B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Over 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. Each one reflects a rich ecosystem of ideas – seeds that grow into a multitude of worldviews. Today, many of these immeasurably precious knowledge systems are endangered – often spoken by just a handful of people. We hear from two Indigenous language champions, Jeannette Armstrong and Rowen White. They reflect on the words, stories, songs and ideas that influence our very conception of nature, and our place within it.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

Featuring

Jeannette Armstrong, Ph.D., (Okanagan) is an Indigenous author, teacher, ecologist, and a culture bearer for her Native language. She is also Co-founder of the En’owkin Centre.

Rowen White (Mohawk) is a seed keeper and farmer, and part of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. She operates a living seed bank called Sierra Seeds.

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
• Produced by: Cathy Edwards
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Associate Producer: Emily Harris
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
• Program Engineers: Kaleb Wentzel Fisher and Emily Harris
• Producer: Teo Grossman
• Graphic Designer: Megan Howe

Resources

En’owkin Centre

Indigenous Seed Keepers Network

Sierra Seeds

Language Keepers: The Struggle for Indigenous Language Survival in California

Hand Talk, Native American Sign Language

Native Seed Rematriation

This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Over 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. Each one reflects a rich ecosystem of ideas, thousands of different ways of seeing and thinking – thousands of worldviews.Today, many of these precious knowledge systems are endangered – often spoken by just a handful of people. 

We hear from two Indigenous language champions, Jeannette Armstrong and Rowen White. They reflect on the words, stories, songs, and ideas that influence our very conception of nature and our place within it.

Language is our main tool for understanding ourselves and the universe. Different languages conceptualise and categorise reality in diverse ways. For example, in English, words like “nature” and “wildlife” define human beings as separate from the so-called “environment.” Other languages instead speak to our oneness with the web of life. 

When our lives are disconnected from nature, the words and stories we have to describe it become impoverished. Language can even do violence to nature – like the phrase ‘natural resources’ that views the environment as a thing – a commodity to exploit.

On the other hand, it seems likely that the more a language can embody the richness of nature, the better its speakers can perceive nature’s ways. If a language encodes kinship, connection, and reciprocity with the natural world, it might encourage a relationship of respect and humility. 

Indigenous languages and cultures reflect historically intimate connections to the natural world and local landscapes. There’s of course huge diversity among such cultures, forming what the anthropologist Wade Davis calls the “Ethnosphere.” He characterizes this as “all the thoughts and dreams and ideas and beliefs and intuitions, myths brought into being since the beginning of time.”

Sustaining this rich diversity of linguistic worldviews is more important than ever. Languages deeply rooted in the reciprocal human relationship with nature may contain what are sometimes called “the Original Instructions” for how to live as a good human being in a way that lasts.

Jeannette Armstrong (JA): My name is Lax̌lax̌tkʷ. And it means the sound and the sparkle of the water. And that water name really has to do with how we think about how we reflect and the way that the current runs through our land and through our veins. My English name’s Jeannette Armstrong and I’m from the Okanagan, I’m Sylix, and I’m a fluent speaker of the Okanagan Nsyilxcәn language.

Host: Dr. Jeannette Armstrong is an Indigenous author, teacher, ecologist – and a culture bearer for her native language.
Nsyilxcәn is spoken today by up to 800 people in the Okanagan Valley in Southwest Canada. Jeannette is profoundly aware of the language’s connection to the land where it’s been developing for thousands of years.

JA: The language comes from the land, and the land has an intelligence in the way that it organized itself over the millions of years that the living things from that place in those conditions had to do. And so as an Indigenous person, I know that our people were in that place for at least 12,000 years, from all of the archaeology but also from our own stories. We have oral traditions that go back to when our land was under water. And so that part, in terms of our language, is an incredible document of our learning and our science and our knowledge and our wisdom over those years in that particular place. And so every Indigenous nation has that. So language is more important, I think, in this day and age than we can really fathom.

Host: Indigenous languages co-evolve with the landscapes where their speakers live. They are systems of knowledge, beliefs, and values that reflect those local ecosystems. They hold detailed ecological knowledge, as well as worldviews very different from those of settlers arriving from elsewhere. Given the precipitous degradation of nature now threatening the habitability of Earth, paying attention to cultures connected to local landscapes may help heal the harms.

JA: The way that nature is thought about needs to change, and there needs to be a transformation in terms of how we learn about nature and how we engage with nature, and how we come to understand that we are nature. Thinking about how that intelligence has been organizing a way for all life to be.

And our intelligence needs to match that intelligence. Our intelligence needs to find ways to understand and speak about that intelligence so that we can frame that in terms of our responsibilities. And philosophically be able to say our society understands the way that we have to be in this place and in that place and in that place, each place being different. And that is the essence of indigenousness, right? In terms of how to be a part of a place in a respectful and regenerative way, is the foundational idea behind being Indigenous.

Rowen White (RW): [SINGING]

This song was gifted to me by a beautiful Anishinaabe woman named Doreen Day[ph], who is a midwife and a water protector, and this particular song reminds us that we as seed keepers, we are plant midwives. The song, in English, if you can even translate it a little bit, says “come in your own time, sacred seed. We humbly implore you that you might give us good life.”And that sets us in good relationship with our seed relatives, because we remember that we are on seed time; we’re on plant time; we’re on land time. We’re not on human time. 

[Speaking in Mohawk language] My English name is Rowen White. My Mohawk name is Kanienten:hawi, which means ‘she carries the snow.’ I’m Snipe Clan from a small Mohawk community called Akwesasne, I come from a long, long line of people who tended the earth. That lineage was severed through the violence of residential schools. 

But I’m a mother. I’m a daughter. I’m a sibling. I’m a twin. I’m a seed keeper and a farmer. And in our language, we don’t necessarily have labels for all that. I’m a Mohawk woman. Right? I’m [Mohawk term], people of the Earth. I’ve thankfully been an apprentice to my plant relatives, my ancestral plant relatives for almost three decades now.

I am one of many who’s responsible for ensuring that this work is intergenerational, and that we’re caring for those seed stewards who are coming in the next generations, and tending to that cultural memory that’s so critical, so essential to this beautiful, radical, irresistible world that we’re seeding in this time.

Host: Rowen White is part of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, and she operates a living seed bank called Sierra Seeds. Her work as a seed keeper and farmer nourishes deep cultural connections to the land, as well as to her ancestors and descendants. Such connections, Rowen believes, are best expressed in Indigenous languages.

RW: I’m feeling really tired of us being asked to sit at the colonial table. Right? And I’m tired of feeling like we have to adopt and squeeze and squish ourselves into these words and into these frameworks. And so I think it’s time to flip it; it’s time for us not to fit into your words, into your English language, but it’s time for you to learn our languages, and to try and understand our relationality and our kinship and the words that we have to describe our beautiful reciprocal relationship with the Earth, with our more-than-human relatives, with our ancestors, with our descendants, the way that we see ourselves in time that’s not bound and squared up and linear.

And so I often balk at the terms “law” or even “sovereignty”. It’s speaking to power dynamics and to relationships and ways of being that are not Indigenous. Right? It’s not how we are with one another. It’s not how we are with our seeds and with our waters and with our minerals and with the land, right?

I have to go back to some of the original stories that have been carried down through lineages that those seeds have heard for generations. Those creation stories, they never ended. They continue to unfurl each and every season. The responsibilities that they encode, the relationality that they encode, are coming alive in every moment throughout our ceremonial cycles. And the ceremonies are those moments in time where we meet those relatives and we renew those agreements and those commitments to them.

Host: As human beings, words, songs, and stories are the lens through which our reality is filtered. They color how we perceive our environment. Jeannette Armstrong is fascinated by the process of how language both reflects and shapes worldviews. As a scholar of her native language, she pores in minute detail over its words and structures. She pays special attention to how the language conveys the relationships between Syilx people and the natural world.

JA: Part of my PhD was to examine that idea about our relationship and our ethical framework as a result of that relationship. And so, I think about how words like “ecology”, “environment”, “resources”, “ecosystems”, and I think about what in my language is parallel to that.

So we have a word that describes what might be closest to “environment” or “ecological systems”, but I think it’s broader than that. We use the word tmixw, and that word is also connected in to the way that we think about the land, right, the actual physical landscape. The word tmixw is really a word I spent a lot of time looking at, because in the middle of the word “mi” is used many times to construct other words. So, for instance, knowledge, that’s [Nsyilxcәn term]. [Nsyilxcәn term], knowledge of the land. We say [Nsyilxcәn term], what we have learned from other people’s stories.

So that small meaning mi is in the word tmixw. Something that’s knowable—a truth. And then if you combine the “mi” with the last part of the sound “mixw” which is movement, any kind of movement makes that sound in the universe or in our land, in the wind, and everything else.

And so tmixw means “everything that can move, and that is alive”. We are tmixw. It’s not just the people that’s living now. All of the humans that have ever lived and all of the humans that are ever going to be. The same thing with every butterfly. Everything that’s living. So the life force is what tmixw is, from the past and the present, and on into the future. And so it’s a profound idea. So when you combine that with [Nsyilxcәn term], which is our word for everything that you see out there, including the water and the mountains and the soil and the rocks and the air and the stars and all of the things in every way that they interact, that’s [Nsyilxcәn term] 

That’s really a profound description in one word of the living environment and the ecosystems, and all of those things that are separately looked at in different science pockets, right, in different categories.

Host: For Jeannette, the word “tmixw” conjures up a very different vision from the English word “environment.” That difference, she believes, reverberates in the ethical relationship Syilx people have to the world around them. After the break, we’ll hear how words are woven into stories, songs and ceremonies to mediate balanced relationships between humans and other-than-humans. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

MUSIC BREAK (00:30)

Host: You can explore our extensive media collection about Indigenous perspectives and practices across a broad range of issues from ecological restoration and Traditional Ecological Knowledge to approaches to human rights and the rights of nature at bioneers.org, or call 1-877-BIONEER to learn more…

English is the most widely spoken language on Earth, and the fact that it contains a worldview has consequences – world views create worlds. The ecological ravages and human dislocations caused by corporate economic globalization are by their very nature anathema to local communities and localized economies. Disconnection from place is at the root of many global crises.

In contrast, Indigenous languages and cultures are more firmly rooted to their specific places, and they speak to consciously reciprocal relationships with those places. For example, Jeannette Armstrong explains how the four main foods her people rely on have deep resonance within the culture.

JA: We harvest all throughout our land throughout the year. And we have four food ceremonies, our main laws are related to those four chiefs, we call them, the chief foods, they’re caretakers of all the other things that depend on them. If they’re gone, then the land is really in trouble.

Host: Syilx tradition conceptualizes their four most important foods as Chiefs, whom they honor in ceremonies. Not only do these foods directly sustain the Syilx people, but their life histories inform and enrich their philosophy.

JA: The Chief Bitterroot is one of the Chiefs that we look after. The bitterroot — which stays in one place underground and produces everything it needs from that one place— it represents a certain way of thinking about how  we can draw from the place that we’re at, from all directions to be able to do that. So, the laws are about stability.

On the other hand, the opposite dynamic to the Bitterroot we call Chief [WORD in her language], and that’s represented by the Chinook salmon. If we understand the Chinook salmon, it goes out down into the rivers, all the way out to the ocean. And when it comes back, it’s like 100 pounds, right? It’s huge. And it brings back all that wealth that our land doesn’t have from somewhere else, to bring back that food to us, that food to the bear, that food to the wolves, that food to all the things, even the trees benefit from it. 

That’s a whole different way of being and doing things that can benefit our communities, our land, all the living things, but it has to be in balance with the one that is only using the local resources. 

So the four chiefs have all different aspects that they balance out. And so those four chiefs and those four ceremonies that we hold every year to remind ourselves, to remind the people that we are an ethical people, we are a responsible people. We’re responsible to all of these living things that give us this understanding of what a balanced system is, what a sustainable system is, what a whole system is that we’re a part of.

Host: Ceremonies like these have priceless value. They attune their participants to nature’s wisdom. They heighten a shared sense of responsibility for protecting and sustaining the land and web of life.

Such traditions are sorely lacking around the world today and Jeannette Armstrong is keenly aware how critical it is to pass the language, along with its ceremonies and stories, onto future generations. Teaching the Nsyilxcәn language to children, she believes, is inextricable from learning about Okanagan land.

A lot of people lost our language, so I have been working all my life to try to give back, because I was lucky enough to wake up knowing it, right? There are children that can grow up in the Okanagan never know the animals and plants and butterflies and insects, and all of those things out there. And that’s sad. 

The impact as an Indigenous person, of having that knowledge and how interconnected those relationships are, and how fragile in some places that those relationships are, I think that knowledge needs to be in every school, in every mind, and in every way possible.

Our knowledge is in our language, but it’s also outside of the classroom. It’s outside on the land. The land speaks to you, the land explains to you. If you can look at the structures and if you can look at some of those concepts that are there in the language. If you understand that structure, then you’re never going to see the land in the same way; you’re never going to see a living thing in the same way.

So, a lot of the work that we’re doing is restoration work because that’s, for our land, it’s been absolutely devastated. And so, a lot of the young people are learning restoration and learning all the plants and learning all the things that are host to those plants, and all the animals that depend on those plants. So, it’s not just regenerating the plant, it’s regenerating all the pollinators and all the birds that use it, and all the different animals that browse on it. So, they’re learning all of those things in the language, and they’re learning the whole system.

Host: Learning the language at the same time as restoring the land is a holistic foundation for children learning how to relate to their Okanagan surroundings. Yet today, we all live in a globalized, and rapidly changing world. Jeannette believes that speaking the language in all contexts is crucial for sustaining Indigenous cultures – as well as making a transformative impact on the wider society.

JA: Language has to be alive, to be spoken in every context, in order for it to survive. It has to be contextualized into the modern world. And so, the Syilx people, as well as other Indigenous people, are making sure that it’s breaking the walls down in the learning institutions, like universities and colleges, where knowledge production is happening on an everyday level. So, our knowledge production has to be there in the language, and it can’t be done from an anthropological sense or a linguist sense in terms of looking at the grammar and how it works as some kind of unique oddity. It has to be there in terms of learning science, learning the land, learning society, learning the humanities, learning the arts, and so on.

Host: When a language is lost, so too is the vast collection of scientific and cultural wisdom encoded within it. Jeannette is a native speaker of her mother tongue, but countless people have lost their ancestral languages through the pressures of cultural assimilation and dislocation. 

For example, the residential school systems of 19th and 20th century Canada and the United States isolated Indigenous children from their families and forced them to speak English in a deliberate and violent act of cultural erasure.

Rowen White’s grandmother went through this horrific so-called school system. As a result, Rowen did not learn her family’s language, Mohawk, till later in life. She’s now dedicated to revitalizing the language intergenerationally. Like Jeannette, Rowen knows the powerful synergy of learning the language while working directly with nature.

RW: We’re creating safe places for our young people, places free of shame, of the shame of what it feels like to be a Native person who doesn’t speak your language. It’s okay. It’s okay to be an adult Indigenous person from wherever you come from, who doesn’t know the language because there are violences that have come between us and that. 

It’s okay not to know the language, and we can create safe places with our food relatives, our water relatives, our more-than-human kin to make it safe so that we can rehydrate that on our tongue again. The language wants to come back onto our tongues. Right? And agriculture and the work that we do with the land and with the seeds is a very somatic practice. It gets us out of our thinking mind.

And the work that we’re doing at Akwesasne Seed Hub, which is an initiative that many of us in our home community are working towards, is directly connected to our Freedom School, which is our Mohawk immersion school. And so, we’re doing this relational food landscape and seed sovereignty work in our community, and it’s inextricable from that language rehydration, right, and that revitalization.

Host: This work echoes Rowen’s own past: she found her way to her ancestral language along with the seeds she works with today. Seeds, songs, and stories – all bound up together.

RA: As a young woman who was desperately wanting to reconnect in meaningful ways to our traditional ways, our traditional languages, I was very fortunate to find the seeds and they found me. I really do believe that. 

In our language, we have this word called [Mohawk term], which is like the spiritual power, the collective spiritual power amongst all of us. And so, part of this work is about making choices to weave ourselves back into this interrelated web of nourishment in our own time, like the seed song that I sung, in our own time, following their instructions, their guidance.

I took my rage and my anger of something that was supposed to be my birthright, which was a bundle of seeds and songs and stories and understandings and language. And when I got that bundle, it was pretty empty. You know? And I was very angry about that as a young woman. 

But by the grace of the seeds and the land, I began to slowly fill that bundle back up again. You know, I had this question when I was 17: Who were the foods and seeds that fed my ancestors? I didn’t know their names. I didn’t know the songs that I could sing to them. But over the last couple decades, by the generosity of foresighted elders who kept seeds tucked away on dusty pantry shelves, knowing that in the right time the young people would come again and ask for these seeds, and for those songs, and for those teachings, and it would be safe again to plant these seeds again, I was able to fill that bundle of teachings, of cultural memory, so much so that my 19-year-old and my 17-year-old don’t have to ask that question anymore of what are those foods and seeds that fed my ancestors. And that’s in one generation that we can heal in that way. And so, when we get into the space of feeling like it’s too late, it’s not. In just one generation, we can heal in that way. 

And in my journey to restore power, like [Mohawk term], like power, like true power, the way that we understand it, in the middle of that sovereignty word is the word “reign”, and when we think about that word in the English language, we think of monarchy. Right? We think of top-down power. We think of all these different structures. That’s not the way we’re approaching this work anymore. Right?

And so, again, coming back around to needing new words to describe the choices that we’re making in order to restore health and vitality, and to have dignified resurgence inside of our communities that is long lasting. There’s one sort of call to action that has deep, deep ripples of impact on this Earth, is that for each and every one of you to ask that same question of yourselves. Who are the foods and seeds that fed my ancestors? And to remember that you descend from people who had beautifully storied reciprocal relationships with the foods and seeds, and they are aching for you to come home to them.

The post The Nature of Language and the Language of Nature appeared first on Bioneers.

California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. Recently, however, it has also become ground zero in the new “lithium gold rush”—the race to power the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage market. The immense quantities of lithium lurking beneath the surface have led to predictions that the region could provide a third of global demand. But who will benefit from the development of this precious resource?

In this excerpt from “Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future,” co-authors Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor examine the valley’s history, the economic and social structures behind its agricultural boom, and how they set the stage for today’s lithium development—raising critical questions about how the next boom will impact those who live and work in the valley. 

Chris Benner is the director of the Institute for Social Transformation and the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship, and a professor of environmental studies and sociology.

Manuel Pastor is the director of the Equity Research Institute (ERI) at the University of Southern California where he is also a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity and the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change.

Copyright © 2024 by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor. This excerpt originally appeared in “Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future,” published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

Full Steam Ahead

Stand at the shores of the Salton Sea, and you get both a hint of past glories and a foreboding sense of disrepair. The sea’s infamous North Shore Yacht Club was, at one time, reportedly the largest marina in the state of California. Once a vibrant locale for boating, skiing, and partying—where celebrities, including Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys, came to play—it was shuttered in the 1980s.1 After decades of the site’s neglect, a walk from its parking lot to the shores reveals a lack of, say, yachts as well as most other human activity. In recent years, it has been remade into an infrequently visited museum and a somewhat more utilized community center, an incomplete resurrection that reminds the visitor just how much the fortunes of the sea, like the body of water itself, have sometimes risen and sometimes fallen (only to rise again?).

The ebbs and flows are no surprise: the Salton Sea has consistently been a place of both problems and promise. It came into being as an accident, to be sure—an overflowing canal that spilled into a usually empty desert sink and, despite desperate efforts to stanch the influx, soon filled it up to create California’s largest lake. But even this not-so-immaculate conception came about because of a buoyant optimism—and a dedicated booster mentality not so far from that of today’s lithium enthusiasm—that diverting water from its usual traditional route to the Gulf of Mexico would allow agricultural enterprise to flourish in the Imperial Valley. Flourish it did—and with agricultural output in Imperial County in the early twentieth century booming, white settlers gathered the spoils but not the crops, establishing a demand for Mexican labor and Mexican subjugation that would become baked into the economic and social structure.2

This mix of owners and workers, of happy, well-positioned winners and quiet (but sometimes not) disgruntled losers, set the terms for political conflicts that persist today. Mexican workers were initially welcomed as being more docile than earlier waves of Asian immigrants, but this fantasy of labor pacification was challenged by a 1928 strike by the Mexican Labor Union of Imperial Valley.3 These events reflected a highly racialized pattern of established interests seeking to dominate economic prospects but being occasionally met by fierce protest—and the current contention over what is to happen with the future of the Lithium Valley is, in some ways, but a continuation of that past and perhaps a final reckoning with the imbalance that was struck in an earlier era.

Equally emblematic (and problematic) of the region’s history was the early reliance on the view that nature was to be dominated and controlled, not respected and revived. If not for the water that irrigated the fields—steered away from its natural course and rerouted to soak a desert—the land would have had little value. Massive transformation of the physical environment, rather than adaptation to the world as it is, has been the norm in the Valley. So too has neglect: when the Salton Sea became a site for agricultural runoff and salinity rose, little was done to reverse the damage to human and animal health. As lithium takes center stage—with the technology of extraction still in the testing stage but excitement running hot enough to lead some leaders to discount community concerns—we are seeing echoes of what has gone before: the same hype, the same skewed complexion of who holds power, and the same desire to conquer nature in the name of progress.

As lithium takes center stage—with the technology of extraction still in the testing stage but excitement running hot enough to lead some leaders to discount community concerns—we are seeing echoes of what has gone before: the same hype, the same skewed complexion of who holds power, and the same desire to conquer nature in the name of progress.

Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”4 The history of the Imperial Valley is a tale of adventurers and investors seeking to create their own self-selected circumstances, but always tangling with a history and geography that exists and constrains. If the old begets (or at least structures) the new, understanding what has happened is critical—and that means exploring the continual efforts toward exploiting land and labor that have been hallmarks of the area. For if Lithium Valley is to be a fount of a more hopeful Green New Deal, we need to uncover and address the truly raw deal that corporate interests and elite local leaders have habitually handed to so many of its residents.

No Longer at Ease

The current interest in Imperial Valley is not about celebrating the agricultural past or re-creating the romanticism of the recreational boom days—it is about taking what lies below the desert and using it to launch a new sort of “white gold rush.” So how is it that the Salton Sea region came to be sitting on an abundance of geothermal energy and lithium?

The geologic depression where the dramas of extraction and exploitation have been and will be staged lies mostly below sea level—at its lowest point, about 280 feet below the sea.5 The result of mountain uplift and subsidence, the Salton Trough—the depression that is filled in part by the Salton Sea—is at the very southernmost extension of the San Andreas Fault, the boundary between the North American Plate and Pacific Plate, which slowly slide past each other at a rate of 0.8 to 1.4 inches a year.6 It also sits at the very north end of the East Pacific Rise, an underwater mountain range that extends through the Gulf of California and southward, off the coast of South America.

This interaction of plates and rise results in the stretching and thinning of the earth’s crust, narrowing the connections between subsurface molten rock and the surface. The complex network of faults and fractures that lie beneath the Salton Trough provides pathways for hot brine to reach nearer the surface, creating one of the largest geothermal resources in the world.7 And just as being at the crossroads of these tectonic plates helps explain the geothermal resources of the area, being at the crossroads of river and sea helps explain the presence of lithium.

Once an underwater extension of the Gulf of California, the Salton Trough also lies near the delta of the Colorado River, whose outlet has meandered back and forth from the ocean to the Salton Trough with the shifting sands of time and the shifting sediments of the river delta. The region has received both ocean sediments and sediments from the Colorado River Basin for 5 million years or more, since roughly the time when the Colorado began to carve the Grand Canyon.8 The evaporating water helped concentrate lithium in the resulting layers of sedimentary rocks, which are now approximately 20,000 feet thick.9 The result: one of only a few places in the world where concentrations of lithium in geothermal brine is high enough to be economically viable with current (or at least, anticipated) technologies.10

This Land Is Our Land

Although lithium may wind up attracting new residents—just as irrigation in an earlier era led to a short-lived population boom—people have made their homes in this part of what is now known as Southern California for at least 12,000–14,000 years, and likely longer.11 In her masterful account of the evolution of the Salton Sea, Traci Brynne Voyles reminds us of what it was like when no one was trying to master the body of water or transform the surrounding land into a source of profit.12 Long before agribusiness, long before a lithium industry, long before a view that extraction was the ticket to prosperity, Native American tribes, the most prominent being a band of the Cahuilla nation, had found a way to live in harmony with the terrain.

Long before agribusiness, long before a lithium industry, long before a view that extraction was the ticket to prosperity, Native American tribes, the most prominent being a band of the Cahuilla nation, had found a way to live in harmony with the terrain.

As she notes, migration over long multigenerational cycles, in response to the changing terrain and the shifting waters, was the norm. Over the past two thousand years, the Salton Sink—the lowest part of the trough—has been filled six times due to flows from what would later be called the Colorado River. When that happened, local tribes retreated to higher ground; when the channel shifted back to what historically was the more normal exit into the Gulf of California and so the waters evaporated, the tribes returned to the receding shoreline.13 Modes of production and survival adjusted accordingly. In the years of flooding, people turned to eating fish and the birds that also came to eat the new bounty. In the years of a dry Salton Sink, beans harvested from mesquite trees were key to nutrition.14

The arrival of Spanish settlers to California, first in the 1600s in present-day Baja and later expanding north, could have disrupted this rhythm extensively, but the Cahuilla were partially spared as the Spanish were more interested in establishing a mission system closer to the coast. Both California and what would later be called the Imperial Valley passed to Mexico when that country-to-be’s war of independence severed the colonial ties to Spain in the early nineteenth century; this interregnum lasted around twenty-five years until the United States wrestled away California (and much of the rest of the Southwest), just in time for the territory’s midcentury Gold Rush and its quick declaration as a state of the Union.

The desert lands of the Cahuilla were initially thought to be just that—desert—and that may be one reason why the tribe was initially less subject to the diseases and overwork wrought by colonialism and neocolonialism, factors that created a flood of risk and oppression that helped reduce California’s overall Indian population from about 150,000 people in 1846 to about 30,000 in 1870.15 Gold was discovered near Twentynine Palms in 1874, and while it never produced a big haul, it is ironic that reservations for the Cahuilla people were created by executive order just two years later, successfully corralling the local population away from minerals and into controllable borders.16 Appropriately enough, the official land of one of the bands of Cahuilla, the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, included a large part of the Salton Sink, something that was consistent with historic cultural patterns but would be problematic when the Sink became the Sea.

Gold might not have been in abundance in this more desolate part of Southern California, but that did not stop the land fever that occupied so much of the Golden State at the time. Of course, to make the land valuable required water, something in short supply in a desert. While there were a few early efforts to bring water from the Colorado River, it was not until the 1890s that the strategy became more refined. Interestingly, the undertaking was private: speculators were betting that they could divert water without government help and thus capitalize on all the benefits.

Bait and Switch

The firm seeking to exploit the area, the California Development Company (CDC), figured out an innovative if legally questionable scheme. It developed a combination human-built and natural canal system that, starting in 1901, took water from the Colorado River a few miles north of Mexico and steered it west and south across the border to connect to the dry riverbed of the Alamo River, which then flowed eventually back north across the border to the Salton Sink. In the process, the water, which could not be privately owned under U.S. law, became the property of the CDC’s Mexican subsidiary and reentered the United States as private property not subject to U.S. regulations—quite a system for, as Voyles puts it, “laundering water the way mobsters laundered money.”17

Private capital also decided to rechristen the location, much as is happening in the current era of lithium. During this time, the CDC recruited the Canadian-born George Chaffey to help develop the irrigation scheme, an engineer who had become at least as well known for his marketing skills as the engineering skills he demonstrated in bringing irrigation and land development to other dry areas in Southern California and Australia.18 While he was certainly helpful with both system design and water laundering, among his other most important contributions was that he “changed the name of the region from the Colorado Desert to the Imperial Valley in order to attract settlers.”19 “Valley” certainly sounded more welcoming than “Desert,” and the first part of the moniker, derived from a separately formed Imperial Land Company that sought to colonize the area, stuck. It was eventually adopted as the official namesake for Imperial County, the last county to be incorporated into California in 1907.

In short, just as Lithium Valley today derives its new name from a get-rich scheme—albeit one with a nod toward environmental sustainability—its old name was also a marketing gimmick, but one without much in the way of redeeming environmental value.

In short, just as Lithium Valley today derives its new name from a get-rich scheme—albeit one with a nod toward environmental sustainability—its old name was also a marketing gimmick, but one without much in the way of redeeming environmental value. While private capital led the initial development efforts, federal authorities also wanted in. Sensing that the government might actually be able to provide cheaper water than profit-hungry speculators, local users supported this plan. The problem was that to assert federal control over the water being diverted, the portion of the Colorado River below Yuma, Arizona, needed to be declared a navigable waterway (in which case, private extraction of water was a crime and the feds had every right to push private investors aside). Various studies and expeditions could not successfully establish that finding, but the pressure of local users and financial stress led the CDC to sell irrigation developments to the federal government in an agreement that was inked in 1904.

Turns out that the deal was a bit of bait and switch: even as they were talking with the U.S. government, the owners of the CDC quietly negotiated an alternative deal with Mexico’s then-dictator Porfirio Díaz to replace the contemporary canal they’d built, which started in the United States before looping into the territory of our southern neighbor, with a cutoff that would actually start on the Mexican side. The advantage of the Mexican cutoff was that it would avoid the drama with the federal government altogether—that is, there would be no tapping into a potentially navigable river on American soil, and any claims the U.S. government might subsequently make about water coming back in from Mexico would get entangled in international treaties. It seemed like an elegant (albeit sneaky) solution, and Mexico was promised half of the flow as payment for its troubles.20 Troubles soon followed: summer floods in 1905 broke through the cutoff and, by that December, the entire contents of the Colorado River were flowing into the Salton Sink.21

The area’s Indigenous population had learned to live with floods from long water cycles, but this time no one, including the local Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians now constrained on their reservation, was prepared for such a sudden deluge.22 Overwhelmed by the disaster and their own failure to build a lasting fix, the canal builders turned for assistance to Southern Pacific, a railroad company eager to protect its transcontinental tracks from washing away. Nearly two years of failed attempts at redirecting the new tide ensued until early 1907, when a complicated system of levees finally did the job.23 The Sink was now a Sea, and in 1911, the legal troubles of the California Development Company—under pressure because of its role in the breach—led to the creation of the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), an agency that remains one of the region’s most powerful players to this day.24

A Boom for Who?

With IID securing water rights to the Colorado River, agricultural development began in earnest. In 1910, 176,000 acres of the Valley were under cultivation; in 1920, that figure was 311,000, a pace of growth that made it one of the most rapidly expanding counties in the state in terms of cultivated acreage.25 Population growth was similarly rapid: the resident count grew from around 13,600 inhabitants in 1910 to 43,500 in 1920.26 Large agribusiness received a further boost by the 1913 Alien Land Law, later significantly strengthened by the 1920 Alien Land Law—efforts which were aimed at sharply curtailing ownership opportunities for Japanese immigrants and thereby provided an opening for bigger firms to monopolize land.27

The boom in crops required labor, and Mexican workers filled the demand. Since landowners had every intention of generating wealth but no intention of sharing it, the growing number of frustrated Mexican workers responded with a strike in 1922. Militant in its tone but less effective in its implementation, the strike was easily derailed by a combination of modest wage hikes and the use of non-Mexican workers, including Japanese laborers who were facing limited options given the restrictions on buying or leasing land that were then biting as a result of California’s xenophobic Alien Land Laws.28 A subsequent labor conflict in 1928 was also Mexican-initiated; by this time, Mexico-origin workers made up 90 percent of those laboring in the fields. Labor action was encouraged by the Mexican consul, and reflected the discontent of not just migrant but U.S.-resident workers.29

Growers and local authorities teamed up to stop this new work stoppage, with the local sheriff expanding his troops by temporarily hiring field bosses to better follow the admonition of the board of supervisors to “arrest agitators.”30 Union leaders backed off from explicit calls to abandon the fields in order to avoid entanglements with the law, but workers did not get that message and stayed away for a few days. The lack of leadership and the active repression by authorities, however, led to disarray; the fields were soon back in action (and worker wage demands were quietly addressed, although other aspects of their nascent demands were not).

The importance of the strike was that it set the template for racialized and corporate domination in Imperial County.

The importance of the strike was that it set the template for racialized and corporate domination in Imperial County. By 1930, the first and only year that the Census enumerated Mexicans (that remained the case until 1980, when “Hispanic” became a new official category and “Mexicans” a subcategory), 21,618 Mexicans made up Imperial County’s total population of 60,903; another 3,214 residents were Indian, Chinese, or Japanese. Mexicans accounted for 6.5 percent of the state of California’s population but over a third of Imperial County, making this demographically the most Mexican of any county in California by far.31 This was very likely an undercount of the Mexican presence since the census enumeration was of residents and did not include the migrant workers who would swoop in during harvest; still, it helps to explain how the local powers’ suppression of the voice of Latinos and labor became woven into the region’s political DNA.

Left Behind in the Golden State

The structural template for the Valley was set in other ways as well. A more stable source of water—not subject to canal breaks and not wandering its way up from Mexico—was put in place during the 1930s as construction began on the All-American Canal, so named because it avoided any detours into Mexico even as it powered an agricultural economy that had many Mexicans detouring their own way to the

Imperial Valley. The first water was delivered from the canal in 1940, just in time for a boom in agricultural production that would be triggered by wartime demands. Between 1940 and 1950, the value of agricultural production in Imperial County more than doubled in real inflation-adjusted dollars even though the population level barely budged, suggesting both a welcome increase in productivity and the presence of nonresident workers.32

This lack of population growth made the Imperial Valley an outlier. California’s population increased by 22 percent in the 1930s—leaning against the Great Depression winds by attracting Dust Bowl refugees and others from different states—then exploded another 53 percent in the boom years of World War II as wartime employment surged, and then another 48 percent in the 1950s as suburban development beckoned domestic migrants from across the United States. Imperial County, by contrast, saw its population fall by 2 percent in the 1930s, tick up by 5 percent in the 1940s, and then increase at a relatively languid 14 percent in the 1950s. If we look at the whole period from 1930 to 1960, Imperial County ranked 52nd of California’s 58 counties in terms of population expansion; nearly all the counties with even slower growth were located in lightly populated areas in the Sierra Nevada.33

The lagging nature of the county persisted even as the Golden State became, well, more Golden. The 1960s were a period of bounty for California—the population continued to rise, the state made a commitment to a master plan for higher education, and the fundamentals were put in place for a technology boom that would eventually launch Silicon Valley into global awareness.34 Little of that seemed to spill over to Imperial County: it saw tepid population growth of 3 percent and agriculture remained key to its economy, with an estimated quarter of the male labor force involved in agricultural production in 1970. Of note, that amounted to about four thousand total resident agricultural workers, but there were another estimated six thousand to twelve thousand workers regularly crossing the border to work in the fields.35

In short, the region was better lubricated by water from the Colorado River, better fueled by agricultural demand, and better staffed by a growing share of disempowered Latino and immigrant workers. This may have brought fortunes to some but it was hardly the basis for widespread prosperity: a system that relied on exploiting labor and extracting water was not a recipe for creating the middle-class lifestyle that beckoned so many to California.36 All this was reinforced by a political constellation that gave agribusiness more or less free rein, offered local communities minimal voice, and provided scant attention to public investment needs. With the world swirling and the future beckoning, Imperial County found itself stuck in place and, given its racialized labor system, stuck in time.

The Shores of Change

Another thing stuck in place was the Salton Sea itself. The flooding of 1905–7 had created a new lake—which in the era of the Cahuilla would have evaporated over time and which, according to contemporary predictions, was supposed to recede to nothing by the 1920s.37 But even though the growth of agriculture absorbed some of the new water flowing from the Colorado, the sea found its level propped up by runoff from the growing agricultural sector. The sea was here to stay but not necessarily to thrive, particularly as the water flowing into the landlocked body of water was managing to pick up pesticides and other contaminants on its way.

It was a disaster in the making—but capitalism, as can be seen in the drilling-happy and climate-ignoring strategies of fossil fuel companies that continue to this day, can often find a way to make money even as environmental collapse lurks in the background.38 Seeing the buoyancy of an increasingly saline sea—and thinking just enough ahead to make profits but not far enough ahead to save the planet—investors poured in to convert the not-yet-toxic sea into a recreational playground that would attract visitors for boating, waterskiing, and fishing.

NOTES

1. “Not Quite Such a Shore Thing,” Never Quite Lost (blog), August 26, 2017,
   https://neverquitelost.com/2017/08/26/not-quite-such-a-shore-thing/.
2. It was reported that in 1920, half of the state’s agricultural labor force was Mexi-
   can, and the share likely ticked up as the subsequent decade brought significant labor migration. Surely, the presence was even higher in the border-proximate fields of the Imperial Valley; see Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 124–26..
3. Ibid., 129–30.
4. This is the most popular representation of the quote from Marx’s monograph,
   “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”; see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm. Wordings of the quote differ depending on the translation.
5. The surface of the Salton Sea itself is about 230 feet, so this refers to the deepest part of the sea and the Salton Sink that it filled.
6. Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, “Assembling a Seismic History of the Southern San Andreas Fault Zone Beneath Salton Sea,” U.S. Geological Survey, August 29, 2022, https://www.usgs.gov/centers/pcmsc/news/assembling-seismic-history-southern-san-andreas-fault-zone-beneath-salton-sea.
7. Kaspereit et al., “Updated Conceptual Model and Reserve Estimate for the
   Salton Sea Geothermal Field, Imperial Valley, California.”
8. David Alles, “Geology of the Salton Trough” (Bellingham: Western Washington
   University, October 28, 2011), https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&ty
   pe=pdf&doi=564f85471b8bdc52105c05d8fb31cdf338609bb2.
9. Leland W. Younker, Paul W. Kasameyer, and John D. Tewhey, “Geological, Geophysical, and Thermal Characteristics of the Salton Sea Geothermal Field, California,” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 12 (1982): 221–58.
10.  Sanjuan et al., “Lithium-Rich Geothermal Brines in Europe.”
11.  Damon B. Akins and William J. Brauer Jr., We Are the Land: A History of Native
    California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).
12.  Traci Brynne Voyles, The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
13. Thomas K. Rockwell et al., “The Late Holocene History of Lake Cahuilla: Two
    Thousand Years of Repeated Fillings Within the Salton Trough, Imperial Valley,
    California,” Quaternary Science Reviews 282 (April 2022): 107456.
14. Voyles, The Settler Sea, 23–33.
15. Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide,
    1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Voyles, The Settler Sea, 48.
16. The executive order of May 15, 1876, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant,
    established eight small reservations for different bands of Cahuilla Indians. The Torres and Martinez reservations were combined in 1891. See Valerie Sherer Mathes and Phil Brigandi, Reservations, Removal, and Reform: The Mission Indian Agents of Southern California, 1878–1903, 1st ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), loc. See also “Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians,” Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association, https://sctca.net/torres-martinez-desert-cahuilla-indians/.
17. Voyles, The Settler Sea, 68.
18. Chaffey gained success in bringing irrigation and land development to Etiwanda
    and Ontario in the Inland Empire in the early 1880s, where he earned a reputation as a fierce if not entirely ethical marketer. He then moved to Australia, which he saw as having similar opportunities in dry land development as California, and where he is credited with creating the first large-scale irrigation townships in the country, in the dry northern plains of Victoria. The development of what became the town of Mildura included questionable business practices that resulted in an official Royal Commission inquiry and eventual insolvency, followed by his return to California in the 1890s. The scent of scandal is, it seems, a consistent feature for many players in the historic and contemporary development of Imperial Valley. See Jennifer Hamilton-Mckenzie “Utopos? A Consideration of the Life of Irrigationist, George Chaffey”, Australasian Journal of American Studies 32, No. 2 (2013): 63-80. The continuing connections between Australia and California are reflected not only in the fact that Australia is the largest global source of lithium, but also in the company now pioneering direct lithium extraction, Controlled Thermal Resources, which is Australian in origin and now redomiciled in the United States. Its CEO, Rod Colwell, was a property developer in Brisbane, Australia, and has also made the move. See John McCarthy, “Colwell’s $1 Billion ‘Green’ Lithium Plan Starts Coming Together,” InQueensland, October 11, 2022, https://inqld.com.au/business/2022/10/12/colwells-1-billion-green-lithium
    -plan-starts-coming-together/.
19. Robert G. Schonfeld, “The Early Development of California’s Imperial Valley:
    Part I,” Southern California Quarterly 50, no. 3 (September 1968): 289.
20. Ibid., 301.
21. Voyles, The Settler Sea, 73. At one point, the new Salton Sea was rising seven
    inches a day; see Kelley, Where Water Is King, 66.
22. It was the Native American population, however, that comprised “most of the
    labor force that was recruited to serve as the frontline in the (eventual) flood-abatement offensive”; see Kelley, Where Water Is King, 69.
23. The flooding headed to the sink along the Alamo and what would become the
    New River channel. The New River subsequently became known as a notorious source of noxious pollution as it became a channel for sewage, toxics, and other contaminants, much of which was contributed as the river makes its way north from Mexico through busy Mexicali, marking yet another environmental disaster affecting the people of Imperial County. See Ian James and Zoe Meyers, “This River Is Too Toxic to Touch, and People Live Right Next to It,” Desert Sun, December 5, 2018, https://www.desertsun.com/in-depth/news/environment/border-pollution/poisoned-cities/2018/12/05/toxic-new-river-long-neglect-mexico-border-calexico-mexicali/1381599002/.
24. This was not the first time that water had suddenly appeared: in 1891, there was a flood that caused a new lake to appear, but this was part of the more regular historical cycle. See Voyles, The Settler Sea, 60.
25. Benny J. Andrés, Power and Control in the Imperial Valley: Nature, Agribusi-
    ness, and Workers on the California Borderland, 1900–1940, 1st ed. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015), 70; U.S. Census Bureau, “Fourteenth Census of the United States: State Compendium, California” (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 1924), 75, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1924/dec/state-compendium.html.
26. U.S. Census Bureau, “Fourteenth Census of the United States: State Compen-
    dium, California,” 11.
27. There is some debate about how effective the laws were, particularly given the
    strategies of immigrant owners to evade the restrictions. There was, however, a sharp drop in Japanese-owned agricultural landholdings in California between 1920 and 1925, although this was partly (but not wholly) driven by a larger slump in agriculture in that period. See Yuji Ichioka, “Japanese Immigrant Response to the 1920 California Alien Land Law,” Agricultural History 58, no. 2 (1984): 170; Masao Suzuki, “Important or Impotent? Taking Another Look at the 1920 California Alien Land Law,” The Journal of Economic History 64, no. 1 (2004): 125–43; and Leah Fernandez, “Breaking Ground: Imperial Valley’s Japanese and Punjabi Farmers, 1900–1933.” Hindsight Graduate History Journal 5 (2011). On the dynamics that led to this anti-Asian legislation, see Brian J. Gaines and Wendy K. Tam Cho, “On California’s 1920 Alien Land Law: The Psychology and Economics of Racial Discrimination,” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 4, no. 3 (2004): 271–93.
28. Andrés, Power and Control in the Imperial Valley: Nature, Agribusiness, and
    Workers on the California Borderland, 1900–1940, p. 132.
29. Charles Wollenberg, “Huelga, 1928 Style: The Imperial Valley Cantaloupe
    Workers’ Strike,” Pacific Historical Review 38, no. 1 (February 1969): 47.
30. Ibid., 54.
31. The runner-up, at a quarter of the population, was Ventura County, an agricul-
    tural area in the Central Coast region. Data is from the 1930 U.S. Census, utilizing state tables available at “1930 Census: Volume 3. Population, Reports by States,” https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1932/dec/1930a-vol-03-population.html.
32. This is calculated by taking the total agricultural value for Imperial County reported in the Imperial County Farm Bureau Crop reports for 1940 and 1950, and deflating by the U.S. Consumer Price Index for those years. The second of these crop reports includes soil improvements in the value total, so the two series are not exactly identical; that margin, however, is a negligible 0.2 percent of the total in 1950. See “Imperial County: Crop Reports & Crop Report Plus,” Imperial County Farm Bureau, https://www.icfb.net/crop-reports.
33. Another slow grower was land-constrained San Francisco. Population growth
    calculated from data available from the Historical Census Populations of California, Counties, and Incorporated Cities, 1850–2010, prepared by the California State Data Center, and obtained at http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/historical/historical.htm.
34. Pastor, State of Resistance.
35. The raw numbers on resident agricultural workers are taken from an IPUMS
    National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) extract from the 1970 Census; see Ruggles et al., “IPUMS USA.” For the estimates of migrant workers, see Martin J. Pasqualetti, James B. Pick, and Edgar W. Butler, “Geothermal Energy in Imperial County, California: Environmental, Socio-economic, Demographic, and Public Opinion Research Conclusions and Policy Recommendations,” Energy 4, no. 1 (February 1979): 72.
36. In 1970, of the 58 counties in the state of California, Imperial ranked 45 in
    terms of homeownership. Most of the counties toward the bottom of that list were located in the higher-cost coastal urban areas, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Barbara, and Monterey, though there were other poor rural areas like Imperial in the last-runner mix as well. Data from the 1970 Census, as taken from Steven Manson, Jonathan Schroeder, David Van Riper, Tracy Kugler, and Steven Ruggles. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 17.0 Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS. 2022.
37. William DeBuys and Joan Myers, Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-Down
    California (Cork, Ireland: BookBaby, 2001), loc. 2563.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from “Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future” by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, published by New Press, 2024.

The post ‘Charging Forward’: The Promise and Perils of Lithium Development in Imperial Valley appeared first on Bioneers.

The North Dakota coal town I grew up in is now the world test site for a potentially dangerous fossil fuel technology.

By Taylor Brorby
Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land; Crude: Poems; and Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience. He teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Alabama.

This story originally appeared in Earth Island Journal.

I GREW UP IN a landscape of lies. As a child, I was told that every lake in North Dakota freezes. This isn’t true. One lake — Nelson Lake, my home lake — doesn’t freeze.

In the 1960s, when generational coal plants were first built in south-central North Dakota, the Square Butte Creek in Oliver County, a small, squiggly stream that eventually empties into the wide, muddy Missouri River, was dammed, and Nelson Lake was created to help with fossil fuel extraction.

In childhood, I roamed the rocky shores of Nelson Lake with worms and bobbers to catch fish with my Grandpa Hatzenbihler. I spent hour after hour in the shadow of the Milton R. Young Power Plant, its blocky structure pierced with two enormous cigarette-colored smokestacks. The power plant was a type of postmodern-volcano-skyscraper that framed my life in the city of Center, North Dakota.

The power plant was an eerie Polaris that allowed me to navigate my way toward home.

The plant was always within view. On nighttime trips back into coal country from Bismarck, where my family would buy groceries, shop for clothing, or go out to eat at Fiesta Villa, The Ground Round, or The Walrus, I could clock how far we were from home by where we were in relationship to the glowing and blinking lights of Minnkota Power. The lights colored low-laying clouds amber. The power plant was an eerie Polaris that allowed me to navigate my way toward home.

From the Square Butte Creek golf course, I’d tee-up on hole number one and aim squarely at Minnkota Power. On clear days, from the bay window in our home, I could glimpse a trail of smoke swirling into the air. All that lignite and fire was never far from my mind.

Though we never said it at the time, it’s clear to me now that I grew up in a company town. Coal colored my childhood, sponsored baseball tournaments, fueled pancake breakfast fundraisers, gave me food, clothing, and shelter. It was the resource that gave eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota electricity, and it gave those of us that pulled it from the ground in south-central North Dakota money, a type of financial security in a region where, previously, most men ranched or farmed.

North Dakota is home to the world’s largest known deposit of lignite coal, estimated to last nearly eight hundred years with current consumption rates. But with increasing calls to leave fossil fuel development in the past, my home power plant is now the world test site for a new fossil fuel technology: carbon capture and storage. 

DEVELOPED WITHIN THE past few decades, carbon capture and storage technology draws carbon dioxide from power plants and other factories onsite, converts the gas to a liquid under high pressure, and, in the case of Minnkota Power, which has labeled their carbon capture and storage development plan Project Tundra, shoots it six thousand feet directly underground to a geologic layer of Earth called caprock. Here, apparently, the liquid carbon dioxide will stay forever. (In other cases, the carbon is transported elsewhere before being piped underground for storage). In theory, the technology will allow factories to stop using the atmosphere as the dumping ground for their gassy waste and instead create an underground sewage system of liquid carbon dioxide. In reality, it has not yet proven effective. Since most natural gas and liquids can move through the tiniest fractures and holes, eventually, what is stored in the caprock under North Dakota farms, schools, and towns will find its way back up and through to the water table and surface.

This technology will not be limited only to Minnkota Power or North Dakota. 

In 2023, the Biden administration announced that it would spend up to $1.2 billion to advance the development of two commercial-scale direct air capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana as part of its emissions-reduction efforts. These projects — the first of this scale in the United States — aim to “kickstart a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites,” the US Department of Energy said in a statement announcing the project in August 2023. There are about 15 carbon capture facilities operating in the US right now. An additional 121 CCS facilities are under construction or in development, including Project Tundra.

These facilities don’t run in isolation. Existing carbon storage operations are already supported by more than 5,300 miles of pipelines, and since existing fossil fuel pipelines cannot be used to transport liquid carbon dioxide (it needs chrome-lined pipelines), the advent of carbon capture and storage will unleash a pipeline-building frenzy across the country from North Dakota to Texas, California to Maine. These pipes will be upwards of 48 inches in diameter and built along existing fossil fuel infrastructural pipelines which carry oil and natural gas.

But here’s the thing about liquid carbon dioxide: If it meets with any moisture, it converts to carbonic acid, a heavy, colorless, odorless gas that destroys all animal life and can be fatal to humans as well. If breathed, it acts as a narcotic poison, inducing sleep, torpor, and death. 

In 2020, a 24-inch liquid carbon dioxide pipeline near Satartia, Mississippi, ruptured, sending a carbonic acid cloud into the air. Two hundred people were evacuated from the area and 45 people were hospitalized. People were found in their cars, along ditches, shaking and foaming at the mouth. Luckily no one died in that incident, but some residents are still dealing with long term health issues from carbonic acid poisoning, including severe asthma attacks, headaches, and trouble concentrating. 

Project Tundra, though, has hit a snag. Originally estimated at $1.4 billion, the project’s cost has risen to $2 billion. New federal emissions regulations have compounded uncertainty around the project’s viability. The new regulations require coal-fired power plants to shut down by 2039 if they cannot cut or capture 90 percent of their CO2 emissions by 2032. The rules include similar emissions restrictions on new natural gas-fired power plants. It’s uncertain yet whether Project Tundra would allow Minnkota Power to fully comply with the new federal regulations. 

Project Tundra could just be the beginning when it comes to carbon capture in North Dakota.

Uncertain as its future may be, Project Tundra could just be the beginning when it comes to carbon capture in North Dakota. At least that’s the hope of Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions. Spearheaded by former Iowa Board of Regents president, Bruce Rastetter. A Republican megadonor, Rastetter is infamous for resigning from the board after trying to leverage political power at Iowa State University to develop a transgenic banana in Tanzania that would displace over 800,000 acres of local farms in that country.

Summit Carbon Solutions has partnered with 57 Midwestern ethanol plants with the aim of capturing and storing their emissions. The plan is to ship their liquid carbon dioxide waste to North Dakota, meaning North Dakota will serve as the region’s underground waste pit. In order to facilitate this, the company has negotiated access to Project Tundra’s carbon storage facility, and begun partnering with Minnkota Power to develop additional storage sites in the region. The company has also contracted with large corporate enterprises, such as Halliburton, to help with drilling, and has on its team former-Iowa-governor-turned-ambassador Terry Branstad, who supported the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Iowa.

With Summit Carbon Solutions’ interest in Project Tundra and carbon capture storage technology as a whole, the technology effectively links Big Ag to the fossil fuel industry, allowing not only Minnkota Power to continue burning coal, but also dozens of ethanol plants to continue converting crops like corn into fuel under the premise of capturing their emissions. 

 

This isn’t the only way that carbon capture technology perpetuates fossil fuel extraction and other high-carbon-emission fuels. Liquid carbon dioxide can also be substituted for water in the process of hydraulic fracturing, which means that power plants, which would normally be taxed at a higher rate for emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a waste product, would now receive a carbon “credit” for capturing their emissions, selling them to oil and natural gas industries, and facilitating further fracking across North Dakota, the country, and the world. While this development could eliminate water from the process of fracking, it still allows for global dependency on the fossil fuel industry for heating, cooling, and electrifying homes.

As the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN) reports: “‘Carbon use’ refers to many hypothetical ways to transform captured CO2 into a limited-market product that can be sold. Today the only commercial use for captured CO2 is to pump it into depleted oil fields to flush out more oil; for every ton of CO2 pumped into a depleted oil field, 2 to 5 tons of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere, which defeats the purpose of capturing the CO2 in the first place. The plain fact is, there is no market (and never can be) for billions of tons of dangerous hazardous waste CO2.”

WHEN I CLOSE my eyes and imagine the landscape of my childhood, I see the shimmering cottonwood leaves of the Missouri River, a bald eagle in sharp profile, the tawny grass swaying in the wind. Then the images of coal plants bricked on the bank of the river, scattered across Oliver, Mercer, and McLean counties fill my mind. I think of the number of people I know who have fought, or are currently battling, cancer. And I wonder why so many resources are being pushed to develop a new technology that will keep us bound to a nineteenth-century way of fueling our twenty-first-century lives. How we could be a model for living better on the planet and stop telling ourselves the lie that this is the way it is, this is the way it has always been. 

I want my home to stop telling lies and to let every lake in North Dakota, finally, freeze.

The post A Landscape of Lies appeared first on Bioneers.

When we spoke with Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman from the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center back in 2022,  they had begun to achieve some major victories in their decade-plus campaign to bring one of our favorite keystone species, Beaver, back to California (which would restore human and other habitats as well). If you haven’t heard our podcast with Brock and Kate, “Beaver Believers: How to Restore Planet Water” from our Nature’s Genius podcast series, you’re in for a treat. There have been many encouraging developments thanks to the Bring Back the Beaver campaign, here’s an update.

In 2024, OAEC was chosen by CA’s 2nd Senate District as nonprofit of the year. They created a cool Beaver website portal, a robust project with information about what’s happening with Beaver in California and the Bring Back the Beaver campaign over the last 15 years, and specific strategies for people who want to learn more. Also in 2024, OAEC sponsored AB 2196, a bill that passed unanimously and codified the CDFW Beaver Restoration Program.

Brock Dolman co-founded (in 1994) the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center where he co-directs the WATER Institute. A wildlife biologist and watershed ecologist, he has been actively promoting “Bringing Back Beaver in California” since the early 2000s. He was given the Salmonid Restoration Federation’s coveted Golden Pipe Award in 2012: “for his leading role as a proponent of “working with beavers” to restore native habitat.

Kate Lundquist, co-director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign in Sonoma County, is a conservationist, educator and ecological artist who works with landowners, communities and resource agencies to uncover obstacles, identify strategic solutions, and generate restoration recommendations to assure healthy watersheds, water security, listed species recovery and climate change resiliency.

KATE: Amazing things have happened around beaver conservation and the recognition of their value in the state of California since we last spoke in October 2022. We’ve been working with many different organizations and NGOs, and developed a beaver policy working group that has really become a focal point, bringing people to the table to support the evolution of beaver stewardship in California. That’s always our North Star as a strategy of change – educating folks, demonstrating the benefits, and ultimately changing the rules so that they support the kind of restoration and conservation that we need to do. 

We kicked off 2023 by organizing a big tour with our elected officials and the heads of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), including the director and his second in command. We took folks out into the field to demonstrate the value of supporting this kind of conservation and beaver restoration.

By June that year, the CDFW handed down a new policy in response to a petition we had submitted, asking them to change language around permits when property owners suffered damage from Beaver – called “depredation” – and are asking for a permit to kill Beaver. The new policy encourages exhausting all options for coexistence first before issuing permits to kill beaver in response to conflict. It was a landmark policy. CDFW also now checks those properties to see if there are other endangered species relying on that habitat. That was really huge, getting more support from our state agencies. 

BROCK: We were awarded a $2 million grant through the Nature-Based Solutions Restoration Fund to create a beaver coexistence program in collaboration with CDFW and other partners, including the nationally-focused Beaver Institute, to support Californians with technical assistance they need for this kind of conservation or coexistence. The program addresses the fact that there are landowners out there who are experiencing damage by beavers on their property in various ways. Because of that depredation policy change that Kate mentioned, the Department is telling them, we’re doing things differently, we have a plethora of different ways you can try to co-exist with Beaver.

Yet we recognize that we don’t actually have a sufficiently trained workforce in California of coexistence contractors, if you will, who are trained in these various techniques – the ability to assess a site, evaluate the appropriate solution, work with the landowner, install it, monitor it, etc. That’s a key piece of this coexistence program. 

With the Beaver Institute, we’re doing detailed in-person and online training of “Beaver Corps” contractors who can work with landowners. If it’s needed, the program will help offset costs in order to reduce the burden on landowners. It’s an exciting and innovative program that skills-up the nature-based solutions workforce in both the process-based restoration and beaver coexistence, while offsetting some of the economic burden.

Work through the California Process-based Restoration Network. Photo by Brock Dolman

KATE: An area we’re also focused on in addition to coexistence efforts is how to enhance, expand, and actually mimic Beaver. Through our California Process-based Restoration Network, we have agency folks, NGOs, and restoration practitioners who are interested in these nature-based solutions. We’ve been making incredible progress, getting a lot of miles built where Beaver are helping expand the wetlands. 

THREE SUCCESS STORIES

MAIDU CONSORTIUM

KATE: The Maidu Summit Consortium is a nonprofit with different Tribal entities: Greenville Rancheria, Auburn Rancheria – some federally recognized, others not. They’ve been organizing around landback efforts over decades, really. In October 2023, in partnership with the State of California, the Consortium carried out the first conservation translocation of Beaver in nearly 75 years. 

There is a 2300-acre valley up in the North Fork Feather River Watershed just below Lassen Peak, a gorgeous valley that is their ancestral homelands, and many of the Tribes still use those lands. Through a Pacific Gas & Electric Company lawsuit settlement, they were finally given title in 2019 with CDFW and the Feather River Land Trust.

They initiated contact with us in 2015, and had already been doing work there and really wanted to bring Beaver back. This is a big mountain meadow with an incredible diversity of species and really good water sources. In terms of habitat, it’s already very beaver-supportive. Beavers were there up until the 1980s before people began poaching them or destroying their dams. We carbon-dated buried beaver wood we found there, and it actually predates contact. There’s a long history of this being a significant place for Beaver. 

The Maidu Summit Consortium had been advocating for their return, but it didn’t happen because the Department wasn’t returning Beaver at that time. We put in recommendations and wrote letters and did a whole beaver recruitment strategy to help set the stage, saying it’s kind of plug-and-play, you can just put Beaver out there as is or you could do some of these other things and welcome them back and they would do great. And now they’re flourishing. There are already three family groups, and they’re reproducing. So that’s one case study. 

TULE RIVER TRIBE

BROCK: Heading to the Southern Sierra, we have the work of the Tule River Tribe east of Porterville. The Tule River Tribe is a federally recognized Tribe with an amazing reservation, one of the larger ones in the state, upwards of 60,000 acres. Their land goes from very low elevation, about 1,000 feet up to about 8,000 feet and has incredible diversity with groves of giant sequoias up as big and grand as anything you would see in Sequoia National Park. 

Back in 2015, one of their Tribal citizens and a council member at the time approached Kate and me about this fascinating rock art site there – a 500 or 1000 year-old pictograph. One of the organisms represented in the rock art is a beaver. We only know of two beaver pictographs in the state. The other one is more in Chumash territory, Cuyama Valley area. And so this council person, Kenneth McDermott, was thinking a lot about their water woes and supply issues and the river, and he’s like, geez, Beaver seems to have been around here a long time ago with our ancestors. Why not again? 

That began a long journey of consideration. In both cases, what we at OAEC were asked to help with was really bringing our understanding of beaver biology and a methodology to do a feasibility assessment and evaluate the habitat. Is there enough water depth, volume, and flow? Is there food and cover to avoid predation? There’s a whole methodology and feasibility assessment we did in order to support both of these Tribal communities. 

In June 2024, the Tule River Tribe had another conservation translocation, and there have been several translocation events that have happened with Tule River since then as well. Super exciting. Then a whole population of wolves moved down there afterward and now they’ve split into two packs. That’s a really interesting dynamic too, the interaction between some animals being rewilded by humans who assist their migration, and then some animals choosing to just hook it on their four legs and make their own way down there. Condors continue to loop around there. The Tribe is also working with DFW on a project that will hopefully move forward to reintroduce Tule Elk to the reservation. 

FIRE

KATE: The Forest Service has been involved in a riparian meadow study, where they are looking at the impacts of beaver mimicry, these process-based restoration structures like beaver dam analogs as a post-fire treatment. So far the results have been positive. In places where nothing was done, there was a lot of sediment that went through; ash and the water and everything just rushed out of these meadows. In places where the structures were put in, a lot more of the post-fire sediment and ash and water was trapped, and those meadows are becoming sponges again, and are much more resilient. This is something that we’ve been observing out in the field and anecdotally, but now that the Forest Service is actually using lots of instruments to measure, the data is supporting what we’ve been observing. 

There’s such a need for it, it’s a no-brainer and it’s exciting, innovative work. Our partners are doing research showing the efficacy of it. What the folks at the Tule River Tribe are doing at their landscape level working with fire is also super inspiring. There are solutions that could easily be deployed before a fire and post-fire. These lighter touch, easy to mobilize, low-cost, effective techniques offer a great response to the large-scale catastrophes that we’re having. We’re helping build legitimacy for beaver and process-based restoration across the state.

Photo: Dr. Emily Fairfax

Dr. Emily Fairfax, co-authored a great paper about Smokey the Beaver and showing incidents where landscape-scale fire was helped by the beaver wetlands within those landscapes, they were much more resilient to fire. For example, the Dixie Fire burned over areas where there were beaver and those areas didn’t burn. She has great footage of that up in Last Chance Creek, for example, very close to where I am right now near Lassen Peak. And then similarly, she’d been looking at fires as they go over and seeing places where either beaver have been or where beaver mimicry has happened. And in one case, Wilbur Hot Springs where they’ve been doing some beaver mimicry had a fire, and the only green spot in the fire footprint was in fact where the restoration had happened, and that showed up on the satellite imagery immediately.

BROCK: Case studies where beavers and the habitat they create that’s wetted adds a bit of resiliency and integrity within these larger landscape matrices. Whether that’s fire scars or during droughts, there’s just more water availability for supporting other species functioning as a refugia, whether it’s a fire refugia for animals to seek refuge literally in, or that’s the only place where there’s water and streams are flowing for the fish during droughts or in the flood space. How does it ameliorate that? So they’re very locationally specific benefits in certain ways.

Beaver dam in the Sierra Nevada, Inyo National Forest

The overarching pattern that we can see based on all those different expressions of success that Kate talked about is this increasing nexus, especially at the state level, of nature-based solutions and climate-smart solutions. California is experiencing real challenges with global/climate “weirding” driven wildfires, droughts, floods and biodiversity losses, while needing to sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Beaver as a species continues to be found as a helpful partner for addressing, ameliorating, and mitigating appropriately at different scales, impacting fire and water and carbon and life and resiliency. It’s just so emblematic. Beaver is a keystone species, of course. It’s an intersectional species by its own very nature and has been making its way into so many people’s worldviews. It’s been really gratifying – but we have our work cut out for us to continue to really excel and amplify those areas where beaver really do have an impact.

Beaver can support a piece of a puzzle of resiliency. I think it’s worth saying that in the best case scenario, in a fully beavered watershed, beaver habitat might only represent 10% of the surface area. We shouldn’t try to put the burden on the backs of the beavers like they’re going to save the whole dang watershed from ridge to river, because the majority of any watershed has never been beaver habitat. It won’t be that. 

We try to be sober about that and not too hyperbolic, because there’s a lot of, “Yay, beaver saved the planet!” We remind folks that, well, they’re only in the northern hemisphere and they’re in a subset of the northern hemisphere, and 70% of the planet is actually ocean water to begin with. But where they’re happy and where they’re being the best beavers they can be, those places indisputably are rocking, like wetlands and riparian corridors. We know disproportionately they support higher biodiversity and resiliency. So the beaver bang-for-the-buck is disproportionately beneficial, and we should learn to live with them and support them wherever they want to be happy.

Resources


Beaver Believers: How to Restore Planet Water – Bioneers Podcast

Beaver website portal – OAEC

How We Won: Lessons Learned & Replicable Strategies for Changing Beaver Restoration Policies – Video Presentation

Are You a Beaver Believer? – Secretary Speaker Series, held monthly by Wade Crowfoot, CA Natural Resources Agency Secretary

Beaver Believer: How Massive Rodents Could Restore Landscapes and Ecosystems At Scale – Article by Teo Grossman

Fire and Water: Land and Watershed Management in the Age of Climate Change

Basins of Relations: A Reverential Rehydration Revolution – Brock Dolman

Beaver in California: Creating a Culture of Stewardship

The WATER Institute’s Beaver in California reader

Sign up for OAEC newsletter

Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature

Earthlings: Intelligence in Nature | Bioneers Newsletter

OAEC trains dozens of practitioners who want to learn and then practice beaver and process-based restoration skills through collaborations with their Tribal partners: the CalPBR Network, North Bay Jobs With Justice, Sonoma County Regional Parks and many others.

The post Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman: How We’re Winning the Campaign to Rehydrate the West appeared first on Bioneers.

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
By Alla Katsnelson 08.02.2023

Our understanding of animal minds is undergoing a remarkable transformation. Just three decades ago, the idea that a broad array of creatures have individual personalities was highly suspect in the eyes of serious animal scientists — as were such seemingly fanciful notions as fish feeling pain, bees appreciating playtime and cockatoos having culture.

Today, though, scientists are rethinking the very definition of what it means to be sentient and seeing capacity for complex cognition and subjective experience in a great variety of creatures — even if their inner worlds differ greatly from our own.

Such discoveries are thrilling, but they probably wouldn’t have surprised Charles Henry Turner, who died a century ago, in 1923. An American zoologist and comparative psychologist, he was one of the first scientists to systematically probe complex cognition in animals considered least likely to possess it. Turner primarily studied arthropods such as spiders and bees, closely observing them and setting up trailblazing experiments that hinted at cognitive abilities more complex than most scientists at the time suspected. Turner also explored differences in how individuals within a species behaved — a precursor of research today on what some scientists refer to as personality.

Most of Turner’s contemporaries believed that “lowly” critters such as insects and spiders were tiny automatons, preprogrammed to perform well-defined functions. “Turner was one of the first, and you might say should be given the lion’s share of credit, for changing that perception,” says Charles Abramson, a comparative psychologist at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater who has done extensive biographical research on Turner and has been petitioning the US Postal Service for years to issue a stamp commemorating him. Turner also challenged the views that animals lacked the capacity for intelligent problem-solving and that they behaved based on instinct or, at best, learned associations, and that individual differences were just noisy data.

A mock-up of a 44-cent US postage stamp commemorating Charles Henry Turner. This design was created for educational purposes by psychologist Charles Abramson and his student Charles Miskovsky. Abramson, who published a biography of Turner, has petitioned the US Postal Service to issue a stamp honoring Turner.

CREDIT: C. MISKOVSKY & C.I. ABRAMSON / COMPREHENSIVE PSYCHOLOGY 2012

But just as the scientific establishment of the time lacked the imagination to believe that animals other than human beings can have complex intelligence and subjectivity of experience, it also lacked the collective imagination to envision Turner, a Black scientist, as an equal among them. The hundredth anniversary of Turner’s death offers an opportunity to consider what we may have missed out on by their oversight.

Had his work not been largely forgotten after his death, the field might now be in a very different place, says Lars Chittka, a zoologist and ecologist studying bees and other insects at Queen Mary University of London. Today, researchers are returning to many of the ideas that Turner’s work raised. “The remarkable developments that I’ve had the pleasure to witness over the last few decades might have happened much, much earlier if people had paid more attention to Turner’s writings,” Chittka says.

Testing tiny minds

Nineteenth-century Western scientists inherited the notion that a strict line separated humans from other animals. Humans had souls, which came with complex thoughts and feelings, and other creatures didn’t. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution disaffirmed this accepted wisdom, proposing a mechanism — natural selection of inherited traits — by which physical, mental and even emotional characteristics could be shared across species. Darwin’s young friend and collaborator George Romanes in 1882 published Animal Intelligence, a book that cataloged examples of cognitive abilities in a broad spectrum of animals. These ideas resonated so strongly with Turner that he named his third child Darwin Romanes.

Turner built an elevated maze, shown here as a photograph (top) and a diagram (bottom) to test how quickly individual cockroaches learned to navigate a new environment. The maze was made of copper strips that are supported by glass rods inserted into the cork stoppers of glass bottles. The whole contraption sat in a pan of water.

CREDIT: C.H. TURNER / BIOLOGICAL BULLETIN 1913

Darwin’s and Romanes’s notions, though, were largely based on theory, observation and a healthy dollop of anthropomorphism. Animal Intelligence was not especially scientific. Turner spent his career testing those notions with the scientific method.

In one of his early studies, Turner set out to investigate if spiders built webs through rigid instinct or if they could respond creatively to novel situations. Meadows make for fairly uniform conditions in which to build webs, he wrote in the Journal of Comparative Neurology in 1892. “But when the external environment becomes more heterogenous, it is interesting to note how the spiders become masters of the situation.” He meticulously described structures of 27 webs he found on windowsills, down railroad embankments, in log piles. “Was this web the result of blind instinct? I think not,” he wrote about an especially contorted web above a hole in a stone wall that effectively cornered insect prey.

Turner coupled his observations with experiments that forced spiders to deal with awkward spatial challenges in their web-building. He collected spiders and placed them first into cylindrical bottles, where they constructed circular webs, and then moved them into boxes, where a few made rectangular ones. Finally, he destroyed parts of existing webs and found that the spiders came up with clever solutions to efficiently patch them up. All these experiments pointed to a capacity for learning, contradicting the dominant scientific narrative. Although web-weaving is instinctive, Turner concluded, “the details of construction are the products of intelligent action.”

During the rest of his three-decade career, Turner continued pursuing research that ran counter to prevailing ideas of his time. Turner also studied birds, aquatic crustaceans, lizards and snakes, but he was particularly interested in the minds of insects. He cataloged surprising capacities for learning, memory, problem-solving — and possibly even emotions, says Chittka — in ants, bees, moths, cockroaches and other insects, anticipating perspectives that only reemerged in the 2000s.

Turner discovered that ants make big circuitous loops as they return to their nest after foraging. French naturalist Victor Cornetz named this meandering a “tournoiement de Turner.”

CREDIT: E.L. BOUVIER, TRANSLATED BY L.O. HOWARD / THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF INSECTS 1922

In a series of creative experiments that involved running ants of a dozen different species through an elaborate maze, Turner concluded that the creatures weren’t guided by a homing instinct, but instead relied on a variety of cues as well as memory, all coming together as a simple form of learning. In a separate study, he placed an ant on a small island and observed that the ant attempted to build a bridge to the mainland using materials at its disposal. The ant went beyond trial-and-error learning, seeming to size up the situation and come up with a goal-directed solution — something ants were not considered capable of at the time, Chittka says. He demonstrated that bees rely on their memory of spatial landmarks — say, a Coca-Cola bottle cap at the entrance of a ground nest — to get where they needed to go. That study was remarkably similar to one published a quarter-century later by the celebrated Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, Chittka says.

Turner may also have been a step ahead of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. About 13 years before Pavlov published a renowned paper on salivating dogs and the fundamental form of learning called classical conditioning, Turner published a report describing how he trained moths to flap their wings in response to whistling, revealing that they can hear pitch. “That very well may have been the first example of classical conditioning — certainly for invertebrates,” says Abramson, who published a biography of Turner in 2003, and an article about Turner’s life in the Annual Review of Entomology in 2007.

A legacy rediscovered

There’s no evidence that scientists intentionally claimed Turner’s discoveries as their own, says Chittka. In Turner’s honor, French naturalist Victor Cornetz named the sinuous meanderings made by some ants “Tournoiements de Turner.” John B. Watson, the father of behaviorism, which became the dominant psychological paradigm for decades starting in the 1920s, called some of Turner’s experiments “ingenious.”

Yet over time, Turner’s legacy faded.

Chittka himself, as a graduate student and young researcher in the 1990s, strongly pushed the field to recognize the complexity of insect minds, not learning until much later in his career that Turner had laid the foundation for key ideas in his research. “I have to admit that I was so much unaware of Turner’s work that I thought that I had pioneered that [direction] for insects,” he says. “Quite clearly, Turner was a century ahead there, and that was quite an eye-opener.”

Turner explored how bees use visual cues in addition to olfactory ones, and whether they can see color as they hop from flower to flower in search of food. He constructed small cardboard discs, cones and boxes and painted them red, green and blue. He put honey in the red cones, and then the red discs, and in both cases the bees learned to look for food there. He argued that his findings showed that bees can see color, but later research revealed that though bees can perceive most colors, they cannot see red. Turner’s study in fact showed that the insects could discern grayscale.

CREDIT: PUBLIC DOMAIN (TOP); C.H. TURNER / BIOLOGICAL BULLETIN 1910 (BOTTOM)

Without a doubt, the barriers Turner faced in establishing and maintaining his scientific career were extremely steep and were forged by flagrant racism and by the mundane circumstances that it engendered. He found a mentor at the University of Cincinnati, where he completed undergraduate and master’s degrees in 1887 and 1892, respectively. He earned a reputation as diligent and brilliant, which likely helped him gain a position as an assistant lab instructor, something few other Black students would have been considered for. But his luck on that front ran out when he sought a faculty position at the University of Chicago after he finished his PhD in zoology there in 1907, likely the first Black scientist to do so, Abramson says. He was considered for a post, but the professor who invited him to apply died and, according to sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, his replacement refused to hire a Black scientist.

Unable to secure the University of Chicago position, Turner became a science teacher at Sumner High School in St. Louis, the first Black high school west of the Mississippi. But he continued to run experiments in the parks of St. Louis and in the small research shed he built behind his home. Another asset he lacked was graduate students or scientific offspring to propagate his ideas and build on them in their own careers. Still, Turner toiled on, publishing more than 70 papers. “It’s just absolutely mind-boggling how he did all that as a one-man operation,” Chittka says.

Some think his ingenuity is what allowed him to build a career despite many constraints. “He was incredibly imaginative,” says Janice Harrington, a poet and author who teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and who researched Turner’s life for a 2019 children’s book about him. “It wasn’t like he could just go buy the equipment he needed or call on an army of lab assistants. When you have those limitations, then you have to think outside the box.”

Turner’s research was also driven by another motivation: He viewed biology as a lens for understanding the common bonds among living things, and also among all members of humanity, Harrington says.

“The marvelous structures and functions of animals, the demonstration that all animals are evolved branches of one common tree, and a knowledge of the laws that control the actions and relations of animals and man,” Turner wrote in an editorial for a newspaper called the Southwestern Christian Advocate, “lead one to recognize and respect the rights of others.”

Excavating the history of figures like Turner can be challenging, Harrington adds. “I think the frustration, if you’re researching someone who is African American, is that a lot of times there’s just going to be holes and big gaps because of the times they lived in,” she says. Key artifacts relating to their life were not deemed worth saving. Turner died of a heart condition at the relatively young age of 56, and neither his house nor his research shed in St. Louis remains standing. An especially sore point for Harrington is mention of a children’s book he wrote, the manuscript of which she has been unable to find.

Abramson has felt these holes too. He first encountered Turner’s work 45 years ago, as an undergraduate excitedly digging through old publications in his chosen field of ant behavior, and has tried to bring attention both to Turner’s science and to his perseverance. But he says a dearth of artifacts relating to Turner’s life has impeded his efforts to persuade a national museum to showcase him.

Yet in the past few years, as the accumulation of evidence begins to outweigh the history of prejudice, Turner’s work is regaining recognition. “We have witnessed over the last decade or so quite a Copernicus-style revolution in the sense of the appreciation of other animals having minds,” Chittka says. Seeing these ideas in Turner’s work from a century ago “is very reassuring,” he adds. “I think it shows that we are heading in the right direction, albeit with a big delay.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

The post Charles Henry Turner’s insights into animal behavior were a century ahead of their time appeared first on Bioneers.

A childhood spent outdoors yields more than just curiosity, resilience and a lasting respect for the environment. Mountains of evidence collected by the deeply influential Children and Nature Network suggest that children’s regular engagement with the natural world is essential for their physical, emotional and cognitive health. Given that we humans are, in fact, animals, this should come as no surprise. However, many children today have little opportunity to develop this bond. Children in the U.S. spend less than 10 minutes per day on average engaged in unstructured outdoor play — compared to more than seven hours in front of electronic screens. How can we reconnect children with nature and restore this essential relationship?

As we experience draconian moves to gut education budgets, national parks, and public lands (and much more), it’s important to remember that public support for basic goals like outdoor access for youth remains nearly universal and that there are thriving policy movements across multiple levels supporting this work. In this newsletter, discover how school environments can foster healing, the ecological benefits of the living schoolyard movement, how nature-inspired design builds resilience, and a program bringing the joy of birding to Chicago public school students.

Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.

‘Schools That Heal’: How School Environments Shape Mental, Social, and Physical Health

What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Research consistently shows that access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. But too few school designers and decision-makers apply this research to create healthy schools. In “Schools That Heal,” landscape architecture professor and designer Claire Latané details the myriad opportunities—from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations—to make supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers. In this excerpt, learn how school environments shape mental, social and physical health. 

Read now

Schoolyard Transformations for Ecological & Social Benefit: Daily Acts’ Climate Resilient Schools Program

The modern American schoolyard is dominated by two elements: asphalt (hardscape) and lawn (softscape). The living schoolyard movement, lead by Sharon Danks’ remarkable project, Green Schoolyards America, seeks to transform schoolyards into lush environments that strengthen local ecological systems and provide opportunities for place-based, hands-on learning. While the conversation about living schoolyards has focused on asphalt removal, the transformation of underutilized lawns is an important tool for schools to conserve water, cool campuses, and encourage biodiversity, while expanding holistic and integrated educational opportunities. Photo courtesy of Morgan Margulies / Ten Strands.

Read now

Keynote Speaker Spotlight: Baratunde Thurston I Inspiring Change, One Story at a Time

What does it mean to truly citizen? Baratunde Thurston, a masterful storyteller and Emmy-nominated creator, explores this question and so much more as the host of the PBS series “America Outdoors” and the acclaimed “How To Citizen” podcast. From unpacking the human side of the A.I. revolution in his newest YouTube podcast, “Life With Machines,” to penning the bestselling comedic memoir “How To Be Black,” Baratunde is a voice for transformative ideas and action. His work blends humor, humanity, and a keen eye for innovation, making him one of the most compelling communicators of our time.

Catch Baratunde and other visionary speakers at the 36th annual Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, California, from March 27-29. Flash Sale: Register with code VISION20 at checkout before midnight P.T. on Feb. 28 and receive 20% off!

Learn more

Ecological Literacy: Teaching the Next Generation About Sustainable Development

As societies search for ways to become more sustainable, Fritjof Capra suggests incorporating the same principles on which nature’s ecosystems operate. In his essay, “Speaking Nature’s Language: Principles for Sustainability” from the 2005 book “Ecological Literacy,” he weaves a blueprint for building a more resilient world on the foundation of concepts drawn from the natural world, such as interdependence and diversity. This essay advocates a shift in thinking to a more holistic view of living systems: taking into account the collective interactions between the parts of the whole, instead of just the parts themselves.

Read now

Birds in My Neighborhood: Connecting kids to the joy of birding — and nature

Birds in My Neighborhood is helping Chicago public school students discover their “spark bird”— the one that ignites a lifelong fascination with birds and nature. Founded by the Chicago-based regional conservation nonprofit Openlands, the program has introduced more than 12,000 students, primarily from the city’s south and west sides, to bird-watching in their own neighborhoods. By using birds as ambassadors, the initiative opens children’s eyes to the joys of bird-watching and the natural world around them. Read more about the Birds in My Neighborhood program in this blog post by Susan Pagani. Photo by Eduardo Cornejo, courtesy of Openlands.

Read now

“We Will Be Jaguars” Book Club with Nemonte Nenquimo & Mitch Anderson

The Bioneers Learning Book Club is honored to present an extraordinary new experience featuring “We Will Be Jaguars,” the powerful memoir by Nemonte Nenquimo. This groundbreaking book, a Reese’s Book Club Pick and one of Library Journal’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, offers an unparalleled glimpse into the life of a fearless climate activist and Indigenous leader.

More than just a memoir, “We Will Be Jaguars” is a call to action—a bold vision for protecting our planet rooted in generations of Indigenous wisdom and resilience. Together, through this book club, we’ll not only explore Nemonte’s inspiring journey but also gather as a community to empower one another and discover actionable ways to champion change in our own lives and beyond.

Join us to reflect, connect, and draw strength from both this extraordinary story and the collective power of shared learning.

Register for this book club by March 3, and you’ll be automatically entered to win a free copy of “We Will Be Jaguars”!

Register now 

The post Bringing the Outdoors Back to Childhood appeared first on Bioneers.

What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Research consistently shows that access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. But too few school designers and decision-makers apply this research to create healthy schools. 

In “Schools That Heal,” landscape architecture professor and designer Claire Latané details the myriad opportunities—from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations—to create supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers. In the following excerpt, learn how school environments shape mental, social and physical health, and how schools can be designed with wellbeing in mind. 

Claire Latané

Claire Latané is a landscape architecture professor at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. Her teaching and scholarship apply research connecting the mind, body, and environment to design places and processes that support mental health. Latané has practiced landscape architecture for 14 years. She has designed interactive environments for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities as well as for affordable housing communities and public parks. 

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Schools The Heal by Claire Latané, published by Island Press, 2021.

The average American spends 15 percent of his or her lifetime in primary and secondary school. Children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours there. Where we live, go to school, work, and socialize shapes how our minds and bodies function and how we relate to the world. Children and teenagers need positive and supportive school environments as they struggle to navigate their lives and futures. Overwhelming anxiety now affects nearly two-thirds of young adults. It has surpassed depression as the number one reason college students seek counseling. And suicide is now the leading cause of death for children and youth aged ten to eighteen.

In a recent survey of Los Angeles public school students, 50 percent of students screened suffered from moderate to severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma-informed education is growing as a teaching approach as more school districts acknowledge that the majority of students today have experienced at least one childhood trauma impacting their ability to learn. A groundbreaking study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly two-thirds of participants had endured at least one adverse childhood experience.

Plenty of evidence shows that nature-filled environments support mental health and well-being. But few designers, and even fewer school decision makers and educators, appear to be aware of the research.

The school environment—the organization and physical materials that make up a school—offers a powerful yet overlooked way to support everyone who learns, works, or otherwise finds themself there. Plenty of evidence shows that nature-filled environments support mental health and well-being. But few designers, and even fewer school decision makers and educators, appear to be aware of the research. Instead, schools too often present harsh environments with imposing fences, locking gates, window grates, and security cameras. These types of places don’t feel safer—they amplify students’ stress, anxiety, and trauma.

Supporting Trauma-Informed Education

Scientists’ understanding of the human brain has changed in recent decades to reveal a vital connection between our minds, our bodies, and the environments we inhabit. This mind-body-environment relationship means our mental health is connected to our physical health and the health of the environment we live in. All three shape who we are and how healthy we can be.

Psychologist Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory explains why. His work connects post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, depression, and anxiety with the autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve. This principal nerve transmits feelings of emotional well-being through our bodies to regulate our heart rate, breathing, and digestive rhythms. It also works in the other direction: when our breathing and heart rate are regular and calm and our stomach is relaxed, the vagus nerve conveys feelings of safety to our brains. When we are overwhelmed or stressed, our heart rate goes up, our breathing quickens, and our stomach feels tight. And in reverse, when our stomach aches or our heart rate goes up, we don’t feel safe.

Often, our bodies react to trauma and anxiety without our being aware of what is happening or why. We jump at the slightest noise or movement. We feel on edge while riding in a car, waiting for an accident to happen. We can’t sleep or relax. These signs of hypervigilance—being supersensitive to our surroundings—are symptoms of anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other anxiety-related disorders. Even if we don’t identify or remember the cause, our bodies do. Children and adolescents live with trauma that builds up in their bodies over time. Sometimes they remember the original physical or emotional trauma or traumas, and sometimes they don’t. Many remain unaware of the cause for their entire lives. We see the effects of trauma as aggression, irritability, skipping school, or “checking out.” This is our bodies’ “fight, flight, or freeze” response. While it is easy to visualize what a fight-or-flight response might look like, a freeze response is harder to recognize. Freeze is a state of numbness or of feeling stuck in one or more parts of the body. People in freeze often seem cooperative, quiet, or contemplative. Or they might have a hard time hearing you. Students who get in trouble for not paying attention could be in freeze. Since the likelihood is that students have endured one or more childhood traumas, trauma-informed educators suggest supporting all students as if they are impacted by trauma.

We can help children and teenagers by creating calming places where they have opportunities to both be alone and connect with other people or living beings to settle their fight, flight, or freeze response. Environments that help calm the nervous system help students feel safe.

Applying Evidence-Based Design

Nature-filled schools with hands-on and active learning and play opportunities calm students, reduce aggressive behavior, and improve learning outcomes. Being in nature helps students play cooperatively and creatively. Neighborhoods and schools with more trees have less crime and stronger social ties than neighborhoods and schools with less. By remaking schools to become welcoming, healthy, safe, and productive, we create models for students and the community to experience, learn from, and emulate in the larger world. While it sounds like common sense, these design solutions are not commonly applied. Too often, concerns about cost and long-term maintenance of supportive school environments take priority over student needs. Tight school budgets set up feelings of scarcity and competition for limited resources. Yet we can create safer, nature-filled, more beautiful school environments for the same or less money than hardened facilities and with greater chances that students and the community will take better care of them. Schools can become social and physical safety nets at the heart of our communities.

We can create safer, nature-filled, more beautiful school environments for the same or less money than hardened facilities and with greater chances that students and the community will take better care of them.

Environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich first coined the phrase “evidence-based design” in his 1984 study showing that hospital patients healed faster and needed less pain medication if they were in a room with a green view. This is one of many studies that connect nature-filled environments or exposure to nature with mental health and well-being as well as physical health. Expanding on his hospital view study, Ulrich went on to discover that the environmental conditions of psychiatric facilities impacted patient aggression. His theory of supportive design suggests that perceived control, social support, and positive distraction are integral to a patient’s well-being. The study proposed a bundle of design elements to reduce patient aggression. Primary factors are nature-filled environments and a sense of belonging.

Attention Restoration Theory

For over fifty years, psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan studied which environments people preferred and how those environments affected them. Their attention restoration theory aligns with Ulrich’s work, finding that access to nature reduces stress and supports mental health and well-being. It sheds light on the types of places that make people feel most comfortable or most at home. Working with landscape architect Robert L. Ryan, the Kaplans translated their research into designable themes and spatial patterns for restorative environments—those places that best restore people’s minds after stress or mental fatigue.

The following are examples of restorative environments:

• Places that offer quiet fascination
• Places that separate us from distraction
• Places that allow us to wander in small spaces
• Places that contain materials with soft and natural textures, such as cloth, wood, stone, or weathered old materials
• Indoor places that have windows with views out to nature

To be most effective, these places should give the sense of being far away, in a setting that is large enough or designed in such a way as to hide its boundaries. A restorative place offers fascination, such as a natural setting where we can see or hear leaves or water moving or watch wildlife. And the place needs to be designed or situated so that it allows us to do what we want to do there, for instance, sit, think, eat, read, walk, or be alone.

The design strategies that support students’ mental health and wellbeing can be organized around three general themes (which are explored in more detail in the next chapter): nurture a sense of belonging, provide nature-filled environments, and inspire awe. While these themes overlap and intersect, they help us to begin visualizing specific opportunities to create more supportive school environments.

End Notes:

1. Mary Ellen Flannery, “The Epidemic of Anxiety among Today’s Students,” NEA Today (National Education Association), March 28, 2018, updated March 2019, http://neatoday.org/2018/03/28/the-epidemic-of-student-anxiety/.

2. Craig Clough, “Mental Health Screening Results of LAUSD Kids Alarming yet Typical,” LA School Report, April 10, 2015, http://laschoolreport.com/mental-health-screening-results-of-lausd-kids-alarming-yet-typical/.

3. Vincent J. Felitti et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14, no. 4 (May 1, 1998): 245–258, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8.

4. Alex Shevrin Venet, “The How and Why of Trauma-Informed Teaching,” Edutopia, August 3, 2018, https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-and-why-trauma-informed-teaching.

6. William C. Sullivan, “Landscapes of 20th Century Chicago Public Housing” (paper presented at the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Savanna, GA, May 1, 2007), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275032357_Landscapes_of_20th_Century_Chicago_Public_Housing; Rodney H. Matsuoka, “High School Landscapes and Student Performance” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/61641.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Schools The Heal by Claire Latané, published by Island Press, 2021.

The post Schools that Heal: How School Environments Shape Mental, Social, and Physical Health appeared first on Bioneers.

We trek into the ancient old-growth forest where the trees reveal an ecological parable: A forest is a mightily interwoven community of diverse life that runs on symbiosis. Our guests are Doctors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan, two Canadian ecologists whose work has helped reveal an elaborate tapestry of kinship, cooperation and mutual aid that extends beyond the forest boundaries.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

Featuring

Dr. Sm’hayetsk Teresa Ryan is Gitlan, Tsm’syen. Indigenous Knowledge and Natural Science Lecturer at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Forestry, Forest & Conservation Sciences. As a fisheries/aquatic/forest ecologist, she is currently investigating relationships between salmon and healthy forests.

Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of the bestselling, Finding the Mother Tree, is a highly influential, researcher on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence.

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Cathy Edwards and Kenny Ausubel
• Produced by: Cathy Edwards
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
• Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
• Producer: Teo Grossman
• Graphic Designer: Megan Howe

Resources

Forest Wisdom, Mother Trees and the Science of Community | Bioneers Podcast

Suzanne Simard – Dispatches From the Mother Trees | Bioneers 2021 Keynote

Suzanne Simard – Dealing with Backlash Against Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change | Bioneers 2024 Keynote

The Wood Wide Web: The Intelligent Underground Mycelial Network | Bioneers interview with Suzanne Simard

Unraveling the Secrets of Salmon: An Indigenous Exploration of Forest Ecology and Nature’s Intelligence | Bioneers interview with Teresa Ryan

Teresa Ryan: How Trees Communicate | Bioneers 2017 Keynote

Deep Dive: Intelligence in Nature

Earthlings: Intelligence in Nature | Bioneers Newsletter

This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): In this episode of our series about nature’s intelligence, we trek into the ancient old-growth forest where the trees reveal an ecological parable: A forest is a mightily interwoven community of diverse life that runs on symbiosis.

We meet Doctors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan, two Canadian ecologists whose work has helped reveal an elaborate tapestry of kinship, cooperation and mutual aid that extends beyond the forest boundaries.

Wander into an ancient woodland and the sheer diversity of pulsing life is breathtaking: birds flitting about high in the towering canopy – bright lichen hugging tree branches – animals scurrying about the undergrowth – moss and mushrooms underfoot – an invisible network of fungi underground.

Audio of Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park: One Square Inch of Silence

Forests first appeared on planet earth some 390 million years ago. They’ve operated on nature’s slow time to evolve a mind-bendingly complex choreography. It’s a kind of forest kin-dom that breathes life into the world.

Western science – despite its virtues – has often not seen the forests for the trees. And extractive industries have reduced forests to board feet, devaluing the vast ecological web of relationships that make up forests, and that make them a key life-support system for planet Earth.

Today there’s a global awakening to a new paradigm of how nature operates. It’s actually a very ancient world view, long held by Indigenous and traditional land-based peoples.

Forests have long enchanted human beings as sacred places of mystery, transformation and wisdom. Cultures throughout the ages and around the world have fostered and maintained kinship with our tree relatives.

Suzanne Simard (SS): I just want to say a few names of these relatives. Grandmother tree, grandfather tree, father tree, mother tree, tree people, the tree of life, tree of knowledge, the banyan tree, the Bodhi tree, the cedar tree, the yew tree, the birch tree. Throughout our cultures, we have honored the tree, through Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Shintoism, Coast Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Heiltsuk, Haida, Haisla, Tsimshian. The trees are always with us. We see them as symbols of life, of wisdom, fertility, continuity, growth, understanding, hospitality, generosity, peace, friendship, spirit.

Host: Suzanne Simard is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. She has revolutionized forest science through her research into the relationship between trees and their underground fungal partners. 

Born in 1960, she grew up among the old-growth forests of the Monashee Mountains. As the years went by, she became devastated by the industrial-scale destruction of the living treasures of her beloved forests.

SS: So I’ve spent my life studying these trees because this is where I come from. I come from this forest  And through my lifetime, I’ve watched what’s happened to our trees. And in fact, in British Columbia, we only have two to three percent of the tall-treed ecosystems still standing. That is wrong.

And so what I did in my grief of watching my forest disappear in front of my eyes is I became a researcher, and I started looking at the underpinnings of what made a forest, because I thought: What are we doing? We’re taking the very things that make a forest and we’re ripping it apart.

Suzanne Simard speaking at Bioneers 2024. Photo credit: Nikki Richter

And I was building on other people’s knowledge, ancient knowledge. But I didn’t know it at the time. I was just trying to fight the corporate model of forest destruction. And so what I did is I started tracing where nutrients went through the forest floor. Where was the energy going; what happened to it when we got rid of the old trees? And in my quest to do this, I found out that, you know, that these trees are in community. Huh, no surprise. Right? The trees are in a forest in community and they’re actually communicating, like a community does.

I’ve worked with many brilliant students, and we’ve all worked on trying to understand how this forest works, how these connections work. And so what we’ve figured out is that when you’re walking through a forest, there’s this huge vibrant thing underneath called a network. And through our work, we changed how we viewed forests, from a bunch of trees that we see aboveground, to a whole network of belowground connections.

Host: This research into underground fungal networks found symbiosis at the heart of the forest’s own management. Cooperation and mutual aid between the trees and mycorrhizal fungal networks, as well as between older and younger trees. Big, elder “mother trees,” as Suzanne calls them, are especially foundational to the health of forests.

Nor does this dance of cooperation stop at the forest’s edge. Enter Teresa Ryan,  Suzanne’s colleague at the University of British Columbia where she studies these connections closely.

Teresa Ryan (TR): So my name is Sm’hayetsk. I’m Teresa Ryan. I’m from the Gitlan tribe with the Tsimshian Nation, Ganhada Clan. And my mother is Loa Ryan. As an Indigenous person, I have my science background and I also have an Indigenous knowledge base that I pull from at all times.

Teresa Ryan speaking at Bioneers 2017. Photo credit: Nikki Richter

Host: As an Indigenous scientist, Teresa Ryan was unsurprised at the findings, such as how salmon from the ocean nourish the forest.

TR: These are beautiful systems that are interconnected. The salmon, when they come in from the ocean, they are bringing with them marine-derived nutrients, and particularly, marine-derived nitrogen, into the river system. They’re feeding many predators, the charismatic species that people see are the bears. They’ll take a salmon that they’ve caught to the riparian area alongside the river, up to their favorite spot, eating their favorite parts. And then they’ll leave the carcass there and go get another one.

And then this amazing thing happens when that carcass is decomposing into the soils, there’s other critters that are coming along and nibbling on it too. Then there’s the organisms in the soil that are also feasting on this annual abundance of food that just shows up on their doorstep.

And then there are nutrients that are carried along mycorrhizal networks in the forest. We actually had a student in our salmon forest project, demonstrated that marine-derived nitrogen is above waterfalls, where salmon can’t actually get to. So that shows us that this marine-derived nitrogen, which it’s coming from the ocean, is transmitted belowground in these vast networks of root systems belowground.

Host: It’s an awe-inspiring parable of the circle of life. Nitrogen from the ocean feeds these vast Canadian forests, courtesy of salmon, bears, microbes and the mycorrhizal fungi that nourish the trees through their roots. There’s nothing like 390 million years of R&D to get it right.

TR: Salmon are everywhere in the forest. And that’s pretty amazing when you think about the size of our trees that we have in these forests, they’re huge. Salmon play an important role in their life cycle.

It’s also beneficial for the salmon, so there’s a reciprocal relationship with the forest. The forest provides the shade, the canopy cover, to keep the streams cool. And that’s important for salmon because they need to have the cool water for the return migration and to lay their egg nests in the streams. And so it’s a feedback mechanism.

Host: Historically, Indigenous practices developed over millennia reflect an astute awareness of the intricate interdependence of forest life. Traditional salmon fishing methods have carefully avoided overfishing, for example, understanding that the rest of the forest needs the salmon too.

Traditional Indigenous teachings already recognized the underground fungal networks that Teresa and Suzanne documented through their scientific study- such as those of the Indigenous Skokomish elder, Subiyay.

TR: He was a very wise elder. And he would tell the stories about the tree people. We have stories about salmon people, and we have stories about tree people, about stone people—there’s all these different beings, and they’re equivalent; they’re people. Subiyay would tell stories about how a forest has so much to teach us, because there’s all of these connections belowground that are interwoven. And because they’re so interconnected it provides something that we can emulate in our communities. It shows us the strength of community.

Host: Community, mutual aid, kinship – these are powerful operating instructions for how to live for the long haul. Not to mention the majesty and genius of this slow-time natural magic.  

In 2021, Suzanne Simard wrote a breakthrough book called “Finding the Mother Tree” where she chronicles these remarkable forest networks. It became an influential bestseller, upending the public’s view of forests.

Suzanne discussed the book with Bioneers producer JP Harpignies.

SS: My purpose of writing that book was just really to convey what this new research is showing, and a better-informed public, to me, is a public that will protect nature better. 

And I felt like they needed to know, because what we were doing in forestry was destroying the very underpinnings of what made a forest, through forestry practices. And I think, they need to know. A plantation is not the same as an old growth forest, for example. 

JP Harpignies (JPH): Right, right.

SS: And what my research is showing is that you need all these complex relationships that are intact and protected and really nurtured to create a healthy ecosystem that provides the life support that we need, that we need and all our relations need.

Host: A forest is known as a “complex adaptive system.” It’s self-organizing. It has dynamic, regenerative relationships that adapt and evolve with changing conditions, while creating conditions conducive to life.  

Because the nature of nature is change, it produces emergent qualities fitted to the time and place. It’s far more than the sum of its parts – and the health of any one part depends on its overall health.

As complex adaptive systems, mature forests are wildly different from the mono-cultural tree plantations installed by industrial forestry. These projects are designed to reduce trees to a uniform commodity that’s easy to monetize in the global marketplace. As Suzanne Simard points out, plantations are not forests at all.

SS: My book is sort of like a different way of looking at the forest. That’s quite opposite to what mainstream forestry will tell you, which is you can replace an old forest and create a more productive forest if you use tree breeding and pesticides and fertilizers, and spacing, and thinning, and I’m coming along saying, actually, we need to work with these natural systems. 

And, you know, as people look at natural systems and they compare them to these managed systems — you see it in the journals as well—these natural systems that are naturally recovering are in better condition than the ones that we’ve applied this industrial model against. And I’m saying that’s a better way to go. It doesn’t mean don’t do anything, but it means do it differently. And so that’s a threat to many decades of research that supported that industrial model. 

JPH: It seems very much that what you’re talking about is a holistic, whole-systems approach as opposed to a reductionist efficiency model, and that that is really like almost an ideological struggle across a whole range of fields.

SS: Yeah. I mean, it’s a lot harder to manage a system as a complex adaptive system than to reduce it down to rows of trees. But the consequences of the rows of trees are much harder to deal with in the longer run than if you’ve managed this whole system. So a whole systems level approach is you’re looking at multiple scales of interaction; you’re looking at all the energy coming in and how it’s flowing through the system, how it’s flowing out of the system; you’re looking at socio-ecological principles and interactions. It’s bottom up, it’s top down at the same time. It’s all of that together, instead of saying, the industrial model is: we know best; we’re going to do it this way; we’re going to create this forest to look like this. That is really easy to do. It’s easy to clearcut and plant a forest. It doesn’t mean that the outcome is good. 

It’s a lot harder to work in these systems level complex systems where there’s many actors and many complex relationships, but that is where the solutions to climate change are. It is in honoring the complexity of those systems. It’s working with the people that know these systems so well for so long. That is the answer to filling our carbon deficits and our biodiversity deficits. It’s working very, very sensitively with cultures and ecosystems. 

Host: After the break, Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan suggest that now is the time to unite modern science and traditional ecological knowledge to bring about a genuine paradigm shift capable of restoring the Earth and enlisting human beings to become a blessing on the land.

Host: When the Europeans first came to Turtle Island, they thought they’d found a luxuriantly fertile and abundant wilderness where numerous Indians living there were simply living freely off the fat of the land. The newcomers couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was actually a vast cultivated landscape carefully tended by the Indigenous peoples living there. They understood that human beings are a keystone species on whom many others depend.

For Canadian Indigenous peoples, the colonial intruders arriving in the 17th century overran their homelands and ravaged their ancient cultural ties to the forest. It caused an epic historical discontinuity both for First Peoples and for the forests, as Teresa Ryan describes.

TR: Indigenous communities on the coast of British Columbia were surprised by colonialism when it landed on our doorstep one day. And so we’ve been tortured trying to figure out why can’t we do our stewardship practices; what happened to our management of resources?

And whatever goes on in the watersheds, such as forestry activity or agricultural activity, or mining or anything, it goes right into the streams and it affects salmon. So Indigenous people throughout the entire salmon forest region, which is in California, all the way along the coast north, all the way around Alaska into the Arctic. And the Indigenous people in these areas have observed changes over the last 150 years. And so how do we get back into expressing our traditions, compared to the way this colonial system has managed it?

Host: Early Native Americans had a widespread system of rules and regulations, and they recognized some limited land ownership because owning brought a responsibility to the land and incentivized moderation.

They also had shared lands. The fishing season was regulated up and down entire river drainages across many cultures speaking different languages. If you broke these kinds of laws, there were grave penalties—and spiritual consequences as well. With the arrival of the colonists, all that changed.

TR: When the colonial agent said you’ll be on this reserve and don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t go fishing, you’re not allowed to do that.

Our economy was obliterated, and that has had a significant impact on Indigenous people for sure, but it’s also had a significant impact on the resources that we provided these stewardship activities for for thousands of years. And now that these resources are vanishing rapidly, there’s a sudden interest in these Indigenous knowledge systems. The land was taken, the culture suppressed, being assimilated, and it’s devastating. 

And so critical imperative action is needed to restore the Indigenous stewardship to these systems, because the knowledge still exists. We still have it, and that’s something we don’t want to give up, not when we’ve lost all these other things. The knowledge is treasured. It has to be protected so that there are future generations that can take care of the resources.

Canadian Wet’suwet’en indigenous first nation people fishing salmon. Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Host: Indeed, there’s a global awakening today around the value of traditional Indigenous knowledge. It’s coupled with the Land Back movement and the intercultural need for First Peoples to be involved in land management decision-making.

Prioritizing the rights and engagement of Canadian First Peoples in protecting and restoring the forests is an explicit imperative for Teresa Ryan and Suzanne Simard.

So how can traditional ecological knowledge be integrated with Western scientific research? Can these two sometimes contradictory world views serve as complementary paradigms to guide humanity through this evolutionary keyhole? Suzanne Simard.

SS: I have this project called the Mother Tree Project, which I started 10 years ago, and we’re working with nations, as well as other people who are working on the land—communities, local communities, woodlots. We have this big climate gradient where we’re applying sort of these forestry practices to look for better ways than clearcutting, and then measuring the impacts on the ecological properties and processes.

The most exciting part is working with Indigenous people up and down the Pacific Coast and the interior British Columbia, finding different ways to re-engage with the forest, to get land back from colonial forestry, and then using a combination of our scientific knowledge with their objectives and goals for the land. 

Because they’re the stewards of the land for millennia, since time immemorial, culturally connected to the land. And that governance and tending and responsibility its very complex and old systems. 

It’s not just ecology and it’s not just culture. It’s the two of them together.

There’s a lot of things I don’t know. But it’s really, really rewarding. It’s the most exciting work I’ve ever done. 

Suzanne Simard measures soil carbon in a coastal rainforest. Photo credit: UBC Faculty of Forestry

Host: Respecting traditional knowledge helps inform the design of the research. It might suggest a new avenue to investigate, or in some cases, standard scientific methods may simply be inappropriate. Suzanne sees this integrated approach as enriching the research.

SS: In working with the nations, you can’t just apply an experiment across this big landscape. Each place, what we do has got to be adapted to each particular nation and what their goals for their plants, and their medicines, and their trees are. 

And so, for example, when we work with the Nlaka’pamux Nation there is no clearcutting allowed, which, of course, in an experimental setting you want to create this broad range of conditions so that you can make comparisons of the worst and the best, but we can’t really do that. We have to change it so that we’re saving these sacred trees, even though we’re trying to measure what is the protection of those trees; what does it mean for the ecosystem to measure it against; what if you don’t have them?

I’m working with the Ma’amtagila Nation, and we visited this grove of ancient sister cedars; they’re like thousands of years old, these cedar trees. They all live in this grove, and the generations of trees have come up around them, so there’s a whole multi-generational forest. 

And I was, you know, invited to talk a little bit about connection between these trees that I’ve been studying, and out of that conversation, I thought we need to understand more about the kinship. How does that kinship work among cedar trees? 

We’re doing all these experiments now to actually measure, what happens to their productivity or their biochemistry, or their reproductive ability when they’re around kin versus strangers. And it was really based on this conversation, and being in that forest, and understanding that traditional knowledge that led us to do that experiment. 

Host: Simard’s research suggests a radical shift in perspective that values the social and cultural aspects of our relationship with trees and with nature. It challenges the increasingly discredited Western scientific ideology that intelligence is restricted to human beings. It elevates cooperation over competition as the driving force of evolution.

Unsurprisingly, Simard’s work has been attacked by some scientists who accuse her of anthropomorphizing the natural world. But as she points out, such language is actually nothing new.

SS: In biology, we’ve always used that kind of language. Think about like families, plant families.

 JPH: That’s right, yeah

SS: We’ve been doing that forever. Or in forestry, we call things parent trees. I started calling these mother trees because it invokes the regenerative capacity of a forest. And there was a lot of backlash around that. But the term parent tree in genetics is used all the time, and it’s been around for a long time.

Our language is full of it. And it’s good. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It helps people understand. Automatically, you go, oh, I get that, because I can relate to that.

And regarding the intelligence of a forest, you know, again, language. Right? We have thought of intelligence as a human thing. We think of ourselves as the center of this anthropocentric center of all living beings, at least in Western culture. And that leads us to think that there can’t be intelligence in nature because it’s not us. We’ve assigned that to humans. It’s a bit of hubris, of course, around human dominance and superiority, but this intelligence of—How do we define that? Well, the ability to make decisions, that’s intelligent. To be adaptive and responsive. That’s a sign of intelligence.

In mycorrhizal networks, you know, the patterns are biological neural network patterns. And we can describe that mathematically. And decisions are made about how to propagate that network or support these trees.

And whole communities, whole ecosystems are working together, that’s an intelligent social phenomenon. So, to me, the forest has all the qualities of intelligence.

Host: Native American restoration ecologist Dennis Martinez offers this Indigenous perspective: “We don’t heal the land. We intervene no more than necessary to allow natural processes to heal the land. It’s about relationship. You have to love the natural world — the plants and the animals — and take care of them as you would your own family. It’s about our responsibility as human beings to participate every day in the re-creation of the Earth. It just goes on and on.”

Again, Teresa Ryan…

TR: Everything that is living has spirit. The way that we think we don’t want to offend those spirits. We don’t want to offend those beings. The way that we think about these beings has an impact on how we adjust our management. Because they’ll know.  They’ll know that we are not honoring their life and they may not return.

So when we think about intelligence in the forest, from a science perspective, we are seeing responses of beings in the forest, particularly through the work on the mycorrhizal networks. We can actually demonstrate that we’re seeing responses. And it’s going to be a work in progress, but it’s come such a long way in helping us to understand these relationships in science. And how there’s reactions in these beings, in their habitats and in their life cycles, and the services that they provide.

So they’re probably smarter than us

Host: Teresa Ryan and Suzanne Simard… “Seeing the Forest for the Trees”.

If you’d like to learn more about the extraordinary intelligence of life inherent in fungi, plants and animals, check out our Earthlings newsletter. In each issue, we delve into captivating stories and research that promise to reshape your perception of our fellow Earthlings – and point toward a profound shift in how we all inhabit this planet together.

The post Seeing the Forest for the Trees appeared first on Bioneers.

My good friend and colleague John List has very ambitious summer plans.

We’ve both believed for a long time that the combination of creative economic thinking and randomized experiments has the potential to revolutionize business and the non-profit sector. John and I have worked to foment that revolution through both  academic partnerships with firms as well as a project of John’s called the Science of Philanthropy Initiative (SPI), whose mission is “evidence-based research on charitable giving.”

This summer, John is committed to taking that mission to a whole new level with the first annual University of Chicago Summer Institute on Field Experiments.  The idea is to bring together for one week top economists, business leaders, and NGOs with the goal of developing powerful, creative solutions to the toughest problems faced by firms, whether for-profit or not-for-profit.

In addition to lots of brainstorming and work focused on firms’ problems, there will be presentations by John, me, and other leading scholars. Knowing John, I’m sure there will also be plenty of after-hours activities.

Here’s how the website describes the sort of people we are looking for:

The Summer Institute is looking for practitioner partners who are open to new and bold ideas that will revolutionize the way they develop policy, do business, or provide charitable programming. Practitioner partners should be willing to work closely with researchers to field-test solutions, and must be willing to allow research publications to come from the partnership. We expect the Institute to serve as a catalyst for field-experiment research and strong researcher-practitioner partnerships.

So if you or someone you know might be a good candidate, please apply!  You can find the details on the Institute website.

We can’t wait to meet you and get started!

The post Great Companies Needed appeared first on Freakonomics.

We’re working on an episode about behavior change — essentially, how to get yourself to do the things you should be doing but often don’t. It revolves around the fascinating research of Katy Milkman at Penn. For example, she and her colleagues have noted a “Fresh Start Effect”:

The popularity of New Year’s resolutions suggests that people are more likely to tackle their goals immediately following salient temporal landmarks. … We propose that these landmarks demarcate the passage of time, creating many new mental accounting periods each year, which relegate past imperfections to a previous period, induce people to take a big-picture view of their lives, and thus motivate aspirational behaviors.

What we’re looking for are your examples of fresh starts — whether it’s a new timeframe, job, relationship, living situation, etc. — and how it may have motivated some aspirational behaviors of your own.

Use your iPhone, Android, or other recording device to make a short audio recording of your answer and e-mail the file to radio@freakonomics.com. Tell us your name, where you live,  what you do — and, most important, your Fresh Start story. We’ll pick through the best, weirdest examples and make them a part of our show. If you’re too shy to record your voice, give us a shout on Twitter, on our Facebook page, or in the comments below. But audio is what we’re really after.

Many thanks!

The post Lend Your Voice to Freakonomics Radio appeared first on Freakonomics.