Casey Camp-Horinek: Aligning Human Law with Natural Law

This keynote talk was given at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

According to Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca), for as long as Mother Earth and Father Sky have blessed all life on Earth with sustenance, there has been a Sacred System honored by all species. Only humans have strayed wildly from these original instructions to live in harmony with all and to recognize our place in the Great Mystery. Now, she says, in this crucial moment, we must find our way back to Balance if we are to avoid the unraveling of the web of life.

Casey Camp-Horinek, a tribal Councilwoman of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma and Hereditary Drumkeeper of its Womens’ Scalp Dance Society, Elder and Matriarch, is also an Emmy award winning actress, author, and an internationally renowned, longtime Native and Human Rights and Environmental Justice activist. She led efforts for the Ponca tribe to adopt a Rights of Nature Statute and pass a moratorium on fracking on its territory, and has traveled and spoken around the world.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

Introduction by Alexis Bunten, Co-Director, Bioneers Indigeneity Program

ALEXIS BUNTEN:

So it’s my absolute pleasure to introduce Casey Camp to the main stage today. I started hearing about Casey about two and a half years ago, when Cara Romero and I were just in the beginning of our work with the rights of nature tribal governance. People in and around the movement kept saying to me, “You’ve got to meet Casey Camp, she’s…” and what I heard from them was that she was leading the movement for the Ponca Nation, her nation, to be the first tribe in America to adopt the rights of nature. [APPLAUSE]

The Ponca were removed from their ancestral territory in what’s now called Nebraska, and forcibly taken to what’s now called Oklahoma. When fracking started causing earthquakes in their reservation territory in Oklahoma, they’d had enough. They needed—they knew—Casey knew they needed stronger protection than current environmental law to stop the destruction of land, for everybody. Sure enough, not shortly after I started hearing about Casey, the Ponca Nation did adopt a rights of nature tribal law in January 2018, and I was thrilled.

And at the same time, our Indigeneity Program director, Cara Romero, had just started an information sharing and knowledge-creation campaign about rights of nature with her own tribe, the Chemehuevi. And over the next few months, Cara presented this idea of tribal rights of nature to her community. This is the idea that tribes can write their own policy to protect nature in perpetuity.

Rights of nature forces those who dare to harm ecosystems not just to pay for damages done but to ensure that the ecosystem, all life forms – water, air – must be allowed to thrive and evolve. And tribal rights of nature law is extremely exciting because US federally recognized tribes are not like states, whose authority is underneath that of the federal government. They have a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government which means that our nations have sovereign immunity. And what that means in regular terms is that if a tribe adopts rights of nature law and that law is challenged by, say, a transnational corporation wanting to frack, that the corporation can’t sue the tribe. [APPLAUSE] We’re ready to test it out.

Since the Ponca Nation adopted rights of nature into their tribal law, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe have adopted the rights of manoomin, or wild rice, and many other tribes are really interested and excited to build this movement. They are looking for the legal, financial and capacity-building support, and that’s what Cara and I are trying to build with our tribal rights of nature movement.

So I hope that you’re starting to understand the historical and monumental magnitude of what it meant when the Ponca tribe adopted the rights of nature. What Casey set in motion was a not-getting-in-the-back-of-the-bus, paradigm-shifting moment.

I finally got to meet Casey at the Protecting Mother Earth conference hosted by the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Nisqually tribe last May… Her poised leadership, intelligence, and innate beauty blew me away.

So then I just did what I usually do when I want to get to know someone better, and help to raise awareness and support for the incredible work they’re doing, I invited her to come speak at a conference with me in New York. Sadly, she wasn’t able to come, but I’m very dogged, so then I invited her to come speak at a conference in London with me. And the highlight of our time together, which was about three weeks ago, was getting to spend time with Casey and her absolutely beautiful granddaughter, Casey.

And I learned that Casey’s got this incredible vision for her tribe. Besides rights of nature, she’s leading a number of other initiatives for food sovereignty, restoring ancestral seeds, and indigenous-led regenerative economy, and acquiring her tribe’s ancestral territory in Nebraska. [APPLAUSE] That’s true decolonization. Some people call it the Native Land Return movement. You’re going to be hearing a lot more about it in the next few years, gifting ancestral territory back to the original tribal caretakers. [APPLAUSE]

And when Casey and her tribe get their ancestral territory back, she’s got some big plans. Casey is so many things. She’s a traditional person, a grandmother, a leader, a movement builder, a peacemaker and a revolutionary. And I just learned backstage that she sewed her own dress, so I think she can literally do everything. So with no further ado, let’s all give a warm welcome to my friend Casey Camp. [APPLAUSE]

CASEY CAMP-HORINEK:

My relative. You are everything. You are life itself. You are me and I am you. All of my relatives here, they love you like I love you. We appreciate you beyond words. We ask you to carry our blessings to the Coastal Miwok and the Pomo ancestors, who are sustaining us in this beautiful place. We ask you in your beauty to talk to the sacred air for us, to talk to the Thunder Nation for us, to talk to the water of the oceans, to talk to the mountains, to flow through us in a sacred manner and give us words, give us a way forward, help us to honor you as you honor us, help us to understand that you are all that is and we are your children, that you as you flow through our Mother Earth within her veins, with you as you come down from the skies, with you as you live within our wombs, with you that take care of us, we come today and we offer this song. I thank you. I love you. I’ll do my best because of you and for our future generations, for all the unborns. We say thank you for this life.

The song says [NATIVE WORDS] and that is simply: We thank you for this sacred gift of water and the blessing that it brings to us. Water is in everything and everything is within the water.

 [SINGS NATIVE WORDS] [APPLAUSE]

I’ve been told in the ways of the Ponca, which means sacred head, that we’re supposed to have witness wherever we travel so that we could be sure that we have told the truth when we go back home and our people ask us: What was said, what was done? So I’m asking this water to stand witness for you and for I, and for all the things that are said and done in this sacred manner.

I want to say thank you to Alexis for the beautiful words she said about me. It’s kind of tricky. I think my daughters and sons might have sent her that note to say, “And you better say this about our mama, ‘cause…” [LAUGHTER] ‘Cause she’s an incredible human being and it’s an honor to work with her.

It’s an honor to be here among you. It’s an honor to be among warriors. It’s an honor to be alive at this time of crisis. It’s an honor to be with relatives.

We talk about the rights of nature as if that’s a separate thing from us. And so in our way, when we wrote this statute, we wrote the immutable Ponca rights of nature, because how are we to say that we are inventing something new but know we are recognizing what has always been? So in coming to you today and bringing this sacred water to you, as she brought me, I believe that we need to take this moment to recognize the interconnectedness to all things, not in the esoterical way but in the truth and reality of what this human body is made of.

In the Ponca way, I was told by my mother that a long time ahead ago – she said it that way – a long time ahead ago, there was a being that lived in the red star area. I think the white folks call it the Pleiades. And among those seven sisters, on that red star, this being focused on this beautiful blue-green jewel that was floating through and around the heavens. Among all the sparkly things, this attracted that being, this red star child. And this red star child was constantly talking to the Great Mystery, to the Creator, and saying, “My spirit longs to be there. When I look at this place, this beautiful star in my sky, it calls me. I see how the four legs walk there. They understand each other. They understand where to feed, when to move on, how to give birth, and I long to be part of them. There’s these winged things. Some of them are small and fluttery, some of them are huge and soaring. Some of those four legs got big noses. But every one of them already loves me. Can I go there, Creator? Can I be part of that great mystery?” “Nah, you haven’t grown up enough. You don’t understand the oneness that exists in this place.” “Oh, but look at the snow fall. Isn’t that what you call it? It’s called [NATIVE WORD] in our language. And that Mija[ph] is so beautiful and sparkly, and it falls into these beautiful piles of softness. I want to jump in those. Oh, and look where the earth has this portion of sand. I think I’ll call her that. I like the sound of that word. I think she might be my mama.” Great Mystery said, “No, you’re just a child, yes, but that’s not your mama. You live here. You’re part of this. Millenniums. Eons.” Red Star child begged for the oneness here in this place that felt like his mother, the earth, until finally the Great Mystery said, “If you arrive there, look at those things with their roots deeply inside the mother and loving her. Do you promise to honor that way of life if I let you put your roots down there? Those buffalo that roam that area that you’re looking at, those can be your brothers, but there must be a way forward where you honor one another, and besides that, you’re just a spirit, Red Child, how are you going to embody yourself?” the Great Mystery said.

And the Great Mystery thought, “What if over that spirit that you are, I built a body from your mother, the earth, to birth you? What if I gave you a way to be part of that harmony? Would you honor it? Would all of your children’s children’s children’s children’s children children and on honor that? I’ll make you different. I’ll give you two legs instead of four. I’m not going to let you fly because you haven’t earned that right. [LAUGHTER] But I will allow you to be part of that if you honor the sacred system of life that’s already in place there.” That’s where the first Ponca came was with the idea, with the understanding that those beautiful things with their roots in the ground would have a breath that Red Star Child would share. And as Red Star Child built a body out of eating the grains, the corn, out of sharing life with the four legs, out of drinking the sacred water, out of listening to the Thunder Nation and the directions that came, there became a sacred way of life that happened, and he built a body to wear over his spirit, her spirit. Because Red Star Child was genderless at that time, because within that body was also self-determination of what Red Star Child chose to be.

And that is us. That is us. That is you. That is I. That is this particular group of two-legged beings that are blessed sharing one mother, one mother, one father, the sky. This incredible mother who sustains us no matter what we do to her, she has unconditional love for us. The sacred pact that we made with the Great Mystery, with the Creator, with the earth Mother is something that is beginning to seep into the consciousness of the two-legged, something that’s beginning to be remembered, and that’s why we gather at a time like this, you and I, that’s why we come together as warriors for her, warriors in peace, warriors in love, but warriors with no way back, only forward. [APPLAUSE]

 [NATIVE CALL] [AUDIENCE RESPONDS]

And at this time of imbalance, when humans have gotten their egos so berserk that they think because we speak a particular language that we share, we’re the boss. Yeah. That shows you just how stupid we are. [LAUGHTER] We’re still that little child. We haven’t even hit adolescence. We’re still those little guys that say, “No, no, no, no, no! I want it my way! I want creature comforts! Give me something to eat. Give me something to drink. Take care of me right now!” And she does. And she does.

And those green things that taste our breath as we breathe out oxygen and they breathe it in and shoot that oxygen back to us, they take care of us. Those sacred things in the ocean that have the same pH level and the same saline solution as the womb of the woman still tries to care for us. Those relatives, whether they are of plant life, whether they are of rock, whether they have four legs or whether they have fins, or creepy crawlers that live way underneath the earth, they still take care of us.

So now what? Now what? If you realize that you’re this embodiment, if you take responsibility because you ate this morning, because you drank this morning, because you breathe, what further responsibility will you take? We are beyond the seventh generation, but we haven’t gone so far as to step out of our creature comforts, like that 3 year old. What will do next?

The Ponca Nation has chosen to follow the rights of nature, the immutable rights of nature by recognizing those rights of nature, and recognizing that we as human beings are not separate from but part of this sacred system of life. And so what we have to do, and we cannot wait, is we have to allow ourselves to grow to the point to take chances, to believe that there is a just transition away from fossil fuels, and that we can say that, we can demand that, we can vote people into office, or just kick them out and do it ourselves. [APPLAUSE]

Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today. We need to make that difference. And within our community, we do it in the kitchen-table way. All of our conversations looking for native rights to be upheld and environmental rights, which are one, was begun around our mama’s kitchen table, being taught. All of my daughters and granddaughters go to MIT. I myself am a graduate of Matriarch in Training. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Two fists for that one! [CHEERS] And down to the babiest one. They know how to listen to our Mother and to receive instructions from her, and to follow through with those fearlessly, as you must do.

We have strong, strong men in our family, and they’re beautiful warriors. They stand around us. Have you ever seen a herd of buffalo protecting the weakest in the center? They stand facing out taking on any obstacles. That’s my family. [APPLAUSE] I’m proud of them. I didn’t even know this word called activist and environmentalist was something separate from what being a human entails. [APPLAUSE]

And that’s what I’m here asking you to do: Take responsibility. Pay back to the Earth herself what she has gifted to you. Take responsibility today. Gather your family around your kitchen table, talk to them about what is going to happen in the next seven generations. Do you want to breathe? Do you want to eat? Do you want to drink? If you do, do something. Go to your state government. Go to your local government. Go to your federal government and say: We are part of nature. We want you to enact these laws, like in New Zealand with the Wanganui River. [APPLAUSE] And if they don’t do it, you do it. You do it. [APPLAUSE] And if you want to look in the mirror this evening, in the morning, any day, see yourself, really see yourself, you have the capabilities, you have the innate understanding, you have the spirit living within you that’s connected to all. Honor that. Honor yourselves. Honor all of creation.

And then we get to hang around here, because I really hate to say this to you, but human beings right now are kind of like ticks are fleas on the Mother Earth. [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] We’re kind of like…and pass around some diseases and refuse to let go…[LAUGHTER] Mosquitoes, all of that kind of stuff.

Don’t we want to be honored as a part of all that is? Yeah. We’re going to do that. We’re going to do that, you and I, all of our relations. All things are connected. We appreciate you very much.

I’m going to ask my nephew, Rain[?], to come out here. We are beginning to make treaties, as we have in the past. We have a woman’s treaty that was made just for women and our supporters, indigenous women to begin with, and then everyone, and I wanted to be able to introduce another form of a treaty to you, because we want to honor all living things in that manner.

RAIN[ph]:

 [NATIVE WORDS] It’s an honor to be here, honor to be here with my aunt. We have very, very little time. So I just want to tell you that in the indigenous space we have a first treaty that’s ever been written under the indigenous rights of nature. This treaty is called the Wolf Treaty. We use the wolf just because it is symbolic. You think about all the misconceptions and stereotypes that people have attached to the wolf, and you think about all the stereotypes and misconceptions people have attached to indigenous people to justify heinous acts. We had a treaty for the grizzly bear. I don’t know if you know this. Two hundred tribal nations signed that treaty, most signed treaty in history. We ended up taking that treaty, going to federal court, and we fought the Trump administration, State of Montana, State of Wyoming, State of Idaho, National Rifle Association, Safari Club International. We were defending not just our sacred relative, the grizzly bear, the first two-legged to set foot upon the Earth, we were defending treaty rights, spiritual, religious freedoms, the Federal Indian Trust responsibility. And you know what? We won. [CHEERS]

So we don’t have a whole lot of time to share [CROSSTALK] to share this with you. But I want to remember a dear friend of mine who passed of ours. His name was John Trudeau. [APPLAUSE] And if our brother John Trudeau was here today, he would say to you, each and every one of you is descended from a tribe. You may not know what that tribe is, but you are descended from a tribe. And he would remind you that you are all indigenous because you are indigenous to the planet, you are indigenous to our Mother Earth.

I’m going to leave you with this thought, briefly. Crazy Horse, he said that we would end up living in a shadow world, but the real world is the world behind this one. It is the world of dreams. So today, I ask you to dream.

There was another prophet, and he sang a song, and he said, You may say I’m a dreamer, but [CROSSTALK] [CASEY: But that’s not the only way.] but I’m not the only one. [LAUGHTER] And here today we see [CROSSTALK] we’re not the only one.

CASEY:

They’re asking us to leave right now, but all of our stuff is over at the indigenous tent. We’re trying to raise youth awareness. We’re trying to bring this treaty to light. And we’re trying right now to create some women’s retreats in a beautiful place. And Earth Rights is the name of it. [APPLAUSE]

Closing Performance by Oakland’s Thrive Choir (2019)

This performance took place at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

The Thrive Choir, an Oakland-based singing group affiliated with Thrive East Bay, a purpose-driven community focused on personal and social transformation, is composed of a diverse group of vocalists, artists, activists, educators, healers, and community organizers directed by musicians Austin Willacy and Kyle Lemle. They have performed their original fusion of gospel, soul and folk in a wide range of settings, including: marches, conferences and festivals across California.

Learn more about Thrive Choir at http://www.thriveeastbay.org/thrivechoir/

Tim Merry: Holding Up a Mirror to the Moment (Day 3)

Slam poet Tim Merry weaves highlights of Bioneers Day 3 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.

Monika Bauerlein: The Future of Journalism

This keynote talk was delivered at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

Democracy is in crisis, and one central reason is the transformation of the media landscape resulting from the collapse of the economic model for news. From where will truth-seeking, fact-based, trustworthy journalism come as we rebuild our democracy? How do we overcome the hyper-capitalist algorithm devouring the free press? Monika Bauerlein is the groundbreaking CEO and former Co-Editor of Mother Jones, which since 1976 has stood among the world’s premier progressive investigative journalism news organizations.

Monika Bauerlein is CEO of Mother Jones, the American Society of Magazine Editors’ 2017 Magazine of the Year. Previously, she served as co-editor with Clara Jeffery, who is now editor-in-chief. Together, they spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by tenfold growth in audience and newsroom staff.

To learn more about Monika Bauerlein, visit Mother Jones.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

Introduction by Steve Katz, Publisher, Mother Jones.

STEVE KATZ:

Hi Everybody.

I want to do two things. One is to tell you a little bit about what Monika Bauerlein, the CEO at Mother Jones has accomplished over those years, and then I want to say a few things about who I think she is, and what you may hear from her today.

Mother Jones has, through Monika’s leadership, provided a home for 100 reporters and editors to do their work in three bureaus around the country, reaching eight million people every month, with investigative reporting that has changed the culture and changed the outcome of presidential elections. And it’s thanks to people like you that that has been possible. We’re deeply appreciative to everyone in the audience who reads our work, supports us, and really finds the rationale for reader-supported journalism as a central part of what they—the kinds of organizations that they support for social change.

All this is why Monika and Clara Jeffery, our editor-in-chief, were awarded the 2019 IF Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence earlier this year from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. They gave it to Monika and Clara in recognition of their enduring support of investigative reporting and independent journalists. And they went on to say that Monika and Clara have done a spectacular job of bringing Mother Jones fully into the digital age, and continuing the groundbreaking investigative reporting that Mother Jones has been known for since we launched in 1976 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.

It’s also why in 2017, Mother Jones was recognized as Magazine of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors, and why PanAmerica recognized Monika and Clara as having been the leaders in transforming Mother Jones from what was a respected if “under the radar” Indie publication to an internationally recognized powerhouse. Not bad. She’s fun to work with. [APPLAUSE]

So, who is this woman? She’s a smarty pants. [LAUGHTER] But first and foremost, she is a journalist, deeply curious about the world that we live in, and with a remarkable openness to be surprised by what she learns from inquiring about the world. She’s a superb writer and editor, who expertly deploys her craft to introduce all of us as readers to stories through character-driven narrative.

But then she takes it the next crucial step, turning a personal problem, as C. Wright Mills, a political scientist wrote many years ago, into a public issue and lifting the story up into an analysis of systems of oppression and control, but also pointing us towards solutions and right actions. As a journalist, Monika is professionally skeptical of extravagant claims, and looks at the world through a lens of verifiable facts. But I think what you’re going to hear as well in just a moment is a talk from someone who has a deeply held moral and ethical view of the world, and is motivated primarily by the passion and promise of what humanity is capable of achieving when we bring our best selves to the work.

She has a remarkable quality of being fully present with someone while never losing sight of the work at hand. And like gravity, she seems to be able to do that at a distance.

And I want to close my introduction by quoting from a note that we received from a donor of ours recently in response to a fundraising letter that we sent out for a very special, a very challenging fundraising campaign that we’re doing these days. And this donor made a lovely contribution to us for our reporting, and went on to write a handwritten note on the cardback that went like this:

Dear Monika, I could already walk when Hitler assumed power on January 30th, 1933. I remember only too well how difficult and full of daily anguish life was during the Third Reich for our family. The Moment for Mother Jones – that’s the campaign we’re doing – brings me hope in our current horrific moment in history, especially here in the USA. My donation and pledge comes with fervent good wishes.

Please welcome Monika Bauerlein, CEO at Mother Jones. [APPLAUSE]

MONIKA BAUERLEIN:

Thank you, Steve.

I’m starting with a picture of Mary Harris Jones, who is the badass lady that Mother Jones is named after. And I wanted to do that because she was somebody who took on a really impossible challenges at a very tough time, more than 100 years ago, and she prevailed. And so may that be an inspiration to us.

I came back not long ago from a gathering of investigative journalists from all over the world, and this was a workshop that I saw there. And it was really a reminder of how many journalists all over the world deal with the same problem, which is that there is this rise of authoritarian and demagogic leadership in many, many places, and one of the first things that these leaders do inevitably is they go after the press. This is in Turkey, which is accidentally the worst jailer of journalists in the world. In India, in Denmark, in Hungary, in all these places, sometimes the journalists are murdered, sometimes they are put in prison, sometimes the oligarch gets their cronies to buy up the news organization and get rid of the troublemakers, sometimes it’s just a constant war of attrition and attacks on credibility and cries of fake news. And not familiar at all…In fact, the United States has fallen every year now in the last three years in the press freedom index that Reporters Without Borders puts together, because this is now a country where journalists are under attack all the time. And this is—I hope you can see this, but we’re ranked between Romania and Senegal at the moment.

And why do these autocrats do this? Why are they so obsessed with getting control of the press? It’s because the truth is really, really dangerous to them. It is one of their worst enemies. And they can’t have it, which is also why the people who wrote the Constitution, with all their flaws and all their blind spots, but they were trying to prevent anti-democratic governance. And so in the fight against tyranny, they saw journalism and a free press as a really essential ingredient.

And so, too, the kind of rise in civic energy that we’ve seen in this country in the last few years has been among other things a rallying to journalism and to the role of truth in empowering an engaged community. But this all goes back well before – that’s me trying to get a source on the phone. This all goes back well before our president with an itchy Twitter finger and all of that. And so I wanted to spend a little bit of time analyzing how we got here, particularly when it comes to this field that I work in.

So I’ve been a journalist all my life, and when I started out, I was living in Germany where I was born, and we spent a lot of time in Italy as well. And in those countries at that time, the memory of fascism and genocide and war was alive. All the old people around me had living memories of these things, and had been participants or affected by them in some way or another. And that gave me a real appreciation of how fragile democracy can be, and how dangerous it is to not fight for it at every step.

The Nazis, when they took power, one of the very first things, like all these other autocrats, they went after the press, and they melted down printing presses. And you know what they did to books. So this all seemed nonetheless really distant and sort of important but not present living history when I came to this country, and ended up in an incredibly vibrant and strong press landscape.

And in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis/St. Paul, where I spent a lot of my early years as a journalist, they had two daily newspapers, two alternative weeklies, African American newspapers, Native American newspapers, Mung newspapers, dozens and dozens of neighborhood newspapers, and those are just the papers. And there were television and radio outlets, and all of them with compliments of journalists and sometimes investigative teams. So a huge amount of journalistic firepower directed at sometimes the powerful.

And I want to pause there to say that this was not the golden age of journalism that some people in my profession sometimes sort of wax nostalgic about, that there were a lot of blind spots. There were a lot of stories that were not being told. There were a lot of communities being ignored. The elite news organizations in particular were very bought into the status quo, and they were very white and very male.

So that was already a problem, and it became more of a problem because of the way that these news organizations were owned, because ownership, and then follow the money is what we say in my profession. The way we’ve paid for journalism in this country historically is by bundling up eyeballs, so all of you, gathering you up and tying you into little bundles and selling that attention of one minute or 10 minutes or two seconds to advertisers. And that was profitable for a really long time, and like any profitable activity, the people who were doing it, and particularly the people who owned the profit-making wanted to do more of it, and so there was an incredible amount of kind of corporatization and consolidation in the business.

Some of you may remember many years ago when Ben Bagdikian sounded a warning about there being 50 corporations that controlled much of the media. We’re actually down to six, and this chart is already back again out of date. So this has been an ongoing problem, and it’s made worse by the fact that really there are just two corporations that control a lot of the news that many people get. This is what happens when you Google—Facebook Big Brother or Google Big Brother. People have—Basically we’ve all had the same idea.

And Google and Facebook have this incredible amount of power. I want to kind of nerd out with you on the details a little bit because we don’t have enough of a conversation of what happens under the hood of how we get information. They have this inordinate amount of power, and it’s not by people walking around and saying, “Elevate this story,” “bury that story,” it’s robots. It’s algorithms. It’s algorithms that are programmed by humans, and in Facebook’s case, for instance, the algorithms are programmed in such a way as to maximize profit for Facebook. That’s what they’re there for. And so the way Facebook makes a profit is the more people spend more time on the platform and share and like and engage, the more money they make by them being the people who do the bundling of eyeballs and selling them to advertisers.

So it turns out one of the easiest ways to get people to like and share and engage is to cater to anger and fear. Whatever your anger or your fear may be, when you push those buttons, there are biochemical responses that happen. And so people who create content for Facebook understood that some people who were just trying to sell cat videos and some people who had much more of an ulterior motive, and we saw that in the 2016 campaign, how much content was shown in people’s feeds that people accepted as news coverage that was actually just designed to manipulate them.

But it gets worse, and it gets even a little more complicated, because Facebook gets a black eye for all of this after the election. And so they decide to ratchet way back the amount of news that they show in your feed period, not just the false stuff but all of it. And because Mother Jones is a nonprofit and we are accountable to our readers, we can actually show some of this stuff in a way that a for-profit corporation couldn’t, and we can also say things about it that maybe not everybody would.

This one’s for our creative director. And we can show the numbers behind it. So you can see that over a period of time, a lot of people became very engaged with our journalism on Facebook because they’re passionate about it. And then suddenly it falls off a cliff in the middle of 2017. And it’s not falling off a cliff because people stopped being interested in news. In fact, there are more people now who follow Mother Jones on Facebook than there were then, but because Facebook tweaked the robots and the algorithms in such a way that you see less news in your feed even when you have told Facebook that you want to follow news.

And that has a huge impact, not just on the information that people see, but also the resources that are available to make that journalism… So that’s just a not-very-well-made chart that shows you how Google and Facebook have sucked up the vast majority of dollars from the eye-bundling business that used to go to pay for journalism.

And just to bring that Facebook story forward all the way to the present, what happens is Facebook still shows people news, but the news—this is something I did yesterday with a tool where you can see what’s trending on Facebook, and you see the top—on the right are the top five stories that happen to be trending at that moment, and it’s basically animal news, lad magazines, and conservative right-wing propaganda. And this is what it looks like every day. It’s Fox News, Breitbart, celebrity stuff, rinse and repeat.

And the result is what has happened to news all over the country. This is a photo of the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom, but the same has happened to the news in wherever you live. There are—There were 56-some-odd-thousand journalists working in just daily newspapers all over the country just 12 years ago, and there are now fewer than half that many. Journalists have actually been losing their jobs faster than coal miners. And I can tell you that in five or seven years, I don’t think your city is going to have a daily newspaper, if it does today. And this is capacity that is not being replaced. It’s not like the Internet is generating content that is no longer coming out of these newsrooms.

And it’s no coincidence that the time frame in which we have seen this implosion of journalism is the same time frame in which we have seen a rise in a different kind of politics, and of a politics that is much more reliant on disinformation and propaganda and ultimately anti-democratic impulses. And just to—The cherry on top is in this environment the only people who are investing in news operations are people who have often an ulterior motive, like Rupert Murdoch and like Sinclair Broadcasting is another company that you may have heard of that’s buying up local television stations all over the country, and you may have seen a video that went viral a couple of years ago where dozens and dozens of these local news anchors were forced to read basically a conservative propaganda script.

So that’s it. Bye! Yeah, no, again, we can’t leave it there, because at Bioneers we’re about solutions. And there is a solution to this, and it’s you.

And I mean that very specifically. I am convinced after everything that I’ve seen in this story of what has happened to news in this country and around the world, that the only way we are going to have journalism that serves the public, that serves the democracy that it’s a part of is for the public to take ownership of it. And that is a very different bottle.

So again, at Mother Jones that’s—we’ve kind of been a 43-year experiment in creating this sort of model. We were started 43 years ago as basically a crowd-funded nonprofit magazine, and today we are much larger than we were, but 68% of our revenue, as you can see there, comes from our readers in the form of a subscription or a donation. And that gives us a totally different set of incentives, and a totally different group of people that we are accountable to, because it’s not shareholders, it’s not Rupert Murdoch, it’s not even a well-meaning billionaire like a Jeff Bezos, it’s you.

And that gives you, gives us, gives you a newsroom that serves you, that can go and do things like send a reporter to work inside of a private prison and find out what’s really going on in these for-profit jails and prisons and detention centers that a lot of people, especially black and brown people, are locked up in.

And when you do that kind of journalism, it—again, because it is so threatening to the powerful, it’s threatening because it has impact. In this particular story that we published, the Obama administration then responded by saying, okay, then we’re going to have to scale back on use of these prisons. Now the—We know how this story ended, literally the day after the election in 2016, private prison stocks went through the roof. But the arc of history bends slowly, and the story is not done yet.

I wanted to address one thing that I do hear a lot right now, which is, okay, but we have these great national newspapers that are doing all this amazing investigative work. How many do we really need? Like The New York Times and The Washington Post are getting at a lot of the stuff that I want to know. And they are doing really amazing work, and I am very happy that there are 1200 people working in The New York Times newsroom, but you don’t want a situation where two elite news organizations, or three or five are the gatekeepers for what news gets gone after and what news you should see. And as an illustration of that, I wanted to show you what happened on Halloween in 2016, which was the day when The New York Times published the story on the left, and Mother Jones published the story on the right. And had—That to me is a real illustration of how you want many different voices and many different perspectives.

And the great news is those are starting to happen. That collage, look, Mother Jones is just one of the tiles over there on the right. There are now more than 200 nonprofit news organizations all over the country. I’m sure there’s one where you live. There are ones focusing on particular issues, there are ones focusing on particular communities, there are ones that have two journalists, there are ones that have 20. There are in total 2,000 people now working in nonprofit newsrooms all over America, and this movement is [APPLAUSE]—Thank you.

You can find them if you want at the Institute for Nonprofit News, INN.org, and you can look at what they’re doing, whether there’s one in your town. They all do fundraising at the end of the year, so there are ways to get involved at any level you want. But the great news is this is a movement that’s spreading. It’s actually spreading around the world.

At this conference that I was at, there were nonprofit news organizations in countries where journalists are killed and imprisoned, and yet they are coming together and making this happen. And you can easily see, from 2,000 to 20,000 is only a factor of 10X. That’s nothing in Silicon Valley. That’s something that could happen over a period of five or 10 years, and then we would have replaced a lot of the capacity that we lost, but we would replace it with something much more democratic, accountable, transparent, and diverse, and we would have replaced it with something that serves you.

And I think she would be proud. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Thank you so much.

OLOX: A Neo-shamanic Transformative Journey Through Arctic Sounds

This performance took place at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

The duet OLOX, which combines Zarina Kopyrina’s ancient, traditional Siberian shamanic music with modern sounds, has performed around the world, from Burning Man to the Kremlin to Iceland to the Arctic. Zarina is passionately engaged with activism and advocacy for the rights and lands of far northern Indigenous peoples.

Zarina Kopyrina, born in the Siberian tundra of the Sakha Republic (aka Yakutia) in a large family, was introduced to the magic of traditional folkloric music and local Indigenous shamanic cultural practices at a young age by her grandmother and others. After graduating from the University of Yakutsk in Economics, Zorina became very politically and culturally active and eventually began a musical career, traveling globally and becoming a widely sought-after performer, one who has created a unique combination of authentic Yakut traditional shamanic sounds deeply rooted in nature and modern musical forms.

To learn more about Zarina Kopyrina and OLOX, visit olox.life.

Read the full transcript of Zarina Kopyrina’s introduction below.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER:

Please welcome OLOX with Zarina Kopyrina. [APPLAUSE]

ZARINA KOPYRINA:

Urui-aikhal Bioneers! It’s a traditional greeting from my people to you. We are Sakha people from Arctic Siberia.

There is an old saying: The tree doesn’t move without wind. It means that we’re all sitting here for the reason. We’re all part of wind of change. We are brought here from the wind of our ancestors who shoulders we stand upon. We are wind to bring a better life for future generations. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

My name is Zarina. My soul brother’s name is Andreas. He’s going to join us very soon. Together we created Olox Project. It means the life. Olox means the life in my Sakha native language. The vision of Olox is to create a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern life.

Let me tell you about my Sakha people. I was born in a small village of 900 people in the most of remote places in the world. You can see from the map that Yakutia is in Arctic Circle, and it would be one of the six largest countries in the world if it was an independent country. It is one of the coldest inhabited places in the world, where winters can reach lows of -94 degree by Fahrenheit. It’s very cold there. [LAUGHTER] So that’s why we deeply respect the power of nature, and we do believe that everything is alive.

Let me show you some pictures of this beautiful world. The reindeers are the lords of tundra. Our Yakutian horses are central for our lives. This is a majestic beauty of our winter. You will be surprised by natural horses, natural wonders of our homeland, such as land of pillars, a beauty of Aurora Borealis.

Sakha culture takes its breath from shamanism. So the word shamanism actually came from our culture. It is one of the ancient and sacred traditions in the world. Shamans are healers of people and nature.

Winter made us a strong people. We’re also well-known and we have famous artists who work with silver and gold.

Sakha people celebrate new year during solstice. Yhyakh is a collective ceremony of cleansing body, mind, and soul. We connect to the sacred with the dance. You can see here a beautiful crane dance. Over 200,000 people are involved with the Sakha ceremony Yhyakh, and here you can see a large circle of Ohuokhai. This is circle dance.

Our ancestors’ wisdom is written everywhere. We receive our energy from the sun for the whole year. We respect the spirit of the fire. We are horse people. The sacred life is written and it’s woven into our beautiful costumes. Ours are the most severest environment on Earth comes some of the most beautiful spirits.

My people also have challenges in this era of globalization. For the last decades, the permafrost is melting at enormous speed. You can see some pictures here. This summer news about wildfires in Siberia broke my heart. So much of my homeland was destroyed. Mining by big corporations creates a lot of destructions. There are large wounds all over the face of Mother Earth. So, let’s pray all together that all sentient beings may be free from suffering, that we bring our dances and songs to the challenges of the precious Earth, that we awaken our inner shamans for the healing of this world. Makhtal! [APPLAUSE]

 [PERFORMANCE]

Terry Tempest Williams, Nina Simons and Eve Ensler on Grief, Anger and Reconciliation

In a time when it’s easier to hate than to empathize, it’s an act of revolutionary love to have sympathy for those who seem different or who have hurt you. Emotions like grief and anger — despite their negative connotation — are necessary to living fully and embracing the full spectrum of human emotion. After all, our world is full of dualities. Without anger, there is no love. And without pain, there is no healing.

Following, Bioneers Terry Tempest Williams, Nina Simons and Eve Ensler explore the process of balancing these emotions.

Terry Tempest Williams

Author-activist Terry Tempest Williams is revered as a “citizen writer” for her work emphasizing environmental ethics and conservation, especially in the “Red Rock” region of her native Utah and in Alaska. Read our recent Q&A with Williams here.

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. But I have sought wisdom from my elders, the elders that we live near – Willie Grayeyes, a community organizer who now is a county commissioner in a Navajo majority in San Juan County Utah. 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.

Nina Simons

Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons is an award winning social entrepreneur and visionary thinker. Her current work is informed by years of experience writing and teaching about women, leadership and diversity.

As I sat at my mother’s bedside, single focused on her passage, my sense of self-worth as linked to work peeled away. I knew in a deeper way that we all have varying parts to play, in bridging worlds, in hospicing the old system and bringing forth the new, And that I was just where I needed to be. At her bedside, during her last week, I felt the ‘reality’ of this physical world meet the invisible world, the energetic realm, the place where hunches are born. I walked each day in a dreamlike state, filled with sorrow and aliveness, feeling myself an eavesdropper to another world. I had imagined that hospicing her through her illness for months might prepare me for her death, but it didn’t.

As the weeks pass, I miss her closeness, her voice and there’s a hole in my heart where the reliability of her love used to live. But I remember she’s still alive in me, now. And in the many invisible worlds that hold me.

The mystery of what happens after death preoccupies me. After she died, I could sense her presence, strongly and near at hand, for weeks. There’s a new curiosity being born in me, for how her essence might show up around me in others, or in dreams, for how I know she’ll be with me forever, or at least to the milky way and back.

I’m wide awake to the fragility of health in this toxic world. The impermanence of life is much realer to me now. Death’s nearness makes living shinier, more crystalline, full moons are fuller, foxes more breathtaking, laughter and wildness and freedom more precious. But the changes in my inner world are deep and foundational. I’m so aware now of how we remake ourselves every day, with every choice. Cultivating ourselves, to grow into our soul’s seed assignment, before we die.

A friend who knows the Mayan cosmology suggested I need to befriend the Death Mother, who lives in the South. While the Life Mother in the North is nurturing, fertile and generous, the Death Mother rules boundaries, limits and appropriate endings. I realize that throughout my devotion to Mother Life, I’ve focused largely on the fertility, the pollination, the wondrous and hopeful regeneration of seasons, perennials, cycles and systems.

Now, to better prepare myself for bridging the worlds, I’m focusing more on the beauty of a snag that stays standing, becoming habitat for crows, eagles and woodpeckers, and the insects and mycelium who return it to become nourishment for the next cycle of the soil’s creation. I’ve long believed that our collective focus on beginnings – while avoiding endings, and on progress, at the expense of history, lineage and tradition Is a relic of the patriarchal, colonial and capitalist systems we were all raised with. Finding that same bias in myself is humbling.

To bring all of our selves to this moment of pivotal change, isn’t facing the true danger of this time, the realities of all that’s dying, a necessary balance, medicine and motivator?

Nina Simons: Bridging the Worlds

Eve Ensler

As an award-winning playwright, performer, activist and author, Eve Ensler is well-known for her work promoting women’s rights and fighting gendered violence. Read an excerpt from her latest book, The Apology, here.

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 *poof* 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 that 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.

What Follows Our Erosion: A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams is known for her work as an author (her most recent book is Erosion, Essays of Undoing) and activist, particularly in relationship to the natural world. In our current puzzling and frustrating social and political environment, Williams has become a leader in putting words to the deep unrest many have felt since 2016.

Bioneers was fortunate to sit down with Terry Tempest Williams to discuss the “erosion” of the United States – and the world at large – and what might follow.

TERRY: I’m going to read a piece that I wrote the morning after the election in 2016. I was on the banks of the Colorado River, and this is from my journal.

This moment, erosion of democracy, November 9th, 2016.

It is morning. I am mourning. And the river is before me. I am a writer without words who is struggling to find them. I am holding the balm of beauty, this river, this desert, so vulnerable, all of us. I am trying to shape my despair into some form of action, but for now I am standing on the cold edge of grief.

We are staring at a belligerent rejection of change by our fellow Americans who believe they have voted for change. The seismic shock of a new political landscape is settling. For now, I do not feel like unity is what is called for. Resistance is our courage. Love will become us. The land holds us still.

Let us pause and listen and gather our strength with grace, and move forward like water in all of its manifestations – flat water, white water, rapids and eddies – and flood this country with an integrity of purpose and patience and persistence capable of cracking stone.

I am a writer without words, who continues to believe in the vitality of the struggle. Let us hold each other close and be kind. Let us gather together and break bread. Let us trust that what is required of us next will become clear in time. What has been hidden is now exposed. This river, this morning, this moment. May we be brave enough to feel it deeply and then act.

Terry Tempest Williams

BIONEERS: How are you feeling now, since you wrote that?

TERRY: My throat closes, so that says something. I remember when I wrote it. I stayed up all night to hear Hillary’s concession speech, and it didn’t come, as you remember, until the morning. And then I walked out to the edge of the river and just sat there. I don’t even remember writing this. It just came out of the moment. I wasn’t surprised. I think living in Utah, I thought this would be the outcome.

How do I feel now? I’m terrified that Donald Trump will win again. And I don’t know what the outcome will be. I think we’re all going to have to work really, really hard. I think we’re watching madness before us on so many levels. I certainly see it in Utah, evidenced on the ground by a rapidity of oil and gas development and the bringing back of uranium mining, which is insanity. With the legacy that the atomic West has experienced with Navajo communities, and certainly my family – nine women in my family are dead from nuclear testing. Half my family’s gone from the result of uranium mining predicated on the development of the atomic bomb. So it’s unthinkable to me. That’s how I’m feeling now.

We cannot look away. We’re watching cruelty become normalized, whether it’s at the Southern border or with the Endangered Species Act, or Charlottesville. On every front, it’s a grand assault.

So how do I feel now? I feel like we have to really, really work hard to make sure that this administration is voted out, mightily.

BIONEERS: Do you feel inspired by what you’re seeing in response?

TERRY: I certainly think that what had been hidden has been exposed. Trump is a symptom as well as a manifestation of our shadow side of this country that’s always been there, that is now being revealed. Certainly, the youth climate justice movement, the activism that we are seeing in terms of gun violence, I think we’re seeing deep engagement. But I don’t think that makes up for what is being lost, and the kind of cruelties that are being exacted, whether it’s on the border, or the gutting of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, or cutting Grand Staircase National Monument in half.

In our community in Castle Valley, there is a Japanese tea master. After the election, she offered to have a tea ceremony, and that’s what we did that night. It was so powerful to just sit as a community in silence and contemplate what had just happened, how we wanted to sit with this, and what we were going to do in these next four years, both as a community as well as citizens. That really set the tone for me.

BIONEERS: This divisiveness and the “shadow side” coming to light seems to have created a disintegration of the public conversation, of public dialogue. “Dialogue” may not even be the right word, because people are just sort of yelling at each other.

TERRY: I don’t even know what we do when the rule of law is not respected, when you realize that the open space of democracy has remained open out of decency and a respect of one’s word and integrity, and that is no longer. If you are sent a subpoena, it doesn’t matter. That’s what worries me, is that there is no democracy if there is no respect for the law. And I don’t know what that outcome will be, if that’s taken to its limit. We’ve never been here before.

That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about these past few years: the idea of erosion. We live in an erosional landscape. We have four directions that are deeply marked to the south, the LaSalle Mountains; to the north, the Colorado River running red, carrying the sediments of sandstone to the ocean; to the west, Porcupine Rim holding the last light of day; and to the east, Castleton Tower, this wonderful monolith of free-standing wingate sandstone that has a pulse. We live in an erosional landscape. It’s not unusual at night to hear what sounds like a bomb, and you realize one of the cliffs has fallen or a boulder has rolled.

Then I started thinking: How does erosion play out in our own lives? The erosion of democracy? The erosion of decency? The erosion of compassion? The erosion of belief, of the body, of time? And I really believe that we are eroding and evolving at once, and that’s not a bad thing. That erosion takes stone to its essence. We see the stratigraphy of deep time in the Grand Canyon through all of the different layers, even the Vishnu shifts three billion years of time. It’s hard for us to even comprehend that.

We, too, are eroding as a nation. And I hope that we will be weathered to our essence of what it means to be human at this moment in the climate crisis.

BIONEERS: What role do you feel that love – all of the different kinds of love – can play in bringing that about?

TERRY: I think everything I do has to do with love. If you talk to any activist or if we get to the heart of what it means to be a citizen engaged, it is about love – a love of justice, a love of equity, a love of fairness. And certainly the work that I’ve been doing regarding public lands is deeply about love – a love of place, a love of wildness, a love of other species. We’re not the only species that lives and breathes and grieves and loves on this planet.

We are all experiencing so much grief in terms of what is being lost, and the suffering that is occurring in real time, in real places. And grief is love.

I think about anger as also a sibling to grief. I’m constantly asking myself: How do I take my anger and transform it into sacred rage? What does that look like? Where do you take it? And if I’m honest, I think I write out of my anger often. But if you go deeper, I write out of my love and questions.

BIONEERS: Stepping back, how do you feel at this moment about the trajectory of your work, and writing and speaking? How have you grown through the process?

TERRY: I think it is an evolution. And certainly, with this last book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing, there’s no embroidery here. It’s raw. In many ways it’s dark. It’s an erosion of my own person, whether it was the loss of my job at the University of Utah based on a political act of purchasing oil and gas leases, or whether it was my brother’s death by suicide. He hung himself in 2018. Those are deeply, deeply erosional moments in my life.

I write to make sense of what I don’t understand. So this book, as I say, it’s raw, it’s real, it’s…I don’t remember ever writing so truly as I have here. In other books, I think I’ve been saved by the structure. I have a wild mind, and the structure holds that mind. But what you see is what you get in this latest collection, and I think that’s where we all are. We don’t have time to mess around, or to be clever, or to be metaphorical. Or at least I don’t. I just wanted to tell it straight and to tell it true, through story.

BIONEERS: You’ve talked about how you try to embrace paradox. What’s important to you about being able to do that? And could you share an example of when the need to do that became evident to you.

TERRY: Well, I know the tensions in my own life. What instantly came to my mind was a sentence I’d written years ago. It haunts me still: “The most radical act we can commit is to stay home.” I miss home. Right now, six months out of the year I’m teaching at the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, which is an absolute privilege. I love it, and I love my students, and I love my colleagues, and I feel free, and I’m learning so much, especially how much I don’t know. But I’m away. And I’m 64 years old. I have never been away from home, meaning Utah, for more than four months at a time. I don’t know how to relate to New England, but I’m learning to embrace trees. I’m learning the names of black oak, red oak, white oak, and the different kinds of maples. I love the Mt. Auburn cemetery because it’s the wildest place in Cambridge, and there’s fox, and there’s birds. So you adapt.

But I have to wear those Lucy Carmichael glasses, those sleeping goggles or whatever they’re called, just to be able to have some darkness. There is no darkness in Boston or Cambridge. Where we live in Castle Valley, Utah, we have a writing studio that Brook and I share. It gets so dark at night there have been times where we’ve missed the studio altogether and walked a half mile to the road. It’s those kinds of paradoxes that my work brings.

The obvious paradox for me in my life is Great Salt Lake, a body of water in the desert that no one can drink, and yet it is such a life-giving source to millions of birds that circumnavigate the planet during spring and fall migrations. I think the paradoxes abound. Colorado River running red, that is dammed every inch of the way, and doesn’t even make its source by the time it gets to Mexico. Is that a paradox? I view it that way, that a free-flowing river should have its say at the end, the mouth, and it doesn’t. It’s silenced by development, by water rights, by dams.

BIONEERS: What would you say about the fact that we have this “erosion” of democracy, and at the same time, it is bringing forward such an enormous response?

TERRY: It’s interesting. And I do think that’s a great point: that we can hold contradictory emotions at once. We can hold a contradictory country at once. This is a time where rather than constricting ourselves and going inward, it’s actually a time to expand. We have to become larger as our country seems to be getting smaller in terms of its … I want to use the word “virtue.” We’re watching democracy collapse, and I think we, as citizens, have to be more expansive and responsive as a result.

BIONEERS: A lot of people are wanting to help, especially to end the detainment of asylum seekers who are crossing the borders. They’re asking, “Why is this still happening?” There’s a helplessness there.

TERRY: First of all, I think we have to vote. We need to make sure that we have fair elections, and I think that’s under real question right now.

I also feel that there’s a lot we can do around our own dinner tables with our families. I don’t know about you, but our family is all over the place politically. There are those that are rabid Democrats and progressives, there are those that are waiting for the revolution with their guns locked and loaded, who are Trump diehards, and then there are those that are moderates that are just waiting to see – won’t someone stand up to Trump? I think we have to have those hard conversations within our own families, within our own neighborhoods, within our own communities, and I think we can begin there to take down those walls that Fox News and MSNBC have set up.

BIONEERS: How do you feel that our undoing can be our emergence together?

TERRY: When I lost my job at the University of Utah, I was crushed. I was brokenhearted. I felt exiled, and I really participated in a real soul-searching time. Was it my fault? What didn’t I do? Was I irresponsible? I think as women, we always take that blame.

That was a time of undoing. And because Brook and I had saved enough money, I could take that time off for six months and just contemplate what had happened. I wanted to grieve. I wanted to reflect. And I wanted to think about: Where do I belong if I’m not in my own home?

What I realize now, looking back, is I thought I would be there forever, but my soul had other plans. Looking back at that moment, my undoing, it has now become part of my becoming. I could never have imagined the kind of expansion of mind and soul that I’m able to participate in now at the Divinity School. And I’m grateful. I think that’s a common story; when we lose a job, when our marriage dissolves, perhaps an illness, my brother’s suicide. When these things occur, I think about Shinran, the Japanese poet, who said: This happened. Now something else can occur. This happened in America. Now something else can occur. And that something else is up to us.

We have more power than we know.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees: An Ecology of the Heart | Gloria Flora

Nine out of ten Americans strongly favor wilderness protection, but federal policy actually threatens such preservation. In her decades of work at the U.S. Forest Service, Gloria Flora faced threats and harassment as she tried to protect the forest commons. She tells us that in order to sustain landscapes, we need to sustain ourselves, and in order to sustain ourselves we need to sustain landscapes.

Bioneers 2019 Day 3: Regeneration (+ Photos to Share!)

As we wrap up another incredible Bioneers Conference, we’re filled with gratitude for the Bioneers community; from the speakers who taught us, to the performers who invigorated us, to each and every person who brought their open heart and mind to this experience, you – the Bioneers – are leading us into the coming year with determination.

As Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel said this weekend:

In this Time of No Time, they say, we can go in any direction we want—by dreaming it. Our dreaming can shift the course of the world.

It’s going to be a long and winding trek across generations.

We’re already making some of the pathways others can walk toward our many dreams. Countless more dreamers will blaze luminous new trails.

The dreams are already within us. One day, may we awaken to find ourselves living in our wildest dreams.

Keep reading for access to the full text of Kenny’s Bioneers speech.

Following are some of the ideas and takeaways Bioneers introduced today, plus some exclusive photos from this weekend.

(We need you this year! Bioneers exists as a movement of movements – do you know of stories we should be telling? If so, let us know by emailing stories@bioneers.org or calling 877.BIONEER.)

ACTION ITEMS

Campaigns to Follow and Support:

• Amazon Watch – Pledge to Protect the Amazon Rainforest (introduced by Leila Salazar-Lopez)

Mission: “Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organization founded in 1996 to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. We partner with indigenous and environmental organizations in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability and the preservation of the Amazon’s ecological systems.”

• A Global Deal for Nature – Petition (introduced by Carly Vynne, PhD)•A Global Deal for Nature – Petition (introduced by Carly Vynne, PhD)

Mission: “Sign the petition calling on world leaders to support a Global Deal for Nature that protects and restores half of the Earth’s lands and oceans.”

• Drawdown Learn

Mission: “Drawdown Learn is a broad initiative to encourage education and learning about climate solutions based on Project Drawdown’s research, analysis, and insights. Through our programs and partnerships, we are helping educators and students of all ages to understand the solutions available to address the climate crisis and create new ways of teaching and learning about Drawdown solutions.”

• Cooperation Jackson (introduced by brandon king)

Mission: “The broad mission of Cooperation Jackson is to advance the development of economic democracy in Jackson, Mississippi by building a solidarity economy anchored by a network of cooperatives and other types of worker-owned and democratically self-managed enterprises.”

• New Consensus (introduced by Demond Drummer)

Mission: “We are a global, distributed network of academics, creators, activists, leaders and entrepreneurs working to make the new consensus the standard operating system for national economies around the world.”

• Youth Vs. Apocalypse (introduced by Isha Clarke)

Mission: “Youth Vs. Apocalypse is a diverse group of young climate justice activists working together to lift the voices of youth, in particular youth of color, and fight for a livable climate and an equitable, sustainable, and just world.”

• Schumacher Center for a New Economics (introduced by Greg Watson)

Mission: “To envision a just and sustainable global economy; apply the concepts locally; then share the results for broad replication.”

• Democracy Collaborative (introduced by Ted Howard)

Mission: “Through our cutting edge research and our many diverse programs, The Democracy Collaborative works to carry out a vision of a new economic system where shared ownership and control creates more equitable and inclusive outcomes, fosters ecological sustainability, and promotes flourishing democratic and community life.”

• Seed Sovereignty (introduced by Christine Nobiss)

Mission: “Seed Sovereignty reclaims seeds and Biodiversity as commons and public good. The farmer’s rights to breed and exchange diverse Open Source Seeds which can be saved and which are not patented, genetically modified, owned or controlled by emerging seed giants.”

• Coral Reef Alliance (introduced by Madhavi Colton)

Mission: “We work collaboratively with communities to reduce direct threats to reefs in ways that provide long-term benefits to people and wildlife.”

TELL YOUR FRIENDS

Keep the Bioneers momentum going! We’ve uploaded lots of highlight photos for you to save and share on social media. You can find them here under “Conference Photos to Share.” Don’t forget to use #Bioneers2019 so we can see what you’re sharing!

Kenny Ausubel: The End of Prehistory

The full text of Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel’s Saturday speech is now online! Revisit it here.

Invest In Change!

By supporting Bioneers, you’re supporting an entire community of diverse leadership who are realizing breakthrough solutions. Every gift – large and small – really counts. Multi-year gifts and bequests assure our long-term impact. Future generations are counting on us.

Give Now

Kenny Ausubel: The End of Prehistory

The following speech was delivered by Kenny Ausubel at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

As we gather for Bioneers’ 30th anniversary conference, we stand at the end of prehistory. Nature is deregulating human affairs faster than a lobbyist can buy a politician. Global weirding is upon us.

We’re in the endgame of the Dim Ages: the collision between the state of nature and the nature of the state. Our civilization is a failed state.

The big wheels are turning. We face a reckoning: transform or perish. It’s emergence in an emergency.

There’s as much cause for hope as for horror. The good news is that we’ve done it before, and as Bioneers has shown for 30 years, in great measure the solutions are present, or we know what directions to head in. The solutions residing in nature consistently surpass our conception of what’s even possible.

We’re entering the Age of Nature. It’s high time to learn the ground rules and play by them to design a regenerative and equitable civilization.

The formula is simple: Taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature. Regeneration is the byword. Building resilience is the grail – both ecological and social.

The imperative is to fast-forward the transition to 100% clean energy, keep the oil in the ground, and, as Project Drawdown is showing, sequester carbon back where it belongs in a drawdown to 350 ppm, which is do-able with what we already know and have.

Doing what’s right for the climate means doing what’s right for everything else. It’s the reimagination of civilization in the age of nature.

Yet the thing we need most is what we have the least of: time. Slouching toward sustainability will not turn the tide. Only immediate, bold and transformative action will enable us to make the leap across the abyss. That’s what we’re here to do.

Looking back over these past three decades of Bioneers, what’s perhaps most salient is the extraordinary rise and influence of social movements and civil society. We’ve acted as the countervailing force holding back complete catastrophe, while developing and modeling real solutions for very different ways of living on Earth and with each other.

The Mayan people describe this movement of movements as “one ‘no’ and many ‘yeses.’” The “no” is to the concentration of wealth and distribution of poverty. The “yes” is to “a world where many worlds fit,” a global society devoted to health, justice, dignity, diversity, and democracy—to human rights and the rights of nature.

So, I want to honor so many of you in this room who’ve been among the visionary leaders of these movements – the tireless frontline activists – the organizers – the creators – the pathfinders – the healers – the dreamers.

As a community, we’ve shown that clean energy works. Ecological agriculture and carbon farming work. Biomimicry and Indigenous Traditional Ecological knowledge work. Restorative justice works.

Local economies – decentralized infrastructures – living buildings – permaculture – green chemistry – 3-D ocean farming – they all work.

And as Paul Stamets first showed us here in 1997, we know that mushrooms really can save the world.

Meanwhile, communities are reclaiming democracy by revoking corporate rights. Nations are instituting legally enforceable rights for nature. Beloved community and gender reconciliation are alive and growing. Reparations are on the table.

The forefront of leadership is coming from women, First Peoples, communities of color, citizens, and now from the swell of amazing young people demanding that society wake the fuck up and start acting like grownups.

Over these decades, we’ve seen these movements grow from the margins to the mainstream. Our job now is to bring them to scale.

We first began advocating for a Green New Deal here at Bioneers in 1995. What may have seemed impossible is now suddenly within reach. The questions are what it’s going to look like, how fast we can make it happen – and how we will overcome the retrograde forces pushing business as usual – and they do mean business.

One thing is for sure: The twin crises of climate chaos and extreme inequality will keep getting worse fast — and people will keep rising up in ever bigger numbers demanding and making change. That’s what happened in the 1930s and it’s happening again.

As Tom Hayden pointed out here three years ago, at the time the New Deal was gestating, it was not called the New Deal. It was called “the movement.” It crystallized from a spray of initiatives often incubated in the “laboratories of democracy” – cities and states. In a few short years, the impossible became reality.

Social security and pensions – bargaining rights for organized labor – jobs by the millions doing meaningful work that needed to be done – and a cultural renaissance that changed the mindscape and politics.

Above all, the New Deal was about redirecting government away from serving the rich to protecting the vast majority of people and the common good.

As Kevin Baker recounts in his brilliant article Where Our New World Begins, “The Great Depression was an environmental collapse every bit as much as it was an economic collapse.”

By the 1930s, five-sixths of the original indigenous animal populations that thrived when the Europeans arrived had been extinguished.

Seven-eighths of the original woodlands had been cleared. One sixth of the topsoil in the US would soon blow away in the cataclysm of the Dust Bowl.

35 million acres of previously arable land had been decimated, with another 225 million acres soon to follow. Plagues of locusts, rabbits and green worms overran the land. The topsoil of Oklahoma and Wyoming blackened the skies of New York and Chicago. Like climate disruption today, millions fled as ecological refugees.

As Baker points out, the devastation resulted from “a desperate capitalist battle, with every man for himself. If producing more crops drove down farm prices and wrecked the land, well, that was just how the market economy worked.”

The private sector offered no plan, except more of the same. The Populist Party surged, and the plutocracy attacked them as “socialists.” FDR stepped in with transformative government action guided by the remarkable understanding that the crisis had to be addressed as a whole system – the care of both people and nature.

The new Soil Conservation Service launched over 500 soil project stations, experimenting with farmers with novel practices such as terrace and contour farming. The government paid them to participate and save their farms.

The Civilian Conservation Corps employed 3 million men to plant thousands of acres of experimental drought-resistant grasses. They constructed more than eight hundred state parks and planted nearly three billion trees, including shelterbelts to secure the soil. In time, they restored more than half of the damaged land.

The programs also acknowledged nature’s limits. They resettled farmers and refugees who became the unprecedented American middle class that emerged after World War II.

And that was just a piece of the New Deal. Massive public works programs. Public health campaigns. Pre-natal and birth care for women. Libraries. Public arts.

Although the New Deal made bad mistakes and odious compromises, it got a lot right. It had been a close call. The nation could just as easily have plunged to the right. And plunging to the right is exactly what the plutocrats have been doing ever since to roll back the New Deal to get back to a government serving the rich.

The great work today of the Green New Deal is to avert climate chaos, build resilience to adapt, and lift the burdens of history once and for all. We need to overturn the New Deal’s grievous old deal with the Southern Dixiecrats to keep the racial caste system in place and build an inclusive society of jobs with justice and self-determination.

And ultimately in the ‘30s, big business coopted the economics to assure its ongoing hegemony. It was only World War II that finally lifted the nation out of the Depression.

Today the world war is to save human civilization as we know it. In the ‘30s, it boiled down to saving capitalism from itself. But this time around, capitalism may not be salvageable at all.

Beginning in the ‘90’s, corporate globalization triggered a tectonic shift of wealth and political power to a super-elite of billionaires. They launched a full-frontal corporate takeover of government.

According to Jeffrey Winters, the author of Oligarchy, wealth in the U.S. today is over “two times as concentrated as imperial Rome, which was a slave-and-farmer society.” If billionaires were a nation, they’d be the world’s 3rd largest country. Call it bottom down and top up – breadcrumbs and circuses.

As Fortune magazine CEO Alan Murray recently commented: “More and more CEOs worry that public support for the system in which they’ve operated is in danger of disappearing.”

As Farhad Manjoo wrote, “They’re worried that when the next recession breaks, revolution might, too. The coming Recession might finally prompt the masses to sharpen their pitchforks and demand a reckoning. But the CEOs now have a plan to head off revolution. They want you to know: Actually, they really do care about the world. Like, a lot. If I sound cynical, it’s only because I’m not a complete idiot. It’s all a game to the moguls in charge. Their greatest fear is that we’ll stop playing.”

So much for “the end of history” that political scientist Francis Fukuyama pronounced in 1992 following the fall of the Soviet Union. Capitalism seemed triumphant, unopposed, unassailable.

Author Mark Fisher calls it “capitalist realism.” It’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Three decades later, it’s Boom and Doom — the terminal convulsions of an oligarchic economic system bedeviled by $100 trillion dollars of stranded oil assets and the impossibility of unlimited material growth on a finite planet.

Petrostates and fossil fuel corporations are growing desperate. The frenzy of deregulation is the distress signal of a failing business model. Market trauma is in store.

Trump is just the hood ornament on the Hummer of plutocracy gone off road. Monopolies smother the economy. The roster of Fortune 500 companies reads like a rap sheet of mass crimes. It’s gangsters and warlords making feudalism great again.

Meanwhile, what Oliver Bullough calls “Moneyland” has emerged as the “dark twin of globalization.” As much as $36 trillion dollars of dark money is stashed in offshore black holes. $1 trillion dollars a year exits the world’s developing countries in laundered money and tax avoidance. By 2015, 52% of Russia’s wealth resided outside the country.

Untraceable shell companies are behind the majority of investment linked to Amazon deforestation, illegal fishing, and other crimes against nature and humanity.

Most of “Moneyland” is entirely legal. The system is the crime.

As writer Franklin Foer commented, “Thievery tramples the possibilities of workable markets and credible democracy. It fuels suspicions that the whole idea of liberal capitalism is a hypocritical sham.”

The predicament is double-barreled: Failing to imagine the end of capitalism may mean the end of the world. On the other hand, state socialism has equally failed. The ground truth is that there’s no precedent or grand model for a next economy – one that’s grounded in equity and the limits and principles of nature.

The first question is: “What’s the economy for?”

If building resilience is the goal, the priority shifts from growth and expansion to sufficiency and sustainable prosperity. Real wealth creation is based on replenishing natural systems and restoring the built environment, especially our infrastructure and cities. It’s based on investing in our communities and workforce. It works best when done all at once.

Economic re-localization creates three times as many jobs, earnings, and tax collections—as well as far greater security.

Like the New Deal era, today waves of smaller-scale models and policies are percolating from the bottom up. Gar Alperowitz and the Democracy Collaborative call it the “Pluralist Commonwealth.”

A core principle is shifting ownership of the nation’s wealth institutionally to benefit the vast majority. Ownership becomes diversified, including public, private, cooperative and worker-owned enterprises. Too-big-to-fail giants are broken up or restructured as publicly owned utilities.

Nor is there a model for what true democratic governance looks like at modern scales. We need to reclaim democracy and decentralize political and economic power to local and bioregional levels. It begins and ends with community and with building stable transgenerational community wealth and job creation.

But paradigms die hard and empires die harder.

As Charles Blow wrote, “This is a game of power, pure and simple, and it’s about whether the people who have long held power will be able to retain it…

“The Founders, a bunch of rich, powerful white men, didn’t want true democracy in this country, and in fact they were terribly afraid of it.

Now a bunch of rich, powerful white men want to return us to that sensibility.”

Naomi Klein warns against “climate barbarism,” saying “This is how the wealthy world is going to ‘adapt’ to more climate disruption: by fully unleashing toxic ideologies that rank the relative value of human lives in order to justify the monstrous discarding of huge swaths of humanity.”

It’s the last-ditch play by Billionaire Nation to make heaven a gated community – even if it’s in hell on Earth.

Instead what’s rising up is the return of the repressed. Everyone who has been othered, marginalized and deleted. The poor. Working people. Women. People of color. Indigenous Peoples. Immigrants. LGBTQ people. Young people. The last shall be first after all.

The word “crisis” comes from the Greek word krino. It means “to decide.” We need to decide what kind of future we want – and act like our lives depend on it.

It’s now o’clock.

The Mayan people call this the “Time of No Time.” Ohki Siminé Forest, a Canadian wisdom keeper of Mohawk descent who lives and works with the Mayan people in Chiapas, describes the Mayan vision in this way.

From here on, we’re on Earth time. Mother Earth is shaking to her core. It’s a time of madness, disconnection, and hyper-individualism.

It’s also a time when new energies are coming into the world, when people are growing a new skin.

The Mayan vision says that we in the West will find safe harbor only if we can journey past a wall of mirrors. The mirrors will surely drive us mad—unless we have a strong heart. Some mirrors delude us with an infinity of reflections of our vanity and shadows. Others paralyze us with our terror and rage, feeding an empire that manufactures our fear into resignation.

But the empire has no roots and it’s toppling all around us. In this time everyone is called to take a stand. Everyone is called to be a leader.

To get beyond the wall of mirrors, the final challenge is to pass through a tiny door. To do this, we must make ourselves very, very small. To be very humble. Then we must burrow down into the Earth, where indigenous consciousness lives. On the other side is a clear pond. There, for the first time, we’ll be able to see our true reflection.

In this Time of No Time, they say, we can go in any direction we want—by dreaming it. Our dreaming can shift the course of the world.

It’s going to be a long and winding trek across generations.

We’re already making some of the pathways others can walk toward our many dreams. Countless more dreamers will blaze luminous new trails.

The dreams are already within us. One day, may we awaken to find ourselves living in our wildest dreams.

Watch Kenny’s full talk here.

Bioneers 2019 Day 2: Climate Justice and Resilience

The second day of the 2019 Bioneers Conference, was dually concentrated on climate solutions and justifiable climate despair (among many, many other ideas discussed throughout the day). Bioneers reminded us that we live in a moment of great unknowing as we face a climate future that’s unlike anything humanity has previously faced. But now is the time to harness our bravery, as Valarie Kaur observed by poignantly comparing the future we face to giving birth:

“What if the darkness in our world right now is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? What if all of our ancestors who pushed through the fire before us, who survived genocide and colonization and slavery and assault, are standing behind us now whispering in our ears ‘You are brave’? What if this is our time of great transition?”

Following are some of the ideas and takeaways Bioneers introduced today.

ACTION ITEMS

Lessons and Takeaways:

• Women and mothers – step up to lead: Moms Clean Air Force‘s Heather McTeer Toney reminded us, “Mothers are realizing that our voices are required at this moment. It’s not an option, it’s a requirement. We belong in these rooms. Anyone who has an interest in seeing the welfare of our children through the impact of climate change belongs in these places.”

• Empower young people and get them outside: Many speakers today mentioned a perceived hopelessness among young people in the face of existential crises. Proposed solutions included fostering closer relationships with the Earth and inviting them into the fold as we work toward climate solutions. We’re going to need everybody in this effort, said Brett KenCairn.

• Get your money out of investments that fund pollution and destruction (divest): “Shell announced this past year that divestment had become a material risk to its business,” said author and 350.org Co-Founder Bill McKibben. Examine your investments and urge institutions to do the same. (And cut up your Chase Bank credit card.)

• Love with these three practices: From Valarie Kaur, we must “see no stranger, tend the wound, and breathe & push.”

• Learn about climate solutions, then share them in ways that resonate with real people: The Project Drawdown website has published its list of solutions. Heather McTeer Toney and Paul Hawken reminded us to speak in a language that your audience will absorb. “Mitigation?” Hawken said in reference to how the media covers the climate change. “Who wakes up in the morning and thinks ‘I can’t wait to go mitigate today’?” (Read an excerpt from Drawdown here.)

• In conversations about climate resiliency, don’t just invite Indigenous People to the table: Put them at the head of the table. Panelists in this afternoon’s “Building Resilience in a Climate-Changed World” noted that Indigenous leaders have inherited ancestral knowledge that makes them especially valuable in these conversations. Listen up.

Tell us your stories: Are there stories Bioneers should be telling? Do you have feedback for us? Reach out! Email stories@bioneers.org or call 877.BIONEER.

Campaigns to Follow and Support:

• Moms Clean Air Force (introduced by Heather McTeer Toney).

Mission: “Our mission is to protect children from air pollution and climate change. We envision a safe, stable future where all children breathe clean air.”

• The Revolutionary Love Project (introduced by Valarie Kaur).

Mission: “We produce stories, tools, curricula, conferences, films, TV moments, and mass mobilizations that equip and inspire people to practice the ethic of love. Our current projects focus on racism, nationalism, and hate against Sikh, Muslim, Arab, and South Asian American communities.”

• 350.org (introduced by Bill McKibben).

Mission: “We’re an international movement of ordinary people working to end the age of fossil fuels and build a world of community-led renewable energy for all.”

• Project Drawdown (introduced by Paul Hawken).

Mission: “Project Drawdown is helping the world stop global warming by achieving Drawdown — as quickly, safely, and equitably as possible.”

• SFEI Aquatic Science Center (introduced by Felicia Marcus).

Mission: “As sea levels continue to rise, communities will need to adapt the San Francisco Bay shoreline to create greater social, economic, and ecological resilience. A critical tool for this process is a science-based framework for developing adaptation strategies that are appropriate for the diverse shoreline of the Bay and that take advantage of natural processes. This project proposes such a framework.”

• American Indian Child Resource Center (introduced by Erica Persons).

Mission: “The American Indian Child Resource Center is a non-profit social services and educational community-based organization serving American Indian community members from across the greater Oakland/San Francisco Bay Area and surrounding counties.”

• Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (introduced by Osprey Orielle Lake).

Mission: “The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International is a solutions-based, multi-faceted organization established to engage women worldwide in policy advocacy, on-the-ground projects, direct action, trainings, and movement building for global climate justice.”

ANNOUNCEMENTS

For Conference Attendees:

Events like Bioneers often have changes up to the last minute. It’s a dynamic process and we’ll keep this page updated throughout the weekend. Most of these changes are reflected in the online program but we are presenting them here for reference.

Invest In Change!

By supporting Bioneers, you’re supporting an entire community of diverse leadership who are realizing breakthrough solutions. Every gift – large and small – really counts. Multi-year gifts and bequests assure our long-term impact. Future generations are counting on us.

Give Now

Read about our day 1 takeaways here.

Bioneers 2019 Day 1: Grief, Love, and the Power of Independent Media

Action Items: Turn Inspiration Into Real Change

The first day of the 2019 Bioneers Conference was immediately transformative. The morning’s powerful, emotional keynote addresses carried us into an afternoon filled with ideas and solutions that can guide us into the coming year.

“We are eroding together. We are evolving together,” said author Terry Tempest Williams in her keynote address. “This is the place we create from. With love, with courage, in grief, and with anger.”

Following are some of the ideas and takeaways Bioneers introduced.


ACTION ITEMS

Lessons and Takeaways:

• Allow your grief to teach you: Nina Simons told us the story of her mother’s passing, saying, “The impermanence of life is much realer to me now. Death’s nearness makes living shinier, more crystalline, full moons are fuller, foxes more breathtaking, laughter and wildness and freedom more precious. Read the full text of Nina’s speech here.

• Take a pass on the labels that polarize us: Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics at Oberlin College David Orr pointed out how the labels we adopt (democrat, republican) have a tendency to make us blind to collaborative opportunities.

• Listen to the Earth: Writer Terry Tempest Williams told us how Utah’s Castletown Tower vibrates like a heartbeat. “How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts? Hands on the Earth, we remember the source of where our power comes from.” (Find an excerpt from Terry’s latest book, Erosion, here.)

• Acknowledge your sacredness and the sacredness of those around you: “Remember anyone you deal with has a lineage,” said co-founder and director of the Sacred Circles Center Jerry Tello. “We must call to our lineage, recognize that when you hurt, I hurt, and when you heal, I heal. We must take the opportunity to bless each other.”

• Write an apology letter to yourself, from your abusers: Writer Eve Ensler described the relief she felt in writing The Apology (read an excerpt here), which was an imagined letter to her from her abusive father. “I don’t believe that the mandate is ever on the victim to forgive,” she said. “But I do believe there is an alchemy that is achieved with a true apology. That your hate and your anger release when somebody truly apologizes.”

• If you have a platform that can benefit somebody else, give it away: The incredible panelists in the “Grief, Sacred Rage, Reckoning & Revolutionary Love” afternoon session discussed the importance of uplifting others as a tool to combat rage and hopelessness.

Tell stories focused on actual human need: In the Green New Deal afternoon roundtable, Paul Hawken shared how stories about existential threats, such as climate change, don’t mobilize people; stories about concrete needs and actions do. (More on that here.)

Support initiatives and candidates trying to get big money out of politics: Several speakers point to this step as one of the biggest moves we can make to carry out several important initiatives.


Campaigns to Follow or Support:

• Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition (supporting a need raised by Terry Tempest Williams).

Mission: “To assure that the Bears Ears area will be managed forever with the greatest environmental sensitivity…where we can be among our ancestors…where we can connect with the land and be healed.”

• Sacred Circles Center (introduced by Jerry Tello).

Mission: “The Sacred Circles Center is a place for people to gather to find and affirm their ‘purpose in life,’ ​to release their baggage, and to heal their wounds.”

• Institute for Nonprofit News (introduced by Monika Bauerlein).

Mission: “To provide education and business support services to our nonprofit member organizations and promote the value and benefit of public-service and investigative journalism.”

• News Match (introduced by Marcia Parker).

Mission: “NewsMatch is a national campaign to encourage grassroots support for nonprofit news organizations.”

• The Revolutionary Love Project (introduced by Valarie Kaur).

Mission: “We produce stories, tools, curricula, conferences, films, TV moments, and mass mobilizations that equip and inspire people to practice the ethic of love. Our current projects focus on racism, nationalism, and hate against Sikh, Muslim, Arab, and South Asian American communities.”


ANNOUNCEMENTS

For Conference Attendees:

Events like Bioneers often have changes up to the last minute. It’s a dynamic process and we’ll keep this page updated throughout the weekend. Most of these changes are reflected in the online program but we are presenting them here for reference.


Invest In Change!

By supporting Bioneers, you’re supporting an entire community of diverse leadership who are realizing breakthrough solutions. Every gift – large and small – really counts. Multi-year gifts and bequests assure our long-term impact. Future generations are counting on us.

Give Now

Read about our day 2 takeaways here.