Page 92 – Bioneers

Nina Simons: Bridging the Worlds

The following speech was delivered by Nina Simons at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

There are fewer and fewer things I know for certain anymore, but one of them is this: We are living through ‘tween times. Times when we are navigating between worlds – bridging paradigms, generations, belief systems and stories that are dying.

From a culture built upon fear, greed, manipulation and hate – toward ways of living and being together based upon love, mutuality, sufficiency, regeneration, respect and valuing differences.

Within the context of Mother Earth, we and all our kin are traversing between the grief of mass extinctions, toxicity, warming oceans and climate conditions that threaten everything – and an abundance of rapidly emergent innovations and collaborations – urban and localized food sheds, biomimicry, restored cultures and lifeways, clean watersheds, solar power, social healing and a world that works for all.

We are straddling the old world – the civilization that’s dying – and the one that we’re all midwifing toward a healthy, regenerative and diversified birth. Sometimes it can feel awkward and scary, but it’s also a super exciting place to be.That’s what Bioneers is all about, for me – making the new world that’s being born visible and palpable, in all its glorious pluralism, in community.

What’s needed in order to bridge worlds? I thought I’d share with you some of my learning this year.

My beloved mother, Rhea Selma Cantor Simons Goodman, died just 7 weeks ago, after several months of declining health and hospice. While I gave her the best end of life possible, It was my closest direct encounter with death to date. As a result, I am feeling suspended between worlds myself now.

She was a very vibrant, creative and joyful spirit, and perhaps like many mothers – was also challenging in some ways. Over time, she had also become one of my closest friends. As this loss is so central to my inner world right now, both breaking my heart and somehow enlarging it, I cannot not talk about it.

In the last dozen years of her life, I saw her change, reshaping the texture of her life by becoming more of who she aspired to be. Her radio show “Living Juicy” was a gift to her community, and over 20 years of practice, she became really good at it. She danced and sang, and developed lasting friendships, and as she died, she savored a resulting abundance of intimacy and love – as much as she could possibly receive.

She showed me how we can remake ourselves at any age; by choosing consciously and repeatedly, by practicing and holding ourselves accountable, we can create new neural pathways that help us become who we most yearn to be.

When I first learned of her life-threatening illness, my complex and busy life suddenly distilled into single-focus, and became crystal clear. There was nothing more important to me than to offer my mother the best, most loving and physically supportive end of life possible. For me, it seemed like an opportunity to walk my talk, to put my devotional love into action. When I showed up prepared for the deep, end-of-life reviews I’d imagined – and found her intently focused on living another eight years, I learned that I had to throw away my plans – and surrender to her own sovereignty, choices and time frame. This was about serving her best transition, and not my own ego – or even my desire for healing, resolution and a graceful death.

So I had to practice a deep level of acceptance in each moment, staying present with the truth of wherever she was, whatever she chose, in her own true time. When she insisted on shopping for clothes, I accompanied her, releasing my misgivings and surrendering creatively. With music blasting, we swing-danced down the center aisle of Forever 21, two old broads, giggling all the way. That evening, as we named our WILMAT (a ritual that’s short for What I Loved Most About Today), that dancing was a star-kissed moment. I realized there was less and less she could control in her life, she who had savored her own autonomy for so long.

Nina Simons and her mother, Rhea Selma Cantor Simons Goodman (Credit: Rhea Goodman)

Whether loving someone toward dying, letting go of life, or living through a dying civilization, I learned it’s essential to honor our dignity and sovereignty, since we’re losing so much else. Acts of kindness, respect and mutuality must become our currency. Watching the nightly news, serial disasters spawn panic – with fear, outrage, loss and tensions mounting – speed and reactivity are on the rise.

As her dying neared, time became distorted, disorienting and elastic. Waiting for death to find her, for her to reach her own right moment to let go felt interminably long, and then I felt guilty for wishing it might come sooner. That impatience is so familiar, as it’s haunted my experience of the snail’s pace of change in the ecological, political and cultural worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My grief arises often, and it’s close to the surface. When it comes in waves, I encourage myself to feel it fully. For the loss of my mother, for the loss of our mother, for the children and people of all colors in cages, for the missing and murdered Indigenous women, for the whales and dolphins, coral reefs and elephants,

For the rivers and for the wildlands.

I am both mourning and outraged by – the mangling of truth and pummeling of justice, the rapacious devastation of lands and peoples and of our young experiment in democracy. I am thankful to remember that grief is coupled with joy – that the deeper we can feel our sadness, the more fire and joy we’ll kindle in our hearts, and the greater our capacity to act on behalf of what the Earth and our love are calling us toward.

What I believe we need most to bridge the worlds, and survive this tween time in a good way, is leading from the heart. And remembering our connections to the invisible world, our devotion to Earth, to embodied truth, to all our kin, to ancestors, to dreamtime and to intuition.

I close with excerpts from a poem by Joy Harjo, this country’s first Indigenous Poet Laureate, who belongs to the Muscogee tribal nation. I read it as a prayer.

It’s called: For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

Put down that bag of potato chips,

that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds.

They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift

to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you

since you were a dream planting itself

precisely within your parents’ desire.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds

and animal people who accompany you.

Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans

have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.

The heart knows the way though there may be

high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers,

massacres, wars, and those who will despise you

because they despise themselves.

Watch your mind. Without training, it might run away

and leave your heart for the immense human feast

set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle,

to the fire kept burning by the

keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind,

your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you.

These helpers take many forms:

animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back.

It may be caught in corners and creases

of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering.

It may return in pieces, in tatters.

Gather them together.

They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Then, you must do this:

help the next person find their way through the dark.

May it be so. Thank you.

The Council of Pronghorn: Terry Tempest Williams Honors the Silent Witnesses to Fracking

Author-activist Terry Tempest Williams is known as a “citizen writer” for the work she’s done to emphasize environmental ethics and conservation, especially in the “Red Rock” region of her native Utah and in Alaska.

The following writing, titled “The Council of Pronghorn,” is one of Williams’ many jarring statements on environmental degradation in her book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. This thought-provoking essay uses Wyoming as an example of how the petroleum industry has devastated areas in our country. The pronghorn antelope serve as the silent and seemingly omnipresent witnesses to these impacts, and Williams posits that their fate may resemble our own.

I strongly suspect a big part of real art-fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny. —David Foster Wallace, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993

What I want to deny is that fossil fuels are killing us. What I want to deny is that living in the state of Wyoming is living in the heart of denial. And if we want to see “entrapment and loneliness and death,” all we have to do is go out and visit the oil patch in Sublette County or Sweetwater County or Gillette, more commonly known as “Razor City,” in Campbell County, Wyoming.

The “dreadful” truth is that if Wyoming were a nation, it would be among the largest coal-producing countries in the world. Since 1996, more than 7.7 billion tons of coal have been produced, most of it coming from the Powder River Basin. Trains leave Gillette twenty-four hours a day carrying coal from our state to yours. We live in a rectangle that borders Utah, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado, all part of the fossil fuel boom in the Interior West. This is a ravaged landscape and few see it, even those who live here.

In 2007, I accepted an invitation to become the first “writer in residence” at the University of Wyoming’s creative writing department. The students I worked with were extraordinary. Many of them were local, but others were not. The students—poets and nonfiction and fiction writers—decided they wanted to do more than examine themselves on the page, they wanted to go outside. They wanted to get a glimpse into the state of the state of Wyoming and believed storytelling could open a door to what a sense of place really means, a gauge and a guide to what folks in Wyoming were thinking. Together, we created a program called “Weather Reports.” It would be simple, direct, and nonthreatening: “What’s the weather like in your town?” Students created a road map. We would visit seven communities in the state that were being impacted by oil and gas and coal-bed methane gas development from Pinedale to the Powder River Basin to Rawlins, Riverton, and the Wind River Reservation.

The “Weather Reports” took place on Friday evenings, when we would gather at a library or arts center, a politically neutral zone, and invite the community to gather in the name of storytelling. On Saturday, we would offer a writing workshop to those in attendance who were interested in developing their stories on the page. The format was always the same: A student would read a story they had written, then invite those in attendance to tell their own. We would form a circle and begin with one question:

“What keeps you up at night?” No one was prepared for the emotion or depth of sharing that followed. Our first “Weather Report” took place in the town of Pinedale, elevation 7,182 feet, located at the base of the Wind River Range; population 1,865. It is also a boomtown, 32 miles north of the Jonah Oil Field, which is estimated to contain 10.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

It was standing room only in the public library. Residents talked about poisoned water, the elevated benzene levels re- lated to the oil and gas development, the ozone alert that was posted for the first time in their history on that very day.

We listened to senior people, primarily women, talk about “Project Wagon Wheel.” In the 1960s, during the Cold War, the Atomic Energy Commission planned to extract Wyoming natural gas with five underground nuclear explosions. The women who protested that action rose to tell their history and it was personal. “I’ll be damned if they were going to blow up our backyard, sage or no sage,” one of the women said. They recounted a straw poll in Sublette County on the presidential election day in 1972 that showed 970 people were opposed to Project Wagon Wheel, 279 were in favor, and 105 were undecided. This was a revelation to the hundred-plus residents in the room. A young man stood up and said: “If you could stop five nuclear bombs, we can hold these gas companies accountable.”

One story of courage followed another until well after midnight. The librarian stood in the back of the room. Her words closed the evening: “One day, I think I’m going to wake up and Wyoming will just be one giant hole in the ground with everything we love, gone.”

In the town of Gillette, elevation 4,556 feet, population 30,560, a mother stood up and said, “What keeps me up at night is the health of my children. My five-year-old son has a rash on his legs and our well water is red.” She paused to control her emotions. “Is anyone else experiencing this?” One by one, other mothers stood in solidarity and shared similar stories, and then two nurses took the floor: “Can anyone tell us why we can’t keep enough chemotherapy in this town to treat all the cancers in Campbell County?”

When we arrived in Casper, the financial hub of the state, elevation 5,118 feet, population 57,814, it was a different story. The state senator Kit Jennings showed up in his shiny black cowboy boots, wearing his sport coat, a bolo tie, and Levi’s held up by a belt with a silver buckle shaped like an oil rig. Everyone knew who he was and everyone knew he was in the pocket of the coal-bed methane industry now following our every move. They didn’t like people talking. Wyoming is a state of big distances with few occasions to assemble. People were isolated and the oil and gas companies liked it that way. The industry had gotten to Jennings, and Jennings was going to get to us.

The senator might as well have entered the room with a loaded shotgun, so violent was his rhetoric and so personal—but a circle had been created and a space of respect had been established. The woman seated next to him handed him the microphone. “What keeps me up at night is thinking I have to show up to a hippie-dippie circle like this . . . You say there is a direct correlation between the rise of crystal meth and rise of rigs in our towns, well that’s bullshit, what do you know”—he was addressing his remarks to me—“you’re an outsider from Utah.” We listened. It was his turn to tell his story. When he finally realized there would be no confrontation, no conflict, no heated exchange of words, he simply paused and said: “I was raised on the oil patch as a kid—people looked down on us, called us white trash.” And with that the combative senator began to tell the truth of his life.

We witnessed the art of storytelling and story receiving.

Senator Jennings had tried to shut down the students’ “Weather Reports” and pressure the president of the University of Wyoming to fire me. But President Buchanan defended our program. Freedom of speech. What’s wrong with telling stories and listening to one another? What’s wrong with gathering as a community to consider where we live, what we love, and what is at stake in the twenty-first century?

What lawmakers fear most, especially those financed by the energy industry, is the art of independent thinking, the arc of creative thinking. What power tries to control is the story, especially the story that sees the world as a complicated whole. What the oil and gas companies know is that if they can keep people isolated and the story fragmented, keep as little known as possible, and in some cases lie, then they can go about their business without protest or accountability.

But the most revelatory of all our “Weather Reports” took place in the bars in Riverton, elevation 4,951 feet, population 11,058, adjacent to the Wind River Reservation, home to the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes.

Riverton, Wyoming, is famous for having sixteen drinking holes in a two-mile stretch. The bars are segregated. We went to a roughneck bar and an Indian bar. The roughnecks were making big money at big risk with long days, where a little meth went a long way to carry them through what is known as “a tower”—twelve-hour days for fourteen days straight and then a week off to rest. We learned Wyoming has the highest worker fatality rate in the nation, three times the national average. The men know this. And one young oil worker after another told stories of death by “trippin’ pipe” or “throwing chain” accidents, or incidents where the drilling mud caught fire or the actual rigs blew up. But their stories always had the same tagline: “It was the guy next to me.” At age twenty-one, many of them saw themselves as invincible. “The sick thing is the family whose boy got chewed up on the rig received a check for ten thousand dollars from the worker compensation fund. And what’s really fucked up is that the company only got fined six hundred and twenty-five dollars for the chain tong mess-up.”

The stories told in the Indian bar where the Arapahos and Shoshone hang were not about jobs on the rigs at all, they were about no jobs.

Their stories were about poverty, missing women, and bison being killed once they crossed the boundary of Yellowstone National Park. Some of the men were blunt enough to ask why we were hanging out in the “wrong bar.” Then it got real. The students came to understand that story engages the whole person. People lean forward. Words matter and cut through race, class, and politics. Stories move us and move through us, become the conscience of a community.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. —Upton Sinclair, Oil!

A year after the “Weather Reports,” I set out on a road trip with two artists, Felicia Resor and Ben Roth, to witness the oil and gas development in Wyoming. We wanted to go deeper than we were able to go with our “Weather Reports.” We wanted to see for ourselves how the fossil fuel economy was impacting the state physically, something that was largely invisible to its citizens, because of either lack of interest or lack of access. Felicia was born in Teton County and raised on a ranch. She was a recent graduate of Yale, with a major in the humanities. Ben was native to Colorado, a metal artist, now living in Jackson. We had received funding from a foundation called Invoking the Pause, by an anonymous donor who asked that we reflect on some aspect of climate change through an art project and how this work might enter into the public conversation. The grant was designed as a two-year project. The first year, we were to investigate what a climate change art project might look like, do some ground truthing, then “pause” to reflect as a team on the information we had gleaned. During the second year, we would begin to collaborate and create something out of that pause.

We formulated our project with the knowledge that Wyoming was the largest coal producer in the country, responsible for more than 90 percent of U.S. coal. Our road trip would bring us into proximity with the sources of Wyoming’s coal, oil, and gas. We wanted the abstract to become real. We were aware of our complicity behind the wheel, the gas we were using (Wyoming is not a small state), but short of riding horses, this was our means of traversing the “Cowboy State,” visiting such far-flung towns as Spotted Horse, Buffalo, and Ten Sleep. We were committed to thinking about what we might do as artists to “move people to countenance it,” the “it” that was not yet known to us.

We made visits to the Jonah Oil Field, to the man-camps in Sweetwater County, to the Halliburton Hilton in Pinedale, to the coal mines in Gillette, to the ranches in the Powder River Basin suffering from the “split-estate agreement” that says residents might own the surface rights to the land, but the federal government owns the natural resources below the land. We witnessed coal-bed methane pumps in the front yards of ranch houses; water-quality issues associated with hydraulic fracking; boomtowns where locals are few and roughnecks are many. We became acutely aware of our nation’s thirst for oil and the hidden costs that remain invisible to most of us. When we asked our guide at the Jonah patch about the decline in air quality in Sublette and Sweetwater Counties, he said it was a result of the geysers in Yellowstone National Park spewing “god knows what” into the atmosphere. There was no discussion to be had. He was the industry’s public relations man. “Those who say the ozone is up don’t have any baseline studies to support their claims.”

That night, we stayed at a friend’s cabin beneath a sky of stars now noticeably obscured by the lights of a twenty-four- hour workforce on rigs lit up like Christmas trees. A decade ago, this was a night sky of only stars, not construction lights and gas flares dotting the sage flats from one horizon to the next. We talked about how these same lights fuel our economy, pave our roads, and pay for free in-state college tuition for any graduating high school senior in Wyoming who wants to go to the University of Wyoming in Laramie, the state’s only university. Residents benefit from its natural gas, oil, coal, and coal-bed methane in tangible ways. Wyoming is a rich state because of its rich resources—and a well-educated one.

We drove from Pinedale to Cora and traveled across Union Pass in the Wind Rivers through a forest of lodgepole pines, once green, now red. It was a long, dry, and dusty road, eerie, even, for those of us who had lived in the American West all our lives. The expanse was so vast, we almost got used to the red forests, a result of local warming that has created a double life span for pine bark beetles, who cut through the bark of the trees to the cambium layer and kill the pines. We saw ghost forests of white bark pines and we imagined hungry grizzlies searching for their autumn food source of pine nuts and not finding them—at risk of entering hibernation in a state of starvation. We witnessed more split estates of mineral rights, above ground and below, that have torn up the hearts of ranches and ranchers in the Powder River Basin, where coal- bed methane operations have ravaged what ranching families believed was their rightful land passed down through the generations. And we witnessed the enormity of the black open-pit coal mines in Gillette, a town where there is so much money, local kids have learned to stand in front of the open doors of bars to catch twenty-dollar bills as they fly out of the saloons or pick them up in the desert snatched by the fingers of sage.

Throughout our wanderings, there was one constant: pronghorn. They were present wherever we went, four-legged witnesses to the environmental stresses in the sagebrush plains. We would see the antelopes watching, not running, as they sat on the edges of the Jonah Oil Field between the rigs and the man-camps, between the roads and the burning slag ponds. Their legs would be hung up in barbed-wire fences as they tried to escape the oil reservations. Many of them, defeated, just sat directly on the oil patches, lethargic, emaciated, fenced in and trapped, their ancestral sage flats now crisscrossed with roads looking like black asphalt scribbles on the whiteboard of winter.

As we drove the long distances, we saw pronghorn antelope standing behind the barbed wire, frozen in fear. And then, in the Big Horn Basin, we saw them running with the wind. And then they would stop and turn, as if looking over their shoulders for what was chasing them. They haunted us. And their large black protruding eyes never left us, as we wondered what they were seeing that we could not.

Pronghorn antelope are uniquely American, found nowhere else on Earth, part of an ancient family, Antilocapridae, that has been roaming North America since the Pliocene era, with fossil records dating back five million years. It is one of the only mammals to have survived the Ice Age. For almost two million years, the pronghorn’s primary predator was the cheetah. They still run with a memory of this Pleistocene cat with speeds of up to eighty miles per hour. The Arapaho and Shoshone call the pronghorn antelope “Windhorse.” With their remarkable peripheral vision, the pronghorn can see in a radius of 360 degrees and spot intruders for up to three to four miles.

The herds we saw in Sublette County around the Jonah Oil Field migrate from Grand Teton National Park in the fall back to Pinedale in the winter, in a hundred-mile seasonal journey returning to the Tetons in the spring. This path of the pronghorn is the longest ungulate migration in the lower forty-eight and has been intact for more than eight thousand years. Now, with the intrusion of development, it is more difficult for them to manage their ancestral trek.

No matter where we seemed to go in the state, the pronghorn were present. Their white geometric markings on tan fur and their black hooked horns create the most stunning of animals. Averaging three feet tall at the shoulder and seventy-five to a hundred pounds, pronghorn are barrel-chested animals with a huge heart and expansive lungs, perfectly adapted with their short buoyant legs to fly across the high plains. As we drove through the miles of open range, another pronghorn would appear on the side of the barbed-wire fence, white fanny flared as danger was noted. I remembered a Polaroid of my three brothers, Steve, Bob, and Dan, each holding up by the horns the pronghorn they had shot as a rite of passage in the 1970s—their boyhood pride exhibited.

We returned home from our road trip with a sobering perspective. The oil and gas companies had created a wide and gaping wound across Wyoming. As U.S. citizens, it can be said, we are all the beneficiaries of America’s oil independence, but there are social and environmental costs and the price is being paid by small rural communities. In Pavillion, Wyoming, with a population of roughly 250, the EPA warned residents in 2011 that they could no longer drink, bathe in, cook with, or farm with their water. Why? No one was saying exactly, but everyone suspected it was contaminated by fracking, by the chemical soup injected into the substrate to release the natural gas. The very company that had fouled their water, Encana, the Canadian company responsible for drilling more than two hundred natural gas wells in the area, donated $1 million to provide water cisterns “to impacted residents” and fund a state study, all the while repeating to the community, “We are not responsible for the problem.”

When we sat with these images over the next year, reflected on them, and digested all the information we had gleaned from our summer of witness, we discussed how our ideas as artists might contribute to the conversation surrounding climate change. What emerged from the “pause” was the overriding presence of the pronghorn.

The pronghorn as witness. What were they seeing? What were they saying to one another? What would they say to us from the vantage point of the Pliocene?

The three of us imagined “A Council of Pronghorn,” a circle of witnesses: twenty-three pronghorn antelope standing in a circle representative of the twenty-three counties in Wyoming. We imagined their skulls floating above weathered fence posts—an homage to the ranching culture—each secured to an iron base repurposed from the gas fields.

We saw each skull not only representing a county in the state, but a voice heard, a story told, a perspective felt. We gathered antelope skulls from hunters, from local collectors, and many from roadkills left behind on the shoulders of lonely straightaways, cleaned meticulously by Felicia and her sister, Avery. The posts were made of lodgepole pine and spoke to the obstacles the animals face, whether fences, roads, or oil rigs. Most of these posts came directly from the Resor ranch. The metal bases made of discarded machinery disks were salvaged from the oil patches, addressing our industrial footprint. We believed these various elements could tell a story:

Animals bear witness to a changing world, a changing climate. The fate of the pronghorn is our own, holding us accountable for what has been taken and for the beauty that remains.

Over the next six months, Ben created the twenty-three Pronghorn Witnesses. Their skulls did float above the spines of weathered ranch posts, each one secured in an iron base. The Council appeared. My task as the writer was to create a poem that would animate them. We imagined lines, words, written in black calligraphy across their skulls.

But once we saw “The Council of Pronghorn” fully articulated in their circle, it became clear to us that they did not need the imposition of our words. A secret language was held within their presence. Their power was gleaned from place. The poem would simply appear as a bookmark, located on a stand to the side of the circle.

Here’s how the words came to me: I lived with one of the skulls. Wherever I was sitting in our house, the skull sat with me. If I was writing in my study, the skull was on my desk watching me. If I was cooking a meal, the skull was by my side preparing the food. If I sat on the porch, the pronghorn skull accompanied me.

After a month, I felt comfortable with our relationship. I slept with the skull.

Brooke was away—and that night, I placed the pronghorn skull on the pillow next to me. I cannot tell you where my dreams took me that night, only that when I awoke, the words were fully formed.

We, The Council

of Pronghorn

have convened

as witnesses

to this moment

in time

when our eyes

wish to peer

into the hearts

of humans

and ask

what kind

of world

are you creating

when we can

no longer

run as Windhorses

but are relegated

to watching

behind fences

dreaming, dreaming

of Spirit

Migrations?

The Council of Pronghorn made its first appearance in the courtyard of the Center for the Arts in Jackson, Wyoming. They circled the square as a disturbance. Visitors had the choice of standing next to pronghorns as part of the circle; inside the circle enduring the horned witnesses’ gaze; or outside the circle as observers. Most people stood outside the circle. The children, however, wanted to build a fire in the center and dance.

And then, The Council of Pronghorn received an invitation to participate in an international exhibit on water at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Ben Roth agreed to drive the pronghorn across the country in his van. What he couldn’t have known at the start of his journey was that the day he arrived in Manhattan, August 27, 2011, would be the day Hurricane Irene made landfall in New York. It took him approximately six and a half minutes to get the twenty- three pronghorns from one end of the island to the other, to get to the cathedral. The city had been evacuated—there were no cars, no buses or taxis or people on the streets. Since this was Ben’s first trip to New York, he didn’t realize the rarity of this moment.

The Council of Pronghorn arrived at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine just as the Arapaho describe them, “Windhorses.” One by one, Ben brought The Council of Pronghorn into the cathedral, which was now a pop-up shelter for the homeless where people could weather the storm.

The pronghorn were placed stoically in a spacious circle inside the nave of the cathedral as the wind roared outside. They told the story of fracking in the American West, of a boom-and-bust economy and contaminated water in towns like Pavillion, Wyoming. They stood as witnesses to the costs of a fossil fuel economy. They haunted, frightened, instructed, and inspired each visitor with their dignity and stark beauty—many who came to see them had never encountered a pronghorn antelope before.

The Council of Pronghorn came to be known as “The Eighth Chapel” and remained in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for almost a year, so compelling was its aura. It is still there, now a semipermanent installation on the grounds of the cathedral on 114th Street in Manhattan, bearing witness to a city and state that continue to face and to fight against their own fracking future.

Excerpted from EROSION: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams. Published by Sarah Crichton Books an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux October 8, 2019. Copyright 2019 by Terry Tempest Williams. All rights reserved.

Artist Christi Belcourt on Kindness and Sacred Earth

Christi Belcourt is a Michif (Métis) visual artist who generously donated the 2019 Bioneers Conference artwork, Prayers and Offerings for Genebek Ziibiing (Serpent River). Belcourt is an esteemed artist and activist whose deeply moving work celebrates the beauty of the natural world and traditional Indigenous world-views. Her artwork spans a range of mediums and is collected privately and publicly around the world. Among her most iconic works are the Water Is Life images that she and artist Isaac Murdock collaborated on for the protest banners at Standing Rock. In 2016 her collaboration and resulting transformative piece with Italian designer Valentino, made global news and established best practices for countering the appropriation of Indigenous art.

Cara Romero, Director of the Indigeneity Program at Bioneers and a renowned photographer in her own right, spoke with Christi Belcourt recently about her art and activism.

CARA ROMERO: Would you share with us where you’re from, about your community, and a little bit about what it’s like?

CHRISTI BELCOURT: I’m Michif from the Métis Nation. My people come from a place called Lac Ste Anne but before it was renamed Lac Ste Anne the original name was Manitou Sahkahigan, which means spirit lake. It’s a very spiritual place where people go to pilgrimage every year. It is a community that is around a lake and a shared space with the Métis people, First Nations people, and non-native people who live around that lake. It’s a place where, unfortunately, I don’t have any land because through the years of colonization and the stealing of Indigenous land, Métis people like my community were left without a land base. There are only eight small Métis settlements in the province of Alberta, and you have to be a member of those settlements to be able to live on them. So by and large, the Métis Nation has become a landless people, in the sense that we have no legal lands left because the government has managed to take them all.

As we’ve seen throughout history, Indigenous lands are being swindled even today through land claim settlements which offer money instead of land. Every single year there is less and less Indigenous land. I believe that the government’s ultimate goal is to remove all Indigenous People from their lands completely, to remove their rights over their territories, and to get every last inch of land absorbed into Canada in a way that gives Indigenous Peoples no rights to say yes or no to development on their lands.

CARA: One thing that your art does is demonstrate Indigenous resilience in the face of this oppression, and your ways of being demonstrate cultural resilience. Can you talk about where the Michif of Métis Nation is in the face of all this, while keeping together cultural transmission?

CHRISTI: I think that within all Indigenous Nations, we have amazing people who do the work of the grassroots at the grassroots level, who continue to maintain the traditional knowledge and maintain their connections to the land. Because our governance structures have been usurped by foreign governing structures – such as Band Council elections, our Métis Nation organization elections. These structures are are not really leading at the grassroots level in terms of transmitting traditional knowledge.

There is this amazing movement of people all across North America who are working really hard, without notice, without acknowledgement, to maintain their traditions and their languages, and they’re doing this through small groups, through one-on-one apprenticeships, and through just simply being on the land and picking the medicines, and learning their language, and tanning a hide. All of these are acts of resilience in the face of what we’re facing. I see this great movement, a silent movement, where there is this massive resurgence to reclaim and restore those things that we hold dear to us in terms of our nation and our culture and our values, which are all connected to the land.

*Our Lives are in the Land* by Christi Belcourt

CARA: You’re known for what I call “artivism,” bringing positive impacts to our Indigenous communities through increased visibility, that beautiful thing that art can bring. You obviously do more than that as an artist, but can you talk a little bit about how you found your way to becoming an artivist, and your philosophy behind making art that gives back to your community?

CHRISTI: That’s such a big question. I don’t know if I have a philosophy. [LAUGHS]. I like the word artivism, by the way, I think that’s really cool.

What I really believe is that the thing that’s going to move us and raise up the level of consciousness as human beings is that we really have to be able to see our connection to the Earth, and see this Earth as a living, breathing, sacred being, which is connected to us and us to her, both on a physical and cellular level, as well as a spiritual level. Human beings have been led to believe that we’re at the top of this pyramid, that we are dominant over the Earth, that the Earth is here for our taking, and we’ve commodified everything. When we switch our thinking into believing that the water is alive, that the trees have their own life and their own territories, that the animals have their own territories, and when we start to walk really gently and softly on the Earth because we see this Earth as a sacred living being, then it changes and raises up the consciousness of how we need to be on this Earth. So less is truly more.

I also believe that kindness is the most important of all actions. It’s really difficult in this world, where we’re inundated with a level of violence seems to be permeating everything. It’s causing a lot of us to feel traumatized through the images that we’re seeing. There’s a lot of stress and fear. Somehow, we have to switch that around. What is the antidote to greed? Generosity. What is the antidote to being mean? Kindness. Kindness is an action that people can take in their daily life. I feel like taking that action can really change this world around, because when you’re kind to even the plants, let’s say, then you walk really softly on this Earth. When you’re kind to the waters, you don’t pollute. When you’re kind to the Earth, you don’t throw things out your window and pollute. You don’t buy plastics as much. You really try to change things around for yourself and for your community.

There’s great work that can be done at the community level. I believe that trying to do things at a huge level, trying to change masses of people won’t come about from the top down, it has to come from the bottom up. We have to do the work with our community at the grassroots level to cultivate this consciousness and awareness. I think as Indigenous People we have that and it’s something that we can share with non-Indigenous people. The level of consciousness of the human species has to be raised up to see the Earth as a living, sacred being, and that’s going to make a really big difference.

I guess that’s my philosophy: Kindness and Sacred Earth.

*Thunderbird Woman* by Isaac Murdoch and Christi Belcourt

CARA : I like that. Everything has a ripple-out effect from there. That’s a beautiful starting place.

When we asked if we could pay for the usage rights for your image, you made a special request, that instead of paying you usage rights, that we, Bioneers, donate those funds to a language project in your community, the Onaman Collective. Can you tell us about that language camp?

CHRISTI: Onaman Collective is the language camp we started two-and-a-half years ago, within the territory where I live, which is Anishinaabek territory (I’m not living currently within my own territory.) But this is an Anishinabek camp that is a year-round, land-based language and traditional teaching camp. It’s for youth and elders, and we haven’t received or accepted any government funds, so all of our fundraising has been done at the grassroots level. So far we’ve got six cabins and a couple other buildings and some lodges for ceremonial purposes, and a beautiful garden that we started this year.

What we’re trying to do is create a safe space for people to come and learn the language, to create art, and to learn traditional skills on the land, and traditional arts in a very relaxed, non-programmed format. We’re trying to get away from the idea of doing weekend workshops, and really trying to encourage a longer-term experience with regaining some of the traditional knowledge and reconnecting with the land for people. A longer term experience means that rather than just making a basket where somebody harvested the materials for you on a weekend, we’re saying let’s go harvest the materials year round. Let’s learn what that is really like. Let’s learn the language around that. Let’s learn all of the Ojibwe language around that activity. Let’s learn from the elders what they did when they were children. Let’s learn this on a deeper level so that we can really, truly pass these skills and knowledge on to our next generation so that the youth become the language bundle carriers, they become the traditional knowledge carriers, that they can really carry this forward.

I’m old enough that I’m lucky enough to have had elders when I was younger that had grown up and lived in the bush and understood all of these things. We need to be able to give these skills – the language, the ceremonial knowledge, the spiritual knowledge of the land, and the philosophy – we need to be able to give the worldview to the youth in a way that it becomes a sacred bundle that they carry forward so that when they become elders, they’re able to then pass that on to the next generation after them.

CARA: That is so powerful. I’m just in awe of that philosophy, and wish that we had something like that in my own community, a year-round process for gathering the materials and knowing when to get out there, knowing the words, and then realizing that the language is deeply rooted in our cultural landscapes. That’s a really powerful thing for the youth to be able to garner from a camp. It’s a really whole and healing approach to what I call cultural transmission.

CHRISTI: Start it up. Start it up.

CARA: Like you, I grew up at a time it was different. There was less TV, there was less distraction from just sitting around. Right? [LAUGHS] We were learning some of these things just by osmosis, being near people that had grown up in a different time period, and more attached to the landscape. Just honoring that whole story is amazing.

Can you tell us what you’re up to now and what you’re doing next?

*Honouring My Spirit Helpers* by Christi Belcourt

CHRISTI: We have a dream of building an art studio/language learning space at the camp. Right now we have cabins, but we have no large space where people can gather and work on large projects, like building a canoe or put a quilting frame up. The youth have asked for a dedicated space for the language where they can have a little library and a classroom. We’re working on fundraising for that. That’s probably our last big push for the camp in terms of building.

We have a number of gatherings that we’re planning. We have storytelling in the wintertime. We’re going to be hunting and trapping, and we’re going to be having a hide-tanning camp. The youth want to do some more skills around traditional weaving, cedar mat weaving and bulrush weaving, making baskets and mats. We have another youth that wants to do ash baskets, so she’s going to be bringing in an elder to teach that. We have a number of language lessons planned. There’s always something in the works there, which is exciting.

In terms of my own art, I’ve just started painting again because I found some time to do that, which feels great. I’m starting to ruminate some things in my mind about artistic images that I might want to put out there according to what’s going on right now. You know, there’s the actions that are happening in Hawaii. A thing I’m spending a lot of time thinking about these days is the people that are trying to cross the southern border in the States and are being separated from their children, and the injustices and crimes against humanity that are happening right here on this continent, committed by the US government to the people who are Latinx people. It’s really hard being so far away, but I believe in prayers, and I believe in making our offerings. I believe that when we ask, there is a grand spirit world and a greater design here at work. I also believe that continuing the path of traditions is following our traditional knowledge in terms of our spirituality and ceremonies as well. It’s really important to use all the tools within our bundle — and that means our prayers and our offerings to the lands and the spirits of these lands as well, to ask them for help. I’m trying to think along those lines, what we can do to join with others to help the people that are being caged and to stop this genocide from happening.

*Bring Our Children Home* by Christi Belcourt

CARA: We’re going to be doing a panel on that in the Indigenous Forum at the Bioneers Conference this year. It’s an intergenerational panel with Indigenous folks from North and South, including some of the tribes right there on the border. We’ll talk about what it feels like as Indigenous Peoples to have that colonial divide between us causing an irreparable wound amongst our people. Hopefully, we can garner insight for how we can talk about that amongst ourselves. It’s always good to be able to articulate those issues, and then hopefully that resonates with the audience, that they’re able to think about those borderlands from an Indigenous perspective and realize how violent it is, and how it violates Indigenous sensibilities about that space. I think about that particular issue a lot too. It’s very painful, not only being far away, but it’s also very painful being so close to it.

I’m from Southern California, Mojave Desert. We have a lot of people who descend from both sides of the border, and are living proof of that we’re connected and humans are part of the ecosystem. You were talking earlier about being kind to the land. It’s just a painful ordeal that’s going on down there.

CARA: Finally, if people wanted to find out more about the camp and are moved to donate, how can they do that?

CHRISTI: It’s the Onaman Collective, and that’s the work that I do with Isaac Murdoch.

And we have a Facebook auction that runs for Onaman Collective Auction for Action which runs about four times a year. There’s just a whole bunch of ways. But the email is probably the easiest to contact us just to ask us questions or to donate: OnamanCollective@gmail.com.

CARA: Perfect, Christi. I feel really blessed to have had the opportunity to talk to you today, and I wish you the very best in all of your endeavors. Thank you for your generosity and your ways of being. You’re very inspirational to many artists. And just keep on keeping on.

CHRISTI: Oh, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure to speak with you. I hope one day we can meet in person. Thank you for using my art work for this initiative. I saw the poster. It was beautiful.

Of course, I wish you and everybody there all the best.

Cara Romero & Paloma Flores: Recognizing Indigenous Delegations & Native Youth Attendees

This keynote talk was given at the 2019 Bioneers Conference.

Bioneers Indigeneity Program Director Cara Romero recognizes Indigenous Delegations. Paloma Flores, Program Coordinator for the SFUSD Indian Education Program, Title VII, recognizes the Indigenous Youth Delegation.

Visit the Bioneers Indigeneity Program.

Learn more about Cara Romero and her work at the SFUSD Indian Education Program, Title VII website.

Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below.

Transcript

CARA ROMERO:

It is such an honor to be here with all of you. I’m the director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program. I’m from the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation in Southern California. I’m also an artist and a mother.

I have the privilege of working alongside Alexis Bunten, she’s Aleut and Yupik. She’s a badass writer, a PhD, and also a mother. Together Alexis and I, and many Native advisors, lead and guide the larger organization in all matters related to our indigenous programming, helping to make sure that all of our work to engage indigenous community locally and globally is native-led, culturally respectful, and elevates indigenous voice as central in our shared mission of protecting Mother Earth.

In my nine years with the organization, I have observed a unique dynamic within our organization, a dynamic that has helped us grow our attendance, engagement, and trust with our indigenous community. Our success is largely due to what Alexis and I call institutional decolonization.

Bioneers created an indigenous-led initiative that has grown from approximately 20 attendees to over 250 indigenous peoples joining us this weekend. [APPLAUSE] There are so many indigenous people here today, natives from North America, Latin America, South America, the Hawaiian Islands, Alaska, Siberia, representing over 99 different nations, that we know of. [APPLAUSE] And there are over 127 native youth, over 250 natives here celebrating this gathering that is Bioneers, celebrating this gathering of humans that care about the Earth and each other.

Kenny and Nina, the founders of Bioneers, did what many organizations that attempt to work with Indigenous Peoples do not – they gave us the power to create an autonomous Native-led program that we envisioned and developed. When you hand over the power, we can create what we need, not what other people think we need. We can also make sure that we practice respect and honor intertribal protocols intrinsic to cross-cultural trust.

Our staff checks in with us on everything related to indigeneity, making sure there’s no cultural appropriation or disrespectful behavior happening on the grounds. Our organization created a first-of-its-kind policy document called Inclusivity Guidelines. And we train everyone on staff on how to be respectful while engaging our indigenous community. It is incredible. [APPLAUSE] Thank you.

The Indigenous Forum and the Native Youth Leadership Program were small when I came on in 2011. We had only about 20 indigenous presenters, and the indigenous youth program only had four kids in attendance. I wanted to increase our indigenous presence in this cross-cultural space, but I knew it would take time. It involved creating trust with our indigenous community and creating an intergenerational outreach effort that includes native youth.

In just about every metropolitan in the US, there is a Native American Student Services Program, sometimes called Indian Education Title 7 programs. These are special programs built on original treaties with Native American tribes. You see, during the forced and rapid loss of our lands and genocide taking place in North America, we attempted to negotiate our land loss in these treaties, largely for education and healthcare. But today these programs are sadly underfunded. These Indian education programs are one of the ways Native American find each other in urban settings, grounding each other and staying close to each other, so our kids can grow together in this globalized world but stay in touch with each other and our cultures.

Today, I would like to honor and acknowledge one very special woman – Paloma Flores from the California Pit River Tribe, and the program coordinator of the Indian Education Title 7 Program in San Francisco Unified School District. [APPLAUSE] With a tremendous sponsorship of our native kids by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, Paloma and other tribal youth leaders in the community have helped us over the last seven years grow our Native Youth Leadership Program from that original cohort of four into the program that now hosts over 125 native youth from all over the country. She is a warrior woman fighting for our native youth in the public school systems. Bioneers, please join me in welcoming Paloma Flores. [APPLAUSE]

PALOMA FLORES:

[Speaker’s language] I am of the Pit River Nation, Madesi band. We are of Medicine Lake on my mother’s side. [speaker’s language] Good-hearted ones. You are meant to be here.

When we invest in the truth, we bring it back to the beginning. If we talk about the future, the future is living now. From four to 127, efforts made collective. To decolonize is truly to indigenize. As we sit, we take it in, but when we stand, we’re rooted. You all are [Speaker’s language] good-hearted ones.

To the youth – [speaker’s language] our people are still here. Our people are still here. [APPLAUSE] So with me, indigenous youth delegation, stand, because we honor you. Stand. [APPLAUSE] Give it up for these young people, Bay Area! [APPLAUSE]

We invest today and we’re able to see tomorrow. When I say Bio, you say warrior. Bio [AUDIENCE RESPONDS “warrior”] Bio [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] [SINGING] When I say Bio, you say warrior, Bio [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Bio [AUDIENCE RESPONDS] Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

Humanizing our End of Life Experiences: Q&A with Shoshana Ungerleider

Physician and activist Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider founded the End Well Project as a way to make end of life experiences more human-centered. This media platform and annual symposium elevates the voices of diverse professionals, sparking a cultural shift in the way we approach end of life care.

Read on for our conversation with Ungerleider about the innovations she is pioneering in her field.

How do the negative connotations around death stymie conversation and, consequently, more innovative end of life care?

For the vast majority of human history we have actually been familiar with death. We cared for our family members at home, when they died – they were laid out in the parlor and we knew what rituals to perform. Throughout history, death was an expected occurrence; it was accepted and planned. Our cultural understanding began to wither about a century ago when death became more medicalized due to advances in science and technology. Through this overarching medicalization of death, the end of life has moved out of our collective consciousness and into the shadows. Effectively, we’ve lost our cultural understanding of how to think about it, prepare for it, but most importantly, how to talk about it. The result is that critical conversations aren’t taking place along the way in order to make sure that the care people receive is care they really understand and want.

What are some of the best conversations or ideas that have come out of End Well’s interdisciplinary approach to end of life care?

From death education for high school students, to creating a lasting digital legacy after you die, to recording the last sound you want to hear before you die…there have been so many great ideas and collaborations, created and discussed at End Well.

How do you go about prioritizing human-centrism in your work? Is human-centrism an approach that we can apply to every field?

I believe death is not a medical issue, but a human one. In order to move the needle on improving the end of life experience for everyone, we need to use the basic principles of human-centered design thinking to create lasting solutions. We need to bring the technical experts and life experts into dialogue, which is exactly what we do at End Well. We invite healthcare professionals, designers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, funders, artists, educators, journalists, students, venture capitalists, patients, advocates, payers, policy makers and more to the table to address the many facets of end of life. Human-centered design is all about keeping the end user at the center of the conversation and building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for. I believe the world would be a much better place if all fields were built with this approach!

In what ways does End Well promote people’s agency in their end of life decision-making process?

At End Well, we believe all people should experience the end of life in a way that matches their values and goals. End Well’s goal is to create a cultural shift to normalize conversations about our mortality throughout life. Through End Well’s online platform and media resource, the creation of new collaborations, systems, protocols, products and networks are coming together to support making the end of life more human-centered for all of us.

What overlap is there between end of life practices and sustainability practices, and are there any initiatives to strengthen it?

Absolutely! For example, it turns out modern funeral and burial practices are quite problematic for the environment. From large amounts of formaldehyde-based embalming fluid being used to acres of land for cemeteries full of steel caskets, concrete burial vaults, and wood coffins to particulate emissions from crematoriums. There are many newer alternatives to traditional options and a growing movement around eco-friendly burial to mitigate the environmental impact of death. On May 21, 2019, Washington State’s Governor Jay Inslee signed SB 5001 which legalizes natural organic reduction, or “the contained, accelerated conversion of human remains to soil.” The law will go into effect on May 1, 2020 and was advocated for by End Well partner Recompose, a Seattle-based company founded by Katrina Spade which offers “natural organic reduction,” a process which gently converts human remains into soil.

Are there innovative practices emerging in the field of end of life that we should keep our eyes on right now?

The death doula movement is picking up lots of momentum, which is fantastic! By complementing the care provided to patients by hospitals, senior-care facilities and hospices, death doulas are well suited to support families and fill in the gaps that occur during the dying process.

Hope Is an Imperative: Sparking an Ecological Design Revolution

While society prepares for the future of a world ravaged by climate change, environmental educator David Orr has spent years writing about how to reverse it. Orr advocates for an ecological design revolution to change how we build homes, grow food and model society, so that future generations can thrive. We can build a more resilient world by simply asking ourselves: “How would nature do it?”

In his book, Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr, Orr frames our devotion to fossil fuels as a moral lapse best judged from the perspective of our descendants. Young people are set to bear the brunt of these climate consequences, so to put power back in their hands, we must engage them in building a more sustainable world.

Orr will present a keynote address at the 2019 Bioneers Conference. Buy your tickets to Bioneers 2019 here.

Following is an excerpt from Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr.

To see our situation more clearly, we need a perspective that transcends the minutiae of science, economics, and current politics. Since the effects, whatever they may be, will fall most heavily on future generations, understanding their likely perspective on our present decisions would be useful to us now. And how are future generations likely to regard various positions in the debate about climatic change? Will they applaud the precision of our economic calculations that discounted their prospects to the vanishing point? Will they think us prudent for delaying action until the last-minute scientific doubts were quenched? Will they admire our heroic devotion to inefficient cars and sport utility vehicles, urban sprawl, and consumption? Hardly. They are more likely, I think, to judge us much as we now judge the parties in the debate on slavery prior to the Civil War.

Stripped to its essentials, defenders of the idea that humans can hold other humans in bondage developed four lines of argument. First, citing Greek and Roman civilization, some justified slavery by arguing that the advance of human culture and freedom had always depended on slavery. “It was an inevitable law of society,” according to John C. Calhoun, “that one portion of the community depended upon the labor of another portion over which it must unavoidably exercise control” (Miller, W. L., 1998, 132). And “freedom,” the editor of the Richmond Inquirer once declared, “is not possible without slavery” (Oakes 1998, 141). This line of thought, discordant when appraised against other self-evident doctrines that “all men are created equal,” is a tribute to the capacity of the human mind to simultaneously accommodate antithetical principles. Nonetheless, it was used by some of the most ardent defenders of “freedom” right up to the Civil War.

A second line of argument was that slaves were really better off living here in servitude than they would have been in Africa. Slaves, according to Calhoun, “had never existed in so comfortable, so respectable, or so civilized a condition as that which [they] enjoyed in the Southern States” (Miller, W. L., 1998, 132). The “happy slave” argument fared badly with the brute facts of slavery that became vivid for the American public only when dramatized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin published in 1852.

A third argument for slavery was cast in cost-benefit terms. The South, it was said, could not afford to free its slaves without causing widespread economic and financial ruin. This argument put none too fine a point on the issue; slavery was simply a matter of economic survival for the ruling race.

A fourth argument, developed most forcefully by Calhoun, held that slavery, whatever its liabilities, was up to the various states, and the federal government had no right to interfere with it because the Constitution was a compact between independent political units. Beneath all such arguments, of course, lay bedrock contempt for human equality, dignity, and freedom. Most of us, in a more enlightened age, find such views repugnant.

While the parallels are not exact between arguments for slavery and those used to justify inaction in the face of prospective climatic change, they are, perhaps, sufficiently close to be instructive. First, those saying that we do not know enough yet to limit our emission of greenhouse gases argue that human civilization, by which they mean mostly economic growth for the already wealthy, depends on the consumption of fossil fuels. We, in other words, must take substantial risks with our children’s future for a purportedly higher cause: the material progress of civilization now dependent on the combustion of fossil fuels. Doing so, it is argued, will add to the stock of human wealth that will enable subsequent generations to better cope with the messes that we will leave behind.

Second, proponents of procrastination now frequently admit the possibility of climatic change but argue that it will lead to a better world. Carbon enrichment of the atmosphere will speed plant growth, enabling agriculture to flourish, increasing yields, lowering food prices, and so forth. Further, while some parts of the world may suffer, a warmer world will, on balance, be a nicer and more productive place for succeeding generations.

Third, some, arguing from a cost-benefit perspective, assert that energy conservation and solar energy are simply too expensive now. We must wait for technological breakthroughs to reduce the cost of energy efficiency and a solar-powered world. Meanwhile we continue to expand our dependence on fossil fuels, thereby making any subsequent transition still more expensive and difficult.

Finally, arguments for procrastination are grounded in a modern-day version of states’ rights and extreme libertarianism, which makes squandering fossil fuels a matter of individual rights, devil take the hindmost.

The fit between slavery and our present use of fossil fuels is by no means perfect, but it is close enough to be suggestive. Of course we do not intend to enslave subsequent generations, but we will leave them in bondage to degraded climatic and ecological conditions that we will have created. Further, they will know that we failed to act on their behalf with alacrity even after it became clear that our failure to use energy efficiently and develop alternative sources of energy would severely damage their prospects. In fact, I am inclined to think that our dereliction will be judged as a more egregious moral lapse than that which we now attribute to slave owners. For reasons that one day will be regarded as no more substantial than those supporting slavery, we knowingly bequeathed the risks and results of climatic change to all subsequent generations, everywhere.

If not checked soon, that legacy will include severe droughts, heat waves, famine, changing disease patterns, rising sea levels, and political and economic instability. It will also mean degraded political, economic, and social institutions burdened by bitter conflicts over declining supplies of fossil fuels, water, and food. It is not far-fetched to think that human institutions, including democratic governments, will break under such conditions.

Other similarities exist. Both the use of humans as slaves and the use of fossil fuels allow those in control to command more work than would otherwise be possible. Both inflate wealth of some by robbing others. Both systems work only so long as something is underpriced: the devalued lives and labor of a bondsman or fossil fuels priced below their replacement costs. Both require that some costs be ignored: those to human beings stripped of choice, dignity, and freedom or the cost of environmental “externalities,” which cast a long shadow on the prospects of our descendants. In the case of slavery, the effects were egregious, brutal, and immediate. But massive use of fossil fuels simply defers the costs, different but no less burdensome, onto our descendants, who will suffer the consequences with no prospect of manumission. Slavery warped the politics and cultural evolution of the South. But our dependence on fossil fuels has also warped and corrupted our politics and culture in ways too numerous to count. Slaves could be manumitted, but the growing numbers of victims of global warming have no reprieve. We leave behind steadily worsening conditions that cannot be altered in any time span meaningful to humans.

Both slavery and fossil fuel–powered industrial societies require a mass denial of responsibility. Slave owners were caught in a moral quandary. Their predicament, in James Oakes’s words, was “the product of a deeply rooted psychological ambivalence that impels the individual to behave in ways that violate fundamental norms even as they fulfill basic desires” (Oakes 1998, 120). Regarding slavery, George Washington confessed, “I shall frankly declare to you that I do not like even to think, much less talk, of it.” As one Louisiana slave owner put it, “a gloomy cloud is hanging over our whole land.” Many wished for some way out of a profoundly troubling reality. Instead of finding a decent way out, however, the South created a culture of denial around the institutions of bondage. They were enslaved by their own system until it came crashing down around them in the Civil War.

We, too, find ourselves in a quandary. A poll conducted for the American Geophysical Union revealed that most Americans believe that global warming is real and that its consequences will be tragic and irreversible. But the response of Congress and much of the business community has been to deny that the problem exists and continue with business as usual. Proposals for higher gasoline taxes, increasing fuel efficiency, or limits on use of automobiles, for example, are regarded as politically impossible as the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. Unless we take appropriate steps soon, our system, too, will end badly.

We now know that heated arguments made for the enslavement of human beings were both morally wrong and self-defeating. The more alert knew this early on. Benjamin Franklin noted that slaves “pejorate the families that use them; the white children become proud, disgusted with labor, and being educated in idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living by industry” (Finley 1980, 100). Thomas Jefferson knew all too well that slavery degraded slaves and slave owners alike, while providing no sustainable basis for prosperity in an emerging capitalist economy. In a rough parallel, it is possible that the extravagant use of fossil fuels has become a substitute for intelligence, exertion, design skill, and foresight. On the other hand, we have every reason to believe that vastly improved energy efficiency and an expeditious transition to a solar-powered society would be to our advantage, morally and economically. Energy efficiency could lower our energy bill in the U.S. alone by as much as $200 billion per year (Hawken et al. 1999). It would reduce environmental impacts associated with mining, processing, transportation, and combustion of fossil fuels and promote better technology. Elimination of subsidies for fossil fuels, nuclear power, and automobiles would save tens of billions each year (Myers 1998). In other words, the “no regrets” steps necessary to avert the possibility of severe climatic change, taken for sound ethical reasons, are the same steps we ought to take for reasons of economic self-interest. History rarely offers such a clear convergence of ethics and self-interest.

If we are to take this opportunity, however, we must be clear that the issue of climatic change is not, first and foremost, a matter of economics, technology, or science but, rather, a matter of principle that is best seen from the vantage point of our descendants. The same historical period that gave us slavery also gave us the principles necessary to abolish it. What Thomas Jefferson called “remote tyranny” was not merely tyranny remote in space but in time as well—what Bill McDonough has termed “intergenerational remote tyranny.” In a letter to James Madison written in 1789, Jefferson argued that no generation had the right to impose debt on its descendants, for were it to do so, the future would be ruled by the dead, not the living.

A similar principle applies in this instance. Drawing from Jefferson, Aldo Leopold, and others, such a principle might be stated thusly:

No person, institution, or nation has the right to participate in activities that contribute to large-scale, irreversible changes of the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles or undermine the integrity, stability, and beauty of the Earth’s ecologies—the consequences of which would fall on succeeding generations as an irrevocable form of remote tyranny.

That principle will likely fall on uncomprehending ears in Congress and in most corporate boardrooms. Who, then, will act on it? Who ought to act? Who can lead? What institutions represent the interests of our children and succeeding generations on whom the cost of present inaction will fall? At the top of my list are those that purport to educate and thereby to equip the young for useful and decent lives. Education is done in many ways, the most powerful of which is by example. The example the present generation needs most from those who propose to prepare them for responsible adulthood is a clear signal that their teachers and mentors are themselves responsible and will not, for any reason, encumber their future with risk or debt—ecological or economic. And they need to know that our commitment is more than just talk. This principle can be stated in these words:

The institutions that purport to induct the young into responsible adulthood ought themselves to operate responsibly, which is to say that they should not act in ways that might plausibly undermine the world their students will inherit.

Accordingly, I propose that every school, college, and university stand up and be counted on the issue of climatic change by beginning now to develop plans to reduce and eventually eliminate or offset the emission of heat-trapping gases by the year 2020. Opposition to such a proposal will, predictably, follow along three lines. The first line of objection will arise from those who argue that we do not yet know enough to act. In other words, until the threat of climatic change is clear beyond any possible doubt (and also less easily reversed), we cannot act. Presumably, these same people do not wait until they smell smoke in the house at 2 am to purchase fire insurance. A “no regrets” strategy relative to the far-from remote possibility of climatic change is, by the same logic, a way to insure our descendants against the possibility of disaster otherwise caused by our carelessness.

A second line of objection will come from those who will argue that even so, educational institutions on their own cannot afford to act. To be certain, there will be initial expenses, but there are also quick savings from reducing energy use. In fact, done smartly, implementation of energy efficiency and solar technology can save money. Moreover, it is now possible to use energy service companies that will finance the work and pay themselves from the stream of savings, making the transition budget neutral. The real problem here has less to do with costs than with moral energy and the failure to imagine possibilities in places where imagination and creativity are reportedly much valued.

A third kind of objection will come from those who agree with the overall goal of stabilizing climate but will argue that our business is education, not social change. This position is premised on the quaint belief that what occurs in educational institutions must be uncontaminated by contact with the affairs of the world and that we have no business objecting to how that world does its business. It is further assumed that education occurs only in classrooms and must be remote from anything having practical consequences. Were the effort to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, however, done as a 20-year effort in which students worked with faculty, staff, administration, energy engineers, and technical experts, the educational and institutional benefits would be substantial.

How might the abolition of fossil fuels occur? In outline, the basic steps are straightforward, requiring:

thorough audit of current institutional energy use;
preparation of detailed engineering plans to upgrade energy efficiency and eliminate waste;
development of plans to harness renewable energy sources sufficient to meet campus energy needs by 2020;
competent implementation.

These steps ought to engage students, faculty, administration, staff, and representatives of the surrounding community. They ought to be taken publicly as a way to educate a broad constituency about the consequences of our present course and the possibilities and opportunities for change.

The longer-term goal of this effort is to begin, from the grassroots, the long-delayed transition to energy efficiency and solar power. Perhaps our leaders will follow one day when they are wise enough to distinguish the public interest from narrow short-run private interests. Someday, too, all of us will come to understand that true prosperity neither permits nor requires bondage of any human being, in any form, for any reason, now or ever.

Restoring the Oaks and Our Connection to the Earth: An Interview with Jolie Elan

Jolie Elan, founding Director of the Go Wild Institute, has spent years drawing from her rich background in ecology and ethnobotany to transform people’s connections to the Earth. The Go Wild Institute weaves modern science with ancient wisdom in the programs it offers, from wild birthday adventures to medicinal plant walks, to reinvigorate an innate sense of belonging to the natural world.

Elan is especially channeling her efforts into conserving the ancient Oak life system. While Oak trees are a global and fundamental fixture of the natural world, they’re facing disease and other threats precipitated by climate change. This year, the Go Wild Institute is holding its sixth annual Mount Tam Oak ceremony to celebrate the Oaks’ abundant gifts and wisdom. The event, from 1-4 p.m. on Oct. 27, is free to the public with limited space.

Read on for our conversation with Elan about the importance of honoring the biodiversity and wonder of the Oak life system. This excerpt has been edited for clarity and length.

Explore more Bioneers media on Intelligence in Nature.

As an ecologist, what drew you to the Oak life system? What significance does it hold in the bigger web of interconnectedness?

One late summer day in Napa County, I stood underneath a Valley Oak tree dropping acorns by the barrel load. As an ecologist, I was fascinated by the sheer abundance of acorns; just one large Valley Oak tree can produce over 500 pounds of nutritious acorns in a year. If the oaks were solely interested in reproduction, they would be more frugal. As I stood under that tree, I remembered that the majority of Native Californian tribes ate acorns as a staple food. Having tasted nutty acorn porridge at a permaculture workshop, I wondered, can acorns make a comeback?

In California, oak woodlands have higher levels of biodiversity than virtually any other terrestrial ecosystem in the state. Sadly, oak woodlands and savannas in California and Oregon are some of the most endangered ecosystems in the United States. Oak ecosystems around the world have been destroyed to make way for agricultural crops that rely heavily on irrigation and chemical inputs.

Oaks have extremely deep roots that reach into the water table, so once established, they require no irrigation. Oak roots hold soils in place, keeping rivers clear for fish. Oaks provide many other ecosystem services like carbon sequestration, climate cooling, clean air, wildlife habitat, and drought resiliency.

As we move through the bottleneck of the Anthropocene, humanity would be wise to realign with the mighty oaks for sustenance and resiliency. Why not plant acorns, restore our oak lands, and enjoy a viable, sustainable, abundant food source? I am certain, nuttier ideas have taken root in California.

What activities will be included in the Oak Ceremony, and how have you crafted them to serve your goal of celebrating the Oaks?

In addition to song, dance, and prayer, we will convene a Council of All Oak Beings. This is a ritual practice of the Work that Reconnects, which has a central purpose of bringing us back into relationship with each other and with the self-healing powers in the web of life, motivating and empowering us to reclaim our lives, our communities, and our planet from corporate and colonial rule.

During this ritual, people go out onto the land in silence and find an Oak Being that wants to talk through them at the Council. This Being could be any part of the oak web of life, like a tadpole, oak, squirrel, or even a river. As we sit with our Beings, we hold open the possibility that communication with the more-than-human world is possible. After 20 minutes, participants return to the group where they embody their Being, often by creating a mask, or just changing the way they move and talk. All the Oak Beings then come together in sacred council to share their experiences, concerns, and wisdom for the healing of our oaks and our planet in general.

I am always blown away by the power of this ritual to increase empathy for our living Earth. It helps us remember that we all belong to something much bigger than our human-centric world.

How are plants intelligent in their own right? What can we learn from them?

Most Earth-based cultures hold that our Earth is alive, sentient and intelligent. Now our best science is saying the same thing. The exciting new field of plant intelligence, also known as plant neurobiology, is showing that plants sense their environment, process these sensory inputs, and make decisions on how to best respond. Many say that the definition of intelligence is just that: sensing, processing these sensations, and responding appropriately to the stimulus in the environment.

Plants can see without eyes, hear without ears, smell without noses, feel without nervous systems, and communicate without talking. Plants have discerning palates that can taste where nutrients are most abundant, and grow their roots towards the nutrients.

The social lives of plants are fascinating, too. Since they invest tremendous resources into their roots, they can’t relocate when conditions turn unfavorable or someone else tries to squeeze them out. Plants occupy their soil, vehemently defending their territory with allelopathic chemicals. However, plants can recognize their kin, and rather than defend against close relatives, they opt to share resources.

Plants also warn others of danger. There are numerous studies that show when plants are injured by browsing animals, they emit airborne chemicals that warn other plants of danger. Once warned some plants will increase root mass to strengthen defenses, or increase levels of chemicals, like tannins, that are toxic to browsers. As an herbalist, I wonder about how relationship with a plant might affect its medicine. After all, if plants can bump up their toxic compounds in response to stress, can they bump up healing constituents in response to gratitude, love, and stewardship?

I could go on for a long time with examples of plants acting intelligently because it really lights me up. I am grateful to Bioneers for raising the consciousness of our intelligent, sentient nature by bringing some amazing thinkers in this field to the stage, including Monica Gagliano, one of the top researchers on plant intelligence.

I can say without a doubt it is possible to tap into the wisdom of plants. In my experience plants are always trying to make contact; they are waiting for us to come back to them. Communicating with plants requires some practice. Most importantly, we have to set aside our false cultural beliefs that this type of communication is impossible.

Often the first few instances when we get downloads from plants, we don’t believe it. That’s why it is useful to start in a group. At Go Wild Institute, I lead a good number of plant spirit journeys. After a primer on how to journey, we ingest a small amount of the plant and sit quietly for 20 minutes, allowing for the possibility that the plant can communicate with us. Afterwards we share our experiences. I have never led a group journey where people did not share profound and similar messages from the plant. When we know that plants have wisdom and can communicate with us, it transforms how we relate to all of life. Our world gets less lonely and infinitely richer and more interesting. We understand viscerally that it is possible to source directly from nature for wisdom, healing, and guidance.

Your website says the “Go Wild Institute weaves science, myth, and spirit to awaken our nature and foster wonder and balance within the great web of life.” Can you explain why your organization takes a holistic approach (including science, myth, and spirit) to ethnobotany?

For the most part, just understanding the science of nature, doesn’t change how we treat our Earth. We can learn the latest science about climate change, GMOs, or trash vortexes, but many people are motivated by their hearts, not their heads. Science engages our logical mind, which we absolutely need, but most science is based on the premise that we can be detached, objective observers of our world.

To know our rightful place within the family of life we must also engage our imaginal mind, our subconscious, and our dreamworld. Myths do just this. Myths are encoded earth wisdom that help us understand nature’s symbolic language and the interconnectedness of all things. Myth supports us as we navigate the mysterious terrain of being an Earthling, helping us find answers to important questions: What is my purpose? What does real power look like? What is my medicine? When we know in our cells that we are part of a deeply intelligent, living earth, we understand that what we do to our planet, we do to ourselves. That’s when we begin to act on behalf of all life.

What spiritual and healing benefits can people receive from connecting with plants?

Plants have immense power to heal us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Each plant offers unique medicine for repair of our world. I want to share a story my teacher Native Healer Bobby Lake-Thom (Karuk and Seneca) who got it from his teacher Rolling Thunder (Cherokee): The Origin of Human Sickness and Medicine.

In the olden days, the animal and plant people could all talk. They lived together in balance, peace, and good will. They all depended upon each other and helped each other in their relationship with the human people. But as time went on the human beings began to increase so fast that their settlements spread over the whole Earth. As a result, all the other “relations” on Mother Earth found themselves beginning to be cramped for room to live. To make matters worse, the human people made weapons. They began to slaughter the larger animals for their flesh or their skins, while the smaller creatures, such as the frogs and worms, were trodden upon without thought; no longer respected as equal relations.

So, the animals decided to have a special council meeting and discuss what they could do for their safety. One by one the “relations” in Nature complained of the way in which the Human people had killed their friends and family; how the Human relations ate their flesh, used their skins, made religious regalia out of their teeth and claws, or just took their feathers without even asking permission.

Thus, it was decided to begin a war against the Human beings for their lack of respect and constant cruel and selfish behavior. One of the animal people asked what weapons did people use to destroy them.

“Bows and arrows,” cried out one of the red Bears. “And what are they made of?”

“The bow of wood, and the string made from our entrails,” replied one of the Bears. It was then proposed that they would make some bows and arrows and fight the human beings with their own weapons.

One of the bears sacrificed himself for the string of the bow and they made a weapon. The bears discovered that their long claws caught on the string and spoiled their aim. One bear suggested that the bears cut their claws, but the chief objected saying that it was better to trust the teeth and claws that the Creator had given them for survival in Nature, rather than sacrificing themselves for human’s weapons. The bears went back to the woods without coming up with a way to stop humans from treating the earth with disrespect.

Then, the deer people held a council and after some serious discussion decided to send rheumatism and arthritis to every human hunter who should kill a deer, unless he took special care to ask for permission for their life, and offer tobacco as payment; in this way show respect to the powers of Creation.

Next came the Fish and Reptiles and Snakes, who had their own complaints against the human beings. They decided to send tormenting dreams so the Human people would go crazy, lose their appetite, get sick, or die. That is why Human people today have such bad dreams and illness.

The birds, insects and smaller creatures came together for the same purpose. Thus, one after another they denounced Human cruelty and injustice toward the other relations in Nature, and voiced their support for sending diseases and death to Humans. They all began to devise and name so many new diseases, one after another, that had it not been for some failures in the plot, the entire Human race would not be able to survive.

The Plant People, who have always been friendly to Human beings heard what had been decided and done by their other relations in Nature, so they too held council. The Plant People with their herbal power, made a pledge to continue to help the Human people; it is their power, medicine, and gifts that can defeat the evilness and sicknesses now bestowed upon humans. Hence each and every plant can furnish a cure for the various human diseases and sicknesses, if only we learn to respect and learn to listen to the Plant People. Thus, came medicine, and secrets from Nature.

What are some ways that people can honor nature and connect with its sacred meaning in their everyday lives?

Honoring and connecting with our nature begins by remembering our true nature; we are part of a living, sentient planet. Our bones are made from minerals that came from rock. Our cells are filled with water that has been part of glaciers, rivers, and oceans. Trees take in our exhales and exhausts of carbon dioxide and mix it with water to make sugar from sunshine, which is the currency of our world – everything wants that sweetness. Every breath we take weaves us into this web of life that is spun in sweetness from sunshine.

One easy and profound way to connect to nature is to take thirty seconds and quietly breathe within the web of life. Imagine your breath swirling in the tree canopies. Feel how you don’t actually have to effort to breathe. Life just breathes you, just like life breathes the whales in the ocean and the geese flying south. Even in a jail cell or a coma, you are still conspiring (con- means “with,” spirae- means “breath”) with our generous, collaborative, and democratic Mother Earth. If just for one second, while doing this exercise, your feel a sense of belonging to something much bigger than your human world then keep up the practice. Maybe next time you can go for five seconds.

After this exercise, ask yourself this: Where do I draw the lines between myself and nature?

Social Medicine: Restoring Public Health by Changing Society | Dr. Rupa Marya

We are told that our personal health is our individual responsibility based on our own choices. Yet, the biological truth is that human health is dependent upon the health of nature’s ecosystems and our social structures. Decisions that negatively affect these larger systems and eventually affect us are made without our consent as citizens and, often, without our knowledge. Dr. Rupa Marya, former Associate Professor of Medicine at UC San Francisco, and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, says “social medicine” means dismantling harmful social structures that directly lead to poor health outcomes, and building new structures that promote health and healing.

Learn more about Rupa Marya and her work here.

The Radical Acts of Growing Diversity and Saving Seeds: An Interview with Doug Gosling

Doug Gosling, the Director of The Mother Garden Biodiversity Program at The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC), is a master seed saver and biodiversity steward. He also manages the gardens at Food for Thought, the Sonoma County AIDS Food Bank, and is Chair of the Food Bank’s Project Africa, a program that supports AIDS relief work in Africa. Doug was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director.

ARTY MANGAN, BIONEERS: You wrote that “Growing plants and saving seeds are some of the most provocative, democratic, and radical acts one can take towards reconciling the modern world’s alienation from the earth and the miracle of life.” How has that influenced your life and the life of folks that you’ve worked with?

DOUG GOSLING, OAEC: We all have ideas about why we’re in such dire straits right now as a species. I think that certainly one of the primary reasons is that we have, as modern people and maybe particularly as Westerners, but not necessarily only as Westerners, become so alienated from the earth from which we rise. In fact, there’s an effort to alienate us from everything that is true. I think why things are so demented, is that people consider themselves outside of everything around us. People, for millennia, have always had a relationship with the land and the water and the air, and understood fully where their food came from. Being in this place that has had a very similar mission over the years, from Farallones to Center for Seven Generations to OAEC, I get to stand here and receive people, thousands of them, and discover over and over again that people feel the alienation even if they don’t know what it is. People are starving for being in relationship, both with the earth and with each other.

I’ve seen amazing things happen. I think the most profound things are the simplest things. When people have an opportunity on our volunteer day to put their hands in healthy living soil, it changes them. It absolutely changes them. No matter what we’re doing in this garden whether it’s digging Bermuda grass or digging blackberries, people thank us at the end of the day to be working on their knees, getting dirty, and having great conversations with a lot of people trying to accomplish the same thing. Working together is a profound experience and it’s something that people don’t get to have.

It is a democratic thing, and it also is a radical act to be a farmer because we’re saying, “This is what’s important, we need to be in relationship to the earth; we need to understand the earth; we need to collaborate and co-create with the earth to be productive and create beauty.” We can do that. I think gardening and farming, especially organics and the small-scale sustainable agriculture movement, are keyholes through which people can re-perceive the earth and the truths of life.

It’s radical, because as we know, the forces are dark and great against taking us off the land and getting hold of our genetics and our food and our varieties. All of that belongs in the hands of the people. The importance of seed saving or gardening, or understanding what makes a healthy relationship and healthy systems, is information that we’ve always had, but it’s been taken away from us. So, it is a way to empower people in a really profound way. It gives people something to stand on and to have perspective from.

ARTY: Speaking of seed saving, can you give me a couple of examples of plants of the seeds that you saved and how they’ve adapted in your region, garden, and soil, and what kind of changes you’ve observed?

Shinshu Runner Beans against background of mixed Runner Bean varieties from market in Mexico City

DOUG: I remember really early on, in the first few years of being here, Michael Presley used to garden here, he then went to Ocean Song. I remember comparing with him. We both started growing different varieties of orach or mountain spinach. The most striking one is fuchsia colored. He took seeds to Ocean Song from here. Over a couple of years we noticed that they had differentiated from each other. They had a different cast to their color. It’s a little difficult to notice actual changes in plants, but what I do notice is that plants throw off sports that are interesting.

I noticed, for example, that dinosaur kale rarely, but occasionally, throws off a version of itself that is a dark green color and shiny as opposed to being blue-green and having a sort of dusty look to it. I’ve been selecting that over the years and created a new variety, which is the way it’s done. In some ways, I believe that plants indigenate very quickly. We know that can be true in a matter of a few generations.

One of the reasons why our nursery is actually a powerful and significant operation is because we offer plants that have been grown here. I think we can assume that they are more comfortable now than when they first arrived, because that’s what happens. It happens to all creatures. We offer things that from seed stock that have been, in some cases, tended and replanted since the early 1980s. I think we’re offering plants that we can safely say are comfortable in Northern California, in the kind of climate that we represent.

Because the process is slow and gradual, it’s hard for me to actually say that I’ve witnessed major changes, but I definitely notice some unusual things that happen. For example, we have a motherwort, which is a medicinal herb, that has come up frilly. It has a frilly edge to the leaves. I’ve selected that out, so now we offer OAEC’s curly motherwort. I don’t know if it has different medicinal properties, but it certainly is beautiful. It’s a beautiful variation on what I have seen motherwort to look like over the years.

ARTY: The UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that “Diversity of cultivated crops declined 75% during the 20^th century, and a third of today’s diversity could disappear by 2050.” Why is preserving food crop biodiversity important?

DOUG: I think it’s important on all kinds of levels. It’s about preserving culture. Cultivated and wild plants represent stories of relationship with humankind for millennia. Many, if not most, of the stories are lost, but there are stories that are extant that we can share. Having diversity in a garden is one of the foundations of creating a system that mimics the natural world around us. No matter how simple a system might look superficially, it’s immensely complex because it relies on relationship and interrelationship.

While we don’t necessarily know exactly what’s going to happen in our gardens when we bring in the diversity, nature figures it out. In setting the stage for the opportunity and the potentiality of relationship that creates a web of life that is more resilient to stress on the system. It is essential for a successful garden or farming operation to set the stage for relationship among a diversity of players.

We’ve seen that monocultures fail. They’re failing everywhere we look. Diversity in nature has succeeded for millennia. It’s not even mimicking nature, it’s being nature. On some level understanding that we can’t survive alone nor can any system that we create. It has to be populated with members that can be in relationship with each other.

What that does is it welcomes more diversity that exists around us to have a habitat or opportunities for pollination to happen. You can look to the soil as the ultimate teacher. A healthy, productive, harmonious soil is one that is made of millions if not billions of players that have a part that we barely understand. If you work on making a living soil, then your plants are an expression of that. It’s about always looking to nature as a teacher.

Hergonas Fava from the High Andes, ILanto Evans’ Yellow Fava, OAEC Purple Fava

ARTY: You grow thousands of varieties of medicinal, edible and ornamental plants in the Mother Garden and make many of them available to the public through your nursery. How is that going?

DOUG: In 1995, we started with one plant sale a year, and we discovered resonance immediately and thought this is something we should keep doing because we already had so much diversity in the Mother Garden and a lot of unusual crops as far back as the early 1980s that people weren’t familiar with, especially the Andean crops. We were probably some of the first people to be saving mashua and oca, and quinoa, and crops like that. We were one of the few people who offered certified organic, heirloom, non-hybrid, exclusive varieties. We offered a ridiculous diversity of varieties. I am kind of obsessive compulsive and I’m just so excited and passionate about diversity and finding it, and reveling in it, and wanting to share it, that we offered plant varieties that I think no one else did.

That continued to grow through the years, until the drought hit and had an impact, as it should have, on people’s gardening habits. With water restrictions in Santa Rosa and other cities a third of our business dropped when the drought hit, that was 10 years ago or so.

The other thing we discovered, even after we slowly started recovering from the drought and people did begin to return to growing annual vegetables, we realized that there was a lot of competition. Literally you could go to the hardware store in Occidental and get heirloom tomatoes. And while our plant starts have not been more expensive than any other nurseries, they’re not the least expensive. People were opting to buy things elsewhere, and we’re sort of seeing our income slowly going down alarmingly. At that point, it felt like the right time to change our mission to focusing on perennials – perennial food crops, perennial culinary and medicinal herbs, habitat, and pollinator plants. We focus on several genera to give people an idea of the diversity that exists within several of those, like abutilons and especially salvias. We have a pretty huge collection of salvias.

We never have really been a business first, even though we need to think about that. It’s always been a mission-driven program. We’re unlike most other nurseries, if not all other nurseries, in that really what drives me and the people who work here is a celebration of plants and diversity, and a desire to share that wealth with everybody.

We do things here that are not necessarily wise in terms of business. The diversity is over the top, and we tend things intensively, and it has made me realize that we are not just a nursery, but also a conservation project that is mission driven and not necessarily bottom-line driven, although we have to respect that because all programs at OAEC need to not lose money. We realize that this is the sort of effort that should have supporters, and that should have some financial foundation beyond us trying to sell enough plants to balance the budget.

I think that some of the decisions that you might make in a business where you’re trying to be as economically sustainable as possible are not decisions that I want to make, like limiting the number of varieties or selling thousands of one particular thing that happens to be the greatest money maker.

We’re looking at creating a structure that includes the nursery being subsidized as a program. The nursery is unique because it is part of the story the Mother Garden, which has been around since 1974, and has been continuously hand-tended and organic. It is one of the oldest certified organic farms in the state. We have, for years and years, been pursuing, researching, and demonstrating the importance of diversity in natural systems and gardens, and have done seed saving since the late 1980s. The nursery is the outward public face of the garden where we literally disperse what we know and love and are tending with the belief that we need to do this. With so much uncertainty in the future, what better thing to do than to share the wealth of the allies who have helped us make it through so far in the face of who knows what? Our systems are collapsing, and the more people who understand how plants can contribute to our health and well-being, the better. So, that’s a big part of what motivates us to find allies who want to support this work financially.

If you are interested in finding out more about the OAEC Mother Garden and nursery contact: doug@oaec.org

Flair Fans: Mimicking Nature to Improve Efficiency

Long-time members of the Bioneers Community may recall hearing from Biomimetic inventor and scientist Jay Harman over the years at Bioneers Conferences. Jay and his company Pax Scientific have just announced a new product, poised to transform a key component of the industrial world that we all interact with daily, whether we realize it or not: the fan.

Jay Harman fell in love with skin-diving and fishing when he was 10 years old. As he says, “When I saw the efficiency and power of how fish swim, compared to my clumsy efforts, I was captivated and knew I’d learn from nature the rest of my life.”

And learn he has. Jay recognized that nature always uses whirlpool shapes, or vortices, to swim and fly and move liquids and gases – and nature sips energy, while humans guzzle it. His self-admitted obsession led to years figuring out how to reverse-engineer a whirlpool so he could recreate nature’s efficiencies. That led to the founding of PAX Scientific, an engineering firm that applies natural geometries to improve industrial equipment. Jay has spoken about his developments and inventions at PAX Scientific in several appearances at the Bioneers Conference.

For over 20 years PAX has worked behind the scenes to help change the industrial world to more efficient design. For example, with the power of just three light bulbs, a four-inch by six-inch PAX mixer can circulate 10 million gallons of stagnant drinking water (like a football field, 30-feet deep). It’s now the number-one specified product in North America for maintaining drinking water quality in the municipal distribution system, with thousands of installations.

But Jay and his team are impatient to make change happen faster, especially with the news that July 2019 was the hottest month in recorded history.

When it gets hot, people turn on fans. But fans are running around us all the time – using 22% of the world’s electricity. That’s a staggering number. Generating the electricity to run fans dumps as much CO2 emissions into the atmosphere as all of the world’s cars, and fan design hasn’t fundamentally changed in 100 years.

PAX’s calculations showed that it’s possible to save a billion tons of CO2 emissions every year from more efficient fans. They got to work and designed Flair, a new fan that uses up to 85% less electricity and quietly circulates air to increase comfort and reduce heating and air-conditioning costs year-round. That’s important, because air-conditioners and heaters are heavy users of power, consuming nearly 50% of household energy. The problem is that in the winter, expensive heated air accumulates near the ceiling while you sit in colder air, and in the summer, cooler air sinks to the floor while you sit in warmer air. Flair’s ring-vortex circulation destratifies the air, so you can change your thermostat and save more than 25% of your heating and cooling costs per room.

Rather than selling the Flair design to a big manufacturer, PAX decided to take it to the people. As Jay says, “The world needs urgent action, but it’s hard for big corporations to change quickly enough to mitigate climate change. No matter how well-meaning the CEO or VP of Sales is, or how much he or she loves their grandchildren or nature, climate isn’t in their companies’ mandate, objectives, or priorities. By launching Flair through a crowd-funding campaign, we can show big manufacturers that people want high-quality, super-efficient products. Our campaign runs through the end of October, and it’s a great chance to make a real and practical step to combat climate change.”

Learn more about Biomimicry and Jay Harman’s work in this episode of the Bioneers Podcast: Sharkskin, Hippo Sweat and the Wood-Wide Web: From Flat Earth to Whole Earth Thinking.

Interview with Louie Schwartzberg

Bioneers Senior Producer Stephanie Welch spoke with director Louie Schwartzberg about his documentary film, Fantastic Fungi: The Magic Beneath Us. The film features mycologist and author Paul Stamets, and an all-star team of professional and amateur mycologists, artists, foodies, ecologists, doctors, and explorers joined forces with time-lapse master Louie Schwartzberg to create this mind-bending film about mushrooms and their mysterious interwoven rootlike filaments called mycelium.

STEPHANIE: You have a long history with Bioneers and I’ve seen your work for years. It’s really beautiful and moving. What drew you into working in time-lapse photography?

LOUIE: When I graduated from UCLA, I moved up to Northern California. I wanted to shoot high-quality resolution film, but didn’t have the money. So I retrofitted old Mitchell cameras that were built in the ‘30s and figured out how to adapt a still-camera lens to the front of it. A friend of mine who made electric guitars for the Grateful Dead helped me build a motor that ran on batteries, so I was able to take a camera outdoors.

I started to chase the light, shooting time-lapse clouds, sunsets, and fog rolling in and out. It took me a month to shoot a roll of film. But most importantly it fed my sense of wonder. It’s hard to imagine what a flower looks like as it opens and closes, or for clouds to morph in front of your eyes. Those rhythms and patterns touched the deepest part of my soul, and I just wanted to keep broadening my horizons and perspective by seeing things through different scales of time. How does a redwood tree look in life? How does a hummingbird look in life, which is the opposite scale of shooting in slow motion?

Then you realize how looking at things through a human point of view is really limiting. Looking at things at “24 frames per second” is a narrow window of reality. There are all kinds of reality based on, in a sense, different metabolic rates of different animals and critters, because we all move at different frame rates. Being able to see that light move at different scales of time. One extreme would be geological time, millions of years, billions of years. Then you look at the time span of a fruit fly, which might be a day or two. It’s all valid.

STEPHANIE: Is it true that you are currently filming 24 hours a day?

LOUIE: Yes. I’ve had cameras rolling in my studio 24 hours a day, seven days a week, nonstop for 40 years. Every day I shoot about a second worth of screen time in a 24-hour period. There are computers triggering the camera to frame a film. For the last 10 years, I’ve been shooting in 3D. There are grow lights that go on and off, photo lights come on during the exposure. I’m shooting plants, flowers, mushrooms, things decomposing. It’s just a way to see things that humans really can’t see. The most precious thing in life is time. So now that I’m shooting digitally and money isn’t a constraint of shooting film, time is the most precious commodity. I just love making the invisible visible. It still fills me with wonder. I think when they asked Albert Einstein his definition of God, it’s a sense of wonder.

STEPHANIE: What were the visual aspects of the world of mycelium and fungi that inspired you to embark on this film?

LOUIE: Visually what inspired me to shoot the mycelium is because it’s a network. The underground mycelium network is a network, and we see that pattern in the circulatory system and nervous system of our bodies. It looks like the branches in a tree. It looks like the neurological pathways in your brain. It looks like the Internet. It looks like the galaxies in the cosmos. This networking pattern is an archetype that exists throughout the universe, and the fact that it lives underground in the shared, gorgeous, communal internet that enables trees to communicate with each other, to share nutrients, to foster ecosystems to flourish, for me that’s like nature’s operating instructions.

STEPHANIE: How long have you known Paul Stamets and how did you meet him?

LOUIE: I met Paul 13 years ago at Bioneers at one of his earliest talks. At that time, I was working on my film Wings of Life, which is about pollination. It’s a film that Disney Nature released, with Meryl Streep telling the story from the POV of a flower making love with bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies. I call it ‘a love story that feeds the earth’.

Then when I heard Paul’s talk. I realized if plants are critical for our survival, the only solar collectors that can turn light energy into food and fuel and medicine, what do they need? They need soil. Where does soil come from? It comes from the largest organism on the planet. It’s only one-cell thick. It’s inside my body and on every continent. It’s the fungal network, the fungal kingdom. It blew my mind.

I invited Paul to my room and I showed him some of my time-lapse mushrooms on my laptop. That was the beginning of a really beautiful, budding relationship that is a great example of how science and art can work together with the intersection being wonder to help people understand nature’s intelligence.

STEPHANIE: What is your favorite thing about mushrooms after working on this and learning so much about them?

LOUIE: There are lots, I never knew that it could be the greatest natural solution for climate change. The reason why there’s carbon under the ground is that we have decomposed organic matter called coal and oil. We’ve dug it up and we’ve burned it and put it into the atmosphere. There’s a way to clean that mess by plants and trees absorbing CO₂, storing the carbon underground and giving us the oxygen we need to breathe.

In the film we see a CO₂ molecule going into a leaf, oxygen being released, and the carbon traveling down the trunk of a tree into the roots, into to the tip of the root, into the mycelium network, where the carbon is sequestered for thousands of years, and to be used as a building block for a new plant to grow. Many scientists believe that if we stop putting fossil fuel pollution into the atmosphere, that the Earth could actually clean the atmosphere on its own in five years, in that symbiotic relationship – photosynthesis with plants and trees, and the mycelium network under the ground. That’s what they do, they sequester carbon.

STEPHANIE: You talk a lot about the intelligence of nature in your work. What is it about the intelligence of nature that you’re hoping people will understand from this and other films that you’ve made?

LOUIE: Learning about nature’s intelligence opens you up to the idea that everything is interconnected. The fact that it’s all one and all connected is no longer a ‘new age hippie’ idea. In my movie, we talk about the science that proves it. Mycelium network under the ground is a shared economy that brings trees together into one real, giant, symbiotic, shared economy– one not based on greed, but based on the idea that when things are shared, everybody flourishes, and communities survive better than individuals.

That is such an important message to understand how nature works, and maybe more importantly, to understand how we could organize our social structure and our politics. Communities connecting is the way for things to be successful. That’s why I’m embarking on a self-distribution platform. Instead of being seen on a streaming platform alone on your digital device, we want people to gather in real time and make those connections. If you’re interested in permaculture, the environmental movement, foraging foods, psychedelics, let’s all interconnect. It’s really the model of Bioneers. You have all these different pillars, from social justice to biology to environmental consciousness to politics. It all overlaps. Having everyone connect, network, and enable each other to be successful is I think nature’s operating instructions, a term that I think Kenny Ausubel coined.

STEPHANIE: In your film, you mention how many ancient cultures and Indigenous Peoples have cultivated deep relationships with mushrooms and plant allies with deep healing properties. Western culture is catching up to a certain extent, learning about the benefits. But as we face so much environmental destruction and climate chaos, talk about conservation and efforts to save the habitats where all these species flourish.

LOUIE: Exactly. The worst thing that’s happening I think with the degradation of the environment is we’re losing species at a frightening rate. Maybe by 2040 or 2050, we might lose half the species on our planet. The sad thing is it took billions of years for these incredible, complex DNA molecules to be created and evolve through the process of evolution. What’s scary is that we know we’re losing certain species, but we don’t even know all the species we’re losing because we haven’t identified them all yet, especially in the world of bacteria, the fungi, insects. This is a critical concern, and I think that’s why we have to work as hard as we can to bring harmony and balance back into nature to slow down this degradation of the environment.

Anything that is a living thing, now that we can kind of understand the idea, that in reality everything is connected. If it’s all connected, then it’s part of me, it’s part of the link that supports my life. And I support other life. The loss of any species is a loss to everybody. So it’s critical.

A lot of these plants and sacred medicines have been a spiritual gateway for man to be able to expand consciousness. You have to ask yourself the question: Why did that happen? Why is it there’s a molecule in psilocybin that can fit a receptor in the brain that triggers serotonin to go through your body and to be able to open up pathways and neurological journeys that don’t exist any other way? Perhaps it could with some deep form of meditation that takes 30, 40 years to achieve, but what a miracle it is if you can perhaps experience something similar in one day.

STEPHANIE: I recall seeing many of your images projected onto the Vatican, and you show some of that event in the film.

LOUIE: Yes, it was a giant event organized by Louie Psihoyos, who enlisted a number of filmmakers to project their content on the Vatican in support of the Pope’s encyclical supporting the environment. We projected on the Vatican the day before the vote for the Paris Accords for climate change.

That was an extremely emotional experience for me, because my parents were both Holocaust survivors. I thought about the fact that the Vatican was silent during World War II and the round up of Jews in Europe, as well as Rome and Italy. Then I looked over my shoulder and I saw 50 giant projectors with a million lumens of light ready to shine on the Vatican, to shine light into the darkness, and that filled me with hope – that change is possible. You’ll see the reaction shots of people in the film, and nuns who are praying to the mushrooms on the Vatican. I thought that was a brilliant judo move.

STEPHANIE: Is there anything you wanted to add about the film that you want people to know?

LOUIE: I love making the invisible visible, and I think that my own mushroom journey has taught me that. You want to turn people on to what you’ve learned and what you’ve experienced, and the film itself I think is an immersive experience, because people say it’s gorgeous, it’s beautiful, but it’s more than that. Beauty is nature’s tool for survival because you protect what you love. So by appealing to the heart, I think the film will help people make the right choices to create a sustainable, healthy, living planet, not only the planet but also a healthy, living, sustainable human structure or social fabric.

There’s a shift of consciousness happening right now that makes it right for this film to emerge, because the film is also about hope. It speaks to the critical time in history we’re facing right now, but at the same time it’s inspirational, it’s hopeful, and in the face of the dark political times we’re going through, we need that.

A giant shout out to Bioneers for fostering this communal effort for 30 years, building community, creating the network, taking the mycelial network that’s below the ground and bringing it above ground. That is nature’s operating instructions.

Explore more Bioneers media on Intelligence in Nature here.

To learn more about Fantastic Fungi, visit fantasticfungi.com.

Kenny Ausubel: The End of Prehistory

These were Kenny Ausubel’s opening remarks at the 2019 National Bioneers Conference. Read the edited transcript here.

With a wide scope and penetrating lens, Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel grapples with the existential crisis now facing human civilization. He shares both his deep faith in the power of human creativity and grassroots movements and honest appraisals of the enormous challenges we face and the short time we have to address them. With his usual inimitable style that seamlessly juxtaposes heartfelt passion, scathing humor and moments of ecstatic inspiration, Kenny tackles climate, inequality, the imperative of the Green New Deal, and Mayan wisdom, to mention only a few topics, ultimately exhorting us to rise to the occasion and trust that we have the capacity and vision to birth a new world.

Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.

View Kenny Ausubel’s full bio at https://bioneers.org/peoples/kenny-ausubel/.

Transcript

CARA ROMERO:

PALOMA FLORES:

Keep Your Finger on the Pulse