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RALPH NADER: THE NEW LEFT-RIGHT ALLIANCE CHALLENGING CORPORATE RULE
From the tiny Amazon tribe beating Big Oil to the guy who built a farm in his swimming pool
TOGETHER, WITH EARTH 7WAYS WE ARE
FIXING THE DAMAGE Depaving cities, Undamming rivers & more
WENDELL BERRY: START SIMPLY AND CLOSE TO HOME DAVID KORTEN: A STORY TO REPLACE
THE GOSPEL OF MONEY AFTER FERGUSON, SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
Sarayaku resident and anti-Big Oil activist Nina Gualinga Issue 73
“The eyes of the future are looking back at us, and they are praying that we might see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heart beats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wildness, wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.” —Terry Tempest Williams, Bioneers 2014
Atlanta Botanical Garden photo by Holly D. Elmore
ISSUE 73 YES! MAGAZINE THEME GUIDE
TOGETHER, WITH EARTH So-called modern progress has depended on exploiting the Earth’s resources as if they had no end. We’ve lost touch with the ancient wisdom that we are partners with Earth and all life on it. But we’re approaching a moment when enough of us reclaim our sacred connection with Earth to give us a chance to save a dying planet.
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Bigger than Science and Religion.
Undo! From swimming pool permacul-
Reimagining our place in a sentient universe.
ture to undamming rivers, seven ways we’re fixing the damage.
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Fight for Life. A tiny Amazon tribe
Revolutionary Pronouns. Can
takes on Big Oil, and wins.
a new word for “it” help heal our relationship with the Earth?
40 Living Earth Economics. David Korten shares a new story to replace the Gospel of Money.
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Wisdom-keepers, United. What these grandmothers learned on their journey across the country.
36 Rivers Without Borders. Managing whole rivers in New Zealand, Mexico, and the United States.
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Swallowed by Whales. A photographer’s spiritual encounter at sea.
photo by muratart/shutterstock
The Revolution Starts Now. Wendell Berry’s vision for the future starts with what we can do today, close to home. yesmagazine . org
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Bigger Than Science, Bigger Than Religion Richard Schiffman
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he world as we know it is slipping away. At the current rate of destruction, tropical rainforest could be gone within as little as 40 years. The seas are being overfished to the point of exhaustion, and coral reefs are dying from ocean acidification. Biologists say that we are currently at the start of the largest mass extinction event since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. As greenhouse gases increasingly accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures are likely to rise faster than our current ecological and agricultural systems can adapt. It is no secret that the Earth is in trouble and that we humans are to blame. Just knowing these grim facts, however, won’t get us very far. We have to transform this knowledge into a deep passion to change course. But passion does not come primarily from the head; it is a product of the heart. And the heart is not aroused by the bare facts alone. It needs stories that weave those facts into a moving
and meaningful narrative. We need a powerful new story that we are a part of nature and not separate from it. We need a story that properly situates humans in the world—neither above it by virtue of our superior intellect, nor dwarfed by the universe into cosmic insignificance. We are equal partners with all that exists, co-creators with trees and galaxies and the microorganisms in our own gut, in a materially and spiritually evolving universe. This was the breathtaking vision of the late Father Thomas Berry. Berry taught that humanity is presently at a critical decision point. Either we develop a more heart-full relationship with the Earth that sustains us, or we destroy ourselves and life on the planet. I interviewed the white-maned theologian (he preferred the term “geologian,” by which he meant “student of the Earth”) in 1997 at the Riverdale Center of Religious Research on the Hudson River north of New York City. Berry
Genesis Farm, founded by the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell, New Jersey. Set on ancestral Lenape lands amid wooded hills and wetlands, Genesis has served for the last quarter century as an environmental learning center and working biodynamic farm grounded in the vision of Thomas Berry.
YES! photo by stephen o’byrne
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UNDO! WAYS We Are Fixing the Damage
Releasing the Rivers The largest dam-removal project in history reached completion last fall, when excavators dredged the final tons of pulverized concrete from the Elwha River channel in Western Washington. Native fish, banished for 100 years from their historic spawning habitat, already were rediscovering the Elwha’s newly accessible upper stretches. Within weeks of the final explosion in August, threatened bull trout and chinook salmon were spotted migrating beyond the rubble. “It was a thrill,” said Olympic National Park spokeswoman Barb Maynes. Before the Elwha Dam was built in 1910, the river produced an estimated 400,000 fingerlings per year, a number that dwindled to 3,000 in recent decades. All five native species of Elwha salmon are expected to repopulate the river. More than 80,000 dams more than six feet high block U.S. waterways, and activists are cheered by the Elwha success story. Two hydroelectric dams once blocked the Elwha; both now are gone. Sediment that was trapped behind them is washing downstream, replenishing habitat. The first 67,000 seedlings (of a planned 350,000) to help restore native vegetation are already planted on the sites of the former dams and reservoirs. A documentary about the project, Return of the River (elwhafilm.com), came out in 2014. —Diane Brooks
photo by James Wengler
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UNDO! WAYS We Are Fixing the Damage
Botanical Remedies Headache or back pain? Before you reach for the bottle of aspirin, consider aspirin’s ancient precursor: white willow bark. Or perhaps echinacea to boost the immune system, aloe vera to heal burns, and black cohosh to ease hot flashes. The trend away from the profit-based pharmaceutical industry toward natural, age-old botanical remedies is beneficial for the environment and wildlife as well as for the humans who take medications. A U.S. Geological Survey study found chemicals from prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications in 80 percent of water samples drawn from streams in 30 states; those waters flow into lakes, rivers, and eventually the oceans. Alain Touwaide, co-founder of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, says pharmaceutical chemists have inverted humanity’s relationship with medicines. “When a sick person used a plant, this person relied on history, the use of the plant over centuries,” he says. Now a researcher starts with a chemical and then experiments to find its uses. Botanical medicine has “an almost philosophical component,” he says, which helps with healing. Users tap into an interactive “sympathy” between humans and the environment, he says. —Diane Brooks
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Photos by Kalcutta and Elena Elisseeva/SHUTTERSTOCK
TOGETHER, WITH EARTH
Deep in the Amazon, a Tiny Tribe Is Beating Big Oil
A Fight for Life David Goodman
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Patricia Gualinga, a community leader who has traveled the world speaking out in defense of indigenous rights, at her home in Sarayaku, Ecuador.
atricia Gualinga stands serenely as chaos swirls about her. I find this petite woman with striking black and red face paint at the head of the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21, 2014. She is adorned with earrings made of brilliant bird feathers and a thick necklace of yellow and blue beads. She has come here from Sarayaku, a community deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. Behind Gualinga, 400,000 people are in the streets calling for global action to stop climate change. Beside her, celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting, and Mark Ruffalo prepare to lead the historic march alongside a group of indigenous leaders. Gualinga stands beneath a sign, “Keep the Oil in the Ground.” She has traveled across continents and cultures to deliver this message. “Our ancestors and our spiritual leaders have been talking about climate change for a long time,” she tells me in Spanish above the din, flashing a soft smile as photographers crush around the celebrities. She motions to the throngs around her. “We are actually speaking the same language right now.” A year earlier, I traveled to her village in the Ecuadorian Amazon to research the improbable story of a rainforest community of 1,200 Kichwa people that has successfully fended off oil companies and a government intent on exploiting their land for profit. How, I wondered, has Sarayaku been winning? This is not the story most people know from Ecuador. Headlines have focused on northern Ecuador, where Chevron is fighting a landmark $9.5 billion judgment for dumping millions of gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and leaving unlined pits of contaminated sludge that poisoned thousands of people. Sarayaku lies in southern Ecuador, where the government is selling drilling rights to a vast swath of indigenous lands—except for Sarayaku. The community has become a beacon of hope to other indigenous groups and to global climate change activists as it mobilizes to stop a new round of oil exploration.
Photo by Caroline Bennett / amazon watch
What I found in Sarayaku was not just a community defending its territory. I encountered a people who believe that their lifestyle, deeply connected to nature, holds promise for humans to save themselves from global warming and extinction. They are fighting back by advancing a counter-capitalist vision called sumak kawsay—Kichwa for “living well”—living in harmony with the natural world and insisting that nature has rights deserving of protection. Naively romantic? Think again: In 2008, Ecuador’s constitution became the first in the world to codify the rights of nature and specifically sumak kawsay. Bolivia’s constitution has a similar provision, and rights-of-nature ordinances are now being passed in communities in the United States. Sarayaku residents describe sumak kawsay as “choosing our responsibility to the seventh generation over quarterly earnings, regeneration over economic growth, and the pursuit of wellbeing and harmony over wealth and financial success.” The people of Sarayaku are the face of 21st-century indigenous resistance. Sarayaku may be a remote, pastoral community, but it is engaging the Western world politically, legally, and philosophically. Patricia Gualinga and other Sarayaku community members have traveled to Europe to meet with foreign leaders and warn energy company executives about their opposition to oil extraction from their lands, produced their own documentary film about their struggle, filed lawsuits, leveraged their message with international groups such as Amazon Watch and Amnesty International, marched thousands of kilometers in public protest, and testified at the United Nations. Sarayaku’s resistance has angered the pro-development Ecuadorian government—which bizarrely hails sumak kawsay while selling hotly contested oil drilling leases—but has inspired other indigenous communities across the globe. Defending life and land
I climb aboard a four-seater Cessna parked at a small airstrip in the town
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UNDO! WAYS We Are Fixing the Damage
Swimming pool becomes backyard farm
Dennis McClung stands inside what used to be a swimming pool in his backyard in Mesa, Arizona. Now it serves as a closed-loop food-producing farm for his family.
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Text by Diane Brooks Photos by Laura Segall
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t’s a typical Mesa, Arizona, suburban subdivision, except for that corner house with a broccoli patch growing on its low-pitched roof. And those goats, chickens, and ducks roaming the backyard, near the solar panels erected above the entryway to that greenhouse planted in the deep end of an old swimming pool. When Dennis and Danielle McClung bought their ’60sera home in 2009, they hatched an eccentric but modest plan to make the best of that decrepit, way-pastits-prime pool. Two days after they moved in, Dennis McClung erected his first in-pool greenhouse, intended to provide food for their young family. He had recently quit his job as a Home Depot department manager; his wife was a nurse. “I convinced my wife of my crazy plan, and she went with it,” he says. “We really wanted to live a more sustainable, self-sufficient life, and we thought this was good idea. And it just kept getting better and better, the more we put into it.” Today their backyard is a mini-ecosystem—McClung calls it a “closed-loop food-producing urban greenhouse”—and their home is headquarters for the Garden Pool nonprofit organization. Its official aim: sustainable food production, research, and education. At night the chickens roost above the pool’s deep-end rainwater pond so their droppings contribute to an aquaponics habitat for tilapia fish. The McClung’s natural water filtration system uses duckweed and solar energy; their organic greenhouse plants are rooted hydroponically, without soil. Pond snails, which probably hitchhiked in on the duckweed, provide calcium for the egg-laying chickens and help manage a pond-sludge problem. On a typical day, the system provides the couple and their three children with about half their diet, McClung says. That includes veggies and herbs from the greenhouse; apples, citrus fruit, figs, sugar cane, bananas, and pomegranates picked from a 40-tree grove in their side yard; along with eggs and goat milk.
McClung’s permaculture farm makes use of goats and chickens. In a side yard along with apples and citrus fruits, he grows sugar cane and bananas.
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Swallowed by Whales
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Photo and Text by Kiliii Fish
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om and I had paddled out in our handmade traditional kayaks, having noticed the rare coincidence of a small ocean swell and whales not far offshore. We shot out of the marina a few hours before sunset, fully loaded with photo gear. Straight out of the gate we heard them blowing, the smell of a fish market lingering in the air. Minutes later, a lone humpback surfaced in front of my bow, ten feet away. I stopped paddling and braced, one hand on my paddle, the other on my camera. It snorted and blew a fine mist sky-high, which landed all over my kayak and lens. I was still clicking despite my heart having stopped beating. An hour later, we spotted a group of feeding humpbacks and paddled to about 100 yards away, careful to avoid disturbing them. From afar I watched and learned the patterns of their behavior—first the whales would dive, exposing their tail flukes, and then the sea lions and pelicans would start diving in a frenzy. Moments later the humpbacks would come crashing out of the deep blue as they inhaled and strained anchovies through their baleen. The thing about wild creatures, though, is that they don’t stay put very well. The whales moved around us as I watched, and then they were amongst us. Truthfully, despite having paddled thousands of miles in beautiful waters and having had lots of wildlife encounters, this one last year in Monterey, California, tops the list. To be in the gaping maw of wild creatures in their environment is a bit transcendental. As a person, I died that evening, and was born again, like a sudden gust of wind or a wild thing on a wild sea. y
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New Left-Right Alliance The
Against Corporate Rule
Why
do so many
policies popular with Americans lan-
guish in Washington, D.C.? Why, for example, is there no action on a federal minimum wage boost, a breakup of toobig-to-fail banks, or a tax on carbon—all policies favored by a majority of the electorate? Ralph Nader argues that both Republican and Democratic leaders are too cozy with large corporations to allow such measures. Each election year, hot-button social issues dominate, and in between, talk show hosts maintain a drumbeat of fear and anger that keeps Americans divided. In his book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, Nader lays out a plan for challenging this stranglehold: Noncorporatist conservatives and liberals could join forces to win battles on issues where they agree—especially those focused on economic justice and strengthening democratic rights. Who would benefit from such an alliance and who would be left out? And could it work? To find out if conservatives are on board, we invited Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative magazine, to join a three-way conversation with Ralph Nader, erstwhile presidential candidate, and YES! Magazine. McCarthy—a maverick on the right just as Nader is on the left—worked for Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign and has written for The Spectator, Reason, and Modern Age.
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Ralph Nader and Daniel McCarthy IN CONVERSATION WITH SARAH VAN GELDER PHOTOS BY STEPHEN VOSS
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Why does a No! guy like me read YES! Magazine? We are in a desperate place. There’s a lot we need to say “No!” to. In the middle of all that are opportunities to change in deep and meaningful ways. When we say “No!” to business as usual, then we say “Yes!” to a different way of doing things. And that different way is starting to emerge, the things YES! Magazine has been writing about for years, the things YES! has worked so hard to make happen. Bill McKibben Author, Activist, and YES! Contributing Editor
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