00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to the 100th episode of For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. I
00:00:20.700want to start off just by thanking all of you who are listening. And for those of you
00:00:25.460who started listening in unlearn and rewild days it seems so long ago that march and i were driving
00:00:33.520up the mountain trying to find enough service to get in our hot spot to record with people like
00:00:40.480bandana shiva or using the solar panel on our car battery just to charge the computer enough to even
00:00:46.100get through an entire episode there were so many crazy behind the scenes recording experiences not
00:00:54.080knowing what the hell we were doing we have stuck it through and I have to say that I have learned
00:01:00.920from every single podcast every guest has shaped me and molded me into the woman that I am and
00:01:08.720I really feel so blessed and lucky to be able to be a part of this collective that puts this on
00:01:16.120every week and the research and just the connections that we share together and then
00:01:23.860get to share with a wider audience is beyond a gift. We are using technology in a beneficial way
00:01:30.840I think in this case and we're able to cross borders and connect with one another on some
00:01:37.260of the most intense, disturbing, pressing, beautiful issues of our time and I don't know
00:01:45.360where I'd be without this guidance so we are just so grateful and excited to share with you a mash
00:01:52.520up March came back to produce this 100th episode so it's a real joy to have him at the helm
00:01:59.080going through years of so much dedication and picking out little bits of magic to share with
00:02:06.540y'all today. Stephen Herod Buhner has really guided my life in so many ways. I definitely feel
00:02:32.180like I was called by the plants, a calling that is so beyond my little life. And the Stephen
00:02:39.780Herodbunner two-part interview had really been this manifesto that I listened to in the first
00:02:46.960few extremely challenging years living out here. No running water, electricity, and it hasn't really
00:02:53.740gotten that much easier, but I'm okay with that. We learn things like nothing else is intelligent
00:02:59.300on the earth except for human beings other things are like lesser intelligences and we we build up
00:03:05.200sort of a software program of ourselves in the world okay now most people take antidepressants
00:03:12.920or they become drunkards or they watch a lot of tv or they learn to shut it off but there's a
00:03:18.860certain number of people that that begin to go wait a second the picture i was given doesn't
00:03:24.140match what I'm encountering in the real world. And a few people go, I want to find out what's
00:03:29.400real. And they act as what this guy, Edward De Bono, called a de-patterning factor for the
00:03:36.320culture. And it's really important that they do that because it keeps the culture more vibrant.
00:03:42.760Of course, the culture doesn't really like it. And there's a lot of conflicts about their
00:03:46.940framework being upset. But nevertheless, in the beginning, a lot of us think it's a rather
00:03:53.320romantic journey and it is but there's many people that have passed before and we'll see
00:03:58.880the records the passages the writings of some of them and we'll get all inspired and we'll start
00:04:03.800saying i want to do that and we start following along and then we begin to find out that there's
00:04:11.020a price and it costs us this little piece of ourself this little piece of our illusion about
00:04:17.000the nature of the world. We begin giving up our sort of narcissistic orientation. We begin to be
00:04:24.960subsumed into this larger framework. The earth begins to flow through us more and more. And a
00:04:30.880lot of people, it starts with the plants. I don't know why. For most of the people that have really
00:04:36.180moved me in my life, Gerta Masanobu Fukuoka, Luther Burbank, Barbara McClintock, it was the
00:04:42.240plants that pull them deeper into the world and begin to reveal to them what's really going on
00:04:47.840here, which is very different than what we've been taught. We get pulled a little deeper,
00:04:53.060we get pulled a little deeper, we get pulled a little deeper. And then we begin to be aware
00:04:57.660that there's a certain work in us that we're meant to do. You know, Wallace Stegner put it
00:05:02.680this great way, he goes, people in America do not understand that we have been subsumed by what we
00:05:09.940conquered. We begin to go deeper and deeper and we give up a little more and a little more. And
00:05:16.500finally, this process begins to happen where we begin to become old growth ourselves, where we
00:05:24.680begin to become the earth speaking on behalf of itself. And that narcissistic sort of anthropocentrism
00:05:31.580that was the majority of who we are is stripped away more and more and more of the psychological
00:05:37.780frame is stripped down to the foundation over and over again until it fundamentally is remade
00:05:44.220and matches more accurately the reality of the world you become something else in the process
00:05:51.620it costs you everything that you are to become that thing as many of you probably know with
00:06:01.320my work in the tongas and in the redwoods and the temperate rainforest in general that i am
00:06:07.240completely in love with salmon. And Chief Callean Sisk is beyond an inspiration when it comes to
00:06:16.400this incredible godlike species. And to think about the desecration and the plantation forest
00:06:22.420and these forests that are trying so hard to come back and knowing that they don't have their salmon
00:06:28.520kin to feed off of is a really frightening thought for the future. So I look to people like
00:06:34.620Chief Callean Sisk for spiritual and ecological sanity in this really crazy time.
00:06:42.600What we're trying to do is wake the people up to the realities of what water is. Our tribe has been
00:06:49.480trying to bring young people up to the river so they can actually see what a real river looks
00:06:55.200like. When it comes off the mountain, how crystal clear. You can see to the bottom. You can feel it
00:07:02.240alive you know you can taste it and let them know that this is how these rivers used to run
00:07:09.280all the way to the delta now they don't because for some reason this society that this modernization
00:07:18.280has decided that it's okay to dump everything and anything into the waterways and think that
00:07:25.060that's fine. Nothing's going to happen. For some reason, they do that. Whereas the old way was that
00:07:32.900this water is precious. This water is life. You could take care of this water. You don't, you know,
00:07:38.040you don't go throwing things in there. You pray to this water. But this day and age, you know,
00:07:44.700hardly anybody prays to the water. I mean, even in the Catholic church, you know, they have holy
00:07:49.900water that they put, you know, I don't know what they do with it, but they use it. Every other
00:07:56.440place, water is a commodity. Water is, you know, taken for granted. The Winimum believe that
00:08:02.720creators talk into them. They're still connected because they only do things one time, and each
00:08:09.560generation has to have that connection. When the fish stop doing what they were told by creator,
00:08:16.060that connection will have been broken and there won't be any hope for our water systems.
00:08:21.820So right now our fish that were taken from our river swim in New Zealand because of fish hatchery.
00:08:28.300We are working very hard to bring them back because we believe they will help bring balance
00:08:34.540back to the river systems here in California. But not only that, they will change many things
00:08:43.420in the ocean as they come back into the system because in new zealand our fish are still wild
00:08:49.780wild winter run chinook are over there from our river and when we bring them back
00:08:57.680the water systems will wake up and so will the people
00:09:02.800bronte is one of my dearest friends and they have shifted my perspective time and time again
00:09:14.260and i'm just fascinated with this idea of cosmic literacy i think about harriet tubman and many
00:09:21.600other folks relationship to the north star and i think about this practice in celestial navigation
00:09:27.840And something I have been writing about is this concept of cosmic literacy, decolonizing literacy.
00:09:37.440Oftentimes, it's written that Harriet Tubman was an illiterate slave.
00:09:42.180Scholars talk about moving out of the concept of calling folks slaves, out of the noun into the action that was happening upon these people, so the enslaved.0.96
00:09:52.620Instead of being like, this person was illiterate, actually, what literacy did she have?0.79
00:09:57.120She was literate. It wasn't your literacy. Oh, but Harriet Tubman was literate. Harriet Tubman was literate in the stars. Harriet Tubman was literate in the soil. Harriet Tubman was the only woman to lead a military operation during the Civil War.
00:10:14.600this was happening in the winter time this was happening at night she was also a nurse in the
00:10:21.820civil war so i'm always like this person was a herbalist so how do i start to read how she knew
00:10:27.560plants via her dream world the way spirit and god were telling her these roots and so i'm just like
00:10:36.500wow okay that's another kind of literacy to have a spiritual literacy to have another relationship
00:10:43.520to time, in the gravity of faith, to know that another way is possible, to be literate
00:10:50.100in imagination, what Martin Luther King called cosmic companionship that we have, that is
00:10:56.920with us, that the stars are with us, that the sky is with us, that the earth is with
00:11:02.920I remember learning about Andrew Harvey at the very beginning of my activist trajectory,
00:11:09.680and he was really weaving in spirituality and theology
00:11:15.400and the way we engage in this really intense work.
00:11:20.440Matter is just as sacred as the light.
00:11:23.620Once the light has opened your eyes to the light's dance in and as matter,
00:11:31.520heaven and earth become one living experience
00:11:35.140And body and soul become married, so you live consciously as an ensouled body and an embodied soul, having a unified experience with the whole of reality as the endlessly flowering dance of the light.
00:11:56.800and how this deeply relates to sacred activism is this
00:12:03.800the situation that we're going into is infinitely serious
00:12:08.300and everything depends upon how we meet it
00:12:11.380with the fullest and most embodied consciousness
00:12:13.660because we're truly in danger of destroying ourselves
00:13:13.360as prayers of sacred transformatory action.
00:13:17.620Angelo Baca is this elder in a young person's body to me.
00:13:22.720his knowledge and his connection to his grandmother and the land and I've been really moved by
00:13:30.700the lands of the southwest and Bears Ears and Grand Escalante and people say that these lands
00:13:37.520are dead that there's nothing there and that they should be just open for the oil and gas
00:13:43.700companies we did a webinar recently and so I would really encourage everybody to
00:13:50.100stay attuned to what's happening with public lands and Bears Ears. And let's really come
00:13:56.840together and fight this because every generation's job is to protect the land. You know, the Trump
00:14:02.800administration is not going to be the last administration that wants to rape these lands.
00:14:08.100And we really need to do more and more to protect these last remnants.
00:14:14.000So we can continue to do what we've been doing, which hasn't worked very well,
00:14:18.220Or we can do what we have been as native people doing for centuries before anybody got here, which was our own ways of stewardship, management, taking care of the land and the plants and the animals.
00:14:33.560And so what we have to do a lot is kind of bring people up to speed between 200 and 500 plus years of how we do things.
00:14:44.200and it's very difficult when they already have closed off their mind to these conversations
00:14:49.760so you know my invitation is always for them to civilly and peacefully have these discourses
00:14:58.320to think on things and consider it and to understand that we are all tied to everything
00:15:06.580else everything is connected and for native people we're very much plugged into the world
00:15:13.900and the universe in a different way than most folks are,
00:15:16.820especially because we've been into the landscape
00:15:20.320or the places that we live in for a very, very long time.
00:15:25.140So even from a scientific perspective, we are the first scientists.
00:15:29.800We have accumulated long-term aggregated data
00:16:25.300She teaches me about being gentle and persistent
00:16:29.960She teaches me about patience and commitment
00:16:34.440When I close my eyes, she speaks to me
00:16:38.880in this language of trickles and bubbles and she says journeys take them and try to remember who
00:16:48.080you are along the way i love this excerpt from lila june and her incredible stand-up poetry music
00:17:00.560art she is a dear friend and i have felt so blessed to walk this path with her so far
00:17:08.420she brings so much healing to so many people and she doesn't shame or guilt but instead she is this
00:17:17.940selfless vessel that holds so much and so if we help the women we help everything and the cree
00:17:28.560have a proverb that says a nation is not defeated until the hearts of the women are on the ground
00:17:34.160because they knew that ultimately it was the women who were the pillars of the society
00:17:41.120and what you have then is you have a converse of that which is a nation can be restored if we
00:17:48.480uplift the hearts of the women off the ground and obviously you get into a lot of philosophical
00:17:54.060debates about gender binaries there and I haven't quite figured out how to tackle that debate even
00:18:00.460though I myself believed I was gay for a long time but kind of realized that that was me wanting to
00:18:07.180be male because I thought being female was a curse that's a whole nother story I don't know
00:18:12.160how to answer that right now but anyway if womanhood and manhood which to me doesn't mean
00:18:18.240skirts and lipstick or monster trucks and big muscles or anything like that it means more like
00:18:23.380can you birth a human being out of your body? That's how I define woman. Do you have that0.95
00:18:30.060ability? And even if you don't, maybe you had a hysterectomy or something, but you came to this
00:18:35.020earth ready and willing to try. That makes you a woman in my eyes. So in terms of women being
00:18:43.260leaders of the resistance, if you will, by and large, women, this is a big generalization,
00:18:52.580generalization warning women lead with their hearts and women have a very intimate connection
00:19:03.240to the children and so if our movement is designed to create a hospitable world for the next seven
00:19:12.400generations then the women is probably who we should be talking to especially the grandmothers
00:19:17.700because the grandmothers have also seen it happen for their children's children
00:19:21.460And they're in that phase. They're in that grandmother's lodge, as my mother calls it, where they have a very longitudinal understanding of what it means to raise a generation from the earth.
00:19:37.480and that's how it was in the old days the grandmothers were the leaders of the society
00:19:43.800not only did they have that motherly nature but they also had just been here for a long time and
00:19:52.820seen a lot of things and learned a lot of things through experience and so they were the ones who
00:19:58.720chose people to take certain positions of leadership they were like the leaders of the
00:20:04.880leaders. And so it all comes back to life. You can slip from a movement for life to a movement
00:20:11.700for revenge very quickly without noticing. And so we need to remember our movements are about life.
00:20:18.760It's about growing life, sustaining life, building life, and protecting life, honoring life,
00:20:26.640cultivating life diversifying life enjoying life and so when we remember that that's what we're
00:20:35.340really here for we remember that it's time to turn to the life bearer Derek really ushered me
00:20:42.220into the movement in so many ways I felt so connected with how honest he was and how blunt
00:20:48.380he was about what was happening to the earth and he wasn't apologetic and there was something so
00:20:53.880potent for me in that. And I love what he's saying about loyalty. And that's really shifted
00:20:59.620my perspective of who am I loyal to? And if I'm loyal to the land base, my decisions are very
00:21:05.400different. And it's something that I really strive for every day. The point is that even on that
00:21:12.120level, we identify with the system, you know, how can we make the US economy grow? I mean,
00:21:17.080do we really want the US economy to grow? Do we really want the US economy to exist?
00:21:20.580I'm not interested in what is best for the economy. I'm interested in what is best for
00:21:25.920the Colorado River. I'm really interested in what is best for the Smith River here where I live. I'm
00:21:30.720really interested in what's best for the salmon. I'm really interested in what's best for the land
00:21:34.000base. One of my books, What We Leave Behind, the central question of that book is, or the central
00:21:40.120answer of that book is understanding that the measure by which we'll be judged and the measure
00:21:46.280by which we should be judged is, do we leave the world a better place by having been here?
00:21:52.840And by world, I don't mean capitalism. I don't mean industrial civilization. I mean the real
00:21:58.760physical world. And this is a really important topic for environmentalism because in the past
00:22:04.38030 years or so, past 40 years, whatever, a lot of the environmental movement has been completely
00:22:09.680hijacked away from being about protecting wild places and wild creatures and wild plants
00:22:16.780to being about perpetuating the culture for a little bit longer.
00:22:22.920So this is how you can get just this whole sort of high-tech sustainability movement
00:22:27.200that has nothing to do with sustainability, that's not about sustaining the real world,
00:22:31.700helping the real world to sustain itself.
00:22:33.900It's all about sustaining this destructive culture.
00:22:36.380I think it's desperately important for us to think very clearly about to whom we are loyal.
00:22:44.460If you are loyal to the agricultural industry in Arizona and Las Vegas and Nevada and the agricultural industry and the cities in Southern California, then it can make sense to dewater the Colorado River.0.95
00:23:01.080But if your loyalty is to the river and those non-humans and humans who actually depend upon the river, then you will make entirely different decisions.0.75
00:23:11.060There's a great line by R.D. Lange about how we perceive the world affects how we behave in the world.0.71
00:23:17.760And if you perceive the world as consisting of industrial civilization and the real world is getting a job, then you're going to behave in one way.
00:23:27.400But if the real world is your own embodied life and the embodied life of the forest and the embodied life of the river, then you're going to have an entirely different set of responses.
00:23:42.340Al Neuer and Ariel Duranger were the first people who told me about We2Go, this cannibalistic mind virus.
00:23:51.180and it's something that has stuck with me ever since because i do feel like humanity for the
00:23:57.680most part has been infected with a mind virus to keep consuming and to extract resources at any
00:24:05.880cost no matter how much is being slaughtered and not that i can say for certain but it doesn't0.96
00:24:11.820seem like we're any happier for having all of this material bullshit that's killing the earth0.71
00:24:16.520so instead of trying to find ways to stop what we've done to become the most powerful nations0.90
00:24:24.120on the planet we still are holding on to that power we're not letting go because we have this
00:24:29.580disease this wheat to go disease and we've commodified everything and now we're even
00:24:35.060commodifying the atmosphere through these prescribed carbon market mechanisms and
00:24:39.600conservation offsets cap and trade systems that do nothing to actually challenge the structural
00:24:45.400violence that has got us to where we are and it allows us these governments and systems to keep
00:24:51.040furthering this cannibalization of the planet there's this sort of mentality that we cannot
00:24:56.680survive without progress and progress is defined within the parameters of economic growth personal
00:25:02.740wealth personal gain and therefore we continue to cannibalize this planet even though we see
00:25:08.540that climate change and all the science and all the numbers is pointing that we are literally
00:25:13.140walking towards the cliff's edge and letting this sort of brigade of people take us on our
00:25:19.640merry way towards the end of humanity.0.88
00:25:23.400Wetiko, the Algonquin word for this cannibalistic spirit, and in Ojibwe it's wendigo or wintiko
00:25:29.400and Powhatan, literally referred to cannibalism.
00:25:33.100And what a lot of this indigenous lore said was two things would happen when someone out
00:25:38.140of necessity even, you know, in a northern winter or whatever, ate another human being's
00:25:42.720flesh. One would be an icy heart, and the second would be this unnatural desire to consume more
00:25:49.580flesh. And when the First Nations communities of North America first interacted with the European
00:25:56.480colonialists, this word comes back into the vocabulary because that's how they saw their
00:26:02.040relationship with nature and, of course, with the First Nations themselves. And I think if we go
00:26:08.340back far enough, the real root of the Westico virus, of the sort of cannibalism that's inherent
00:26:14.680in Western modern culture, comes from our separation from nature, which, you know, many
00:26:20.240argue that stemmed from the Neolithic revolution, from farming, from sedentary lifestyle. So we went
00:26:27.680from hunter-gatherers that lived in codependence with the mother. Our ancestors would go into0.97
00:26:34.580nature and they would be in this natural bounty. They would hunt and gather the necessary food and
00:26:40.220calories they needed. And we know from a lot of the research in cultural anthropology, like Marshall
00:26:45.700Salon's work, their original affluent society, that hunter-gatherers actually lived not what we
00:26:51.660are told the Hobbesian worldview of a sort of brutish, nasty, short life, but quite the opposite.
00:26:58.300it. They were working 10 to 20 hours a week. Their average calories were about 2000 calories per
00:27:04.360person. We know this from teeth samples and bone density and other things. So they were living
00:27:09.240quite decent lives compared to even modern standards of how the majority of people
00:27:13.880nowadays live. And so not to say we want to go back to that way of living, but there's something
00:27:20.080really interesting that happens when our livelihood comes from taming nature and extracting from
00:27:25.780nature and this sort of farming mindset. And this initial separation happens. And we know that some
00:27:32.540of the first buildings that are built in the first city-states of Ur and Babylon are the granaries.
00:27:38.580Because as soon as you have a surplus of food production, you then create a place to store
00:27:43.360that surplus. And then you need a military or militia or police or whatever to protect that
00:27:49.480surplus and then hierarchy is created and you have your you know emperors and sun kings and
00:27:56.660all of that and so you know from babylon to new york is a very short distance both psychologically
00:28:05.200culturally and temporally and so we end up in this place where we value the sort of brute strength
00:28:12.260of the male which creates this sort of patriarchal culture there's a culture of extraction of rape
00:28:18.260You know, we essentially have a rape culture as the dominant culture. That's what Western culture is. And I'm not just talking about the effects on women in this culture. And of course, that is the dominant thread. But, you know, the mother herself, right, to Mother Nature, to Earth herself. And so it's really deeply embedded in the Western European psyche. And this is not to blame, you know, Western Europeans. When we came out of the Fertile Crescent, those were the heavily populated areas.1.00
00:28:42.960And then through colonialism and imperialism and war and violence and expansion, this culture has become the dominant culture.
00:28:51.280And the way it sort of affects us all is through memes, essentially, cultural ideas.
00:28:58.640And, you know, memes just are essentially the base unit of culture.
00:29:05.340We don't even know, which is why understanding and deconstructing culture is so important to understand the ways in which we're controlled, right?
00:29:13.720The invisible hand, Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand is the perfect mimetic virus, right?
00:29:19.600We know from 30 plus years of economic data that it's fundamentally untrue, that if people behave selfishly, there will not be a perfect equilibrium, quite the opposite.
00:29:32.380We had a webinar with him for the One Million Redwoods Project, and the depth that he understands
00:29:38.620our troubled times, plus how much he is so in love with the earth and with the oceans.
00:29:46.260Once upon a time, almost everything was a commons. All our land was held in common,
00:29:50.520our water, our crucial resources, our fish, our forests, a whole lot of it. But gradually,
00:29:56.100those common resources were grabbed, enclosed, primarily by the market, but also by the state.
00:30:02.380with devastating consequences for people and what the commons is is is not capitalism and
00:30:08.540it's not communism it's something else entirely it's community management and community benefit
00:30:14.700on a shared and equal basis so the land was once held in common almost everywhere
00:30:21.900the concept of private land ownership was completely alien to people worldwide until
00:30:27.340until the 15th century in Britain. It was in England that it was invented and then it was
00:30:33.500spread through colonial conquest all over the world and then copied by other colonial powers
00:30:39.660and it became the dominant model and now we can hardly conceive of being without it but it's a
00:30:43.940very recent thing and a very alien thing to the whole of the rest of human history and it's a
00:30:50.500highly destructive thing because when a commons is enclosed not only is a community scattered and
00:30:56.280destroyed with devastating consequences I mean I've seen with my own eyes what's happened to
00:31:02.660indigenous people when they lose their land and those people are us we are all living in a post
00:31:07.940enclosure society because we lost our commons everybody lost their commons through the same
00:31:14.280processes but it's not just that we lose ourselves in that we lose the living world as well because
00:31:22.980the common system protected it but when when that land is grabbed when it's either privatized or
00:31:29.620seized by the state people then try to extract as much profit from it as quickly as they can
00:31:35.000and reinvest that profit elsewhere and that means turning the polycultures the complex systems
00:31:41.560with which we lived into monocultures with devastating environmental consequences and
00:31:47.720gradually we're seeing that process creeping around the world so what we have to do is to
00:31:52.180try to restore the commons and I think there are various means of doing it when it comes to issues
00:31:58.500like land I would like to see a land value tax on the most valuable properties which brings down
00:32:03.960the price of land for a start and then part of the product of that tax used to allow communities to
00:32:10.380buy land back and then start managing it in common which is crucial both for our own well-being and
00:32:17.560for the well-being of the land and its ecosystems at sea I would love to see instead of the smash
00:32:24.260and grab free for all open access system we have at the moment I would like to see a common system
00:32:29.940where a community of fishers and other people for that matter divers and recreational anglers and
00:32:37.080wildlife watchers whale watchers and the rest of it manage an area in common together and they
00:32:42.720don't let other people come and exploit it but they say right this is under our control as a
00:32:47.800community and we're going to make sure that all the wonderful species and ecosystems here are
00:32:53.860going to be sustained forever so that we can continue to love and enjoy them and to make a
00:32:59.640living from them and they can continue to sustain the natural wonders of the marine world
00:33:06.700there's been so many conversations that have left me emotional and distraught but
00:33:16.520i was really able to grieve with kurt and i think partially it's because he allowed himself
00:33:23.860to share how he felt and i remember one time in the conversation he says if i sound angry it's
00:33:31.540because I am and there was something so potent in his love and his care and his ferociousness
00:33:38.440to protect Tokatai and the Sailor Sea and the Lummi Nation and the Chinook Salmon and I think
00:33:44.560a lot of us are always looking for action points and how to be engaged and how to get involved and
00:33:49.400what can we do that's tangible and I really believe that we can come together and demand
00:33:56.600And the removal of the Snake River dams.
00:34:00.260And that's something that we're going to be continuing to work on as a collective of For the Wild in the next year with many other fighters for the Pacific Ocean.
00:37:16.780And she is just such an incredible lover and fighter about the devastation of mining and what it does to rivers and salmon and land and people and the caribou and the deer and the bear who drinks from the river and eats the salmon, let alone the fact that British Columbia has 2000 abandoned mines.
00:37:38.120and it's the wild west still of gold mining because gold mining kind of at least in the
00:37:43.280united states has this romantic old-timey feel of these cute little towns and the gold pans and
00:37:49.680the miners and their little 1900s outfits and i know there's so much talk about renewable energy
00:37:56.120but there's so little talk about the mining issues and the devastation let alone the genocide of
00:38:01.920native people that gold mining entailed and how are we really going to have a just transition
00:38:07.240into renewable energy when mining in mostly indigenous peoples or people of color's backyards1.00
00:38:14.940is decimating land and people's health it's really something that we have to all take a much0.99
00:38:22.000stronger stance on because these mines are coming into the last remaining sacred healthy headwaters
00:38:29.480on earth and putting their tailings ponds and then these companies are just going bankrupt
00:38:33.880and leaving this wastewater for thousands of years to continue polluting these areas
00:38:38.840that still have a chance of survival into the Anthropocene.
00:38:42.680The work that Indigenous people do to protect their way of life, myself included,
00:46:54.720We're willing to trade that for anyone else's home.
00:46:57.440if we are willing to learn instead of be saved if we're willing to put the enormous
00:47:05.760contemplative labor and a labor towards sorrow instead of away from it maybe there's a chance
00:47:13.500to actually learn something of one's own dappled ancestry i think that's important word to use you
00:47:20.560know we imagine ancestry we imagine a vector that seems to get narrower as it goes away from us
00:47:27.020We become, claim some kind of single identity, you know. In actual fact, of course, it vectors in the opposite direction. As time articulates our ancestry, it widens, not narrows, it widens to the point where the idea of, for example, white supremacy, it's so ludicrous as a historical reality. You know, there's no such thing as the white homeland. There's no such thing as white people, for crying out loud.
00:47:53.720dune is one of the most special people in my life i got to spend quality time with him up
00:48:05.100at his home in cordova alaska and we rafted down the copper river and had run-ins with grizzly
00:48:11.900bears and sandstorms and glacier iceberg bottlenecks and the whole time we just were
00:48:19.260able to sit in such beautiful conversation together and he has been such a influence
00:48:27.600on my life and he is really a hero and I loved him saying we lose if we do nothing but we win
00:48:36.220by going in and I can still see him saying that. In order to diversify the economy the native
00:48:42.080corporations in the spill zone the Alaska Native Claim Settlement Act corporations decided that
00:48:47.160they were going to clear cut a million acres in the parallel path of the exxon valdez and i sat
00:48:53.000down with pamela and some of my friends and i said i'll tell you what if we clear cut the parallel
00:48:57.740path of the exxon valdez we will no longer be fishing in 10 years or less and this cannot
00:49:03.580happen on our watch and so pamela asked me she says well can you live with the outcome no matter
00:49:10.320what happens win or lose and i said well i can tell you this pamela we will absolutely lose if
00:49:16.040we do nothing at all. And we win by going in. We have to be louder than everything else. But we
00:49:22.440have to remain a voice of reason. So people will reason with us. And so we need to take on our own
00:49:29.260people, our own native corporation. So I flew to back down to Arizona. And I went to my mother and
00:49:36.600laid next to her bed. And I said, Mama, I need your advice. The natives are starting to clear
00:49:41.960cut the forest and we just had the Exxon spill and Exxon's appealing all the claims. It could be
00:49:48.120years before we ever see a settlement, but we're not going to make it if we nuke the forest. I said,
00:49:54.220look at what's happened to California and Oregon and Washington and their wild fisheries,
00:49:58.680their wild salmon way of life. What happens to those tribes and those people and those cultures
00:50:04.140that are tied to these oceans and their resources? She said, well, I think it's your turn to give me
00:50:11.200advice for the next 30 years. And you tell me what we should do. And I said, well, we need to
00:50:16.760sue our people and they'll like it. We'll create an economic alternative to get paid to leave our
00:50:22.240tree standing, therefore protecting our subsistence and commercial fishing way of life.
00:50:26.740Because those trees have a right to life just like we do. And they happen to be the cathedral
00:50:31.340to our wild salmon. So clearly Diana had a huge impact on me and the One Million Redwoods Project.
00:50:41.460I'd say she was and has been one of the most influential people behind how I view reforestation, restoration, and how we're moving forward with this biomimetic reforestation initiative that is the One Million Redwoods Project.
00:51:03.520I always say that it is a discussion that can happen at the kitchen table.
00:51:08.200I don't want it to be a discussion that's happening in the ivory tower of any university.
00:51:14.560I want ordinary people to hear the call of the forest and to have it ringing in their hearts so that the children will listen to them
00:51:24.340and that the children will go out and look at the species and also respect the biodiversity around them and hear that call.
00:51:33.420This is the global garden that we all share.
00:51:37.120We all share in its biodiversity, and we will all hold hands to protect it across the world.
00:51:44.120And how we're going to do that is by the bio-plan.
00:51:47.960Now, the bio-plan, if you read my works, you will see that we have inherited the mantle of nature.
00:51:55.240We have inherited a certain kind of divinity of life.
00:51:59.840And the divinity of life is spelt in the piano of our DNA and how that piano is played in a zero and one pattern of thinking, which is the same as your computer systems.
00:52:15.200It's zero and one in all kinds of ways.
00:52:18.980And it's a binomial pattern, a fractal binomial pattern that is in your body.
00:52:25.080It's just like the falling of leaves of a tree.
00:53:39.180I cannot wait to hopefully one day go up in a tree with her and study epiphytes and mosses
00:53:45.180losses and carbon sequestration and all of the incredible things that she has been studying for
00:53:52.480so long. Over the long time span of the evolution of green plants, what has evolved is that plants
00:54:00.020have become incredibly efficient converters and storers of that sunlight energy through
00:54:06.160photosynthesis into their leaves and other living parts and dead parts of their structures. And that
00:54:11.440that carbon that's, say, manufactured in a leaf of a redwood will endure for some period of time,
00:54:17.540maybe from three to 10 years as a single needle or leaf. But at some point, it will age just like
00:54:23.580we do. And that packet of carbon that's been stored in that leaf will fall to the forest floor
00:54:28.620thanks to the presence of microbes that are able to decompose and move that carbon from the leaf
00:54:34.840into other forms, trees are then able to use those nutrients to create more structures,
00:54:41.100to create more leaves, to harvest more energy.
00:54:43.920And so I think that when we think about the carbon cycle, we have to think about how long
00:54:49.700is carbon stored in these different parts of a tree's structure?
00:54:54.220And how long is it stored in, say, calcium carbonate deposits in a desert ecosystem?
00:55:00.280and how long has it been stored in oil reserves down far underneath the forest floor that was
00:55:05.900created during the Cretaceous. So when we think about carbon cycling, we have to think about not
00:55:10.760only how much is stored, how apparent it is, but how long will it be immobilized? How long will that
00:55:16.680carbon dioxide that's been taken out of the air, thanks to photosynthesis? And so when you think
00:55:21.860about a fast growing tree in New England, for example, a maple tree that grows very quickly,
00:55:26.940It dies within 80 years and is recycled.
00:55:30.360That carbon is not staying immobilized very long.
00:55:33.500But when you look at a long-life tree like the redwoods that you're so protective of
00:55:38.100and trying to help along, I think that carbon is being stored for a much longer time period.
00:55:44.240So this idea of carbon cycling is sort of easy to explain when you have this theoretical
00:55:49.600kind of conceptual idea of how carbon is made, stored, and moved around.
00:55:53.900But when you want to tweak the system to remove carbon dioxide, then there are a lot of other factors, both biological and social and cultural, that we have to think about in order to maximize the amount of carbon dioxide that's taken out of the atmosphere.
00:56:07.660here. I feel like it was some cosmic coincidence that I was able to speak with Peter Wellenbin
00:56:14.740and Janine Benyus right after the One Million Redwoods Kickstarter wrapped up because as I was
00:56:20.580in the depth of the research trying to figure out how to get out of the reforestation industrial
00:56:27.060complex, Peter was this light on biomimetic reforestation, how to look at the forest in
00:56:34.140these family bands and really understand that I was on the right path with thinking about the
00:56:40.640understory plants and the fungi and the whole forest as a community rather than this monocrop
00:56:46.100plantation reforestation methods that's usually used and used over millions of acres actually
00:56:52.680so I just give so much credit to Peter and Nalini and Diana and Janine for really shaping the way
00:57:01.020that I understand reforestation and how to be really innovative moving forward and not just
00:57:06.540getting stuck in these conventional ways that are honestly really disruptive to the forest.
00:57:11.280Some trees like to live on their own because there are trees of the savannah of grasslands
00:57:16.240and there are usually no neighboring trees. So there are some trees like willows or some
00:57:22.740birch tree species or apple trees, cherry trees, which used to live on their own. But in general,
00:57:30.120in the most woodlands with the tree species like Douglas fir or sequoia
00:57:35.120or in our region, beech trees, oaks, azer, and so on.
00:57:39.920They used to live in family bands, and there's a very good reason for that.
00:57:45.480A single tree knows instinctively, I'm not a forest.
00:57:48.960And just as a forest, you can cool down together on a hot summer day.
00:57:53.340For example, trees are sweating together.
00:57:55.740A beech tree is consuming as much as 500 liters of water per day.
00:58:02.840And that means that the air gets very humid, much cooler.
00:58:08.380The discoveries from the University of Aachen found out that the temperature difference
00:58:14.120from managed beech tree forest to unmanaged beech tree forest is 3 degrees Celsius in
00:58:20.960summertime and to conifer plantations, much more.
00:58:25.260So the trees can cool down together, can create their own climate.
00:58:30.980And when we think about climate change, what climate change does to ecosystems, then I would say the damage would be not that big when we wouldn't manage that intensive forest.
00:58:42.500Because every tree you cut, you fell, cause a damage because you have a gap in the canopy, there comes sunlight in, the air gets warmer, the air gets drier, and that's stress for the trees.
01:05:33.900I mean, they know what color therapy does. You know, why are these elementary schools and why are they the colors? Why are they just bland beiges and grays? They already know all the psychologists know what these do to your psyche. You know, you're in a fenced area. You're in a place with little windows. You know, you're already confined.
01:05:54.020So a lot of times you look and it's like, wow, these kids, they're already in prison.
01:05:59.300So when they go to prison, it feels like normal.
01:06:02.480So it's like, but I have a real simple saying, it's beauty in, beauty out.
01:06:06.540If you put beauty into a space that has none, that's what you're going to get out of it.
01:06:11.480It's the same thing that you put into your body.
01:06:13.920If you put healthy, nutritious, vibrant, alive food in your body, that's what you're going
01:06:20.080to get instead of the dead things instead of the chemicals that we are putting into our bodies
01:06:24.980and that's what I my garden in front of my house is one of the biggest social experiments that you
01:06:31.140could do because it shows how all of a sudden people see concrete and asphalt and trash and
01:06:37.720then you see this whoa this is an almond tree this is a banana tree in the middle of south
01:06:42.920central on the street with fruiting bananas on it you realize that we're not here alone that we
01:06:48.480everything on this planet and the planet is alive everything around you is alive and you were saying
01:06:55.220about the plants calling you yes there's videos online where people have connected electrodes to
01:07:02.160the plants and amplified the sounds that they're giving off and every plant is given off a separate
01:08:56.780It would be really ironic and horrible if I spent all of my time in boardrooms trying to fight for clean water and clean environments and for our families and then never actually got to do that myself.
01:09:09.280So I make a conscious effort to be in season and to put those values as a priority and kind of schedule my calls and my work around making sure that I'm also harvesting salmon and I'm harvesting medicines and I'm going to birthday dinners with family and I'm doing these things that ground me and strengthen me and fuel me.
01:09:29.840When I go out to these communities and Indigenous people come, I have received so much medicine from different Indigenous people from territories from all over who will come to me and thank me for speaking out.
01:09:40.660And they'll give me medicine to smudge or tease or whatever it is that they may have to share and say, make sure you take care of yourself.
01:09:48.660Here's something from the land from here to help you in your journey.
01:09:52.660They know that this work comes with great personal sacrifice also.
01:09:56.940so reverend kalani is definitely one of my heroes this conversation with him
01:10:04.540was so fantastic i love his voice i love his passion i love his humor and i really love how
01:10:13.300he doesn't want us to be victims and to flip the script on natural disasters because it's true
01:10:18.640they're only going to get more and more intense and i think leaders like kalani are so important
01:10:24.740right now to look to to be guided by people who really understand the complexity of the situation
01:10:31.180and have so much energy to lead us forward? They're not disasters. These are actually
01:10:40.380natural processes. And then it's only a disaster or a hazard because people with their stuff
01:10:49.900are standing in the way. It's a disaster now only because we put the Walmart there.
01:10:57.180So these natural processes, they fluctuate like all other events in life. They're on an arc,
01:11:06.140a curb, a natural cycle of positive and negative influence. So some years they will be greater,
01:11:13.300Some years it will be less. But overall climate change suggests that the less is getting lesser and the more is getting more, if you know what I mean.
01:11:26.860So we're going to see greater, hotter, longer duration and higher impact events and less throttling down to smaller events now in the cycle because where we are as climate is impacted by our actions and activities.
01:11:45.940that being said we really do need to prepare our communities and we need to do it in a way
01:11:53.120that makes us not victims but responders you know i mean so that we don't feel like
01:12:00.200we're dangling at the end of a leash waiting to be supplied something by some emergency service
01:12:07.780contractor but rather that we're definitely in control of our situation and able to provide
01:12:15.400for ourselves and that's a whole shift in consciousness. While you fight the bad guys
01:12:24.120you got to fight the bad guys girl you know because if you don't fight the bad guys they
01:12:27.380will run over you so you know I continued work obviously on on opposition to mega projects0.96
01:12:33.680stupid infrastructure projects like the line three pipeline that we are facing now 915,0000.88
01:12:39.620barrels a day that they want to bring through northern Minnesota. Last year we defeated a1.00
01:12:44.580similar pipeline in the same territory. That was called the Sandpiper. We defeated them in
01:12:50.420Minnesota and now they are back. There are already hundreds of people camping on the proposed route
01:12:55.480in Minnesota. And if they issue that permit, there'll be thousands of people. And I don't
01:12:59.700think that Minnesota is North Dakota. They do not want essentially a civil war, which is what
01:13:03.960they're going to get if they actually issue that permit. They should ship those pipes to Flint,0.59
01:13:08.520to Flint, Michigan, a place that hasn't had a functioning water system for about 1200 days.
01:13:14.580But at the same time, I want to make where we're going.
01:13:17.740And I don't even call it the alternative.
01:13:49.440And I have so much respect to those who we've had on the podcast who are willing to put
01:13:55.060their bodies on the line and willing to really physically stand up for what's right and not
01:14:01.020just get comfortable and hide behind their computer screens or in their safe little homes
01:14:06.640because honestly, none of us are safe.
01:14:08.720So I really challenge myself as well as all of us to get braver and to really know that
01:14:15.380at some point we're all going to be called upon to stand up and to be on the front lines.
01:14:22.320I want to say that Terry is one of my heroes, but I realize that I want to say that about
01:14:27.260every single person who comes on this show, but I do feel like Terry and I connected in
01:14:32.700a way that was so beautiful. And I felt her and I really felt the land speak through her.
01:14:41.400And I always think of her when I think of the Red Rocks of Utah, because I feel like she has
01:14:47.960so much to teach me about sacred rage and how to be a land protector. Honestly, I've taken hope out
01:14:55.940of my vocabulary. It's not that I'm not hopeful, it's that I don't think it's helpful. And rather
01:15:01.380than hope, I choose to think about faith. I have tremendous faith in our capacity to change. I have
01:15:08.320tremendous faith in the power of consciousness. I have tremendous faith in the works of people
01:15:15.580to make very quick changes. But we're up against a capitalistic society, not just the United States,
01:15:25.460but China and every other country that wants the same kind of lifestyle that we have.
01:15:32.080So when Donald Trump says that the G20 gathering, you know, Western civilization is at risk, he's right, but not in the way that he thinks.
01:15:41.320You know, and he said our lifestyle is at risk.
01:16:13.040We're in denial of where we find ourselves now
01:16:16.280and that there is a real world and it is really dying right now.
01:16:19.980And what concerns me most are those that have no voice.
01:16:22.880And those are the birds, those are the plants, those are the moths, those are the elephants, all of the creatures among us who are struggling. And that's what I'm concerned about.
01:16:34.260i met nemo at cop 21 in paris with my dear friend jade beget and the indigenous environmental
01:16:44.720network and i was at this rights of mother nature tribunal and he was on the stage with some other
01:16:50.360incredible activist and i just was so moved by him that i waited till the very end of the event
01:16:56.400and he was standing alone for just a split second and i ran up to him and at that point we made a
01:17:02.200connection and it was a dream of mine to get him on the podcast actually and it took a few years
01:17:07.200but when I finally was able to connect with him again I am just I am just beyond amazed by his0.60
01:17:16.400strength to go through what he goes through every year in Nigeria to think that there's a spill
01:17:22.240an oil spill the size of Exxon Mobil that happens every year there in their delta which once was a
01:17:28.960pristine beautiful ecosystem and the strength that he has to keep going for his land and for
01:17:34.160his people i have so much respect for him memory is a storehouse for creativity for innovation
01:17:42.300because the truly innovative human is one that lives in harmony with nature
01:17:50.020fighting nature is clearly the pathway to failure because nature can defend herself
01:18:00.860nature can actually do without us we're not masters of the universe just a part of a great
01:18:09.960complexity of beings around us and beings within us this clearly is the way to the future we have
01:18:18.180to go back to the past. And the past is not a cake. The past is innovation, is harmony. The past
01:18:26.400is a recovery of solidarity. The Colorado Plateau, that's another story. You know, if we had a Ravens
01:18:35.460point of view, an aerial view, it looks like an exposed nervous system with all the infrastructure,
01:18:40.820the roads, the pads, the oil and gas rigs, the flares at night. It's a heartbreak. You know,
01:18:47.440you go into the Uintah Basin, and it's worse. You see fracking, infant mortality rate has
01:18:54.120skyrocketed because of fracking, water poisoned in states like Wyoming. Again, it's connecting
01:19:01.400the dots. It's not just one community. But when you start looking at the collective in the interior
01:19:07.360west, I can't believe what I'm seeing just in my lifetime. Again, I think it's why public lands
01:19:14.880matter so much, Ayana. They're breathing spaces in a society that is increasingly holding its
01:19:22.440breath. So I do think we have to fight for these lands. And I'm so encouraged in that this is
01:19:30.680front and center of a new conversation. There's people in the East that have no knowledge of
01:19:35.960what public lands are because it's privatized in the East. They don't exist. Same with the Midwest.
01:19:42.200They've been plowed under. So I think people are finally coming to understand that we have a great heritage. These are not just public lands, but they're our public stories, our natural histories and our cultural histories. And that's very, very powerful to the identities of Americans.
01:20:01.600i so appreciate jackie in the way that she speaks about the separation of people and land
01:20:11.680and of course there is now a lot of talks luckily around reparations and what does it mean to
01:20:18.720reunite people with their land whether that's indigenous people or reparations for people of
01:20:25.440color i think about queen kwet and the gulagichi nation in the east coast and i think this is a
01:20:32.020really huge topic that we all need to be sitting with is how can people start to have that access
01:20:39.440and then build relationships that are in harmony that aren't just extractive of course the devil
01:20:45.800becomes in the detail so as we talk about a systemic transformation from a society that's
01:20:52.100built on principles and practices where there are inherently winners and losers, where kind of
01:20:59.360capitalism means that there's capitalization, and then there are those who are capitalized upon.
01:21:06.800And it's usually, you know, of course, through the reckless extraction and usage of natural
01:21:11.540resources. And then we've had this extraction of people, and then the use and abuse of people
01:21:20.560through systemic oppression. And so how do we really affirm human rights and earth rights as
01:21:28.100we move forward? And how do we affect a systemic transformation where the vision of people most
01:21:36.660impacted will be things like everyone having access to clean air, clean water, uncontaminated
01:21:42.840land and the commons in terms of a place called home. In the Antiquities Act of 1906, there is
01:21:50.580only authority for the president to designate. And so for him to do anything more or do anything
01:21:56.820else, he's going to need the backing of the entire Congress to do that. So we feel really confident
01:22:03.500that actually what he's doing is not legal in a court of law. You can see that how they snuck in
01:22:11.540drilling into the arctic national wildlife refuge up in alaska with through the tax bill
01:22:18.340and that received very little fanfare or attention because the parties are playing up the whole tax
01:22:25.640cut that people are getting money but you know the money doesn't come from nowhere somebody pays for
01:22:31.120it and you know indigenous people indigenous lands that are paying for it again we've had0.63
01:22:37.240the Gwich'in relatives come all the way to D.C. to try to protest this whole action and this
01:22:42.680inclusion of the drilling of their lands in that bill. And unfortunately, that bill has passed.0.76
01:22:49.760So now we're thinking about what does that mean? More opportunities to destroy and come in and
01:22:57.280develop these places that have no business being developed. They should be left alone the way that
01:23:02.220they are oh faith jamil and princess loopjack yes they were another two allies that i met during cop
01:23:12.10021 in paris again i saw faith speak and i remember literally feeling the land the arctic the caribou
01:23:20.440speak through her through their voices and they are such warrioresses for this planet i see them
01:23:27.700traveling and speaking in washington dc to fight for the arctic and i just love how the guachin 20
01:23:34.940plus years ago decided then and there that they were not going to give into corporate interest
01:23:39.240that they were going to commit and fight for their land and for their people it's an ecosystem that
01:23:44.820we all need to be focused on the arctic is ground zero in many ways and trump just opened it for
01:23:52.320drilling and losing the arctic and the space that it provides so many of our kin is
01:24:01.840indescribable and irreplaceable we believe if anything happens to the caribou it happens to
01:24:09.420the quichin and vice versa we have old songs old dances that tell of our relationship with the
01:24:19.480caribou. We still use all the bones to create tools that we need. We still make clothing
01:24:29.580from the hides. When the caribou's in our territories, we honor the caribou with our hunt,
01:24:38.120and then that feeds us all through the winter, and we still live like that.
01:24:44.700it's a very very powerful relationship and it's a very powerful time when you're out on the land
01:24:51.960it's like all of your senses reawaken the place that is a threat right now is the biological heart
01:25:02.000of the refuge system that's the place where the caribou give birth to their young and
01:25:10.660It's the only safe place that this herd, the porcupine caribou herd, will go to give birth to their young.
01:25:21.320If the oil rigs are allowed to come in, it will displace them from their nursery, basically.
01:25:31.640That place is perfect for the caribou to use as their birthing grounds because the high winds keep mosquitoes away at that time.
01:25:40.660It's a safe area from predators because it's a coastal plain.
01:27:53.940How are you going to be able to find strength every day?
01:27:58.720The only way that you're going to do that is if you go out and you take on those powers that be.
01:28:04.400You make those decisions for yourself and your people and your communities.
01:28:09.360And you build these restoration funds.
01:28:11.360You demand that government and industry pay these restoration funds because it's the only way that we're going to restore what has been lost and preserve what we still have.0.65
01:28:21.540And right now, the majority of land that has fossil fuels under it just happens to have Native people standing on it.0.70
01:28:29.760And so if we were to protect Native rights around the world, we would protect some of the last wild green spaces we have on planet Earth.0.70
01:28:38.320But it's going to take the people to believe in themselves and to believe in the planet.1.00
01:28:44.620We have a duty to stop this violence against the earth.
01:28:49.780We have a duty to stop the creation of what I call a seed slavery and a food dictatorship.
01:28:56.260To push poisons everywhere, genetic contamination and pollution everywhere,0.52
01:29:01.180just so one company can harvest super profits through collection of royalties,0.96
01:29:06.300often illegal, as in the case of India, what has pushed the cotton farmers to suicide.0.94
01:29:11.320So we are talking about an ecocidal and genocidal system.0.99
01:29:15.300Ecocidal because it is destroying biodiversity.
01:29:18.700Genocidal because humans are part of that web of biodiversity.