News Feeds | ecology.iww.org (2024)

NW Energy Coalition - Tue, 05/28/2024 - 11:42

The transition from gas to electricity is well underway in Washington state in response to both climate change and bold state policies designed to address it. State climate policies set progressive targets, like the Clean Energy Transformation Act requiring 80% of electric utilities’ resources to be clean (renewable or non-emitting) by 2030 and 100% clean by 2045. And, the Climate Commitment Act, which utilizes an emissions trading market to reduce economy-wide emissions, including from gas utilities, to 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, 70% below 1990 levels by 2040, and 95% below 1990 levels by 2050. But the exact path to get there is left up to regulators and utilities.

This implementation phase is critical to making these state climate policies a reality. The Washington legislature took the next step to providing a pathway for fossil gas utilities to begin to decarbonize. The Gas Utility Decarbonization policy, HB 1589, passed this year and supports the state’s largest electric and gas utility in planning the decarbonization of its gas system and establishes the programs and regulatory tools that will enable a managed transition of the gas system as customers choose to electrify their homes and businesses.

What does the Gas Utility Decarbonization policy do?

For example, typically gas and electric utilities like Puget Sound Energy (PSE) submit separate plans for their gas and electric businesses to the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (UTC). This law directs the UTC to consider PSE’s proposed electric and gas plans as an integrated whole, to inform decisions that support reliable, affordable and decarbonized energy at the lowest reasonable cost to customers.

Additionally, the law provides a process for PSE to obtain regulatory approval of new clean energy projects, essential to replacing gas in its system. The purpose of this new process is to allow for more certainty for the company and customers about which new clean energy resources will be built during a new phase of building and procurement of resources to meet state clean energy goals.

The law also allows for the accelerated depreciation of PSE’s gas system, which ensures its gas assets are fully depreciated by 2050. Some advocates have raised concerns about the rate impacts on low-income customers, and the law’s failure to address the utility’s “obligation to serve” customers with gas. However, the language gives the UTC ample discretion to adjust the depreciation schedules to address affordability and require a reduction in PSE’s rate base. Ultimately, we believe that setting gas utilities on a path to fully depreciate gas infrastructure is a necessary step to fully transition to a decarbonized energy system.

Importantly, the law also strengthens requirements for PSE’s energy efficiency, demand response, and targeted electrification programs, including more stringent planning standards, and new incentives and rebates for low-income customers to transition from gas to electricity. While this law only applies to PSE, we are hopeful that its implementation will provide valuable lessons learned that can inform a comprehensive policy for all gas utilities in the future.

A managed transition is the lowest-cost approach

As PSE notes in its factsheet on the law, this transition is already happening with gas demand declining 7% and 3% for its residential and commercial customers in 2023, respectively. With this trend expected to continue in the coming years, now is the time to plan accordingly to support this transformation.

The transition from gas to electricity won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. It is up to advocates, policymakers, and regulators to work with utilities and shape when and how it will unfold. Research from Synapse and Climate Solutions used modeling to compare various cost scenarios of starting a managed transition in 2025, 2030, 2035, versus an unmanaged transition. As you can see in the figure below, a managed transition now is most effective at keeping costs affordable and reducing the risks of stranded assets for utilities.

Residential Average Gas Bills in Four Scenarios through 2065

Misinformation is fueling pushback from critics

This report helps to counter some pervasive misinformation about the law. Some of the Gas Utility Decarbonization policy’s detractors have filed ballot measures to not only repeal the law, but to make it harder for gas utilities to reduce gas service. Critics falsely claim that the law will ban gas, and require current gas customers to switch out their appliances.

NWEC has joined Climate Solutions and Washington Conservation Action in challenging several approved ballot titles to ensure that the information provided to voters is clear and accurate. If the proponents are successful in qualifying for the November general election ballot, voters will be faced with a choice: retaining meaningful policies that allow for a timely, managed transition of the gas system, coupled with supportive electrification programs; or saddling customers with the risks of costly stranded assets.

It’s worth noting that PSE itself supported this law, asking for the regulatory and planning tools to make a sensible transition. Notably this law could have gone further to amend PSE’s “obligation to serve” to allow the company to decline to provide gas service when it is not economical to continue to invest in the gas system. While the “obligation to serve” was left intact in the final policy, we believe that this law remains a positive step towards the strategic planning needed to successfully switch from gas to electricity.

At the end of the day, the UTC has an essential role to play in implementation – reviewing PSE’s plans to protect customer’s interests and ensuring progress towards PSE’s winding down of its gas business. The writing is on the wall, and it’s imperative to support planning for gas utility decarbonization to achieve Washington state’s climate goals.

The post The path for gas utility decarbonization in Washington state first appeared on NW Energy Coalition.

Categories: G2. Local Greens

Undisciplined Environments - Tue, 05/28/2024 - 06:00

By Future Natures

‘Strange Natures’ is a zine that brings together art, stories and essays by multiple authors, from different places, times and vantage points, different ways of noticing, seeing, listening and inhabiting reality.

Drawing from a series of contributions that responded to a call issued by the Centre for Future Natures in 2023, ‘Strange Natures’ is a zine that brings together art, stories and essays by multiple authors, from different places, times and vantage points, different ways of noticing, seeing, listening and inhabiting reality.

A fascination with the strangeis a fascination for that which lies beneath the surface, beyond ordinary ways of seeing, sensing and perceiving.Embracing the strange can create portals to other worlds.These can open up new ways of seeing that can help us historicize, recast and subvert binary ways of thinking, dominant framings and anthropocene politics of ecology, crisis and control. They can help us to make sense of alienating and unsettling effects that globalisation has had on bodies and embodied experience.

The zine shows many ways of understanding and experiencing ‘strange natures’, from nomadic river islands and the call-and-response of bullfrogs in India, to the haunted floodplains of Texas; from strange patterns in bird flights off the Scottish coast, to stories and poems that challenge the boundaries of selves and bodies.

‘Strange Natures’ invites us to abolish the rational, to find re-enchantment, to embrace the weirdness of the world as we know it, and accept the inevitability of transformation in a changing, vastly-more-than-human universe of possibilities.

The zine is published by the Centre for Future Natures under a Creative Commons licence. It is available to download for free in online and self-printable versions. Visit the web page to find out more.

https://futurenatures.org/zine-strange-natures/

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The Future Natures initiative is hosted at the Institute of Development Studies, UK.

Future Natures builds on lessons, insights and infrastructure developed over fifteen years of interdisciplinary research, methods development and international partnership associated with theESRC STEPS Centre(2006-2021) based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex.

The post Zine: Strange Natures appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.

Categories: B4. Radical Ecology

Land Workers' Alliance - Tue, 05/28/2024 - 05:12

The post SMALL FARMS IN ENGLAND TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR FARMING SUPPORT AFTER TEN YEARS OF CAMPAIGNING appeared first on Landworkers Alliance.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

The EU elections are fast approaching and most countries head to the polls on June 9th. We know if we want to have an EU Parliament that will respond to our calls for climate action, we need to ensure that everyone we know manages to go vote that day.

The best way to do this is make our own plan to go vote and then support others to do the same. Below are some handy tips for making your plan and some guidance for how you can talk to others about what’s at stake and why it’s important to vote.

Tips for making a plan to vote:

• Check the hours of your polling station and consider what time of day would be best for you to go. Do you need to request time off work? Or plan childcare?
• Consider how you will get there and how much time you will need for that.
• Add the day and time to your calendar using our handy tool!
• Think about who could go with you and invite them. It’s more fun to vote together.
• Check you have all you need to bring with you to the polling station and put it somewhere you’ll find it easily on the day.

Resources:

1. Find all the information you need about how to vote in your country including where to go and what to bring.

1. Our Partner, Climate Action Network has created a scoreboard where you can check out the track record of the whole EU Parliament on climate action.

Encouraging others to go vote

If you have a lot of like-minded friends, the chances are they’re interested in voting for the same things you care about. But are all your friends and family aware of the election and planning to vote? Encourage them to make a plan together with you and if they seem reluctant here’s some suggestions for ways you can try to motivate them – and try to link these points to things you know they care about.

• I’m very worried about the predicted outcomes of the EU elections. Explain how you’re feeling and make it personal to you….
• Every year we’re seeing hotter summers and more devastating floods and droughts. It will only get worse, unless we act now and demand that international bodies like the EU take climate action.
• We need the next European parliament to prioritise the climate and the social justice issues we care about. If it doesn’t, it will have knock-on effects for all of the changes we want to see in our countries, and in Europe as a whole.
• Some people who share our values feel skeptical about voting. They wonder if voting will create change. But if lots of people feel this way, and do not vote, it could affect the election result. That’s why it’s so important we take our values to the polls.

We are running some online ads to help increase voter turnout but internet giants like Facebook and Google are making it hard to promote anything related to elections, which is affecting our reach. That’s why we need your help to spread the word. Will you help us promote the tool we created to help get out the vote?

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The post How to vote in the EU elections appeared first on 350.

Categories: G1. Progressive Green

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The post Protected: Our Pawa: Why Australia’s energy transition matters to the Pacific appeared first on 350.

Categories: G1. Progressive Green

Public Advocates - Fri, 05/24/2024 - 17:32

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 24, 2024
Contact: Zack Deutsch-Gross

Voices for Public Transportation Applauds Senate for Passing Connect the Bay Bill

Sacramento–Today, the California State Senate passed the Connect the Bay Bill, SB 1031 (Wiener, Wahab), which will provide operating funding for Bay Area public transit through a regional ballot measure slated for the 2026 election. The Voices for Public Transportation Coalition—a broad group of 40 community, rider, labor, and policy organizations—celebrated this critical step towards protecting and expanding transit service, walking, and biking to meet communities’ needs and climate goals.

The authorizing legislation is a critical step toward achieving our vision of transformative transit service in the Bay Area. The bill sets a goal of raising $1.5 billion in annual funding, with at least 45% going to transit operations. It also includes two progressive revenue sources, a payroll and per-square-foot parcel tax, and caps a regressive sales tax option at half a cent. As the bill advances in the Assembly, Voices for Public Transportation will continue to advocate for additional funding for public transit and to limit roadway expenditures to state of good repair and safe and complete streets.

“We are happy to see this essential legislation move forward,” said Zack Deutsch-Gross, Policy Director at Transform. “SB 1031 has the potential to improve transportation for everyone in the Bay Area, but we must stay focused to ensure public transit and safer streets, not highway expansion, are at the forefront of the measure.”

“Bay Area residents strongly support improving and transforming public transit — SB 1031 enables the Bay Area to advance a ballot measure that addresses transit agency’s fiscal challenges while also advancing the reforms that can deliver a seamless, rider-focused system.” said Ian Griffiths, Co-Executive Director, Seamless Bay Area. “It’s critical that this bill move forward, as there is no credible alternative plan to prevent service cuts or make the necessary investments in our system needed to address our housing, climate, and equity goals.”

“SB 1031 is the Bay Area’s only plan for ensuring frequent, reliable, and affordable buses, trains, and ferries. We are glad the bill advanced out of the Senate, and we will continue to work in the Assembly to ensure it provides enough funding for transit service and to maintain the progressive revenue sources and limits on the regressive sales tax,” said Laurel Paget-Seekins, Senior Policy Advocate for Transportation Justice at Public Advocates.

“The Bay Area deserves a world-class transit system, and SB 1031 is an essential step towards that goal. This measure will help maintain and transform public transit service for our entire region. We look forward to working with the Assembly to ensure the final legislation supports the Bay Area’s values around climate action and equity,” said Dylan Fabris, Community & Policy Manager at San Francisco Transit Riders.

“We’re pleased SB 1031 is moving forward with more progressive revenue sources being part of the conversation for funding an improved and hopefully more accessible and equitable transportation system,” said Marjorie Alvord, Community Leader at Genesis.

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Voices for Public Transportation Coalition is a group of 40 community, rider, labor, and policy organizations. Coordinating Committee members include:

• Public Advocates Inc. is a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination by strengthening community voices in public policy and achieving tangible legal victories advancing education, housing, transportation equity, and climate justice.
• TransForm works to ensure that people of all incomes thrive in a world safe from climate chaos. We envision vibrant neighborhoods, transformed by excellent, sustainable mobility options and affordable housing, where those historically impacted by racist disinvestment now have power and voice.
• San Francisco Transit Riders is the city’s member-supported, grassroots advocate for excellent, affordable, and growing public transit. We believe that empowering everyday transit riders to speak up for rider-first policies will bring us the world-class transit system we need for a livable, sustainable, and accessible San Francisco.
• Urban Habitat is a movement support organization working to democratize power and advance equitable policies to create a just and connected Bay Area for low-income communities of color.
• Seamless Bay Area is a not-for-profit project whose mission is to transform the Bay Area’s fragmented and inconvenient public transit into a world-class, unified, equitable, and widely-used system by building a diverse movement for change and promoting policy reforms.
• Genesis aims to impact structural racism through our issue campaigns. As the Bay area affiliate of the Gamaliel Network, we center our work on those who are the most vulnerable (youth, elders, people with disabilities).

The post Press Release: Voices for Public Transportation Applauds Senate for Passing Connect the Bay Bill appeared first on Public Advocates.

Categories: E2. Front Line Community Green

Public Advocates - Fri, 05/24/2024 - 14:29

Public Advocates is partnering with impacted students, families, educators, and grassroots community organizations across the state to call for an equitable education bond this November to fund billions of dollars in unmet facility modernization needs in schools across the state. California students urgently need this school facility funding from the state to modernize outdated and unsafe facilities.

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The post Videos: Equitably funding school facility modernization appeared first on Public Advocates.

Categories: E2. Front Line Community Green

May was a month of sadness and dismay in Brazil. Extreme rainfall left two-thirds of the state of Rio Grande do Sul underwater. This is a territory larger than that of the entire country of the United Kingdom.

To date, 161 people have died and 81 are missing due to unprecedented flooding of rivers and lakes in this state in southern Brazil, bordering Argentina and Uruguay, after torrential rains in that area. Almost 600,000 people lost their homes and more than 80,000 had to be rescued from rooftops, on boats or in security force helicopters.

How to support people affected by extreme rains in Brazil

Besides, more than 12,000 pets had to be saved from death by rescue teams, including a horse that was left stranded on a roof and became a symbol of the surreal impact that a tragedy like this represents.

“I’ve seen things that no one should go through as a human being. I’ve seen people surrounded by children searching for refuge”, said Juan Romero, a Venezuelan migrant affected by the floods. “Maybe some died like this”.

At 350.org, we also had employees and partners personally affected by the disasters. A community leader who, two years ago, played a fundamental role in the fight to end a coal mine project in the region and thus helped prevent the environmental degradation of a huge area, lost her home and saw her neighborhood destroyed. A freelance colleague in the Communications area had to hurriedly leave her apartment, on the first floor of a building in the state capital, because the water level accumulated in the street rose so quickly that it reached the height of her doors and windows. Fortunately, both of our friends are safe, but the scare and damage caused to them – and the hundreds of thousands of people affected – will last a long time.

The individual effects of the tragedy are also reflected on a collective scale, and the economic impacts will be felt not just at the state level but nationally. One of the country’s main financial analysis companies, MB Associados, estimates that the disaster will reduce Brazilian GDP growth by up to 0.5 percentage points in 2024, due to the massive destruction of infrastructure and the loss of goods and services in Rio Grande do Sul. Company analysts say a climate event has never caused so much economic damage in Brazil.

And it is worth remembering that, as often happens in times of great collective loss, poor communities and families made up of black and indigenous people were disproportionately harmed. Environmental racism and climate injustice have once again become clear.

What caused such a disaster?

Such a destructive event was only possible due to a combination of several factors, including the relaxation of environmental protection legislation in the state, the geographic position of major cities in the state (the capital and the surrounding towns are located in plain terrains in the margins of various rivers and lakes) and the lack of maintenance in river water containment structures. Not to mention long-term structural causes, such as the waterproofing of soil in cities and the lack of a housing policy that provides housing in safe areas for everyone.

A few scientific papers and climate models alerting that Rio Grande do Sul is an area particularly susceptible to the impacts of the climate crisis were issued in the past few years, but governments at all levels failed to acknowledge and address this issue. Adaptation measures such as moving families from the riskier areas to other locales, creating better evacuation routes, and planting more trees in the margins of rivers and lakes, to prevent these water bodies from being silted up, could have reduced damages.

Plus, a consensus among those climate experts who analysed this case is that the rains over the state were bizarrely concentrated. Cities in the region recorded a volume of rainfall up to ten times greater than the historical average for the period.

A “rapid attribution study” by ClimaMeter, that is, research carried out by scientists to identify what caused such intense rains, showed that the climate crisis worsened the precipitation that led to the deadly floods by 15%. The researchers responsible for the assessment, led by the University of Paris-Saclay, even pointed out that El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon that usually worsens rainfall in this region of Brazil, is not enough to explain the amount of rain that formed. What they are saying is that the human-caused climate crisis played a prominent role in this catastrophe.

Since the main cause of the global climate crisis is the burning of oil, gas and coal, it is therefore evident that the current destruction of Rio Grande do Sul bears the imprint of fossil fuels, as do so many other recent disasters around the world.

Can we avoid new traumas?

The trauma, lives lost, and suffering caused will never be fully repaired, and what can be rebuilt – buildings, bridges, hospitals – will take months or years to return to operating as before. Infrastructure experts predict that recovery could take ten years or more.

To get an idea of ​​the scale of the task, the state government predicts that it will be necessary to move entire cities from the places where they were, to rebuild them in safer areas.

Woman in a center for donations to the families affected by the floods in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Credit: Rafa Neddermeyer/Agência Brasil

The costs of this reconstruction will be impressive. The Brazilian government has already allocated 11 billion dollars to help the state, but the economic consultancy BRCG predicts that the need for spending could easily reach around 21 billion dollars.

This is not an isolated case. Analysis published by the massive news website UOL, based on official numbers from the past ten years, estimates that the damages caused by extreme rains in Brazil in a decade reached 27 billion dollars.

And since, unfortunately, it will be necessary to rebuild a large part of the state, what can we do better this time? What lessons can we learn and put into practice? From 350.org’s point of view, at least three aspects stand out:

1. Rio Grande do Sul – Locally, governments urgently need to put into practice mechanisms for building public policies together with the communities affected and those potentially affected by climate events. In short, municipal and state governments must listen to people and respect their needs when rebuilding what was destroyed. Furthermore, it will be necessary to consider that the climate crisis has established a new “normal” for the climate, full of extreme events, which requires serious investment in climate adaptation.
2. Brazil – Nationally, the tragedy in its own territory makes it even more obvious that Brazil needs to take advantage of its temporary leadership role in the G20 (group of the 20 largest countries and economies in the world), in 2024, and host of COP30 (the conference of the UN climate committee), in 2025, to push for a more ambitious agenda for global climate. We need much stronger national emissions’ reduction targets (NDCs), as well as a concrete global commitment to financing the energy transition, with resources flowing from rich countries to poorer ones. Brazil is demanding this and has the opportunity to sew effective commitments in this regard. Additionally, it needs to show leadership, declaring the Amazon a fossil fuel exploration-free area and taking genuine energy transition measures in the country.
3. Other countries – All governments need to accelerate their fair energy transition and deforestation reduction policies, especially those in rich countries, as they are most responsible for the climate crisis. For this to happen, the world needs to allocate large volumes of resources and implement effective ways for the richest to finance the transition in the poorest communities. If we direct the subsidies that currently support the fossil fuel sector towards renewable energy and tax great wealth to finance adaptation and mitigation measures for the climate crisis, this change is possible.

Ultimately, this Brazilian tragedy shows us that in times of climate crisis, extreme events are taking on a force previously unknown. It also confirms that acting to prevent the large-scale disasters that the climate crisis brings is much easier and cheaper than remedying the situation when these tragedies happen. Most importantly, we can save lives and prevent enormous suffering if we act now.

The trailer for this climate dystopian film was already difficult to watch. The entire film detailing the full-blown impacts of the climate crises, will be undigestible if we do reach that stage. But for now, we still have a chance to rewrite a better script for our future.

The post Climate neglect is destroying entire cities in Brazil appeared first on 350.

Categories: G1. Progressive Green

In the vast expanse of the ocean, beneath the gentle sway of waves and the dance of sunlight filtering through azure depths, sperm whales are engaging in a dialogue that has long captivated human curiosity. These oceanic giants, with their intricate social lives and complex communication, embody a world of mystery and wonder that continues to intrigue scientists and researchers.

Among them is Shane Gero, an author of a recent study by Project CETI that used machine learning to decipher sperm whale vocalizations. Gero, the biology lead for Project CETI, discussed this fascinating field of research at the 2023 Bioneers Conference. The project’s recent study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications, identified variations in sperm whale calls that show they are more expressive and structured than previously believed, forming the backbone of a phonetic alphabet. The findings open a window onto the deep underwater world of sperm whales and could be a key to someday deciphering their language.

Sperm whales are social beings, forming tightly knit communities and bonds that transcend generations. Within their pods lies a society rich in culture and tradition. Long-term studies have unveiled a matrilineal hierarchy, where knowledge and customs are passed down from grandmothers, mothers and aunts to calves, shaping the fabric of their existence.

At the heart of this society is their language, which is made up of short bursts of clicks of varying patterns, known as codas. These sequences of sounds are the threads that bind sperm whales together, conveying a wealth of information that scientists have been observing, recording and cataloging for decades. But until now, researchers have been able to take only baby steps toward anything remotely close to comprehension.

The new findings from the purposefully broad and interdisciplinary team of scientists gathered together by Project CETI are providing tantalizing glimpses of progress toward a deeper level of understanding. By using machine learning to analyze thousands of sperm whale calls, researchers found that variations in the codas were contextual rather than random, forming the basis of a phonetic alphabet capable of complex communication. The findings challenge previous notions about the simplicity of sperm whale communication and the paradox it represented.

The Paradox of Sperm Whale Communication

Complex societies, whether among human or non-human species, typically depend on advanced communication systems to navigate intricate social dynamics, including tasks such as strategizing and teaching. In the case of sperm whale societies, where researchers have documented cooperative hunting and foraging strategies, the transmission of intergenerational knowledge, and cultural diversity among pods, one would expect the complexity of their communication to parallel the sophistication of their collective behaviors.

However, despite a wealth of knowledge regarding sperm whale behavior and social dynamics, researchers have encountered a puzzling paradox regarding their communication systems. While the societal complexity of sperm whales hints at a rich and nuanced language akin to human languages, historically, researchers have not been able to identify the same level of complexity within sperm whale vocalizations.

This discrepancy has raised questions about the nature of their communication and the potential existence of undiscovered layers of complexity within their vocalizations. Unraveling this enigma promises to shed light on the intricate world of sperm whale communication and deepen our understanding of the parallels between human and non-human intelligence.

Deciphering the ‘Sperm Whale Phonetic Alphabet’

The study by Project CETI, which utilized recordings from the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, reveals a fascinating complexity within sperm whale communication — one that is much more in line with what would be expected of a complex society. The study illuminates a previously unseen depth in sperm whales’ vocal repertoire.

By analyzing the different codas, or click patterns, of the Eastern Caribbean sperm whale clan, the researchers were able to identify specific variations in the codas. For any given coda, the whales might slow the clicks down, speed them up, or add an extra click or clicks on the end.

With the ability to analyze thousands of codas, the project leveraged machine learning to discover that rather than being random, the variations were sensitive to the conversational context in which they occurred. In short, the codas give the sperm whales their own phonetic alphabet, and with it, the ability to convey meaning. Just as humans can combine the same sounds in different patterns to create various words and meanings, the codas represent a tool the whales could use to describe their world.

As we continue to learn more about the mysteries of the ocean and its inhabitants, the symphony of sperm whales serves as a reminder of the vastness of life forms and their unique methods of expression. The journey to decode their language is far from over, but with each new insight, researchers inch closer to unraveling the depths of connection and communication among these oceanic giants.

Shane Gero, one of the report’s authors, has recently discussed Project CETI’s sperm whale research with the Bioneers audience in these fascinating discussions:

• Shane Gero – Preserving Animal Cultures: Lessons from Whale Wisdom (VIDEO)
• What Sperm Whale Communication Can Tell Us About Communities & Cultures Beneath the Ocean’s Surface (ARTICLE)
• Deep Listening: Whale Culture, Interspecies Communication, and Knowing Your Place (PODCAST)

The post Decoding the Symphony of Sperm Whales: New Study Dives into Complex Vocalizations appeared first on Bioneers.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

PoWHR Coalition - Thu, 05/23/2024 - 08:04

Washington, D.C. — Virginia Senator Tim Kaine criticized the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s pipe failures and environmental violations after sustained pressure from his constituents to speak out. “The testing has shown all kinds of problems. There continue to be the kind of environmental violations that slowed them down before. It’s not like Congress waving a magic wand saying, ‘Do this project,’ made it a project being done well. So I’m not happy with that,” he said on Capitol Hill. Kaine said the recent pipe rupture during hydrostatic testing revealed “some serious challenges” that need to be fixed.

Senator Kaine joins his colleague Representative Morgan Griffith in calling for pipeline safety to be further scrutinized. In early May, Delegate Sam Rasoul and twenty-three Virginia lawmakers wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) demanding they deny MVP’s request to go into service. Several days ago, MVP admitted to another construction delay and pleaded with the FERC to allow it to go into service immediately. Despite similar constituent pressure, Senator Mark Warner has remained silent on this issue.

Russell Chisholm, co-director of the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights Coalition (POWHR) responded:

“Thanks to sustained pressure from his constituents, Senator Tim Kaine has spoken out about MVP’s pipe failures. Now Senators Kaine and Warner must call for immediate investigation and enforcement of pipeline safety across the MVP route. Their constituents’ lives are on the line because Congress greenlit this beleaguered project; their job is to meaningfully take action to protect us from a deadly explosion.”

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Categories: G2. Local Greens

Alaskan Native Looks to Tradition to Deal with Contemporary Problems

Deenaalee Hodgdon (who uses the pronouns they/them) is a Native Alaskan and the Executive Director of On The Land, an Indigenous media and consulting business that elevates the voices of Indigenous Peoples. Hodgdon has seven years of commercial fishing experience and has been a raft and cultural guide in Denali National Park.

They work with the Arctic Athabaskan Council and represent the AAC on the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation among the Arctic states, Arctic Indigenous Peoples and other Arctic inhabitants.

Deenaalee also works on developing sustainable management of salmon fisheries, and building just economies in Bristol Bay, along the Yukon, and in the larger Arctic region. They are the co-founder and co-director of The Smokehouse Collective, an Alaskan mutual aid network that works to build the resilience of Native people.

ARTY MANGAN: You are an experienced fisher, do you fish on rivers and at sea?

DEENAALEE HODGDON: When I was younger, I mostly fished on the river. In the last six years, I’ve been fishing out in Bristol Bay. I fish in Nushagak Bay, which people also call a river too, but its mouth is so massive that you could be in the middle of the river and it feels like you’re kind of on the ocean or open water.

ARTY: What is it like to spend so much time on the water? How does it affect you emotionally and spiritually?

DEENAALEE: I like that question because you led in with how you both fish on the river and on the open water, and I’ve been a raft guide and I also used to row crew. I come from a people who developed the original kayaks. For me, being on the water is like a process in trust and letting go of control because the water is going to do whatever the water wants to do. There are things a person can do to make themselves safer, like knowing how to read the water, knowing how to read the weather, and having as much knowledge and tools as you can in order to survive while being on the water. But at the end of the day, the water’s going to do what the water wants to do.

When I’m on the water fishing, for example on the drift boats, I appreciate that time in my life because you’re out there day and night, sometimes not getting any rest when you’re fishing around the clock. You have to step up and into a place between instinct and survival skills, as well as utilizing the knowledge that you’ve gained from people who have come before you, whether they’re fishermen in the commercial industry — your captain and crew mates — or it’s ancestral knowledge that comes through your bloodline.

ARTY: South of Alaska, from British Columbia to California, most salmon fisheries are in decline. Are there rivers in Alaska where the fisheries are thriving or at least stable?

DEENAALEE: It’s been amazing to see what the tribes have done on the Columbia River in terms of bringing salmon back. It’s really heartening, and I get excited to think about the work that those tribes have been doing bringing back salmon that have been lost or whose numbers have been diminished.

In Alaska, it really depends on the stock of the species. I would say Bristol Bay is one of the last truly great safe havens for salmon in the world.

The management of the returns of salmon—while not being as good as it could be—has done a better job of ensuring that fish are returning and that the stocks are healthy. That being said, climate change science predicts that there’s going to be species that are winners and losers along the continuum of climate change. Right now, there are two species of salmon that we’re seeing that are winners in climate change in Alaska—pink salmon are thriving in Southeast Alaska and are also thriving in another area of the Arctic.

The other is Sockeye salmon, the main fishery for Bristol Bay, which have been thriving for the last five years. The expected number of return of salmon has declined for this upcoming season. But it’s still higher than expected returns that I saw as a young person growing up in Bristol Bay.

Unfortunately, Chinook or king salmon, the large salmon that are the literal backbone of salmon peoples, are suffering from climate change. The Nushagak River, which flows into Bristol Bay, is one of the last strongholds of king salmon in the world, and they are currently being considered a potential stock of concern. During last year’s Alaska’s Board of Fisheries meetings, the tribes of the Nushagak River were advocating for the sockeye salmon fishery to be adjusted to protect the run of the kings, which usually will run up the river returning home first.

So, it’s a balancing act. Right now, within that entire context, we’re trying to balance the health and well-being of ecosystems and the concerns of the salmon, and halibut, and all these other fish that peoples are reliant upon, alongside an economy that has been extraction based and has been used to the abundance of large returns for the last five years, and that’s the commercial industry—the fishermen, processors, wholesale buyers and the consumers of fish at large across the world.

ARTY: What are some of the climate adaptive strategies that are being implemented in your region?

DEENAALEE: There are a lot of communities right now that are having to go through something called relocation/manage/retreat/protect in place. A lot of communities in Southwest Alaska, like the communities of Quinhagak and Kwigillingok, Noatak, and others up north are having to face questions of how do we ensure that our communities aren’t disappearing when facing things like coastal erosion, flooding, loss of sea ice, etc.

There are relocation programs that move villages from Point A to Point B. And there’s a protect-in-place program that reinforces infrastructure to make it more resilient to the stresses of climate change.

ARTY: What do Native Alaskans have to do to build food sovereignty in the face of climate change?

DEENAALEE: In the Arctic, we are hunter/gatherer societies who are at pivot point with climate change. We are losing ice and permafrost; the very structure of the tundra is thawing. In the context of food sovereignty, we need to use traditional gathering spaces to have conversations about what seeds we need to be planting to nourish our soil as it changes.

Where are our old stories to guide us? The Inupiaq people have stories about when there used to be palm trees in Alaska. How do we bring those stories to the surface so that they can guide the work that we’re doing right now?

There is a future-looking orientation that I’m trying to root into with food sovereignty within the context of climate change. How long do we have and how can we build a fertile soil while doing the deep grieving work of losing our permafrost and losing our boreal forests? And while that shift is happening, we are advocating to ensure that our people have the time and the space to go out and harvest on the land because we know that when we do not have the ability to participate in those harvests, death happens. Our communities are dying when we are not rooted in our traditional harvesting practices.

Food sovereignty for Native Alaskans is to bring that back. It is a work of transition and translation, being able to grieve and have the medicines that we need and the conversations to hold the deep work of being in advocacy spaces to ensure that we support one another to take the time to participate in those practices while we are on the frontlines.

One of the strategies that I’m looking into more is: How do we make adaptations around our food systems and our economies within those food systems, and our relationships that are needed to build a resilient, reliable, ecologically sound and responsive system? To me, that looks like being able to localize where we are getting our food. By local, it would be great if every community had community gardens and had their own co-ops, but that’s probably not going to be the case anytime soon.

How can a region be more food secure in growing and providing for the community? Within the whole of Alaska, how can we make sure that Alaska isn’t just dependent on a three-day supply that comes from the lower 48, but that we have the transportation networks in place and food caches in place so that there is a supply and it’s accessible by community members and isn’t being run by the cash economy?

ARTY: Alaska has unique vulnerabilities in regards to climate change which require location-specific adaptations.

On the personal level, as an Indigenous, queer person, have you experienced resistance or even racism in your work, in your activism or other parts of your life?

DEENAALEE: Yes and no. Yes, we continue to face racism through the system. A lot of times, within the Board of Fisheries or the Alaska Board of Game process, our voices as Indigenous Peoples are not valued; traditional knowledge is not valued. It is starting to gain a little bit more traction, as non-Native scientists are stepping up as allies and giving a stamp of approval that what the elders are saying is validated by science.

Within this world, I’m pretty privileged. Yes, I’m Native, yes, I’m queer. However, I’m light-skinned; very tall, so I have a presence; I’m well-spoken because I’ve been trained in a Western academic institution at an Ivy League college. As soon as I say I went to Brown University, in certain situations, in certain circles, I automatically gain an ear more than, I would say, the average Native person or average BIPOC person. So I would say that I really do function within a lot of systems of privilege while carrying my identity.

I have felt the loneliness of being one of the only Native people within my radio group and my fishing group up until about two summers ago when we had a couple more Native people who were hired on in my fishing group. But advocating for subsistence and Indigenous rights within my own fishing group has been like pulling teeth; it has not been easy, and that oftentimes is because the fishermen coming to Alaska and who are excelling as fishermen have been coming here for the last 30 years and have close relationships with the region and they’re okay with maintaining the status quo. So when you pushback and say, “Hey, would you be willing to step in and change X, Y, Z in order to benefit a more vibrant ecosystem,” a lot of the time there’s pushback.

Those folks aren’t taking the time — and maybe they don’t fully care — to help to create change, because at the end of the day, they’re able to take their catch and the money from that catch and leave the state. They don’t see the bigger picture of the repercussions of their actions.

ARTY: As an activist, how do you keep your body, mind and spirit strong?

DEENAALEE: I think I’ve been labeled activist, but I don’t necessarily consider myself an activist—like I do and I don’t. I think that word has a lot of political weight to it. I just define myself as a community or tribal member who cares and is working to maintain, uphold and assert our sovereign rights, to make our lands and waters sovereign according to our original instructions.

I appreciate the question about keeping yourself balanced and centered — I’m still learning how to do that. I have recently been reminded that if you do this work and you’re not grounded and centered, you get sick. Then you’re not fully able to do the work that you are called to step up into, whether you’re being asked by people or a higher power, or whatever you want to chalk it up to.

I’ve been learning to build and maintain more of a practice around my self-care. Basic things like drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, and eating the foods from the land. That food from the land is not only vital to my physical health, but also to my spiritual, mental and emotional well-being. I can’t really process gluten very well; I can’t process dairy very well. Those are two foods that are non-native to these lands. I am thriving and I’m so much more mentally clear when I’m eating beaver, fish, moose, when I’m eating these foods that haven’t been so GMO’d that they don’t even know what they are.

I also require a lot of sleep. That’s pretty integral to my functioning. And I have to get outside. It’s unfortunate, because the first thing that often doesn’t happen when I’m facing a lot of deadlines and need to be in a lot of meetings is taking the time to get outside. But it’s essential for me to be outside on the land and to participate in subsistence activities. I have also adopted skiing and climbing and biking, more recreational-based activities. If I’m moving my body, I’m in a good place, and that at the end of the day is the most important. I have to move my body and breathe fresh air, and if I can do that, I’m pretty well grounded.

I recently picked up my beadwork again. Keeping my hands busy is important. In the summertime I do that by picking fish and flaying and putting away the fish, or picking berries, putting away food, doing the things necessary at that time of year. But in the wintertime, it’s picking up sewing and beading or tanning and working on moose and caribou hides.

I was just thinking about how it’s time for me to start making some bone tools, because I haven’t scraped hides as much as I wanted to this winter. Those are pretty necessary.

I also do yoga and pull Tarot cards, and keep my mind active.

ARTY: I heard you use the phrase “pleasure activism.” You resisted the label of activist, but you engage in pleasure activism?

DEENAALEE: Yeah. Pleasure activism is a term that was coined by adrienne maree brown in her book titled Pleasure Activism. It’s something that resonates with me. Western Christian-based societies, like the United States, are built on religious rigidity. I was raised with some of that rigidity that denied some of the pleasures of the world like dancing and feasting and having joy and true connection. Through adrienne maree brown’s work and pleasure activism, I’ve been reintroduced and given the word “toolkit” to describe an ethic and an ethos that I would like to live by. Within the world of this work things can be so disheartening and dark. They can feel like how will we ever win against the pressures of climate change and extractive industry. It’s a constant struggle. For example, tonight, I’ll be going to another public hearing for another land grab that is happening in Alaska, in which eight million acres of land are being up for evaluation on whether or not it should be open for mineral and mining, and oil and gas leasing, or whether no action should be taken and those lands will remain with their protections. It gets tiring.

So I think there are things within life, like dancing, feasting with one another–especially around the foods that we harvest together–playing music, singing, stretching, really playing. I started playing volleyball again, which is one of my first loves in life, and it’s integral to keeping that balance. I think in order to do good, we have to feel good, otherwise, we’re just reifying the systems that keep us feeling bogged down.

I’ve done work when I’ve been depressed. I’ve done work when I’ve been angry. I’ve done work when I’ve been sad. Was it my best work? Was it work that I think connected with people in an authentic way? No, not at all. Was I “doing the work?” Yeah. Did it make a difference? Maybe. Was it filled with the love and longevity that it could have been if I was in a good place—not saying I have to be in a good place all the time—but no.

That’s why I am turning away from policy work because in the policy world you have to go through a long and cumbersome process that often doesn’t take time to connect with people before putting together policies that impact their everyday lives.

I’m trying to re-root back into digging my hands in the earth because I love to play in dirt. As a little kid, I dug holes in the garden and made mud pies, and played on the banks of the river. I was more action-oriented. Being in my body — whether that’s fishing or gardening or playing volleyball – enables me to connect with people in my community. Those are the things that are going to weave together our connections in a much more pleasurable way so that we can continue doing the work in the long run.

The post Alaskan Native Looks to Tradition to Deal with Contemporary Problems appeared first on Bioneers.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

ab banks, an urban farmer whose work is grounded in agroecology, wellness and Black food autonomy, is the Garden Lead for People’s Programs at the Oxford Tract at UC Berkley, which grows food and seeks to advance food autonomy for Oakland’s Black population and to ensure that healthy produce is available to under-resourced community members, including the unhoused. Peoples Program is a Black-led organization founded by Black youth to empower the community of Oakland.

Previously a Just Leader Fellow with the Cooperative Food Empowerment Collective, which seeks to build a cooperative food economy powered by the visionary leadership of Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, ab also started the (Free) Community Health Clinic, and is the Agroecology and Wellness Coordinator at the Berkeley Food Institute. Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed ab banks.

ARTY MANGAN: One of the many positions you hold is the Garden Lead for the People’s Programs in the East Bay. Can you describe the community that you work in and how the program serves that community?

ab banks: Initially a friend of mine developed an urban garden on a quarter-acre of abandoned land on Campbell Street in West Oakland, but we recently transitioned off that land to the UC Berkeley Oxford Tract. The produce that was harvested from that land in West Oakland went to local families. We started an informal CSA grocery program for local families that has expanded and now serves about 150 people. We don’t actually farm in that neighborhood anymore because­ the land is going to be developed with housing, but we still serve the same people that we started the CSA with.

ARTY: That is a big challenge of urban farming. I’ve heard many times from urban farmers who had established farms and gardens but eventually had to move because the city or the landlord wanted to develop the land. It makes it challenging. Michael Ableman, an urban farmer I know well, works in a very underserved part of Vancouver, BC, and most of his workers are unhoused people who have a variety different challenges in their lives. He farms in the parking lot of a major sports arena and knows that eventually he may have to move, so he created a one-acre orchard composed of 30 to 40 different varieties of fruit trees, but all of the trees are planted in 4X4 planter boxes, three-feet high, so, if he has to move, he can just forklift them onto a truck and move them to a different location. Michael wrote a book about the project: Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs and Hope on the Urban Frontier

ab: That’s amazing!

ARTY: You also started the Free Community Health Clinic. Can you tell me a little bit about how that started?

ab: in 2017, when People’s Programs started passing out food, it was evident even then that there was a big need for some type of public medical care. People would come to pick up food and some of them would have injuries and wounds and ask us for Ibuprofen and things like that. We had started with providing food and then extended it to passing out clothes, but we felt the next obvious step was to provide free accessible healthcare, so we raised funds and were able to buy a mobile clinic—a clinic on wheels. Now, along with hot meals, we provide access to free healthcare, as much as you can do in a mobile clinic. And for anything that we can’t do, we send people to a referral to get the medical care they need.

That’s how it started, and it’s still expanding. We want to be a resource for what the community needs; we don’t want to limit it. If another need is asked for and we can help, we’re going to build a program around that and offer that as well. When I think about the populations I serve, these folks have the answers; they know exactly what they need. They’re not in need of a savior to come in and do all these things for them. What people need is a viable local economy, self-determination, and the ability to set their own destiny, whatever that means for them. When I talk to students of color, they know exactly what they want to do and need—they just need the resources to get it done.

Photo by Marco Alexander

Julius Nyerere, a highly influential former president of Tanzania, wrote a book called Ujamaa about how important it is for farms to be in the hands of local farmers who care for the people around them and know what they want to eat, and how that creates a sense of community. When we started the farm in West Oakland, it drew in the community members around us, and they gave us feedback. When your food isn’t local, you can’t make decisions about how food is grown. Urban farms are important because city folk need food and should have autonomy over the food that’s grown, and they should know how to grow their own food.

ARTY: How does farming in the city affect the urban ecosystem?

ab: It totally changes ecosystems, and in my opinion, for the better. It just breaks up cement jungles, as a lot of folks call them, and creates more green spaces. There’s a lot of research about what green spaces do for mental, spiritual, and emotional health, and there is a biological benefit when people eat food that is grown where they’re from. A while back, I spoke to a nutritionist about the importance of eating eat food from your culture and eating locally grown food. If you don’t eat local food, you won’t have the correct microbiome to fight diseases that are prevalent where you live.

ARTY: That’s consistent with the Macrobiotic principle of eating food in season. Locally-grown food is food in season for that locale, so, for example, no pineapples in December…

ab: Exactly right.

ARTY: Let’s talk about your work as a Just Leader Fellow with Cooperative Food Empowerment Collective. Is your breakfast program inspired by the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program in the ‘60s?

ab: Yes. Definitely. What we do is called “Decolonization Programs and Projects.” We think of it as being an evolution from a survival program. Everything that we’re doing is an attempt at decolonization. We pass out food because people are starving. We give free access to healthcare because people need healthcare. Some people with diabetes have wounds that escalate to infection and even amputation because they don’t have basic healthcare. We provide basic needs directly in line with how the Panthers rolled.

They realized that a crucially important population in their community was students. Schoolchildren weren’t getting fed adequately, so when they went to school, they couldn’t focus because they were hungry. To a lot of people, it always feels like a complex issue—we need to get the funding, etc. No. We’re just going to go out there and set up tables and feed the children. Obviously, it takes a lot of logistical work to get that done, but if it needs to get done, we’re going to do it. That’s kind of the fervor that we carry when we’re building programs and projects.

We feed 300 to 400 people every other Sunday. During COVID, we went out three times a week because folks weren’t getting fed by anyone. Many in the homeless community depend on people leaving a restaurant giving them a dollar or leftovers. During COVID, that wasn’t happening, so we increased the number of days we provided food. We serve people in West Oakland near St. Vincent’s Shelter, and we also have a driving crew of folks who serve around 15 to 20 encampments, and that’s 300 to 400 meals.

ARTY: When the Panthers were feeding kids in Oakland and other cities in the ‘60s, they were harassed, jailed, even murdered by the FBI. How is your program perceived by those in power?

ab: I’d say we haven’t really been perceived by the government. In my opinion, if folks really cared about what we were doing, then we would have an endless supply of money, but we never see funds at all. I haven’t really experienced any harassment. There have been times, of course, where people have said, “Oh, you need a food handler’s permit” or have tried to put obstacles in our way, but it’s only made us better because if we get a critique, we’re going to definitely shift our feet and make sure we’re grounded and do the right thing in how our operations roll.

ARTY: Have the socioeconomic conditions improved in communities of color in recent years?

ab: No. It’s getting worse. Homelessness is up 22 percent since 2017. If people say it’s getting better, I point them in the direction of the homelessness rate. It’s clear in the data, and it’s obvious in the streets. The reason we focus on homelessness is because this is the community that we feel encompasses all the communities of the Bay Area. No one’s exempt from being homeless in terms of race and class. We see all different types of people, but still, the homeless in our region are majority Black.

ARTY: I ‘d like to ask you about what motivates you, what your vision is. I listened to an interview with you on KQED, and you said you’re creating sovereignty from an intersectional standpoint, pushing folks who are last to go first, and letting love lead the way.

ab: What motivates me is that I want all the people I know to have the ability to lead their own destiny and to be sovereign. I think folks often shy away from understanding that because it seems like a lot of work to be in charge of your own destiny, but I have 100 percent faith in the community that I serve, that one day we’ll be able to achieve our own liberation and be completely autonomous over our lives. That’s my motivation.

Just thinking about the work that we do, it’s really sad. It’s really sad to see people starve. It’s really sad to see people deal with substance abuse when there are real solutions that I don’t feel are taken seriously by the people in power. I want to continue to draw a line of demarcation and say, ‘Hey, listen, there’s stuff that can be done, and if the government can’t figure it out, let the people figure it out.’ Obviously, the people who are closest to the problems are closest to the solutions as well, so let those folks lead the way.

I’m motivated by the history and legacy that has been left behind for me by the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and all the African anti-colonial freedom fighters—Thomas Sankara, Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, etc. All of those people inspire me, and all the revolutionary movements that have happened inspire me to keep going and to keep understanding and not backing down from what I know to be true, which is we are our own liberators.

ARTY: On that KQED interview, you also talked about radical forms of self-love. How do you reconcile the concept self-love with working to overcome injustice and suffering in your community?

ab: When there are people on the streets starving or people in your family struggling with substance abuse, that must be addressed first in order to actually feel that there’s promise in the future. If you want to develop love for yourself, there’s work that needs to be done to make sure your community is safe and good. That’s partly why I do the work at People’s Programs

I could shut myself off from the community, get a massage, do some yoga, go to the gym—which are all things that I do—but I need to help feed my people, read to gain knowledge, and talk to people and see if I can give them what they need, because without that, I’m going to feel the pain of the exploitation of capitalism without having any answer for it.

ARTY: As a frontline activist covering many bases in terms of serving community needs, there’s a high risk of burnout. You mentioned how you take care of yourself, but do you have any recommendations, things you’ve learned about how to avoid burnout?

ab: I think it’s important to analyze particularly where the burnout is coming from. I can feel when it’s happening before I get tired. When I start to feel burnout, I feel a dissociation, but I also have a slight pushback on this. There are people who don’t do any direct service work but still experience burnout. It’s an emotional feeling because of all of the really messed up, nasty stuff going on in the world. My answer to that is what I was alluding to in the last question. When you’re doing all of these self-care things, but they’re not working, it’s often because you are part of a broken system, and you’re feeling hopelessness because you’re trying to fix something on the personal level without actually contributing to a wider solution.

We’re experiencing pain and grief for something we feel helpless in, but actually there’s a bunch of things you can do to contribute to the revolution, so that’s my first thing. The second thing is for people who are on the frontlines doing direct-action work—my advice is build a team, a solid team of folks you can be honest with, who can hold you accountable, who know your triggers and know what’s going on in your life. It’s not as simple as just saying, ‘Oh, you should journal,’ or ‘Oh, you should go for a walk.’ I think it’s much more complex than that. The only real advice I have is to have comrades and community members who are in your corner and are keeping it real with you; keeping it real when you mess up; keeping it real when you’re doing good; keeping it real when you need a break. If you don’t have people on your side, and you’re trying to do everything you can for the revolution all at once, then you are going to burn out.

Doing this work is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. You have to able to delegate something to a comrade and say: ‘Hey, listen, I can’t do this right now.’ And they trust you because they know how much you are putting into the work. It might seem from the outside that I’m doing a lot, but I’m doing exactly what I’m passionate about, and I’m not doing more than I’m supposed to be doing. I’m delegating when I need to. I help run the clinic and the farm, but I don’t run the clinic or the farm by myself. I do what I can, and I’m honest and truthful about what I can do. And I can prevent my comrades’ burnouts by stepping in when they need a break, but if we’re all kind of dragging our feet, then we’re all going to burn out.

I was telling one of my elders how tired I was. I had to work the farm that day and the clinic the next day. I was working seven days a week. She looked at me and said, “ab, you’re not going to f*ck up the revolution with one day of rest.” It’s important to note that when you’re going real hard, you need to listen, so you know when you’re going past your limit and you need a break, and you know when you need to keep going.

ARTY: You cited that expression: “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” It usually takes a long time to understand that. It’s usually folks who are older than you who figure that out, and, too often, by the time they figure it out, they have seriously burnt out. Everything is so urgent right now, and yet this is a multi-generational struggle. Yes, we’re looking for as much success and progress as possible right away, but at the same time, we’re trying to build something solid that other folks can stand on and build on in the future.

The post Urban Farming, Community Care and Self-Love appeared first on Bioneers.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

When the Covid pandemic hit and disrupted so many of our social and economic systems, a crisis within the crisis exploded: the number of people who were facing hunger grew catastrophically. News footage showed miles-long lines of cars at food banks with many of those people being turned away due to a lack of food. At the same time, quite a few farmers were dumping their crops because many of their major markets, such as restaurants, were closed.

The urgency of the crisis caused a small group of college students in Southern California to feel they had to do something. Their initial, modest goal of providing food to one local food bank grew astonishingly quickly, and became the Farmlink Project, a national operation redirecting millions of pounds of food to feed the hungry while highlighting the food system’s twin failures of food insecurity and food waste.

One of the students who co-founded the project is Owen Dubek, now its Creative Director. An avid surfer and documentary filmmaker, Owen captured the whole story in his inspiring, award-winning film: Abundance: The Farmlink Story.

In this interview, Arty Mangan of Bioneers discussed this extraordinary initiative with Owen and with Farmlink’s Director of Sustainability, Julia DeSantis.

ARTY MANGAN: The pandemic was obviously the crisis that awakened your activism and the activism of your colleagues, but what were the specific conditions that inspired you to act?

OWEN DUBEK: In the beginning of the pandemic, we were seeing billions of pounds of food going to waste on farms. It became front and center as a national news story. Right in our backyard in L.A. at some of the food banks near us, we were seeing mile-long lines. At the same time, many of us were being sent home from college. I had just graduated and had my first job, but work had really slowed down, and a few of us asked ourselves: What can we do to help?

So, we talked to the West Side Food Bank and a few others in our area. They said that they needed more food. With a few friends, we scraped a couple hundred dollars together, rented a U-Haul truck, and drove our first truckload of food from a local farm to that food bank. We didn’t set out to build an organization; we were just looking for one small way we could help. Julia joined us a little bit later, but during the pandemic she was working on an initiative that was getting groceries to older folks in her area. It turned out that there was a huge wave of young people who were privileged enough to have the time to volunteer who had the spirit and motivation to make a difference.

ARTY: What did you learn from taking action in that crisis? And what is your message to young people who are discouraged by the world’s seemingly intractable problems and feel powerless to address them?

OWEN: We’ve shown the film in a bunch of schools. That’s what I’m focused on because I think a lot of people, especially younger people, are a little cynical about the future and don’t know how to take the first step. They don’t know where to start. What we’ve learned is that— and it sounds like a cliché—but the power of collective hope is the reason that Farmlink exists. It’s the reason we were able to move 100 million pounds of food. Hundreds of people went to work every day doing the most that they could do to get as much food on people’s tables as possible. There was a deep sense of hope that drove people to drop out of school, quit their jobs and give it everything they had to get food to communities that were facing hunger.

There’s an interesting angle here too. Looking at the analytics of our videos that we put online, when we dwell on the negative, when we dwell on the crisis and emphasize how bad things are, we see people click away within five to seven seconds. They do not watch the video, and they’re definitely not inspired to take action. But when we root it in hope and highlight faces of young people who are hopeful, it really inspires people to do something about it. I think people are sick of hearing how negative things are, and they’re looking for ways to take action.

JULIA DeSANTIS: I studied Climate Communications at school because I went through that emotional cycle, when you learn about a problem and then you’re either overcome with paralysis or you develop a deep connection to the issue. I wanted to learn how to find a way to activate positive impulses, to imbue hope and the will to take action in many more people.

What Farmlink can be a demonstration of is that we were all kids that just got started somehow but were able to get a lot done. We were not a group of experts, but we were willing to support one another by taking action together. Especially with communicating about the climate, we don’t need to bludgeon people with the truth anymore. We need to catalyze people’s energy into a sustainable creative force – the problem-solving force of people who are excited to break a problem or a system down, delegate tasks, and try again tomorrow. I think that’s what gets momentum. Farmlink uniquely captured the spirit of students wanting to get out there with no prior expectation of how they should operate in the world. It’s the spirit of creative problem-solving combined with the joy of being able to learn together. I think that’s also something the climate challenge offers to everyone: we know the beauties of this planet and we want to continue to create a healthy life on it.

ARTY: A big part of your mission is to empower the next generation of changemakers. You responded to a crisis out of your instinctive altruism, but now, looking back at the successes you’ve had and the impact that you’ve made, have you developed a theory of change?

OWEN: We knew nothing about the agricultural space, and we were not experts in the charitable food space, but we knew what questions we wanted to ask and were not afraid to call industry leaders and other people in these domains, and ask them, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing, what do you think? Are we on the right path? You said we’re doing this wrong, how do we do it right?” And without that advice, counseling, consulting, none of this would have happened. Eden, who’s one of our founding members, said on a panel: “You’re going to fail along the way, but you need to set it up so that when you fail, you can bounce right back and build it stronger.”

Another thing that was really crucial—and I think a lot of companies and movements in their early stages can get this wrong—is that everyone had ownership over the project. It didn’t matter if you were the first person or the 500th person to join the project, it felt like it was yours. You can see that in our early news coverage. The same person never went on the news twice. It was always a different person because it was everyone’s project, and that made everyone work so much harder.

ARTY: So, it was a spontaneous startup enterprise, but entrepreneurial startups can be exhausting, exhilarating and challenging in regards to effective management. How did the internal systems develop in a way that was organizationally effective?

OWEN: In the beginning, it was literally just call up your friends. Hey, this guy knows how to build a website. This guy knows how to make videos. This person’s down to cold call 500 farmers in a day and has no shame or fear or rejection. It just ballooned into having 100, 120 people. We started looking for advisers, asking each other: “Does anyone have a parent who started a business?” And the advisers we found said things like, “You need a fundraising team; you need a food program team, etc.” So, we broke our work into four different pillars, and it was able to naturally grow through that.

There was a key transition point where all of these kids were going back to college. We had to figure out a hybrid model. We hired full-time a mix of industry experts and the student leaders who had started Farmlink while also making sure that there was a fellowship program that could usher in the next generation of change-makers. Right now, we have 26 full-time employees. Some of those are people who have left other large nonprofits because they were inspired to come work with us, feeling they could drive their vision for the future more readily at Farmlink. Some of them are the founders you see in the documentary, and we have a fellowship program with 50 to 60 students who play a major role in moving food, fundraising, storytelling, policy, all the things we’re working on.

ARTY: Things grew pretty fast. What were some of the obstacles you encountered? And what are the opportunities that opened up?

OWEN: The first major obstacle was we received all of our funding as a result of news stories. We were on ABC News World Tonight; we were in the New York Times, and we were on NBC. Tens of thousands of people in a twenty-minute burst were donating $10, $20 at a time, just everyday Americans coming together to support this project. But that model was not sustainable. There’s a limit to how many times you’ll get major media coverage, so we had to pivot to find corporate partnerships and different fundraising opportunities. That was a major challenge.

Another difficulty was figuring out where there are major surplus opportunities. You can see in the film that we called 100 farms that first day and no one had surplus food. We weren’t looking in the right places. Eventually, we found bigger farms, larger commercial farms that were wasting a lot of food, but it took us a while to find them. Now we’re at the point where we’re able to anticipate three, four months in advance when a major harvest might go to waste.

In the fall, we rescued 36 million apples that were going to go to waste. Due to the pandemic, contracts had been cut with farmers in an entire region of West Virginia. We were able to anticipate that far enough in advance to send hundreds of trucks to divert that food to hundreds of different communities. The biggest challenge in the beginning was finding food and getting there fast enough to collect it, and it feels like we’re getting a lot better at that.

ARTY: It sounds like there’s a lot of flexibility into your system.

OWEN: Totally, because I think that was the thing that wasn’t working with other organizations during the pandemic—they weren’t agile. They’d been doing things the same way for many years, but all of a sudden, we’re in this global pandemic and the supply chain looks nothing like it did yesterday, and they weren’t necessarily adapting as fast as our new organization of young people with no preconceived ideas could. That’s a big thing we need to be conscious of going forward. It would be very easy for us to grow and become an organization that’s kind of rigid, so we’re really trying hard to bake it into our DNA that we want to continue to be agile, especially as challenges with climate change come forward.

JULIA: I lead our sustainability team, and it’s really important how we respond to the existing system that is designed to over-produce, that has bubbles of surplus that need to be recovered and redistributed away from landfills to people who could really benefit from having access to that food.

At the same time, there are many different ways to approach growing food globally at scale, so part of what I really have our team focus on now is how we can explore ways that food can be grown more resourcefully and distributed more efficiently. I think there’s plenty for Farmlink to continue to learn to be able to be part of adaptive solutions that make sure that food is distributed in the most sustainable and humane way.

ARTY: You started out wanting to help one local food bank, and now you have the capacity “to feed millions of people with dignity.” What does it mean to feed people with dignity?

OWEN: Let me lead with a stat that fifty percent of people who are food insecure and know where their local food bank is, will not go there because of the stigma associated with it. That tells us that there’s a crisis in how we are delivering food to people. Waiting in line for hours in your car and being handed a bag of food that sometimes isn’t culturally appropriate and isn’t necessarily what you wanted can be a shame-inducing experience. We truly believe it should not be that way, so we try to prioritize sending food to organizations that are giving people choice in their food, where there aren’t patronizing processes or paperwork, where people can actually access the food bank easily, for example, in a community center. We love community organizations where food is built into everyday life.

In the documentary you can see a community center in Oklahoma, in the Cherokee Nation, where people go to for live music, dancing, and they can get fresh produce there as well. That’s so important that it’s baked into everyday life, and it removes that stigma a little bit, and in turn you’re reaching more people. So that’s what dignity means to us.

ARTY: Are there policies, either economic or political, that actually restrain what you’re trying to do?

OWEN: Yeah. The first low-hanging fruit, no pun intended, right off the bat, is that there are states where you can get a tax deduction for donating food to us, and then there are states where you don’t get a tax deduction. If those states did have tax deductions, farmers would donate hundreds of millions of pounds more food.

And we’re trying to get reimbursed for some of our transportation costs. If an entire harvest of food is about to go to waste in a state, sometimes the Department of Agriculture of that state will pay farmers for their work so that dozens of farms that have been there for a hundred years don’t go belly up. A lot of times, there is a requirement to donate the food in order to get paid, but there isn’t an easy pathway for them to donate the food. We’re trying to bake it into policy that when this happens, the state also reimburses the transportation, so that we can coordinate with the farmers in an ongoing, sustainable way.

ARTY: Let’s talk about overproduction. In one of your videos, Chef Nick DiGiovanni shows three tomatoes and explains why they’d been thrown away. One had a minor blemish; one was slightly overripe; and in the last case, a buyer had just pulled out of a purchasing commitment. DiGiovanni said that our current system is designed to throw away roughly 30 percent of the food we produce. Do you agree that the system’s actually designed that way?

OWEN: I don’t think there was a conscious decision to create a system that throws away 30 percent, but it’s the world we’ve built together. It’s not that people are evil or unjust and want to throw away food, but these are what the existing incentives are driving people to do.

As a large-scale conventional farmer, you need to be delivering a perfect-looking product that meets certain criteria dictated by the market. Your potatoes have to be just right, not too big or too small, with uniform color and no spots, etc. As a result, there are going to be a lot of potatoes that the farmer can’t sell, but a huge amount of food needs to be harvested just to find the 70 percent of it that will be saleable. In Mexico we saw 25 million tons of bananas that were perfectly edible go to waste because the supplier pulled out of the contract. There had been a cold front that swept through, and that had created a lot of little brown spots on the bananas. They were perfectly edible. I flew down there to film a video and ate a bunch of them, and they were great, but they didn’t look like what the market wants a banana to look like, so they all went to waste.

ARTY: Talk a little bit about the process of making the film at the same time you were running at high speed to try to build an organization to help feed people.

OWEN: I showed up on the first day to take some photos of my friends driving a U-Haul truck with some food to their local food bank thinking, hey, maybe we’ll get on the local news, maybe we’ll make an Instagram post out of this, or something like that. There was never an intention of making a documentary or starting an organization, but it quickly became clear in the first couple of days that footage and photos documenting what we were doing were going to be really important. You see a lot of it in the documentary—three months after I took those photos, ABC World News wanted the images of how we were trying to feed people and showed them to tens of millions of people.

After that, I began to think that maybe there’s a documentary here, but I wasn’t sure. I was filming in the background on important events, visiting farms just to continue to tell stories and send stuff to the news, but kids started dropping out of school and people starting quitting their jobs, calling their bosses and saying: “Hey, I’m working on something that’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” When that was happening, I realized that there was something truly special happening that went well beyond connecting farms to food banks. It was a surge of collective hope and empowerment during the biggest crisis in our generation’s life that made this topic worthy of a documentary.

ARTY: The crisis of the pandemic certainly shed more light on the food system’s systemic failures of hunger and of food waste.

OWEN: These problems had existed for a very long time, but the pandemic brought them front and center into the national conversation. A lot of people thought that when the pandemic was over, there probably wouldn’t be any more surplus food, but that’s completely wrong. There’s more surplus food than ever; this is the system we’ve been handed.

We definitely don’t want Farmlink to continue forever. We joke that we want to put ourselves out of business, but we are quite serious about wanting to help create real solutions that would make this project unnecessary. As long as there’s surplus food and there are hungry people, though, we’re going to do this for as long as we can.

ARTY: How has your experience with Farmlink changed you?

OWEN: It’s given me my best friends. I’ve been able to work on something that I feel is so important, dedicate all my time to it and become so close to the people around me. It’s given me a community that I never had before. It’s also connected me to a deeper sense of purpose. I drove around the country with a group of friends, visiting all the communities we had served, and that trip changed me in a lot of ways. We worked a twelve-hour day in a parking lot at a food bank, and at noon we saw nurses lining up, waiting an hour in line during their lunch break, to get food. I feel like that single moment changed me in how I look at the economics of the United States and the importance of bringing justice to this issue.

This included the time I spent with Anne Lopez, who’s running the somewhat secret network of food banks for undocumented people who don’t feel comfortable going to a food bank because they could be risking deportation. I felt like all of these experiences brought me from a person who makes social impact documentaries because I generally care about the world, to someone who now has a very deep personal connection to these issues and feels the injustices in my bones, and I think that deeper capacity for empathy will find its way into my film projects going forward.

JULIA: Farmlink has given me the opportunity to work with other people on a shared challenge we all care passionately about. It’s a defining opportunity that will mark us deeply and stay with us throughout our lives. Farmlink gave me the voice to articulate what I believe and to be able to work with brilliant, dedicated, resourceful, hilarious, beautiful, young energy to try and try again on something that we know without any doubts is worth our time. Farmlink was started by young people but is now made up of a diverse group of people across age groups who have a shared “if-not-now-when” energy. Whether you’re young or old, you’re constantly reminded that this is our time.

We are living in critically important times, so let’s get after it and do something cool with it and share the joy. We get to create something with a team to improve conditions that we are born into. That is a massive opportunity that I have been gifted and that I get to come back to every single day when I show up to work. It’s such a fun thing that I’ve been able to grow into radically, as someone who can think, research, test, and trial again. It’s such a gift to make mistakes and learn with a team. That has dramatically improved my problem-solving skills and my respect for other people’s opinions. I’ve learned that an expansion of creativity is possible when you give yourself permission to dare. I think those are just some of the many, many gifts that Farmlink has given me.

The post The Farmlink Project: Reducing Hunger by Reducing Food Waste appeared first on Bioneers.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Undisciplined Environments - Thu, 05/23/2024 - 07:02

A contribution to student encampments for Palestinian liberation.*

“This obscure feeling that you had as you left Gaza,
this small feeling must grow into a giant deep within
you. It must expand, you must seek it in order to find
yourself, here among the ugly debris of defeat.

I won’t come to you. But you, return to us! Come
back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the
top of the thigh, what life and what existence is worth.

Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you.”

Ghassan Kanafani (1956)

Background: Longue durée of Palestinian liberation and political ecologies of resistance to settler-colonialism

1. Salamanca, O. J., Qato, M., Rabie, K., & Samour, S. (2012). Past is present: Settler colonialism in Palestine.Settler colonial studies,2(1), 1-8.
2. Pellow, D. (2017) Chapter 4: The Israel/Palestine Conflict as an Environmental Justice Struggle, in What is critical environmental justice?. John Wiley & Sons.
3. Ajl, M. (2024). Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, DOI: 10.1177/22779760241228157.
4. Malm, A. (2024) The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth
5. Salamanca, O.J., Khosla, P. & Aruri, N. (2024) Intervention — “It’s been 164 Days and a Long Century: Notes on Genocide, Solidarity, and Liberation. Antipode Online. https://antipodeonline.org/2024/04/11/notes-on-genocide-solidarity-and-liberation/

Environments of Palestine

1. ENTITLE in Palestine (2015) The Political Ecology of Everyday Life under Settler Colonialism I – Reporting from Palestine, https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2015/09/02/the-political-ecology-of-everyday-life-under-settler-colonialism-i-reporting-from-palestine/
2. Isaac, J. & Hilal, J. (2011) Palestinian landscape and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict,International Journal of Environmental Studies, 68:4, 413-429, DOI: 10.1080/00207233.2011.582700
3. Jaber, D. A. (2018): Settler colonialism and ecocide: case study of Al-Khader, Palestine,Settler Colonial Studies, DOI:10.1080/2201473X.2018.148712700207233.2011.582700
4. al-Butmeh, A., al-Shalalfeh, Z., Zwahre, M., & Scandrett, E. (2019). The environment as a site of struggle against settler-colonisation in Palestine. In Harley, A., & Scandrett, E. (eds.). Environmental Justice, Popular Struggle and Community Development. Policy Press (pp. 153-172).
5. Forensic Architecture (2024) ‘No Trace of Life’: Israel’s Ecocide in Gaza 2023-2024, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/ecocide-in-gaza
6. Qumsiyeh, M. B (2024) Impact of the Israeli military activities on the environment, International Journal of Environmental Studies, 81:2, 977-992, DOI: 10.1080/00207233.2024.2323365
7. Braverman, I. (2024). Frontier ecologies: Israel’s settler colonialism in the Jawlan-Golan. Political Geography, 111, 103073.
8. Molavi, S. C. (2024) Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance, Pluto Press.
9. Salamanca, O.J. (2024) “Because of the Land”: Insurgent Infrastructures of Social Reproduction in Palestine. In: The Undisciplined Environments Collective (Eds.) Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations, pp. 26-46. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Climate in Palestine

1. Bigger, P. et al. (2024) Ceasefire now, ceasefire forever: No climate justice without Palestinian freedom and self-determination, Climate and Community Project, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27376.43527
2. Mason, M., Zeitoun, M., & Mimi, Z. (2012). Compounding vulnerability: impacts of climate change on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Journal of Palestine Studies, 41(3), 38-53.

Water in Palestine

1. Hafez, Y. and Dhenin, M. (2024) Palestine’s Jordan River Drained of Water and Livelihood, https://atmos.earth/palestines-jordan-river-drained-of-water-and-livelihood/
2. Alatout, S. (2006). Towards a bio-territorial conception of power: Territory, population, and environmental narratives in Palestine and Israel. Political Geography, 25(6), 601-621.
3. Selby, J. (2003). Dressing up domination as ‘cooperation’: The case of Israeli-Palestinian water relations. Review of International Studies, 29(1), 121-138.
4. Braverman, I. (2020). Silent springs: The nature of water and Israel’s military occupation. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 3(2), 527-551.
5. Beltrán, M. J., & Kallis, G. (2018). How does virtual water flow in Palestine? A political ecology analysis. Ecological Economics, 143, 17-26.
6. Trottier, J., & Perrier, J. (2018). Water driven Palestinian agricultural frontiers: The global ramifications of transforming local irrigation. Journal of Political Ecology, 25(1), 292.

Land, Food and Commons in Palestine

1. Quiquivix, L. (2013) When the Carob Tree Was the Border: On Autonomy and Palestinian Practices of Figuring it Out, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24:3, 170-189, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2013.815242
2. Alkhalili, N. (2017). Enclosures from below: The Mushaa’in contemporary Palestine.Antipode,49(5), 1103-1124.

   Grosglik, R., Handel, A., & Monterescu, D. (2021). Soil, territory, land: The spatial politics of settler organic farming in the West Bank, Israel/Palestine. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(5), 906-924.

3. Sayrafi, I. (2022). Political Ecology and the Social Solidarity Economies within the Power Matrix in Rural Palestine. Center for Development Studies – Birzeit University.
4. Henderson, C. (2024). Israel’s weapon of hunger in Gaza, https://peasantjournal.org/news/israel%E2%80%99s-weapon-of-hunger-in-gaza/

Waste in Palestine

1. Perrier, J. (2021). Land defenders, infrastructural violence and environmental coloniality: Resisting a wastewater treatment plant in East Nablus. In Environmental Defenders (pp. 198-217). Routledge.
2. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, S. C. (2021). Failure to build: Sewage and the choppy temporality of infrastructure in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(1), 28-42.
3. Garb, Y., & Leblond, N. (2024). Flowing toxics: E-waste field work in the Palestinian-Israeli space. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 42(1), 45-63.
4. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, S. (2019). Waste siege: the life of infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford University Press
5. Baumann, H., & Massalha, M. (2022). ‘Your daily reality is rubbish’: Waste as a means of urban exclusion in the suspended spaces of East Jerusalem. Urban Studies, 59(3), 548-571.

Urban Palestine

1. Abujidi, N., & Verschure, H. (2006). Military occupation as urbicide by “construction and destruction”: The case of Nablus, Palestine. The Arab World Geographer, 9(2), 126-154.
2. Alkhalili, N. (2019). ‘A forest of urbanization’: Camp Metropolis in the edge areas.Settler Colonial Studies,9(2), 207-226
3. Joudah, N. (2020) Gaza as Site and Method: The Settler Colonial City Without Settlers, https://antipodeonline.org/2020/08/24/gaza-as-site-and-method/
4. Abu Hatoum, N. (2021). For “a no-state yet to come”: Palestinian urban place-making in Kufr Aqab, Jerusalem. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(1), 85-108.
5. Golańska, D. (2022). Slow urbicide: Accounting for the shifting temporalities of political violence in the West Bank. Geoforum, 132, 125-134.
6. Salamanca, O. J., & Silver, J. (2022). In the excess of splintering urbanism: The racialized political economy of infrastructure.Journal of Urban Technology,29(1), 117-125.
7. Azzouz, A. (2024). Erased city. City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 28(1-2), 1-6. DOI: doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2024.2323388

More-Than-Human Palestine

1. Sasa, G. (2023). Oppressive pines: Uprooting Israeli green colonialism and implanting Palestinian A’wna. Politics, 43(2), 219-235.
2. Amira, S. (2021). The slow violence of Israeli settler-colonialism and the political ecology of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Settler Colonial Studies, 11(4), 512-532.
3. Salih, R., & Corry, O. (2022). Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(1), 381-400.
4. Sharif, L. (2015). Savory colonialism: Land, memory, and the eco-occupation of Palestine. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 11(2), 256-257.
5. Sezer, J. (2023). Sustaining Resistance, Cultivating Liberation: The Enduring Bond of Rooted-Resistance-Companionship between Palestinians and Olive Trees, https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/44436
6. Qumsiyeh, M.B., Abusarhan, M.A. (2021). Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation in Palestine. In: Öztürk, M., Altay, V., Efe, R. (eds) Biodiversity, Conservation and Sustainability in Asia. Springer, Cham.
7. Adolfsson, J. (2023). A new storm over the Naqab: The temporality of space in Israeli settler colonialism, https://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1717177&dswid=6293

Green Imperialism in Palestine

1. Jung, W. And Wu, C. (2024) A Mirror of Our Immediate Future: On Green Imperialism and Palestine, https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/a-mirror-of-our-immediate-future/
2. Hughes, S. S., Velednitsky, S., & Green, A. A. (2023). Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental injustice in the age of climate catastrophe. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(1), 495-513.
3. Shqair, M. (2023) Arab–Israeli Eco-Normalization: Greenwashing Settler Colonialism in Palestine and the Jawlan, in Hamouchene, H. and Sandwell, K. (eds). Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region. Pluto Press. URL: https://openresearchlibrary.org/content/00f17fce-1221-4a50-bc6e-643d19f790f7
4. Alkhalili, N., Dajani, M., & Mahmoud, Y. (2023). The enduring coloniality of ecological modernization: Wind energy development in occupied Western Sahara and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Political Geography, 103, 102871.

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* This selection was curated by Ethemcan Turhan and is reproduced here with his permission. Last updated 28 May 2024.

The post Palestinian Political Ecologies Reader appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.

Categories: B4. Radical Ecology

Research is catching up to the fact that fungi play an absolutely fundamental role in the very existence of our ecosystems and in the lives of plants, animals and other organisms. Vast underground fungal networks exchange nutrients, form relationships with microbes and plants, and funnel billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the soil and biosphere. Yet we know astonishingly little about the ecological extent and distribution, as well as the biological characteristics, of this under-recognized kingdom of life. If we are to address the climate and biodiversity crises, we cannot neglect to look underground.

Explore what some of the most intrepid scientists and researchers in this emerging field are learning about the ancient relationships between fungi, plants and animals — and why they are critical for the health and resilience of the web of life. Below, Merlin Sheldrake discusses the ancient library of solutions fungi have developed in their co-evolution with plants; Sheldrake and Toby Kiers, a leading evolutionary biologist, explain the work of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) to build a global database of underground fungal networks; Paul Stamets shares how a mycelium-derived treatment could help endangered bee species; and Suzanne Simard talks about her breakthrough discoveries regarding plant communication via underground mycelial networks.

Learn about the thriving world under our feet and help us spread the word about its foundational role in life on earth.

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‘An Ancient Library of Solutions:’ The Effort to Save the Mycorrhizal Fungi Vital to Life on Earth

Before plants evolved their own root systems, fungi provided the connection to the soil that enabled plants to move from water onto land. These underground networks remain crucial to plants’ survival, exchanging nutrients, forming relationships with microbes, and funneling billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the soil. But these vast underground networks represent a global blindspot, with 90% of mycorrhizal fungal hotspots currently falling outside protected areas. This is a problem not only for the fungi but all the organisms and ecosystems that depend on them. In this edited transcript of a Bioneers keynote address, biologist and bestselling author Merlin Sheldrake talks about the vital work of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) to map and protect these fungal networks and preserve this “ancient library of solutions.”

Read now

Mapping, Protecting and Harnessing the Mycorrhizal Networks that Sustain Life on Earth

Merlin Sheldrake and Toby Kiers are two of the world’s leading researchers seeking to understand the critically important but long-overlooked and understudied role of fungal networks in supporting life. Join them as they discuss their work with the groundbreaking, visionary Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), which Kiers co-founded. Together with GlobalFungi, Global Soil Mycobiome Consortium, the Crowther Lab, and researchers, SPUN is building a global database of mycorrhizal diversity that will allow researchers to quantify biodiversity hot-spots and identify underground ecosystems of high conservation priority.

Watch now

Solutions Underfoot: How Mushrooms May Help Save the Bees

Old-growth forests are libraries of ancestral knowledge, with fungi being the biological network that connects it all. Visionary researcher Paul Stamets has spent more than 40 years studying mycelium, its ability to recycle nutrients, and its role in sustaining life from the ground up. He’s now using those restorative properties to help protect endangered bees. Read about the potential benefits of a mycelium-derived treatment and what it could mean for the health of bee populations.

Read now

How Underground Mycelial Networks Communicate

As a doctoral student, Suzanne Simard discovered something about the forest that radically upset the status quo and challenged the dominant idea that the relentless competition for resources was invariably the primary driver underlying the behavior of all species. Her breakthrough scientific discovery, dubbed the “Wood Wide Web” by Nature magazine upon publication, revealed the symbiotic biological exchanges and the communication between forest species via underground mycelial networks. Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of “Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest,” discusses her work in this interview with Bioneers.

Read the conversation

Mapping Earth’s Hidden Allies: SPUN’s Mission to Protect Mycorrhizal Fungi and Combat Climate Change

The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) is tackling the urgent need to map and protect mycorrhizal fungi, crucial for ecosystem health and carbon transport. Despite their importance, only 0.01% of Earth’s surface has been sampled for these fungi. SPUN’s Underground Explorers Program accelerates sampling by supporting local scientists with grants to document mycorrhizal fungi in underexplored regions. With climate change intensifying, SPUN’s mission to create high-resolution biodiversity maps using machine learning is critical. Learn more about SPUN’s work and how you can help. Photo credit: Mateo Barrenengoa

Learn more

Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses

We’re excited to announce that our new season of Bioneers Learning is online, and registration is open! You can register for our first-ever self-paced courses, along with courses covering topics such as the Rights of Nature movement, gender equity, regenerative herbalism, and sacred activism.

See the full catalog

The post The Underground Networks Crucial to Life on Earth appeared first on Bioneers.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Written by The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN)

Mycorrhizal fungi, the network-forming fungi that form symbiotic relationships with plant roots, have underpinned life on Earth for over 450 million years. Scientists know that mycorrhizal fungi are critical to maintain ecosystem health, and that they transport massive amounts of carbon fixed by plants – making them an untapped resource in our fight against climate change.

However, only 0.01% of Earth’s surface has been sampled for mycorrhizal biodiversity. As a result, these underground ecosystem engineers have been left out of conservation agendas and environmental assessments.

In response to the gap in global concern for mycorrhizal fungi, The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) launched in 2021. SPUN is carrying out large-scale research to map and protect the mycorrhizal networks that regulate Earth’s climate and ecosystems.

There’s a tremendous amount of ground to cover. As the planet’s warming accelerates, we need to gather as much information about climate-regulating underground fungi as possible. In an effort to accelerate sampling efforts and decentralize their research methods, SPUN developed the Underground Explorers Program, supporting local scientists with grants to sample and document mycorrhizal fungi in the world’s most underexplored regions.

SPUN and their collaborators need resources and funding to help compile fungal data from across the world into high-resolution maps that use machine learning to project mycorrhizal biodiversity and threats to underground ecosystems, so fungi in the greatest peril can be identified and conserved. Reach out to SPUN on the contact page if you have ideas for resources, funding or collaborations. You can learn more by watching the videos of their expeditions.

Profiles of all Underground Explorers are available on their web page. Here are a few profiles of past recipients of the awards.

Dr. Jessica Duchicela – Ecuador – Dr. Duchicela is tracing 19th-century German explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s route through Ecuador. “While his scientific contributions were remarkable, it is important for Ecuadorian research teams to critically engage with his legacy, acknowledging the power dynamics and biases inherent in colonial scientific endeavors, while leveraging his methodology and findings to advance our own indigenous knowledge systems.”

Dr. Nicole Hynson – Hawai’i – Dr. Hynson’s project aims to understand which mycorrhizal fungi are partnered with Hawai’i’s endemic plants. The islands’ native flora are facing exceptionally high rates of extinction, and Hynson hopes that understanding their mycorrhizal communities could aid in future restoration efforts.

Dr. Nahuel Policelli – Patagonia – Patagonia’s steppe grasslands are extremely understudied. These ecosystems are being threatened by an invasive willow shrub that is quickly dominating the landscape. Policelli is working to learn whether non-native plants are “borrowing” mycorrhizal fungi as a mechanism to facilitate their invasion.

Dr. Nourou Yorou – Ivory Coast – Ivory Coast has lost 85% of its forests since 1960, driven in large part to cocoa production. Yourou is studying the underground effects of forest conversion to cocoa plantations, comparing forested belowground biodiversity to conventional and organic cocoa plantations.

The post Mapping Earth’s Hidden Allies: SPUN’s Mission to Protect Mycorrhizal Fungi and Combat Climate Change appeared first on Bioneers.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

When Claudia Peña brought the show “Lyrics from Lockdown” to Houston, she saw that the crowd was mostly older white people and worried there could be some walkouts. She even positioned herself in a chair by the door so she could talk to anybody who walked out about why they had done so. But it turns out there was no need. Not only did no one walk out, but the crowd was energized. In this excerpt from an interview with Bioneers, Peña talks about the power of stories to change hearts and minds and why she stopped relying on statistics to discuss incarceration and prison abolition.

Peña is the executive director of For Freedoms, an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation. She serves on the faculty at the UCLA School of Law and is the founding co-director of the UCLA Center for Justice. The Center runs the Prison Education Program, which creates innovative courses that enable faculty and students to learn from and alongside currently incarcerated participants.

BIONEERS: What are some examples of the art and media you’ve created around the issues of incarceration in prisons?

CLAUDIA: I’ve been working on the issue of prison abolition since the late ‘90s. I used to be really committed to numbers and data and statistics, because they were so obvious and overwhelming. I was convinced all anybody needed to see was these numbers. They needed to know how much we were spending on prisons in comparison to universities. They needed to know how much we were spending on keeping somebody in prison — which is $132,000 in California — and know that it would cost half that amount to send somebody to the most expensive private university in California. I thought those numbers would make them agree with me. But I was wrong.

Stats are actually not that convincing to people. Or they might be in the moment, but they don’t really motivate people to do something. I realized that storytelling, where you can reach people’s hearts and minds — which is the oldest way we’ve ever shared knowledge and wisdom in the existence of humanity — is the thing that really can get people to move in particular ways.

The most recent and actually one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on is a show called “Lyrics from Lockdown.” It is a show that uses comedy and hip hop, calypso, spoken word — all sorts of different styles of music and poetry — to tell two parallel stories of men who were wrongfully incarcerated. One man was incarcerated while he was a student at Harvard Law, and the other one still sits in a prison in Texas now, 30 years after being locked up at the age of 17 for a crime he didn’t commit. The show has been written by Bryonn Bain and workshopped in prisons and jails all over the country for over a decade. It’s an incredible show, and it’s actually going to be going to Broadway this year.

We did a southern tour of it last year. We went to Houston, Birmingham, Atlanta. And I have to tell you something funny about what happened in Houston. I’m not that familiar with Texas, but everybody I know from Houston in my own network is Black. So when we went to Houston, I had just assumed we were going to have a Black crowd. I think the time we had done it before then in its fullness was at the Apollo Theatre, and it was an incredible crowd. We got a standing ovation and an incredibly enthusiastic response. We got to Houston, and I sort of assumed it was going to be the same thing, and when I looked out at the audience, it was pretty white and pretty old. I went back to Bryonn and the three musicians, and I was like, “Okay, we have a very different audience out there; prepare yourselves; I don’t know what it’s going to be like.” The man who we’d worked with at that venue said they get walkouts from some shows, so we should be prepared; some people might walk out; don’t take it personally.

So I decided to sit in the audience right next to the door so I could have a sense of walkouts and the demographics. And I thought, maybe I’ll walk out with them and ask them why they’re leaving, just to understand. Not only were there no walkouts, but there was, again, a rousing standing ovation, an incredibly enthusiastic response. I’ll admit that I had assumed it would not be the case, because I had made my own assumptions about the audience. It was just great to see that the story is universal enough.

The writing is unparalleled, and Bryonn’s performance is incredible. But the story is universal because it touches on family and love, friendship and resilience, and challenges. And, of course, it touches on the criminal legal system and the injustice and the horrors of being in prison, but it does it in a way that, for some reason at the end of the show, you leave feeling pumped up. You want to go do something. That’s the energy I’m looking for; that’s the response that I want. All my little charts and statistics from the late ‘90s and the early aughts didn’t quite do it, but a show that’s headed to Broadway is nailing it.

BIONEERS: When there was this rousing response, and people were ready to go take action, where were you all directing them? Where were you telling them to go?

CLAUDIA: I’m so glad you asked this question. Everywhere we do a show, we work with local community organizations to be in the lobbies, so they’re ready to gather all of that energy and galvanize. Whether it’s just signing up for a listserv or getting people to come to your next event, or being able to educate people on the local political issues.

We’ve had voter registration tables at some of the shows. We plan to do the same exact thing on Broadway, in a way that Broadway has never seen. We’re connected to over a hundred community organizations that will be in the lobby. We’ll have artwork from formerly incarcerated folks, maybe even currently incarcerated folks in the lobby as well. In our talkbacks after the show, we’ll feature advocates, formerly incarcerated people, perhaps even some well-known names that really care about these issues in order to continue to direct people on exactly what to do. Right now, while you feel this way, sitting in this seat, what you need to do next is X. It may be to vote on a local policy, it may be everybody’s gotta go storm a particular governmental agency. Perhaps for many people in the audience, the way that they participate is they fund things, and so perhaps they will donate to the community organizations. There are a lot of different directions people can take their participation, and every single one of them is needed.

BIONEERS: How do you respond to people who are concerned about the concept of abolition of prisons?

CLAUDIA: There are a few ways to take that. When people say, “I can’t imagine the abolition of prisons; what are we going to do with all the murderers and the rapists?” First: You can’t end violence with violence, and the prison industrial complex is an incredibly violent institution. Second: I want people to understand that for those who cause harm, it’s a result of harm they’ve experienced that’s been left unaddressed. We would do much better by providing resources for people to heal — to do the work so they can reconnect to their own humanity. Our society would benefit more from people having a healthier mental and spiritual state than it would from sending people into these cages where, generally speaking, they become even more dehumanized. The experience of dehumanization as a result of being someone incarcerated — oftentimes there’s a lot of violence and scarcity in these spaces — and it affects people’s ability to show up in a more humanized way.

I also like to point out that this way of addressing harm using punishment on the scale of mass incarceration, in the way that it exists in this country, is very new. It has not been the reality for most of human existence, and it certainly wasn’t the case on these lands since the beginning of time. Mass incarceration on this level has really only existed for the last 40 years. Incarceration in the way that we know it in the United States has existed for maybe even less than 100 years. If something has not existed for that long, it’s not a foregone conclusion that this is what’s needed or that this is even working.

There’s also a lot of literature showing that being incarcerated doesn’t necessarily help you get to a better space before you get released. Programming does. Access to therapy, access to group, access to education. All of those things do help, and those things can exist outside of carceral facilities. You don’t need to access those programs by going to prison or jail; they can just exist in the community. Those are the things, along with education, that help people get to a place where they can see that there are different paths, different opportunities, and different responsibilities for them.

With education, it’s wild what we have seen with recidivism rates. The average recidivism rate in this country is 65%. People who go to prison have about a 65% chance of going back, which is a terrible failure rate. But that’s exactly what the system is set up for, so in that way, it’s a great success rate. Go them. But with each type of education that you get, the recidivism rate drops significantly. Getting vocational education, and then getting an AA. Once you get your BA, it drops to 6%. And, of course, with a Master’s degree, it’s zero percent. So if people want folks who have been incarcerated to not end up back there, education is the best thing, not more incarceration.

I also want to note the reasons why people go to prison and who is being put in prison. There are a lot of people in prison for use of drugs. The use of drugs is usually self-medication for trauma that people have experienced. Overwhelmingly, the folks who are in prison for using drugs are Indigenous and Black people and poor white folks. But the people who do the kind of harm that affects thousands, potentially millions of people, like financial fraud, white collar crime, poisoning our rivers. Those are real crimes. They’re crimes against the land, crimes against humanity. They are awful things that will have an effect on thousands, millions, for a long time. Those folks are not being incarcerated. Now I’m an abolitionist, so I am not advocating that those people should go to prison. I am advocating for people to look more closely because there are a lot of folks out there who think people in prison deserve to be there. You should be asking yourself: why do you have that perspective?

The post Using Storytelling to Change the Narrative on Mass Incarceration appeared first on Bioneers.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Family Farm Action - Wed, 05/22/2024 - 07:08

Media Contact: Jessica Cusworth, jcusworth@farmaction.us, 202-450-0887

The post Farm Action Testifies Before Senate Committee Highlighting Corporate Price Gouging and Food System Consolidation first appeared on Farm Action.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

PoWHR Coalition - Tue, 05/21/2024 - 19:05

Washington, D.C. — The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) today, admitting another delay in construction and pleading with the agency to allow it to go in-service. The beleaguered pipeline project is nearly six years delayed and has more than doubled in budget. The pipeline claims its opponents are “mischaracterizing” their request to go in-service as “premature”, weeks after it exploded one of its failing pipes during hydrostatic testing.

Russell Chisholm, co-director of the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights Coalition (POWHR) responded:

“Over the past decade, we have watched this reckless fossil fuel company botch the process to build a pipeline, and throw tantrums every time something doesn’t go their way. MVP shamelessly accuses those of us in harm’s way of ‘mischaracterizing’ their intent to blast methane through our communities as ‘premature’ when they just blew a pipe up during testing and obscured the facts surrounding the incident. This company’s conduct is revolting and all financiers and government officials who backed this project should be mortified. Let this disgraceful methane gas pipeline saga be a lasting lesson to MVP’s enablers to stop backing dangerous, climate-wrecking fossil fuel projects and start listening to fenceline communities.”

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Categories: G2. Local Greens

Green Action - Tue, 05/21/2024 - 17:49

Saturday, October 12, 2024

White Mesa Ute Community of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe:

Spiritual Walk and Protest against Energy Fuels’ uranium mill

Categories: E2. Front Line Community Green