Bioneers Blog

Shortly after my first wife and I landed in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1974, we moved to a small farm 25 miles north of town. Chimayo is home to the Santuario de Chimayo, called the Lourdes of North America for its reputedly miraculous healing dirt. It’s one of the famous traditional Spanish Northern Villages that remained after the Conquistadores retreated south around 1600. The villages remained largely isolated for centuries in this beautiful though harsh high mountain desert. The communities are close-knit, deeply familial, and profoundly religious.

Nora and I wanted to get back to the land to heal ourselves and to farm. We wanted to learn basic real-world life-ways, from growing food to solar building, canning vegetables and cutting firewood.

In this high desert mountain ecology, water is life. Our farm’s water rights were administered by a community-based system of acequias, ditches diverted from the Santa Cruz River originating in the Rocky Mountains above us.

The acequia system was originally hand-dug centuries ago by the first Spanish settlers from the rocky hard earth. They brought the practice from Spain, but it was originally developed by Islamic desert cultures in North Africa. Governing water was the basis of Sharia - Islamic law - the word Sharia means water.

The village treated water as a commons requiring strict governance. The mayor domo of the acequia was our first visitor. Juan Trujillo, a saturnine figure carrying a battered shovel over his shoulder, made sure we understood our obligations to use only as much as he permitted, when he permitted. He told us guns had been drawn over such matters. And, I learned, I was expected to show up on Saturday for the annual community ditch cleaning day.

I never worked so hard in my life, but about 60 men and boys armed with shovels and an occasional bottle of Jack Daniels left me in the dust, or more accurately the mud. Only sheer will power kept me lifting spoon after spoon of impossibly heavy mud while willows whipped my sunburned face. But I had to prove myself. A newcomer and a city boy, I was also an Anglo, one of only six Anglo families in a valley of about 5,000 Hispanics with centuries-old roots in this place.

We really did farm and the community came to accept us. Because most young people were leaving the land, anyone who farmed seriously gained community respect. Our beloved Spanish  next-door neighbors relished floating our baby daughter Ramona down the acequia in an inner tube to her squealing delight.

I was elected Treasurer of the ditch committee, which I took as a great honor. Until I discovered it also meant Juan would be calling me at 5am on Sunday mornings to fix the ditch. But truly it was an honor. I became a member of a community built around the commons of water and food. For us, the healing dirt of Chimayo was tierra sagrada.

Arturo Sandoval is an elder and esteemed leader in the Indo-Hispano lineage of Northern New Mexico. Arturo’s life work is as a bridge-builder, organizer and teacher. He works among the often conflicted indigenous, Latino and Anglo cultures of the Southwest, helping revitalize local and regional cultures, protecting ecosystems, and boosting economic development in one the country’s poorest regions. He deeply understands the profoundly important and critically endangered traditional knowledge these diverse cultures have to teach the dominant culture - from a living commons to a profound love of community and the land – tierra sagrada.

Arturo is founder and president of the highly respected non-profit Center of Southwest Culture, which helps develop healthy indigenous and Latino communities through economic development initiatives and educational and cultural work in the Southwestern U.S. and México. He has advised community-based organizations, large companies and government bodies at the local, national and international levels.

With 40 years’ experience in media and public relations, he has worked as an award-winning print journalist, TV news anchor and news photographer. He is also founder and president of VOCES, Inc., a communications and organizational-development consulting firm based in Albuquerque and Chihuahua, Mexico. Bioneers is honored to work with Arturo on our Dreaming New Mexico Localized Foodshed project.

Please join us and Arturo Sandoval, one of our great visionary leaders from Nuevo Mexico, at Bioneers 2009.

Earlier in the 20th century, the AmericanMedical Association controlled the medical industry. Alongside fiercely opposing national health insurance, the AMA fought domination by corporations. For well over half the century it was remarkably effective at preventing corporate competition from offering health-care services except for outlying sectors such as the drug business and medical supply companies. Laws enacted around 1900 forbade corporations from engaging in the commercial practice of medicine because, unlike a doctor, a corporation could not be licensed to practice medicine, and the commercialization of medicine conflicted with “sound public policy.”

Dr. Morris Fishbein, long-time head of the AMA, characterized the prospect of corporate medicine as “racketeering.” In truth, the AMA had a horror of corporations relegating doctors to the status of employees, shrinking to just another labor input on a corporate balance sheet.

By the 1970s, however, the critical condition of medical economics presented an irresistible growth opportunity for commercial medicine. The AMA’s failure to deliver affordable, effective health-care to a large plurality of Americans opened the gate wide for privatization. Large corporate ventures seized the opportunity, promising efficient business management to control costs.

Dr. Fishbein’s worst fears about the corporatization of medicine have been realized. Managed care has proven to be a fatally flawed system. U.S. health care costs have reached the highest per capita of any developed nation in the world while health-care quality is dismal compared with other developed nations, and 47 million people have no insurance. Managed care has more accurately become “managed profits” on an increasingly concentrated playing field.

There’s another basic systems error, a kind of original sin in our disease-care model. Most of the health advances in the 20^th century were public health measures such as clean water, air and sewage systems. Human and environmental health are one notion, indivisible. A movement called Ecological Medicine has arisen based on the recognition that advancing public health is inextricably linked to restoring ecological well-being. The first goal of medicine is to establish the conditions for health and wholeness, thus preventing disease and illness. The second goal is to cure.

Underlying that understanding is another insight. Nature has a profound and mysterious ability for self-repair, for self-healing, historically called “the healing force of nature.” It is nowhere to be found in our current disease-care system.

These are the dimensions in which Dr. Andrew Weil operates. He is perhaps the Dr. Spock of this generation of physicians. That’s Dr. Benjamin Spock, not the Spock of Star Trek, although Andy has certainly gone where no doctor has gone before.

His brilliance is matched by his courage as a physician-diplomat willing to take on the daunting task of refashioning a system in crisis.

Andy has played a central role in bringing about the historic transition to what he calls an Integrative Medicine that is willing to explore and use whatever really works, from both conventional medicine and alternative and complementary therapies. Above all, Andy treats people, not diseases.

He is one of the few doctors in the country who majored in botany at college. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in the 1960s, he worked for thirteen years on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and traveled the world to study ancient healing and medical lineages, from Ayurveda to shamanism.

Andy is best known for his prodigious output of best-selling books and lectures. The title of his brave new book speaks for itself: Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future.

But in many ways Andy’s most important work takes place in the trenches of medical education. He is Director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona. He has helped create a consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine. He is now working to change medical education to include environmental education.

Above all perhaps Andy’s mission has been to reconnect medicine with nature, and he stands as one of our wisest and most compelling advocates for the ecological health of the planet. It’s no coincidence that he’s also a passionate gardener and cook. As Erma Bombeck said, “Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died!” Andy’s plants are thriving.

Join us at the Bioneers Conference!

There is no word in Native American languages for the love of an object. Native cultures consider infatuation with an object a form of madness.

We have become possessed by our possessions and it is a form of madness. At the same time we’re destroying Earth’s carrying capacity by the sheer volumes of resources and energy we use to make and sell more stuff, we’re not any happier for it. Quite the opposite. Depression, anxiety, lack of friends and community – the litany is all too familiar.

Yet at the same time, the spandex extremes of rich and poor have stretched to a world of have-nots and have-a-lots. For the 2 billion of the world’s people who live on less than $2 a day, more of the right stuff would a very good thing.

But that is not the way of the world right now. Consider what Clive Crook wrote in “The Height of Inequality” about a telling image from the Dutch economist Jan Pen’s study called Income Distribution in Britain in 1971.

“Suppose that every person in the economy walks by, as if in a parade. Imagine that the parade takes exactly an hour to pass, and that the marchers are arranged in order of income, with the lowest incomes at the front and the highest at the back. Also imagine that the heights of the people in the parade are proportional to what they make: those earning the average income will be of average height, those earning twice the average income will be twice the average height, and so on. We spectators, let us imagine, are also of average height.

“Pen then described what the observers would see. Not a series of people of steadily increasing height—that’s far too bland a picture. The observers would see something much stranger. They would see, mostly, a parade of dwarves, and then some unbelievable giants at the very end.”

Back when Pen wrote his book, incomes were already more skewed in America than in Britain. Over the past thirty-five years, and especially over the past ten, that top-end skewness has greatly increased. The weirdness of the last half minute of today’s American parade—even more so the weirdness of the last few seconds, and above all the weirdness of the last fraction of a second—is vastly greater than that of the vision, bizarre as it was, described by Pen.

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Annie Leonard has the right stuff. She created the activist equivalent of a rock video global mega-hit…and it’s about garbage. Her now legendary 20-minute video, The Story of Stuff, has pinged around the planet as one of the most viral, most viewed and most influential topical videos in history. The Story of Stuff was viewed by more than 3 million viewers within six months of its release in 2007, and hasn’t stopped since. It appeals to grade-school kids and policy wonks alike. It has become a widely used educational tool in schools across the country and internationally.

 The Story of Stuff has reframed consumerism and hyper-materialism in ways that make people feel we can jettison our shopping bags without regret and embrace instead the creation of a livable, joyous, equitable world.

One sign of its success is that it made the front page of the New York Times, while Fox News has charged Annie with undermining Western civilization itself.

But Annie Leonard didn’t just wake up one day and make a video. An expert in international sustainability and environmental health issues, she spent more than 20 years investigating factories and dumps in over 30 countries. During the 1990s, she traveled throughout Asia to track exported waste from the U.S. and Europe. She testified before the U.S. Congress on international waste trafficking. She saw first-hand the pain and devastation our gluttony inflicts on people most of us will never see.

As Coordinator of the Funders’ Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption, she communicates and campaigns worldwide about the impact of consumerism and materialism on global economies and health. She has worked with numerous groups worldwide and serves on many boards.

Annie understands that the video’s popularity is one more step in an epic struggle to free ourselves from the grip of our disposable civilization. Please join us at Bioneers 2009 with our own Garbage Czar, the unstoppable Annie Leonard.

MICHAEL POLLAN

With the onset of escalating climate change, our misconceived industrial food system is one of our greatest vulnerabilities. It’s dangerously fossil-fueled, centralized, monocultural, toxic and unhealthy. It’s an accident waiting to happen, except that it’s no accident.

The countervailing and rapidly spreading locavore movement will become a matter of survival and resiliency in the face of radical environmental disruptions. Creating a far more decentralized, diverse, locally self-reliant food system is also a critical path to building prosperous local economies that bestow local jobs and more secure food systems.

But what will it really take to build more localized foodsheds?

Bioneers has been looking at that question with our Dreaming New Mexico project, and here’s a taste of what we’ve been learning.

• Think like a foodshed. Map the land according to agro-ecoregions. Different places are appropriate for different crops, both biologically and culturally.
  
  
• View each agro-ecoregion through a climate change lens as to its capacity and vulnerability. Consider agro-ecoregions for their abilities to sequester carbon, to rely on groundwater during drought, and to diversify and perform ecosystem services.
  
  
• Scale up green greenhouses for larger-scale, integrated systems such as produce, fish and mushrooms that can support communities or regions.
  
  
• Distinguish small, medium and family farms from corporate farms and tenant farmers as measures of a strong food system.
  
  
• Define local. Is it locally grown? Processed? Manufactured? Marketed? Sold? Within what range of food miles?
  
  
• Look beyond farms and farmers at the whole system of food entrepreneurs, processors and manufacturers, distributors, training and educational infrastructures, capital flows and investment incentives, and marketing. It takes a village to feed a village.
  
  
• Institute Fair Food Trade policies and certification at the city and state level. The vast majority of communities and regions cannot be food self-sufficient, and local farmers also need to export. Fair Trade policies make trade a positive. Expand Fair Food Trade criteria to include: climate change impacts, food security, biosecurity, food safety, biodiversity conservation, food sovereignty and the protection of important sectors, fledgling industries and people in society. Such policies can reduce poverty; create living-wage jobs; protect workers' rights; protect environmental and public interest laws and regulations; and support family farmers and food security.
  
  
• Make the food economy a bright-line local political issue for candidates and public servants. Develop and support political leaders who advocate for a local food economy, including using city, county and state institutional purchasing power to supply local food products to schools, hospitals and health-care institutions.

Michael Pollan has done more than perhaps any other single national figure to serve up food for thought about our food systems and diet. Michael has the rare gift of being able to shift our perception those subtle few degrees that reveal the world anew. As a journalist and author, he has courageously ventured into some of the most controversial thickets of American food culture. Perhaps part of his secret is that, as a passionate gardener, he gravitates to the pragmatic and empirical. Securely grounded in the literal and factual, he can subversively entertain the lyrical and visionary.

Michael is the author of several award-winning books, including the current best-seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a masterpiece on the ethics and ecology of eating. The revised edition for young people has just come out. He also wrote The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World, where he shape-shifted into a plant for a keen look at how plants might be calling the shots in their co-evolutionary dance with unsuspecting human beings.

As a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, he has expertly covered polarizing topics ranging from genetic engineering and animal agriculture to the co-optation of organic farming by agribusiness. He has written for Harper’s, where he served for many years as executive editor, as well as for Mother Jones, Vogue, Gourmet and House and Garden. His journalism has won numerous awards, including the Reuters-I.U.C.N. Global Award for Environmental Journalism, and the American Humane Society’s Genesis Award.

 Michael grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University and Columbia. Currently he serves as the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as the Director of the Knight Program in Science and the Environment. He is helping students and professionals shift the state of science and environmental reporting those few critical degrees that help us understand our food choices and see the world from Earth’s point of view.

 Please join us and Michael at Bioneers 2009.