Bioneers

Photo: Lakeview Middle School in Watsonville, CA, surrounded by farms that use pesticides

At a Pesticide Reality Tour last May, Dr. Ann Lopez stood next to legendary farmworker activist Dolores Huerta, Lopez’s inspiration for her work to elevate the lives of farmworkers. Dolores Huerta, ever the activist at age 95, was there to support the Campaign for Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) co-founded by Lopez to eliminate the exposure to toxic pesticides that farmworkers endure with devastating regularity. 

Seventy percent of the population of the farming community of Watsonville, CA, where the rally was held, is Latinx, many of whom work in the local berry fields in the Pajaro Valley that straddles the Santa Cruz and Monterey County line. In this agricultural region, like many others, pesticides are routinely sprayed around schools and homes. Each year, one million pounds of pesticides are applied to farmland in Santa Cruz County, 67% of which are toxic fumigants that become airborne and can travel for miles.

One of these pesticides, chloropicrin, is banned or restricted in Europe. The chemical is injected into the soil as a sterilizing fumigant before planting a crop. In the First World War, it was used as a poison gas and recently there have been allegations that it is being used by the Russians in the war against Ukraine.

The European Union’s Food Safety Authority has established that chloropicrin is toxic when inhaled and causes severe eye, skin, and respiratory irritation. Some studies have indicated that it could also cause DNA damage.

Lopez, a biologist turned farmworker advocate, addressed the gathering about the dangers of pesticides with a tone of indignation, “I’m sick and tired of meeting families that have at least one kid that has some anomaly that will probably affect them for life including brain cancer, bone cancer, ADHD, and learning disabilities. It was shocking to go house-to-house and meet these families and almost everyone has some child that has one of the serious anomalies…. Mothers sent me pictures of their children just before they died.”

Lopez’s ire is not solely based on anecdotal evidence. The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has identified 13 pesticides correlated to the onset of childhood cancer between birth and 5 years old, when the mother lives within 2.5 miles of pesticide application while pregnant.

Dr. Lopez pointed to the fact that Latinx school children are 3.2 times more likely than white students to attend schools with high exposure to hazardous pesticides as an example of environmental racism. Children and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of these agricultural toxins.

Ernestina Solorio has been working in the farm fields since 1993, even when she was pregnant with her two youngest children who have been diagnosed with ADHD, have learning problems and suffer from depression. Holding back tears as she addressed the CORA rally in Spanish, Solorio said, “Both of them are constantly going to medical appointments and counselors and psychologists. It is very difficult to see that they are not getting better or making any progress. If I had known about the chemicals in the field, I would have chosen not to work there. The difficult thing for me is that my lack of knowledge now results in my kids’ suffering. My 18 year old asks why he can’t be normal. The owner of these fields should have some conscience and think about the kids and how much they suffer… Driscoll’s should have some conscience and change those farms to organic for the kids and the farmworkers and the community.”

The CORA campaign is primarily targeting Driscoll’s, a family owned company that began in the early 1900’s in Watsonville and is now the largest berry grower in the world with farms in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Baja California, Chile, and Peru. CORA is promoting organic and regenerative farming as the remedy to the tragedy of farmworker families’ exposure to toxic pesticides that destroy health and even take lives.  Fifteen to twenty percent of Driscoll’s production is currently organic, however, 9 of the 11 schools in Pajaro Valley are adjacent to conventional farms that use toxic pesticides and the 2 others are only a couple of blocks away from farms that use chemical sprays.

Driscoll’s position is that they are in full compliance with state and federal pesticides laws. But evidence is mounting that those laws are woefully insufficient to protect the public’s health. Ultimately, CORA wants to see the more than 25,000 acres of farmland in the Pajaro Valley farmed organically. In the short term, their campaign is focused on having the fields near homes and schools converted to organic farms in order to protect the health of children and the wider community.

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What rational sense does it make to spray food with poison? And yet that is the prevailing method in which food is grown commercially with the exception of a small percent of crops that are grown organically. Chemical pesticides (the suffix “cide” means killer) leave residues on foods that we consume daily. The USDA found that more than 75 percent of fruits and over 50 percent of vegetables contain pesticide residues.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determines what level of those pesticide residues are “safe.” The standard they use is that the pesticide will not cause “unreasonable adverse effects to humans or the environment.” Determination on whether a pesticide meets that standard is based on research done by the same chemical companies seeking approval for their products. The registration process can take 6 to 9 years, at a cost of millions of dollars. So, companies have substantial incentives to get their products approved and are assisted by a cadre of lobbyists.

According to the Environment Maryland Policy and Research Center, “Big agribusiness corporations have invested millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying to defend agricultural practices that pollute America’s rivers, lakes and ocean waters and to defeat common-sense measures to clean up our waterways.”

Over the years, some government agencies, such as the Public Health Service and Fish and Wildlife have found evidence that pesticides negatively affect human health. After the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal book ,Silent Spring, which sounded the alarm on the harms of pesticides, President John F. Kennedy directed the President’s Science Advisory Committee to investigate. The Committee found that pesticides cause environmental contamination and are potentially dangerous to other living organisms, including humans.

Prior to 1962, the government regulated pesticides mainly to verify that chemical preparations were effective, and were less concerned with issues of safety. But with the publishing of Silent Spring, and with support from the Kennedy administration, legislative action to evaluate pesticide safety began. Numerous laws have passed regulating pesticides since then, but do they go far enough to ensure public and environmental health and safety?

Approximately 800 chemicals are approved for agricultural use currently. More than 8 billion pounds of pesticides are used globally every year with the U.S accounting for roughly 11 percent, or more than one billion pounds despite evidence of their association with cancer, and neurological and pulmonary diseases. The soils of 80% of global farms contain pesticide residues. A report from Systemiq titled “Invisible Ingredients: Tackling Toxic Chemicals in the Food System” estimates that the global healthcare cost due to pesticide exposure is $816 billion.

Why, if the EPA’s standard of “unreasonable adverse effects” is being enforced, has

Bayer/Monsanto had to pay out $11 billion dollars in settlements because the courts determined that the herbicide Roundup caused cancer (Bayer still faces another 60 to 70 thousand more Roundup lawsuits)? Why have 25 countries banned or restricted Roundup? And why, if their product is safe, has Syngenta paid $187.5 million in 2021 to settle claims linking its herbicide paraquat to Parkinson’s disease? This is by no means a comprehensive list, just prominent examples that lead one to question the EPA’s rigor in adhering to its own standard.

Even though strong evidence that harm to environmental and human health from pesticides exists, can a case be made that the benefits of pesticide use outweigh the risks? The argument is that pesticides protect crops from damage and disease and without them we would not have a stable food supply. But data from The Rodale Institute contradicts that argument. Rodale has conducted 40-year side-by-side commodity grain trails comparing organic production to conventional (chemical) farming. The research revealed that, “Organic systems produce yields of cash crops equal to conventional systems. However, in extreme weather conditions, such as drought, the organic plots sustained their yields while the conventional plots declined. Overall, organic corn yields have been 31 percent higher than conventional production in drought years.”

How Did Pesticides Become Acceptable? 

By some accounts, pesticides have been used for thousands of years. There is evidence that sulphur was used to control pests in ancient Sumeria 4500 years ago, obtained by heating up the mineral pyrite, an iron sulfide, to release the sulphur. Mercury and arsenic salts were introduced later, and the insecticidal properties of chrysanthemum flower extracts (pyrethrum) were discovered around 2000 years ago. As industrialization progressed, much of the source chemicals were waste products from mining and manufacturing such as arsenic, mercury, sulphonic acid and lead in the forms of dusts, granules and sprays. Even some fertilizers were made from industrial waste. By the late 1800s through the early 20th century, kerosene was used for controlling pests like fruit flies, leafhoppers on farms and fleas on pets in homes. Lead arsenate and calcium arsenate were widely used on larger farms by 1900, and were still in wide use till the 1940s and not banned by FDA until 1988. Needless to say, those make up a highly toxic arsenal, even more hazardous than most modern chemicals.

In the latter part of the 19th Century,  American farmers experienced an atypically high pressure from pests. This created an opportunity for chemical companies to push their products as scientific breakthroughs that were superior to biological controls and nature-based strategies. 

But in the 1890s, a number of poisonings led to opposition to these substances. In 1903, Great Britain set limits for residues in food and drink. American chemical companies fought regulation and for 60 years, US regulators failed to support limits even though dozens of reports of serious food poisonings were reported in both US and Europe.

Organic farming pioneer, Will Allen, in his comprehensive book War on Bugs, tells the story of the evolution of pesticides and how the public came to accept them with the help of an unlikely player, popular children’s book author, Dr. Seuss.

Illustration by Dr. Seuess appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1928

In the early 1900s, nearly 40 percent of Americans were farmers (today that number is less than 2%). Farm journals, at that time, were influential sources of information read by a large portion of the population and even used in some schools as reading material. The majority of advertisers in those journals were chemical companies. So the journals were eager to tout the benefits of the products that provided their main income stream while minimizing their toxic impacts.

By the 1920s, chemical companies, seeking ways to expand their markets into households, promoted the concept of “chemical cleanliness” to rid the home of insects and rodents. In 1928, cartoonist Theodore Geisel, was hired by Standard Oil to promote its pesticide Flit. Geisel later gained fame under the pen name Dr. Seuss, as the author of the loveable and whimsical children’s books such as The Cat in The Hat, Green Eggs and Ham and many others. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Geisel’s humorous advertisements made Flit a household name. Geisel’s cartoons, which appeared in thousands of magazines and newspapers, were, in fact, advertisements promoting the pesticide. One such cartoon showed a family scene with the caption: “Don’t worry Papa, Willie swallowed a bug, so I’m having him gargle with Flit.” Standard Oil’s advertising campaign was successful in convincing the American public to embrace pesticides as safe and a normal part of homelife. In War on Bugs, Allen pulled no punches assigning culpability to Geisel, “Seuss helped Americans become friendly with poisons.”

Beating Swords into Plowshares: Wartime Chemicals Repurposed for Agriculture

With America’s entry into World War II, there was a sudden demand to supply the military with a wide variety of critical needs. Chemical companies and other industries retooled factories producing peacetime products to supply the materials needed for war. Everything from synthetic rubber and plastics to explosives and pesticides. American soldiers were equipped with an individual supply of DDT for delousing, and killing bed bugs and malaria carrying insects. DDT was acclaimed for its role in controlling a typhus outbreak during World War II in Naples, Italy when American forces deloused a million Italians with DDT powder.

Post war, companies such as Dow, DuPont, Standard Oil, Monsanto and others transitioned their factories back to products for families, farms, and industry. Ammonium nitrate, used extensively during the war to make bombs, was converted into nitrogen fertilizer. Nerve gas developed by the Nazis became the basis for many pesticides.

As the chemical industry moved into the post war boom era, they were riding high in both profits and public approval, widely admired for the scientific breakthrough that led to an era of “better living through chemistry” thanks to the “miracles of science” (a couple of advertising slogans promoted by Dupont).

Challenged by an Unlikely Antagonist

But the industry’s prosperity and favorable reputation would face a serious challenge from an introverted marine biologist and best-selling author known for her lyrical nature writing.

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson revealed the shadow side of the so-called “miracles of science” by describing how the widespread, indiscriminate use of pesticides entered the food chain. With a particular focus on DDT, she explained how it was poisoning ecosystems and killing fish, birds and insects as it persisted in the environment long term and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. 

Carson, deeply distraught by how man’s war against nature was upsetting the ecological balance with grave, long-term effects, wrote, “Intoxicated by his own power, mankind seems to be farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of nature and of the world.”

An organized campaign by the chemical industry called Carson a hysterical woman (the use of “woman,” as well as “hysterical,” was also meant to be a discrediting pejorative by the chauvinistic, male-dominated science world).

Silent Spring, which has sold over 2 million copies and has been translated into 16 languages, awakened public environmental consciousness and led to a domestic ban of DDT. Carson’s book is not only credited with starting a movement to regulate pesticides, it is widely acknowledged, along with the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that killed thousands of wildlife and polluted 35 miles of coastline, as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was formed. The NGO, National Resources Defense Council, also founded the same year, has been heavily involved in legal battles to restrict harmful pesticide use.

The Green Revolution: Some Promise, but Ultimately a Flawed System

Despite the momentum to create a sane and safe approach to agrochemical use, a countervailing movement had been gaining favor around the same time. The high-yielding hybrid seeds of the Green Revolution came with the promise of “feeding the world.” Credited with saving one billion lives from starvation, Norman Borlaug, acknowledged as the “Father of the Green Revolution,” was given the Nobel Peace Prize. But the overlooked caveat of Green Revolution technology was the fact that the hybrid seeds are highly dependent on synthetic, petroleum-based fertilizers to obtain those high yields, as well as pesticides due to their inferior resistance to pests and diseases compared to more traditional crops.

Hybrid seeds were the central element to the new intensified farming system that also included monocropping and mechanization. But over time, the flaws of that system began to reveal themselves. Monocropping encouraged greater pest infestations requiring more applications of pesticides. Chemical fertilizers and plowing destroyed the health of the soil, which resulted in weakening the immune response of plants. And due to heavy, repeated applications of pesticides, insects over time became resistant.

Pesticide Action Network (PAN) describes the declining benefits of the Green Revolution in this way, “In 1982 the luster of the Green Revolution was beginning to fade. The promised dramatic increases in yields from ‘miracle’ hybrid grains that required high inputs of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides failed to deliver and were revealed as campaigns to sell technology to growers who couldn’t afford it.”

Despite the growing evidence of the flaws of the system, it has endured as the dominant agricultural paradigm often driven by inflated claims. The next evolution came in the 1990s with Genetically Modified (GMO) crops. After decades of industry promises of unrealized future innovation and aggressively promoting their technology by monopolizing the seed markets for corn, soy, canola, cotton and sugar beets, their main success is producing herbicide resistant corn, soy, and canola. The technology allows the farmer to spray over the crop killing the surrounding weeds but not the crop itself. Monsanto/Bayer leads the way with Roundup Ready seeds. Tests have shown that these crops often contain higher residues of glyphosate than non GMO seeds of the same crops. The price of this “success” is the billions of dollars of legal settlements that Bayer is paying to victims who have contracted cancer due to exposure to glyphosate.   

In the 1990s and beyond, chemical companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, DuPont, and Bayer bought up seed companies. By the 2000s, five of the world’s seven largest seed producers were chemical companies who viewed seeds, not as the foundation of a healthy food system, but rather as a mechanism to sell more chemicals.

As a result, we live in a chemically saturated world. The EPA has approved over 80,000 chemicals with hundreds of new ones added each year. In a small test, the Environmental Working Group tested umbilical cords gathered by the Red Cross and found on average 200 chemicals including pesticides. When it comes to chemical pollution, agriculture is not the only source, but it is the most dominant, fouling the air, polluting waterways, soils, people and wildlife.

Grass Roots Action Fills in Where the FDA Falls Short

With ubiquitous chemical contamination and increasing evidence of its harms–cancer, neurological, reproductive and endocrine systems disorders–why does it appear that the EPA seems too often to favor industry interests over public safety?  

The undisputable fact is that there is a “revolving door” between industry and FDA through which former chemical industry personnel go to work for FDA and former FDA employees go to work in the chemical industry. The opportunity for conflict of interest is a genuine concern. 

In the absence of rigorous regulatory agency oversight to sufficiently safeguard public health, where do we look for answers?

The first line of refuge for personal health is organic food and Certified Organic Regenerative (ROC) foods. Regenerative agriculture is the evolution of organic farming which emphasizes soil health, healthy ecosystems and highly nutritious food. However the term “regenerative” is used in different contexts and if it is not labeled ROC, you cannot be sure that it has not been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides. Unfortunately, organic food does generally cost more and that can be a barrier for some.

The Environmental Working Group has a downloadable PDF titled “Clean Fifteen and Dirty Dozen.” If you can’t buy organic food, this guidelines lists the 15 foods that carry the lowest pesticide residues and the 12 foods to avoid that have the highest amount of pesticides.

Other organizations are working to transform the food system to one that is free of toxic pesticides.

The Center for Food Safety takes legal action against the FDA and the big agriculture companies such as Monsanto, and is an excellent source for pesticide information.

Beyond Pesticides works with local groups to promote organic land management practices that embrace a precautionary approach by eliminating toxic pesticides.

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the first national environmental advocacy group to focus on legal action, has taken the first Trump administration to court 163 times and been victorious in 90% of the cases.

No one is more vulnerable to pesticide exposure than farmworkers and their families. The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has identified 13 pesticides correlated to the onset of childhood cancer between birth and 5 years old, when the mother lives within 2.5 miles of pesticide application while pregnant. Farmworker families suffer disproportionately high rates of debilitating, pesticide-related diseases that are devastating families. A small, grassroots organization, Campaign For Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (CORA), is challenging the largest berry grower in the world to initially transition all of their berry fields near schools to organic and ultimately to convert their entire production to organic farming to eliminate these avoidable and tragic health risks.

The name Silent Spring is a metaphor for a time when the environment becomes so toxic and deadly that many species are wiped out and the sound of the songbird ceases. Rachel Carson found the war against nature to be incomprehensible and questioned its irrationality, “How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?” 

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When neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his wife set out to build a small, regenerative farm in rural Georgia, they didn’t expect cows to become central to his scientific curiosity. But as Berns began caring for a small herd of miniature zebus, he found himself drawn into a deeper exploration of their emotional lives, social intelligence, and communication. 

In Cowpuppy, Berns weaves together personal storytelling, careful observation, and accessible neuroscience to reveal a surprisingly rich inner world behind those familiar brown eyes. In this excerpt, he takes us inside one deceptively simple question: What does a cow actually mean when she moos? 

You can also explore more of Berns’ work and perspective in our recent conversation, where we dive deeper into animal cognition, interspecies connection, and what cows — and dogs — can teach us about ourselves.

Everyone knows what a cow sounds like. The cow says Moooo! A classic example of onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like its meaning.

Or is it? In English, the cow may say moo, but in French, they meuh. In Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese it’s mu. Welsh cows say the unpronounceable mw. Danish cows go muh, but in Dutch they boe. While most of the world seems to agree on the monosyllabic /m/ sound, to my ear it wasn’t really an /m/ sound, or even one syllable. If we’re going for acoustic verisimilitude, a few languages get pretty close to cow-talk. In Finnish, it’s ammuu. In Bengali, it’s hamba. But I think the closest to what cows really sound like, especially with emphasis on the second syllable, is heard in Tagalog: ungaa; or Korean: eum mae. Of course, my cows were of the Asian variety, so that may have had something to do with the similarity of their vocalizations to languages of southeast Asia—a cattle dialect of sorts.

There is, in fact, tremendous variation in the sounds cows make. Each cow has a repertoire of vocalizations that presumably mean different things, and no cow sounds exactly like another. As in the human voice system, cow vocalizations originate with vibration of the vocal folds of the larynx. The emerging sounds are then modulated by the configuration of the tongue, mouth, and lips. Sometimes a cow will vocalize with her lips closed, in which case it really does sound like mooo. Other times she will keep her mouth open, resulting in a nasal version, like Steve Urkel might do if he were a cow. And then there’s lowing, a deeper, more resonant sound that can be heard at great distance.

It is a generally accepted tenet of biology that the reason animals vocalize is to communicate with one another. But for this to work, there has to be both a sender and a receiver. Although humans talk to themselves, other animals don’t. Even the solitary wolf, seemingly howling at the moon, is communicating with other wolves, who may be miles away. He might be calling for a mate or warning others to stay away from his territory. Vocalization is intentional and meant to convey information to a recipient.

To understand what cows are saying, we have to examine mooing from both the sender’s and receiver’s perspective. What is the sender trying to convey? And what do they expect the receiver to do? If we understood the receiving end, this would open the door to verbal communication, like people have with dogs.

All of my cows mooed, some more than others, and the females were generally more vocal than the males. It wasn’t until the third season that I could say this with some confidence because it wasn’t until then that I had enough males and females to observe. The boys were more physical, but the girls were more vocal. A bit like humans, I guess.

Ethel had always been the most vocal of the herd. She mooed nearly every evening when it was time for the grain. She mooed incessantly at each of her calves until they were a month old, to the point that it appeared they learned to ignore her entreaties. Sometimes I would hear her mooing in the pasture for reasons only she knew. Unless it was repetitive or sounded particularly urgent, I ignored her, just like the rest of the herd did. (Okay, I didn’t really know if the herd ignored her, but there were no obvious reactions from the other cows when Ethel was doing her regular mooing.)

Although Ethel was the most vocal of the herd, the others mooed from time to time, and for a few weeks after Xena’s calf was born, she mooed even more than Ethel. As a first-time mom, Xena did not possess the knowledge and security of a seasoned cow, like her momma, Lucy. Newborn calves don’t do much other than drink milk and sleep. The momma, though, has an increased caloric requirement due to lactation and needs to eat roughly 50 percent more than normal. Poor Xena was torn between filling her belly with grass and checking on her calf. She would graze for a bit with Luna sleeping nearby, but as soon as Xena moved on to fresh forage she would bellow at Luna until she got up and followed her to the new location. Ethel had done the same with all of her calves, but Lucy radiated confidence and rarely needed to moo. Her calves just followed her.

Except when a calf managed to slip through the fence. It was inevitable. Every one of the calves, at some point, found their way to the wrong side of, the fence. They had a tendency to nap beneath the rails while their mommas were grazing, and I think when they woke up, they just rolled the wrong way. Other times, they were curious and squeezed underneath. However they got out, though, the momma went into a tizzy, running back and forth along the fence line, mooing desperately at the wayward calf to get back in, which, of course, they never seemed to figure out. One time, when Tex was a calf, we found him curled up under a tree in the forest. When Lucy mooed, I knew something was up. The only clue to his approximate location was the direction Lucy was aiming her bellows.

The boys’ vocalizations were entirely different than the girls’. They rarely mooed, and when they did, it was a harsh sound, almost like a donkey braying. The only times Ricky Bobby mooed were when he was separated from the herd. This didn’t happen often, just when he was castrated and when he was having his hooves trimmed. I think his braying was more from the pain of separation than the physical pain. BB’s moo sounded more like a grunt, but he, too, did it only when he inadvertently got separated from the herd, like when he lingered in the barn too long and the herd decided to leave. Poor BB would come out and, realizing he was alone, call out for his friends.

These descriptions would seem to imply that cows moo mainly when they’re in distress. Temple Grandin used cow vocalizations as a type of negative metric of how well they were being handled at slaughter. Vocalization is also increased when calves are separated from their mothers (more so with the mothers than the calves). The same is true for dairy cattle. Fo these reasons much of the cattle industry has gravitated toward mooing as a marker of stress. A quiet cow is a happy cow. However, the context of any vocalization must be taken into account. Slaughterhouses and dairies are inherently stressful situations, so any vocalization in those contexts will necessarily indicate physical or emotional stress. What about other, nonstressful situations?

Although my cows vocalized most prominently when they were unhappy about something, they also mooed when they appeared perfectly fine. Like Ethel, they occasionally mooed in excitement when I was about to give them treats or when I was moving them to a fresh pasture. When the mommas mooed at their calves, sometimes they were just saying, Hey! Let’s go! Other times, I think they were teaching the calves what their momma sounded like. Cows identify each other by their signature calls. One study found that three-to five-week-old calves can differentiate recordings of their mothers from other cows. And it’s not just the cows identifying one another. I could do it, too, just as I could identify each of my dogs by how they sounded.

In an effort to understand cattle vocalizations, researchers have put considerable effort into decoding moos. The classic approach was through acoustic analysis, which relied on a spectrogram. A sort of vocal fingerprint, a spectrogram plots how different audio frequencies change over the course of a vocalization. They are especially common in the analysis of birdsong. When applied to speech, acoustic analysis is termed phonetics. The fundamental unit of phonetics is a formant, which describes the frequency of a sound. Speech, though, is composed of several frequencies, each changing in amplitude during the course of a vocalization. The formant with the lowest frequency is called F1, the second F2, and so on. When this type of analysis was done on cow vocalizations, the average F1 was 790 Hz and F2 was 1942 Hz. This combination of F1 and F2 sounds similar to the formants produced when an adult human male makes the long a sound.

While formants describe vowel sounds, speech involves a lot more than that. How a formant is initiated and how it ends determines the basic unit of human speech, called a phoneme. Even though there are five vowels in written English, there are twenty to twenty-four phonemes that describe how to pronounce vowel sounds. For example, in grade school, kids are taught the difference between the short a sound in cat (abbreviated /a/) and the long a of cake (/./). There are another twenty or so phonemes for the consonants. Cattle vocabulary, if there is one, would have to use a much more restricted set of phonemes because cows don’t have nearly the degree of vocal control humans do.

A single cow vocalization lasts one to one and a half seconds, but there are several ways a cow can alter how she moos. Presumably, these alterations are done intentionally and, therefore, contain information that is being transmitted to someone—another cow, a human, or maybe another farm animal. One study found that moos could be divided into open-and closed-mouth types. With mouth closed, a cow produces a lower frequency formant, and these types of moos are more frequent when a momma is near her calf, especially during the first month after birth. With mouth open, the sound projects farther and is a higher pitch. These types of moos are used when momma and calf are separated and the momma is calling for her calf. Further analysis has revealed that individual cows could be distinguished by differences in the formant frequencies—a vocal signature—but only in the closed-mouth moos. The authors speculated that vocal identification is more important when cows and calves are near each other, with open-mouth moos serving as a more general call. Taking this type of analysis one step further, Australian researchers determined that vocal signatures are maintained across different emotional states. Cows were assumed to be in a positive emotional state when the farmer was getting their feed ready and a negative state when they were isolated or denied access to food, but the cows were recognizable by their moos in both positive and negative contexts.

No study has yet been able to differentiate positive and negative emotional states just from mooing. It may be that cows, like most animals, have no need of mooing when they’re happy, instead reserving vocalization for distress and warning calls. But that wouldn’t explain Ethel’s moos during the evening grain. No, vocal decoding is a hard problem. Machine-learning algorithms are just beginning to get a handle on decoding human emotion from human speech.

The difficulty is compounded in domesticated species. Because humans have altered their natural evolution, the vocalizations of domesticated animals may be directed at either their compatriots or humans. Wild animals, in contrast, have no need to communicate with humans, so their vocalizations are directed at one another or occasionally to frighten off potential threats.

In terms of domesticated animals, the most progress in understanding vocalizations is with dogs. Dogs are evolved from wolves, which are famously vocal, and this may have something to do with dogs’ ability to understand human speech, as well as our ability to decipher their vocalizations. Research has shown that people are generally quite good at recognizing some dog emotions from their vocalizations, such as aggressive barks at strangers versus barks when they’re playing, although this ability is largely dependent on a given person’s experience with and thus exposure to dogs. In general, low-pitched barks are understood to be aggressive in nature, whereas high-pitched barks convey a more positive emotional state, like playfulness.

In fact, this high-low vocal rule has been observed in many animals. Harsh, low pitches signal hostile intent, and purer, high pitches mean friendliness. There is a simple explanation for this relationship. Physics dictates that large animals will have lower-pitched vocalizations. To the extent that an individual can vary the pitch of its sounds, lowering the pitch will make them sound bigger and more threatening. Conversely, raising the pitch will have the opposite effect, signaling that they are small—even juvenile—and don’t want any conflict. Although this rule has not been studied with cattle, it likely holds true.

If humans can broadly recognize whether an animal vocalization is hostile or friendly, it is straightforward to program a computer to do the same. It’s really a matter of having a lot of data. An early decoder of dog barks, for example, could tell the difference between barks produced in six situations: playing, fighting, walking, being left alone, being approached by a stranger, and being shown a ball. However, the algorithm required six thousand barks and was about 50 percent accurate (substantially better than guessing, which would be correct 17 percent of the time). To make a moo-alyzer, you would need a comparable number of audio samples, about one thousand per type of moo. Doable, but a person would still need to hand code what each moo represented before training a neural net on the data. One promising approach to decoding cow vocalizations recognizes that moos often occur in sequence, almost like a sentence. Instead of focusing on a single moo, the transitions between open-and closed-mouth mooing suggest a simple way to understand what a cow is saying, especially in the context of mother-calf interactions. In a typical sequence, the momma uses an open-mouth

moo to call her calf and then transitions to closed-mouth when they are reunited.

Mooing isn’t even the whole story of cow communication. Cows make other types of vocalizations more frequently than moos. They grunt and snort. Ethel, as the most vocal of the herd, was a prolific snorter too. She would only do this when her calves were doing something she didn’t like, usually by wandering off too much for her comfort. What was interesting was that Ethel used a graded level of snorting. Mild irritation was signaled by a soft, brief snort. As she became more unhappy, this would increase in volume and stridor to the point of sounding like a grunt. The best way I can describe it is how Marge Simpson sounds when she grunts in disapproval. Although scientists have studied cow mooing, there has been no research on these types of subvocalizations in cattle. However, grunts have been categorized in other ungulates. Deer have been said to emit four types of grunts/snorts distinguishable by their acoustic parameters: the grunt, the alert-snort, the snort-wheeze, and the aggressive snort. All but the alert-snort are produced when deer are near each other, some being affiliative and others aggressive. The alert-snort is a loud propulsion of air by a lone deer warning others within earshot of a potential threat. I heard alert-snorts every day when I walked through the woods around the farm. It seems likely that cows have a similar vocabulary. I would often hear the cows emit brief, high-pitched grunts when they played with each other. This was especially true of the calves, but everyone did it when they got going, like when they played in the sand pile.

There was another type of cow vocalization that I could find no reference to. I call it cooing. This was something all the calves did. When I crouched down and called them over, they would often nuzzle my neck, licking it while making soft snuffling sounds, which sounded like the coos of an infant. It was so quiet, you could only hear it if you were on the receiving end. I assumed the calves did it with their mommas too. Sometimes even the adults cooed. Xena tended to do it a lot when she wanted neck scratches. The coo of human babies is a potent releaser of oxytocin in mothers, and scientists think this promotes and maintains bonds with the parents. I think cows do the same thing, which would explain why I became so attached to them, especially the calves.

Taken from Cowpuppy by Gregory Berns. Copyright © 2024 Gregory Berns. Used by permission of Harper Horizon, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus, LLC. www.harpercollinsfocus.com/

The post Cowpuppy: What Cows Are Really Saying When They Moo appeared first on Bioneers.

When Gregory Berns joins our call, he isn’t sitting in a lab or a lecture hall. He’s calling from his farm in rural Georgia, and he’s in the middle of a fight against the rapid expansion of massive data centers spreading across the landscape south of Atlanta. Developers are proposing facilities millions of square feet in size, drawn to poorer counties where land is cheap and tax revenue is desperately needed. Once built, the land is permanently altered.

For Berns, a neuroscientist known for putting awake, unrestrained dogs into MRI scanners, the fight against data center sprawl isn’t separate from his research. It’s another expression of the same problem he’s been circling for years: what happens when complex lives — human or nonhuman — are flattened into abstractions, and when systems are designed to ignore what they consume.

Now a Distinguished Professor of Neuroeconomics at Emory University, Berns spent decades studying human decision-making using functional MRI before turning his attention to animals. Around 2011, that curiosity narrowed in on dogs — one of the few nonhuman animals able to cooperate with brain imaging without anesthesia or restraint. What began, as he puts it, as “an idea in search of a question” quickly opened into something much larger. Why stop with dogs? There are roughly 6,000 mammal species on the planet, yet humans have meaningfully studied the inner lives of only a handful.

Today, Berns’ work is driven by a deceptively simple aim: to better understand the interior worlds of other mammals, without harming them, and with animals treated as partners rather than passive subjects. Using noninvasive brain imaging, he explores what behavior alone can’t reveal — how animals perceive, decide, feel, and relate — and what those discoveries mean for the ethical systems humans have built around them.

In the conversation that follows, Berns reflects on what neuroscience can and can’t tell us about animal minds, why individuality is such a disruptive concept in how we treat other species, and how acknowledging animal inner lives challenges the assumptions that underpin everything.

You can read an excerpt from Gregory Berns book Cowpuppy here.

Bioneers: In nonhuman animals, what does brain imaging offer that behavioral observation can’t?

Gregory Berns: For much of the 20th century and even into the 21st, the only way to try to understand what was going on in another animal’s mind was to study behavior. You observe what an animal does and try to infer what’s happening internally. That’s how behaviorism and operant conditioning really took hold, based on the idea that animals learn through simple rules of reward and punishment — carrots and sticks.

But that turns out to be a very incomplete picture. Even with humans, we know we’re not strictly governed by rewards and punishments, and animals aren’t either. There’s ample evidence that many animals build internal models of the world: mental representations of their environment and the other beings in it. They make decisions based on those models. That’s a much more efficient way of navigating the world than constant trial-and-error. Animals are far more efficient than that.

Brain imaging offers a different way in. If an animal can sit still in an MRI scanner, we can start to see circuits in action — not individual neurons, but large-scale patterns of activity related to motivation, perception, and decision-making. And because mammal brains are so similar in their basic structure, we can link what we see in other animals back to what we already know about humans, and cautiously infer what another animal might be experiencing.

A good example of why that matters is jealousy. Most dog owners will tell you their dogs experience jealousy, but for a long time many scientists would say it’s too complex an emotion to attribute to animals.

We designed an experiment to explore that question. Dogs were in the MRI scanner, looking at what appeared to be another dog — a very realistic dog statue — with their owner positioned in between. Sometimes the owner gave the dog in the scanner a treat. Other times, the owner turned and gave the treat to the fake dog. As a control, we also used a bucket, so in both cases the dog wasn’t getting the food, but only in one case was it going to something that looked like another dog.

In some dogs, that situation evoked activity in the amygdala, a brain region associated with arousal and emotional reactivity. And importantly, that response correlated with dogs who had a history of aggression.

The key point is this: The dogs were extremely well trained. They stayed perfectly still in the scanner. Behaviorally, they were doing exactly what we wanted them to do. But beneath the surface, it was bothering them, and that’s something you would never know just by watching the dog. It shows the real limitation of relying on behavior alone to understand what an animal is experiencing internally.

Bioneers: So in brain scans, if the same area lights up in dogs and humans, what can we actually conclude from that?

Gregory: That’s what’s known as reverse inference, and it’s something people in brain imaging argue about a lot. The basic idea is that if you see activity in a particular brain region in an animal, and that region looks structurally and functionally similar to the same region in humans, you can make a cautious inference about what the animal might be experiencing.

But it’s not a certainty. Even within humans, our interpretations change over time. I spent many years studying what we used to casually call the “reward system.” For a long time, when we saw activity in those dopamine-related circuits, the knee-jerk conclusion was that the person was experiencing pleasure. We now understand that’s too simplistic. Those circuits are more about motivation — about something being salient or worth paying attention to — and whether that motivation is positive or negative depends heavily on context.

So when we see similar patterns in dogs, we’re making the same kind of inference, but carefully. You need more context to know whether something is pleasurable, aversive, or something else entirely.

Bioneers: When has your own intuition about dogs not matched what you found in their brains?

Gregory: One clear example came from some of the last experiments we did, where we created movies specifically for dogs to watch in the scanner. We filmed everything from the dog’s point of view — using GoPros, walking around dog parks, showing scenes we assumed dogs would find interesting.

My intuition, very much shaped by being human, was that dogs would be focused on who was on the screen. Is that a dog? Is that a person? Is that someone familiar? But when we analyzed the brain data using machine-learning methods, that’s not what we found.

What the dogs’ brains were really distinguishing was what was happening, not who was doing it. They could clearly differentiate between actions like walking versus eating, but they didn’t strongly discriminate between whether it was a dog or a human performing those actions. It wasn’t who was on the screen; it was what was happening.

That was a good reminder that we’re always at risk of projecting our own way of seeing the world onto other species. I’m human, and I interpret scenes in a very human way. But dogs evolved to pay attention to different kinds of information, and brain imaging can reveal those differences in ways our intuition often can’t.

Bioneers: Affection is something many people feel instinctively in their relationships with animals, especially dogs. How did you translate that intuition into something neuroscience could actually test?

Gregory: Affection was one of the early questions I really wanted to answer, because it’s something dog owners feel very strongly about. We designed an experiment that was essentially Pavlovian. The dogs learned that one signal meant they were going to get a food reward, and another signal meant they were going to get praised by their owner. Then we looked at what happened in their reward-related brain circuits.

What we found was that for about 75% of the dogs, there was equal activation in those circuits when they anticipated food and when they anticipated praise from their owner. To me, that’s about as close to proof as you can get that dogs experience genuinely positive feelings toward their people and that those feelings aren’t purely transactional. I’m happy to call it love.

What’s been even more striking to me, honestly, is my experience with cows. Once I got to know them and they accepted me into their herd, they began offering affection in the same way they offer it to each other: licking, staying close, engaging socially. I can give them treats, but for the most part, that’s not what drives the relationship. It’s not like a dog showing up because it thinks there’s food involved.

In many ways, that makes it feel even more genuine. It reinforces the idea that rich emotional lives, including affection, aren’t limited to the animals we’re most comfortable loving.

Bioneers: Your research shows that individual animals’ brains — even within the same species — can be remarkably different. Why is individuality such a disruptive idea when it comes to how we treat animals?

Gregory: Over the course of my career, I’ve probably scanned around a thousand human brains. And what you see very quickly is that everyone’s brain looks different; it’s like a fingerprint. Even when people are doing the exact same task, the patterns of activity vary from person to person. They’re stable within an individual, but across individuals, they’re remarkably diverse.

When we started scanning dogs, it was the same story. Early on, my students would get discouraged because the data looked so messy. I’d tell them, “Don’t analyze it yet. You need enough subjects to see the pattern.” But the reason it feels messy is that dogs are individuals. Their brains vary just as much as human brains do.

We even saw this in a large study we did with Canine Companions for Independence, where we scanned puppies being trained as service dogs. These dogs were incredibly similar on paper — mostly golden retriever–lab crosses, raised and trained in nearly identical conditions. Even then, their brains all looked different.

Individuality is subversive because it doesn’t fit neatly into systems designed for efficiency. Industrial agriculture, in particular, depends on flattening animals into categories: “cattle” rather than individuals. Once you start thinking about animals as distinct beings with their own inner lives, the whole system becomes harder to justify. You’re less likely to eat something with a name, which is why ranchers traditionally don’t name their cows.

Recognizing individuality forces us to confront the moral shortcuts we’ve built into the way we treat other animals, and that’s deeply uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Gregory Berns with one of his cows.

Bioneers: If we truly accepted that animals have rich emotional lives, what would have to change in our idea of “normal” life?

Gregory: I think, at some level, most people already accept that animals have emotional lives. You’d have to be pretty hard-hearted to deny that. Even the ranchers and cattlemen I know aren’t blind to it, they just wall it off. Compartmentalization is the real issue.

The bigger crisis goes far beyond food. It’s about wild mammals and the sheer amount of space they need to survive. Many species, especially large mammals, require vast, connected habitats. What we’ve done instead is parcel land into smaller and smaller pieces, cut it up with roads, and turn ecosystems into isolated islands. Once animals can’t move where they need to go to find food, mates, or seasonal refuge, extinction becomes almost inevitable.

Urbanization has made this harder to see. About 80 percent of people in the U.S. now live in urban areas, which is a complete reversal from a century ago. Most people are physically and psychologically distant from the consequences of development. Living on a farm has made those connections impossible for me to ignore. You see immediately how one change affects everything else that lives there.

I’m not especially hopeful that this will change quickly. But education matters. Organizations like Bioneers can help bridge that gap by reminding people that we share the planet with these other species — and that the choices we normalize have consequences far beyond our own lives.

The post What Neuroscience Reveals About Animal Minds appeared first on Bioneers.

“Women leaders acknowledge how the protection and restoration of nature becomes lasting when it is rooted in people’s wellbeing and livelihoods. For them, conservation is not separate from caring for human life; it is human life. They begin by addressing community needs because behind every degraded ecosystem, they see degraded living conditions, broken relationships, and lost possibilities for dignity and stability. Rather than treating community vulnerability from a charity perspective or means to an end, they address it with care and a clear orientation toward meaningful, lasting results.” 

—Women Weaving the Way Forward report from Daughters for Earth

Across the globe, women are leading some of the most effective responses to the planetary crisis, restoring ecosystems while strengthening communities, livelihoods, and cultural connections to nature.

Zainab Salbi has spent much of her life working alongside women in the world’s most complex and fragile environments, from war zones to conservation hotspots. As the co-founder of Daughters for Earth, a global fund and movement supporting women-led climate and conservation solutions, she is helping shift the narrative from one of victimhood to one of agency, resilience, and systemic change.

Her organization’s newly released 2025 impact study, Women Weaving the Way Forward, examines 24 women-led conservation initiatives across diverse ecosystems and cultures. The findings reveal a powerful pattern: When women lead, ecological restoration becomes inseparable from social, economic, and cultural renewal. These projects not only restore landscapes and wildlife, but also strengthen community wellbeing — even as they face persistent funding gaps and gender-based barriers.

In this conversation, writer and community activist Anneke Campbell speaks with Salbi about what her team uncovered, how women are reshaping conservation through holistic, integrated approaches, and what this research reveals about leadership, language, and collaboration in a changing world.

(This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Anneke: What feels most meaningful and exciting to you about this study? 

Zainab: The narrative around how women are impacted by the planetary health crisis, particularly climate change and biodiversity loss, is often very prominent and negative. And yet, as someone who has worked closely with women in war zones and conflict settings, I also know their agency is not passive. They are warriors. So I knew there was another story here.

This study looks at the world from a woman’s perspective — not only as victims, but as warriors, as wise women, and as lantern carriers.

I followed my gut and took a leap of faith. I said, Let’s find the women. For three-and-a-half years, we searched globally for women working in conservation hotspots, putting funding behind their efforts and eventually asking: What’s the common thread? We supported 103 projects across seven ecosystems in 11 countries.

We’ve now completed a six-month pilot study that shows us a clear path forward. We’re seeing strong commonalities: Women take a holistic and highly practical approach. They create solutions grounded in common sense, addressing people’s needs at the community level, and weaving environmental solutions together with social, economic, and cultural priorities. Most importantly, they’re producing lasting change and modeling a new kind of leadership in the process.

Anneke: That’s exactly what our newsletter is about: leading from the feminine — and your work shows what that looks like. How did you select the groups you researched and funded?

Zainab: Scientists have already identified which regions, species, and biodiverse areas most urgently need protection, so we’re really just following their roadmap. It’s not controversial. On that map, we overlay where women-led action is happening. That’s the uniqueness of our work: finding the women who are leading conservation projects grounded in biodiversity priorities.

Then we measure the conservation data, as scientists do, and we’re discovering all these powerful byproducts. Suddenly, this work becomes valuable not just for conservationists, but also for economists, sociologists, and women’s rights advocates. We’re tracking how these projects address the economic needs of communities and how they support girls’ and women’s empowerment, which is especially exciting. These women are modeling leadership, addressing behavior change toward nature, and weaving in cultural and traditional stories, which every culture holds.

All of these threads are coming together. And I believe, having come from a different culture myself, that every single culture carries beautiful stories of humans intertwined with nature in a loving way. I still remember those stories from my own grandparents.

Anneke: One thing that stands out in this work is how it challenges dominant, top-down approaches to climate action. Can you talk about how your study rethinks the role of technology, funding, and community?

Zainab: We have to be careful not to generalize, because we’re not denying the value of technical solutions. That said, people are often more willing to take risks when it comes to technology than when it comes to community-based approaches. As a result, the vast majority of climate funding goes toward technical solutions.

One of the key findings of this study is how these women-led projects merge technology with traditional narratives about nature. For example, Lion Guardians blend ancestral Maasai tracking skills with modern tools like GPS and data collection, creating a living, evolving model of conservation that unites heritage and science in service of both people and wildlife. Some technological solutions are excellent; some are not. The problem with focusing only on technology is that it often fails to address immediate community needs, while expecting people to adopt change right away. That’s a very Western-centric — or perhaps masculine-centric — approach.

In the endangered lion conservation project, for instance, the team first had to understand the economic realities driving human–wildlife conflict. What began as a way to prevent retaliatory killings has evolved into active stewardship: Former hunters now track and protect lions, teach coexistence, and mediate conflicts. Another example is the Mara–Meru Cheetah Project, which has trained more than 150 safari guides — who once saw cheetahs primarily as tourist attractions — to understand their behavior, minimize disturbance, and actively contribute to conservation data collection.

Anneke: What you’re illustrating is an incredibly holistic approach that sees all the parts as connected — as they are in reality. What does that mean for how we design solutions and policies?

Zainab: These integrated, woven solutions show that we also need integrated policies. Right now, our policies are deeply fragmented, and we’re calling for integration at every level.

A few years ago, I was very sick, and I experienced this fragmentation firsthand. The heart doctor didn’t want to talk to the lung doctor, who didn’t want to talk to the physical therapist. Eventually, I found an integrative medicine doctor who combined Western medicine with Arabic medicine, Chinese medicine, and naturopathic approaches, and that’s when I finally began to heal.

Anneke: “Integrative medicine for planetary health” is such a powerful concept. But integrative medicine is often expensive and seen as inaccessible. How are you thinking about the economics and what this approach asks us to rethink more broadly?

Zainab: Yes, it is expensive, and that’s an important point. In fact, our focus in the coming months is to deepen our analysis of the economics and deconstruct the dollar impact of this work, so we have tangible evidence. This is not a sentimental study; we’re going to prove its value economically. And we’re doing that while still honoring narrative, spiritual, emotional, and cultural dimensions, rather than imposing an external story. I love that part of this study.

We need new language, new metrics, and new measurements to talk about this existential issue. In this field, you often see spiritual people speaking in spiritual language, and analytical people speaking in analytical language, and it’s very hard to integrate the two. What we’re discovering is that instead of being limited by purely mind-led indicators, we need to dare to introduce new ones — psychological indicators, spiritual indicators — new ways of measuring what protection of the Earth really means.

When we only speak from the heart, it can shut down the mind, because people don’t always trust that language. We need to bring the two together, to marry mind and heart, technical and spiritual solutions, and not separate them. And that’s exactly what these women are doing.

I’ve interviewed many of the women leading these initiatives. They’re not women’s studies scholars, they’re conservationists. And they’ll say, We did this, we did that, and I’ll think, Wow. They’re doing it simply because they’re wired differently, because they see differently — and that difference is needed. So we have to find new language, and we need to be playful in that space, like musicians playing before they find the tune. We need that same openness to discover new ways of talking about planetary health.

This matters deeply to me because I come from another culture. I often ask myself: How do I talk about this issue with my own family when I go home to Iraq? Climate change, as it’s usually framed, is seen as a very Western concept. So what are the real entry points? Scientifically, it’s undeniable. But experientially, how do we open the conversation in ways that resonate across cultures and invite people in?

Anneke: Given everything you’ve learned, how are you hoping to share this work with funders, communities, and the wider world?

Zainab: We’ve entered 2026 at a time when climate change is still being denied by some, and fear around immediate resources is overwhelming concern for planetary health. At a moment when climate change and biodiversity loss demand deeper collaboration, we’re instead becoming more divided and increasing our investments in war.

That said, the hope my team and I are holding onto is at the community level. People are not waiting for governments to act. Communities are stepping forward because they have to. In this chaotic moment, our goal is to use these four years before the world reconvenes in 2030 to reassess global agreements, from climate and biodiversity frameworks to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

We want to double down on supporting these women, because they’re leading us toward a new pathway for action. They’re focused on the how. And that, for me, is the secret sauce.

Anneke: For readers who feel inspired by this work, what actions can they take? 

Zainab: This is an invitation. We cannot do this alone. The work becomes most transformative and impactful when we do it together. So it’s an invitation to everyone whose heart is calling to join us in whatever way you know how, and to become part of this movement. Some people know how to communicate, some know how to donate, some know how to bring communities together. The world feels like it’s going mad, but in that chaos, there’s also an opportunity to focus our actions. In the madness, a door is opening.

At a practical level, we’re working to build a $100 million fund so we can continue supporting these women and researching women-led projects. It’s an invitation for women philanthropists — and really for everyone — to participate at any level. I’m not a high donor myself, and philanthropy is not limited to big checks.

We often share the story of the hummingbird: There was a forest fire, and all the animals panicked except for a tiny hummingbird. She rushed to the river, took a single drop of water in her beak, and dropped it onto the fire — again and again. The other animals said, You’re so small. What difference can one drop make? And she replied, I’m doing everything I can. Why don’t you join me instead of criticizing me? Her action inspired the others to bring their own drops of water — for some, a bucket; for others, a tiny drop.

If your heart is calling you to a specific region, we can connect you with women’s groups working there. If it’s a particular species, we can share the women-led projects protecting it. And if you want to be part of this movement, please come with your drop of water so together, we can make a river.

Support Women Leading the Way Forward

Daughters for Earth supports hundreds of women-led conservation initiatives across the globe, protecting ecosystems while strengthening community resilience, cultural continuity, and economic wellbeing. You can explore their work, learn more about the Women Weaving the Way Forward study, and find ways to support women-led climate solutions here.

The post Women Weaving the Way Forward: A Conversation with Zainab Salbi appeared first on Bioneers.

At the Eastern Band of Cherokee Tribal Council meeting on January 8, 2026, the Council read and unanimously passed a historic resolution affirming the rights of the stream system in the Great Smoky Mountains, known to the Cherokee as “the Longperson”. 

The Council chamber, an intimate wood-planked room with a horseshoe-shaped table of Council members, was filled with a long line of young Cherokee women representing the NAIWA Daughters (North American Indian Women’s Association). They stood before the podium, ready to testify in support of the resolution they had written to bring before the Council.

Holding two handmade traditional pottery vessels, the young women reminded the Council that the water of the Longperson was one of their relatives. “Before we begin, we wanted to acknowledge that we cannot have this discussion without our relative, Longperson, present. Held in two vessels created by the hands of two beloved women, these waters were borrowed from the headwaters in the National Park, and will be returned to the Oconaluftee River in a water ceremony following the session.”

The youth spoke about the challenges of witnessing the simultaneous erosion of culture and the decimation of the natural world. Jasmine Smith, NAIWA Daughter Co-Founder and Chairwoman, urged the Council to vote on the resolution and to trust the youth, who understand what is at stake. She encouraged them to vote with future generations in mind — those who will look back and wonder how their Ancestors treated the water system: as property or as something sacred.

Zailiana Blythe, from NAIWA Daughters, speaks to the Council at the podium.

“Our Ancestors knew that the land and the water are not resources. They are ancient relatives. They understood that when the river suffers, our people suffer. When the land is harmed, our nation is harmed. They understood that without the sacred balance that sustained them, without our land, who are we as Cherokee people? When we forget the land, we forget ourselves. But we stand here today because we refuse to let our people forget. Our Ancestors fought for these places. They protected them. They advocated long before advocacy had a name. They stood beside these rivers and called them Longperson. They prayed for us before we existed. And when we speak today, we do not speak alone. We speak with the fire of every Ancestor who has walked before us. We speak with the strength carried in our DNA. Because this resolution is not just policy.
It is an act of remembering who we are as Cherokee people in a commitment to protect what our Ancestors entrusted to us.”

Kyndra Postoak, Rights of Nature Project Lead for NAIWA Daughters, asked “Do we see nature as something we own, or do we view it as something we have the responsibility to protect?” This question to the Council summarized one reason the rights of nature movement is gaining momentum across the globe, as humanity grapples with the disastrous outcomes of treating nature as property.

To many attendees, the Council meeting was a testament to the power of youth organizing with a vision for a new legal paradigm—one where Nature is represented by humans who affirm and guard her rights to survive and thrive once again.

Elk Wade in Oconaluftee River in the Smoky Mountains (photo: Kelly vanDellen)

The Longperson stream system in the Great Smoky Mountains is the longest river system east of the Mississippi and permeates the ancestral territory of the Eastern Band of Cherokee people. The relationship between the Cherokee people and the river system is as old as the river itself. The resolution codifies the relationship of reciprocity between the Cherokee and its water relative, while affirming the tribal nation’s sovereignty and the Rights of the Longperson.

The rights of nature resolution is significant for the vast scale of the ecosystem it aims to protect and for the youth of the advocates who are bringing this legal framework to life. The resolution acknowledges the Longperson as having five rights:

1. The right to exist, persist, and regenerate its vital cycles, structures, functions, and processes free from negative human disturbance, alteration, or destruction.
2. The right to maintain and restore its natural state and integrity, including the right to be free from pollution, contamination, non-native invasive species, and other environmental degradation.
3. The right to serve as a home and habitat for non-human relatives, consistent with the ecological relationships established through time.
4. The right to access and maintain free-flowing conditions, including protection from damming, obstruction, or any alteration that impedes the natural flow of water. 
5. The right to be protected by the Eastern Band of Cherokee under the laws, customs, and traditions of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and to have its rights enforced by the appropriate authorities.

Guided by Elders, Native American Youth are Rewriting America’s Legal Future

This is the second rights of nature resolution drafted and introduced by high school and middle school students. In 2023, a Mashpee Wampanoag youth group, named the Mashpee Native Environmental Ambassadors, presented a Rights of the Herring Resolution, which their Council passed unanimously. This resolution calls for the Tribal Nation to restore and indigenize the streams in Mashpee to ensure the herring’s survival. 

Representatives from the NAIWA Daughters of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) were inspired by Mashpee’s work and felt a similar affection for the Tsuwa (Eastern Hellbender Salamander) as the Mashpee felt for the herring. Initially, NAIWA Daughters advocated for Tsuwa rights and protections within the U.S. federal system to secure endangered species status. After consulting with elders and cultural leaders in their community, they decided to turn to their tribal nation’s system to ensure success. In alignment with community support, NAIWA Daughters determined that the foundational EBCI rights of nature resolution should focus on the foundational relative:water. The Longperson’s waters sustain the entire ecosystem that supports not only the Tsuwa, but also all their human and non-human relatives.

In her testimony, NAIWA Daughter Kyndra Postoak stated: “Nature has intrinsic value. Every river, forest, mountain, and creature has a right to exist in balance and dignity. Humans are a part of that balance, not above it. Our communities, culture, and lives depend on healthy, thriving ecosystems. Protecting nature means protecting our children’s future, our identities, and the traditions rooted in the land. This belief is reflected in the work of NAIWA daughters, who actively stand up for the protection of waterways through advocacy, education, and community action. 

“We work to defend rivers and streams from pollution and misuse, recognizing water as a living relative rather than something to be owned or exploited. These young ladies’ efforts highlight the deep cultural and spiritual connection between water and Indigenous communities, reminding us that clean, protected waterways are essential not only for ecosystems but for human life, health, and heritage as well. By embracing the rights of nature, we commit to stewardship, to nurture, defend, and restore our relationship with the land and water rather than exploiting or destroying them. The works of groups like NAIWA Daughters show that protecting nature is not just an environmental responsibility, but a moral one. It is an act of respect, persistence, and hope for future generations who deserve a world where rivers still flow clean, and life remains in balance.”

This resolution for the rights of nature wasn’t created overnight. For 18 months, the NAIWA Daughters held community consultation dinners to gather feedback and learn from elders. They tabled at Cherokee events and conducted input surveys to stand beside their resolution. The young women advocated, door-to-door, with Council members to share the heart and purpose of their resolution. When a tribal election occurred, they repeated the process all over again. They gained the support of several Tribal Council members and collaborated with organizations advancing rights of nature policies. They also conducted cleanups and water ceremonies across the country and held sessions with native and non-native allies, culminating in the Council work session to ensure full Council support.

Unanimous Vote for the Rights of the Longperson 

When item 18 came up on the docket on January 8th, the entire room recognized the immense heart, soul, and effort the young women had invested in the law and its historic implications. Attendees commented that the room was hot and heavy when the NAIWA daughters gave their testimony. Some said they could feel the presence of Ancestors in the room.

Watch the Council meeting and the passing of the resolution. Youth testimony starts at 2:50, item number 18.

The Council unanimously voted yes with a standing vote and a round of applause. The NAIWA Daughters presented them with gifts of gratitude, shirts and stickers that proudly read “Water Protector” in Cherokee and English across the front.

Drawing on ancestral teachings and a history predating the establishment of the U.S., the young advocates reminded everyone in the Council chamber that passing the resolution helps to revitalize Indigenous law and order—a legal model in which nature is regarded as relative and protected from harm.

Grant Wilson, Executive Director of the Earth Law Center, celebrated the Council’s vote. “This historic resolution holds a mirror to the Cherokee understanding that the Longperson is a sacred, living relative — not mere property — and translates this relationship into a powerful legal framework. The Rights of the Longperson is also another profound example of how Indigenous youth and women are leading the way toward the Rights of Nature and intergenerational justice worldwide… As the global community increasingly recognizes Nature’s rights —now established in hundreds of jurisdictions worldwide — those with the deepest cultural and spiritual connections to the land are often the ones best equipped to give Nature a voice.”

Casey Camp Horinek is an elder of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma, and advisor to Movement Rights, an organization advocating for the rights of nature movement. She thanked the Eastern Band of Cherokee for upholding their traditional ways and for the care they have taken of the Longperson since time immemorial. “We believe this resolution will only strengthen your leadership and guardianship for generations to come. As you may know, owing to global Indigenous leadership, the Rights of Nature is now the fastest-growing environmental justice movement worldwide, with laws in over 40 countries. In passing this resolution, the Eastern Band of Cherokee will join a growing number of Indigenous peoples leading a profound shift in our collective human relationship with the natural world. “

The NAIWA Daughters were clear that they will not let their efforts end with this resolution. They are working with the Tribal Council to create a task force to assess the river’s health and lead policy initiatives that implement the spirit and purpose of this resolution as binding code and law.

They will share their story and efforts to advance the Rights of Nature movement in Indian Country by presenting their work at the next National NAIWA Daughters convergence. Their goal is to inspire Indigenous young women leaders across Turtle Island. Jasmine Smith, Chair of the EBCI NAIWA Daughters, will also be speaking at the 2026 Bioneers Conference Indigenous Forum.

To follow the NAIWA Daughters’ work, you can follow them on Facebook. Contact them at naiwadaughters@gmail.com 

The post Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Pass Historic Youth-Led Rights of Nature Resolution appeared first on Bioneers.

For much of modern history, humans have been taught to see other species at a distance — as resources, symbols, data points, or representatives of a category rather than as beings with inner lives. Science, religion, and culture have all played a role in reinforcing the idea that humans stand apart from the rest of the living world, uniquely endowed with intelligence, emotion, and agency.

And yet, across disciplines and traditions, that story has been unraveling during the last few decades. Advances in animal cognition and plant behavior research, long-term field observation, and new respect for traditional  Indigenous ecological knowledge have revealed something both radical and deeply familiar: Other species think, feel, remember, communicate, and relate, often in ways that challenge our assumptions about what intelligence and empathy even look like. Learning to truly see them requires not mastery, but attention.

Sy Montgomery has spent decades practicing and writing about this kind of attentive relationship with other species. A naturalist and author of more than 40 books for adults and children, Montgomery has spent decades observing animals up close, from octopuses and turtles to pigs, dogs, and wild creatures encountered briefly in the field. Her work invites readers into relationships with other species not as abstractions, but as individuals, each with their own ways of being in the world.

In this conversation with Bioneers, Montgomery reflects on how humans lose — and can relearn — that way of seeing; what animals have taught her about empathy, identity, and attention; and why cultivating curiosity and care across species may be one of the most important practices of our time.

Bioneers: So much of your work invites readers to see animals as individuals, not abstractions. How did that way of seeing begin for you, and how has it evolved over time?

Sy Montgomery: I think most of us begin life seeing animals as individuals. As children, that comes naturally. But somewhere along the way, many adults lose that way of seeing. For a long time, science itself reinforced the idea that an animal was simply a representative of its species, not a unique being. Behavioral research used to treat animals that way, and frankly, I think the researchers themselves knew it was nonsense.

That began to change in a very visible way when Jane Goodall went into the field in 1960 and refused to number the chimpanzees she studied. She named them. She recognized immediately that each one had a distinct personality and history. Louis Leakey chose Goodall deliberately — she wasn’t trained as a scientist, and he wanted someone who might see something new. And she did. Today, especially in field biology, the first thing you’re taught is to figure out who’s who. Otherwise, nothing you observe will make sense.

In that regard, I don’t think I have changed very much since I was a child. I’ve always believed animals are individuals. What can be challenging is recognizing individuality in species that are very unlike us — reptiles, or marine invertebrates, for example. But once you pay attention, it becomes undeniable. Every octopus I’ve met has had a completely distinct personality. The same is true of turtles.

There’s nothing special about me in being able to see this. If I can do it, anyone can.

Sirocco the kakapo, an endangered flightless parrot in New Zealand, attempts to copulate with Sy’s head. Photo by Nic Bishop.

Bioneers: Why do you think we lose that way of seeing as adults? What do we gain — or lose — by that shift?

Sy: I think one reason is that it becomes much easier to experiment on animals, kill them, and eat them if we pretend they don’t have thoughts, feelings, or individual lives. There’s a real incentive to strip away individuality and dignity, because acknowledging it would demand responsibility.

A lot of this traces back to René Descartes and the idea that only humans think: I think, therefore I am. That notion flies in the face of both evolution and common sense. Evolution shows us that thinking, remembering, imagining the future, and feeling emotions all offer adaptive advantages. If loving your offspring or your mate helps a species survive, why would those capacities suddenly appear in only one species? That would be absurd.

Even the way we talk about evolution gets this wrong. We still call it a “theory,” though it’s long been proven fact. And evolution tells us we are connected — emotionally, cognitively, biologically. Our science says that. And so do our sacred stories. Every creation story, from every culture and religion, tells us that we are part of a family. We are related. We are similar. And we need one another.

When we forget that, when we deny kinship, we lose not just empathy for other species, but something essential about ourselves.

Bioneers: Have you ever encountered animals you thought didn’t show signs of empathy?

Sy Montgomery: Yes, but I think it’s important to remember that not seeing something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It often just means we haven’t learned how to look yet.

For a long time, people used “bird brain” as an insult, assuming birds were stupid. What that really reflected was our own failure to recognize the complexity and power of a bird’s intelligence. Today, we know that birds like parrots and crows are extraordinarily smart. They make and use tools, plan for the future, and remember past events. Intelligence doesn’t have to look like ours to be real.

The same is true when we talk about empathy. When we don’t recognize it in an animal, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist — it may just be expressed in a way we don’t yet understand. Size doesn’t tell us much, either. A small brain can be incredibly powerful, and intelligence can be organized in ways that challenge our assumptions altogether.

Take octopuses. Their brains don’t resemble human brains at all. You wouldn’t even recognize the structure as a brain if you were looking for something familiar. And yet they are astonishingly intelligent. Or consider sea urchins. They don’t have a brain in the way we define one, but increasingly scientists are suggesting that they are a brain — that their entire bodies process information in a distributed way, rather than in a single centralized organ.

These discoveries invite us to rethink what a “brain” even is, and what cognition can look like. Sea urchins don’t have eyes, yet they can perceive color, sometimes in ways we can’t. Octopuses can change color instantly to match their surroundings, even though they don’t have color receptors in their eyes. For years, people assumed they were colorblind. The truth was that we simply hadn’t figured out how they were seeing.

The lesson, again and again, is to keep looking. To stay curious. 

Bioneers: Is there an animal encounter that truly surprised you? Something that defied your expectations?

Sy: My first encounter with Athena, a Giant Pacific octopus, in March of 2011 completely surprised me. I didn’t know what to expect, but one thing I did not expect was for her to seem clearly excited to see me … clearly curious. She looked me in the eye. She reached out and tried to touch me.

That moment knocked me off my feet.

Octopuses are so radically different from us. Half a billion years of evolution separate humans and octopuses. I didn’t expect to be able to read her at all. These are powerful, venomous animals, and yet I never felt fear. I also never felt aggression from her. Even when octopuses grab you, which they sometimes do, it has never felt threatening to me.

What surprised me most was realizing, in real time, that I could understand her intentions. I knew when she was curious. I knew when she was calm. I knew when she was engaged. And I hadn’t gone into that encounter expecting any of that. So I know I wasn’t projecting my own feelings onto her. I simply didn’t anticipate that kind of connection was possible.

To be seen, and to see in return, across such an immense evolutionary distance was thrilling. It changed my understanding of what relationships across species can look like. 

Enjoying the company of a pinktoe tarantula at the spider lab of Sam Marshall. Photo by Sam Marshall.

Bioneers: Of all your immersive encounters, is there one animal experience that most changed how you understand yourself as a human?

Sy: I’m not sure I understand myself as a human at all. I didn’t really identify as human when I was a child—I thought I was a horse for a while. My pediatrician told my mother I’d grow out of it, and I did … when I realized I was actually a dog.

I joke about that, but there’s something sincere in it. Animals have always felt like my teachers. In How to Be a Good Creature, which is a memoir told through thirteen animals, I was forced to look closely at what each of those beings showed me about how to live. Animals are already perfect at being what they are. We’re the ones who struggle.

My first dog, Molly, taught me what I wanted to do with my life. She was my older sister, even though technically I was older. I wanted to go into the woods with her and learn how to understand the world the way wild animals do. In many ways, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Other animals have taught me different lessons. Christopher Hogwood, our pig — who lived to be fourteen and died peacefully in his sleep — was a profound teacher. But it isn’t only the animals who live with us who shape us. Sometimes it’s a brief, unexpected encounter in the field that opens a door and changes how you see everything.

What animals have given me, above all, is a way to practice openness and compassion. Not just toward other species, but toward other humans as well. In a time when it’s easy to dismiss people who think differently as evil or stupid, animals invite us to do something harder: to try to understand another being on their own terms.

If you can stretch your imagination enough to consider the inner life of an octopus — an animal with nine brains that can taste and see with its skin — you learn how to put yourself into another way of being. It’s a kind of training in perspective-taking. And it’s a voyage I would recommend to anyone.

Bioneers: In your writing, you balance scientific rigor with deep emotional presence. How do you navigate that line?

Sy: I’m trained first as a journalist, and one of the earliest lessons you learn in journalism is to trust your reader. You don’t try to shove your opinion down someone’s throat. You show them what happened, and you let them come to their own understanding.

So I try to describe what the animal did, as clearly and accurately as I can. And I can also tell the reader how I felt when that animal did it. But I don’t want to draw the conclusion for them. I don’t want to force my feelings onto the reader. I want them with me on the journey and then arriving at their own meaning.

That approach requires restraint. It’s tempting, especially when you care deeply, to tell people what they should think. But I believe readers are far more powerful than that. If you trust them, they’ll often come to insights that are richer and more lasting than anything you could dictate.

My goal is to create the conditions for connection — to open a space where the reader can encounter another being, and then decide for themselves what that encounter means.

Sy exploring the rainforest canopy of Amazonian Peru. Photo by Dave Meyer.

Bioneers: What feels most important to offer young readers right now, especially amid ecological uncertainty?

Sy: I don’t think of children as the leaders of tomorrow. I think they’re the leaders of today. Kids have an enormous influence, not just on their own futures, but on how their families live and even how they vote.

Years ago, a friend of mine who trained educators told me about a study showing that most conservation and environmental information reaching parents didn’t come from newspapers or the internet. It came from their kids. Children go home and say things like, “We shouldn’t kill possums; they eat ticks,” or “We need to stop using plastic bags because they hurt sea turtles.” Kids are powerful messengers.

They also have a natural affinity for the living world. Why wouldn’t they? Humans were hunter-gatherers until very recently, and paying attention to the natural world was once essential to survival. If we nurture that attentiveness instead of dismissing it, kids can become agents of real change.

Every child has some kind of power. Every child has something they love and some talent they can bring to it. What we need to offer them is the truth: knowledge is power, and love is power.

Bioneers: What do you think humans most misunderstand about other species or about our place among them?

Sy: I think we tend to fall into false binaries. Either we assume other species are so unlike us that they fall outside our sphere of care, or we expect them to be so much like us that when we notice a difference, we don’t know what to do with it.

I think the truth is far more interesting. We need to celebrate both our sameness and our difference. I love the ways I’m different from my dog. He can hear things I can’t hear, see in the dark, run faster than I ever could, and experience the world through scent in ways I can barely imagine. That’s a whole sensory universe I’ll never inhabit, and I find that thrilling.

At the same time, there are ways we clearly connect. He understands when I’m happy or sad. He loves affection. I love affection. That shared emotional ground matters, too.

It’s not so different from our relationships with other humans. You don’t want to spend your life in a hall of mirrors with people exactly like you. Difference is part of the joy. But neither do you want to be so alien to one another that connection becomes impossible.

When we approach other species with that mindset — curious, open, and willing to be surprised — relationship becomes a source of delight rather than domination. And that shift changes everything.

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