our higher-order goal is to conserve resources and reduce pollution, then always, always, always trying to keep stuff out of the landfill isn’t always the best way to achieve those goals.
You have said we need to stop thinking about maximizing recycling and start thinking about optimizing recycling. How do we do that?
What’s driving this at the city and county and state levels are landfill-avoidance goals. These are really powerful. They motivate and inform a lot of policy, consumer education, and programs. They assume anything that goes into the landfill is bad and anything we can do to keep stuff out of the landfill is good.
We need a more refined evaluation framework. We should set goals around conserving resources and reducing pollution and then design solid-waste programs to achieve those goals. If I could do one thing, it would be to move away from weight-based goals that say we need to keep everything out of landfills.
I can understand that this causes some discomfort. But at the end of the day, to quote Jerry Brown, being on the wrong side of science is rarely a winning proposition. The environment doesn’t care what we think. It cares what we do.
You have suggested that the emphasis on recycling materials, rather than reducing their impact while they are being produced, is a form of greenwashing. Can you explain that?
There are some folks in industry who know that our priorities are the opposite of where they need to be to reduce environmental impacts, but they like it the way it is, because it’s a whole lot easier for them to manage this way. We’ve externalized responsibility for waste collection to government in this country: So as long as the public’s attention remains focused on the end of a product’s life, then that’s not industry’s problem, it’s government’s problem. But the moment we start saying, “Hmmm, most of the impacts are on the production end and industry needs to reduce those,” then industry’s on the hook. So it encourages people to obsess on recyclability and compostability. It’s a convenient red herring. It’s greenwashing.
What about the problem of marine plastic pollution? Isn’t more recycling a potential solution, a way of keeping plastic out of the water?
Recycling doesn’t keep plastic out of the ocean. Landfills do. We don’t dump garbage in the ocean; we dump garbage in landfills. And though we love to hate them, landfills serve the function they were created and designed for, which is to contain garbage and keep it out of the environment. Very little garbage in the US ends up in the ocean.
What can be done to address the problems with recycling policies highlighted by your study?
There is no way average consumers can sort this out on their own. Industry and government need to use environmental metrics to identify and favor materials that are bio-based and recyclable and low impact. But let’s start with low impact, not recyclability. Because right now we’ve turned everything on its head and are making decisions around recyclability and compostability and not considering the actual impacts of reduction.
The largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from consumption—41 percent—is associated with the purchase of materials, including food, packaging, and durable goods. Of that 41 percent, 1 percent is from landfilling. The other 99 percent of those greenhouse gas emissions is upstream of the consumer, primarily in manufacturing. That’s what the science tells us. We need to explore meaningful solutions to those production impacts.
For example?
Concrete is a very pollutant- and greenhouse-gas-intensive material. There are easy ways to reduce it by swapping out cement for other materials when you make concrete. You could significantly reduce emissions by 20, 30, 40, 50 percent. It’s a really easy win, a low-hanging fruit. Yet hardly any cities are working on it—they’re too busy banning straws.
I’m sorry, I’m sharing some frustration. I see an environmental crisis unfolding and I see a lot of really good intentions and they are focusing on really small solutions. Who wants to talk about concrete? There are no videos that tug at your heart strings, like the one of that straw up a sea turtle’s nose or the albatross full of plastics. No turtles are dying of concrete. Except they are. Because of the impact on climate change. But you can’t see it.
It seems you are playing the Socratic role of gadfly to environmental conventional wisdom here. What do you hope will come of this study?
Everyone talks about reduce, reuse, recycle. But they give lip service to reduce and reuse. My whole career has been about demonstrating the viability and importance of moving up the hierarchy—doing recycling but also prevention and reuse. That led to this new frontier of getting out of the solid-waste box altogether so we can start looking at the full impact of materials across their entire life cycles. We’re the pioneers here, but there are some other states that are thinking about it. It’s a pretty significant change, to consider the full life-cycle as opposed to just garbage. That’s the outcome I want to see. At the end of the day, I want to know that I moved the needle on reducing environmental impacts.
September 20th, the global morning started in Australia where more than 300,000 people marched in what is said to have been the largest climate action in Australia’s history.
Despite the derisive but justified attitude by some youth that the older generations have left the world in an unmitigated mess, young people are unquestionably taking an aggressive lead in the Climate Justice movement. The New York Times wrote, “Rarely, if ever, has the modern world witnessed a youth movement so large and wide, spanning across societies rich and poor, tied together by a common if inchoate sense of rage.”
With a mix of encouragement and concern, I traveled an hour south to Watsonville, CA to participate in a student climate rally. Watsonville is an immigrant farmworker community with an 81% Hispanic population. The center of Main Street, which is lined with stately old buildings, is the City Plaza, a classic Mexican Zocalo style park surrounded by palm trees. Around the edges of the park a farmer’s market was in full swing. Climate activists, mostly adults, standing along Main Street held signs as cars passed and honked in support.
The mood was festive, but the news, on a variety of fronts, is oppressive. An article on Extreme Heat in Rolling Stone reports that the US Department of Defense has warned that climate change “will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the nation and poses immediate risks to US national security.”
MIT researchers say that rising temperatures combined with humidity could eventually make much of South Asia uninhabitable. This could hold true for significant parts of the American Southwest due to extreme heat. In 2003, 70,000 people died in a heat wave in Europe. July 2019 was the hottest month on record.
In the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, just a short drive from the City Plaza, 5 years ago a record warming of the Pacific Ocean caused the fisheries and the marine food chain to crash, and starving sea lions showed up on beaches. The same kind of warming is developing again.
In 2017, when Hurricane Harvey dumped over 40 inches of rain turning much of Houston into a lake, water rose in the home of friends of our family. They retreated to the second floor and when the waters kept rising they fled to the balcony. Then the waters rose to the level of the balcony, but fortunately a boat came by and rescued them. We are already living in a world hotter than any time in human history.
For all of this and much more, New York City gave one million students permission to skip school and join the world-wide strike. 100,000 people gathered around the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Millions worldwide joined the strike in places like Indonesia, Johannesburg, Manila, Germany, Poland, Australia, Nairobi, Kenya, just to name a few. Marchers in 150 countries, led by youth, protested government inaction on climate change.
In the Watsonville City Plaza, the crowds were more modest, perhaps 200 people, but nevertheless the concerns ran deep.
Watsonville mayor, Francisco Estrada, said,“Our leaders in Washington and around the world have mortgaged your future for profits, they have done everything in their power to kill the earth all in the name of greed, all in the name of capitalism….We need to take back our planet.”
Watsonville Mayor, Francisco Estrada
At the end of his talk, Pajaro Valley High School (PVHS) students, who made a carbon neutral trip to the rally by walking the 2.4 miles from campus, marched into the park chanting “Another world is possible, the youth are unstoppable.”
They then took the stage, some spoke in Spanish. There was some gleeful Trump bashing, real concern about how climate change is driving refugees to the US southern border and how capitalism is destroying the earth. They also criticized the media for covering frivolous topics like the Kardashians instead of climate change.
Many of these youth are the first generation of their families born in the US whose parents migrated and worked low-paying hard-labor farmworker jobs and who struggled and sacrificed to make a better life for their kids.
The youth raised concerns about the threat to farmworker’s health from heat exposure and the potential for lost wages if work is not possible in extreme heat.
Miguel Orejel, faculty advisor for the Dream Club at PVHS who works with undocumented students said, “The people who are affected and will be affected are working class people of color. Capitalism is killing us.”
James Raygoza, who noted that unlike in New York City, he and his fellow students were not given the day off from school, said, “Our collective future is being jeopardized and it is in our best interest to fight against those who sacrifice our future for the sake of profits.”
13-year-old Luke Zamora of PVHS staged a die-in on campus to highlight the threat to life by climate change. He asked everyone to, “Look around you. Look at the trees and all the buildings, think of all the memories you have made in this beautiful city and realize that all of this may be under water if we don’t do anything about it.…We are literally killing ourselves slowly and since the adults aren’t doing anything, lets us, the youth, do something about it.”
Emigdio Ballon (Quechua) was instrumental in bringing quinoa to the U.S. from Bolivia in the 1980’s, and worked with Seeds of Change in the early days with Gabriel Howearth and Kenny Ausubel (Co-founder of Bioneers). As the President of the Board of Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute, Emigdio annually travels to South America (Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay) to share his seeds and agricultural expertise and train indigenous farmers. Emigdio Ballon, the Agricultural Director of the Pueblo of Tesuque, was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director. Emigdio will perform the opening ceremony at the seed exchange at the Bioneers Conference.
Emigdio Ballon
ARTYMANGAN: Who are your influences and heroes?
EMIGDIOBALLON: Indigenous people, in ancient times, were sustainable and independent. I am influenced by traditional technologies and practices like the preservation of seeds.
We have to think about what’s important in life. Indigenous people, we have very high respect for the food and the seeds. Seeds are the beginning of life, and that’s why it’s important for us to have reverence, so when we plant seeds, we make special ceremonies.
I would also say that my heroes are my ancestors, my grandpa. And now in these times, Vandana Shiva, and the many other people who are involved in fighting against the patenting of seeds, transgenic seeds and genetic engineering.
ARTY: Describe the tribal farm at the Pueblo of Tesuque.
EMIGDIO: 20 years ago, alfalfa was the main crop at Tesuque Pueblo. The thinking was that alfalfa would bring in money. But the environmental effects of alfalfa weren’t understood – the amount of the water needed and the amount of the legwork needed in comparison to edible crops.
But we have changed that, we’ve planted close to 750 fruit trees. We now have berries, peppers, plums, apricots, peaches, six or seven different types of apples, grapes, blackberries, raspberries, asparagus, edible crops, many medicinal plants. We now have so much crop diversity.
Also, we’re building our cob houses. We have a natural geothermal cooling and heating system. The way the world is today, anything can happen. But the Pueblo can thrive because we are prepared and have the ability to grow food in difficult conditions.
We also have a seed bank that we built 2011 from recycled materials. We used compressed tires in the foundation and straw bales and adobe for the walls. The most important thing is we didn’t hire a construction company. It was built with the hands of the people from the Pueblo, young people from the Pueblo of Tesuque. The spirits blessed us and guided us in building the seed bank. Besides the seed bank, we are using solar panels and have a solar dryer and a solar shower.
My principle focus is preserving the traditional seeds because for thousands of years indigenous people have been selecting the best crops, growing them out and saving the seed. The work and knowledge of Indigenous farmers are the basis of agricultural science.
We are also trying new things like growing vertically strawberries, tomatoes and all the seeds we have in storage in the seed bank to see how they grow in different types of situations and conditions. I don’t want to say that we discovered new things, but we’re taking techniques other people are already practicing to see if we have the same adaptability.
The way we work we try to do most all our activities by hand. We try using machines as little as possible. We use drip irrigation and micro sprinkler systems. Our micro sprinkler system is not very high. Maybe one or two feet high because we want to preserve the water in the dimension where evapotranspiration happens, so the plants don’t dry out from the heat.
The other factor is we are not irrigating in the daytime, only when we plant or in very extreme situations to refresh the plants. The rest of the time we irrigate at night.
We have to respect the spirits. Mother Earth has spirits, the water has spirits, the air has a spirit. Everything has a spirit. That’s why when we have to do something, we ask permission from the spirits.
ARTY: Are you saying that before you make a decision on some of your horticultural practices, you consult the spirits?
Emigdio Ballon hosting the Seed Exchange at the Bioneers Conference
EMIGDIO: Definitely. I have a very long background in science. I have a few publications in magazines, my thesis was published, but the scientific world doesn’t give value to spiritual things or the practice of indigenous people. We have to talk with the spirits, we have to ask permission from the spirits. Yes.
ARTY: That’s a very traditional way of doing things. Are there other traditional practices that you use?
EMIGDIO: There is not a big difference between the practice of the Quechua or the Inca people, and the people here from the Pueblo. For example, before doing anything, we have to ask permission or make an offering. We have to give something to the spirits because the spirits give to us so many different things. Talking this way may sound a little crazy because I can’t prove the benefits and the effect of the spirits.
We have had some damage to the crops, but the damage is not very intense. We don’t use any type of insecticides. We’re organic certified, and we don’t use any type of chemical fertilizer. We spray edible preparations. When we do that, we’re checking and asking the plants if it’s okay or if it’s not okay.
ARTY: Are those preparations biodynamic? Biodynamic agriculture has a spiritual component. Are you blending traditional indigenous practices with biodynamic?
EMIGDIO: Yeah. Biodynamics practices are very interesting because they relate to the spirit of connection because you have to make all these applications at sunrise or sunset. For my people, the Inca people, we have to look at the constellations and we have to look at the moon, also we have to look at the sun. We’re looking at all these elements. When you go to Bolivia to Titicaca Lake you have the Sun Gate or the Door of the Sun. If you look at it exactly when the sun is going to pass during the equinox, it is an indicator calendar for planting or harvesting.
ARTY: You mentioned all the different varieties of fruits, vegetables, perennials and annuals you’re growing. Why is biodiversity on the farm important?
EMIGDIO: When I finished college in my country, I was working with my people in the Altiplano area of Bolivia, and I began to tell farmers what I learned in university. I said, “Guys, we have to begin to separate these tubers – the color and the sizes – and we have to plant things separately.” Then I had a conversation with my uncle, he said to me, “You know what, I’ve been planting potatoes for seven years, and now you’re trying to teach me how to plant potatoes.” It was funny.
Altiplano farmers plant a mix of different potatoes, different colors – purple, red ones, white ones, etc. It’s very interesting. When there’s a frost, some survive, some die. And that’s the importance of the diversity of the crops because some of the crops can tolerate the heat, some crops can tolerate the rain, some tolerate frost and other conditions.
Hopi people and Quechua people have very similar techniques for planting in dry land. When you see the Hopi people, they’re planting not only one color of corn. They’re planting so many different colors of corn. And they practice dry land farming. They put one seed or five seeds or 10 seeds or 20 seeds in one hole. They are practicing what we call natural selection because some survive certain insects, some survive the dry conditions. When you ask me, “Why is diversity important?” my answer is, so that people can have something to eat.
ARTY: Seeds are a big part of your work and a part of your life. What’s your relationship to seeds?
EMIGDIO: My relationship with seeds goes back to when I was growing up. My mother was making business from one location to another location, from one community to another community, moving seeds all the time. I was traveling with her and taking different types of seeds to different Indian places. When I was young, I planted quinoa and potatoes with my grandfather. He put some seeds in my hand to plant, but I kind of ignored the relationship. Before my grandfather passed away, he put a bunch of seeds in my hand, and he said, “This is life.” At the time, I didn’t realize the significance of those words. But seeds have become an important part of my work for almost 34 years. That’s why I am very tied to the seeds.
ARTY: As a result of that, you built the seed bank at Tesuque. What types of seeds are you saving?
EMIGDIO: I mentioned my focus on traditional seeds: seeds for Hopi people, Navajo people, Quechua people, Guaraní people. We have different types of corn from Hopi, beans from Hopi, melons from Hopi.
I have different types of beans from Africa, Peru, Mexico and Bolivia because at some point people may need to grow these crops in this area. We also have different types of tobacco because tobacco is very important for the indigenous tribes, not only in the US, but all over the Americas because they’re using tobacco for ceremonies and medicine.
We also have a diversity of quinoas because thanks to the spirit of the quinoa I came to this country. In 1984 or 85, I was invited by Professor Dwayne Johnson from Colorado State University to do research on new crops in the US – quinoa, amaranth, the small tubers, and other crops.
ARTY: Do you exchange seeds with other folks?
EMIGDIO: Actually, we are open for exchanging or giving. We get some funding from Seeds, Soil and Culture to send seeds to other Indigenous people or other people who want to work with these types of seeds. We are going to send seeds to Taos, to Navajo people and the Hopi people. Hopi people from Second Mesa and Third Mesa get tobacco from us for the smoke in the kiva because the kiva is very sacred and they want tobacco that isn’t grown with chemicals. They need to have sacred tobacco, and sacred tobacco is the tobacco that doesn’t have contaminants.
ARTY: Most of the general public doesn’t think much about seeds, why are seeds important?
EMIGDIO: Those who control seeds, control life. That’s true. If the corporations control the seed production, we have to depend on these corporations. That’s why, for me, it’s so important to maintain the open-pollinated seeds, it’s so important that every single person has their own garden where they can grow their own food and collect their own seeds. For me it’s very, very sacred talking about seeds.
Here in the Pueblo, when we have to do the planting, we pray; when we have to harvest, we pray. You can say, oh man, these people are crazy praying. Prayer will bring nothing. But for us, it’s so important because prayer connects us with the greater spirit. The spirits are with us all the time when you care about them – water, earth, seeds, clouds, all these things. Indigenous People are not taking gold and silver out of the mountains. We’re not digging Mother Earth to take the oil out. We respect those parts of Mother Nature as sacred. It’s sacred because they are part of life. Food, medicine, everything comes from Pachamama.
On Sept. 20, millions of people across 132 countries are expected to leave their schools and places of work to take part in the Global Climate Strike. This protest, organized by a coalition of youth climate activists, is meant to send a message to politicians that people want meaningful action on climate change. A massive disruption of the status quo is a deliberate strategy to portray the urgency of the situation, with activists noting that “the climate crisis won’t wait, so neither will we.” The strike is scheduled days before a United Nations climate summit in New York, and will kick off a full week of action and activities.
350.org, an “international movement of ordinary people working to end the age of fossil fuels and build a world of community-led renewable energy for all,” has been an ongoing supporter of youth climate activism, and, most recently, the Global Climate Strike.
“We are supporting young people across the world who are organizing youth-led strikes,” says Thanu Yakupitiyage, Associate Director of U.S. Communications at 350.org. “There was a call from young people across the world for adults to step up and join young people in calling for bold climate action. There’s a real desire to make this an intergenerational moment for transformative action. 350.org is supporting along with many other, I guess you could say, ‘adult groups.’ We are supporting them and making sure we’re backing them all the way. You can check out the U.S. youth demands at strikewithus.org.”
The list of demands for the Global Climate Strike is decentralized, meaning that young people in different locations may have specific, place-based requests. However, the overall purpose of the Strike will be focused on transformation of the economy through ending the era of fossil fuels and supporting a Green New Deal that creates millions of jobs for workers in a sustainable, 100% renewable economy.
The Global Climate Strike is the latest event in an increasingly youth-led environmental movement. In the fight for their future, younger generations are organizing behind leaders like 16-year-olds Greta Thunberg, a Swedish activist who founded Fridays for Future, and Irsa Hirsi, daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and executive director of U.S. Youth Climate Strike. The world is currently home to the largest generation of young people in history, and the Union of Concerned Scientists notes that “kindergarteners starting school this month have lived in the five hottest years on record.” Young people will be the ones to deal with a future burdened by the worsening impacts of climate change, which is one reason why they are taking bold action now.
“There’s something really powerful about young people taking the helm,” says Thanu Yakupitiyage, Associate Director of U.S. Communications at 350.org. “In a system of intergenerational learning, what we’re seeing is that not only can young people learn from adults, but adults can learn from young people about what it actually takes to make changes. We’ve seen over the last year, even with the Green New Deal, it really is kids pushing that movement, and we need to get behind that.”
The Global Climate Strike will be huge, but not unprecedented. Earlier this year on March 15, 1.4 million young people worldwide participated in the largest global climate action protest ever as part of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement. On May 24, another Fridays for Future strike took place at 2,300 schools worldwide. The fact that these strikes are happening at schools also makes a larger statement about the increasingly dire consequences of climate change.
“The impetus of it is to really disrupt business as usual. A lot of the logic around the strikes and young people leaving school is actually pretty brilliant. It’s like, ‘If you want us to stay in school and prepare for our futures, we’ll do that, but if there is no future for us because of the climate crisis, then why would we stay in school?’” says Yakupitiyage.
The success of the Global Climate Strike is contingent on people showing up and showing solidarity. The easiest way to do so is by signing the pledge to get involved. The pledge page also contains a global map where you can find and RSVP strikes going on near you. If you’re unable to join a strike yourself, you can still take action as an ally. Spread the word with your friends and family, or use this step-by-step organizer’s guide to initiate a strike in your workplace or community.
Coalitions of young people and adults are expected to remain active and follow the growing momentum of this year’s strikes, especially with support from individuals around the world and from other organizations. As one of the main nonprofits helping to organize the Global Climate Strike, 350.org has outlined campaign tactics to help maximize the impact of the strike.
“We’ll be continuing to work to stop the fossil fuel industry, to phase out fossil fuels and to hold candidates accountable going into the 2020 elections,” says Yakupitiyage. “We’ll demand that the fossil fuel industry pays for the damages that have been accrued because of the climate crisis, because Exxon knew, all of these fossil fuel companies knew what would happen with the burning of fossil fuels, and they let it happen for a short-term gain.”
By escalating action, the youth-led environmental movement will continue to “turn up the heat,” so that politicians and big businesses feel the pressure to protect the environment as much as they protect their own profits.
Isha Clarke of Youth vs. Apocalypse discusses how their group is redesigning the climate justice movement to centralize justice and provide a platform for youth of color and indigenous youth. YvA is doing deep work to build local, national and global coalitions with other youth movements and adult allies. Maya Carlson, Manager of the Bioneers Youth Leadership Program, caught up with Isha in between her school work and activism to find out more.
MAYACARLSON: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What identities are you holding right now?
ISHA CLARKE: I am a doer of many things at once. I’m a student. I’m a dancer. I’m an artist. I’m an activist. I’m a human being. I’m a sister, a daughter, a cousin. All that. I feel that I have a voice and a message that’s important, and I don’t think that’s unique to me. I understand things, so I feel it’s my responsibility to express that and to spread the knowledge. I think I’m also a leader.
MAYA: How did you get involved in climate justice organizing?
ISHA: I first got into climate justice in 2017 when I was invited to an action targeting Phil Tagami, a very prominent developer in Oakland. He was trying to build a coal terminal through West Oakland and was suing the city to do so.
The action was going to his office dressed as elves. It was a Christmas in June theme, and we had a long scroll made by a bunch of students from all over Oakland saying that the kids of Oakland don’t want coal for Christmas. We were anticipating just going to his office, but there was an exchange very similar to the exchange with Senator Feinstein. That was the moment when I realized how much I love doing that work and how important climate justice is, specifically because of how central environmental racism is to climate justice, and how intersectional the fight is. I realized that that is where I belonged. This was at the end of my freshman year of high school. A lot of the people who were at that action were the original members of Youth vs. Apocalypse (YvA).
MAYA: Tell me more about Youth vs. Apocalypse. How did it evolve into what it is now?
ISHA: Youth vs. Apocalypse has undergone so much change in the past year. YvA started off as a fellowship with about 10 youth fighting this coal terminal. It’s grown into a coalition of people who are now working on national and global movements. We very quickly transitioned from this small group fighting local fights to organizing strikes that are a part of national and global movements, which is huge.
The purpose of YvA is to reshape the climate justice movement and try to save the world while doing that.
MAYA: You spoke a little bit about environmental racism and the importance of centralizing youth of color and Indigenous youth in climate justice movements. Are you working with other groups to bring that conversation forward? What does that look like for YvA in practice?
ISHA: YvA’s central mission is to do climate justice work in a way that respects what we’re trying to accomplish. When we’re asking for volunteers, we ask folks to think about their identity and their privilege. We are always having the conversation about what a movement that’s truly diverse looks like. There’s a very real difference between saying that you’re trying to empower youth of color versus giving a platform to youth of color. It’s not about giving power to youth of color, because youth of color already have power in them. They already have importance, they already have a presence, they already have ability. It’s about providing the space for them to claim that. That’s something that YvA is also trying to do. “I’m not going to call on you to speak because you’re a person of color. I’m going to give this space for you to feel comfortable to say that this is what you want to do.”
We are constantly having this conversation, and through having this transparency all the time, everyone in our group takes the task on themselves to look at who they are and how they’re privileged, or how the oppression that they experience may impact what they feel comfortable doing or what they feel their role should be in trying to challenge that. We make an effort to orient ourselves in a way that respects what we’re trying to fight for.
MAYA: How does this type of work happen when you collaborate with other people, both youth and adults?
ISHA: One of the reasons YvA wants to reinvent what the climate justice movement looks like is because historically the climate justice movement has not been about justice. It has excluded voices of color, and it hasn’t reflected folks most directly impacted by the climate crisis. This structure still exists in a lot of the ways that people are organizing, and it’s not necessarily intentional. I think it’s more about a lack of understanding, of not having lived the experience of being excluded or shut out. It’s work to make sure that when YvA is collaborating with other people that we’re on the same page about climate justice.
YvA has done workshops for other organizations about what it looks like to be an ally in the fight for climate justice. YvA is trying to do work within the movement and trying to move the movement forward. It’s a loaded task, but if we don’t address the same systems that got us to this climate crisis, we’re not going to be able to reverse it. We can’t actually meet our goal of reversing climate change if we don’t acknowledge the systems of oppression – like racism, white supremacy, and greed – that led us to the climate crisis.
MAYA: How do you see adult allyship working in youth-led movements?
ISHA: Adult allyship is actually very strong at this moment. Adult organizations will reach out to YvA asking, “What do the young people want to do?” Adult organizers are very much trying to follow the youth. There is still work to be done there too, because, yes, the youth need to be leading this movement, and I’m super glad that people are on board with that, but there’s also a point at which we get stuck … where we can’t do everything. There’s a difference between leadership and carrying everything.
It’s also true that a lot of these adults have been organizing for decades; they have a lot of experience. Young people aren’t disregarding the fact that we’re working with people who have a lot of experience. Youth should be envisioning what moving forward looks like, but with the support of people who have been doing this work, and who may know things that we don’t know. There can be more collaboration. Overall though, we have a lot of adult allyship, and that’s something that is relatively new and it’s working out well for us.
MAYA: It’s been neat to sit in on some of the meetings and witness how labor unions are showing up and supporting youth-led movements.
ISHA: I was just saying that that’s one of the most exciting things for me, that we’ve gotten so many labor unions on board. That’s something very new, and I think it’s super powerful. When we’re talking about the Green New Deal, one of the arguments from the other side is always that labor doesn’t agree with it, that it’s not good for them, they don’t want it. This collaboration between YvA and Labor is proving everyone wrong. This coalition building also reinvents what the climate justice movement looks like. Climate justice includes labor unions. Labor unions are fighting for the Green New Deal and for climate justice, and I think that’s super powerful.
MAYA: I want to close out by talking about the Global Climate Strike. How is YvA involved in the September 20th Climate Strike? What’s your role both locally and nationally?
ISHA: YvA is definitely one of the leaders of the Bay Area Strike. We decided that we wanted to have seven demands for the seven days of the strike, each with a direct call to action. We’re also doing a lot of outreach. One channel of outreach is doing a lot of school presentations and talking to teachers. We’ve been super successful at getting teachers to make the climate strike a field trip, getting BART passes and school buses for people who need support in getting to the Strike. Through all of this, we’ve been able to get a lot of Oakland public school students to come to the strike. We’re also working on this in San Francisco. There will be a lot of students at this strike, which is going to be super powerful, because that’s exactly what we want.
We’ve also been coordinating with adult allies who are working with us. YvA’s main thing is the September 20th General Climate Strike. There will be a week of actions following that where other local organizations have their own events, but we’re all in collaboration. With all of us working together, we’ve been able to coordinate a lot.
Ten Strands is a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to bringing environmental literacy to all of California’s 6.2 million K–12 students. They have been instrumental in establishing and implementing breakthrough policies that have trained over 20,000 teachers and implemented environmental literacy curriculum in 40% of the schools in California to date.
Teo Grossman, Senior Director of Programs & Research for Bioneers, sat down with the founders, Karen Cowe and Will Parish, to learn more.
Karen Cowe is CEO of Ten Strands and Project Director of their Environmental Literacy Steering Committee. An education-industry executive with 25+ years’ experience, she was formerly President/CEO at Key Curriculum Press.
Will Parish is the Founder and President of Ten Strands. Will is a credentialed public high school science educator with a 30-year record of innovative accomplishments in the environmental and educational fields. He taught Environmental Science at Gateway High School in San Francisco, and now serves on the board. He served on the California State Board of Education’s Curriculum Commission and then founded Ten Strands as a nonprofit organization to support California’s efforts to achieve statewide penetration of high-quality environment-based education into schools.
TEO GROSSMAN: What does the name of your organization “Ten Strands” mean?
WILL PARISH : The symbol that we have – which is the intertwining, woven wreath – has blue for the sky, green for growth, yellow for sunlight and brown for soil. What does the ten mean? The number one is the beginning and zero is the end of everything. If you put them together, you get ten, which is the symbol of perfection, and of course which Mother Nature is. It’s also the basis of our numeric system, so it feeds right into education.
KAREN COWE: We knew that we wanted to link education, environment, and community, and we were thinking about the kinds of things that strengthen those ties. Our view from the office is over the Golden Gate bridge, and we were thinking about the cable in the bridge and about the John Muir quote, “If you touch something in the universe, it’s connected to everything else.”
TEO:
How did you both come to this work?
WILL: When I was teaching environmental science at Gateway High School, I was asked to start the program, and did so in 2002. A few years into it, I was asked to teach Civics, which I loved, so I did that. One day, I noticed the students weren’t very energetic, so I tried something. I brought a Twinkie into the classroom, and I said, “Where can you buy one of these?” And everybody said, “Well, any corner store has them.” I said, “That’s right. Corner stores are full of junk food, booze, and cigarettes.” I said, “Where can you buy a head of lettuce or a bunch of carrots?” And they said, “Well, across town; can’t do it easily in Excelsior or Bayview Hunters Point.” And I said, “Well, that’s by design to some degree.” They said, “Really, Mr. Parish?”
So we talked about “food deserts” and the systems that keep them in place, and that incensed the kids enough that it was an incentive to learn more about civics and how citizens operate in a democracy. That experience set off a light bulb in my head, and I thought, wow, if that works well in my class, why couldn’t it work well in all subjects in all classes? So I sought a position within the education state policy arena to see if we could influence introducing that teaching style, and I was appointed to the State Board of Education Curriculum Commission, now called the Instructional Quality Commission.
In that
position, I was chair of the science committee just when the Education and the
Environment Initiative Curriculum came up for review. I found that I wasn’t the
only one with this idea. There were over 100 people who had not only thought
about this idea, but had spent seven years preparing the most amazing piece of
curriculum for science and for history/social science that enhanced the
teaching by connecting the students’ to their own environment. That’s really
how I got into it.
TEO: So you were a teacher. Was that
something you went into early in life?
WILL: Yes, yes. Very early. In college,
I was a cross country ski racer, and had been into backpacking and horseback
riding, and very much loved to be in nature.
I think the
seminal moment happened when I was on a trip around the world in my Jeep with
my roommate, and I was exposed to the amount of environmental degradation all
around the planet having to do with resource use, primarily fossil fuels, and
the pollution associated with that. And I committed myself in my mid to early
‘20s to dedicate my life in some way to address that situation.
My first step was to go to law school, get a law degree and develop a means of combatting the electricity production system that relies on fossil fuel. So I built a company that uses the alternative fuel of agricultural crop waste, and for 14 years I built this company to produce electricity for Southern California Edison. That ran its course, and I took another job having to do with educating people from airplanes about the environment below.
By the time
I was 46, I asked myself, what have I really liked in the arc of my career? And
it was education. It coincided with Governor Gray Davis saying, “We need more
teachers. If you go get a job at a school, you don’t have to have a credential,
as long as you sign up for credentials.” So I said great, that’ll be my next
step. That’s the full arc of how I wound up in the classroom.
KAREN: As I think about my career, the
way that I characterize it is about having an interest in place-based
education. Before I even knew what a career was, I was connected to place where
I grew in rural Scotland in a village of 1,200 people. My family’s been in that
village since at least the 1300s.
My village is on a hill, near a tributary of the River Tweed. My mother worked in a paper mill on the tributary, and she actually had lots of jobs. But when I was a teenager, her job was to test the quality of the water in the river and how the mill was impacting it. I learned early from her the importance of the ways in which things connect in any given place, in any given village around the village, to the rest of the world. Right? So if my mother wasn’t going down to the river on a daily basis and collecting water samples and taking them into the lab, and sending that data up to the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, then all of that would be impacting what was happening downstream. I always understood that it was important for us to be stewards, because that little tributary connected to the Tweed, and that floated in the North Sea and connected to the world’s oceans.
So when I went
to university, and started to think about what I wanted to do professionally. In
the summertime, I started teaching English to young students who came to the UK
from other countries. And I was always struck by the instruction materials that
I was given, because they were never about the place where these kids were.
They were about London, for example, when we were all in York. So I used to
just throw away those materials and rewrite them for that place.
Then when I left college, I lived in Greece for six years. I started working for the first publishing company ever in Greece to write instructional materials about Greece, to teach English to Greek children, because those materials were previously coming from the big publishing houses in London. It was such an obvious idea to me to localize instructional materials.
I moved to the States in 1996, and I started to work for a math publishing company. We did math and science and a little bit of engineering, and we were maniacs about creating authentic experiences for children to explore their own view of mathematics, instead of these pseudo contexts that you make up to help them grasp concepts.
In 2012, the shareholders of the publishing company I was working for decided to sell the business, and I took it through a transaction. Around that time I met Will, and he told me that he wanted to start a nonprofit focused on environmental literacy. The penny dropped for me. I was like, Oh my gosh, that’s exactly the thing I’ve been building towards over all these years!
TEO: Can you talk about the work you’re
doing now?
WILL: Every fourth-grader in California public schools learns about the gold rush. And there was a particular curriculum that went way beyond what you would normally learn about the Gold Rush, such as about the monetary basis of it, San Francisco growing as a financial center, or the incredible work that it took Chinese immigrants to build the tunnels. This curriculum included information about the environmental impact of the Gold Rush, such as the hydrological mining that liquefied the mountains and ruined the streams below, and the use of mercury to leech out the gold, and how that sits in the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, which is the reason that we can’t eat our shellfish.
There are 500 lesson plans in this curriculum interspersed in the subjects of science and history/social science. The idea was to focus on kids that take those two subjects from kindergarten all the way through the 12th grade, with a slow drip irrigation of environmental impact throughout science, throughout history. We got it approved, and about that same time I met Karen, who knew how to push it into the school system.
KAREN: We worked on that first project – the Education and Environment Initiative Curriculum – in partnership with CalRecycle, which is part of the California EPA. Through that partnership, we have trained over 20,000 teachers and brought the curriculum to over 4,000 schools – about 40% of the 10,000 schools schools in California. At last count, there were 7-8 million lessons in circulation. That was a really nice start for us.
That curriculum came about because of 2003 legislation that was authored by Senator Fran Pavley, and it called for two things: the creation of environmental principles and concepts – big statements that articulate the interdependence of natural systems and human social systems. And it called for the creation of a model curriculum that demonstrated how to translate those statements into standard based instruction.
At first, our eyes were only on the curriculum, because it was the thing that existed. We came to learn that there was probably going to be more mileage in the principles and concepts side of the equation rather than the curriculum, because it was just there as a model for how to do it. Environmental principles and concepts were going to really be the vehicle for fully integrating environmental literacy into existing education infrastructure in California.
In terms of this legislative trajectory that we’re on, through that Pavley legislation we learned these environmental principles and concepts could be integrated into some core education documents, like standards and frameworks and assessments. The timing was perfect because there are new science standards, new history/social science frameworks, new health frameworks. If we’d come along at a different time, slightly earlier or slightly later, there would be nothing to jump on this opportunity. But we were there at the right time.
Fast forward,Ten Strands sponsored legislation SB-720 in 2018, authored by Senator Allen and Assembly Member Tony Thurmond. What we were doing with that legislation was to say, we’re going to have a new governor and a new superintendent, and a lot of what we’ve been doing to has been informal. How can we formalize it?
SB-720
basically does four things:
1) It directs the State Board of Education, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and district superintendents and their school boards to support environmental literacy;
2) It pulls the core ideas from the Blueprint for Environmental Literacy into education code as the State’s definition of environmental literacy, with these big human-impact, human interdependent statements;
3) It supports teachers through curriculum instruction, professional development and assessment, and helps them build relationships with science-rich community-based organizations;
4) It
articulates a process in the public resources code for revising the
environmental principles and concepts based on current scientific and technical
knowledge, specifically getting climate change in.
TEO: Practically, what does that mean for a
student in the classroom? What changes?
WILL: One of my favorite examples was
how to make economics interesting to a high school senior. Right? You don’t do
it by starting with, “Well, students, today we’re going to learn about—[YAWNS]
excuse me…the theory of economics. We’ll start with Keynesian theory.” Right?
You don’t do that.
What worked so well in the EEI curriculum, is you say, “Hey students, raise your hand if you know anybody in the salmon industry.” Everybody raises their hand because they have a fisher parent or a waiter in a restaurant, or they eat salmon. So my next question might be: “Well, where does salmon come from?” Duh, the ocean. And, “How do you get the salmon out of the ocean?” You use nets. “What happens to the other wildlife in the ocean when you’re using these nets?” So the kids begin to think about the by-catch and if you use bottom-trawling nets, the destruction of seabed ecosystems around the world.
Another
question is: “Well, if they use nets, how many boats can be out there catching
all these fish?” And more conversation. “Well, can anybody come catch? What
about the Chinese, the Japanese, Norwegians?” And of course, yes is the answer.
So we begin to get them really interested in, Oh gee, I can see what’s going to
happen here; there are an awful lot of people who want a limited resource.
Then I talk about, “Well, how many jobs are there?” and “What happens to the resource over the course of a few years if the fishing goes unabated.” And of course it depletes. So now I’ve got ‘em, right? So then we can talk about regulation, and drop into: “So what does all this mean? You’ve got the fish. You can think of a supply. You’ve got the fishermen, women, as the demand, and where’s the optimum level, and how do you achieve that?
I haven’t
even mentioned the word economic theory, and yet we’re diving right into it,
and now the kids are really interested. Yeah. So that was fun.
The lead consultant that we work with who led the EEI development helps us to think about the environmental principles and concepts. If you look at science standards or history/social science standards or health standards, how do you take these big statements of interdependence and connect them to those disciplinary core ideas? So that you’re not just studying the topic absent human impact, human dependence, complexity as a result of governmental decisions and that kind of thing. It’s a way of thinking, and it it is basically systems thinking – grade level appropriate, content specific.
When you’re working with groups of teachers, you help them think about their lesson planning and their unit design by keeping this human impact, humans dependence upon natural systems in mind as they’re doing their planning through the unit against their grade level topic.
TEO: How progressive is this? Where does this legislation being implemented in California rank compared to other states or private institutions?
KAREN: We’ve chosen to work with the State of California rather than, for example, through private schools or through charter management organizations. We’ve chosen to join the California Department of Education, to look at their standards and frameworks, which emphasize a kind of pedagogy that’s interesting to us: inquiry. The Next Generation Science Standards that California adopted in 2013 are very thoughtful, progressive science standards, and so we are just joining that movement.
In terms of environmental literacy, we’re not aware of any other state that’s got anything like that extra layer that California’s got going, which are these Environmental Principles and Concepts. We’ve been told that California is far ahead of most other states. Although many other states have blueprints for environmental literacy, and are implementing the ideas, we don’t think any of them are as funded as well as we’ve been able to fund our effort. Maryland, for example, has an environmental literacy high school graduation requirement. That’s the one other place that we’re aware of that has some education legislation supporting this kind of thing.
WILL: Another state, Oregon, has passed
legislation that gets kids outside, and it’s not exactly part of the education
system, but it is acknowledging that getting kids outside is an important
educational goal.
After No Child Left Behind, there was a federal law dating back to 2001 that some lawmakers attempted to pass. This other bill came forward, which was No Child Left Inside. It never became law, but it proposed federal funding for states that incorporated some sort of environmental education into their education system. 22 or 24 states adopted an environmental literacy plan. And those plans exist in Maryland, Oregon, Hawaii, Kentucky, Colorado are just five of those 20-some states. I think it’s safe to say that they’re looking at California to see what can happen at the legislative level to impact the entire system, because nobody else has gotten that far just yet.
TEO: What’s at stake if the work succeeds? In terms of the number of students going through California public schools, what’s the dream outcome? A generation of students who are environmental literate. Do either of you have a sense of what that practically means?
WILL: Let me just give one quick
example. Each year, 400,000 kids in California graduate high school and they
are all of voting age. So if they would register, and if they have gone through
the California system of environmental literacy, my hope is that legislation
and supporters in Congress and in the Senate, and down the ballot and across
the California state positions of authority would be people who support
legislation that is pro-environment, or that is beneficial to reducing the
human impact on the environment.
KAREN: There are 6.2 million students in California alone. You know? There’s eight Scotlands in California. It’s a big system. Will mentioned No Child Left Behind and that era of accountability where things just got boiled down to math and english. We have an opportunity here where kids again are learning science with very thoughtful standards. We are encouraging kids to do hands-on work and think critically. You can help stimulate different thinking as kids are exposed to some of these subjects for the very first time.
I remember a
friend of mine telling me that when California had a big push for recycling,
the kids were the ones going to the parents and saying, “I just learned this in
school; this is how it’s done.” That helped bring about a behavior change at a
level that you’ve never seen before in California.
So it’s
wonderful that there are nearly half a million voters coming out, but also just
at a level of a second grader and that level of a fourth grader, the way in
which they’re able to think critically about the materials that are being put
in front of them is just also really very empowering for them.
TEO: David Orr, the educator and writer, is famous for saying all education is environmental education. In his landmark book, Earth In Mind, he laid out a set of principles that he suggested no student should be able to graduate college without having a basic understanding of.
It sounds like you’re replicating this approach in K-12, suggesting that no student shall graduate high school without a basic understanding of how the world actually works with regard to natural systems – we depend on them, they depend on us.
KAREN: Exactly right. That’s it.
TEO: Talk about the collaborations Ten Strands is involved in. I know you have a strong focus as an organization, as a network, and as movement on equity as a key component of how this is all going to work.
KAREN: We do not do this alone. The most direct group we work with is called the Environmental Literacy Steering Committee, which we helped form in collaboration with the Superintendent Torlakson. It’s a 30-person committee that organizes around the state’s Blueprint for Environmental Literacy to implement the ideas in there. Will is the co-chair of that committee, and Craig Strang from the Lawrence Hall of Science is the other co-chair. I’m the project director, and the people on the committee are from the formal system, the non-formal system, government agencies.[s2]
When we looked at all the ideas in the Blueprint, we asked, “Where do you start?” One of the things that we decided as a group at the very beginning was that it was really important for us to take this work to scale, and that it needed to be equitable and culturally relevant to the diverse communities that we work with in California. Looking at the whole system, the best way to get it there was to identify school districts as a unit of change. You’ve got these 6.2 million students who are in 10,000 schools, and a thousand school districts, and 58 county Offices of Education. When we looked at all those numbers, we thought that a thousand school districts was something that we could get ours head around as a number.
Also,
because of Governor Brown’s local control policies, the funding for schools
flowed most directly to school districts. So in terms of sustainability around
this work, environmental literacy – alongside science and other core subjects –
would need to be articulated into district goals and priorities. So we have
these three sort of big guiding goals – scale, equity, and cultural relevance –
and school districts as a unit of change.
In terms of
how we’ve organized around that, in addition to the steering committee, we have
18 different partners now working on the different parts of the plan. We’re
working with four different statewide networks that specialize in teacher
in-service professional development: the California Science Project, the
California History/Social Science Project, the Global Education Project, and
the California Science Teachers Association, which is the largest professional
organization for science teachers in the state.
We’ve raised
money and made direct investments in those networks so they can integrate the
environmental principles and concepts, and environmental literacy in the
workshops they do with teachers. So that’s one of the ways in which we’re going
about trying to take the work to scale.
We see school districts as a unit of change and as a strategy to attend to equity, because as we get into planning with school district leaders, like the district superintendent, the district curriculum instruction person, the district professional development person. We’re saying let’s plan together for all schools in your district. So it doesn’t matter really which zip code a school is in.
TEO: Unlike the Las Vegas’s claim to fame, what happens with California often doesn’t stay in California. This has been the case most notably with air quality standards but there are many other ways California serves as a leader, sometimes simply due to the scale of the state. Do you have a sense of the larger national or global potential for the project? Is it the same as the automotive industry, in that curriculum developers figure they might as well use California Standards as the baseline elsewhere, given the production scale?
WILL: There is an international organization called the North American Association of Environmental Educators, and they are focusing more and more on what’s working in California. The hope is that other states will be able to learn from the approach that we’ve taken in California with multiple stakeholders, and working within the system, and finding the key lever points to develop the relationships and move the system toward embracing environmental literacy. Is it exportable to other states? There are a lot of looking at what we’re doing.
There have been two different organizations that have asked for participation from California. I was invited to put on a workshop at UC Berkeley on the College of Natural Resources where each summer they bring 30 environmental leaders from 30 different countries. And because of the success that we’ve experienced in California with environmental literacy, I was asked to give a workshop about what it looks like, what’s the landscape. It was very well received. All of those countries were super interested to take nuggets of what they learned and see if they could apply them back in their home country.
The other organization was the World Future Council, which also asked that California be represented, and that was 15 different countries.
We haven’t
sought an audience internationally. We don’t feel like the work we have to do
in California is complete. This is a huge state, and if we can get it to work
here, it will be more easily exportable.
KAREN: I do feel, though, we’ve been pulled out of California to participate in conversations, like you said, through NAAEE, but also when we participated in the Global Climate Action Summit. There was definitely some international participation there, especially on a cross-sector panel that we ran at the end. So it’s starting to happen, even though we haven’t been looking for it.
TEO:
Where does Ten Strands go from here? You said that your work is by no
means done. Where does California go from here, what’s next on the agenda?
KAREN: One of the
things we’re considering is building out a state network that would offer
regional support to school districts to create environmental literacy plans
tied to district goals and priorities, and using these pilots that we’re using
right now to build tools and resources for the field.
Another
thing that we’ve barely touched on is thinking about future teachers. So if
you’re in the Cal State system or the UC system, and you’re going to teach
science, history/social science or English or mathematics, that as part of your
credential you know how to integrate environmental literacy into your science
instruction. So looking at the teacher pipeline and then building out some kind
of network to help districts to do this kind of planning.
At the end
of the day, it’s about making sure that we’re happy with the work we’re doing
and happy with the partnerships that we’re forming. You know?
TEO: It’s been hard work but it sounds like
through some combination of determination and talent and luck and timing,
things have unfolded in the right way. How are you feeling? You’re a small
organization working a gigantic system.
WILL: The analogy that I like to use is that Ten Strands is the tug boat pushing against the super tanker of the education system. I like the analogy because as the leaders of the tug boat, we have to be in agreement with the leaders of the supertanker where it wants to go. So we’ve been able to have that communication and say, “Hey, a little bit more toward those productive environmental literacy waters. There you go.” And it’s been a collaborative working relationship in that way.
KAREN: It’s just incredible to sit with teachers and their kids, and have the kids share with you what they’re learning as a result of taking this approach. We’ve been so lucky that, as we’ve built these relationships, obviously at the level of the state agencies, but also at the level of like a kindergarten teacher who has taught in the same school for the last 17 years. To go into her classroom and sit with her kids, and watch her teach the kids about structure and function as it relates to birds, and connecting that to litter reduction on the campus. These little kids, they’re little kindergarteners, and her job is to teach them to read. Here they are at the end of the year with her, they know how to read, and they know how to articulate themselves against a very complex topic. This is the thing that really keeps me going, all of the ways in which we meet these fine, fine educators working with these wonderful kids who have so much potential.
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