Chef Regina Tchelly with her food creations on her veranda, with Copacabana Beach in the background. Favela Organica
By Agostino Pestroni
Take a dozen banana peels, wash them gently with a brush under running water, then chop them into small pieces. Next, blend the peels with five spoons of cacao and a cup of ice water. Once the lumps have been removed, place the mixture in a hot, buttered pan and stir it for five minutes. Let it cool down to thicken, and then roll the resulting dough into small spheres. Lastly, dip the balls into sesame or peanut powder, and you'll have a brigadeiro, an iconic Brazilian dessert.
But this is not the standard version of the sweet: It's a unique variant created by Regina Tchelly, a 39-year-old Brazilian chef and resident of Rio de Janeiro's Babilônia slum.
<p>"I always wanted to be a chef, but not a normal one," Tchelly says.</p><p>In 2001, Tchelly moved from a small town in northeastern Brazil to the favelas, or slums, of Rio looking for a better future for her and her daughter. She initially worked as a housemaid, a common profession for women coming into the city from poorer areas. But the longer she shopped at the local markets, the more she grew disappointed by the amount of food being thrown out each day.</p><p>Back in her hometown, she had learned to use all parts of the fruits and vegetables she prepared, and she couldn't make peace with the wastefulness of the city. She knew that the thrown-away peels, seeds, and rinds held precious nutritional value. Tchelly has since worked to give a second life to food that would otherwise go to waste. She shows that repurposing food waste is not only a solution to the problem of access to healthy food, but also one remedy to help address a broken social system.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDUxMTY1Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NDk1NDEyOX0.qveLhDsh6gjy_SJ7fnx5BLkZfc30Z7exMWqoIo-Cjk0/img.jpg?width=980" id="c4769" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="5a97044d6e71ca284e01ed75cc5cd2c6" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Regina Tchelly giving a talk about the impact of food on health in a Rio de Janeiro hospital. Favela Organica
<h2>Democratizing Real Food</h2><p>The difficulty of making ends meet in rural areas of Brazil is <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Brazil/Ongoing-domestic-migration" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">one of the reasons for migration within the country</a>. Small farmers leave their homes to crowd into the favelas of the megalopolis, where they can no longer afford the quality of food they used to produce on their land.</p><p>About <a href="https://catcomm.org/favela-facts/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1.5 million</a> people live in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, known as the Cidade maravilhosa, or city of wonder. Electricity, running water, and sanitation systems are often lacking in those informal settlements long neglected by the government, and life is tough for those who live in them. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/family-food-insecurity-and-nutritional-risk-in-adolescents-from-a-lowincome-area-of-rio-de-janeiro-brazil/2557E62F6E770DC4144FF5D00B0E0E58" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Food insecurity</a> is one of the most significant divides between the favelas and wealthy areas of Rio: In the slums, many rely on government-subsidized schools, food banks, or junk food to feed their children.</p><p>It's a matter of affordability rather than supply, though. Food abounds in Brazil. A 2014 <a href="http://www.fao.org/in-action/fapda/publications/country-fact-sheets/en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">study</a> by the Food and Agriculture Organization listed Brazil as the world's third-largest exporter of agricultural products. Yet <a href="https://www.scielosp.org/article/csc/2020.v25n9/3421-3430/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">5 million people</a> still suffer from <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/malnutrition-in-all-its-forms-and-social-inequalities-in-brazil/89E445C46FF53653A6604163C1EB86E4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">malnutrition</a>.</p><p>"My idea was to democratize real food, so to allow everybody to be able to access it," Tchelly says.</p><p>In 2011, Tchelly gave her first course on how to cook with food scraps to six other housekeepers in her slum, which led her to create a social enterprise called <a href="https://favelaorganica.com.br/pt/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Favela Organica</a>. Her goal was to teach others how to repurpose food waste produced by Rio's markets, and to learn how to grow produce on their balconies and in their yards. Tchelly's project relies on the idea of an integrated food cycle: growing food, utilizing it all, and creating compost with what's left to fertilize a garden.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDUxMTY2NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NDkwNDc2OH0.nqQKFWhgBdPxnsCUgXAIOWygueR6ZW5f9t29VcKfpEs/img.jpg?width=980" id="ae904" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ed69af837c7eff99599eedc2fe1062d0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
A class on how to use juicing residue for skin care. Favela Organica
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDUxMTY2Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2NDAxMjUxMX0.hDqR9kLfVZbYJhYjBBSpoRghlrza7KOu5pooCxhUu30/img.jpg?width=980" id="9ea30" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="db8f96e70aaa7a76d283017d95ede675" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Favela Organica's work focuses on the cycle of life and uses yoga and meditation as part of its classes. Favela Organica
<p>While Tchelly initially aimed at tackling food waste, her project soon turned into something more powerful. With the pandemic and the resulting food insecurity <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/08/10/covid-brazil-deaths-inequality/?arc404=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">spreading widely within the crowded favelas</a>, what Regina Tchelly ultimately provides is a way for people to gain dignity by making their own nutritious food. She's part of the <a href="https://www.terramadre.info/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Terra Madre</a> network, a global movement of food producers, chefs, and academics who believe that through a holistic approach to food, communities affected by systemic social disparities can regain power over what they eat, which is the first step towards self-determination.</p>
<h2>Innovating for Food Justice</h2><p>The balcony of Favela Organica overlooks the famous Copacabana Beach. A small vegetable garden adds to the produce coming from local farmers who donate to Tchelly what they cannot sell. Tchelly's workplace is a forest of hanging pans and pots, with a cooking station for two people and a larger space where she gave free classes to 60 people at a time — until the pandemic hit. Now she offers her courses online.</p><p>Tchelly supports the free lessons for residents of the favela. She covers her costs with the income earned from her high-end catering services and the money she receives from giving talks around the world, or winning prizes such as the Prêmio Aliança Empreendedora from the Brazilian Entrepreneurial Alliance. Over the years, Tchelly has built up enough recognition for her work that, in 2016, she was invited to San Paolo to give a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqc29uVIbo" target="_blank">TEDx Talk</a>. Since she began offering courses, Tchelly has taught some <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=208&v=yPDD8O14tsg&feature=emb_logo" target="_blank">30,000 people</a>, mostly women, around Brazil how to regain power over the food they eat.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDUxMTY2OC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1ODI4MzIwMX0.FGXkyUNNxqoMBTA8CcWomxhqx3aLYSIbHTDKeEh2q7E/img.jpg?width=980" id="4e685" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="896170dbff69522b1caa12ad72427d8d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
'Tabuli de broccoli,' a salad created by Tchelly made with broccoli stems. Favela Organica
<p>The only requirement to attend Tchelly's classes is that attendees must develop a new recipe to bring to market from the widely available food scraps of Rio de Janeiro. Last year, Ivonides Silva, 54, joined one of the classes.</p><p>"When you go to the market, you spend 10 reais ($2) and use seeds, fruit, and everything else," Silva says. By cooking this way, nothing goes to waste, and Silva has been saving money on groceries.</p><p>As her final project, Silva transformed pumpkin rinds and seeds — parts of the fruit that are usually thrown away — into flour, which she then used to bake a cake. Her classmates liked it, so she began selling more cakes to neighbors and at the salon where she works as a hairdresser. She now sells about five cakes each month, which adds 240 reais ($42) to her income. If it wasn't for the pandemic, Silva says, she could sell many more.</p><p>"Tchelly gives us the tools to have the autonomy to create a small business to make some money," Silva says. In the slums of Rio de Janeiro, where people make on average <a href="https://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=57787" target="_blank">734 reais ($130) a month</a>, the supplementary income from the sale of cakes is a welcome help.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDUxMTY3Mi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNDM2NTczM30.0b-tLtGZxXrqhidrPRCWZD4rvClRUIn-gDqvey2SUxY/img.jpg?width=980" id="b13db" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="029612a5727369b5f6780e3826b79108" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Tchelly at a food bank in Curitiba, Brazil, teaching how to make pumpkin risotto. Favela Organica
<p>Maria Beatriz Martins Costa, CEO of <a href="http://www.greenrio.com.br/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Green Rio</a>, a network that advocates for fairer and better food, is fond of Tchelly's work, but told me that to have a greater impact, projects like Tchelly's need more public support. According to a <a href="https://www.iisd.org/publications/food-security-brazilian-case" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">report</a> by the International Institute of Sustainable Development, limited access to food is not the result of lack of food availability, but of its unaffordability for many Brazilians. The Brazilian government has worked toward reducing social inequality in the past two decades with programs like the <a href="http://www.fao.org/3/i3023e/i3023e00.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Zero Hunger Program</a>, which aims to give all Brazilians enough good and nutritious food through a series of multi-sectoral public policies. Thanks to this program, the country was removed from the FAO's world hunger map in 2014.</p><p>But malnutrition problems remain, and the pandemic is accentuating them.</p><p>Growing one's own food can help, which is why Tchelly and many other activists around the world also teach students how to grow urban gardens.</p><p>"This kind of agriculture is important because it gives you support," says Costa, who sees urban gardens as another expression of family farming. She believes family farmers play an essential role in future food scenarios and are critical in diminishing food and social disparities. About 77% of Brazil's farmers are family farmers (as opposed to agribusinesses), but they receive only <a href="http://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/283339/" target="_blank">36% of the total industry revenues</a>. According to Costa, the difference in income between small and large farms is partly because of a lack of logistics to distribute products and infrastructures to scale up.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDUxMTY3My9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNjI2NDEzOH0.mtp-uqWB0Vj9uqFNWawcQj464YUDcWPWEtc5KwqN250/img.jpg?width=980" id="8c9cd" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="69745d31653ac880802003baaf1a895f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Tchelly teaching a class at a food bank in Curitiba, Brazil, on how to use all parts of the produce. Favela Organica
<p>"Public policies are fundamental," Costa says. Over the past 20 years, Brazil has constructed a robust food security policy that includes Safra, a credit program for family farmers, and a program that pushed schools to buy food from local small farms. But in 2019, the current government, led by President Jair Bolsonaro, eliminated the Consea, Conselho Nacional de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional — a body that allowed Brazilian civil society to have a say in the formulation of food policies — a <a href="https://www.slowfood.com/lets-defend-brazils-food-security/" target="_blank">move that many fear</a> is the first step toward deconstructing the country's food security policy.</p><p>Still, Costa believes that Brazil, with all its flaws, is working toward issuing policies that promote family farmers. For example, the country's current secretary for Family Agriculture and Cooperation, Fernando Schwanke, has created the first bioeconomy plan for biodiversity and family farming. Such policies, combined with entrepreneurial efforts like Tchelly's, could brighten Brazil's food future.</p><p>"Regina Tchelly was a pioneer and game-changer and deserves all credit as being a forerunner fighting for a change in the food system," Costa says. Tchelly, with her daily fieldwork, represents a larger, and often unseen, global movement that focuses on the roots of nutrition inequalities. Together, they are working to provide access to fairer, cleaner, and better food for all.</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2020/10/09/food-waste-brazil-communities/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.</em><br/></p>From Your Site Articles
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A crowd of climate activists march behind a banner in NYC during Climate Week on September 20, 2020. Erik McGregor / LightRocket / Getty Images
After decades on the political periphery, the climate movement is entering the mainstream in 2020, with young leaders at the fore. The Sunrise Movement now includes more than 400 local groups educating and advocating for political action on climate change. Countless students around the world have clearly communicated what's at stake for their futures, notably Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who just finished her yearlong school strike for climate. Youth activists have been praised for their flexible, big-picture thinking and ability to harness social media to deliver political wins, as Sunrise recently did for U.S. Sen. Ed Markey's primary campaign. They necessarily challenge the status quo.
<p>"Every social movement in the U.S. that has been successful has always had strong youth and students out there leading the charge—and in most cases, leading the charge more aggressively and demanding actions over and beyond the general population," says Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University. That's certainly true for climate, with youth demanding a radical transition away from fossil fuels on decidedly tighter timelines than their predecessors have advocated for. Pressure from youth such as Varshini Prakash, the co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, led Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to endorse a bolder <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/890814007/biden-outlines-2-trillion-climate-plan" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$2 trillion climate platform</a> over the course of the campaign.</p><p>Sena Wazer, co-director of Sunrise Connecticut, describes how her work is often viewed by older activists: "The main response that I think many of us get from older folks is, 'Well, you're so inspirational and give me hope,' which is nice, but it ends up getting really frustrating, because we're not here to give you hope, you know? We're here to get something done."</p><p>Bullard says it's critical that we, as a society, allow youth's energy and optimism bubble to the top, and to empower young people to assume the leadership they're seeking. Having written more than a dozen books on environmental justice, he considers himself an elder in the movement. In contrast, Bullard calls young people "the tip of the spear," and says it's absolutely critical to have them out there "pushing hard for transformative change."</p>
A Convergence of Issues
<p>The unequal impacts of a changing climate have become extremely clear in 2020, so equity has come to the fore of climate conversations in every corner of the country. A global deadly pandemic continues to rage out of control in the U.S., heat waves are setting new temperature records, wildfires are scorching American Western states, and the hurricane season has already made it to the end of the alphabet for naming storms. In all cases, low-income, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities are bearing a disproportionate amount of the impacts.</p><p>"Today, the scab is off, the ugly reality of injustice is hitting us up close and personal, made more realistic by this COVID pandemic," Bullard says.</p><p>This year the decidedly youthful focus on intersectionality is a big part of what defines the transformation of the climate movement. Climate is not just an environmental issue, according to youth activists. It's also a racial justice issue, an economic issue, and an access-to-health care issue.</p><p>"Environmental justice is really seeing the intersection of these issues," says Alex Rodriguez, a community organizer with the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters, which aims to make environmental issues a priority for the state's elected leaders. The group is now focusing their efforts on the coming election and recently succeeded in persuading the state to allow absentee voting in November. "We want people to be safe when casting their vote," says Rodriguez, 26, whose fellow grassroots committee members range from age 16 to 60.</p><p>Rodriguez, who also serves on the equity and environmental justice working group for the Governor's Council on Climate Change, says, "We see our programmatic work as a way to help lawmakers see what they can do to improve the dignity of those suffering from environmental racism, systematic racism, and economic oppression."</p><p>Seeing the overlap and bringing these issues together is a strength that Bullard says was missing from the civil rights organizing he was involved with in the 1960s. He says 2020 is unique in many ways.</p><p>"The number of marchers is unprecedented, from different economic, ethnic, and racial groups—an awakening unlike any that I've seen on this Earth in over 70 years," Bullard says. "Today, the different movements are converging, and I think that convergence makes for greater potential for success."</p>Young and Old
<p>But young people are one essential demographic among many when it comes to climate action. With all that's on the line for climate in the coming elections, up and down the ballot, collaboration becomes key. Bullard says previous generations of climate activists can now play the critical role of mentoring, assisting, and supporting. Standing with, not in front of, youth.</p><p>"Youth are leading us and taking on frontline activity," says Jayce Chiblow, the community engagement lead for Indigenous Climate Action, a Canadian organization that works for Indigenous-led climate justice solutions. But in doing so, she says many young Indigenous activists are experiencing the trauma of violence, getting arrested, and being taken away from their land. "All of our older people are supporting those youth: Elders, mentors, people trained in nonviolent action," Chiblow says. "The youth aren't alone."</p><p>That support can go a long way. "There's a lot of anger and a lot of fear, and that's understandable," says Wazer of Sunrise Connecticut. "I definitely feel those things, too, just considering the ways that our future has been threatened and kind of trashed by older generations."</p><p>Under the Trump administration, the number of environmental rollbacks alone can be disheartening, not to mention new <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/video/arctic-national-wildlife-refuge/" target="_blank">drilling permits in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge going up for auction</a>.</p><p>Wazer is frank about the risks of burnout, depression, and anxiety from the stress of it all, but draws inspiration from the example of the late U.S. representative and lifelong civil rights activist John Lewis. "That forgiveness and that ability to keep fighting and stay motivated … I think that that is something really powerful to learn from older generations."</p><p>An intergenerational approach can leverage the individual strengths of youth and older people in all their diversity.</p><p>"The elders hold our stories," says Chiblow, who is Anishinaabe from Garden River First Nation, Ontario. Those stories include lived experiences, culture, history, and generations of adapting to changes in climate. Such collective experience continues to inform Indigenous knowledge and connections to the land, as well as how people manage and govern themselves in relation to it. This knowledge is passed on through relationship-building and storytelling.</p><p>"Every time you hear that story, you're at a different point in your life, and you'll pick up something else … something new," Chiblow says.</p><p>Changes in perspectives that come with time and experience are among the reasons why intergenerational learning and coalitions are critical to the climate movement. To combine that living and learning is to expand the reach and meaning of the message exponentially. As part of her research for her master's degree, Chiblow brought together youth, community leaders, and knowledge keepers in her community to workshop climate action. "Those relationships are vital to keep that movement going," Chiblow says.</p><p>The value of intergenerational relationships resonates far beyond Indigenous cultures, too. Rick Lent, a member of Elders Climate Action in Massachusetts, says he is motivated to act for his granddaughter. He recounts the time she said to him, "Please tell me that there is something hopeful regarding the climate in our, in the future, because I'm going to be living with the repercussions, and I'm scared."</p><p>Lent takes that request seriously and says that working on behalf of future generations translates into effective messaging. "When you show up as a group of elders, and you're talking to your legislator, our pitch is, 'I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing this for my grandchildren.' So it gives you a whole different story about who you are and why you're doing this work."</p><p>Elders Climate Action has <a href="https://malegislature.gov/Bills/191/H832" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">campaigned to pass a decarbonization plan</a> in the Massachusetts legislature, which would set a net-zero emissions goal for 2050 and codify environmental justice in state law. With the November elections fast approaching, the group's focus is now on assuring everybody can vote safely. In some states, the group's chapters are pushing for voter registration and in others, ensuring people can vote by mail.</p><p>"We're going to be in a pandemic in this year's elections," Lent says, which poses risks to people's health, especially that of older voters. And because most poll workers, traditionally, have been seniors, Elders Climate Action is also encouraging youth to take up that mantle. "We need vote-by-mail," Lent says, "And we need more poll workers, younger poll workers."</p>
The Unique Value Proposition of Elders
<p>Older activists bring unique strengths to the table, according to gerontologist Mick Smyer, who designs strategies to move people from anxiety to action on climate. He calls himself "the aging whisperer to climate groups" and "the climate whisperer to aging groups." He is quick to point out that the learning can go in both directions.</p><p>"I think older adults are untapped resources," Smyer says. "Older adults bring several resources, one of which is their circles of influence. Just by virtue of having lived longer, older adults are going to have denser and richer networks," Smyer says. "The second is, when it comes to voting and civic engagement, older adults, as an age group, outperform all other age groups."</p><p>He uses the 2016 presidential election to illustrate his point: "The older age groups, 70% of them voted. Nobody [else] came close." He is cautious about making sweeping statements about older people broadly, but he says that ageism is alive and well. And that can deter the kind of collaboration that would beget necessary progress on climate action.</p><p>As the twin global patterns of an aging population and a changing climate continue arm in arm, Smyer says a good place for starting this work is within one's family.</p><p>"We each have that power to use in our circles of influence, particularly in our families, and we don't realize it," Smyer says. Whether it's via Zoom or FaceTime or a phone call or a chat in the living room, Smyer says, family members have a superpower: They will listen to each other, and they'll at least start the conversation.</p><p> "Intergenerational collaboration around climate issues, particularly in this election season, starts at home, and then goes to the polling booth," he says.</p>Speaking the Same Language
<p>As an individual's network of family, friends, and connections becomes wider and more diverse, the more work will need to be done to have them all working toward the same goals. That is equally true for the climate movement at large.</p><p>In bridging the gaps among baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials, Bullard says, "Each generation will have some idiosyncrasy and uniqueness about it that another generation will not understand or comprehend."</p><p>If everybody in a group or institution is similar, then there's no need to explain a lot, Bullard says. There's usually a fair amount of shared knowledge and values. But the more diverse that group gets, in age, race, gender, or culture, he says, the greater the potential for making mistakes, stepping on people's culture, and causing pain. But the potential for learning also increases exponentially.</p><p>Chiblow says successful collaboration comes down to being able to speak in shared concepts. The term "justice," for example, is an English word that's hard to translate into the Anishinaabe language. Chiblow says that because her community sees itself as belonging to the land, and being part of the land, the Anishinaabe worldview, and therefore their understanding of justice, is necessarily more holistic than the mainstream.</p><p>"Indigenous people have been feeling [the effects of climate change] for so long," Chiblow says. Today, as wildfires rage across the West, the mantra of "I can't breathe" is being driven home on a grand scale. For better and worse, climate justice is finally a front-page story.</p><p>"It's affecting the broader society," Chiblow says. "We're finally at the turning point where we could start to make real change because … people are really starting to feel that urgency."</p><p>The urgency will be tantamount in the coming election. A lot is at stake, says Chiblow: "Incentives, funding, all-around agreement, and also the way we're able to manage our lands and ourselves as people."</p><p>Bullard, too, is insistent on urgency. "This election is one of the most important elections of a generation, because there's so many things at stake," he says. "We can't wait another 40 years on climate. We don't have that much time. We don't have 40 years to get justice."</p><p>Issues of climate justice will be on the ballot in state and local elections this fall, such as Nevada's proposed renewable energy standards and Louisiana's proposed disaster funding. And the topic has finally made it onto the national stage. Joe Biden called Trump a "climate arsonist" for not acting on or even admitting that the wildfires in California are clearly climate-related. The frequency and intensity of such disasters is indisputable.</p><p>"Hurricanes don't swerve to avoid red states or blue states. Wildfires don't skip towns that voted a certain way," Biden <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-address-west-coast-fires-confront-growing-threat/story?id=73000218" target="_blank">said in a speech on Sept. 14</a>. "The impacts of climate change don't pick and choose. That's because it's not a partisan phenomenon."</p><p>In many ways, the results of the upcoming elections will reflect the ways youth activists and older activists are able come to a common understanding of what climate justice means and what they want the future world to look like. </p><p>"There's a lot of knowledge built up in experience, and there's a lot of energy that's stored in young people," Bullard says. "When you put those two together, you have … an excellent recipe for potential success."</p>From Your Site Articles
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Participants hold an Indigenous sovereignty banner as hundreds of protesters disrupted traffic marching on Central Park West in New York City on Oct. 14, 2019. Activist group Decolonize This Place and a citywide coalition of grassroots groups organized the fourth Anti-Columbus Day tour. Erik McGregor / LightRocket via Getty Images
By Jazmin Murphy
Whenever you talk about race relations here in so-called "America," Indigenous communities [are] always the last ones on the rung," says Wanbli Wiyan Ka'win (Eagle Feather Woman), also known as Joye Braun, a front-line community organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network who fought against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. In defending the land so deeply beloved and cherished by her people, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Braun recounts how actively her community is excluded from environmental work and how she and her colleagues are blatantly silenced, even when working alongside allies. "We've had to really fight … to even have a seat at the table," she says.
<p>The exclusion of Indigenous people and other non-White communities in environmental and conservation work is, unfortunately, nothing new. For centuries, conservation has been driven by Eurocentric, Judeo-Christian belief structures that emphasize a distinct separation of "Man" and "Nature" — an ideology that does not mesh well with many belief structures, including those belonging to Indigenous communities.</p>
<p>"Christianity has been largely built up around the idea of colonization," Braun says. Not only do these belief structures hold disproportionate power in environmental legislation, but they hold historical pains for those outside of Western religions. "Christianity was forced down our throats," Braun says. "Our reservations were divided up: 'OK this community … you can be Catholic. This community … you're Lutheran. This community … you're whatever.'"</p><p>Before the onset of such religion through colonialist conquests, the overwhelming consensus throughout the world was that human beings were just a small part of this natural world. Neither detached, nor superior. Of course, this "consensus" was not necessarily expressed in such a way that all groups adhered to the same belief structures. Yet, the underlying environmental ideology remains: Human beings are, to some extent, connected to all other living things on Earth, even the Earth itself. As European imperialism — and along with it, cultural genocide — began to take hold worldwide, so began the spread of the "Man versus Nature" dogma.</p><p>Today Braun's life is just one example of the ideological exclusion of non-European thought as it relates to wildlife and the natural world. Nonsubscribers are barred from participation in the protection of the world and nonhuman lives they hold so dear, which inhibits their environmental stewardship. But around the world, and especially in the United States, we are witnessing a historical push toward the dismantling of imperialism, the decentralization of power, and the welcoming of non-White, non-European values into conservation.</p>
<h3>How Modern Conservation Upholds the Superiority of Humans</h3><p>Christianity has deep, painful historical associations with the obsession of dominance. The same Bible that was used to enforce humans' domination over nature was also used to force Indigenous peoples to abandon their cultural truths for those more palatable to Europeans. This laid the foundation that continues to separate human life from nature to this day.</p><p>As the Bible states in Genesis, "Let [Man] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over all the wild animals of the earth." We see echoes of this passage in the frameworks of many conservation objectives today, with concepts such as "creating" sustainable forests, "managing" wildlife populations, and "preserving" wilderness as a realm separate from that of humans. This reduces our perception of human connectivity to nonhuman life and to distance constituents from the objective recognition of Earth's intrinsic value.</p><p>Take one of the U.S.'s leading environmental organizations, for example. The <a href="https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/index.htm#:~:text=Follow%20Us-,Our%20Mission,of%20this%20and%20future%20generations." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">National Park Service</a>—a federal organization with <a href="https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063447583" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">well-known racist origins</a>—has a mission statement that almost exclusively highlights the instrumental value of North America's natural lands: "The National Park Services preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations … to extend the benefits of natural and cultural resources conservation … throughout this country and the world."</p><p>Their mission is painfully anthropocentric, never mind that the very lands it aims to extend were stolen from Indigenous tribes who are now denied access. Missions such as these create a nigh impenetrable ideological barrier through which environmentalists of non-Christian cultures cannot pass.</p>
<h3>Keeping POC Out of Conservation</h3><p>These organizational goals exclude other faith (or non-faith) groups and have nurtured a hostile environment that disproportionately affects people of color. Historical experiences function to reinforce these impacts, further preventing people of color from exercising agency in conservation initiatives. For one, White constituents do not live with the same generational trauma that people of color do.</p><p>Experiences rooted in genocide and slavery, for example, still inform people's experience of the outdoors. Black people were forbidden to enter certain spaces owned by the National Park Service and other natural lands because of Jim Crow laws and deeply rooted racism, <a href="https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/conl.12431" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">as pointed out by researchers Rachelle K</a>. <a href="https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/conl.12431" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Gould and others</a>. Many were lynched in these landscapes as well. Thus, for Black people, experiencing the outdoors was to put one's life on the line.</p><p>Simultaneously, "those in power [imposed] a particular concept of environment," Gould says, which denied Black people's experiences in natural habitats. Ideological disparities have likewise discouraged Indigenous agency in land management despite how profoundly they value land and wildlife. In the words of <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-0149-5_17" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paula Gunn Allen of the Laguna Pueblo</a>, "The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies … It is not a matter of being 'close to nature'… The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as our self (or selves)."</p><p>Inequality lies even in the evasiveness of definitions. "Google the word, 'environment' and see how far you need to scroll to see pictures of people in urban areas," Pomona College psychologist Adam Pearson says. "What counts as being an 'environmentalist?' And what counts as 'environmentalism?'" The vast majority of Americans believe that people of color do not feel strongly about environmental causes. Black, Latino, Asian, and White respondents <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/115/49/12429.short" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">in a 2018 survey</a> overwhelmingly associated environmentalism with whiteness and underestimated environmental valuation in their own communities. Some 65% of Latin and 68% of Asian respondents self-identified as "environmentalists," compared to 50% of White respondents.</p>
<h3>What Equal Opportunity Actually Looks Like</h3><p>The public has long held onto the idea that the socioeconomic inequalities play a large role in a person of color's individual capacity to care for the environment when in fact, conservation organizations often create unequal socioeconomic barriers. People of color who try to enter professional roles in American conservation often encounter pay rates <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/17/all-work-no-pay-the-plight-of-young-conservationists" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">below the poverty line</a> (and have done so for decades). That requires applicants to have enough accumulated wealth to be able to afford forgoing reasonable pay to "gain experience" — a luxury out of reach for many non-Whites because of <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">massive racial wealth disparities that result from long-standing discrimination</a>. Even those who fall in line with the Christian dogma are granted unequal access and compensation. Forty-nine percent of Black Christians, compared to 28% of White Christians, earn less than $30,000 annually, according to the <a href="https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/christians/christian/racial-and-ethnic-composition/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Pew Research Center</a>.</p><p>Ideological disparities have also had clear effects on Indigenous agency in land management. For example, the United States Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services works to combat "<a href="https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/directives/pdf/1.201.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wildlife damage</a>," the idea that wildlife poses a threat not only to human health, safety, and property, but to natural resources as well. This concept is a stark contrast to many cultures' environmental values.</p><p>How would one expect an Indigenous person, a Buddhist, or a Muslim to feel welcome in such a space? The answer lies not only in dismantling millennia of imperialism, but also in the conscious invitation of non-White, non-European cultures into conservation.</p><p>According to Pearson, this requires combating stereotypes of environmentalists and creating enthusiasm for working in traditionally noninclusive spaces. Fulfilling these responsibilities requires taking an honest look at how ideological contrasts actively exclude people of color and perpetuate a negative feedback loop that overrepresents White people in environmental and conservation spaces.</p><p>"Inviting people to advise doesn't mean that they're gonna listen," Braun notes when discussing possible methods of increasing diversity in conservation. "I've seen that a lot. That's just them patting themselves on the back." She says real progress relies on human connection. "When you are facing one another, then you're forced to deal with things like the prejudices you carry on your back. You're forced to face the potential of racism. You're forced to face the economic divides."</p>
<h3>Abandoning Exclusivity for Diverse Community-Based Management</h3><p>As climate change becomes a mainstream concern, Indigenous knowledge can reveal truths not visible with White, Eurocentric approaches to conservation. Traditional ecological knowledge is <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-019-01218-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">central to monitoring and combating climatic change</a>, according to a 2019 study in British Columbia and Alaska. "The region is a bellwether for biodiversity changes in coastal, forest, and montane environments," the authors write, and "an extremely dynamic and resilient social-ecological system where Indigenous Peoples have been adjusting to changing climate and biodiversity for millennia."</p><p>Nearly 100 Indigenous elders from communities along the Pacific Coast shared with researchers the changes they had observed in coho and sockeye salmon migration patterns and the effects of warming aquatic temperatures with great detail. They had similar observations of the Sitka black-tailed deer, highlighting that their migration patterns had been influenced by fluctuating factors such as rising temperatures and reduced snowfall. Ultimately, the researchers asserted that present environmental governance is far too rigid in its exclusivity of Indigenous knowledge and that "token community visits" must evolve to invite Native environmental observers and managers to share their knowledge to create tangible progress.</p><p>While these ideas remain nascent in much of American conservation, other countries provide examples of success. For decades, forests in Benin were exclusively owned and managed by state officials. They were supported (and thus, politically influenced) by major stakeholders including the Fondation Aide á l'Autonomie Tobé, a Swiss non-governmental organization. Though the foundation surely had the best interests of the Benin constituents in mind, their collaboration didn't represent the public's values. Those living within the Tobé-Kpobidon forest, for example, did not feel welcome in forest management, which led to unsustainable resource use and degradation of the land.</p><p>To establish newfound hope for sustainable forest management and community involvement, a team of researchers, led by Rodrigue Castro Gbedomon <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1389934116300016" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">implemented a "community forestry approach" in 2016</a>. This methodology aims to "alleviate poverty among forest users, empower them, and improve the condition of the forests." The idea was that the invitation for community involvement (and thus, agency in management decision-making processes) would nurture a sense of ownership in constituents, encouraging them toward more conservative use of forest resources, thereby creating a more sustainable existence for the forest.</p><p>The team consciously invited varying ideals and perspectives into management practices by interviewing elders and community leaders on their perspectives regarding the forest's health. Stakeholders included nongovernmental organization leaders, and traditional and religious authorities that led and guided the surrounding communities. Divinity priests were invited as well, representing deities revered by the locals, including Ogu (the god of iron), Tchankponon (the god of smallpox), Otchoumare (the god of the rainbow), and Nonon (the god of bees). First Settlers and local hunters were also given authority in this work, serving to extend the network of participation deeply into every facet of the residents surrounding and within the Tobé-Kpobidon forest.</p><p>This decentralization of power and integration of diverse belief structures was supported by the foundation, which provided the financial resources and the means for reinforcement of the constituents' chosen management policies. This included warning signs indicating forest boundaries and guards to manage entry into the area. The foundation also rewarded locals' involvement with a yearly stipend of 500,000 FCA ($1,000) to further encourage their continued dedication to conservation activities.</p><p>This new governance structure yielded phenomenal results. As community access to the forest expanded for medicinal gathering, hunting, beekeeping, and more, the forest's contribution to the local economy increased to make up more than 25% of the First Settlers' income. Also, the native flora experienced a "progressive evolution" alongside a healthy, low rate of human agricultural interference. (Cashew plantations, for example, expanded at only 0.4% annually). This community-focused approach continued to have positive effects on the forest in the years after the study.</p><p>The Tobé-Kpobidon Forest experimental management approach, along with the extensive foundation of evidence validating Indigenous knowledge, serve as a beacon of hope amid the darkness that looms over non-White, non-European demographics that yearn for a role in conservation initiatives. It demonstrates that the present ideological chasms that keep people of color out of conservation can be defeated and that such cultural victories powerfully serve both humans and the natural landscapes in which we reside.</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/15/conservation-decolonize-environmentalism/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+yes/most-recent-articles+(YES!+Magazine+Most+Recent+Articles)" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.</em><br/></p>From Your Site Articles
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A marmot stands in front of Hidden Lake and Reynolds Mountain in Glacier National Park. Tobias Klenze / Wikimedia Commons / CC by 4.0
By Breanna Draxler
Climate change is the undercurrent that drives and shapes our lives in countless ways. Journalist Judith D. Schwartz sees the term as shorthand. "It's almost as if people think climate is this phenomenon, determined solely by CO2, as if we could turn a dial up or down," she tells me over the phone. "We are missing so much."
<p>In her quest for climate solutions, Schwartz leans into the complexity of natural systems. As she and I talk, I come to imagine our climate as a beautiful series of overlapping Rube Goldberg-style cycles of carbon, water, nutrients, and energy. Those systems have been knocked out of alignment, sure, but as Schwartz sees it, repair is not impossible.</p><p>While mainstream environmentalism has historically pursued either preservation or conservation, Schwartz's new book, <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/02/norway-reindeer-herding-sami-culture/" target="_blank">The Reindeer Chronicles</a> (Chelsea Green 2020) explores a third option: regeneration. She looks at community efforts to restore ecosystems the world over. "We've been trained to believe that finding solutions is a job for the experts," she writes, but "Earth repair is a participatory sport: a grassroots response to evolving global crises."</p><p>Schwartz is worried that climate change conversations center around terrifying projections. "What do you do with that? Cower under the bed?" She says collapse is unlikely to be a one-shot meteorite, and that gives us some leeway. If we assume we're not always going to get things right, that leaves room for mistakes and the collective learning they bring. "We have so much more agency than we've been able to see," she says.</p><p>We may not know what the future climate is going to look like, and she acknowledges that not knowing is really hard. "But we've got to try," she says matter of factly. "We're here now … Just start."</p>
Overcoming Cultural Myths
<p>Schwartz comes to the topic of climate solutions with curiosity and a deep appreciation for science. You can hear it in the way she writes about processes like transpiration and decomposition: "The logic of nature is no secret; it is laid bare in every streambed, every handful of living soil, every spiderweb, if we bother to take a look. Its tale is told through accrual or retrenchment of biomass, biodiversity, and soil organic matter: the stuff of life."</p><p>She has a particular soft spot for soil health, sustainable grazing, and water retention—subjects on which she has written entire books. These pop up throughout The Reindeer Chronicles as she attends Ecosystem Restoration Camp in Spain and Cowgirl Camp in Eastern Washington. (Yes, it's a thing).</p><p>While I find the name off-putting, Schwartz uses her Cowgirl Camp experience as a springboard to discuss the critical role of women in agriculture. The word "farmer" often conjures an image of a man on a tractor, but she writes that a third of American farmers are women, and in the Midwest, it's closer to half. </p><p>"It's our cultural myths. It's our myth of the cowboy. It's our myth of what a farm is," Schwartz says. "There might be women involved, but you think about them as the supporting cast. We tend to look for heroes before we look for heroines."</p><p>By perpetuating the myth of the male farmer, Schwartz says, "We miss half of the imagination, insight, problem solving, intuition that's out there." And when it comes to climate change, we're going to need all we can get.</p>Naturalizing the Economy
<p>Schwartz's writing is lyrical in its descriptions of systems normally not given such linguistic fanfare. When talking about the economy, she writes, "Its theme music—the vicissitudes of the market, job numbers, profits and losses—sets both melody and tone for newscasts and public debate, the inadvertent soundscape of contemporary life." She calls the disconnect between limitless growth and a finite planet "a society-wide exercise in fooling ourselves."</p><p>But rather than try to force the complexity of nature into existing financial structures—by giving value to resources and ecosystem services, for example—she writes of naturalizing the economy instead. This requires rethinking basic concepts we take for granted, like productivity, jobs, and meaningful work.</p><p>"There is no natural law that says profit must supersede other types of reward," she writes. "The truth is, we are what we measure—or at least our actions are largely determined by how we gauge success. What if environmental healing, social engagement, and a commitment to the future governed our companies and institutions, and therefore our work lives?"</p><p>A lot of the solutions in the book talk about connecting with the land. In some communities that access is collective, but I press her on the fact that access to land is incredibly inequitable. In the U.S., a lot of that has to do with historic and systemic racism. What role does justice have to play here, and how can that be factored into the conversation about ecological restoration?</p><p>"It plays a huge role," Schwartz says. "The people who are most at risk of losing work in this time are people of color and young people." Rather than try to shoehorn everybody back into a service economy that refuses to provide a living wage and requires working two or three jobs, she tells me, we can start investing in restoration.</p><p>She describes the magnitude of the potential benefits with enthusiasm: not just a wage, but tools that are going to be needed throughout the world—the capacity to grow food, manage landscapes, design dwellings. Not to mention the impacts on mental and physical health of being in natural spaces and eating healthy food.</p><p>Schwartz describes these as short-term signposts that give positive feedback on the long road to restoring ecosystems. Biodiversity inevitably bounces back, she says, and soil health, too. While she doesn't tackle the issue of racism head-on, she makes clear that healthy communities include people and the land.</p><p>"What can be more healing than to heal land?" she asks me.</p>A Local Land Ethic
<p>The book is somewhat meandering in its quest for resilience. Schwartz's willingness to entertain a wide range of ideas and approaches is central to her message: "Once ideas on how to achieve what's assumed to be impossible are articulated, that goal is no longer impossible."</p><p>She describes different communal land management traditions—the Himma that long sustained shared grazing lands for Bedouin shepherds in Saudi Arabia, and ahupua'a, whereby each self-sustaining unit of shared land in Hawai'i included functional ecosystems that stretched from the mountains to the sea.</p><p>"I was very humbled by Indigenous knowledge, understanding myself as a newcomer on that land," she says. She admits she has a lot to learn but is excited about the prospect. I ask her how she views the relationship between Western science and traditional ecological knowledge.</p><p>"They can serve as reality checks for each other," she says. She goes on to explain how in Western culture, scientific inquiry is about breaking things apart to look at them in greater detail. But this reductive approach misses the way things fit into systems. In this way, she says science can disconnect people from the very nature they are trying to understand.</p><p>"Originally science was based on keen observation," she says. "That is part of getting us to knowledge." Ancient knowledge systems emphasize the connections between humans and nature—and see humans as part of larger whole. She says science today seems to be bearing that out more and more.</p><p>Still, that doesn't preclude the need for ancient knowledge as the climate rapidly changes. "Who better to be able to keenly observe those changes than people who have known what it has been?" she asks me. "To have a baseline and to know the various factors that will be changing?"</p>Centering Community
<p>Alongside the understanding of place, Schwartz emphasizes the equally important respect for community. Her writing recognizes that climate change is not so much an environmental problem as a human problem.</p><p>"Running in the back of my mind, like the hum of those hovering bees, was the dawning realization that all the knowledge and technology needed to shift to a regenerative future—one marked by agriculture that builds soil carbon, retains water, produces nutrient-dense food, and revives land and communities—is already available," she writes. "It's only people that get in the way."</p><p>To come at it from another angle, as one of her sources puts it, "There is nothing wrong with the Earth."</p><p>In reporting the book, Schwartz reckons with the notion of imperialism and comes to realize the limits of information. Knowing more doesn't necessarily change minds, but feeling heard can. Building trust can. Overcoming fear can. She witnesses the power of consensus when decades-old feuds among ranchers in New Mexico dissipate with the formation of a collective vision for their future.</p><p>"Worst-case-scenario perseverating keeps everyone pumping stress hormones. This leaves us at once frozen and overwhelmed, unable to act or seek alternatives," she writes. "In short, we stuff our heads with worst possible outcomes and wonder why we get them."</p><p>In my favorite example from the book, from which the title is derived, Schwartz explores what some local Indigenous leaders have called "green colonialism" in northern Norway. She follows the efforts of an Indigenous reindeer herder to prevent the government from culling his animals. While Norway's government is considered among the most progressive in the world, it doesn't recognize the value of the grazing animals in climate change mitigation, instead investing in wind turbines on those very same lands. The herder's family considers reindeer herding a cultural bank for traditional language, handicraft, knowledge of the environment, and ecology. So the loss is far greater than the animals themselves. (<a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/02/norway-reindeer-herding-sami-culture/" target="_blank">Read an excerpt here.</a>)</p>Homebound
<p>"This was not an easy book to write," Schwartz admits, and the world looks very different today than when she was writing it. Schwartz says the pandemic has given her permission to fall in love with the place where she is. She describes her home in southern Vermont as beautiful, though somewhat dismissively, saying that she always viewed the action as taking place somewhere else. Home was just the place she returned to after each of her reporting trips to write without distractions.</p><p>Now, though, she says she's experiencing a newfound presence and grounding right where she is, and realizing there's far more to discover than she previously acknowledged. "What was in the background has become foreground." I would venture a guess that her shifted perspective is not unique in these uncertain times, and that's just what she thinks we need.</p><p>Even in the small town of Bennington, Vermont, where she lives, she's seeing the effects. A "grow your own food" webinar was offered in June. While a successful local event might usually attract five people, 100 people signed up. She says this is evidence that people are aware of the need for local resilience.</p><p>"We've all got places," she says. "Places have their own ecological logic. Let's do what we can where we are and learn from each other." That idea of connecting with place and community is central to her worldview. "The 'we' who can address climate change is everybody," she says.</p><p>"There is no one size fits all for climate action." Schwartz says we need to protest oil companies and make art and grow healthy food and feed one another and, in her case, write—all using our respective skills to imagine a more resilient world.</p><p>Her argument, reinforced by 2020's stay-at-home orders, is to focus on restoring the functions of whatever ecosystem you call home. Rhetorically, she writes, "How many microclimates does it take to make a new climate?"</p>Tipping Points
<p>In her concluding chapter, Schwartz asks what people would do if restoring ecosystems was achievable. She then lists possible answers, among them: keeping water in the ground, jettisoning the cynicism, and dancing.</p><p>I can't help but push back on this. After all, if our planet is at a tipping point, don't we need to do more and at larger scales to actually achieve meaningful ecological restoration?</p><p>Her answer is perfect in its simplicity: "Tipping points go both ways." We may be on the brink of disaster, if we choose to dwell on the worst-case scenarios. But maybe, just maybe, if we focus on the best possible outcomes, we can tip the scales to bring best-case scenarios into being.</p>From Your Site Articles
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An aerial view captures the Torre Guaceto marine reserve in Puglia, Italy. Jeremy Woodhouse / Getty Images
When Cosimo Di Biasi, 66, decides it's the right day to fish, he begins at 5 p.m. He drives 4 miles to the port of Torre Santa Sabina, boards Nonno Ugo, his 21-foot fiberglass boat, and navigates south for a half-hour to reach a marine reserve in Puglia, in southern Italy.
<p>The rocky coast is interspersed with sandy beaches, and at the tip of a tiny peninsula, a majestic tower overlooks the coast. Built by the Aragonese in the 16th century to spot the invading Turkish, the tower is now the symbol of Torre Guaceto—a marine reserve spanning 5,400 acres of sea and 5 miles of coastline, where only five boats and seven fishers are allowed to fish.</p><p>Di Biasi has been operating in the area since he was 10. He would skip school to fish with his father, and he would bring baskets of fish to the teacher to excuse his absences. Still, she failed him in grade six three times.</p><p>When his boat is in position, Di Biasi throws the half-mile-long leaded net into the water, which is then held up by a series of floating buoys. After this quick operation, the fisher returns home. The invisible wall will lay all night, waiting for fish to get entangled. The morning after, Di Biasi wakes up at sunrise, goes to the bar to get a coffee and a croissant, and navigates his boat back to the reserve to load up the abundant catch of the day.</p>
<p>Back at the port in Santa Sabina, locals, restaurant owners, and other buyers wait for Di Biasi. Many of them have already reserved fish from Di Biasi's catch the night before. The species, like mullet, are common here; their incredible size sets Di Biasi's catch apart.</p><p>While other fishers in the Mediterranean struggle to make ends meet, going out every night and extracting fish of any kind and size, from anchovies to dolphins, Torre Guaceto's fishers enter the reserve only once a week, making stellar revenues of up to $10,000 a day. They are part of a cooperative management project that allows the sea to recover while they thrive economically.</p><p>But what may seem like a fairy tale today came after years of struggles and conflicts. Conservationists began the difficult task of working with local stakeholders more than 25 years ago, in a region plagued by organized crime and aggressive exploitation of natural resources. Now those fishers are the marine reserve's greatest allies.</p><p>"We are the guardians," Di Biasi says proudly. "This stretch of sea is ours."</p>
Historic Exploitation
<p>Alessandro Ciccolella, the director of Consorzio di Gestione Torre Guaceto, the management entity of the natural reserve, says that before they took over in 2001, this stretch of coast was a no-man's-land. Organized crime had a stronghold in the area, using the shores of Torre Guaceto as a port for tobacco and drug smuggling.</p><p>"Ciccolella would tell us that one day Torre Guaceto would be a reserve. But we didn't believe him, and we didn't care," Di Biasi says.</p><p>Fishers would detonate homemade bombs underwater, harvesting the dead fish that floated to the surface. In the process, though, they were killing marine life, destroying the reef, and risking their lives. Plus most of the kill went to the seafloor, while clouds of dust filled the waters. According to Ciccolella, fishers thought they were plowing the sea for good.</p><p>The area was so worn out that in 2001 the Consorzio, formed by World Wildlife Fund and the nearby cities of Brindisi and Carovigno, decided to close the waters of the reserve for five years to let it recover from the past exploitation.</p><p>"They took away a piece of the sea from us. We used to keep our boats there, and the tower was the place where we cooked and hung out," De Biasi says. "From one day to the other, we couldn't fish anymore."</p><p>Friction arose between the fishers and the management of the reserve escalating to slashed tires and broken car windows. The local fishers kept fishing illegally at night, to make a point, even if they still had the rest of the sea to fish. The coast guard occasionally caught them, confiscated their boats, and gave hefty fines.</p><p>"We needed to know what was underwater and let it recover," Ciccolella says, explaining the fishing ban. "We were able to do it because the area was not too big, and it was easier to reason with fewer people. But the benefits of a small reserve are way larger than you can think of."</p>Restoring Abundance
<p>Paolo Guidetti, a professor of Ecology at Nice University in France, played a crucial role in developing the reserve's sustainable fishing model. He says it wasn't easy to start a dialogue with the fishers, but it turned out to be crucial to the reserve's success. In 2005, after five years of the fishing ban, the fishers were allowed in for a fishing trial.</p><p>"We met God's abundance," Di Biasi says. Catches were fivefold compared to the outside area, and fish were bigger and of higher value.</p><p>The Consorzio teamed up with Guidetti and Marcello Longo, president of <a href="https://www.slowfood.com/" target="_blank">Slow Food</a><a href="https://www.slowfood.com/" target="_blank"> </a><a href="https://www.slowfood.com/" target="_blank">Puglia</a>, a local chapter of an international movement that fights the disappearance of local food cultures around the world. They organized meetings with the bewildered fishers to create a protocol to start fishing again while preserving the biodiversity of the area.</p><p>"The fishers themselves proposed to fish just once a week," Guidetti says with excitement. Fishers would also use shorter nets—0.75 miles long instead of 2.5 miles—and larger mesh size to free smaller and juvenile fish.</p><p>While a day of fishing in the outer sea might give fishers a couple of hundred dollars in revenues, within Torre Guaceto, the fishers had miraculous days, and Di Biasi says, could catch up to $10,000 worth of fish a day.</p><p>The biodiversity had recovered, and in the following years, because of the renewed—but limited—fishing pressure, catches stabilized at almost twice the weight of catches from outside waters. According to Guidetti, the biologist, Torre Guaceto gives the highest catches per unit in the Mediterranean.</p><p>The biologist is sure that including the fishers in the decision-making process made Torre Guaceto a success story. Understanding the value of protecting the area, illegal fishing essentially stopped. Fishers turned into sentinels, helping the coast guard spot poachers. Researchers and managers developed friendships with fishers. "A top-down ministerial approach has never worked," Guidetti says.</p><p>And the positive outcome of the reserve goes way beyond the limits of the Torre Guaceto waters.</p><p>An increase of the fish population within a reserve pushes juveniles out of the area to find their own territory. This spillover is called "reserve effect"and benefits the areas immediately around the reserve. But there is an even more significant contribution from the sanctuary. With less fishing pressure, female white seabream inside the reserve can grow to twice the size of females outside and produce 100 times more eggs. A <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052108" target="_blank">unique study</a> by Guidetti followed those fish eggs and found that marine currents carried them south for hundreds of miles, repopulating far away areas. He called this a "shower effect."</p><p>Guidetti says that Torre Guaceto is the only reserve in the world with continuous and precise monitoring of the fish population, which shows the positive impact of a well co-managed marine reserve.</p><p><span></span>"It would be optimal to have a Torre Guaceto every 30 kilometers, to repopulate the rest of the sea," Guidetti says.</p>
Expanding Protections
<p>The biggest problem for a Marine Protected Area seems to be control and management. Many projects similar to Torre Guaceto fail because of the absence of precise control of the territory. Now, after years of struggling, Torre Guaceto can count on the rigorous vigilance of the Italian Coast Guard and of the fishers. But even with such control, some illegal fishing still happens at night.</p><p>Today an unlikely event is happening: Fishers are the ones asking for the protection for the sea. "We requested the director to enlarge the marine reserve," Di Biasi says. The request is now under examination by the Ministry of Environment. In the meantime, 10 other fishers from nearby towns have already started fishing with shorter nets and wider mesh sizes, hoping the reserve will be extended to include their coastlines soon.</p><p>Now Di Biasi goes to elementary schools to explain the importance of sustainable fishing. He also goes to fishing communities in other Mediterranean countries to tell incredulous fishers that it is possible to make more money while preserving the sea.</p><p>"We hope they will follow our example and create a marine reserve," Di Biasi says. "It took us time to learn this, but now we hope that others will do [it] too."</p>
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An example of abandoned oil pumps and well. Martina Birnbaum / Getty Images
By Ray Levy-Uyeda
A farmer for most of his life, Sam Stewart bought farmland in Montana about 35 years ago. Since then, he's planted and harvested his wheat and other crops around 16 open oil wells on this land, which he estimates were dug in the 1920s.
<p><br/></p>
<p>Maneuvering around the wells is not an arduous process, per se, but it requires seeding the same area twice, which is wasteful and can slow his process. The real nuisance is the invisible methane wafting into the air—a greenhouse gas with an impact 10 times that of carbon dioxide. "You don't want loose gas being just emitted," Stewart says.</p><p>Unplugged wells in Montana and across the country <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2020/04/29/484158/congress-can-help-energy-states-weather-oil-bust-coronavirus-pandemic/" target="_blank">leak thousands of metric tons</a> of <a href="https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-DRILLING/WELLS/gjnpwylaapw/USA-DRILLING.jpg" target="_blank">greenhouse gases each year</a>. They can also leach toxins into groundwater and surface water systems, contaminating aquifers. More often than not, these wells simply aren't being cleaned up. That's in part because a lack of funding and political will has stymied the state's cleanup efforts, and in part because there's uncertainty around ownership. "I didn't know they were actually abandoned," Stewart says of the multiple orphaned wells on his property. "I thought the oil company was responsible."</p><p>A foundation formed in 2019 could finally help clean up some of these abandoned oil wells, including those on Stewart's property. "The operator who is responsible is long gone," says Curtis Shuck, founder of the Well Done Foundation. "Our focus is doing the right thing, leaving it better than the way we found it."</p>
Abandoned Wells
<p>The first oil wells in Montana were drilled at the turn of the century, and the industry <a href="https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6881&context=etd" target="_blank">experienced its first boom</a> in the 1920s. <a href="https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6881&context=etd" target="_blank">Energy demands of World War II</a> spurred a second boom; between 1942 and 1945, <a href="https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6881&context=etd" target="_blank">oil production in the Elk Basin region</a> increased from 16,000 to 940,000 barrels annually. When those wells no longer produced oil, companies could just leave. The Oil and Gas Conservation Commission of Montana, tasked with identifying and plugging abandoned wells, wasn't created until 1954, and by that time an untold number of wells had already been drilled, produced, and abandoned. </p><p>As more companies moved into Montana, oil and gas production grew into an increasingly important part of local and state economies; by 2015, it<a href="https://montanapetroleum.org/about-us/economic-impact/" target="_blank"> made up 5.6%</a> of the state's general fund. But the industry that once was a cornerstone of Montana's economy is now in a nosedive: a yearslong decline in global oil production and demand compounded by the <a href="https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063049965" target="_blank">pandemic-induced economic slowdown</a> has produced some of the worst oil <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-07/oil-companies-warn-kansas-city-fed-of-widespread-insolvencies" target="_blank">production conditions in recent years</a>.</p><p>In 2016, the most recent year for which he was able to provide data, 4,713 oil and gas wells were in operation in the state and 204 had been abandoned, according to Allen Olson, executive director of the Montana Petroleum Association, a trade organization that works on behalf of the businesses. But that's a <a href="https://montanapetroleum.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MPA-Booklet.pdf" target="_blank">fraction of the tens of thousands</a> that have been drilled in Montana in the past century. </p><p>Data on abandoned wells remain incomplete, which further complicates cleanup efforts. Plus, state legislatures have drastically different policies on how to address abandoned wells. One thing remains certain: The issue is enormous and far-reaching. A 2018 report from the <a href="https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-06/documents/6.22.17_ghgi_stakeholder_workshop_2018_ghgi_revision_-_abandoned_wells.pdf" target="_blank">Environmental Protection Agency </a>estimated that the country has 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells. </p><p>Abandoned wells in Montana—left by companies that filed for bankruptcy, for example, default to the state. Theoretically, a state-run fund pays for well adoption and closure, but even under state control, the wells often lay unplugged, because plugging abandoned wells and restoring the surface land is expensive. Olson believes that the "state regulatory agency here is doing an excellent job staying on top" of plugging wells. But the <a href="http://www.mtrules.org/gateway/ruleno.asp?RN=36%2E22%2E1308" target="_blank">state's plugging plan</a> doesn't explicitly address the issue of abandoned oil wells, and also neglects to lay out a time-bound plan for plugging wells. </p><p>It's not just that states like Montana don't have a legislative apparatus to hold corporations accountable, says Mitch Jones, the climate and energy program director at Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit that pushes for corporate and government accountability. He says that the lack of governmental action is by design. When wells are abandoned, Jones says, "the costs of doing business are passed on to the public instead of being paid by the shareholders in the industry."</p><p>Nationwide, the federal government's own agency in charge of plugging abandoned wells, the Bureau of Land Management, has openly acknowledged that it <a href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/701450.pdf" target="_blank">doesn't have the financial resources</a> to tackle the issue of plugging wells on federal land. There was no federal <a href="https://climatecrisis.house.gov/sites/climatecrisis.house.gov/files/Climate%20Crisis%20Action%20Plan.pdf" target="_blank">nationwide bond requirement</a> to cover the cost of reclaiming wells until the 1950s, and the required value for bonds has not increased since then. </p><p>That's right: the amount required to cover the cost of cleanup has not been increased or adjusted for inflation for nearly 70 years, so the federal amount is <a href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/701450.pdf" target="_blank">woefully ineffective.</a> Bond standards of a couple thousand dollars often don't address wells that cost tens of thousands to plug, another cause for wells to be abandoned. </p><p>Jones believes that extractive companies are harming the environment and then escaping culpability by declaring bankruptcy. "Not pointing fingers isn't really an option in order to win this fight against climate change," he says. Identifying the sources of harm holds polluting industries accountable for supporting solutions and provides a pathway for legislation that protects the planet, Jones says. The <a href="https://climatecrisis.house.gov/sites/climatecrisis.house.gov/files/Climate%20Crisis%20Action%20Plan.pdf" target="_blank">House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, </a>for example, just proposed a $2 billion remediation program for orphaned wells in June, though given the political climate, that legislation has a rocky future.</p>
A Boost or a Burden?
<p>Kirk Panasuk, a lifelong Montanan, farmer, and member of the Northern Plains Resource Council's Oil and Gas Task Force, remembers growing up with oil wells on his grandparents' farm. Panasuk says "once you've leased the land you've lost control." An oil company would lease the mineral rights—not the surface land but the profitable oil below. That lease might expire, the company would leave, and another company would come in to start the process again.</p><p>Agriculture is a difficult industry, and Panasuk says what seems like "free money" at the outset can lead to problems down the road. Water systems are connected, which means that an oil leak in Montana has the potential to leach chemicals into bodies of water such as the Yellowstone River that flows into other states through the Missouri River, a <a href="https://www.nwd-mr.usace.army.mil/" target="_blank">river crucial</a> to municipal, industrial, and agricultural function. </p><p>Panasuk now volunteers with the NPRC to lobby state legislators on practices that would hold resource extraction companies accountable by mandating water testing and treatment. He admits that he's made money off of these companies by leasing mineral rights to oil producers who then sell the oil at market. Despite the environmental fallout, Panasuk believes that oil companies' leasing of land actually "saved a lot of small farms from failure [and] bankruptcy."</p><p>Olson of the Montana Petroleum Association says that in 2019, when oil was $60 per barrel, a company might produce 100 barrels per day and pay a royalty fee of 12.5%, which could garner a farmer $750 per day for leasing their land. Today, with prices and production down, the payoffs look different. In April, oil prices went into the <a href="https://billingsgazette.com/news/local/oil-price-collapse-hits-billings-area-businesses-hard/article_df10e954-3e0c-5b6c-9641-135208d4ad2c.html" target="_blank">negative</a>, and in August, they're <a href="https://www.oilmonster.com/crude-oil-prices/central-montana-price/159/228" target="_blank">hovering around $30 per barrel</a>. </p><p>While an oil lease might benefit a farmer initially, Jones says that oil companies are well-versed in this practice. "The oil and gas industry takes advantage of the inequities in our agriculture system to prey upon farmers and get them to sign leases for drilling on their land," Jones says, which can "undermine agricultural activity that's taking place."</p><p>In other farming communities around the country, where oil and gas companies produce natural gas through <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poor-communities-bear-greatest-burden-from-fracking/" target="_blank">hydraulic fracturing</a>, farmers and members of the local community often bear the brunt of water pollution. Not to mention that farming is dependent on a predictable and healthy climate, which is being threatened by resource extraction. </p>A Foundation Is Formed
<p>In early 2019, Curtis Shuck was in the northern town of Shelby, about 15 miles south of the Canadian border, meeting with farmers about agricultural transportation. More than three decades in the oil and gas industry hadn't prepared him for what he saw—abandoned, methane-leaking, unplugged oil wells.</p><p>He walked the area with the farmers and learned how they worked around the wells, most of which had stopped producing oil decades earlier. What was left were remnant pipes strewn across the fields and a sulfuric stench like rotten eggs. </p><p>On his journey home to Bozeman, Shuck couldn't stop thinking about what he had seen, knowing that each open well was responsible for tons of emissions. On that drive, the idea for the Well Done Foundation was born. </p><p>Just over a year after that first trip north, the Well Done Foundation plugged its first three wells and expanded beyond the Montana pilot program into dozens of other states. Shuck says that he hopes the foundation can also gather the concrete data that the government lacks, such as the number of orphaned wells and their emissions, which makes it difficult to develop solutions.</p><p>Shuck says he can acknowledge the state's shortcomings in their cleanup efforts while building relationships with those who make regulatory decisions. The "state fund is grossly underfunded," Shuck says, but "why should the public bear the burden of this orphaned well issue?"</p><p>The Well Done team identifies abandoned oil wells around the state, and then posts a financial bond to the state's Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, a way for the state to track and partially fund the plugging. In doing so, the state is holding up its end of the bargain, but without this push from Well Done, it might take the state years to accomplish what the Foundation does in months. </p><p>The foundation researches individual well emissions for about nine months as well as studying the construction of a well, how deep it goes, and the materials that are required to plug it. Shuck says it's important that the foundation does its due diligence to identify wells that have collapsed in on themselves or have an obstruction that needs to be addressed before plugging. </p><p>Then the foundation works with county commissions, private entities, and those who own the surface land to develop and execute a "plugging plan," which so far has been funded by private or anonymous donors. The actual plugging of the well takes only a few days, and then the Foundation works to restore the surface land to its "pre-drilling condition," which allows a farmer to seed the land and grow crops. </p><p>Shuck is adamant that the foundation's work is not about fighting corporations, but about taking responsibility for one's community. The foundation has built partnerships with both conservation organizations and oil and gas companies. Shuck says that abandoned wells are a "bit of a black eye to the industry," so plugging the orphaned wells demonstrates their environmental responsibility and develops a partnership that may come in <a href="https://www.rigzone.com/news/orphan_well_stimulus_would_employ_displaced_workers-04-jun-2020-162291-article/" target="_blank">useful as the industry quickly changes</a>.</p><p>"There are plenty of folks that want to blame Big Oil, little oil, or oil in general," he says. But the work, to him, is not about pointing fingers. Neither the left's demonization of fossil fuels nor the right's push for energy independence are relevant to the work, in Shuck's view. </p><p>In late April, the foundation successfully plugged its first well—a 96-year-old well called Big West Anderson #3 in Toole County that it had "adopted" by taking over legal responsibility from the state. The well, which hadn't produced oil since the 1980s, had been releasing 6,600 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. For comparison, one car on the road releases about <a href="https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100U8YT.pdf" target="_blank">4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide</a> per year. </p><p>Just one day after the foundation plugged Big West Anderson #3, its greenhouse gas emissions were nonexistent.</p><p>Shuck says, "What's exciting about this is that we can make an impact one well at a time."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from </em><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/08/13/pollution-oil-wells-montana/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.</em></p><p><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/ray-levy-uyeda/" target="_blank"><em>Ray Levy-Uyeda</em></a><strong><em> </em></strong><em>is a Bay Area-based freelance writer who focuses on gender, politics, and activism.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
- Princeton Study: Up to 900,000 Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells ... ›
- Oil and Gas Wells Linked to Low Birthweight in Babies - EcoWatch ›
- BP Arctic Oil Well Still Leaking, Too Unstable to Shut Down ... ›
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Malte Mueller / Getty Images
By David Korten
Our present course puts humans on track to be among the species that expire in Earth's ongoing sixth mass extinction. In my conversations with thoughtful people, I am finding increasing acceptance of this horrific premise.
<p>The COVID-19 pandemic, along with climate change, drives home the lesson that we must honor and care for Earth. The increasing frequency of the appearance of deadly viruses reminds us of the consequences of disrupting the natural systems by which life on Earth organizes to create and maintain the conditions essential to both its own existence and ours.</p>
<p>This is a time for learning and conscious collective choice like no other in the human experience. Defining lessons are coming from a variety of "teachers," including the pandemic and climate change, protests against systemic racism, and oddly enough, Donald Trump.</p><p>Perhaps we can now recognize and accept the limits of Earth's regenerative systems and our need to help Earth heal from the damage of our recklessness. The Earth is strong, but also vulnerable. As Earth cares for us, we either care for it or bear the consequences of our recklessness.</p><p>The pandemic may be seen as a not-so-subtle warning to humanity that we may be sacrificed, if necessary, to protect the health of the planet. On the path to human extinction, the most vulnerable will go first, but there will be no human winners.</p>
<p>COVID-19's attack also exposes the culpability of the economic system that bears major responsibility for our assault against Earth and each other. We now see with ever greater clarity the disconnect between two economies. One is a financial economy devoted to generating unearned profits for monopolists and speculators. The other is an economy of Earth's regenerative systems and humans doing work essential to the well-being of people and planet. We can get along just fine without financial speculation, and labor devoted to wasteful or destructive purposes to make money for rich people. We cannot survive without the regenerative systems of a living Earth and the beneficial labor of both human and nonhuman beings.</p><p>We also see more clearly the devastating consequences of concentrating power in the hands of the financial elite. For example, the pandemic has exposed the long and vulnerable supply chains that only serve the interests of exploiters who locate industry where wages and taxes are lowest and environmental regulations are most lax to produce consumer goods for the world's affluent. Disruptions of those supply lines led to shortages of critical products, such as nose swabs and face masks, that we're only now realizing can be more quickly and securely obtained through local producers—assuming we still have some that can take on the job.</p><p>Another lesson we're learning involves the nature of money. COVID-19 prompted the U.S. Congress and Federal Reserve to create trillions of dollars in instant money for purposes both good and bad. Never has it been so clear that money is just a number that national governments can create from nothing. Consequently, lack of money should never be a society's defining constraint so long as idle or misdirected resources are available for new money to put to work meeting real needs.</p><p>Of course, meeting essential needs is very different from creating money to keep stock prices inflated and to bail out businesses, such as the corporate travel industry that electronic communication may have rendered obsolete. Too much of the money instantly created by Congress and the Fed was aimed at propping up financial markets while the real economy floundered. Therein lies another lesson: Follow the money and know its purpose, which takes us to the lessons of the Trump disaster.</p><p>With his perpetual deceptions, his assaults on the integrity and competence of government, and his persistent denial of responsibility for their devastating consequences, Trump reminds us of how much we depend on honest and functioning government at all system levels. He is forcing state and local governments (and also other nations) to take on new responsibilities because they know they cannot wait for leadership from his feckless administration.</p><p>In sending unidentified Department of Homeland Security officers to impose his will on the people of Portland, Oregon, and other cities, Trump is reminding us of the dangers of tyranny and the importance of having political leaders who are honest, intelligent, of sound mind, and committed to a strong democracy. We are becoming ever more conscious of the fatal error of electing politicians who believe government is inherently burdensome and best minimized.</p><p>These are all lessons essential to the future we seek and to our choices in the upcoming election.</p><p>During a July 23 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=319548652768061&ref=watch_permalink" target="_blank">webinar hosted by YES! Media</a> that I took part in, Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the System Shift Lab and research fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, noted that the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=319548652768061&ref=watch_permalink" target="_blank">emergence of the new depends on the disintegration of the old</a>. While many of us have been eager to welcome the new, we are not always so ready to accept the disintegration of the old. Yet the point that Nafeez drove home in our webinar is that both are part of the process of transformation.</p><p>As the institutions of the imperial civilization of our past disintegrate, it exposes the extent to which their power has rested on a foundation of war, racism, and violence devoted to enforcing mass servitude and securing the rights of property owners. Succumbing to the enticements of money worship, we celebrate the successes of a miniscule super-wealthy minority, and the fiction that we might one day join them.</p><p>Let us welcome the growing recognition that returning to business as usual is neither possible nor desirable. We must accept our current mission to birth a <a href="https://davidkorten.org/home/ecological-civilization/" target="_blank">new civilization</a> devoted to the well-being of people and Earth: A civilization in which money is just a tool, and nurturance of life is the prime purpose.</p><p><span></span><em>David Korten is co-founder of YES! Media, president of the Living Economies Forum, a member of the Club of Rome, and the author of influential books, including "When Corporations Rule the World" and "Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth." His work builds on lessons from the 21 years he and his wife, Fran, lived and worked in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on a quest to end global poverty.</em></p><p><em><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/07/30/covid-earth-economy-climate-change/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2646932009#/" target="_self"></a></em><em></em></em></p>
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The Anderson Community Group. Left to right, Caroline Laur, Anita Foust, the Rev. Bryon Shoffner, and Bill Compton, came together to fight for environmental justice in their community. Anderson Community Group
By Isabella Garcia
On Thanksgiving Day 2019, right after Caroline Laur had finished giving thanks for her home, a neighbor at church told her that a company had submitted permit requests to build an asphalt plant in their community. The plans indicated the plant would be 250 feet from Laur's backdoor.
<p>Laur has a premalignant blood disease, and for the past two years, she has been trying to build up her immune system to prevent the disease from evolving into a terminal form of cancer. "When I heard about this plant," Laur says, "I went to the Duke Cancer Research Center, and a Duke scholar in my illness told me this would be a life-threatening situation for me, and I would have to leave." Having to move from her home, where she has lived for 15 years, would be devastating for Laur, not to mention a monetary loss. Who would buy a home 250 feet from an asphalt plant?</p>
<p>Laur lives in Anderson, North Carolina, a rural <a href="https://northcarolina.hometownlocator.com/counties/subdivisions/data,n,township%2520of%2520anderson,id,3703390056,cfips,033.cfm" target="_blank">township with just over 2,000 people</a> (and zero cell towers). It is one of the many predominantly Black communities in the United States experiencing a perfect storm of injustices threatening the health of residents and their environment.</p><p>An informal community survey shows that more than 70% of Anderson residents are Black, while the <a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/caswellcountynorthcarolina,NC/PST045219" target="_blank">county and state's populations</a> are 32% and 22% Black, respectively. Predominantly <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844406/" target="_blank">Black neighborhoods in the U.S. have historically been exposed to higher rates of air pollution</a>. Specifically, Black people in America are exposed to about 1.5 times more particulate matter—a form of air pollution known to cause cancer—than White people. This <a href="https://www.epa.gov/pm-pollution/health-and-environmental-effects-particulate-matter-pm" target="_blank">exposure leads to higher incidences of health problems</a> such as heart attacks, asthma, and decreased lung function.</p><p>A growing number of studies show <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412016301386" target="_blank">polluting facilities are disproportionately located in Black and minority communities</a>, so it's hardly surprising that the asphalt plant was slated for construction in Anderson. A 2018 study from the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844406/" target="_blank">the discrepancy goes beyond geography or poverty</a>, too: Not only are more factories in minority neighborhoods, but these factories are more likely to produce greater emissions than those in non-minority neighborhoods.</p><p>These days, the risks are even higher. Because <a href="https://www.who.int/airpollution/ambient/health-impacts/en/" target="_blank">exposure to air pollutants decreases lung function</a>, communities in polluted areas are more susceptible to COVID-19; a recent <a href="https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/covid-pm" target="_blank">Harvard study found that people in areas with high particulate matter are 8% more likely to die</a> of the coronavirus than those in areas where the pollution is just one unit lower. That's been borne out in North Carolina, where <a href="https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard/cases" target="_blank">Black residents make up 33% of the state's 1,568 COVID deaths as of July 15</a>, despite only making up only 22% of the population.</p><p>"This is not just an Anderson community health crisis," Laur says. "This is a North Carolina health crisis. It's an American health crisis."</p>
Grassroots Resistance
<p>The plant that would threaten Laur's health and home was awaiting the approval of an air permit by the North Carolina Department of Air Quality which, if approved, would basically greenlight the project. "This made me get out and go door to door," Laur says. One by one, she alerted her neighbors to the prospect of the asphalt plant. "I got to meet some of my neighbors I never knew before," she says. "There's no secret that there has always been a pretty strong line between the White community and the Black community here." In the end, three neighbors joined her efforts—the Rev. Bryon Shoffner, Anita Foust, and Bill Compton. Together, they formed the Anderson Community Group to advocate for environmental justice in their community.</p><p>"We are all the four corners of the community," Laur says with a laugh. "You've got a sick old White lady, Rev. Shoffner is a disabled vet, you've got Anita, who is a Black woman, and you've got a White, old country farmer. We all come from different faiths, but we've all come together as one."</p><p>Suddenly thrust into activism, the group contacted the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, a coalition that provides resources and connections with other groups. "We advocate, we organize, and we assist communities with whatever actions they are thinking of trying to protect themselves," says Naeema Muhammad, the network's co-director. Muhammad met with the activists from Anderson and recognized their need for legal advice, so she connected them with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The legal resources were key when the group determined that the data from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality's environmental justice report wasn't adding up.</p><p>The report—a requirement for all DEQ permit requests—stated that the Anderson community was 33% minority. That seemed far too low to the residents, so the Anderson Community Group did a census of each house within a 1-mile radius of the proposed plant—the same radius considered in the DEQ's environmental justice report.</p><p>"Rev. Shoffner went out into the community and did his own survey and found out that it was more than 70% minority," Laur says. "That was huge, because that changed the situation to a Title VI matter." Title VI is a federal civil rights law that prevents people from being discriminated against on the grounds of race, color, or national origin. Title VI cases require a more rigorous and comprehensive environmental justice report, so recognizing the Anderson community as a Title VI matter increases the strength of their request for a more in-depth report.</p><p>The massive difference in race demographics comes down to census data, Laur says. The DEQ was using race data from the 2010 census, which was only <a href="https://www.censushardtocountmaps2020.us/?latlng=35.77385,-78.73807&z=7&query=coordinates::36.44038,-79.36343&promotedfeaturetype=states&arp=arpRaceEthnicity&baselayerstate=4&rtrYear=sR2010&infotab=info-rtrselfresponse&filterQuery=false" target="_blank">completed by about 64% of the population of Caswell County</a>—the county where Anderson is located. Laur says the Anderson population response rate could be even lower because the community is considered <a href="https://www.nccensus.org/about-the-census#hard-to-count-communities" target="_blank">"hard-to-count" by the U.S. Census Bureau</a>.</p><p>"The people who don't fill it out are rural people who want to keep their land and don't want zoning and minorities," Laur says, which creates skewed race demographics. The Anderson Community Group said that when they brought up this issue with the director of North Carolina DEQ, he said he was aware of the problem.</p><p>"So that tells me that all the EJ reports in North Carolina that have been done may not even be valid, just like ours," Laur says. "We were told that we are the first [community members] who have ever doubted it and checked it out."</p>Elevating Voices
<p>Determined to have new data collected, the Anderson Community Group rallied in early 2020. After learning from the state Department of Air Quality, the department responsible for approving or rejecting the asphalt air permit, that 100 statements of concern from community members would be sufficient to trigger a public hearing, the Anderson group gathered letters of concern from their community. They submitted more than 108.</p><p>"Then we were told there wasn't enough concern to have a public hearing," Laur says. "So, we started inundating the [Department of Air Quality director with emails and phone calls from the community."</p><p>Finally, in February 2020, the DEQ declared a public comment period for the issue, effectively placing the air permit for the asphalt plant on hold until a public hearing August 3. The public hearing will be held online because of COVID-19, but Laur says most people in Anderson don't own computers, and won't be able to attend. When the community group filed a complaint regarding accessibility, the DEQ then allowed public comments to be submitted via voicemail.</p><p>"Well, we don't have a cell tower out here," Laur says. She has personally never been able to use her cellphone in her home, and even her landline phone drops calls frequently. Even being able to afford a landline is a luxury in Anderson, Laur says.</p><p>To make sure community voices are heard, Laur says, the Anderson Community Group is "begging, fighting, scratching, and screaming" for the public comment period to be extended until the hearing can be held in person. The group fears that the community won't be able to properly participate, and as a result, the DEQ will approve the asphalt permit without listening to residents' concerns or considering accurate data.</p><p>The health impacts on the community could be huge. During Shoffner's unofficial survey, he also found that more than 90% of those within a 1-mile radius of the proposed plant have health conditions such as asthma, lung disease, and previous strokes and heart attacks that would be exacerbated by polluting industries.</p><p>"That's the thing that we feel they are truly missing: They're not allowing data to catch up," Shoffner says. Not only is the existing data outdated and inaccurate, he argues, but even data from 2018 would only provide a partial picture, because it does not account for the effects of COVID-19 on the community. "Of course, our ultimate goal is for them to say they're not going to build a polluting industry in a Black neighborhood, but our next move is to get them to postpone it until they get the data that shows how the asphalt plant and COVID-19 is affecting Black and brown people."</p><p>Shoffner says that the pandemic has thankfully slowed down the whirlwind of decisions on the asphalt plant and given the team time to consider what else they can do to halt its construction. For example, in July, the group <a href="https://acejustice.org/ej-petition" target="_blank">created a mail-in petition</a> for the North Carolina governor to stop the permit process.</p><p>"This team has been able to research and dig and get in a lot of doors," he says, noting that they have had productive conversations with leaders from the North Carolina DEQ. "We're winning as long as we're on the phone and getting conference calls. When they stop taking our calls, that's when we'll start asking what to do now."</p><p><em>CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Anita Foust. Text has been updated.</em></p><p><em>Isabella Garcia </em><em>is a former solutions journalism intern for YES!.</em></p><p><em><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/07/23/north-carolina-community-pollution/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2646927403#/" target="_self"></a></em><em></em></em></p>
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By Bill McKibben
The upcoming election looks to be an apocalyptic turning point for our democracy—and our planet. In Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency, political visionaries and movement leaders such as Bill McKibben define the urgency of this moment and provide a manual for turning out voters in an age of extreme inequality, climate change, and pandemic.
<p>It is a cliché at this point to describe an election as "the most important of our lifetimes." Every election is key—they're how we take stock of where we are as a nation. They're part of a chain stretching into the past and into the future. </p><p>But if you wanted to make the argument—and I do—that this year actually is special, the climate crisis might be as good a place as any to start. And that's because it comes with a feature that most political issues don't: a deadline. In October 2018, the world's climate scientists issued a special report, assessing our chances of meeting the targets set at the global climate talks in Paris a few years before. Those targets were modest—they called for attempting to hold the planet's temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Since we've already raised the temperature 1 degree, and that's been enough to melt half the summer sea ice in the Arctic, kill off vast swaths of coral reef, and set big patches of the Earth on fire, it's not like the Paris targets are desirable. (Desirable was the world many of us were born onto.) They're crucial. And if we hope to meet them, the scientists were quite explicit: We have to fundamentally transform our energy systems by 2030. They helpfully defined that fundamental transformation: We need to cut our carbon emissions in half. In 10 years.</p><p>Anyone who has ever spent time around governments knows that speed is not one of their hallmarks. If we have any hope of meeting that target set for a decade out, we need to be hard at work just about … now. If another four years of inaction passes, the chance is over, and with it the planet as we've known it.</p><p>The past four years, of course, have been more than a time of annoying stasis—it's been a period of active regression. The Trump administration has tried, with a good deal of success, to undercut every environmental law on the books, paying particular attention to climate change. A rogue's gallery of coal lobbyists and oil executives have taken the top jobs in the environmental and energy bureaucracies and used the posts to give their industries free rein across the landscape. Where the Obama administration had scored modest successes—ratcheting up the gas mileage for cars, for instance—they've sprinted in the opposite direction.</p>
<p>Above all, of course, they've removed America from those Paris climate accords, in an act of breathtaking vandalism. It took decades for the international community to reach those agreements, and now the country that has poured the most carbon into the atmosphere is also the only country not engaged in the only global effort to do something about it.</p><p>It's not that the Paris accords were so amazing—even the people negotiating them acknowledged at their signing in 2015 that they fell short of the task. Even if all the countries on Earth kept their pledges, the mercury would still rise nearly 3 degrees Celsius. But the calculation was that perhaps once countries began implementing renewable energy on a large scale, they'd find it cheaper and easier than they reckoned, and a virtuous spiral would ensue, allowing much faster progress. At first, it seemed to be working—throughout the past decade the world's engineers kept dropping the price of sun and wind, and the pace of installations started to quicken. But then appeared Trump, who labeled global warming a hoax manufactured by the Chinese and who believed that wind turbines caused cancer. It was as if the road along which we were supposed to be accelerating was suddenly filled with potholes; momentum slowed, not just here but in much of the rest of the world. (The appearance of Trump-like figures in other countries didn't help—Brazil's Bolsonaro, for instance, started opening up the Amazon to intense exploitation, an act as reckless as opening a new fleet of gas-fired power plants.) Having lost three decades to the oil industry's campaign of disinformation, we were now losing time again.</p>
<p>And time, as I have indicated, is the most precious asset here. Most of our problems linger—my entire adult life we've been engaged in the fight to try to provide medical care to Americans. It's infuriating that we haven't done it yet; Trump's efforts to cut back access will, of course, kill many and bankrupt more. But at least they won't make it harder to solve the problem once we finally decide to—the day will come when some president is able to make our country match every other industrialized nation, and the preceding decades will not have made it harder. The climate crisis isn't like that—as a team of scientists reported in November, we're about to cross a whole series of tipping points, ranging from destabilizing Antarctic ice sheets to slowing down vast ocean currents. These are not reversible; no one has a plan for refreezing the poles.</p><p>Every election that passes, we lose leverage—this time around our last chance at limiting the temperature rise to anything like 1.5 degrees would slip through our fingers. Which is why we need to register and vote as never before. It's also, of course, why we need to do more than that: many of us are also hard at work this year taking on the big banks that fund the fossil fuel industry, trying to pull the financial lever as well as the political one. And even within the world of politics, we need to do much more than vote: no matter who wins, Nov. 4 and 5 and 6 are as important as Nov. 3; we have to push, and prod, and open up space for the people we work to install in office.</p><p><span></span>But in the autumn of an even-numbered year, we have a superpower that will wither as soon as Election Day passes. Our vote is our chance to have a say. In the case of the climate, that is not just about what will happen for the next four years. It's about what will happen for the next 10,000 years.</p>
<p><em><u><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/bill-mckibben/" target="_blank">BILL MCKIBBEN</a> </u>is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, the founder of 350.org, and the winner of the 2014 Right Livelihood Award. He is a YES! contributing editor.</em></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from </em><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/07/20/election-climate-change/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.</em><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2646807687#/" target="_self"></a></p>From Your Site Articles
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Environmental activists attend the Climate Network's Global Climate Strike protest in Bogota, Colombia on September 20, 2019. Juancho Torres / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
By Inés M. Pousadela
In early 2020, as millions went into lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the environment experienced temporary relief from the impacts of human activity. As skies cleared and birds and animals claimed city spaces, it became apparent that the young people who had mobilized for the climate across the world in 2019 were right: Much environmental damage is the result of human action, and as such, can also be reversed through human initiative.
<p>The experience of 2020 has made clear that whether the threat is climate change or a pandemic, humanity won't survive its challenges unless people act collectively on the basis of scientific consensus.</p><p>Before the pandemic hit, the climate emergency had made headlines and had become part of everyday conversation. It all started when one determined young girl, then 15 years old, walked out of school and staged a solo protest outside her country's parliament. But it wasn't a solo protest for long, because hundreds of thousands of young people quickly took up the initiative.</p><p>Driven by inspiration rather than imitation, young people throughout the Global South organized their own local climate actions, feeding into the global climate movement. They used this global platform to draw attention to—and infuse new energy into—long-standing, under-acknowledged Indigenous movements defending land, water, and air against extractive industries and agribusiness.</p>
<p>In Ghana, <a href="https://civicus.org/index.php/media-resources/news/interviews/4313-ghana-work-in-the-little-corner-of-your-community-has-a-potential-to-cause-change-at-the-top" target="_blank">Perk Pomeyie</a> of the Ghana Youth Environmental Movement used graphic design and social media to mobilize young people around #FridaysforFuture and #SchoolClimateStrike. He also collaborated with the International Youth Climate Movement in the region to mobilize during the United Nations' Africa Climate Week in Accra in March 2019. "As a grassroots activist in Ghana, this was the first time I gained a strong personal conviction that my work in the little corner of my community has a potential to cause change at the top, if supported with the right tools, capacity, and resources," he explained.</p><p>Across the Global South, activists have adapted their tactics to their local situations, all while shaking off delegitimization attempts that characterized the climate movement as driven by privileged people from the Global North.</p><p>"Although it is a very progressive thing to hold strikes in Global North countries, in a country like Sudan, going to school is a privilege for a lot of students. It doesn't make any sense for people to strike from a school they got into after a huge struggle," said <a href="https://civicus.org/index.php/media-resources/news/interviews/4133-sudan-young-activists-show-climate-solidarity-through-drought-floods-and-tears" target="_blank">Nisreen Al Sayeem</a>, of the Sudan Youth Organization on Climate Change and Youth and Environment. "Young people in Sudan are taking three different paths for climate action: policy, activism—including advocacy, campaigning, and work in civil society organizations—and community-based work."</p>
<p>The latest <a href="https://www.civicus.org/index.php/state-of-civil-society-report-2020" target="_blank">State of Civil Society Report</a> from CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, puts the spotlight on this rising generation of young climate leaders, who are giving fresh impetus to persistent struggles in countries including Colombia, Ghana, and Sudan. They may not have received the same media attention as Greta Thunberg, but these youth activists are every bit as committed, engaged, and important.</p><p>In their collective undertaking, these climate leaders have cast aside stereotypes of young people as impulsive and immature. They have come to embody the voice of reason by embracing science, encouraging evidence-based decision-making, and challenging disinformation. They are offering a lesson to their governments on what it means to act responsibly.</p><p>Young people face considerable risks when they take action in countries where civic and democratic freedoms aren't widely respected, and where environmental, Indigenous, and land rights activists have long experienced violent and even lethal repression. One <a href="https://www.civicus.org/index.php/media-resources/news/interviews/4305-colombia-the-protection-of-the-environment-is-inseparable-from-the-success-of-the-peace-process" target="_blank">young environmental activist</a> from Colombia vividly described the dangers he faces daily in a country where "people live in a state of incredible anxiety due to the systematic murders of social and environmental leaders," leaving them "afraid to speak, organize, and protest." Demonstrating how dangerous climate activism can be, he asked not to be named for security reasons.</p>
<p>One way in which young climate leaders try to mitigate such dangers is by building alliances that may offer safety in numbers, and by connecting their domestic struggles to global climate concerns. In Colombia, major domestic issues are deforestation and population displacement, linked to the troubled implementation of the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas, which sought to put an end to a half-century-long armed conflict.</p><p>Climate activism in Colombia received a boost during the mass anti-government protests that erupted in November 2019, as climate activists encouraged protesters to embrace environmental demands. "In a country where people are afraid to speak," said the Colombian activist, the fact that millions took to the streets in what was considered the largest mobilization in several decades was "a unique opportunity" for the climate movement to push its agenda. "We may not be able to mobilize people specifically around climate, but we can take advantage of these mass mobilizations and put our issues out there … so that they understand that our issues also concern them and they start mobilizing for them as well."</p><p>In this activist's experience, global inspiration led to local action, which in turn led to participation in regional processes to build a Latin American climate network. These regional efforts then led to the creation of a national environmental network, bringing together young people from all over the country to work for climate action. Still a work in progress, the national environmental network succeeded in getting the protest movement to include among its demands the declaration of a national climate emergency. Coming full circle, Colombia's national environmental network now also views global policy-making arenas as a battleground for future struggles.</p>
<p>Climate activism happens simultaneously at all levels, connecting the local to the global—from the streets of Bogotá and Manila to the sites of environmental damage in Bangladesh and Nepal, to high-level international forums such as the <a href="https://www.civicus.org/documents/reports-and-publications/SOCS/2020/SOCS2020_Climate_en.pdf#page=37" target="_blank">United Nations</a>. In country after country, climate activists operate within institutional systems, and employ disruption tactics when necessary and possible, to communicate their message: The climate is in crisis, and going back to business as usual after the pandemic is not acceptable.</p><p>The climate movement has suspended street action because of COVID-19, but activism continues online. The movement has already succeeded in turning a political nonissue into an urgent agenda item. Now the pressure is on to promote a green recovery from the pandemic, countering the existing inertia to pursue a carbon-fueled dash for growth.</p><p>When it comes to the key decisions that will shape human lives in the post-pandemic world, this new generation of activists will continue to pressure decision-makers into giving them a future worth fighting for.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/ines-m-pousadela/" target="_blank">INÉS M. POUSADELA</a> is a Senior Research Specialist at CIVICUS and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report 2020. She has written several books and articles on political representation, social mobilization, participation and accountability, and civil society.</em></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/07/17/youth-climate-leaders-global-south/" target="_blank">YES! Magazine</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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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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