Gloria Steinem and Carl Anthony both spoke at Bioneers; Peter Buckley was an invaluable friend and very longtime behind-the-scenes supporter and ally; and while Wendell Berry never spoke at the conference, his worldview has had an enormous influence on us and on so many of the people whose work we have highlighted over the decades.

Gloria Steinem (1934—2026) was one of the greatest activists for the full equality of women. We won’t recapitulate the details of her life, which are being recounted far and wide across the media landscape at the moment, but there are a few aspects of her persona that bear emphasizing because her legacy doesn’t just lie in her considerable achievements but in the leadership-style she modeled for all of us.  

Truly remarkably, as a major public figure she listened to criticism and took it to heart when it rang true. So she was extraordinarily adept at making allies out of some pointed critics, and while resolute and unwavering on core ethical positions, she never made enemies unnecessarily. She was also very good at working cooperatively and nurturing others’ leadership abilities, not at all possessed by the need to dominate those she worked with. Exceptionally poised, centered, unflappable (and funny!), she didn’t get thrown off balance even during very challenging moments. She was lucid and realistic about political situations, but even when the movement faced painful defeats, she kept her eyes on the long game: the idea of abandoning the struggle was unimaginable to her. The fight for women’s rights has been waged for centuries, and though we have far to go, during her lifetime enormous gains were made, thanks in no small part to her immense contributions.

• Watch a talk Gloria gave at the Bioneers Conference in 2011
• NPR: Gloria Steinem, trailblazing journalist and activist, dies at 92

Note: Sadly, another world-renowned, extremely influential and important feminist leader and thinker, a longtime close associate of Gloria Steinem’s, Robin Morgan, author of the classic, Sisterhood is Powerful among countless other accomplishments also just passed away.

Carl Anthony (1939—2026), a towering figure in the Environmental Justice Movement, may have done more than anyone to drive home the inextricable link between the exploitation of the poor and people of color and the degradation of our ecosystems. 

The only African-American student when he entered Architecture School at Columbia, he became a professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and later co-founded the firm, Anthony, Fleming & Assoc., in Oakland. Appointed to the Board of Earth Island Institute by its founder, David Brower, Carl co-founded (with Karl Linn) the Urban Habitat Program, a groundbreaking initiative to cultivate multicultural leadership in environmental justice movements, and, with Luke Cole, he produced Race, Poverty and the Environment, a highly influential quarterly magazine.

Later a Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, he went on in the early 2000s to shape national conversations on the environment and equity as Director of the Ford Foundation’s Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative in New York. When he returned to California, he co-founded Breakthrough Communities, Oakland, a project that built on the many strategies and environmentally equitable programs he had funded during his time at the Ford Foundation.

Carl served on numerous boards and commissions, including the Berkeley Planning Commission, the Presidio Council, the San Francisco Planning and Research Commission, the Gamaliel Foundation, the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. 

Carl Anthony was a visionary leader, a great scholar, activist, educator, and mentor to many of us, and we strongly recommend his 2017 book, The Earth, The City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race, in which he shares a lot about his personal trajectory as well as his wisdom.

• Watch one of the presentations Carl gave at Bioneers

And for more about him:

• Urban Habitat: Rest in Power, Carl Anthony
• Forever Missed: Stories, Tributes, and More
• Oaklandside: Remembering Carl Anthony, architect who brought racial equity analysis to environmental movement
• Urban Habitat: Earth Day and Carl Anthony’s Legacy

Peter Buckley (1947—2026) was a genuine visionary who had an enormous impact on many organizations and people but whose relentless energy went into creating vital, lasting projects and institutions that would contribute to the common good with no interest in attracting attention to himself. An attorney and then a highly successful entrepreneur, he became an extremely effective philanthropist in several domains, from education to activism to land conservation to green building, and he founded or co-founded some truly groundbreaking initiatives and institutions. 

Among his many achievements, Peter envisioned and tirelessly led the building of the one-of-a-kind David Brower Center and served as its President from its opening until his passing. The building itself pushed all the limits of cutting-edge green design, way beyond the highest levels of LEED certification, but its even greater accomplishment was how it became a truly uniquely dynamic hub for dozens of cutting-edge, extremely influential environmental and social justice organizations working under the same roof, as well as a nexus of progressive cultural life in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationally.  

In 1995, he co-founded (with Zenobia Barlow and Fritjof Capra) the Center for Ecoliteracy which has had a huge impact on food and nutrition in schools in California and nationally. He also co-founded Greenwood School, a K-8 school with an environmental emphasis, in Mill Valley, California. 

Peter was also an important leader in land conservation in the U.S. and internationally and in regenerative farming initiatives, serving on the board of Doug and Kristine Tompkins’ Conservation Land Trust that created mind-bogglingly immense national parks in Chile (Including Corcovado National Park), backing the work of The Land Institute, and co-founding with his wife Mimi a remarkably biodiverse agricultural enterprise, Front Porch Farm.

Peter was a dear friend to many of us in the Bioneers community, and we are deeply indebted to him for having generated so many long-lasting resources that will help sustain us and many generations to come in our quests to achieve a far greener and fairer world.

• Learn more about Peter

Wendell Berry (1934—2026)

It is hard to find someone who was more beloved by broad swaths of eco conscious and progressive folks across the U.S., most of them modern, cyber-literate urban dwellers, and therein lies a paradox because Wendell Berry was probably the most exalted voice for genuine “old-fashioned” rural values of the last couple of centuries. 

A celebrated, award-winning poet, essayist, novelist, activist and teacher who wrote some 50 books and had taught English at NYU and then at the University of Kentucky, Berry was certainly a sophisticated intellectual, but in his own eyes he was above all someone who farmed a Kentucky hillside for 50+ years in the county where his family had lived for eight generations (according to some accounts, his great, great-grandfather bought 500 acres of land there after serving in the army in the War of 1812).

He used mules instead of tractors for plowing, railed against the destructiveness of industrial agriculture and was a tireless conservationist and advocate for local, rural communities and for commitment to one’s land. In the 1970s and the early 1980s he edited and wrote for Rodale Press, specifically for its publications Organic Gardening and Farming and The New Farm.

He was also a deeply principled activist, who over the years protested the Vietnam War, Nuclear Power, Climate Change, and, closer to home, mountaintop removal by coal corporations, and was even, reluctantly, arrested once or twice. 

What made Wendell Berry such an exalted and loved figure, besides, of course, the brilliant authenticity of his writing, was his absolute integrity and honesty, his unshakeable ethical compass, something that resonates in an America shaped by narratives such as Gary Cooper’s character in High Noon and that is at times associated with “small-town” values espoused by conservatives, but that those on the right very rarely live up to. This genuine 8^th-generation Kentuckian turned out to be a far better exemplar of the highest octave of traditional, land-based values than any conservative while being on the right side of so many of the battles for the soul of our civilization. There has never been anyone quite like Wendell Berry. He will be sorely missed, but his wisdom and elegant poems and prose will resonate for many generations.

For more information:

• The Berry Center was established in 2011 to put “Wendell Berry’s writings to work by advocating for farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies.”
• Kentucky Lantern: Kentucky writer, farmer and advocate Wendell Berry dies at 92
• NPR: Beloved writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry has died at age 92
• Bill McKibben | The Crucial Years: Two Men
• Wendell Berry | E. F. Schumacher Lecture: People, Land, and Community

For a list of Berry’s books:

• Books on Board: Wendell Berry Books

The post In Memoriam: Remembering and honoring a few recently deceased friends and allies appeared first on Bioneers.

The project grew out of conversations with a health equity funder that saw trust as central to the challenges facing healthcare. Once funded in the fall of 2023, the project brought together:

• a team of biologists at Biomimicry 3.8, led by the organization’s co-founder Dayna Baumeister, to study trust patterns across taxa;
• BSI’s team, led by founder and Director Toby Herzlich, to translate those findings for leaders working on social change;
• documentary filmmaker Patsy Northcutt, who followed the project throughout and produced its video library;
• and a cohort of 11 social justice and community leaders across five organizations, who tested the emerging framework and helped ground the biological insights in real-world applications.

The result is the Nature of Trust Framework — eight guiding principles, drawn from biology, organized around three phases of trust: how it’s established, how it grows, and how it’s maintained.

We sat down with BSI Managing Director Gina LaMotte, who served as the Nature of Trust project manager, to discuss how the research came together, what nature reveals about trust that we often miss, and why this work feels more urgent than ever.

Bioneers: Can you tell us about how the research for this project was conducted?

Gina LaMotte, BSI Managing Director: A team of biologists, led by Dayna Baumeister of Biomimicry 3.8, conducted what they call a Bio360 — a deep-dive into the question, “What can nature teach us about trust?” The team reviewed more than 200 species and systems, looking at the more-than-human world. They researched trust between organisms of the same species, as well as relationships across ecosystems, with the intent of finding the deep, recurring patterns across all taxa. It was an incredibly systemic way of looking at trust.

Once those biological patterns had been identified and distilled, the team compared the findings with existing human research on trust. This showed where the patterns aligned with — and differed from — what humans have learned about trust over the last few decades. There’s a section near the end of the Bio360 report that lays out that analysis.

After the Bio360 was complete, we began testing and exploring the material with our cohort. They brought in really important questions and perspectives from their lived experience, such as, “What does this mean in our social context? What is the right language to convey these ideas to our communities? How do we account for the ways that trust is shaped by our history of harm, injustice, and institutional distrust?” There was a lot of valuable dialogue and critique during that co-creation process, which helped us strengthen and make the framework more accessible.

There was a moment in the research when some of the findings seemed fairly obvious and intuitive — like “Of course we need willingness and honesty!” But we realized the real “aha” moments weren’t happening at that level of the eight guiding principles. They are actually in the specific insights that bring life to those principles — the things you’re not always conscious of, but that turn out to be true and highly consequential once you notice them!

Bioneers: Can you walk us through the framework itself?

Gina: The framework is structured like an infinity loop — starting with how trust is established, how it grows, and how it’s maintained. Within that, there are the eight guiding principles: willingness, discovery, familiarity, honesty, cooperation, reliability, feedback loops, and boundaries. As I mentioned, the really valuable part for us is that within each of those eight principles, there are three to four specific insights — and that’s where things get really interesting.

Most people’s instinct, when it comes to trust, is to want to know how to repair it once it’s broken. But one thing we found in the natural world is that when trust breaks down, organisms don’t necessarily repair it directly — they either go their separate ways, or they have to re-establish the conditions that allow trust to develop again. There’s no shortcut back to the level of trust that existed before. You have to return to that foundational question: What makes you willing to build trust with me in the first place? What’s in it for you, and what’s in it for me? Trust takes energy to build and maintain, and it has to be worth the investment.

Bioneers: Can you tell us about some of the findings and examples?

Gina: One of the best entry points is the cleaner wrasse fish. It’s become the “poster fish” of the project, the common thread we use to illustrate all eight guiding principles. Cleaner wrasse are these tiny fish that establish “cleaning stations” in coral reefs. Larger fish — sometimes the very predators that would normally eat them — will stop at a cleaning station as clients. The cleaner wrasse eat dead skin and parasites off of them, getting a meal in return. You’ll see these iconic videos of a tiny fish inside the gaping mouth of some scary-looking predator, cleaning away like a dentist. It’s a mutualistic relationship. That big fish could just close its mouth and eat the little one at any time.

There’s a lot to unpack in that dynamic — what draws the larger fish to the station in the first place, and what makes the interaction work over time? They have repeated interactions and real feedback loops — and the information from each interaction influences what happens in the next one.

Bioneers: Is that trust happening on a community level or an interpersonal one — is the larger fish learning it can trust cleaner fish in general, or just one specific fish?

Gina: In the immediate moment, it’s organism-to-organism. But since many cleaner fish service one larger fish over time, that larger fish is also learning which stations it can reliably return to. If the interaction becomes less reliable, it’ll go somewhere else next time. So there are really both interpersonal and community-level dynamics at play.

Bioneers: Are there examples of distrust that don’t seem to come from any actual bad experience — more like innate distrust?

Gina: Not exactly. In human terms, distrust can be shaped by trauma and historic injustice, and there isn’t a direct analogy for that in the natural world. That’s one of the important limitations of looking to biology for insight: Nature doesn’t capture the full complexity of the human experience of trust.

There is something we learned about familiarity, though. Across the more-than-human world, familiarity and similarity can be important cues for trust. We tend to trust organisms that are more similar to us than ones that are different, in part because it’s metabolically more efficient to do so. We will see some marker of similarity — like our physical features or style, a cultural affinity, a shared hobby — and we make a leap: “If we have this in common, I can trust you more.”

One of the counter-lessons here is that we need to be conscious of this tendency in ourselves and others. When familiarity becomes a proxy for trustworthiness, we can unconsciously extend more trust, credibility, and belonging to people who look, act, or think like us — and less to people who don’t. It takes real effort to find common ground with people who are different from us when our brains are already, unconsciously, a few steps ahead in deciding who to trust. The tendency is natural, but it is also addressable.

Bioneers: Can you give us an example of trust-building within a single species?

Gina: One honeybee example I love is the waggle dance, as an example of cooperation. When forager bees find a good source of pollen or nectar, they return to the hive and perform this elaborate dance to communicate the quality and location of the resource. Other bees will then follow that information, check out the location themselves, and then bring their own information back to the hive. The better the source, the more bees dance about it, and the colony can reach a quorum around where to find the tastiest nectar or pollen!

What’s interesting — from a trust perspective — is that this isn’t just a one-way communication. It’s an ongoing feedback loop engaging the entire colony. They’re constantly taking in new information, testing it, and adjusting their behavior accordingly. It’s a beautiful example of how cooperation and feedback loops work together in a social system.

Bioneers: Boundary-setting is one of the eight guiding principles of trust identified, but it seems like an unusual thing to associate with trust-building — can you speak to that?

Gina: It’s an interesting one, because a lot of people think of boundary-setting as separate from — even at odds with — trust-building. Trust feels associated with openness, generosity, and cooperation, so setting a boundary can feel harsh. But when we look at the natural world, we see that healthy relationships aren’t limitless. They have thresholds. Conflict is inevitable, so what matters is that those thresholds are communicated and that there are consequences when they’re crossed. When have you gone too far, and what happens when you do?

In the natural world, you see this constantly. Animals signaling around their territory, or your dog protecting its food or toys. If animals play too roughly, there’s a correction. These are all signals that reduce uncertainty in the relationship and help make cooperation more sustainable. Our relationships depend on knowing what the limits are — and what happens when those limits are crossed. A lot of us struggle with boundary-setting, especially around trust, because we want to signal harmony, but if we don’t establish boundaries, trust actually erodes.

Bioneers: Why does trust matter so much right now?

Gina: I asked myself the same question when this proposal was first suggested. Why trust? Is it really that important? But the more we dug into it, the more evident it became: Trust is an invisible force in our lives that underpins every relationship we have — yet that we understand surprisingly little about. We’re pretty good at breaking it, but we don’t understand the mechanics of rebuilding it and nourishing it over time.

It’s omnipresent in our lives — with family, partners, colleagues, and institutions such as government, education, technology, and law enforcement — and it has consequences at every level. Trust is foundational to social change and collective action. It underpins all our social interactions, whether we’re conscious of it or not, and determines whether we can accomplish anything that requires collaboration, cooperation, peace, or stability.

We’ve entered a new era in our cultural evolution and our planetary health — one with a lot of uncertainty and disruption, and that’s only going to keep amplifying. The massive challenges we’re facing will require collective action and decentralized leadership. To respond effectively, we’ll need to be able to build trust with one another.

When we turn our attention to the more-than-human world for insights and time-tested strategies, it’s like having access to an entire library of solutions. We are surrounded by 3.8 billion years of research and development. As we grapple with how to redesign our social systems, or even the way we lead our own organizations, we can turn to the more-than-human world for new approaches — models that are adaptive and resilient, rather than mechanistic, industrial, and extractive. That’s exactly the kind of modeling we need as we enter the ecological age.

Bioneers: Given how many potential applications this research has, how are you approaching the dissemination of this information?

Gina: For us, it doesn’t end with theory and inspiration. We’re committed to making it incredibly pragmatic. Our job is to build the bridge between nature’s intelligence and practical human applications so people can actually start to integrate this into their lives. Like any new habit, you strengthen these muscles starting with small, concrete practices. So we’re approaching dissemination as more than simply sharing the framework — we’re creating different entry points for people to explore, reflect on, and apply these ideas in very grounded ways.

We built the Nature of Trust Toolkit, with videos and printable insight cards, as well as more than 40 activities people can download, including case studies, discussion questions, and journal prompts. We also have team activities and games to ground all of this within organizations. The idea is to give people tools they can pick up and use, rather than simply giving them something interesting to read about.

Bioneers: On a personal level, is there a specific application of this work that you’re most excited about?

Gina: We’re living in an era with a lot of signals of distrust at the societal level — distrust in government and media, obviously, but also in the K-12 education system and in climate science, which I’ve been especially close to, having worked in sustainability and environmental education for a long time.

But as we’ve been digging into this in preparation for our September Trust CoLab, I’m finding that the application I care most about is at the organizational level — tuning into my own habits and noticing what I’m doing — or not doing — that contributes to trust-building. BSI is steeped in partnerships. Everything we do involves collaboration with others, so it is genuinely satisfying to see how these lessons play out in such a practical and embodied way. And I’m realizing that this isn’t something you master — it’s a lifelong practice of paying attention.

Watch a video about the Nature of Trust Project:

Go deeper with BSI’s work: Their Intro to BSI session this fall is a good entry point for anyone curious about applying biomimicry to social change.

The post The Nature of Trust: What Biomimicry Can Teach Us About Building Trust appeared first on Bioneers.

J.P. Harpignies: Jason, you’ve had a long career as a journalist covering a very broad swath of topics related to the environment, from climate and energy to biodiversity to public health, and you’ve had to vet many more such stories by others since you served as one of the nation’s leading “eco editors,” first for some 8 years at the excellent Earth Island Journal and then, for nearly a decade, as editor-in-chief of the Sierra Club’s flagship magazine with, I believe, nearly a million readers. You’ve also traveled extensively to investigate stories, from the Arctic to tracking jaguars in the Sonoran Desert to witnessing the massive devastation of Alberta’s tar sands to covering the aftermath of hurricanes, to mention only a few. How did you get your start and what drew you to eco journalism? Was it a calling from a young age?

Jason Mark: Thanks for this opportunity to talk to the Bioneers community. I appreciate it! I’ve certainly taken an unorthodox path as a journalist. I started my journalism career in the late 1990s at the (dearly departed) San Francisco Bay Guardian, a muckraking weekly dedicated to holding the powerful to account. After a short stint at a community newspaper, I then made a major swerve and spent six years as human rights campaigner at Global Exchange, working on issues like sweatshop abuses and helping to organize protests against the World Trade Organization and the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Around that time, climate change was starting to get more attention, and I came to sort of an intellectual commitment to environmentalism. I had been a backpacker and wilderness enthusiast since college, but at first those were more aesthetic and recreational pursuits. Over time, I came to believe that environmental justice is going to be the social justice issue of the 21st century.

My passion for environmental sustainability was cemented when I made another swerve—this time, toward organic farming. While living and working on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California, I started to develop more of an emotional and visceral commitment to the more-than-human world. Eventually, I was able to reignite a journalism career by carving out a beat for myself covering food and agriculture. To be able to combine my passion for protecting the living world with my passion for language and writing has been a real honor and a privilege—one I don’t take for granted.

J.P.: Though you have delved into so many aspects of the environment, and you are an extremely rigorous and precise investigative reporter, one gets the sense that a passionate love of the natural world and especially of wilderness is foundational in your work and in your psyche. Is that an accurate assessment? And if it is, does that passion make you view your role as activism as much as journalism?

Jason: Yeah, that’s very much true. I’m a flesh and blood being with a flesh and blood connection to the rest of the living world and I feel a genuine sense of kinship with other beings—whether that’s coyotes and river otters or Stellar’s jays and Western red cedar. I believe we all have an innate biophilia. And I also believe that such biophilia has to be cultivated and encouraged—if that weren’t the case, then I suppose we’d have fewer people locked in their digital boxes. I try to bring that love of nature to the page.

There’s a classic saying that you should write what you love. So, if you love golf, become a golf writer; if you’re a political junkie, write about politics. Me? I’m in a romantic affair with Mother Nature, so I write about the environment.

Now, I suppose it’s true that such passion could cloud my judgement as a journalist. And when I was in my twenties, I did mostly wear an activist’s hat. But for the better part of 20 years now, I’ve been first and foremost a journalist. Do I have a point of view? Certainly. I also have opinions—one of which is that pure objectivity is a crock. But when it comes to my writing, my north stars are accuracy, thoroughness, honesty, and intellectual fairness. Above all, get the facts right. Everything starts with that.

J.P.: Your earlier book that came out in 2015, Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man, was really a quest to find and appreciate some of the last pockets of untamed land and creatures in this evermore anthropocentric biosphere, and your brand new book The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet strikes some similar themes, but it also has a very different flavor, in that there’s less pure reportage and more philosophical discourse, especially focused both on the crucial role of memory in human culture and on mobilizing memory as an activist strategy in order to protect and regenerate the natural world. It struck me as a sort of “eco-Proustian” text. Where did this idea about the centrality of memory in the struggle to preserve the web of life come from?

Jason: I think that’s true—while Satellites in the High Country was more boots-on-the-ground, my new book, The Earth Said Remember Me, is more contemplative and meditative, even as it’s anchored in profiles of citizen scientists and grassroots environmental activists.

How did I get the idea for The Earth Said Remember Me? There are two answers. One is cerebral. The other is a bit more West Coast woo-woo. And they are both integral to how this book came to be.

First, the cerebral. The Earth Said Remember Me is all about the idea of “shifting baseline syndrome.” The term describes the ways in which we keep getting used to ever-degrading environmental conditions—how easily we accommodate and adapt to loss. It’s a powerful idea, one of those concepts that helps us to see the world. Some years ago, I noticed that various environmental authors, no matter their subject, kept coming back to it. In book after book, shifting baseline syndrome would be given a brief cameo, a two- or three-page detour as the author would unpack the idea and explain how it connects to their specific topic and concern.

There was shifting baseline syndrome in George Monbiot’s Feral, a book about rewilding, as Monbiot bemoaned how “our memories have been wiped as clean as the land.” There it was again in Jon Mooallem’s book, Wild Ones, about humans’ conflicted relationships with wildlife. I spotted shifting baseline syndrome in Melanie Challenger’s On Extinction, and Lydia Millet touched the hacky sack in We Loved It All. Shifting baseline syndrome has become like the Forrest Gump of environmental letters, always there at the edge of the frame.

Someone should write a whole book for a lay audience about this concept, I felt. That person should be me, was my next thought.

Now, the woo-woo. Five years ago, my family and I were coming back from a weekend getaway to the San Juan Islands and on our way home to Bellingham, we passed over what’s called Colony Creek. Just as we went over the bridge, a big bald eagle zoomed above the car. It was January, the season when bald eagles gather in big numbers in the local farm fields, and the sighting wasn’t unusual. But something happened in that moment: a visitation from the muse. Time twisted and warped, and I felt myself pulled into the distant future as I wondered: “What will my daughter know of bald eagles?”

When I was growing up in the 1980s, bald eagles were still listed as endangered and vanishingly rare. Today, they are common; my daughter and I have even spotted them at the county dump. The eagle seemed a perfect example of how baselines can shift, of how our experiences of the natural world are based on our expectations of what is “normal.” It was, more importantly, an example of how sometimes baselines can shift in virtuous directions, of how we can lose sight of abundance just as easily as we can ignore loss. I’ve spent the years since unpacking those ideas.

J.P.: Since it’s so central to your text, could you unpack a bit more about “Shifting Baseline Syndrome,” i.e., the human tendency to adjust to new realities and rather rapidly forget how shocking that reality would have been to us just a little while earlier. 

Jason: “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” sounds technical, like something out of the psychiatry’s official handbook of disorders, but it’s a commonplace malady. You’ve experienced shifting baseline syndrome anytime you’ve struggled to remember what summers were like before the nonstop, sizzling heat, in those years before fire season was an annual Armageddon. You’ve been caught in shifting baseline syndrome if you’ve ever tried to tell a younger person what a beloved place was once, like: “There used to be red-winged blackbirds at this pond”—only to be greeted by a look of confusion. None of us are strangers to what I call “the great getting used to.

The concept of shifting baseline syndrome was coined in a one-page essay written in the mid-1990s by a fisheries scientist, Daniel Pauly, who was attempting to describe a collective amnesia he had perceived among fishermen. Pauly noticed that each generation of fishermen looks to the catch at the beginning of their fishing career to establish their sense of normal—without recognizing that their normal, their baseline, would be considered meager by previous generations. Pauly described this as “a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of species.”

My argument in the book is that this form of environmental amnesia is one of the major reasons why civilization has not responded adequately to the climate crisis and the extinction emergency. All of it—the extinctions, the clear cuts, the wounds of the mines, the looming chaos of an atmosphere unraveled—can be traced to the ways in which we trick ourselves into believing it’s not really that bad because today is only a tad worse than yesterday.

It’s not necessarily that we cease to care, but that we slowly cease to notice—and then inevitably fail to remember. Forgetting conspires against even the strongest commitments to defend the planet. So, my book is about how easy it is to forget—and how important it is to remember. Remembering is part of the work of resistance.

J.P.: Another term many of us might not be familiar with that you invoke is an emotional state called “solastalgia.” Can you explain what that word describes and what’s important about it?

Jason: Solastalgia is another one of those terms of art that keeps popping up in environmental literature, another neologism for this bewildering age. The term was coined by an Australian environmental philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, around the turn of this century. It’s a deliberate play on nostalgia: sol for solace and desolation, algia for pain. Albrecht defines it as “the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home territory.” In the simplest terms, solastalgia is the homesickness one feels when home no longer feels like home.

I think that solastalgia is such an important idea because it can serve as a counter to the lure of nostalgia, which often colors the past with a rosy patina, and all too often has served as the political reactionary’s sour tonic. When it comes to the important work of ecological memory-making, the great virtue of solastalgia is that—in contrast to nostalgia—it doesn’t crop the past. If it did, then it wouldn’t click. For a place of solace to become a zone of anguish requires a fidelity to the reality of earlier times. Solastalgia also depends on specificity; anchored in intimacy, it counters abstraction. Butterflies and salmon and bald eagles aren’t ideas—they are living, breathing beings, each with a will of their own. We should think of them, and remember them, as such.

J.P.: Your book advocates using observation and note-taking/record-keeping whether in the form of citizen science engagement or just in becoming an “ecological memoirist” as conscious forms of resistance. Could you explain why you think those might be effective strategies?

Jason: A lot of the book is centered on citizen scientists—whether they are counting monarch butterflies or tracking the diminishment of glaciers or working for the recovery of salmon. I am just endlessly inspired by the citizen scientists who bring so much passion and energy to work that is done on a volunteer basis. Community science is great because it’s so democratic—anyone can do it. And it’s often physical and embodied—people are usually doing this work out in the living world, sometimes in remote places. They are engaging with wild nature. Also, it works! Especially in this era of decreased government funding for the sciences, citizen scientists play an essential role in data gathering.

Citizen scientists are writing the first drafts of natural history, and that’s so important because history is—and always has been—contested terrain. There are people working right now to rewrite or erase history, including the history of the landscape. The powers-that-be have always sought to foment forgetting.

Here in the United States, wannabe authoritarians are waging a war on history and memory. Historical plaques at national parks, national monuments, and battlefields are being rewritten to change any narratives that might reflect negatively on the nation’s past. The Smithsonian Institution—that great repository of American history—is facing government officials’ threats to revise the stories it tells. The federal government is removing from official websites certain words that are now considered verboten. Forbidden words include “advocacy,” “oppression,” “Native American,” “climate change,” and even “female.” Also on the list: “historically.” Maybe you can see, then, why memory is a form of rebellion.

J.P.: Given how dire the environmental situation is and the immensely powerful reactionary political forces blocking any attempts to address it, is there a risk that the only thing left for us is a form of solastalgia, or do you still have hope that we can start to turn the tide in the years ahead?

Jason: I understand that things are dire. As I’ve been out talking to folks while on book tour, one of the most common questions I get is about how to deal with climate grief. I try to tell people that while grief is a state, mourning is an action—and any action can be alchemized into something else, including a commitment to defend the earth however you can.

I have plenty of hope. I remain buoyed by optimism, especially when I see all the grassroots, under-the-radar, community-level work to protect, restore, and rewild the planet. I also believe that hope and optimism are, in a way, irrelevant. If you are optimistic, then act to make things even better. If you are pessimistic, act to avoid the worst possible outcomes.

But no matter what, act.

The post The Earth Said Remember Me: An Interview with Jason Mark appeared first on Bioneers.

This is Volume #30 of the Leading from the Feminine newsletter, a vibrant resource in the flourishing world of leading from the heart, hands and spirit.
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At the Water’s Bend: Young Women & the Rights of Nature

What happens when young women draw on the wisdom of their ancestors to transform the laws that govern their tribal communities? A new generation of Indigenous leaders are doing exactly that: bringing ancestral values and the essential work of protecting the living world into the halls of their tribal councils.

Our conversation with Jasmine Smith, founder of NAIWA Daughters and a Bioneers Native Youth Ambassador, offers a powerful glimpse into this catalytic moment in the Rights of Nature movement. As a teenager, Jasmine and a group of young Indigenous women organized to protect the Long Person—the Cherokee name for their interconnected waterways—and helped secure a historic Rights of Nature resolution through the Eastern Band of Cherokee Tribal Council. Their work is now laying the foundation for further efforts to restore and protect the watershed that sustains their home.

These young women are not embracing a new idea so much as reclaiming an old one: that we are nature; that water is our relative, rather than our resource; and that our responsibilities extend both backward and forward seven generations. These young leaders are showing what becomes possible when Indigenous knowledge, youth leadership and the power of collective action come together—and when the voices of young women help guide the work of restoring our Earth.

This is leading from the feminine at its most transformative: rooted in relation and shaped in community.

What follows is a transcript of a conversation between Britt Gondolfi, Bioneers’ Indigeneity Special Programs Coordinator and Jasmine Smith, Founder of NAIWA Daughters and a Bioneers Native Youth Ambassador. The transcript was edited for clarity and brevity.

A Conversation with Jasmine Smith, Founder of NAIWA Daughters

An introduction from Britt Gondolfi, Bioneers Indigeneity Special Programs Coordinator

I first met Jasmine Smith in her ancestral homeland, the Great Smoky Mountains, along the banks of the Long Person, the Cherokee name for the river and stream system that has sustained the Cherokee people for millennia. We were camping streamside at a Protecting Mother Earth gathering hosted by the Indigenous Environmental Network. Over several days, we attended workshops and strategic visioning sessions together, learning directly from Tribes working to protect and preserve our precious planet. 

When Jasmine took the stage at an open mic, her powerful poem about the legacy of Cherokee women carried the audience 20 generations back and 7 generations forward, leaving them on their feet for a standing ovation. My 7-year-old was so moved by the Indigenous teen on stage that she found the courage to share an impromptu song of her own. That moment captured one of Jasmine’s great gifts: lifting up, inspiring, and empowering other young Indigenous women to speak up and join in. 

At 16, she founded a junior chapter of the North American Indian Women’s Association so young women in her tribe could build a support network of sisters and aunties and get organized. After taking Bioneers’ Indigenizing the Law course, Jasmine connected her organization of Indigenous teenage girls with our Native Youth Ambassador Program. With grit, determination, brilliance, ferocious faith, and guidance from elders, parents, and mentors, these young women helped pass the first-of-its-kind Rights of the Long Person Resolution in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Council. The resolution created a task force and inspired the council to initiate efforts to undam a section of the Long Person on the Ewa River. 

In this conversation, Jasmine shares the journey behind that work, the power of young Indigenous women organizing together, and what it means to indigenize the law by speaking for “that which cannot speak for itself.”

BRITT: Would you share how you decided to start the NAIWA Daughters, and who NAIWA (North American Indian Women’s Association) Daughters are?

JASMINE: NAIWA is a nonprofit within our tribe with elder women members. They’re known for their cooking, but we always wanted to bridge the gap and have youth talk to our elders more. I remember the day we went in there; we were talking about creating this pilot program and building that partnership. I was so nervous talking to our elders about it. Now we’ve built those relationships, and they’re supporting our work, and we’re supporting theirs. 

My third great-grandma, Ruth Littlejohn, is a very big pillar within our community. She helped found our fire station and raised money for our housing program. She’s a very impactful and strong woman. She and Ethylene Conseen and another woman they knew got together to create a network of Indigenous women across Turtle Island, and that’s when they started NAIWA. It grew from the Cherokee chapter into a national nonprofit.

NAIWA Daughters is also contributing and partnering with national NAIWA more. We’ve attended several national conferences, and this year, the national organization is coming back to the homelands. They’re having their conference in Cherokee, and we’re planning that and will host youth caucuses for the first time in a long time. They originally had youth as part of it, but it kind of dwindled away after my great-grandma passed away. So we’re getting to bring that back to our homelands. 

My second great aunt is the treasurer for our chapter, and for the national nonprofit. We have four generations within NAIWA this year. So my aunt, my grandma, my mom, my sister, and me. We have four generations on our homelands, affecting change and starting youth caucuses. So it’s a really historic moment, and it’s part of our family and lineage.

BRITT: You’ve talked about patriarchy and the importance of Indigenous women having a platform and a place of leadership in the community. This is a very wise and grounded awareness to carry. How old were you when you started the NAIWA Daughters? How old are you now, and how did you get to this place of understanding?

JASMINE: I started NAIWA when I was 11, and this understanding of how Indigenous women lead goes back to our ancestral ways. As a community, we understood that women were pillars and lifegivers, and we honored them, but we were an egalitarian community. So everyone was equal, but we honored women for what they did for our community and how they gave life. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. That’s something that they passed down through generations. 

Coming from a family that has such strong matrilineal women and matriarchs, it’s kind of in my DNA to lead. And harnessing this in NAIWA Daughters was an outlet for that, and it fostered that environment. And through, I think, intergenerational trauma, our community’s looking at how we can reconnect with those ancestral values. 

It reflects within our tribe. I grew up not having seen Indigenous women within our Tribal leadership. And now, since the ‘90s, we’ve had four women on our tribal council. It was an honor bringing our resolution for Rights of Nature into the chambers, and there were already four women on the council supporting us. It was great, because it wasn’t like we were talking to a bunch of men. We got to see women who looked like us in those seats, and they have really been empowering, supporting us.

We’ve always seen, at least in my family, women taking leadership. And my mom’s someone I always look up to because she always takes that leadership role. And she does so much, but she does it the right way, and understanding when we do anything, we have to do it under a certain set of values. So it kind of goes back to those values of how we live and how we interpret things, and just a way of being.

BRITT: You all originally started with a Rights of Nature initiative for the Eastern hellbender salamander. Will you walk us through the journey and thought process, and how you ended up narrowing your focus to this immense water body? And share a bit about the Cherokee history of the Long Person?

JASMINE: Yes, Long Person’s what we call our waterways. Its head begins in the mountains, and its feet travel to the sea. That’s over roughly 800 miles. This is a personal connection for me because my Cherokee name’s Agasga, meaning “rain”. So when you’re a baby, in our community you’re introduced to water. And for us, traditionally, we went to water and had ceremony sometimes seven times a day. It was a daily routine to have that relationship.

The journey to create the resolution all started when we were tubing down the river, and we would have to stop all the time because tourists would stack rocks, which disrupts the ecosystem and the homes of the juwa, the hellbender salamander. We got so frustrated, we wanted to do something about it. So we started conversations, and thought, “what if we made a resolution that says you can’t do this?” Then we talked about advocating for the land. We didn’t really know about Rights of Nature efforts until we met you. We understood this isn’t a new concept, it’s a cultural concept, something we’ve done since time immemorial, advocating for nature, and being a voice for the voiceless. 

We submitted a public comment, and that was one of our biggest community events. We had over 60 youth participants and adults come in just one night, planned out the public comment, wrote it as a community, and advocated for the juwa. We even had a survey about how many of the adults here had seen a juwa, and three or four raised their hands. Then we asked the youth, and nobody raised their hand. That’s a connection point that we’re losing because our waters have been unclean, and the hellbender has always been an ecological count, a mark, for us. What we say is that if the water flows over its back five times, it’s clean enough to drink. And what is it telling us when the juwa’s going endangered, and it’s going extinct? The juwa has been around since the dinosaurs. It survived all of that, and it’s starting to be endangered now. So what are we doing, as humans, for it to be going extinct? It’s a cultural loss as well. 

This resolution has opened many doors for other projects, like the dam project. We’re working on undamming one of the big parts of our Long Person, and reconnecting the sicklefin redhorse fish with the juwa. They haven’t been in connection for almost 101 years. 

But it all ties back to our water. We are water. Water is life. We couldn’t do any advocacy for land without talking about water. You can’t talk about Cherokee people without talking about water. You can’t talk about our homelands without water, because it is the center of Cherokee. If you look at where we lived traditionally, it was always in a water bend, and the importance of water to us has always been there.

Featured Media

Watch: 

Bioneers Conversation: The Rights of Nature Movement in Indian Country and Beyond: From Grassroots to Mainstream

Bioneers Keynote Talk: Coley Kakols Miller – Undam the Klamath: The Fight Isn’t Over Yet

Read: 

From Atmos: The Rights of Nature: Rewriting the Law For a Living Planet

From Mosaic Environmental Fund: Native Youth Network Spreads Rights of Nature

Listen:

Bioneers Radio & Podast episode: Indigenous Women Rising: Upholding the Hoop of Life

Indigeneity Conversations Podcast Series: Indigenize the Law: Tribal Rights of Nature Movements with Casey Camp-Horinek | Part 1 & Part 2

To Learn More & Get Involved in the Rights of Nature Movement:

Through four interactive sessions, we will explore the connections between tribal sovereignty and environmental governance, learn how Rights of Nature laws are being developed and defended, and see how these movements intersect with community organizing, youth leadership, and local action.

The post LFF Volume #30: Young Women Leading: From Cultural Memory to Political Action appeared first on Bioneers.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

Featuring

Elodie Freymann, Ph.D., is a primatologist, botanist, social anthropologist, filmmaker, scientific illustrator, and conservation activist. She has received several awards for her work and is a Fellow at both The Explorers Club and The Linnean Society.

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written and Produced by: Cathy Edwards
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
• Graphic Design: Megan Howe
• Interview recording engineer: Mike Kohn at KPFA studios

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Opium poppies relieve pain, foxgloves can treat heart conditions, aloe vera gel soothes the skin. Potent chemical compounds found in nature have been used for medicine throughout human history, from medicinal fungus found on Otzi the iceman over 5000 years ago, to the latest cancer treatments being developed from tropical plants. An enormous amount of human insight and ingenuity has gone into discovering and refining these medicines across the ages.

However, we’re not the only species that knows how to use the pharmacy of the living world. Mounting evidence suggests other animals’ relationships with healing plants is also deep-seated, sophisticated and intelligent, carefully choosing specific resources to treat their illnesses and injuries.

It’s about survival – just as all animals need to eat, so we all need to heal. Sometimes healing is an automatic function of our immune systems; but often we rely on external medications to help out.

Many questions remain. To what extent is healing behaviour instinctual, and to what extent is it learned knowledge, passed down through generations? Do our human medicine cabinets overlap with those of other animals? And over time, how much medical knowledge has been shared between species?

These are questions Dr. Elodie Freymann is seeking to answer. She started by studying the plants chimpanzees select to self-medicate, and is now one of the leading researchers in this field – which has an interesting scientific name…

Elodie Freymann (EF): So I learned about this field, and no one has heard of this, and no one knows how to pronounce it, but it’s called “zoopharmacognosy”. And when you break down that word, it’s zoo, as in animals, pharma, as in medicine, and cognosy, as in cognition, as in knowledge. So what this field is is we study how animals know about the medicines in their natural environments, in their ecosystems. Cool. Right?

And it’s not just chimps that do this. Chimps were the first animal that we discovered to be self-medicators, and the more that researchers set their mind to it, the more we realized that actually this is happening all throughout the animal kingdom, from chimps, to elephants, to great bustard birds, to bears, to civets, to snow geese. It’s incredible, and the more that we study it, the more animals we discover.

So we’re learning that healthcare is not one of the things that sets our species apart, it’s actually something – surprise, surprise – that’s universal. And animals, just as they know how to seek shelter, just as they know how to find food, they know how to find medicine as well.

Host: The ability of other-than-human animals to find medicine in their environments has long been known by Indigenous communities and traditional healers.

But it was in the late 20th century that scientists started documenting this behavior in our close cousins, chimpanzees. The term itself, zoopharmacognosy, was coined in the late 1980s. 

EF: Around the late ‘70s, ‘80s, it was discovered that Chimpanzees are pretty proficient medicine users. And chimps are able to identify and select medicinal plants that can help rid them of internal parasite infections. And then, over the course of the ‘90s and early 2000s, this was discovered in several other species of animals. Over the last few years, there’s been another big surge of people researching this topic.

It feels like every day that goes by there’s a new amazing discovery that happens in this field. Animals ranging from bottlenose dolphins in the Red Sea—have been shown to rub against corals that have antifungal and antibacterial properties. There are these amazing birds called great bustard birds in Spain where the males eat certain medicinal plants that have antiparasitic properties during their mating season.

The theory is that it reduces their parasite load and therefore enables them to do these costly mating displays and increase their fitness. So we’re discovering self-medication– animal self-medication throughout the animal kingdom.

Host: These numerous discoveries suggest that self-medication is by no means limited to humans or even to our close primate cousins. It’s a universal survival strategy, an intelligence distributed across species. It’s an exciting moment for the field of zoopharmacognosy.

Elodie began studying the topic in 2019.

In 2021 her PhD took her to Budongo Central Forest Reserve in Western Uganda, to study the wild chimpanzees that lived there.

The research station where she lived and worked was surrounded on all sides by trees, and teeming with life.

EF: There’s just the most incredible sounds all around you. You have black-and-white-casqued hornbills, which are these incredible large birds. And they make these amazing calls.

Listen to a black-and-white-casqued hornbill

And the forest has all of these amazing smells. There’s all of this fruit fermenting on the forest floor.  And then every so often you’ll be walking down a trail and there’ll be a scuttle and you’ll see a blue duiker or a red duiker, which is this kind of this small ungulate species; there’s monkeys swinging around in the trees. And hyraxes at night, it sounded like there were just people screaming at the top of their lungs in the forest.

Listen to hyraxes

So crazy sounds coming from all sides. And then, of course, you have the chimps, who, every morning, at the crack of dawn, you often wake up to their calls. And it’s just this chorus from all around you.

As a researcher, I would be so completely and utterly lost in the forest without the guidance of the local field staff, who most of them grew up in and around this forest. I was incredibly fortunate to work with two amazing Budongo field staff members– one was named Geresomu and one was named Robert. The amount of expertise and knowledge that these guys have is just so extraordinary.

In the morning, you wake up really early. You meet up with your field staff collaborator, and you head into the forest and you have to try to find the chimps. Chimps nest in trees. They’ll call in the morning when they’re up and they’re about to move. So you basically have to be strategically positioned so that you’re close enough that you hear their call and get to them before they disappear.

For my methodology, what I was doing was I was picking one chimpanzee a day and following them around. And that meant going wherever they go. So if they’re sleeping, you’re resting. If they’re traveling through vines, you’re cutting through vines, you’re scaling hills, you’re crossing rivers, you have no agency. You’re just – you’re a chimp. You are following the chimps, you are blending into the group. And I was taking data on as many things as I possibly could.

Host: Chimpanzees’ practice of self-medicating was already well-known when Elodie started her research in Budongo Forest. Back in the 1960s, the primatologist Jane Goodall had observed unchewed, bristly aspilia leaves in chimpanzee dung; later research found these leaves helped chimps purge themselves of intestinal parasites.

Elodie hoped to document a more comprehensive picture of the many additional plants that chimps used to treat themselves. Her goal was to illuminate profound questions about their medical intelligence.

EF: In order to ask some of the more complicated questions, like, for example, how are the chimps acquiring these behaviors in the first place. Is it instinctual? Is it learned? We needed to have a bigger sample size of these behaviors, and we needed more data. And so that was really my broad research question when I started my research: Which medicinal resources are these chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest using or targeting as medicine?

And I realized that I was going to have to, in addition to the classic primatological approach of following chimpanzees around and recording their behaviors, I also was going to need to figure out how to monitor their health in a non-invasive way so I could keep tabs on, for example, how their parasite loads were fluctuating or if they had any sort of obvious infections, or wounds, or signs of illness or ailment.

And I also knew that I would have to do some pharmacology, so figure out whether any of the medicinal resources that they’re eating actually have chemical bio activity, they actually have evidence that they are effective against the diseases or the illnesses that the chimpanzees are exhibiting.

So I also wanted to incorporate this element of how people relate to the natural world: Are people that live in this same ecosystem that live in and around this forest using any of these medicinal resources as medicine as well?

I just began casting the widest net I possibly could, collecting data on everything I could imagine. Then the job became trying to take all of these different pieces of evidence and put them together to kind of build stories. You know? This chimp has a high parasite load and I know this because I collected his poo yesterday and I took a urine sample and I can see that he has some sort of infection, and he’s eating a plant that no one’s ever seen the chimps eat before. And then I collect this plant, and I test it in a lab, and I find that, oh, it actually has strong antibacterial properties, or strong anti-inflammatory properties, and oh, in the village nearby, this plant is actually really a common cure for diseases X, Y, and Z. I mean, that’s an example, but that was the way that I was trying to bring all of this evidence together and synthesize it.

So one of the things we did find was that chimps are selecting leaves to rub and apply to their wounds, and in some cases they chew up the leaves and apply that kind of saliva and leaf mixture to the wounds themselves, and in some of those cases those leaves had known medicinal properties, sometimes relating to wound healing in people.

Host: Elodie was building a comprehensive picture of chimpanzees’ behavior, health, the properties of their medicinal resources, as well as the medicinal plants local people used.

That picture led to the observation that chimps used certain leaves to treat wounds. It also revealed an intriguing insight about tree bark.

EF: I was spending a lot of my time not only studying the chimps but trying to learn how to identify all the trees that they were interacting with on a daily basis, because the second you can identify the trees, the forest just suddenly becomes so exponentially more alive around you, and you can start seeing trees as individuals, and identifying patterns in when chimps visit which trees.

And I got really interested in why they’re eating bark, because there’s tons of trees in the forest, many of which have these really juicy sweet fruits like figs that the chimps love, and yet I was seeing chimps climb down, strip the bark of certain trees, and eat the bark, which is incredibly energetically costly. It takes time. It’s not particularly nutritious. Tree bark has lignin in it that makes it difficult to digest, and it’s not obvious what nutritional value it offers to the chimp diet.

I knew that in traditional knowledge systems around the world, bark is one of the most common plant parts used in medicine because bark has some of the highest density of plant secondary metabolites, which is the chemicals that make a plant medicinal. And so I was wondering: Could this behavior be a medicinal behavior for the chimps?

We had cases of sick chimpanzees traveling far distances to certain species of trees, eating the bark in very small quantities, which is unusual in and of itself, because why travel a very far way to just take a tiny bite of bark?

And so I really focused on that, and I collected a bunch of bark samples, and we tested, and a lot of these bark samples had some really strong antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. So stories began to kind of bloom out of all of this data.

Host: The story that emerged from the myriad data was this: the bark of certain trees does indeed have potent healing properties, and it looks as if the chimps are experts in finding it and using it therapeutically.

This was a fascinating scientific finding in its own right, but importantly, it also highlighted an urgent conservation issue. We’ll hear more after the break.

If you’d like to learn more about the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in fungi, plants, and animals, subscribe to our Earthlings newsletter. In each issue, we delve into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of our fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all inhabit this planet together. You can subscribe at bioneers.org/earthlings. 

Host: From observing the chimpanzees in Uganda, Dr. Elodie Freymann had identified certain species of trees they seemed to be using to self-medicate.

But she also noticed a concerning trend.

EF: Right as I was getting really getting excited about a few of these tree species in particular, we were also noticing that some of these same species are the ones that are most targeted by illegal loggers.

That kind of opened my eyes to a new angle. And that is the conservation aspect of all of this, why it’s important to even do this research. This science has a really important implication for the protection of these wild pharmacies, these medicine cabinets that have evolved over millions and millions and millions of years to help the plant heal, and as a wonderful side effect, help animals and people heal as well. And we’re literally chopping them down. 

That kind of illuminated this new mission for me, of not just learning the science but also communicating the science, and trying to show people before it’s too late that these natural medicines, they’re gifts, we’re not entitled to them. And if we want to protect animals, we have to protect their access to these medicines; we have to make sure that they’re able to take care of themselves. 

Host: It isn’t enough just to make these discoveries about natural medicines; it’s also critical to conserve the ecosystems that produce them. In protecting medicinal resources, you protect the animals who use them to heal.

And that includes humans. Another key part of Elodie’s research was about the medicinal use of those same barks by people in the region. She interviewed local experts, some of whom are featured in her documentary “Waiting for Alstonia”, available on Youtube.

Here’s an excerpt, where her colleagues Monday Mbotella Gideon and Gerosomu Muhumuza, share insights into the use of bark by both chimps and humans.

Monday: I have observed chimps feeding on tree bark, different species of tree bark, but not continuously, just one moment at a time. And this gives me the answer that really it is medicinal because if it was food, then they would feed on it time after time.

Gerosomu: I for one do believe that chimpanzees eat alstonia boonei as a medicinal tree.

Host: Alstonia Boonei is a large, deciduous tree. And it kept coming up in Elodie’s conversations with local experts

Monday: I grew up next to this forest. I’ve even seen people using alstonia boonei for medication. People get the bark, they boil it and make liquid out of it, and then they take it.

Host: It turned out that Elodie’s bark observations were far from new. They simply added more evidence to what the local community had known for generations.

And the fact that both humans and chimps were using the same tree barks for medicine raised profound questions. What was the origin of this shared medical knowledge? How far back does this knowledge stretch, and who was learning from whom?

EF: Many of the healers that I talked to, they had a couple of anecdotes about finding and discovering medicines from watching the chimps, and that is definitely something I’ve seen across – I’m working on a project now in Mount Elgon in Kenya with elephants, and a lot of the people that we’ve been talking to and doing interviews with also have learned medicines from watching the elephants.

So there’s absolutely a knowledge interchange. People are learning from animals, and there’s a chance that animals are also learning from people. And so identifying and pinpointing the origins of this knowledge is kind of fascinating to think about, and impossible to figure out.

Host: These are questions with extremely deep roots. Some medical knowledge might pre-date both chimpanzee and human species; some has certainly been learned from other animals.

It may be impossible to fully unpack the origins of medicinal plant knowledge, but the fact that humans and other animals share this knowledge underlines just how interconnected we are.

And if we all rely on these wild pharmacies for medicine, that creates an even greater incentive to protect them – not just in Budongo Forest, but all over the world.

EF: So I found some cool new plants that chimps use and some cool behaviors, but what really was grabbing my attention was this overlap that I found between the barks that the chimps were using, seemingly as medicine, and the people in the local villages used as powerful medicines.

I started thinking about that overlap as a medicinal entanglement.

And I started realizing that these entanglements must exist all over the world, and in not just chimpanzees, but in animals that look much less like us, and are more difficult for us to look in the eyes of and necessarily recognize as a cousin.

So I decided that even though I love chimpanzees, they’re my first love, and I hope to keep studying chimps for the rest of my life, I really wanted my next project to engage with wildlife species that we don’t have that obvious connection to, and show how connected we are in our need to stay healthy and flourish on this planet.

Host: Expanding her research led Elodie to the other side of the world, to a completely different ecosystem: the Central Peruvian Amazon. There, she launched a project with the biologist and conservationist Dr. Rosa Vasquez Espinoza.

This time they started by looking at the medicines local Asháninka people used, hoping to find clues to medicinal practices in the more-than-human world.

EF: We’re trying to find the first cases of animal medication in that region. So, having the privilege to sit down with Asháninka elders who have lived in this forest ecosystem, and their parents, and their parents, and their parents have lived, and they know all of these incredible secrets about the medicinal resources in this region, and learning from them, and then trying to take that knowledge about which plants people are using in this region, and work in reverse of the methods that I was using in Uganda, where I started with watching the chimps and then I asked people. Here, we’re starting with people and then we’re trying to figure out which animals are interacting or using, potentially medicating, with these resources that people rely on.

Host: The team believe they may have documented the first case of animal self-medication in the region, and are currently working on confirming this.

At the heart of this field of study is the question of how animals’ medical knowledge is acquired. Western science has historically tended to put diverse animal behaviors down to so-called “instinct.”

But Elodie has a hunch that animal self-medication is a knowledge system that requires intelligence, learning, and cultural transmission.

EF: My big project at the moment is trying to change people’s thinking about animal medicinal knowledge, not as something that’s just innate or instinctual or robotic, but something that is deeply cultural and learned and potentially passed down across generations just like our own knowledge is.

As someone that’s spent a lot of time in the field with animals, to me, it’s pretty obvious that this medicinal knowledge is intergenerational, that it’s transmitted, that it grows and evolves and changes. Very hard to prove. We’re working on that. It’s sort of a life goal, is to prove that.

But in the meantime, how can we protect those knowledge systems and protect those medicinal resources?

Host: There are two important imperatives for protection. One is to prevent the ecosystems where these medicines grow from being destroyed. The other is to safeguard other-than-human medicinal knowledge from being appropriated, patented and exploited by commercial entities.

EF: Right now, in the field, there’s this big ethical gap. There are protections in place, protecting against the exploitation or biopiracy of human medicinal knowledge to prevent against a pharma company coming into a community, you know, conducting a bunch of interviews, saying what medicines are important, taking and extracting that knowledge and commercializing it, and then selling that medicinal resources for profit. There are safeguards in place to protect against that. There are no such safeguards to protect against the exploitation of more-than-human medicinal knowledge. And to me, that’s a major problem.

It’s complicated because a lot of this medicinal knowledge is shared, as my research has been showing, that people get medicinal information from a lot of different ways, and there’s amazing anecdotes all around the world of people discovering medicines from watching animals. And that’s been going on for centuries and centuries. So what is human knowledge and what is more-than-human knowledge? It’s kind of hard to parse, and that’s one of the fascinating things about the field in the first place.

One of the things I’m trying to do is try to protect the medicinal resource itself and the medicators that rely on the medicinal resource before that resource disappears or is exploited for profit.

That’s the very, very bare minimum that we can be doing to help the other species on this planet stay healthy, and make it through this, you know, trying time where all of these ecosystems are changing and there’s all of these new threats, and climate change is changing which parasite species and which pathogens are arising and impacting these species. So we’re not going to turn climate change around overnight, but we can make sure that we’re not cutting down the very medicine cabinets that animals need to keep themselves healthy and happy on this planet.

Host: Healing is a universal feature of life; the ability to respond to damage connects humans with all other organisms on the planet, whether it’s automatic, instinctual, or learned.

The practice of healthcare, too, may be found in ecosystems around the world; it’s another thread that weaves us together with our other-than human kin. 

EF: When we say healthcare is a universal right, I think a lot of the time people are talking about people. They’re just talking about humans. But healthcare is a universal right for people and for all of the other creatures on this planet, whether it’s chimps, whether it’s jaguars, whether it’s peccaries. 

Whatever they are, they deserve access to healthcare in the same way that all of us deserve access to healthcare. And how can we do what we can to make that kind of cognitive change in how we understand the more-than-human world and dethrone ourselves as the top of this pyramid in the animal kingdom, and place ourselves back in this wider community of life.

Host: Elodie Freymann, Wild Pharmacies: How Animals Heal Themselves 

The post Wild Pharmacies: How Animals Heal Themselves appeared first on Bioneers.

I first met Jasmine Smith in her ancestral homeland, the Great Smoky Mountains, along the banks of the Long Person, the Cherokee name for the river and stream system that has sustained the Cherokee people for millennia. We were camping streamside at a Protecting Mother Earth gathering hosted by the Indigenous Environmental Network. Over several days, we attended workshops and strategic visioning sessions together, learning directly from tribes working to protect and preserve our precious planet. 

When Jasmine took the stage at an open mic, her powerful poem about the legacy of Cherokee women carried the audience 20 generations back and 7 generations forward, leaving them on their feet for a standing ovation. My 7-year-old was so moved by the Indigenous teen on stage that she found the courage to share an impromptu song of her own. That moment captured one of Jasmine’s great gifts: lifting up, inspiring, and empowering other young Indigenous women to speak up and join in. 

At 16, she founded a junior chapter of the North American Indian Women’s Association so young women in her tribe could build a support network of sisters and aunties and get organized. After taking Bioneers’ Indigenizing the Law course, Jasmine connected her organization of Indigenous teenage girls with our Native Youth Ambassador Program. With grit, determination, brilliance, ferocious faith, and guidance from elders, parents, and mentors, these young women helped pass the first-of-its-kind Rights of the Long Person Resolution in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Council. The resolution created a task force and inspired the council to initiate efforts to undam a section of the Long Person on the Ewa River. 

In this conversation, Jasmine shares the journey behind that work, the power of young Indigenous women organizing together, and what it means to indigenize the law by speaking for “that which cannot speak for itself.”

What follows is an edited excerpt of a conversation recorded at the Bioneers 2026 conference.

BRITT: Would you share how you decided to start the NAIWA Daughters, and who NAIWA (North American Indian Women’s Association) Daughters are?

JASMINE: NAIWA is a nonprofit within our tribe with elder women members. They’re known for their cooking, but we always wanted to bridge the gap and have youth talk to our elders more. I remember the day we went in there; we were talking about creating this pilot program and building that partnership. I was so nervous talking to our elders about it. Now we’ve built those relationships, and they’re supporting our work, and we’re supporting theirs.

My third great-grandma, Ruth Littlejohn, is a very big pillar within our community. She helped found our fire station and raised money for our housing program. She’s a very impactful and strong woman. She and Ethylene Conseen and another woman they knew got together to create a network of Indigenous women across Turtle Island, and that’s when they started NAIWA. It grew from the Cherokee chapter into a national nonprofit.

NAIWA Daughters is also contributing and partnering with national NAIWA more. We’ve attended several national conferences, and this year, the national organization is coming back to the homelands. They’re having their conference in Cherokee, and we’re planning that and will host youth caucuses for the first time in a long time. They originally had youth as part of it, but it kind of dwindled away after my great-grandma passed away. So we’re getting to bring that back to our homelands. 

My second great aunt is the treasurer for our chapter, and for the national nonprofit. We have four generations within NAIWA this year. So my aunt, my grandma, my mom, my sister, and me. We have four generations on our homelands, affecting change and starting youth caucuses. So it’s a really historic moment, and it’s part of our family and lineage.

BRITT: You’ve talked about patriarchy and the importance of Indigenous women having a platform and a place of leadership in the community. This is a very wise and grounded awareness to carry. How old were you when you started the NAIWA Daughters? How old are you now, and how did you get to this place of understanding?

JASMINE: I started NAIWA when I was 11, and this understanding of how Indigenous women lead goes back to our ancestral ways. As a community, we understood that women were pillars and lifegivers, and we honored them, but we were an egalitarian community. So everyone was equal, but we honored women for what they did for our community and how they gave life. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. That’s something that they passed down through generations.

Coming from a family that has such strong matrilineal women and matriarchs, it’s kind of in my DNA to lead. And harnessing this in NAIWA Daughters was an outlet for that, and it fostered that environment. And through, I think, intergenerational trauma, our community’s looking at how we can reconnect with those ancestral values. 

It reflects within our tribe. I grew up not having seen Indigenous women within our tribal leadership. And now, since the ‘90s, we’ve had four women on our tribal council. It was an honor bringing our resolution for Rights of Nature into the chambers, and there were already four women on the council supporting us. It was great, because it wasn’t like we were talking to a bunch of men. We got to see women who looked like us in those seats, and they have really been empowering, supporting us.

We’ve always seen, at least in my family, women taking leadership. And my mom’s someone I always look up to because she always takes that leadership role. And she does so much, but she does it the right way, and understanding when we do anything, we have to do it under a certain set of values. So it kind of goes back to those values of how we live and how we interpret things, and just a way of being.

BRITT: You all originally started with a Rights of Nature initiative for the Eastern hellbender salamander. Will you walk us through the journey and thought process, and how you ended up narrowing your focus to this immense water body? And share a bit about the Cherokee history of the Long Person?

JASMINE: Yes, Long Person’s what we call our waterways. Its head begins in the mountains, and its feet travel to the sea. That’s over roughly 800 miles. This is a personal connection for me because my Cherokee name’s Agasga, meaning “rain”. So when you’re a baby, in our community you’re introduced to water. And for us, traditionally, we went to water and had ceremony sometimes seven times a day. It was a daily routine to have that relationship.

The journey to create the resolution all started when we were tubing down the river, and we would have to stop all the time because tourists would stack rocks, which disrupts the ecosystem and the homes of the juwa, the hellbender salamander. We got so frustrated, we wanted to do something about it. So we started conversations, and thought, “what if we made a resolution that says you can’t do this?” Then we talked about advocating for the land. We didn’t really know about Rights of Nature efforts until we met you. We understood this isn’t a new concept, it’s a cultural concept, something we’ve done since time immemorial, advocating for nature, and being a voice for the voiceless. 

We submitted a public comment, and that was one of our biggest community events. We had over 60 youth participants and adults come in just one night, planned out the public comment, wrote it as a community, and advocated for the juwa. We even had a survey about how many of the adults here had seen a juwa, and three or four raised their hands. Then we asked the youth, and nobody raised their hand. That’s a connection point that we’re losing because our waters have been unclean, and the hellbender has always been an ecological count, a mark, for us. What we say is that if the water flows over its back five times, it’s clean enough to drink. And what is it telling us when the juwa’s going endangered, and it’s going extinct? The juwa has been around since the dinosaurs. It survived all of that, and it’s starting to be endangered now. So what are we doing, as humans, for it to be going extinct? It’s a cultural loss as well. 

This resolution has opened many doors for other projects, like the dam project. We’re working on undamming one of the big parts of our Long Person, and reconnecting the sicklefin redhorse fish with the juwa. They haven’t been in connection for almost 101 years. 

But it all ties back to our water. We are water. Water is life. We couldn’t do any advocacy for land without talking about water. You can’t talk about Cherokee people without talking about water. You can’t talk about our homelands without water, because it is the center of Cherokee. If you look at where we lived traditionally, it was always in a water bend, and the importance of water to us has always been there.

BRITT: Take us back to that day in the council chambers. There were thousands of people watching online, and the room was packed. Feelings, memories, what did it feel like that day?

JASMINE: We started the Rights of Nature process 18 months before, and we kept asking: What’s it going to be like on Council day? Over those 18 months, I created scenarios in my head: Am I going to do this, am I going to do that? When it came to writing my speech and talking to Council, one of the things I really wanted to say is that we can’t flex sovereignty if we aren’t going to our ancestral roots and decolonizing our legal systems. In my speech, I talk about how we can’t be Cherokee without our land, and if we don’t pass this resolution, are we really upholding those Cherokee values, and is this a priority for our tribe?

The river is right beside our tribal council, so before even going into the chambers, we started with a water ceremony and brought the Long Person into the conversation in a pot that was made by a beloved woman. We had to make sure that we were doing this the right way, and with intentionality by having Long Person, because we couldn’t have had that conversation without it in the room.

Within our group, we were trying to figure out who was going to cry first, and we all thought it would be our mentor, Kim, and it was me first. I tried not to get emotional, but even now, any time I talk about it, I do, because it was such a significant moment.

Having community support was the biggest thing, prioritizing this in our tribe. NAIWA were there supporting us. Having my elders there, government leaders, tribal council leaders taking time out of their day to come support this. We saw that other people saw the value in this program, and what we’re doing to help mold these Indigenous women into being the future leaders of our tribe. And it felt right. It was a full circle moment.

It was very hot in the room, and people there were talking about how you could just feel the ancestors there. One of our council women, Shennelle Feather, talked about how we get to honor and reconnect with our Long Person, our relative, and have that relationship go to a deeper level. That’s something we haven’t had in a very long time. So through the Long Person Resolution, we’re reconnecting with our ancestors. And having that relationship and advocating for things that don’t always have a voice. So being a voice for the voiceless. 

So that’s kind of what the day was like. I was happy to see my fellow Indigenous young leaders speaking up and advocating and making change. And I’m always so proud of them. I never envisioned us doing this, but it was almost like our ancestors entrusted this to us, a calling to restore ancestral ways, and to heal intergenerational trauma.

BRITT: That’s beautiful. I watched it remotely. I was crying my eyes out. Other allies were texting me; they were all crying. I had jokingly said that obviously we’re honoring water here, because water is flowing out of all of us watching what was happening in this Council Room. So it was so beautiful to see y’all carry the Long Person in that beautiful pottery made by this beloved woman. It was only right, I think, that tears fell because we’re water. And so by recognizing the Long Person as a rights-bearing entity but also relative, it’s like it’s honoring the water in us and in the ecosystem and in the spirit of that person.

So what was it like to be a teenager going to your tribal council and telling them: I want you to pass this law.

JASMINE:  It was not an easy process. We had separate meetings with tribal council members to gain their support, and meetings with the chief to talk about how this would affect our fishing department, and how it would affect other fish and wildlife, and how our tribe operates, and tubing companies. And yes, all those things are so important, but talking about that – it’s almost as if we’re forgetting the real importance of the resolution and advocating for Long Person, because it hasn’t had an advocate in so long.

We realized we had to get community input, and get the community behind it to get it over the finish line. Educating the community was hard, but beautiful at the same time, because they reconnected to a cultural concept that we’ve always had, and it empowered them. And a big success was making our Rights of Nature T-shirts, and having it say “Water Protector” in Cherokee and in English. So when anyone wears the T-shirt, they’re a water protector too, just by wearing that T-shirt and empowering our community members to affect change. 

So with the survey, we got those responses that showed we had pretty much full support, which was a big factor in our tribe’s support. Because at the end of the day, they’re supposed to be there for their community. And when we showed them that, it was really, really hard for them to say no. It was healing for the tribal council and just for our tribe in general because this was the first resolution in our tribe that doesn’t look at water as something to be owned or profited from, and giving rights back, and having this resolution in places like our visitor center, and some of our biggest achievements as a tribe. It was a lot of work, but it’s so rewarding to know our waters are protected. 

Now we’re looking at what specific laws we need to protect the Long Person. One of the things my mom always jokes about is that if you need anything done, let the youth handle it.

BRITT: That’s incredible. I love what you said in your presentation, that, you know, this is not a new legal concept. And you brought in that traditional value of doing good. I think for many people in the Rights of Nature movement, there’s this idea of this hot, new legal, environmental movement, and that it’s brand new in 2008 in Ecuador, in the constitutional amendment, but I think the real truth of the matter is this is old.

Right relationship, reciprocity, seeing oneself as a part of the ecosystem, not separate from it, not allowing people to poison the well and kill all the animals and ruin the food and the air. I mean, there were laws before there were the current governments that are operating in this territory now. People think that everyone was just running around wild, but there were laws and value systems, and that’s how you have thousands of years of continuous culture; that’s how you have thousands of years of language and practice and spirituality; that’s how people survive where they’re placed for thousands of years is because there are rules. And what I find so powerful and so beautiful and inspiring is that y’all are the youngest leaders in your community, but you’re bringing forward some of the oldest rules.

Would you share a bit about the Cherokee value system and principles of doing good? What did you learn about Cherokee values in the process of bringing about this good work? And for people that aren’t familiar with Cherokee, if you could help them understand the rules that you all live by.

JASMINE: That’s actually how we start our resolution off, we list the Cherokee values that correlate with the resolution itself. And that’s what we try to encompass in everything we do, as a tribe, as NAIWA Daughters, and just as people. And understanding that everything we do reflects our ancestors’ sacrifices. It’s also things like meeting people, making connections, supporting one another. Those are all Cherokee concepts. And it’s the little things that amount to the big successes. And without partnerships, conversations, and reciprocity, work and relationships, we wouldn’t have been able to get this resolution going and finished.

Throughout this process, we made sure to uphold those values with everything. When we’re talking to elders, we make sure we’re listening more than talking, and soaking up the knowledge, sitting in space with them. Talking to educators and attorneys in this process, how can we make sure that our words are translated into legal government systems today? 

One of my favorite things about our language that I find so fascinating is that you see how our values are built into just the way we communicate, and understanding relationship and reciprocity, and all of those components. Two examples are how in Cherokee “root”, in direct translation, means “to help”. And for basket, whenever you’re talking about making a basket, you never say, “I made a basket,” you always say, “I mended wood to sculpt this object.” It’s that understanding that we utilize these things but it’s a relationship we have with them, and respecting that, so anything we do, every time we speak our language, throughout this process, it’s going back to those values. And everything we do we need to do the right way. 

We really learned that through this process, and doing anything with NAIWA Daughters, making sure our projects instill those values. That’s one of the things the girls were talking about when we first started, is why doesn’t our tribe already have these things built into our constitution, and have them as the basis of our tribe? This is what the youth are supposed to be doing today, this is our job. We get to bring these values back and be the leaders that we need today, and be the future leaders our tribe needs.

BRITT: That’s beautiful. What’s next for you all?

JASMINE: What’s next, specifically for Rights of Nature, is the dam project. We have this resolution put in place; it lays the foundation for anything environmental, anything talking about land or water, we can always refer back to this. It’s great to know that because we’ve effectively made it possible for so many other projects. That’s one of the bigger things coming up for NAIWA Daughters. But outside of our priority projects, we’re speaking at conferences on Rights of Nature, and empowering other youth.

BRITT: What is your call to action or advice or counsel, especially for young people? You were inspired by a group of young people who did something in their tribe; you went home, you made it uniquely yours and did it in your way, and have had beautiful outcomes already would be your message to youth in Indian Country.

JASMINE: Sitting with the Mashpee NEA and learning about their efforts for the rights of the herring was so helpful, having those conversations and understanding, what to expect if something happens, what’s your counter. But it also creates a community, a network of Rights of Nature advocates. That’s one of the things that we really wanted to voice, is while NAIWA Daughters is doing work, we’re always open to supporting youth and giving guidance, and helping out, because Rights of Nature is so important; we want to support other tribes.

What I love about having conversations with youth and empowering them is that they can always do it better than we did. My advice for youth is never, never give up on the work, because you’re not just advocating for other youth now; you’re advocating for youth in the future. 

Community is one of the biggest things. If it’s hard, creating a network and making relations makes it so much easier. Garner support. We had support from people who weren’t even from or non-Native companies and organizations. If their values are the same as ours, and they want to partner, creating a network of supporters outside of the tribe is really helpful when we’re talking about sovereignty and having people in the community that can support and uphold the work. 

It’s important to advocate for our waterways, and to effectively make Mother Nature whole and healthy all together, we have to create these networks. It’s good here, but it also has to be good here, and over there. We’re doing it for not my sixth grandchild, but my great, great, great, great, great, great-grandchild that I’ll never meet. Knowing that I made a difference and made their life better. You do it to honor your ancestors, because they made sacrifices for you to be where you are, and you have to do the same for future generations.

Honestly, it gives me chills sometimes just talking about it, because before the Long Person Resolution, I had an innate connection with water, but now it’s different. It’s more of a “I see you, and you see me” deeper relationship, and knowing you’ve protected me for so long, I’m going to give back in a time when you need it. It’s understanding if your ancestor speaks to you and you get this feeling to keep going. That was really our fuel to do this, and understanding that it’s meant to be and it just takes time.

The post Speaking with Youth who are Speaking for the Voiceless: A Conversation with Jasmine Smith appeared first on Bioneers.

Featuring

Saru Jayaraman (JD, Yale, MPP Harvard), an academic at UC Berkeley and a renowned labor activist, is President of One Fair Wage, which organizes to raise wages and end sub-minimum wages nationwide. She is author of: Behind the Kitchen Door; Forked: A New Standard for American Dining; and One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America.

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Kenny Ausubel
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): In his book Goliath’s Curse, researcher Luke Kemp at Cambridge University looks at the rise and collapse of over 400 societies over the past 5,000 years. At the center of every collapse is extreme inequality caused by wealth extraction by the one percent. As inequality spikes, these increasingly hollowed-out societies become acutely vulnerable to shocks, collapses and rebellions.

Fast-forward to Peak Inequality in the U.S. in 2026. The Goliath wealth pump has been cranking at warp speed to extract the biggest wealth transfer in history from bottom to top. They want to have their cake and eat yours too.

The world’s 12 richest billionaires have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. The top one percent control $58 trillion in assets, more than the combined GDPs of the U.S. and China. That’s more than enough to eliminate global poverty 22 times over.

About three to five giant corporations dominate around 80% of almost every industry and marketplace. About 60% of rising costs since the pandemic can be attributed to corporate “greedflation.” “All that the market will bear,” as the Robber Barons fondly put it.

While basic living costs balloon, savage policies are shredding the social safety net and workers’ rights, hurling people into economic free fall. Labor’s share of income is the lowest since the Great Depression.

But when the mass immiseration becomes this extreme, people fight back against Goliath.

This is the terrain where labor organizer Saru Jayaraman takes her stand. As founder and president of One Fair Wage, a national organization of over 300,000 restaurant and service workers, 1000 restaurant owners, and organizations, she leads campaigns to raise wages and end all subminimum wages nationwide. She spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Saru Jayaraman (SJ): I have been organizing for 25 years and represent an industry, the restaurant industry, which is 13.6 million people in the United States who work in the lowest wage jobs in the United States. The largest employer of women and people of color, and youth and immigrants, and pretty much all of us, gets to pay $2.13 an hour in 2026.

When half of America cannot afford to feed themselves, their families to survive, they also cannot engage politically, and as long as they are paid the wages they are paid, as long as they’re working three jobs instead of one, and as long as they do not see any reason to vote because the people in power, the people who run all represent the antithesis of everything they need and stand for. [APPLAUSE] 

So I’ve been sharing this and facing a lot of push-back. In 2024, when we were trying to raise money to put wage increases on the ballot in key states like Arizona and Michigan, donors told me that’s cute, you’re trying to raise wages. We’re trying to save democracy. And I had a really hard time trying to explain to people that raising wages is saving democracy. [APPLAUSE] It is the same thing, because there is no world in which democracy can function with these incredibly high levels of inequality. And I’m sad to say we haven’t heeded the warnings that working people have been trying to tell us for so long. We’re in a moment when working people either stayed home or went the other way because we didn’t listen; we didn’t pay attention; we did not say your lives matter. 

Host: Saru and her organization are traveling around the country, organizing meetings and rallies with the Living Wage for All Coalition. In every state, workers are joining and telling their stories…

Johannah: My name is Johannah Alabi. I am a CN certified nursing assistant from Connecticut. I dedicate 15 years to this work caring for those who cannot care for themselves. But today I stand before you not just as a CNA, but someone who is struggling… I have 2 fulltime jobs over 80 hours a week just to make ends meet. I do not have a day off. I make under $25 an hour at both jobs even with my experience. I work endlessly to provide for my kids, but we just make it. My wages cover food and roof over our head. But there’s nothing left over for savings or for emergency. Caregivers are working 60, 70, 80, even 100 hours a week to make ends meet. This is not sustainable. This is not respect. That is not care. It’s time for $25 an hour minimum wage for all. Thank you so much! [CHANTING]

Silvy: My name is Silvy, I’m from Bridgeport Connecticut. I’ve been bartending since 2018. I work hard, I work long hours, sometimes up to 13 hours a day. My base pay is $8 an hour, which is $8 less than the Connecticut state minimum wage. It hasn’t changed since the cost of living has skyrocketed. Service workers are often grouped under unskilled labor and we are told that our work isn’t valued much. And when profit is the dominant interest at large, it will only be service workers who are paid less than they’re worth. I ask that we are paid the full minimum wage plus tips. We are human beings who deserve to be paid a living wage! No less than $25 an hour. Thank you!

Host: There’s not a single state, city or county where a full-time worker making the minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom rental. Roughly half of Americans can’t afford a thousand-dollar emergency. Poverty is now the fourth leading cause of death.

As director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, Saru witnesses the real-world human costs of these chilling statistics every day. She’s authored several books, including One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America. She’s working with over 100 labor and community organizations on a Living Wage for All campaign to address the twin affordability and democracy crises.

She knows that the affordability crisis is actually a billionaire crisis, which in turn is a democracy crisis. The most unequal countries are seven times more likely to experience democratic backsliding or autocracy.

Raising wages is not a left-right issue – it’s a top and bottom issue. Meanwhile, she says, both major political parties play a cynical game of political football that sidesteps tackling the imperative for a living wage.

SJ: We were struck by a series of USA Today articles that came out documenting a rumor video that the right had been circulating among MAGA voters saying that Donald Trump had already raised the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour. The videos were so popular and gained so much attention among right-wing voters. 

Now, we all know it’s a lie, and they lie all day. No big deal. That’s not the news here. The news here is that they didn’t say Donald Trump raised the wage to 15 or 17 or 20. They said he raised it to $25 an hour, which is the least you need to live anywhere in the United States of America right now. The MIT Living Wage calculator says the cheapest county in the U.S. is McLennan County, Texas, and you need $25 to survive. So they picked the very number that affects all of us, including MAGA voters. 

When I saw these articles, I said we have a five-alarm fire. The right is talking about 25 and agitating their base about 25, and the left is stuck on 17, some places 15. And I gotta tell you, this is why people hate us. People hate us because they see us negotiating against ourselves before we even get to the room. [APPLAUSE] They see us arguing for half a loaf. 

Even as I’ve started talking, I’m sure there are people in the room who, some part of their brain is saying, “What about small business?” “What about will the economy survive?” “Can we manage 25?” And I’m not blaming you. That is what you have been fed your entire lives. But we negotiate against ourselves before we even tell working people we are fighting for you; we are fighting for the full loaf, not half a loaf. We know what it takes, and it’s no less than 25. So it is time for a living wage for all, a floor of 25. Let higher cost regions go to 30 and higher.

So we polled across red, blue and purple districts – overwhelmingly popular. And I gotta tell you, people are so angry right now. If you tell them we can’t raise the wage, prices will go up, they say, “What are you talking about? Prices have already gone up!” The only price that hasn’t gone up is the price of human beings. 

We have to give people some sense of hope that a different future is on the horizon, one in which they can survive, and, yes, maybe thrive.

Host: Taxpayers are subsidizing wages because companies refuse to pay a living wage or provide enough hours. Saru Jayaraman says that while it’s clear a living wage is essential for people to survive and thrive, the general focus of politicians has been only on reducing costs and inflation.

SJ: There’s so much talk about affordability, but most of it is “bring costs down”, “freeze the rent”, “affordable childcare”, “affordable healthcare”. Nobody is saying those things aren’t essential, critical, important and there is no world in which we achieve affordability by simply bringing costs down. 

Look at inflation over the last 75 years. It has never come down. It has never gone backwards. Do you know that now half of Americans earn less than $25 an hour? Half of America earns less than what it costs to live in the cheapest place in the United States of America. So half of America thinks maybe things are okay, and half of America has been in a five-alarm fire for a very long time. 

And if you look at the last six years in particular since the pandemic, it is double or triple the level of inflation of the last 75 years. So this is not the stagflation of the ‘70s. This is not anything we have ever experienced as a country. This is unprecedented. Unprecedented affordability crisis means an unprecedented democracy crisis, means unprecedented crisis, period.

I have heard from so many older people: I am so sad to say that the young people in my life will never leave the house. Because they can never afford to! And that’s a funny thing and a heartbreaking thing because the California budget office just reported recently that a new trend we’re seeing among minimum wage workers is that young people are deciding never to have children because they can’t afford to; they can’t imagine a life where they could actually afford their own place and have their own children. How heartbreaking is it that we are denying the next generation the ability to have kids? 

Host: Saru says that ensuring a living wage for everyone is a popular policy, but big business often discourages that support by repeating the false claim that raising wages will hurt small businesses.

SJ: It’s, you know, fair game and exciting and popular for everybody to say billionaires, trillionaires. I think there’s still this reverence for small business over people that is used by the billionaires and the trillionaires and the corporations to get even the most progressive people on our side to shy away from raising wages. 

And so, let us push our representatives, even our best friends, to say this cannot be a one-sided conversation. It has to be about prices and paychecks. It has to be about, yes, bringing costs down or freezing them, but life will never be affordable unless people have enough money in their pockets. 

Host: We’ll hear more from Saru Jayaraman when we return.

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Host: Extreme concentration of wealth leads to extreme concentration of power. In 2024, just a hundred billionaire families poured two billion dollars into U.S. federal elections. That’s about a 160-fold increase since the Supreme Court passed Citizens United in 2010, allowing unlimited dark money to be poured into elections. A billionaire is 4,000 times more likely to run for office than a regular citizen. Few policies pass that they don’t want.

The National Restaurant Association – the extremely powerful corporate lobby that’s often referred to as “the other NRA” – continues to wage class war on restaurant workers by swaying state and federal policy. It came about in 1919 with the express intent of being able to hire newly freed Black women after Emancipation, not pay them, and have them live only on tips. That is the origin story of the miniscule $2.13 an hour wage for restaurant workers today.

SJ: Since 1938, when FDR first – created the first federal minimum wage in the United States, you have to know that the opposition has used the exact same arguments over and over again for a century – “prices will go up, jobs will be lost, people will lose hours, small businesses will close, and the economy will tank”. Right? Whole industries will collapse. Same thing over and over and over and over again. 

Your restaurant didn’t need to raise prices, they just did. And, you know, the National Restaurant Association’s own data shows there’s a natural closure of about 20 percent of all restaurants every year, but when the wages go up, they’ll pull those restaurants in particular and say, look, they closed because of this. 

Prices have not actually gone up that dramatically each time we’ve raised the wage. In fact, I did a study with another professor here at UC Davis, and the title of the study was—at the time, this was way back when we were doing Fight for 15 and all the same arguments came up, prices are going to go up, jobs will be lost, blah, blah, blah, and we—the title of this study was A Dime a Day, because we studied—if you gave every worker in the food system, from farm workers up to restaurant workers $15 an hour, how much more would it cost the average consumer, and the answer was a dime a day. It’s not a dollar to dollar increase, y’all. 

Our calculation is it’s about, at most, at 10 percent over many years. None of the wage increases, none of the bills we’re moving raise the wage overnight. We can afford that, especially we can afford that if we’re earning enough to consume. 

Host: Saru says it’s well documented that countless initiatives across the country to create living wage policies have been stymied by the same tactics of disinformation, intimidation, and fear that the National Restaurant Association has deployed for decades. Even minor wage increases in Blue states have often been rolled back – by both political parties.

SJ: We’ll have hearings in blue states, very Trifecta blue states – Colorado, Maryland, New York – and the restaurant association will require all workers to attend a pre-shift meeting, and tell them, listen, the legislators are trying to take your tips away. Right? When the law is: Let’s raise the wage to a full minimum wage with tips on top. “The legislators are trying to take your tips away, so we’re going to shut down the restaurant, pay you all $15 an hour”, which, by the way, they could never afford to pay normally, because they normally pay $3 in the very blue state of Maryland. $2 in the very blue state of New Mexico. You know? Most of the country, it’s 2, and 3, and 4. And they’re like, you know, this law is about taking your tips away, so we’re going to shut down the restaurant, pay all of you. Come, come—you know, and then it’s 75 or 100 workers getting up one by one: “Please don’t take my tips away.” 

And we do everything in our power to get workers to come to say, “No, I need a raise!”, which the overwhelming majority, of course, of workers want. But those workers are working three jobs and terrified of showing up with their name and their face, and their employers see it. So democracy doesn’t work when the majority of people are unable or terrified to come speak up. And then a minority of people are paid to come speak for their bosses. Right? 

And the Democrats, I don’t believe they’re this dumb. Maybe they’re this dumb. But their response is, oh, we can’t do this because workers don’t want it. And I really believe it’s a good excuse, or maybe they are that dumb to be taken in by what we call an AstroTurf campaign, right, Fake grassroots campaign. 

But that’s been my experience of democracy, is Democrats blocking wage increases because of the restaurant association, rolling back—Do you know in 2025, as the affordability crisis became the thing that everybody understood, it was Democrats, who for the first time in United States history, rolled back workers’ wages, cut them in half in Michigan, in Colorado, in DC, in Chicago. I could say state after state. Republicans would never touch this with a ten-foot pole, because turning back workers’ wages they would always consider to be political suicide. Democrats thought it was okay because we have not created the consequences for those Democrats. 

Do you know what the Republican stand on minimum wage is? It’s not leave it where it is. I mean, I’ve debated them on The New York Times podcast. Their stance is there should not be a minimum wage. The free market should take care of wages. They never negotiate—Do you think they sit in a room with policy wonks and say, “What’s acceptable? What’s feasible? What’s palatable?” before they come out and say there shouldn’t be a minimum wage? No. They don’t care. They will say exactly what they need and want. 

So this has been my experience of democracy. What would it look like in a real democracy? In a real democracy, workers would be able to have one job instead of three. They could show up en masse and say, oh, take your hands off our wages. If we can make it a big deal in the policy arena, then we see workers who’ve been afraid start to talk about it with one another. If you are alone in a workplace and you’re like, we deserve $30, and nobody else is talking about $30, it becomes really, really hard. But if it’s on the television and everybody’s talking about it, suddenly it becomes something we can talk about. “You know? Let’s talk about it. Do you think we’re worth $30, first of all? Hell yeah, we’re worth $30.” They could overpower any lies or AstroTurf campaign, and they would be listened to. That’s what democracy would look like; that’s why it would be important. 

Host: More and more people are seeing the reason they’re sicker, poorer, and chronically insecure is the giant sucking sound of the Goliath wealth pump.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Congress could make policy changes, like an embarrassingly modest wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires, which would raise an annual estimated $414 billion for social programs and fighting poverty. Remember, from WWII until 1980, the top marginal tax rate in the U.S. was 81%.

But the most effective, lasting change comes from the grassroots. Saru Jayaraman calls for a bold, proactive vision that unites working people across the country and that addresses their key concern: the cost of living.

SJ: I know there’s a lot to be unhappy about, I know there’s a lot to cry about, there’s a lot to be angry about, there’s a lot to defend. Yet if all we do is defense, we will lose. 

But I have to tell you in terms of democracy, I have been hearing so often from our members across the country, if I ask them, ‘Come to Saturday’s rally, No Kings; help us save democracy,’ they’ll say, “Save democracy? I earn $3. I work three jobs. What has democracy done for me lately?” 

And I have asked workers: What would you do? What would you do if you actually had the capacity to engage in the democratic process? If you had one job instead of three, if you could engage politically, what would you work on? Do you know what they tell me time and time again? They say the climate crisis. 

Working people live in the communities that are most impacted by environmental crisis. So of course they care, but they do not have the capacity, again, nor do they see people in power doing or speaking to anything that represents them or resonates with them, or frankly addresses the top need they have, which is the cost of living. 

As sad as this moment is, there’s a moment of opportunity where the pendulum could swing in the exact opposite direction. And yes, they would have time to engage on the issue they said they would engage on if they had capacity, which is the climate crisis. 

What’s so hopeful to me is that when I travel the country, I’m in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or even the South, every red, blue, and purple district, the one thing I find working people across the political spectrum can agree on is if you work, you deserve to earn enough to feed your family, to have a roof over your head, maybe even to take a vacation. What a concept. 

But I really want to ask you to join me in stopping this notion of “saving democracy”. It’s not working. It didn’t work in 2024. The messages we were told – “you’re wrong, the economy is working; you’re wrong, there’s so much that we’ve done, we’re just not messaging it right.” No! No! You know what the best message is for working people? Delivering. Delivering on the things that allow them to survive and thrive and live. 

So that is why I feel such deep urgency to work with you to deliver, to deliver on wage increases that will put more money in peoples’ pockets, that will give people a sense of hope. And, yes, together, building a different future in which all of us can thrive. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] 

Host: Saru Jayaraman, “Saving Democracy Means Ending Extreme Inequality.”

The post Saving Democracy Means Ending Extreme Inequality appeared first on Bioneers.

These are not separate emergencies. They are the same failure, showing up at different scales — systems that were never built to protect the most vulnerable, and the people stepping in, often without pay or institutional backing, to hold the line anyway.

The following conversation brings together four women doing that work from radically different vantage points: Brandi Gates-Burgess, founder of Breast Friends Lactation and Support Services, who has spent her career closing the breastfeeding gap in Black communities across the Bay Area; Sandra Adler Killen, an ER and pediatric nurse who has deployed to Gaza three times to train local clinicians in infant nutrition and lactation care amid famine and mass casualty; and Dr. Cindy Nelly, a global health consultant and midwife who has spent 25 years building health systems in conflict zones from Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza. They were brought together by Sandra, and guided in conversation by journalist Tiffany McElroy.

What emerges is not a comparison of suffering, but something more like a shared diagnosis of what happens when the people closest to a crisis aren’t the ones being listened to, and what changes when they finally are.

What follows is an edited excerpt of a conversation recorded at the Bioneers 2026 conference.

TIFFANY: My first question is for all of you: why did you choose to get into the specific work you’re doing right now? Brandi, let’s start with you.

BRANDI: Black women are least likely to breastfeed their babies. There are enormous health disparities behind that fact, and it’s what drew me into this work.

I was 21, in college at UC Riverside, when I had my daughter. I breastfed her because I was a broke college student — but once I learned how critical breastfeeding is to Black maternal health, and how much it reduces infant mortality, I knew I had to get the word out. I changed my major to sociology so I could understand how these outcomes were shaping Black birth in this country.

The numbers are what convinced me this was my life’s work: Black women and birthing people are three times more likely to die in childbirth than any other race or ethnicity. If we can get Black families to breastfeed for at least six months, it changes the health trajectory of an entire community — lower rates of diabetes, asthma, allergies, obesity, breast cancer. Once I understood that, the mission became simple: We support each other, and we get moms breastfeeding for at least six months.

In 2023, I launched Breast Friends Lactation to bring that support to low-income families in the Bay Area, specifically pairing them with lactation consultants who look like them and understand what it means to navigate motherhood as a Black woman in America. We’ve been at it ever since, and we’re booked solid.

SANDRA: Nursing is actually my fifth career. I came to it late — I became a nurse at 50, after working in several very different fields, because I wanted to dedicate myself to this work. I worked as an ER nurse and a postpartum nurse, and I’d always wanted to do lactation support. I breastfed my own two children and saw firsthand the health benefits, the bonding, how emotionally powerful it was. So I became an IBCLC, just like Brandi.

For many years now, I’ve done international humanitarian work, first in Syria and Lebanon with refugee populations, and for the last two years in Gaza, training neonatologists, pediatricians, OB/GYNs, midwives, doctors, and nurses to deliver this kind of support in some of the most challenging environments imaginable.

CINDY: My own path, I’ll admit, wasn’t especially altruistic at the start. I began traveling early, and as someone very privileged to be able to do that, I started noticing the disparities around me. I wanted to keep traveling, but I wanted it to mean something — to give something back to the communities I was moving through. If I don’t have a plane ticket in hand, I get anxious. I just need to be on the road.

Then I had my daughter at 23. I chose a midwife without really thinking about why, but my great-grandmother had been a midwife, and somehow, through whatever force that is, maternal lineage, I knew that was how I needed to give birth. My first career had actually been in environmental science, but in that moment of giving birth, with that connection to my midwife, I realized: This is what I want to do.

As healthcare providers, we have incredible privilege. We’re present with people during the most painful, and sometimes the most joyful, most intimate moments of their lives. When else do we get that? It’s sacred. We can find that connection with trees, with plants, with nature — but connecting human to human in such a vulnerable space is powerful in a different way.

TIFFANY: In so many systems, especially healthcare, it feels like the most vulnerable end up working against the odds the system creates. Brandi, can you talk about why breastfeeding matters so much in the Black community, and what the barriers are? And then Sandy and Cindy, I’d love to hear why breastfeeding matters even amid everything going on in conflict zones.

BRANDI: Breastfeeding is a safety net for every baby. Every baby deserves their birthing parent’s milk — it’s uniquely designed for that specific baby. Throughout pregnancy, the body is creating the optimal food for that particular child. We do families a disservice when we say formula is just as good. I tell my clients: Formula is good if a baby doesn’t have a mother. But if they have one, that baby should be fed her milk, because it’s built specifically for them.

That said, there are real barriers here in America — not just for Black families, but for everyone. One is our reflex toward medical intervention at every step. We’ve forgotten what normal newborn behavior and weight loss actually look like, so we over-supplement early on. That first month is critical for establishing milk supply for the entire breastfeeding journey. If it’s not established properly, families end up needing donor milk or formula to make up the gap.

Another barrier is that we have no paid maternity leave. We live in a country where you can’t legally separate a puppy from its mother before eight weeks, but we tell a woman her body isn’t healed and she still has to return to work at six. During COVID, we proved this doesn’t have to be the case. People were paid to stay home. If we can do that, we can provide six months of paid maternity leave. Instead, in the U.S., many people don’t even get six weeks; some go back after two.

Formula companies also heavily target Black and Brown families. We already have high cesarean rates, and when someone feels like their body “failed” at birth, that insecurity carries over into feeding. So when a formula ad shows up on Instagram or TikTok asking, “Is your baby getting enough?”, it lands. That’s how formula gets introduced, along with the early risks that come with it: allergens, digestive issues, and more.

These barriers hit the Black community hardest, but really, all women and birthing people in America face them — the lack of paid leave, and the early, unnecessary push toward formula.

SANDRA: I’ll speak to Gaza specifically. Many of you already know, from the news, what’s transpired there — periods of starvation, no food, no medical supplies. Add in environmental factors like asbestos and munitions exposure, plus malnutrition, stress, and PTSD, and it’s a perfect storm for infant mortality and morbidity.

Culturally, families have their own traditions and religious practices around infant feeding. I’m not Muslim myself, but I’ve learned a great deal about Islamic tradition, including that Muhammad called for breastfeeding for two years, long before Western medical bodies caught up with that same recommendation. I use that with the families I work with, because there’s often a fear that their milk isn’t good enough, or that they’ll pass on toxins to their baby. We’re seeing high rates of cleft lip and palate, congenital birth defects, prematurity, and extremely low birth weight.

When aid does get in, one of the first things allowed through is formula in massive quantities. I believe that’s not an accident. Poorer health outcomes follow. I’d go so far as to say that using formula this way is itself a strategy of this genocide.

I’ve worked with well-meaning clinicians and surgeons who hear formula is needed and bring it in their luggage — and I have had to tell them, directly, not to. Their intent is to place a can of formula at every mother’s bedside immediately after delivery. But once formula is introduced, milk supply drops and health outcomes worsen. I had to work directly with hospital directors at al-Aqsa Hospital, Al-Shifa Hospital, and facilities in Gaza City to stop well-meaning charities from distributing formula this way. Formula is medicine. We use it when it’s medically necessary, not as a default.

CINDY: You can’t talk about formula without talking about water. Globally, one in four health centers lacks access to clean water — water that’s often used to mix formula.

That’s before you even get to displacement camps or rural areas.

And this isn’t only a Global South problem. In the U.S., we have water deserts — over two million people without access to safe water. Combine unsafe water with formula feeding, and you get the full range of illnesses that come with it. Those two issues are inseparable.

But there’s real hope, too. Milk banks are one of the most incredible developments I’ve seen. There’s one in Gaza. I saw it firsthand in the NICU, and the team there was rightly proud of what they’d built. A milk bank is where a mother with an abundant supply, or one who has lost her baby, continues pumping and donates that milk to other infants who need it.

CINDY: Domestically, we face this too. At the tertiary care hospital where I work — where we take care of the sickest of the sick babies, many requiring surgery and immediate intervention — we have a milk bank, but more barriers than systems to support it.

Policy around safe milk banking in the U.S. is something we need to take seriously. And globally, there’s a tendency to assume that in places facing poverty or crisis, something like a milk bank is too ambitious, even a privilege. It’s not — it’s fundamental. In fact, we have a lot to learn from systems already in place. I think of Pumwani, in Africa, which delivers over 20,000 babies a year and has an incredible milk bank system. That’s a model worth studying, not underestimating.

TIFFANY: Brandi, tell us about your nonprofit. How do you get women excited about breastfeeding, and what connections do you help them make?

BRANDI: My nonprofit is Breast Friends Lactation and Support Services. We now run eight support groups throughout the Bay Area — in Richmond, Concord, Pittsburg, West Oakland, Fruitvale, San Leandro, San Francisco, and Rancho Cordova — providing in-home lactation support for Black and Brown families. We have four lactation consultants who go directly into people’s homes. If a client reaches out, they don’t even need to see a doctor first. We bring everything with us: a scale, pillows, formula if it’s needed for weight issues, nipple shields, feeding tubes, syringes, ice packs. It’s basically a lactation office in a suitcase.

We also run a peer support program built on a workforce development model: We take mothers from the community who’ve successfully breastfed for a year — our goal for every family — and train them through the USDA’s Loving Support peer counselor model, which includes 20 hours of lactation-specific education. They go on to work as peer counselors themselves.

We’re entirely grant- and donation-funded. Our peer counselors call clients weekly for the first eight weeks to make sure breastfeeding gets off to a strong start, and even if a client doesn’t pick up, we send text check-ins — “Congratulations, you made it through the first two weeks. Your baby may start feeding more frequently, so this is a great time for skin-to-skin contact” — so they’re still getting guidance either way.

We also run a “latchline,” our version of a breastfeeding warmline, available by call or text every day from 7am to 7pm, and a NICU support group for families with babies in intensive care. And we train birth workers directly — doulas, nurses, pediatricians, midwives — because they don’t always have the lactation-specific knowledge to catch red flags early. Instead of a provider saying, “Your baby’s losing weight, here’s some formula,” we want them saying, “Let’s get you to a lactation consultant and start pumping” before jumping straight to supplementation.

Our groups are open to the whole community, but they’re intentionally tailored to Black families, because our goal is to increase Black breastfeeding rates specifically — creating a safe space that’s led mother to mother, peer to peer.

Most recently, we launched DABS — Dads About Breastfeeding — a support group from the father’s perspective, led by my husband, who I had trained as a peer counselor. Dads often feel left out of the feeding journey, so DABS gives them a space to learn how to safely handle breast milk, assemble pumps, and support bottle-feeding — moving them from “I don’t know, he seems hungry, feed him more” to actually being part of the process. We launched it in October, and it’s already working well.

TIFFANY: Cindy, can you tell us about your work in the field? Brandi walked us through her work with clients — I’m curious what your day-to-day looks like.

CINDY: I’ve spent the last six years working internationally. While most people were home during COVID, I wasn’t. I worked in over four countries during that time, building healthcare infrastructure at a senior level for the federal government, the WHO, and the UN.

My work now is focused on systems, specifically, where they’re broken.

It’s easy to celebrate rescuing people from crisis, whether it’s Katrina or Gaza, any conflict or natural disaster. But why do we keep having to rescue people in the first place? Why does that keep being the model, and where does it break down?

There’s a concept in global health called the Humanitarian Development Nexus. On one side, you have humanitarians — the “cowboys,” as they’re sometimes known, myself included at various points, working with organizations like MSF. We rush in and put a bandage on the hemorrhage. On the other side, you have development actors — organizations like USAID — implementing, or trying to implement, long-term policy and infrastructure. The problem is these two groups rarely coordinate. And the biggest failure, in my experience, is that neither group reliably listens to the people on the ground.

That’s the work I’m focused on now: How do we build systems that actually lead from the ground up? In Gaza, the Ministry of Health had produced a new maternal health protocol — remarkable, given it happened during a war. But it hadn’t been implemented. When I arrived, I spent the first two days doing nothing but listening. I didn’t rush in to deliver babies; that wasn’t my role. I just listened to the providers.

One issue that came up repeatedly was episiotomies — the surgical incision made during childbirth, cutting the perineal tissue between the vagina and anus. The new protocol said doctors shouldn’t be performing them routinely; the evidence doesn’t support it as standard practice. But every first-time mother was still getting one.

Think about what that means in context: A woman has this incision, then returns to a tent, sharing a bathroom with 300 other people. The tissue breaks down. Infection sets in. There are long-term consequences. I’ve seen this pattern before, in the DRC, in cases involving sexual violence. It’s not unique to Gaza; it’s a practice still happening in the U.S. too, despite decades of evidence against it.

The point is: Gaza’s government had already put out a policy ready to change this, during a war, no less — and plenty of people had come to help, but no one had taken the time to actually listen and act on it. Just by listening first, I was able to help the incredible providers already on the ground solve a problem they were already trying to solve, rather than showing up with outside ideas about what needed to change.

I still get texts from providers there — “Another first-time mom, no episiotomy.” The physicians were remarkably open; they just hadn’t had support in changing the practice.

SANDRA: I want to share something specific about my practice. The first time I went to Gaza, I was part of a team doing mass casualty support — treating gunshot wounds and explosion injuries — working out of tents in the Al-Mawasi area, near Khan Yunis. We became one of the medical points of care for that community: primary care, wound dressing changes, mothers giving birth, mothers with mastitis, babies with hypoglycemia. When those cases came in, I could help. I had the training. The local clinicians started asking, “Can you teach us this? We know nothing about it.”

So I put together a training proposal. I was fortunate that an NGO brought me on, because very few international humanitarian healthcare workers are allowed into Gaza — I believe it’s down to around 10 a week now, and since the war with Iran, even fewer, sometimes just one entry a week. Many people get denied.

My work is about capacity building. I go in, I listen, and I ask what they want to be trained in. Then I build that plan and teach with the goal of making myself obsolete. I’m not a white woman coming in with answers. I ask: What do you need? What do you want? I’ll educate you, keep coming back as long as you want me to. And when there’s peace, I’ll come back simply to visit.

CINDY: That’s exactly why I came when you asked me to. It sounds obvious, put that way, but you’d be surprised how many people go into this work with a different agenda entirely.

TIFFANY: I can imagine. What does the future of maternal health and reproductive care look like to each of you, and where do you find hope, given everything going on right now?

CINDY: Just recently, Representative Adams introduced what’s known as the Momnibus legislation — a reintroduction of a bill aimed directly at the fact that Black women in this country face three times the maternal mortality rate of other groups. Even in the middle of everything happening politically right now, people are still putting forward legislation to address that.

There’s also a push through the International Confederation of Midwives to train a million more midwives worldwide. Midwives, nurses, and IBCLCs are critical frontline infrastructure. The estimate is that expanding access to them, along with community health workers, could reduce maternal and child mortality by 67%. That’s a campaign worth joining.

Even in the darkest moments, grassroots organizations keep pushing good work forward. Those are two efforts close to my heart, especially working in the Southeast. I still don’t understand why we aren’t listening to Black and Brown mothers, or why we haven’t built a workforce of midwives, nurses, and IBCLCs that actually reflects the people giving birth. That’s on us — on me, too, as someone in this field.

BRANDI: There’s a bill right now — AB 2160 — that would let lactation consultants bill for our services like any other healthcare provider. That would matter enormously, because this work is so often unpaid; it’s done purely out of passion. Getting reimbursed for these services would make organizations like Breast Friends far more sustainable.

There’s still so much work to do in reproductive justice, and I don’t know how quickly things will change. But my hope is built on initiatives like these — more midwives, more lactation consultants, more community members stepping in, professional or not. I tell people all the time:

My dream is that you won’t need me. That we build a village again, where this knowledge — how to breastfeed, how to care for our babies — is just something we know and share with each other, the way it always used to be. My hope is that I put myself out of a job, because everyone already knows how.

SANDRA: When I was in Syria and Lebanon in 2023, working with internally displaced people and refugees — Palestinian and Syrian — women who weren’t nurses, midwives, or doctors, women who worked in building administration, would come up to me and ask if they could just sit in on my trainings. When I asked why, they’d say: “I just want to be the person in my camp that moms can come to for support.”

That’s what this comes down to. Whether it’s advocating for these bills, or being that person in your own community — it’s us. Change happens over time. It’s not a hundred-yard dash; it’s a marathon. We stay committed, we don’t give up, and we remember that even two minutes today, 20 minutes in three weeks, two hours next month, adds up. That sustained effort is what changes things.

The post The Village We Lost: Rebuilding Maternal Care From Gaza to Oakland appeared first on Bioneers.

This is Volume #29 of the Leading from the Feminine newsletter, a vibrant resource in the flourishing world of leading from the heart, hands and spirit.
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Why Maternal Care is a Justice Issue

Motherhood has become one of the defining fault lines of our time. From the dismantling of maternal health systems in Gaza to the ever-present crisis of Black maternal mortality in the U.S., the policies around and resources for caregiving are increasingly shaped by those who have the political and economic leverage to bypass restrictions created by our failing systems and institutions. Yet across these vastly different contexts and continents, the people at the center of intervention are often the same: midwives, nurses, lactation consultants, community organizers, and mothers themselves. 

From Gaza to Oakland, the work of nurturing mothers and children—and expectations around how mothers should nurture their children—reveal just how intimately braided social, environmental, and reproductive justice are. When maternal healthcare systems collapse, when clean water becomes scarce, and when communities lose the threads to traditional and intergenerational knowledge that once sustained them, the damage disrupts generations. These systems we’ve built often exploit both the planet and the people whose labor sustains it, especially women, caregivers, and communities on the frontlines of injustice.

These realities raise an urgent question for us all: what does it mean to care for life in a time of cascading crises? As ecosystems unravel, conflict displaces communities, and inequities deepen, the health of our societies is inseparable from the health of the living world. 

The most attuned solutions to ecological and social crises emerge by listening to the people closest to them. The Earth—our first mother—offers an abundance of models for generosity, interdependence, and regeneration. Nurse logs—old fallen trees—provide homes, water, and food for tiny new seedlings to grow. Fungi connect tree roots underground to trade water and nutrients through mycorrhizal networks. In wetlands marshes filter dirty water and renew the health of local rivers. These other mothers—the nurse logs, the tree roots, the wetlands—demonstrate how to sow the seeds of renewal and rebuild a village from the ground up. 

Their work challenges us to imagine a culture where care is recognized as essential infrastructure, where communities hold the wisdom to heal, and where the work of mothering, in all its forms, becomes a blueprint for building a more just and life-affirming future. It’s time to turn to our mothers and ask: what do you need in order to caretake safely, with dignity?

The following conversation brings together four women approaching this work from radically different vantage points: Brandi Gates-Burgess, founder of Breast Friends Lactation and Support Services, who has spent her career closing the breastfeeding gap in Black communities across the Bay Area; Sandra Adler Killen, an ER and pediatric nurse who has deployed to Gaza three times to train local clinicians in infant nutrition and lactation care amid famine and mass casualty; and Dr. Cindy Nelly, a global health consultant and midwife who has spent 25 years building health systems in conflict zones from Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza. Sandra brought everyone together, and journalist Tiffany McElroy facilitated the conversation.

What emerges is not a comparison of suffering, but something more like a shared diagnosis of what happens when the people closest to a crisis aren’t the ones being listened to, and what changes when they finally are.

What follows is an edited excerpt of a conversation recorded at the Bioneers 2026 conference.

TIFFANY: Why did you choose to get into the specific work you’re doing right now? Brandi, let’s start with you.

BRANDI: Black women are least likely to breastfeed their babies. There are enormous health disparities behind that fact, and it’s what drew me into this work.

I was 21, in college at UC Riverside, when I had my daughter. I breastfed her because I was a broke college student — but once I learned how critical breastfeeding is to Black maternal health, and how much it reduces infant mortality, I knew I had to get the word out. I changed my major to sociology so I could understand how these outcomes were shaping Black birth in this country.

The numbers are what convinced me this was my life’s work: Black women and birthing people are three times more likely to die in childbirth than any other race or ethnicity. If we can get Black families to breastfeed for at least six months, it changes the health trajectory of an entire community — lower rates of diabetes, asthma, allergies, obesity, breast cancer. Once I understood that, the mission became simple: We support each other, and we get moms breastfeeding for at least six months.

In 2023, I launched Breast Friends Lactation to bring that support to low-income families in the Bay Area, specifically pairing them with lactation consultants who look like them and understand what it means to navigate motherhood as a Black woman in America. We’ve been at it ever since, and we’re booked solid.

SANDRA: Nursing is actually my fifth career. I came to it late — I became a nurse at 50, after working in several very different fields, because I wanted to dedicate myself to this work. I worked as an ER nurse and a postpartum nurse, and I’d always wanted to do lactation support. I breastfed my own two children and saw firsthand the health benefits, the bonding, how emotionally powerful it was. So I became an IBCLC, just like Brandi.

For many years now, I’ve done international humanitarian work, first in Syria and Lebanon with refugee populations, and for the last two years in Gaza, training neonatologists, pediatricians, OB/GYNs, midwives, doctors, and nurses to deliver this kind of support in some of the most challenging environments imaginable.

CINDY: My own path, I’ll admit, wasn’t especially altruistic at the start. I began traveling early, and as someone very privileged to be able to do that, I started noticing the disparities around me. I wanted to keep traveling, but I wanted it to mean something — to give something back to the communities I was moving through. 

Then I had my daughter at 23. I chose a midwife without really thinking about why, but my great-grandmother had been a midwife, and somehow, through whatever force that is, maternal lineage, I knew that was how I needed to give birth. My first career had actually been in environmental science, but in that moment of giving birth, with that connection to my midwife, I realized: This is what I want to do.

As healthcare providers, we have incredible privilege. We’re present with people during the most painful, and sometimes the most joyful, most intimate moments of their lives. When else do we get that? It’s sacred. We can find that connection with trees, with plants, with nature — but connecting human to human in such a vulnerable space is powerful in a different way. 

For Further Complexity

We would be remiss in not touching on what often gets lost in the conversation around infant feeding: women’s choice. For some mothers, breastfeeding is an empowering and rewarding experience. For others, it can be physically difficult, medically contraindicated, or simply not possible.

Factors including low milk supply, infant feeding difficulties, workplace barriers, and the need to continue medications for mental or physical health can all shape feeding decisions. In these situations, discussions about infant nutrition can sometimes overlook the health, well-being, and autonomy of the mother herself. While public health messaging has emphasized the benefits of breastfeeding—which are real and substantial—many parents suffer from pressure and guilt when their circumstances do not align with that ideal. These considerations are especially relevant in communities where safe drinking water and infant formula are readily available, making formula feeding or combination feeding safe options. 

Holding these truths together means recognizing that promoting breastfeeding and centering maternal well-being are not competing priorities but complementary ones: children flourish when the women caring for them are healthy, supported, and empowered to make informed choices for themselves and their families. 

Some of the resources below offer additional perspectives on the complexities of infant feeding, including a “fed is best” perspective.

Featured Media

Watch: 

Indigenous Milk Is Medicine from director Missy Whiteman (Northern Arapaho and Kickapoo) and the American Indian Cancer Foundation

Andrea McLean on letting go of breastfeeding pressure from Giovanna Fletcher’s Happy Mum Happy Baby Podcast

Read: 

‘For the women who gave birth in the dark’: a portrait of motherhood in Gaza from The Guardian

When breast isn’t best by Laura Frances Callahan in Aeo

Listen:

Midwifing a Movement: Birth Centers and the Care Economy – Bioneers Radio & Podast episode

Trump Destroyed USAID. Now People Are Dying. Reveal Podcast episode

The post LFF Volume #29: Across Borders, a New Vision for Maternal Care appeared first on Bioneers.

Featuring

Anna Malaika Tubbs, Ph.D. is a bestselling author and leading multidisciplinary expert on race, gender, and equity. Her most recent bestselling book is Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us (2025).

Lisa Rudman, Partnership Director at the San Francisco Public Press, a local investigative newsroom, is a lesbian feminist journalist, media professional and environmentalist.

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Stephanie Welch and Emily Harris
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Producer: Teo Grossman
• Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): After 250 years of existence as a republic, the United States stands as a symbol of many things to many people. Some struggle every day to counter the popular notion that the U.S. is a thriving democracy. They work to shed light on how the country has always been separate and unequal for Black people and other people of color, and how the patriarchal structure that the founding fathers crafted from the very beginning remains firmly embedded in the systems that shape U.S. society.

As a scholar and author, Anna Malaika Tubbs has carefully studied how patriarchy and systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism intersect and reinforce one another.

In a conversation at a Bioneers Conference, Lisa Rudman, Partnership Director at the San Francisco Public Press, spoke with Anna Malaika Tubbs about her book Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us, and strategies to move beyond this deeply embedded and destructive system.

Lisa Rudman (LR): Anna is a New York Times best-selling author and multi-disciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender and equity, with a PhD in sociology and a Master’s in multi-disciplinary gender studies from the University of Cambridge, in addition to a Bachelor’s in medical anthropology from Stanford. You see why I wanted to go through this. [LAUGHTER]

Anna Malaika Tubbs (AMT): I’m just a nerd, just a proud nerd. [LAUGHTER] 

LR: Anna translates her academic knowledge into stories that are clear – that is true – and engaging.

Please join me in welcoming Anna Malaika Tubbs. [APPLAUSE] 

AMT: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. 

LR: You made a distinction earlier that I think is a good segue. You said, you know, in America, we like to talk about patriarchy everywhere else. You specifically talk about the brand of American patriarchy. I really want you to start there, and if you can define what you mean by both those words together, both those words separately, anywhere you want to take that.

AMT: Yes. I love defining it. It’s one of my favorite things to do. So thank you. And I’ll say, when I wanted to talk about American patriarchy, it’s not because I think that it’s the worst patriarchy in the world. I’m really not in the business of ranking patriarchies. They’re all bad. [LAUGHTER] We’ll just say that. But I think that we haven’t spoken as much about patriarchy in the United States. And I think that, from what I’ve observed and from what I’ve studied, patriarchy operates differently in each of the places that it exists. 

And so our definition of patriarchy has often really been reduced to this notion that it’s about men against women. That’s not the case. That’s not the definition of patriarchy. It’s actually about how we define who gets to be human in any nation, and that changes, right, from place to place. So patriarchy in the U.S. is different than patriarchy in India. It’s different than patriarchy in France. It’s different. 

And so, in the U.S., I point to the founding fathers, and that doesn’t mean that they created patriarchy. Right? Obviously, they’re taking from the monarchy, etc. But when we’re looking at each nation, we can really point to the leaders who chose patriarchy. So we have to remember patriarchy is not divine. It’s not the natural order. It wasn’t our first way of organizing ourselves. Right? Indigenous people organized themselves very differently. There still made of—might have been some elements of patriarchy, but it’s different than what we’re seeing right now. 

And so, in 1776, if we just all go back to look at the founding fathers for a second, they win the Revolutionary War. This is a surprise to everybody. They were the underdogs. They weren’t expecting to win. [LAUGHS] No one was really expecting them to win. Many of them were young men. They are very fearful that this revolutionary spirit is going to spread across this new nation, because they’re also oppressing a lot of people who they needed to win the Revolutionary War, so they’re oppressing the women in their lives, they’re certainly oppressing Indigenous people, they’re certainly oppressing people who are enslaved – Black people. So they’re very afraid of what happ—they’re oppressing poor people, poor farmers, especially. They’re afraid of what would happen if that revolution spreads. 

And so the period of time between writing—or the Declaration of Independence, winning the Revolutionary War, and then writing the Constitution, we all—we see several rebellions taking place, one of them, the most famous, being Shay’s Rebellion. It’s the thing that makes them want to go and write the Constitution, because they’re worried that they couldn’t actually quell this rebellion fast enough, and they want to form a national military, mainly inspired by and—a local conflict, not an international one. So they’re motivated to write the Constitution and decide who is going to get to have power in this nation. This is when we choose patriarchy – they do. And they say that they want to create a republic of men.

So the Constitution tells us that they are the ones that are going to get to own land. They are the ones that are going to get to vote. There’s a lot of other things they’re going to get to do, but these are two of the primary ones. They, on purpose, leave out women. And we see in the letters that they write to their mothers, to their wives, to their daughters, that women should not participate politically. They do not want that to happen. 

“Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight. I am sure every good Politician would plot, as long as he would against Despotism, Empire, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy, or Ochlocracy.”
Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776

Now this is not just a sign of the times, because there are other countries that are choosing differently. In fact, we see in France, not that women could vote, but that women could have Parisian salons where they talk about politics and voice their opinions, at the very least they’re allowed to talk about it. And Thomas Jefferson says that this is going to ruin France. And so he says, in particular in the United States, we will not repeat the mistakes of the French. 

So they’re aware there are other ways and other things that they could choose. They choose a republic of men.

So they define women as those who are simply meant to reproduce the power of men through children. This is where we get the binary in the United States, of—there’s a man that’s recognized, there’s woman that’s recognized. Clearly that’s leaving out a lot of people who they’re not recognizing as neither man nor woman, so they create a problematic binary. But then we have, in the Constitution, clauses to protect the institution of slavery. So they’re not including Black people in the definition that’s already limited of man and woman. They’re not including Indigenous populations. They’re not including immigrants from that point forward. They’re no longer including them. They’re not really including poor white people either. They make it up to the states to decide if people who don’t own property can vote. It was really important to some of the founding fathers it would only be people who could—who owned property who would be allowed to participate. 

So then all these people who are excluded from notion of man and woman are told: You’re not going to be treated as human beings, however, you may some day be treated as human beings if you assimilate to the two groups that are recognized. And if you do your part to protect this social order, then one day you might be able to ascend this made-up ladder of humanity. And that’s where the trick of so many people who are not included in it fully still support it, protect it, because they think some day they’ll be able to get there. 

And so all of American history can really be summarized by a group of people who loved that social order, who thought this is the way that this nation needs to be organized, who said that that was democracy, but it’s not democracy, because democracy means that power is vested in the people, all of the people. So we’ve not actually experienced that. So what we’ve actually experienced is American patriarchy. 

But then you have a part of American history, the other part of it, which were all the people who were not included but who did not fall for the trick, and who said: This is not good enough, this is not democracy; we can get closer to democracy. The more that we include people, then we will be closer to that ideal, and that has been the tug of war of American history ever since. 

LR: You have to. Yeah, I mean…[LAUGHTER] 

To your point about these structures and systems are not accidental, they get set up, they… give power and privilege to certain people, it’s not about a conspiracy, it’s saying this is not an accident. And so I’m going to ask you, how do you see, then, the structures and systems of white supremacy and racism interlocking with American patriarchy? Because even though this book is defining American patriarchy, I’m trying to think of gender binaryism and – it’s more than sexism. It’s really about everything underneath that umbrella. So how do you see those systems interlocking and working? And maybe there’s a story from the book that you want to refer to. 

AMT: Yeah. So I see American patriarchy encompassing all of those -isms, because if you’re saying that people who are enslaved are not counting as man or woman, that’s how we’re furthering the justification of racism in the United States. And if you’re saying that people who don’t own land cannot participate, that’s where we have classism. If we’re saying that in order for us to be human we must be man or woman, of course, you’re leaving out people who are non-binary, and you’re very specifically erasing many Indigenous belief systems that did recognize people beyond this gender binary. It’s where all of it kind of stems from under first telling us that you either have to be a man or a woman. 

And so, in a way, we’ve all been told that we’re kind of fighting for our right to be gendered in the United States, that gender becomes our path to humanity. But it’s not just gender, it’s white elite gender. So it is all of those things. That’s why American patriarchy is really unique. That’s where—That’s the difference. 

And as an example, if—in the example that I gave earlier, where the founding fathers are saying we are the ones who get to have power, we are the ones who get to have status, and the women in our lives are solely meant to reproduce that status through children, if we look instead at Black women at the time, Black women who are enslaved, the law was saying that their children were not children but were somebody else’s property, and that no matter how a Black woman came to have children – and we know that there horrific ways in which this has happened – no matter how, that child would always carry the status of the mother. So this is a direct opposite definition than what they’re showing of the white male. 

So this is why, in many ways historically, Black women have been seen as the antithesis of that power. But what I argue is that actually that, having been so separated from it, is the power that Black women hold, because if you were told by law you’re not a human being, your children are not human beings, in fact, you’re somebody else’s property, Black women don’t go, oh, well, if the law says it, it must be true. [LAUGHTER] Instead, you immediately wake up to the con, and you say this is BS, this is made up; I don’t believe you, and therefore I need to make up something else; I need to create new systems; I need to reclaim systems before patriarchy; and I need to make this nation worthy of me, worthy of my children. That is how progress has happened in the United States. That’s how change has happened. It’s not ever been that those who loved the original social order woke up one day and said: [SIGHS] I feel like giving people their rights today. You know? I’ve changed my mind. They deserve their rights. No. It’s been that those who did not have those rights guaranteed to them, they grabbed it with their hands, they fought, they bled, they sacrificed. They made it so that we made it to where we are today. 

And so when we’re having even conversations right now, where so many people are saying this is the worst it’s ever been, we don’t know what to do, that is just a complete misunderstanding of American history, quite frankly. This is a continuation of the pattern, and now we’re being called to fight like those who had to redefine and make new systems, and claim those rights and protect them. 

Host: More from Anna Malaika Tubbs and Lisa Rudman when we return…

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Host: Let’s return to the conversation with Anna Malaika Tubbs and Lisa Rudman… Waging a fundamental challenge to the American patriarchal system, Anna says, requires solidarity and looking to the long tradition of collective struggle in the United States, which has repeatedly confronted and reshaped American institutions.

Lisa asked Anna about the role of white women in sustaining and challenging patriarchal structures—a complicated dynamic, given that white women both benefit from, and are harmed by, those structures.

AMT: So white women…So the reason—And I will say it first, too. My mom was a white woman, so I’m also going to talk about the allyship of white women, but first I want to talk about the problematic part. A lot of people ask this question: Why are white women voting for Trump? Why are they protecting this? What is—You know, this is not in their best interests, and they’re voting against themselves, all those things. But if you understand American patriarchy, you understand that actually, in a lot of ways, they’re not, in their minds, voting against their interests, because in American patriarchy, they’re at least recognized, they’re seen. If we’re looking at the scale that I described, and you have the white elite man, and then you have the wife connected to him who has a role to play – you can talk about “trad wives” if we want to – she has a role to play in reproducing the power of that man. And we see that everyone else has just said you don’t get any of this recognition. Okay? Well, in that case, that person is saying I kind of would like to stay in this; I have some proximity to this power. 

So, similar to what I was saying earlier around how Black women were cast so far away from that power, that they see it very clearly; they’re not trying to fall for the trick, those who have any proximity to the power can be fooled. 

LR: A little more erased for them? 

AMT: Yeah. They can be closer to it. They want to replicate it. They want to protect it. They want to play their role in it. 

But that’s not all white women. And so in the book I also talk about allyship. I talk a lot about how my mom, in particular—it’s something that I took for granted because she’s my mom. I wasn’t really even thinking of her obviously in the sense of an ally, but the more I had conversations with people who struggled with allyship and what it means to be an ally, I realized that there was a lot that they could learn from my mom, because my mom never said to me that she knew, because she was a woman too, what it would be like to be a Black woman. Never. In fact, she said, “I don’t know what that is like, but I will do my part to learn; I will walk alongside you.” And similar to what I was saying earlier about Black mothers, she said, “I will do what I need to do to make this world worthy of you, my child.” And that’s allyship. 

So even if it doesn’t—you don’t feel like you know exactly that experience, you have to see what it means to change this world for all of us to be included. 

LR: And you don’t need to be stuck, if I can say, in the essentialism of who you are. You need to recognize that. You might feel guilty for a couple minutes, but guilt is not really motivating emotion, really—doesn’t really get you into change. But then you can decide where you want to be—What I always say, like, in relationship to struggle. And really, it’s beautiful what you said about your mother saying my relationship is to change the world to deserve you. 

You get to choose how you want to—and it might mean you have to give up some stuff to move away from that proximity to power, and to join with people who—who you know are really fighting for the new world. 

AMT: Yeah. And the thing is it’s this trick of power and what that means. Right? Everybody’s losing in this system. It’s hurting everybody. It’s hurting those who were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries. Even, you know, white men who seem to have it all, if they are not aware of the trick of this system, they’re actually experiencing really high levels of depression, drug dependency. People don’t realize there’s a lot of pain, no matter where you fall in this system. And that’s where those who have kind of woken up to it, to the con, choose allyship, choose let’s stop trying to ascend this ladder, it’s made up; the system isn’t working; let’s try to change the system versus let me try to thrive within it. 

LR: Yeah. And individually navigating a way as opposed to collectively seeing where liberation is. 

You talk about “breaking free”, so we want to talk about what we can do and how to actually work together. But I know that you have some more to say about men particularly, and fear, how fear motivates a certain amount of staying stuck in what’s not really even good for any humans. 

AMT: Yeah. I think that anything that comes from fear and insecurity is going to lead to control. It’s going to lead to having to silence parts of yourself that keep you from being vulnerable, that keep you from being an actual human being. You know, obviously the violence that’s been waged against women is not something that I’m trying to minimize by any means, and so much of that has come from men not being allowed to be fully human. And so there is just a conversation to be had there. 

And then in terms of the layers of how we start to break free from this, I think the first layer is it happens on a personal level. This book is deeply personal for a reason. I want the reader to also really take kind of—to see how it’s operating in your own life, first of all, how are you speaking about yourself to yourself. For many of us, we really have internalized the notion of I am supposed to be quiet, I am supposed to be in the background, I am supposed to allow somebody to talk to me any kind of way. Or we’ve internalized I’m supposed to dominate, people are supposed to listen to me— so what’s going on internally? That’s going to be really important as a step. And all of this can happen simultaneously, it doesn’t have to be one at a time. But internal work is really important. 

The second part is in our relationships, we may be replicating American patriarchy, whether that’s in our friendships, whether that’s in romantic relationships, certainly within parenting. If we look at our children and we’re thinking, actually, I need to just tell you how the world works right now, and you need to fit into that; or are asking them something June Jordan said is that “when a child is born, the world begins again”. And if we look at children in that way, instead we think what beautiful new world are they carrying, and how do I protect that as much as possible. That would be the opposite of American patriarchy. But if we’re saying to them: This is how things work, and this is how you need to do it, and this is the box you need to fit in, that’s one way in which we’re replicating it. So then we need to analyze it on that relationship level. 

The third level is really kind of one of the most important. This is the community level. This is where we see new systems forming all the time. This is actually where change happens always first, is at the community level. It doesn’t happen nationally first. It always happens where a neighbor sees a mother who needs help with childcare, and they help; where a person says, “It doesn’t make sense that children don’t have food,” and let’s say the Black Panther Party, they make free meal systems. Right? These are where we see the models of what the world could look like. If we look at American history and we look at Black American history in particular, the Black church was one example. There’s other issues with—we could talk about the Black church, but the good parts have been meeting the community needs and creating a nation within a nation. It’s why so many of the powerful orators in American history have come from Black church, because that was one of the first places where they were allowed to speak as human beings, and be taken seriously. 

And then, that’s when you actually start to see something take hold on a national level, because people have been able to see it operating. And so they then advocate for that on a political or policy level. And that’s really kind of like a fourth layer of change. 

So, yes, it can feel very daunting when you’re coming up against American patriarchy because it’s in all of our experiences. It’s in all of our systems. Every law that came out of this vision of insecurity, every—the medical system, you know, why Black women are dying at such high rates when they go in to give birth, all of it comes back to this. And we’re not just—None of us are going to solve this on our own. It’s not going to be one person who brings the solution to everything, but if we recognize that we’re a part of a larger team of people in this tug of war, and we recognize the needs of those around us, and we recognize that we actually have the power to always create something new in every single one of our interactions, you can start right away. 

And the final part is that when we talk about people saying: We don’t know what to do right now; this is so scary. I’m not minimizing how scary it is, I agree. It’s scary. It’s one of the scary times. But this is when you really learn how people have done this in the past. What did they create together in order to achieve change, in order for us to have many years of, honestly, privilege that we’ve forgotten what it means to be brave? This is the time to study them. We know how to live differently every single day. We have the tools, we have the stories. If we’re not doing so, that’s just our choice.  

Host: “Challenging American Patriarchy at Its Roots” with Anna Malaika Tubbs and Lisa Rudman

The post Challenging American Patriarchy at Its Roots appeared first on Bioneers.

NAOMI: We are living in a time of multiple crises. How do we understand what the polycrisis means for us?

RAJ: The idea of polycrisis is that it appears that there’s a whole bunch of very bad things happening at the same time: the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pandemic disease, catastrophic weather events, and a range of things that are a series of unfortunate events. That is, I think, a misunderstanding of the structural forces that are driving all of these events. 

Capitalism has always managed to patch up problems by extracting in new places, and finding new frontiers to open up. You see this process even happening now, where Elon Musk, for example, has a new frontier in low Earth orbit. He’s created a new space that’s monetized and is now his zone to be able to extract wealth from. He’s the king of low Earth orbit [with his company Space X], and he will be for a while. But there’s only so much deferring and fixing that can happen. 

Now, what we’re seeing is what happens when there’s no more cheapening of the world that can be done, and the climate crisis is not just bad, but getting worse. There was a terrifying paper in the Reviews of Geophysics two weeks ago that shows that the rate of climate change is going up; the world is not just heating, it’s heating up faster than we thought it was. 

On top of that, of course, we are seeing rising authoritarianism. The far right capturing our media, our means of attention. All of this is not an accident but precisely an outcome of a series of crises in capitalism that have been brewing for a while. 

When you hear polycrisis, sometimes you will hear a narrative that it’s just a really bad time, but it’s going to get better. But unfortunately you need a clear-eyed structural analysis to understand that, in fact, movements on the frontlines that are taking on the crisis understand this to be the outcome of decades, even centuries of capitalist accumulation. If you understand that, then you can understand why the imagination of what needs to come next is so radical, and in which lots of post-capitalist experiments are happening. 

One of the things that you need if you’re going to imagine a better world is a rocket fuel of joy. That’s why protests like the No Kings marches matter, even though at times they get criticized for not having a focused political agenda, while white supremacist organizations are undermining the state.

 But a protest, when it’s done right, is how we meet and intersect and listen to one another by meeting people who are not necessarily in our normal circle. I have to declare a preference here. I met my wife on a protest.

NAOMI: This might be the moment for Leah to talk about strategic optimism.

LEAH: I would like to bring Wendell Berry into the conversation. One of my favorite poems is the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto.” Please read it if you have not, there are many quotable lines.  The one that is relevant to this conversation is “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

At Soul Fire Farm, the way we situate our work as Afro-Indigenous regenerative agriculturalists is by feeding the community and training farmers. We’re builders. We’re building these institutions that inhabit the values we wish to see in the new world. But that can’t be the only strategy. 

I like the image of butterfly with each of its four wings representing aspects of transformative social justice: build, resist, reform, and heal with kinship at its center. Resist includes protests and civil disobedience. Reform is getting involved in the electoral politics and public education, and then heal. So we build, resist, reform, and heal with kincentricity at its center which fuels of our love, our connection, our Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” That helps us to envision a post-capitalist society.

I agree with Raj about the insanity of the growth imperative of a three percent compound growth on a finite planet is literally insane, and it is colonial, it is white supremacist, it is dualist, and the only way that we’re going to survive on this planet is in reciprocity with all the other beings that live here.

NAOMI: My daughter is now 23, but when she was 19 or so, we had the talk, and it’s not the talk you’re thinking. It was the climate catastrophe talk. If any parents have had to try to convince their child it’s worth going on with their hopes and dreams in this catastrophe, it’s a really hard. It’s much harder than the birds and the bees talk. 

 My daughter, bless her heart, was challenging me about optimism. What we decided together is something that we call strategic optimism.

 If you decide to be a pessimist, then the rational behavior would be some sort of hedonistic nihilism. You would be like let me accumulate as much as I can in the near term, bump everybody else; I’m just going to get mine because everything’s about to go up in flames. No long-term planning, no altruism, no generosity, no compassion. That’s sort of the logical extreme of this pessimistic, nihilistic viewpoint. 

If on the other hand you choose optimism as a practice – not as a feeling but as a practice – then your attitude is I’m going to get up today and I’m going to plant this crop, I’m going to feed my community, I’m going to sequester carbon in the soil, I’m going to look out for my neighbor. Maybe there is only an infinitesimal chance we will win. But in the meantime, today I can alleviate suffering for some beings in my immediate community, and tomorrow I can alleviate some more. And maybe, just maybe we can alleviate enough suffering that we’ll all survive together.

But if we don’t do that, there’s absolutely no hope. So we’ve decided in our family that this strategic optimism is our practice. It’s our discipline. The way that you get up and you take your vitamins, or you go on a run, or you brush your teeth. You get up and you decide to do whatever step it is on whatever wing of the butterfly you have access to help build that world that we want to see.

We talk about food justice. We talk about equity. We talk about sovereignty. We talk about accessibility. A lot of the practices at Soul Fire Farm are not only about those three, but are also about weaving in Black and Indigenous wisdom, and ancestral wisdom into the land, and teaching people to become their own sacred farmers on other lands.

LEAH: I love the term sacred farmer. I would like to bring the ancestors into the room. Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was radicalized as a sharecropper. She was only 6 years old when she noticed that the landowner was setting the scales incorrectly to undervalue the cotton harvest and not pay the Black laborers their fair due. That kept them indebted and in extreme poverty so they couldn’t leave the plantation. As a child her first act of civil disobedience was to fix the scales.

 Later in her life, when she was an organizer during the Civil Rights movement, she learned that  many sharecroppers were being kicked off their land for registering to vote, for joining a protest, signing a petition, or joining the NAACP. She would have organizing meetings in her house, and as a farmer, she canned food that she grew. Radical youth would ask, “Mama Hamer, why you wasting your time canning these peaches and stuff?” Her answer was, “Child, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.”

So she organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative, where 500 sharecroppers who had lost their land co-owned the land. They were doing all kinds of beautiful mutual aid. 

So Fannie Lou Hamer is our inspiration at Soul Fire Farm. To realize the idea that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves, we have to make sure that our agriculture is locally rooted, it’s regenerative, it’s tied to our heritage, and it’s in our hands. 

There were 16 million Black farmers in the early 1900s. Most of them were kicked off their land by white supremacists, literally pushed off their land and lynched. The U.S. Department of Agriculture selectively gave loans to white farmers, causing bankruptcy among Black farmers. TIAA – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – and other investment firms unscrupulously grab up Black owned land, which is vulnerable because a lot of Black farmers don’t have access to lawyers and  don’t leave wills.

So the rising generation of Black and Brown farmers is landless, they have no capital, and are just a few  generations away from the red clays of Georgia – with its traumatic association with the forced removal of Cherokee people and the slave labor of African descended people. We say the land was the scene of the crime, but the land was never the criminal. Now a beautiful rising generation of people who are the color of soil are ready to reclaim that right to belong to the earth, to have agency in the food system, and are recognizing that regenerative agriculture was invented by Indigenous and Black people.

Dr. George Washington Carver is literally the godfather of regenerative agriculture.  He worked with farmers when he was at Tuskegee University from 1890 to 1940 promoting cover crops, compost and crop rotation. Dr. Carver made sure that the soil health was the foundation of farming practices. He had a whole generation of Black farmers doing regenerative agriculture before Rodale came onto the scene in the 1940s.

We can look back to the Ovambo people of Namibia with their raised beds and the people of Liberia with their African dark earth, and the polycultures of Nigeria. That’s the kind of agriculture that we’re doing. We feed our community, no cost, door-step delivery. We train thousands of Black and Brown farmers in person on the farm through a 50-hour course, and then they go off and they do their sacred farming all across Turtle Island and, beyond.

The theory of change involves practices like sewing of seeds, of being trans-local, and locally adapted. Providing land-based mutual aid, in which the farm becomes a hub for feeding folks, for gathering, for organizing, a safe haven, a kind of aboveground railroad. The land becomes the scene of the revolution, just as it was in the Civil Rights movement. Black farmers were the ones who housed, fed and clothed and protected the freedom riders. If there were no Black farmers, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights movement. You think the Freedom Riders stayed at the Hyatt? No, they went to a Black farmer’s house. That’s where they hid. That’s how they stayed alive. As Malcolm X said, “Land is the basis of all revolution, all freedom, all justice.”  

NAOMI: Thank you for all of your work. I just have to ask, how your work has been impacted by the current administration. 

LEAH: It sucks. But we’re not stopping, I would say one of the more heartbreaking things, is that  we had a major legislative victory with the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration. They actually folded in a provision for Black farmers that we had fought for for over a decade. Historically, the USDA had discriminated against Black farmers. There was a landmark Civil Rights settlement called Pigford v. Glickman in 1999 that offered a very small amount to each of the farmers who had lost their land, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We needed full debt forgiveness for these farmers. 

So we helped, along with farmers across the country, to introduce legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which was led by Senator Cory Booker. It was debated and I got to speak to Congress. It was crazy. They were actually listening to Black people. I could hardly believe what was happening. 

 A 5 billion dollar provision for the debt relief went into the Inflation Reduction Act, and was passed; payments were going out. And now they stopped.

The Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Training grant is gone. All of the socially disadvantaged farmers programs are gone. People bought things based on contracts that were made, now the contracted money has evaporated. So it’s a shit show. It’s really, really rough. 

We’re doing our best to piece together mutual aid networks. Susu is a Caribbean lending society. We’re trying to put together a national susu to try to stop the bleeding, so we don’t lose any more land. But now all the funders are skittish. Their attitude is, Black people were cool in 2020, but they’re not cool anymore. Don’t you do any programs for white farmers? I’m like, are you kidding me? The white farmers receive over 90% of the USDA funds. We absolutely need to support Indigenous and Black folks in getting through these times, and to continue the work. 

NAOMI: Raj, when the government starts to clamp down, what are the models that you’ve seen that have been successful? Where can we look for inspiration in places perhaps in this country, historically, as Leah has been sharing with us, but also around the world?

RAJ: One of the places I have been very inspired by is Arkansas. I was just traveling through Arkansas for a book that I just finished that weaves together the history of all the things that have happened in Arkansas, ranging from Indigenous dispossession to the Elaine Race massacre [1919 massacre in which as many as several hundred Black tenant farmers, who were organizing against abuses were murdered], the site of the largest race massacre in U.S. history, to the rise of Walmart also in Arkansas. 

One of the movements that I particularly was taken by is the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. The origins of this are germane to us now because in 1928, the Mississippi flooded and grew to 60 to 100 miles wide, depending on where you were. It was a catastrophe. The cleanup was a billion dollars back then. It was a huge expense, but of course, Black farmers saw none of that money. In fact, it was that event that flipped Black farmers’ voting allegiance from Republican to Democrat. 

It was the failure of the federal response to a catastrophe that politicized people. It wasn’t the event, it wasn’t the flood. It was the government’s failure afterwards. This is important for our mobilizing in this moment, because in that moment, there was socialist organizing happening throughout the South, and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union was a site of social organizing where white and Black tenant farmers together organized despite the attempts of white supremacists to sew racial division. It turned out that white and Black tenant farmers had much more in common with each other than they did with the white bourgeoisie. 

That is a moment that we can learn from particularly as we see the betrayals of the white working class and the absence of any dividend of white supremacy for white working class people. This is a moment to be able to split what appears to be a fairly firm hegemonic block into its constituent parts and to recruit. It is something to think about because this is a moment in which government failure writ large is a recruiting ground for a genuine grounded working class transformation.  

But it depends on us using the language of recognition, mutuality, solidarity and socialism. It doesn’t happen because we’re just all going to get along and kumbaya our way out of this. You need a materialist analysis, otherwise people don’t see one another and recognize that we have much more in common than the white supremacists would have us believe.  

Elsewhere in the world, there are movements that have managed to lay foundations that are paying off right now. One of my favorites is in India in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are descendants of organizations that started off as women’s literacy groups, and that have survived the scourge of Hindu supremacy. It’s not an accident that Narendra Modi and Donald Trump were best buds in his first term I’m thinking of an event in Texas called Howdy, Modi, which was the only event that Trump came to where he was not the star. Trump opened for Modi in a stadium in Houston, and then Trump buggered off and everyone cheered for Modi because there’s a whole phalanx of rightwing desis [Indian Americans], who are part of the South Asian diaspora who believe in Hindu supremacy. 

In India, Hindu supremacy is nasty and vile, and there have been people who have fought back against that, particularly in Andhra Pradesh where there is a system of farming that was originally coded as Hindu natural farming, but has been reclaimed as the world’s largest agroecological transition. More agroecological farmers have been spawned in Andhra Pradesh than anywhere else, where over two million farmers are currently agroecological farmers. And by 2035, six million farmers will be agroecological farmers.

India is hostage to fossil fuels, particularly through the Gulf of Hormuz, and hostage to fossil fuel based fertilizers  which are scarce and expensive due to the US/Iran war. One of the ways to avoid using fertilizer is to farm agroecologically. They’ve set up systems so that farmers wean themselves off fertilizer, so they don’t pay the high cost of fertilizer and can start making money.

It’s predominantly women and Adivasi [people indigenous to an area], and low-cost farmers. That has happened despite the scourge of Hindu supremacy because these movements have been robust and understood how to experiment and how to protect oneself against divisive racial rhetorics.

NAOMI: Raj, you’ve written about the difference between food security and food sovereignty Would you explain that.

RAJ: The idea of food security is a way of depoliticizing the word hunger, because it renders hunger into something that’s tractable for the state. Food security is when you have sufficient access to foods to be able to lead a healthy life. But you can be food secure in prison. The idea of food security says nothing about power.

The term food sovereignty was coined by La Via Campesina in the early ‘90s, and launched in 1995 at the World Food Summit in Rome. The idea of food sovereignty is about reclaiming power from the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Food sovereignty is about a community’s right to be able to end hunger and define its own food policy.

What that means is that communities have to decide what food sovereignty is by studying and discussing it. La Via Campesina decided  that food sovereignty was dependent on an end to all forms of violence against women. The idea being that if this is about communities’ right to decide what food policy is, then everyone has to be equal, and the biggest obstacle to that, as identified by La Via Campesina, was patriarchy and that needs to be fought against.

Particularly now,  given the revelations about Cesar Chavez, that dialectic is sharp and vital to remember: food sovereignty is about a radical naming of inequality of power and a redressing of it.

NAOMI: Leah, the matriarchy is a big part of your practice. Would you talk about your work on farms in Haiti and Dominican Republic, and how that may relate to the  matriarchy and the patriarchy.

We don’t really have an agroecological movement in this country. We don’t have a politicized agricultural alternative community. It’s happening in smaller ways in which people are being trained how be farmers, as well as how to be the next generation of political leaders. 

LEAH: When we talk about deconstructing the patriarchy, our model is not one of franchising; the other farms I work on are not our farms. We intentionally have a de-growth framework. We are aiming towards our own irrelevance. We have no interest in pushing our survival on anybody. We are part of mycelial network. 

The farms in our network are all women-led, as is our farm. We only have two men on our staff of 22 (those poor guys). Altair Rodriguez runs an organic family farm in the Dominican Republic called La Finca Tierra Negra in the area that was the training ground for the militia against the Trujillo regime. Trujillo burned down the farm of Altair’s great grandfather and killed many family members. She revived the farm out of the ashes. It’s an agroecological farm growing coffee and 22 other crops. They are constantly producing fruits and medicines and work with Haitian migrants and Dominican women.

We have a sister farm amongst my homeland of Ayiti (Haiti) on the Western side of the island, outside of Léogâne, where one-third of the community was killed in an earthquake in 2010. We did so much grief work there. Out of the ashes of that earthquake, we planted thousands of fruit trees, moringa trees, and had woman-led seed exchanges. We helped reforest the hillsides that were denuded by the French as part of their extortion and punishment of our beautiful revolutionary island.

On the Caribbean island of Vieques is the Maroon Farm. In an effort led by  women, they cleaned the soil that the U.S. military destroyed. They are providing food security by feeding the entire island. We also work with farmers in Sierra Norte in Oaxaca, Mexico.

All of these farms are incredible. We spend our winters doing solidarity brigades. We raise money, we bring resources, we bring skilled people to do projects that they want to do, not ones that we pretend we know that they should do. We do consciousness raising. We do political education. We’re all members of La Via Campesina. We study together and we plan and strategize together. 

Something that I’ve noticed in the past ten years especially in the Caribbean, is people used to identify with colonial borders that have been imposed by the French, English and Spanish, but there has been a revival of Taíno and Arawak identity. At food sovereignty conferences by and for Taíno and Arawak Black women, the perspective has changed to “we’re one people; what is this BS they’ve been trying to convince us of? We have enough food. We have the best soil. There’s food all year round; let’s feed our people.” 

NAOMI: Raj, in this very strange post-neoliberal world that we are entering into, there might be some hope that there could be some transformation. Do you think in this time of seemingly endless uncertainty and confounding ways that there might be some potential for optimism?

RAJ: There’s nothing guaranteed. Often at this stage of the conversation, it turns to “if only we do this, this and this, everything’s going to be fine.” No, because that’s an unreasonable way of understanding the world. In Brazil, for instance, under the first Lula administration, there were some victories. For example, in the food system, there were certain laws about being able to get food, one example was the Popular restaurant initiative, supported by the government that offered very cheap healthy meals. Here in the U.S. now most food is eaten outside the home, and to have public restaurants is a way to have dignity for the working class.

Then under the Bolsonaro administration, that was ground into dirt. And most of the public restaurants now are roach motels. But now under the second Lula administration, they have a program for cozinhas solidárias, or solidarity kitchens. The government will pay people to open a licensed kitchen and make local food available to the public. There are still some public restaurants, but the zones in which organizing happens have moved into these spaces of social gathering in the solidarity kitchens. 

What does that have to do with hope? Well, this is precisely the dialectical process. We won something under the first Lula administration, then the fascists came and then destroyed it. Now we rebuild with something else. The engine for hope is always the social movements. One of the engines for getting rid of Bolsonaro was his abject failure in dealing with the massive floods that Brazil had experienced a couple of years back. Again, the failure of a government to be able to respond to the climate crisis is an engine for the kinds of radical care that our movements are in the business of providing.

What I see that as the fulcrum of hope is the recognition that movements are already providing care. And, there’s nothing inherently leftwing about that. If you followed what happened after the hurricane Helene that tore through North Carolina, there were neo-Nazis on horseback, providing aid and media and solidarity. The far right are doing it as well, and that’s the terrain on which we struggle, we need to recognize it. They get a move in this world as well. They get to redefine the terms of climate change. They get to have a say about how climate change needs to be met with yet more racist exclusion. Our recruiting has to be stronger. We have to organize better, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but there’s everything to fight for.

NAOMI:  The examples that Raj gave of the Popular restaurants and solidarity kitchens in Brazil makes me think of the concept of  food commons. Leah, how do food commons come into your work?

LEAH: What unifies nonviolent strategies is the idea of ubuntu – “I am because you are” – of kinship. It’s an indigenous concept of animism or non-duality, this idea that I am the mountain, the mountain is me; I’m not a defender of the river, I am the river. The pre-enclosure concept that you could own a person or the land, is absolute insanity. You mean to say we’re going to take Mother Earth and put some lines on her and this part is going to be mine, and I have the right to exclude everyone, even if they starve? Insanity.

The idea of the commons is a reclamation of our sanity to humble ourselves below our big siblings who are the hawks, and the rivers, and the sequoias. They were on the scene before us; we came later, and are younger and less wise. So we need to defer to those who have figured out how to live in relationship and harmony. They understand that if there’s some sugar, some photosynthate coming into the forest ecosystem, that it will be shared amongst kin and non-kin. If there is a pest coming in and there’s a warning that needs to be distributed, everyone’s going to get the warning, not just the people I like or the cute ones, but everybody’s going to get it. The air is to be shared, the water is to be shared. When we signed papers for our farm we immediately got to work figuring out how to put it in a cooperative, which is a Western legal approximation of an indigenous commons.

The land has veto power over the people in our cooperative.  We gave our pro bono student lawyers the challenge of giving the legal right for the land to have veto power. The local indigenous Mohican people need to have it too. We became the first cooperative in New York state to do a culture respect easement with Indigenous people, and also the first in New York state to do the Rights of Nature with our co-op.

So our little 80 acres is somewhat of a commons, but we want to spread this idea. Food is for everybody. Water’s for everybody. The land is for everybody.

The post Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman appeared first on Bioneers.

Stevenson, who is especially known for creating music in direct relationship with the natural world, first traveled to Antarctica in 2010 with legendary whale biologist Roger Payne, where he learned to imitate whale calls on his double bass and attracted a dozen sei whales to their icebreaker. More recently, during a 2025 trip to Baja California documented by Andy Mann, Stevenson performed underwater music for humpback whales while listening to their vocalizations through hydrophones.

The following is an edited excerpt from Stevenson’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Watch his performance at the Conference here.

GARTH STEVENSON: 

I grew up in British Columbia. My family spent a lot of time in the outdoors going on some pretty extreme camping trips, and that really became the foundation of a part of my soul. I had an amazing experience kayaking as a teenager: A humpback whale came up out of the water right in front of us, with all these fish trying to escape its mouth, and then went back under. Then it just kind of followed us around the bay for an hour. It really imprinted on me. I had seen whales before, but this felt special and kind of spiritual.

After high school, I went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. When I got there, my connection to the natural world kind of collapsed. I spent most of my time in practice rooms — and if you’ve never seen music school practice rooms, imagine a hallway lined with a hundred tiny telephone booths, each with someone practicing their own thing. Walking down the hallway sounded like the score of a horror movie: saxophone, bagpipes, upright bass, drums — none of it listening to each other.

I really wanted to find a quieter place to play. I discovered Walden Pond just outside of Boston, and I started taking my bass there every day and hiking to the far end of the lake. I worked on the music that I was practicing at school, which was mostly jazz at that time. After doing that for about a week, the music just didn’t sound right. There were birds singing and the wind blowing up in the tree canopy … and I was trying to learn a bee-bop melody on my bass. I asked myself what music would sound right at this location on a given day, and that slowly started changing the way I approached playing the bass. I began to spend a lot more time listening and finding the gaps in the sounds of nature for the notes to sneak in.

I’ve been doing that since 2002. Every new location teaches me something different. Sometimes when I’m playing out in nature, animals will come by. I was playing for a group of people outside once, and we had a giant bear come down and circle around us.

I’ve noticed that when I’m out in the woods listening to music with other people, the sounds of nature afterward, especially the interactions between birds, feel much more vivid and alive. It’s hard to tell whether we simply weren’t paying attention before, or whether the orchestra of nature briefly adapted itself to the music.

I’ve spent most of my music career playing with other humans, and a lot of that music has been improvised. In many of the bands I’ve played with, we improvised entire concerts. It’s very different from playing music you already know because it requires a deeper kind of listening — not just, “Oh, you’re playing a C, so I’ll play a C.” You can mimic each other, but that gets old pretty quickly.

What I’ve found is that when you close your eyes and improvise with another musician, you can almost see right into their soul. You can sense how they’re feeling that day. And sometimes, something really special happens that I still can’t fully explain. It’s the same feeling I’ve experienced in other profound moments in life — watching a beautiful sunset, witnessing a child being born, or playing music for a friend who was dying of cancer.

Over the years, I learned how to imitate whale calls — mostly humpback calls — pretty accurately. That was cool, but it was really just a baseline attempt to connect with them. Whales have been around for millions of years, and I’m sure that when they heard me playing, they immediately knew I was not a whale. If they could speak our language, they’d probably say, “Go spend another million years on whale Duolingo, then come back and try again.”

When I played for humpback whales in Mexico, my bass was connected to an underwater speaker that amplified what I was playing. I also had hydrophones monitoring the incoming sound so I could hear the whales in return. After making that initial “hello,” showing them I could kind of play whale calls, I started sharing some of my own human music.

I wasn’t listening to see whether they were matching my notes. What I was searching for was the same feeling I sometimes experience while improvising with other musicians: a sense of connection that goes beyond imitation. The connection I’m looking for with animals through music isn’t about obvious mimicry. It’s something deeper than that.

A really interesting experience I had was playing for around 40 turtles being treated in a veterinary hospital. Every turtle had its own tank, and I was set up at one end of the room. All the turtles swam as close to the front of their tanks as they could to get nearer to the source of the music. I also played for penguins and seals out in different places in Antarctica. But the most powerful experiences have been with whales, including most recently in Baja California in Mexico. 

One of the reasons I was in Mexico was to support an organization called FOMARES, which is working to create a 200,000-square-kilometer marine protected area around Southern Baja. Mexico’s Minister of the Environment attended one of the concerts I performed there, and later that night, after I had returned to the boat where I was sleeping, another boat pulled alongside ours. It was him.

He said, “I want to hear the whales.”

I had no idea what kind of sounds they might be making at night, but we dropped the hydrophones into the water. The whales sounded so beautiful that he became visibly emotional.

We recorded the sounds, and there was this echo to them, a kind of natural reverb. I’ve spent so much of my life tweaking delays and reverbs that I immediately became curious about where it was coming from. When I looked at a map, I saw all these underwater canyons nearby. The sound we were hearing was the whales’ voices bouncing off the canyon walls. The whales were using reverb long before humans ever did.

Over the years, I’ve realized that whether you’re a human, a whale, or even a lawnmower, we all have to follow the same rules of sound and physics. In the end, it’s all frequencies moving through the world.

Some animals can see far more colors than we can. We can’t even imagine what they’re experiencing. Others can hear frequencies far above or below our range. Humpback whales are interesting because their vocal range overlaps pretty well with human hearing. Even so, I had to approach the experience knowing I couldn’t fully understand what the whales were sensing. Whatever it is I’m chasing in those moments feels almost like another kind of sense — something humans may still possess, but that has faded over time. Maybe it was much stronger thousands of years ago.

We humans are animals too, and we’re very curious with our ears. Whales, who’ve developed their hearing and singing to such an amazing level, are probably curious too.

Out in nature, there are all these competing frequencies. Birds are competing with cicadas. Every species may subtly adapt the notes they sing to fit into a larger symphony. Blue whales, for example, sing so low they’re almost beyond human hearing, and researchers have found that after ship propellers began filling the oceans with low-frequency noise, blue whales lowered their pitch even further so they could still communicate.

When I was listening to the whales in Baja, I wasn’t trying to isolate individual calls anymore. I was trying to hear the whole thing together. Maybe seven whales, maybe ten — all these little dots of sound bouncing around like instruments in an orchestra. I wasn’t expecting whales to copy my notes any more than I would copy theirs. Maybe the connection was happening somewhere else. Maybe it was in the way our rhythms and tones were interlocking as part of a larger composition.

The post A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales appeared first on Bioneers.