This piece was originally published on the Food Tank website. Food Tank is a nonprofit organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.
According to the 2018 State of Women-Owned Businesses report, the number of women-owned businesses increased by 58 percent from 2007 to 2018. From this, businesses owned by African-American women grew by 164 percent, which is equal to 20 percent of all women-owned businesses. Not only does this provide a huge boost to the economy, it can create jobs in local communities. Food Tank has compiled a list of 14 African-American female entrepreneurs who have incorporated sustainable food production practices into their business motto.
Based out of Los Angeles, Lynette Astaire saw a gap that needed to be filled in food education and decided to open Superfood School. As part of the program at Superfood School, Astaire conducts one-on-one consults for meal planning and advice. Additionally, clients are able to attend retreats at LiveLoft, located on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, to undergo a detox, where they receive juices and raw meals made from local produce and items grown on-site.
Located in Houston, Texas, Tamala Austin is the founder of J.I.V.E., which stands for Juicing is very essential. What started off as a home-based business is now located in Whole Foods stores in Houston. J.I.V.E. offers organic juices and smoothies, with both vegetarian and vegan options. Austin hopes to educate customers on the transition and maintenance of a healthy lifestyle that is enjoyable and sustainable.
Erika Boyd and Kirsten Ussery are co-owners of Detroit Vegan Soul. Ussery is general manger and in house baker and Boyd is the executive chef. The two saw that there was a lack of accessibility to good, nutritious food available to the people of their community and took it upon themselves to prove that it is possible to eat good tasting comfort foods that are also healthy. What started as a meal delivery and catering service in Downtown Detroit quickly became a full-fledged restaurant, which can now be found at two locations in Detroit. What makes Ussery and Boyd unique is that they are always putting eco-friendly practices at the forefront of their decisions making. For example, all produce used in the restaurant is sourced from local organic farmers and all food waste generated at the restaurant is returned to the farms and used as compost.
What started as a means of creating healthy and nutritious beverages in a pinch became a full-time career for the owner of Sol Sips in Brooklyn, New York, Francesca Chaney. At first, Chaney made organic drinks using a maximum of four ingredients and sold them at pop-up events. She quickly realized that there was demand for healthy, simple and nutritious foods and beverages and made the decision to open her own business. Chaney wants everyone in her community to have the opportunity to enjoy healthy foods, which is why she implemented a sliding scale brunch every Saturday, where customers pay between US$7 and US$15, whatever they can comfortably afford.
Julia Collins is co-founder and the former President of Zume Pizza located in Mountain view, California, a food company that is best known for its use of robotic technology to create healthy accessible food. Unlike most delivery pizza, Zume Pizza is cooked en-route to its destination, with no added sugars or chemicals. All of the ingredients found in their pizza is sourced from local farmers that use sustainable and ethical farming practices. And although they utilize robots in their production chain to perform the more dangerous jobs, like removing the pizza’s from the oven, Zume Pizza is conscientious of job creation and hopes that by sourcing ingredients from local farms, more companies will follow suite, resulting in more business to local farms. Additionally, although automation is generally associated with job loss, historically, advancements in technology have led to job creation. With the cost savings through the use of automation, Zume Pizza is able to pay their employees liveable wages (US$18/hour) and all of their employees have fully subsidized health insurance plans.
As founder and executive director of The Black Feminist Project, Tanya Fields is a food justice activist and educator. And Fields started the Libertad Urban Farm, an organic urban garden in the Bronx, as an effort to address the lack of nutritious food and food education accessible to low-income people, specifically underserved women of color. Additionally, Fields works closely with The Hunts Point Farm Share, connecting city residents to high quality local produce through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).
Located in Baltimore, Pure chocolate by Jinji was co-founded in 2012 by Jinji Fraser. Fraser sources the cacao used to make the chocolate through growers in Ecuador who she personally met. Knowing who was growing the beans and that they were being treated well was her primary concern, along with knowing that the cacao was grown sustainably by ensuring the region was well suited for cacao growth. Fraser intentionally selects seasonal ingredients from local providers and every chocolate is handcrafted and free from dairy products and all refined sugars.
Based in Southwest Berkeley, California, Kanchan Dawn Hunter is co-creator of Spiral Gardens, a nursery, community farm and produce stand. A day in the life of Hunter at Spiral Gardens generally involves educating children and adults in agriculture, from plant identification, growing, harvesting, and preparing, Hunter explains all the steps required from soil to table. Spiral Gardens provides an opportunity for members of the community to grow organic vegetables and then to enjoy their harvest. Every Tuesday Spiral Gardens hosts a “Produce Stand” where they sell fresh organic fruits and vegetables from local family farms to the community at cost. Hunter is most passionate about creating transparency and accessibility of food and farming to people that are most often kept from it.
Cynthia Nevels is the owner of the Dallas based award-winning food truck SoulGood. The food truck serves vegan and vegetarian dishes with locally sourced organic produce. The reason she decided to start her own business was to honor her son’s life, who lost his battle to cystic fibrosis. The vegan and vegetarian dishes she serves at her food truck are those she would make for her son while he was waiting for an organ transplant. During this difficult time, Nevel felt the one thing that she could control was the delivery of healthy and nutritious food to her son. She hopes to share these nutritious meals with her community and to spread awareness of healthy living.
Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Jamila Norman is a world-renowned urban farmer and food activist. In 2010, Norman founded Patchwork City Farms, a certified naturally grown organic urban farm where she is the sole farmer. Norman’s passion for farming is fueled by nature and the ability to feed and educate her community with safe and nutritious foods. Norman is also involved in other organizations within the world of food justice and equity. She is co-founder of EAT Where You Are, an initiative that aims to spread awareness of the importance of including fresh foods in diets, and is a contributing author to OASIS (Oldways Africana Soup in Stories). And Norman is the manager and one of the founding members of the South West Atlanta Growers Cooperative, which supports Black farmers of Atlanta in creating an equitable food system that encompasses environmental sustainability and cultural responsibility.
Leah Penniman co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 and, as co-director and program manager at the farm, fills many roles. Penniman is a farmer, trainer, author, speaker, advocate for food justice and winner of the 2019 James Beard Foundation Award. The mission at Soul Fire Farm is to end racism and injustice within the food system. This message is portrayed in Penniman’s novel Farming While Black, a comprehensive manual for small-scale African-heritage farmers in reclaiming their place in the food system utilizing traditional farming practices and regaining their connection to land. Through training of the next generation of food activist-farmers, Soul Fire Farm aims to promote sustainable agriculture and environmental justice while maintaining food sovereignty.
Safia Rashid is certified in sustainable urban agriculture and is the owner of Your Bountiful Harvest located in Chicago, Illinois, a sustainable urban farm and garden consultation service. Whether the need is advice, guidance, or to purchase organic seedlings, Your Bountiful Harvest covers it, with on-site visits to home gardens and greenspaces. Rashid’s main goal is to teach people the skills required to increase and improve their food self-sufficiency while using sustainable farming practices.
As owner and operator of Three Part Harmony Farm in northeast Washington, D.C., Gail Taylor supplies organic and local produce to her community through a multi-farm CSA, meaning that the share of fresh produce will include produce from partner farms, expanding the array of veggies that one receives. Not only does Three Part Harmony exist to provide nutritious foods to D.C. residents, it also seeks to establish an ethical, robust, and fair food economy while bringing awareness and uprooting the racism engraved in the food system.
New York Native Karen Washington has dedicated decades of her life to advocating for justice in the food system and has promoted urban farming as a means of generating access to fresh local food for New Yorkers. Karen has been involved in various organizations that promote food justice including Just Food, Farm School NYC, Black Urban Growers (which she co-founded), and NYC Community Gardens Coalition. Currently, Karen owns and operates Rise & Root Farm, a cooperatively run organic farm in Orange County.
Feature Image Courtesy of Nation Swell, Karen Washington.
Kandi Mosset is a mother and member of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation of North Dakota. She is known worldwide for her involvement on the frontlines of the protests at Standing Rock and as a leading voice in the fight against environmental racism. subsequent leadership on pipeline and resource extraction activism. Along with fellow water protectors, Mosset traveled from the protests in South Dakota to the 2016 Bioneers Conference to provide an update on Standing Rock that reached millions and returned to share a deeply moving keynote address in 2017. She currently works with the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) as Lead Organizer of the Extreme Energy and Just Transition Campaign, and she previously served as the IEN’s Tribal Campus Climate Challenge Coordinator. Mosset is passionate about bringing visibility to the impacts of climate change and environmental injustice, specifically those affecting Indigenous communities throughout the world.
Bioneers was thrilled to interview Kandi Mosset about the significance of the fight at Standing Rock for humanity’s fight to protect Mother Earth. This is an edited excerpt of that interview.
We say
Mother Earth because the mother provides and keeps a child alive for the first
few years at least. On planet Earth, the food is grown in the soil, the air we
breathe. When we say Mni Wiconi, “water is life”, it’s more than just a saying.
The very essence of being alive is water, because we are made up of it, it’s
all around us, it’s in us. If we abuse the water, we’re abusing ourselves.
All of these things are connected. All of these ecosystems are circular. The problem with the world today is that a lot of things are very square. We like to put things in boxes. We like to label things in boxes. We like to live in boxes. It’s allowed us to be disconnected from the very essence of ourselves, which is that we are part of the system; not above it, not beside it, not over it, under it, we are part of it. Reaffirming and understanding that as humanity is being brought back because of what we’ve been able to show with the fight at Standing Rock.
This moment we find ourselves in was prophesized 200 or 300 years ago. The major fights against Dakota Access Pipeline and the on-the-ground fights were on sacred sites. There are over 380 sacred sites in that corridor, and there’s a lot buried under the ground that people don’t see. Medicine was put there to make sure that diverse nations who were traditional enemies could gather together there and trade. We each had our own skill sets. My tribe, for example, Mandan Hidatsa Arikara, are farming tribes. We lived along the Missouri, and we had water for irrigation. So we would have more of the farming goods – the corn, the squash, the beans – whereas another tribe would have meat. And so we recognize diversity even in ourselves, and recognize that, even as traditional enemies, we relied upon each other for those times of trade. People would tell the stories to the youth, the future generations, about how it was really important to listen and understand each other, because the significance of the medicine would come up again. And here we are. And it is significant.
With the fight at Standing Rock, we’ve been able to show that over 500 tribes can still get together for the same cause, which is for justice and for truth and reconciliation, and for a change of the system. That fight has helped that whole narrative move forward, so that people understand that it wasn’t just about Indigenous Peoples, it was people in general reaffirming your attachment to the sacred, or reaffirming yourself as an individual. It doesn’t matter the color of your skin or whatever, you have to do that as a human living on the planet.
There’s also the Hopi prophecy about how all of the people of the rainbow would again gather and unite, and that’s what would change the world. What they mean by the rainbow is there’s all different colors of people. It’s not just us as Native people. We have our allies that stood and are standing in solidarity with us. It was about more than just the pipeline, it was about capitalism and colonialism, and how we have to decolonize our minds and our bodies and our spirits.
That’s where the theme of Indigenous Rising comes from. We never have changed the narrative, and what we’ve been saying for over 500 years is that capitalism is not sustainable. Greed could be our undoing, and we had to recognize that, not just as Native people, but as humanity.
So to see it actually come alive during that time, personally, gives me goosebumps — when I talk about how it could be the change that the entire world needs to see, that there is a different way.
Julian Brave NoiseCat (Secwepemc and St’at’imc) is a 26-year-old Indigenous journalist, activist and policy analyst. As Director of Green New Deal Strategy at Data for Progress and Narrative Change Director at the Natural History Museum, his work is largely focused on environmental justice and Indigenous issues — and where the two overlap.
NoiseCat’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, in which he recently covered the highly publicized standoff between high school students and a Native American man in Washington, D.C. (“It appears that a great deal of this nation … is not ready to look at the nasty complexity of racism, power and privilege squarely in the face and tell the truth.”); The Nation, in which he profiled Native Congresswoman Deb Haaland; The Paris Review, in which he wrote about the new Native literature renaissance (“In a cultural moment defined by fear of ecological apocalypse, democratic decline and legitimized white supremacy, newfound interest in Native writers—who speak with the authority of a people who lived through genocide and survived to talk about it—makes sense.”); and several other publications.
We caught up with NoiseCat to discuss the experiences that set him on a pathway toward storytelling, the value of strong leadership within his generation, and what he hopes to achieve by the time he turns 30.
BIONEERS: Tell us a little bit about your pathway toward becoming a media maker and why storytelling is so important to you.
Julian Brave NoiseCat
JULIAN: The reason why storytelling is so important to me is that I grew up believing that, as an Indigenous person, I did not see myself in the stories that I was encountering in the broader culture and definitely in school. But I also believed, because my father is a Native artist and because I had very strong pride in who I was and in my difference, that, as an indigenous person, I had something to say and something to contribute.
Every opportunity I got, I would read the writings, for example, of Sherman Alexie, which were really impactful to me. And I would try to emulate that. Somewhere, stored away, I have a short story that I wrote when I was in fifth grade that was supposed to be in the voice of Sherman Alexie.
I think believing that I had something important to say led me down this path, and also being encouraged by my mom and lots of teachers. I was also fortunate enough to grow up in a place like Oakland, where nobody would scoff at the idea that a young Indigenous guy would have something to say and that people should listen.
All of that gave me a sense that my voice could matter and have an impact. And then, I went to college, and I did some writing for the campus newspaper and got a summer gig with the Huffington Post after I graduated. I just kept pushing for those kinds of opportunities. I’ve been very fortunate to get a lot of opportunities in the writing and journalism world at a younger age. But also, I think I’ve been pretty willing to put myself out there and to keep trying. And I’ve faced a fair amount of rejection as well.
BIONEERS: You mentioned your mom, and you mentioned Sherman Alexie. Who are some other people who you look up to, who influence your work?
JULIAN: I was born in Minnesota. I remember, when I was 11, we went to the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., in part because my dad had a piece that was featured there. We ran into Jim Northrup, the late Indigenous poet from Minnesota, on the National Mall, and he read his poem, “Indian Car,” to me. That moment always has stuck with me as being really powerful.
I also participated in the Martin Luther King Oratorical Fest when I was a kid, which was in the Oakland Unified School District. Being surrounded by that activist culture, and in particular, in Oakland, the black church activist tradition, really emphasized oratory and voice, which had a longstanding impact on my development.
BIONEERS: What are some of the biggest issues you see facing your generation and the people you care about right now?
JULIAN: Climate change is the big one. Also, more broadly speaking, just a sense of precariousness for millennials. We are coming of age in a world that is economically very difficult to be viable in. Rising costs of living and declining wages are very real. We’re seeing way less protection for workers than ever before, and in the media field in particular. There’s a complete destabilization of the business model for journalism, sort of wrought by big tech.
In the last few years, we’ve also seen a real sense of political destabilization, with the rise of proto-fascist and sometimes outrightly fascist movements along with a resurgent right wing.
BIONEERS: All of those things being the case, do you have hope that we can turn this ship around?
JULIAN: There are some very powerful rising social movements, many of which are being led by young people, as is the case with my friends in the Sunrise Movement. That is incredibly inspiring to me.
In the Indigenous world, the movement at Standing Rock was initiated by the youth of Standing Rock, who met with Barack Obama in 2014. Then, when the Dakota Access Pipeline was threatening their water and their homes, they led a run to Washington, D.C. to raise awareness of this issue. That was really the beginning of the campaign.
Throughout Standing Rock, there was a group called the International Indigenous Youth Council, and they were literally organizing without laptops. All they had were iPhones. Before the Green New Deal, Standing Rock was the headline environmental movement in the United States. In that moment, groups like the International Indigenous Youth Council weren’t even getting the resources to have their own computers.
Whenever I go out and report in Indigenous communities, I am always amazed by how much communities and nations and organizers, governments, social workers, creators, artists, all of these people who are relatives and friends, are doing with so little. That is always incredibly inspiring to me. At the core of it, being part of that is really the reason why I write and work: to hopefully make a contribution to that big picture.
BIONEERS: If one of your peers were to approach you and ask, “What is the biggest action I can take to improve the world for future generations?” what would you tell them?
JULIAN: I think that the biggest action we can take as young people is to stand with the young people out there, who are organizing in their communities, fighting back against climate change, environmental degradation, democratic decline, economic injustice, social injustice, gender injustice, racism. I think the biggest thing young people can do is to join that monumental struggle. I would just encourage young people to look to their left and look to their right at their fellow young people who are already doing amazing stuff, and believe that they can do it.
BIONEERS: What does it mean to you to “stand with” people who are taking action?
JULIAN: First, I think it means to show up, whether that be in person or even online. It means showing up when, for example, our Jewish brothers and sisters or our Muslim brothers and sisters or our black brothers and sisters or our queer brothers and sisters are under threat or being attacked by forces that aim to divide us; showing that we see their wellbeing, their health, and their prosperity as integral to our own health and happiness and prosperity.
Fundamentally, it’s about seeing all of our struggles as interconnected, all of our destinies as interconnected, and therefore seeking to do one of the things that humans are uniquely good at, which is to be compassionate as a species, and then to cooperate, to try to take on these big challenges together to make them a little less scary.
BIONEERS: Tell us about what you’ll be working on in the next couple of years.
JULIAN: I’m hoping to write my first book before I’m 30. I really want to write a book about Indigenous current affairs: pain that endures and is still inflicted upon Indigenous people and communities and bodies, but also the resilience and resurgence of those communities that I’ve seen and reported on throughout North America and beyond.
BIONEERS: What excites you most about coming to Bioneers this year?
JULIAN: The people. For folks who are engaged in environmental work, it’s a gathering place, and it’s an opportunity to see people you might not have seen the rest of the year.
Also, personally, I grew up in Oakland, California, so Bioneers is an opportunity for me to go home, to get out of D.C. I’m always excited to get back to my roots, see my mom and see my friends and girlfriend.
As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deal proposals have appeared in the U.S. and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them. Monetary policy, normally relegated to obscure academic tomes and bureaucratic meetings behind closed doors, has suddenly taken center stage.
The 14-page proposal for a Green New Deal submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., does not actually mention Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), but that is the approach currently capturing the attention of the media—and taking most of the heat. The concept is good: Abundance can be ours without worrying about taxes or debt, at least until we hit full productive capacity. But, as with most theories, the devil is in the details.
MMT advocates say the government does not need to collect taxes before it spends. It actually creates new money in the process of spending it; and there is plenty of room in the economy for public spending before demand outstrips supply, driving up prices.
Critics, however, insist this is not true. The government is not allowed to spend before it has the money in its account, and the money must come from tax revenues or bond sales.
In a 2013 treatise called “Modern Monetary Theory 101: A Reply to Critics,” MMT academics concede this point. But they write, “These constraints do not change the end result.” And here the argument gets a bit technical. Their reasoning is that “the Fed is the monopoly supplier of CB currency [central bank reserves], Treasury spends by using CB currency, and since the Treasury obtained CB currency by taxing and issuing treasuries, CB currency must be injected before taxes and bond offerings can occur.”
The counterargument, made by American Monetary Institute (AMI) researchers, among others, is that the central bank is not the monopoly supplier of dollars. The vast majority of the dollars circulating in the United States are created, not by the government, but by private banks when they make loans. The Fed accommodates this process by supplying central bank currency (bank reserves) as needed, and this bank-created money can be taxed or borrowed by the Treasury before a single dollar is spent by Congress. The AMI researchers contend, “All bank reserves are originally created by the Fed for banks. Government expenditure merely transfers (previous) bank reserves back to banks.” As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts it, “federal deficits do not require that the Federal Reserve purchase more government securities; therefore, federal deficits, per se, need not lead to increases in bank reserves or the money supply.”
What federal deficits do increase is the federal debt; and while the debt itself can be rolled over from year to year (as it virtually always is), the exponentially growing interest tab is one of those mandatory budget items that taxpayers must pay. Predictions are that in the next decade, interest alone could add $1 trillion to the annual bill, an unsustainable tax burden.
To fund a project as massive as the Green New Deal, we need a mechanism that involves neither raising taxes nor adding to the federal debt; and such a mechanism is proposed in the U.S. Green New Deal itself—a network of public banks. While little discussed in the U.S. media, that alternative is being debated in Europe, where Green New Deal proposals have been on the table since 2008. European economists have had more time to think these initiatives through, and they are less hampered by labels like “socialist” and “capitalist,” which have long been integrated into their multi-party systems.
A Decade of Gestation in Europe
The first Green New Deal proposal was published in 2008 by the New Economics Foundation on behalf of the Green New Deal Group in the U.K. The latest debate is between proponents of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), led by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, and French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling “Capital in the 21st Century.” Piketty recommends funding a European Green New Deal by raising taxes, while Varoufakis favors a system of public green banks.
Varoufakis explains that Europe needs a new source of investment money that does not involve higher taxes or government deficits. For this purpose, DiEM25 proposes “an investment-led recovery, or New Deal, program … to be financed via public bonds issued by Europe’s public investment banks (e.g., the new investment vehicle foreshadowed in countries like Britain, the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund in the European Union, etc.).”
To ensure that these bonds do not lose their value, the central banks would stand ready to buy them above a certain yield. “In summary, DiEM25 is proposing a re-calibrated real-green investment version of Quantitative Easing that utilizes the central bank.”
Public development banks already have a successful track record in Europe, and their debts are not considered government debts. They are financed not through taxes but by the borrowers when they repay the loans. Like other banks, development banks are money-making institutions that not only don’t cost the government money but actually generate a profit for it. DiEM25 collaborator Stuart Holland observes:
While Piketty is concerned to highlight differences between his proposals and those for a Green New Deal, the real difference between them is that his—however well-intentioned—are a wish list for a new treaty, a new institution and taxation of wealth and income. A Green New Deal needs neither treaty revisions nor new institutions and would generate both income and direct and indirect taxation from a recovery of employment. It is grounded in the precedent of the success of the bond-funded, Roosevelt New Deal which, from 1933 to 1941, reduced unemployment from over a fifth to less than a tenth, with an average annual fiscal deficit of only 3 percent.
Roosevelt’s New Deal was largely funded through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a public financial institution set up earlier by President Hoover. Its funding source was the sale of bonds, but proceeds from the loans repaid the bonds, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms and much more; and it funded all this while generating income for the government.
A System of Public Banks and “Green QE”
The U.S. Green New Deal envisions funding with “a combination of the Federal Reserve [and] a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks,” which could include banks owned locally by cities and states. As Sylvia Chi, chair of the legislative committee of the California Public Banking Alliance, explains:
The Green New Deal relies on a network of public banks — like a decentralized version of the RFC — as part of the plan to help finance the contemplated public investments. This approach has worked in Germany, where public banks have been integral in financing renewable energy installations and energy efficiency retrofits.
Local or regional public banks, Chi says, could help pay for the Green New Deal by making “low-interest loans for building and upgrading infrastructure, deploying clean energy resources, transforming our food and transportation systems to be more sustainable and accessible, and other projects. The federal government can help by, for example, capitalizing public banks, setting environmental or social responsibility standards for loan programs, or tying tax incentives to participating in public bank loans.”
U.K. professor Richard Murphy adds another role for the central bank—as the issuer of new money in the form of “Green Infrastructure Quantitative Easing.” Murphy, who was a member of the original 2008 U.K. Green New Deal Group, explains:
All QE works by the [central bank] buying debt issued by the government or other bodies using money that it, quite literally, creates out of thin air. … [T]his money creation process is … what happens every time a bank makes a loan. All that is unusual is that we are suggesting that the funds created by the [central bank] using this process be used to buy back debt that is due by the government in one of its many forms, meaning that it is effectively canceled.
The invariable objection to that solution is that it would act as an inflationary force driving up prices, but as argued in an earlier article of mine, this need not be the case. There is a chronic gap between debt and the money available to repay it that needs to be filled with new money every year to avoid a “balance sheet recession.” As U.K. professor Mary Mellor formulates the problem in her book “Debt or Democracy” (2016):
A major contradiction of tying money supply to debt is that the creators of the money always want more money back than they have issued. Debt-based money must be continually repaid with interest. As money is continually being repaid, new debt must be being generated if the money supply is to be maintained. … This builds a growth dynamic into the money supply that would frustrate the aims of those who seek to achieve a more socially and ecologically sustainable economy.
In addition to interest, says Mellor, there is the problem that bankers and other rich people generally do not return their profits to local economies. Unlike public banks, which must use their profits for local needs, the wealthy mostly hoard their money, invest it in the speculative markets, hide it in offshore tax havens or send it abroad.
To avoid the cyclical booms and busts that have routinely devastated the U.S. economy, this missing money needs to be replaced; and if the new money is used to pay down debt, it will be extinguished along with the debt, leaving the overall money supply and the inflation rate unchanged. If too much money is added to the economy, it can always be taxed back; but as MMTers note, we are a long way from the full productive capacity that would “overheat” the economy today.
Murphy writes of his Green QE proposal:
The QE program that was put in place between 2009 and 2012 had just one central purpose, which was to refinance the City of London and its banks. … What we are suggesting is a smaller programme … to kickstart the UK economy by investing in all those things that we would wish our children to inherit whilst creating the opportunities for everyone in every city, town, village and hamlet in the UK to undertake meaningful and appropriately paid work.
A network of public banks, including a central bank operated as a public utility, could similarly fund a U.S. Green New Deal—without raising taxes, driving up the federal debt or inflating prices.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”
Mark Schapiro is an award-winning environmental investigative journalist whose work has appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Mother Jones, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of Seeds of Resistance: The Fight for Our Food Supply.
In this transcribed excerpt from his presentation at the 2018 Bioneers Conference, Mark tells a truly fascinating story that weaves together American foreign policy, agricultural heritage harkening back to the birth of western civilization and how an Italian seed breeder working for the United Nations in the Middle East managed to shepherd a refugee seed collection through two wars in hopes of preserving an ancient genetic treasure that could help farmers adapt to climate change.
Investigative Journalist Mark Schapiro speaks at Bioneers 2018 as part of a panel on Evolutionary Plant Breeding, also featuring Cooper Freeman, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Program Manager; Leonard Diggs, Manager of Santa Rosa Junior College’s Shone Farm
When thinking about seeds, it’s important to understand the convergence of a couple of different events. First, we have a very powerful convergence of control over the seed industry. Three companies, all of which are chemical companies, now control over half of all commercially traded seeds. Secondly, you have very dramatic changes happening in the conditions for growing food, which are challenging the current model of agriculture.
In my previous book Carbon Shock, I wrote about climate change and all the ways in which it is putting pressure on our economy, our political systems, and the way we understand resources. I learned, from farmers in the Central Valley of California and all over the world, how conditions were changing from the way that farmers had grown up thinking they would be. Both organic farmers and conventional farmers are experiencing very profound change.
One of the questions that I wanted to ask as a journalist was, “What do those profound changes mean for the types of seeds that people use? And what do those changes mean at a time when the consolidation is increasing and a movement in response to that consolidation is also expanding rapidly.” I tried, in my book, to tell stories about the people that are involved in this struggle that is underway, and how this plays out for people all over the world.
War Zone in the Birthplace of Agriculture
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the city of Abu Ghraib became infamous as the location of the prison where horrible things were done by American soldiers to Iraqi prisoners. Prior to 2003, Abu Ghraib was renowned for being the host to an extremely important seed bank that collected seeds from all over that region. Iraq is the center of the fertile crescent and Abu Ghraib is located in the great Delta, the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which was the birthplace of domesticated agriculture. Seeds that have been planted for many, many centuries began their journey into our ecosystem in the Delta of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which means these seeds in Abu Ghraib were some of the most ancient domesticated seeds on the planet.
The conditions in that part of Iraq and the Middle East are hot and dry, which means that the seeds that have grown up there have become tolerant to extreme levels of heat and extreme levels of drought. Even during the crazy realm of Saddam Hussein, scientists would come from all over the world to study these seeds, and in some cases, bring them back to their home regions. It was a fantastic center for exchanging seeds.
In April 2003, American troops rolled into Iraq and made their way pretty quickly to Baghdad. As the fighting got more and more intense around Baghdad, the seed bank was hit by a random rocket – it’s unclear whether it was an American rocket or rocket from the Iraqi defenders – and the seed bank was rattled and almost destroyed.
A group of Iraqi scientists went into that seed bank and salvaged whatever seeds they could, threw them into a van and raced them across the border to safety in Syria. They drove the van to a small town called Tal Hadya, which is about 15 miles from Aleppo. In Tal Hadya there is a seed research center called the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). ICARDA, one of the UN’s network of seed research institutions, welcomed the refugee seeds. Some of the staff from ICARDA were familiar with these plants because they spent time training people in Iraq. There had been active exchanges between Tal Hadya and Abu Ghraib. Seeds from Abu Ghraib had been planted and were also preserved in the vault at ICARDA.
Growing a Mix of Seed Varieties
There they grew out many different seed varieties – millet, barley, wheat, numerous varieties of beans, peas, etc. Anyone familiar with the foods of the Middle East knows how much diversity there is and how much tasty food there is, much of which emanates originally from multiple thousands of years ago in the region.
Nobody was paying attention to the ICARDA facility 10-20 years ago. It was just another agricultural institution for dry regions. But now the climate of many places is becoming more like those hot dry areas; large parts of the United States, as well as other parts of the world, resemble the Middle East. The seed bank outside of Aleppo had become an extremely important institution.
For about 10 years the Iraqi seeds were grown out – the whole mix of different related varieties together – at the Syrian seed bank. Syrian farmers traditionally grow wheat with multiple varieties in the same field.
Agriculture, Climate and Conflict
Then war came to Syria. There are many different tensions that contributed to the war, but one was related to agriculture. By 2010, the Syrian government was pursuing an effort to consolidate farms into larger and larger operations that used more uniform seeds. Then a drought hit. The newer uniform seeds were much less responsive to drought than the traditional seeds may have been. The drought decimated the farmer’s crops. There were multiple causes that led to the tensions in Syria, but that is one factor that I’ve seen convincingly argued.
Aleppo was a redoubt of the rebels for many years, and was one of the strongest centers of resistance in a horrible civil war that has been tearing Syria apart. So the rebels took control of the seed bank.
I talked to scientists who were there at that time. The rebel commander who took control of the area around Tal Hadya, just 15 miles from Aleppo, was a farmer. He understood exactly the importance of this seed bank, and he struck a deal with the scientists. He said, “We’ll keep your electricity going and we’ll get you diesel to run the tractors so you can keep growing your plants, I just want you to provide food to help feed the troops.” The UN had lost control of the area, so it was the rebels and the scientists who cut a deal.
That deal lasted until the fall of 2016, when the government forces of Bashar Assad launched attacks on Aleppo. They were horrible and brutal. There were barrel bombs. Many, many innocent people were killed during that time period.
As the war came closer and closer to Tal Hadya, the electricity started failing. So, a group of scientists bundled a whole bunch of seeds from the Tal Hadya seed bank into a van and raced them across the border into Lebanon, where they are being grown out today in the Bekaa Valley, which is controlled by Hezbollah who are completely cool with this enterprise. The scientists affiliated with the UN are now going in and out of this area and trying to keep those seeds from Syria and Iraq alive. The efforts by those scientists to save the seeds illustrates how important the world perceives these seeds to be.
Saving the Seeds, Continuing the Experiment
Italian scientist, Salvatore Ceccarelli, an ingenious seed breeding pioneer who worked for 25 years at the seed bank outside of Aleppo, took two 20 kilo sacks of wheat seeds that he was responsible for, put them on an airplane and took them to Italy. The seeds in the sacks were a mix of several different varieties. He turned them over to a rural seed NGO in Italy, which then dispersed them to several farmers in Tuscany and Sicily.
What does it mean to grow out a population of seeds? The broad genetics of the different varieties gives the whole mix a greater resilience to varying and extreme weather conditions. Italy has been undergoing a severe drought and severe rise in temperatures, causing extreme stress on commercial wheat and creating a serious crisis in the pasta industry. This mixed population of seeds grown together is evolving over several years and is producing very hardy wheat crops.
It is a fascinating experiment. The Tuscany wheat produces a higher yield than the Sicily wheat because there’s more rain in Tuscany. Both are being called the Aleppo mix in recognition of where these seeds came from.
But the only seeds you can legally sell in the market in Europe and in the United States are seeds that are single varieties, one type of seed that’s repetitive and that guarantees that it will essentially reproduce the same plant characteristics over multiple generations. In contrast, the seed mix evolves and adapts to changing conditions.
While Ceccarelli was doing this experiment, a coalition of agricultural groups lobbied the European Union in Brussels. Based on scientific arguments, they convinced the European Union to wave a set of laws that require that seeds be of a single variety allowing this population of wheat seeds, as well as some barley and millet, to be grown.
The highly successful experiment ran for about five years in Italy until it ended in December of 2018. The thesis of the experiment is that breeding multiple varieties of seeds with a broad range of genetics in the same field leads to crops that are able to respond to a broad set of environmental conditions. Ceccarelli’s argument is that this approach is the best way for farmers to respond to climatic changes.
Editors Note: Our deepest thanks to Mark Shapiro for telling this story at Bioneers – and, as usual, it doesn’t stop here. Learn more about a project in the US inspired by Dr. Ceccarelli’s work. The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and Shone Farm of Santa Rosa Junior College are conducting an Evolutionary Plant Breeding Project, implementing some of the same techniques in their fields in northern California.
As Bobby Kennedy Jr. said, “Dr.James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos – a modern-day hero who has braved criticism and censure and put his career and fortune at stake to issue the call to arms against the apocalyptic forces of ignorance and greed.” Among the world’s top climate scientists, Dr. James Hansen describes the dire urgency for dramatic global climate action, including the immediate end to new coal plants. Since 1981 he has served as head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He will share his personal odyssey into climate action, including civil disobedience.
This speech was presented at the 2010 Bioneers National Conference.
Chloe Maxmin represents District 88 in the Maine House of Representatives. She’s the youngest woman in the Maine House of Representatives and won her election running as a Democrat in a district that is one of the oldest in the state and had never elected a Democratic to the state house.
Representative Maxmin has been active in climate organizing and politics since she was barely a teenager. She co-founded Divest Harvard, has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Brower Youth Award, and is a contributor and fellow at The Nation. We first met Chloe when she gave a keynote address to the Bioneers Conference in 2014 and have been witness go the leadership that she’s shown on a regular basis at national and local levels since then. Chloe generously paused her busy schedule to speak with Bioneers’ Teo Grossman about the groundbreaking Green New Deal for Maine, the power of youth movements today, and the big question of whether our current system is capable of dealing with the challenges we face.
TEO GROSSMAN, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMS & RESEARCH, BIONEERS: We spoke with you last year during your primary race. You’ve since won the election and taken office. Congratulations! I’m curious what it feels like now, having won the election, now you are actually representing all the people in your district, which is a different job than campaigning for them, I suppose.
REP. CHLOE MAXMIN (D – NOBLEBORO), MAINE: Thank you! It is a very different job than campaigning. It’s kind of ironic to me how they’re two completely different skill sets but both vital and complementary if done right. It is an honor to represent my community and my home that I love. I represent a very conservative community, even though I’m a Democrat. A lot of people put their faith and trust in me, and that is something that I think about every day and will never take lightly. I am very committed to actually representing my district, which should be obvious but it actually seems to be kind of novel to always be asking, “What does my district think?” whenever we’re going to take a vote in Augusta.
Sign for Chloe Maxmin’s recent campaign.
When I really think about it, I don’t think of myself as somebody who is on the inside of the system. I’ve fought outside the system for so long and been so frustrated at its lack of empathy, urgency, attentiveness, representation. I am really trying to do things differently and to focus most of my energy on how I can bridge what’s happening in Augusta and in these political spaces with the realities in my community and among my constituents, what we’re talking about, and what we’re thinking about.
REP. MAXMIN: Yes, I sponsored Maine’s Green New Deal. It genuinely came out of conversations I had when I was knocking on doors in my district. I live in a very rural natural resources-based community, and we don’t really talk about climate change, we don’t really talk about green jobs, but everything I heard was, “We want good jobs, we want growing industries, we want to protect our natural resources, we want to lower our property taxes, we want to make sure that we’re really boosting vocational training and technical training.” All these different themes to me are what a Green New Deal mean. It’s an economic revitalization strategy.
I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to push a climate bill or not because I’m just so frustrated with how politics deals with climate change, but I decided to do this and call it a Green New Deal to really call attention to a radically different way of thinking and talking about climate policy in Maine specifically but also in general. What we created is targeted legislation instead of a very broad resolution, and it’s very Maine specific. It leaves out some big things like agriculture and transportation, but that’s because we really focused on economic growth and rural development.
The other unique thing about our bill is that, since day one, the labor community has been involved with crafting it. One of the main purposes of the bill is to build a broad platform so that we can have broad political power instead of a niche political power, which is how it usually works in Maine. As we transition to renewable energy, the bill is asking how we make sure that all Mainers are treated fairly and equitably.
The first part of the bill is the Renewable Energy Mandate, which moves Maine to 80% renewable energy electricity consumption by 2040, about double where we are right now. The second part of the bill creates a task force on a Green New Deal, which is where a lot of these green jobs programs will be fleshed out. These are going to be major programs, and they have to be thought through and researched before we just throw in legislation. The other big part of that task force is creating a subsidy for solar power and heat pumps for low-income homes in our low-income heating program and tax incentives for middle class homes that want to go solar. Again, we are focusing on the most vulnerable folks as we make this transition.
The third part of the bill is Solar on Schools, which will create a voluntary net metering program for public schools in Maine. We’re teaming up with a bond proposal that would increase access to renewable energy for schools. This is an educational opportunity, a labor/economic growth opportunity, but also will lower the costs of operating our schools so that our property taxes aren’t going up.
The last part of the bill is a Commission on a Just Transition, which is a body that will report annually on how/if our renewable energy transition is just and equitable. The task force and the commission both have very unique memberships. The task force has young folks, climate scientists, local energy developers, people from frontline communities, labor voices, people who have an existential stake in making this transition just and rapid. The Commission on a Just Transition includes people who are impacted by this transition. So we’re really bringing to the table all of these voices that have been traditionally left out of this conversation.
I debated whether or not to keep the title of the bill the “Maine Green New Deal” because it’s now become very contentious, and it was not back when I first thought of this. I decided to keep it because I knew that everyone would be excited and would look at the bill. That part has been really successful, and the bill has been received really well. A lot of people are excited to mobilize around it, and the launch of the legislation definitely created the space that I wanted to have this new conversation about climate. Obviously there is some pushback, but this pushback is good because we’re talking about this issue in a different way.
TEO: I’d like to get your take on workforce development, a “Just Transition,” and the costs and economic potential of a Green New Deal. You got your start working on Divestment, which has continued to grow – Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund divested recently and the total numbers are upwards of $6 trillion committed to divestment. Now we’re talking about the other side of things: what to invest in. How would this work and what’s the forecast for Maine? Anything you learned from the Divestment movement that applies here?
REP MAXMIN: That’s such an interesting question. I think especially with this bill, since it will eventually be binding legislation, it’s really combining the divestment and the investment conversation. They’re intertwined in this context because, by investing in and requiring renewable energy, we’re divesting from fossil fuels, and part of what this bill does is really draw attention to the impact of that divestment. For example, we’re moving to 80% renewable energy consumption by 2040 instead of 100% because there are lots of folks in Maine who work in the fossil fuel industry. We don’t have any extraction here, but we have a lot of pipelines, compressor stations, oil tankers,and all that kind of stuff. So we’re really looking at the cost of divestment in these communities. It has a real impact.
As we’re making progress, we need to be investing in technical training, apprenticeship programs, green jobs, strategy, and growth programs. We need to be training a whole new workforce and creating economic opportunities like putting solar on schools, for example, or solar on low-income homes, or solar on middle class homes.
Maine is a very rural state, and we’re also one of the poorest states in the nation with one of the highest income tax rates. What we are always seeking here in Maine is sustainable industries. So many of our industries, like our logging industry, for example, or our paper mills, have been declining because the world is changing. We’re always trying to find that next thing and incentivize those folks to come to Maine. Our farming community is a huge part of that, growing hemp and sustainable crops and creating resilient food systems. Our fishing industry is a huge part of that, but we want to make sure that we’re creating an even broader field for people. Because of our previous administration, we have not made much progress towards making Maine a renewable energy industry hub. We have a lot of work to do to really bring people to our beautiful state and make sure we have true vibrant economic development here.
TEO: I was doing a little research prior to our conversation and I was pleasantly surprised by the total amount of renewable energy used in Maine in terms of the overall energy mix.
REP MAXMIN: Yes, right now about 75% of the electricity that is generated in Maine comes from renewable energy, but not all of that energy is consumed in Maine. Right now our retail electricity consumption is about 40% renewable. However, our Renewable Portfolio Standard kind of acts like a cap and there’s absolutely no incentive to consume more than 40% renewable in the retail sector. That’s where this bill comes in.
TEO: That’s a good base to build from. I mean…some of us living in other states would be happy to have that problem.
REP MAXMIN: It is definitely. I think Maine is brilliant and beautiful. I’ve argued that we can be a real climate leader because we’re an extremely purple state, and we’re a very poor state, we’re a very rural state, and our entire economy will collapse if the worst of climate change comes to pass.
TEO: Why is that?
REP MAXMIN: Because the majority of our economy is based on our natural resources and our tourism industry. The things that are bringing people to Maine are disappearing and the things that are sustaining Maine outside of the tourism industry are also disappearing. Our lobstering industry, for example. The lobsters are already moving north. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99% of the world’s oceans. Shrimping, scalloping, fishing, these are multi-multimillion dollar industries in Maine, and they’re at risk of extinction if we don’t do something. Maine is all about our natural resources, our woods, lakes, rivers, oceans, and even in my lifetime living here I’ve seen it change drastically.
TEO: I recently spoke with Vien Truong, CEO of Green For All, about the Green New Deal. Part of our conversation focused on the reality that although much of the conversation is at the federal level, so much of the actual work that needs to be done will likely take place at regional, state and local levels. Numerous pieces of ambitious clean energy and “Green New Deal” legislation are being introduced at the state and city levels across the country. Are you tracking what’s happening elsewhere on this front? What do states bring to the table in this regard? How do your efforts fit into a much larger movement?
REP MAXMIN: First of all, we need everything. We need federal action, state, local, municipal — at every level we’re regulating different things, so we need it all. Right now federal action, I think, is hopeless, so the states better get going. Some states already have, but we have not here in Maine.
Speaking from the perspective of a Mainer, we have a very prideful and independent culture here. We do not like anything top-down. When we’re talking about building a climate justice movement that it is very Maine specific, it makes sense to not just take whatever is happening at the national level and just smush it down onto Maine. That would never work, and it would be a losing game. I really believe that each state should have its own comprehensive climate justice energy policy.
I have been talking with a lot of different folks working on labor/climate bills to kind of get a sense of where we’re matching up, and we’re definitely on par with what the other renewable mandates are, and specifically for the efforts that have heavily involved and prioritized labor. I think there are lots of unique parts about our bill, like who we’ve included on these task forces and the commission, our Solar-on-Schools piece, and how we’re using it as an organizing tool statewide. But all the efforts echo each other to some extent.
I think when some people hear about our bill, how we’re “only” 80% or how it establishes a task force, they say, “But climate change is so urgent, we can’t study it anymore!” There is a whole conversation to be had regarding whether our political system is built to deal with a crisis like this. I don’t think it is at all.
It’s frustrating, but this is the point that we’re at. We have to be intentional and strategic with our policy and how we’re thinking about this transition. I don’t think rushing it through, not thinking about it and not bringing all the right people to the table is going to get us anywhere good. It will just replicate the same problems and improper power dynamics that we’re struggling with right now with the fossil fuel industry. We have a chance to do things right, and I think we should take that really seriously.
TEO: That’s fascinating. It must be really different for you to approach the urgency and immediateness of the response required from the perspective of an elected official compared to the thinking that might have come when you were a 20-year-old climate activist in college.
REP MAXMIN: When I was 20 (and I’m only 26, so it’s not like that was that long ago!) if someone had put forward a bill saying anything less than 100% by 2030, I would have been very frustrated. But what I keep saying to people is that, to me, our Green New Deal bill does match the urgency of the crisis. It matches the urgency of the climate crisis because we’re building a platform for action that is creating actual political power that can actually pass this type of legislation with support from the labor community.
It’s a bill that came from the perspective of my community, which has been completely left behind by the Democrats. My whole focus now is rural politics because I don’t think we can achieve the kind of policy that we want on climate, healthcare, anything, if we’re not broadening our base and really involving people who are struggling with our movement. To me, this is bold, and it is exciting. It’s very different. And I think it can change the way that we organize around these issues in Maine and ultimately everywhere, when we get all the rural communities on board.
My goal with this Green New Deal bill was to take something that’s traditionally associated today with hyper liberal politics and translate it to a rural state and a rural community. I think we did that pretty successfully.
TEO: I don’t believe the Sunrise Movement was around while you were in high school and college but clearly they’re cut from the same cloth as the Divestment movement that you were engaged in. How do you feel about the work that young people are doing today to drive action and policy change?
Sunrise Movement Members in Washington D.C. (credit: shutterstock.com)
REP MAXMIN: I’ve always felt so grateful to work with youth organizers because youth is its own kind of expertise. There’s a moral clarity and purpose there that I don’t think exists anywhere else. Unfortunately because of that clarity, youth voices have often been dismissed as naïve, or told “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And we’ve really listened to different voices, and those voices have not served us well. We keep electing older folks, but we keep having the same problem. I think part of what’s happening in our country is that we’re just fed up with politics as usual, and we’re seeking different ways to influence our political system.
I know all the Sunrise folks, I think what they’re doing is amazing. They have absolutely turned the tide on the national climate conversation. That’s the power of young people.
We have our public hearing for the Green New Deal on the Youth Climate Day of Action in Augusta so that all young folks have an opportunity to come testify and actually have their voices heard in front of the committee. Most of these folks can’t vote because they’re too young. So how are they supposed to have a voice? It’s time.
Introduced bu Dune Lankard, Alaskan Indigenous Social Entrepreneur
The revered Gwich’in Elder from Alaska, who has won many awards for her work to protect the arctic national Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling, including the Goldman environmental Prize, depicts how her people are being severely impacted on the front lines of rapid climate change, and how they are responding.
This speech was presented at the 2009 Bioneers National Conference.
“All the traditional seeds are like brothers and sisters. It was mostly the women who kept the seeds. My mother told me she had to trade seeds with my “Tia” in Ohkay Owingeh because every five years we have to keep rotating the seeds to invigorate them with other seed sources from the different waters: Rio Embudo, Rio Grande, Rio Santa Cruz, Rio Chama.”… Estevan Arrellano, New Mexican historian
Seed saving was once a central part of people’s cultural lives and an essential aspect of food security. Even though most people may not think much about seeds anymore, they still play a profound role in our lives. Plants are arguably the keystone kingdom of life, given their unique ability to photosynthesize the sun’s energy into vital carbohydrates, which in turn feed animals, people and microbes.
Seeds from food crops embody the evolutionary genetic information of thousands of years of adaptation. Season after season, they dynamically respond to environmental conditions. Protected within the seed coat, lying dormant are the plant embryo and the stored nutrients the mother plant has provided to ensure the greatest opportunity for success of the next generation. When conditions – soil temperature, day length and moisture – are right, the seedling emerges and thrives on those stored nutrients until it has the capacity to gather nourishment from the surrounding environment through the development of new roots.”
THE GENESIS OF AGRICULTURE The genesis of agriculture involved farmers selecting and saving seeds from plants that had the characteristics they most desire, such as flavor, stature, and resistance to drought. 10,000 years ago, the first farmers gathered seed heads from wild grasses in the Middle East, grew them out and selected and bred for what has evolved into modern day wheat varieties.
The cultural story differs with each plant, but the process is essentially the same. The dynamic legacy of seeds nurtured by the symbiotic relationship between people and plants has traditionally been driven by farmer-based knowledge and skills.
SEED MONOPOLY Unfortunately, we now have a troubling loss of diversity and monopolistic control of the most fundamental source of our food. Perverse patent laws allow corporations to own life-forms through their genetically engineered seeds, and three chemical companies now control more than 60% of the seed market. Governments around the world have approved these mergers, leaving no way for citizens to sue or break them up. Even more disturbing is the fact that these companies continue to buy up seeds and then “shelve” them as a way to eliminate competition, further limiting the diversity of seeds that farmers can buy and plant.
Before 1924, the USDA sent their employees around the world to find seeds that fit eco-niches in the U.S. and then gave the seeds to farmers for free through their local representatives. But big business saw seeds as a potential commodity and, throughout the 20th century, pushed farmers into the system we have today.
SEED DEMOCRACY A new seed democracy is more important than ever. Each year at the Bioneers Conference hundreds of people gather to exchange seeds they have saved. This simple act helps to adapt seeds to the local environment, preserve biodiversity and maintain some measure of democratic control over seeds in the face of global monopolization of this precious resource. In contrast to global seed monopolization, the seed exchange is a sharing community of grassroots gardeners and small farmers who are carrying on the thousands-year-old tradition of exchanging open-pollinated seeds. Saving seeds advances local food sovereignty and extends the legacy of participation in the co-evolution of people and plants.
Since the birth of agriculture, saving seeds has been basically second nature for most of humanity. In our modern world, however, many of us aren’t even minimally conversant in the act of growing and harvesting our own food, let alone well versed in how to select and save seeds. Luckily, there are resources in our community we can turn to for guidance. In this transcribed conversation from a workshop at the Bioneers Conference, three expert seed savers share their best practices and discuss the implications and deeper meaning of seed saving in the modern era.
John Navazio, Senior Scientist for the Organic Seed Alliance and a Plant Breeding and Seed Specialist for Washington State University Extension.
Matthew Dillon, Director of Agricultural Policy & Programs for Clif Bar & Company and the cultivator for Seed Matters, an initiative of Clif Bar Family Foundation
SARAH McCAMANT: Know Your Seed, and know what you’re planting.
Sara McCamant
Make a label and remember what it is. You need to know whether it’s a hybrid or an open-pollinated variety, because when you save seed from hybrids, they do not grow true the next year. You’re going to get some other version, and probably end up trying to figure out why your Sun Gold tomato doesn’t look like a Sun Gold tomato the next year because it was a hybrid. So you’re looking for open-pollinated varieties.
Hybrids either say “great new hybrid” in their description, or they say F1, which means it’s the first generation of a cross. People do save seeds from hybrids, but I’m not going to encourage that because it is a breeding project, trying to stabilize a new variety and bring it back to being open-pollinated. John, how do you describe open pollinated?
JOHN NAVAZIO: Really, in botanical terms, it means that it’s freely allowed to pollinate with other plants of that same variety within that group of plants that you’re growing when you’re growing them. So in some cases we have “selfers”, which are actually selfing, but it essentially means that it’s not a controlled pollination, which is often what the seed companies are doing, especially with hybrids.
John Navazio
Essentially we’re talking today about annual and biannual plants. Annuals are very easy to think of because they complete their entire reproductive cycle, their complete life cycle, within one season. So you plant them in the spring, they go through summer, they flower, they make seed, and then all annuals die at the end of one growing season.
As a seed saver with annuals, the thing to think about is how much variation is there in the time of flowering between the varieties of a crop. We’re based in Washington State, almost to the Canadian border, and we work with northern farmers all the way to northern Alberta, Maine and Quebec. So time to flowering and then being able to plant that crop early enough so it fully matures seed is very crucial. And even for you here in paradise, here in California, where you have a much more lengthy season, there are still some things that I’m sure do not fully mature in this climate. So that’s one of the things you have to be conscious of before you get into full blown seed saving.
And in some cases you need to be conscious of, gee, I have a lettuce, but I don’t want it to flower too early; I want it to be in the vegetative stage for long enough. So you start to play with the timing of this crop in its vegetative versus reproductive stage. It gives me a nice lettuce for a few weeks of harvest before it flowers, and then still matures in time to give you a full satisfying seed crop.
Matthew Dillon
MATTHEW DILLON: I want to add that it’s not just about the seed crop being able to get to maturity, it’s also about being able to harvest the seed crop before the rains come in. Brassicas, kales, broccolis, mustards, lettuce, and spinach are all dry-seeded crops as opposed to wet-seeded crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, melons that you’re harvesting from the flesh of a fruit. In dry-seeded crops you not only want maturity, you want to make sure that you’re going to be able to get that seed off the plant before moisture puts that seed at risk of fungal diseases, or of even sprouting on the plant. Sometimes lettuce that starts to seed will sprout while it’s still in the flower head. So it’s not just about maturity before cold comes, it’s also about maturity and harvestability before adverse weather sets in.
JOHN NAVAZIO: Let’s go ahead and define biennials. Biennial means two seasons of growth to complete the life cycle. It’s amazing how many garden plants are biennials. The great advantage of being a biennial from the plant’s perspective is that it stores sugars in one form or another during the first season of the life cycle, so that then when the second season comes, it can put all of that stored energy into a large amount of seed. Swiss chard, for example, stores a lot of food in their leaves; cabbage is another example of that. Biennials, on a plant-for-plant basis, tend to produce much more seed than the annuals do because of this effective plant strategy.
So the defining thing about biennials that many people growing them don’t really realize is that they require something called “vernalization”, which means it takes 8-10 weeks of temperatures at or below 50 degrees before they flower. Many of these plants evolved in semi-temperate or sub-tropical regions where in winter they can survive being outside without being completely frozen, as would happen in further north regions of temperate zones. They survive during the winter, but they go through enough cold so it essentially signals to the plant that it is safe for them to start growing again and go into the reproductive phase. So when you have biennials that flower during the first season of growth, you should never save seeds from biennials that flower during the first season. It means they’re prematurely flowering.
Even in San Juan Bautista the other day, we were in a Swiss chard trial where plants had been planted in late June and some of them were flowering. Very undesirable. Don’t think, Ah, this is great, I don’t have to go through all that waiting all winter and going through vernalization, I can get my seed now. You will be selecting for an annual cycle on that plant.
Cabbage is one member of the brassica oleracea species – cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, collards. So when you grow biennials, you must consider how well they do vegetatively in the first year, because you want it to be a good quality cabbage or a good quality beet, carrot. And then you think about how well it stores over winters in your climate. Many of you here in California can just leave these crops out in the field during the winter and they will flower successfully the next year, and won’t get frozen out. But we often do selection in carrots for how well they store, because where I live we often have to store our carrot roots for four and a half or five months.
Then it’s important to look at how well they do as a flowering crop the next year. A lot of people abandon looking at plants for how much vigor health and general overall health during the flowering stages. They don’t think about that.
Then, in some of the OSA seed guides that are coming out you’ll see we describe the optimum over wintering size. That would take a whole class just to talk about. You don’t want a carrot that’s too big or too small to go through winter. There are optimum sizes for all of these crops.
MATTHEW DILLON: Experiment. That’s how we got here in the first place. You as the seed saver experiment with what works in your garden, on your farm, in your system, and through all of this information, if it’s sometimes getting a little technical, just keep that in mind. The only mistake you can make is not trying at all.
SARAH McCAMANT: Yeah, though I made some pretty bad mistakes.
JOHN NAVAZIO: I bet I’ve made more mistakes than you have.
SARAH McCAMANT: It’s just sad when you lose something that you really liked by a bad mistake.
JOHN NAVAZIO: But then you learn your lesson even better.
SARAH McCAMANT: Right. Like putting some wet seed in and it all rotted. We put this as number 2, because one of the things that I discovered that was really different being a seed saver than a gardener was that I needed to be able to pass information along and track it all the way through. This means that your labels can’t fade, you actually need to remember what you planted. When you save it, you need to make sure the bags are labeled. You need to track and record, and the more information the better. So you’re tracking information like health and vigor of the plants, when are they mature, how long does it take for them to germinate. The more information you track, the better seed saver you’ll be, and the more information you can pass on as you share the seed with other people. Just labeling and tracking information is such a different thing when you go from gardener to seed saver, and really getting systems to record that information that isn’t out in the garden. Let me tell you how many labels fade, maps, little notebooks where you write descriptions — make sure they’re out of the garden. It’s something you keep track of through the whole process, because you lose labels every step of the way if you aren’t careful.
We have some envelopes and labels here for seed projects, and you can see we recommend: common names, Latin names, did you keep it isolated, did you select for vigor, a good description of the plant, what year – that’s really important – when was the seed saved? Because if you start seed saving and you don’t write the year, then all of a sudden you have three jars of kale and you’re like, “I don’t know which one is the freshest.” All of that information is very key, so save information, not just seed.
MATTHEW DILLON: You’re not just saving information about the technical aspects, the dates to maturity and everything Sarah mentioned, but it’s also important as a seed saver to save the story of where you got the seed. Even if you don’t know much, even “I just got this from my friend Bill and he didn’t tell me much information but it’s Bill’s favorite bean, and this is what I do know”. And you start to pass that down generation to generation as well.
We don’t always have the exact story. In fact, we rarely have the exact story about any of the heirlooms we pass on. There are many different iterations of seed stories out there for each variety, but I think it’s important to keep that weave alive, keep that heritage alive and to strengthen it each generation by collecting our own stories.
SARAH McCAMANT: When we hold the story, we feel more responsibility to carry it on. I worked on a farm years ago in Santa Cruz owned by Mary Sagorini[ph], a 95-year-old Italian woman, and took care of her orchard. She gave me some bean seed, and I just called it Mary Sagorini’s bean seed. All of a sudden you feel that responsibility. It’s not Blue Lake 724 or whatever. There’s a name and a person, and the more you create what we call seed culture, seed connections, the more likely you are actually going to care for that. We need to bring it back and make it have meaning in our lives.
So the third one is watch for is cross-pollination, which is when we start getting more technical. This is the place that separates beginning seed savers from more advanced seed savers. We always tell everyone to start with the easy ones we call self-pollinators – lettuce, beans, peas, tomatoes – because you don’t have to worry that much about cross pollination with those.
When you move into the more difficult ones, what makes it more difficult is that you have to be aware of pollination and make sure that you’re not getting two varieties crossing and ending up with something different. You have to understand how things pollinate and what they pollinate with. That’s where it gets much more technical and you need books if you’re not already a biologist or scientist who’s been working with this, and where it can give you a little information.
We created this chart, because it talks about how they pollinate. There are different types, self-pollinated, wind pollinated, insect pollinated. And I’m going to let John take it from here on that.
JOHN NAVAZIO: In selfers, “self” means self-pollinated, versus wind or insects, which are always cross-pollination mechanisms.
Self-pollinated systems essentially have a mechanism to cause selfing most of the time, not always. This is biology, folks. There are always exceptions, always a chance of crossing. That’s an evolutionary mechanism built into them to cross a small amount of the time, to mix up the genetics, and to basically incorporate the best genes from other members of that population. So remember that. It’s not 100% all the time.
They always have perfect flowers, which just means both male and female sexual parts. And the pollination and fertilization occurs in two different mechanisms. The first is – if you want the $5 word – is cleistogamous, petals that remain closed throughout the entire flowering process. Essentially, they are restricting insect pollination in that way, even though they’re showy flowers.
How does that work? Some of the Fabaceae, also called legumes, are very showy, but they remained closed. Well actually they’re still attracting insects that are crossing them at a small rate in any given generation.
And then there are other examples. There are self-pollinated plants in the Asteraceae – lettuce and chicories are the most notable – and even though they have open flowers, the pollination and subsequent fertilization that creates the seed happens before the flower opens. So even though blue-flowered chicories are beautiful and open fairly early in the day, that pollination has happened long before they opened, sometimes the day before, and that’s why they can still be selfers.
In cross-pollinated systems there’s always some kind of biological mechanism to assist in crossing. Showy flowers and wind are important – showy flowers, insects; wind for wind pollinated. You’ll have basically separation of male and female sexual parts in different flowers, which means like in squash, you have separate male and female flowers. Easy. You also in some cases have separate male and female plants like in spinach.
Self-incompatibility, just remember, it exists. There are certain crops that just will not receive their own pollen, even though they have perfect flowers. Dichogamy, a temporal separation of sexual parts, and you’ll actually have, like in carrots, where the female part of the flower is fertile before the male, before the anthers shed their pollen. So then the bees and the hover flies and the wasps that are crawling all over your carrots are easily crossing, because on any one flower they’re landing on, there’ll be this separation where they’re not pollinating and recognize pollen at exactly the same moment.
All you need to know is: Is it a crosser? And do I have to worry about cross pollination? How much separation?
SARAH McCAMANT: Let’s talk a little bit more about what you can do if you want to grow plants that are cross pollinators. One is that you can just grow one variety and then make sure, for all the gardeners, that you are watching what your neighbors are growing, because a lot of these can cross pollinate up to a mile. The wind-pollinated crops they recommend a mile isolation from other varieties going to seed.
Some of it you can do by hand pollination. So you can grow squash and actually take control of when and how they pollinate, and you cover the flowers so nothing else can pollinate. Those are techniques that a lot of books describe.
Sometimes you can separate them by time. You can do two varieties of sometimes that would normally cross, but you plant one a little earlier, or two corns, where maybe one’s a 90-day and one’s a 110-day, and so they’re actually going to drop their pollen at different times.
So there are different ways you can control pollination, and deal with cross pollination or not. The simplest one is to just grow one variety and figure out who else around you is growing and make sure they’re not growing something that’s going to cross. That’s the main way I’ve always done it in my garden. But it is tricky, because there are pretty large distances you have to control, and that’s what makes home gardeners get a little overwhelmed with this. “Well I don’t know what everyone else is growing around me.” And then you have to look at other ways of controlling it.
If you go to Seed Savers Exchange, they grow hundreds and hundreds of varieties of things on their farm. They have cages that they build to keep insects out, and they control the pollination, like putting insects in. So there are different ways. The book Seed to Seed actually has some really good techniques for that.
If you start with the easy ones, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s a really good entry point. I call them the entry drugs. You get hooked on it, and then you decide you’re willing to do the harder stuff because it’s so much fun. I think the best entry drug of all seed saving is beans. Some people say tomatoes, because there’s such tomato love in this culture, and heirloom tomatoes are so amazing. This is kind of fun. But beans are even easier, and beans are so beautiful. You grow them and you have these little brown shells that look kind of ugly out there in the fall garden. You gather them all and bring them in, and you start breaking them open, and they’re so beautiful. You can run your hands through them and then you’re hooked.
You do have to worry a little bit about pollination with beans. I just got my first bean cross this year. They do recommend separating two different beans by 10 to 15 feet at least, because you do get some crossing every once in a while.
JOHN NAVAZIO: It can be as much as 4% in some places. The ancestral homeland of beans in North and South America, crossing can be up to 10 – 12%, because the insects that co-evolved with beans are there in their ancestral homeland.
Also, as you get deeper into seed saving, learn more about the history of your crop: What kind of climate it came from, conditions. It will be a real insight into that crop and how its reproductive mechanisms work.
Even if you look at the minimum separation distances, it’s always nice to have a physical barrier between. If you want to do three or four beans because you get totally hooked on beans, then you can grow rows of corn between your beans, or three rows of corn between two bean varieties, or a row of sunflowers, things like that. That will really cut down on that outcrossing.
SARAH McCAMANT: Right. And people say, “Well what’s wrong if I got a little crossing?” There isn’t anything wrong, and actually it can lead you to be a plant breeder when you start seeing some interesting crossing. When most people save seed and grow it the next year, they want it to grow true to type. But if you want to play with it, there’s no reason not to, though it’s good to save some of the seed as true to type so you’re keeping one clean variety.
The next thing I find the most problematic for small growers and gardeners is this: Consider that numbers really count in plant populations. What we’re talking about is there are certain population sizes that are recommended for really getting good quality seed. It goes back to the pollination issue, which is that plants that cross-pollinate. Why do they cross-pollinate? It’s actually a mechanism to increase vigor and overall health of the plant by getting pollen from other plants, and it increases and develops stronger plants. So when you save seeds from small populations, you’re kind of bottlenecking the genes, and narrowing the diversity and the strength of that plant.
On our chart is something called population size, number of plants, and what is recommended. We actually looked for lower numbers in some places based on experience and looking at all the books and guessing. So some of the numbers are going to be different than what John would recommend to farmers. They may be lower, based on, for example, you really can grow arugula with smaller plants than 100, but the books probably say 100. You say, “What the minimum for corn? 100 plants?” Well, they actually recommend 200 plants. We put 100 just so we would get you to do it. Or broccoli, what do we have in broccoli? It’s 40, which is also a smaller number. But that’s kind of intimidating to most home gardeners.
And so that’s where I say do it in a community scale. That’s what we did up in Sebastopol, is we realized that for the numbers it would be hard for most home gardeners to do. We set up a seed garden. All the seed that we grow there goes into our community seed bank. We grow large quantities there. We do our corn there. Every year we do one type of corn, we do 200 plants. It’s something most of us couldn’t do in our own homes, and we’re able to do those kind of population sizes that are good for increased vigor.
If you get those lower population sizes, what you get with a lot of plants is something called in-breeding depression, which means that you’re just getting too narrow of parents. You’re breeding too much your cousin.
JOHN NAVAZIO: You’re marrying your cousin.
SARAH McCAMANT: Right. You’re marrying your cousin. That’s exactly what it is. So you’re always trying to keep the family ties a little broader. You want to marry the people across the street.
MATTHEW DILLON: When you have in-breeding depression, you can save seed from 10 kale plants, and if you plant those seeds, you might not see anything at all in the next generation. So you’re like, “What are these guys talking about, 100 plants? I saved seed off 10 kale plants and everything’s fine.” If you continue to save seed off of 10 kale plants, generation after generation, you will start to see initially problems with reproductive vigor. You’ll start to see mutations in flowers, it’ll start producing less seed, you’ll have more difficulties with just getting flowers to set in different types of crops. Reproduction’s usually one of the first places that you notice in-breeding depression, which kind of makes sense. The plant’s saying, “I don’t want to keep breeding like this; it’s not working for me.” It’s the plants trying to find the solution to a bad situation.
JOHN NAVAZIO: Yes, it is. And as Sarah said, it’s like my sister or my cousin doesn’t look that cute anymore. There is a continuum in all of this. Nothing is etched in granite, folks, when it comes to biological systems. There’s flux and flow in it. There’s no definitive number. If you see 40 on that sheet and you get 38, it’s okay. 42 is better. But what we’re trying to do here is show you there’s a biological continuum.
The wind-pollinated crops need a further distance. And we often say up to two miles with corn because, especially now with the GM corn, we want to make sure people don’t get GM genes in. But Chenopodiaceae or Amaranthaceae on this chart, beets, spinach, they have wind pollen that will travel several miles under certain conditions.
The other thing is when you’re isolating plants, do you ever have 100% assured isolation, where there’s not going to be any crossing? No. And this is the other thing the books lead you to believe. Oh, one mile, it’s absolutely pure, no crossing’s going to occur. It doesn’t exist. The only place you’re going to get perfect isolation is if you go to the moon and grow it on the moon in some module or something.
These are biological systems. There’s always the minimum isolation distance. You can see it grows over time. Peppers cross at a much higher rate than peas do, so we’ve moved them along the criteria. That also means that you need a higher number. The more they cross naturally, the higher number of plants you need. Why? Because of everything that Sarah very nicely just described. They’re yearning for that variation for maintaining the variation that’s in a natural population. Whereas once peas were inbred a long time ago, probably a lot of the peas died out and some of them survived.
SARAH McCAMANT: So the last two tips on this sheet: One is choose ideal plants for ideal seed. This is something that everyone has to realize as they get into seed saving, is that you actually become a plant breeder whether you want to or not. What you save seed from means that you are either saving qualities you like or qualities that you don’t like. It’s called selection. You look for plants that have the best qualities, and that are healthy. The number one thing is you don’t ever really want to save seed from plants that are unhealthy. There are some diseases that can pass from seed to seed. We don’t want to get into the specifics of those, but you can make sure you’re not doing that by never saving seed from unhealthy plants.
The other reason is, if you save seed from unhealthy plants, it means you’re saving seed from plants that are more likely to get sick, so you’re selecting for disease instead of selecting for health. That’s the thing you have to remember is every step of the way you’re selecting for some type, so you want to select for health.
We do a lot of lettuce in our seed garden, and we’re always selecting for slow to bolt. So don’t save seed from the lettuce that bolts first. “Oops, oh I guess I won’t eat that, I’ll save seed from that.” Well then you’re selecting for plants that bolt, and that’s probably the biggest thing with lettuce is you don’t want plants to go right to seed the minute it gets hot.
Te last is about saving the seed once it’s dry. Every seed you have to process differently. We’re not going to get into that. But when you have the final seed, you want to make sure it’s fully dry, and then you want to store in what’s cool, dark, and dry. There’s little ways you can tell whether it’s dry enough or cool enough.
I say glass jars are the number one way to keep moisture out. There are other ways, but it’s really better to have an even temperature than temperatures that go up and down. It would be better to have it at 65 continually than for it to be 32 and then go up to 90 and then back to 32.
Dark/light, you’re going to lessen the lifetime of that seed if it’s out in the light, both getting moist and dry, if it’s changing humidity and it’s changing temperatures.
MATTHEW DILLON: There’s a lot of variation in how long seeds last. Generally, it depends upon the oil content of the seed to some degree, but with crops like parsnips, the seed doesn’t last very long. If you can get your parsnip seed to last three or four years, you’re doing really well. Sometimes it only lasts a year or two. Whereas other crops like beans or corn, you can certainly get your seed to last for 10, 12 years. I’ve had tomato seed that’s lasted for over 10 years, easily. So it depends. Don’t feel bad if you grow a crop and the seed viability and germination drops immediately after three years. It happens.
It can also be not just the way you stored it, but it could be something that happened during the actual growth and maturation and development of the seed, something you didn’t see or you couldn’t control.
What are the roles of educational institutions in the era of climate change? Dr. Anthony Cortese, Co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Crane Institute of Sustainability and the Intentional Endowments Network, is a groundbreaking leader in transforming higher education, will survey some of the most promising developments in education, and what still needs to happen. Founder of Second Nature, supporting senior college and university leaders in making healthy, just and sustainable living the foundation of all learning and practice in higher education, he’s a principal organizer of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, as well as co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).
This speech was presented at the 2010 Bioneers National Conference.
Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, Ph.D. is an award-winning filmmaker and anthropologist committed to ethnographic rescue and the conservation of vanishing indigenous knowledge and tradition. Indigenous science and TEK have a key role to play in planetary restoration. The first female National Geographic Fellow and a descendant of Hawaiian chiefs, English seafarers and Chinese merchants, she was raised by Hawaiian elders who prophesied her role as a steward of ancestral wisdom. She will describe her 2010 186-day expedition by amphibian seaplane to access some of the world’s most fragile environmental and cultural regions, and present her findings about the interrelatedness of poverty, education, cultural survival, biodiversity and health.
This speech was presented at the 2010 Bioneers National Conference.
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