Following in Nature’s Footsteps: Tracking the Wild with Doniga Markegard

By Doniga Markegard

Doniga Markegard, as a teenager, trained as a tracker of wild animals, which ignited a lifelong passion for the natural world. On the trail of a mountain lion on the California coast, she met a rancher with a deep reverence for nature, fell in love, got married, started a family and together they run Markegard Family Grass Fed, a pastured livestock operation in which Doniga blends her tracking, permaculture and holistic grazing knowledge to regenerate coastal prairie lands. In this excerpt (Pg. 183-186) from Doniga’s recent book Dawn Again: Tracking the Wisdom of the Wild, Doniga and renowned Permaculturist Penny Livingston are sharing notes on their observations of the landscape from a tracker’s perspective and a Permaculture perspective, deepening each other’s understanding of nature’s phenomenal complexity and how to mimic nature in systems domesticated by humans.

As we entered the grassland, we started sharing our observations with each other. She pointed out the trail of water gaining velocity as it traveled across the land. The trail was worn smooth from the water picking up any small pebble that may have lain there. Penny said the traveling water could be captured or routed in a way that would allow it to penetrate the soil or be stored for later use. She pointed out that once the water hit the road, it picked up even more speed until it gushed out along the downward-sloping edge, causing the erosion she showed me. She was tracking water!

I stopped to part the grass and noticed a bobcat trail that led along the edge of the water trail. I pointed it out to Penny. The bobcat had been using the edge of the water trail but was hidden by the tall grass.

As we traveled along, Penny was looking at the soil types. She would point out the clay soils. “Those would be perfect for natural building materials!” she exclaimed.

We continued to drive down the road on the edge of the grassland. The ocean appeared in the distance. Penny pointed out the trees flagged by the winds, indicating the prevailing wind direction. I spotted a well-used game trail and asked her to pull over. There before us were tule elk tracks crossing the road, filing in one behind the next to travel through the grasslands. They looked fresh, lacking moisture on the disturbed surface, indicating they were not weathered from the morning’s fog. I asked if she wanted to follow the tracks and she eagerly agreed.

The tracks led us over a rise in the grasslands. Quietly we walked until we got up to a ridge. There before us stood a massive bull elk surrounded by five cow elk. With his neck outstretched and muzzle turned up, he sounded an eerie whistle out of his slightly open mouth. His dark brown neck, with long hairs reaching out from chin to chest, flared as he bugled to communicate with the cow elk as well as any bulls that may have been lurking nearby. The dark neck transmuted into a light brown body with a whitish rump. The small group did not compare to the one-thousand-head-strong herds of the past, but still held the magnificence of a species communicating with each other in a way that each individual understood and vocalized in response. The small group sounded high-pitched calls in response to one another, keeping their group together and communicating any alarm. It was an orchestra that needed no rehearsals.

As we stood in amazement in the presence of these magnificent creatures, I could see Penny’s eyes scanning the grasslands. I asked her what she was seeing and she pointed out the types of grasses the elk were feasting upon. The native perennial bunch-grasses dotting the trail looked delicate and wispy amongst the non-native annual grasses. The grasses had already dispersed their seeds, leaving a protective shell opened and exposed, like a mother without a child. She said next year she would come back to that patch once the grass was ready to harvest and collect the seed for her land. I would never have registered that patch of productive purple needle grass or noticed that it would be a site to collect the seeds to propagate elsewhere. Aside from working on the organic farm, I had never focused on propagation of anything in the wild. That day I was walking with Penny, I was focused on propagation of observations and collection of data. Collecting wild seeds was a new concept.

The things Penny focused on showed me how she perceived the world. I had seen the trail of the bobcat in the grass and parted the grasses because I knew there was a good chance I would find the tracks of a bobcat traveling along the edge of the trail, seeking cover in the tall grass. The bobcat could stalk up on the small mammals living in the cover of the plants while at the same time remaining hidden from larger predators or people. I knew what to look for, after having followed the tracks of that species for countless hours. Penny had focused on the movement of water and the types of soil with similar intensity. She had spent her own countless hours observing the way water traveled, was directed or dissipated, absorbed or shed. She applied all of that information to her landscape.

As we drove along, we buzzed like honeybees after being so close to those majestic elk. Our observations were flowing as if our brains had opened up to each other. I realized I had been viewing the earth through the eyes of a non-human animal—I’d worked immensely hard to understand how to get in the mindset of a bobcat, a beaver, a deer, a wolf. And now it was time for me to view the land through the eyes of a human animal—a responsible one, holding all living beings as my kin and relatives. I had learned, as Gilbert Walking Bull prophesized, how to live like the wild animals. I felt I needed to relearn, or perhaps even reimagine, what it meant to be human.

Intrinsic – A Performance by Climbing PoeTree (2018)

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

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

Learn more about Climbing PoeTree at their website or explore all their performances over the years at Bioneers. 

This Performance took place at the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

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

Intrinsic – A Performance by Climbing PoeTree

This Performance by Climbing Poetree took place at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. These two Brooklyn-based poets-artists-activists-educators-musicians-performers may be the most brilliant socially engaged spoken word duo in the known universe. They perform material from their recent kickass album, “Intrinsic”.

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

To learn more about Climbing PoeTree, visit climbingpoetree.com

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

Farming in the Radical Center

America has never felt more divided. But in the midst of all the acrimony comes one of the most promising movements in our country’s history. People of all races, faiths, and political persuasions are coming together to restore America’s natural wealth: its ability to produce healthy foods.

In Food from the Radical Center (Island Press, 2018), Gary Nabhan tells the stories of diverse communities who are getting their hands dirty and bringing back North America’s unique fare: bison, sturgeon, camas lilies, ancient grains, turkeys, and more. These efforts have united people from the left and right, rural and urban, faith-based and science-based, in game-changing collaborations. Their successes are extraordinary by any measure, whether economic, ecological, or social. In fact, the restoration of land and rare species has provided—dollar for dollar—one of the best returns on investment of any conservation initiative.

Following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Food from the Radical Center.

Read Bioneers’ Arty Mangan’s review of Food from the Radical Center here.

Have you ever savored the ripe fruits or fresh vegetables from land that you yourself had begun to restore perhaps just a few years before? If not, does land restoration seem like an abstract concept with which you have no hands-on experience? Do habitat restoration and species recovery feel like things that happen off in the distance, beyond your sight, your earshot, your taste buds, and your nostrils?

Ironically, the fruits of restoration are already all around you, though they may not be explicitly presented to you in that manner.

In North America today, you can partake of some 628 species of cultivated food plants and 14 species of livestock, in addition to at least 4,000 types of wild plants and species of fish and game. Your increased access to this diversity of foods is largely due to the collaborative conservation and restoration efforts of a variety of farmers, fishers, foresters, foragers, ranchers, chefs, orchard keepers, and discerning eaters on this continent.

Over the course of the following stories, I’ll be encouraging you to savor some of that great diversity of foods, but I’ll also be inviting you to taste and see the world from which those foods spring in an entirely different manner: Tasting the huckleberries with a sense of when fire last moved through that patch of berry bushes . . . Digging for camas after seeing their wet prairie habitat freed from the competition of invasive species . . . Hooking a Chinook salmon and smoking it over alder wood after learning how stream restoration allowed it to migrate up into the headwaters from the sea . . . Grilling a bison burger after helping bring down the fences to let the buffalo roam, creating wallows that other creatures and plants use along the way . . .

Such place-based foods may begin to bless your table more frequently than they did in the past, but the fruits of restoration do not appear all at once, nor are all of them edible. Some of the rewards, in fact, are social, for the roots of the trees we plant with neighbors begin to bind us together. Most importantly, these efforts can break down our stereotypes, as a woman from a salmon restoration project once brought home to me.

I encountered her in a workshop of the Society for Ecological Restoration, and although I no longer remember her name, I will never forget how humbled I felt by her message. This middle-aged woman came into our workshop to offer a twenty-minute talk after half of the session was over. She sat down in a crowded room among a couple dozen young environmentalists excited by the fact that President Clinton and Forest Service director Jack Ward Thomas had just put twenty-four million acres of old growth forests in their region under ecosystem management. It was not long after the federal listing of northern spotted owls had forced the closure of industrial-scale logging in many national forests, and thousands of loggers had lost their jobs. The youth in the room were not only jazzed that “their side” had won a major environmental victory. They were also hopeful that now forest restoration would be funded on an unprecedented scale—the equivalent land area of four Connecticuts.

As this latecomer stood up to be introduced and offer the next talk, the mood in the room shifted. I perked up. Perhaps it was because the next speaker looked so different from many others at the conference. While the vast majority of participants wore Teva sandals, khaki shorts, green fleeces, and brightly colored T-shirts with outrageous drawings and in-your-face slogans in defense of mother earth, she wore a pastel, Western-style pantsuit, a silk blouse, and boots. As she spoke her very first word to us, I could sense male attendees dismissing her because of her dress, her beauty-parlor hairdo, and her vaguely rural Western accent.

She started off by explaining that she was there because her husband had been one of the loggers who had lost his job when the FEMAT logging closures began to go into effect. Just hearing that she was from a family of loggers made the group uncomfortable. Their collective body language grew irritated, even hostile. Even when she began to describe how she and her husband had recruited jobless loggers to join them in restoring salmon streams, most of the men in the room were tapping their pencils, looking out the windows, or staring at their laptop screens.

But then this “stranger in a strange land” did the most flabbergasting thing, right in the middle of the twenty minutes allotted to her. She asked if we could take a two-minute break so that she could use the women’s room and suggested that because she could still finish her talk in the allotted time, we should all stay put. When she abruptly left the room, there were curses, barbs, and wisecracks that do not bear repeating. And yet everyone stayed in the room as they had been politely asked to do.

When the woman returned, she was dressed in a fleece, T-shirt, khaki shorts, and Tevas; her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She moved out in front of the podium, and to the best of my recollection, said something like this:

“Listen up. A few minutes ago, you dismissed me on the basis of my dress and my accent. But I’ll tell you what: I will not let you dismiss the work that the fine men that my husband and I have recruited are doing in this region. They are healing the very streams and wildlife habitats that some of you in this room have worked to protect! You need their work as much as they need yours. But to join forces on behalf of the fish and wildlife we all want to see survive, you have to first acknowledge the value of the men and women who care about the same things you do but who don’t talk about them with the same words you do.”

To say that I was appalled and embarrassed by my own prejudices is an understatement. My colleagues and I had hardly offered this courageous, compassionate, and intelligent woman the time of day, let alone any deeper listening. She simply did not look like a member of our “club” of conservationists. That was the day I decided that I needed to quit the club I had been in—consciously or unconsciously—for most of my life. To this day, I remain grateful to this performance artist who had found a novel way to speak truth to power—in this case, the power of the expertocracy.

In memory of that moment, I encourage all of us to imagine something other than the infamous zero-sum game that is stalemating our country. We need to interact with each other differently, taking a more inclusive approach to decision-making and restoration.

In Stitching the West Back Together, my old friends Tom Sheridan, Nathan Sayre, and David Seibert explain why it’s time we engage rather than alienate the diverse voices in our rural and urban communities. They want us to regard everyone—farmworkers and loggers, cafeteria cooks and wild foragers, hunters and fly-fishers, teachers and preachers, ranchers and career professionals in agencies—as equal partners in collective efforts to “stitch back together” our damaged landscapes and communities.

Each time such diverse players come together, we should get in the habit of asking six fundamental questions:

  • Do you sense that this restorative work might address the deepest practical needs that you, your family, and your neighbors must fill to continue living with dignity in your community?
  • Might it build toward some moral common ground that will allow your community members to be better lasting stewards of the resources in your home place?
  • Does it strengthen your community’s overall capacity to collectively solve problems, reduce disparities, and resolve conflicts with novel solutions?
  • Will working together through more equitable processes foster you and your neighbors’ own well-being, intellectual growth, neighborliness, and organizational capacity?
  • Will it help all of you to better safeguard what makes your place unique and offer you more lasting solutions in the face of uncertainty?
  • Will being engaged in this collaboration be pleasurable for you, allowing you to taste, see, smell, and hear the fruits of your collective labors? Or will it simply be another tedious obligation to attend seemingly endless meetings and hearings where no one really listens to anyone else?

If you choose to ask such questions, they may help you move toward some immediate reduction in conflicts. But you cannot count on pat answers or flash-in-the-pan solutions to carry you very far. Be cautious of instant claims of success, like We planted three hundred trees today and now the forest (or orchard) looks like it is restored!

A sequoia forest cannot be restored in a single a day, nor can a diverse pollinator guild be reassembled merely by sowing nectar-rich plants on a single farm. It takes efforts across administrative and property boundaries so that changes ripple out through an entire foodshed and patient capital can be invested over decades.

In the end, the benefits of restoration will be far more than what you grow on your farm, what you harvest from a nearby forest patch, or what ends up on your plate. Being part of collaborative restoration involves the slow-growing fruits and steady dividends of long-term social engagement. It is ultimately about place-making and peace-making—in your community’s meeting rooms and council halls, on farms and ranches, around forests and lakes, and at many tables. Its goal is that all may reap the many tangible and intangible benefits of community-based collaborations.

In the past, many of us who wanted to restore landscapes or help species recover were obsessed with outcomes; in other words, we were emphatically content-driven. We only began to pay sufficient attention to social process when our neglect of it began to trip us up and undermine our goals. Count me among the ranks of those content-driven geeks who must have seemed narrowly focused and marginally collaborative to members of the first few communities I worked within.

In fact, I initially missed the significance of a landmark event that occurred near my desert home in October 1999, when the Community- Based Collaborative Research Consortium was founded. Forty funders, facilitators, researchers, activists, and community members met in Tucson, Arizona, just a few miles from where I was working at the time. Did I even catch wind of their proximity?

How could I have neglected such an extraordinary convergence happening on my home ground? Well, it is probably because I was (and still am) a recovering “content geek.” As a matter of fact, if I had tried to write this story for you even a half dozen years ago, I would have led it off in a completely different manner that I am attempting today.

Perhaps I would have tried to baffle you with scholarly bullshit . . . or numb you with impressive numbers . . . or entangle you with technical assertions to convince you of how bright and right I was about how to conserve land, recover species, and farm sustainably.

But after suffering from a rash of concussions and various other personal setbacks a few years ago, I no longer “feel” that I was ever that bright or particularly right about anything at all . . . at least not when
I compare my insights to those of the many good people around me.

Instead, I feel grateful to still be alive during this precious moment on earth, when I can rub shoulders, fins, and wings with lives quite different from my own.

I am stunned and humbled by the capacity for innovation found in every heterogeneous community where I have had the chance to work. I no longer assume that I personally have some unique ability to provide answers to the nagging problems plaguing my community, our society at large, or the food-producing landscapes we depend on.

It’s not that I have lost complete confidence in all my old environmental values, skills, and convictions. It’s more that I have gained deep respect for the validity of values, skills, and convictions quite different from the ones I grew up with. And in this case, by “growing up,” I mean the maturation process that those of us who were involved in the environmental movement have undergone since that first Earth Day in 1970.

From Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities by Gary Nabhan. Copyright © 2018. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

A Review of “Food from The Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Our Communities”

“Have you ever stumbled into a place where you were bowled over by an abundance of wildlife?” So begins the chapter Bringing Back the Bison in Gary Paul Nabhan’s latest book: Food from the Radical Center: Healing our Land and Communities (Island Press, 2019).

The question brought to mind a time in 2013 when there was an unexpected spike in anchovies in the Monterey Bay and massive schools were swimming by the mouth of the Santa Cruz Harbor. There were dozens of sea lions in formation, diving down to grab a mouthful of anchovies and coming up for air over and over again while hundreds of pelicans were dropping from the sky with seagulls in hot pursuit trying to steal some of the small, iridescent, nutrient-dense fish that overflowed from the pelican’s pouch. I was spellbound and felt genuinely renewed at what Gary Nabhan calls the “lure of life.”

Nabhan begins each chapter with a “Have you ever” question that leads to an experience full of appreciation for the diversity of the natural world and how it contributes to human culture and sustenance. Through these inquiries, he introduces the reader to people who are stewarding urban gardens in Querétaro, Mexico; Bison stocks on the plains and woodlands of North America; Atlantic sturgeon in the Delaware River; Navajo churro sheep;  rare fruit in Phoenix, AZ and California, and many more stories. These efforts are not just about salvaging a single species on its way to extinction – as important as that is – they are also about revitalizing the culture, economics, ecosystems and communities that these plants and animals have had, and can still have, a prominent role in.

Community Collaboration and Empowerment

In the face of intractable societal schism, Nabhan makes larger points to help bridge the divide that obstructs progress in conservation. He first names what is painfully obvious, “Americans appear to be at war with one another rather that at work with one another.”

But where most people see division and isolation in today’s acrimonious political and social environment, he sees community and cooperation. “We must be willing to take a step toward consensus, even when it means risking criticisms from mud-slingers on the far extremes. This fertile ground is what rancher Bill McDonald began to refer to in the mid 1990’s as the radical center.” A concept that Courtney White successfully applied as an organizing principle to ameliorate antipathy between ranchers and environmentalists in the Southwest when he founded the Quivera Coalition to create a framework for productive collaboration.

Nabhan cites another systemic problem – the failed top down approach that has driven much environmental policy. Science, rather than ignoring culture, should respect and consider it when designing solutions. Studies have found that plans that are imposed without community participation or that don’t build community capacity to solve problems and resolve conflict, fail. Resource protection programs that don’t develop understanding and caring within the affected communities tend to be abused.

The remedy that Nabhan provides multiple examples of is practical grassroots community engagement – the inclusion of diverse and even conflicting factions to find common ground and solve serious local problems.

Bringing Back Bison

At one time 25 to 30 million bison, a keystone species that sustained the biodiversity and fertility of prairie grassland ecosystems and were a major food source for indigenous communities, roamed the North American plains and woodlands. Bison were nearly eradicated in a matter of decades reduced to, as wildlife historian Dale Lott said, “a carpet of whitening bones and a few hundred scattered survivors.”

It’s hard to overstate the role bison played in developing the grasslands, with assistance from Native American fire management practices that stimulated the growth of fresh forage, into some of the most fertile topsoil in the world, an asset that Midwestern farmers have been exploiting ever since. Buffalo wallows started as temporary shallow pools that were sealed by bison hair and oils when bison drank and bathed in them turning them into larger more permanent watering holes that support a variety of wildlife. Tragically, bison were brought to the brink of extinction by habitat loss, government policy and the industrial scale massacre that brought the population to less than 100 by the late 1880’s.

In the 1990’s, the InterTribal Buffalo Council of 58 tribes were managing over 15,000 bison, Nabhan writes, “in ways that nourish their culture and spirits as well as the ecology and economy of the region.”          

Hugh Fitzsimmons, of Shape Ranch near Carizo Springs, Texas, who wanted to develop a free-range herd of bison on private lands, attended the Intertribal Buffalo Council. As a non-Native, he was not sure that he would be welcome, but he ultimately made friends and connected with Native American mentors who have taught him everything he knows about raising bison and with whom he now exchanges breeds. Hugh has a vision to increase bison herds in Texas to restore degraded ecosystems and regenerate deep-rooted native grasses to make the region more drought resilient.  

Kent Redford of the Wildlife Conservation Society organized multicultural gatherings to listen to the priorities of Native American bison managers and to ensure their voices were a major part of the vision for bison recovery and prairie restoration of the Great Plains. Through these kinds of efforts, bison have rebounded to a population of 450,000 across the three nations of North America. Most of that work has happened on private and tribal lands.

The successful recovery of such an iconic species whose presence shaped the rich ecology of the Great Plains and the culture of Native people has, as Nabhan points out, a wider implication than the increasing numbers indicate. “The sense of place matters. That open space matters, that free ranging game matter, and that access to untrammeled land for recreational or spiritual rejuvenation matter.”

Revival of an Ancient Fish

Another example of community driven conservation involves an endangered anadromous fish that can grow to 16 feet long and weigh up to 800 pounds. Atlantic sturgeon have been on Earth as a species for around for 70 million years. Millions of Atlantic sturgeon once inhabited the Delaware River, now one of the most contaminated waterways on the Eastern Seaboard. This bony-ridged fish, one of the largest and longest lived in North America, was once a key part of Native American diets – tens of thousands of pounds were harvested a month. But by the late 1800’s industrial fishing practices using gill nets to sell the sturgeon as pet food, fertilizer, caviar, bait and oil depleted the stocks to about 180,000. In modern times the numbers crashed even further, with only a few hundred remaining in the Delaware River watershed.

Since 2012, The William Penn Foundation Delaware River Initiative has funded $140 million to 130 organizations to support collaborative grassroots conservation to clean up the river – an important drinking water source for local low-income communities – and restore wildlife habitats along streams and the river. As a result, Atlantic sturgeon populations are bouncing back from historic lows.    

Conservation You Can Taste

Whether it be preserving the remaining Black Sphinx date trees in Metro Phoenix, stewarding Native seeds of the Southwest, raising awareness and taking action to halt the demise of pollinators who perform eco-services for $30 billion worth of food crops, or the revival of heirloom grains, Gary Nabhan is not merely a dispassionate reporter of these endeavors, but often a catalyst and an active participant who brings diverse constituencies together in what he refers to as “conservation you can taste. His decades long efforts to coalesce disparate groups to restore working landscapes has focused on revealing common ground and fulfilling the ambitions of scientists, environmentalists, farmers and ranchers alike. These are not just one-off projects for Gary, but rather the tapestry of his life’s work.

In this book, he celebrates the local heroes who labor on the frontlines of food species extinction, cultural restoration and community empowerment. The lessons learned are that success comes from community-based collaboration, turning adversaries into partners, and finding an alternative to the failed approach of top down environmentalism. Regulations and policies need a more inclusive approach to decision making “to stitch together our damaged landscapes.” Nabhan advocates for a humbler approach, admitting that we may not have all the answers, and shifting the driving force of environmentalism from guilt to the “reverence of restoration.”  

Gary Paul Nabhan has been a hugely influential food writer; books like Enduring Seeds and Coming Home to Eat are ethnobotany masterpieces. His writings, teaching and activism have helped raise awareness of the environmental and cultural degradation of industrial agriculture and have cultivated a renewed appreciation and celebration for the elegance and importance of the relationships among land, water, soil, plants, people, animals and the cultural continuity of place.

In Food from the Radical Center, Gary Paul Nabhan provides a number of rich and detailed accounts from across the country illustrating that, in a world of ecological and social crisis, ideological differences can be put aside to work together for the common good around basic human needs – clean air and water, biodiversity, food security and community.

Learn more! Read an excerpt from Food from the Radical Center here.

Tom Hayden – A Global Green New Deal: History, Context and Future

In 2014, the legendary activist, progressive movement strategist and long time California State Senator Tom Hayden (1939-2016), gave a poignant, moving and incredibly prescient address as part of a Climate Leadership symposium that Bioneers hosted. In his remarks, Hayden delved into the history of the New Deal, the movements and drivers that presaged its development and the pressing need for a modern version, a Green New Deal, to be enacted to deal with climate change, the major existential crisis of our time.

His remarks below are essential contextual reading for understanding how we’ve reached the moment we’re in today, where a Green New Deal is making national news, lead primarily by an active and engaged youth movement of newly elected, next-generation policymakers along with vibrant movement activists. 

Watch a video version of this talk or listen to Spirit in the Air: Reform, Revolution and Regeneration, an award-winning episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature podcast featuring Tom Hayden.

I learned during a couple of experiences in my life a kind of an answer to the complicated question of where ideas come from. In this movement we’re prone to think ideas come from scientists, and that is correct up to a point. I’ve always thought that ideas came from listening. A lot of people listening to each other is what we’ve been doing today, and it’s not easy to immediately synthesize what you’ve heard, because the listening is a process. We have to be open-minded and remember to not tell people your story unless you’re willing to hear theirs. From an organizer’s viewpoint, you’re always trying to detect: What are people feeling, thinking? What words do they use? It’s a very unscientific approach to language, but it’s been a very powerful force in social movements like liberation theology in Latin America.

The Port Huron Statement

The first of the two experiences I want to discuss is the Port Huron statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, which the history books say I wrote. It was 27,000 words long. It tried to express a vision of our generation in 1961-1962. We had come through the freedom rides and the beginning of what would become the Free Speech movement. About 62 people gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, thanks to the UAW that gave us a room. I wrote the document, it’s true, but in order to write the document, I interviewed tons of people. I wrote it and then it was somehow rewritten in a five-day period. Looking back, I certainly get credit for having set the typewriter and pounded it out and made sure that it was in the mail and all that, but the way I feel about it in retrospect is that the Port Huron statement wrote us – that there was a spirit in the air, it was a consensus in the air. James Joyce said the same thing about his writing 50 years earlier. James Joyce said that what he was trying to write was the unwritten consciousness of his generation.

So, the knowledge, the feeling, the mix is in the generational experience. It’s not in the writer’s head. That’s an old left model where the organizer comes and tells you the line and tries to make it narrow enough to rally you to a certain demand and then moves on. This is more about attempting to get at the actual feelings that people have not yet articulated. I think we’re in the process of articulating those feelings.

Today is one day, a few hours in a process that has been going on since I first heard of solar energy from someone in the Brown administration 40 years ago. It goes way back. It’s deep. There are many ancestors and many previous attempts to express it. I’ve learned that these things do take time and there’s no rushing them even though we have to do things urgently.

The New Deal

The other example that I think is a good one is my reading of the New Deal. The reason I think of the New Deal is because I am a writer first and foremost, a movement activist, a twenty-year participant in the legislative process and I was born at a moment when the New Deal saved my family.

What happened is that my grandfather died in a cannery accident, the fault of the Carnation Milk Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He fell in a vat and was chopped up. He left my grandma with eleven kids. This was during the Depression and she survived and took care of those kids. During that time she was sustained by a $5,000 check from the company with regret for the death of her husband. There was no pension, there was no Social Security, there were no rights for organized labor. Her world fell apart in the late ‘20s, early ‘30s, and I don’t remember all that much about her, but I remember her as being sort of the quintessential nanny, the grandmother and all these kids.

What they were doing in the Depression was huddling up together like students do today, five to an apartment, living through a semester at NYU or wherever. They were selling apples and they were doing odd jobs together and pooling what little they made every day in order to buy food and pay the bills to get to the next day.

They were not political. This is a key point in my sharing with you. I believe, along with C. Wright Mills, that we have to reach people who are in their personal milieu and their problem is that they’re detached from history and social structure; they don’t know what has happened to them; they are in a catastrophe and they are prone, if they’re working people, to think there’s something wrong with them – their ethnicity, their class, their lack of education. They’re not prone to automatically blame an outside aggressor. That would take a level of pride and insolence and insubordination, so to speak, a mutinous mentality that they don’t have. They’re survivors, and they know a lot. I’m not saying they lack knowledge. They know a lot. I learned that too, after leaving the university and going to Mississippi and Georgia and Newark. I learned that poor people know a lot that middle class people do not know unless they come from that background.

In the middle of this process of the collapse of capitalism, the collapse of what government we had, there were the stirrings of the New Deal. There were social movements, Communist Party-led organizing drives in manufacturing plants. Got nowhere. People got fired, got clubbed down, beat up, shot. Anarchists tried to do it in their horizontal way, to borrow the current language of the current movement. Trotskyists kept attacking everyone on both sides for not following the correct line. Farmers – I don’t remember if they picked up pitchforks – but they went to work against the banks and the grange.

This started a period of turbulent working class expression and middle class expression at having been sold out by somebody. It began with finding ways to make enough to buy food to eat, and it ended up with doing everything possible to obstruct the business as usual unless they were fed, unless their children were fed, unless they could go to school, unless there was somebody to say there was hope on the horizon, to borrow a more recent phrase.

I remember my mom went through this, the orphan of a father she hardly knew. When I was growing up at the end of the ‘30s and the beginning of the Great War, I remember sitting on her lap a lot, and she’d always talk to me about how she loved Roosevelt. I didn’t know who Roosevelt was. I just thought, “Roosevelt, that’s God. My mother loves God and Roosevelt is taking care of us.” She would keep saying that, because by that time, after the revolutionary inciting of working people and average everyday people, they had achieved Social Security. I can’t tell you what that would have meant for my mother when she was thinking about Grandpa.

They achieved bargaining rights for organized labor. Unheard of. Seemingly impossible. They achieved pensions and all the rest of it, and they had achieved what was known as the New Deal. Now, at the time it was being built, they did not call it the New Deal. They called it the movement. It didn’t have a name. They didn’t announce, “Now we are starting a movement for a New Deal.”

What happened was this strange mix of a revolutionary impulse on the one hand, a liberal impulse from do-gooders who wanted a better government, people in the center who were very frightened at the possibility of social disorder and were timid about raising their head, and then people on the right like my priest, Father Charles Coughlin, who was busy organizing an anti-Semitic response to the very same conditions, working closely with Henry Ford on the idea of a new Nazi party based in my hometown of Royal Oak or Hamtramck.

The people on the far right thought Roosevelt was a Communist. I don’t remember if they questioned his place of birth. But he was leading us to a Soviet America. Some of the people on the left thought that was a great idea – a Soviet America – and they were in little discussion circles constantly reading textbooks from Marx and Engels about the future of Soviet America. Most people that I would identify with were organizers. They were selfless people who didn’t work for much money, didn’t think far ahead, to the careers that they would hold as future labor bureaucrats or Democratic party administrators. They wanted to know if they’d have their heads crushed by a policeman’s baton. They were willing to do that. There’s sort of a lost generation there in history.

There was another group, maybe a little like some people you know or today’s climate scientists. They were known as the brain trust of the New Deal and they were a very eclectic group of people who were brainy intellectuals. They were probably part of the most important American tradition that I’ve ever studied and I consider myself part of, the American pragmatic tradition. I know that pragmatism is now a dirty word, but if you look under it, it means: listen first, see how far people are willing to go, and improvise a step forward, a program that will take you a little bit towards survival or a little bit towards a better life as rapidly as you can.

The New Deal brain trust invented all these amazing programs. One parallel today would be like if somebody said, “We need a Renewables Work Administration, like the National Recovery Administration. We need to put every person in this country and on this planet who’s out of a job or under-employed into a great employment project, publicly funded, privately funded, but it has to happen, because there’s a great work to be done.” The great work was to save us from the Depression in those days. The great work today is to save us from climate catastrophe and the end of civilization as we know it. No one had the idea for The New Deal in 1929. They were gripped with that idea by 1937.

The whole idea of industrial workers being organized, the whole idea of old age pensions, of delivering people Social Security, having to sit at a table and argue about whether we could also do healthcare, being told by the president we don’t have the votes, we can’t do that, some future generation will fight for healthcare – that’s how the New Deal was pounded out.

It was improvised by very creative people who dared to take it on and who simply believed that their current lives were unlivable and they didn’t have to be poor to know that. It was just an unlivable situation with fascism approaching and with the Depression never seeming to end. And out of that pragmatic determination they decided the government had to hire people, the government had to protect people, the government is what saved my mother, and why she loved Franklin Roosevelt.

It was a close call. We could have gone to the right. We could have gone into chaos. The answer to what might have happened we’ll never know because then came World War II, and everybody thought, “Problem solved.” Everybody’s working down the street in the empty plant. They’re building planes and tanks and trucks and jeeps and cars. The car industry was formed out of that experience.

My father went to work as an accountant for a car company. Detroit was booming. My mother loved Roosevelt for those reasons, not ideological. When we come to that point when people aren’t trapped in ideology but are willing to do what works, that’s the time when I think we’ll have the equivalent of a New Deal for the climate catastrophe.

From A New Deal to A Green New Deal

There are people who argue that there’s no climate problem. There are people who are fascistic in their inclinations. There are people who, unfortunately, are ideologically driven – they believe in a market even though there really is no pure market, it’s all government supported through incentives or taxes or mandates. They’re mad. They’re really angry, but there’s a madness that’s ideological; they don’t have a picture. And I’m talking about the Tea Party and people that I thought would fade away, but seem to get more ferocious as the threat grows.

There were people who said, “Okay, we’re going to invest in the rebuilding of America and, after the war, in a Marshall Plan for the world.” They cut a deal without a handshake, as far as I know. The finance capitalists were divided over whether their obligation was to reform the system in order to stabilize their profit or crack down on these insurgents and stop them in their tracks and go all the way to drive them off the political map towards God knows what kind of system we would have had.

On the other hand you had labor and social movements and populist movements where the argument was, “Should we take the right to collective bargaining or go all the way to Socialism?” It was kind of like 1919 when the Socialists told the Suffragists, “All the way with Socialism first, then you women will get your right to vote.” And the women said, “Not taking that offer, thank you very much; some of us are Socialists, some are not, but we all want the right to vote.” And we’re at a similar crossroads. If you read Naomi Klein’s excellent new book, This Changes Everything, she outlines a similar debate today.

I come from experience, not ideology, not theory. I do my reading. I try my best. But my sense is the most we’re going to accomplish here is a global Green New Deal, which is quite a lot when you think of the state of the planet. We need the green billionaires and we need the younger generation.

However, somebody has to cut a deal. Unless you believe that we have to have revolution first and then save the planet. If you believe that, I advise you to listen. Just go to meetings in your community, in your PTA, in your neighborhood and ask—get up, actually, and say, “I want a revolution first, what do you people think?” You’ll see that they’re not there now. They might be thinking about it, but it’s a simple fact that we need to have this green infrastructure, a green financing mechanism, and at the same time, just as labor needed to be organized and respected in their dignity, we need all the people of color, the disenfranchised communities of California to feel that they have been invited to the table and that they’re going to get somewhere.

We need to double the rate of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. We need to get the brain trust to understand that that is necessary because if we don’t do it, it will even get worse. We need to go to at least 50% or 60% solar and renewables as part of our electrical system. We need to reject the idea that the grid is some holy place like a medieval church that needs to be respected.

Remember that it took people power to knock out the nuclear plant in Sacramento. We were told if there was no nuclear plant built in Sacramento we’d be dead, because it’s so hot there. Go to Sacramento now. Last time I was there it was one-hundred and ten degrees and they had an electricity surplus. A surplus. Why isn’t that model a larger part of our story? One-hundred and ten degrees and running an energy surplus through a publicly owned utility whose board members are elected, with investors still making lots of money off it.

We need to put out of commission this infernal Dracula of the nuclear power lobby that seems to continue running on fumes. Where is capitalism when it comes to nuclear power? They never stop. They say we have to have a robust nuclear industry to achieve our climate goals. It comes from madness, arguing that it’s either a Chernobyl future or a climate catastrophe future.

California’s a very precious place, not because somebody designed it that way originally but be- cause we are an advanced economy with 199,000 jobs in the clean energy industry, and we’re getting rid of coal and getting rid of nuclear. There are a lot of people that don’t want to see that. They used to say, “Well, Governor Moonbeam, who listens to him?” They can’t call him Moonbeam any longer, but they can wait him out. He’s only got one more term, and they can try to avoid the California model, the idea that you can have an advanced economy run on 100% renewables, step by step, without nuclear and without coal. They don’t want this idea floated out there, because some of them think their interests would be harmed. They don’t know that it may really be in their best interest.

Nobody knows what the California story is. It could be because people in California are too busy with their projects to identify where they’re going or the governor’s afraid of Republicans. It’s not that the story is perfect. We know from today that we need to be on all out alert to stop fracking, and we need to tell the governor if he wants climate leadership on the planet, fracking will be his Achilles heel.

I think it’s a complicated course that we have to navigate, and we need organizers. We need people to drill down on this. I think we have had enough of the science elite. They have delivered us such great material on how to get to 100%, but they don’t know how to get to it politically. You know, the desert is covered with giant parabolic collectors, and the Sierra Club is worried about birds, and you say that’s the only way we can get to 100% renewables? By destroying a desert and the wildlife? That leads you into endless committee hearings and litigation and the only thing that can avoid that confusion is more consensus, more dialogue. How are we going get there?

We have precious little time to get there, but we know from the science that it is inevitable that things will get worse. It is also inevitable based on my experience that people will fight back. It’s all one step at a time. The starting point is to combine the notions of reducing emissions and achieving jobs and environment justice. The finance capitalists will have to accept the jobs argument and the empowerment of poor people. That’s not in their normal picture. The environmental justice advocates will have to convince themselves that this emissions catastrophe is real and is really going to wipe us out, and that we have five or ten years to get through it as safely as we can.

There are 33 states that are controlled by coal interests. There’s only about 25, 26, 27 states where we’ve got a shot. But that’s the green bloc that has to be organized state by state, community by community, to have such power that they can push back until the inevitable gets worse and we see the investments flowing. The investments have to flow in an equitable way, in a fair way. That’s what happened with the New Deal. The poor got better off. The workers got rights. Business got rich by stabilizing capitalism. That’s where we are and I think that’s where we probably have to go.

If you read Thoreau’s book of essays that was published after his life, The Dispersion of Seeds, it’s about the growth of communities and the rise of new generations. At one point, Thoreau says, and I’m quoting: “We find ourselves in a world that is already planted, but is also being planted as at first.” That’s the transition we’re in. That’s the planting and cultivating that we’re doing. We see in these panels today, we see in these presentations, a new world rising that has been cultivated but is again being planted as at first.

The title of Thoreau’s essay was I Have Faith in a Seed. So do I.

Closing Performance by Oakland’s Thrive Choir (2018)

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

Learn more about Thrive Choir at thriveeastbay.org/thrivechoir

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May Boeve: Climate Change is Changing the World – Now We Too Must Change

“We are witnessing the dying gasps of the fossil fuel industry and the tyrants they support. We are witnessing the unfolding of a just transition, a new way of making energy. And we may be witnessing a new way of being with and among each other.” – May Boeve

As Executive Director of 350.org, the groundbreaking grassroots international climate change campaign whose innovative organizing and mass mobilizations have uniquely helped generate a mass global sense of urgency and action, May Boeve shares her eagle’s-eye perspectives on the current state of the climate struggle. She illustrates 350.org’s learnings and strategies moving forward, including ways of learning about and incorporating justice and equity. She illuminates pathways our species must take to keep 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground and radically accelerate the shift to 100% clean energy.

Previously, May co­founded the Step It Up 2007 campaign, and prior to that was active in the campus climate movement while a student at Middlebury College. She is co-­author of Fight Global Warming Now. Learn more about May Boeve’s work at 350.org.

Read a full transcript of these remarks here.

Introduction by Clayton Thomas Muller, Stop It At The Source Campaigner for 350.org.

This speech was delivered at the 2018 National Bioneers Conference.

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Why We Need a Next System — And How to Get There

Over the past 10 years, Gar Alperovitz has played a central role in creating the quiet revolution of on-the-ground models and experiments of economic democracy. He’s a practical visionary who’s working to advance public ownership, community and worker-owned businesses and cooperatives, and intergenerational community wealth creation. And he has the experience to add weight to his powerful message and mission: Alperovitz co-founded The Democracy Collaborative in 2000, followed by the Next System Project, of which he’s co-chair. He has operated on the frontlines of real world politics, running political campaigns, House and Senate staffs, and policy planning in the state department and has a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, and author — most recently of Principles for a Pluralist Commonwealth.

In his 2018 Bioneers keynote address, titled “Why We Need a Next System,” Alperovitz discusses his work with the Next System Project, breakthrough models for community-based political-economic development, and how we can begin to build and work toward the systemic change we need to save both democracy and the planet.
Following is a full-text version of Gar Alperovitz’s keynote address. Watch the full video here.

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Gar Alperovitz:

The system is failing all around us.

Our infrastructure is falling apart, our jails are full and can’t hold more people, our young people are burdened with a trillion dollars in student debt. The temperature of the Earth is starting to rise. In a country like the United States, the fact that anywhere from 45 to 50 million people are hungry — we’re in a heap of trouble.

We can’t go on like this. We can’t keep moving toward climate catastrophe, nuclear war, the systems of inequality, poverty, famine. There is a systems problem. It’s time to talk about alternatives. It’s time to talk about what’s next. We need to be aspirational and be clear about the vision of the world that we want.

As systems fail, individual and community creativity explodes, and that’s what we have seen. People in this country are solving the problems themselves. They’re coming up with new models and strategies, and within those models and strategies are the kernels of a systemic way to move forward. Land trusts, cooperatively owned businesses, sustainable energy, state-owned banks, urban gardening, urban farming — these small successes taken together are a proof of concept that this can happen on a larger scale.

We’re compelled to search for alternatives, not just analytically but in how we live and in what we do, how we organize our daily lives. And that has tremendous potential. All bets are off in terms of our previous thinking, our ways of thinking about economy and our ways of thinking about politics have proven an abject and utter failure. The good news is we have no choice but to adopt revolutionary thinking.

How We Can Change the System

We can do better. We can build a better system. That’s not impossible. We can do it, collectively, neighborhood by neighborhood, step by step.

If there’s one thing I’d like to do, it’s to take this abstract idea — the system — and bring it down to, “What is it I can do tomorrow to change the system?” The task in this period, in my view, is to lay down an irreversible foundation when it comes to projects, organizing, politics, etc., that establishes the basis for a transformation.

My heroes are the Civil Rights workers in Mississippi in the 1930s. We don’t know many of their names. They laid the foundation for the 1960s. That is where I think we are, and to see ourselves in that role is empowering.

Everybody knows we live in something called corporate capitalism. That means there’s extreme concentration of wealth ownership. The top 400 people have more wealth than the bottom half this society — that’s 150 million, 160 million people. There is extraordinary income inequality and ecological damage. We know all about this. But the systemic problem is how you organize an advanced system so that you can reverse these trends with the institutions moving with you rather than against you.

Who are the dominant institutions? In the Medieval times it was the church, and the Medieval lords had the lands and the power. In the modern corporate system, the people who own the corporations have the money and the power, and overwhelmingly influence politics. In the 1960s I worked in the Senate with Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, and there still was a countervailing balance to corporate power, particularly on environmental issues. The labor movement was part of that, and Gaylord Nelson was a labor lawyer. He depended on having labor support in order to do environmental work.

Labor unions in the United States have collapsed from 34% of the labor force down to 6%. There is an overwhelming attack by conservatives and corporate leaders to drive it down further. Labor is becoming a weak force in politics, which means that if Gaylord Nelson were alive today, he probably couldn’t be elected, and he probably couldn’t do his environmental work. hat is one way of thinking about our current systemic design — corporate domination of the main sectors, countervailed and counterbalanced by another system.

By contrast, the state socialist system kept all of the ownership in the state, and all of the power concentrated at the top. The ecological harm and damage to human rights and more proved that design was overwhelmingly negative.

I want you to think about design. What is the nature of the design that you would actually want to live in? Who would own things? Where would the power come from? Would it be an expansionary system? Corporations have to expand. They’ve got to keep reporting more profits, and that has environmental implications for big corporations. So what is the nature of the design? What would it look like in the ideal? How do we get from here to there?

That’s the nature of this program we call the Next System Project. At one level, we have a major debate going on amongst theorists and academics and activists on the design of different systems. But if you want to actually change the system, get it out of the abstraction of the academics. There is a lot there that can be built on and worked on.

One way to start is with projects. We’ve worked a lot on the Evergreen Cooperatives Project in Cleveland, Ohio. This is in a very poor neighborhood — 40,000 people, mostly black, the average unemployment is 20%, family income averages $20,000 a year. In the middle of that neighborhood is the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and University hospitals. All three of those institutions have a lot of taxpayer dollars in them — Medicare, Medicaid, education money. They buy a lot of things just to exist, and they can’t move. They are so-called “anchored” because there is a huge investment of capital in those buildings and facilities. This is a technical term these days — anchor institutions.

One of the designs that we’ve developed is using the purchasing power of these big institutions and focusing it on this community to establish a community-wide nonprofit corporation to benefit and reflect the community’s interest as a whole. What is interesting about it is that it begins with the principle of community — not corporation, not state socialism — but local community, and it has attached to it another idea: worker ownership. That is a systemic design in miniature.

Now I’m going to use a dirty word. It also has a planning system. Public money in these big institutions focusing downward to help stabilize the community is a planning system. It’s not simply the market. It may be checked by the market. The market forces may make these guys a little more competitive. That’s fine. But it’s stabilized that way.

There are three major industries in the Cleveland model. Evergreen Cooperative Laundry is probably the most ecologically advanced industrial scale laundry in the Midwest, possibly in the nation, employing 300 workers. It also has a large greenhouse, Green City Growers, producing something like 4,000 heads of lettuce a month. Then there’s Evergreen Energy Solutions, the most advanced solar installation company in the Midwest which is also a worker-owned company attached to this community complex.

What you see there has been picked up in Preston, England by the Labor Party. Preston has advanced that whole idea, it’s become the policy of the Labor Party, and is now being picked up in other European countries. It started in Madrid, where they said, “Our community is the starting point of how we build a system.”

That’s a different design. It’s not corporations, and it’s not state socialism, and it’s not small business. It privileges community and institutionalizes it somehow, in the Evergreen model via a nonprofit corporation. In the case of Preston, the city government — which is very like a corporation — makes that the centerpiece of the design and then builds out from there. It says we want to build community. If you don’t have community, you don’t solve a lot of problems, including ecological problems.

This is something very rarely talked about in this country, but it needs to be faced directly. This is a continental scale system. It is literally an empire, internally. With roughly 3,000 miles coast to coast with 340 million people — how do we have participatory democracy?

It’s a system that is gargantuan, and just as it was in the 1920s and 30s, the question of scale itself is very important today. To the extent that you believe the system must be highly centralized, you lose participatory democracy. But if you go the other direction, you lose the benefits of scale. So it is a real problem, not a phony problem.

Addressing Issues at Home

Where might you see the idea of dealing with the scale problem thoughtfully and intelligently in the United States? By way of comparison, just let me mention to you how big the U.S. is. You can drop Germany into Montana. You can drop France easily into Texas. This is a very big empire, internally. If you think about where the fault lines may occur and where the debate might begin for the longer term redemocratization of America, California is an obvious target.

We may learn something from the last election, but California is so far advanced in many ways, particularly on environmental issues, on high-speed rail and on use of the public facilities. There is the possibility of beginning to develop over time a realistic, practical vision of how we decentralize as we move the population from 350 million to 400 and 450 million. It is inevitable that we have to decentralize. This is the most interesting part of the country where we could actually begin that experimentation.

So we’re beginning to think about systems, not as abstract things for an academic debate, but in practical terms: How would you actually begin practically to build on the existing models?

One of the most interesting things that’s happening around the country, and it’s happening here in California particularly, is that the idea of building banks that are public banks.

It draws on the Bank of North Dakota, which is currently one of the most conservative states in the country. It also has the most radical banking system in the country, which derives from the people who built it 100 years ago. The conservatives kept it because it’s so good. The small businessmen, the farmers, the co-ops — everyone likes the Bank of North Dakota and it’s become a model around the country. The last time I looked, there are maybe 15 different places where people are trying to set them up.

Some of them are going to work and some of them are not, but what is important about this is that somebody is actually looking at one of the central institutions of the system – the banking system – and saying, “Why could this not be made much more responsive to the public by changing the ownership and control?”

I don’t think people actually look in the mirror and say, “I could actually participate in changing the system.” It’s a hard confront. Who, me? Who else?

You can start by looking at concrete elements of the system. A system, after all, only is a lot of elements pasted together in a particular design. This one gives predominance to the large corporation and to the money behind it, so they overwhelmingly run the game now in politics. But if you built up a mosaic of alternative institutions and a movement — environmental, political, cultural, feminist, etc. — that actually began to understand that the way to make progress on all of these things is going to require us to change the powerful institutions that we are confronted with, then it becomes less abstract, less academic. Don’t make the system problem an academic problem, but see it as something that is our problem. We could do this if we wanted to, like those people in the 1930s in Mississippi.

We not only need to build a vision of a different kind of system design, and a pathway and personal roles, but on the way we need to think about how we build political economic power — institutional power, like the labor movement did to support Gaylord Nelson so he could do environmental work. What is interesting about the kinds of things that are happening around the country — the Cleveland model, the Evergreen model, etc. — is that they also become places where you can build political and institutional power, even as you’re laying groundwork for a larger systemic vision.

So if you take these abstractions seriously, and then break them down, you can begin to see pathways forward in many parts of the country.

I want to leave you with this one message: Bring system design down from the clouds and think about it almost like a recipe that you’ve decided to change or make from scratch. Begin to think, “It’s not too big for me.” Then do two things: Call a bunch of friends and start reading about this and talking about what you can do tomorrow to support each other.

Alex Eaton – Smallholder Farmers as Climate Change and Food Security Leaders

Alex Eaton, co-founder of Sistema Biobolsa, shares how this groundbreaking social business is creating a movement toward regenerative agricultural practices among small farmers in Latin America, East Africa and India. He illustrates how small farmers around the world can work together to increase global food production, while turning their farms, homes and soils into carbon sinks by using waste-to-energy technology, capacity building and innovative financing. Because small farmers still produce 80% of the world’s food, their survival is crucial to mitigating the effects of climate change, protecting biodiversity and preserving social stability in many countries. Alex shows how Sistema Biobolsa’s unique scaleable approach addresses climate change, food security, and poverty around the world by engaging “smallholders.”

To learn more about Alex Eaton’s work, visit Sistema Biobolsa.

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

This keynote talk was delivered at the 2018 National Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

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Charlie Jiang – Climate Change Activism and a New American Dream

Climate change, racism, and rising inequality threaten our communities. Charlie Jiang, a son of immigrants and a leading SustainUS youth delegate to the 2017 United Nations climate negotiations, will offer a vision of active hope, arguing that out of the compounding crises we face, we have a singular opportunity to mend the wounds of our past and usher in a brighter future.

This talk was given at the 2018 National Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.

For more about Charlie Jiang’s work, visit edf.org

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