J ournalism for P eople B uilding a B etter W orld
25
VANDANA SHIVA: Expand the Commons
to Include Everything We Need
S
YEAR
How to Bring Nature Into YOUR DAILY LIFE
Three Cities Switching to LIFE-AFFIRMING ECONOMIES Want Want
W inter 2021 S pring
HOW TO AWAKEN Our Ecological Psyche
+
Busting the American Myths of Bigger and Better And essays from
Winona LaDuke, Mark Ruffalo, Leah Penniman, Tim DeChristopher
What an
Ecological Civilization Looks Like
US $6.50 Canada $6.50
11
7
25274 87100 1
Display until April 30
GET PAST THE STING FOR A HEALING CUP OF TEA
8
y e s ! s p r in g
2021 ::
y e s ma g a z i n e . o r g
INDIGENOUS FOODWAYS
Valerie Segrest
fringe of the forest, the cusp of a riverbank—as it grows its rich nutrient storehouse at the intersection of two worlds colliding. Nettle teaches us how to thrive in a paradox. In disturbed environments, Nettle grows strong, accumulating medicine from the soil and sun and demanding we pay attention to its presence, or pay the price of its burns. In early spring, look for radiant green shoots emerging from the cold soil and promising the change of season. This is the time to harvest tender leaves for food. Make sure you forage in a clean area that has not been sprayed with chemicals. Using scissors, carefully snip the top leaves at an angle and into a basket. Rinse in a colander using gloves or tongs. If you eat them fresh, they will sting you. But add a little bit of heat, and the sting is denatured. THREE WAYS
Stinging Nettle
Sauteed greens: Cook with olive oil, onion, and garlic. Finish it off with a splash of vinegar and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds if you’ve got them on hand. Frozen greens: Blanch them in a pot of boiling water for 30 seconds, then plunge them immediately into a bowl of ice to stop the cooking process. Squeeze the water out and freeze them for later use in soups or whenever you need a frozen leafy green.
Urtica dioica
S
ome plants create hard bark, thorns, terrible flavors, or odors to repel predators. The ingenious Nettle has its sting, from a combination of chemicals packaged in tiny silica hairs adorning its stems and leaves. Throughout Europe, North Africa, and North America, tenacious Nettle can produce 10,000 seeds per plant annually while also propagating itself via rhizomes. For more than 3,000 years, Nettle has been used as food, medicine, and fiber by Native cultures that revere it for its resourcefulness and versatility. To know its medicine is to understand why Nettle requires fierce protection from being overconsumed. Decorating itself in acid compounds is how Nettle has cleverly survived for millennia. Nettle concentrates vitamins and minerals from the soil in its body, resulting in easily absorbable nutrition, boasting superior levels of phytonutrients and life-sustaining vitamins and minerals. A cup of Nettle tea can offer 500 mg of calcium—double what’s in a cup of cow’s milk. Fortifying blood, building bones, increasing energy levels, improving circulation, and decreasing inflammation and oxidative stress in the body are a few of the health benefits. You can find the plants on the edges of ecosystems—the PHOTO ABOVE BY VALERIE SEGREST
Tea: Closer to summer, when the plants have grown taller and more fibrous, dry the leaves in a paper bag for tea. Add 1 tablespoon of dried Nettle leaf to 1 cup of hot water, steeping for 15 minutes up to a few hours. The longer it steeps, the more time the plant has to give up its mineral-rich medicine. Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot) is a nutrition educator who specializes in local and traditional foods. She is regional director for Native Food and Knowledge Systems for the Native American Agriculture Fund.
y e s ma g a z i n e . o r g
::
y e s ! s p r in g
2021
9
6
Rules for Humans Rejoining the Natural World ILLUSTRATIONS BY DELPHINE LEE
18
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
Toward an Ecological Civilization A society based on natural ecology might seem like a far-off utopia—yet communities everywhere are already creating it. JEREMY LENT
A
s a new, saner administration sets up shop in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of policy initiatives this country desperately needs. Beyond a national plan for the COVID-19 pandemic, progressives will strive to focus the administration’s attention on challenges like fixing the broken health care system, grappling with systemic racial inequities, and a just transition from fossil fuels to renewables. These are all critically important issues. But here’s the rub: Even if the Democratic administration were resoundingly successful on all fronts, its initiatives would still be utterly insufficient to resolve the existential threat of climate breakdown and the devastation of our planet’s life-support systems. That’s because the multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of an even more profound problem: The underlying structure of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice.
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
19
Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabekwe) is a renowned author, speaker, and activist, focusing on Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and sustainable tribal economies. Twitter: @WinonaLaduke
34
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
PHO TO FROM IN VISIBLE HAND /PUB LIC H ERALD
crops, horse cultivation, and traditional varieties. We grew in small plots, hand seeded, and in a larger 20-acre plot, mechanically harvested with some 40-yearold equipment. We also put in a field with horses because some of our partnerships here involve not only our own horse-drawn agriculture, but our Amish neighbors’. We’ve come to collaborate, as we have similar interests in terms of technology and geography. We provided seeds to tribes throughout the region, all interested in the same questions: How do you grow it? And, what can you do with it? What we found is that the plant will teach you—don’t be in a rush. We are re-creating an industry from the seed to the product—whether smokable or for manufacturing. Some tribes are looking at materials processing—car parts, bags, etc.—others are looking at hempcrete, an improvement on concrete due to its sustainability and the fact that it is a carbon sink. There’s a lot of room in the New Green Revolution. After all, if you are going to change the materials economy—well, the whole economy—you will need a lot of producers and also some folks in manufacturing. That’s the goal. Indeed, if hemp’s potential is realized, we can transform the materials economy, and that’s revolutionary. That’s our work now, to investigate, vet, and find technologies and economic models that can be replicated. Tribes are in a unique position. Tribal sovereignty provides their governments leeway in the development of cannabis policies and will be a stabilizing force in turbulent times. Today, confusing regulations and lucrative growth in the cannabis industry set a complex scene, but tribal nations are in a position to continue a course they set. Tribes have the potential to revolutionize the industry. We have the land—we just need a bit of time, technology, and finances. This is an opportunity for justice—social and ecological—in this post-petroleum economic transition. And we are ready to go. y
Seneca Rights of Nature activist Degawëno:da’s (“he who thunderz”) rows on the Ohi:yo’ (Allegheny River). It is illegal, under the current system of law, for a community to tell a corporation to stop polluting.
LIVING ECOLOGICALLY IS ILLEGAL The Rights of Nature movement offers a solution. MARK RUFFALO MELISSA TROUTMAN
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
35
Expand the commons to include everything we need.
RECLAIMING OUR COMMON HOME VANDANA SHIVA
THE PATH TO AN ECOLOGICAL civilization is paved by reclaiming the commons—our common home, the Earth, and the commons of the Earth family, of which we are a part. Through reclaiming the commons, we can imagine possibility for our common future, and we can sow the seeds of abundance through “commoning.” In the commons, we care and share—for the Earth and each other. We are conscious of nature’s ecological limits, which ensure her share of the gifts she creates goes back to her to sustain biodiversity and ecosystems. We are aware that all humans have a right to air, water, and food, and we feel responsible for the rights of future generations. Enclosures of the commons, in contrast, are the root cause of the ecological crisis and the crises of poverty and hunger, dispossession and displacement. Extractivism commodifies for profit what is held in common for the sustenance of all life. THE COMMONS, DEFINED Air is a commons. We share the air we breathe with all species, including plants and trees. Through photosynthesis, plants convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and give us oxygen. “I can’t breathe” is the cry of the enclosure of the commons of air through the mining and burning of 600 million years’ worth of fossilized carbon. Water is a commons. The planet is 70% water. Our bodies are 70% water. Water
46
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
PHOTO BY WEERAJATA/ADOBE ILLUSTRATION BY ENKHBAYAR MUNKH-ERDENE/YES! MAGAZINE
“We receive our seeds from nature and our ancestors. We have a duty to save and share them, and hand them over to future generations in their richness, integrity, and diversity.” is the ecological basis of all life, and in the commons, conservation creates abundance. The plastic water bottle is a symbol of the enclosures of the commons—first by privatizing water for extractivism, and then by destroying the land and oceans through the resulting plastic pollution. Food is a commons. Food is the currency of life, from the soil food web, to the biodiversity of plants and animals, insects and microbes, to the trillions of organisms in our gut microbiomes. Hunger is a result of the enclosure of the food commons through fossil fuel-based, chemically intensive industrial agriculture. A HISTORY OF ENCLOSURE The enclosure transformation began in earnest in the 16th century. The rich and powerful privateer-landlords, supported by industrialists, merchants, and bankers, had a limitless hunger for profits. Their hunger fueled industrialism as a process of extraction of value from the land and peasants. Colonialism was the enclosure of the commons on a global scale. When the British East India Company began its de facto rule of India in the mid-1700s, it enclosed our land and forests, our food and water, even our salt from the sea. Over the course of 200 years, the British extracted an estimated $45 trillion from India through the colonial enclosures of our agrarian economies, pushing tens of millions of peasants into famine and starvation. Our freedom movement, from the mid-1800s to the mid1900s, was in fact a movement for reclaiming the commons. When the British established a salt monopoly through the salt laws in 1930, making it illegal for Indians to make salt, Gandhi started the Salt Satyagraha—the civil disobedience movement against the salt laws. He walked to the sea with thousands of people and harvested the salt from the sea, saying: Nature gives it for free; we need it for our survival; we will continue to make salt; we will not obey your laws. EXPANDING ENCLOSURES While the enclosures began with the land, in our times, enclosures have expanded to cover lifeforms and biodiversity, our shared knowledge, and even relationships. The commons that are being enclosed today are our seeds and biodiversity, our information, our health and education, our energy, society and community, and the Earth herself. The chemical industry is enclosing the commons of our seeds and biodiversity through “intellectual property rights.” Led by Monsanto (now Bayer) in the 1980s, our biodiversity
was declared “raw material” for the biotechnology industry to create “intellectual property”—to own our seeds through patents, and to collect rents and royalties from the peasants who maintained the seed commons. Reclaiming the commons of our seeds has been my life’s work since 1987. Inspired by Gandhi, we started the Navdanya movement with a Seed Satyagraha. We declared, “Our seeds, our biodiversity, our indigenous knowledge is our common heritage. We receive our seeds from nature and our ancestors. We have a duty to save and share them, and hand them over to future generations in their richness, integrity, and diversity. Therefore we have a duty to disobey any law that makes it illegal for us to save and share our seeds.” I worked with our parliament to introduce Article 3(j) into India’s Patent Law in 2005, which recognizes that plants, animals, and seeds are not human inventions, and therefore cannot be patented. Navdanya has since created 150 community seed banks in our movement to reclaim the commons of seed. And our legal challenges to the biopiracy of neem, wheat, and basmati have been important contributions to reclaiming the commons of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. PARTNERSHIP, NOT PROPERTY So, too, with water. When French water and waste management company Suez tried to privatize the Ganga River in 2002, we built a water democracy movement to reclaim the Ganga as our commons. Through a Satyagraha against CocaCola in 2001, my sisters in Plachimada, Kerala, shut down the Coca-Cola plant and reclaimed water as a commons. Ecological civilization is based on the consciousness that we are part of the Earth, not her masters, conquerors, or owners. That we are connected to all life, and that our life is dependent on others—from the air we breathe to the water we drink and the food we eat. All beings have a right to live; that is why I have participated in preparing the draft “Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.” The right to life of all beings is based on interconnectedness. The interconnectedness of life and the rights of Mother Earth, of all beings, including all human beings, is the ecological basis of the commons, and economies based on caring and sharing. Reclaiming the commons and creating an ecological civilization go hand in hand. y Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., is a renowned scholar, author, environmental activist, and food sovereignty advocate. Her latest book is Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth. Twitter: @drvandanashiva
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
47
48
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
THE GIFT OF ECOLOGICAL HUMILITY These Afro-Indigenous practices challenge ideas of human supremacy. LEAH PENNIMAN
“I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour.” —George Washington Carver, Tuskegee University, 1930
I
n my early 20s, I apprenticed myself to the The Queen Mothers of Kroboland in Ghana with the hope of understanding more about my cultural heritage. Early one morning, I arrived at the compound of Paramount Queen Mother Manye Nartike, who was particularly animated by a rumor she had heard about our diasporic practices in relation to land. In disbelief she admonished me, “Is it true that in the United States, a farmer will put the seed into the ground and not pour any libations, offer any prayers, sing, or dance, and expect that seed to grow?” Met with my ashamed silence, she continued, “That is why you are all sick! Because you see the Earth as a thing and not a being.” She was right, of course. As African Americans, our 400-plus years of immersion in racial capitalism—the commodification of our people and the planet for economic gain—has attempted to crush our sacred connection to the Earth. Many of us have forgotten that our cultural heritage as Black people includes ecological humility, the idea that humans are kin to, not masters of, nature. Despite the pressures to assimilate, there are those who persist in believing that the land and waters are family
Leah Penniman, left, and Mx. T tend to the maize plants at Soul Fire Farm. The farm in upstate New York uses Afro-Indigenous farming practices to regenerate 80 acres of land. Besides producing food, the farm’s programs use the land as a tool to heal trauma from colonization and further the food justice movement.
PHOTO BY NESHIMA VITALE-PENNIMAN
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
49
25
ABOUT YES! MEDIA
S
YEAR
IN APPRECIATION
YES! Magazine co-founder David Korten
Evolving Into an Ecologically Civilized State of Mind
I
t was my pleasure to converse with YES! co-founder David Korten in our weeks-long preparation for an interview that spans his 83 years on the planet and all the experiences and ideas that led him to co-found YES! Magazine 25 years ago. David evolved from a self-described “conservative young Republican” who traveled the world hoping to “save” other cultures from communism, to a collaborative thought leader who calls out the outsized influence of corporations and passionately advocates for global societies to move toward an ecological civilization. On that subject, he is the author of many books, including When Corporations Rule the World. The way in which David has opened himself over the past several decades to unfolding, emerging, and relearning offers a model for us all. —Zenobia Jeffries Warfield Zenobia Jeffries Warfield: A lot of folks have referred to 2020 as an unprecedented time. But we can look to recent history, even, and see that there’s much precedent for what’s going on right now. Though there is this convergence where all the things are happening at once. How would you describe it? David Korten: One of the things we need to get clear on is that for a long time, we have been going in a direction as a species that no sane person should want to be going. But we hide it under a lot of statistics, and basically a lot of media distortion coming from the system that is driving us actually in the direction of human self-extinction, but which doesn’t want anybody to see that because the system is working for a very few people who control most of our media and education and our conversations. We have these findings from science—massive consensus of the world’s brightest scientists calling attention particularly to the climate issue, as you know, essentially terminally
56
yes ! spring
2021 :: yesmagazine . org
serious for the species. It’s very hard for the scientists to get everybody’s attention. But that little bug that we call the coronavirus, man, that’s got our attention. And it has exposed, certainly like nothing else in my 83 years, the failings of our system, of just how out of touch it is with our fundamental nature as living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth. The fact [is], we’re all interconnected and all interdependent, and the division of the world into identities of race and gender, etc., is a fabricated creation. Well, the gender’s definitely not fabricated, but the way it’s played out is totally fabricated, and it is fabricated to support a system in which a very few people benefit from the tremendous destruction that’s being played out. Warfield: You didn’t always think this way, though. You worked with international development institutions for 30 years. Korten: What I realized was that most everything we were doing in the name of economic development was essentially going into communities where people lived as communities, they were connected to the land, they lived from their land, and in many instances, essentially controlled their own assets. And this had been disrupted for a long time by the colonial dynamics. Most people living on their land had at least some kind of claim to rights to its use. But what we were doing in the name of development was pushing them off of that land, separating them from controlling their own means of living and putting them into service ... essentially forcing them into lives as itinerant agriculture workers or sweatshop workers in some factory, so that, by the definitions of our contemporary economics, they were serving the economy. And suddenly it began to hit me that what we call serving the economy is essentially a kind of servitude in service to the rich people who control the real assets, but they do that by controlling our access to a means of living. That was when I really broke with the establishment and began the work in civil society. Warfield: Right. What was that like, coming back home, finding the folks to connect with who were thinking along those same lines? Korten: Most of the people who were focused on concentrating economic power as such—what you might call confirmed racists—that was just a kind of an incidental part of it, which is different than what [was experienced] in the South where it was intentional suppression of anyone with dark skin. All these dynamics in some ways are so complex and yet they integrate together in some ways a very simple frame, either what my colleague Riane Eisler calls the dominator society—with a few people on top and everybody on the bottom—or a partnership society in which we basically recognize we’re all human beings dependent on the health and vitality of living Earth. We all do better when we all do better. Warfield: Which is the theory or framework of ecological
ABOUT YES! MEDIA
civilization, right? pushing us deeper … and bigger, in a way. … Korten: As I understand it. You’ve The way I see it, it’s a continuous unfoldprobably seen, there are different vering toward ever-greater complexity, beauty, sions of ecological civilization. China awareness, and possibility. has it built into its constitution, but its Warfield: So where do you see us going real theory is really what we’d call susnow? Humans (all over) working together tainable development. They end up callwith the Earth, we’re so far away from that. ing it the “two mountain theory”: we’re You say often how we’re moving toward going to continue growing GDP and be extinction. At the risk of sounding superfithe world leader in growing GDP. And cial, how do you give people hope? we’re also going to be the world leader Korten: If you think about human culin protecting the environment, which is ture and institutions, they are both proda fundamental contradiction. A friend ucts of the human mind. And again, like often comments, “You can’t climb two money, they exist only in the human mind. mountains at the same time, you simply There is nothing out there that prevents got to make a choice.” us from changing what’s in here (points to Warfield: Exactly. And some of what TH A NK YOU , head). And that can happen very rapidly. I’m seeing, too, with ecological civiliHow? I don’t know, but it has happened DA V ID KORTE N, zation, is it’s a framework that can be in the human past. And that’s partly why F O R YOU R P A SSION, applied to Indigenous ways of being that it’s so important that we begin trying to G U I D A NCE , A ND DE V OTION have existed across the planet for eons. envision, what would this ecological civiliT O O U R ORG A NIZA TION Korten: As we now come to rediscover zation look like? This gets you into things what Indigenous people always knew, like ownership and how we think about A N D E SP E CIA LLY FOR that their well-being was dependent on how we use money. … [And] the nature S H A RING YOU R V IS ION OF the well-being of their place. That is of the family, and all the changes in how A BE TTE R WORLD. now true on a global scale. We are now a we think about family, and so forth, but LOV E , global species. And we have to find ways still recognizing that family—however we to manage our numbers and our ways Y OU R YE S! FA M ILY define it—is essential, just as community of living in ways that are in balance with is essential. And the core has to reside with the living Earth and its needs. Because living families in living communities, not If you’d like to send your own if the needs of all of us living beings are with transnational corporations and banks thank-you note to David, email essentially not being met, the Earth loses that are totally delinked from life. thanksdavid@yesmagazine.org its capacity to sustain life. Herein is a Warfield: We’re all learning and relearnfundamental lesson of all of this: That ing at these different stages in our lives. life, as we have now come to understand But I often think about “how do we get a it, can only exist in communities that self-organize, to create consensus to make transformative change?” A friend once and maintain the conditions of their own existence. said to me you don’t need everybody, you just need a critical Warfield: I do want to get back to YES! You said before mass. What are your thoughts around the kind of work that that the intention wasn’t for YES! to be this great media needs to happen to get just that? outlet. It was a platform to have thinkers come together to Korten: You need millions of conversations around exactly discuss issues, and get out those thoughts about solutions, the questions we’re asking. One possibility: start a comalternatives. munications organization, maybe you call it YES! [laughs]. Korten: Resistance alone is a losing strategy. You have to Maybe you put out a magazine that has an issue called ecohave a positive alternative, something that we move toward logical civilization that does a beautiful job of beginning to instead of away from. lay out some of the questions. When we were founding YES!, it was a time when MarWarfield: We’ve learned a lot from each other over our garet Thatcher’s idea that there is no alternative was very series of conversations. I appreciate the learning exchange. prominent. And the thing very strong in my own mind was, Korten: What I appreciate about it, is that we clearly share we absolutely have to keep alive the recognition that there is in common our passion to learn. an alternative. So in a sense, we never give up. Warfield: Absolutely. It’s always great talking with you, Now, once we got into that, then it became more [about David. Thank you so much. y exploring] what does that alternative look like? That became increasingly our frame of telling the stories that exemplify This is an excerpt of a longer conversation. Go to the alternatives. And as this keeps playing out in YES!, it’s yesmagazine.org/thanksdavid to read more and hear the full audio. also playing out in my own understanding and thinking … PHOTO BY PAUL DUNN/YES! MAGAZINE
yesmagazine . org
:: yes ! spring 2021
57
CULTURE SHIFT Powerful Ideas Emerging
Books + Films + Audio How to Blow Up a Pipeline | 65 One Billion Americans | 67 The Little War Cat | 70 Inspiration Lisa Congdon | 69 Crossword Invisible Hand | 72
64
yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
BOOKS+FILMS+AUDIO
Illustrations by Fran Murphy
In a World on Fire, Is Nonviolence Still an Option? Tim DeChristopher
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” John F. Kennedy, March 13, 1962
OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, advocates of nonviolence (such as myself) have been losing the debate in the climate movement. After decades of a well-funded and organized movement that has tried every nonviolent strategy, yet failed to pressure power structures away from the path of climate catastrophe, the promise of nonviolent success rests mainly on faith. Adding to the lack of efficacy is a startling rise in draconian consequences for peaceful activism, including dozens of states that have proposed laws legalizing vehicular homicide of activists marching on a public street. As proponents of nonviolence are increasingly ridiculed as “peace police” and booed out of movement spaces, Kennedy’s warning grows more urgent. These dynamics should ensure a warm welcome to Andreas Malm’s new book with the incendiary (but somewhat misleading) title How To Blow Up a Pipeline. It is not in fact a manual, but rather a treatise inviting the climate movement to widespread sabotage and property destruction, and it is surprisingly compelling. Malm avoids the grandiosity and testosterone that often saturate calls for violence, and instead offers a humble and nuanced case for how sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure and machinery might be “synergetic and complementary” to a movement largely centered around nonviolent mass mobilization.
As a climate movement insider who protested outside COP1 in 1995, Malm has a balanced critique of the climate movement and sees great hope in groups like Germany’s Ende Gelände. But his primary critique is that the movement’s incredible and historically unprecedented commitment to nonviolence is no longer strategic. Malm spends mercifully little time on the usual activist culture debate about what is or is not violent. Instead he takes a nuanced but common sense approach to the ethics of violence. He acknowledges that property destruction is violence, but says it’s “different in kind from the violence that hits a human (or an animal) in the face.” This is obvious to most people, and one of the refreshing things about Malm is that he doesn’t downplay the importance of navigating popular sentiment while engaging in drastic direct action. He repeatedly emphasizes the virtue of “collective self-discipline,” and he acknowledges the tricky tightrope between pushing yes ! spring
2021 ::
yesmagazine . org
65
“The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.� Vandana Shiva Author, Activist, and YES! Contributing Editor
Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported.