J ournalism for P eople B uilding a B etter W orld
S pring 2019
DIRT
EARLY NATIVE TRADITIONS THAT LEAD TO GOOD HEALTH
By Reconnecting With Soil, We Heal the Planet and Ourselves
The Climate Solution Right Under Our Feet Simple Steps for Cultivating a Revolution in Your Backyard US $6.50 Canada $6.50
91
7
25274 87100 1
Issue 89 YesMagazine.org
Gifts of Good Soil: “I Believe Food Should Be Free” History of Racial Injustice Revealed by Dirt
8
yes ! spring
2019 ::
yesmagazine . org
ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE? How people young and old are relearning the art of making friends. Julia Hotz
A
I w a i t for my first guest, I wonder what sort of characters would sign up for this? “This” is LokPal—a local cooking workshop, premised on strangers “sharing a meal and sharing a bond.” Then Abby arrives, wearing cherryred lipstick as bright as her smile. As I hand over her name tag and prepare to ask the usual barrage of small-talk questions, Abby makes the first move, deftly breaking the ice with tales of her kindergarten classroom. Next is Tania, a marketing specialist with the downto-earth manner characteristic of England’s “North.” She’s followed by Sana, an Indian woman with unending enthusiasm and a penchant for vegetarian cooking. Stanley arrives, and then Doris, two salt-and-pepperhaired strangers radiating a gentleness that makes you feel you’ve known them for years. Last is Alex, whose serious face stands in stark contrast to his neon-yellow jacket and quirky sense of humor. These six are joined by 40 others who’ve signed s
Men’s Sheds create community hubs that foster social bonds through collective activities. The international nonprofit suggests that men best communicate shoulder to shoulder, so Men’s Sheds offer hands-on projects.
PHOTO BY MARK LINDSAY
yesmagazine . org
::
yes ! spring
2019
9
THE SOFTENING OF CITIES Lynn Freehill-Maye
28
yes ! spring
2019 ::
yesmagazine . org
Depaving and greening alleys invites nature deep into cities and reconnects urban dwellers to one another.
R
achel Schutz hated watching the kids play outside, and not because she was a curmudgeon. As director of an after-school program in a Latino neighborhood near Portland, Oregon, she likes the outdoors, the piney tang that hangs in the damp air. But the kids’ shoes would thump on the asphalt, the pounding echoing against metal dumpsters along the alley. That was their play space. When a neighbor’s pine tree shed its needles, she watched the kids sweep them together and build them into a nest or fort. Otherwise, they were limited to games with chalk or a ball hoop.
Portland alley advocates estimate there are 76 miles of alleys in their city—all potential green public spaces. This northeast Portland neighborhood is one of many projects reclaiming forgotten concrete pathways for nature and people.
PHOTO BY DEREK DAUPHIN
The kids wanted something different for the Inukai Family Boys and Girls Club’s 5,000 square feet of alleyside space. They talked about a soccer field or a traditional playground—but surprised Schutz by choosing a nature park. They imagined dirt, logs, and boulders to climb on, raised beds to grow flowers and veggies, and hundreds of trees and plants throughout. Schutz just had to figure out how to remove the pavement. Doing so introduced her to a soften-our-cities movement in which cities such as Nashville, Tennessee, Montreal, and Detroit are rethinking all that cement. Alleys and alleysides in particular are being effectively reimagined as people-friendly pathways, parks, and lushly planted urban habitat. Schutz and the kids she serves understand why the idea has been spreading. The day before they strong-armed the asphalt up, one girl asked her, “Miss Rachel, does this mean we get real grass we can touch?” yesmagazine . org
::
yes ! spring
2019
29
THE SCIENCE BEHIND MUD’S MAGIC For thousands of years, mud has been wallowed in and slathered on for both medicine and beauty. Does it really work? Linda Ingroia
38
yes ! spring
2019 ::
yesmagazine . org
constantly exposed to the microbiota of the soil. “We walked on it, handled it, had physical proximity to nature. In our modern lives, structures of home and cars, clothing and shoes, have created physical barriers to the microbial world.” While some barriers are obviously beneficial, she adds, “It’s a double-edged sword. … The more we put up barriers, the more we reduce our human microbiomes.” When adults do decide to muck around, the garden is often a healthy place to do it. Biklé, a serious gardener herself who converted her lifeless
PHOTO BY VCG/GETTY IMAGES
backyard into a thriving garden (see page 23) says, “Because of the interaction with [healthy] soil microbes and what’s happening to their microbiomes—gardeners tend to be happier, healthier.” Which brings up mud just for the fun of it. In recent years, many people are jumping back into muddy child’s play at full throttle. Since its creation in 2010, about 3.5 million people have participated in Tough Mudder events. And at the Louisiana Mudfest in Colfax, along the Red River, people race open vehicles
through acres of mud ponds every spring. The Boryeong Mud Festival attracts large global participation. Every July near Seoul, South Korea, anyone game can partake in mud wrestling and tug-of-war, mud baths and masks, and family-friendly mud rides. Maya Shetreat says that for some, mudslinging is a way to reconnect to your own wildness. “It’s intuitive to us—to get dirty.” y Linda Ingroia is a food and health editor and writer. She was formerly executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Follow her on Twitter: @lindati1.
yesmagazine . org
::
yes ! spring
2019
41
THE CLIMATE SOLUTION RIGHT UNDER US The ideas behind regenerative farming are simple and ancient. Michaela Haas
44 44
yes! ! spring spring 2019 2019 yes
::::
yesmagazine. org . org yesmagazine
RACIAL INJUSTICE UNEARTHED Soil is a living witness. Leanna First-Arai
I
n July 1898, a Black ice cream vendor by the name of John Henry James was accused of assaulting a White woman just west of Charlottesville, Virginia. He was dragged off a moving train by an angry mob, hanged from the branch of a locust tree near the train tracks, and shot multiple times. This past summer, 120 years later, John Henry James was taken on a pilgrimage from CharlottesÂville to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which memorializes the victims of racial violence in the United States. James, symbolically represented by a jar filled with soil collected at the site of his lynching, was accompanied by approximately 100 members of a delegation of Charlottesville residents intent on ushering his allegorical remains to their final resting place. He would join others whose lives have been largely washed away from collective memory.
48
yes ! spring
2019 ::
yesmagazine . org
PHOTO BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/WASHINGTON POST
CULTURE SHIFT Powerful Ideas Emerging
Rare Birder Sightings 58 Books + Films + Audio: The Good People of the Zombie Apocalypse 62 Women’s Anger 64 22 Films to Soothe Your Racial Justice Soul 66 Small Works 68 The YES! Crossword: Tilling the Earth 72
RARE BIRDER SIGHTINGS Bird-watching is booming, yet Black birders are as rare a bird as exists. Glenn Nelson
58
!
2019 ::
YES! PHOTO PAUL DUNN yesBY spring
yesmagazine . org
T
A d a m s grew up in the Chelsea-Elliott Houses, a sprawling, low-income housing project on the west side of Manhattan in New York City. There, cookie-cutter brick buildings are separated by modest courtyards with benches and tables. Trees and grassy yards enclosed by black, wrought-iron fences dot the fringes of the project. The scant open spaces could seem confining, except to young girls with dreams of growing up to become zoologists, or to tired and hungry birds navigating the Atlantic Flyway. During her youth, Adams escaped to the natural world by watching National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Five years ago—on a lark, so to speak— she attended a bird walk in Central Park. Looking up in the sky, she saw a world that she could not unsee, even upon returning to her housing complex. There, right outside her door, she saw an unexpected number of avian species—northern parulas, black-throated blue warblers, black-throated green warblers ... She hasn’t stopped looking. “Not too many people saw the value of birding in the projects,” Adams says. “But when they’re migrating, birds don’t say, ‘Oh no, those are the projects, I’m going to go to Central Park. I got to eat, I got to rest, and I got to find a mate. So whatever habitat is suitable to doing those things, I got to find it.’ Ecosystems don’t stop according to neighborhoods.” A lot of people don’t get Tiffany Adams mostly because she’s Black, and, well, everyone knows Black folks don’t watch birds. Though the outdoor activity is booming in this country, birding is as White—93 percent, according to the most recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey—as the feathers of a whooping crane. The field markings of the typical iffany
Tiffany Adams prefers urban birding, often at Seattle’s Hing Hay Park near her home. She is a self-trained ornithologist with a master’s in urban environmental education. She’s also an artist who creates various species of birds out of pipe cleaners.
yesmagazine . org
::
yes ! spring
2019
59
BOOKS + FILMS + AUDIO
Illustrations by Fran Murphy
Are You One of the Good People of the Zombie Apocalypse? Practicing for some not-too-distant future. Mark Rahner
WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN AS I WRITE THIS. Vital services for people are temporarily gone. Hundreds of thousands have no paychecks coming and no plan for what they’ll do. Garbage is piling up in the national parks. In an economy with a tiny percentage hoarding the resources, more and more of us are fighting for the scraps. Some days, even without the minor detail of the reanimated dead, it’s easy to see our proximity to a zombie apocalypse. 62
yes ! spring
2019 ::
yesmagazine . org
It’s apt context for considering Peter Biskind’s new book, The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism, especially for me. I’m a comic book writer whose work includes a zombie series, as well as a career-long pop culture critic and lifelong devotee of the genres in Biskind’s title. I expected from the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls an illuminating dive into the connection between my kind of nerd pop culture and the rise of extremism, currently a euphemism for Trumpism. Biskind asserts that there are centrist shows (World War Z) and extreme ones on the right (24) and left (Avatar), with subcategories such as the luddite left and dot-com left. But some shows (like The Matrix and The Hunger Games) appeal to extremes on both sides. Apocalyptic fantasy movies and TV shows, he says, are “dress rehearsals for a show we hope will never open.” But he doesn’t develop that thought adequately. I say that show is now opening. Zombie shows in particular do reflect extremism and have been vehicles for cultural commentary starting with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) and on through countless imitators, such as popular AMC series The Walking Dead. Regardless of the specific social commentary—Vietnam in Night, consumerism in Dawn—they tend to share some basics: no functioning government, everyone for themselves, fighting for increasingly scarce resources, armed to the teeth. After two years of a Trump administration, a Republican-controlled Congress, and historic political polarization, the zombie apocalypse is getting a little real. Zombie shows seem less and less like escapist fantasies than practice for some not-too-distant future. The zombie fans who converge in a Venn diagram with assorted nihilists, government haters, and doomsday preppers may have just been better at sensing which way the wind’s blowing. A zombie apocalypse hallmark is
BOOKS + FILM + AUDIO
The Power of Angry Women Three short excerpts. Recent books by Rebecca Traister, Soraya Chemaly, and Brittney Cooper address the particularly superpowerful way women are feeling these days. From different perspectives, they each examine the way women’s anger is deflected in patriarchal society and its potential for political impact— past, present, and future.
The Reckoning T h e a n g e r w i n d o w w a s o p e n . For decades, for centuries, it had been closed. Something bad happened to you, you shoved it down, you maybe told someone but probably didn’t get much satisfaction—emotional or practical—from the confession. Maybe you even got blowback. No one really cared, and certainly no one was going to do anything about it. But in the four months that followed the reporting on one movie mogul’s sexual predation, a Harvey-sized hole was blown in the American news cycle, and there was suddenly
64
yes ! spring
2019 ::
yesmagazine . org
space and air for women to talk—to yell and scream and rage. … Some of those who spoke did so to friends or family members or to other colleagues, many for the first time. Some women lodged complaints, years later, with HR departments. Some spoke to reporters, providing corroborating evidence, contemporaneous witnesses, photographs, and diaries for documentation; they showed their nondisclosure agreements and settled lawsuit filings; they produced the friends and husbands they told at the time, though many, many of them had told no one.
YES! ILLUSTRATION BY FRAN MURPHY
68
yes ! spring
2019 ::
yesmagazine . org
yesmagazine . org
::
yes ! spring
2019
69
FPO
YES! Magazine is printed on FSC-certified paper made from 30% and 100% postconsumer waste.
FPO FPO
Van Jones Activist, author, host of CNN’s The Van Jones Show
YES! PHOTO BY BETTY UDESEN
“For those genuinely seeking solutions and inspiration during these troubled times ... YES! Magazine.”
Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-Supported.