The Amazon at a Tipping Point: Can We Turn It Around? | Leila Salazar-López

This keynote talk was given at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

Unprecedented fires, deliberately set to expand industrial agriculture and other extractive development, are burning across the Amazon, a dangerous escalation of the global climate emergency. Scientists warn that the Amazon is reaching “the tipping point” of ecological collapse, but Indigenous movements across the region are resisting and calling for international solidarity to help them defend their rights and territories. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have protected their sacred ancestral territories. Leila Salazar López, Executive Director of Amazon Watch, urges us to stand with them to protect and restore the bio-cultural integrity of the Amazon, because our collective future depends on it.

Leila Salazar-López, the Executive Director of Amazon Watch, has worked for 20+ years to defend the world’s rainforests, human rights, and the climate through grassroots organizing and international advocacy campaigns at Amazon Watch, Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, and Green Corps. She is also a Greenpeace Voting Member and a Global Fund for Women Advisor for Latin America.

To learn more about Leila Salazar-López and her work, visit Amazon Watch.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

Introduction by Eriel Deranger, Executive Director, Indigenous Climate Action.

ERIEL DERANGER:

[Greeting] My name is Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, and in my native language my name means Thunder Woman. I’m so happy to be here, and I want to recognize the traditional territory of the Coast Miwok for allowing me to be here today, and it’s so good to be here. Bioneers’ 30th anniversary.

As a board member of Bioneers, I remember when I stood on this stage three years ago, as a keynote, and one of the things that helped ease my time up here was the introduction provided by Clayton Thomas-Muller, a friend. And today I so honored to have the privilege of introducing Leila Salazar-López, a friend and a comrade in the movement to protect and uphold the rights of Indigenous Peoples. [APPLAUSE]

Leila is a mother, a proud Chicana Latina woman and passionate defender of Mother Earth, the Amazon, indigenous rights, and climate justice. Since 2015, she has served as the executive director of Amazon Watch, leading the organization in its work to pretend—to protect and defend the biocultural and climate integrity of the Amazon rainforest by advancing Indigenous Peoples rights, territories and solutions, including solar for energy, communications, and transportation in the Amazon.

But for more than that, she has worked to defend the world’s rainforests, human rights, and climate through many grassroots organizations and international advocacy campaigns at Amazon Watch, Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange and Green Corps. She is currently a Greenpeace voting member and a Global Fund for Women advisor for Latin America.

I first met Leila in the halls of the Rainforest Action Network in 2008 when we were both campaigners. And I looked to her. I immediately found comradery as another racialized woman working within the environmental movement. I looked to her for guidance and courage to continue to move forward in places that often didn’t accept us in those rooms, and at those board tables, and with our own thoughts.

Leila left the Rainforest Action Network in 2009, where she moved onto the Amazon Watch, just one floor away from RAN, and I continue to stay in touch with her, where I continue to look and see how she pushed the boundaries in the organization she moved through, that she pushed and advocated for the rights of communities, of the redistribution of power and privilege. As the executive director of Rainforest—or of Amazon Watch, she has continued to show tremendous leadership and demonstrating what it means to show up for community, and grounding her work in what it means to be a true ally.

I, in my own journey to become executive director of my own organization, I looked to Leila for leadership and for mentorship. Just this past month when we were together in New York City for the climate week, I said to her, “Leila, you’re one of my mentors. I look to you as a strong women of color leading an organization and showing what it means to have real demonstrated leadership of showing up for community and really putting your heart in your work.”

We have to ensure that we support women like Leila Salazar-López, like Atossa Soltani, like the many women of the Sarayaku and the Zapara people who are rising up and demonstrating what it means to be true leaders in the face of adversity.

Leila first traveled to the Amazon in 1995 as a student intern, and as she continued to move forward, she met so many people that taught her so much about what it means to be in the region, and what it means to stand up and protect the rights of those communities. Today she will share that story and journey with you. Please join me in welcoming Leila Salazar-López. [APPLAUSE]

LEILA SALAZAR-LÓPEZ:

Good morning, Everyone. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Thank you, Eriel. She already made me cry, and for those of you who know me, I will probably cry. Thank you, Bioneers. Thank you so much for holding this space for all of us during this very difficult and challenging, but inspiring time here on Mother Earth.

I first want to acknowledge the Coastal Miwok and all the California native peoples whose land we are on. I want to acknowledge our ancestors, all of our ancestors, my Yaqui and Aztec ancestors from what is now Northern Mexico, Sinaloa, Zacatecas, and also from Yucatan, where my great grandfather’s from. I want to acknowledge and thank our family who migrated from Baja, California, and then to Southern California to search for a better life, just like many migrants are doing today. And I want to give a special thanks to my family who’s out there somewhere, who always supports me, always loves me, even when it’s really difficult, especially over these last few months, which have been very, very intense since we heard about the fires burning across the Amazon. And I want to thank the Amazon Watch staff and family, who have been working tirelessly for 23 years to defend the Amazon. [APPLAUSE]

Woo, that’s what it looks like. So the Amazon rainforest is on fire. Let that sink in for a moment. How many of you have heard about this? Okay. Kind of preaching to the choir here, but here it goes. And how many of you were here yesterday during Bill McKibben’s talk? How many of you cried or were terrified? I was crying and terrified for the rest of the day yesterday, and I hope while you hear me speak, I won’t make you terrified – maybe a little – but I’ll also inspire you to join us, and to join Indigenous Peoples in resistance for existence and survival for all of us. [APPLAUSE]

So, you probably have heard about the fires in Brazil, and most of the fires have been in Brazil. And they are raging across the Amazon in Brazil, and in Bolivia, and across the entire Amazon, and they’re devastating, they’re catastrophic. And combined with the threats across the Amazon – oil and gas and agribusiness, and deforestation, and degradation, and mining, and megadams – this is what—these threats and the fires combined with climate change, this is what could lead the Amazon to a tipping point of ecological collapse.

But can we turn this around? That’s the question. That’s a question that we’re here to answer today.

First, the Amazon, and our beautiful, beautiful planet Earth. This is South America, and this is the Amazon Basin. And the Amazon Basin is as large as the continental United States. It’s massive. It’s the world’s largest tropical rainforest. It is a global treasure. It houses a third of the plant and animal species on Mother Earth. It produces 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. So we need the Amazon to breathe. We need the Amazon for global biodiversity. We need the Amazon for…protecting our climate.

The Amazon—You might have heard of the Amazon as the largest tropical rainforest. It also has one of the largest rivers on the planet, and above the river, the Amazon River, are the flying rivers, which are the atmospheric rivers which regulate our global weather system. Without the flying rivers, our entire global weather system is destabilized. And the reason why the flying rivers can be taken off course is because of increased deforestation caused by these fires and many other threats.

This is one of the many images that you’ll see if you’ve traveled to the rainforest. How many of you’ve actually been to the rainforest? A lot of you. And for those of you who have been, once you’ve been, just like once you know, you can’t go back, and that’s what happened to me when I went to the Amazon rainforest when I was 21 years old. I went to learn about plants. I wanted to study ethnobotany. And my life took a different course once I met Indigenous Peoples who were a living library, who are a living library. When you walk with Indigenous Peoples in the rainforest, and they can name every single plant and tell you every single property – for food, for medicine, for housing, for clothing, for shelter – then you know there is—they have a millennial knowledge that needs to be protected.

And in the Amazon, there are these. So I said that the Amazon houses a third of the plant and animal species on the planet. This is one of my favorites – the pygmy marmoset. It’s about this big. You can hold it in your hand, and you just want to take it home. It’s the cutest thing ever. But you can’t take it home. And they’re almost extinct. And so they are, like many of the plants and animals on this planet, under a lot of threat. So we’re working to protect them. We’re working to defend them. And the best way that we can do that is by standing with Indigenous Peoples. [APPLAUSE]

There are over 400 distinct indigenous nations, peoples throughout the Amazon rainforest, and they are the best protectors of the Amazon. They are the best protectors of biodiversity on our planet. The UN – you guys have probably heard this stat before – the United Nations says that 80% of the global biodiversity on this planet is on Indigenous Peoples’ lands. So that’s why we are working to stand with Indigenous Peoples to protect biodiversity, to protect the climate, and to protect life.

And when we see these images of these fires, and this destruction taking place all over the Amazon, this is—This is what it looks like. This is what industrial agribusiness does to the Amazon, and this is why the fires have been intentionally set. Let’s make no mistake. The fires in the Amazon are not wildfires. They’re not a mistake. They are intentional. They are malicious. They are set by government policies and economic policies and drivers to do this to the rainforest.

This is a map that we created in late August, right after the fires started, just to map out where some of the fires were happening, and also to show that, yes, a lot of the fires were happening in Brazil, but they were happening all over the Amazon. And we’re talking thousands of fires. In Brazil alone there’s been over 100,000 fires, just this year alone. In Brazil alone, there’s been over three million hectares burned. In Bolivia alone, there’s been over five million hectares burned. Just this year. Just this year. And that is forest that has been there for thousands and thousands of years. And we’re not going to get that back anytime soon.

What we have to do now is protect it and restore it as quick as possible. [APPLAUSE] Alright, I’m going to go back for a second.

A lot of people ask us, Well, who’s responsible? Who’s doing this? And it is the government. It is the Bolsonaro government. Let’s not make light of it. The Brazilian government has a policy, has not only the rhetoric, but the policies to destroy the Amazon to make way for economic development, to make way for agribusiness, to make way for soy and cattle, to make way for mining. It is their policy to destroy the Amazon for economic development. So it’s not a mistake. It’s not a wildfire. It’s intentional and malicious, and destructive. And not only are they intentionally setting fire to the forest, they’re intentionally rolling back rights of Indigenous Peoples. The moment Bolsonaro got in office, he rolled back the rights of Indigenous Peoples, merged environmental and agribusiness ministries to intentionally destroy the lands and the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

And so we have been standing strong with Indigenous Peoples, APIB, the indigenous movement of Brazil, to say no, to stand up for rights, to stand up for lives, to stand up for territories. And the indigenous movement of Brazil, actually just on Friday, embarked on a trip to Europe, a 20-city tour for six weeks, to go to Europe to go to companies, to go to banks, to go to European governments, to the EU parliament to say don’t trade with Brazil. Don’t trade in high-risk commodities with Brazil. [APPLAUSE] Because that is what’s destroying the forest. If you care about the forest, if you care about human rights, if you care about indigenous rights, if you care about the climate, then don’t trade in high-risk commodities. No government, no corporation, no retailer, and no bank should be doing this.

And that’s why we actually joined together with APIB to put out a report called Complicity In Destruction to highlight and expose these corporations, big agribusiness traders like ADM, and Bunge, and Cargill, and retailers like Costco and Walmart, and banks, financial institutions like Chase and Santander, and BNP Paribas. And asset managers, very, very big banks, like BlackRock, and—How many of you all have heard about BlackRock? So thank you for those of you who know about BlackRock’s big problem. The rest of you look up BlackRock’s big problem and you’ll know that they are the biggest investor in climate destruction, whether it be agribusiness or fossil fuel.

And speaking of fossil fuel, these are the fossil fuel reserves in the Amazon. You may have heard about Chevron in Ecuador or Occidental Petroleum in U’wa territory or in northern Peruvian Amazon. That’s in the Western Amazon, that’s in the most biodiverse part of the Amazon, an area that we call the sacred headwaters region. It is the most biodiverse, culturally diverse part of the Amazon, and it’s in the Western Amazon. And these are the fossil fuel reserves across the Amazon that these companies and these governments would like to get their hands on.

There are many protected areas throughout the Amazon and Indigenous Peoples’ territories that are protected in the Amazon. In Ecuador, for example, Indigenous Peoples have rights to their ancestral territories, but they don’t have rights to the subsurface minerals. So the government can still go in and drill, and concession off territories like this. These are Indigenous Peoples’ territories overlapped with oil concessions. And this has been the model for decades.

And as I mentioned, I was just in Ecuador last week with some of my colleagues, and standing with Indigenous Peoples in meetings, actually. We were in meetings to talk about the alternative—alternative solutions to oil development. And it was very hard to be there last week because we were in meetings but we were also standing with Indigenous Peoples as they were rising up, rising up against the continued policies that would cause this, that would cause the destruction of Indigenous Peoples lands and the rainforest to cause massive oil spills like this. This is what it looks like. This is just a very small picture of what it is. We’re talking billions and billions and billions of gallons of oil and toxic wastewaters that have been spilled into the Ecuadorian/Peruvian Amazon as a result of oil development.

And for what? For a few weeks’ worth of oil? This is why people like Sarayaku, who are very close allies, have said no. We’re not. We’re not going to ever allow fossil fuel companies onto our land. We want to be free from oil development. We want to keep fossil fuels in the ground. [APPLAUSE]

And it’s indigenous people, it’s Sarayaku, it’s women, Women Defenders of the Amazon Against Extraction, it’s indigenous movements that we’re working with to protect the Amazon, to restore the Amazon, to advance indigenous solutions, to advance and support climate justice. And we’re doing this together. We’re doing this as NGO allies, we’re doing this as movements in the climate justice movement and indigenous rights movement, in the women’s movement. We’re doing this together. And this is what we have to do at this time.

The youth have called upon us to stop talking and take action. How many of you were out in the climate march, climate strike? [APPLAUSE] I was out there with my kids in San Francisco marching for climate justice, and I have to say that it restored my hope. After the fires, it was pretty daunting and devastating to come to work, and just get up in the morning, but seeing the youth stand up for climate justice and demanding that we take action really restored my hope.

Being in Ecuador last week, seeing Indigenous Peoples stand up to the IMF and to their government who is imposing policies on them without their consent gave me hope and re-inspired me to really do everything possible to stand up to forces like BlackRock for our children, because like the sign says, we have to act as if our house is on fire, because it is. It’s the Amazon. It’s the Arctic. It’s the Congo. It’s Indonesia. All of these ecosystems have been on fire, and we have to put out the physical fires and we have to put out the political fires, and we have to come together like we did in this ceremony last week. We have to come together, all of us. We have to get out of our silos and we have to come together for our future, for our collective future.

So I want to ask you all to please come together, unify. That’s what we’re doing here at Bioneers. We come together. We share ideas. We inspire each other. We challenge each other. We cry together. And what I want to ask you all to do is to take action for the Amazon.

My time is up, but I want you to go to AmazonWatch.org and take a pledge to protect the Amazon, and stand with Indigenous Peoples. And just—If you remember anything of what I’ve said today, I want you to remember that the best way we can protect the Amazon is by standing with Indigenous Peoples. And if we protect the Amazon– [APPLAUSE] And if we protect the Amazon, we will protect our climate, and we will not reach that tipping point, and we will have hope for our future generations. So will you stand with me? [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Then stand. [APPLAUSE]

And I’m going to just do this real quick. [CHEERS] Thank you!

Tim Merry: Holding Up a Mirror to the Moment (Day 2)

Slam poet Tim Merry weaves highlights of Bioneers Day 2 into bardic verse.

This performance took place at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

Tim Merry works with major businesses, government agencies, local communities, and regional collaboratives to help engender breakthrough systems change through coaching, training, keynote speaking, engagement, and facilitation designed to energize and shake up the status quo. Tim is also a traveling spoken word artist inspired by poets from the ancient Anglo Saxon oral tradition all the way through history to modern poets such as Kate Tempest.

Intrinsic – A Performance by Climbing PoeTree (2019 Day 1)

This performance took place at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

These two Brooklyn-based poets-artists-activists-educators-musicians-performers may be the most brilliant socially engaged spoken word duo in the known universe. They perform material from their recent kickass album, “Intrinsic”.

Climbing PoeTree (Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman) are award-winning multimedia artists, organizers, educators and a spoken word duo who have independently organized 30 tours, taking their work from South Africa to Cuba, the UK to Mexico, and 11,000 miles around the U.S. on a bus running on recycled vegetable oil, presenting alongside powerhouses such as Vandana Shiva, Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker, in venues ranging from the UN to Harvard to Riker’s Island Prison.

To learn more about Climbing PoeTree, visit http://www.climbingpoetree.com/

Eve Ensler: The Alchemy of the Apology

This keynote talk was delivered at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

Eve Ensler, the brilliant playwright and tireless activist for women’s rights globally, founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising, was like so many other women, sexually abused, in her case by her father. In her new bestselling book, The Apology, Eve has attempted to transform, with unflinching truthfulness and compassion, the horrific betrayal she suffered into an expansive vision for the future. She shares her story and explores how other survivors of abuse might be able to mobilize their imagination and inner strength to move from humiliation to revelation to find healing and inner freedom. She has written her own apology which she offers on this occasion.

Eve Ensler, Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and one of the world’s most important activists on behalf of women’s rights, is the author of many plays, including, most famously the extraordinarily influential and impactful The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed all over the globe in 50 or so languages.

To learn more about Eve Ensler, visit her website.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers co-founder and Chief Relationship Strategist.

NINA SIMONS:

This year, being a milestone for Bioneers, we did everything we could to bring back to this stage some of those visionary doers, artists, and activists who have had the greatest influence on us, whom we look up to the most, and whose work has continued to grow, adapt, and evolve over time. There is no one who inspires me, challenges me, and whose example strengthens my courage more than the incredible playwright, author, and women’s rights activist, Eve Ensler. [APPLAUSE]

As a social artist and activist, Eve has consistently grown her vision and her strategies to adapt to the lessons life’s brought her, and to respond to the global pandemic of violence against women. A strong argument can be made that no one in human history has more effectively used the arts to further human rights injustice. Her play, The Vagina Monologues, has been performed by countless women all over the planet, and is likely the most widely performed and impactful play ever written. Eve parlayed the unparalleled viral success of that play into building perhaps the biggest and most successful movements to eliminate violence against women and girls the world has ever seen – V-Day, followed by One Billion Rising. Being savvy, humble, and open-sourced in her approach, she made her play accessible to women and girls the world over, and then made One Billion Rising contagious by not trying to own, control, or brand it.

She helped raise over $100 million to fund thousands of projects around the world, including community-based anti-violence programs and safe houses in such widely disparate places as Afghanistan, Haiti, Kenya, Egypt, Iraq, South Dakota, and the City of Joy, the now world-renowned community for women survivors of violence that Eve co-founded in the war ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.

Of course, Eve has done far more as an artist than create The Vagina Monologues. She’s written other remarkable plays, produced films, won countless awards, and written several great works of non-fiction and memoir, including her incredibly timely new book, The Apology, which she’s going to talk about today.

It’s often hard for socially engaged artists and writers to reconcile their aesthetic or literary lives with their activism, but Eve seems to do it more seamlessly than anyone I’ve ever seen. She channels her boundless creativity into both her art and her advocacy so organically that rather than awkwardly co-existing, they feed and strengthen each other, and the result is powerful but gracefully crafted, totally engaged, fully embodied, truly revolutionary art.

When she was stricken with life-threatening illness, she discovered the healing power of nature, and has been a devoted eco-feminist ever since. All of us have suffered to varying degrees from living in a world in which one out of three women are beaten or raped in their lifetimes, but I have watched her grow ever more confident, courageous, and bold in her vision, and effective in both her art and her activism. Even more impressively, over the years, and despite the global horrors she has tirelessly been combatting, she has become, without losing any of her edge or wonderfully caustic humor, an ever-more centered radiant, wise, and compassionate soul.

I’m so very grateful to call her friend, and to the universe for having provided us and all women and men everywhere at this time with the one and only Eve Ensler. [APPLAUSE]

EVE ENSLER:

Good morning, family. [APPLAUSE] Good morning, family. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] That’s better. [LAUGHTER]

A couple of notes before I start. This is an offering, not a prescription. If it doesn’t work for you, release it. If it does, excellent. When I use the word woman, I mean to include women – straight, gay, bi, trans, non-binary, queer, gender queer, agender, and gender fluid.

I was sexually abused by my father from the time I was 5 until I was 10. Then physically battered regularly and almost murdered several times until I left home at 18. Some place deep inside, I believed my father would one day wake up out of his narcissistic, belligerent blindness, see me, feel me, understand what he had done, and he would step into his deepest truest self and finally apologize. Guess what? This didn’t happen. And yet the yearning for that apology never went away. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve rushed to the mailbox, believing that finally today there will be a letter waiting, an amends, an explanation, a closure to explain and set me free.

It’s 31 years since my father died. For over 22 of those years, I have spent and been a part of a glorious movement to end violence against women, struggling day in and day out to put an end to the scourge. I’ve watched as women break the silence, share their stories, face attack, doubt, humiliation, open and sustained shelters, start hotlines. I’ve been part of a movement that is 70 years old, began by African American women fighting off their rape of slave owners and white supremacists. I have witnessed the recent powerful iteration of #MeToo. I’ve seen a few men lose their jobs or standing, a few go to prison, a few faced public humiliation. But in all this time, I have never seen or heard any man make a thorough, sincere public apology for sexual or domestic abuse. In 16,000 years of patriarchy – and I have done a lot of research – I’ve never read or seen a public apology for a man for sexual or domestic abuse.

It occurred to me there must be something central and critical about that apology. So I decided I wasn’t going to wait anymore, that I was going to climb into my father and let my father come into me, and I was going to write his apology, to say the words, to speak the truth I needed to hear. This was a profound, excruciating, and ultimately liberating experience. And I have to tell you, I learned something very profound about the wound. I don’t imagine there’s anyone sitting here today that doesn’t have a wound that they carry, that has in some ways defined or guided or determined your life.

And what I learned writing this piece is that when we sit outside the wound, the radiation pours down on us, but when we go through the wound, it’s very, very painful, and it feels as if we might die, but as we keep going and going and going, we come to a point of ultimate freedom. I learned about what a true apology is.

We teach our children how to pray. We teach them the humility of prayer, the devotion of prayer, the attention required, the constancy, but we don’t teach our children how to apologize, or maybe they get to say an occasional meager, “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” or “I’m sorry if you feel bad,” but what I learned writing this book is that an apology is a process, a sacred commitment, a wrestling down of demons, a confrontation with our most concealed and controlling shadow.

I learned that an apology has four stages, and all of them must be honored. The first is a willingness to self-interrogate, to delve into the origins of your being, what made you a person who became capable of committing rape or harassment, or violence, to investigate what happened in your childhood, in your family, in this toxic, toxic culture.

In my father’s case, he was the last child, the accident who became the miracle, and he was adored. But I’m here to tell you, adoration is not love. Adoration is a projection of someone’s idealized self-image onto you, forcing you to live up to their image at the expense of your own humanity. My father, like many, many boys, was never allowed to be tender, vulnerable, full of wonder, doubt, curiosity and yearning. He was never allowed to cry. All of those feelings had to be stifled, pushed down, and in doing so they metastasized, and eventually became what he called the shadow man, this buried creature who later surfaced as a monster.

The second stage of an apology is a detailed accounting and admission of what you have actually done. Details are critical because liberation only comes through the details. Your accounting cannot be vague. “I hurt you,” or “I’m sorry,” or “I’m sorry if I sexually abused you” just doesn’t do it. Those words don’t mean anything. One must say what actually happened. “Then I grabbed you by your hair, and I beat your head over and over against the wall.” This investigation into details includes unmasking your real intentions and admitting them. “I belittled you because I was jealous of your power and your beauty, and I wanted you to be less.”

Survivors, and I know there are many here today, are often haunted for years by the why. Why would my father want to kill his own daughter? Why would my best friend drug and rape me? There is a difference between explanation and justification, and knowing the origin of a perpetrator’s behavior actually begins to create understanding, which ultimately leads to freedom.

One of the hardest things about writing this book was how deeply I didn’t want to feel my father’s pain. I didn’t believe he had earned the right from me to feel his pain. But to be honest with you, I have remained connected to my father since the time of the abuse through my rage. I was a permanent victim to his perpetrator. And I just want to say about my anger, you know, I was very able to be compassionate to so many people in my life, in all sorts of countries and places, I always had compassion. But I found the way I talked about white men very dis-compassionate. I found it in anger, and I listened to myself. There was a part of me that I just wasn’t happy with. I was stuck in a paradigm I realized that my father had designed. And as my father’s mother says to him in my book: anger is a potion you mix for a friend but you drink yourself. Feeling my father’s pain and suffering, ironically, released me from his paradigm.

The third stage of an apology is opening your heart and being, and allowing yourself to feel what your victim felt as you were abusing her, allowing your heart to break, allowing yourself to feel the nightmare that got created inside her, and the betrayal and the horror, and then allowing yourself to see and feel and know the long-term impact of your violation. What happened in her life because of it, who did she become or not become because of your actions?

And the fourth stage, of course, is taking responsibility for your actions, making amends and reparations where necessary, all of this indicating you’ve undergone a deep and profound experience that has changed you and made it impossible for you to ever repeat your behavior.

What and why should one want to undergo such a grueling and emotional process? The answer is simple: freedom. No one who commits violence or suffering upon another, or the Earth, is free of that action. It contaminates one’s spirit and being, and without amends often creates more darkness, depression, self-hatred and violence. The apology frees the victim, but it also frees the perpetrator, allowing them deep reflection and ability to finally change their ways and their life.

My father, in my book, wrote to me from limbo, and it was very strange. I have to tell you, he was present throughout the entire writing of the book. He had been stuck in limbo for 31 years. I truly believe that the dead need to be in dialogue with us, that they are around us, and they are often stuck, and they need our help in getting free.

With this exercise, I believe now that my father is free. And because he was willing to undergo this process, he’s moved on to a far more enlightened realm.

As for those of you who cannot get an apology from your perpetrator, I believe that writing an apology letter to yourself from them is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done, and it can shift how the perpetrator actually lives inside you, for once someone has violated you, entered you, oppressed you, demeaned you, they actually occupy you. We often know our perpetrators better than ourselves, particularly if they are family. We learn to read their footsteps and the sounds of their voices in order to protect ourselves. By writing my father’s apology, I changed how my father actually lived inside me. I moved him from a monster to an apologist, a terrifying entity to a broken little boy. In doing so, he lost power and agency over me.

We cannot underestimate the power of the imagination. And I just have to say in these times that we are living in, our imagination is our greatest tool. It is shifting trauma and karma that has numbed our frozen life force, and in the deeper and more specific my imagining and conjuring in this book, the more liberation I experienced. When finally at the end of the book my father or me, or me or my father, or both of us as one – I’m so not clear who wrote this book – my father says to me, “Old man, be gone.” It was exactly like the end of Peter Pan. Do you remember when Tinkerbell says goodbye and goes [MAKES SHOO SOUND] into the ethers? My father was gone, and to be honest, he hasn’t come back.

And I want to talk a little bit about forgiveness, because I think often we are survivors of all kinds of things, whether it’s racial oppression, or physical oppression, or economic oppression, or sexual violence. We’re told that we have to forgive and get over it. I don’t really believe that the mandate is ever on the victim to forgive, ever. But I do believe that there is an alchemy that occurs with a true apology, where your rancor and your bitterness and your anger and your hate releases when someone truly, truly apologizes.

People have asked me throughout the tour of my book, “What will it take to get men to apologize?” This is the $25 million question. And I have to tell you, it’s a question that is underlying everything we are experiencing on this planet right now. At one point in the book, my father tells me that to be an apologist is to be a traitor to men, to be an apologist is to be a traitor to men. Once one man admits he knows what he did was wrong, the whole story of patriarchy will come tumbling down.

So I say to all the men here, what we need now is for men to become willing gender traitors, and stand with us, and apologize so we can all get free.

There are so many apologies that need to be made. Our entire country rests on unreckoned landfill. That’s why it so easily becomes unraveled. Think of the massive apology and reparations due the First Nations people for the stealing of their lands, the rapes, the genocide, the destruction of culture and ways.

Think of the apology and reparations due African Americans for 400 years of diabolical slavery, lynchings, rape, separations of family, Jim Crow and mass incarceration. I honestly believe that apologies, deep, sacred apologies are the pathway to healing and inviting in the New World.

So as I was preparing this talk, something miraculous and difficult happened. I realized there was an apology I needed to make, an apology that would force me to confront my deepest sorrow, my guilt and shame, an apology I had been avoiding since I moved out of the city to the woods where I now live with the oaks and the locusts and the weeping willows, Lydia, the snapping turtle, running spring water, foxes, deer, coyotes, bears, cardinals, and my precious dog Pablo. This is my offering to you this morning. It is my apology to the Earth herself.

Dear Mother, it began with the article about the birds, the 2.9 billion missing North American birds. The 2.9 billion birds that disappeared and no one noticed – the sparrows, the blackbirds, and the swallows who didn’t make it, who weren’t even born, who stopped flying or singing, making their most ingenious nests that didn’t perch or peck their gentle beaks into moist black earth. It began with the birds. Hadn’t we even commented in June, James and I, that they were hardly here? A kind of eerie quiet had descended. But later they came back, the swarms of barn swallows and the huge ravens landing on the gravel one by one.

I know it was after hearing about the birds that afternoon I crashed my bike, suddenly falling and falling, unable to prevent the catastrophe ahead, unable to find the brakes or make them work, unable to stop the falling. I fell and spun and realized I had already been falling, that we had been falling, all of us, and crows, and conifers, and icecaps, and expectations falling and falling, and I wanted to keep falling. I didn’t want to be here anymore, to witness everything falling and missing and bleaching and burning and drying, and disappearing and choking and never blooming. I wanted—I didn’t want to live without the birds or bees, or sparkling flies that light the summer nights. I didn’t want to live with hunger that turns us feral and desperation that gives us claws. I wanted to fall and fall into the deepest, darkest ground and be still finally, and buried there.

But Mother, you had other plans. The bike landed in grass and dirt, and bang, I was 10 years old, fallen in the road, my knees scraped and bloody, and I realized even then that earth was something foreign and cruel that could and would hurt me because everything I had ever known or loved that was grand and powerful and beautiful became foreign and cruel and eventually hurt me. Even then, I had already been exiled, or so I felt, forever cast out of the garden. I belonged with the broken, the contaminated, the dead. Maybe it was the sharp pain in my knee or elbow, or the dirt embedded in my new jacket, maybe it was the shock or the realization that death was preferable to the thick tar of grief coagulated in my chest, or maybe it was just the lonely rattling of the spokes of the bicycle wheel still spinning without me. Whatever it was, it broke, it broke inside me. I heard the howling.

Mother, I am the reason the birds are missing. I am the cause of salmon who cannot spawn, and the butterflies unable to take their journey home. I am the coral reef bleached death white and the sea boiling with methane poison. I am the millions running from lands that have dried, forests that are burning, or islands drowned in water. I didn’t see you, Mother. You were nothing to me. My trauma made arrogance, and ambition drove me to that cracking, pulsing city, chasing a dream, chasing the prize, the achievement that would finally prove I wasn’t bad or stupid or nothing or wrong.

My Mother, I had so much contempt for you. What did you have to offer that would give me status in the marketplace of ideas in achieving? What could your bare trees offer but the staggering aloneness of winter or a greenness I could not receive or bear. I reduced you to weather, an inconvenience, something that got in my way, dirty slush that ruined my overpriced city boots with salt. I refused your invitations, scorned your generosity, held suspicion for your love. I ignored all the ways we used and abused you. I pretended to believe the stories of the fathers who said you had to be tamed and controlled, that you were out to get us.

I press my bruised body down on your grassy belly, breathing me in and out, and I inhale your moisty scent. I have missed you, Mother. I have been away so long. I am sorry. I am so sorry. I know now that I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal, pistol, and stamen. I am branch, and hive, and trunk, and stone. I am what has been here and what is coming. I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder. I am impulse and order. I am perfumed peonies and a single Parasol tree in the African savannah. I am lavender, dandelion, daisy, dahlia, cosmos, chrysanthemum, pansy, bleeding heart, and rose. I am all that has been named and unnamed, all that has been gathered, and all that has been left alone. I am all your missing creatures, all the sweet birds never born. I am daughter. I am caretaker. I am fierce defender. I am griever. I am bandit. I am baby. I am supplicant. I am here now, Mother, in your belly, on your uterus. I am yours. I am yours. I am yours.

L. Frank Manriquez – Opening Ceremony

This performance took place at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

L. Frank Manriquez (Tongva/Ajachmem), an award-winning Native California Indian artist working in many media and a tribal scholar, community activist, and language advocate, has exhibited her artwork in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. She has served or serves on a number of boards, including that of the California Indian Basketweavers Association (for 15 years) and the Cultural Conservancy, and is a founding board member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Languages.

Nina Simons: Bridging the Worlds

These were Nina Simons’ opening remarks at the 2019 National Bioneers Conference. Read the edited transcript here.

Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons is renowned for her open hearted explorations of the difficult psycho spiritual, emotional and relational challenges facing those of us seeking to birth a far more compassionate, just and nature-honoring world. Still reeling from the recent loss of her mother, Nina offers this tribute to her with extraordinary tenderness, honesty, vulnerability and courage, ultimately helping us see that embracing loss and our woundedness can strengthen us in our resolve to persevere and thrive in the struggles we are engaged in.

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist, is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

To learn more about Nina Simons, visit her website.

Terry Tempest Williams: Erosion

This keynote talk was delivered at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

Wind, water, and time are agents of erosion evident in the desert. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation from the Great Smokies to the Grand Canyon. But Terry Tempest Williams is also seeing another kind of erosion in America: erosion of democracy; erosion of science, decency, compassion, and trust.  “How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?” she asks. “What if our undoing leads us to our becoming? We are eroding and evolving, at once.” Terry Tempest Williams, one of this country’s most beloved authors and defenders of public lands, and social and environmental justice, comes to us from her desert home in Utah.  She writes, “Beauty is its own resistance. Water can crack stone.”

Terry Tempest Williams, one of the greatest living authors from the American West, is also a longtime award-winning conservationist and activist, who has taken on, among other issues, nuclear testing, the Iraq War, the neglect of women’s health, and the destruction of nature, especially in her beloved “Red Rock” region of her native Utah and in Alaska.

To learn more about Terry Tempest Williams, visit her website.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers co-founder and Chief Relationship Strategist.

NINA SIMONS:

This year, it is particularly joyful for me to be able to welcome back to Bioneers several women who have been incredibly important as friends, inspirations, and role models to me. Among them, none has been more influential in inspiring my life’s journey than Terry Tempest Williams. [APPLAUSE] Yeah.

Terry is a naturalist, author, educator, artist, and activist. She’s one of the greatest engaged nature writers in the lineage of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, Mary Oliver, and Thoreau. But her body of work, which includes over a dozen extraordinary books, transcends any pigeonholes.

Her latest book of essays, which is just out, called Erosion meets us exactly at the nexus of this moment. Terry is in fact one of the greatest writers period, with the countless literary awards she has received and their testament to that.

Coming from a culture that’s encouraged us to specialize, to confine our purview and interests in one direction, Terry’s writing has inspired me to slough off that conditioning and to instead embrace all my curiosities and passions. The unfettered wildness of her mind and heart have modeled for me a kind of systems thinking that wraps her arms around the whole caboodle, linking the inner experience with the outer worlds while exploring the connections among art, ecology, women, politics, social healing, indigeneity, democracy, wild lands, family, and faith. She’s long been a passionate advocate and activist for peace, indigenous rights, environmental and social justice, women’s health and freedom of speech, and one of the most ardent defenders of wild lands, especially the transcendentally beautiful Red Rock Canyon country of her home state of Utah.

She is a woman who contains many seeming paradoxes, someone who gracefully reconciles her family’s deep ancestral roots in the earliest days of Utah’s Church of Latter Day Saints with a thoroughly modern, exquisitely refined, sophisticated sensibility of the sacred, someone who can testify passionately but politely before Congress one day, but get arrested in an act of principled civil disobedience on the next. She is a naturalist, scholar, and beloved professor, but also a wanderer, a sublime poet, an artist, and a desert mystic.

Through it all Terry has taught me how to transcend apparent polarities, that by linking paradoxes we can help to define healthy, whole systems to regenerate life itself. She’s taught me how to dance with duality to reclaim wholeness.

With all that she is, I must admit that she has had the greatest impact on me in how she is as a person herself. Her embodied essence, her purposeful presence, her radiant authenticity, and the unshakable dignity, humility, and nobility of soul that emanates from the core of her being. We all know we are living in incredibly challenging times, with the integrity of the entire biosphere and the survival of us and all our kindred species and our democracy hanging in the balance. There’s never been a time in which we need to hear and read voices who can show us how to see and feel the truth without turning away, acknowledge our pain while embracing life with love, and resist wrongs with every fiber of our being but never lose our humanity and compassion in the struggle.

Please welcome one of my greatest sheroes and beloved friends, Terry Tempest Williams. [APPLAUSE]

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS:

It is a privilege and humble joy to join you today in the name of all that binds us together in this beautiful broken world.

And to the Miwok people, thank you. Deep, deep gratitudes.

Erosion. Evolution. We are eroding and evolving at once.

All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. This isn’t suffering, it’s erosion. – Chuck Palahniuk

I come from an erosional landscape in the Red Rock Desert of Southeastern Utah. To the south rise the La Sal mountains 12,000 feet high. To the north is the Colorado River running red carrying the sediments of sandstone downriver. To the west is Porcupine Rim, that holds the last light of day. And to the east is Castleton Tower, rising from the ground floor 400 feet tall. Wingate sandstone, one of the largest free-standing towers in the world, eroding.

This past summer, geologists from the University of Utah detailed the natural vibration of this sandstone tower. They enlisted two climbers to place a seismometer at the bottom of the tower and then climb and place another seismometer at the top. They wanted to listen to stone. What they found surprised them. This from Science News and the bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. It was published last month. “At about the same rate that your heart beats, a Utah rock formation called Castleton Tower gently vibrates, keeping time and keeping watch over the sandstone desert, swaying like a skyscraper, a red rock tower taps into the deep vibrations of the earth – wind, waves, and even far off earthquakes.”

“We often view such grand and prominent land forms as permanent features of our landscape when in reality they are continuously moving and evolving,” says Riley Finnegan, a graduate student and co-author of this paper.

Lastly, “Most people are in awe of its static stability and its dramatic free-standing nature, perched at the end of a ridge overlooking Castle Valley,” said the geologist Jeff Moore, who led the study. It has a kind of stoic power in its appearance. Moore and his colleagues study the vibrations of rock structures, including arches and bridges. So this isn’t unique to Castleton Tower, they just chose to focus on Castleton Tower, to understand what natural forces act on these structures. They also measure the rock’s resonance, the way the structures amplify the energy of the earth that passes through them. Castleton Tower has a pulse.

For those of us living in the valley, what we have intuited has been confirmed. Castle Rock is alive.

Let’s take this next few minutes, and I just want us to listen to the pulse of earth – Castleton Tower.

 [AUDIO PLAYS RUMBLING NOISE]

 

The earth has a pulse, as do we. No separation.

 [AUDIO ENDS]

Our pulse, the pulse of Earth, Castleton Tower, is relational, born out of love and grief, disturbance and stillness at once. There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth. – Nietzsche

To commit to a place is to commit to the shadow side of our own home ground. Sometimes we see it, sometimes we don’t, but when we do, we must speak.

On December 28th, 2016, Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument, protecting 1.3 million acres of fragile desert lands. He heard the voices of the Diné, the Navajo, the Hopi, the Ute, the mountain Ute, to the Ouray Ute and Zuni Nations. He heard them. These lands are sacred, where their prayers are spoken, where their ancestors are buried, where their ceremonies are performed. It was a handshake across history, a renewal, a commitment of trust.

Less than a year later, Donald Trump by executive order eviscerated Bears Ears National Monument, by 85%, and cut Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in half. Those protected lands, sacred lands, are now open for business to oil and gas development, to coal mining, to uranium mining, a boon to the fossil fuel industry in the midst of the climate crisis. This is my home.

What is beauty if not stillness? What is stillness if not sight? What is sight if not an awakening? What is an awakening if not now?

The American landscape is under assault by an administration that cares only about themselves. Working behind closed doors they are strategically undermining environmental protections that have been in place for decades, and they are getting away with it in practices of secrecy, in deeds of greed, in acts of violence that are causing pain. Like many, I have compartmentalized my state of mind in order to survive. Like most, I have also compartmentalized my state of Utah. It is a violence hidden that we all share.

This is the fallout that has entered our bodies, nuclear bombs tested in the desert. Boom. These are the uranium tailings left on the edges of our towns where children play. Boom. The war games played and nerve gas stored in the West desert. Boom. These are the oil and gas lines, frack lines, from Vernal to Bonanza in the Uinta Basin. Boom. This is Aneth and Montezuma Creek, the oil patches on Indian lands. Boom. Gut Bears Ears. Boom. Cut Grand Staircase Escalante in half. Boom. And every other wild place that is easier for me to defend than my own people and species. Boom. The coal and copper mines I watched expand as a child, Huntington and Kennecott. Boom. The oil refineries that foul the air and blacken our lungs in Salt Lake City, our children’s lungs. Boom. And the latest scar on the landscape, the tar sands mine in the Book Cliffs closed, now hidden, simply by its remoteness. Boom. Add the Cisco Desert where trains stop to settle the radioactive waste they carry on to Blanding. Boom. Move the uranium tailings from Moab to Crescent Junction, then bury it, still hot, in the Alkali Desert, out of sight, out of mind. Boom. See the traces of human indignities on the sands near Topaz Mountain left by the Japanese internment camps. Boom.

President Donald J. Trump can try to eviscerate Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante monuments with his pen and poisonous policies. He will stand tall with other white men, who for generations have exhumed, looted, and profited from the graves of ancient ones. They will tell you Bears Ears belongs to them. Boom. Consider Senator Oren Hatch’s words regarding the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition, support of the Bears Ears National Monument, the Indians, he says, “They don’t fully understand a lot of things that they are currently taking for granted on these lands; they won’t be able to do it if it’s made clearly into a monument.” And when he was asked to give examples, the Senator said, “Just take my word for it.” Boom.

This is a story, a patronizing story, a condescending story. I see my politicians and frontier Mormons discounting the tribes once again, calling them Lamanites, the rebellious ones against God, dark-skinned and cursed. That is their story. Racism is a story. The Book of Mormon is a story. [CHEERS] Boom.

Perhaps our greatest trauma living in the state of Utah is the religiosity of the Mormon patriarchy that says you have no authority to speak – women, Indians, black people, brown people, gay people, trans people. It is only the chosen ones who hold the priesthood over us and council us that their only way to heaven is through them. Boom.

All my life I was told I could not speak, that I had no voice, no power except through my father or my husband, or my bishop, or the general authorities. And then there was the prophet. Boom. I refused to perpetuate this lie, this myth, this abuse called silence. If birds had a voice, so did I. [APPLAUSE] I would tell a different story, one of beauty and abundance, and what it means to be alive.

Environmental racism is the outcome of bad stories, a byproduct of poverty. In Utah, yellow cake has dusted the lips of Navajo uranium workers for decades who are now sick or dead. Boom. There is no running water in Westwater, a reservation town adjacent to Blanding. Local municipalities refuse to provide Navajo families with a basic right, a human right. Boom. But we are not prejudiced. Boom.

If you speak of these cruelties, we, as Mormons, I am a Mormon, are seen as having betrayed our roots and our people. These are my people. Boom.

This is who I am. Boom. A white woman of privilege born of the covenant. I am not on the outside, I am on the inside. Boom. It is time to look in the mirror and reflect on the histories that are mine, that are ours. Boom. We are being told a treacherous story, that says it is an individual’s right, our hallowed state’s right, our nation’s right to destroy what is common to us all.

The earth has a pulse. We have a pulse. No separation. The land beneath our feet, the water we drink, the air that we bring gifts, breathe. Our bodies and the bodies of the state of Utah are being violated. Our eyes are closed. Our mouths are sealed. We refuse to see or say what we know to be true. Utah, this nation, is a beautiful violence. Boom.

Do we dare to see ourselves for what we are, broken and beautiful? Do we dare to see Utah for what it is, an elegant, toxic landscape where the power of oppression rules by repression, our proving grounds of fear? What are we afraid of? Exposure. Boom. Our denial is our collusion, our silence is our death. The climate is changing. We have a right and responsibility to protect each other. Resistance and insistence before the law. We are slowly dying. We are ignoring the evidence. Awareness is our prayer. Engagement is our prayer. Beauty will prevail. Native people are showing us the way. It is time to heal these lands and each other by what, by calling them sacred.

May wing beats of raven cross over us in ceremony. May we recognize our need of a collective blessing by Earth. May we ask forgiveness for our wounding of land and spirit. And may our right relationship to life be restored as we work together toward a survival shared. A story is awakening. Many stories are awakening. We are part of something so much larger than ourselves, an interconnected whole that stretches upward to the stars. Coyote in the desert is howling in the darkness, calling forth the pack, lifting up the moon.

We are eroding, we are evolving together. This is the place we create from, with love, with courage, in grief, and with anger. What do we do with our anger? With a name like Tempest, I can tell you I don’t have a lot of hope. [LAUGHTER] But I have sought wisdom from my elders, the elders that we live near – Willie Greyeyes, a community organizer who now is a county commissioner in a Navajo majority in San Juan County Utah. [APPLAUSE] When he was told that he was not a resident of the state of Utah, that it was an illegitimate election from an illegitimate candidate, whose family have lived in Navajo mountain for generations, when they asked what right he has to the state of Utah, he simply said, “My umbilical cord is buried here.” When I asked Willy what do we with do with our anger, he said, “Terry, it can no longer be about anger. It has to be about healing.” Going to the source of our pain, and recognizing it, owning it, apologizing for it, embracing it with a commitment to change.

And when I asked Jonah Yellowman, a medicine person among the Diné what he was seeing, he said, “Terry, we have to go deeper.” And so I ask us today, together, what does that look like for each of us, each of us in our own places with our own gifts, in the places we call home.

And Evangeline Gray, a medicine woman, who’s been fighting for water rights for her people in San Juan County for 30 years, still no water, she says to dwell is to see things as they are. And then you stay and fight for those things that you see for your community. It is a privilege, she said.

We are eroding and evolving at once. Perhaps Jonah’s call to go deeper is a call to acknowledge the power that resides in the Earth itself. The organic intelligence inherent in deserts and forests, rivers and oceans, and all manner of species beyond our own, even within our own bodies. We cannot create wild nature, we can only destroy it, and in the end, in breathtaking acts of repentance and renewal, try to restore what we have thoughtlessly removed at our own expense, be it wolves in the Yellowstone or willow flycatchers along the Colorado River. We are eroding and evolving at once.

How do we find the strength to not look away at all that is breaking our hearts? Hands on the earth, we remember where the source of our authentic power comes from. We have to go deeper. What has been weathered and whittled away is as beautiful as what remains – erosion, essence. We are eroding and evolving at once.

Shinran, the 14th century Buddhist poet said, This happened. Now something else can occur. We need not lose hope, we just need to locate where it dwells. To dwell is to see things as they are, and then you stay and fight for the things you love in your own community.

Castleton Tower has a pulse. We have a pulse. The pulse of the planet is in our hands. Engagement is a prayer. Boom. [APPLAUSE]

David Orr: Is There a Future for Our Democracy? Why Everything Depends on the Answer

This keynote talk was delivered at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

We are living through the most dangerous challenge to free government in the U.S. anyone of us alive has encountered. Like a house with crumbling foundations, American democracy is suffering from decades of deferred maintenance. The challenge of repairing and updating our institutions would be difficult enough, but we obviously do not live in “normal times.” The pace of change is faster, threats bigger, risks global, and the time to forestall the worst is very short. David Orr, one of the nation’s most lucid and influential thought leaders, draws from his forthcoming book, Democracy Unchained: Politics as if All People Matter, to consider what we must do to return to the better angels of our collective nature and turn the ship around. What happens next is up to us.  

David W. Orr, a Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics (Emeritus) at Oberlin College, is a pioneering, award-winning thought leader in the fields of Sustainability and Ecological Literacy. The author and co-author of countless articles and papers and several seminal books, including, most recently, Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward, he has served as a board member or adviser to many foundations and organizations (including Bioneers!). His current work is on the state of our democracy.

For more information about David Orr, visit The Oberlin Project.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO and founder.

KENNY AUSUBEL:

For decades, the work of David Orr has revolved around changing the structure of a system that’s programmed for disaster. I’d like to introduce David through some of his own words excerpted from his forward to my last book, Dreaming the Future. David is an amazing writer.

Structural change requires tossing overboard many of the foundational myths of the modern world. There’s the myth of lordly human dominance over nature that presumes that we know enough to manage the planet even though we can’t manage the back 40. There’s the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem, not an inescapable part of the human condition. There’s the myth that economy can grow forever on a finite planet. And it’s corollary, that human happiness is a byproduct of consumption, a word that ironically once referred to a fatal disease. [LAUGHTER] There’s the myth that–[LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Yay, David. There’s the myth that security is the offspring of a monstrous capacity to kill and cause havoc. Beneath such thinking is a kind of feckless belief that we can tame the demons that we unleash on the world.

And he continues: Two broad revolutions have been gathering force for centuries, but always against long odds and stacked decks. In the West, the first began with fledgling steps toward democracy and the concept of human rights based in law. Across the span of nearly 2500 years, the battle for basic rights has gathered force. The decks are still stacked, and the road ahead will be no less challenging or bloody than that already traveled, but the battle for enforceable human rights and the extension of the rights to life, liberty and property to future generations and eventually the extension of rights to animals and nature will go forward. And someday, what Martin Luther King, Jr. described as the arc of history, will indeed bend toward inclusive and dependable justice.

The second stream is still older. It’s the knowledge of how to make the human presence in the world on nature’s terms not just human contrivance. Everywhere its hallmark is the humility to learn from nature and develop partnerships with ecological processes. It’s alive and flourishing in our time in the work of so many people and the Bioneers all working with nature and posterity in mind.

David Orr’s vision, wisdom and example have helped shape and guide so very many of us for so many years. Although David’s above all an educator, he’s always combined scholarship with action. Along with an illustrious academic career, his teaching has extended far beyond the classroom into the campus, the town and region around it, and the national dialogue. He’s been seminal in advancing ecological literacy and the greening of educational curricula in higher education institutions. His books remain foundation to the entire field.

He’s also been a leading figure in developing ecological design and putting it into action in local economy movements. A long-time professor of environmental studies and politics in Oberlin College, in 1996, he spearheaded the design and construction of the first LEED platinum green building on a US campus. [CHEERS] Yeah. [APPLAUSE] The Oberlin project then extended the effort into a Town Gown partnership to build a regional green economy template that others are now emulating.

David’s influence has also reached into the corridors of national political power. He was in the vanguard of identifying climate disruption as the biggest political failure in human history. In 1989, he organized the first ever conference on the effects of climate disruption on the banking industry. In 2008, he organized the Presidential Climate Action project with a world—which was a world class think-and-do tank that positioned climate disruption as the top national security issue. Its policies and recommendations penetrated the Obama administration’s policies, though we wish it had been more.

His books including Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse are among the best on the subject. David’s received countless prestigious awards and sat on many, many nonprofit boards and foundation boards including Bioneers and Rocky Mountain Institute. His focus today, thankfully, is on the crisis of democracy and on the crisis of governance that threatens the viability of human civilization.

So please join me in welcoming our dear friend, who reminds us that hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up, David Orr. [APPLAUSE]

DAVID ORR:

Pronouns are interesting things, and they cause us to do lots of things we otherwise would not do. So when we say I and me and mine, that takes us to markets. That’s the side of us that is a consumer. If you say we, ours, and us, that takes you to a different area, where we’re citizens, not just of the United States, but also of a biosphere, and a moralsphere. So for 40 years or longer, we’ve had a war waged against ours and us and we, a war waged against government. Get government off our backs. Government messes up everything. So government is the problem. Markets are said to be infallible.

Now the point of what I want to say today is that this is the most massive political failure in history. We call it climate change or climate destabilization, but it is chaos in any word. So I want to connect that to a political failure, this failure to do the public business in a way that was transparent and open and competent. And that’s the headlines every day.

And so we had the first warning given to a US president about climate change. It was given in 1965. That’s a long time ago. We knew enough in 1965 to develop a day jury, a climate policy binding in law.

So let’s talk about politics. You’re not supposed to talk about politics, sex and religion, and I’m going to talk about politics. We’ll leave sex and religion out of this. Unless you…nevermind, that’s too…[LAUGHTER]

Now, here’s the origin of the idea. Lost in the mists of time, we don’t know exactly where the idea of democracy started, but in the Western world it started here. That is the agora or the Greek forum below the Parthenon. This is where Socrates and others debated the ideas of democracy, and it wasn’t always pretty. Democracy seldom is. But what they did was to wager a bet that enough people, enough of the time, would know enough and care enough to conduct a public business in a way that was responsible.

And then there was a second proposition, and the second proposition was very simply that you and I matter, that people matter, our rights count. As Jefferson put it, unalienable rights that we have to life and certain things that guarantee our dignity and our way in the world. And that we, as people with those rights, have a or should have a say in how we’re governed and by whom. That was the bet.

Did it work? Well, this is Thucydides. You all remember Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars. You remember these things, right? [LAUGHTER] This is a lesson in civics. You’ve all been there. So what he wrote here on the screen was why it didn’t work in Greece, in the Peloponnesian Wars. This is that famous classic history. And I’m not going to read this slide, it takes too much time, but the issue here is it falls apart.

John Adams, one of the founding fathers, as we call them, said that democracies die by committing suicide, seldom by outside intervention. They commit suicide. Read the daily papers. [LAUGHTER]

The next case I want to bring up here is this, the question here is: How did the democracy of the Weimer Republic after World War I descend in the world of Goethe and Schilling and great German philosophers. How did it become the world of Hitler and Himmler and Auschwitz? And so how did these people, the most educated people on Earth, how did they fall for Hitler? What was the origin of that? So how did this occur, and what are the lessons we could draw from that in our own life?

Now, second point: Is the US a democracy? How many of you think the US is a democracy? Let’s see your hands. Put them up really high. Shout. [LAUGHTER] Well, we established that point. I guess we move on. [LAUGHTER] How many of you are in favor of royalty? [LAUGHTER] The data is not encouraging.

This is from one of the great studies of American democracy by two of the best political scientists that observed this, and they say that your opinion and mine don’t really matter much. And so there effectively is—Think of this as the Grand Canyon, a chasm, and on this side there’s us and our public opinion, and on this side there are laws and regulations and so forth, and the bridge that ought to connect what we want as people and the policies and regulations and laws that we get over here is broken, or it’s been turned into a toll bridge.

So down this list of items here, we favor all of these things: healthcare, climate action, and so forth. You get down to here, what passes Congress? $1.4 trillion tax cut for people who really don’t need it. So we don’t get what we want, and democracy is broken.

Is democracy dying? The scholars, the people who study this for a living, believe it is, or at least it’s impaired. This is from the Economist magazine, and they have the United States as an impaired democracy and going south. The public opinion – this is from a poll the World Values survey – and what it shows is that virtually in every country, every democracy, support for democracy is declining. And if I broke this out into age groups and so forth, it’d say the same thing. The elderly, the middle class, young people, democracy is failing.

Now part of this goes back to the fact that—that pronoun issue – I, me, and mine. We’ve been focused on market solutions, and the climate change is going to respond to markets or technology, and those are important things, but not to political change, where we come together and we say, This is our country, it’s our democracy, it’s our policies, and they do matter.

I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown in 1941 was the wealthiest city per capita in the county. If you go there now, it looks like it was bombed down in World War II. This is very typical of the rust belt region. It’s not shiny like a lot of California is. It’s rusted out, burned down, disinvested. Cities like Detroit, and Cleveland, and Toledo, and Youngstown, Ohio, these are cities we now fly over. This is part of the flyover zone. So if you wonder why there was support for Donald Trump in the last election, a lot of it is found in the failures that we’ve pursued.

As Youngstown was declining, so too were the prospects of each generation. So this just shows the odds of people, young people, earning as much or more than their parents by 10-year periods. It’s going down. So if you’re a young person in Youngstown or in that rust belt, or in a lot of the areas in the United States we mark as a red zone, which will come up here in just a minute, you don’t see a future that your parents saw. That’s that map.

Now it isn’t quite that bad. A lot of those red zones are 47/53 in terms of support for and against, and so forth, but that’s the United States right now. And we here are in the blue zone, but we’ve got to find ways to reach into that red zone. We’ve got to reach out across these chasms.

This is from a report recently released – well last month – from the US Senate Committee, Joint Economic Committee. This is—What is circled here are deaths of despair – opioid addiction, drug addiction, suicide. It’s going straight up. This is my district, and this is called gerrymandering. You all know the term. This is how you have to gerrymander Ohio to keep the most far right wing Congressperson in office. And so that’s called gerrymandering and it happens. There are a lot of reasons. You—Most of you know all about that.

This is the transition of the United States. Now here in California, you have six cows and 40 million people. [LAUGHTER] Wyoming has 40 million cows and six people. But you both have two Senators. And so the way the Senate is going right now, very soon, 30% of the country will decide 70% of the Senate membership.

And then there’s this problem. We thought we had this solved at one time. When Barack Obama was elected president, I just assumed, boy, that’s great; it’s over; we’re going to win; we finally have crossed that threshold into acceptance and diversity. But we found it was a little premature. These are the hate groups across the United States that the Southern Poverty Law Center tracks. And there are probably more than this, and they’re well armed and they’re not quite with us yet. This is a problem of income. If you want to know why democracy collapses, go back into history. Plato and Aristotle said it collapses because of oligarchy. Democracy becomes an oligarch world. It’s ruled by the rich people and so forth. This is simply a diagram that shows the transference of roughly $20 trillion from the bottom to the top of the income spectrum – $20 trillion. That red bump down at the bottom, if you’re a working person, you’ve lost ground. If you’re one of those workers in Ohio or the rust belt states and you have to live by paycheck to paycheck, you’ve lost ground.

The question is: So what? Why don’t we just become an epistocracy and rule by expertise? Why don’t we do what China is doing? Surveillance, democracy, and imprison dissenters. Democracy really doesn’t work, and again, it does seem to commit suicide fairly often. Thucydides’ comments are still relevant to our world today.

Let me give three reasons why we have to defend democracy, and this is where we’ve got to come together as citizens to understand how we conduct the public business in ways that’s fair and decent and sustainable. So this is Jim Hansen, the best climate scientist – certainly the most famous climate scientist – in the world. That’s right, you can applaud. [APPLAUSE] He is a genuine hero. [APPLAUSE]

Jim Hansen, the quote here says that you can’t fix climate until you fix democracy. And that’s really inconvenient because we don’t have much time to fix climate. The IPCC about a year and a half ago said we had about 12 and a half years to fix it, but we’re down to say 11, or whatever the number of months it might be, but that doesn’t give you much time, not on this planet with this much infrastructure, and that long way to go. But 11 to 12 years to deflect carbon emissions downward.

So why do we have to fix democracy? And you begin to think about the reasons here. This is going to be an all-hands-on-deck time for us. We’ve got to all of us get engaged. So all of you who are organic farmers and permaculturists, and all of you who are business people, and all of you who are educators, we’ve got to come together, and we can only do that if our votes matter, if our policies are supported, if we can bridge that gap from this side to that side.

And then there’s this point. Wait, I want to skip over that slide. There’s this point, and this gets into some kind of difficult things. Can you imagine a solar powered, sustainable, resilient, hyper-efficient, fascist society? [LAUGHTER] Now think about that, because the bottom of this explains what fascism is: ruled by oligarchy, misogyny, racism, and so forth. That’s the daily headlines. Do you see any difference between the bottom of this slide and the top, the prospect? Not much. And that’s where we’re headed.

And then there’s this: Shoshana Zuboff is one of the great lights at Harvard Business school. In that quote at the top, describes the inherent dignity of people. Democracy may be, as Winston Churchill once said it was, the worst form of government, except for all the others that have ever been tried. [LAUGHTER] But even in its imperfections, and it is imperfect, but it’s the only system of government that says you and I matter, at its best, not always, not everywhere, not any one place all the time. But at its best, democracy does matter.

And then the bottom quote is from C.S. Lewis who concluded—the theologian—that he wasn’t fit to rule even over a henhouse, as he put it. So the question is: Who among us could be the ruler, the king, the emperor? Who has that level of wisdom? It would have to be somebody with a really, really big mind and great foresight and so forth, and the hutzpah to tell you what a great mind he has. [LAUGHTER] Nobody. Nobody, Lewis’s point has that claim.

So what do we do? [LAUGHTER] I want to issue a caution here. I don’t think we ought to be directed solely at Donald Trump, No. 45, because what he did – and we ought to also give him a round of applause, because what he did was to highlight everything that was wrong and had to be fixed. He took a highlighter [APPLAUSE]… essentially to everything that we need to undo and redo and rethink.

So the end of the stalk is going to be we don’t need to repair democracy so much as we need to invent the first ever democracy, true democracy. [APPLAUSE] So this gets personal. We started after the election. I, after the election of 2016, I went into a deep depression, and I was ready to retire and go off and do what old white guys do and play golf, and bowl, and things like that. [LAUGHTER] Neither of which I do well. But the—Or with any particular joy. [LAUGHTER] So what we did was to organize a conference. And what we were looking at here was like looking through the rearview mirror. How did we get to the election of 2016?

So this, by the way, is a new hotel we built entirely solar powered, platinum building. That’s where we had all these gatherings. Tim Egan from The New York Times and a whole series of wonderful, far-out speakers, the one on your left there, I’ve forgotten his name, but you see him in movies. We brought people together. This, by the way, is [Peter Wehner] on the right, on your righthand side, and Bill, former governor of Colorado – I’m blanking on his last name. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Bill Ritter. That’s right. And you know what happened here? This was interesting, because we put them on the stage together and we asked each to explain how you would repair liberalism or conservatism. And you know what? The conversation was civil, funny, productive, creative. Imagine that in American politics. It can happen.

Reverend William Barber was like an exclamation mark at the end of the event. [APPLAUSE] And so when you come to think of what ails us, it may be economics, may be technology, climate change certainly has both of those elements to it, but it’s moral. And William Barber pointed out that this is a moral failure before it’s anything else, before it’s even a political failure.

So this is the next part of this. We’ve pulled together 34 authors – Bill McKibben, who’s here, and a lot of very, very bright people, K. Sabeel Rahmann, and Ganesh Sitaraman, and so forth, Jessica Tuchman Matthews. And we assembled a book: Democracy Unchained. We took Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, and inverted the title. She’s on our advisory board, by the way. And the book comes out in mid-February of 2020. Make your order. So if you have a smart phone, order it on Amazon. [LAUGHTER] You can pre-order.

And then we’re following that with events that are on the right side of the screen. The opening event with authors and others will be at the National Cathedral March 25th of 2020. And then we do events in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco. What we want to do is start a conversation, a conversation about how we rebuild first American democracy. As you’re bringing this democracy into an emergency room, you’d stop the bleeding and stabilize the vital signs first, then you get to lifestyle changes. But the long-term conversation we have to have is how do we build a democracy in which all of us in fact do matter.

So that’s part of this. And then government, trying to restructure government, starting with the words that we use. Let’s reclaim our public language. How did the word conservative become what it has become? Or how did the word liberal become so disparaged? Those are flip sides of the same coin. Everybody in this room, on one issue or another, you’re conservative or liberal, but you’re both. It’s called a thinking person, not a ditto-head. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE]

And then why governments matter. I don’t have time to read this, but begin to think about what we do in the public arena. We need government. Not a government that’s been defunded and defrauded and depersonalized and all those things that we’ve done in the past 40 years to disparage government and to disparage the idea of public service. We need government, but we need government of the people, and by the people, and for the people, that’s transparent and effective, and all of those things.

And so what’s to be done? Well, here’s where we at Bioneers need to think through how hard this is going to be, and think of the heroes and heroines in this room, people who have sacrificed and who have risked a great deal. That’s all of you. We’re going to all have to risk, we’re all going to have to sacrifice something to make this dream come true.

Frederick Douglass said power doesn’t give up, never easily. And so it hasn’t. So what’s this change look like? Well, this is part of it. It’s the power that we have to be citizens, the power that we have to be foresightful, the power that we have to engage power and tell the truth. And so… [APPLAUSE]

We’ll just call her what’s-her-name. She’s up there. Imagine 13 years old. Now she’s 16 or so. Imagine the courage she demonstrated. Like lightning on a dark night, she illuminated the terrain.

So imagine democracy unchained, from what? All those isms, all those human failures and frailties and sins. Imagine a real democracy – us, we, ours – where all votes are counted. The right to vote in fair electoral districts is guaranteed. Our representatives both in state legislatures and county legislatures and federal government and so forth look like us, they’re diverse and are not old like me, all of them. A few of them could be old. [LAUGHTER] Imagine publicly funded elections. Get money out of politics once and for all. [APPLAUSE] Imagine that you have the same healthcare benefits guaranteed to Mitch McConnell. [APPLAUSE] Imagine a democracy in which corporations are not persons. [APPLAUSE] Imagine a democracy in which ecocide is a crime against humanity and punishable as such. [APPLAUSE] Imagine a democracy where lying and systematic deception is wrong and is a crime, and that includes Facebook, that includes television, that includes all the media. Imagine a democracy that would protect our lands and waters, as my friend and that eloquent writer, Terry Tempest Williams, who will be out here in just a moment when I get off the stage has said for so long, imagine our public domain protected by a democracy that is competent and ecologically alert. [APPLAUSE] Imagine a democracy that would protect the global commons. Imagine a democracy calibrated to the way the world works as a physical system, that Bioneers and all you Bioneers for years have showed. Imagine a democracy in which justice flows down like a mighty river. [APPLAUSE] Nirvana. No, this is planet Earth, not nirvana.

But only a government of, by, and for the people in which we have no malice toward anyone, but charity for all. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]

Demond Drummer: A Green New Deal

This keynote talk was given at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

New Consensus is a leading-edge non-profit policy “think tank” working behind the scenes supplying research and detailed policy proposals for the Green New Deal to its leading political advocates, such as Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasion Cortez. Demond Drummer, New Consensus’ co-founder and Executive Director, well known in Chicago as a highly effective activist, is one of the true intellectual architects of the Green New Deal. He draws from the history of FDR’s WWII mobilization, the moonshot of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement to explain the critical importance of the Green New Deal as the next chapter of the American story.

Demond Drummer is the Chicago-based co-founder and Executive Director of New Consensus, a nonprofit working to develop and promote the Green New Deal that has advised many progressive leaders and organizations, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement. Demond’s other notable projects include CoderSpace, a computer science learning lab where youths develop leadership skills, and LargeLots.org, a community-driven effort to reclaim and city-owned vacant lots in Chicago.

To learn more about Demond Drummer, visit New Consensus.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

Introduction by Michelle Romero, National Director, Green For All.

ANNOUNCER:

Please welcome the national director of Green For All, Michelle Romero. [APPLAUSE]

MICHELLE ROMERO:

Good morning. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS]

Over the past decade, so many of you in this room today have poured your hearts and souls into building a more inclusive green economy and a better future for all. In 2007, back when the green economy was more of an idea than anything real, our founder, Van Jones, published his national best seller, The Green Collar Economy. [APPLAUSE] How one solution can fix our two biggest problems. And I think many of us in this room can agree that our two biggest problems back then are some of our two biggest problems today – the climate crisis and growing inequality.

In Chapter 4 of Van’s book, which is titled Green New Deal, Van became the first person to flesh out what a Green New Deal could look like, and Green For All became the organization to advocate for these solutions. The idea was simple: let’s put the people who most need work to work doing the job that most needs done, and build a more sustainable future. [APPLAUSE]

Green For All helped to popularize the term green jobs, advance solutions that tackled poverty and pollution together. We won millions of dollars for green jobs, trained green entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, and continue to this day to mobilize public funding and private finance for clean economy projects in underserved neighborhoods. You see, we don’t believe in a green economy that’s just for some, we believe in green for all. And that means ensuring that the people who are hit first and worst by the climate crisis do not benefit last and least from the solutions. [APPLAUSE]

We also…We also don’t believe that you need to choose between good jobs and a livable future. As Van say, everything’s that’s good for the planet is a job, a contract, a business opportunity. Well in the 10+ years since Van wrote his book and we were founded, we have faced some major challenges along the way, challenges that we must overcome as a movement if we’re going to build the future and the world that we want.

One of those challenges these past few years, which I know has been very difficult for those of you who’ve dedicated so much of your lives to advancing this agenda, has been the lack of attention that our politicians have given to the greatest existential threat of our time. And I’m not just talking about the Republicans, the Democrats too. [APPLAUSE] But all of that changed in the fall of 2018 when the Sunrise movement activists successful broke through the silence to deliver a salient message: the climate crisis cannot wait; we will not wait. And thanks to the work of youth activists around the country and the globe, climate change has risen to the top of our 2020 political agenda, and a Green New Deal has become a household name. [APPLAUSE]

I could not be prouder to introduce our next speaker. Demond Drummer is executive director and co-founder of the New Consensus, and a leader at the forefront of the movement for a Green New Deal. Since 2018, the New Consensus has been working to turn the dream of a Green New Deal into a policy platform that centers the needs of directly impacted communities and workers, and put into place a plan to transform the United States economy. Over the course of the last year, Demond and the New Consensus team have advised some of our country’s most influential politicians and movement builders, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Justice Democrats, and the Sunrise Movement. [APPLAUSE]

As one of the most ambitious and transformative policy platforms since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, New Consensus’ Green New Deal has made headlines, transformed our politics, and provided a bold and critical vision for the future of our country. Please welcome to the stage, Demond Drummer. [APPLAUSE]

DEMOND DRUMMER:

So I’m here to talk about the Green New Deal, and I’ll talk about it in three different ways. First, I’m going to talk about the Green New Deal as a mobilization. Second, I’ll talk about the Green New Deal as a series of moonshots. And third, I want to talk about the Green New Deal most importantly as a movement, or rather a movement of movements. And I’ll be doing this by showing some old photographs that we looked to for inspiration.

The first photo is fascinating. At the beginning of America’s full entry into World War II, the United States had the productive capacity to build about 3,000 airplanes, like literally 3,000 airplanes. President Roosevelt, however, wanted 189,000 airplanes. And you can imagine how long that would take to build that. And, of course, some folks thought he was being unrealistic, and these skeptics weren’t completely unjustified in their skepticism. Because, again, the productive capacity of the country simply did not exist, and not just for airplanes, the tanks, the jeeps, and the helmets, all the equipment that was needed to wage war, there was no military industrial complex. Now this is not to praise the military industrial complex, but I’m making a point, so bear with me. [LAUGHTER]

So Roosevelt tapped some of the leading business figures to organize America’s industry for the war effort. These leaders assessed the capacity of different factories all over the country and worked out how to retool them and share processes and expertise to produce what was needed to sustain a war effort. Critically, the financial capital needed for this rapid scale-up of productive capacity came from the public sector, and not just as a purchaser of the end product, but as the initial investor in the factories that were building the things that we needed. And when it was all said and done, a country that could only produce 3,000 airplanes before entering the war, had produced 300,000 by the war’s end.

Now, to be clear, the history of the economic mobilization for World War II is challenging and complex. It is quite shameful that the greatest mobilization of our country has been around war. Now we can’t change that history retroactively, but we can use the example and the lessons of that history to mobilize for the future and change the story of this country, where the biggest mobilization that will be told of America will be around the Green New Deal. [APPLAUSE]

And at New Consensus, we see the Green New Deal as a World War II scale mobilization of all the resources of our country, our industrial capacity, our ingenuity, our financial capital, everything, all of the resources of our country to transition to a clean and just energy economy. The Green New Deal proposes a set of solutions and national projects that match the scale, scope and speed of climate breakdown. Again, we believe that we need to set out bold solutions that meet the scale and scope of the problem, and not let our politics define the type of solutions that we can implement. [APPLAUSE]

So what are we proposing? We propose that we upgrade every single building in this country to the highest levels of energy efficiency, air quality, water efficiency, and water quality; upgrade our country’s infrastructure to be more resilient; accelerate, massively accelerate the adoption of renewable energy; restore our natural ecosystems; research, develop, deploy technologies to decarbonize heavy industry; and position our country to be a leader in clean manufacturing. Why can’t we do that? [CHEERS]

We must also transform our food system and invest directly in farmers to adopt regenerative and sustainable agricultural methods. [APPLAUSE] Let’s take the subsidies away from Conagra and Monsanto [APPLAUSE] and give that money directly to farmers whose rural areas are being literally gutted with all their wealth. So we have a lot of work to do. The money is there. Don’t let anybody fool you.

So we also want to invest in America’s productive capacity to produce the stuff that we need to have a clean economy – electric vehicles, not too many, right, electric vehicles; the energy efficiency parts and components, pipes; all the stuff that we need to see the economy and have a society that we want. We have to build and produce more things here. About 25% of emissions comes from trade alone. So the economic mobilization will renew our economy and give rise to sustainable businesses and industries, and create millions of good, quality, high-paying jobs.

And because of the sheer size and scale of this great effort, the Green New Deal will leave no worker and no community behind. So the greatest generation mobilized our country to beat fascism abroad. It is our task and our day and our time to beat fascism right here at home, and mobilize our country to meet the imminent and existential threat of climate breakdown. [APPLAUSE] And this is what the Green New Deal is all about.

Now the next photo is much more familiar to the American story as we traditionally tell it. I spent most of my childhood wanting to be an astronaut until I reached calculus. [LAUGHTER] And I was particularly inspired by Kennedy’s moon mission speech at Rice University, where he said we choose to go to the moon in this decade because that goal will serve to organize and measure our country’s energy and skills. The moon shot wasn’t just about science. It was about survival. It was about proving that the American system could beat the Soviet system. That’s literally what it was all about. And, again, it’s unfortunate that we have these moments of galvanizing work around conflict. Right? But this is the history that we’ve been given. We must build on this history to create new history. Right? And write the next chapter of the American story. But the moon shot wasn’t just about science.

And we often forget that the U.S. spent most of the so-called space race behind the ball, behind the Soviet Union. The whole idea was to catch up and assert some level of technological sophistication. Right? And today we find ourselves in a very similar situation. When it comes to the technologies that we need to move to a clean economy, we as a country simply—we’re not on the map. Right?

So the Green New Deal calls for a series of technology moon shots, and like the space race before, the Green New Deal is a great national effort and exercise, not just in research and science, but in survival. And it goes without saying that transforming every sector of our economy will be difficult. It’s not easy. And in most cases some of the technology that we need is either in its infancy or it simply doesn’t exist. But that simply cannot stop us. We must throw the entire might of our human ingenuity at these problems and make massive investments of public capital to a network of research universities and labs and small companies that are trying to figure things out to solve the most pressing technological challenges that stand in our way to a clean and just economy.

And this brings me to my last photo. We’ve talked about the Green New Deal as a mobilization. We’ve talked about the Green New Deal as a series of moon shots, again building on the story of this country to show that the Green New Deal is not antithetical to the scale, scope, and ambition that this country has seen in other endeavors.

Now I’d like to talk about the Green New Deal as a movement, and maybe more appropriately a movement of movements. What we are seeing today in this time is a gathering of the justice movements. The Green New Deal is a capacious framework that is designed to address the interlocking systems of oppression that affect us all. Some see this as a weakness, but I argue that the comprehensiveness of the Green New Deal is actually its true strength, because there is no way to truly transition to a zero carbon economy without interrogating and challenging the logic of an economy that exploits people and extracts from the earth. [APPLAUSE]

Economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that behind the climate crisis, behind every economic crisis is a crisis in thinking. I’m going to say it again, that behind the climate crisis, behind the persistent economic crisis that exists throughout the world and communities all across this country, is a crisis of thinking. And it’s important that we notice that the people who are opposed to the Green New Deal right now, say it can’t be done, where are the details, all of this stuff, this is a crisis in thinking. And what we require in this moment is a new political consensus and a new economic consensus, a consensus that says that we will no longer be duped by the mythic invisible hand of the market–[APPLAUSE] a consensus that recognizes that the public sector has a fundamental role to play in shaping markets – energy markets, financial markets, labor markets – to serve the interests of society. [APPLAUSE]

The Green New Deal proposes a set of solutions that meet the scale of the crisis that we’ve created for ourselves. Its comprehensiveness is its power. So the Green New Deal, we’ve talked about it as a World War II scale mobilization of all the resources of our country, we’ve talked about it as a series of technology moon shots, and we understand that the Green New Deal is a movement of movements. It will be brought forth and sustained by an enduring alignment of our youth, who are leading the way and know that we all deserve clean air, clean water, and good food, workers who deserve pay on which a family can thrive. It’s being brought forth by scientists and researchers who can lead us into the light, and even by entrepreneurs of all types, investors even, who are looking for good returns that can renew this economy—they do exist—grassroots leaders and organizations who continue to lead change, mobilizations, moon shots, movements, that’s the story of our country. That’s the story of America. And we in this room and in communities all across the country are writing the next chapter of the American story. [CHEERS]

There is a direct correlation between wages that can’t sustain a family and an economy that can’t sustain human life on this planet. [APPLAUSE] So this morning, we, the people, we have an economic mandate. We have the ingenuity, we have the existential imperative, and the power to give ourselves a Green New Deal. And I know deep in my heart and in my soul that we can, and even more that we will. Thank you so much, Bioneers. [APPLAUSE]

Isha Clarke: A New Era of the Climate Justice Movement

This keynote talk was delivered at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

With Isha Clarke. To build a successful global climate movement, we must prioritize the voices of those most impacted by environmental injustice. We must recognize that our current climate crisis is rooted in racism, white supremacy, and greed. We must also resist efforts to tokenize the term “intersectionality” rather than actually implementing it in our movements and daily lives. What would a movement and a society functioning on a genuine understanding of intersectionality look like?

Isha Clarke is a dynamic, passionate high school student environmental and social justice activist born, raised, and educated in Oakland, CA. Her experience has taught her first-hand that threats to the environment disproportionately affect people of color, low-income folks, and young people, and this realization has fueled her passion to fight to create a just and equitable world while maintaining a livable climate.

To learn more about Isha Clarke, visit Youth vs. Apocalypse.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER:

Please welcome from Youth Vs. Apocalypse, Isha Clarke. [APPLAUSE]

ISHA CLARKE:

Hey! [LAUGHTER] How’s everybody doing today? [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Good? You look as good as you feel then. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Good morning, everyone. I am so, so, so grateful to be on this stage right now.

My name is Isha Clarke. I am 16. I am—[CHEERS] I am born, raised, and educated in Oakland, California. [CHEERS] And I am an activist with Youth Vs. Apocalypse. [CHEERS]

When people ask me what Youth Vs. Apocalypse is I find it hard to answer because it’s so many things. But if I had to condense it, I would say that YVA is a Bay Area youth climate justice organization that seeks to redefine the climate justice movement so that we can reverse the climate crisis and save the world. [APPLAUSE]

Historically, climate justice movements and environmental justice movements in general have been very white and very old. But that demographic doesn’t represent, doesn’t accurately represent the people being most directly targeted by environmental injustice. [APPLAUSE] People of color, people from working class, underserved communities, and indigenous communities are consistently targeted by environmental injustice. This is exactly why I came into this movement and the foundation of Youth Vs. Apocalypse.

In June of 2017, as a freshman in high school, I was invited to an action targeted Phil Tagami, a prominent developer in Oakland. Phil Tagami was and still is suing the City of Oakland so that he can build a coal terminal through West Oakland, two and a half miles away from my house. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] West Oakland is a predominantly black and brown, low-income community that already suffers from high rates of health issues like asthma that would be exacerbated by this coal terminal. It was during this action that I learned what environmental racism is.

Environmental racism is coal terminals through West Oakland, is oil refineries through Richmond, and oil pipelines through indigenous lands. [APPLAUSE] I thought to myself: If this is true, if this is the root of environmental injustice, why doesn’t the environmental justice movement include anyone from these communities? And if they do, why are they not the leaders? And on top of all of this, why aren’t these movements talking about environmental racism and its importance?

I knew that this needed to change. I knew that if we really wanted to defeat what we’re up against, the movement couldn’t leave out the people on the frontlines of its impacts. In fact, it had to be led by them. [APPLAUSE] I wanted to be involved in a movement that acknowledged this. And more than that, put in the work to make this new movement a reality.

This is the work of Youth Vs. Apocalypse. This is what we mean when we say our work is to redefine the climate justice movement. Our work and what should be the work of everyone is to build movements where people on the frontlines of injustice are leading the fight and pioneering new systems of being. On top of this, we must recognize that the fight against climate change is a fight against all of the systems of oppression that fuel the climate crisis– [APPLAUSE] white supremacy—white supremacy, racism, economic exploitation, greed, the list continues. When we scream for climate action, we are also screaming for the abolishment of ICE and closure of concentration camps at the border. [APPLAUSE] When we scream for climate justice, we declare the Black Lives Matter. [APPLAUSE] When we scream for a green economy, we are calling for unionized jobs and livable wages for all. We are calling–[APPLAUSE] Yeah! We are calling for an end to displacement. If we do not truly acknowledge intersectionality in the fight against climate change, then we will never be able to reverse the climate crisis. [APPLAUSE]

So, I challenge each and every one of you in this room today to not only understand intersectionality but to practice it. Start by acknowledging your own privileges. It may be white privilege, it may be class privilege, it may be privilege that you get from your citizenship status. How does that privilege influence how you think, how you act, what you feel comfortable saying, what you feel comfortable doing, how much you feel comfortable speaking, how often you choose to volunteer yourself for tasks, etc. etc. etc.? We must always check our own privilege. We must always ask ourselves how we can use our privilege to provide a platform for others to claim their own power and voice. [APPLAUSE]

This is how we create a movement that reflects the injustice that we are fighting. This is how we reverse the climate crisis. This is how we create a world that is both just and sustainable. This is how we save the world. Thank you so much. [APPLAUSE]

brandon king: Making the Transition from Extraction to Regeneration

This keynote talk was given at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

Given the existential threats of climate change, economic inequality and ever escalating political instability, we need concrete, integrated solutions to our shared problems. An inspiring model of what such an integrated approach could look like is Jackson, Mississippi’s Cooperation Jackson, an emerging network of worker cooperatives and solidarity economy institutions working to institute a Just Transition Plan to develop a regenerative economy and participatory democracy in that city. brandon king, Founding Member of Cooperation Jackson, shares his experiences helping conceive and build these extraordinarily promising strategies and social structures that reveal that we can put our shoulders to the wheel and build a truly just and sustainable future.  

brandon king is an community organizer and cultural worker originally from Hampton Roads VA, currently living in Jackson MS. After graduating from Hampton University in 2006 with a BA in Sociology, brandon moved to New York City where he worked as a union organizer and later as an organizer working with New York City homeless people.

To learn more about brandon king and his work, visit Cooperation Jackson.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

Introduction by David Cobb, Cooperation Humboldt.

ANNOUNCER:

Please welcome the founder of Cooperation Humboldt, Mr. David Cobb. [APPLAUSE]

DAVID COBB:

Good morning, Bioneers. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] So I have the distinct privilege of standing before you to introduce brandon king, and so that’s the main reason I’m here.

But I’m also here for another reason. I suspect the reason that many of you are here. And that’s because I know that we are living in a moment of fundamental crisis, actually a series of crises, an ecological crisis. It’s not coming, it’s here and getting worse. It’s an economic crisis because we are living in late-stage capitalism and watching as this economic system continues to destroy the planet and create a racist, sexist, and class-oppressive world order as we go over the cliff. And that is leading to a political crisis because our current political institutions cannot solve the problem. How am I doing so far? [APPLAUSE]

Okay, so we’re in the right spot. And I want to be clear that what this means, these three series of crises are called systems collapse. Now, in one sense, that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing because our current systems are fundamentally premised on white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and empire. So it’s goo that those systems are collapsing. In another sense, we recognize the sense of joyful urgency that this moment creates for us, because we are the generation that is going to have to shift the dominant institutions from the power over, dominating, extractive systems back to the ecologically sustainable and socially just systems that once existed. And that’s why I applaud the commitment that Bioneers is making, and more and more people are making, to go back to indigenous people who still know what that means. [APPLAUSE]

I study, relate, and work with indigenous people not to make myself feel good. I already feel good. [LAUGHTER] I study and relate with indigenous people because I want to live. And I know that they remember the ways to live properly so that my children and grandchildren can live too. [APPLAUSE]

So I’m here to introduce brandon king because brandon king is a founder of a group of people doing that work right here, right now, in the United States, the capital of empire, and doing it in a way to meet people’s material needs. Brandon king is a farmer. He is an artist and culture worker, and he’s a revolutionary. I know that because that’s what he told me the first time I met him several years ago at Cooperation Jackson when that experiment was first beginning. He was an inspiration to me then. He is more than an inspiration to me now because he has data about what this experiment looks like. He has lived experience about what it means to begin to make a just transition.

Brandon will tell us, I hope, about what he and his colleagues and comrades are learning in Jackson, Mississippi, the heart of the old confederacy, about what it means to create conditions to shift to a just transition, to meet people’s material needs in economic ways concretely, both the challenges—So I don’t expect to just get a uproarious everything is good. I hope we’ll get a little of that, but I hope he will share it with us, exactly what they have learned so we can begin to apply it.

Ladies and gentlemen, please help me in welcoming a DJ, a farmer, and a straight up revolutionary, brandon king. [APPLAUSE]

BRANDON KING:

Peace, Everybody. How’s everybody doing this morning? [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] I think David, he spoke well. I think he sort of—For me, I consider myself an aspiring revolutionary, because that’s a big, big, big, big word, and there’s people who really deserve to carry that. Right? That’s a big responsibility. And I hope upholding what my ancestors would like for me to do and would like for me to be.

So, yeah, I’m here to talk about just transition, like transitioning from an extractive, destructive, exploitative economy to one that affirms life, to an economy that is regenerative, to an economy that honors Mother Earth, honors the sacred. How can we sort of get back to those ways? And, yeah, I think about just transition, and I think it needs to be a framework which includes social justice, because many times the people who are on—who are mostly directly impacted by climate change are the communities on the frontlines, and so a social justice framework should be sort of put in place when thinking about a just transition.

So, I think right now, it’s a call for us to have a bold commitment to radical change, and to take action, and we need to go back to and—1) I think science is calling it out. They’re like, We don’t have a lot of time. And 2) I feel like there’s deep indigenous knowledge that has been telling us that we need to listen to in terms of shifting the way that things are currently, and going back to ways that were in alignment with the planet and in alignment with the Earth.

And so I want to share a bit just about Jackson, and about what’s happening locally, and this experiment, this project that I’ve been a part of and have been—like before it was even a name of an organization, I had been sort of working towards building something that is a self-determined, something that is life-affirming for black people in the US. And so this plan that we had is called the Jackson-Kush Plan. Jackson, Mississippi.

And what David talked about in terms of Jackson being a place that is the heart of the confederacy. All of that’s true. It also is a place where a lot of folks who migrated up North because of Jim Crow violence, because of white terror, the people who stayed are people who understand the need for self-defense and self-determination, and defending what’s theirs. There’s a rich history and culture of resilience that’s in Mississippi that I don’t think gets spoken much about.

But, yeah, so Jackson, we had this plan, right, and we wanted to develop people’s assemblies, so figure out ways to do people-centered decision-making processes. We wanted to pursue political office but to do it in a way where our politics are ours. It’s not beholden to the two-party system that’s in bed or in alignment with this capitalist sort of structure. Right?

And the other thing, which is the project that I’m a part of building, is building a solidarity economy. And so Cooperation Jackson comes out of an organization, a New African People’s organization, the Malcolm X. grassroots movement, which I’m—which I come out of. It’s the goal to build power for people.

And so, yeah, there’s different things that sort of play into that. Right? Jackson being a place that is in contention, contention with gentrification and communities that are looking to prey upon the existing community, and grassroots folks that are looking to shift power and shift control and shift wealth and resources to themselves and to the community. Right? So that’s what we’re sort of in the heart of.

When I think about Jackson and when I think about just transition and how it looks in the South is something where you can’t just build in a way without opposition in Mississippi. The laws—You can’t even officially incorporate as a cooperative in Mississippi. So the question of building and fighting, it wasn’t even a question around fighting because that’s already is. You know?

And so when we think about shifting and transforming the world around us, we want to build in a way where we’re building green worker cooperatives, where we’re doing community production. I don’t know how many people know about that. If you’ve heard of maker spaces or fab labs or 3D printing and stuff like that, I feel like we’re on the edge of being able to produce the means ourselves. I think the whole question around seizing the means of production is a real question, and that needs to be addressed. And we exist in a world and a time where we can start to produce the means ourselves with existing—with the resources existing in our community. [APPLAUSE]

And so that’s what we’re embarking upon just with Cooperation Jackson. We want to build an eco-village, like how can we incorporate a bunch of different practices from composting to using solar energy, to using—producing the homes from the materials that exist within our community, all of these different things to build a sustainable sort of infrastructure for our folks. Those are some of the things. I mean, because if you think about just transition, for me, I’m like capitalism in many ways takes our time. It takes our time. Right? Like most of the time we’re working all day and all night or whatever because we’ve got to pay bills because we’ve got to live in a house, we’ve got to pay for food, but like how about if we were able to set up a situation where we have housing, we’re growing food, that’s less reason for you to want money. You can have money to do other things that you like want to do, but if we take away the things that are—if we take away the things that—Actually if we provide the things that we actually need in order to survive, it makes us less dependent upon these systems that are harming us. [APPLAUSE]

And so in Jackson, we have this thing called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, and my thing is it’s like—it’s a local sort of project. The—Something’s may be transferable to your situation wherever you are, and I think a principle of just transition is that it’s local communities figuring out what local solutions work best for them. So with our research and with folks have been doing for 30+ years, this is what we came up with in terms of like how to address building a sustainable, regenerative community, and if you could see, thinking about alternative currency as something, building a community land trust, which is something that we have, eco village, all the things.

And so just wanted to show this graphic. One of the ways we’re—we sort of came about our work, it’s like we didn’t think about it doing it just like one thing, like we’re just going to do farming or we’re just going to do catering, or we’re just going to do arts and culture, or we’re just going to do composting. We were thinking about like whole systems approach. What are the things that we need in order to sustain life? How can we work in a way where we are owning our labor? How can we work in a way where we are learning collectively how to be democratic with each other?

I think this country in many ways talks about democracy, but we don’t know how to do it. We don’t know how to do it. [APPLAUSE] Because I mean it takes a deep level of patience and trust in each other that we’re going to come across or come to the decision, but there’s a struggle that happens when we’re actually listening to each other, when we’re valuing each other’s opinions. I feel like the exploitative, the extractive economy that values bosses, they would have get[?] things done a lot quicker because it’s just one person that decides, but when we’re making space for all of us to decide, the process is a bit slower.

But the challenge is that with climate change we don’t have much time. Right? And so how do we do these things? How do we hold ourselves? How do we hold each other? How do we learn how to be democratic with each other? How do we learn how to share resources and wealth, and distribute that with each other? All of those things are the things that we are experimenting with and trying in Jackson. [APPLAUSE]

I don’t know if y’all seen this map before, but this map is—Movement Generation put it together, folks in Our Power campaign, the Climate Justice Alliance, which Cooperation Jackson is a member, with just a layout of what the extractive economy is and what the values are of an extractive economy, and how can we—how we can move and build towards a regenerative economy, an economy that affirms life, that—the worldview is about caring, and protecting, and honoring the sacred, where the purpose is ecological and social well-being, where we’re building deep democracy. Right? Like I said, like the—being patient with each other, and knowing that it may take some time to come to decisions, but if we hold each other, then that’s all the more good for us. Right?

And so, yeah, the goal is to build a living economy, one that affirms life. [APPLAUSE] So we have a center. It’s called the Kuwasi Balagoon Center. Kuwasi Balagoon was a New African anarchist based in New York City, but he was a citizen of the Republic of New Africa, which is based in Mississippi. Jackson is a part of it, the land—and he was in the Black Panther party, was forced underground into the BLA, the Black Liberation Army. But the territory, when he was talking—fighting for sovereignty and self-determination, it was the South. It was Jackson.

And so when we think about someone who believed in horizontal decision making, who was also queer, who believed in being completely free, we look to this person. This person also said a lot about growing food in vacant lots. He said a lot about learning how to can food. He said a lot about staying in shape and working out together. He said a lot about free clothing exchanges. He said freely—like anarchist clothing exchanges. But all of these things I feel like are, for me, it’s like a monitor. It’s a monitor to a barometer to like where we need to go, and an inspiration of where we’ve been, and where we can go.

And so that picture right there is like a picture of him. I painted it, and I donated it to the center. And, yeah…[APPLAUSE] So, yeah, the background is about freedom. I just thought about complete freedom: What would that mean? How would that feel? And in the foreground that’s him. And the painting is a picture that he drew actually, that I redrew, but it was on his obituary. It’s called Piece By Piece, Fight by Flight. Yeah, so yeah, that’s that. [APPLAUSE] It’s cool to share my art work with like mad people. [LAUGHTER]

So yeah, so that’s the center. We also have solar like on our—on the Kuwasi Balagoon Center, but also on the community production space as well. I’m sorry it’s all pixelated.

And then, so Freedom Farms Coop is a coop that I’m an anchor for as well, and the goal for Freedom Farms is to grow food for our community to incorporate agroecology and Afro-ecology principles and practices, and figure out a way to build food security towards building for broader food sovereignty. So we’re growing food to feed people. [APPLAUSE]

And that’s—And, yeah, and so I mean, the goal, we’re going—we want to build to scale, but we also know that we—there’s a learning curve, and there’s also—I feel like history and ancestral history and trauma, all of those things are real in the black community, and it’s sort of difficult to get black folks to be back on the farm because of our history that we’ve had with the land here, and how we’ve interacted with the land here, based on our exploitation. And so there’s a deep level of healing from the trauma that has to happen. And folks—And we’re working on ways to figure out how to do that, and to be mindful, because we know that our history with the land came a long, long time before our enslavement, and we also know that because of the agricultural technologies that our communities had in West Africa, folks were directly targeted in order to implement that here on these lands. So, yeah…

So the Green Team, they do landscaping and composting, whatever. Trimmings that they get from the leaves or whatever from their jobs, we make that into compost. The compost goes back to the farm.

The Community Production Cooperative, like I told you, like I said before, it’s about—it’s about how can we create the means of production ourselves using tools that exist. So fab lab equipment, it’s like I think 30 or so different tools, like different robots kind of things. And if you put these tools together, you can make almost anything. And it sounds really weird until you like actually see it. [LAUGHTER] And I’ve seen it. I’ve been to fab labs. There’s one in Detroit that we’ve connected with, Inside Focus. There’s fab labs all over the world – Barcelona, in Chile, in Africa, all over.

And so, yeah, I think it’s important to—If there’s thing within our grasp that could help us to gain more control over our lives, like how can we do that, and how can we engage in that process. Right? And so one of our goals is to be—like to delink from the systems that are harming us, and delinking, I think, requires us to be—have some sort of sense of what the value chain and exchange chain sort of looks like, and how do we sort of gain control over those aspects. And to be able to demonetize that, and to do it in a way that we decide what the value is rather than the markets. [APPLAUSE]

So, yeah, so a goal of building a transition city, that’s what we’re about. The land that we have is on a community land trust, Fannie Lou Hamer. It takes the land and the housing off the market. You’re able to say land in a community land trust can’t be sold for over 99 years. And there’s a board that includes people from the community that decides what happens to that land. And so all of our land that we have from housing projects to our production spaces, all of that is in the community land trust. Yeah. [APPLAUSE]

And so, in closing—I’ve got like 30 seconds—one thing that I want to say is that urgent action is needed. I think—I was thinking about the workshop I went to in the indigenous tent about Alcatraz and Standing Rock, and just to think about how many indigenous territories were reclaimed after Alcatraz because of people being inspired to take action. [APPLAUSE] Those kind of things are very important for us to do and to think about.

I think in closing, there’s a resource gap for groups locally that are trying to do similar things. I think it’s important for us to figure out how to connect and to build solid relationships with each other. I know that the task is super daunting, and at the same time, I feel like we have the capacity, the potential, the wherewithal, and we also have our ancestors that are—that I feel like want us to live in a better and more just, more humane, more—world that is in right alignment and right relationship.

And, yeah, I’m looking forward to doing that, continuing to doing that with y’all. Yeah, peace. Peace. [APPLAUSE]

Intrinsic – A Performance by Climbing PoeTree (Day 3)

This performance took place at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

These two Brooklyn-based poets-artists-activists-educators-musicians-performers may be the most brilliant socially engaged spoken word duo in the known universe. They perform material from their recent kickass album, “Intrinsic”.

Climbing PoeTree (Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman) are award-winning multimedia artists, organizers, educators and a spoken word duo who have independently organized 30 tours, taking their work from South Africa to Cuba, the UK to Mexico, and 11,000 miles around the U.S. on a bus running on recycled vegetable oil, presenting alongside powerhouses such as Vandana Shiva, Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker, in venues ranging from the UN to Harvard to Riker’s Island Prison.

To learn more about Climbing PoeTree, visit http://www.climbingpoetree.com/