People wait in line to vote in Georgia's Primary Election on June 9, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images
Georgia's mid-June primary was the latest example of pandemic-induced voter suppression. Long lines at polling stations stretched for blocks and blocks as socially distanced voters waited for several hours to vote in person. In Fulton County, which includes Atlanta and is the state's most populated county, some voters waited past midnight to cast their ballot.
<p>Scenes like the one in Georgia—and <a href="https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/04/09/wisconsin-election-milwaukee-had-5-voting-sites-while-madison-had-66/2970587001/" target="_blank">Wisconsin before that</a>—have ignited a national conversation about voting by mail. In response, President Trump has claimed that voting by mail "<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1266172570983940101" target="_blank">will lead to massive fraud</a>" and favor the Democratic Party. Notably, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/05/26/862797418/twitter-points-users-to-fact-checks-of-trump-tweets-for-the-first-time" target="_blank">Twitter even placed a fact-checking warning on one of Trump's tweets</a> about voting by mail, breaking with its previous practice of not calling out Trump's falsehoods.</p><p><a href="http://www.andrewbenjaminhall.com/Thompson_et_al_VBM.pdf" target="_blank">Vote by mail does not favor one party</a> over another, a 2020 study from Stanford University found. Additionally, a recent survey by Pew Research Center showed that <a href="https://www.people-press.org/2020/04/28/two-thirds-of-americans-expect-presidential-election-will-be-disrupted-by-covid-19/" target="_blank">70% of Americans favor allowing people to vote by mail</a>. Even when broken down by political party, 87% of Democrats and 49% of Republicans favor expanding mail-in voting.</p><p>"Undermining voter confidence in the system is a form of voter suppression," said Raúl Macías, counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "Millions of Americans have voted by mail safely and securely for decades."</p><p>The Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, has <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2020-03/Coronavirus%2520Response%2520Memo.pdf" target="_blank">recommended states provide a universal vote-by-mail option</a> to hold fair elections during the pandemic.</p><p><span></span>As of May 2020, 29 states and Washington, D.C., have "no excuse" absentee voting, and five other states conduct elections entirely by mail with limited in-person voting options. However, <a href="https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-table-1-states-with-no-excuse-absentee-voting.aspx" target="_blank">16 states still require voters to provide an "excuse" to receive an absentee ballot</a>. While <a href="https://trustthevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/27May20_BipartisanTruthAboutByMailVoting_v3.pdf" target="_blank">most of the "excuse-required" voting states have ruled the novel coronavirus outbreak is a valid reason</a> to receive an absentee ballot, four of them—Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi, and Texas—have not made the necessary changes to allow absentee voting widely available during the pandemic.</p>
<p>In Texas, the state Supreme Court went as far as to <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/27/texas-vote-by-mail-coronavirus/" target="_blank">block a ruling that would allow Texans to use the pandemic as a reason to vote by mail</a>. As it stands, Texas will only send absentee ballots to voters who are 65 years or older, disabled, out of the county during the election period, or confined to jail.</p><p>According to MOVE Texas, a nonprofit organization focused on civic engagement for youth in Texas, the ruling is anti-voter and could lead to voter suppression by forcing residents to choose between their health and voting. But, seeing anti-voter decisions from the state government is not a surprise to the MOVE team.</p><p>"In the past, we've seen elections as a statewide issue," said Raven Douglas, political director of MOVE Texas. "But, after the 2019 legislative session where we were able to defeat […] a really bad anti-voter bill, we came together with a number of ally organizations and decided we could no longer rely on our state government to pass pro-democracy reform."</p><p>So, in addition to starting a petition to voice the organization's disappointment in the <a href="https://movetexas.org/protect-our-democracy-from-a-pandemic/" target="_blank">Texas Supreme Court ruling against mail-in voting</a>, MOVE Texas is turning to local officials to help voters in other ways. Douglas noted that county officials can greenlight curbside voting options, extend clerk's office hours, provide extra drop boxes, and more.</p><p><span></span>"You don't have to wait on your governor or your secretary of state to pass guidance, you can do that directly with your elections administrator and your county clerks," Douglas said.</p>
<p>Macías also acknowledges the need for in-person voting expansion during the upcoming elections.</p><p>"We think it's really important that every voter has the opportunity to vote by mail this election, but also in-person voting has to be maintained," Macías said. That means modifying polling places to fit social distancing guidelines, expanded early voting, making voter registration easier online or by mail, and investing in education programs about how this election might be different from what voters are used to.</p><p>Additionally, Macías notes that for most states to scale up their vote by mail systems to handle a much higher volume of ballots, they will need new equipment, such as ballot sorters, signature-verification software, optical scanning devices, and enough printers to handle the expected increase of applications and ballots.</p><p>"We really want to see Congress send more money to help elections officials conduct their elections," Macías said. "This is really the time when the federal government needs to step up. It's too important."</p><p>In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians, a pro-democracy organization, is advocating for an even more radical solution: skipping the application process and just sending absentee ballots to all voters, with postage-paid return envelopes, for the November election, through a <a href="https://votersnotpoliticians.com/votesafe/" target="_blank">campaign called VoteSafe</a>.</p>
<p>"We're running out of time," Nancy Wang, Voters Not Politicians' editorial director, said. "Our campaign started seven weeks ago and with every day it's becoming harder and harder."</p><p>VoteSafe is asking state officials to take other measures to fight voter disenfranchisement, such as supplying secure ballot drop boxes and accessible polling locations that follow protocols for sanitization and social distancing, increasing funding for ballot security and tracking, and expanding access to local clerks' offices leading up to Election Day.</p><p>"We wouldn't be blazing trails here, we would really be following best practices," Wang said, citing the expert advice the organization received from the former elections director for Denver. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2018/05/10/the-cybersecurity-202-how-colorado-became-the-safest-state-to-cast-a-vote/5af317c930fb042db5797427/" target="_blank">Colorado is seen as a leader in election integrity and pro-voter policies</a>. </p><p>One of those best practices is running a culturally competent education campaign, meaning that Wang and her team must be sensitive to different communities' history with voting and cater to that. For example, Wang says, some people don't trust the U.S. Postal Service, so there must be enough drop boxes for physical ballots and in-person polling sites for voters who may be deterred by having to send their ballot through the mail.</p><p>"You need to make sure you're creating a system that doesn't disenfranchise voters for other reasons," Wang said. To do this, Voters Not Politicians has partnered with community groups across Michigan to make sure the messaging and education surrounding the election is sensitive and resonates with the state's communities.</p>
<p>"This issue is really a concern for organizations that work not just in voting rights spaces," Wang said. "There is a lot of really great work being done by other groups in the state."</p><p>Partnerships with organizations that don't strictly deal with voting rights can also help show that voting by mail is not a partisan issue, Wang says. A majority of Michigan voters are supportive of expanding voting options—67% of voters approved a 2018 proposal to expand voting by mail.</p><p>"We should be trying to make it easier to vote for everyone, particularly in this election cycle," Macías said. "We shouldn't be asking voters to choose between their health and their vote."</p><p>That same sentiment is what prompted the nonpartisan organization Democracy North Carolina to join several other voting and elections organizations in a <a href="https://democracync.org/news/democracy-nc-goes-to-court-to-ensure-north-carolina-holds-fair-safe-elections-this-fall/" target="_blank">lawsuit demanding that the state take "necessary steps to guarantee a fair, safe election in November</a>."</p><p>"The decision to sue came down to the fact that our general assembly has a history of either inaction on voting rights issues, or outright hostility to voting rights," said Tomas Lopez, the group's executive director.</p>
<p>What's needed, according Democracy North Carolina's suit, is a relaxation of voter registration requirements, making in-person voting safer and ballot drop boxes available, and easing the process of absentee voting. While North Carolina is a no-excuse absentee voting state—meaning anyone can apply to receive an absentee ballot in the mail—absentee voters must get the signatures of two witnesses or a notary for their absentee ballot to be counted.</p><p>According to Lopez, 4% of North Carolina voters voted by mail in 2016, but the state board of elections predicts 30% to 40% of voters will vote by mail this year. Lopez fears that with social distancing orders, absentee voters won't be able to acquire two witnesses, or a notary, and will either not submit their ballot, or submit it and have the ballot rejected.</p><p>"All the stuff that we're doing is about trying to make sure that our election rules are responsive to the reality that people are having to live in," he said.</p><p>Another reality is that <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2020/05/05/coronavirus-black-lives-matter/" target="_blank">COVID-19 is disproportionally affecting Black</a> and brown communities, the same communities that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/poll-prri-voter-suppression/565355/" target="_blank">suffer the most from voter suppression</a> efforts.</p><p>"One of the really concerning parts of this is that, absent the kind of changes we are putting forward, voting access for Black and brown North Carolinians is going to take a double hit, from COVID and all the ways which it's hitting communities, and from all the ways the election rules are failing to respond," Lopez said.</p><p>"The election is already different, the question is whether the rules are going to respond to it or not," Lopez said. "All of these COVID response issues are rooted in things we'd like to see in November."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2020/06/22/coronavirus-vote-election/" target="_blank">Yes! Magazine</a>.</em></p><p><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/isabella-garcia/" target="_blank">ISABELLA GARCIA</a> is a former solutions journalism intern for YES!.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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Dyed wool at a weaver's home in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Wolfgang Kaehler / LightRocket / Getty Images
By Tracy L. Barnett
High up in the southern sierra of Mexico's state of Oaxaca, an innovative nonprofit business inspired by Mohandas Gandhi is helping Indigenous Zapotec families to weather the economic storm that COVID-19 has brought to the Mexican countryside.
<p>San Sebastian Rio Hondo, a Zapotec highland village like many others, has traditionally supplemented its agrarian way of life through the wool industry. Long famous for its rich tradition of Indigenous handwoven textiles, Oaxaca has nevertheless fallen on hard times, along with most of rural Mexico, partly because of policies promoting urbanization and undermining the traditional rural way of life.</p><p>In San Sebastian, the hardship has been severe: <a href="http://www.microrregiones.gob.mx/catloc/LocdeMun.aspx?tipo=clave&campo=loc&ent=20&mun=347" target="_blank">as of the 2010 census</a>, 55% of the population lived in extreme poverty, more than a third had not completed primary school, and more than two-thirds did not have a high school education. Unemployment continues to be high, compelling a high rate of migration out of the state and out of Mexico. Among the women, job opportunities were practically nonexistent.</p><p>This was the context that Eliseo "Cheo" Ramírez was born into. In his parents' and grandparents' time, villagers grazed sheep and helped cover expenses by making woolen textiles. In the 1970s and '80s, however, the Mexican government initiated a program to plant pine trees for lumber, and the pastures and native forests began to shrink. The industrial clothing industry began producing cheap synthetic yarns. Spinning and weaving, once a staple in every home, fell by the wayside. The children of weavers and farmers began making their way north to work in the U.S. as meatpackers and migrant farmworkers.</p><p>Ramírez' prospects for employment were so grim that he set off from home in 2006 at age 16 for the U.S., crossing the Sonoran Desert and nearly dying of thirst. The experience proved so traumatic that he never made the attempt again. Now 32, he has good reason to remain home: he's the chief operating officer and head of sales and part of the core team of <a href="https://khadioaxaca.com/" target="_blank">Khadi Oaxaca</a><a href="https://khadioaxaca.com/" target="_blank">,</a> a farm-to-garment nonprofit textile enterprise aiming to regenerate the village way of life in a sustainable way. He no longer harbors illusions of an American Dream; his dream nowadays is to help generate opportunities that keep more of his people at home with their families.</p><p><span></span>Khadi Oaxaca follows what is known as the Gandhian economic model in three ways: It focuses on producing gainful employment for many instead of big profits for a few; it strives to build local autonomy and resilience at the village level, building in a cash supplement that supports the traditional agrarian life; and it follows the Gandhian strategy of making clothing from scratch, with workers spinning their own thread from organically grown cotton. And now, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic causing jobs to dry up everywhere, this handspun thread has become a lifeline for the local economy.</p>
<p>Khadi Oaxaca is the brainchild of the Mexico-educated son of a U.S. industrialist, Mark "Marcos" Brown, and with his wife, Kalindi Attar. Brown had traveled to San Sebastian as a teenager in 1974 and developed a lifelong relationship with the village. He later spent time in India, where he learned about khadi, a handspun cloth that became a cornerstone of the Indian independence movement. He lived for two years in Gandhi's ashram, studying under one of the Mahatma's last living disciples, and learned about how Gandhi's satyagraha movement used khadi as a sign of Indian national pride and resistance to the exploitative practices of the British clothing industry.</p><p><a href="https://www.esperanzaproject.com/2020/latin-america/mexico/a-little-bit-of-gandhi-in-oaxaca/" target="_blank">As Brown studied Gandhi's movement</a>, the connections to the <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2018/05/31/why-fast-fashion-needs-to-slow-down/" target="_blank">wasteful global "fast fashion" industry</a> quickly became apparent, in the ways it has contaminated the planet and degraded the lives of millions of sweatshop workers. He vowed to live his values, learning to spin and to weave, making his own clothing, and thinking of ways in which khadi might serve the poverty-stricken people of the Oaxaca countryside that he'd come to love.</p><p>So when Brown returned to San Sebastian in 2010, he brought with him a charkha, or Gandhian spinning wheel, and a plan. Less than 1% of the thread market was handspun at that time—a dramatic contrast to his first visit in the 1970s, when many families spun their own woolen thread. In 2010, a kilogram of thread, the quantity per month that average households can spin in their spare moments, sold for just 400 pesos—about USD $18, nowhere near enough to incentivize the practice of spinning.</p><p>"Gandhi would say, you have to create a thread standard—like the gold standard used to be," Brown said. "The idea of a standard is that a woman can spin and actually survive on that spinning; she can make enough for her family to live on and meet their basic needs. Can you imagine that, spinning, where the standard can meet your basic needs of survival, where it takes you out of hunger? And that gives you a sense of security and well-being?"</p><p>Brown put the village carpenter to work duplicating the charkha. He found a supply of organic cotton, and he set about teaching the young Ramírez and his wife, Felipa, how to spin. Brown then put Ramírez in charge, and soon a team of 20 women—mostly grandmothers—were spinning, a loose affiliation of home-based businesses now seeing their labor turned into a variety of textiles and sold across Mexico and the United States. The revenue flows back to the spinners, weavers, embroiderers, and other artisans working in the village, and to the cotton growers they purchase from on the coast.</p><p>Remigio Mestas, a Zapotec textile artist, entrepreneur and cultural promoter in Oaxaca working to revive the Indigenous textile traditions, agreed to buy all the thread the women produced, which he supplied to weavers who sell through his stores. That was the beginning of a business that now, a decade later, helps to sustain nearly 500 people in the village, including cotton growers, spinners, clothing designers, and marketers. </p>
<p>"It's a very interesting and laudable project," Mestas said. "It could be an example for many; if it were to spread, it could address our problems of unemployment and hunger in the countryside."</p><p>Mestas also connected the group with Margaret MacSems, who co-founded a project with Mixtec farmers on the coast working to revive native coyuchi cotton production. MacSems would eventually join the Khadi Oaxaca team, becoming director of sustainability, thus connecting the enterprise with coyuchi farmers. Mestas also put Brown in touch with teachers who trained Ramírez and others how to weave with the upright pedal loom, and how to work with natural dyes.</p><p>The team has been able to raise the pay rate from 400 pesos per kilo of handspun thread to 1,500 pesos, or nearly $70 in today's dollars—a standard that makes a meaningful difference in a village economy. The thread has become the foundation of a cottage industry, now employing 350 spinners.</p><p>In the past few years, Khadi Oaxaca had seen an exponential growth in sales. Attar, as head designer, and Ramírez attended fashion expos, where she was struck by the way people would react to their displays. "They'd walk right past top designers and stop at our little stand," Attar said. "It's been amazing to me the way people have responded. It seems that doing every part of the process by hand is such an attractive quality for people."</p>
<p>"As (Gandhi) would always say, when we talk about village economics, if it comes from a place of nonviolence, of a truly sacred economics, then you don't need any commercialism; you don't need to market that which has its essence and its beginning in goodness," Brown said.</p><p>Now, however, the pandemic has shut down not only the expos but the entire Mexican tourism industry, which is what drew shoppers to the tourist-destination boutiques across Mexico that featured Khadi Oaxaca's unique products. That's put the group's model to the test. Less fabric is being woven, and Khadi isn't stocking finished garments, is reducing work for the sewers, stitchers, and embroiderers, and the group's core staff took a pay cut to reduce the economic impact on the artisans. Only the spinning hasn't been cut back; rather, Khadi has expanded its roster of spinners by 100 people.</p><p>The company quickly started expanding its online presence. Ramírez began posting photos of the existing stock on an already lively Instagram account, and orders began to flow in from the United States. Online sales jumped from an average of $1,300 USD per month before the pandemic to $6,500 in May. And international sales shot up from 5% of the total before the outbreak to 60% now, mostly from the U.S., MacSems said.</p><p>That growth has all come about through Khadi's Instagram account, which isn't a sales portal. The next projects are an online catalog and a shopping cart on the company website, and working to expand their presence on other social media.</p>
<p>Despite the cutbacks, 20 families are supporting themselves weaving cloth with upright pedal looms—fathers such as Juvenal García, who used to spend his days cutting down the pine forests in the region for lumber, and Carlos Vargas, who used to travel to the U.S. for seasonal landscaping work. Even if they had wanted to leave home, the pandemic shut down those options; but both said they much prefer to stay home and work with their families.</p><p>The largest part of the operation, however, is still the spinning. The network of spinners now extends far beyond San Sebastian into the rancherías, the tiny rural settlements where families still live in the traditional agrarian way. For Eugemia Velázquez, a 38-year-old mother of six, Khadi has provided a degree of dignity and comfort that were previously unthinkable. Before she started spinning for Khadi, Velázquez was a wool artisan like her mother and grandmother; she knitted little hats, dolls, and tortilla warmers, and every two weeks would leave them with the street vendors in the next town, who would pay her a small advance and then pay the rest later if the pieces were sold. But sometimes, none of them did, making her family's economic situation precarious.</p><p>These days, Velázquez has been content knowing that she can deliver a pound of thread every two weeks and earn enough to buy her children school supplies and other items she can't make or grow herself. </p>
<p>Sales doubled at Khadi from 2018 to 2019, and that was without even concentrating on online sales. This has been possible, Brown said, in part because people are willing to pay the actual cost to produce ethically and regeneratively fabricated products, and also because Khadi Oaxaca has been able to receive grants from private foundations in the U.S.</p><p>Based on the growth in sales before the outbreak of COVID-19, the business was on track to be independent of grant funding by mid-2022; now that's less certain, MacSems said. Overall sales have plummeted 56% since February. But she said she's optimistic, given the potential of online sales and the burgeoning interest in this kind of project. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, thread production has doubled, with some families saying it's their only source of income. Grant funding has allowed Khadi Oaxaca to continue buying the thread that has become a mainstay for local families.</p><p>"What we've found is that it is possible to care for each aspect of the supply chain, be ecologically mindful, empower local communities and create unbelievably beautiful textiles," Attar said. "COVID is painfully helping us globally to wake up to the fact that our Earth is indeed suffering; we are all interdependent. Our goal is to be a model and live the change we want to see in the world. May we look toward great souls like Mahatma Gandhi for guidance."</p>
<em><span></span></em><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/tracy-l-barnett/" target="_blank">TRACY L. BARNETT</a> is a Mexico-based freelance writer and the founder of The Esperanza Project, a magazine covering social movements in the Americas.<br/><br/></em><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2020/06/17/coronavirus-mexico-indigenous-families-handspun-thread/" target="_blank">Yes! Magazine</a>.</em><u><em></em></u><table><tbody></tbody></table>
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A scene from Unceded Territories, an immersive virtual reality experience created by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun and Paisley Smith. youtu.be
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun does not use email or text. In the Coastal Salish communities from which he hails, he has been known as a painter and a dancer since the 1980s. Yet, he has been exploring the "virtual reality renaissance"—the technology that allows you to figuratively step into a computer-generated 3D world—since it made its soft debut in the '90s.
<p>In 2019, Yuxweluptun fell in with Paisley Smith, a filmmaker and virtual reality director who, like Yuxweluptun, comes from the unceded territories of the <a href="https://coastvoice.wordpress.com/2017/07/23/squamish-musqueam-and-tsleil-waututh-first-nation-culture-and-language/" target="_blank">Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh</a> First Nations, in what is today known as British Columbia.</p><p>Together, they created <u><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNxnSaVO3VU" target="_blank">Unceded Territories</a></u>, an immersive and provocative virtual reality experience that drops the viewer into a world designed in Yuxweluptun's style. Surrounded by his '80s-style visuals, you are then encouraged to design the world as you want by throwing oil paint onto the screen with abandon. Only once you've reached the end of the virtual adventure do you realize the running oil has left a trail of destruction in its wake, and that there is no turning back from this changed environment.</p><p>By combining Smith's virtual reality filmmaking with the '80s-style visuals of Yuxweluptun's paintings, Unceded Territories explores the intersection of environmentalism and Indigenous rights. It is just one example of the many ways Indigenous artists across the Americas are engaging technology and other works to draw attention to their culture and the environmental challenges confronting their communities, which are on the front line of climate change.</p><p>"How do I teach people to love the land?" asks Yuxweluptun, whose paintings tell stories about Indigenous human rights and climate change. "You can't use my story and blame me for that. You can't blame me for global warming."</p><p>In the past, establishments outside of Indigenous communities rarely took note. Now, with social media, awareness is no longer limited to those directly affected, he says.</p>
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f44fc9a12d287e773a01dc2e4cfa635a"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cNxnSaVO3VU?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p> Virtual reality, Yuxweluptun says, is another medium for someone like him to express his ideas in more ways than just on a one-dimensional canvas. "Not everybody can do it, because you have to be able to think in a certain way," he says. "It's a different way, other than painting or making a sculpture."</p><p>Here are the stories of four other groups of Indigenous artists using technology and art to tell their communities' stories.</p>
The Condor and the Eagle
<p>Bryan Parras has been working in radio in the Houston market since the early 2000s and, as time passed, saw how social media made storytelling more accessible to everyone—including those in marginalized communities.</p><p>In 2014, Parras met a European couple, Sophie and Clément Guerra, who had come to the United States to support the climate movement and who quickly became entangled in the Indigenous movement as well. Eventually, they began work on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7757874/" target="_blank">The Condor and The Eagle,</a> an independent documentary about four Indigenous leaders on a transcontinental adventure. Journeying from the Canadian plains, through the U.S and deep into the heart of the Amazonian jungle, they battled Big Energy while working to unite the peoples of North and South America and deepen the meaning of "Climate Justice."</p><p>Parras, himself of mixed Indigenous descent, is no stranger to filmmakers and reporters who come into Indigenous communities to observe, but without getting their actual input. "It's another form of extraction, right? Cultural extraction," he says.</p><p>It's why Parras, was the documentary's campaign producer, acted as a bridge between the filmmakers and his community, so that Indigenous communities portrayed in the film would be included in the editing process as well. "What may not be written in the history books are now archived in this story," he said.</p><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7e42f930bcbabcc50e96fe72da091581"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YSMutzSW7gQ?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>Since its premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival in October 2019, The Condor and the Eagle has been selected by more than <a href="https://thecondorandtheeagle.com/" target="_blank">50 film festivals and won 12 awards</a>. The most notable one is Best Environmental Documentary at the 2019 Red Nation International Film Festival in Beverly Hills, California.</p>
Wenazìi K’egoke; See Visions
<p>Casey Koyczan is Tlicho Dene from the Northwest Territories of Canada. When he collaborates on virtual reality exhibits, he brings what he calls a "Northern aesthetic"—visuals of the remote landscape of the Northwest Territories of Canada. His latest project is <u><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_-rHnn-YZ8" target="_blank">Wenazìi K'egoke; See Visions</a></u>, a three-chapter virtual reality experience that takes you into a dreamlike interpretation of encounters with animal spirits of the North.</p><p>See Visions uses stark colors to evoke the feeling of walking through the snow under an aurora borealis. Koyczan considers the animals depicted in this atmosphere-heavy video to be its most important features. "It's all about being involved in the North," he says. "It reinforces the subtle notion that we are on their territory."</p><p>See Visions debuted in a prototype version in 2019 at the annual ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto, a global hub for Indigenous-made media art. Koyczan and his partner on the project, Travis Mercredi, are now developing it for length and interactivity.</p><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e14560de3ad5d7db995fe320ca64b0f1"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D_-rHnn-YZ8?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>
<p>It's the kind of work ImagineNATIVE envisioned when it began featuring virtual reality projects in 2017, with the idea of depicting the world for Indigenous communities 150 years into the future. The idea, Koyczan says, is that although their current reality is not ideal, Indigenous communities will survive. "Thriving in this society hasn't been laid out yet," Koyczan said. "It's really cool to depict these things. How things could be."</p><p>Although he studied fine arts in college, Koyczan decided he preferred shaping things with his hands. He often builds installations that allow him to project each of his projects from his laptop—creating a physical aspect for further immersion. He also creates the music for his projects, playing several instruments in a style he calls "electro-rock."</p><p>About his and Mercredi's work, Koyczan says, "We feel it's providing accessibility and insight into a portion of our landscape and aesthetic as new media artists."</p>
Three Sisters
<p>In 2019, the Dundas West Art Museum in Toronto hosted an art exchange that allowed one Canadian artist to travel to Chile to paint a mural, while Chilean artist, Paula Tikay, went to paint in Canada.</p><p>"At the end of [painting] a mural, one leaves and leaves [their] work for the people who transit those places," says Tikay, who is Mapuche, the largest Indigenous group in Chile. "They are like small messages that can identify and rescue stories from places. They are like gifts that appear for the inhabitants of that space."</p><p>Dundas West Art Museum is Toronto's <a href="https://www.kickstartbia.ca/innovation-stories/dundaswest" target="_blank">first open-air street art museum</a>. The neighborhood of Dundas West has long been connected with Chile since Chileans began moving there as refugees of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in the 1970s.</p><p>Tikay's contribution to the museum is a Three Sisters mural, depicting three Indigenous women who represent the three main agricultural crops of Indigenous groups in the Americas.</p><p>Three Sisters is the name given to climbing beans, maize, and squash that are/were grown together in an agricultural strategy called companion planting. It's a historical reminder that European settlers learned to plant crops on American soil from its Indigenous people.</p><p>Tikay calls it an honor to use her art to remind people of that, especially because it was also practiced in her ancestral southern Chile. </p><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6f040ac7ae059ec5bb1fc944c1897119"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UU-L1dEhI2M?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>
My Louisiana Love
<p>The Houma Nation sits on the Mississippi Delta; the wetlands there were struck by both Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the BP oil spill five years later. These disasters, both natural and manmade, slowly chip away at the way of life of the Houma people, making them less able to hunt, trap, and fish.</p><p>In 2015, Monique Verdin co-produced the documentary, <u><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290531/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm" target="_blank">My Louisiana Love,</a></u> which traces her journey back to her home in the Houma nation and focuses on her community's struggle with decades of environmental degradation.</p><p>It has recently been made available on PBS again.</p><p>Verdin herself expressed surprise at its rerelease. "I didn't think it would be relevant at the time," she says, "but it's even more relevant now."</p><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="d2e15f3cec2f7a69836db64ef5353021"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-o7hL7pDNtM?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>In telling this larger social and economic story, Verdin makes the film semi-autobiographical by displaying her and her family's struggles, which include the death of her father. "With my father gone," she says in the narration, "I had lost another piece of my Louisiana."</p><p>She is working to address some of the issues highlighted in the documentary. She is part of <a href="https://anothergulf.com/aboutus/" target="_blank">Another Gulf is Possible</a>, a grassroots collaborative, led by women of color, that is doing resistance work against corporations searching for oil in the region while reviving Indigenous methods of living off the land sustainably.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/demi-guo/" style="" target="_blank">Demi Guo</a> is an NYC journalist with bylines in WNPR and National Geographic.</em></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from </em><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/06/15/indigenous-artists-climate-technology/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.</em><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2646208694#/" target="_self"></a></p>From Your Site Articles
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Chief Wilma Mankiller of the Cherokee Nation. Peter Turnley / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
By Mark Trahant
Around the world, statues are coming down. Civil War generals. Mass murderers. And Christopher Columbus.
<p>In every case, far more stone monuments remain than are removed. A survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center found some 1,800 named memorials honoring Confederates. Add to that union generals. And military leaders from the American Revolution, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.</p><p>The generals are men of course. One study said there is a "staggering lack of public statues of women." A database in <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/03/i-sorted-uk-s-statues-gender-mere-27-cent-are-historical-non-royal-women" target="_blank">the New Statesman in the U.K</a>. and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/why-the-dearth-of-statues-honoring-women-in-statuary-hall-and-elsewhere/2011/04/11/AFx8lgjD_story.html" target="_blank">The Washington Post in the U.S</a>. found only 13% and 7% of statues in these countries depict historical women as opposed to historical men.</p><p>So what's next? How do we make the stone-tablet version of our history more representative of the actual history?</p><p>Wednesday, President Donald Trump nixed the idea of renaming military bases to make the country more reflective. </p><p>"These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom," Trump tweeted. "Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations. Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military."</p><p>A few statues of American Indians and Alaska Natives are spread out across the country. In fact: Some of the most representative locations are Congress and a few state legislatures. In the U.S. Capitol (standing alongside Andrew $%!* Jackson, colonizer Junipero Serra, would-be dictator Huey P. Long and missionary killer Marcus Whitman) there is <a href="https://www.aoc.gov/art/national-statuary-hall-collection/kamehameha-i" target="_blank">Kamehameha I,</a> <a href="https://www.aoc.gov/art-by-state/new-mexico" target="_blank">Po'Pay</a>, <a href="https://www.aoc.gov/art/national-statuary-hall-collection/will-rogers" target="_blank">Will Rogers,</a> <a href="https://www.aoc.gov/art/national-statuary-hall-collection/sakakawea" target="_blank">Sakakawea</a>, <a href="https://www.aoc.gov/art/national-statuary-hall-collection/sarah-winnemucca" target="_blank">Sarah Winnemucca</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_Bear" target="_blank">Standing Bear</a> <a href="https://www.aoc.gov/art/national-statuary-hall-collection/chief-washakie" target="_blank">Washakie</a> and <a href="https://www.aoc.gov/art/national-statuary-hall-collection/sequoyah" target="_blank">Sequoyah</a>. </p><p>So at least 4% scoundrel (certainly could have added more names to that side of the ledger) and 8% Indigenous.</p><p>Let's play "what if?" What if the rest of the country was like that? Who should we be honoring?</p><p>Imagine the 20th century and the Native leaders that could be honored on civic plazas, in front of city halls or on university campuses. (Yes, there are a few now, but we are talking numbers. At least 2% of all the statues. And even better is the 7% goal set by Congress' own example.)</p><p>The list could include:</p>
<p><strong>Vine Deloria Jr.</strong>, Standing Rock. It's hard to chronicle Vine Deloria in terms of his importance to the country and to Native America. He was a thinker. An architect of change. And, always, a writer. When it comes to honoring the past, Custer Died For Your Sins defines the possible. "Crazy Horse never drafted anyone to follow him. People recognized that what Crazy Horse did was for the best and was for the people," Deloria wrote. "When Crazy Horse was dying, having been bayoneted in the back at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, Crazy Horse said to his father, 'Tell the people it is no use to depend on me any more.'</p><p>"Until we can once again produce people like Crazy Horse, all the money and help in the world will not save us. It is up to us to write the final chapter of the American Indian upon this continent."</p><p>Deloria could have been writing about himself.</p><p><strong>Lucy Covington</strong>, Colville. She was a rancher-turned-politician who led the fight against the failed policy of termination in the 1960s. Termination was an idea to save money by ending the federal government's relationship with tribes. (She would sell a cow to pay her way to Washington.) One of the tools that she used in this fight: a tribal newspaper. She started Our Heritage, a newspaper with the mission of informing tribal members about the issues. She would lead a quiet campaign to quell what she called the "present fever and fervor for termination."</p>
<p><strong>Howard Rock</strong>, Inupiat. He was the legendary founder and editor of The Tundra Times. He once called his newspaper an "unselfish venture." The Tundra Times was essential reading for anyone and everyone interested in Alaska issues. Rock maintained a nonpartisan editorial position but endorsed individual candidates based on Native issues. He also wrote about Native culture, and the newspaper carefully followed and reported on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act developments until the legislation became law in 1971.</p><p><strong>Annie Dodge Wauneka</strong>, Navajo. She became a nurse caring for patients during an influenza pandemic. She had the flu when she was young and gained enough antibodies to be immune. Later she traveled door-to-door on the Navajo Nation explaining tuberculosis. She was the first woman member of the Navajo Nation Council. And she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.</p>
<p><strong></strong><strong>Jackson Sundown</strong>, Nez Perce, born as Waaya-Tonah-Toesits-Kahn. He was a champion rodeo rider who became a folk hero because of his performance in the 1916 Pendleton Round-Up.</p><p><strong>Elizabeth Peratrovich</strong>, Tlingit. She championed equal rights for Alaska Natives. She is credited for persuading lawmakers to pass the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, the first anti-discrimination law in the United States. Every year on Feb. 16, Alaska celebrates Elizabeth Peratrovich Day.</p>
<p><strong></strong><strong>Billy Frank Jr.</strong>, Nisqually. Frank was a tribal leader who fought for treaty rights, and that included defying the state of Washington on the river. He said: "I was not a policy guy. I was a getting-arrested guy." But those arrests led to something. He became friends with those who shackled him. He was appointed to offices by the same governors who once had him arrested. He convinced the entire establishment in the Pacific Northwest that he was, indeed, right—and that folks were better off joining him in his cause.</p><p>And because of Billy Frank Jr., the salmon survive today and have returned to streams where they were once extinct. And the tribal communities of the Northwest are stronger in so many ways.</p><p><strong>Wilma Mankiller</strong>, Cherokee. She was the first woman elected as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. In a speech at <a href="https://www.seattlepi.com/search/?action=search&channel=local%2Fopinion&inlineLink=1&searchindex=solr&query=%22Emory+University%22" target="_blank">Emory University</a>, she told a story about the United States sending a negotiation team to meet the Cherokees and draft a treaty. One of the initial questions was: "Where are your women?" Cherokee women often accompanied their leaders at important ceremonies and negotiations—and it was inconceivable that the representatives from the federal government would come alone. How can you negotiate anything with only half your people or half a way of thinking? Mankiller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.</p>
<p><strong>Helen Peterson</strong>, Cheyenne and Lakota. She was the long-serving executive director of the National Congress of American Indians during much of the termination era. But that was her second career. Before that, she was an expert in Latin America, promoting human rights for farm workers and other Latin Americans. In 1949 she represented the United States at an international conference in Peru. She was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who encouraged her to move to Washington, D.C. "The Indians are their own best spokesmen, their own best diplomats; but they can exercise these roles effectively only in proportion to their opportunities to exchange information and to use their combined strength and concerted voice," she wrote in an article calling for more participation by Native people in elections. Her son, Max Peterson, put Helen Peterson's career in perspective when she died. "During those times, there were no women in power, really," he said in the Denver Post. "Her accomplishments don't sound like much now because a lot of women are doing the same things, but back then, doing those things were a big deal. She went to Washington as a lobbyist. That was an exclusively male area, and she managed to do a great job on behalf of Indian legislation and Indian rights."</p><p><strong>Forrest Gerard</strong>, Blackfeet. Gerard was one of the first American Indians to work on Capitol Hill and helped guide the Senate past the policy of termination into tribal self-determination. He worked for U.S. Sen. Henry Jackson and the Interior Committee where the "golden era" of Indian policy bills rolled off a legislative assembly line, the Indian Finance Act, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, and the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.</p><p>This list, of course, is not the end—only the beginning. Because in a country of this size and diversity it makes little sense to cling to statues that honor only a few, including historical figures unworthy of such acclaim. There remains a richer story that has yet to be told, chapter by chapter, stone by stone, and generation by generation.</p>
<p class=""><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/mark-trahant/" target="_blank">Mark Trahant</a> is editor of Indian Country Today and a Professor of Journalism at the University of North Dakota. He is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and has written about American Indian and Alaska Native issues for more than three decades. Trahant is a YES! contributing editor.</em></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from </em><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/06/11/columbus-statue-indigenous-history/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.</em><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2646173192#/" target="_self"></a></p>From Your Site Articles
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A field of organic lettuce grows at a sustainable farm in California. thinkreaction / Getty Images
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the future of the Cannard Family Farm—whose organic vegetables supplied a single Berkeley restaurant—was looking stark.
<p>Ross Cannard is the son of an iconic leader in the local organic movement in California. "Iconoclastic," Ross says with a chuckle. Bob Cannard built his 30-year career by rejecting organic certification in favor of his own "better than organic" breed of "natural process agriculture," enriching the soil on his Green String Farm with crushed rock and compost.</p><p>He and his son have long sold the fruits of their labor to the famous restaurant Chez Panisse, where, since 1971, chef Alice Waters has pioneered an elegant cuisine based entirely on fresh, local foods straight from the farm.</p><p>But in March, the stay-at-home order hit, and the restaurant closed.</p><p>"You're a farmer. Plants are already in the ground," says Evan Wiig, director of membership and communications for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. "You make plans months and months in advance. You can't just turn on a dime."</p>
<p>Waters was worried about the vulnerable situation her workers and producers were finding themselves in. She rushed to establish a subscription CSA, which stands for community supported agriculture, offering weekly food boxes that could be picked up at the shuttered restaurant, filled with goodies from her regular producers like Cannard.</p><p>"I'm trying to connect our network with the people who would like to have that food in their home," she said on Michael Dimock's podcast, <a href="https://www.rootsofchange.org/flippingthetablepodcast/available-episodes/" target="_blank">Flipping the Table</a>, on March 26. "We can sort of skip the restaurant for now. … We could help people do the cooking in their own kitchen."</p><p>Cannard augments that market with his own local CSA, setting up a farm stand in the parking lot of Baker & Cook, a café in nearby Boyes Hot Springs, now serving only takeout. Along with produce, Cannard has his olive oil available, as well as wine from a friend's vineyard, and flowers from another local farm. Friends and neighbors are among his 100 or so customers.</p><p>This CSA model, where buyers invest in a farm's annual production upfront in exchange for a regular share of the harvest, is built on long-term relationships between farmers and consumers. It's those relationships, farmers say, springing from the fertile soil of Sonoma County, that are making survival possible. New local grassroots networks and nimbler digital marketplaces, too, are popping up to provide critical lifelines. And despite the strange, isolating atmosphere created by the coronavirus, the region is now bursting with spring growth.</p>
Building Food Communities
<p>Family farms in California and across the country have been hit hard by the impact of the coronavirus on their markets. But in the health-conscious Bay Area, where celery was already one of the first groceries to disappear from the produce rack, demand for fresh local produce has shot up. The challenge is in redirecting food from farms to new customers.</p><p>Sonoma County has historically been an agricultural region. When the organic food movement sprang up in the 1970s, this area was one of its early proponents. The first farmers markets and CSAs appeared in the 1980s and flourished, but the burgeoning network was later eclipsed by an inflated wine industry, much of it owned by distant corporations.</p><p>According to a 2018 crop report, 60,000 acres have gone to grapes, with only 500 acres in food crops. Land prices have skyrocketed, the cost of labor has gone up, and increased regulations have all made it harder to run a viable business here. Many farmers had turned to "boutique" specialty crops for restaurants.</p><p>"Farmers are always in an uphill battle, especially ecological farmers," says Wiig of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. "I often hear them say, 'I'm working my butt off and hoping for the best.'" That's even more true now, as the pandemic strangles economies the world over.</p><p>For farms with existing CSAs, Wiig says, this is a really good time. "In the beginning of March, most CSAs were struggling to fill boxes. Now some now have waiting lists, some in the 100s."</p><p>But for those who didn't have CSAs established, Wiig says, this is a really tough time. "We've been able to keep farm markets open as essential businesses, but crowds have decreased with people afraid to go out, and sales are down."</p><p>Community Alliance was quick to jump in, becoming a "matchmaker" for producers and buyers on its website. They're also providing all kinds of information for farmers about how to start and run a CSA, including useful software, relevant legislation, available funding sources, and a series of four webinars showcasing successful farms.</p><p>Farm Trails, a local nonprofit with 250 farmer members, also leapt into the fray. The organization has been building relationships between farmers and consumers for 47 years by organizing farm visits and hosting educational events. Two days after the shelter-in-place shut down regular sales outlets, Farm Trails had put up a new page on its website and invited its members to post their offerings.<span></span></p><p>"We know our farmers well," executive director Carmen Snyder says. "We did outreach to them to see what they had. Spirit Works had plenty of alcohol, so they started making lavender sanitizer, giving it away to first responders and health care workers, and selling the rest at the local hardware store."</p><p>In the online marketplace's first two days, web traffic on Farm Trails' site went up 1000%.</p><p>"Many people have been on the fence about CSAs," says Sonya Perrotti, who runs the 1-acre Coyote Family Farm in Penngrove. "This was the push." While she has always sold most of her produce in a CSA, Perrotti benefited from the new digital marketplace. She has now sold out of her 100 shares and plans to expand.</p>
Scaling Up Support
<p>F.E.E.D. Sonoma, a food hub that aggregates produce from dozens of local farms, was another quick responder. When the pandemic hit, it went from serving Bay Area restaurants to building a cooperative of farmers, filling food boxes for distribution at F.E.E.D.'s Petaluma warehouse and other drop spots in the county.</p><p>"Our local food system is extremely diverse," says co-founder Tim Page, who has the energy of a visionary combined with the skills of a businessman. "We have a ton of small farms but we don't have the infrastructure to support them. That is what F.E.E.D. is trying to establish." Since converting the restaurant supply business to a CSA, it has gone from 90 boxes to 450. Ultimately, the goal is 1,800 or more.</p><p>"I grew up in L.A.," Page says. "Every single farm is gone. The same thing will happen here if the general public does not understand the importance of it.</p><p>"That understanding was on display at the Sonoma Farmers Market, which now operates with strict restrictions and safety precautions because of the virus. "We think F.E.E.D. is going to save us," said Candy Wirtz, co-director of Paul's Produce, a well-established farm in Sonoma, as she weighed out my purchases. The CSA model could be transformative for Paul's and other farms across the country.</p><p>Subscribing to a CSA is a lifestyle change for consumers, to be sure. It means eating what's in season and learning to cook unfamiliar vegetables. But it's a change that many people are making now because of the stay-at-home orders. "People just have to learn to cook again instead of eating out," says Judith Redmond, part-owner of Full Belly Farm near Sacramento.</p><p>In light of this newfound commitment to CSAs, Perrotti, of Coyote Family Farm, says: "My hope is that this solidifies instead of going back to the way things were. I hope the importance of local farming stays at the forefront."</p>Farms With Futures
<p>To help small farmers stay in business during the crisis, Community Alliance is also advocating for stimulus dollars. "Most often subsidies go to a small number of the largest farms, or to buy food that goes to food banks from far away, while local farmers can't sell their food," Wiig says. "We want food banks to buy from local farms."</p><p>This seems like a win-win. Millions of tons of food is being plowed under as 60 million people are now going hungry, 17 million of them since the pandemic began, according to Feeding America, the national network of food banks.</p><p>But it's complicated. David Goodman of the Redwood Empire Food Bank puts it plainly: Local food is too expensive. "We distribute nine and a half million pounds of produce annually," he says. "It costs about 9 cents a pound, 3 cents to transport. With 82,000 people to feed, it would be a luxury to think of tending to local needs by buying locally."</p><p>That reticence is partly because the food bank system is tangled in bureaucracy. The USDA decides what to purchase and from where. Because of the distances between sites, the federal agency has tended to favor foods with long shelf lives, such as canned and processed foods, and long-lasting produce like apples and potatoes. "If local food is what we need, there has to be a plan," Goodman says.</p><p>Such a plan might be where short-term disaster relief meets long-term resilience. Michael Dimock is president of Roots of Change, a nonprofit organization that advocates for transforming California's food system. To get serious about preparing the food system for future disasters, Dimock says, the government needs to be involved. Roots of Change is now advocating for a tax on sugary beverages to help foot the bill.</p><p>Dimock says the state needs a paradigm shift for farms to remain viable in the face of multiplying disasters to come—not only pandemics, but fires, floods, and other symptoms of climate change. "How bold will people get in the months ahead to demand real change? My hope is they will get more radical."</p><p>Food is fundamental. While farmers have yet to face the full economic impact of this pandemic, their collaborative efforts, along with local grassroots networks, could mark the beginning of a new economy laboring to be born.</p>
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Garden interns learn plant and weed identification at the Cheyenne River Youth Project in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Cheyenne River Youth Project / Facebook
By Stephanie Woodard
Many Americans are now experiencing an erratic food supply for the first time. Among COVID-19's disruptions are bare supermarket shelves and items available yesterday but nowhere to be found today. As you seek ways to replace them, you can look to Native gardens for ideas and inspiration.
<p>"Working in a garden develops your relationship to the land," says Aubrey Skye, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lpPMKFw77k&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR2BPC1A7hvv2M_-MzkJsMBsDXMu7LDrlVqPy9ydDiqWJW1T6nQZ3__gcWs" target="_blank">a Hunkpapa Lakota gardener</a>. "Our ancestors understood that. Look at the old pictures. It's etched on their faces. When you understand it as well, a sense of scarcity and insecurity transforms into a feeling of abundance and control—something we all need these days." For several years, Skye ran a <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/ndwp/traditional-foods/index.html" target="_blank">CDC-sponsored gardening program</a> on Standing Rock, a reservation that straddles North and South Dakota. He created hundreds of productive plots, large and small, for fellow tribal members.</p>
<p>Tribes' food-scarcity problems developed after signing treaties with the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. Under these agreements, tribes typically transferred land to the federal government in return for education, health care, and other services. The diminished tribal homelands that resulted, along with continual federal efforts to decrease Native land holdings, severely restricted the hunting, fishing, and other activities with which tribes had fed their people since time immemorial. To force tribes onto reservations, Skye adds, the United States purposely destroyed critical food sources, such as the huge buffalo herds that once roamed the Plains.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMwOTMxNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwMTc4OTAyNH0.pl3o_XN6vhnO41CvxoiGNX2jSuSmrV1f6SP3HfpqX9w/img.jpg?width=980" id="a99f6" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="12609ff38757532adcf89cb37649a3bf" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Aubrey Skye, Standing Rock Sioux tribal member, tills gardens for himself and other tribal members. He does some by hand, and others with this tractor. Photo by Stephanie Woodard.
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-Bird-Womans-Garden-Agriculture/dp/0873512197/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1588337839&sr=1-1" target="_blank">Abundant lifeways</a> were decimated. Starvation and death ensued. Massacres, such as Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, killed additional American Indians, as did forced removals from homelands, with the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Navajo Long Walk among the best-known. The injustices continue today. Oil and gas pipelines, mines, industrial animal farms, and other projects may be sited to <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2017/01/24/the-spirit-of-standing-rock-on-the-move/" target="_blank">imperil tribal lands</a> rather than those of other peoples. Poverty, limited health care, and, in some areas, lack of running water for frequent anti-virus hand-washing, means the COVID-19 pandemic has hit certain tribes, notably the Navajo Nation, hard.</p>
<h3>Growing Strength</h3><p>Incessant disasters have created economic and social burdens, including hunger, that fall heavily on children. "These tragedies are so hard on kids," says the Cheyenne River Youth Project's director Julie Garreau. The project is on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, in South Dakota, just south of Standing Rock. "Don't ever let people tell you children don't know what's going on," she says. "The pandemic is creating enormous additional stress, beyond what they were already struggling with."</p><p>Her program works to make up the difference. With its 2.5-acre garden, café, gym, and library, the organization has long provided children with good food and a safe place to learn and have fun. Now that tribal children are sheltering at home, the youth project's garden and the sack meals her organization delivers ensure that, at the very least, they have healthy food each day, says Garreau, who is a tribal member.</p><p>"I'm so grateful," she says. "We're a nonprofit, and our funders contacted us—we didn't go to them—and gave us support for meals with a hot entrée, juice, and a healthy snack like fruit or nuts. We started driving around in our pickup with food for 35 kids, then 50, then 75." The youth project is working to get the word out. "We hope to reach 250 kids," Garreau says.</p><p>Dream of Wild Health also focuses on youth as it restores the multitribal urban-Indian community of Minneapolis and St. Paul to physical well-being and a spiritual relationship to the Earth. "We grow leaders and seeds," says Community Outreach and Culture Teacher Hope Flanagan, who is Seneca. "An urban upbringing can mean our youth lose track of our old way of walking on this Earth." Dream of Wild Health helps the children relearn this knowledge, she says.</p><p>In the process, the group's activities help the community reclaim <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/food-sovereignty">food sovereignty</a>—ready access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food—according to Executive Director Neely Snyder, a St. Croix Chippewa tribal member. Dream of Wild Health meets this need by distributing crops that it grows on its nearby 30-acre farm: It participates in a farmers market, delivers household shares of farm produce to locations in Native neighborhoods of both Minneapolis and St. Paul, and partners with other community organizations, such as the Minneapolis American Indian Center.</p>
<p>Since the COVID-19 challenges began, innovation has been key. To continue to offer chef-led cooking lessons for youth, yet maintain social distance, Dream of Wild Health delivers ingredients to the children's homes and runs the program via a video link. Virtual activities have proven popular. When a seed-saving and sacred medicines <a href="https://dreamofwildhealth.org/event/online-sacred-medicines-garden-beginnings-workshop" target="_blank">workshop</a> moved online, the typical 40- to 50-person audience for a live event burgeoned to some 220, Snyder says.</p><p>To grow real crops in a real garden requires getting out on the land—with a difference nowadays. This summer, Skye anticipates, reservation gardeners will either work alone or in groups practicing social distancing. Dream of Wild Health farmers are figuring out how student interns, whom they call Garden Warriors, can work on the group's farm and maintain distance.</p><p>While gardening, Skye says, tribal gardeners will put into action traditional practices that arise from close observations of nature and the belief that humans, plants, animals, and other aspects of the natural world form a <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/01/07/food-system-seeds/" target="_blank">mutually reliant community</a>. We are all related, Skye says. "Gardening and eating food you've raised give you a direct connection to Mother Earth."</p><p>Gardeners are necessarily optimists. At a time when our world is so dangerous, <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/04/28/coronavirus-grow-food/" target="_blank">the garden is a place of refuge</a>. "We will come out of this crisis," Garreau said in an email. "To do so, we must not stop planning and planting." Taking cues from Native gardening practices can help even novice gardeners get growing in these difficult circumstances.</p><p>Follow Indigenous gardeners' advice to grow your own plot, however small or experimental. At a time when stay-at-home orders continue to try and keep populations healthy, Garreau sums up the importance of sinking your hands into the soil: "Gardens represent so much more," Garreau continued. "Food, yes, but a belief in our future. Gardens represent resiliency, strength, wellness, culture."</p>
<h3>1. Plot Your Success</h3><p>Experienced gardeners may be comfortable planting big fields of their favorite crops. Skye has a nearly 1-acre plot just downhill of his Standing Rock home. But if this is your gardening debut—as it was for some tribal members he provided with gardens through the CDC project—ensure success by starting small. Try a few pots or raised beds, or perhaps a small in-ground plot, with easy-to-grow plants, he says. Good options might be tomatoes, peppers, green beans, radishes, summer and winter squash, onions, or leafy greens. "Don't bite off more than you can chew!" Skye quips.</p>
<h3>2. Cultivate Plant Friendships</h3><p>Many American gardeners know about the Three Sisters—in the celebrated trio, cornstalks serve as trellises for beans, which in turn fix nitrogen (fertilizer), while big, flat squash leaves conserve soil moisture and keep down weeds. Such plant groupings, also called <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/323589.Carrots_Love_Tomatoes" target="_blank">companion plants</a>, are expressions of cooperation and sharing, says the Mohawk director of the Traditional Native American Farmers Association, Clayton Brascoupé. "Your garden should be like a healthy forest, which has trees of various sizes," he says. "Look at nature, and figure out combinations that mimic it."</p><p>In his gardens at Tesuque Pueblo, north of Santa Fe, you can see peas twining up corn plants and basil rising above the broad, flat leaves of watermelon. "Experiment!" he says. "Plants can surprise you. One year, we discovered that garbanzos and corn really enjoy each other."</p>
<h3>3. Make Room for Hard-Working Beauties</h3><p><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/02/07/yard-sustainability-native-plants/" target="_blank">Embellish your garden with colorful flowers</a>, particularly <a href="https://choosenatives.org/" target="_blank">those native to your area</a>. "They attract bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other pollinators," says Skye, adding that pollinators are an integral part of a plant's life cycle. "Without them, the harvest wouldn't happen, and we would be looking at extreme food shortages, not just occasional gaps. By giving pollinators flowers they like, we support them, just as they support us."</p>
<h3>4. Keep Crops Cozy</h3><p>Got a plant that's struggling? Give it a rock! Brascoupé explains that in Southwest Native gardens, rocks are commonly set next to seedlings or plants that need help. They act as heat sinks, smoothing out day-night temperature variations as they soak up the sun's heat and release it in evening's chill. The practice may have been more widespread, he says, appearing as far north as Iroquois gardens in the U.S. Northeast. It makes sense, he says; in a cold region, rocks protect seedlings from unexpected early-season frost.</p>
<h3>5. Source Materials Locally and for Free</h3><p>For no-cost drip irrigation, Brascoupé uses a fine needle to poke a hole in the neck of clean soda-pop bottles or milk jugs. He then fills the containers with water, replaces their caps, and pushes their pierced necks into the soil.</p><p>Conserve soil moisture and keep weeds down by surrounding the plants with mulching materials that would otherwise have been discarded. People spend time and money getting rid of cardboard, shredded office paper, lawn clippings, and leaves, Brascoupé says. "Tell neighbors, 'I can take that off your hands.' Build human relationships."</p>
<h3>6. Embrace Dandelions</h3><p>Don't banish dandelions. Welcome these supposed weeds! Their leaves are delicious and nutritious, and their taproots break up hardened soil, I learned from Native gardeners. My New York City backyard used to be so compacted, little grew there. I tried scattering dandelion seeds around the yard. They grew and blossomed, and soon earthworms moved in. The soil became soft, friable, and plant-friendly. Earthworms are at it 24-7, working on your behalf, according to Skye. "What more could you ask for?" he says.</p>
<h3>7. Include Healing Herbs</h3><p>Skye has a small medicine-wheel garden by his home, where he delights in growing echinacea, chamomile, comfrey, and other medicinals from seed he saves from one year to the next. Such circular plots are traditionally places to grow herbs and thereby experience their delectable flavors and the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221976.The_Medicine_Wheel_Garden" target="_blank">natural healing they promote</a>.</p>
<h3>8. Save Your Seeds</h3><p>At the end of the season, <a href="https://www.nativeseeds.org/pages/seed-saving-instructions" target="_blank">save the seeds</a> of plants that thrived—and that you enjoyed—in your garden. You can help ensure your future food supply and, if you include unusual or heritage varieties, do your part to sustain biodiversity.</p><p>Seed-saving preserves history as well, Skye says. He called seeds time capsules. "We Native people have always saved them. As we plant, and save, and replant, the seeds go through all we are going through, the good times and the bad." The Dream of Wild Health seed collection, for example, includes a Cherokee family's gift of corn that survived the tribe's deadly Trail of Tears, a forced march that displaced their ancestors from their original homelands.</p><p>Today, danger confronts all of us on this Earth. "We were already facing climate change, and now there is the pandemic," Skye says. The seeds will always be there, to provide both food and a spiritual connection to the Earth, he says. "They are how we will survive."</p><p>Garreau echoes this sentiment: "When we come out of this terrible pandemic, we will have learned to be stronger. We will be invincible."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/05/20/garden-advice-indigenous-food-growers/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
- 'This Is History in the Making': Cherokee Nation Is First U.S.-Based ... ›
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Walter street residents and neighbors gather to watch the wedding of Aaron Meyers and Amanda Mason on Walter Street in Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. on April 25, 2020. Evelyn Hockstein / For The Washington Post / Getty Images
When the shelter-in-place orders came down in California, the first thing I thought of was my cousin's wedding—the one I was supposed to officiate. I'd been working on creating a special ceremony since the fall. But once the pandemic kicked in, everything was canceled.
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<p>Perhaps my cousin is luckier than some—after all, a wedding can be rescheduled. Even so, he had to let go of a cherished dream of when and how his wedding would take place.</p><p>He's certainly not alone. Many people have had to give up important shared rituals—graduation ceremonies, prom nights, long-awaited concerts, religious services, opening-day baseball, and even funerals. The loss, while necessary, is profound.</p><p>What can we do to cope? Can we learn something from this experience that will help us carry on? What will it mean for the future of our social fabric?</p><p>No one knows exactly how forgoing shared rituals will affect us individually or as a society. However, science does give us some clues. By understanding the purpose of shared rituals, we can try to preserve their intent and create a sense of shared emotion, connection, and transcendence.</p>
Why We Have Shared Rituals
<p>Shared rituals play an important role in our psyches, according to social psychologist Shira Gabriel. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28263640" target="_blank">Her research</a> suggests that rituals—choreographed events that produce an emotionally laden experience—create a feeling of unity and sacredness that bonds us together with others.</p><p>"Rituals give us a feeling of going beyond the ordinary—of having a moment that transcends that, turning events into something special and meaningful," Gabriel says.</p><p>Why transcendent? Because when we participate in ritual, we experience a sort of emotion contagion that sociologist Émile Durkheim called "collective effervescence." That uplift and energy increase our sense of commonality (even with strangers) and make us feel we are part of a larger community. It's why we can feel so bonded to fellow Golden State Warriors fans at a game or so unified during a protest march.</p><p>Gabriel says that we often create shared rituals when we go through important life transitions, too, because they mark the passage of time as sacred. Weddings, funerals, and graduations, for example, all give us a sense of meaning, which makes forgoing them so hard.</p><p>"There's no doubt that people are going to grieve and are going to feel sad about the loss of what they had planned," she says.</p><p>Losing out on shared rituals may also be difficult for society at large, sociologist Randall Collins argues. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227501412_Rituals_of_Solidarity_and_Security_in_the_Wake_of_Terrorist_Attack" target="_blank">His research</a> has suggested that when people stop gathering to share emotional experiences, their sense of oneness tends to dissipate, even after experiencing a community tragedy as unifying as 9/11.</p><p>He wonders whether the same might happen with the coronavirus outbreak, especially given the need for "social distancing." A big event involving the whole country—and, in fact, the whole world—will make "everybody focus on the same thing and feel the same emotions," which creates a sense of solidarity. At the same time, however, we lose face-to-face interaction with other people. Can email, phone conversations, and Zoom meetings make up for that loss? "I would say the evidence is sort of a yes, but to a weaker degree," Collins says.</p><p>Gabriel agrees that there is something special about in-person rituals. But <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439760.2019.1689412" target="_blank">her research</a> findings suggest that collective effervescence and social solidarity don't happen only during bigger public events; they can occur even in everyday interactions, too, such as watching TV together or attending an interesting lecture. This means we can create that uplift more easily than we might think.</p><p>"Everyday moments of collective effervescence can make us feel more connected to others, and make us feel as if our life has meaning," Gabriel says. "Our research suggests that people who experience these things a lot are likely to be happier and feel less anxious and depressed."</p>
Creating More Collective Effervescence Now
<p>It's good to know that losing shared rituals isn't dire. That doesn't mean giving them up is easy.</p><p>Therapist <a href="https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_should_you_go_to_therapy" target="_blank">Lori Gottlieb</a>, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, worries that people might discount their losses as trivial by comparing themselves to others who may be suffering more serious losses, such as losing a job or loved one. But, she adds, not being able to fulfill life dreams or expectations can be painful, too, and may require grieving.</p><p>"People need to be able to talk about what they're experiencing, because these are real losses," she says. "We're not here to rank each other's losses in terms of which one is more valid or which one is more significant."</p><p>She points to her own losses from the coronavirus outbreak—her teen son will miss his last semester of eighth grade, and she can't hold a funeral after her father's death or sit shiva for him (a Jewish tradition that helps the bereaved honor the passing of their loved ones). Dismissing those losses or not accepting our feelings of loss is not the answer.</p><p>"As parents, partners, family members, and friends, we need to allow people to talk about the things that they're missing," she says.</p><p>That doesn't preclude reframing a loss in more positive terms or looking for potential <a href="https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/finding_silver_linings" target="_blank">silver linings</a> in our current experience, she adds. Being at home with less to do and more free time may give people new opportunities for intimacy, such as calling up old friends or spending time with children who are usually away at school.</p><p>"Instead of focusing on the things that you don't have, you can look at all of the new things that you do have right now," she says. "There's a lot to be gained in the midst of loss, in the form of community and connection."</p>How to Make New Rituals
<p>Sheltering in place could also inspire people to create alternative events to mark special occasions, she says, such as a Zoom dance party to celebrate a graduation, which might even end up being more memorable than what was originally planned.</p><p>Jan Stanley, who works as a celebrant—someone who designs rituals for weddings and funerals—says that it's not hard to create rituals online, if you keep certain things in mind. She suggests that you:</p><p>• Ask people to bring to their online gathering something symbolic to share, such as a candle to light, a memory or story, a picture, or a poem. Getting people to contribute in that way can help create a sense of oneness.</p><p>• Mark the moment by having someone provide an opening statement that designates the beginning of any ritual and explains the purpose of being there. That sets the tone and makes people realize that this is a special moment in time and not just another online meeting.</p><p>• Create emotional highs, perhaps using music, dancing, poetry, moments of silence, or something else with high emotional resonance to augment the experience.</p><p>• Always have a distinct ending that includes an emotional peak, because people <a href="https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-peak-end-theory/" target="_blank">tend to remember</a> an event better that way.</p><p>Though an online ritual may lack some of the power of an in-person ritual, says Stanley, it still has value. Even doing rituals alone can be useful, she adds, if it's meaningful. Research suggests that creating rituals just for ourselves can help <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23398180" target="_blank">alleviate grief</a> after loss and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29771567" target="_blank">make us feel less out of control</a>, which could help now, when the world seems so uncertain.</p><p>"If you can design a ritual to be meaningful—so that it actually touches your heart or brings someone to mind or gives you a sense of your own purpose—all the better," she says.</p><p>Gabriel, the social psychologist, encourages people to also look beyond formalized rituals to everyday opportunities to share positive emotion and a sense of solidarity from a distance.</p><div id="c96d1" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="696aa5802c12d5fbceeab18c574c135d"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1255514430860820481" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">How people from Detroit social distance: https://t.co/z3MuJLGYk4</div> — philip lewis (@philip lewis)<a href="https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/statuses/1255514430860820481">1588172941.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>She points to examples from her own neighborhood, where people are putting up rainbows in their windows, drawing pictures on the sidewalk for others to see when they walk by, or leaving notes for one another on the ends of driveways. She mentions widely shared online videos showing people singing from their balconies, cheering in appreciation of health care workers, or creating drive-by birthday parades.</p><p>"People are drawn to collective rituals like these for a reason—we want to feel connected to other people and to feel a sensation of sacredness," she says. "These kinds of events should bring on those same sorts of feelings."</p><p>Once the shelter-in-place orders have been lifted, though, Gabriel hopes we'll gain a renewed appreciation for shared rituals.</p><p>"Hopefully, we'll go back to them, and we'll value them even more than we do now," she says. "And, maybe we'll have learned some new tricks along the way, some new ways to connect to other people that we didn't have before."</p>
<p class=""><em>Jill Suttie is book review editor of the online magazine Greater Good, published by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, and a frequent contributor to the magazine.</em></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2020/05/05/coronavirus-social-distancing-rituals/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2645951394#/" target="_self"></a></em></p>
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Essential farm workers continue to work as Florida agriculture industry struggles during coronavirus pandemic. Joe Raedle / Getty Images.
By Liz Carlisle
This opinion piece was originally published by Yes! Magazine on March 30, 2020.
As the coronavirus crisis has laid bare, the U.S. urgently needs a strategic plan for farmland. The very lands we need to ensure community food security and resilience in the face of crises like this pandemic and climate change are currently being paved over, planted to chemically raised feed grains for factory farm animals, and acquired by institutional investors and speculators. For far too long, the fate of farmlands has flown under the radar of public dialogue—but a powerful new proposal from think tank Data for Progress lays out how a national strategic plan for farmland could help boost economic recovery while putting the U.S. on a path to carbon neutrality.
<p>The new Data For Progress <a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/memos/land-access-for-beginning-disadvantaged-farmers" target="_blank">memo</a> builds on the Green New Deal <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text" target="_blank">resolution</a>—a sweeping proposal to build out a carbon neutral economy, inspired by the package of Roosevelt administration social policy that lifted the United States out of the 1930s Depression and created the largest middle class in history. The Green New Deal, advocates say, would mobilize similar infrastructure and jobs programs, but with a focus on climate mitigation and resilience, and a more broadly construed focus on equity. (While the original New Deal met many goals expressed by organized labor, it failed to address racial inequality).</p><p>Yet this latest Data for Progress memo, published today, hearkens back several decades before Roosevelt's presidency. Reopening conversations that were front and center during Abraham Lincoln's time in the White House, the memo proposes one of the most promising strategies yet offered for meeting climate targets while building broad-based economic prosperity: a systematic national policy to facilitate land access for small farmers.</p>
Lincoln’s Unfinished Business
<p>Farmland ownership has not followed the path that President Lincoln envisioned, explains the memo's co-lead author Meleiza Figueroa, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at University of California, Berkeley and faculty-owner of the Birmingham-based Cooperative New School for Urban Studies and Environmental Justice. When Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, he promised small tracts of land to family farmers. Following emancipation, the Lincoln administration also promised "40 acres and a mule" to formerly enslaved Africans.</p><p>However, land speculators cheated from the beginning of the homestead era, gobbling up multiple claims under different names. And "40 acres and a mule" were never provided to emancipated slaves, as President Andrew Johnson <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/" target="_blank">rescinded the promise</a> after Lincoln's assassination. Homestead claims <a href="https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/abouthomesteadactlaw.htm" target="_blank">trickled to a close</a> in the early 1900s, and the federal government backed out of land policy, letting the market take its course. "When you look at the history of injustice in this country," Figueroa says, "it's all about land."</p><p>In the century-long absence of a coherent U.S. policy framework for farmland, Figueroa and her coauthors point out, several worrying trends have developed. For one, prime farmland has been paved over. According to the American Farmland Trust, 25.1 million acres of U.S. agricultural land—nearly the size of the state of Ohio—was converted to developed uses between 1982 and 2015.</p><p>Such land use change has significant climate implications. A <a href="https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2012publications/CEC-500-2012-032/CEC-500-2012-032.pdf" target="_blank">2012 University of California, Davis study</a> that compared an acre of urban land to an acre of irrigated cropland found that the urban land generated 70 times as many greenhouse gas emissions. There's also an opportunity cost: Land-based carbon sequestration strategies like <a href="https://civileats.com/2018/10/11/fire-and-agroforestry-are-reviving-traditional-native-foods-and-communities/" target="_blank">agroforestry</a> and <a href="https://civileats.com/2020/02/11/two-states-are-leading-a-cover-crop-revival/" target="_blank">cover cropping</a> can't be adopted if the land is under concrete.</p><p>Second, the memo points out, what farmland remains has become ever more concentrated in the hands of large farms and institutional investors. A mere <a href="https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.356/" target="_blank">3.2% of U.S. farms account for 51% of the total value</a> of the nation's agricultural production. Forty percent of U.S. farmland is rented, discouraging sustainable agricultural practices that require long-term management and secure land tenure. And farmers make up just <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx" target="_blank">1.3%</a> of the U.S. workforce.</p><p>"There's an assumption out there that this is just the forward march of progress," Figueroa says. " 'Who wants to be a farmer anymore?' Actually, a lot of people want to be farmers now—especially young people who are aware of the effects of climate change and also not satisfied by alienating office labor. Why not offer the opportunity for meaningful and gainful work that is beneficial to everybody, to people and planet?"</p>Racial Injustice Plays Out on the Land
<p>The absence of a coherent U.S. land policy can be blamed for some of the current problems with farmland concentration, say the authors of the Data for Progress memo. But co-lead author Leah Penniman, founding co-director of Soul Fire Farm in Upstate New York, argues that the U.S. government has had a very influential de facto land policy over the past century, even if it wasn't articulated as such. "The very basis of U.S. land policy is rooted in the theft of land and the exclusion of people of color from land," Penniman explains. "This, of course, started with the genocidal stealing of almost the entire continent from the stewardship of Indigenous people … [and] throughout much of our history, there have been various state-level property ownership requirements that excluded people of color from being able to own property."</p><p> When people of color did amass property, Penniman says, they were targeted with violence.</p><p>"The Ku Klux Klan, the White Caps, and the White Citizens Council were responsible for lynching almost 4,500 people, many of whom were landowners, who they saw as having the audacity to get off the plantation and to want to stop sharecropping." The federal government also discriminated against black farmers through USDA programs, Penniman explains, resulting in a rapid decline of black farmers from 14% of the nation's farmers in 1910 to approximately 1% today.</p><p>Given that the average age of the American farmer is 57, and a significant share of the nation's farmland will soon change hands, Penniman and her co-authors argue, Americans have a short window of opportunity to rectify this unjust history while ensuring that farmland is conserved and that farmers have opportunities to combat climate change.</p>A Diverse Coalition for Reform
<p>The diverse coalition mobilizing around these shifts to farm policy is notable: Contributors to the Data for Progress memo range from staffers at predominantly white farm state groups like National Family Farm Coalition and Family Farm Defenders to racial justice leaders like Penniman and Figueroa to academics focused on economic policy.</p><p>What these diverse constituencies share, the memo's authors explain, is that they've all gotten the short end of the stick of land consolidation and are struggling to survive. Ironically, many family farmers have accumulated significant land over the past generation or two but are less economically secure, as they've taken on debt to keep up with the treadmill of overproduction stimulated by current agriculture policy.</p><p>"We need to give current family farmers, who are mostly white, a lot of credit," Penniman says. "Nobody wants to be complicit in racism and in that kind of harm and exclusion. I think it's in our best interest as a nation not to pretend that we're all the same or that we all need the same policies, but to really look truthfully at what needs to change. And we've found that having these honest conversations in our communities often leads to common ground."</p><p>As for how to turn this common ground into policy change, the memo's authors outline a couple different pathways. The 'low hanging fruit' option, explains contributor Adam Calo, a researcher at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, would be to expand three separate kinds of existing policies. For one, Calo believes, the U.S. should ramp up efforts to conserve farmland and protect it from development while limiting land investment by large corporations. Second, programs that incentivize farmers to use regenerative agricultural practices that combat climate change should be dramatically scaled up. The third and critical piece of this policy triad, Calo emphasizes, is equity: the U.S. must strengthen and enforce policies that ensure "Socially Disadvantaged Farmers" (the USDA's term for farmers subjected to racial discrimination) have equal access to all farm programs and particular set-asides to redress historic injustices.</p><p>More ambitious and transformative, the memo's authors suggest, would be to combine these objectives with a fully integrated land policy. Such a policy would include public land banks that could acquire land from retiring farmers and provide affordable access for farmers of color, new farmers, and farm cooperatives who pledged to use sustainable practices. It would also include a land commission, anchored by community-based institutions led by people of color, that would periodically assess that state of farmland access and make policy recommendations.</p>Good Stewardship at Scale
<p>Figueroa is excited about these more far-reaching approaches, which she sees as opportunities to mobilize the underutilized climate response potential in Black and brown communities. "How many Oaxacan farmers are in apartment buildings right now?," Figueroa asks. "If you gave them land, they know what to do with it. It's not like they forgot what to do with it once they crossed the border."</p><p>But getting farmers on land isn't enough, Figueroa and her coauthors emphasize. A successful Green New Deal for farmland must help ecological farmers stay on the land—and thrive. Penniman points to the success of payment for ecosystem services policies like those in Costa Rica, where farmers are compensated for providing environmental benefits on behalf of society—benefits like maintaining pollinator habitat, preventing soil erosion, and sequestering carbon. We already have such programs in the U.S., including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program, but they are funded at much lower levels than other farm programs that predominantly support industrial agriculture.</p><p>Overhauling farm programs by shifting current subsidies to instead compensate farmers for climate-beneficial practices—and establishing public procurement and supply management—would allow current family farmers to earn more money on fewer acres. At the same time, it would enable farmers to produce more human food (rather than biofuels and feed grain for factory farms) and provide more public benefits (such as drawing down emissions and improving watershed health). Remaining and degraded acres no longer needed by these now much more viable farms could be transitioned into land banks like those envisioned by the Data for Progress team, offering a just transition for both existing family farmers and landless farmers looking to contribute to climate mitigation and community food security by stewarding land.</p><p>"It's a win-win," Figueroa says. "People who want to put their labor into agriculture and struggling farmers who want support can actually join together as a community."</p>From Your Site Articles
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Members of environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo install solar panels in Puerto Rico's Adjuntas community. Arturo Massol
By Coral Natalie Negrón Almodóvar
The Earth began to shake as Tamar Hernández drove to visit her mother in Yauco, Puerto Rico, on Dec. 28, 2019. She did not feel that first tremor — she felt only the ensuing aftershocks — but she worried because her mother had an ankle injury and could not walk. Then Hernández thought, "What if something worse is coming our way?"
<p>Her hunch was right. In the twilight hours of Jan. 7, 2020, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the U.S. territory, with its epicenter near the city of Ponce on the south coast, a few miles from Hernández's hometown. Buildings trembled throughout the territory, but the southwest took the brunt of the quake, with dozens of partially or completely collapsed dwellings, including a school and a church, according to a <a href="https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/fotogalerias/muchosmunicipiosdelsurexperimentarondanosenestructurasyresidencias-galeria-2539161/" target="_blank">report</a> from El Nuevo Día. The island's primary power generation plants in the southern area of Puerto Rico failed, immediately plunging the territory into darkness.</p>
<p>As a survivor of Hurricane Maria's devastation in 2017, Hernández was consumed with anxiety and desperation at the prospect of having to live through another natural disaster, and watching the government mismanage the recovery again. "My father's Alzheimer's progressed since the storm, and dealing with an equal emergency was unthinkable," she said, before bursting into tears. She doubted she could maintain her economic stability after the earthquake damaged her nail business in the urban center of Yauco.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjgzMjgzOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMjU3Nzk2OH0.857RhIF4LSWcGUSfMGPhvPB565_zzh44UhSJ6sXBJk8/img.jpg?width=980" id="bc44c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e5a757e7f8226f8383c08ded4aa73378" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
A view of a washed out road near Utuado, Puerto Rico, after a Coast Guard Air Station Borinquen MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew dropped relief supplies to residents Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017. The locals were stranded after Hurricane Maria by washed out roads and mudslides. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Eric D. Woodall / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
<p>Help did arrive, although it didn't come from the government initially. Instead, a hyperlocal response made up of disparate nonprofits and volunteers arrived and provided much needed aid, even during continuing aftershocks. Hernández said she was especially thankful for the response from one community organization, Tabernacle Followers of Jesus Christ.<br></p><p>Those volunteer initiatives sparked a feeling of trust in refugee camps, said Víctor Amauri, a social worker and one of the help coordinators with Solidarity Brigade of the West, which is made up of people from many organizations who provided direct response to help communities after Hurricane Maria.</p><p>"Strategizing after the hurricane and developing short- and long-term plans was our strong suit," Amauri said. "Now, it isn't straightforward to plan something for tomorrow, because everything changed. Misinformation and lack of transparency from the federal and local governments are preventing us from helping our people as they deserve."</p><p>The group leaders of the Solidarity Brigade used to meet in Mayagüez to organize community building projects. They would teach about composting and orchard keeping, and promote grassroots efforts to enhance food security and local agriculture as tools of self-sustainability.</p><p>"But in this context, we cannot think ahead," Amauri said. "We are still handling dozens of cases of families that are sleeping on the floor because, even though we are a country prone to hurricanes and, thanks to our location in between fault lines, earthquakes, the authorities never developed an emergency plan response."</p><p>A report by the Center of Investigative Journalism of Puerto Rico, the <a href="http://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2018/04/puerto-rico-far-from-having-plan-to-face-climate-change/" target="_blank">Climate Change Series Project</a> — the culmination of years of requesting public documents — found that despite Puerto Rico's vulnerability, the territorial government had taken limited measures to tackle natural disasters. Even though investigative work in 2017 uncovered evidence that the death toll of Hurricanes Maria and Irma was much higher than the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/08/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-death-toll.html" target="_blank">64 victims claimed by the former governor Ricardo Rosselló</a> — <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/28/health/puerto-rico-gw-report-excess-deaths/index.html" target="_blank">nearly 3,000 people are estimated to have died</a>, a little less than twice as many as in Hurricane Katrina — and the territory's ability to respond to emergencies has not improved much. </p><p>The government's inefficient response has led to the formation of several citizen coalitions that know the needs of their communities. The Single Voice Movement is a conglomerate of local nonprofit and community-based organizations that already developed a two-year response plan for earthquake-affected communities. The projects developed by these entities have a vision that looks inward toward active communities capable of supporting themselves and their neighbors, said Cora Arce Rivera, executive director of Aspira de Puerto Rico.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjgyNjU5Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNTI0NjQxNH0.-J4GQbxXXye9W14PDKM3E_XOoOpI8vvcUIjLxXAulk4/img.jpg?width=980" id="e1cef" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="cba9a33809657e9e3bee1f9bb8ad4489" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
A group of students from Aspira's Inc. Alternative School in the municipality of Mayaguez ready to go to the town of Cabo Rojo and receive farming instruction. Francisco Acevedo.
<p>Aspira's alternative school in the western town of Mayagüez allows teenagers, most of them school dropouts, to explore the significance of agriculture. The students are learning to cultivate tropical root and tuber crops that can germinate in unfavorable conditions. They are particularly resistant to damage by high wind hurricanes and typhoons, Aspira's agronomist Francisco Acevedo said.</p><p>José Esteban López Maldonado, a student at the elite Residential Center of Educational Opportunities in Mayagüez, runs a <a href="https://www.periodicolaperla.com/le-dan-la-escuela-jose-esteban/" target="_blank">similar project</a> in the small mountainside municipality of Adjuntas. In 2016, he managed to acquire one of the hundreds of schools closed by the local Department of Education and transformed it into a coworking space where people can learn about hydroponic cultivation, coffee planting, and greenhouses. USDA Rural Development, which offers loans and grants to economic development projects, has offered López help to improve the infrastructure of the school, but local authorities have not been able to provide him a proof of ownership so he can take advantage of the program, he said.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjgyNjYxMS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMjIxOTYzOX0.JODZrc7sTy6qPWZIYGouPMuKX6tGhf39_aQzZPZY7D8/img.jpg?width=980" id="c0d62" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="10c0e9afabada5f2beeae350087009bd" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
José Esteban in Ponce, Puerto Rico, presenting his new initiative to distribute coffee Caturra, produced in his farm Lírica. Coral Negrón
<p>The island also faces a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/04/finally-puerto-rico-has-way-out-its-debt-crisis/" target="_blank">bankruptcy crisis</a> and <a href="https://apnews.com/1211eb3e68b24c35a994c60973c8de65" target="_blank">austerity measures</a> imposed by the federal Financial Oversight and Management Board. José Caraballo-Cueto, an economist and assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico, said the bureaucracy around government processes exemplifies how the island is the perfect prey for disaster capitalism. "Restoration doesn't have the impact it deserves on the local economy because the biggest beneficiaries are not locals," Caraballo said. "A private law firm is even handling the cases of lack of proof of ownership post-Hurricane María."</p><p>In Puerto Rico, almost 92 percent of houses were damaged by the hurricane, according to a <a href="https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/vol--44--no-2--housing/the-lack-of-proof-of-ownership-in-puerto-rico-is-crippling-repai/" target="_blank">report</a> from the American Bar Association. More than 95 percent of those tenants, about <a href="https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/vol--44--no-2--housing/the-lack-of-proof-of-ownership-in-puerto-rico-is-crippling-repai/" target="_blank">1.1 million people</a>, applied for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Individuals and Households Program in 2018, but a FEMA spokesman told NBC News that 335,748 <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/puerto-rico-crisis/no-deeds-no-aid-rebuild-homes-puerto-rico-s-reconstruction-n868396" target="_blank">claims were denied because they couldn't provide a deed</a> proving ownership of their homes.</p><p>Situations such as this one eroded Puerto Ricans' belief in local and federal institutions, which have promoted new governance models, said Arturo Massol Deyá, the executive director of 40-year-old environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo.</p><p>In 150 locations across the island territory, Casa Pueblo ensured that, after Maria, those with the most urgent need for electricity received solar panels, including hospitals, small bodegas, and the homes of aging residents who required dialysis. In the recent earthquakes, the solar power systems proved to be more resilient than the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/puerto-rico-earthquake-power-outages-prepa-news" target="_blank">Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority's electricity grid, which failed again</a>.</p><p>In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Massol Deyá acknowledges that people wanted to be helped by their fellow townspeople. "They discovered soon that the true meaning of 'just recovery' is that the resources end up providing services that change the reality of constant vulnerability," he said.</p><p>"Energy is the ability to do work," Massol Deyá said. "We are putting the opportunity in the hands of the people; we want them to acquire the power to govern themselves and enjoy their production. It is the maximum self-decolonization scenario because the top-down model has collapsed. … it is not effective."</p><p>An upcoming Casa Pueblo project, in collaboration with professors at the University of Michigan, will be to use <a href="https://global.umich.edu/newsroom/puerto-rico/" target="_blank">biomass from coffee production to generate energy</a>. The energy produced will be used to power the coffee plantation to improve the harvest. The technique, Massol said, helps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, it will generate employment and provide a more sustainable life for the residents of Adjuntas.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjgyNjYyNy9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNTYyMDY5N30.Px8y8bw-tVga0q8DTaJ9QTUXdhWJyS03WFa_VFLYrGY/img.jpg?width=980" id="4b2e1" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ddc2f3b7f05b7fb2e9abd1ad1b9bf604" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Arturo Massol, executive director of Casa Pueblo de Adjuntas. Omar Alfonso
<p>All these grassroots actions are becoming the backbone of survival in Puerto Rico. For the time being, however, the lives of those residing in earthquake zones are stagnant, said Edward Santiago-Pacheco, a U.S. Army veteran and father of a newborn girl.</p><p>He lost his newly purchased house in Yauco in the 6.4 magnitude earthquake and has not heard back from the insurance company, the bank, or any local government agency.</p><p>"It is hard to overcome this when you just brought a new life into this world," Santiago-Pacheco said. "FEMA only provided money for two months of rent for temporary housing, but I still must pay my house mortgage. The worst part is that the local government is using our pain in favor of their political propaganda."</p><p>On Feb. 10, the Solidarity Brigade learned about Hernández's and Santiago-Pacheco's cases and reached out to them, Amauri said. However, thousands need similar help.</p><p>"Two of our members are sociologists (Roberto Vélez and Jacqueline Villegas), and they developed a census to identify all necessities and help people the best possible way. But we need the government to publish relevant information that can help us organize our strategy," he added.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjgyNjY0OC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNjUwMzc5N30.OtGMrbtQbNSViTrNakr45D_QvO6L_D_nR954dOVKNaI/img.jpg?width=980" id="c486c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3fc839db8949cdade82d010b4981cf9f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<p class=""><em>Coral Natalie Negrón Almodóvar is a Puerto Rican data journalist, a current grantee of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, and Patti Birch for Data Journalism Fellow at the Committee to Protect Journalists.</em> </p><p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2020/02/24/puerto-rico-natural-disaster-recovery/">YES! Magazine</a>. </em></p>Casa Pueblo's installation of solar panels in a hardware store in Adjuntas. Arturo Massol
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By Tim Lydon
Climate-related disasters are on the rise, and carbon emissions are soaring. Parents today face the unprecedented challenge of raising children somehow prepared for a planetary emergency that may last their lifetimes. Few guidebooks are on the shelves for this one, yet, but experts do have advice. And in a bit of happy news, it includes strategies already widely recognized as good for kids.
<p>First, consider that a child born today enters a world growing progressively hotter, where recent weather extremes have displaced <a href="https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/06/lets-talk-about-climate-migrants-not-climate-refugees/" target="_blank">tens of millions</a> of people. Scientists say displacement may swell into the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2019/10/30/shocking-new-maps-show-how-sea-level-rise-will-destroy-coastal-cities-by-2050/#6195a2a9456c" target="_blank">hundreds of millions</a> in the years ahead, as the rapid <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2019/12/05/alaska-climate-change-glacier/" target="_blank">melting</a> of glaciers now underway drives sea levels upward. The resulting <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/mental-health/2018/10/18/climate-change-and-its-staggering-refugee-crisis/" target="_blank">migrations</a> will likely trigger conflict, hunger, and political instability. As we already see in the children pressed against the U.S.-Mexico border, many of them fleeing drought in <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/418976-migrant-caravan-shows-the-destabilizing-effect-of-climate-change" target="_blank">Central America</a>, migrations may also lead to hardened borders and xenophobic or <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/7/20756775/el-paso-shooting-trump-hispanic-invasion" target="_blank">racist</a> impulses. All this causes military analysts to call climate change a "<a href="https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/06/why-climate-change-is-a-threat-multiplier/" target="_blank">threat multiplier</a>" that can exacerbate existing social problems.</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/02/18/climate-change-kids/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>. <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2645215980#/" target="_self"></a></em><em></em></p>
<p>Parents today must brace kids for both the direct physical impacts of climate change and the humanitarian crises they will trigger, which may be worsened by human behaviors. Whether kids experience the events personally or in the context of world news, experts say kids will need strong foundations in resilience, positive thinking, compassion, and other skills to maintain mental health and inform their responses.</p><p>"It's a lot for parents to think about," said Tracey Wiese, an advanced nurse practitioner who specializes in family practice and psychiatric mental health in Alaska. As warming brings <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/new-report-highlights-alaska%E2%80%99s-last-five-years-dramatic-climate" target="_blank">transformative change</a> to Alaska, upending landscapes, cultural norms, and nutritional resources, Wiese sees growing anxiety among parents.</p><p>"I hear about it every week now," she said from her office in Anchorage. "Parents are worried about existential stuff, like clean water, a livable planet for their kids, even catastrophic environmental events."</p><p>Wiese said parents can use a range of strategies to help children, but that kids first require a supportive relationship with one or more caregivers.</p><p>"That connection is vital for helping children develop skills such as resilience," she said.</p>
PoPositive Stress and Strong Support Networks
<p>Wiese defines resilience as the ability to manage stress and adapt to change. Her words are backed by a 2017 American Psychological Association <a href="https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf" target="_blank">report</a> on the mental health impacts of climate change, which also emphasizes strong caregiver support and the value of resilience. For parents, the report's authors recommend cultivating belief in a child's own resilience, fostering optimism, and teaching children to control emotional responses to change. These are common tenets of modern parenting the report said are made especially important by climate change.</p><p>Psychologists also describe the value of "<a href="https://center.uoregon.edu/StartingStrong/uploads/STARTINGSTRONG2016/HANDOUTS/KEY_49962/TypesofStress.pdf" target="_blank">positive stress,</a>" which may include public speaking, making new friends, and other experiences that can briefly increase heart rates but that help wire young minds to adapt to change. Parents who provide supportive coaching through these normal life experiences help kids develop resilience.</p><p>"Parents also need to model positive and appropriate responses to stress," Wiese said.</p><p>Like many things, what happens earliest in life matters most, but teens and even adults can still improve resilience. The APA offers an online <a href="https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/resilience" target="_blank">guide</a> with age-appropriate strategies for parents.</p><p>In contrast, stress related to poverty, malnutrition, violence, or abuse can weaken a child's resilience, acting as "threat multipliers" of their own for children born into the climate change era. In such cases, climate can compound existing stress, potentially increasing odds for substance abuse, anxiety, or depression, according to the authors of the APA report.</p><p>Especially where caregiver support is lacking, coaches, teachers, and other mentors can help young people manage these negative stressors. It's a reminder that entire communities, not just parents, will have a hand in raising climate-resilient children.</p><p>That community focus is an important factor according to Susan Clayton, a psychologist at Wooster College in Ohio and co-editor of <em><a href="https://www.elsevier.com/books/psychology-and-climate-change/clayton/978-0-12-813130-5" target="_blank">Psychology and Climate Change: Human Perceptions, Impacts, and Responses</a>,</em> which summarizes psychological research tied to climate change.</p><p><span></span>"Strong social support networks give children a better foundation in resilience," Clayton said. She lists teachers, clubs, and faith communities as good examples of social networks that become "sources of meaning" for kids.</p>Connnection to the Outdoors
<p>Connecting youths to the outdoors is also important when it comes to climate change. <a href="https://www.parentingscience.com/outdoor-learning.html" target="_blank">Research</a> shows time outdoors, especially at an early age, can reduce childhood stress and anxiety, while strengthening confidence, imagination, and physical health — all characteristics that will help tomorrow's adults adapt to a changing world.</p><p>"Nature-based education [and] therapy are real sources of strength and resilience for young people," Clayton said.</p><p>But not everyone grows up with access to the outdoors, and both climate change and population growth are driving greater <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/climate-migrants-report-world-bank-spd/" target="_blank">movement</a> to urban areas worldwide. It means more kids live in developed areas with limited time in nature.</p><p>Fortunately, concern over how much time kids spend hitched to phones and computers has already sparked a <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2019/12/13/nature-based-education/" target="_blank">revival</a> in nature-based education. Parents and teachers today can access a growing network of tested programs. Some, such as <a href="https://www.plt.org/about-us/" target="_blank">Project Learning Tree</a> and the <a href="https://www.neefusa.org/nature/water/benefits-environmental-education" target="_blank">National Environmental Education Foundation</a>, are active across the country, but an expanding galaxy of others function at the local level. At the movement's cutting edge is a growing number of outdoor-focused <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/04/early-childhood-outdoor-education/558959/" target="_blank">preschools</a> and <a href="https://www.rei.com/blog/news/are-outdoor-preschools-the-wave-of-the-future" target="_blank">kindergartens</a> that provide formative experiences in natural settings, including within urban areas.</p><p>Proponents say nature-based education is good for older kids, too, and can spark interest in science and other fields that will be crucial in the decades ahead, as people engineer solutions to climate-related challenges. Such programs may steer teens toward promising careers. But in the short term, learning about science and nature can instill optimism in the face of discouraging climate news.</p>Discuss and Model Solutions
<p>But what about day-to-day actions in the home? Experts agree that discussing climate change and modeling behaviors that reflect climate solutions are important, too. Discussions need to be <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/04/raising-kids-climate-change/554969/" target="_blank">age-appropriate</a> to protect young children from unnecessary stress and anxiety. But exhibiting climate-positive behaviors such as energy conservation and avoiding single-use plastics carries value at all ages. According to Wiese, it shows kids that parents are engaged in trying to better the world, and it fosters resilience by channeling energy toward tangible action.</p><p>Mary DeMocker, author of <a href="https://www.marydemocker.com/" target="_blank"><em>The Parents' Guide to Climate Revolution</em></a>, agrees. As the mother of two young adults, DeMocker spent more than two decades raising kids with climate change in mind, and she believes in empowering young people to create solutions.</p><p>"Anything that gives kids a sense of agency is important," she said. "Maybe they help put together the family's emergency plan or evacuation kit. For older kids, it might mean writing letters to Congress."</p><p>DeMocker's book contains 100 short, action-oriented chapters with ideas on greener lifestyles, getting kids outdoors, and promoting solutions to the climate crisis. She is attentive to the science of climate change and the <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046972" target="_blank">urgent need</a> for a swift transition to clean energy. That drives her belief that children growing up today must feel empowered to create change. In addition to strong support networks, time outdoors, and positive thinking habits, she said, empowerment comes from solid foundations in both civics and climate science.</p><p>"I encourage parents to push for climate literacy in schools," she said. "Climate change is the biggest thing that's going to affect their children's future. Kids need to know the science and causes but also the solutions. And it needs to be taught free from the constraints of political interests."</p><p>DeMocker said young people should not be told "what to think about climate, but how to think about it." She believes teaching kids to think critically about the issue, including in geopolitical terms, helps them avoid despair and instead empowers them to create change. A grounding in civics and democracy then informs kids how change can occur.</p>Foster Compassion
<p>Compassion is also a theme in DeMocker's work. She said it's an important emotional response for parents to exercise while listening to a child's fears about climate change, which may include concerns about wildlife, natural disasters, or the well-being of friends, family, and even pets.</p><p>In Alaska, Wiese also sees the importance of compassion. She said parents foster compassion when they provide a safe emotional place for kids to express their feelings and where feelings are respected. For younger children, she also sees value in <a href="https://www.pbs.org/parents/thrive/raising-includers-5-tips-to-help-your-kids-be-kind-and-compassionate?gclid=Cj0KCQiApaXxBRDNARIsAGFdaB9Dp67VmyJHY5kke0ptpDapbSc767cVtYMrs-05ZI0DtfKRAKVgRw8aArYCEALw_wcB#disqus_thread" target="_blank">compassion-based play</a>.</p><p>Exercising compassion models behaviors young people will need in the future, too, as they emerge as adults into a world undergoing significant physical and societal change. Global experts <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1041261" target="_blank">predict</a> low- and middle-income people — and especially children — will continue feeling the brunt of weather extremes, food shortages, and other climate-related events. Tomorrow's adults will need to know the value of compassion to promote responses that alleviate suffering, foster social justice, and decarbonize the economy. That provides a check against intolerance, nationalism, and other negative reactions that can compound suffering and civil unrest. Practicing compassion also carries mental health <a href="https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-compassionate-mind" target="_blank">benefits</a> that can help tomorrow's adults weather the climate disruption they will experience.</p><p>Like climate change itself, the prospect of raising children on a warming planet is daunting. When it becomes overwhelming, Wiese said, parents should focus on what they can control: Practice self-care. Provide kids with safety and support. Teach resilience and compassion. And model planet-healthy choices that orient children away from anxiety and toward solutions.</p><p><em>Tim Lydon has worked on public lands issues for many years and is a founding member of the Prince William Sound Stewardship Foundation. His writing has appeared in Hakai Magazine, The Revelator, The Hill, Terrain.org, and elsewhere.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
- 5 Answers for Kids Concerned About Climate Crisis - EcoWatch ›
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By Tyler Wells Lynch
For years, Toni Genberg assumed a healthy garden was a healthy habitat. That's how she approached the landscaping around her home in northern Virginia. On trips to the local gardening center, she would privilege aesthetics, buying whatever looked pretty, "which was typically ornamental or invasive plants," she said. Then, in 2014, Genberg attended a talk by Doug Tallamy, a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware. "I learned I was actually starving our wildlife," she said.
<p>The problem, Tallamy explained, is with the picky diets of plant-eating insects. Most of these bugs — roughly 90 percent — eat and reproduce on only certain native plant species, specifically those with whom they share an evolutionary history. Without these carefully tuned adaptations of specific plants, insect populations suffer. And because bugs themselves are a key food source for birds, rodents, amphibians, and other critters, that dependence on natives — and the consequences of not having them — works its way up the food chain. Over time, landscapes that consist mainly of invasive or nonnative plants could become dead zones.</p>
<p class=""><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/02/07/yard-sustainability-native-plants/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2645075454#/" target="_self"><br/></a> </em><em></em></p>
<p>Croplands can be just as destructive, making up nearly 20 percent of all land in the United States. And that doesn't even include the single largest irrigated crop in the country. Covering more than 40 million acres in the U.S., grass lawn consumes an area roughly the size of New England — land that, for the sake of habitat conservation, might as well be pavement.</p><p>Considering how little habitat and food these monocultures provide, and the incredible amount of resources they require, is there any wonder why the global insect populations <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature" target="_blank">are plummeting</a>?</p><p>But there are solutions. One, at least in theory, is quite simple: Plant more native species. It's a calling that has spoken to a growing number of park managers, home gardeners, and landscapers — many of whom trace a direct line of inspiration to Tallamy. His research has helped overturn decades of harmful horticultural practice, forcing us to rethink how we tend to both public and private spaces.</p>
SaSavanna Syndrome
<p>In lieu of monocrops, landscapes with a larger, more diverse biomass of native species help support pollinators, sequester carbon, capture runoff, and rebuild habitats. <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190905094056.htm" target="_blank">One recent study</a> found habitats with two or three native tree species are on average 25 percent to 30 percent more productive than monocultures, meaning they contribute that much more food and energy to an ecosystem. Habitats with five native tree species were 50 percent more productive. Wildlife is drawn to lands teeming with native plants.</p><p>For individuals who'd like to live a more sustainable lifestyle, the simple message of planting more native species is both productive and rewarding — a refreshing contrast to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals" target="_blank">consumerist </a><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals" target="_blank">exhortations</a> that blame the collective problem of environmental collapse on individual shopping choices. Like anything else, real change has to happen at the macro level, especially when it comes to turfgrass — a crop with deep cultural, even evolutionary roots.</p><p>Sociobiologists refer to the preference humans have for vast swaths of low-cut grass as "Savanna Syndrome." Open grasslands allowed our primitive ancestors to keep an eye out for predators. So even today, on a deep level, we feel safer when we can see to the horizon.</p><p>Until the Industrial Age, the demands of agriculture kept lawns at bay. They were seen mostly as status symbols that said a person had enough money to brush off the territorial demands of farmland. The invention of the lawnmower democratized the lawn, and further embedded its pathological hold on our psyches.</p><p>But lawns require huge quantities of water and often chemical treatments to maintain them — not to mention the emissions produced by two-cycle lawnmowers. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, running a lawnmower for one hour <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529234907.htm" target="_blank">emits as much air pollution</a> as driving a typical car 100 miles. This resource allocation becomes more and more difficult to justify as climate change continues to dry up once-productive habitats. As a monocrop, lawns displace landscapes that could benefit people, plants, animals, and insects. It's time for us to reconsider lawns on a grand scale, several researchers have concluded.</p><p>Considering how entrenched lawns are in the American imagination, to uproot them will require some give-and-take. Advocates say we need a culture shift as well as policies that support it.</p><p>"As climate change and droughts worsen, we might get to a point where there's political support to outlaw lawns," said Sarah B. Schindler, a professor of law at the University of Maine, who has written several papers about the legal authority of municipalities to ban lawns. "I do think we're seeing a change in norms, and I think part of that is tied to rising awareness of climate catastrophe."</p><p>Part of that work is simply raising awareness. Many people don't think about the possibility of their yards as anything but turfgrass. As Tallamy puts it, lawn is the default landscape, but it doesn't have to be. "People don't realize there's an alternative."</p>Choosing Native Plants
<p>Some communities are beginning to impose alternatives. In <a href="https://www.latimes.com/home/la-hm-ga-turf-removal-class-20190307-story.html" target="_blank">California</a>, <a href="https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2019/07/18/rebate-turf-replacement-water-conservation/" target="_blank">Colorado</a>, and <a href="http://cronkitenewsonline.com/2013/10/cities-offering-rebates-to-encourage-residents-to-convert-yards-to-xeriscaping/index.html" target="_blank">Arizona</a>, where water shortages are a growing crisis, cities offer rebates for each square foot of lawn replaced with native or water-saving landscapes—a process known as "xeriscaping." In wetter climes, <a href="https://doee.dc.gov/service/raingardenrebate" target="_blank">Washington, DC</a>, and cities in <a href="https://lincoln.ne.gov/city/ltu/watershed/grant/landscape.htm" target="_blank">Nebraska</a>, <a href="https://www.12000raingardens.org/about-rain-gardens/incentives/" target="_blank">Washington state</a>, <a href="https://www.cityofames.org/home/showdocument?id=3456" target="_blank">Iowa</a> and <a href="https://www.southstpaul.org/680/Rebate---Rain-Barrel-Rain-Gardens" target="_blank">Minnesota</a> have implemented rebate programs for the planting of rain gardens, which capture and infiltrate more runoff than grass. The city of <a href="https://www.alexandriava.gov/uploadedFiles/recreation/parks/Managed%20Meadows%20and%20Grassland%20Habitats%20in%20the%20City%20of%20Alexandria,%20Virginia.pdf" target="_blank">Alexandria, Virginia</a>, recently changed its municipal mowing to allow for the growth of meadows and glades in city parks. </p><p>Throughout the country, local groups are advocating for the planting of natives on roadsides, medians, campuses, and parks. Some, like <a href="http://www.foodnotlawns.com/" target="_blank">Food Not Lawns</a>, encourage homeowners and neighborhoods to replace lawns with edible plants to establish food sovereignty and food security within their communities. Others take a more clandestine approach by planting "guerrilla gardens" or tossing "seed bombs" into abandoned lots and properties where they don't have the legal right to garden.</p><p><span></span>"One thing that we've learned with our research is that there is room for compromise," Tallamy said. Native planting doesn't have to be all or none to make a difference. He gave the example of chickadee reproduction: If you have at least 70 percent native plant biomass in a given habitat, you can have sustainable chickadee reproduction. "That gives you 30 percent to plant perennials and exotics and other ornamental plants."</p><p>Tallamy's research into the relationship between native plants and insects has inspired gardeners to do more than just turn their yards into native oases. Many are now creating resources to empower others to do the same.</p><p>The National Wildlife Federation created a <a href="https://www.nwf.org/nativeplantfinder/" target="_blank">native plant finder web tool</a>, which allows users to plug in a ZIP code to find trees, shrubs, and plants native to their region. Following her horticultural revelation, Toni Genberg created <a href="http://choosenatives.org/" target="_blank">ChooseNatives.org</a>, a resource to help users find, purchase, and learn about native plants. Since switching to natives, Genberg herself has seen all sorts of wildlife return to a property that, before, was only a suburban simulacrum.</p><p>Matt Bright founded the nonprofit charity Earth Sangha with the goal of propagating and restoring local native plant communities in the DC area. "We've set records for total plants distributed from our wild plant nursery for four years running," he said. "And overall, the trend has been towards more demand from all corners, whether that's from park managers and ecologists, homeowners, or landscaping companies."</p>Biodiversity Among Buildings
<p>But shifting away from lawns is complicated by the fact that municipalities have long adopted rules called "weed ordinances," which require short ground cover for purely aesthetic reasons. This effectively mandates the planting and maintaining of lawns, as do many local zoning laws and HOA bylaws. And these rules aren't always taken lightly. In Michigan a few years ago, a woman <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/julie-bass-may-face-jail-time-for-planting-vegetables/2011/07/08/gIQAZZOv3H_blog.html" target="_blank">faced jail time</a> for growing a vegetable garden in her front yard instead of lawn.</p><p>People don't want to be told that they can't have their lawns, but they also don't want to be told that they have to have a lawn.</p><p>The elephant in the room, of course, is property rights. Limits and requirements can inspire backlash. As Genberg points out, "Americans don't want to be told what to do, especially when it comes to their properties."</p><p>That's why Tallamy has focused on talking to the public instead of advancing top-down regulation. Laws, especially bans, need public support to pass. To even think about regulating lawns you first need to change the culture around them. As people like Toni Genberg and Matt Bright show, Tallamy's message is resonating.</p><p>"What you do on your property affects everybody," Tallamy said. Nonnative or ornamental plants may not look like pollutants, but from an ecological standpoint, they are. Tallamy's research bears this out: A new paper from his team shows just how effective nonnative plants are at destroying local habitats.</p><p>"We compared caterpillar communities in hedgerows that were invaded with non-natives versus hedgerows that were mostly native," he explained. "There's a 96% reduction in caterpillar biomass when they're nonnative, so if you're a bird and you're trying to rear your young, you just lost 96% of your food."</p><p>But there's a flip side, he said. If you take the invasive species out and put the native plants in, you've just created 96 percent more food.</p><p>And this isn't some gardening trend reserved for America's suburbs and conservation lands. In Manhattan, the most densely populated urban center in the country, officials converted an abandoned railway line into a public park called the High Line, with a policy of planting at least 50 percent native species.</p><p>"There are monarch butterflies there, there are all kinds of native bees, which really surprised me," Tallamy said. "If you can do that in Manhattan, you can do it anywhere."</p>From Your Site Articles
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