B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

09-10 * 13:00 - FT meeting (Bea)

08-21 * 13:00 - Radical Democracy Meeting (Bea)

A self-assembling coating made from seaweed and zinc can keep fruit fresher and lasting longer than even the cool interior of a fridge. This invention, described in a new paper from a team of Canadian scientists, enabled even delicate strawberries to survive at room temperature for four days without molding. It strikes two sustainability targets at once: reducing food waste, and limiting dependence on carbon-intensive cold chains. 

The main seaweed ingredient in this invention sounds unusual but is actually a widely-used food additive and vegan gelatin-substitute called agar that is produced from red algae. This made up the bulk of the new fruit coating, but when combined with the micronutrient zinc and tannic acid it did something interesting that the researchers are still trying to understand, swiftly self-organizing into a thin layer of microparticles that evenly coated any fruit dipped into it. For this, the researchers tested out fresh strawberries, apple slices, and whole grapes. 

Next, they trialled their new coating both inside and outside a fridge, comparing dipped fruit with fruit that remained untreated. This led to the most striking discovery, that coated strawberries at room temperature outperformed uncoated strawberries placed in the fridge. The treated, uncooled fruit held out for at least four days or more before becoming moldy, while the untreated but refrigerated fruits started molding on day four. Meanwhile, coated strawberries that were kept in the fridge were even more robust, lasting a full six days.

At room temperature the untreated strawberries stayed mold-free for just two days, compared to the four-day staying power of treated strawberries. Cut apple slices stayed fresh for roughly 24 hours while the untreated controls began to show visible signs of decay at about 12 hours. The treated grapes, meanwhile, lasted almost 14 days, taking a full week longer to show signs of wrinkling and shrinkage than the untreated fruit. 

 

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Overall, the novel agar dip extended fruits’ shelf life by at least twofold, and reduced weight loss at the four day mark from 30% to 13%. The researchers say the coating has antibacterial qualities which can explain its preserving features, is safe for human consumption, maintains the nutritional quality of the treated fruit, and can easily be washed off when food is ready to eat.

A lifecycle analysis also revealed that the coating had a lower or equivalent emissions impact to refrigeration. And although these reductions were relatively modest, the researchers say the benefits would become much more significant when extrapolated to a whole cold chain system, where small gains can add up to big savings.  

In Canada where the research was based, food waste is a huge problem, with some reports estimating that 46% of fresh produce is lost or wasted in the country each year, valued at $58 billion.

Upgraded with commercially-available agar and used on a wider range of fruits, the researchers believe their invention could make a real dent in this problem, becoming a “practical, sustainable strategy to mitigate food loss and build resilient fresh produce supply chains,” they write.

Yang et. al. “Self-Assembled Metal−Phenolic−Agar Microparticle-Derived Coatings Enable Scalable and Sustainable Fresh Produce Preservation.” Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 2026.

Image: Slashio Photography for UnSplash

The planet’s oceans are an ally for fighting climate change. They absorb about a third of all human-generated carbon dioxide emissions. Many researchers are looking at ways to speed up the ocean’s ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

One proposed solution is to dump iron into ocean waters. This would trigger a bloom of phytoplankton—microscopic plant-like organisms that use sunlight to produce food—which would pull large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But research published in the journal Nature shows that not all places are equal when it comes to ocean iron fertilization (OIF). The carbon dioxide removal strategy could have unintended side-effects, and its ecological impact and effectiveness depends on where it is put into action.

The team from the University of California, Irvine has found that implementing OIF at higher latitudes rather than near the equator could reduce environmental impacts while still achieving removal of carbon dioxide

“The Central Pacific should be avoided for OIF due to the severe ecological risks, and the Southern Ocean may offer the best balance between carbon sequestration and ecological risk over decadal timescales,” says Jun Yu of UCI’s department of earth systems science.

 

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Artificial OIF is more than a theoretical concept, Yu says. Researchers have conducted field tests in the past. But those short-term OIF experiments were designed to see whether iron “is the limiting nutrient for phytoplankton growth in ocean regions, not to serve as a climate solution.”

To work as a climate solution, OIF would need to be done at much larger scales over longer periods. That could have unintended environmental consequences such as biodiversity loss, expansion of oxygen minimum zones, and disturbance of fish habitats. That’s because the added iron can deplete nutrients from water. That results in less zooplankton, tiny organisms that serve as food for fish and larger marine animals.

Yu, J. Keith Moore, Adam Martiny and colleagues set out to see which regions can achieve efficient, durable carbon dioxide removal, and what the ecological impact would be. They used an ocean iron fertilization model to analyze the fertilization potential and ecosystem impact across ten ocean biomes over 60 years.

The team found that OIF removed up to 5.3 parts per million of carbon dioxide, or 0.70 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. They also found that the areas with the largest plankton blooms, and hence the most effective at carbon dioxide removal, were the Southern Ocean and the equatorial Pacific.

However, the strategy depleted nutrients near the equator. Fertilizing 0.35% of the ocean in the equatorial Pacific leads to at least 10% decline in zooplankton. Meanwhile, fertilizing 0.2% of the Southern Ocean led to a 10% increase in zooplankton.

“The next step would be to explore the fishery impact of OIF, with additional model experiments at more locations in the Southern Ocean to test the benefits and risks,” Yu says.

Source: Jun Yu et al. Climate benefit and ecological cost trade-offs for ocean iron fertilization. Nature, 2026.

Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory

This week we’re finally doing it! We’re going to Kingwood, Texas, and talking about the greenbelt trail system I’ve been telling everyone about for years. This is a storytelling episode, featuring guests John Walsh, Jerry Lunow, and Bill Neuhaus, so I hope folks enjoy hearing about NASA, timber companies, bike trails, and Houston’s bayous. But also, stick around to hear how a suburban development in Texas from the 1970s mirrors and pre-dated Dutch bike planning with special guest, Steve Vance from Streetsblog Chicago.

Now, as you know at Talking Headways, we offer you three ways to enjoy our fine content:

• Read the full transcript (with a few AI typos) by clicking here.
• Reading an edited segment below the player on this page.
• Or simply putting in those AirPods and clicking the audio player below to get the full dulcet tones of our host and his guests:

Here’s the partial excerpt:

Steve Vance: I did not think about the benefit of living in Houston when we moved there. It only came to light when we moved away from Kingwood in 1996 to Batavia, Illinois.

And then my perspective and appreciation for the design of Kingwood changed again when I visited Houten in the Netherlands in 2011, where I recognized some of the design principles in Houten were actually present in Kingwood. And I was shocked that somebody in the ’70s had this idea that has been replicated 4,000 miles away at around the same time, but also I think in Davis, California, there are some parallels between Kingwood and their bike path system and Davis’s bike path system.

Jeff Wood: Throughout the production of this episode, I couldn’t shake thinking about how the United States and the Dutch diverged in the 1970s. In 1973, an oil crisis hit and prices spiked. To many people, this is a line of demarcation. Gary Nelson notes that 1973 is the year that petroleum killed America, and auto-oriented sprawl clearly won out over communities designed for active transportation like walking, biking, and transit.

Some countries, such as the Netherlands, made deliberate choices, moving towards less energy-intensive modes as the United States shifted further towards auto dependence. In 1979, with more oil embargoes and the election of Ronald Reagan, auto dependence and urban sprawl were set in stone for another generation.

Steve and I enjoyed a rare Texas bubble, a place where you could bike everywhere if you wished.

Steve Vance: Growing up there, I was a free-range kid before that phrase even existed. And I had a bicycle, and I was able to ride my bicycle to any of my friends’ houses in other subdivisions and ride it to the grocery store, which I think was called Randall’s at the time, and the library and school and the pool in my subdivision or in my friend’s subdivision because there was a greenbelt trail system, a network that was grade separated through the forest.

And then when I moved to Batavia, like, I was put on lockdown. I was not allowed to bike to certain parts of Batavia or Geneva. There’s a road in that part of Illinois called Randall Road. It probably has a state highway number. But I was not allowed to cross that road. And the thing is, the grocery store was on the other side of that road, and thus I was severely restricted.

Things that were normal for me to do in Kingwood, I was not allowed to do in Batavia because Batavia had very little bike infrastructure, had almost no on-street bike lanes, although Kingwood didn’t have any because it had such a robust trail network. And then the middle school that I attended in Batavia was built on a greenfield site at the edge of town, and so I either had to take a bus or one of my parents had to drive me

Jeff Wood: Steve wanted to bike and walk. But as kids, we didn’t know why we couldn’t or what was really different aside from the fact that one place had accessible transportation and the other really didn’t.

Steve Vance: So later the Dutch Consulate sent planners to come to Chicago to work with the Chicago Department of Transportation’s bike lane designers and planners.

And some events were open to the public, and so I attended one where one of the Dutch planners explained this layered network system. So there’s a network of roads for cars and vehicles, and there’s a separate network for biking, and they will intersect at certain points and you make certain treatments so that those intersections are safe.

But between points, you have completely separate networks. They don’t have to be the same network with the bike path and the road in the same alignment. You can separate them. It was neat to learn in like 2010 that there was a name and a concept and a process for doing what I had experienced as a child in Kingwood for five years.

These Dutch planners would say, “Get a map out. Mark the points of interest that you’re trying to promote cycling to, and draw straight lines between them.” So you can see the beginning of a network. Obviously, you can’t build bike trails in a straight line because there are buildings and natural resources in the way, and so then you try to draw the straightest line possible between the two points.

And so if you look at a map of Kingwood and you mark all the playing fields and the schools and the pools, it’s, it’s basically the whole bike path or multi-use path, the Greenbelt Trail, was designed to just connect all of those things. It hit every point that someone like me or my sister needed to go to frequently on our bikes.

The network was there for that.

A recent study from Open Plans and the Transportation Research Program at Hunter College argued that AVs will generate excessive “deadheading,” or empty vehicle miles, in New York City. The concern is fair, but the conclusion was based on a false equivalence: it treats the density of California as directly comparable to New York City. The literature is clear that deadheading depends on demand density. There are fewer empty miles when cars don’t have to travel far to find their next passenger.

Nonetheless, the report raises an important question: how can AVs avoid creating more congestion? It’s a fair question, given the rapid introduction of tens of thousands of personally owned for-hire vehicles more than a decade ago was a shock to the system. While AVs will have a much smaller footprint, there are lessons we all can learn from mistakes made by companies such as Uber and Lyft.

I walk and bike everywhere and I want the same for my kids. That’s why I was thrilled that after a year of advocacy and organizing, the City of Oakland is redesigning one of the city’s most dangerous streets to prioritize bicycle and pedestrian safety. It’s also why I work at Waymo. In my personal advocacy and in my role as the Policy Development and Research Manager at Waymo, I often think about the trade-offs required to build a safe, vibrant, and efficient transportation system. Whether it is bike or bus lanes, curb management, or parking, there is rarely a perfect solution. The conversation about how to most effectively deploy AVs is no different, and curb management is an important place to start.

Cities become more delightful when there are fewer cars circling and less curb space devoted to vehicle storage. Right now, roughly 40 percent of ride-hailing miles are empty, a figure that generally holds for AV fleets. But as a fleet operator, Waymo is incentivized to minimize deadheading because we bear the cost of every single empty mile driven. Every unnecessary mile means additional operating costs, energy consumption, vehicle wear, and risk exposure. Traditional ride-hailing platforms don’t internalize these costs; they are pushed onto the drivers. Waymo, like cities, wants to reduce empty miles as much as possible.

One solution to reducing empty miles is parking between rides. Taxis do this at taxi stands, and the San Francisco County Transportation Authority found ride-hail drivers park an average of 10 minutes between hails. When Waymo asked researchers from UC Berkeley and UC Irvine to model the impact on VMT from AVs staging at the curb, they found that it reduced empty miles by more than 60 percent. And the magnitude of the reduction was striking, particularly because the model strategically accounted for moving empty AVs into off-street lots during low-demand periods.

Staging is also a highly productive use of curb space, according to the researchers. Because AVs spend much of their time providing trips, the cumulative value generated by staging far exceeds that of a curb space occupied by a privately owned vehicle. For a commercial district, this means that local businesses could receive eight to 10 times as many potential customer visits than if the space were designated for private vehicle storage only.

None of this means AVs should have unrestricted access to the curb. Waymo already prioritizes parking in off-street lots, limits itself to one staged vehicle per block face, and avoids cycling through the same spot repeatedly. In a recent report, Open Plans and the Transportation Research Program at Hunter College argued that New York City’s “constrained curb space” makes staging infeasible, leaving AVs with little choice but to drive empty between trips. But the curb isn’t constrained by the laws of physics, it’s constrained by policy. As the Berkeley and Irvine researchers suggested, establishing permitting standards can formalize curbside staging. Deadheading can never be zero, so the real question is how many empty miles will we accept in exchange for the safety, accessibility and other benefits of AVs. Curb management is exactly how cities can organize that tradeoff with clear rules.

Encouragingly, New York is having these conversations at the highest level. Mayor Zohran Mamdani created an Office of Curb Management this year to bring more order to how the city allocates curb space. Officials are weighing ideas from metered spots to residential permits to dynamic pricing. Each plan differs, but the premise is one we agree with: curb space is valuable, and managing it inconsistently doesn’t serve anyone well.

Waymo, city officials, and urbanists have common cause, and we don’t have to wait to start having these conversations. Open Plans has in fact been a leader on reimagining curbs. New York is the first and only city in the nation to implement congestion pricing, which has been a resounding success. Though controversial, there is renewed interest in more visibly holding drivers accountable for blocking street cleaning.

At Waymo, we believe AVs can play a valuable role in making transportation safer and cities more livable. Conversations about curb management and other policies that help responsibly deploy AVs are key to our work with the city officials, advocates, and communities we hope to serve.

• Congressional Democrats are accusing the Federal Transit Administration of intentionally stonewalling transit projects. The Trump administration has yet to issue any grants from a multibillion-dollar capital investment program since the president’s second term started. It’s also tried to cut off funding for already-approved projects in blue states, like the Gateway Tunnel. (New York. Times)
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy believes bike lanes cause traffic congestion. In fact, the opposite is true. (Bloomberg Government)
• Despite tariffs, demand for new transit buses in North America remains strong as agencies replace their aging fleets. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Safety and comfort are just as important as distance when it comes to walkability. (The Conversation)
• The privately owned cross-country passenger rail line AmeriStarRail has yet to materialize because the company hasn’t been able to reach an agreement with Amtrak. (USA Today)
• Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ campaign promise to make the L.A. Metro free would cost $1 billion and possibly prevent the agency from improving service. (LAist)
• A Washington, D.C. cycling group is pushing for better walking, biking and transit access around the new RFK stadium. (Greater Greater Washington)
• Portland residents who bought an e-bike using the city’s rebate program say the purchase changed their lives. (Mercury)
• Kansas City is using water-spraying trucks to keep extreme heat from warping streetcar tracks. (Axios)
• The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority has three finalists for CEO. (Saporta Report)
• A Vision Zero plan in the Seattle suburb of Lynnwood is getting pushback from people who say the city doesn’t need to spend money on traffic safety because it already has relatively few road deaths. (The Urbanist)
• Ann Arbor transit agency The Ride is starting a shuttle service for University of Michigan football games. (MLive)
• Heavy electric vehicles are tearing up China’s roads. (Techy 44)
• A proposal for high-speed rail in Australia would save a lot of jet fuel and help solve Sydney’s affordable housing crisis. (B1M)
• Japanese cities are so livable because everyday needs are within walking distance, and there’s an excellent transit system for longer trips. (BBC)

The world’s butterflies are on the move.

Whether it’s the iridescent blue Godartiana byses flitting south in Brazil as temperatures rise or Europe’s endangered Danube clouded yellow losing ground to more intensive agriculture, roughly 1 in 10 of the world’s 19,000 butterfly species appear today in different places than they were once found.

That’s according to perhaps the most through accounting to date of how butterflies are changing locations as the planet changes around them, published last week in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“We found butterfly species shifting their ranges on every continent where they occur. The scale is astonishing,” said Shawan Chowdhury, the paper’s lead author and head of Monash University’s Global Change Ecology Lab in Melbourne, Australia.

This isn’t the first time such butterfly shifts have been documented. But much of the past research has concentrated on insects in North America and Europe, where money and scientific infrastructure support more intensive and long-running research. That, however, isn’t where most butterfly species occur. They are concentrated in the biodiversity hotspots of the tropics.

To remedy this mismatch and create a more comprehensive picture of what’s happening to butterflies, Chowdhury and colleagues went beyond the usual sources of scientific papers. They sought out research published in languages other than English. And they surveyed 68 butterfly experts from 49 countries to get their insights.   

“When we included non‑English studies and expert knowledge, a completely different global picture emerged,” said Chowdhury. “Without these sources, we would have dramatically underestimated the global patterns of range shifts, especially overlooking key patterns in the tropics, where 80% of insect species live.”

 

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The resulting picture was one of global turmoil, with butterflies buffeted by both climate change and habitat loss. Of the 1,758 species reported to have altered their location, 80% expanded their range, showing up in places where they previously hadn’t been seen, including Brazil’s little Godartiana. Those range expansions were concentrated in the tropics, where insects already live at the edge of the temperature limits they can tolerate.

In contrast, nearly 30% of species lost ground in some places, a phenomenon chiefly documented in Europe and North America. Meanwhile, 22% of species had moved to different elevations, a phenomenon often associated with rising temperatures, which organisms try to escape by moving to higher ground.

While the reasons for these changes are many, two major factors emerged most frequently in the literature. Climate change was identified as a major driver in 79% of the species in which scientists had identified causes of the butterfly movements. Habitat disturbance and agriculture were cited most often in cases where a butterfly species saw its range shrink.

These mass movements of butterflies around the globe highlight the need for conservation initiatives that can aid them, the authors write. That includes identifying and protecting places likely to provide the most hospitable conditions for a species as the climate changes; reducing harm from activities such as farming; preserving land that connects different patches of habitat to aid the butterflies in their movements; and forecasting where species are likely to move when considering what land to protect.

While butterflies are attention grabbing thanks to their beautiful colors and the remarkable metamorphoses they undergo from larva to adult, the alarm over the changes in their locations isn’t just about the insects. It’s also an alert that something bigger is amiss.

Much as Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” tied the pesticide-induced loss of insects to broader ecological mayhem, so people can read a bigger message into the movement of butterflies. “Butterflies are early warning indicators,” said Chowdhury. “If their ranges are shifting this dramatically, it signals profound changes across ecosystems.”

Chowdhury, et. al. “Extensive climate-induced range shifts in butterflies across the globe.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. Aug. 5, 2026.

Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash

The year is 2036. Connected Autonomous Vehicles comprise 25 percent of the cars on the nation’s streets and roads and fleets of robo-cabs crisscross cities. But after one such CAV blows a stop sign and kills a pedestrian, federal cybermarshal Dana Grant starts asking questions — but can Grant get to the bottom of the “accident” … or undercover a plot to use these connected AVs to kill thousands? That’s the plot of “Autokill” (Open Road Media) by “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz and playwright Cary Pepper. To purchase the full book, click here. But for now, curl up with Chapter 3, “What Was Wrong?” in this exclusive excerpt.

After staring at the computer screen for several minutes, Dana Grant sat back and slowly shook her head. She wasn’t happy and she didn’t know why.

The case seemed simple enough. Last week, a Connected Autonomous Vehicle killed a 35-year-old woman in California. She was sitting in a park, set back from the road some 50 feet, when she was struck by the vehicle. According to local police, the car ignored a stop sign, which was one reason the case landed on Dana’s desk. That, and of course, the fatality.

Dana Grant was a federal cybermarshal assigned to the National Transportation Safety Board’s Portland-based CAV unit, Western Sector. With thousands of robo-cabs, trucks, and buses on the nation’s roads and streets, the National Transportation Safety Board had created a new branch to investigate CAV-related accidents. It was similar to the division that investigated aviation incidents, but only two offices had been opened so far (Eastern Sector was head-quartered in Boston), its operating budget was smaller, its staff had not been provided with the in-depth training that allowed agents in the aviation division to effectively probe air-transport events, and, unlike the aviation division, the CAV unit had no NTSB Training Center.

The marshals had been promised such expertise, but the agency, despite being in existence for six years, was still getting “up to speed” and Congress (swayed by the powerful CAV lobby) had repeatedly failed to adequately fund it, leaving many marshals to obtain any special training they felt they needed on their own, at their own expense. Dana had overheard several of her colleagues proudly vowing not to “go all tech” as long as they had to pay for it themselves.

Not Dana. If she were doing the job, she wanted to be as good at it as she could be. Just as she’d gone the extra distance as a cop in Phoenix. Since joining the unit, she’d been taking workshops and reading as much as she could to educate herself on the intricacies of CAVs. When she needed help, she didn’t hesitate to reach out to the small network of advisors and consultants she’d slowly assembled around her during the five years she’d been on the job.

Influenced by those advisors and consultants, Dana had stopped using the word accident when talking about her cases. She investigated crashes.

An accident is an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause. But CAVs, obeying algorithms designed for maximum safety and free of road-rage-inducing ego, didn’t do things unexpectedly or take potentially-dangerous risks. So when a CAV collided with anything, it wasn’t an accident. It was a crash.

Dana also quickly learned that crucial to investigating and understanding any incident involving a CAV meant knowing how to read and interpret the information gleaned from its black box, which included every decision, maneuver, and change the vehicle made during a trip. It included interactions with passengers. It included everything the car did, saw, and heard. And because this data was all in computer code, it required knowing how to understand what you were looking at.

Even with all the time Dana had spent learning about this arcane corner of the universe, she still had large gaps in her knowledge of it. But she was light years ahead of every other agent in her office, and she knew it.

Now Dana sat pondering why the CAV ignored the stop sign. Programming error? Software failure? Faulty sensing equipment? If any of those were the issue, did the problem lie with Relyable, the company that manufactured the car? Or was it a matter of a repair, similar to fixing the brakes on a human-driven car? And if that were so, was the root cause a failure by the company that operated the vehicle to properly maintain it?

Or, if it was a programming or software error, did that signal a failure by the engineers at the company that made the car? Which would mean Dana had to see if the same company created both the computer code and the software, because it was possible that correct computer code had been negated by faulty software.

A third possibility was that someone tampered with the stop sign, which happened often in the 2020s, when kids defaced traffic signs or anti-AVers tried to demonstrate the weakness of autonomous infrastructure. Then came the 2029 Topeka School AV bus crash. A couple of teenagers out for kicks turned a 30-mph sign in to one reading 80 mph by making the three an eight. The bus raced around a sharp curve doing 80, left the road, and plunged 35 feet down an embankment, killing 21 children and the bus attendant.

For the next three years, all AV school buses had to have a human driver. Meanwhile, every inch of roadway in the United States was minutely mapped: every traffic sign, signal, lane marking, and channelization. And the federal government required any change, no matter how small, to be immediately entered in the central Geographic Information System Command file, the huge database where all this information lived. Failure to do so resulted in states and cities losing as much as billions in federal highway dollars. Now, any discrepancy between what an AV saw and what was in the GIS database, was detected by the CAV’s Command Center (all the companies that operated CAVs had command centers that controlled their fleet) in a nanosecond, and the GIS Command Center threw the vehicle into fail-safe mode, choosing the safest available option for its next action.

If a vehicle saw “80 mph” but the database listed “30 mph,” the GISCC would send an alert, slow or stop the vehicle, and a remote driver would take over the CAV. In addition, all other vehicles from that company would be alerted and a post-mortem would be conducted.

The system worked almost flawlessly in cities and on state roads; the only gaps now were the small towns and rural areas that didn’t have the ability to update the GIS files, or the few places where locals believed that routinely updating their files was an infringement by an overbearing government. Since 2033, there had been only nine instances of minor crashes due to un-updated traffic devices, and none due to vandalism. Could this be the first?

Maybe. Yet Dana had a gut feeling it was something else. There were thousands of Relyable delivery robos operating in the county and there hadn’t been similar incidents. Which suggested that the computer code, the software, and pretty much everything else in the vehicle was operating properly. So what else could it be?

Relyable had already responded to the police-finding that the car went through the stop sign. Company spokespeople maintained that the sign had been defaced with both a hole and grafitti, so the fault lay not with the vehicle and its sensing equipment, but with the town for not repairing the sign. Relyable also noted that the town had been cited four times for not complying with GIS Command. The company could not be held responsible, it reasoned, for signage or traffic signals that were not repaired or replaced in a timely manner.

Dana studied pictures of the sign; there was no question that it had been vandalized. A tagger had gone to work on it, and there was a hole dead center in the middle of the O. If it was a bullet hole, someone was quite a shot.

Did that mean the CAV had not seen the sign? Or had it seen the sign but was no longer able to identify it as a signal to stop, perhaps interpreting it as nothing more than a lamppost or structure designating street parking? Why did the Topeka fail-safe protocol fail?

“Oh, you caught that California thing.”

She hadn’t heard Kyle coming up behind her. But now there was that soft wheezing through his seemingly-always-clogged nasal passages. Perhaps if he lost some weight… The thought ran through her head almost every time she saw Kyle. He wasn’t obese. Just unnecessarily overweight, all in his belly, which hung over his belt in a loose fold.

Kyle Beaumont would always be overweight, always breathe heavily through his nose, always be, in Dana’s mind, one nasal breath away from a heart attack. Which of course she hoped would never happen. She didn’t hate Kyle or wish any bad would come to him. She just wished he wasn’t her boss.

Not because he was overweight and breathed through his nose. Because he was always hovering, and he wasn’t thorough. He’d been with the NTSB 20 years to her 5, and was more interested in clearing cases than conducting competent, thorough investigations.

So, rather than encourage his people to spend as much time as they needed to properly run a case, he’d be satisfied with a preliminary finding, even one still open to questions, if it added to the “Case Closed” log he submitted weekly to the head of the Portland bureau.

As a result, Dana’s unit had a high closure rate, which Kyle was determined to maintain. But given how they were achieving it, she wasn’t sure that was something to be proud of.

Their findings tended to hold the vehicles or companies blameless, and Dana sometimes wondered about that. But the truth was, in crashes involving CAVs and human drivers, it was almost always the human driver at fault. CAVs had proven themselves to be more consistent, more stable, and less erratic than human drivers. They were not distracted as easily or as often, never tried to beat a changing traffic light or speed past an approaching train, and had no interest in pushing themselves to test their power, speed, or endurance.

So the fact that Kyle’s long list of closed cases often found in favor of the CAV wasn’t surprising. Nevertheless, Dana often found herself wishing he didn’t reach that conclusion quite so fast.

Standing behind her looking over her shoulder, he’d moved closer. She knew, without turning, because the heavy breathing was now only inches from her ear.

“New perfume?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“You smell different. New shampoo?”

“Nope.”

“Different soap, maybe?”

She pictured him sniffing the air around her. Or, worse, sniffing her.

“Same soap.”

“Something about you is different. Are you …?”

It was time to end this. She shifted in her chair, sending it backward into his foot, then turned around and was “surprised” to see the wheel of the chair pressing on his shoe and the edge of her seat against his leg.

“Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize you were that close.”

“No harm done,” he assured her, reaching down to lightly rub his knee. “You still working on that?” he nodded toward her computer.

“Hmm-hmm,” she muttered, studying the screen again to indicate she was too distracted to talk.

“Stop sign was vandalized. The town didn’t update its GIS records. Like the company says, it’s their fault. Can’t you close it?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she started. “I—”

“You have ‘a feeling,”’ he finished for her. “Here we go.”

She hated when he did that. But it had been years since she took him seriously when he said those things in that tone of voice. That had stopped after working with him for two months, when she almost caved in the wake of his response to her first “feeling.”

That first time, still new to the unit and trying to find her way, she’d almost let him intimidate her because she was half-doubting herself: Had she really been on to something, or was it more an attempt to prove she could do the job?

But she stuck with it, and it paid off. Driver vs. CAV, and the driver swore the robo had swerved into his lane. There was activity to the right of the CAV that might have made it swerve toward the driver, but a check of the black box showed it swerved no more than a foot and did not cross the double yellow line that separated the vehicles.

On a hunch, Dana checked the driver’s cell-phone records and found that he’d been on the phone at the time of the accident. It was him, not the robo, that had swerved across the
double yellow line.

Two lessons learned: Always trust her gut, and never listen to Kyle about such matters.

It took her a while to stop railing at herself for letting him come as close as he did to shutting her down, but she finally landed in place of self-understanding: she was navigating new territory with insufficient training. She was allowed a few missteps; she could forgive herself. Afterward, she did more than that, using the episode to redefine their relationship.

Never one to be intimidated (easily or otherwise), not even as a child, she would never again be bullied by a bureaucrat now that she was 35, carried a badge, and believed (knew) that she was better suited for this work than he was.

“Here I go,” she corrected him. “It’s not gonna affect your life much.”

“Except what it’s gonna do to our clearance rate.”

“You mean my clearance rate?”

“Ours includes yours. You slow up, we slow up.”

“I’ll work this extra fast.”

“Work what? The cops confirmed the CAV went through the stop sign. No one’s contesting that. The cops confirmed the stop sign was vandalized. No one’s contesting that. The town didn’t update its GIS file. You wanna blame the robo? It’s like, someone blindfolds you, then blames you for walking into something. How much more open-shut can you get?”

“Looks that way.”

“Except you know better.”

“I just want to leave it open a little longer so I can—”

“You can have a little more time on this. But don’t take too long. And don’t neglect your other cases.”

“I never do,” she answered, fingers busy on her keyboard, focusing on her screen, as a way to end the conversation.

Finally sensing their talk was over, Kyle walked away, triggering a new train of thought for Dana: What kind of ratings was he getting on his quarterly evaluations? But why go there? For years he’d been part of a federal bureaucracy that valued meeting quotas and demonstrating its own skewered sense of “efficiency.” She knew exactly the kind of evaluations he was getting. And he knew exactly how to keep getting them. And keep his job.

She peered at the screen for real now, hoping to find something new. Kyle was right about one thing: It did seem like an open-and-shut case. The CAV had functioned perfectly until it encountered the vandalized stop sign.

So what was bothering her? What was wrong?

• Even accounting for manufacturing, swapping out a gas-powered vehicle for an electric one results in 50 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The break-even point is about 18,000 miles, which the average person drives in a year and a half. The benefits are greater for older cars built under less stringent environment standards and in places with green electric grids. The only exceptions are for plug-in hybrids that run mostly on batteries or a second car that isn’t driven much. (Grist)
• Rail projects are still moving forward despite the Trump administration’s animosity toward them. (Quartz)
• Robotaxis seem to be getting glitchier as Waymo grows, and the cities it’s expanding into are unprepared. (New York Times)
• Cities too often ignore medium-density “missing middle” development that encourages walking. (CNU Public Square)
• Walking to school has gotten a lot harder than many adults remember. (Upworthy)
• A town just outside Boston prioritized safety over speed, and the result has been zero traffic deaths over the past three years. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Richmond announced plans for quick-build safety improvements at 700 intersections as part of its Vision Zero program. (WRIC)
• Gov. Mike Braun may have been on shaky legal ground when he extended Indiana’s gas tax holiday. (Indianapolis Star; paywall)
• A Houston developer is building a 12-story, 2,000-space parking garage that takes up an entire city block. (Chron)
• The increasing popularity of giant U.S.-style trucks and SUVs in Australia has led to an uptick in pedestrian deaths, even as driver and passenger fatalities continue to decline. (The Conversation)
• In Bogota, bike advocates are fighting back against the gender stereotype that cycling is only for men. (The Guardian)
• The massive Grand Paris Express metro expansion will feature 68 new architect-designed transit stations. (Arch Daily)

I went for a run this morning, on a paved trail that runs along a little creek surrounded by a few loblolly pine trees and some red maples, a little bit of urban nature surrounded by houses, streets, and suburbia. It was humid in the early summer morning, with mist steaming up off the concrete […]

Replacing a gasoline car of any age—even a brand-new one—with an electric vehicle will almost always lower overall carbon emissions, according to a new analysis. The findings resolve a key conundrum about making the switch from gasoline to electric vehicles, the researchers say.

Driving an electric vehicle (EV) produces less emissions than driving a gasoline car, and the disparity is growing ever wider as electric grids decarbonize. So it has been obvious for a while that if you’re in the market for a new car the best choice for the environment is an EV. But manufacturing an EV produces more emissions than manufacturing a gasoline car, and this has led to uncertainty about the break-even point.

That is, if you own a gasoline car that works fine now and are considering when to replace it with an EV, should you drive the gasoline car into the ground, staving off the hefty emissions burden of EV manufacture for as long as possible? Or should you replace it as soon as budget allows, and start to reap the benefits of the EV’s much lower operating emissions?

“Even if you scrapped a new gas car, the EV still wins,” says study team member J. Elliott Campbell, chair of the environmental studies department at the University of California in Santa Cruz.  “The environmental advantage of EVs is now crystal clear.”

Campbell and his collaborator Roland Geyer, at the University of California in Santa Barbara, calculated the life-cycle carbon emissions of keeping a gasoline car on the road for 16 years (the typical lifetime of a passenger vehicle) compared to replacing it with an EV.

They considered many different vehicle types and timelines for replacement, as well as electricity sources, individual driving habits, battery size, and other parameters.

Replacing a gasoline car with an EV makes climate sense across a broad range of scenarios, even when the gasoline car is new, the researchers found. Of course, that won’t be affordable for most people. But it’s a stark illustration of the climate benefits of EVs.

 

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In the analysis, climate benefits were generally greatest when gasoline car was scrapped in year 1, leading to an average 58% reduction in emissions over the 16-year period. It takes about three years of driving an EV to make up for the greater emissions involved in manufacturing it.

“I was shocked that even scrapping a hybrid gives big climate benefits,” Campbell says.

In 92% of the scenarios the researchers ran, replacing a gasoline car or hybrid vehicle with a battery electric vehicle before the end of its lifespan reduced overall carbon emissions. The exceptions: scenarios involving the least efficient EVs drawing power from the dirtiest electric grids; plug-in hybrids; and gasoline cars that are driven very few miles annually.

The energy mix of local electricity grids can shift the break-even point. But across most of the United States, it’s worth replacing even the most efficient gasoline cars early. And for the most common gasoline car models sold in the United States, early replacement makes climate sense even in areas with the dirtiest electric grids.

The benefits of switching to an EV will become even greater in the coming years, as electric grids decarbonize and battery recycling technology improves, which will decrease manufacturing emissions associated with EVs.

Campbell is now working on an analysis of the mass of materials involved in EVs compared to gasoline cars. “An EV has a 0.5 ton battery but a gas vehicle can use 20 tons of petroleum in its life,” he says. Batteries can be recycled, “but once you burn petroleum it’s essentially gone forever.  I think more work needs to be done to explore this material advantage for EVs.”

Source: Campbell J.E. and R. Geyer. “The climate benefits of retiring a fully operational internal combustion engine vehicle.” Science 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.

• If the chicken is biking and the egg is building bike infrastructure, new research shows that the egg comes first. Bike lanes and bike parking both lead more people to cycle to work, according to a French study in the journal Transport Policy. (Momentum)
• Road usage charges like Hawaii’s that rely on annual odometer readings are simple and non-intrusive, but they don’t take into account where and when those miles were driven. (Traffic Technology Today)
• Modern, connected urban transportation systems commonly leave out parking garages, resulting in a lot of unnecessary cruising around looking for parking. (Route Fifty)
• Planetizen is running a three-part series on traffic congestion.
• European right-wingers are just as in love with cars as their American counterparts. (The Loop)
• A bike- and pedestrian-friendly extension of 15th Street in Midtown Atlanta is set to open by the end of the month. (Urbanize Atlanta)
• The Atlanta Beltline, often blamed for gentrification, is building more affordable housing and starting a down payment assistance program. (WABE)
• Indiana Gov. Mike Braun is opposed to a lane reduction on a bridge connecting the state to Louisville. (WDRB)
• Cuyahoga County, Ohio is considering raising parking rates for the first time in a decade. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
• Signal Cleveland has lots of details about pending transit cuts.
• A pickup truck driver intentionally ran down two people on a Memphis sidewalk. (News 3)
• A Philadelphia state representative is introducing a bill to ban self-driving buses. (Billy Penn)
• A public transit YouTuber exposed massive cost overruns on the L.A. people mover project. (Hollywood Reporter)
• A Denver man is tracking down all of the stamps left by his grandfather, who poured the concrete for many of the city’s sidewalks. (Rocky Mountain PBS)

Donald Trump’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rolled into Santa Monica today to hold a hearing on the federal government’s plans to open up California’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, floating nuclear power plants (really!), rocket testing, and other questionable uses. Trump is using NOAA to challenge California’s – and only California’s – right to protect its coastlines.

Needless to say, California is not taking this lying down. Tribal leaders, environmental groups, local political leaders, and others gathered in the courtyard for a noon rally before the 2 p.m. meeting to tell the Trump Administration that California’s coast is not for sale.

“We know what is best for Los Angeles County, for California, and for our nation,” argued Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, after arguing that the Trump Administration is intentionally pushing policies that hurt Californians. “If they wanted to really help our communities, they would release billions of disaster aid to help our coastal communities desperate to rebuild their lives after the Palisades Fire.”

At the rally before the hearing, speaker after speaker took to the podium to denounce not just the idea that politics is clouding California’s environmental regulations, but just the opposite: that political concerns were pushing the administration’s attacks on California to the benefit of Trump’s political donors.

“We’ll keep fighting, but we know what’s going to happen today,” stated Congressman Dave Min (D-Irvine). “A bunch of you are going to go in and give your testimony, and this rigged review is going to come to the conclusion that has been preordained.”

Trump’s Plan

The Trump administration is reopening a federal review of California’s Coastal Management Program, raising the possibility that the state could lose some of its longstanding authority to protect its coastline should he succeed.

The program, which has been federally approved since 1978, operates under the federal Coastal Zone Management Act. It gives California a role in reviewing federally regulated projects that could affect the state’s coastal resources, including projects in federal waters. The California Coastal Commission, State Coastal Conservancy, and San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission all play roles in implementing the program.

That authority has allowed California to challenge or modify projects ranging from offshore oil development to pipelines, desalination facilities and rocket launches. Despite Trump’s claim that the state should lose its rights because of “environmental extremism,” the Coastal Commission has reviewed thousands of federally regulated projects over the decades, but has opposed only a small percentage of them.

NOAA is conducting a new review of the state’s coastal program after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick accused California of using its coastal authority to obstruct projects favored by the administration for political reasons.

Among the examples cited by federal officials is California’s opposition to expanded SpaceX rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. SpaceX has been firing test rockets from the base for the last half dozen years. But, the state has asked for more oversight of all rocket launches marines from Vandenberg accidentally fired 155-millimeter artillery shells over a major freeway in Southern California.

State officials, however, argue that the review is part of a broader effort to remove obstacles to the Trump administration’s plans for the coast, particularly its push to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Speaking at today’s hearing, Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary for Natural Resources, noted that after states were given greater purview in enforcing environmental standards for projects nearly six decades ago, the states participating in the Coastal Zone Management Act have approved 95% of the federally requested projects. In that same time, California had approved 96% of the projects.

Crowfoot continued with the theme that the federal review is more about politics and Trump’s feelings towards California than about policy.

“Americans across the country share the concerns we do about the health and safety of our coasts. The Trump Administration proposed expanded offshore oil drilling in the states of Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and California. When leaders of three states expressed strong concerns on behalf of their constituents, the federal government backed off those proposals…Yet they continue to target California,” he testified. Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina all voted for Trump in 2024.

The administration has proposed opening federal waters off California to new oil and gas leasing, something that has not happened in decades. It has also sought to restart the Sable pipeline, which has been shut down since the 2015 Refugio oil spill. Recently, the government spent billions of dollars to stop wind farms and other renewable energy projects from being built.

California’s coastal program was already reviewed under the previous administration. NOAA’s 2024 review included public meetings and stakeholder input, and a draft report completed in 2025 found that California had successfully implemented and enforced its federally approved program. The Trump administration nevertheless ordered another review.

If the federal government ultimately determines that California’s program does not comply with federal requirements, it could seek changes to the program or move toward decertification. That could weaken the state’s ability to challenge federal projects and put federal funding connected to the program at risk.

The confrontation is unusual enough that legal experts told the Los Angeles Times they were unaware of another instance in which the federal government had stripped a coastal state of its rights under the Coastal Zone Management Act. What happens in California could therefore establish a precedent for the relationship between the federal government and coastal states elsewhere.

Gabrielino Tongva & Chumash activist and singer Tina Orduno Calderon sings a welcome song at the Rally to Protect the California Coast. To listen to the song, click here. You Can Still Submit Comment

Californians who want to push back against the Trump administration’s effort to weaken the state’s coastal protections have a relatively simple place to start: tell the federal government what you think. You can submit your own comment electronically, here.

While the only in-person meeting was held (or is being held depending when you’re reading this) today, there are virtual meetings tomorrow and Wednesday, August 11 and 12. For more details on those meetings, click here.

“Trump is threatening California’s coast in pursuit of reckless offshore oil and gas extraction to pad the wallets of his corrupt oil cronies,” Newsom said in a statement. “We won’t stand by while Trump sidelines the people who rely on and care for California’s coast. Now is the time to make our voices heard. Give the Trump administration an earful.”

You can read the state’s official comments, here.

A woman was killed on Market Street on Friday. A recent report shows a higher number of severe and fatal crashes in San Francisco than when the city first took its Vision Zero pledge over a decade ago.

A new study from a coalition including the Vision Zero network and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety concludes that the core problem is that cities take the pledge to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries to zero, but then don’t integrate it into all aspects of planning. The “Safe System Success Stories: Proactive Injury Prevention in Transportation” evaluates projects in 13 cities by their ability to reduce crashes. It’s a template for how all cities should look at all projects.

“Across the board, across the city, cities need to make changes and align decision-making and all their funding decisions, all policy decisions, with traffic safety priorities,” explained the Vision Zero Network’s Leah Shahum. “Most cities are not doing that yet; San Francisco is not alone in that.”

More from the study:

Put simply, speed kills. Kinetic energy is the central driver of injury in road collisions. As the amount of kinetic energy in a crash increases, whether through higher velocity or greater mass, the human body is less able to tolerate the forces released. Kinetic energy risk can be managed by reducing how often and how far people drive (exposure), limiting operating speeds and vehicle mass (severity), and reducing how often road users are placed in conflict (likelihood of a crash).

The three levers from the study

According to Shahum, those three safety levers need to be considered in every bit of planning. New York City’s congestion pricing was one successful planning example cited in the study. By charging drivers to enter the city’s most congested area, it reduces the number of cars and vehicle miles traveled, reducing exposure. It encouraged a switch to bicycles. And of course it reduces how often users are placed in conflict “by enabling street space to be repurposed for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. Such infrastructure separates pedestrians and cyclists from motor vehicles, reducing opportunities for conflicts.”

Closer to home, San Francisco’s Van Ness BRT also pulled all three levers because it created…

…dedicated, center-running transit lanes, reduced general-purpose lanes from three to two in most segments, narrowed lane widths, added median pedestrian refuges, programmed signals with leading pedestrian intervals, and restricted left turns for private vehicles at most intersections. These changes reduced conflict points, shortened pedestrian crossings, improved transit operating speeds and increased person throughput without roadway expansion.

Projects that don’t meet the safety criteria, she explained, simply shouldn’t be built. Shahum cited an example from Santa Rosa, which nixed a long-planned road-widening because it clearly increased exposure. “It’s not just about a project there or a project here, it’s about changing how we make decisions about widening,” she said. “If a project fails on delivering on safety, you can’t use it as an excuse that something’s been in the pipeline for a long time.”

Shahum confirmed there’s a parallel with equity-based planning, where cities require themselves to ask whether a project exacerbates disparities before it can proceed. Unfortunately, Caltrans and county departments of transportation continue to build projects that are in conflict with Vision Zero goals. Think of all the ramp widenings, which increase speeds and exposure to wrecks.

“City planners need to be unafraid and unapologetic about taking things off their plan and off the funding cycle if it’s not going to improve safety,” said Shahum.

Be sure to check out the report.

At our recent annual Conference, Bioneers brought together two ground breaking figures in the struggle for an equitable and healthy food system. One working on the global architectures of that system and the other a hands on farmer and educator exemplifying how solidarity can empower dispossessed communities to reclaim their food sovereignty. Raj Patel is one of the world’s experts on sustainable food system, and a tireless activist against neocolonial and extractive agriculture, Leah Penniman is the visionary founder of Soul Fire Farms and the author of Farming While Black. The conversation was moderated by Naomi Starkman founder and former Editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, the award winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the US food system. The following is an edited excerpt of that conversation.

NAOMI: We are living in a time of multiple crises. How do we understand what the polycrisis means for us?

RAJ: The idea of polycrisis is that it appears that there’s a whole bunch of very bad things happening at the same time: the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pandemic disease, catastrophic weather events, and a range of things that are a series of unfortunate events. That is, I think, a misunderstanding of the structural forces that are driving all of these events. 

Capitalism has always managed to patch up problems by extracting in new places, and finding new frontiers to open up. You see this process even happening now, where Elon Musk, for example, has a new frontier in low Earth orbit. He’s created a new space that’s monetized and is now his zone to be able to extract wealth from. He’s the king of low Earth orbit [with his company Space X], and he will be for a while. But there’s only so much deferring and fixing that can happen. 

Now, what we’re seeing is what happens when there’s no more cheapening of the world that can be done, and the climate crisis is not just bad, but getting worse. There was a terrifying paper in the Reviews of Geophysics two weeks ago that shows that the rate of climate change is going up; the world is not just heating, it’s heating up faster than we thought it was. 

On top of that, of course, we are seeing rising authoritarianism. The far right capturing our media, our means of attention. All of this is not an accident but precisely an outcome of a series of crises in capitalism that have been brewing for a while. 

When you hear polycrisis, sometimes you will hear a narrative that it’s just a really bad time, but it’s going to get better. But unfortunately you need a clear-eyed structural analysis to understand that, in fact, movements on the frontlines that are taking on the crisis understand this to be the outcome of decades, even centuries of capitalist accumulation. If you understand that, then you can understand why the imagination of what needs to come next is so radical, and in which lots of post-capitalist experiments are happening. 

One of the things that you need if you’re going to imagine a better world is a rocket fuel of joy. That’s why protests like the No Kings marches matter, even though at times they get criticized for not having a focused political agenda, while white supremacist organizations are undermining the state.

 But a protest, when it’s done right, is how we meet and intersect and listen to one another by meeting people who are not necessarily in our normal circle. I have to declare a preference here. I met my wife on a protest.

NAOMI: This might be the moment for Leah to talk about strategic optimism.

LEAH: I would like to bring Wendell Berry into the conversation. One of my favorite poems is the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto.” Please read it if you have not, there are many quotable lines.  The one that is relevant to this conversation is “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

At Soul Fire Farm, the way we situate our work as Afro-Indigenous regenerative agriculturalists is by feeding the community and training farmers. We’re builders. We’re building these institutions that inhabit the values we wish to see in the new world. But that can’t be the only strategy. 

I like the image of butterfly with each of its four wings representing aspects of transformative social justice: build, resist, reform, and heal with kinship at its center. Resist includes protests and civil disobedience. Reform is getting involved in the electoral politics and public education, and then heal. So we build, resist, reform, and heal with kincentricity at its center which fuels of our love, our connection, our Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” That helps us to envision a post-capitalist society.

I agree with Raj about the insanity of the growth imperative of a three percent compound growth on a finite planet is literally insane, and it is colonial, it is white supremacist, it is dualist, and the only way that we’re going to survive on this planet is in reciprocity with all the other beings that live here.

NAOMI: My daughter is now 23, but when she was 19 or so, we had the talk, and it’s not the talk you’re thinking. It was the climate catastrophe talk. If any parents have had to try to convince their child it’s worth going on with their hopes and dreams in this catastrophe, it’s a really hard. It’s much harder than the birds and the bees talk. 

 My daughter, bless her heart, was challenging me about optimism. What we decided together is something that we call strategic optimism.

 If you decide to be a pessimist, then the rational behavior would be some sort of hedonistic nihilism. You would be like let me accumulate as much as I can in the near term, bump everybody else; I’m just going to get mine because everything’s about to go up in flames. No long-term planning, no altruism, no generosity, no compassion. That’s sort of the logical extreme of this pessimistic, nihilistic viewpoint. 

If on the other hand you choose optimism as a practice – not as a feeling but as a practice – then your attitude is I’m going to get up today and I’m going to plant this crop, I’m going to feed my community, I’m going to sequester carbon in the soil, I’m going to look out for my neighbor. Maybe there is only an infinitesimal chance we will win. But in the meantime, today I can alleviate suffering for some beings in my immediate community, and tomorrow I can alleviate some more. And maybe, just maybe we can alleviate enough suffering that we’ll all survive together.

But if we don’t do that, there’s absolutely no hope. So we’ve decided in our family that this strategic optimism is our practice. It’s our discipline. The way that you get up and you take your vitamins, or you go on a run, or you brush your teeth. You get up and you decide to do whatever step it is on whatever wing of the butterfly you have access to help build that world that we want to see.

We talk about food justice. We talk about equity. We talk about sovereignty. We talk about accessibility. A lot of the practices at Soul Fire Farm are not only about those three, but are also about weaving in Black and Indigenous wisdom, and ancestral wisdom into the land, and teaching people to become their own sacred farmers on other lands.

LEAH: I love the term sacred farmer. I would like to bring the ancestors into the room. Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was radicalized as a sharecropper. She was only 6 years old when she noticed that the landowner was setting the scales incorrectly to undervalue the cotton harvest and not pay the Black laborers their fair due. That kept them indebted and in extreme poverty so they couldn’t leave the plantation. As a child her first act of civil disobedience was to fix the scales.

 Later in her life, when she was an organizer during the Civil Rights movement, she learned that  many sharecroppers were being kicked off their land for registering to vote, for joining a protest, signing a petition, or joining the NAACP. She would have organizing meetings in her house, and as a farmer, she canned food that she grew. Radical youth would ask, “Mama Hamer, why you wasting your time canning these peaches and stuff?” Her answer was, “Child, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.”

So she organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative, where 500 sharecroppers who had lost their land co-owned the land. They were doing all kinds of beautiful mutual aid. 

So Fannie Lou Hamer is our inspiration at Soul Fire Farm. To realize the idea that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves, we have to make sure that our agriculture is locally rooted, it’s regenerative, it’s tied to our heritage, and it’s in our hands. 

There were 16 million Black farmers in the early 1900s. Most of them were kicked off their land by white supremacists, literally pushed off their land and lynched. The U.S. Department of Agriculture selectively gave loans to white farmers, causing bankruptcy among Black farmers. TIAA – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – and other investment firms unscrupulously grab up Black owned land, which is vulnerable because a lot of Black farmers don’t have access to lawyers and  don’t leave wills.

So the rising generation of Black and Brown farmers is landless, they have no capital, and are just a few  generations away from the red clays of Georgia – with its traumatic association with the forced removal of Cherokee people and the slave labor of African descended people. We say the land was the scene of the crime, but the land was never the criminal. Now a beautiful rising generation of people who are the color of soil are ready to reclaim that right to belong to the earth, to have agency in the food system, and are recognizing that regenerative agriculture was invented by Indigenous and Black people.

Dr. George Washington Carver is literally the godfather of regenerative agriculture.  He worked with farmers when he was at Tuskegee University from 1890 to 1940 promoting cover crops, compost and crop rotation. Dr. Carver made sure that the soil health was the foundation of farming practices. He had a whole generation of Black farmers doing regenerative agriculture before Rodale came onto the scene in the 1940s.

We can look back to the Ovambo people of Namibia with their raised beds and the people of Liberia with their African dark earth, and the polycultures of Nigeria. That’s the kind of agriculture that we’re doing. We feed our community, no cost, door-step delivery. We train thousands of Black and Brown farmers in person on the farm through a 50-hour course, and then they go off and they do their sacred farming all across Turtle Island and, beyond.

The theory of change involves practices like sewing of seeds, of being trans-local, and locally adapted. Providing land-based mutual aid, in which the farm becomes a hub for feeding folks, for gathering, for organizing, a safe haven, a kind of aboveground railroad. The land becomes the scene of the revolution, just as it was in the Civil Rights movement. Black farmers were the ones who housed, fed and clothed and protected the freedom riders. If there were no Black farmers, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights movement. You think the Freedom Riders stayed at the Hyatt? No, they went to a Black farmer’s house. That’s where they hid. That’s how they stayed alive. As Malcolm X said, “Land is the basis of all revolution, all freedom, all justice.”  

NAOMI: Thank you for all of your work. I just have to ask, how your work has been impacted by the current administration. 

LEAH: It sucks. But we’re not stopping, I would say one of the more heartbreaking things, is that  we had a major legislative victory with the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration. They actually folded in a provision for Black farmers that we had fought for for over a decade. Historically, the USDA had discriminated against Black farmers. There was a landmark Civil Rights settlement called Pigford v. Glickman in 1999 that offered a very small amount to each of the farmers who had lost their land, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We needed full debt forgiveness for these farmers. 

So we helped, along with farmers across the country, to introduce legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which was led by Senator Cory Booker. It was debated and I got to speak to Congress. It was crazy. They were actually listening to Black people. I could hardly believe what was happening. 

 A 5 billion dollar provision for the debt relief went into the Inflation Reduction Act, and was passed; payments were going out. And now they stopped.

The Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Training grant is gone. All of the socially disadvantaged farmers programs are gone. People bought things based on contracts that were made, now the contracted money has evaporated. So it’s a shit show. It’s really, really rough. 

We’re doing our best to piece together mutual aid networks. Susu is a Caribbean lending society. We’re trying to put together a national susu to try to stop the bleeding, so we don’t lose any more land. But now all the funders are skittish. Their attitude is, Black people were cool in 2020, but they’re not cool anymore. Don’t you do any programs for white farmers? I’m like, are you kidding me? The white farmers receive over 90% of the USDA funds. We absolutely need to support Indigenous and Black folks in getting through these times, and to continue the work. 

NAOMI: Raj, when the government starts to clamp down, what are the models that you’ve seen that have been successful? Where can we look for inspiration in places perhaps in this country, historically, as Leah has been sharing with us, but also around the world?

RAJ: One of the places I have been very inspired by is Arkansas. I was just traveling through Arkansas for a book that I just finished that weaves together the history of all the things that have happened in Arkansas, ranging from Indigenous dispossession to the Elaine Race massacre [1919 massacre in which as many as several hundred Black tenant farmers, who were organizing against abuses were murdered], the site of the largest race massacre in U.S. history, to the rise of Walmart also in Arkansas. 

One of the movements that I particularly was taken by is the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. The origins of this are germane to us now because in 1928, the Mississippi flooded and grew to 60 to 100 miles wide, depending on where you were. It was a catastrophe. The cleanup was a billion dollars back then. It was a huge expense, but of course, Black farmers saw none of that money. In fact, it was that event that flipped Black farmers’ voting allegiance from Republican to Democrat. 

It was the failure of the federal response to a catastrophe that politicized people. It wasn’t the event, it wasn’t the flood. It was the government’s failure afterwards. This is important for our mobilizing in this moment, because in that moment, there was socialist organizing happening throughout the South, and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union was a site of social organizing where white and Black tenant farmers together organized despite the attempts of white supremacists to sew racial division. It turned out that white and Black tenant farmers had much more in common with each other than they did with the white bourgeoisie. 

That is a moment that we can learn from particularly as we see the betrayals of the white working class and the absence of any dividend of white supremacy for white working class people. This is a moment to be able to split what appears to be a fairly firm hegemonic block into its constituent parts and to recruit. It is something to think about because this is a moment in which government failure writ large is a recruiting ground for a genuine grounded working class transformation.  

But it depends on us using the language of recognition, mutuality, solidarity and socialism. It doesn’t happen because we’re just all going to get along and kumbaya our way out of this. You need a materialist analysis, otherwise people don’t see one another and recognize that we have much more in common than the white supremacists would have us believe.  

Elsewhere in the world, there are movements that have managed to lay foundations that are paying off right now. One of my favorites is in India in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are descendants of organizations that started off as women’s literacy groups, and that have survived the scourge of Hindu supremacy. It’s not an accident that Narendra Modi and Donald Trump were best buds in his first term I’m thinking of an event in Texas called Howdy, Modi, which was the only event that Trump came to where he was not the star. Trump opened for Modi in a stadium in Houston, and then Trump buggered off and everyone cheered for Modi because there’s a whole phalanx of rightwing desis [Indian Americans], who are part of the South Asian diaspora who believe in Hindu supremacy. 

In India, Hindu supremacy is nasty and vile, and there have been people who have fought back against that, particularly in Andhra Pradesh where there is a system of farming that was originally coded as Hindu natural farming, but has been reclaimed as the world’s largest agroecological transition. More agroecological farmers have been spawned in Andhra Pradesh than anywhere else, where over two million farmers are currently agroecological farmers. And by 2035, six million farmers will be agroecological farmers.

India is hostage to fossil fuels, particularly through the Gulf of Hormuz, and hostage to fossil fuel based fertilizers  which are scarce and expensive due to the US/Iran war. One of the ways to avoid using fertilizer is to farm agroecologically. They’ve set up systems so that farmers wean themselves off fertilizer, so they don’t pay the high cost of fertilizer and can start making money.

It’s predominantly women and Adivasi [people indigenous to an area], and low-cost farmers. That has happened despite the scourge of Hindu supremacy because these movements have been robust and understood how to experiment and how to protect oneself against divisive racial rhetorics.

NAOMI: Raj, you’ve written about the difference between food security and food sovereignty Would you explain that.

RAJ: The idea of food security is a way of depoliticizing the word hunger, because it renders hunger into something that’s tractable for the state. Food security is when you have sufficient access to foods to be able to lead a healthy life. But you can be food secure in prison. The idea of food security says nothing about power.

The term food sovereignty was coined by La Via Campesina in the early ‘90s, and launched in 1995 at the World Food Summit in Rome. The idea of food sovereignty is about reclaiming power from the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Food sovereignty is about a community’s right to be able to end hunger and define its own food policy.

What that means is that communities have to decide what food sovereignty is by studying and discussing it. La Via Campesina decided  that food sovereignty was dependent on an end to all forms of violence against women. The idea being that if this is about communities’ right to decide what food policy is, then everyone has to be equal, and the biggest obstacle to that, as identified by La Via Campesina, was patriarchy and that needs to be fought against.

Particularly now,  given the revelations about Cesar Chavez, that dialectic is sharp and vital to remember: food sovereignty is about a radical naming of inequality of power and a redressing of it.

NAOMI: Leah, the matriarchy is a big part of your practice. Would you talk about your work on farms in Haiti and Dominican Republic, and how that may relate to the  matriarchy and the patriarchy.

We don’t really have an agroecological movement in this country. We don’t have a politicized agricultural alternative community. It’s happening in smaller ways in which people are being trained how be farmers, as well as how to be the next generation of political leaders. 

LEAH: When we talk about deconstructing the patriarchy, our model is not one of franchising; the other farms I work on are not our farms. We intentionally have a de-growth framework. We are aiming towards our own irrelevance. We have no interest in pushing our survival on anybody. We are part of mycelial network. 

The farms in our network are all women-led, as is our farm. We only have two men on our staff of 22 (those poor guys). Altair Rodriguez runs an organic family farm in the Dominican Republic called La Finca Tierra Negra in the area that was the training ground for the militia against the Trujillo regime. Trujillo burned down the farm of Altair’s great grandfather and killed many family members. She revived the farm out of the ashes. It’s an agroecological farm growing coffee and 22 other crops. They are constantly producing fruits and medicines and work with Haitian migrants and Dominican women.

We have a sister farm amongst my homeland of Ayiti (Haiti) on the Western side of the island, outside of Léogâne, where one-third of the community was killed in an earthquake in 2010. We did so much grief work there. Out of the ashes of that earthquake, we planted thousands of fruit trees, moringa trees, and had woman-led seed exchanges. We helped reforest the hillsides that were denuded by the French as part of their extortion and punishment of our beautiful revolutionary island.

On the Caribbean island of Vieques is the Maroon Farm. In an effort led by  women, they cleaned the soil that the U.S. military destroyed. They are providing food security by feeding the entire island. We also work with farmers in Sierra Norte in Oaxaca, Mexico.

All of these farms are incredible. We spend our winters doing solidarity brigades. We raise money, we bring resources, we bring skilled people to do projects that they want to do, not ones that we pretend we know that they should do. We do consciousness raising. We do political education. We’re all members of La Via Campesina. We study together and we plan and strategize together. 

Something that I’ve noticed in the past ten years especially in the Caribbean, is people used to identify with colonial borders that have been imposed by the French, English and Spanish, but there has been a revival of Taíno and Arawak identity. At food sovereignty conferences by and for Taíno and Arawak Black women, the perspective has changed to “we’re one people; what is this BS they’ve been trying to convince us of? We have enough food. We have the best soil. There’s food all year round; let’s feed our people.” 

NAOMI: Raj, in this very strange post-neoliberal world that we are entering into, there might be some hope that there could be some transformation. Do you think in this time of seemingly endless uncertainty and confounding ways that there might be some potential for optimism?

RAJ: There’s nothing guaranteed. Often at this stage of the conversation, it turns to “if only we do this, this and this, everything’s going to be fine.” No, because that’s an unreasonable way of understanding the world. In Brazil, for instance, under the first Lula administration, there were some victories. For example, in the food system, there were certain laws about being able to get food, one example was the Popular restaurant initiative, supported by the government that offered very cheap healthy meals. Here in the U.S. now most food is eaten outside the home, and to have public restaurants is a way to have dignity for the working class.

Then under the Bolsonaro administration, that was ground into dirt. And most of the public restaurants now are roach motels. But now under the second Lula administration, they have a program for cozinhas solidárias, or solidarity kitchens. The government will pay people to open a licensed kitchen and make local food available to the public. There are still some public restaurants, but the zones in which organizing happens have moved into these spaces of social gathering in the solidarity kitchens. 

What does that have to do with hope? Well, this is precisely the dialectical process. We won something under the first Lula administration, then the fascists came and then destroyed it. Now we rebuild with something else. The engine for hope is always the social movements. One of the engines for getting rid of Bolsonaro was his abject failure in dealing with the massive floods that Brazil had experienced a couple of years back. Again, the failure of a government to be able to respond to the climate crisis is an engine for the kinds of radical care that our movements are in the business of providing.

What I see that as the fulcrum of hope is the recognition that movements are already providing care. And, there’s nothing inherently leftwing about that. If you followed what happened after the hurricane Helene that tore through North Carolina, there were neo-Nazis on horseback, providing aid and media and solidarity. The far right are doing it as well, and that’s the terrain on which we struggle, we need to recognize it. They get a move in this world as well. They get to redefine the terms of climate change. They get to have a say about how climate change needs to be met with yet more racist exclusion. Our recruiting has to be stronger. We have to organize better, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but there’s everything to fight for.

NAOMI:  The examples that Raj gave of the Popular restaurants and solidarity kitchens in Brazil makes me think of the concept of  food commons. Leah, how do food commons come into your work?

LEAH: What unifies nonviolent strategies is the idea of ubuntu – “I am because you are” – of kinship. It’s an indigenous concept of animism or non-duality, this idea that I am the mountain, the mountain is me; I’m not a defender of the river, I am the river. The pre-enclosure concept that you could own a person or the land, is absolute insanity. You mean to say we’re going to take Mother Earth and put some lines on her and this part is going to be mine, and I have the right to exclude everyone, even if they starve? Insanity.

The idea of the commons is a reclamation of our sanity to humble ourselves below our big siblings who are the hawks, and the rivers, and the sequoias. They were on the scene before us; we came later, and are younger and less wise. So we need to defer to those who have figured out how to live in relationship and harmony. They understand that if there’s some sugar, some photosynthate coming into the forest ecosystem, that it will be shared amongst kin and non-kin. If there is a pest coming in and there’s a warning that needs to be distributed, everyone’s going to get the warning, not just the people I like or the cute ones, but everybody’s going to get it. The air is to be shared, the water is to be shared. When we signed papers for our farm we immediately got to work figuring out how to put it in a cooperative, which is a Western legal approximation of an indigenous commons.

The land has veto power over the people in our cooperative.  We gave our pro bono student lawyers the challenge of giving the legal right for the land to have veto power. The local indigenous Mohican people need to have it too. We became the first cooperative in New York state to do a culture respect easement with Indigenous people, and also the first in New York state to do the Rights of Nature with our co-op.

So our little 80 acres is somewhat of a commons, but we want to spread this idea. Food is for everybody. Water’s for everybody. The land is for everybody.

The post Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman appeared first on Bioneers.

For bassist and composer Garth Stevenson, improvisation is not just a musical practice. It’s a way of listening deeply enough to search for connection across species. Over the last two decades, Stevenson has explored music as a form of interspecies encounter, creating improvised performances in forests, on remote coastlines, and even underwater with whales. Rather than trying to mimic animal communication, he’s interested in something more elusive: the possibility that music can create moments of connection between beings that experience the world in fundamentally different ways.

Stevenson, who is especially known for creating music in direct relationship with the natural world, first traveled to Antarctica in 2010 with legendary whale biologist Roger Payne, where he learned to imitate whale calls on his double bass and attracted a dozen sei whales to their icebreaker. More recently, during a 2025 trip to Baja California documented by Andy Mann, Stevenson performed underwater music for humpback whales while listening to their vocalizations through hydrophones.

The following is an edited excerpt from Stevenson’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Watch his performance at the Conference here.

GARTH STEVENSON: 

I grew up in British Columbia. My family spent a lot of time in the outdoors going on some pretty extreme camping trips, and that really became the foundation of a part of my soul. I had an amazing experience kayaking as a teenager: A humpback whale came up out of the water right in front of us, with all these fish trying to escape its mouth, and then went back under. Then it just kind of followed us around the bay for an hour. It really imprinted on me. I had seen whales before, but this felt special and kind of spiritual.

After high school, I went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. When I got there, my connection to the natural world kind of collapsed. I spent most of my time in practice rooms — and if you’ve never seen music school practice rooms, imagine a hallway lined with a hundred tiny telephone booths, each with someone practicing their own thing. Walking down the hallway sounded like the score of a horror movie: saxophone, bagpipes, upright bass, drums — none of it listening to each other.

I really wanted to find a quieter place to play. I discovered Walden Pond just outside of Boston, and I started taking my bass there every day and hiking to the far end of the lake. I worked on the music that I was practicing at school, which was mostly jazz at that time. After doing that for about a week, the music just didn’t sound right. There were birds singing and the wind blowing up in the tree canopy … and I was trying to learn a bee-bop melody on my bass. I asked myself what music would sound right at this location on a given day, and that slowly started changing the way I approached playing the bass. I began to spend a lot more time listening and finding the gaps in the sounds of nature for the notes to sneak in.

I’ve been doing that since 2002. Every new location teaches me something different. Sometimes when I’m playing out in nature, animals will come by. I was playing for a group of people outside once, and we had a giant bear come down and circle around us.

I’ve noticed that when I’m out in the woods listening to music with other people, the sounds of nature afterward, especially the interactions between birds, feel much more vivid and alive. It’s hard to tell whether we simply weren’t paying attention before, or whether the orchestra of nature briefly adapted itself to the music.

I’ve spent most of my music career playing with other humans, and a lot of that music has been improvised. In many of the bands I’ve played with, we improvised entire concerts. It’s very different from playing music you already know because it requires a deeper kind of listening — not just, “Oh, you’re playing a C, so I’ll play a C.” You can mimic each other, but that gets old pretty quickly.

What I’ve found is that when you close your eyes and improvise with another musician, you can almost see right into their soul. You can sense how they’re feeling that day. And sometimes, something really special happens that I still can’t fully explain. It’s the same feeling I’ve experienced in other profound moments in life — watching a beautiful sunset, witnessing a child being born, or playing music for a friend who was dying of cancer.

Over the years, I learned how to imitate whale calls — mostly humpback calls — pretty accurately. That was cool, but it was really just a baseline attempt to connect with them. Whales have been around for millions of years, and I’m sure that when they heard me playing, they immediately knew I was not a whale. If they could speak our language, they’d probably say, “Go spend another million years on whale Duolingo, then come back and try again.”

When I played for humpback whales in Mexico, my bass was connected to an underwater speaker that amplified what I was playing. I also had hydrophones monitoring the incoming sound so I could hear the whales in return. After making that initial “hello,” showing them I could kind of play whale calls, I started sharing some of my own human music.

I wasn’t listening to see whether they were matching my notes. What I was searching for was the same feeling I sometimes experience while improvising with other musicians: a sense of connection that goes beyond imitation. The connection I’m looking for with animals through music isn’t about obvious mimicry. It’s something deeper than that.

A really interesting experience I had was playing for around 40 turtles being treated in a veterinary hospital. Every turtle had its own tank, and I was set up at one end of the room. All the turtles swam as close to the front of their tanks as they could to get nearer to the source of the music. I also played for penguins and seals out in different places in Antarctica. But the most powerful experiences have been with whales, including most recently in Baja California in Mexico. 

One of the reasons I was in Mexico was to support an organization called FOMARES, which is working to create a 200,000-square-kilometer marine protected area around Southern Baja. Mexico’s Minister of the Environment attended one of the concerts I performed there, and later that night, after I had returned to the boat where I was sleeping, another boat pulled alongside ours. It was him.

He said, “I want to hear the whales.”

I had no idea what kind of sounds they might be making at night, but we dropped the hydrophones into the water. The whales sounded so beautiful that he became visibly emotional.

We recorded the sounds, and there was this echo to them, a kind of natural reverb. I’ve spent so much of my life tweaking delays and reverbs that I immediately became curious about where it was coming from. When I looked at a map, I saw all these underwater canyons nearby. The sound we were hearing was the whales’ voices bouncing off the canyon walls. The whales were using reverb long before humans ever did.

Over the years, I’ve realized that whether you’re a human, a whale, or even a lawnmower, we all have to follow the same rules of sound and physics. In the end, it’s all frequencies moving through the world.

Some animals can see far more colors than we can. We can’t even imagine what they’re experiencing. Others can hear frequencies far above or below our range. Humpback whales are interesting because their vocal range overlaps pretty well with human hearing. Even so, I had to approach the experience knowing I couldn’t fully understand what the whales were sensing. Whatever it is I’m chasing in those moments feels almost like another kind of sense — something humans may still possess, but that has faded over time. Maybe it was much stronger thousands of years ago.

We humans are animals too, and we’re very curious with our ears. Whales, who’ve developed their hearing and singing to such an amazing level, are probably curious too.

Out in nature, there are all these competing frequencies. Birds are competing with cicadas. Every species may subtly adapt the notes they sing to fit into a larger symphony. Blue whales, for example, sing so low they’re almost beyond human hearing, and researchers have found that after ship propellers began filling the oceans with low-frequency noise, blue whales lowered their pitch even further so they could still communicate.

When I was listening to the whales in Baja, I wasn’t trying to isolate individual calls anymore. I was trying to hear the whole thing together. Maybe seven whales, maybe ten — all these little dots of sound bouncing around like instruments in an orchestra. I wasn’t expecting whales to copy my notes any more than I would copy theirs. Maybe the connection was happening somewhere else. Maybe it was in the way our rhythms and tones were interlocking as part of a larger composition.

Continue exploring interspecies intelligence and connection: Read how neuroscientist Gül Dölen used octopuses and psychedelics to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is uncovering the shared “forest pharmacies” humans and animals have relied on for generations in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.

The post A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales appeared first on Bioneers.

Research is increasingly confirming what many Indigenous communities and traditional healers have understood for generations: Humans are not the only species that knows how to use the natural pharmacy of the living world. Around the globe, scientists are documenting how animals ranging from chimpanzees to elephants to birds seek out medicinal plants to treat illness, parasites, and injury.

For Elodie Freymann, a primatologist, botanist, filmmaker, and conservation advocate, that realization has reshaped the way she thinks about medicine, intelligence, and humanity’s relationship to the rest of the natural world. Freymann recently attracted international attention for her research in Uganda’s Budongo Forest documenting how wild chimpanzees use medicinal plants to self-medicate. But one of her most important discoveries came through conversations with local healers, who explained that many of the same plants used by the chimpanzees were already part of nearby communities’ traditional medicinal knowledge systems.

Freymann’s work now focuses on what she describes as “shared forest pharmacies” — the overlapping medicinal relationships between humans, animals, and ecosystems. Blending primatology, anthropology, ecology, and art, her research explores how species learn from one another, how medicinal knowledge moves across generations and ecosystems, and what modern science still has to learn from Indigenous and local knowledge systems. She is currently expanding this research through the first systematic study of non-human self-medication in the Peruvian Amazon.

The following is an edited excerpt from Freymann’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Read more about Freymann’s incredible work in our recent interview.

ELODIE FREYMANN: 

I took a very winding path to end up where I am, doing what I’m doing. As a child, I was always fascinated by two things that I never thought went together. The first was chimpanzees. I’ve tried hard to figure out where that fascination came from, and I think it probably traces back to climbing as a kid and being called a monkey by family members, so I started associating myself with primates. Like many young people, I was also deeply influenced by the work of Jane Goodall. For me, she was a hero — someone I could look up to and think, “Okay, this is possible. I can do this too.”

I was also passionate about medicinal plants. I remember finding out when I was a kid that the Earth produces medicines, and I thought that was so cool. 

I think what those interests have in common is that, like many of us, I was raised within a culture that teaches humans to see ourselves as separate from the natural world: exceptional, more intelligent, more complex, and more emotional than the other beings we share this planet with.

But when I looked at chimpanzees, I saw cousins. I could look into their eyes and recognize something familiar. And with medicinal plants, I began to understand that we share a long and complex co-evolutionary history with them. Somehow, the chemicals plants produce to heal and protect themselves can also heal us when we consume them. That’s not a coincidence. It’s because we are part of the same community of life. We’ve co-evolved for millions of years. We even share a common ancestor with plants.

So plants and chimpanzees brought me into the natural world. And as someone who grew up in New York City surrounded by buses and tall buildings and not a lot of trees, that was very intoxicating.

But it’s been a long, winding road. I did a lot of art as a kid. Both of my parents are artists, and for a long time, I never saw myself as a scientist. I briefly worked in documentary filmmaking and studied social anthropology in college, but I still felt this deep need to reconnect with the things that fascinated me as a child. Somehow, I ended up finding a master’s program where I could study how chimpanzees use medicinal plants. How cool is that?

I learned about this field no one has heard of and no one knows how to pronounce: zoopharmacognosy. When you break down the word, it’s zoo, as in animals, pharma, as in medicine, and cognosy, as in cognition/knowledge. It’s the study of how animals know about the medicines in their natural environments, in their ecosystems. 

It’s not just chimps that do this. Chimps were the first animal that we discovered to be self-medicators, but the more researchers set their mind to it, the more we realized that actually this is happening all throughout the animal kingdom, from chimps, to elephants, to great bustard birds, to bears, to civets, to snow geese. It’s incredible. The more we study animal self-medication, the more examples we discover across the animal kingdom.

It turns out that healthcare is not one of the things that sets our species apart; it’s actually something – surprise, surprise – that’s universal. And animals, just as they know how to seek shelter and find food, know how to find medicine as well. 

When I began my master’s research at the University of Oxford, which later transitioned into a Ph.D., I wanted to start with a very simple question. I knew I’d be working in the Budongo Forest in western Uganda, and I wanted to identify new medicinal plants used by chimpanzees. At that point, researchers only knew about a small handful of plant medicines chimps used, partly because the field had slowed down for a while. Funding was limited, there were methodological challenges, and after several decades of research, we still only knew of a few plants chimpanzees used to treat internal parasites.

I wanted to expand that dataset so we could begin asking more complex questions, like how chimpanzees know which plants in their environment are medicinal and which are simply part of their regular diet.

To do this, I had to use a very interdisciplinary methodology, which for me was ideal, because I had a very interdisciplinary and weird past. I had studied social anthropology and had an art background, but I didn’t have much formal training in the quantitative sciences. I had never even taken a statistics class, so I spent a lot of time teaching myself, learning new methods, and talking with researchers who had found unusual ways to bridge disciplines and combine fields.

Then I headed out into the field, completely green. I had never seen a chimpanzee in the wild before. I arrived in the middle of the pandemic and began what became a completely life-changing experience: spending nine months living alongside wild chimpanzees at a research station.

And I learned so much, not just about the chimps but about the forest ecosystem. My first paper wasn’t even about chimps; it was about red-tailed monkeys. And I wrote another paper about birds from my observations there. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that science is everywhere and everything. You have to keep your eyes really wide open, and the more you do, the more you see.

As for the chimps, I was collecting a lot of their poop and examining it under microscopes to identify parasites. I was analyzing urine samples for signs of infection, carefully monitoring their diets, and paying close attention to any plants they ate that seemed unusual. I was also collecting plant samples themselves and bringing them to a lab in Germany, where we ran pharmacological tests to see whether they had antibacterial or anti-inflammatory properties.

Spoiler alert: they absolutely did.

The final part of the research, and the part that excited me most, was having the privilege of sitting down with healers in nearby villages who also used the forest as a pharmacy and medicine cabinet. I spoke with them about several plants I had been watching closely because the chimpanzees were seeking them out in unusual ways. By that point, I had gathered evidence suggesting the chimps were occasionally using the bark of certain trees that were not part of their normal diet.

The healers generously shared that some of those same trees were also used as medicines in their own communities. Surprise, surprise.

It was groundbreaking for me. I had been so focused on these natural medicine cabinets from the animals’ perspective that I hadn’t been thinking about them as shared. I wasn’t thinking about all the many interspecies entanglements that must exist around the world when it comes to medicines different species, including ours, are using.

I published some of those results, and now I’m working on a new postdoctoral project. In many ways, the direction has stayed the same. I’m still studying how animals use medicine in the wild, but now I’m approaching it through the lens of these medicinal entanglements and shared forest pharmacies. In some ways, it’s an expansion of the concept of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, which is incredibly important.

At international forums, there are many conversations about the importance of medicinal plants as a primary source of healthcare for people around the world. But the more-than-human world is often absent from those discussions, even though many animals rely on some of the same medicinal resources.

We at least have some safeguards in place to protect traditional ecological knowledge in human communities, though those protections are still far too weak and exploitation remains widespread. But there are virtually no protections in place for the medicinal resources that other species depend on.

That has become my mission, both as a scientist and a science communicator: to change the way we think about medicine on this planet. Medicine isn’t something that exists only for humans. It’s something all living beings rely on to survive and flourish, especially amid the rapid changes ecosystems are facing today.

Right now, I’m working with colleagues and collaborators to draft what could become the first protections for the traditional medicinal knowledge of animals, along with safeguards for the resources themselves against exploitation, degradation, and biopiracy.

I also recognize what a privilege it is to spend time with animals in the wild, and I never take that for granted. I want to do whatever I can to bring those experiences to people who don’t have the opportunity to interact with animals on a daily basis. That’s part of why I’ve started working on films, using a handful of very small grants to help share this work with a wider audience.

This knowledge has existed for thousands of years. It’s not something we’re only discovering now. People living within these ecosystems have understood many of these relationships for generations, and science is only beginning to catch up.

I saw that firsthand while working in Uganda. I had become fascinated by a behavior called bark feeding, where chimpanzees strip and consume the bark of certain trees. In primatology, this had often been dismissed as a kind of “fallback food” behavior, something animals do when there are no better options available. But the more evidence I collected, the less that explanation made sense.

When I started speaking with healers in nearby villages, I asked whether they also used bark from certain tree species medicinally, and whether they thought chimpanzees might be doing the same thing. They just laughed at me. To them, the answer was obvious. Of course humans used those barks as medicine. Of course the chimps did too.

That experience deeply shaped the way I think about science now. I’m an outsider when I enter these ecosystems. I always try to begin by listening to the people who live there and know those environments intimately. Otherwise, trying to understand these medicinal relationships is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

There’s absolutely a knowledge interchange happening between humans and other animals. Across many cultures, people have learned medicines by observing animals. And in some cases, animals may even be learning from people as well.

That perspective is shaping my current work in the central Peruvian Amazon, where I’m collaborating with an incredible team that includes Asháninka scientists. Instead of beginning solely with animal observation, we’re starting by asking which medicinal plants and resources are already culturally important within local communities, and then studying how animals interact with those same species.

It’s also changed the way I think about scientific collaboration itself. Too often, researchers parachute into ecosystems, extract knowledge, and fail to properly credit local scientists and collaborators. That has been a longstanding problem in primatology and conservation science. For me, collaborative authorship and local expertise are non-negotiable. The people who live in and understand these ecosystems are not secondary contributors to this work. They are central to it.

A lot of what I’m trying to do now is listen deeply enough to learn the right questions to ask, and help build collaborative teams that bring together many different voices and ways of knowing from around the world. Then the goal is to carry those insights back into the scientific community until science finally begins catching up with local knowledge.

Continue exploring the hidden intelligence of the more-than-human world: Read how musician Garth Stevenson uses improvisation and whale song to search for interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how neuroscientist Gül Dölen is using octopuses to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses.

The post Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication appeared first on Bioneers.

What happens when a drug designed to make humans more social is given to one of the most evolutionarily distinct forms of intelligence on Earth?

That question helped launch some of the most unexpected neuroscience research in recent years for Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist whose work explores psychedelics, critical periods, social behavior, and the evolution of consciousness across species. While leading a lab at Johns Hopkins University, Dölen and her collaborators made headlines after giving MDMA to octopuses and discovering that the notoriously solitary animals suddenly became strikingly social and playful. For Dölen, the experiment revealed something much deeper than an unusual animal behavior study: It suggested that radically different forms of intelligence may still share ancient molecular mechanisms linked to social connection and consciousness.

Now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, Dölen’s research spans psychedelics, neuroplasticity, evolution, and comparative neuroscience, often using highly unconventional animal models to investigate how brains learn, adapt, and relate to the world. Her work increasingly asks what humans can learn by studying minds that evolved along entirely different evolutionary paths — including octopuses, which she describes as “about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth.”

The following is an edited excerpt from Dölen’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript.

GÜL DÖLEN: I’m a neurobiologist. I grew up in Texas, and most of my experience swimming was in chlorinated pools. But when I was a kid, we visited my grandparents in Turkey and went to the Mediterranean. At least, that was the plan. The moment I saw all the sea urchins covering the ocean floor, I refused to get in the water.

My grandmother, who was a zoologist, wasn’t having that for a second. She picked up a sea urchin and showed me where its mouth was, then explained how it used its spines to move food toward that mouth. Suddenly, this thing I had been terrified of transformed into this spectacular, alien creature living on the ocean floor. I think that was probably the first moment I ever considered becoming a scientist.

Fast forward many years, and I had started my own lab at Johns Hopkins University. We had made what I genuinely believed was a really big discovery about psychedelics and critical periods, something that I think could fundamentally change how we understand these drugs and how we use them as medicines.

The problem was that, in the beginning, I was having a very hard time convincing anyone else that this was earth-shattering enough to keep funding. I think I was on my sixteenth rejected grant application at the NIH. I was feeling pretty demoralized, like maybe I wasn’t going to be able to keep the lab open or keep paying people. But I still had a tiny bit of money left over, so I thought: why not do something completely wild and fun as a sort of mic drop before I moved on to becoming a UPS driver or whatever my next career was going to be.

I had already been fascinated by octopuses because of that early interest in marine biology, and I was also deeply interested in evolution. The problem is that brains are notoriously difficult to study through the fossil record because brains don’t fossilize. You can look at brain endocasts, but that only gives you the rough anatomy. It doesn’t tell you very much about how a brain actually works.

Around the same time I was struggling to get NIH funding, a paper came out in the journal Nature describing the first octopus genome. I was completely stunned. I remember thinking: This is it. This is how we’re finally going to understand brain evolution. A genome is exactly what you need to reconstruct phylogenetic trees across evolutionary history, so suddenly, there was a way to begin understanding, at least at the molecular level, how brains evolve.

I was incredibly excited about all of this, and I had already started talking with people about how to somehow break into the octopus world. I had a collaborator at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole who had been helping me think through some of these ideas, and one day he called and said, “You know, we have seven octopuses available. Do you have any experiment you want to do with them?”

And I said yes.

So he packed them into a box and FedExed them from Massachusetts down to Baltimore. Then he got on a plane himself and flew down too. I sent everyone else home from the lab so we could run the experiment ourselves.

The experiment we wanted to run was to give octopuses MDMA, a psychedelic drug known for causing humans and other mammals to become much more social. It’s the classic rave drug, but it’s also now being developed by several companies as a potential treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

MDMA is a completely synthetic compound. It doesn’t really exist in nature, though there are some related compounds in sassafras trees. So unlike many psychedelics, it’s not something animals would have naturally encountered or evolved alongside, even though there are other psychedelics that animals do use.

We thought there was almost no chance this would work because octopuses and humans are separated by something like 600 million years of evolution. Our last common ancestor was basically little more than a bacterium. We’re actually more closely related to sea urchins than we are to octopuses. Their brains look nothing like ours, and despite what you may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses are viciously asocial creatures. I like to joke that they’re the psychopaths of the ocean. They seem to have an incredible capacity for cognitive empathy, but very little obvious emotional empathy.

So we assumed MDMA probably wouldn’t do much because we didn’t think octopuses shared the same kind of social brain chemistry that mammals do. But since MDMA has some similarities to amphetamines, I thought maybe we’d at least see some kind of behavioral response.

We started with a very high dose because we had no idea how to translate human dosing to an octopus. At those higher doses, the octopuses behaved a lot like humans on amphetamines. They became hypervigilant, staring around the tank and looking at me suspiciously.

But as we gradually lowered the dose and got into the range that would roughly correspond to an effective human dose, something really strange happened. The octopuses started doing what we called “the ballerina move.” Normally, when an octopus knows there’s another octopus nearby, it becomes extremely reserved. It pulls all eight arms tightly underneath its body and keeps its distance. If it interacts at all, it might cautiously extend a single arm, touch the other octopus, and immediately pull back.

On MDMA, it was completely different. Suddenly, all eight arms were floating outward in the water, almost like they were dancing. They engaged in what looked to us very much like play behavior. They were doing backflips, exploring each other freely, and spending far more time near the other octopus than with the toy we had placed in the tank.

What made this so remarkable was that octopuses don’t have brain anatomy that looks anything like ours. They don’t have a cortex, an amygdala, or a nucleus accumbens, all the structures we normally associate with social behavior in humans and other mammals. And yet they were responding to this synthetic compound with behaviors strikingly similar to our own.

To me, that suggested that the thing we truly share is happening at the molecular level. This was a very clear demonstration of how two molecules interacting with each other can radically alter consciousness, in this case specifically around social behavior. The real mechanism isn’t necessarily brain anatomy itself. It’s the molecules and the ways they interact.

This completely transformed the way I think about science. My lab spent many years focused on circuit mapping and brain anatomy, but over time I’ve become less interested in anatomy alone and much more interested in comparative studies across radically different species.

I didn’t invent this idea that the best way to understand complex behavior is not by only studying ourselves, chimpanzees, and other animals closely related to us, but by studying species that are maximally different from us, like octopuses, which are about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth. That idea really came from J. Z. Young, one of the earliest modern neuroscientists. In the 1960s, he wrote a book called A Model of the Brain arguing that octopuses were actually the ideal animals for understanding the fundamental building blocks shared across brains. His point was that if you compare species that are too similar, it becomes hard to distinguish what is truly fundamental from what is simply an accident of shared evolutionary history, like whether a brain happens to have a cortex or not.

In some ways, this can be understood as a new example of what evolutionary biologists call “deep homology.” That’s different from the kinds of examples many of us learned about in high school biology, things like convergent evolution and the distinction between compound eyes and camera eyes. What molecular biology is increasingly revealing is that this kind of deep homology at the level of genes and molecules is far more common than we once realized.

We recently finished mapping another octopus genome, this time for the zebra pygmy octopus, Octopus chierchiae. What’s extraordinary is just how different octopus genome architecture is from our own. Their genome is roughly twice the size of the human genome and packed with repetitive sequences, many of which are thought to be jumping genes, essentially virus-like elements that invade genomes over evolutionary time.

What’s fascinating is that octopuses seem remarkably tolerant of these repetitive sequences, and we’re beginning to suspect they may actually play some important regulatory role.  We also found that octopuses continue growing neurons throughout their lives, so adult neurogenesis is fairly common in them. On top of that, there’s extensive RNA editing happening inside their neurons. They continue learning well into adulthood, they can regenerate lost arms, and they’re capable of adapting to wildly different environments, from the Arctic to the Caribbean.

They possess this astonishing range of learned and adaptive behaviors that makes them some of the most behaviorally flexible and cognitively complex invertebrates on Earth. And we keep discovering entirely new things they can do, these bizarre little superpowers we don’t have ourselves. They solve problems in ways completely different from humans, and honestly, that’s incredibly exciting to me as a scientist because who wouldn’t want to study superpowers?

Right now, there’s a huge cultural fascination with octopuses as cute, emotionally relatable creatures. I actually think that badly misunderstands what they are. Despite what people may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses did not evolve to cuddle middle-aged white guys going through a divorce.

Most octopus species are intensely asocial. They are extraordinarily successful predators with incredibly sophisticated learning, memory, camouflage, and problem-solving abilities, but they are not social in the way humans are social. Some species are so solitary that females may never even see the entire male. They only encounter his specialized reproductive arm, which he detaches in order to escape before being eaten.

I think it’s important to respect octopuses for what they actually are rather than trying to remake them in our own image. The truly remarkable thing is not that they are secretly humanlike. It’s that minds so radically different from ours can still reveal deep biological commonalities at the molecular level.

People are usually willing to protect what they know and love, so part of my job as a biologist is helping people understand these animals more deeply. That includes understanding just how alien they are and how fundamentally different they are from us, while still finding connection in the fact that we are part of the same biology, shaped by the same evolutionary history and built from the same basic materials.

Continue exploring consciousness, communication, and intelligence across species: Read how musician Garth Stevenson explores music as a form of interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is documenting the shared medicinal knowledge of humans and animals in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.

The post The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses appeared first on Bioneers.

The infinitely curious author and science writer Michael Pollan embraces the mystery at the heart of the great mystery of life: What is the nature of consciousness? And how can we understand consciousness when our only tool is our own consciousness? Joined by interviewer and UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner.

Featuring

Michael Pollan is a writer, teacher and activist. His most recent book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, was published in February 2026. He is the author of nine previous books, all bestsellers. Pollan has taught writing at Harvard and UC Berkeley and has been a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow.

Dacher Keltner, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, is the host of the Science of Happiness Podcast and the author of many articles and books, including Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.

Credits

• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Written by: Kenny Ausubel and Teo Grossman
• Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
• Associate Producer: Emily Harris
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Resources

MichaelPollan.com

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

Michael Pollan’s Bioneers 2026 Keynote

Plant Intelligence and Human Consciousness: Into the Mystery with Michael Pollan and Monica Gagliano

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

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

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): There’s a good reason that philosophers, who have been struggling to understand consciousness for millennia, call it “the hard problem.” Even in this modern era, with all our sophisticated scientific understanding, the mystery of how the matter between our ears leads to subjective experiences remains more confidently explained by poets, novelists, priests or shamans than contemporary gatekeepers of knowledge.

Meanwhile, advances in our understanding of the rest of life that we inhabit this biosphere with are yielding an understanding that intelligence, once considered a solely human realm, clearly extends deeply into the more-than-human world. It may well be the case that consciousness is similarly embedded throughout life itself – but our ability to understand, appreciate and plumb our own human internal experience remains in a nascent state, collectively.

According to Michael Pollan, one of the world’s most influential science writers, quote: “To delve into the subject of consciousness is to quickly discover how little we know about a phenomenon we all know so well.” [no end quote needed]

After transforming the way society thinks about food with his landmark book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan turned his attention from the stomach to the mind, writing the best-selling volume on psychedelics called How To Change Your Mind. That body of research and experiences led him naturally to write the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness…

Michael Pollan spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Michael Pollan speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Nikki Ritcher

Michael Pollan (MP): I’ve spent the last five years on a quest to understand consciousness, the hard problem. How is it that subjective experience arises, and who and possibly what has it and why? I looked at everything from plant consciousness, which we’ll talk about a little bit, to my own stream of consciousness, to efforts to build artificial consciousness in machines. And I want to talk about one of the biggest takeaways from this project. And that is this: that I believe humanity is approaching a Copernican moment, what I call a Copernican moment, that will force the issue of who exactly we are and how we fit into nature.

You’ll recall Nicolaus Copernicus, 500 years ago, blew everyone’s mind in the West when he demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. He displayed our sense of centrality in a way that was really hard for people to observe. This was the first of a series of takedowns of humanity. 

Darwin came next, showing that we were animals descended from apes. And one after another, our claims to being special have fallen – culture, language, reasoning, tool-making – all have fallen when we found that there are animals that can do all these things. 

But a different, and I think even more profound, Copernican moment is upon us. At the same time that we are discovering that a great many more animals and possibly other life forms like plants possess consciousness, we have the arrival of artificial intelligence, promising machines that are not only intelligent but possibly conscious. That these two developments are coinciding, are happening at the same time, I think is going to rock us very soon, prompting an identity crisis and forcing us to make some key ethical and moral decisions. 

Let me talk about animals first. So, go back 400 years, and René Descartes claimed that humans had a monopoly on consciousness. And we operated on that basis for many centuries. That belief, which was so powerful, allowed him to dissect dogs and rabbits while they were still alive. And he was able to dismiss their screams of agony as just physiological noise, because that idea was so powerful, it overwhelmed the evidence of his senses. 

But the same idea allowed the rest of us, beginning in the Age of Enlightenment and reason, to treat nature as unconscious, and therefore something we could exploit any way we wanted to. And we operated on that assumption for a very long time. It took us several hundred years to begin to recognize that other species shared this incredible gift that we call consciousness. 

But in recent years, things have been changing. We’ve been undergoing this process in which consciousness is being democratized. You know, a few decades ago, we came to appreciate that other primates are conscious. That was the first step. In 2012, a group of animal scientists, philosophers, cognitive scientists got together in Cambridge, England, and issued a declaration on consciousness. And they declared that all mammals are conscious, and that some other species, some birds were conscious, and cephalopods, I think octopuses. And this was a real change, a real shift in the weather in science. 

Photo: Diane Picchiottino / Unsplash

Just ten years later, they issued an update signed by a great many more scientists and philosophers, in which they said that all vertebrates are conscious, possibly some invertebrates, and possibly insects. So how did this revolution happen?

Well, part of it is due to the fact that we had always assumed that consciousness is produced or generated in the cortex. The cortex, of course, is the most recent, most uniquely human structure in the brain, and it’s associated with higher forms of thought, like rationality, decision-making. So surely, consciousness must reside there. 

But the research has been shifting our sense of where it begins, and that instead of thought, consciousness probably begins with feelings, simple things like hunger and thirst, and warmth and cold, and itch. This is where consciousness begins, and therefore it begins in the upper brain stem. And lots of animals have brain stems, many more than have cortices. So that’s led to a real change. And this is a key point about feelings. Keep it in mind when we get to computers. 

And I take this, this expansion of the circle of conscious beings or sentient beings, a word I’m sometimes more comfortable with, as a very positive development. Basically, I think what we’re seeing is that science is helping us to reanimate a world that we treated as dead for way too long. [APPLAUSE] 

And you know, this period of treating the world that way in the larger context of things is a very recent and short phenomenon, it’s a couple hundred years. The default of humanity is one form of animism or another. Most Indigenous cultures see the world as animated by spirit, which is a synonym for consciousness. Kids, the default of young kids, is that everything is conscious – their toys, their cars, their whatever. So it’s interesting that we had a departure from this very deep human assumption. And in fact, it’s a cognitive bias that things are conscious. You’re better off thinking that that boulder over there is a bear and then deciding, oh, it’s actually just a rock – this is called agency detection – than the other way around, and you assume that that bear is just a rock and not to worry about it. So it’s a good, sort of basic response to things. 

So that’s the good news. But now we have the prospect of conscious machines, and I think that this is a lot more troubling. We now have machines that speak to us in our language in the first person. We all already take this for granted, but it’s a stunning development, a momentous development that, of course, none of us were consulted about. And these machines are convincing many people that they are conscious. I’m talking about people who are having relationships with chatbots, falling in love with them, letting them convince them they’re geniuses or gods. But I’m also talking about the people who work on these machines. 

So for my book, I followed efforts to create a conscious AI. I had access to a project where this was going on. And, you know, the consensus in Silicon Valley is that it will be possible to make a really conscious AI, that maybe right now they’re fooling us, but it could happen. 

I argue why I don’t think this is true, and it has to do with the same reason: If consciousness depends on feelings, what are the feelings of a machine? Can a machine have feelings? I agree, no. [LAUGHTER] And if it tells us they have feelings, should we believe it? 

Feelings depend on having a body. Feelings depend on the fact that you have a body that is vulnerable, that can suffer and that can die. I don’t think simulated feelings are real feelings. I think simulated thoughts are as good as real thoughts, and that’s why we see computers mastering games like Chess and Go. They can make things happen in the world, but what will this—the weight of a feeling expressed by a machine have? Unless it can be mortal, unless it can actually have a vulnerable body—those feelings will be absolutely weightless. 

My argument might not matter, though, because people believe that these machines are conscious, and it’s understandable why. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything. 

So there is talk in Silicon Valley – I’m amazed how common this is – that we should consider when we have conscious AIs, giving them moral consideration, admitting them into this widening circle of moral consideration. I think it’s a big mistake to do that. I think it’s something we have to fight against, that when we, you know, grant personhood to computers, we will lose our ability to control them. 

And you will recall, we did this once before when we decided, in our lack of wisdom, to grant personhood to corporations. That did not work out very well. It seems to me that there are moral obligations we owe to people and other mammals that should come first. [APPLAUSE] 

So I’m going to leave you with this Copernican question and this choice: Where does that leave us now? We have pressure coming from these two sides – animals becoming more conscious, plants possibly becoming conscious, insects becoming conscious. That’s pressing on us in a way that we can decide is positive or negative. And then on the other side, at the same time, we have computers making claims for consciousness. Who do we identify with? Who do we have more in common with, the AIs who can speak our language in the first person, or the animals that can suffer and feel and grow old and die? Who’s team are we on? The choice we make, as a species, will have tremendous consequences for who or what we admit into this circle of moral consideration, and how we conceive of our place in the world. 

Host: More from Michael Pollan when we return…

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Host: At a recent Bioneers conference, Michael Pollan was interviewed by Dacher Keltner, an author and Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley who served as the lead scientific consultant for the two animated “Inside Out” films by Pixar that explore the role emotions play in our lives.

Dacher Keltner (DK): I remember talking to you five years ago or something, kind of in the wake of This is Your Mind on Plants, and then How to Change Your Mind. And I remember we were walking in the Berkeley hills, and you were saying, you know, it’s like, well, what’s up next, and you’re like: I think I’m going to write a book about consciousness. And I laughed at you. [LAUGHTER] And I thought, well, that’ll be the end of your career, [LAUGHTER] and no one will buy that book. You know? And you’ve just been sort of jaunting around the wo—it’s a sensation! I mean, it’s like you’re all over the place; it’s a best-seller; it’s stirring all kinds of conversations. What’s going on? 

MP: Good question! I have no idea. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what’s going on. I mean, I think— 

So I started on this book. It grew out of How to Change Your Mind. Right? I was having these psychedelic experiences, and like anyone who’s had psychedelics, suddenly consciousness is foregrounded. You’re like—the windshield of perception has been smudged, and you’re like: Shit, there’s a windshield. [LAUGHTER] And you start—You start thinking about that windshield, and why is it the way it is. And so I got curious. And my writing usually follows my curiosity. 

DK: One of the first persons to figure prominently is this kind of mysterious philosopher at NYU, Thomas Nagel. I love his book The View from Nowhere. 

MP: Yeah I do too. 

DK: It’s spectacular. What a great— 

MP: He’s a critic of reductive science. 

DK: Yeah. 

MP: And, he wrote a famous essay in the early ‘70s, before there was a lot of scientific work being done on consciousness, called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Provocative title. And his thesis was that if it’s like anything to be a bat, if it feels like anything, then a bat is conscious. 

Now, we don’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a bat. You know? We use light to navigate the world, and they use echolocation. Right?  So they bounce sound waves off of things. But we can sort of imagine that. 

DK: Yeah. 

MP: Enough to say, yeah, they’re probably conscious. So that became the question you ask of any creature. Does it feel like anything to be X? It doesn’t feel like anything to be your toaster. How do we say for sure that anything is conscious?  How do I know you’re conscious? We infer it in the case of— 

DK: I’m insulted. 

MP: —other people. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, we have to infer it, I mean, because we don’t have access to anyone else’s consciousness. You know, we can use symbol systems to learn something about it,  like language.  But there is—I mean, William James said the breach between two consciousnesses is the greatest breach in nature, and so how do we cross that?  And imagination is an important tool. We have theory of mind, which is…you know, philosopher talk for the ability to imagine someone else’s point of view. 

DK: So one of the beauties of the book is, as always, you take us on a journey, and it’s interesting because you kind of flip the typical Western approach to the mind, the Cartesian approach of you start with reason and sophisticated thinking and syllogistic logic and so forth, and you go—you start with sentience, and you move upwards, out of the brain stem and into the cortex. And, you know, I want to see where you land, and keep pressing you. 

Sentience, just the registering of sensations in all the different modalities by which we receive sort of information from the outside, it’s remarkable. You know? It truly is. You think about the skin – it’s 7 pounds and billions of cells, and all kinds of information is going into your brain stem and your somatosensory cortex telling you where you are, and who’s touching you, what that touch means. You think about the new science of smell, how we create spaces and meaning and memory and childhood nostalgia out of smell. I mean, sensation’s deep. Right? And it’s great that you start there. 

MP: I would add one thing to your definition of sentience, which is kind of a more basic form of consciousness. I think it’s maybe universal,  I mean, among all living things. But there’s valence too. There’s a recognition of, this is good or bad for the organism. 

DK: Right. And then you take us to plants, and, you know, I think a lot of us in this room, in particular at Bioneers, revere your scientific reporting and experience in writing of plants. And the new science on sentience of plants blew my mind. You know? 

MP: Yeah. They have 20 senses. 

Photo: Sergei Aleshin / Shutterstock

DK: God! 

MP: I know. They can sense gravity, I mean, and pH, and all these things that we can’t sense. 

DK: And then they know kin, they know non-kin, they know cooperators. 

MP: They can see. I mean, you know, there are vines that will change their leaf form to imitate the plant they’re climbing up, to hide. I mean, how do they see what the leaf form is and then how do they change themselves? We have no idea. 

DK: Yeah. So what did that tell you about consciousness, the plant science? What did you start to think? 

MP: So, it’s quite remarkable what plants can do. We’re fooled by the fact that they’re so still. But they have behaviors. They’re just slower than ours.

So these scientists call themselves plant neurobiologists. They know there are no neurons, they’re just trolling more conventional scientists. And it drives them crazy that they talk about plant neurobiology. So there’s a whole lot of these very cool experiments showing that plants can hear and see; they—in ways we don’t really understand. 

I don’t conclude that plants are conscious because I think that word has specific meanings tied to being a mammal, at least. But I do think they’re sentient. And sentience, as I said, is a simpler form of consciousness that may well be universal. I think even single-celled creatures have sentience. I think you can’t survive in a world that’s constantly changing without sensing your environment and knowing what’s good or bad for you. 

And so, yeah, that’s kind of where I came out on plants. And then I realized, well, consciousness is the way humans do sentience. And so every creature has its own version of sentience that’s appropriate to its body type, its sensorium, the scale at which it lives, and it would be anthropomorphic of us to say that, you know, plants are conscious the way we are. And they’re not. They don’t have interiority, I think. They don’t have a voice in their head. They can’t talk to themselves, all these amazing things that we can do. 

Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Tammy Horton/Boris Zharkov Photography

DK: One of the things that scientists like myself appreciate about your writing is often scientists become unlikely heroes in your books, and one of your heroes is Michael Levin. 

MP: Yeah, he’s an amazing biologist. This is a biologist at Tufts who—I urge you to look him up. He studies how animals regenerate themselves. And he’s very interested in bioelectric fields.

Now, I didn’t know what these were. They were discovered in the ‘30s, but that any multi-cellular thing will have a bioelectric field that is organizing it, holding memories,  enforcing a division of labor among cells in a multi-cellular situation. The study of this didn’t really begin until the ‘80s, when we developed these voltage-sensitive dyes. Before that, when the cell died, the field was gone. So unlike DNA, which survives the death of this—of the animal, and you can study it—or plant, bioelectric fields were very elusive. But now with these dyes, you can study them. And he’s really shown how powerful they are. 

He works with planaria, which are these worms that, if you chop off a tail, they regenerate a tail; you chop off a head, they regenerate a head. They’re kind of amazing. And he teaches them something. He conditions them and then he chops off their head. They grow a new head, and they remember the lesson. Which means that the information that they had learned was stored in their bodies, in this bioelectric field, not in the brain.

So his kind of covert project is a takedown of the neuron and the gene. Which is, you know, pretty ambitious. So it’s a really interesting project, and he believes that the simplest beings are cognitive beings. The way evolution works is it creates cognitive beings that can solve problems, and that you can’t hardwire everything because our world is so changeable.  The world, the environment  in which they live is so changeable. So that creatures need sentience in order to navigate a world that’s constantly changing, and it’s a very compelling vision. 

Host: Over the course of his research for his book, Michael Pollan found at least 22 distinct and often divergent theories of consciousness, as well as a theory about the specific consciousness of consciousness researchers. He believes it’s a clear indicator of how nascent the field remains, and how ineffable a mystery consciousness is.

MP: Non-local consciousness is a term for idealism. I mean, that’s what the philosophers called idealism. And that is the idea that consciousness is outside of our brains, and the job of the brain is to channel it, and that we’re like radio receivers or TV receivers, and we’re tuning in to consciousness. And it can be different kinds of consciousness.

Aldous Huxley uses that model in Doors of Perception. And he argues that psychedelics expand what he called the reducing valve, because we only let in that amount of consciousness that helps us survive. That would be the Darwinian explanation of like we only know these, but psychedelics opens it up and suddenly you feel like you’re more conscious.

I don’t know how you prove idealism. I think it’s a metaphysical idea, so I don’t think it’s susceptible to scientific proof. It’s consistent with all the brain science we’ve done on consciousness, which sounds crazy, but, you know, the brain is obviously involved in that system as well, it just has a different role. It’s not generating, it’s bringing in, and so damaging or changing the brain in some way would change consciousness. So it holds either way. 

Cristof Koch, you know, he was the ultimate brain-centered researcher. He was the head of the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle, he worked with mapping individual neurons. He really believed brains generated consciousness, until he went to Brazil and had an experience on ayahuasca, which I talk about in the book. And he had an experience of consciousness outside of his brain, and it gave him this crisis. He was like crying to his wife, it was such a big crisis. And he got very interested in idealism. I don’t know where he is right now, but the last time I talked to him, he was engaging with this idealist philosopher named Bernardo Kastrup. 

So you know, I don’t know what to make of that, honestly. Same with panpsychism. That’s another theory that solves the hard problem, but at a high expense, the expense being consciousness didn’t evolve or arise, it was always here, and it’s part of matter, that all matter has some degree, small degree of consciousness, and somehow it gets combined from all these—you know, the consciousness of our individual particles and cells into the kind of consciousness we have. 

Another interesting idea – you’ve solved the problem. It’s sort of like physics when they say, well, we can solve quantum mechanics if we stipulate a multiverse, that there are 50 different worlds. Okay. That’s a high price to pay, but okay.

Host: Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner, “Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness”

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