Urban Farming and the Wonders of Nature In a Food Desert

Chanowk and Judith Yisrael are farmers in the suburban South Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, which has been designated as a food desert. On their half-acre property, they grow 40 fruit trees and raise bees and chickens in what they refer to as a “home grown revolution.” Chanowk, who left his job as a software technician to become a farmer, is the president of Slow Food Sacramento and he and Judith joined forces with other urban farmers to pass a law permitting residents to sell their homegrown produce. Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director, interviewed Chanowk and Judith at the annual EcoFarm Conference.

ARTY MANGAN: Tell me about your farm.

CHANOWK YISRAEL: Our farm is where all the animals in the neighborhood live. We’re surrounded by so much life, people say there’s so many living things here, whether it’s the squirrels, rabbits or the cats that stroll around – for some reason they don’t mess with the chickens and they don’t catch mice, they’re just hanging around. What it’s a testimony to is that they know there’s a space where it’s safe for them. That’s just something we don’t get in our neighborhood because in most of our neighborhood you’re going to find pit bulls in people’s yards, you’re going to see gates around most of the houses and things like that, so it’s not necessarily very inviting.

Our farm is a sanctuary for life. It’s also a place where people can step out of the pressures of an everyday city life and be able to step into a new world where there’s nature, where there’s food, where there are bees, where there are chickens and start to recover some of that awe and wonder of nature that we seem to lose as we get older.

ARTY: Agriculture, for you, has a spiritual component.

CHANOWK: If I could have a room full of farmers, I would ask, “Who told you that your only job is to grow food and sell it to people?” If you go back, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 years, maybe even more, you see the people who were doing agriculture were not just growing food to feed people, but they were also the people you would go to for herbs. In many cases, they could have been people who carried on some of the shamanic traditions. They were the people you went to in order to enact a ceremony that usually took place in a natural environment. So, it was these stories of the land that provided so many different functions in society other than just food production.

Western society, especially academia, operates as if the physical science is the only science there is, like there’s no such thing as a spirit because you can’t see it, you can’t taste it, you can’t touch it, you can’t smell it, and you can’t hear it, so it doesn’t exist. But at the same time, you can’t see the rays of the sun, but you can feel the heat. So, we know that all of these things are here, and there are things outside of our five senses that really play into what we call agriculture or nature. However, most farmers are not in tune with those things. Even being at the EcoFarm conference, I talk to farmers, and I’m like, “Okay, let’s look up what’s happening right now.” And nobody knew the constellations. Nobody.

Give me a night sky and I can tell you what season we’re in, I can tell you when we’re supposed to be planting things. When you think about the makeup of the universe, they say the visible part of the universe is just a small part. You’ve got all this dark matter that nobody can see.

Where you see the spiritual aspect of farming is in biodynamic and in permaculture, which are based on Indigenous wisdom. We can’t change the farming process to make it more convenient or to incorporate so much heavy machinery because when you’re touching the soil, you’re touching the food, you’re the ones planting the seeds. There’s this thing that takes place in your spirit, your mind, your body, your soul, and it makes you stand up straight and walk around knowing that you’re living in an environment where there are unseen things, and you’re working with them, even though you may not know exactly how it’s going to turn out in the end.

ARTY: Indigenous wisdom, carried through by Rudolf Steiner and biodynamics, understands that food is also nourishing the spirit. If we don’t eat nutritious food rich in minerals, our spirit becomes weak and we can’t deal with all the forces that are pushing us in the wrong direction.

JUDITH YISRAEL: That’s absolutely right. One of the speakers on the first day at the EcoFarm conference talked about agriculture being man’s first vocation, if you look at the creation story. So, that’s always been a very deep part of many cultures and even ceremonies.  Things like harvest festivals and living according to the cycles of nature are very powerful, but have become lost.

ARTY: How do you define food justice and food sovereignty?

CHANOWK: Talking about food sovereignty and food justice is very symbolic because we’re about at 40 years of EcoFarm right now, and at the same time, also culminating with 400 years of the first documented slave that came to the United States in 1619.

When the Pilgrims got off of their ships they found themselves having to survive in a land they had no knowledge of.  If it wasn’t for the gift of the people who were here, by taking them under their wings and showing them how to survive, the history books may have been written totally different. In payback for that wisdom, that humble gift, they were subjected – they and we – were subjected to some of the most heinous conditions in the history of the planet.

If you think of the 400-year time period of Black people in the United States, the farmers, from then to now, have not only been stewards of land, but also the stewards of ancient practices, whether they want to admit it or not. Now, our Indigenous people are starting to ask, “Are you going to admit where you got this stuff from?” It’s now time for the people who started these things to come back and not take your power, but to be in collaboration, bring the spirituality back into agriculture in a way where it’s not something that’s done just to grow food to sell it. You bring the ceremony back. You bring the value back.

Western society just doesn’t push those things. When you talk about food justice and food sovereignty, what it really comes down to is there are people holding the food and farming space – that was once held by the ancient traditions – in a way that ultimately results in the destruction of the planet. It’s time now to re-incorporate the ancient wisdom that can still provide the results of people being able to eat, and will also be regenerative, not destructive as it is now.

Youth learn beekeeping skills

Here at EcoFarm, we have the changing of the guard. Now it’s time for younger people, people of color to help lead. And when the elders in any society get to 50, 60, years old they’re going to sit down. We ain’t forgot about you. You cool. We still love you. But we need to have the fire and the innovation of the young people. The elders can be the rudder, but who’s going to row the boat, right? I think this is where we are right now. We’re at the crux of the matter. How that situation is handled is going to determine how we end up living on this planet going forward.

ARTY: What kind of work are you doing with youth and what are their challenges in this crazy world?

JUDITH: I remember when we first started to work with youth that came to visit the farm. We had given them a chore, we had them do an activity. They got to see the chickens and the bees and all of that. Towards the end of the tour, we like to have the youth actually get dirty. We want them to leave with some soil under their nails.

ARTY: Inoculate them.

JUDITH: Exactly. I remember Chanowk was working with the youth, and one of the young ladies stood up and said, “This is like slavery.” At that point, I remember there being a silence. Chanowk graciously addressed that. He talked about the difference between what we’re doing now and what was learned in school about slavery. He explained the benefits of growing your own food.

One of the challenges of asking youth to work in the soil, especially for Black people, is there’s some trauma involved in that, there’s a stigma attached to working in the soil. Sometimes we have youth whose parents, whether they’re black or brown, for whatever reason do not want their children in the soil or have not yet realized the value and the benefit. So, there’s definitely some challenges with getting them to realize the power and the sacredness of putting their hands in the soil.

Some of the things we do with the youth in addition to our programming is we teach them not only to cultivate the soil, but we also teach them to cultivate themselves. We teach them leadership skills. We give them an opportunity to serve the community in ways they may not have had, but also to be able to collaborate within the youth group. They find that very powerful.

CHANOWK: When we talk about youth, we talk about them as if they’re these independent entities. Every youth is connected to a parent. When you start working with youth, you’re not going to be able to make the changes you need to make unless the parents are involved, because young people don’t usually buy the food. If you’re doing specific youth outreach, and we’ve actually had this happen, where you’re telling youth, “Yeah, man, let’s look at Food Inc., let’s look at the chickens, let’s look at all of this, don’t you see what’s happening?” They may go march into the house and be like, “Mama, we’ve got to throw everything in the refrigerator away!”

JUDITH: They’re fired up!

Yisrael Farm teaches families how to eat healthy

CHANOWK: And mom’s looking like, “What are these people telling my children? They won’t eat no food now. We can’t eat chicken.”

We had one of our students who went shopping with her mom, she was like, “I had to tell my mom. My mom was putting stuff in and I was just taking it out.” So, we realized at that point it’s really about getting families together – moms, dads, aunts, uncles, anybody connected to food. That’s where we started to do family cooking classes. That’s where you see parents and children interacting with each other, they’re cooking food, they’re spending time together in a way they probably weren’t usually doing, because going consensus now is that we get dinner if it’s cooked and then separate out.

JUDITH: Go into our rooms and the different places. Absolutely.

ARTY: You use the phrase “People, profit, and planet,” and you add presence to that. What does that mean?

CHANOWK: What kind of presence does your business occupy in your community? What does it do? Of course, when we start a business we want to hire people, and even with farming, we want to pay them a decent wage and give them what they’re worth. We want to do good for the planet and we want to make a profit, but you can do that and still be a business that extracts from the community.

What presence does your business play in the community? For example, we work with youth. That’s a presence, because they know that they can come to us. When you start engaging with young people around nature, no telling what you may end up talking about. You might end up counseling because natural environment is great for that.

I can’t tell you how many people have called us up and say, “Hey, I don’t have any food today and I’m hungry. You’re a farm, is there anything…?”

“Come on over, bring as many bags as you can, and we’ll give you as much food as we can give you.” So, you’re a resource for the community. People get sick. They call up Judith, “I went to the doctor and they want to give me 17 pills, is there anything that you can help me with?”

“Sure. We’ve got nettles, we’ve got different things you can try.”

So, that’s presence, outside of your products that you sell, what does your presence do for the community?

JUDITH: Absolutely. Another example is a tragic situation that happened in Sacramento where a young man by the name of Stephon Clark was shot and killed by Sacramento police because he had a cell phone that they mistook for a weapon. When a community goes through something like that, there’s a lot of trauma that the community experiences. What we were able to do with that is hold a healing circle right on the farm. It was a space where the community could come together, have some time to voice concerns, but mostly spend time communing with each other and healing; that’s another example of presence. Presence doesn’t always look like a transaction that’s happening monetarily, it can just be about being there and being a resource.

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Patrisse Cullors Is Reshaping America

Patrisse Cullors wears many hats—she’s a performance artist, an award-winning organizer, and a best-selling author. But above all else, Cullors is one the most effective and influential movement builders of our era. The Los Angeles native is reshaping America.

In 2013, Cullors was one of the three original co-founders of #BlackLivesMatter, which has since grown into an international organization with dozens of chapters fighting systemic, anti-Black racism and violence. She’s won many awards for her work with the organization, including The Sydney Peace Prize Award (2017) and Black Woman of the Year Award (2015) from The National Congress of Black Women. While she’s worked to create and shape #BlackLivesMatter into an international force, Cullors has also fought to change the underpinnings of her hometown: She’s was a key figure in the fight to force the creation of the first civilian oversight commission of LA’s Sheriff’s Department, and she spearheaded the criminal justice reform legislation that will appear on the city’s March 2020 ballot.

Cullors also recently produced a series of theatrical pieces: Power: From the Mouths of the Occupied, and co-authored the book, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, earlier this year. The book delves into the roots and constructed social illness of racism, while providing a searingly open and vulnerable account through the portals of her mind and her communities’ lives.

In her Bioneers 2018 keynote address, Cullors discusses how the Black Lives Matter movement came to fruition, how it’s been shaped by the events of the past five years, and what it hopes to accomplish in the future.

Watch Cullors’ full keynote presentation video here.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

PATRISSE CULLORS:

In 2013, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and I co-created and gave birth to Black Lives Matter. And we weren’t sitting in a boardroom. We weren’t on a conference call. We weren’t at an organizing strategy meeting. Each of us were in separate places, watching the verdict of George Zimmerman. We all remember that day — July 13, 2013 — waiting to hear for some sort of justice for Trayvon Martin, and really some sort of justice for black people, here in the US as well as around the world. And instead, what we received were “not guilty” verdicts. Over and over again I read on my social media feed, not guilty, not guilty, and eventually not guilty of all charges. I was sitting in Susanville, a small prison town, 11 hours north of Los Angeles, visiting one of my mentees, who actually just received 10 years, 85% time, for never harming a human being. I’m watching this verdict of someone we know killed this little boy—there was no question about that—and then also sitting in this prison town, knowing that my mentee deserved to be free.

I had this moment of first shock, second rage, third despair, and then fourth: What are we going to do about it?  As I was scrolling through my social media feed to figure out who I was going to talk to, how we were going to show up, what the next step was, I came across Alicia Garza’s post. She had written a love note to black folks, and in that love note, she had closed it off with Black Lives Matter. And I remember looking at those three words and saying, That’s it. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to do.

I put a hashtag in front of it. Alicia said, “Well, what’s that?” I said we’re going to make this thing go viral. Within that year, it wasn’t social media that made Black Lives Matter go viral, it was three black women. It was black women and the community of black women and queer folks and trans folks that believed in those three words, believed it so deeply and so profoundly, and we organized around it. We showed up for it. We talked to people about it. We talked to our own family members about it.

Building a Movement

I remember that first year. Obama was in office, and many folks said, “Well, we don’t need Black Lives Matter. Why would you say that? You have your black president. It’s all over, guys.” And our response was that we need Black Lives Matter more than ever.

Then August 9 happened, and Mike Brown is murdered. There was this moment for many of us, in those two to three days that Mike Brown was not only murdered, but he’s also left on the concrete for four and a half hours, humiliated in front of his family and his community. And then the family and community decided to grieve, the way we know how to grieve, right? For black folks protest is grieving. So folks go out, they hold a vigil, they hold a protest, and instead of receiving care, instead of receiving dignity, instead of receiving love, they’re met with rubber bullets, they’re met with tear gas. I’m watching, again, on social media, another tragedy.

I called a few friends up. I said, “What are we going to do? This can’t keep happening in this way without a public response, without public outrage.” And so, Darnell Moore and I organized 600 black folks to travel from across the country, including Canada, to St. Louis for three days. We called it the Black Lives Matter ride.

We had two specific goals. The first goal was to show up and just be present, just let folks know that we’re here, we’re here for you, whatever you need. And the second was that we were going to go home and organize. We weren’t going to allow the media to make it seem that Ferguson was an anomaly. We believe that Ferguson was Oakland, Ferguson was Los Angeles, Ferguson was Detroit, Ferguson was Baltimore, Ferguson was every single city where black people existed and were under the lynchpin of state violence and law enforcement violence.

This became an incredibly important moment for Black Lives Matter, because it was the rise of what is now a global network of 40 chapters across the globe.  A network of 40 chapters here in the US, in Canada, and in the United Kingdom. We’ve seen Black Lives Matter be used across Latin America. We’ve seen it used in South Africa. We’ve seen it used in Amsterdam and Australia.

Searching for Strength & Vision

When we created Black Lives Matter, we were super clear on a few things. One, this movement wasn’t a movement about black Americans only. This movement was a global movement, and that was incredibly important that we connected ourselves to a larger diaspora, because anti-black racism isn’t a US phenomenon, it is a global phenomenon. The second thing is we were super clear that Black Lives Matter was about all black lives. It was about black women, black queer folks, black trans folks, black people with convictions, black people who were incarcerated, black people with disabilities. We were not building a movement just for heterosexual cis black men. We were building a movement that could combat patriarchy and homophobia and transphobia. We were building a movement that could have an honest conversation about climate change. We were building a movement that could have an honest conversation about what justice really looks like to our communities. We were building a movement that was unapologetic about being abolitionist.  

As we continued to develop and get stronger and bolder, 2016 happened. And I don’t know about y’all, but I definitely did not imagine we would be where we’re at right now. This was not a part of my plan. As I sat in 2016, sitting, watching the news with friends, praying for a different outcome, I remember 45—because I don’t say his name—being told that he was the next president of the United States, and I had a similar reaction that I did in July 2013, a reaction of shock, grief, despair. I remember sort of holding my body and crying, and a good friend of mine leaning over and rubbing my back and saying, “We’re going to be okay.” I remember saying to him, “No, we’re not. We’re not going to be okay.”

I started to plot my escape from the US. Really and truly started to look up other places, where I’m going to take me and my two and a half year old. I’m an organizer, born and raised an organizer, so that was like a couple weeks of me going down a rabbit hole of trying to escape, and I rather quickly pulled myself back up and said, alright, it’s time to fight.

I spent two years working with our global network, working with other organizations, working with other community members, trying to understand how we protect ourselves in this moment. How do we respond to the terrible, terrible crimes against humanity? And yet also how do we build a vision, a vision where we can imagine black people living, black people thriving, where part of the work that we’re doing is not just responding to our death, not just responding to the harm against us, but actually developing something that has the ability to raise my child, to raise my child’s child, and his children’s children. What does that vision actually look like? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like?

Part of our work, all of us in this room, is not just about tearing things down. We know that. What are we building and what are we building towards?

When you think about Black Lives Matter, when you think about the movement that has been created over the last five years, remember that our movement is about imagining a world where black folks are actually free. Imagining a world where the word poverty is a past tense, imagining a world where we don’t need handcuffs or shackles any longer, imagining a world that we all deserve to live in.

Note: At the end of this address, Cullors took the Bioneers audience on a guided tour of their collective future. It’s a meditation best expressed via video. To watch it, check out Cullors’ full keynote address video. The meditation begins at 16:33.

Elizabeth Dwoskin On The Reckoning of Silicon Valley

No one is better equipped to help us understand the perils and promise of what is happening in Silicon Valley than Elizabeth Dwoskin. As The Washington Post’s Silicon Valley correspondent since 2016—before which she was The Wall Street Journal’s big data and artificial intelligence reporter—she has become the most penetrating observer and critic of the tech scene. She has broken many crucial stories on data collection abuses, online conspiracies, Russian operatives’ use of social media to influence the 2016 election, gender bias in the tech world, Instagram as a vehicle for drug dealing, and many more. Dwoskin may even be one of the most important investigative journalists of our era because she is relentlessly and insightfully tracking the forces that have the potential to dramatically change the fate of our species.

In her keynote address at Bioneers 2018, Dwoskin discussed the Facebook monopoly, the harmful effects of social media on society and its users, and Silicon Valley’s shady and reckless business dealings and handling of private data.

Watch Elizabeth Dwoskin’s full keynote presentation here.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

ELIZABETH DWOSKIN:

On the evening of September 19, Bailey Richardson logged onto Instagram for the last time. “The time has come for me to delete my Instagram,” she wrote to 20,000 followers. “No reason in particular. My brain just needs more space. Thanks for all the kindnesses over the years.”

On that day, Richardson joined the 68% of Americans who, according to Pew, have either quit or taken a break from social media this year. They’ve done so to protect their privacy or to relieve themselves from the pressures of quasi-obligatory exposure and connection. As Richardson discovered, using a product simply because you feel you can’t leave isn’t exactly a healthy reason to stay.

Now, many Americans have made a similar decision, but Richardson’s choice is particularly poignant because she was one of the creators of Instagram. She was among a handful of early employees who were drawn to what was then an Indie platform for artists, photographers, and hipsters who wanted to share the beautiful things that they discovered about the world. She ran the startup’s official @Instagram account and organized the first in-person InstaMeets in places as far flung as Moscow and North Korea.

In retrospect, Instagram and Snapchat were the end of an era. They were the last social media platforms that could explode on the scene in an age of Facebook’s dominance. Today, investors think it would be impossible to build something similar. Facebook would buy it, as it did Instagram, overpower it, as it is doing to Snapchat, or the mere presence of the social giant would dissuade people from building social products, as is happening across the Valley right now. This reality raises profound questions about monopolies, ones that are far from resolved by our legal system or by policymakers.

The Social Media Reckoning

Monopolies have historically been defined by people being able to undercut real or potential competition by charging lower prices than anyone else. But by that definition, Facebook will never be a monopoly. Why? Because its products are free. There’s no lower prices to charge.

As the scholar Tim Wu argues, perhaps our laws need to evolve to encompass a broader definition of what constitutes a monopoly. Essentially of what does it mean to be too powerful?

The question of power is at the core of my mission as a journalist in an age of tech giants. I don’t need to tell you that it’s a year of reckoning for Silicon Valley.

It’s also a year of reckoning for all of us that have come to rely on its products for connection, expression, shopping, learning, entertaining, bill paying, the list goes on. We’re questioning the effects of technology on our health, on our democracy, on our community, on our attention, and on our time. Ultimately we’re asking whether these products are good for the world. I want to probe that question from different angles, and to ask how we got here. But first let’s go back to Bailey Richardson.

Bailey let me tell her story because she wanted to make the case for something better. She critiqued the celebrity-driven, influencer culture that transformed the platform from a place for niche connection into the digital QVC. Some might say this is the natural evolution of technology. It’s human nature to compare yourself to others and to ogle at beautiful things. But her critique also extended to the role that technologists play in engendering these problems, the minute but impactful engineering decisions and choices that arise from a culture that is hyper-focused on growth and on commanding attention, often at the cost of well-being.

Today, this growth ethos that was pioneered at Facebook is ubiquitous throughout the tech industry. It’s embodied by the fact that most companies actually have a growth team, often staffed by former Facebook people. The result is a system iterated over and over again, expertly designed to hook you in. You know how it is. You stay off for a little while, but then you get a notification that you were tagged in a photo. You’re telling me there’s a photo of me out there but I can’t see it unless I log in? As it turns out, photo tagging became one of the most effective psychological luring tactics in the history of Silicon Valley.

Another one is the so-called recommendation engine orchestrated so that when you click on one image of a hedgehog you get 1,000 more, countless nudges and hooks, infinite micro-decisions that in my view comprise an untold history of Silicon Valley. Because you are not just the product, as has become popular to say, you’re also the guinea pig for one of the largest psychological experiments ever created. You might even say you liked it, at least at one point. We can all remember a time when social media felt more meaningful. And for many there are still pockets of meaning. As Bailey pointed out, there are cheap likes and there are deeper ones, there are quick hits of dopamine and there are deeper, serotonin-infused contentment states.

The question is: When does one bleed into the other? Robert Lustig, one of the doctors who proved that sugar was addictive, is today seeking to demonstrate that excessive technology use lights up the same destructive pathways in the brain as sugar does. Though the science is still evolving on that, one of the more interesting avenues in my reporting is to understand how people conceived of all of this at the time.

Tech companies talk a lot about the term engagement — a click, a like, a share, that’s all engagement. And notions of engagement were viewed through very circular logic. If a person engages, well then they must like it, and therefore, if you do things to induce them to engage, if you tweak and test your way to hyper growth and hyper engagement, it’s all okay. Everyone’s making a free choice here. But at some point, finding out what people liked became secondary to just making the numbers go up. Facebook even turned that notion of growth into a mission statement to connect the world. But underneath this dogma is something more insidious, a business model that needs your attention, and I believe that has led us to where we are today.

Consequences of Hyper-Connectedness

Let’s look at some of the more recent consequences — the 2016 election. Entrepreneurs looking for fast cash masqueraded as clickbaiting news outlets to draw Facebook’s users to their sites where they could make money showing ads. Some of that content that they pumped out had more viewers than The Washington Post. Now Russia is building up its own influence campaign at the time, but Facebook hasn’t discovered the extent of it yet. Even before the election, false news was being flagged by employees. But it was dismissed as a problem by higher ups, including Mark Zuckerberg. At least one powerful executive, the one who sat among the supporters behind Judge Kavanaugh in his Congressional hearings a few weeks ago, argued that they should take very limited action, because a lot of the sites that trafficked in sensationalism appeared to be more right-leaning, and they did not want to risk appearing biased against the right.

Another flashpoint was when Facebook launched live video. They were racing to catch up with trendy live-streaming apps like Meerkat and Periscope. According to reporting by my counterparts at The Wall Street Journal, executives knew that users might start committing acts of violence on camera, and that in all likelihood they would. But they considered that collateral damage in the mission to create a product that the world would use.

The massacre in Charlottesville was another flashpoint. One question is whether tech companies hold any responsibility for the tragic events. Far right groups used tech platforms, from Facebook, to WhatsApp, to lesser known apps like Discord, to organize the march. Tech companies are actually moving away from the scrolling news feeds that we have come to be used to, and are starting to emphasize private messaging in closed communities that are not visible to the broader public.

But let’s not forget how these recommendation engines work. You join one group and Facebook algorithm shows you similar groups to join, groups that were joined by people who are similar to you or in the group that you already joined. So you join one extremist group and now you’re in this ugly extremist echo chamber that software designers maybe didn’t create but have certainly amplified.

The uncanny ability of Internet, and particularly the smartphone, to profile you and find you wherever you are means that once you’re in a certain bucket, you’re likely to be pummeled with similar messages. That is the perfect influence machine, according to psychologists. Unlike Facebook, Discord and WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted, digitally scrambled so that even the companies that own the apps can’t read their content. Facebook’s former security chief told me recently that these services are effectively a lost cause when it comes to tracking bad stuff. And perhaps this is convenient for companies in a certain sense. You’re less at fault if it’s impossible to know what really happened.

Then there’s this big privacy law that just passed in Europe. You may have heard of it. It’s called GDPR. This law changes the whole way that Europeans regulate privacy, and one little known part of it is that it requires that companies delete a lot more records that they’ve been doing until now. Until now, the philosophy’s been save everything, data mine it, use it to predict your preferences. But now that GDPR is in place, and companies are being required to delete, it’s going to make it even harder for companies to stay on top of what really happens on their platforms. The records simply won’t exist.

So you see, tech companies are in a Catch 22. Society is urgently telling them to protect people’s privacy, but we are also telling them to have complete visibility, and to increasingly police that content, and make judgment calls about the nature of that content. At some point, they will have to choose, and the question is: What choices, as a society, do we push them into?

More recently, the broadcaster Alex Jones was at the center of these free speech and censorship debates. Jones, who has denied the Sandy Hook school massacre, had one of the largest Facebook followings of any publisher. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, for years they all debated what action to take, because, guess what, putting something false or psychologically harmful on a social network is not against the rules. Even when a Sandy Hook mom experienced trauma and death threats because of these accusations, these companies all said that Jones had done nothing wrong.

The exception to this painful decision making interestingly enough may soon be Twitter, which recently introduced rules prohibiting content that results in real world harm. Twitter has been around for 12 years and just instituted this policy. It’s the only company to do so, and it’s going to be really, really hard to enforce.

We think that algorithms are so complex, but in many ways, it’s their simplicity that’s augmented social problems. After the Parkland school massacre, a conspiracy about one of the victims shot up to become one of the top recommended videos on YouTube. The recommendation algorithm is the culprit again. When one group seems to be unusually engaged in a certain topic, the algorithm looks at that and says, wow, that’s interesting, I better show it to more people. The next thing you know, YouTube is recommending brutal conspiracies to people who would never have searched for them.

There’s been almost no common sense judgment applied to ask why people might be feverishly interested in a topic or whether that subject is worth promoting. This is the stuff journalists ask every single day.

When I think of these incidents, I think of living through them as a journalist. Banging my head against a wall as I’m trying to push these companies, these powerful, opaque companies to say anything that has a ring of truth, to disclose more information. And I think in these moments about how important it is to retain my own sense of shock, because it’s very easy when you’re in this line of work to get numbed, and most journalists have the heard-it-all-before effect, but for me, I think staying in touch with my feelings and with myself as a human, even before I’m a journalist, for me that’s the most important driver.

The Wake-Up Call

There are so many places to start the story of how things began to unravel—I haven’t even gotten to the Russian ads. For me, though, it’s the most poignant moment, because it unleashed a wake-up call for the companies and Congress as well. This wake-up call could be a game changer because the lack of regulation that tech has benefitted from is now being called into question.

The Post broke the story of the Russian ads on Facebook and on Google too. From there we moved to Twitter, where we showed how powerful Americans, influential Americans, came to be duped into retweeting content from Russian impersonators, often people they disagree with that they thought they were fighting with, but they were fake fights. Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook disclosed thousands of Russian ads seen by what they originally said were 10 million people. But that 10 million, it just seemed off. How could it be so few?

Researcher Jonathan Albright felt that there was something about Facebook’s disclosure that was a partial truth. He knew that the goal of Facebook ads isn’t just to sell products, it’s to lure people into click-liking your brand, and becoming your Facebook friend so that you can send them more content, but this time for free. Albright demonstrated that Russians were reaching a far greater audience with free content that piggybacked off their ads. This was something Facebook had not discussed. After a lot of pressure, the company admitted that it wasn’t just the 10 million who saw the ads, it was nearly 90 million Americans. That’s close to half of all Facebook users in the United States that were exposed to Russian content. And the company only admitted this late the night before they were being dragged into Congress to testify. If I’m a little cynical, you can understand why.

In this arc, we’ve gone from the highs of tech companies taking credit for the pro-democratic uprisings in the Middle East in 2011 to the lows of Russian meddling in Cambridge analytica today. But even during the highs, the seeds of hyper growth were being planted. They became part of the DNA. Can you change your DNA? It’s one of the biggest questions I’m asking this year.

With Congressional hearings and potential regulation on the horizon, Silicon Valley has been in react mode. Facebook has hired 20,000 people, new people, in the last two years to review problematic content around the world. It has built AI to detect fake and spammy accounts. And they’re making it a lot harder to game the ad system.

There are also interestingly a lot of under-the-radar internal projects taking on the problem of unhealthy tech use. And you can think of this effort right now in two camps. On the one hand, there are those who want to nudge you and tell you how much time you spent in trusting you to make an informed decision on how you use technology. Tim Kendall, the former Facebook executive who’s become an anti-addiction crusader, says this approach is like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking because they drank too much last night. His anti-tech addiction app Moment is worth checking out.

Silicon Valley’s attempt to rectify the problems are also creating a lot of downstream consequences in politics. A few weeks ago in the last two weeks, Facebook purged about 800 political accounts and pages run by Americans. The company told us that these pages were being operated by profit-driven spammers, and they were taking down their content, not for what they said, not for their speech, but because they were spammers. But when I actually talked to some of those people whose pages got deleted, the story was much more complicated. They said, “Wait, wait, we’re real Americans; we’re not Russians; we’re not even following their playbook. We’re not spammers, we’re just doing what political activists are doing every day online.” And their decision to do this is driving a stake through the heart of what online organizing means today.

They make a strong case that affects the left and the right. And their case is strengthened by the fact that Facebook won’t tell you exactly what behavior crossed the line. That means everyone, including me, is in a guessing game as to the nature of truth.

We’ve reached a tipping point, and I have little doubt that change will come. The role of people I call the defectors, like Bailey Richardson and Tim Kendall, are more important in shifting the thinking in Silicon Valley than you realize. Because as Facebook and as the Russians discovered, people are most influenced to change their ideas if it comes from within their social network. But it’s more likely, I think, that change will come from outside forces – lawsuits, state attorney generals, regulators in the US and abroad, and the politicians from both sides of the aisle and from across the pond that are increasingly demonizing tech, sometimes in ways that go way, way too far. State-level lawsuits are particularly important because they sidestep the broken political process at the federal level, and discovery in a lawsuit is important because it may give clues to people’s mindsets and intents, and that’s why tech companies are fighting them hard right now.

For my part, I will go back to my desk tomorrow morning, I’ll get my coffee and prepare to spend the day confronting companies that are wealthier and more powerful than nation states. I will try to understand the consequences of their actions, intended and unintended, consequences society has not seen before and does not have rules or frameworks to understand. There’s a dizzying number of things I can pay attention to. I can search for more Russian activity ahead of the midterms next week, I can look for more Baileys, more political organizers, more evidence of tech addiction. It’s not hard to keep your compass pointing north. I know where to look, it’s just that there is so much to look at.

5 Videos of Social Justice Leaders That Will Spark the Changemaker In You

Over the course of 30 years, Bioneers has witnessed the progress of social justice movements around the world and amplified the voices of incredible movement leaders. These are thought leaders, innovators and passionate speakers who are often willing to risk a great deal in the pursuit of what they know is right.

In honor of the advancements made over three decades, and in recognition of how much work we still have ahead of us in order to achieve an equitable, just and loving society, we’re shining a spotlight on five social justice leaders, movers and shakers who have spoken from the Bioneers stage.

1. Fania Davis – Justice that Heals

Drawing on a lifetime of social justice activism, Fania Davis depicts the essence of Restorative Justice, an emerging approach that seeks to move us from an ethic of separation, domination and extreme individualism to one of collaboration, partnership and interrelatedness. Rooted in Indigenous views of justice and healing, this rapidly expanding global movement invites us to make a radical shift from either-or, right-wrong, and us-versus-them ways of thinking. It seeks to midwife an evolutionary shift beyond domination, discord and devastation toward healing, wholeness and holiness with one another and all creation.

Learn more about Davis’ work at Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth.

2. john a. powell – Overcoming Our Fear of the “Other”

As humanity faces global environmental and social collapse, our fear of the “Other” can be magnified by unstable contracting economies, radically shifting demographics, and new social norms. Can humanity overcome these divisions and come together to protect our common home? john a. powell, a nationally respected voice on race and ethnicity, leads UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion, serves on the UC Berkeley School of Law faculty, and is author of Racing to Justice.

Learn more about powell’s work at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley.

3. Rinku Sen – The Intersection of Environmental and Racial Justice

Rinku Sen is one of the most dynamic and influential social, racial and gender justice activists of our time, and among the nation’s most effective voices for inclusion and human rights. She’s also a cutting-edge journalist, author and researcher. She shares her vision of how we must urgently learn to face and address our completely intertwined ecological and social justice crises, while we learn how to do it without losing our minds, our friends…or our fights.

Learn more about Sen’s work at Race Forward.

4. Edna Chavez – Youth Activism, Today and Tomorrow

This inspiring 18-year old activist from South Central Los Angeles, who has lost many friends and family members to gun violence, was a key participant in the March for Our Lives event and has become a leading gun control advocate and voter registration organizer.

Learn more about Chavez’s work at March For Our Lives.

5. Climbing PoeTree – Intrinsic

Climbing PoeTree (Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman) are award-winning multimedia artists, organizers, educators and a spoken word duo. They may be the most brilliant socially engaged spoken word duo in the known universe. Enjoy this performance from Bioneers 2018.

Learn more about Climbing PoeTree.

Jeremy Narby: Beyond the Anthropo-Scene

The renowned “anthropologist under Amazonian influence” and Indigenous rights activist Jeremy Narby, author of landmark books The Cosmic Serpent and Intelligence in Nature, considers the intelligence of living beings and wrestles with his own culture’s anthropocentric concepts. In his view, constantly affirming the centrality of humans gets in the way of respectful living in the biosphere. Rethinking human-centered concepts such as “nature” and “anthropocene” can cast light on our relationship with the living world. Because the words we use influence how we think, we gain from examining them with care.

Introduction by J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer.

This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.

How Mapping Technology Can Help Us Tell Stories and Protect Ecosystems

Google Earth Outreach founder and visionary engineer Rebecca Moore says the signs are all around us, telling us that our life-support systems are in critical condition. Only recently has it become possible to monitor the health of Earth’s life-sustaining resources in a manner both globally consistent and locally relevant. Moore is showing how satellite data, cutting-edge science and powerful cloud computing technology such as Google Earth Engine allow us to achieve an unprecedented understanding of our changing environment and put this data into the hands of those who can take action. Combined with Google Earth’s new narrative storytelling tool, grassroots activists, communities and other environmental change-makers can now vividly show what’s at stake, and envision solutions in ways that can change hearts and minds, while guiding wiser decision-making to protect and restore our vast, fragile planet.

Rebecca Moore discussed how mapping technology helps us achieve conservation and social missions at the 2018 Bioneer Conference. The full text of her presentation follows.

Click here to watch a video of her presentation.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Rebecca Moore:

We’re going to talk about Earth’s vital signs. Think about it: When you go to the doctor, you can get your heart function measured, your lungs, your brain. You can get all kinds of tests done. But what about the planet? What about the Amazon that produces the oxygen that we breathe, or all the river systems of the world that are like its bloodstream? Where can we all go and know how healthy those critical systems of our Earth are? Historically, the answer has been basically nowhere. But if there’s ever been a moment to harness technology in service of planetary health, this is it.

I’m going to start not with big data but with small data. I got my start in my own community, and I believe that’s a very great way to start out as an activist, because you learn and then you can scale. So I started in the Santa Cruz mountains about 10 years ago. We got a letter in the mail, “Notice of Intent to Harvest Timber.”

Nobody could read this map. Black lines indicate where the logging’s going to happen, but black lines are also the roads and everything else. So most people simply threw it out.

But Google Earth had just come out, and I’m a mapping nerd. I said, ‘I wonder if I studied this plan and remapped it in the full 3D satellite imagery of this new Google Earth, could we really understand what was at stake?’ Maybe it was nothing to worry about, or maybe it was. I wanted to find out.

Over that weekend, I brought in the data. There were going to be helicopters hauling logs over the daycare center and nursery school, and I could make 3D models of it. I showed my work at a community meeting, and people were horrified. Now they could really see the reality: How big the project would be (1,000 acres, six miles long) and how close it was going to be to so many aspects of our community life.

We called ourselves Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, or NAIL. Our mascot was Charlie the Beaver because beavers are responsible loggers.

This was Google Earth 10 years ago. This was Rebecca 10 years ago. I was asked to present this Google Earth logging flyover to political groups and the media because no one understood the official plan. But they could understand in a few seconds what was wrong when they saw it in Google Earth. My neighbors were writing, saying, “I thought I understood until I saw it on Google Earth; now I’m shocked and appalled.” The Chronicle talked about green eyes in the sky as a new tool, satellite imagery for environmentalists.

When you can present maps and data in the context of the real planet, then people can understand. We used this technique to raise awareness. Ultimately we proved that the plan was not only a bad idea, but we used Google Earth to prove that it was illegal, and we stopped the logging.

And it gets better. We’ve always had this feeling in our community that we stopped the plan, but wouldn’t feel safe until the land was permanently protected. Just a few months ago, a bill was passed, and funding was secured. It’s going to become a new open space park in the Santa Cruz mountains.

So that’s how I started: with 1,000 acres.

Storytelling through Mapping

Fast forward: We launched a new version of Google Earth, and with everything that we’d learned over a decade, we realized the heart of it was storytelling and tying the issues, concerns, dreams, solutions and challenges to the land.

We’ve invented a new digital magazine we call Voyager. Every week we’re updating it with stories, and as you can see, there’s a bit of an environmental bent – nature stories, stories about climate change. We’re trying to educate the world about the world.

My current personal favorite Voyager story is the brown bears of Katmai National Park. There’s a live bear cam, so you can see what’s going on right now. We want to bring the world alive. We want to help everybody understand and be able to celebrate this dynamic planet, this beautiful place where we live.

The Introduction of Google Earth Engine

That’s not where the story ends. Our storytelling and visualization is fantastic, but we have a problem: The world is changing dramatically in ways observable from space. You can see, for example, deforestation in the Amazon. We were approached about eight years ago by Brazilian scientists who said what they really needed was to deal with the fact that we were losing a million acres a year of Amazon rainforest. It was typically happening illegally in parts of the forest where there’s not good law enforcement on the ground. However, there was daily satellite imagery that was free, public domain.

There was a virtual alerting system. We could use science to detect changes, and we could alert people. The problem was it was petabytes of data. That’s billions of megabytes of data. If you were going to try to manage all that satellite imagery and then analyze it, it would take weeks on a single computer. So they were stuck.

That’s where Google Earth Engine was conceived: in the Brazilian Amazon. We do have a few computers at Google. They’re running YouTube, Gmail, search, etc. Why not have them run an environmental analytical engine for the planet? So that’s Google Earth Engine: an environmental planetary scale engine to help us understand, map, measure, and monitor what’s going on on Earth.

There’s all this incredible data being captured while we’re sitting here. The problem is it’s typically going onto tapes and stored in a vault somewhere in a government archive. The way I think about it is, ‘How can we liberate that, bring that online, and make it available to scientists and anyone who wants to turn those pixels into knowledge?’

With Google Earth Engine, we spent three years bringing all that historic data online. We’re also bringing the new data online as it’s being collected, co-located with massive computing to derive the insights that we need to understand what’s changing and what kind of solutions are possible. So once that was built that, we wondered what it would look like if we stitched together a global, panable, zoomable planetary timelapse. An animated video of the planet.

It was fascinating. We could see Las Vegas growing while Lake Mead shrunk. Hmm…that’s interesting, isn’t it? We could see deforestation in Bolivia, which would be artistically beautiful if it weren’t sad. We could see the Alberta tar sands.

But there are beautiful things too, geologic features like the shifting sands of Cape Cod beaches.

To build that timelapse, we had to analyze five million satellite images. It was three quadrillion pixels. We ran it on 66,000 computers in parallel. We had it in a couple days. On a single computer, it would have taken 300 years.

The first big scientific vital sign, you might say, was working with one of the world’s leading scientists, Matt Hansen, at the University of Maryland to create the first high-resolution, fresh map of the state of the world’s forests: where they’re still intact, where they’re disappearing, where they’re growing back because of reforestation efforts. That was published in the journal Science. It’s been incredibly highly cited. It was a million hours of computation that would have taken 15 years on a single computer.

But we don’t want to just produce scientific papers. We want to drive change on the ground. So now we’ve operationalized running that program every week. The data goes into an application that you can check out called GlobalForestWatch.org. There’s real transparency now on what’s happening to the forests of the world.

Now it’s a cat-and-mouse game. The people that are doing the illegal logging used to log during the dry season because that was more convenient for their trucks. But now they know they can be seen from space, so they’re logging during the rainy season. They used to be able to get away with that, but now there’s radar. We bring all the radar data into Earth Engine, and this group, Instituto Socioambiental in Brazil, developed a radar-based algorithm. They saw this line developing of change in the heart of the Amazon, not near any roads. It was an illegal mining operation. They got it shut down immediately.

Now let’s switch to fisheries. Something like 20 percent of the seafood that we eat is caught illegally or unsustainably in some way. There’s a moratorium in China for a month once a year to allow fisheries to recover. The day that moratorium is up is a bad day to be a fish. No one has ever been able to know what’s going on in the high seas, which is the global commons, owned by all of us, but owned by no one nation, and therefore not well protected.

With Oceana and Skytruth, we built a tool called Global Fishing Watch. It’s bringing in data on all these vessels. They’re beaming their position for maritime safety, but now it can be used to manage and understand how we can fish sustainably. Fisheries are collapsing, but it’s well known that if we can just conserve and fish a little more intelligently, the oceans could be abundant for generations to come.

We can see the tracks of individual vessels. We can determine using AI if they are trawling, long-lining pr just transiting.

Mapping Data Assisting Scientists

On this map, the green area is a new protected area that went into effect in the Kiribati Islands. You can see before and after. It looks good, right? The fishing cleared out. However, about a month later, you can see that one vessel was fishing illegally. The government of Kiribati impounded the vessel. It resulted in a $2.2 million fine, which is 1 percent of the country’s GDP.

This is critical for these small island nations. They don’t have the U.S. Navy. They have thousands of islands. How are they going to protect their waters? This is a way to virtually ensure that these protected areas are truly protected, they’re not just paper parks.

In Indonesia, seafood is incredibly important for their diet. The Minister of Fisheries has now adopted Global Fishing Watch for her government’s use. If she knows a boat is illegal, she will warn the crew, they get off the boat, and then she blows it up. You do what you’ve got to do.

So there’s also a very strong scientific aspect to our work. We’re making all this data that we’ve produced available openly for scientists, economists, and ecologists to study and understand what these patterns are and how they relate to slave trade, sustainable fishing, and so on.

Mapping Data Goes Solar

We have amazing 3D data in Google Earth and Google Maps. If you fly into the cityscape of San Francisco or New York, you see these beautiful 3D buildings. What if we could turn that into an understanding of the solar potential of every rooftop in the world? That’s what we’ve done with Project Sunroof. You can go there, enter your own address and see the solar potential for your house. We have very precise information of the potential for cities and countries to go solar.

We packaged that up into a tool that we launched called the Environmental Insights Explorer. San Jose took that data and has become the first city to commit to becoming a gigawatt solar city. They knew they could be that ambitious because we showed them they could generate 3.4 gigawatts. We’re giving them the data to increase their level of ambition.

Nina Simons: Celebrating Women’s Ways

In her new book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018), Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. Informed by her extensive experience with multicultural women’s leadership development, Simons replaces the old patriarchal leadership paradigm with a more feminine-inflected style that illustrates the interconnected nature of the issues we face today. Sharing moving stories of women around the world joining together to reconnect people, nature and the land—both practically and spiritually—Nature, Culture and the Sacred is necessary reading for anyone who wants to learn from and be inspired by women who are leading the way towards transformational change by cultivating vibrant movements for social and environmental justice.

The following poem is from the book’s final essay.

I find myself appreciating women —
and valuing what we bring to the world —
in this writhing, frightening change-time, more every day.

And I so deeply admire men who are
learning from women’s ways,
becoming better listeners, rotating leadership,
and staying connected to others —
even while you stay true to your own purposes.
Remembering the value of beauty,
relatedness, flexibility, pausing and reflection.

I am oddly reassured by the ancient prophesies
that predicted this would be a time
for the return of the Feminine —
a time for re-balancing the world.

Perhaps I seek reassurance from our ancestors,
for what I already know, deep in my bones,
is true and needed and right.

I’m discovering aspects of myself as a woman
that I’d largely abandoned,
ones that are larger than I’ve allowed myself to be,
parts that are fierce, fiery and feisty,
also playful, sure-footed and wise.

Before, I imagined them too dangerous to reveal.
Now, I feel called to bring all of me to bear —
from the place of my own commitment,
from the place of my deep love for people and nature and culture.
My fear pales in comparison with what’s at stake.

I remember that we teach young women
to be good by following the rules,
coloring inside the lines, and not making waves.
We’re taught to keep our heads low — to avoid conflict.
To be good at caring for others, and knowing what they need —
often well ahead of knowing our own needs, ourselves.

But we expect young men to rebel.
To find their own identity,
they’re encouraged to defy the norms,
to stand firm in their own convictions,
and to step out on their own.
Boys are applauded for taking risks,
and for bragging, or boasting
about their achievements.

Girls are told to demure and be quiet.
Admonished not to show off,
“not to be so full of yourself.”
(Who are we supposed to be full of,
++++++we might wonder, if not ourselves?)

Many of us are learning, now,
to turn that caring and nurturing inward as well,
and to toss out some of our good-girl conditioning,
to step out and fulfill our purposes
in creative, risky and authentic ways.

How encouraging to find women emerging everywhere,
stepping out of our safety zones,
mirroring and complementing each other’s strength and vulnerability —
which is the “power through,” not “power over” that is the essence
of power being redefined and reclaimed
++++++by women all over.

What do I love most about women?
(As reminders for us all
about women’s magnificence
in this transitional time.)

When women interact intimately,
there’s a lot more going on than an exchange of ideas.
We absorb each other’s textures, scents, and colors.
We inhale each other’s bearing, intuiting undercurrents of childhood,
gleaning molecules of emotion —
our bodies trade a hundred unspoken cues.

As women enter deeper relational waters,
our enthusiasms become infectious,
our beginnings and endings blur, seamlessly.
We enjoy the rhythms we form with each other,
concepts coinciding as our passions swirl.

We not only braid our thoughts, ideas and feelings together,
we let our memories mingle with our intuitions and our dreams.
I love how often women remember how much we don’t know —
and that our intuition or silence, dreams or deep listening
often bring whatever is most needed.

At our best, we weave our worlds together,
contrasting combinations of disparate realities.
Creating a multicolored canvas thick with texture and pigment.

Changing our moods and minds as often as the winds —
but rarely our hearts, our truest compasses.

As women, our bodies and the moon instruct us
to recognize the cyclical nature of change.

We understand innately that the destruction and death
all around us
++++++also mean that a birth is imminent.

Each of us, men and women alike,
are being asked to assist in this labor.
To deliver the profound, fierce, single-focused commitment to life
that accompanies any successful birth.

The midwives know that
++++++it’s just when the labor is becoming most scary, bloody and intense,
just when the mother feels she cannot bear the pain any further —
that is when you know that
++++++the baby is about to be born.

As women, we attentively attune to our bodies, relishing the pulses of deep knowing that come from our bellies.

Together, we knit dimensional patterns of our laughter, anger, sadness, and the holy water of our tears.

We yearn to mend the tattered fragments,
to turn our anger into compassionate action. To integrate the painful,
frightening, enraged hot beauty and the flows of laughter, unity and celebration into
++++++dancing a new world into being.

Republished with permission from Nature, Culture and the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018) by Nina Simons.

See more from our Everywoman’s Leadership Program >>

Formless Warriors: 21st Century Wisdom from Old-Growth Cultures | Enei Begaye, Dune Lankard and Hawk Rosales

For thousands of years, First Peoples have successfully managed the complex reciprocal relationships between biological and human cultures using Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Yet no prior human civilization has ever faced the globalized ecological collapse occurring now.

In the face of unprecedented pressures on their homelands and ways of life, indigenous leaders Enei Begaye, Dune Lankard, and Hawk Rosales are organizing in new ways to protect the environment–and spread their knowledge for the sake of all life on Earth and future generations.

Shamanic Plant Messengers And The Fate Of The Earth

In this fascinating conversation, author and anthropologist Wade Davis and ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison delve into the fascinating human relationship to consciousness altering plants, delving into the use of coffee, cacao, peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin by ancient and contemporary peoples, and the relevance these relationships may have for current human predicaments.

Explore our Visionary Plant Consciousness & Psychedelics media collection >>

Not Fate But Choice: Reinventing Fire for the Clean Energy Era | Amory Lovins

“Humans are inventing a new fire, not dug from below but flowing from above, not scarce but bountiful, not local but everywhere, not transient but permanent, not costly but free, and this new fire is flameless.”

The internationally acclaimed energy and design strategist Amory Lovins shows how by 2050 we can run our energy system with no oil, coal or nuclear power. He says we can achieve that vision with clean energy and energy conservation, led by business, without an act of Congress or any new inventions. By making this transition, we can save more than $5 trillion and double the size of the US economy.

Nature, Culture and the Sacred: Integration and Congruence through Practical Magic

In her new book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018), Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. Informed by her extensive experience with multicultural women’s leadership development, Simons replaces the old patriarchal leadership paradigm with a more feminine-inflected style that illustrates the interconnected nature of the issues we face today. Sharing moving stories of women around the world joining together to reconnect people, nature and the land—both practically and spiritually—Nature, Culture and the Sacred is necessary reading for anyone who wants to learn from and be inspired by women who are leading the way towards transformational change by cultivating vibrant movements for social and environmental justice.

The following excerpt is from the book’s final essay.

Many among us are reaching to cultivate our best selves in the most regenerative and effective ways to help heal our ecological and social systems, and shift the course of our ailing world, while also celebrating and enjoying life. My hope is that this offering might prove useful to cultivating your own emergent or evolving leadership.

While some of the chronic biases and injustices of our social systems are increasingly visible to many — across economics, race, environment, gender, class, age, orientation, ability and ethnicity — the harms and violence resulting from them are also escalating. And, as we are also the immune system of the planet, people are mobilizing, thankfully, and acting on behalf of what we care most deeply about.

Now is definitely the time.

That movement-building, however, is still more factionalized than it needs to be, which keeps us from becoming optimally effective. To cultivate our best opportunities to shift our systems, bridge-builders and connectors are needed across all sectors and issue areas to help create connective tissue among diverse yet related communities and constituencies.

And of course, the impacts of our escalating imbalances are not evenly distributed. The harms and violence being felt by some are far worse — due to color, class, nationality, gender, or faith — than for those of us with the privileges that whiteness, wealth or maleness still confer. In the global south, refugees fleeing their homelands due to climate change impacts and violence are increasing, even as white nationalism is spreading. Thankfully, many individuals and communities are stretching and boldly risking much to help alter our course, with approaches as diverse as running for political office, engaging people through the arts, as well as grassroots and movement organizing.

Many more of us now are seeking clarity for how best to develop ourselves to protect and defend what we love. We’re heeding a call to act on behalf of a future where diversity in all its forms is valued for the strength and resilience it can offer, and life’s creatures and living systems can thrive along with our kids and grandchildren.

What’s at stake? Only the capacity of Earth to sustain human life into the future. Many more of us now know that our personal and global health, human rights, peace and freedom — and a viable future and quality of life for humankind — are not only interdependent but are also hanging in the balance.

With all the current challenges of our broken social systems, over the coming years the impacts of climate destabilization will rapidly and inexorably increase the challenges that lie ahead. Potable water and healthy food may become increasingly hard to access, and costly, as droughts and wildfires, tornadoes and earthquakes roil any perceived sense of safety we may have left.

There are no guarantees and we cannot know the outcomes, but I am heartened by my faith that together, with all of our resilience, love and inner knowing, we can “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice” while we grow our community connections and alternative support systems to help sustain us through the times ahead. One thing’s for sure — we cannot do this work alone. We need the power of collective and community for the work ahead.

I am immensely grateful for the emergence of gender fluidity and the dissolving of old gender norms and identities that are increasingly prevalent among younger people. Life has also taught me to appreciate the unique value of caucus work. When people who identify as sharing a gender convene with others who mirror many of their lived experiences, potent healing and strengthening can happen. This has proven valuable in race and class work, as well as with gender.

I realize that — coming from a different generation — my focus on women and balancing gendered qualities in our institutions and culture may seem outdated to some. If so, I apologize for my blind spots, and ask you to receive these ideas flexibly and with understanding.

For the remainder of my days, I will act toward co-creating the world I want, in collaboration with others who share many of my values. For me, this means working to advance the leadership of women, and all people leading more from their “feminine” aspects and an integrated wholeness of our humanity. It also means shifting our culture to achieve greater gender equity and balance in our institutions, cultures and policies. This is the most comprehensive and systemic way I can see to help us to heal on every level — ranging from the individual to the societal and from the social to the ecological.

I am not alone in this perception. Public awareness, in many parts of the globe, is changing far sooner than governance, policies and institutions. Increasingly, researchers, think tanks and survey data are also proving that the leadership of women — and those who lead in a more gender-balanced way — is our best shot toward shifting our course toward a future that’s Earth-honoring, equitable and vital.

Republished with permission from Nature, Culture and the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018) by Nina Simons.

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Will Mushrooms Be Magic for Threatened Bees?

The renowned mycologist and genius discoverer of immunological and bioremedial properties of mushrooms Paul Stamets wrote a recent Op-ed in the New York times discussing breakthrough research he unveiled at the 2014 Bioneers Conference. Since our species emergence from Africa, mushrooms have represented a thread of knowledge – critical for human survival as medicine, fire portability and the regeneration of forests. His latest epiphany is MycoHoney, made by bees that sip mycelium droplets, which prolongs worker bee longevity, detoxifies the hive, and could prevent colony collapse disorder, as well as our own. Fasten your seat belt.