yes! P owerful I deas , P ractical A ctions
winter
Pete Seeger Tells It In His Own Words
2013
Solutions to Our Biggest Challenges Have Been Here All Along
What Would Do?
7 Ways to Go Wild: Start With a Nap
Vandana Shiva gathers dried wheat, millet, and fenugreek at her seed bank in India.
Vandana Shiva: All I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest A Natural Economy? No Monopoly, No Greed Backyard Permaculture—Wherever You Live
ISSUE 64
“I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.� Terry Tempest Williams Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Soul Of Autumn / Vladimir Konovalov
FROM THE EDITOR
Nature’s Original Idea
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I live among Chief Seattle’s people, and one of the things I’ve learned from this experience is humility. I say, “I’ve lived here 12 years—longer than I’ve lived anywhere!” And then I look around at the ancient petroglyphs and the shell middens that whiten the beaches, and I remember that my neighbors’ ancestors have lived here for thousands of years. I talk about the growing divide in our society between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Then I’m invited to a potlatch, where a seafood feast is followed by an outpouring of gift giving. Ah yes, these people figured out centuries ago that inequality upsets the delicate balances that allow societies to thrive. So instead of gaining status from accumulating stuff, they earn respect by giving it away. One of the old stories tells of a time when people and animals were on equal footing, and they were all hungry. They made a wager. Whichever side won a game of chance could eat the other. Humans won, but not by much. There’s humility in that story, too—it could have gone the other way. When the Suquamish Tribe began making its way out of the devastation caused by having their land taken away and their culture suppressed, one of their first priorities was to restore habitat for salmon and shellfish. The tribe, with its staff of biologists, is now among the most relentless forces for clean water and fish habitat in this area. When a nearby saltwater bay was closed to shellfish harvesting because of pollution, I figured cleaning up that bay would be too difficult. Just harvest somewhere else! But tribal leaders saw it differently, and now I do, too. Each place is sacred—even places dominated by strip malls, industry, and parking lots. Nature doesn’t write off parts of the Earth, and neither can we. This place we live is all we have. There is no place “else.”
After years of patient work, that bay is now clean; tribal members go out on the sandy flats at low tide with buckets and digging forks and bring home shellfish for themselves—and to share. It takes humility to recognize that what we’ve called progress isn’t always for the better and that sometimes nature’s original idea was a better one. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned over years living among the Suquamish people and months asking “What would nature do?” • Nature works in cycles. There is no place to throw things “away.” When nature’s systems are working, every kind of waste nourishes another part of the system. We humans can produce that way, too. • Nature is a self-organizing and adaptive network of relationships. Except when these relationships are disrupted, this network generates yet more life and relationships, in forms that are competitive and cooperative, and unimaginably diverse. • Nature uses current energy (mostly from the sun), not fossil energy. And it doesn’t draw down the principal of the Earth’s largess. It lives off the interest. That means it can continue indefinitely. I grew up in a culture that claimed the right to conquer, use up, and displace nature. Human intelligence coupled with technology would take us on a one-way trip to a brighter future, we were told. Today, as we reach the limits of what life on Earth can tolerate, we need a little less hubris and a little more humility. If we learn from nature and from our indigenous brothers and sisters, I now believe we’ll have a much better shot at that bright future.
Sarah van Gelder Co-founder and Executive Editor yesmagazine . org
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THE ISSUE 64 THEME
What Would Nature Do?
The Mission of YES! is to support you in building a just and sustainable world. In each issue we focus on a different theme through these lenses: NEW VISIONS Solving today’s big problems will take more than a quick fix. These authors offer clarity about the roots of our problems and visions of a better way.
WORLD & COMMUNITY New models that foster justice and real prosperity, and sustain the Earth’s living systems. How can we bring these models to life and put them to work?
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Guide to the THEME SECTION
photo by paul dunn for yes! magazine
18 The Solutions Are All Around Us An architect, a biologist, and a chemist search for design secrets in owl feathers and spider webs—and launch a new sort of industrial revolution. By Sven Eberlein
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You Are Where You Live
Waste Not
How the sky, rain, geography, and cultures of our place shape us. By Susan Griffin
It’s time to quit flushing the good stuff. Here’s how to turn waste into a resource. By Claudia Rowe 35 : : Just the Facts—Taking the Earth to its limits
THE POWER OF ONE Stories of people who find their courage, open their hearts, and discover what it means to be human in today’s world.
BREAKING OPEN Humor, storytelling, and the arts— taking you into unexpected spaces where business-as-usual breaks open into new possibilities.
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21 7 Ways to Go Wild
-Age like a conifer
-Color like a butterfly
-Nap like your ancestors
-Build a city like a forest
-Live like a bear
-Cooperate like a pelican
-Eat like an ancient healer
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Sex in the Wild
Weird City Creatures
What I learned about love from a hermaphrodite, a cannibal, and a dizzyingly diverse array of sea creatures. By Eva Hayward
An artist gives voice to New York’s moths, salamanders, and fish and teaches the urban art of flight. By Natalie Pompilio
OTHER FEATURES
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12 Grace Amid Ruins Three U.S. peacemakers find help in an Iraqi town during U.S. bombing. By Greg Barrett
60 Who Pays the Price of a Forest? Why Mexico’s indigenous people are wary of conservation money from California. By Jeff Conant
24 Nature’s Economy is Down-to-Earth
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To make a sustainable economy, think like a mountain, a grassland, or a cell in the human body. By David Korten
photo by jeff conant
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Farming Fish, with a Side Salad
If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Eat ’Em
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FROM THE EDITOR
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READERS FORUM
How to grow food more like nature. By Katherine Gustafson
A tasty solution to the invasive species problem. By Joe Roman
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SIGNS OF LIFE : : The climate crisis is now. Florida farmworkers win. Nicaragua leaves School of the Americas. Mexican Peace Caravan arrives in D.C.
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PEOPLE WE LOVE
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COMMENTARY : : Drawing a line in the ice.
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THE PAGE THAT COUNTS
Permaculture in Your Backyard
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FROM THE PUBLISHER : : How to get to zero waste.
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YES! BUT HOW? : : Games for long winter evenings.
12 steps, from lawn to permaculture haven. By Doug Pibel
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IN REVIEW : : Pete Seeger tells his story.
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46 What I Learned in the Forest Seeds, clean water, biodiversity, and freedom— how the forest changed my life. By Vandana Shiva
on THE COVER
Vandana Shiva holds a bouquet of dried wheat, millet and fenugreek at the Navdanya Seed bank in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. The inside walls of the seed bank have all been painted by Gujarati and Rajasthani tribal artists. Photographed by Suzanne Lee.
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What Would Do? Solutions to Our Biggest Challenges Have Been Here All Along Sven Eberlein
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“What surrounds us is the secret to survival.” Biomimicry scientist Janine Benyus at home in Montana, where she spends her days watching and learning from the genius of the natural world. photo by Paul Dunn for YES! MAgazine
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ISSUE 64
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magine this assignment, says Bill McDonough in a recent TED talk: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, converts nitrogen into ammonia, distills water, stores solar energy as fuel, builds complex sugars, creates microclimates, changes color with the seasons, and self-replicates. Sound impossible? Well, nature’s already completed this one. It’s called a plant. And the fact that it does these things safely and efficiently is inspiring engineers and designers to reconceive the ways we manufacture such basics as soap bottles, raincoats, and wall-towall carpeting. Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle, the two fields of inquiry that frame this emerging discipline, stem from the work of biologist Janine Benyus, architect William McDonough, and chemist Michael Braungart, who realized that the very models they considered key to making safer, more environmentally-friendly products were sitting right before us, in the natural world. The trio wrote two pivotal books—Benyus’ Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature and McDonough and Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things—which laid out their beliefs and touched a nerve. ”What would nature do to design lasting and regenerative materials?” asks Benyus. “How does a river filter fresh water and a spider manufacture resilient fiber?” Braungart, picking up on the theme, wonders: “Why aren’t we designing buildings like trees and cities like forests?” Their questions reminded readers that life is a vast web of networks, that working with, rather than dominating, nature might unleash greater possibilities. Indeed, Benyus, McDonough, and Braungart invited us to reconceive basic principles of manufacturing in ways that seemed at once radical and rudimentary. The public embraced these concepts, and today, a decade after
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A peacock feather is a perfect example, Benyus says, of the artistry and ingenuity of nature. Most colors are created by pigments, and although the feather appears multi-hued, the only pigment it contains is brown. Those intense colors are a result of the feather’s structure. Nature achieves its purposes without harsh, expensive chemicals or excess energy. photo by Paul Dunn for YES! MAgazine
Just the Facts Research by Madeline Ostrander and Doug Pibel
N
itrogen is the most common element in the atmosphere. Plants can’t grow without it. Carbon is essential to life: 18 percent of a human body and 50 percent of a tree is carbon. Left alone, natural systems maintain cycles that keep these elements circulating where they’re needed and in the right amounts. But we’ve pulled nitrogen out of the air to feed plants and put carbon, from burning coal and oil, into the air. We’ve thrown natural cycles out of balance. Excess carbon is heating the planet. Excess nitrogen is poisoning the air and water. In order to have the clean water, healthy ecosystems, and stable climate we need to survive, we’ll have to stop overloading the systems.
1. Nitrogen in the air
1. Carbon in the air
6. Bacteria put nitrogen back into the air
4. Living things eat plants and excrete nitrogen
Overloading the cycle Overloading the cycle The ocean holds a lot of CO2, but it’s past its limit and turning acidic. Humans take carbon out of the ground—coal and oil—and release almost 40 billion tons into the air each year.
3. Plants grow
4. Animals eat plants and produce CO2 as a waste product.
5. Nitrogen on plants makes them grow
5. Rotting plants release CO2
2. Plants take in C02
3. Living things eat the plants
Forests take huge amounts of carbon out of the air. But we’re destroying 80,000 acres of rainforest a day.
Balanced, nitrogen cycle
2. Bacteria put nitrogen in the soil
Balanced, carbon cycle
Overloading the cycle Nitrogen can also return to the air as a powerful greenhouse gas.
Overloading the cycle Humans take nitrogen from the air for fertilizer: 144 million tons each year. Plants use half or less and the rest runs into surface and groundwater—and eventually the ocean.
Human and animal waste could fertilize enough crops to feed the world. As much as 300 million tons of it is produced each year, most of it wasted. Algae blooms. Fish die. There are 95,000 square miles of dead zones.
Sources at yesmagazine.org/64JTF
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ISSUE 64
Farming Fish With Salad on the Side raising fish in the barn, the natural way
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t E&T Farms in Cape Cod, Mass., owner Ed Osmun is in the barn, spraying a mixture of cayenne pepper and garlic onto a lush crop of salad greens. The simple homemade pesticide deters aphids but is harmless to other living things. That’s especially important because these greens are growing in water that is circulated to fish tanks full of koi and tilapia. Osmun sells the tilapia at local farmers markets and supplies the koi to garden stores, where they’re sold to populate ornamental water features. There’s no place for chemical pesticides and fertilizers in this aquaponic system. It’s a combination of aquaculture (cultivating fish) and hydroponics (growing plants in water) that can yield large amounts of protein and produce from a relatively small space, while emitting virtually no waste products. Aquaponics takes advantage of nature’s process of breaking down waste into life-sustaining nutrients. Bacteria in the tanks convert the ammonia in fish waste into nitrate, a plant nutrient. The water is pumped from the fish tanks through the plant trays, where the plants absorb the nitrate and purify the water before it returns to the tanks. Round and round the water circulates, with plants and fish each serving the needs of the other. Aquaponics is so efficient that Osmun reports his system has been running for six years without changing the water, only adding some on occasion to compensate for evaporation. The only regular inputs into the system are the fish (purchased as tiny fry), fish food, seeds, beneficial insects for pest control, and electricity. Electricity is the largest input, as a considerable amount of it is required to run the pumps and turn the large waterwheels that oxygenate the water in the fish tanks and spread beneficial bacteria in the water. Osmun uses food pellets to sustain the fish, but some aquaponic pioneers like Will Allen of Growing Power and Robert Olivier of CompostMania are making their own fish food—fly grubs raised on food scraps. The symbiotic relationship between fish and plants can be harnessed to fill a big human need. Americans now eat four times as much fish as ten years ago—425 million pounds a year. With many wild species threatened by overfishing, and environmental problems caused by offshore fish farms, aquaponics looks like a win-win solution that can spare the earth and sea while feeding humans—almost like nature intended. Katherine Gustafson is the author of Change Comes to Dinner, about sustainable food, published by St. Martin’s Press.
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A HEALTHY appetite for invasive species
Can’t Beat ’em? Eat ’em
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spent the summer traveling the coast from Cape Cod to Newfoundland about a decade ago. It was a beautiful seascape, but I was there because an invasion was underway—by the European green crab, one of many invasive species causing ecological havoc in North America. Invasives—such as green crabs, feral pigs, snakeheads, and zebra mussels—prey on native animals and plants. They eat their food, wreck their homes, and are among the top causes of extinction. I was trying to find out how the green crab had extended its range north to the Canadian Maritimes: by ballast rocks in the 19th century or ballast water in the late 20th? (It was both as it turned out.) As I flipped over beach cobbles to collect crabs for DNA analysis, I thought perhaps there was something else I could do. So one afternoon I collected a few green crabs and brought them back to the inn. Following instructions from Stalking the Blue-eyed Scallop, I prepared the green crabs and sautéed them in butter. Fresh from the sea, the delicate flaky meat beat any store-bought crab I’ve had, claws down. I’ve been an invasivore ever since. There are lots of examples in nature, from wolves to weed-eating moths, where predators help keep their prey in check. And consider the environmental impact of human appetites: Atlantic cod, bison, and Pismo clams have all but disappeared. We managed to dispatch all 5 billion passenger pigeons—many of them smoked, stewed, fried, or baked in pot pies—by 1914. So why not put this destructive streak to good use for a change? In the United States, invasive species cost about $120 billion a year in damage and the price of control measures like herbicides and pesticides. Eating them is an earth-friendly alternative embraced by the rapidly growing invasivore movement. I recently stopped at Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Conn., where chef Bun Lai has an entire invasive species menu that replaces less sustainable foods like shrimp and tuna. His popcorn Asian shore crabs were a fun novelty, the spear-caught lionfish sashimi divine. Adding invasive species to our plates is not the whole solution. We need strong controls on transporting species, and when a new species does arrive, a rapid response is essential (and typically requires more than a knife and fork). But for those species that have already gotten through the gates, why not pile ’em on our plates? Joe Roman is author of Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act, editor ’n chef at eattheinvaders.org, and a fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.
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ISSUE 64
Backyard Permaculture promotes sustainability and self-reliance by creating managed ecosystems— modeled on natural ones—right in our backyards. It’s “garden farming,” says Peter Bane in The Permaculture Handbook. Think you don’t have enough room? Bane grew more than 150 species on less than 2,000 square feet. He identifies 12 principles to guide your permaculture project. —Doug Pibel
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Solar hot water
Catch and store energy.
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You get a gift of energy from the sun. Use it to replace the fossil energy that’s changing our climate.
Wild blackberries
Cultivate diversity. In
Compost
natural systems, there’s always a mix of plants and animals. Include native plants and a wide variety of cultivated ones. It’s more resilient, more productive, and more interesting.
In nature, everything’s food for something else—there’s no “away” where waste can go. Use animals, worms, and composting to make food for the soil.
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Make no waste.
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Chickens
Use and value nature’s gifts. If we focus only on products, we can miss the bonuses that nature provides. Chickens, for instance, produce eggs and meat. At the same time they increase soil fertility and will do light tilling as they scratch for bugs and seeds.
Homegrown trellising
Choose small and slow solutions. The fast pace of modern life is not the pace of nature. It also requires huge amounts of fossil energy. Use the simplest, lowest-energy tools and processes. It may take more time, but it’s sustainable.
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Second-growth trees
Cultivate vision and respond to change. Once your
Sun path
Pond
Design from pattern to details. Nature has had billions of years to work out how to design systems. Follow natural patterns to make the movement of nutrients and the interactions between plants, animals, and humans as efficient as they are in nature.
Observe and interact. Learn the patterns of your land. Where does the rain run off? Where does the wind come from? What’s sunny and what’s in the shade?
ecosystem is in place, the richness of its life allows it to adapt to changing conditions. Your observation and interaction allow you to help with that adaptation.
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Mind the margins and look to the edges. Where
Living spaces
Integrate, don’t segregate. There’s
Vegetable patch Crop rotation
Self-regulate and accept feedback. Taking too much out will make the system break down. If your harvest is sparse, take it as a lesson: find a balance between yield and maintaining the soil.
Get a yield (or harvest). Natural systems produce a surplus, representing the captured free energy from the sun. In a managed ecosystem, we can harvest that surplus. The harvest may be as direct as picking an apple or it may take several steps: grass makes hay to feed goats that produce both manure to feed more plants and meat for humans to eat.
no separate living space in a forest and nothing that serves a single purpose. Trees provide shade for plants on the forest floor, habitat for birds and animals, and an annual supply of food for plants, animals, and birds. Integrating living and growing spaces makes for more production and more comfort.
different environments connect is where the most biological action is: the edges of swamps and rivers, the border between forest and meadow.
Sources: Permaculture Handbook by Peter Bane Photos by Paul dunn for yes! magazine
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Everything I Need to Know
in the Forest Vandana Shiva
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Vandana Shiva at her biodiversity farm, Navdanya, which is also where the Earth University is located. Participants learn humans’ role and responsibility in Earth Democracy, and they work with seeds and soil as living things, in the context of the entire web of life. photo by suzanne lee
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Alice Walker, author and activist
“YES! Magazine ... Changing People’s Consciousness”
NONPROFIT. INDEPENDENT. SUBSCRIBER-SUPPORTED. :: yes ! winter 2013 YesMagazine.org
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