Michael Pollan shares his transformative experiences with psychedelics. These profound tools forged his enlightenment on the expansive channels of love, connection and consciousness. Pollan is a journalist and the author of books such as How to Change Your Mind.
Directed and Edited by: Theo Badashi Sound Mix: Stephanie Welch Consulting Producer: Kenny Ausubel for Bioneers Produced by: Theo Badashi and Maximilian DeArmon for Cosmogenesis Media Group
Although we can’t understand the communication systems used by whales and dolphins, they are just as intelligent as humans, but in different ways. We have a lot to learn from these aquatic creatures, which can “see” with sound better than humans can see with our own eyes. Featuring James Nestor, author of Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and what the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves.
Directed by: Maximilian DeArmon and Theo Badashi Edited by: Brandon Pinard and Theo Badashi Sound Mix: Stephanie Welch Consulting Producer: Kenny Ausubel for Bioneers Produced by: Maximilian DeArmon and Theo Badashi for Cosmogenesis Media Group
Science now shows that plants appear to be sentient beings, and their innate intelligence can teach humans a great deal about consciousness. Featuring Jeremy Narby, anthropologist and author of Intelligence in Nature, and Kenny Ausubel, co-founder and CEO of Bioneers.
Directed by: Maximilian DeArmon Edited by: Abe Costanza Sound Mix: Stephanie Welch Consulting Producer: Kenny Ausubel for Bioneers Produced by: Maximilian DeArmon and Theo Badashi for Cosmogenesis Media Group
Creative Commons Credits: California Academy of Sciences Nucleus Medical Media Yesil Scientific Illustrations and Animations
The patriarchal system isolates men and women from each other’s experiences. Gender Equity and Reconciliation International creates safe environments for men and women to share authentic, and often otherwise taboo, conversations about gender and sexuality. Featuring Zanele Khumalo, South African facilitator, and co-founders Rev. Cynthia Brix, Ph.D. and William Keepin, Ph.D.
Directed by: Maximilian DeArmon Edited by: Johwell St-Cilien and Maximilian DeArmon Sound Mix: Stephanie Welch Consulting Producer: Kenny Ausubel for Bioneers Produced by: Maximilian DeArmon and Theo Badashi for Cosmogenesis Media Group
Restorative justice is a perspective that can transform society and our justice system. By promoting healing over harm, its practices can bring communities together in the mediation of conflict. Featuring Fania Davis, co-founder and director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY).
Directed by: Maximilian DeArmon Edited by: Johwell St-Cilien Sound Mix: Stephanie Welch Consulting Producer: Kenny Ausubel for Bioneers Produced by: Maximilian DeArmon and Theo Badashi for Cosmogenesis Media Group
A child’s first introduction to manhood is often through their fathers. It’s high time we push back on toxic masculinity and what it means to “be a man”, in order to create a better future for our children and ourselves. Featuring author and activist Kevin Powell and Tony Porter, the Co-Founder of A Call To Men.
With growing interest in co-ops, public banking, worker-owned companies and non-profit corporations, could we be setting a new standard for the American ideal, while building a more sustainable economy? Featuring Gar Alperovitz, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative and co-chair of its Next System Project, and Ted Howard, co-founder and President of The Democracy Collaborative.
Directed and Edited by: Theo Badashi Animations by: The Next System Project Consulting Producer: Kenny Ausubel for Bioneers Produced by: Theo Badashi and Maximilian DeArmon for Cosmogenesis Media Group
By Richard V. Piacentini, President and CEO of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens
At Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, our commitment to sustainability in everything we do has led us to construct some of the world’s greenest buildings. On a single project site, a visitor to Phipps can now see an unprecedented multi-facility complex of three buildings, each showcasing a different construction type — new, modular and existing — and each designed to meet the most rigorous standards in the built environment. We use the Living Building Challenge, LEED Platinum, SITES Platinum and WELL Building Platinum certifications as our standards for our new buildings.
Our commitment to these certifications began in November 2006 when I attended the Greenbuild Conference in Denver. We were one month away from opening our Tropical Forest Conservatory, a revolutionary 12,000-square-foot glasshouse that was designed to be passively cooled and have no greenhouse effect. By this time, we found ourselves thinking in systems, which is how nature works. We were trying to understand how to best integrate our buildings into the environment.
While I was at Greenbuild, Jason McLennan introduced the Living Building Challenge, the most rigorous green building standard in the world that is based on systems thinking. We were just about to start planning for our education, research and administration building, the Center for Sustainable Landscapes (CSL). Finally here was a certification program that went beyond checking boxes and understood that we should be thinking more broadly than just saving energy and water. It was more than a program — it was a philosophy that understood that the way we construct our buildings could help us integrate ourselves back into nature. So we decided to pursue it. At that time, no one had ever built a Living Building and no one knew if it was possible so we decided to pursue LEED Platinum as a backup.
Right before we started design, the Sustainable SITES Initiative was launched, which attempted to define best practices for integrating buildings into the environment. We decided to pursue that too. During construction, the WELL Building Standard was launched to define best practices for human health in the built environment. Even though the Living Building Challenge has many requirements related to human health, by this time we had really come to understand how human and environmental health are inextricably connected, so we decided to pursue WELL too to see if there was anything else we could learn to make buildings better for the people who will occupy them.
During the construction of each of these buildings, the question often came up: “How much did this project cost?” A simple answer just doesn’t do it justice, as it implies that the only factor that should be considered in a new project is the initial cost. A popular misconception that passes for conventional wisdom says that green buildings are too expensive and aren’t worth the investment. At Phipps, we know that this is a short-sighted mindset — in fact, green buildings make perfect economic sense, and their benefits only increase when an organization approaches a construction project with a holistic, long-term view.
All
three of our new green buildings are designed to meet the Living Building
Challenge and operate at net zero energy, meaning they generate all of the
energy that they use within a year. The CSL actually produces more energy than
it uses in a year (net positive), generating 133,301 kWh and using only 129,876
kWh in its last year of operation. This electricity that powers the CSL is
produced entirely on-site through solar and wind generation. One of the reasons
the building is able to achieve this remarkable feat is because it is extremely
efficient. The CSL has an energy use intensity (EUI) of 18, which is 73.8% less
than the EUI of a typical office building. This energy efficiency is achieved
through a combination of sustainable features and strategic design choices that
anyone can make. For example, choosing to situate the building so that it faces
south, maximizing solar gain and daylighting, greatly reduced our energy needs.
Our geothermal heating and cooling system is a very efficient way to condition
the building and it is completely powered by on-site generated power. Over
time, the fact that Phipps’ green buildings will never have a heating, cooling,
electric or sewer bill really adds up. The cost of operating the CSL over the
next 30 years compared with a conventional office building of the same size will
save Phipps $3 million in energy costs alone. With conventional buildings there
will always be utility costs.
On its lower campus, Phipps’ green buildings capture,
treat and reuse all water that falls onsite, managing 3.25 million gallons of
storm water per year — enough water to fill five Olympic swimming pools. Since
the CSL opened in 2012, not a single drop of storm or sewer water has left the
site. As a botanical garden, Phipps has a great need for water. Water that
falls on the back of our campus, where our three green buildings are located,
is used to irrigate the landscape or is allowed to infiltrate. A combination of
constructed wetlands and sand filters allows us to clean and reuse all of the
water from toilets and sinks. A typical office building using the CSL’s amount
of potable water will spend more than $140,700 over the next 30 years on water
usage and treatment. That cost simply does not exist in the CSL, Nature Lab and
ESC. By capturing, treating and reusing the water on our site, Phipps also
saves the City of Pittsburgh money by keeping this water out of the already
overtaxed combined sewer and storm water system. By treating and reusing all
water that falls onsite, green buildings save money for the building owners and
the cities in which they exist.
Though it is often not considered during the building
design process, the biggest cost to an organization is staff — not electric,
rent, water, etc. Many peer-reviewed professional studies show correlations in
building design that are designed to address employee health and staff
productivity, attendance, focus and mental engagement, mood, overall physical
health, recruitment, and retention. These studies appear in journals such as Indoor and Built Environment, Journal of the Illuminating Engineering
Society, International Journal of Epidemiology
and International Journal of Environmental
Research and Public Health. In fact, a study done by real estate services firm Stok
cites an annual profit of $3,395 per employee in a 150,000 square-foot high
performance green building. In addition to the Living Building Challenge, Phipps’
CSL and ESC are designed to meet WELL Platinum Certification, a certification
that focuses on human health and well-being in buildings. Our green buildings
are free of Living Building Red List toxic chemicals, which are very commonly
found in typical office buildings and are harmful to human health. They also
incorporate elements of biophilic design, which connects people to nature in
the built environment and has a positive impact on human health. From extensive
use of indoor plantings to plentiful windows offering views of nature and
natural light and ventilation, these buildings blur the line between the built
and natural environment, celebrating the bonds between humans and nature. By
investing in our staff’s well-being upfront, we will see a long-term payoff in
the future.
Before Phipps began constructing green buildings on its lower campus, the site was a brownfield — toxic, barren and completely paved over. Now, it has transformed into a thriving ecosystem that is healthy for the people, native plants and wildlife who occupy it. Restoring the land and making it more beautiful also added an attraction for the visitor experience. Green buildings operate with nature, not in spite of it. This creates a beneficial ecosystem for all living beings that use the space.
Finally, taking a broader look at green buildings, Phipps’ projects support a new sector of construction. By serving as a role model for the world, the CSL, ESC and Nature Lab encourage other organizations and individuals to pursue Living Buildings. Our spaces prove that green buildings can be beautiful and are better places to live, work, learn and play than traditional buildings. If more organizations follow Phipps’ lead, more manufacturers will respond with more efficient and less toxic building materials increasing competition for these items and thereby lowering their cost. In addition, as more people begin to construct high performance green buildings, industry leaders will be encouraged to innovate and invent new technologies for them, leading to job growth in their fields. Constructing green buildings doesn’t just make economic sense for individual organizations; it contributes to the economy as a whole.
When looking at a building project from a long-term view, it becomes increasingly apparent that high performance Living Buildings vastly out-perform their traditional counterparts. By generating their own energy and managing all of the water that falls onsite, they never see a utility bill, saving millions of dollars over time. The value of human and environmental well-being are not typically a part of building design conversations, but they should be.
Since 1994, Richard Piacentini has led the green transformation of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, including construction of the Center for Sustainable Landscapes, the only building in the world to meet Living Building Challenge™, LEED® Platinum, WELL™ Platinum, and SITES™ Platinum certifications. Richard is interested in the connection between people and plants particularly as it relates to human and environmental health. He has received numerous professional honors, including APGA, ILFI and USGBC leadership awards.
The
new documentary film “Poisoning Paradise” tells the story of local activists in
Hawaii who are battling political corruption, corporate bullying, and
systematic concealment by the agrochemical industry about their widespread
testing of genetically engineered seeds and crops.
Communities became surrounded by experimental test sites after policymakers in Hawaii and D.C. tried to diversify the Hawaiian economy, which was overly reliant on tourism. They encouraged the world’s largest chemical companies to utilize Kauai’s favorable climate and fertile soil to test their biotech seeds, which are designed to be reliant on toxic chemicals, such as RoundUp Ready herbicides. For years, Syngenta, Pioneer DuPont, BASF, and Dow AgroSciences have been allowed to apply hundreds of tons of Restricted Use (RU) pesticides on thousands of acres across the Garden Island’s West Side, the traditional homeland of an Indigenous and disenfranchised population.
Bioneers sat down with Director Keely Brosnan to discuss how “Poisoning Paradise” explores the community’s ongoing struggle to advance bold new legislation governing the fate of their island home.
BIONEERS: What inspired you to make this documentary?
KEELY BROSNAN: In essence, this film is really a love letter to Hawai‘i. I grew up in Hawai‘i as a small child, and live in Hawai‘i part-time. It’s a place I love and with people I love.
I started to hear rumblings in 2013 about GMOs and
experimental outdoor field trials of genetically engineered crops and
pesticides, but I didn’t really understand what was happening. So, I met with
some residents and local activists and attended meetings. And my neighbor and
producing partner Teresa Tico wanted to make a film about Bill 2491, and my
husband and I agreed to fund the project. Then it grew exponentially into Poisoning Paradise, which has a much
broader reach and message than the original concept.
BIONEERS: What
were some of the shocking things you learned in your research that you decided
to include in your film?
In the 1980s, as the colonial-based sugarcane industry
collapsed and the pineapple industry collapsed, policymakers in Washington and Hawai‘i
invited the biotech industry to take over the fallow fields. I don’t think that
they understood what the consequences would be, or the amount of chemicals that
these agro-chemical industries would be utilizing.
The business model of large agricultural companies is to maintain a system that’s reliant on toxic pesticides. They have an arsenal of tools in their toolbox, including restricted use pesticides: Atrazine, Chlorpyrifos, and “general use pesticides” that people are more familiar with, like Roundup. The chemical companies use pesticides on their GE crops at a much higher frequency than conventional farmers. Handwritten spray logs show that GE fields are sprayed with a higher frequency and many more times per day than conventional farms. This results in a chemical cocktail of untested combinations of pesticides that are sprayed multiple times a day, multiple days per week, all year long near our schools, homes, hospitals, and environmentally sensitive shorelines. So, it’s really caused a lot of uproar in our community.
BIONEERS: We hear these companies referred to as “biotechnology” companies, but as your guests point out in the film, these are chemical companies who have no interest in reducing the amount of pesticides that farmers spray on crops. On the contrary, their primary technology is “pesticide-tolerance,” which allows farmers to blanket crops with chemicals that kill weeds without killing the plant itself. It seems like these companies are contributing to a massive increase in pesticide use?
KEELY: They’re
chemical companies that are developing seeds for GE crops that are designed to
rely on the chemicals they sell. So as Vandana Shiva says in our film, why
would a chemical company be a means to reducing the sale of Roundup, the single
largest contributor of profits to Monsanto? They designed these crops to sell
more chemicals. This is why what’s happening on Kauai is important for
everyone, because this is where research and development and field trials for
genetically engineered crops happens. Once they develop their seeds, they ship them
around the country and around the world.
BIONEERS: These trials are allowed to go on without any environmental impact studies?
KEELY: To date,
yes. The federal government hardly regulates genetically engineered crops in
any meaningful way, and until recently, the state has had a hands-off approach
to these chemical companies. But I think the day of plausible deniability is
over. I don’t think lawmakers can say that they didn’t know that these
chemicals were dangerous.
Just in the past six months, we’ve had three different courts who ruled in favor of individuals who sued Monsanto/Bayer, the conglomerate, after developing Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, totaling nearly $2.5 billion in damages. In August 2018, a San Francisco jury awarded Dewayne Johnson $250 million in punitive damages and another $39 million in compensatory damages for his lost income and pain and suffering. A federal jury in March 2019 ordered Monsanto to pay more than $80 million in damages to another California man, Edwin Hardeman, after it was determined that his cancer was partly caused by his use of the weed killer Roundup.
Director Keely Brosnan
BIONEERS: Can residents find out about statistics
regarding birth defects or environmental damages caused by the spraying of chemicals
in Hawai‘i?
KEELY: I’m not sure that they’ve been keeping accurate records at the National Birth Defect Registry in the State of Hawai‘i. Often when you have a serious ailment, you have to leave the island and seek treatment elsewhere in order to get the kind of specialized care that Children’s Hospital in LA, or St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, or other hospitals that are geared towards treating children provide.
The truth is I’m not aware of anybody testing the air, water or soil quality. Nobody really knows, for example, what happens at the end of the day after they’ve applied these chemicals on fields. They mix the chemicals in their trucks for application, and then they clean out that drum from their truck. They’re not hauling away the poison that was inside. So where does it go when they rinse it out into the field? We live on an island with finite natural resources, and one of our most important natural resources is our drinkable water. We have to be very careful about contaminating aquifers.
We need to start gathering data and testing the oil samples near people’s homes. We need people to start canvassing neighborhoods and going door-to-door to talk to people about whether they’re sick, or whether their family members or neighbors are sick. Putting federal, state or even private funding into that kind of a program would be a good idea. Our federal regulatory agencies aren’t doing enough to protect people and the environment from these toxic pesticides. [Report on
BIONEERS: You address
neonicotinoid pesticides in the documentary. Can you talk about the dangers of
that particular technology?
KEELY: Unfortunately, Neonicotinoids and similar systemic insecticides are currently among the most utilized pesticides in the world. They are linked to the alarming collapse of bee colonies and, without a doubt, the decline of our pollinator population.
I believe the EPA is going to ban the use of Neonicotinoids
in the U.S., and ask that they be removed from the shelves for consumer use.
I’m following that story and will be updating information on our website for
people who are interested.
There are fantastic organizations like the Center for Food Safety, who is defending our food system from pesticides and pharmaceuticals, and toxic food additives and genetic mutations. Most recently, they spent years in court representing conservationists and beekeepers who sued the EPA for failure to protect pollinators from toxic neonicotinoids. There was a settlement reached last month where the EPA agreed to withdraw certification for 12 Neonicotinoid-based products, pulling them from the market because of the devastating effects that they have on our pollinators.
BIONEERS: You show in
the film that people of color and Indigenous Hawaiians are bearing the brunt of
the harms caused by the experimental tests. The local community there in those affected
areas are deeply involved in organizing around raising awareness and advocating
for legislation. Can you tell us about the bills that have been introduced and
the status?
KEELY: Bill 2491
failed, which was really sad. It asked for modest buffer zones around schools
homes, hospitals and other environmentally sensitive areas. It also would have
required disclosure of what was being sprayed, when and where it was being
sprayed, and an environmental impact study. As you saw in the film, that bill
failed after going through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The grassroots movement just for Bill 2491 probably
surprised local legislators and government officials, but it didn’t surprise me
because people who live in Hawai‘i really have a sense of stewardship of the
land. They really want to be thoughtful and careful and I don’t think that
government reflects the people’s wishes and desires as it should.
Then, last summer, the Governor of Hawai‘i signed into law Bill SB-3095, which does require 100ft buffer zones around schools. That was fantastic news, but it’s by no means a solution. I was sitting on an airplane at the time with my husband when I heard the Bill had passed, and although I felt some elation that we had some forward momentum and that it would set a precedent, I told my husband, “This plane that we’re sitting on right now is longer than a hundred feet,” so to require only a hundred foot buffer zone around a school is clearly inadequate.
Through SB3095, we were able to ask for disclosure of the chemicals that the agrochemical industry is using on the island. That report should be made available sometime in January 2020, and will be the first time that we have real disclosure. Then, the State of Hawai‘i initiated a total ban on Chlorpyrifos, which is extremely important, because they know that it causes damage to fetuses in utero, and also to babies and children as they develop and grow. The problem is the ban is little consolation if you live next door to these fields, because they’re allowing three more years for companies to phase it out, so they can still use it in Hawai‘i until 2022, I believe.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has given the EPA until July of this year to decide on the use of Chlorpyrifos. Hawai‘i was the first state to ban it, and then California followed suit. Other states like New York, Oregon, Connecticut and New Jersey have bills under consideration to remove Chlorpyrifos from the market. So, we’ll have to wait for the EPA findings.
BIONEERS: Your film includes a nice balance of voices. There are people such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Sylvia Earle, the marine biologist; Vandana Shiva, the activist and author; Andrew Kimbrell, attorney and director of the Center for Food Safety and other lawyers they’ve worked with on the ground. Can you talk about some of the local experts and activists who appear in the film?
KEELY: Yes, I wasn’t an expert on the subject. I am a
filmmaker, and I stepped up to document what was happening as a journalist. But
we also had local experts and scientists and we decided that it would be useful
for us to gain some expertise from them. Fern Anuenue (formerly Rosenstiel)
obtained her Bachelor’s in Science with triple majors in wildlife management
and environmental science and marine biology. Andrea Brower has a PhD in Sociology
and, specifically, from working in environmental sociology. So, they brought a
lot to the table. They are residents and they are on the ground assisting a
very grassroots movement.
BIONEERS: How concerned should tourists who are traveling to Hawai‘ibe about risks to their own health? Who would they contact if they’re planning to travel to the Islands?
KEELY: I certainly think it’s worth a call to the tourism office to tell them they’re concerned. Whether they give you any information or not is another question. The 1.3 million people that went to Kaua‘i last year probably weren’t aware that Hawai‘i hosts more outdoor GE crop field trials than any other state in the nation.
As you’ll see in our section on tourism, you can’t even
bring an apple to Hawai‘i. The State Department of Agriculture will take
that away from you. So, while on one hand, they’re doing a very good job of
protecting our natural resources, I personally think that the visitor industry
should be pushing our state officials to protect public health. They have a
responsibility to inform visitors who are going to be in the Hawaiian Islands
that they may be exposed to these RU pesticides and chemicals.
Let’s say you want to go camping at Polihale State Park. The
winds can blow from those fields right across your campsite to the ocean. Drift
is relevant and it’s real. If you were trying to be careful, if you were trying
to protect your children’s health, you might want to avoid a certain part of
the island where these field trials are taking place.
I think anyone who is visiting Hawaii should could call the Board of Tourism, the Department of Health, the Department of Agriculture, the Governor’s office and ask these really important questions. I believe that the County government is a political subdivision of the State, and it has a responsibility to protect the environment for everyone’s benefit.
Hawai‘i’s State Constitution states that for the benefit
of present and future Generations, the State and its political subdivisions
shall conserve and protect Hawai‘i’s natural beauty and
all its natural resources — and that includes land, water, air, minerals and
energy sources. It would be good for elected officials to know that people are
concerned.
BIONEERS: Who are you
hoping to reach with your film, and how they can become involved?
KEELY: We hope to
reach a broad audience. While we talk about Hawai‘i, we are trying to
help people around the country understand the situation here as well as the
broader impacts.
Poisoning Paradise
is a time capsule of a grassroots movement that is seeking disclosure and environmental
protections, which necessitate an Environmental Impact Statement. We want
scientific data to understand how these chemicals affect our food, health,
land, water, air, oceans and wildlife, and all other natural resources in the Hawaiian
Islands. We want to reach out to anyone who is also interested in protecting
the environment and who are involved in the food movement and sustainable
agriculture. The recent rulings against Monsanto make this discussion very
relevant and real.
I think education will always be part of the solution. The
bottom line is that we need to move away from pesticide-heavy agriculture, and
we need to put our resources into recreating regenerative, diversified
agriculture systems. They remove toxic pesticides and fertilizers from the
equation, and they help to protect our communities, farmworkers, and our
environment.
These regenerative systems also drastically reduce
agriculture’s reliance on fossil fuels, which include petroleum-based
pesticides and fertilizers. They help to build soil that sequesters carbon,
which slows down climate change. They help to build a strong foundation of soil
that captures and holds water, eliminating destructive sediment and runoff. They
also make farms more drought tolerant.
I think everyone should be pushing for counties to regulate
from within when it comes to pesticides. That includes your county parks, county
roads, and especially your county schools. Every state and every county should
be pushing to get the Department of Education to ban the use of herbicides
around schools to protect children. That’s a great first start.
Also, while you might not be able to grow all your own food,
grow something, or get to know your farmers at the local markets. Buy organic
where you can, educate yourself about the “dirty dozen,” what to avoid unless
it’s organic. Pick and choose, if you have to, which crops you can afford to
buy that are organic. We want to protect our food supply. We want to protect heirloom
seeds, and organic seeds. I think it’s the only way that we’re going to have a
viable food system.
Be part of the solution. We need everybody’s help and
everybody’s voice. I hope that audiences find Poisoning Paradise, not only informative but also beautiful to watch—it
really highlights what’s at stake for all of us.
A conversation with Gar Alperovitz, co-founder and co-chair of the Next System Project and the Democracy Collaborative.
BIONEERS: When you talk about the “Next System”, how far-reaching is the change you’re talking about?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: We’re talking about the entire political economic system, which means how business is organized, how cities are developed, how parliaments or governments are organized, how states are organized, how regions are organized. Everything, starting at the grassroots level in a neighborhood all the way up to: What’s wrong with the Constitution? What are the problems in parliaments? What are the problems in Washington? How do you replace the corporation? Every level. Changing the system means re-examining every single institution and seeing pathways forward, those that are theoretically meaningful but also practical things on the ground that point in a new direction.
I think as time goes on what we’re looking at is the introduction of new ideas. The ideas that became the New Deal were local experiments in the 1920s that were worked out and fine-tuned. Then when the time was right in the 1930s they went national with the New Deal, we saw Medicare, Social Security, and labor law allowing for unions. All that was experimented with locally, then became national, and I think we’re going to see a similar process.
BIONEERS: Do you feel there are certain big, game-changing actions that would address many of those things at once?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: People usually distinguish between reforms, which are small changes at the edge, and revolutions, where everything changes at once. The language I like is “evolutionary reconstruction”. This means redeveloping how cities are organized, piece by piece, looking at how regions might be changed and developing the elements, walking the path as you go. It produces systemic change, fundamental change in the institutions, but the pathway is a reconstructed pathway, not reform. Reform keeps the institutions in place and tries to fix up around the edges. Revolution is explosions, tries to throw things over. The pathway we think makes sense in an advanced system like our own is kind of evolutionary, while changing the fundamental institutions as you go.
Gar Alperovitz
BIONEERS: A key question is how to deal with industry, transnational corporations and large banks that hold so much power?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: I think we will begin to see larger scale publicly-owned or democratically owned structures, maybe even regional/community/worker, different structural forms that represent the community that are not just centralized kind of authorities.
A decade ago, the big banks collapsed, General Motors collapsed, Chrysler collapsed, and the U.S. government nationalized those companies. If the speculation had been allowed to go on, the country would have gone into massive depression. When General Motors and Chrysler went down, all the suppliers in the cities around them suffered too, which meant those communities were badly beaten up. That’s why the Obama administration had to jump in and do something. Then, after we put a lot of taxpayer money into them, they went back to the old owners after taxpayer expense.
I think we’ll see another economic crisis, because the regulatory structure is being ripped apart by the government at the interests of the big corporations and banks. At some point, some of those will become public or regional or state structures.
BIONEERS: What are public or community banks, and how do they fit into the picture?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Big banks in almost every other major country around the world are actually public banks. It’s very common for the reasons I’m talking about, because if you don’t do that, you run into trouble and it costs the whole country a lot of money.
The most important aspect is that this is where people put their savings, but also city tax money goes into the public bank. Cities have a lot of taxpayer money, so why put it in a big, big New York or Wall Street bank, which invests that capital in speculative things, rather than the local community? Keeping that money in public banks allows that capital to be invested in what a community needs. It’s part of this whole notion of democratic development of the community. It’s a very practical, common sense approach, and not in any sense radical.
We love to point to the Bank of North Dakota because they do it so well. The Bank of North Dakota is a statewide public bank that’s 100 years old, and it’s in one of the most conservative states in the country. They run it with the support of farmer co-ops and small businesses, local townspeople. It’s very popular and very successful.
The model is being replicated or considered in many parts of the country, including Los Angeles, Washington State, Philadelphia, and Phil Murphy won the governorship of New Jersey campaigning on developing a public bank. Cleveland hasn’t done it yet, but is in the process.
BIONEERS: You’ve mentioned that Ohio has quite a lot of action in this regard. Can you describe what is happening there?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Ohio is very interesting because we’ve had a lot of job displacement and companies leaving. We can trace this all the way back to the Youngstown fight, which was about 35 years ago, when a big steel company shut down and workers decided to take it over and own it themselves. There was a big, big fight about that. Since then, the idea has been in the air that companies might be owned by workers, or in that case, by the community or community-worker ownership.
Many worker-owned companies have developed over the last number of years. ESOPS – Employee Stock Ownership Plans and co-ops in Cleveland culminated with a development of about 40,000 people in a very poor, black neighborhood with about $20,000 per year annual family income, and 20% unemployment. Our folks helped to develop a community-wide nonprofit corporation that covers the whole community, and worker-owned companies are attached to that. They’re not stand-alone, they’re part of the community building structure.
BIONEERS: How do worker-owned companies benefit the community and build community wealth?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: A worker-owned company is a worker-owned co-op, one person, one vote. One example would be a credit union. There are 3 million people in credit unions, so this is very conventional in many parts of the country. The idea that the workers could have a stake in their company and own it, control it, is just an extension of this. There are lots of co-ops in this country, and a lot of experience with this around the world, so it’s not a very novel idea.
What’s interesting is bringing co-ops in as part of a community structure that is a nonprofit corporation. This benefits the whole community, because those companies can’t get up and go. They’re financed in part by the community through a community corporation. So it’s a mixed model, and that’s what’s unique about the Cleveland model and others in different parts of the country that are following suit.
The notion of trying to stabilize the economic health of communities is very commonsensical, and doing it in ways that change the ownership patterns. Community and worker-owned companies don’t get up and move, because they live there and the people are there.
BIONEERS: You stress the importance of “anchor institutions” in this next system. What are those?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Big anchor institutions are very important. They are institutions that don’t leave the area. In Cleveland, we have both public and private hospitals as part of the network. Cleveland Clinic is a private hospital. Case Western Reserve University also has a hospital and medical school. Hospitals connected with universities are all anchored in the community. They receive and use so much public money – Medicare, Medicaid, educational money – you can use that as leverage in the development process.
There’s a whole network called the Health Anchor Network, and those anchor institutions help build up the community by redirecting their purchasing power. They say, we buy a lot of food, we buy a lot of goods, we buy a lot of furniture, we buy a lot of equipment. If we direct some of that to the community – not just to get supply, not just because it helps the community, not just because it might be good to give the workers some ownership, and not because it’ll anchor more jobs – but it also improves the job situation in a community, and the health outcomes improve. So this is a converging trend.
Anchoring institutions in a way that allows people to have a long-term stake in the community is financially practical and it makes sense to people. The ideas seem novel, but they’re quite, quite straightforward.
BIONEERS: Where are some other places where innovative projects in this vein are sprouting up?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Austin, Texas and Madison, Wisconsin are doing really interesting things with co-ops and land trusts and credit unions. There are people in Oakland and the greater Bay Area doing really interesting development around transit exits. When you put in a subway or a transit system at the exits, property values go way up, because it’s a really good place to put housing. Developers want to capture that, but if you hold on to it and develop it in public ways, the public captures that money and can subsidize the transportation system. Washington, D.C, has been doing that for a long time.
Major cities like New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle are all experimenting with worker-owned land trusts, different kinds of end-to-end energy systems.
The truth is lots of people are taking part in what some people are calling The New Economy Movement. If you go to the Democracy Collaborative website and many others, you’ll find hundreds of these kinds of experiments. There’s enough practical experience around the country, you can just call somebody up and find out how to do it.
Several of our folks have gone to the city of Preston in England to share what is happening in Cleveland. It’s a city of about 120,000. One particular person there, Matthew Brown (who’s now the head of the city council, but at the time he was what we would call an alderman) got turned on with what we were doing at the Democracy Collaborative and with what was going on in Cleveland, and got interested in one of my books. He said, We could do that here in Preston. And he rolled up his sleeves and got it going. People liked the idea. Other cities in England are looking at doing that kind of model. The Labor Party has picked it up, and there are a number of people working in European communities that have begun thinking about it. You don’t have to have an election, you can develop it locally. It’s a very exciting development.
BIONEERS: What about rural areas where small communities have been abandoned by poor agricultural policy choices and big corporations? There was an intentional effort by industry and the US Government to get rid of farmers, mechanize agriculture and capture all that land to turn food into a commodity. Now these small towns are really suffering.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Yes, it’s terrible history. There are a very small number of farmers now, about 1.5% of the labor force. That means the people either stay in these dying towns or they drain to the cities. Development in rural areas is very, very difficult. Some of that can be reversed around small town redevelopment in rural areas, and I think some of it’s going to be. Historically, farmers co-ops and rural electric co-ops organized and played a big part in putting together the Bank of North Dakota.
Also, with adequate political buildup, it makes every bit of sense to create land trusts from the point of view of the nation, to keep people on the land and in small towns. Small towns can be very ecologically efficient if you build them up sufficiently. I’m looking for current experiments that work in the rural areas. There are some attempts in Wisconsin to create multi-stakeholder kind of cooperatives, often around using a public facility or public university.
You put your finger on one of the hardest problems in the rural, decaying areas. The paradox here is that subsidies for agriculture are a huge part of the federal budget, and yet farmers are a very small part of the population. Somehow the politics of that can be worked. It’s a really hard problem. It’s doable, but it takes a political push. We’ve got to organize the constituency.
BIONEERS: How do politics play into these new economic models and systemic changes?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Red/Green/Blue doesn’t work anymore. Ohio is a good example. Ohio voted for Mr. Trump, and it is one of the most interesting places for experimentation in the country. So what’s happening at the grassroots level may be different from what happens at the current level of politics.
What’s driving a lot of our current politics is unanswered pain, and it’s being exploited by the right. But the pain levels are growing, and that means you need solutions at some point. I think we’re seeing the prehistory of a real transformation happening. If you look at it historically, the kinds of things people are focusing on that look like small experiments are often the seedlings for giant redwood trees. That’s possible. It’s also possible that we will go in a really rightwing direction and things get very painful. Lots of transformations go through difficult phases.
At the Next System Project, we’ve asked the big questions: How would you actually design a system? We’re talking about bits and pieces here. There’s a whole group of people who we’ve asked, “What makes sense? How do you get democracy? How do you get real liberty? How do you get equality? How do you get ecological sustainability? What is a systemic vision? We’ve had something like 45 different contending papers written. We’ve had conferences at MIT and Harvard, really trying to get deep into this so-called “Architecture of the Next System.”
Ideas matter, and have magical power because people see, “Oh, we could do it a different way. If we really wanted to, we could roll up our sleeves and try it here.” That’s what makes this period a very powerful time of American history.
From ancient myths to modern blockbuster movies, humanity has recounted countless stories in which a seemingly inert vegetal world suddenly comes to life to express itself like a person. What if these stories were more than the fruit of vivid imaginations and were based on an underlying truth? Monica Gagliano, Research Associate Professor in Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Western Australia, has courageously illuminated the revolutionary new field of Plant Bioacoustics. She shares startling cutting-edge research and shows how contemporary science has finally begun lifting the veil of our assumptions by beginning to attune its ears to vegetal “voices.” She believes this new paradigm will expand our perspectives to provide us with imaginative new solutions to our current eco-cultural predicaments.
Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers CEO & Co-Founder.
Ellen Brown is an attorney and leading public banking advocate, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and Senior Fellow of the Democracy Collaborative. She is the author of hundreds of articles and 13 books, including the best-selling Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution and Banking on the People. She also co-hosts the “It’s Our Money” radio program on PRN.FM. Bioneers sat down with Brown to discuss the speculative economy, public banking, and whether we could be headed toward another major financial crisis.
BIONEERS: Let’s start with a big picture. We’re more than 10 years past our 2008 financial crisis triggered by Wall Street banks. Can you talk about some of the worst effects that we’re still seeing now?
ELLEN: The rich are getting richer, as most people are aware, and the rich, of course, own the media, so they report that the economy is doing fine. But for the lower 80% of the population who are net debtors, it’s getting worse. Consumer debt is ballooning. We have a massive homeless problem. We have a shortage of houses and jobs.
There’s a deficit of money in the system. And it’s not just the U.S. Virtually all countries are heavily in debt. So if everybody’s in debt – countries, businesses, individuals – who are they in debt to? They’re in debt to the banks. Banks create our money supply, not governments, as most people think. They create it as debt — as loans. They just write the figure into your account when they make a loan, and then that money has to be paid back, plus interest. So there’s a catch: more money has to be paid back than was created in the original loan, so there’s never enough money to pay off the debts.
BIONEERS: When you said that the rich are getting richer, you’re saying that as they get richer, they’re capturing that capital and it’s not going back into the economy?
ELLEN: Exactly. It’s extraction – extracting money out and putting it into the speculative, wealthy money-making-money economy. It’s a closed loop, driving asset prices up without producing anything new.
BIONEERS: Many economists are agreeing that there are bubbles again, and that we’re in for another financial crisis. Do you agree? What do you see as the indicators of something like that?
ELLEN:I definitely agree. One indicator is that the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates, at least until recently, and virtually every time they raise interest rates, it creates a recession. Their argument is that we’re at technical full employment, so if everybody’s working, they’ll demand more money, wages will go up, and that will create inflation.
We’re not even close to true full employment. But that’s their argument, that we’re dangerously close to full productivity, and therefore if they raise interest rates, that’ll slow the creation of money in the economy in the form of credit. But it puts a huge burden on businesses that now have to pay more, along with students, consumers and governments.
It’s estimated that at current rates, the U.S. government will be paying close to a trillion dollars just in interest every year, which is more than we pay for the military. That would eat up our tax base. So it’s unsustainable and it’s unnecessary. There are other ways we could work this system that would be sustainable.
BIONEERS: What are the dangers of wealth funneling into what you call the “speculative economy”?
ELLEN: The speculative economy is a big casino. When you buy a stock, the money you spend does not go back to the company. The only money that the company gets is with the initial public offering. After that, it’s literally a casino. The prices keep going up and up, and there’s little relationship between the stock price and the real value of the stock. But it doesn’t matter. You buy it because you think somebody else, some “greater fool,” as they say, will buy it at a higher price, and you’ll make money off of it.
But if you are in that position, you’re not using that money to buy your groceries. That’s play money. It’s extra money that you’ve got, and you just keep speculating until you lose. You lose the bet, and then you get wiped out, and some wealthy person gets more. It’s a game of Monopoly. The game was designed to show that the rich get richer. The hotel owners always win in the end. They suck out the profits, and they win.
BIONEERS: Did publicly owned institutions fare better during the financial crisis?
ELLEN: Eighty percent of the Chinese banking sector is publicly owned. And they just sailed through the crisis. They continued with this remarkable 10% growth for a while.
Public banks lend counter cyclically. They put more credit out there when the private banks are pulling in their credit. That keeps the economies going. North Dakota has its own public bank, and it survived the credit crisis better than any other state. Even today, the Bank of North Dakota is doing brilliantly well. There was an article in 2014 in the Wall Street Journal that said that the Bank of North Dakota was more profitable than JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author of that article said that it was due to oil. But that very year, oil collapsed, and the Bank of North Dakota continued to report record profits. They have a very efficient business model. That’s what I say their profits are due to.
BIONEERS: What have been some other positive effects of North Dakota’s public banking sector?
ELLEN: By law, all of the state’s revenues are deposited into the Bank of North Dakota. The bank’s charter says it will not compete with local banks. Instead, it partners with them. Local banks have all the branches and tellers, and they’re doing the basic banking. If they need help with loans that are too big, that they would otherwise have to let a Wall Street bank take on, they tap the Bank of North Dakota. It allows their state to use its own credit without being exploited by out-of-state banks.
The bank was set up in 1919 because the farmers realized they were being exploited by what was basically a cartel. The railroad, the banks, and the granary were all one system. It was extractive, extortionate, and the farmers were going bankrupt. When they realized they were losing their farms and that was the reason, they got together as the “Non-Partisan League”, and they won an election and set up their bank.
That’s basically what it is for them. It’s about keeping money in the state and leveraging it for their own purposes. When you realize that banks actually create money, it makes sense that that power should belong to the people. They’re creating money out of their own capital and their own deposits. It’s just a more efficient way to use their own money.
Los Angeles paid $170 million in 2017 just in bank fees. Plus $1.1 billion in interest. So it’s just an inefficient system. We’re sending our money off to Wall Street. They have no obligation to reinvest it in our communities, and they don’t. Their mandate is to make as much money as they can for their shareholders. So they invest in the big money makers, even though we the people don’t approve. It might be oil, it might be prisons, it might be fracking. But if it makes money, they’re not worried about the environment. They don’t have those standards.
The Bank of North Dakota is making low-cost loans into the community for the particular sectors that they support, and any excess profits go to the state. Then the state can spend that money on the things that people need.
BIONEERS: If we have another financial crisis, how do you see the bailout process transpiring?
ELLEN: Theoretically, the Dodd Frank Act was all about no more bailouts. But the Dodd Frank Act specifies avoiding bailouts by doing bail-ins. Bail-ins means taking the depositors’ money instead of the taxpayers’ money. So they’re taking our money either way.
If you’re a too-big-to-fail bank and you are insolvent, you’re required, under Dodd Frank, to take the money of your creditors and turn it into capital of the bank. So you used to think you had money in the bank, now what you’ve got is a share of a bankrupt bank. Depositors are theoretically protected by FDIC insurance. But the pot of money in the FDIC fund is very small, and what they’re insuring is $6 trillion in deposits.
There was another alternative that was raised when Obama was President, which was to nationalize the banks. What they call nationalization is that we take over the debts and clean up the books, and then we hand them back to private investors. The reason they didn’t do it was that it would be too expensive to pay off the debts of these bankrupt banks.
Hopefully somebody will raise this idea again. If you nationalize the banks, you don’t need to pay off those debts, since banks actually create money on the money they lend. You could have the Federal Reserve buy the bad debts in the same way it bought the dodgy mortgages or the mortgage-backed securities off the banks and rebuilt their asset base by replacing these mortgage-backed securities with good assets that they could call capital. They could do the same thing here: put the bad debts of the banks on the Federal Reserve and just leave them there. You don’t need to balance the books. The Federal Reserve can carry that debt indefinitely.
BIONEERS: How popular is the idea of public banking? Have there been polls done?
ELLEN: No, all we know is that there’s obvious growing support. We have over 50 activist groups in different cities and states around the country working on their legislators. We have 25 pieces of active legislation. Some of them are getting close. Progress is slow. But we’re essentially changing the whole system, so you expect it to be a little bit slow. I think the biggest resistance – not counting the big banks themselves and people with a vested interest in protecting their jobs, like bureaucrats and politicians – is from people who don’t understand what we’re talking about.
BIONEERS: What drew you to this subject matter? What would success look like to you?
ELLEN: I actually wrote 10 books on health, and the politics of health. At some point I realized that if you wanted to fix the health system, you had to fix the banking system. That’s how I jumped over into writing about banking.
Right now, we have all these little “siloed” movements that are really good, but they just don’t have enough power by themselves. What they all need is money. Many things need funding, and we think we’re short of funding. We think the government can’t put more money out there, but it can. Once you realize how the system works, you realize that there is too little money in the economy. We could pump a lot more in there. Rather than creating price inflation, we could generate jobs and productivity. We could build infrastructure. Infrastructure is a type of thing that you can extend credit for that will be paid back. They’re called self-funding loans.
That’s how money should work. You should spend the money first, on good things, productive things, not speculative things that’ll suck money out of the economy. Spend it into the economy, and it will pay back.
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Since 1994, Richard Piacentini has led the green transformation of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, including construction of the Center for Sustainable Landscapes, the only building in the world to meet Living Building Challenge™, LEED® Platinum, WELL™ Platinum, and SITES™ Platinum certifications. Richard is interested in the connection between people and plants particularly as it relates to human and environmental health. He has received numerous professional honors, including APGA, ILFI and USGBC leadership awards.
