Transcript for Figure 1.15, People Under the Northern Lights

[Karen Anna Lodje Gaup, Sami Reindeer Herder, translated]: When you want to get the herd of reindeer to graze, you have to check the grazing land. To do that, you have to dig your way down to the ground.

Then, you have to check if there is ice in between or near the ground. You need to know this if you are herding in the winter.

That bit is important. This is in the spring. We were shipping reindeer from the mainland to the Arnøya island. I was born into reindeer husbandry.

I was born in a desolate place in the mountains. And I have spent all my life in the mountains. The best thing is to work with reindeer.

You get to decide for yourself. And you think only of reindeer, day and night. I know these places like my own living room.

I have made all of this myself. This is moccasins. That is the best kind of shoes in the winter. And the “pesk” coat is much better than the snowmobile suits.

You can move freely and do everything. Throw a lasso into the herd, even with the coat on. Sometimes you have to be really strong.

But then we have a dog that can help. And in these new times, since 1960, we have the snowmobile.

Now, I will talk about the old days, when I was little and lived in a small turf hut all year round. We didn’t have a house.

When the campfire went out in the hut and I looked through the smoke hole, I could see the northern light, the stars, and the moon.

And, also, the northern light seemed very scary. You didn’t want to look for too long, when it danced above the trees.

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Transcript for “People under the northern lights | Sami reindeer herder Karen Anna” by Visit Norway is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 1.16, Indigenous Activism in Sweden

[Caption: Natural resource exploitation in Sápmi threatens the survival of the Sami people. Sami activists demand that it be stopped.]

[Music.]

[Maxida Märak, musician and activist, speaking in Sami]: I belong to a people that wanders between worlds. A people following the wind, the water, the reindeer. I come from a culture totally dependent on a functioning, natural cycle. But our way of life, in harmony with the forests and mountains, no longer has a place in the society of today.

For centuries the Sami have been subjected to violations by the Swedish state. Not only because they’ve stolen our lands and exploited our territories. They have also forcibly converted us to Christianity. Placed us in so-called nomadic schools. Forcibly removed us. Measured our skulls. Burned our sacred drums. The list of violations is long.

To me, the violations are the same as they were 400 years ago. Only that they’ve been modernized. We, the Sami, don’t count. Our way of life, it doesn’t count. Today, over 1000 mining explorations take place in Sweden, the majority of which are in traditional lands of the Sami. Our appeals are rejected. Our protests ignored. Our voices are not heard.

But now, winds will turn.

[Caption: International law provides that indigenous peoples, including the Sami, have the right to self-determination over their lands. Amnesty International fights for indigenous rights all over the world.]

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Transcript for “Indigenous Activism in Sweden” by Amnesty International Sverige is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.5, Elevator Psychology – Social Influence (Candid Camera)

[Allen Funt, Show Host]: The gentleman in the elevator now is a Candid star. These folks who are entering – the man with the white shirt, the lady with the trenchcoat, and subsequently, one other member of our staff – will face the rear.

And you’ll see how this man in the trenchcoat [audience laughter] tries to maintain his individuality, but little by little [laughter]…. He looks at his watch, but he’s really making an excuse for turning just a little bit more [laughter] to the wall.

Now we’ll try it once again. Here’s the Candid subject. Here comes the Candid Camera staff – three of them, at least. And this man has apparently been in groups before. [Laughter as the man turns to face the back wall as others are doing.]

Here’s a fella with his hat on in the elevator. First he makes a full turn to the rear and Charlie closes the door. A moment later, we’ll open the door – everybody’s changed positions. [Laughter as the door opens and the man has turned with the group.]

Now we’ll see if we can use… now we’ll see if we can use group pressure for some good. Now, in a moment, on Charlie’s signal, everybody turns forward. [Laughter.] Notice, they take off their hats. [Laughter as the man takes off his hat.] And now, do you think we could reverse the procedure? Watch. [Laughter as the man replaces his hat.]

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Transcript for “Candid Camera (Elevator)” by ATW Training is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.7, The Sociological Imagination

[Narrator]: One of the most important things to learn in sociology class isn’t a fact about the history of sociology or political analytical method. Rather, it’s a state of mind. The state of mind that is at the core of sociological practice is called the sociological imagination.

The best way to understand what this is and what this mindset entails is to look at a particular example. Let’s imagine you lose your job – sucks, right? Now you’re focused on thinking of how can you pay for all the things that you require in order to live your life. How are you going to find a new job in order to sustain yourself? What a sociologist would ask in this situation is this question: Is your experience of losing your job here personal trouble or is it a social issue? In other words, is this something that is idiosyncratic and individual about the particular choices that you made, or is it rather the consequence of broader social patterns and contextual factors?

Through the sociological imagination, we make connections between your personal experiences

and the broader economic, political, cultural, familial, educational, and environmental forces that influence the world that you see and experience. The opportunities that are available to you and the challenges that you face by adopting the mindset of the sociological imagination – you go from seeing yourself as an atomized individual whose decisions are entirely responsible for everything that happens to you to seeing yourself as a part of a network of other people who influence one another.

With this mindset, you begin to realize all of the opportunities and freedoms that you have for agency and all of the constraints and restrictions that prevent you from doing anything that you would like. Through the sociological imagination you begin to teach yourself to see the world.

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Transcript for “The Sociological Imagination” by Andrew Reszitnyk is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.11, Prezi illustraction of Social institutions

Economy: The social institution that organizes a society’s production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.

Functions

Economy directly affects the prosperity of a society; a growing economy means a growing society. An economy must increase income while decrease expenditures of goods and services.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Economy has a significant effect on the development of its society. An economy helps to create job opportunities, this will lead to higher incomes for individuals and families.

Many economies go through periods of rise and decline; greatly impacting its community. Many factors can easily trigger an economic decline. When in decline there are less job opportunities, lower income for workers, and businesses are unable to obtain a required revenue.

Politics: The social institution that distributes power and sets a course of actions for a society.

Functions

Government is based on politics, it is a way to authorize a select group of people to direct and control individuals to gain stability among the community. This institution is what creates and enforces laws to produce a safer environment.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Politics is responsible for a safe community as well as social programs that can further develop its society. Education and job opportunities can be seen as a product of politics.

The political hierarchy clearly separates those directly involved in the government and those who are not, creating a clear sense of inequality. There are high chances of corruption between politicians. Rebellion is commonly seen in societies where inhabitants do not agree with the views of those working with the government.

Health & Welfare: Health is the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being. Welfare is the good fortune, health, happiness, prosperity of a person, group or organization.

Functions

A society aims to have high standards of health and welfare and for its individuals to meet the criteria. The standards of health and welfare can be interpreted by socially-constructed views and norms. These standards are needed to work towards a healthier and happier society.

Strengths & Weaknesses

The institution of health and welfare allows individuals to stay healthy and get medical help when necessary. It has taught societies when it is necessary to seek help.

Emotions and socially-constructed meanings are commonly used to interpret a societies standards in health and welfare. This can be problematic in societies that have far different views on health and welfare norms compared to medical facts.

Family: A social institution found in all societies that unites people in cooperative groups to care for one.

Functions

Families evolve faster than any other social institution. The family continues to develop a society by passing on beliefs, traditions, and cultural/societal norms. A family shares an intimate bond, it creates a sense of identity, this ultimately affects social interaction.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Without the institution of family a society would fail. Family is responsible for socialization, social placement, and material and emotional security within society.

In many cultures it has become common for families to be seen as patriarchal and endogamous, between a man and wife. This has caused separation and discrimination towards families who do not meet these ideas.

Religion: Religion is a social institution involving beliefs and practices based on recognizing the sacred Faith.

Functions

Religion has played a role in changing a society’s culture throughout history. In a society there are often subgroups that have certain religious beliefs and practices. Every religion holds different beliefs, values, practices, and symbolisms. Religious groups aim to make their beliefs more wide spread and accepted.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Within a society, religion provides a sense of unity between a group of people. It helps to mold and develop a society. Practicing a religion can provide a sense of significance and reason for life.

Many religions commonly practiced across the world have been established for centuries. Their beliefs follow an “old-fashioned” mindset. Many traditions involve a patriarchal lifestyle further enabling gender discrimination.

Education: Education is the social institution that allows society at large to pass its knowledge, including basic facts, job skills and cultural norms and values, on to the next generation.

Functions

A society may use many different forms of education in order to pass on standard knowledge, specific skills, societal norms, and cultural beliefs to the next generation. The different forms of education are classified as formal or informal. Schooling is considered to be formal, while cultivating knowledge through conversation and experience would be informal.

Strengths & Weaknesses

There are countless ways to spread and obtain knowledge, because of this it can be very easy for those in a society to educate one another. Education has led to socialization, cultural innovations, and job opportunities.

There are still many factors preventing a large portion of people to acquire an education level that meets one’s societal standards, primarily due to the formal schooling system. Students will often drop out of school before graduating or are not able to afford formal schooling at all.

How Social Institutions Affect Each Other

All six social institutions play a key role in developed societies. If one institution were to disappear it would cause another to collapse due to its direct dependence on the former. The other institutions would soon fail in a chain reaction inevitably leading to the downfall of the society affected.

Examples of Social Institution Affects on Each Other

Economy and Education directly affect each other when it comes to jobs. The economy is responsible for creating jobs for individuals to help further boost the economy. The education system is responsible for teaching individuals valuable and special skills that meet the requirements needed to obtain jobs.

Religion plays an important role by helping to mold societal norms, traditions, and beliefs. Families help to pass these values onto their children, allowing the religious practices to be spread through future generations.

Science: A Potential Social Institution

Although science can be seen as a part of the social institution of education, it plays a large role in any society. Without a strong scientific field it would be impossible to further the understanding of how the universe works- specifically how the earth, human body, and even societies work. There would be a lack of understanding valuable information, setting back societal progress greatly.

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Transcript for Figure 2.12, The Family Equation

[Dr. William Lynn Weaver]: My father was everything to me. And it’s actually kind of difficult talking about him without becoming very emotional. Up until, you know, he died, every decision I made, I’d always call him. And he would never tell me what to do, but he would always listen and say, “Well, what do you want to do?” And he made me feel that I could do anything that I wanted to do.

I can remember when we integrated the schools, that there were many times when I was just… Scared. And I didn’t think that I would survive. And I’d look up, and he’d be there. And, whenever I saw him, I knew that I was safe.

You know, I always tell you that your momma is the smartest person I’ve ever met, but I think my father ranks right up there as brilliant. When I was in high school, I was taking algebra, and I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to do my homework. And I got frustrated, said, “I just can’t figure this out. I’m just…”

So my father said, “What’s the problem?” He came by and said, “What’s the problem?”

And I said, “It’s just algebra.”

And he said, “Well, let me look at it.”

And I said, “Dad, they didn’t even have algebra in your day.” [Laughs.]

And I went to sleep.

And around 4 o’clock that morning, he woke me up and he said, “C’mon son, get up.” He sat me at the kitchen table, and he taught me algebra. What he had done is sit up all night and read the algebra book, and then he explained the problems to me so I could do them and understand them.

And to this day, I live my life trying to be half the man my father was – just half the man. And I would be a success if my children loved me half as much as I love my father.

Attribution

Transcript for “The Family Equation” by StoryCorps is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.13, My Aunties: Father Figures

[Stefan Lynch Strassfeld]: My family were mostly gay guys, who were my babysitters and the guys who you know, took the pictures at my birthday parties. And I felt like I had this amazing family. I called them my aunties. And it was a really wonderful, amazing world that came crashing down.

Starting in ’82, the first person I knew, died of AIDS. Um, a young guy named Steve.

[Beth Teper]: And how old were you at the time?

[Stefan]: I was ten when he was diagnosed. I remember, I was on the beach on Fire Island and he was covered in these purple spots and I remember asking my dad, like what’s wrong with Steve? And my dad said, “Oh he has this skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma.” And I said, well what is that? And my dad said, “Well nobody really knows, but there are some gay men that are getting it.” And within I think 2 months, Steve was dead.

And it was pretty much a succession of deaths of my family throughout the next decade.

My step dad Bill died in ’87. My dad died in ’91, after a really grueling six months of me taking care of him. You know, I was 19 and I was on a break from college and was really at my wits end and exhausted from taking care of my dad I called up my auntie Eddie and I said, “Can you help?” And within a week, he’d organized 40 people to do round the clock shifts.

He was the only other person in the room with me and my mom when my dad died. At that point, everyone had died except for a handful of stragglers who I now hold near and dear to my heart. My aunties.

It was a powerful family. There was a lot of love. And they modeled for me how to survive an epidemic, even if you were dying while doing it.

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Transcript for “My Aunties: Father Figures” by StoryCorps is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.14, Fritjof Capra Speaks to the Heart of the Matter

[Dr. Fritjof Capra]: In the coming decades, the survival of humanity will literally depend on our ecological literacy on our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly.

[Music.]

None of our global problems – energy shortages, environmental degradation, climate change, economic inequality, violence and war – none of these problems can be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they’re all interconnected and interdependent. What we need is systemic solutions. Solutions that do not deal with any problem in isolation, but always within the context of other problems.

In fact, the systems approach is a powerful tool that can make all the difference. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature. The way to sustain life is to build and nurture communities from local to global levels. If we have all the knowledge and the technology to build a sustainable world, why don’t we do it?

[Music.]

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Transcript for “Fritjof Capra Speaks to the Heart of the Matter – Trailer” by Films for Change is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.18, What is meant by kinship?

[Colin Jones]: Kinship is very – you can do a PhD on that in our culture. Kinship represents who we are within our family group, our kin group, our whole clan group or tribal group, so kinship is very important. The European term today, what do you have? People who are unemployed, housing problems, and problems within the family, we have a support mechanism called Centrelink. In our culture, our support mechanism was our family, our kin, so our kinship was your relationship to.

Now, for instance, a little girl grows up, she gets married, she has a little child. That first little child is the daughter. Now she is the mother and the father is the father but the father’s brothers

will also become the father. The mother’s sisters will also become the sister and to the Europeans that sounds very confusing, but my little grandchildren, they talk about their grandmothers, their mothers, mum Debby, mum Wilma, mum Gina, and we know who their real mum is but we know that structure of line who the other mothers are within that family group. So that young mother if she is needing a break or whatever and feeling a little bit stressed she has the other mothers – her family line – to take over from that kinship to help within that structure.

A young boy growing up, he learns to track, to hunt, to make weapons. Where does that come from? His father’s brothers. His uncles in our culture, but in his culture they’re also fathers, so they take that role of training and helping as well. So kinship within our culture is very, very important and that’s why we talked before about the missions [inaudible] and we know we have families sent to all those areas. We may not have seen them but once you mentioned the name we know who they are, what line they are.

And that’s why in our culture we’d say if I said to you, hey brother, will you come from [inaudible] growing up we were founded in the [inaudible]. Where do you come from, who has raised you, what’s your family history in your background and your mixture, who you are. What are we doing? We’ve shown respect, because we’re not only talking to you, we’re referring to your forefathers as respect, so we know your line of kinship, where you come from. So we can relate to that [inaudible] and we know where you fit within that structure – very important in our culture.

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Transcript for “What is meant by kinship ?” by Rural Medical Education Australia is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.23, Stockholm, 1972 – When Environmental Protection was Born

[Narrator]: In 1972, global leaders came together in Sweden for the first ever United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. It was unlike any previous event, bringing together 113 governments to discuss humanity’s impact on the natural world.

[Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, speaking to the UN Conference]: It is clear that the environmental crisis which is confronting the world will profoundly alter the future destiny of our planet. No one amongst us, whatever our status, strength, or circumstance, can remain unaffected.

[Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden]: The human environment will always change. Development will continue. There will be growth. This cannot and should not be avoided. The decisive question is in which direction will we develop, by what means shall we grow, which qualities we want to achieve, and what values we wish to guide our future.

[Maurice Strong, UNEP’s first executive director]: I think the lasting message of the Stockholm conference will be the realization that man has come to one of those seminal points in his history where his own activities are the principal determinants of his own future.

[Narrator]: Now, 50 years after that Stockholm meeting, we face a triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. As well as other planetary ills that are affecting our current and future well being.

[Speaker]: This triple crisis is our number one existential threat. And we need an urgent, all-out effort to turn things around.

[Narrator]: An unhealthy planet threatens human health, prosperity, equality, and peace, as we have seen only too clearly in COVID-19. It also threatens the achievement of SDGs. In this moment of truth, we need to urgently work to transform our economies and societies. The science is clear. The solutions are known. We need whole-of-society action for a whole-of-society problem. We know it can be done. The world came together to fix the ozone layer, phase out leaded fuel, and stop endangered species from going extinct.

With this in mind, the UN General Assembly has decided to convene an international meeting entitled, “Stockholm+50: a healthy planet for the prosperity of all–our responsibility, our opportunity.” It will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, from the 2nd to the 3rd of June, 2022. It will commemorate the 50 years since that 1972 watershed moment when the environment took center stage for the first time.

There is only one earth and the stakes have never been higher. Join us.

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Transcript for “Stockholm, 1972 – When Environmental Protection was Born” by UN Environmental Programme is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.28, It’s Time to Bail Out the Planet

[George Monbiot, narrator]: The COVID-19 pandemic has been a nightmare for all of us. As vaccines are deployed across the world, many hope we’ll soon be able to return to our previous lives. But before we rush to resume ‘business as usual’, we should pause to consider where COVID came from.

Like many infectious diseases, COVID-19 has its origins in the encroachment of human activity

into the natural world as countries have sought to grow their economies. Activities like logging, mining, road building, farm expansion, and urbanization cause massive habitat destruction.

This, in turn, has brought people into ever closer contact with wild animal species, many of which carry dangerous pathogens and diseases. When humans venture into ecosystems and

destroy the habitats of wild species, these diseases can jump from animals into the human population. Around three-quarters of new diseases [that] infect humans come from other

Animals. COVID-19 was not a random event. It’s a symptom of a global economic system that’s destroying the living planet and killing off our magnificent wildlife.

COVID-19 may be the first pandemic many of us have experienced, but unless we change course, it will almost certainly not be the last. So before we spend billions of dollars reinstating the status quo, perhaps it’s time for a rethink in order to prevent future pandemics and tackle ecological and climate breakdown. Governments must take a different path.

What would this look like? It means investing to decarbonize the global economy as fast as possible and shrinking our environmental footprint. It means bringing an end to destructive activities like deforestation and intensive mining. And it means ending our addiction to economic growth and putting the needs of people in the planet first.

After the financial crisis in 2008, we bailed out the banks. In 2021, we need to bail out the planet.

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Transcript for “George Monbiot: ‘It’s time to bail out the planet’” by openDemocracy is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.30, Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis, Chapter 1: Systems

Just down the hill from where I sit, Oregon’s first newspaper The Oregon Spectator, promoted the virtues of the expanding American empire. In 1850, they wrote: “The Indian retreats before the march of civilization and American Enterprise; the howling wilderness is fast becoming fruitful fields.”

What can we learn from a statement like this? Why did settler culture frame both indigenous peoples and the land as “wild” and in need of “civilizing”? What are some ways that Chinookan and other indigenous communities in this place responded, resisted and survived 200 years of colonialism? And if, as the Oregon Spectator claimed, American Enterprise set out to tame a wild world and remake it into fruitful fields, what kind of world did it actually build? What kinds of fruits have we all inherited?

My name is Ben Cushing. I’m a sociology instructor at Portland Community College in Portland OR. This podcast is an attempt to ask questions about the social and ecological crises that we currently face. Over the past couple years, the oppression and violence that is so deeply rooted within this society has been laid bare. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly impossible to deny that the living systems of this world are unraveling all around us. Too often, we discuss these twin horrors separately. But more and more, folks are beginning to connect the dots between the violent exploitation of the land and the violent exploitation of people.

So, this podcast is an effort to examine some of the root causes of the climate crisis. But, maybe surprisingly, we won’t spend very much time talking about the climate crisis itself. Instead, we’ll examine the ways that climate change grows from the same root as other crises we face, including racial and gender injustice and economic exploitation and precarity. In each of the four chapters of this podcast, we’ll explore the roots of the climate crisis from different angles – ranging from a discussion of the consequences of the capitalist economic system, to an examination of the cultural stories that justify colonialism, genocide and slavery. And throughout, we’ll try to keep sight of our own agency to resist systems of power and to co-create alternatives to the way things currently are.

We’ll be exploring big questions, and we won’t do them all justice. But my hope is that this series will offer one place among many to think them through.

So where to begin? I’d like to begin by thinking about systems.

The sociologist C Wright Mills is helpful here. Mills argued that sociology can offer us some tools to understand how our own experiences fit within larger social and historical contexts – how our lives are tangled up in systems. All of us, he suggests, are embedded in systems that shape the lives we live and the people we become. So, any meaningful examination of the climate crisis, and of our own experience of it, is going to have to consider how certain social systems produce certain outcomes for people and the land – how corporations, for example, impact workers and wildfires, or how settler colonialism provides the ideological framework for the oil industry.

So we need to think about systems.

One of the most powerful tools that Mills offers us, as we try to think in terms of systems, is the ability to distinguish between two kinds of problems we may face. The first kind, individual problems, are just the everyday problems that we all experience from time to time: maybe I stayed up too late watching tv, and slept through my alarm, and missed an important meeting. Individual problems are caused by something in our own private lives, and by extension, their solutions will take place within our private lives. Maybe I need to go to bed earlier, or turn up the volume on my alarm.

But the second kind of problem that Mills points our attention to are what he calls “social problems.” Social problems are larger public issues, which impact our lives. For example during an economic crisis like the COVID-19 recession, losing one’s job or home isn’t just an individual problem, it is a social problem. It is caused by something within the larger social system, and its solution must be at the scale of that system.

Too often we make a terrible mistake when we experience a social problem (like unemployment or housing insecurity) and we think of it as an individual problem. Sometimes I imagine two people sitting at their table after they’ve put their kids to bed. They have bills and foreclosure notices spread out in front of them. They’re stressed to the limit, and arguing. And the story that runs through their minds is something like this: “How did we let this happen? Why can’t I get my act together?” Now we zoom out, and we can see into the house next door, and someone is sitting at their table alone, asking themselves “how did I let this happen?” If we zoom out farther, we see that half the homes on the block are having that conversation, and the ¼ of the households in the state… and so on. These folks are experiencing a social problem and the scale of the global economy. Asd yet they feel alone. They’ve been given the wrong story. When we mistake social problems with systemic root causes and systemic solutions for individual problems with individual causes and solutions, we take on too much blame. We also let systems, and powerful players within those systems, off the hook.

Mills suggested that this skill, the ability to see our own experiences within a larger social and historical context, is crucial for understanding our own lives. Even more, he argued that it is a prerequisite for democratic self governance. If we don’t understand the systems we’re a part of… If we can’t see how policy impacts our lives, how can we meaningfully participate in creating policies that will benefit us? The individualism of this culture undermines not only our understanding of our own experiences but also our ability to democratically improve them.

What does all of this have to do with the twin crises of social injustice and ecological unraveling?

On the one hand, it can help us get clear eyed about root causes. Just as it would be wrong to blame someone who lost their job or their home in the context of the COVID-19 recession, it would also be wrong to blame a coal miner or commuter for the climate crisis. The climate crisis, and the ecological crisis more generally, has very deep roots. We’ll be exploring some of them – from the corporate structure to particular definitions of race and gender – in future chapters. The climate crisis is the predictable outcome of a certain kind of social system. It is the fruit of a certain kind of “fruitful field.”

On the other hand, being attentive to systems can help us get real about solutions. If our social systems have created the climate crisis and the larger ecological crisis, solutions will have to be at the scale of the system itself. No amount of green consumerism and lifestyle change is likely to get us out of this mess. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this fact comes from the experience of the global lockdowns in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, at the height of pandemic lockdowns around the world, global Co2 emissions fell by 17%, down to 2006 levels. That was remarkable to see. And yet, given the scale of these “lifestyle changes” and the pain that they caused, still, 83% of emissions remained. Mass lifestyle change without system change can only get us so far. And it places the onus of change on the individual. Again, letting systems and powerful players off the hook.

More and more, climate justice organizers have begun using a decidedly sociological framing in their slogans. All over the world, people have been carrying signs reading “system change not climate change.”

The ecological crisis isn’t just the result of individual misbehavior or unethical business practices – those easy culprits with simple solutions. Much more troublingly, it is the entirely predictable outcome of the system working as (and for whom) it has been designed to work.

If we hope to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, there will be other things that may have to change: Economic systems. Belief systems. Systems of domination.

C. Wright Mills suggested that sociological thinking can be “a terrible lesson, and a magnificent one.” It can reveal to us that we are in fact trapped within systems. But it can also reveal those systems to be made by people, and subject to change. Subject to system change.

This has been chapter one of Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis. I’m Ben Cushing. If you found this discussion to be helpful, check out the other chapters in this series. And please consider sharing it with a friend.

In this chapter we emphasized the importance of interrogating systems. In the next chapter, we turn our attention to this economic system: capitalism.

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Transcript for “Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis – Chapter 1: Systems” by Ben Cushing is included with permission.

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Transcript for Figure 3.4, A Deadly Peace in Colombia as FARC Disarms

[FARC Commander, speaking in Spanish]: Our commitment is clear. In the next six months, during the transition, we are going to put down our weapons. But, implementing the [peace] agreement will be much more complicated than coming to the agreement. Communities are worried. Social activists are being murdered. People are saying the paramilitaries are here, waiting for us to disarm, so they can finally take control of the area.

[Narrator]: The leaders of Columbia’s largest rebel groups signed a peace deal in late November with Colombia’s government that puts an end to one of the world’s longest-running conflicts. Under the deal, thousands of FARC guerrillas have marched to temporary zones where they’ll stay before joining Colombian society.

But as these fighters move toward a new life, they’re leaving behind a vacuum. Paramilitary organizations, drug cartels, and other rebels are already moving in to seize the territory that guerrillas once controlled. The locals living here are left to wonder whether the central government can, for the first time, establish control of this rugged country of jungles and mountains.

There’s reason to worry. During peace talks last year, nearly 120 human rights activists and leftists were killed across Colombia. Few cases have been resolved. Activists accused the

guerrillas’ longtime foes, the far-right paramilitaries.

Maria [last name unintelligible] attends mass to hear her brother’s name read. He had spoken up for locals forced from their land by paramilitaries. A week earlier, he was killed as he walked with his partner and her daughter. He left behind a 24-year-old son.

[Maria, speaking in Spanish]: Five hooded men approached him and his partner, who were with their daughters, and the men killed him.

[Narrator]: This is a rare outing for Maria. She’s also an activist and she’s afraid she’ll

be targeted next.

[Maria, speaking in Spanish]: We’ve always been scared of the post-conflict because we knew it was going to be even harder than the conflict itself. We still want peace. But the price of this peace will be many more deaths.

[Narrator]: The root of all this violence lies here in these lush hillsides. They’re dotted with fields of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine. FARC’s rebellion has been financed by these plants. Other groups are hoping to cash in once the guerillas move out.

[Resident of farming area, speaking in Spanish]: For many years, the peasants of Northern Cauca have had to grow the coca leaf because of the hunger and poverty of the rural communities. Coca farming brings violence to the community because it means money. But not for the peasants. The money is for the big drug traffickers.

[Music.]

[Narrator]: The last guerillas have moved into temporary camps like this where they will stay during the transition.

[Man sings in Spanish.]

[Narrator]: They live in limbo: not at war, not quite at peace. Some have trickled back into the jungles, hoping to return to work in the drug trade, but most cautiously prepare for a new quieter life.

[Lorena Jimenez, radio operator for FARC, speaking in Spanish]: I joined six years ago.

[Narrator]: Lorena Jimenez didn’t want to end up like other women she knows – a poor housewife stuck in the countryside. She dreams of the new opportunities a peaceful Colombia may bring.

[Jimenez, speaking in Spanish]: “Give me an eternal day by your side so that you can see how much I want to make you happy.” We are actually really romantic. We are normal people, just like any other civilians. We also fall in love.

[Narrator]: Her days as a radio operator for the FARC’s battle-hardened 6th front are coming to an end.

[Carlos Antonio Acosta, FARC soldier, speaking in Spanish]: War…. It’s a …. It’s a mud pit. It’s a swamp that no one wants to be in. Soldiers don’t want war. The police don’t want war. No one in this country wants war. After 26 years of war, I’m ready for peace.

[Jimenez, speaking in Spanish]: I would go home to my family. To see them again…. To be able to tell them the experiences I’ve seen with the FARC. And little by little, build my life as a civilian. A new Colombia. A Colombia without war. A Colombia without misery. This is my hope.

Attribution

Transcript for “A Deadly Peace in Colombia as FARC Disarms | The New York Times” by The New York Times is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 3.7, Are We Who We Think We Are?

In the age of social media, people increasingly get to have a sense of authorship over how they present themselves to the world. Your carefully curated Instagram feed, your Facebook profile pictures – these are ways in which you essentially get to dictate, you get to construct, the way that other people perceive you. And this raises all kinds of questions about the fluidity of our identity, about how we interface with other minds, with other people – and it raises all kinds of questions about authenticity, authentic exchanges, right? Who am I, right?

And so the philosopher by the last name of Cooley, he wrote, he was a sociologist and he wrote about Looking Glass self theory, and basically what he said is that we come to be through the interactions that we have with other people, by making models of the other person’s mind. In other words, he says I am NOT who I think I am, I am not who you think I am, I am who I think you think I am. In other words, we make renderings of what other people think of us and actually play the role of becoming we think they think we are.

But in the end, we never actually get to know other people’s minds. All we get to know is our

modeling of their modeling of us. So at the end of the day, we live inside of a construct of our own making. I guess perhaps what we should do is come clean about this fact and stop asking questions about authenticity in the ways that we present ourselves artfully on social media and instead accept the fact that identity is a fluid act of improvisation, and that the self is not a solid thing and never has been, you know.

Again, I am NOT who I think I am, I am NOT who you think you are, I am who I think you think I am. Wrap your head around that one.

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Transcript for “Are We Who We Think We Are?” by Jason Silva: Shots of Awe is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 3.14, Kimberlé Crenshaw at Ted + Animation

Many years ago, I began to use the term “intersectionality” to deal with the fact that many of our social justice problems, like racism and sexism, are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice.

Now, the experience that gave rise to intersectionality was my chance encounter with a woman named Emma DeGraffenreid. I actually read about Emma’s story from the pages of a legal opinion written by a judge who had dismissed Emma’s claim of race and gender discrimination against a local car manufacturing plant. She applied for a job, and she was not hired, and she believed that she was not hired because she was a black woman. The argument for dismissing the suit was that the employer did hire African-Americans and the employer hired women. The real problem, though, that the judge was not willing to acknowledge was what Emma was actually trying to say, that the African-Americans that were hired, usually for industrial jobs, maintenance jobs, were all men. And the women that were hired, usually for secretarial or front-office work, were all white.

Only if the court was able to see how these policies came together would he be able to

see the double discrimination that Emma DeGraffenreid was facing. But the court refused to allow Emma to put two causes of action together to tell her story because he believed that, by allowing her to do that, she would be able to have preferential treatment. She would have an advantage by having two swings at the bat, when African-American men and white women only had one swing at the bat.

But of course, neither African-American men or white women needed to combine a race and gender discrimination claim to tell the story of the discrimination they were experiencing. Why wasn’t the real unfairness law’s refusal to protect African-American women simply because their experiences weren’t exactly the same as white women and African-American men? Rather than broadening the frame to include African-American women, the court simply tossed their case completely out of court.So first of all, black women weren’t allowed to work at the plant.

Second of all, the court doubled down on this exclusion by making it legally inconsequential. And to boot, there was no name for this problem. And we all know that, where there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.

Many years later, I had come to recognize that the problem that Emma was facing was a framing problem. The frame that the court was using to see gender discrimination or to see race discrimination was partial, and it was distorting.

For me, the challenge that I faced was trying to figure out whether there was an alternative narrative, a prism that would allow us to see Emma’s dilemma, a prism that would allow us to rescue her from the cracks in the law, that would allow judges to see her story.

So it occurred to me, maybe a simple analogy to an intersection might allow judges to better see Emma’s dilemma. So if we think about this intersection, the roads to the intersection would be the way that the workforce was structured by race and by gender. And then the traffic in those roads would be the hiring policies and the other practices that ran through those roads.

Now, because Emma was both black and female, she was positioned precisely where those roads overlapped, experiencing the simultaneous impact of the company’s gender and race traffic. The law — the law is like that ambulance that shows up and is ready to treat Emma only if it can be shown that she was harmed on the race road or on the gender road but not where those roads intersected. Heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, all of these social dynamics come together and create challenges that are sometimes quite unique.

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Transcript for “Kimberlé Crenshaw at Ted + Animation” by Kate Andersen is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 3.28, Van Jones on Education and Equity

It’s good to see everybody here today. I’m standing up here calling for change. You’re calling for change.

One of the best ways we can fight for a positive future is to open up access to education, especially around technology. My whole family got out of poverty on a bridge called my father’s back and it was largely because my dad had access to quality education. That’s a ticket out of poverty for everybody, especially when we focus on preparing young people for the jobs of the future.

Young people and people of color need to be able to participate and design what’s coming in technology. This is not about fighting to get in the back of the line for the last century’s jobs, it’s about putting underestimated young people in the front of the line for the new century’s jobs – and making sure that the change that is coming works for everybody.

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Transcript for “Van Jones on Education and Equity | Global Citizen Festival: NYC” by Global Citizen is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 3.35, Donna Maxey, Founder of Race Talks

[Music.]

Race Talks is unique. You never know who’s coming through the door. We’ve had all different ages be a part of the discussion. We’ve had people who were 100 who came. My mother lived to be 101. We’ve had people who were newborns who came. We had speakers that were in fourth grade. Some of the most amazing discussion groups were third and fourth grade students who came to Race Talks with their parents. What makes it a success is the environment in the room.

I was inspired to start Race Talks because there was so much racism going on in the world. It’s not a new thing; it’s been going on for forever. There was a factoid that caught my attention: That by the year 2040 there would be more people of color than there were white people in the United States. I know that there’s a lot of fear that white people have around the issue of people of color and are people of color going to do to white people what has been done to them in the past? And I’ve never heard anyone say that they would like retribution. What I hear people say is they want equity. And so I thought the best way to make sure that people understood this on all sides that they were being heard and they were being listened to was to have conversations around issues of race.

The first hour we have speakers and the second hour we have facilitated discussions. And we encourage folks when they come to not sit with the people that they know. Go sit with somebody you don’t know. Each discussion is totally different. We crack jokes, we laugh. I think having food is really important. It gives them something to talk about. You know, somebody’s food is wafting over towards you, you’re going to go, “Oooo, what is that? Oh man, that smells really good” and the next thing you know you’re in a conversation with the person. It’s just a safe environment.

So what it does is it gives people practice talking to folks they don’t know. Talking about difficult topics that they normally would not talk about with other people. Once people leave Race Talks they’ve gotten encouraged to speak about topics. Basically the whole idea is to give people a chance to be heard. To have difficult conversations. How to talk, but also how to listen.

George Floyd brought in a new era. As someone said, the Holocaust was the first racial catastrophe that was recorded. George Floyd was the first time that it was recorded and sent out over and over and over again to people over the news and so it gave white people an opportunity to see what people of color have known has gone on for decades, for generations, for centuries, in this country and across the world and ever since you’ve seen discussions happening about it and white people who are allies, I like to think of them more as, I like them to be co-conspirators as opposed to allies. Allies kind of on the periphery, co-conspirator you’re all caught up in it, you’re you’re working on it, to help make a change.

Race Talks is definitely a part of a larger movement to change the discussion, the complexion, the racial scene here in this country and in the world. People are starting to realize through exposure to other folks that we want the same things. So I think structures change by individuals changing. And individuals change by having experiences. Race Talks makes a change in people’s lives in that they are brought into a community as a whole. And they’re having an experience together that makes them connected. That’s what all of us do out in the world every day is we have experiences, we make friends with people we don’t know, and that’s all Race Talks is. It’s a place for people to gather and and be themselves and to speak their truths.

[Music.]

Attribution

Transcript for “Donna Maxey, Founder of Race Talks” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is included by permission.

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Transcript for Figure 3.42, Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis, Chapter 3: The Wall Built in Our Minds

You’re listening to Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis. Chapter 3: The Walls Built in Our Minds.

The town I grew up in, Veneta, Oregon, sits at the foot of Oregon’s coast range, where the hills meet the southernmost part of the Willamette Valley.

At the corner of Territorial Rd and Hwy 126, there used to be a diner that served as a bit of a hub for the community. Folks – like loggers, farmers and many others – would gather for breakfast and chew the fat with their neighbors. As a place of gathering, Big’s reinforced the patterns of solidarity that tethered our community, but it also fortified our dividing lines.

In the parking lot of Big’s Hi-Yu-He-He, as the diner was called, was a moc totem pole, topped with a carved Cleveland-Indians-style image of a native man, grinning.

So there, on Kalapuya land, stood a faux-Haida Pole upon which a caricatured ‘Indian’ smiled down at over-burdened log trucks that seemed always to drive in the same direction. This ‘Indian’ statue tells us almost nothing about the indigenous peoples of that land, but it tells a troubling story about my community. He was our creation, after all, and he was invented to be our mirror image. He is one important construction that justified the subordination of this land and its ancestral peoples. My whiteness is another.

I’m Ben Cushing. Welcome to Chapter 3 of “Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis.”

This week we’ll ask questions like: What is the relationship between the walls in our minds and the walls between our communities? Where do those walls come from? What purposes do they serve? And whose?

Sometimes I ask the folks in my classes whether or not Wednesday exists. They usually look at me funny for a second, then look at each other, and start talking. There’s often some debate, but they usually come to a very important conclusion, pretty much on their own. Someone will say, “No, it’s not real. Somebody just made it up.” Somebody else will respond, “Just cuz they made it up doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

It turns out that lots of things are like this: not real, and yet really real. Made up, but consequential. Money is made up, but anyone who’s faced hunger or eviction knows it’s real. Nations are made up, but anyone facing a border wall or a tank knows they matter.

Wednesday is an example of what is sometimes called a social construction. That term has gained some traction in the last couple of years. A social construction, like Wednesday, is a category. It’s part of our language, and we use it to make sense of the world around us. In this case, it helps us organize our sense of time. When pressed on it, we can certainly see that there’s no essential Wednesdayness of one day, or Thursdayness of the day after. But since we all basically agree on what day of the week it is, the social construction we call “Wednesday” shapes how we see the world and how we behave – like whether we go to work or gather with our friends. Social constructions matter because they organize our shared sense of reality. To borrow a phrase from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, they give us patterns of “vision and division” – shared ways of seeing, and dividing into categories, the world around us. And since social constructions are made by people, and arbitrary, that means that our sense of reality is also made by people, and arbitrary. And that matters.

Actually, all aspects of culture, from our values to our big stories to our social constructions like Wednesday, are made by people. And all of us participate in that process. In a sense, we’re all co-creators of our shared worldview. But it’s not like we all sit in a circle and come to consensus on our culture. This isn’t an especially democratic situation.

Do all people in this society have equal power? If not, do those groups with more power have more influence over the culture? More influence over beliefs, language, stories, representations of other, less powerful, people? If they do, do those powerful groups shape the culture in ways that benefit them?

If the answer to this last question is yes, that’s pretty troubling. That would mean that our own beliefs could be hurting us. That my own sense of reality could be manipulating me.

In this chapter, and the next, we’ll be exploring some of the ways that culture can function to legitimize systems of power. It can even make those systems feel natural and inevitable – as “just the way the world works.”

We’ll also ask questions about how culture might be a site of our resistance. If beliefs and stories can justify oppressive systems, can we not also use beliefs and stories to challenge those systems and call into being alternative ways of living together – ways that do justice to our past and present and allow us to build the worlds we want and need?

But that’s a very big subject. So where should we begin? Let’s start by thinking about division. Or more specifically, about Dichotomy.

I began by talking a bit about Big’s Hi-Yu-He-He, the diner in a white rural community with a racist native mascot. In that case, we can think of the social construction of the “Indian” and the social construction of the “white man” as a dichotomy. Both categories – Indian and White – are made by people – like Wednesday. And in this case the so-called Indian and the so called “white man” are presented as opposites – as profoundly different and mutually exclusive. That’s how dichotomies work. They’re two socially constructed categories, which are defined as mutually exclusive and profoundly different – often as opposites.

So, we need to try to get our heads around the socially constructed dichotomies that have played an important role in justifying and naturalizing the systems of power that we’ve inherited. These dichotomies are not only crucial to understanding our past, they are key to understanding and dismantling the systems of violence and exploitation we face today. They also help us see how interwoven various systems of power are, from gendered violence, to institutional racism to the fossil fuel industry.

In what follows I’m going to name some pretty painful elements of this culture, including racist and sexist stereotypes. To understand this culture, and how it erases, justifies and normalizes all kinds of violence and exploitation, we have to take a clear eyed look at some devastating ideas. What makes that worse, is that if we’re honest, most of us will find that these ideas have made their way into our own thinking about the world. And for many listeners, they may be just one more reminder of the daily indignities of living in this society.

Sometimes, when I’m teaching, I’ll put a T-chart up on the board – like a big cross. On the top left side, I’ll write “human” and on the top right I’ll write “Nature.” Human and Nature are a classic dichotomy. Students then brainstorm some of the cultural meanings associated with each. It doesn’t take them long to see that this culture frames them as opposites. We end up creating a list that usually looks about like this.

Humans: Civilized

Nature: Wild

Humans: Dominant

Nature: Submissive

Humans: subject, or actors

Nature: objects, acted upon

Human: Rational

Nature: Irrational, unthinking

Human: Owner

Nature: Property

Human: Master

Nature: Wild and in need of taming

The list goes on. Safe/Dangerous. Ordered/Chaotic. If you wanted, you could begin to build your own list. There’s a lot more to be added.

Remember, this list that we’re building isn’t about naming what’s true. Most of us know on some level that this stuff isn’t true. It’s about noting the cultural meanings that function in the background of our minds, and which may actually influence how we think and behave.

Note how much of this is about defining relationships. Dominant/Submissive. Owner/owned. Master/tamed. These ideas call into being certain ways of relating to the non-human world. And they make those relationships feel inevitable….natural.

This human/nature dichotomy is so powerful that we even apply it to ourselves, dividing our being into opposing parts. We have a mind which we frame as human and a body that we frame as natural. Many of us spend a good deal of time and money trying to tame our bodies. Perhaps even more powerfully, many of our religious traditions draw a hard line between our souls – which are sacred and not of this world – and our bodies – which are profane and worldly, the source of our sins. As Wendell Berry wrote: “Perhaps the greatest disaster of human history is one that happened to or within religion: that is, the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from the creation.” The dichotomy of the holy and the profane devalues the world, and all the living beings that constitute it, including, I’d argue, us. We’re left with, in the words of the theologian Matthew Fox, a deep “cosmological loneliness.”

I’ll then put another T-chart on the board, for another dichotomy – another division grounded in this culture. On the left side, I write masculine, and the right, feminine.

At this point, you could probably hit pause, and fill this in on your own. But these are some of the meanings we often write down:

Masculine: Strong

Feminine: Weak

Masculine: Dominant

Feminine: Submissive

Masculine: Rational

Feminine: Irrational, emotional

Masculine: Protector, provider

Feminine: Vulnerable, dependant

Masculine: Active Subject

Feminine: Passive Object

Of course the list could go on and on. And of course it would vary at different times and places. These are, after all, cultural creations, subject to constant change. And they’ve certainly changed over time. Still, they persist in U.S. society today.

These are not just meanings. Importantly, they are also roles. It’s as if we’re all actors in a kind of play, and, given the masculine or feminine roles, we’re all expected to read our scripts as written, and relate to one another as such. And of course most of the institutions of our society have been historically (and often still are) organized according to these roles and the power relations they imply: Husband/wife. Doctor/Nurse. Dentist/Hygienist. Pilot/flight attendant. Boss/Secretary. Principal/Teacher. And so on. Each are gendered roles in gendered institutions, and each concentrates power in predictable ways. These meanings matter because they don’t only shape our thinking. They shape our behavior and organize our institutions. They organize power.

Interestingly many scholars have argued compellingly that these definitions of gender were created for the purpose of organizing unequal relations of power – determining who serves whom and how. In just one example, the social scientist Silvia Federici argues in her remarkable book Caliban and the Witch, that the rise of capitalism required the fragmenting of the communal aspects of medieval peasant life and particularly women’s power within it. The Witch Hunts that spanned the 16th-17th Centuries, she argues, were actually a form of class war waged by European elites against poor and working class women. The result, she argues, was the redefinition of femininity along the lines we just outlined, framing women as irrational and dangerous – shews in need of taming. The centuries long campaign of public torture and terror that goes by the name “the witch hunts” attempted to brake women’s communal ties, their economic independence and the peasant uprisings they often led. Despite this continuous assault, various groups of women in all kinds of contexts have been resisting these forces ever since.

Federicci’s argument is far more complex than we can tackle here. But the point, for our purposes, is that this culture’s ideas about gender aren’t just wrong or cruel (which of course they are). Even more, they’re functional to a specific system of power. They call into being certain relationships of domination and exploitation, which get branded as natural. It’s just human nature, we’re told. Just the way things are.

The last T-chart to go up on the board is labeled with the words “white” and “black.”

Like “human” and “nature,” and like “masculine” and “feminine,” “white” and “black” are social constructions – dichotomies invented by people. Historians have a pretty clear understanding of when, where and why racial categories were invented. And, perhaps by now, you can guess the gist of the story. Racial categories function to legitimize various forms of power, historically and today. They tell a story about who can enslave whom. About whose land can be taken by whom. And whose voice – and indeed whose life – really matters within this society.

So my students and I begin the ugly task of filling in our T-chart. It usually ends up looking something like this.

White: Civilized

Black: Savage

White: Safe

Black: Dangerous

White: Clean

Black: Dirty

White: Rational

Black: Irrational

White: Moral

Black: Perverse

White: Human

Black: Not fully human

We could go on. But you get the picture.

Over a century ago, the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out that the act of representation was an act of power. One of the powers of dominant groups in a society – in this case, white people – is to represent themselves and to represent others. In other words, white folks have had the power to define “whiteness” for themselves and “blackness” for black people.

More recently, the black feminist sociologist Patrical Hill Collins built on this insight, arguing that racial stereotypes aren’t just generalizations about a racial group – which would wrong because they erase individual differences. Rather, she suggests that racial stereotypes were strategically developed by white elites to justify specific forms of exploitation and violence. So for example, when white slavers framed the black men they enslaved as dangerous – especially to white women – they justified a whole regime of violent repression to maintain black men’s subordination and punish anyone who fought back. Even more, Collins argues that white slavers developed gender specific and class specific stereotypes, which were applied to people according to the specific types of labor they were forced into on plantations. For example, enslaved men who worked in the fields were framed as strong but dangerous, and enslaved women who worked in the master’s home were framed as maternal and safe – the mammy stereotype. She called these representations controlling images. Images that function to maintain a certain kind of race class and gender hierarchy.

There’s much more to Collin’s argument than we can address here, but the point, for our purposes, is that these socially constructed categories aren’t just bad ideas. They’re tools of power. And they’ve functioned to erase and legitimize some of the most horrific things that we humans have ever done to one another.

Some listeners might be wondering what all of this has to do with the climate crisis. These seem like very different issues. And indeed, in many respects they are.

But consider the remarkable similarities between each of these socially constructed dichotomies: Human/Nature, Masculine/Feminine, White/Black. They aren’t exactly the same, for sure. But they sure do rhyme.

Note how each creates roles and calls into being certain kinds of relationships: Relationships of domination of subordination. Relations that frame the dominant groups as rational (humans, men, white people) and the subordinate groups (nature, women, black people and other people of color) as irrational and wild. They frame that encourage the dominant groups to tame and use the subordinate groups. They frame the dominant groups as active subjects, while framing the subordinate groups as passive objects; things to be used.

Modern systems of power, from settler colonialism to capitalism to imperialism, rest upon socially constructed categories. These categories serve a purpose. They justify violence and exploitation and erase the harm they cause, at least in the minds of those perpetrating the violence.

What does it mean that patriarchy, white supremacy and extractive capitalism all rest upon such similar ideological foundations? Can this insight offer us clues about how to dismantle these systems? Given how interwoven these systems are, can we really tackle the roots of the climate crisis if we don’t also tackle white supremacy and patriarchy?

On the one hand, this can feel really overwhelming. How do we go up against such massive interlocking systems of power?

But on the other hand, as Audre Lorde and many others have pointed out, when we see how intersecting these systems really are, we don’t only see the size and power of the system, we also begin to see our many potential partners in its dismantling.

Maybe this is overly simplistic or trite. But I’m going to say it anyway because I feel it’s true. If the question is, “How do we go up against such a massive interlocking system of power? A system so effectively built on division…” Maybe the answer is “together.”

In this episode, we’ve explored some of the walls in our minds. Next episode, we’ll examine how the stories we tell shape the lives we live.

If you’ve found this podcast to be helpful, consider sharing it with a friend. Thanks for listening.

Attribution

Transcript for “Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis – Chapter 3: The Wall Built in Our Minds” by Ben Cushing, published by Podbean, is included with permission.

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Transcript for Figure 4.1, Tourists In Colombia Can Now Take Jungle Hikes With Ex-FARC Guerrilla Guides

[Mary Louise Kelly, Host]: Colombia is home to snowcapped Andean peaks and lush Amazon jungle, an ideal vacation destination. But drug violence and a long-running guerrilla conflict has kept tourists away for decades. In 2016, Colombia’s largest guerrilla group disarmed, and now some ex-combatants are guiding tourists through former war zones. For our international travel series Wish You Were Here, reporter John Otis takes us into the jungle with former militants.

[Crosstalk in Spanish.]

[John Otis, Reporter]: I’m with a small group of tourists preparing to rappel down a canyon in southern Colombia. It’s a 150-foot drop next to a massive waterfall, but we’re with a couple of pros.

[Jairo]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Otis]: Our guides, the husband-and-wife team of Jairo and Daisy are intimately familiar with this jungle terrain. For years, they patrolled here as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist rebel group known as the FARC.

[Daisy]: (Speaking Spanish)

[Otis]: To escape from army troops, Daisy tells us, the rebels sometimes had to rappel down cliffs with just tree vines – though, for us tourists, they’ve provided ropes and safety harnesses.

[Daisy]: (Speaking Spanish)

[Otis]: These were things you had to do during the war to save your life, she says.

[Crosstalk in Spanish.]

[Otis]: When the war ended five years ago, 13,000 FARC guerrillas laid down their weapons, but many lacked skills to secure jobs in the cities. So with funding from the Norwegian government, about 30 of them set up a tourism business in Mesetas, a town that used to be in rebel territory.

[Unidentified Person 1]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Otis]: They attract a lot of tourists from Bogota, a six-hour drive away. The most popular activity is rafting, here on the Guejar River, which features swimming holes, waterfalls and plenty of rapids.

[Sound of rafters yelling.]

[Otis]: Despite the thrills, sightseeing with former guerrillas does feel a bit odd. Though it claimed to be waging war on behalf of Colombia’s poor, the FARC also trafficked cocaine, carried out massacres and kidnapped civilians for ransom.

[Felix Sanabria]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Otis]: Former rebel Felix Sanabria, who heads the tourism agency, insists that the FARC fought for a just cause and claims its war atrocities haven’t scared away visitors.

[Sanabria]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Otis]: Tourists want to hear directly from us why we went into the hills to fight and what we’re up to today, Sanabria tells me. No one has said they don’t want to be with us because we used to be guerrillas. Indeed, the whole idea is to give tourists a taste of what their lives are really like.

[Unidentified Person 2]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Otis]: Rather than a fancy hotel, for example, we bunked down at a resettlement camp deep in the jungle, which is home to 80 former FARC rebels. Alongside them, we eat rice, beans and chicken stew in a rustic mess hall. The guerrilla experience costs about $125 per person.

[Crosstalk in Spanish.]

[Otis]: At night, we sit around a campfire as Marcos Alvis, a former FARC commander, fields our questions about the war.

[Marcos Alvis]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Manuela Jimenez]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Otis]: One member of our group, Bogota high school student Manuela Jimenez, asks if Alvis has ever killed anyone.

[Alvis]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Otis]: He explains that amid the chaos of combat, it was usually impossible to tell. Then comes another tough question – why did the FARC kidnap so many people?

[Alvis]: (Speaking Spanish).

[Otis]: Rather than explaining, Alvis, who now has tears in his eyes, apologizes to us and asks our forgiveness for the abuses the rebels committed during the war. Under the peace process, former rebels have been carrying out similar acts of atonement with war victims throughout Colombia. Afterwards, Manuela, the high school student, reflects on the emotional evening.

[Jimenez]: It’s really weird. Like, I’ve heard all my life, FARC did this, FARC did that, they kidnapped people. And now you see them asking for forgiveness and wanting to make up for everything they’ve done. And I don’t think they can make up exactly, but I think if they continue to do this tourism, that it’s really nice. They want to share paradises that have never been seen because of war.

[Sound of waterfall.]

[Otis]: One hidden patch of paradise is that cliff next to the waterfall we’re about to rappel down.

[Crosstalk and laughter.]

[Otis]: Manuela’s mother, Margarita Martinez, had never rappelled before. But after she makes it safely to the bottom, she points out that the former guerrillas guiding her down have been surviving in the wilderness all their lives.

[Margarita Martinez]: So, actually, you gave me much more confidence than just, like, a regular guy who does – you know, who does a little training. So, actually, it was better to be in their hands.

[Cheering.]

[Otis]: And with that, she starts back up the cliff to do it all over again.

For NPR News, I’m John Otis in Mesetas, Colombia.

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Transcript for Figure 4.2, If The World Were 100 People

[Music.]

Text on screen reads:

If the world were 100 people….

• 50 are Women | 50 are Men
• 14 Americas | 11 Europeans | 15 Africans | 60 Asians
• [Circles represent age groups:] Age 0-14 | Age 15-24 | Age 25-54 | Age 55-64 | Age 65+
• 31 Christians | 23 Muslims | 15 Hindus | 7 Buddhists | 16 Unaffiliated
• 12 Mandarin | 6 Spanish | 5 English | 4 Hindi | 3 Arabic – and the rest speak 6,500 other languages!
• 86 Can Read & Write | 14 Cannot
• 15 People make less than $2 Per Day | 56 People make between $2-$10 Per Day | 13 People make between $10-$20 Per Day | 9 People make between $20-$50 Per Day | 6 People make between $50-$90 Per Day | 1 Person makes more than $90 Per Day
• 1 Person Controls 50% of all the money
• 21 Overweight | 63 Healthy | 15 Malnourished | 1 Starving
• 87 Have Clean Water | 13 Do Not
• 77 Have Shelter | 33 Do Not
• 44 Have Internet | 56 Do Not
• 75 Have a Mobile | 25 Do Not
• 7 Attended College | 93 Did Not

If the world were 100 people….

Would we all fight harder for equality?

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Transcript for Figure 4.3, What Is Globalization? Understand Our Interconnected World

Every day, we knowingly or unknowingly experience globalization, the worldwide movement of people, ideas, money, goods, data, drugs, weapons, computer and biological viruses, greenhouse gases and more.

This isn’t new. People and goods have always moved around the world. The Silk Road, a network of trade routes stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to East Asia, facilitated the spread of fabrics, spices, art, weapons, technology, ideas and disease over thousands of years.

What is new, however, is the scale, velocity and range of these flows across borders. Think about the speed at which an infectious disease like Ebola or Zika can spread around the world, or the reach of a financial contagion like the crisis of 2008. Look at your smartphone and think about the global coordination it took to produce. The interconnectedness of the modern world

allows ideas, behaviors, styles, products and news to spread more quickly and broadly than during any other period of history.

But globalization’s effects are complex. What represents an upside for some people might represent a downside for others. Technology, for example, allows billions of people to contact friends and access news from around the world. International supply chains, the networks that turn raw materials into finished items, produce and distribute goods more quickly and cheaply than ever. But the pace of technological innovation has also led to the automation of manufacturing processes, which eliminates jobs.

Trade is another example. Between 1970 and 2015 global exports and imports of goods each multiplied more than 50 times more. Imports lead to increased consumer choices and reduced prices and more trade can strengthen ties between trading partners and promote peace, security and growth. But more trade opportunities and technological advances mean many corporations choose to ship their operations to countries where the labor and natural resources are cheaper, and individuals and companies that can take advantage of international resources experience outsized gains, which widens the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

The effects of globalization, both negative and positive, are a reality. No one can opt out entirely, but governments have many options for responding. They can choose how open or closed they want to be towards trade investment. Visitors, immigrants, refugees, Internet traffic and more.

Governments can also contend with globalization through collective rather than national responses. A set of international institutions and other arrangements has emerged

to manage globalization.

Although some countries view globalization as a threat to local identity, culture or social and political norms, no country can be entirely self-sufficient. The challenge is for individual governments and the world collectively to promote globalization’s benefits while effectively helping the individuals and countries that globalization hurts the most.

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Transcript for Figure 4.6, How The Term ‘Third World’ Is An Outdated Term

[Jay Cameron, narrator]: Do you say, “Third World,” when you describe impoverished countries or conditions? Well, I’ve got good news: Today’s the day you learn that the term is offensive and outdated.

For years, many historians and commentators have been screaming from the rooftops to erase “the Third World” from our vocabulary. The phrase, however, persists.

[Montage of speakers using the term “Third World”]: “We look like the Third World. I mean, honestly, we look like the Third World. This is stuff that you see in another country.”

“It’s a Third World.”

“Third World.”

“Third World country.”

“Third World country.”

[Cameron]: So what gives? Why is the term so contested? Well, for starters, it has a very specific, long expired context. The term originated in the 1950s to map out Cold War alliances. The First World consisted of the capitalist block, led by the U.S. The Second World was the Communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union. The Third World encapsulated the non-aligned countries, which the

superpowers competed to influence. So a Third World originated around now defunct political alliances.

Today the term is stripped of its nuance and loaded with offensive connotations. It’s used to invoke images of extreme poverty, civil unrest, and crumbling infrastructure, producing a false sense of superiority as if those issues aren’t happening in the so-called First World. A quick glance at several indicators shows just how unfettered from reality a First World versus Third

World dichotomy really is.

Take income inequality. According to the World Bank, the United States is the 51st most unequal in the world, sandwiched between Djibouti and Cote d’Ivoire. Australia is 93rd, right between Romania and Syria. If you peruse The Economist’s Democracy Index, you’ll find so-called Third World countries like Uruguay, Mauritius, and Costa Rica listed under full democracy, and on the flawed democracy list, the United States, Belgium, and Italy.

Or how about responses to the Covid-19 outbreak? Surely the richer, more developed countries handled it much better. Not quite. In 2020, Vietnam tallied 1,465 cases and 35 deaths. The United Kingdom: 2.4 million cases and over 73,000 deaths. Oh, and Vietnam has 30 million

more people.

The key takeaway here is that every country has the capacity to fail miserably in certain areas and thrive in others.

If Third World is demeaning, what’s a suitable alternative? Some have adopted terminology like

developing or low-income and middle-income countries. Others opt to divide the world between

the global south and global north. Even better, just compare apples with apples. If it’s education systems you want to contrast, simply stick to that.

Remember, the world is not black and white, so stop dumbing it down.

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Transcript for Figure 4.10, Land Grabbing in Mali

[Narrator]: Mali, in West Africa, is one of the world’s poorest nations. In a practice known as land grabbing, land which has been cultivated by local farmers for generations has been earmarked for development, removing entire communities in the process.

[Boubakary Sidy Coulibaly, dispossessed farmer, speaking in unknown language]: They came unexpectedly and took our land. They beat up the elders, they beat up the women… even the pregnant women.

[Narrator]: Libyan multinational Malibya has been given 100,000 hectares of farmland here in the Ségou region in a 25-billion-dollar project to produce food for export. It’s part of a World Bank strategy to build economies in the developing world through foreign investment. But the reality for Mali’s subsistence farmers – 80 percent of the population – is very different.

[Subsistence Farmer, speaking in unknown language]: They told us they wouldn’t give us the full value of the houses…. They would only be giving us a small amount.

[Narrator]: Women are particularly hard-hit when their land is taken away, making it difficult for them to feed their families. As food prices rise, UNICEF has warned a million children’s lives are at risk.

[Aimina, dispossessed farmer]: Us women depend on farming. If we cannot make our living from farming, we cannot take care of our children, or take care of ourselves.

[Narrator]: Land grabbing has become an increasing problem in the developing world. Since 2008, an area the size of France has been snapped up.

[Renée Vellvé, food security specialist]: The World Bank actually did a report which said that the UK and China lead the land grab race. Africa represents perhaps half of the land grabbing that’s going on right now.

[Narrator]: With land grabbing thought to be a cause of the current food crisis and of increasing instability in countries like Mali, campaigners are calling on the World Bank to stop encouraging this sort of development. For the people of Ségou, the struggle continues.

[Aimina]: We cannot leave our land… we will not leave our land. Because we are farmers and cultivating our land is the only thing we know. It is the only thing we have ever known in all our lives.

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Transcript for Figure 4.11, Globalization theories [clipped at 4:05] | Society and Culture | MCAT | Khan Academy

All right. Let’s take a look at globalization and some of the theories and different perspectives about it. In general, globalization is the sharing of culture and money and products between countries that is happening because of international trade and advances in transportation and communication.

You might think that globalization is a recent development but really International Trade has influenced changes across borders for centuries. Silk and spice trade routes through East Asia that began as early as the first century BCE introduced different cultures and linked the economies of different nations. As did the English and Dutch shipping empires in the 16th century. Globalization is also a social process where people become more and more aware of other cultures and peoples across geographical political and social borders. The economic interdependence of different countries as well as advancements in communication technology and the progress of technology in general have all contributed to globalization.

There are many theories of globalization. Let’s look at World Systems Theory first. World Systems Theory focuses on the importance of the world as a unit rather than looking at individual countries. It divides the world into three regions: core countries, periphery countries, and semi-periphery countries.

Core countries include areas like Western Europe and the United States. These countries have a strong central government with enough tax to support it. They are economically Diversified, industrialized, and relatively independent of outside control. They have strong middle and working classes and focus on higher skill production of material goods rather than raw materials.

Periphery countries are those in Latin America and Africa and tend to have a relatively weak government. They tend to depend on only one type of economic activity like extracting raw materials. There’s a high percentage of poor and uneducated people as well as a small upper class which controls most of the economy and this creates a huge inequality in the population. These countries are greatly influenced by core countries and transnational corporations which can harm the future economic potentials of the periphery countries.

Semi-periphery countries like India and Brazil make up the middle ground between core and periphery. They are often not dominant in international trade but they have a relatively diversified and developed economy. These semi-periphery countries can come either from periphery countries, moving up towards the industrialized core countries, or from core countries, declining toward periphery status.

The World Systems Theory is a fluid model but it is criticized for being too focused on the economy and the core countries and forgetting about culture or even the class struggles of individual countries.

Then we have Modernization Theory, which proposes that all countries follow a similar path of development from a traditional to a modern society. It assumes that with some help traditional countries can develop into modern countries in the same way that today’s modern countries developed in the first place. It looks at the internal social dynamics as the country adapts to new technologies and the political and social changes that occur.

Dependency Theory was a reaction to Modernization Theory and uses the idea of core and periphery countries from the World Systems Theory to look at the inequalities between countries. Basically it is the idea that periphery or third world countries are poor and export resources to the wealthy core or First World countries not because they are in an earlier state of development but because they have been integrated into the world system as an undeveloped country. They have their own structures and features not seen in developed countries and will not accelerate to become a developed nation. They are in an unfavorable economic position that means they don’t even have the opportunity to improve and develop. They’ll remain poor and dependent on wealthier nations.

These are just a few of the theories of globalization. There are lots more that look at culture or social networking, economy, politics, or even goods. The world is now a busy and bustling place where events and things can have an effect around the globe.

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Transcript for Figure 4.15, Apartheid Architecture

In South Africa, the first thing you come across is apartheid architecture – what that did and what impact it has today. So I think apartheid architecture is arguably one of the most genius

architecture that has ever happened, because it has orchestrated not just building but how people live, in people’s lives, far beyond the regime of apartheid architecture.

So what they did was, they came up with this thing called the 40/40 rule so where they would build a 40-square-meter home which would be a labour camp for the majority of the people – black people in South Africa. Place it 40 kilometers away from town, where sort of the white masters lived, and then devoid those communities of economic opportunities and gathering places because those will have political implications with them. And what this did was it forced people to spend 40 percent of their income commuting 40 kilometres to go work in town where only, that’s where the jobs and economic opportunities were. So that’s what back in the 1960s when that was felt and about it in the 25 years ago.

I’m 25 – just when I was born it ended – but the laws might have changed, but the architecture didn’t. So people are still spending 40 percent of their income commuting to work in town today, which then renders them incapable of developing their own homes and their own communities.

And this wasn’t just apartheid architecture. We started looking at different housing projects around the world and we realized the majority of social housing projects around the world have failed. And they have failed because of three reasons. One, for some reason when people are designing for low-income communities they think that they shouldn’t consult them in the designing of their own home. It’s failed because whenever people design low-income communities they seldom put them away from economic opportunities which is ironic because the only reason why you have slums and shanty towns is because people are trying to move closer to work. Three, people design these social housing projects in a box, which is almost impossible to add on as the family grows in number and in economy so it practically forces people to stay within that low-income bracket.

So I partnered with Andrews University masters architecture class to do the opposite of what every social housing project has done and that way we did our first pilot project in a bungalow with Ubuntu Design Group.

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Transcript for Figure 4.26, The ‘Cost’ Of Globalization

[Narrator]: You’ve been waiting in line for hours to get your hands on the newest version of your smartphone, promising quicker access to information while featuring quick and intuitive on-the-go banking, a built in GPS to help you get to that concert you’ve been so desperately waiting for, and of course, the easiest tools to help you share that cute cat video on your social networks.

The world is at your fingertips. While our smartphones can easily connect us to the rest of the world, the processes and resources involved in manufacturing, distributing, and selling smartphones to customers are not so simple. iPhones for example are the direct result of over hundreds of thousands of people spanning over nineteen countries and three continents. From concept and design to the different components and phases involved in the development of the iPhone, these components each have a different development process and are often sourced from a variety of countries. From semiconductors then accelerometers, to memory chips and application processors, these parts are all eventually sent to China where factory workers follow a meticulous one hundred and forty one step process to assemble an iPhone in less than 24 hours. By the end of 2014, over 70 million iPhones were assembled and shipped to stores across the world. The cross-border production of the iPhone represents just one of the processes of globalization.

International communities, organizations, corporations, and individuals are becoming increasingly interconnected through economics, politics, culture, and the environment. The increase of countries opening their borders has promoted substantial proportions of global trade. In economically developing parts of the world, lower wages relaxed laws, and reduced taxes have made it more profitable for multinational corporations like Apple to manufacture products overseas instead of in their home countries.

Undeniably, globalization has helped consumers access and create a diversity of products

and services at a lower price and at a quicker pace. Although the idea of increased international trade and faster technological development seems like a pretty good thing, is globalization beneficial to everyone? What is the true cost of achieving that lower price point? Sourcing cheaper labor often results in hiring overseas workers that migrate thousands of miles in search of employment, like the many who migrate to Shenzhen, China to work for the Taiwanese owned technology company Foxconn. These deprived workers struggle to feed their families and difficulty obtaining adequate health care because they pull in less than a living wage, earning as low as an equivalent of $1.78 US an hour. Foxconn is frequently in the spotlight for their unethical factory conditions, and strenuous work hours, and their unbearable working conditions resulted in fourteen workers committing suicide in 2010.

Similar work conditions have been documented in mineral mines around the world. The quest to obtain minerals has not only contributed to harsh mining conditions and increasing environmental degradation, but has also supported the funding of the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo through the illegal mining and selling of conflict minerals to technology companies around the world. As technology allows us to connect with one another on a global scale, this awareness has mobilized individuals around the world to campaign against these injustices, encouraging companies to become more transparent and share information about their products’ origins. These companies are taking action by mandating safer work conditions, enforcing fines for in-compliant suppliers, and even threatening to move business elsewhere. New companies are also following suit in response to the ongoing criticism of the technology industry. Fairphone, a Netherlands based smartphone company is employing these standards by committing to ethics based production and sourcing methods.

Where do we go from here? It’s easy to point the finger at corporations and blame them for the negative social and environmental impacts of smartphone production, but is there something more we can do as consumers? What is our responsibility as part of the global supply chain? The next time you pickup your phone to check out that cute cat video, remember the combined efforts of the people around the world who worked to make your phone. The world is truly held at our fingertips.

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Transcript for Figure 4.27, Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

[Hans Rosling]: Visualization is right at the heart of my own work – I teach global health. And I know having the data is not enough. I have to show it in ways people both enjoy and understand.

Now, I’m going to try something I’ve never done before: animating the data in real space. With a bit of technical assistance from the crew. So here we go.

First, an axis for health: life expectancy from 25 years to 75 years. And down here an axis for wealth: income per person, four hundred four thousand and

$40,000. So down here is poor and sick, and up here is rich and healthy.

Now I’m going to show you the world 200 years ago in 1810. Here come over countries Europe, brown; Asia, red; Middle East, green; Africa South of Sahara, blue; and the Americas, yellow. And the size of the country bubbles showed the size of the population and in 1810. It was pretty crowded down there, wasn’t it? All countries were sick and poor. Life expectancy were below 40 in all countries and only the UK and the Netherlands were slightly better off — but not much.

And now I start the world. The Industrial Revolution makes countries in Europe and elsewhere move away from the rest, but the colonized countries in Asia and Africa, they are stuck down there. And eventually the Western countries get healthier and healthier.

And now we slow down to show the impact of the First World War and the Spanish flu epidemic. What a catastrophe. And now I speed up through the 1920s and the 1930s, and in spite of the Great Depression, Western countries forge on towards greater wealth and health. Japan and some others try to follow, but most countries stay down here now.

After the tragedies of the Second World War, we stop a bit to look at the world in 1948. 1948 was a great year. The war was over. Sweden topped the medal table at the Winter Olympics, and I was born. But the differences between the countries of the world was wider than ever. The United States was in the front, Japan was catching up, Brazil was way behind, Iran was getting a little richer from oil, but still had short lives, and the Asian giants – China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia – they were still poor and sick down here.

But look what is about to happen here. We go again in my lifetime. Former colonies gained independence, and then finally they started to get healthier and healthier and healthier. And in the 1970s then, countries in Asia, Latin America started to catch up with the Western countries. They became the emerging economies, some in Africa. Follows some Africans were stuck in civil war and others hit by HIV.

And now we can see the world today in the most up-to-date statistics. Most people today live in the middle. But there are huge differences at the same time between the best of countries and the worst of countries, and there are also huge inequalities within countries. These bubbles show country averages, but I can split them. Take China. I can split it into provinces. There goes Shanghai. It has the same wealth and health as Italy today, and there is the poor inline province Guizhou, it is like Pakistan. And if I split it further, the rural parts are like Ghana in Africa.

And yet despite the enormous disparities today, we have seen 200 years of remarkable progress. That huge historical gap between the west and the rest is now closing. We have become an entirely new converging world and I see a clear trend into the future. With aid, trade, green technology, and peace, it’s fully possible that everyone can make it to the healthy, wealthy corner.

Well, what you have seen in the last few minutes is a story of 200 countries, shown over 200 years and beyond. It involves plotting 120,000 numbers – pretty neat.

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Transcript for Figure 5.1, In the Colombian Amazon, Peace Has Environmental Consequences

[Narrator]: A […] peace deal brought big changes for one of Nicaragua’s southern neighbors, Colombia. The peace deal ended a half-century-long conflict between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC – a conflict that killed more than 220,000 people and created one of the worst crises of internally displaced people in the world.

The peace deal also opened up parts of Colombia that were considered too dangerous to venture into for decades, and that’s had some side effects for the environment. Forests in former FARC territory are being chopped down and burned at record rates now that there’s a power vacuum in remote parts of the country. Reporter Gena Steffans is based in Colombia and recently reported on this from deep in the Amazon rainforest.

[Gena Steffens, reporter]: When you go down these rivers during the burning season, the atmosphere is just filled with a thick, yellow smoke. And as you’re going down the river you see these towers of smoke just billowing up into the sky.

[Narrator]: Steffans says the area being deforested grew by 44% in the year after Colombia’s peace deal was finalized.

[Steffens]: We’re talking almost 360,000 American football fields. I mean, the scale of the deforestation is just something that nobody has ever really seen before in this region.

[Narrator]: And who is responsible for felling all these trees?

[Steffens]: There’s two main groups that are responsible. One is just average campesinos, or, you know, rural peasants, who are taking advantage of the fact that the FARC aren’t there to increase the land that they use for agricultural production or raising cattle. But also there’s been, apparently, individuals with a lot of economic resources who are sponsoring groups of workers to go into the most isolated reaches of the forest and cutting down more than 100 hectares at a time, which is huge. So it’s basically related to this land grab where these individuals are taking advantage of the power void to take control of land that essentially doesn’t belong to anybody.

[Narrator]: So, bad for the environment, but obviously this land represents an opportunity for cattle ranchers, then, doesn’t it?

[Steffens]: Yes, absolutely. One guy who I visited has only a few hectares to his name and the only way that he can support his family is to cut down a few hectares more of trees and put a few cows on there in order to sell the milk, because no other crops grow on the soil. And so, the only economic opportunity that he sees in his life is cattle ranching. And the other opportunity would be to cultivate coca, which is illegal.

[Narrator]: So you’re really describing a crisis, Gena. Take us back, if you would, to how the FARC protected the forest in [area]. Were they environmentalists by default because people were too scared to go into the jungles, or did they actually have a real strategy for environmental protection?

[Steffens]: Well, I think a lot of people will say that the FARC enacted environmental controls because they were, you know, these great environmentalists, but – and, OK, I think that there is some truth to that – but probably more so, I think it was a tactical necessity. Because, this is a guerilla army whose survival depends on not being detected by the Colombian military. So, I mean, if you’re flying over the forest in a helicopter, and you see a patch of deforested land, you’re immediately going to think, oh, somebody’s there. I think that more than anything, limiting deforestation was a strategy the FARC used to protect themselves.

[Narrator]: So, if you were on the ground in the 80s, how was the FARC actually protecting the jungle – these trees?

[Steffens]: Basically, the FARC would tell everybody, okay, if you’re going to cut down trees, you can only deforest an area of up to five hectares per year. And then, to go further, they basically drew a line in the ground and said, anything beyond this line, don’t touch it. This land’s off limits. And they’re the only authority figures and nobody is going to argue against them.

[Narrator]: I mean, the villagers and campesinos obey because, because FARC, right?

[Steffens]: Yeah, exactly.

[Narrator]: It’s ironic that the Colombian government today doesn’t have that same kind of reputation and force to say, don’t cross this line.

[Steffens]: Yeah, exactly. They are extremely underfunded. And they just don’t have the resources or the personnel to tackle this type of thing. And, also, it’s important to note that the bulk of the damage that’s occurring is happening in areas that are so isolated. They’re just… they’ve always been out of reach to the Colombian state.

[Narrator]: You also alluded to new farmland for coca. I’m curious, does it look like things are going to get worse before they actually improve?

[Steffens]: I think so. Colombia – until recently – had a plan to basically reach zero net deforestation by year 2020 and the Colombian Minister of the Environment recently came out and said, sorry, we’re not going to be able to reach that plan. So, I think it’s definitely going to get worse. And until somebody tells the people that they can’t continue doing this, people are going to keep doing it.

[Narrator]: Gena Steffans is a reporter and photographer based in Florencia in southwest Colombia. You can read her story at PRI.org and see her photos at our Instagram. You can follow us at PRI The World.

[Steffens]: Thank you.

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Transcript for Figure 5.6, (Jamaica) IMF Decimating One Country After Another

[Michael Manley, former prime minister of Jamaica]: First of all, you go to the private banking system and you say, well, can I get a private banking loan, because I’m strapped for cash and I need some support, and I am having trouble paying my overseas bills.

[Stanley Fischer, Deputy Director, International Monetary Fund]: When the private banks won’t lend to you, then you got to do something if you’re leader of a country. And typically what you’ve got to do is to cut back your spending in some way, and try and get more money so that the impact of those cutbacks are not as severe as they otherwise would be. And it’s at that point that you generally come to the IMF.

[Manley]: What you really need is to sit down with them and say, look, can I work out a 5-year program? And in the meantime, I’m strapped for some cash, so can you help me up front get out of the cash bind? And then put it in the context of a long-term development plan? And they say, no. Long-term development is your problem. We are here only to see who do you owe the money to? Why are you in a bind? And we lend you some money in a very short time frame at full interest rate to get you out of the bind. And they then impose upon you tremendous restrictions in what you can spend.

[Fischer]: And then we reach agreement on a set of measures on the budget, on the exchange rate, on monetary policy, on interest rates, on banks, on maybe privatization, and say, yep, we think this could solve your problems.

[Manley]: And you said to them, but if I do it that way, when I finish repaying you, I’m going to be in the bind all over, because this can’t solve my problem. This is not our problem.

[Dr. Michael Witter, Professor of Economics, University of West Indies]: The whole idea was to set conditions which the government could not meet, and when the government failed to meet them, you would have to renegotiate a new loan in which the conditions became tighter. So the IMF didn’t say, cut out this education program or cut out this health program. What the IMF said is, you must spend only so much money on health and education and the implication of that was that you had to cut out some programs.

[Witter, speaking in a classroom]: Essentially what the IMF wanted us to do was to devalue our currency. That’s the first thing, to make our dollar cheaper.

[Fischer]: They needed to expand their exports and diminish their imports, and the best way of doing that is to make foreign currency more expensive.

[Witter]: And since our society is so heavily dependent on imported food, imported fuel, imported books to go to school, imported medicine, when we devalue, the cost of those things we import go up to the citizens. And as a result, the economy today is much more under the control of foreigners – not necessarily through direct ownership, but through the mechanism of debt. In the 1970s, we owed $800 million. By the end of the 1980s, we owed $4 billion. Nowadays we owe $7 billion. So the debt is rising and all the time the debt is rising, our capacity to export to produce is getting less.

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Transcript for Figure 5.10, How Junk Food Is Transforming Brazil

[Music.]

[Indigenous Speaker 1, translated to English]: We depend on the river to live. You live a calm life. You can eat everything fresh. Whether it’s açaí, or vegetables, or shrimp, or fish. But it’s changed a lot now.

[In text on screen]: Multinational food companies are searching to expand their markets for processed foods. In Brazil, sales of these products have more than doubled in 10 years – and have reached the most remote parts of the country.

[Carlos Monteiro, Public Health Professor, University of São Paulo]: Ultra-processed foods – soft drinks, salty and sweet snacks, and a lot of ready meals – are actually not foods, they are formulations.

[Sean Westcott, Head of Global Product and Technology at Nestlé]: I’m a big believer in what we do at Nestlé, where we use science and technology to enhance nature, not to replace nature. We’re in this almost utopian period where food’s abundant. It’s cheap. We solve the problem of food security, but in doing that, we didn’t anticipate what the impact would be. Now we focus on things like reducing salt and reducing saturated fat.

[Monteiro]: In epidemiology, we see the vector of disease. So, mosquitoes are the vector of malaria. The vector of obesity is ultra-processed foods. Obesity is increasing all over the world. In Brazil, every year we’ll have 1 million new cases of obesity.

[In text on screen]: For the first time in modern history, there are more obese than underweight adults in the world. The spread of high-calorie, low-nutrient food parallels a rise in chronic disease. Critics say this phenomenon is fueled by aggressive marketing in developing countries.

[Monteiro]: When you see marketing in the U.S., it’s trying to change people from brands. In Brazil, it’s to make people change from traditional diets to ultra-processed foods. What Nestlé and other companies are doing is they go to these small villages to get these new clients.

[Westcott]: As consumers climb up the economic ladder, they get to a point where their lifestyles change. We provide a very good choice for them. It’s all about taste at the end. But not taste at any cost. We know that if we don’t make a product that tastes good, it doesn’t matter how nutritional or how good for you it is. If it’s not being consumed, it’s not having an impact on the diet.

[Monteiro]: The success of these big food corporations will be the destruction of dietary diversity.

[Indigenous Speaker 2, translated to English]: Nestlé products are tastier. They have more nutrients, vitamins. They’re good. If we could afford it, we’d buy Nestlé for everybody.

[Monteiro]: We are in a transition in Brazil. When the transition is over, it will be much more difficult to go back.

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Transcript for “How Junk Food is Transforming Brazil | Times Documentary” by The New York Times is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 5.16, The Grameen Model: Technology + People

[Narrator]: By 2021, 150 million people could be living below the extreme poverty threshold of less than 1 dollar and 90 cents a day, due to the economic downturn caused by the Coronavirus. When we measure those who lack basic shelter or clean water, and children who go hungry, the ranks of the poor will swell by 240 to 490 million this year.

Since 1997, Grameen Foundation has worked to empower the poor, especially women, to create a world without poverty and hunger, because we know people living in poverty have the strength and ingenuity they need to build better lives. What they lack is opportunity, and they have never needed it or us more.

Experience tells us the best way to deliver opportunity is with a technology plus people approach. We start by designing human-centered digital solutions to connect the poor with resources and information. Then we train local Grameen community agents to bring those solutions to women and families, regardless of whether they have Internet, smartphones, or the ability to read. It’s a model that works to help the poor build assets, survive crises, and increase resilience. It’s a model that works. Because as powerful as tools like digital technology and mobile phones are in our fight to end poverty, none are more potent than the human to human interaction of neighbor helping neighbor.

When we recruit, train, and equip a local agent, she becomes a micro entrepreneur herself, ready to offer her neighbors solutions aimed at eradicating two systemic causes of poverty: lack of financial empowerment and poor crop productivity. When an agent brings financial inclusion

to her clients, she delivers more than relief from long and costly trips to a distant bank. She delivers the ability to collect, send, save, and borrow money. When an agent works with smallholder farmers on data-driven farm plans, she delivers more than best practices to improve crop yields, she delivers a business plan that helps ensure lasting success.

In every case the Grameen agent empowers her client with agency to make decisions, an opportunity to unleash her own capacity. The result is a chain reaction of measurable outcomes including increased income, food security, educational opportunities, and sustainability. On average, a Grameen community agent directly impacts 150 beneficiaries, each typically living in a five-member household. This means each agent indirectly impacts about 750 people. And like ripples on a pond, the economic impacts of each agent’s influence benefit entire communities.

Underlying our model is a deep understanding that agents and the poor women they serve do not live in a vacuum. That’s why we work to strengthen women’s ecosystems with programs that promote gender equity, peer support, market engagement, health, and nutrition. Since 2016 we’ve reached nearly 13 million people, and we will keep reaching because our goal is to support as fully as possible every woman who has the courage to break free from poverty. To show her that Grameen Foundation, its partners, and donors believe in her. Will you believe too?

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Transcript for “The Grameen Model: Technology + People” by Grameen Foundation is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 5.17, After the Green Revolution

[Music.]

[Dr. Tarak Kate, Director, Dharametra]: In the last two decades, the cost of production has gone so high and the farmers are getting so much indebted, more than 275,000 – remember the figure, more than 275,000 – farmers committed suicide in this country.

After independence, the country was facing a food crisis. The government decided to become self-reliant in food production and so they decided to adopt the Green Revolution technology.

Green Revolution promotes a package of Technology, a use of holding crop varieties, use of chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides. And, of course, there has been a very positive impact in the sense that our grain production has increased four times in the last 50 years and we can boast that we can produce enough food for the ever-growing population. But at the same time, the soil has been degraded, the soil and water has become volatile, even the food has become poison.

The farmers, they-they borrow money from the moneylenders at a very exorbitant price. They borrow all the inputs from the agro business centers, so it has just become the cash economy. They have [unintelligible] significantly very high number of farmer’s suicide. This is very pathetic to note and this is the gift of Green Revolution technologies.

[Sonali Phate, Microbiologist]: The traditional farmers very well know how to keep the soil productivity over the years, so some innovative farmers came up with the solution.

Sanjeevak is a fermented product of cow dung and cow urine. It is the aerobic fermentation process. The beneficial microflora grows inside the [unintelligible]. It requires only 10 kg of cow dung. Even if the farmer is not having the cattle, you can collect the 10 kg of cow dung from a neighboring farm.

[Bapu Mahajan, Farmer, translation into English]: Although I got good yields for the first few years, the use of fertilizers degraded the soil quality, and over the years the yields decreased a lot.

[Kate]: Generally what happens that the scientists they consider to be belonging to the elite class and they don’t want to interact at the same level with a local [unintelligible] researchers so they want to pass on knowledge to the farmers. They are not in position to learn from the farmers.

[Phate]: The conventional research approach is not directly related to the problems faced by the farmers, especially growing the farms organically.

[Mahajan, translation into English]: I believe that experience is the best ‘Guru.’ The scientist does a scientific study of a problem and finds a solution in the laboratory. The farmer works on the farm to find a solution based on first-hand experience.

[Jeevansingh Pakal, Farmer, translation into English]: I believe a farmer can also be a very good scientist. He applies his mind to the problem he is facing on the farm.

[Kate]: Whatever problem they face, they follow those problems and they try to evolve their own solutions. And their solutions – whatever solutions they come out – they are true to the ground reality.

[Mahajan, translation into English]: It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. It used to take almost a whole day to apply Sanjeevak, and the smell and Sanjeevak spilling on the worker’s clothes made them reluctant to do this job. Eventually I developed a tank automation system, which automatically applies Sanjeevak to the fields – after searching for an alternative for almost a year.

[Kate]: I feel that scientist and village scientists, they should consider themselves to be an equal level, and both can learn from each other.

[Phate]: Traditional knowledge has to be validated scientifically and modified or improved so that it is acceptable and applicable everywhere. So we prepared the Sanjeevak with five formulation, different ingredients, to test its effect on productivity and growth of crops. We found out there is up to 43 percent increase in their yield over the chemicals and up to 53 percent increase over the control without addition of any fertilizer to the Sanjeevak, saving over the inputs of cost is up to 75% with this NGO over chemical fertilizers.

[Pakal, translation into English]: There is a language problem when talking to the scientists. They use complicated language and sometimes it is hard to communicate.

[Phate]: These organic techniques – they have to do it on their farms, hard work is required. We have to keep their inspirations at high level so that they keep on working with organic inputs.

[Ganesh Birajdar, Researcher]: Part of the trouble we find when we go to promote it is the kind of system right now is there because of that farmer’s attitude, that nothing is in our control. We don’t feel like we can change it, so before how I had to talk about we can actually do it and that is actually a big problem.

[Mahajan, translation into English]: Farmers are committing suicide in this region because of low crop yields, and I am getting record-breaking yields. So this innovation is like 24-carat gold, which is always pure and precious wherever it is used in the world.

[Phate]: I joined Dharametra to use my knowledge for society. I learned how to identify the problems of organic farmers and how to work on that. Socially, I am attached to the society as well as I am academically attached with the scientific community, and that’s great.

[Kate]: A scientist is like a honey bee. By identifying one technology at one place, passing it to another place, and from another place for the third place, fourth, like that – you are actually enriching nature. You are working for the rural poor, we are changing their life so these are the aspects that are very, very satisfying.

So here I want to caution Africa not to repeat the same mistakes that we have committed in India. Ecological agriculture, which is very sound ecologically and economically viable, should be followed and that could be the future not only for South Africa but the whole African continent.

[Music.]

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Transcript for “After the Green Revolution” by The Sustainability Institute is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 6.10, The Fight to Make Bad Jobs Better

[Narrator]: When politicians talk about workers, they tend to focus on certain types of jobs.

[Political ad 1]: “Bernie Sanders stood for American workers.”

[Political ad 2]: “It’s American workers that remake this country.”

[Narrator]: But in the U.S., retail workers have outnumbered manufacturing workers since 2002.

And food service workers aren’t far behind. These jobs are in every community – they’re the base of the service economy. So with the recession in the rear-view mirror, it’s worth asking: can these jobs be good jobs?

[Music.]

[Striking workers]: What do we want?

Contract!

When do we want it?

Now!

[Narrator]: These Kroger workers are rallying outside a grocery store in West Virginia because their employer wouldn’t meet their demands, stalling negotiations for a new union contract.

[Fred Hogan, Kroger employee]: It’s not like we’re asking for the sun, the moon and the stars.

We want a modest living wage and we want the maintenance of our medical benefits.

[Narrator]: Kroger eventually agreed to a new 3-year contract for over 4,000 workers. It includes pay raises and zero cuts to their benefits.

By negotiating collectively, service workers can secure an hourly wage that is six dollars higher on average than nonunion wages. But they are a small minority. Private sector union membership in the U.S. has fallen to 6.4% of all workers. It’s even lower in the retail and food service industries.

The decline of unions in the U.S. was caused in part by larger trends that have shifted

the types of jobs available, especially for those without a college degree. During the 80s, 90s and 2000s, several occupations that used to provide a stable middle-class income grew more slowly than both higher-wage and lower-wage jobs. That’s partly due to new technologies: robots in factories, computer software in offices.

[David Autor, Labor Economist, MIT]: The decline in the middle has been steep. A lot of that has been growth at the top, which is good. People have moved out of the middle and into professional, technical and managerial jobs. But, the bottom section of the labor market, which comprises maybe 17-18 percentage of jobs, is about a third larger than it was in 1980. And if you look just among people without a college degree it’s much larger still. And that’s the group we should be concerned about.

[Narrator]: The great recession intensified those longer-term trends. Since 2010, the economy has added millions of jobs, but not evenly. The biggest area of growth was in high-skill occupations, mostly for people with 4-year college degrees. Meanwhile workers with a high school diploma were pushed out of middle-skill occupations. And in low-skill jobs, they’re increasingly competing with those who have some college.

[Autor]: We’re adding lots of jobs. The concern is that, many of the jobs that are being added are not good jobs, in terms of offering a reasonable standard of living and job security. And many of the good jobs that are being added are not accessible to typical workers.

[Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut, at Congressional hearing]: Thank you for joining us today to discuss the importance of predictable schedules and incomes for workers.

[Kingia Phillips, at Congressional hearing]: Hello my name is Kingia Phillips. I am a former worker at South Philadelphia Walmart.”

[Phillips]: The juice pallets were the most hard to do. And when you’re pregnant, you’re not supposed to lift above your head, but I had to.

[Narrator]: Kingia came to DC to speak in favor of a federal bill that would regulate work schedules for retail, with the aim of increasing stability in hours and income.

[Phillips]: After I had the baby I asked them could I have my schedule adjusted, a tiny bit. And they told me that we all have kids and they have a job to do, a company to run. And it turned out that they cut my schedule down to 8 hours a week. I was doing 32 hours.

[Narrator]: It’s a common complaint among part time retail workers: that to get enough hours you have to be available to work at any time the store is open, which is especially hard for parents, students, and people with a second job. So after a month, Kingia quit.

[Phillips]: I knew they were just going to tell me to re-open my availability, and that would be the only way for me to make more money and be able to sustain myself and my child.

[Narrator]: The federal proposal faces an uphill battle in a Republican Congress, but since 2014, six cities and the state of Oregon have passed scheduling policies. The details vary from place to place but most of them apply to fast food and retail workers, they require two weeks advance notice of work schedules, with extra pay for subsequent changes that are initiated by the company. Most of the measures also require employers to offer hours to existing employees before hiring more people.

[Carrie Gleason, Director, Fair Workweek Initiative]: So what it does is, a lot of these policies start to balance out the burden of doing business, so that the people who are getting, who are getting paid the lowest aren’t the only ones bearing the cost.

[Narrator]: Policymakers have also moved to increase the minimum wage and require paid sick leave in certain cities and states. It’s a response to the fact that not only are middle-class jobs moving out of reach for non-college workers, but a lot the remaining jobs have also gotten worse since the recession hit.

[Gleason]: In 2005, you could walk into a JC Penney, and it was a stable workforce. People had full-time hours, and health insurance, and even commission. It was a workforce that knew each other, and felt like they could make their job better. By 2008, that workforce was completely contingent. People’s hours were changing from one week to the next. Nobody knew each other.

[Narrator]: The number of involuntary part time workers — those are people working part time who would prefer full-time work — that jumped up during the recession. And the increase was greater for both the retail sector and for leisure and hospitality, which includes restaurants and hotels. This is part of a much broader trend.

A 2016 study found a significant rise in “alternative work arrangements” across the economy. That includes temp workers, contract firm workers and freelancers. And it makes sense: Salaried and full-time workers are fixed costs for employers. Whether revenue is up or down, you have to pay them and fund their benefits. But if you have a pool of more flexible workers whose hours you can dial up and down to match your sales, you can save money, at least in the short term. Those cost-cutting strategies have been enabled by new technologies.

[Gleason]: Today, a lot of big employers are using workforce scheduling technologies, and so it’s an algorithm that’s setting the schedule. And when you do an analysis of when the peak hours are, it’s easier to slot people in for four hour shifts and then rotate it out. But there’s very few companies have systems that basically say, ‘My goal is to try to give people some stability in their hours from one week to the next, and I’m gonna try to match people’s schedules from one week to the next.’

[Narrator]: What this has meant for some workers is schedules and paychecks that change from week to week. A Gallup poll of hourly workers with varying hours found that one out of three said their schedules cause them financial hardship.

[Madison Nardy, Target employee]: Instead of giving me two 8 hour shifts and a 4 hour shift, they would give me 5 4-hour shifts. So I would have to go to school and go to work 5 times a week, instead of working 3 days a week.

The amount of hours they give out is based on sales, which I believe is horrible. One week I’ll have 13 hours, the next I’ll have 25, the next I’ll have 30, then back down to 15. And that — that shows on my paycheck.

[Narrator]: Target and Walmart already post schedules at least a week and a half in advance. Both companies have also raised their minimum wages in recent years. And several retailers have announced an end to the controversial practice of on-call scheduling.

[News Anchor]: On-call shifts require employees to call employers the day before or the day of the potential shift to find out if they’ll be needed to work. If employees aren’t needed, they don’t get paid.

[Narrator]: But they’re a long way from a model like Costco’s which guarantees a minimum amount of weekly hours for both full and part- time workers. The union model for including workers’ input in business decisions has not really moved with the economy into these low-wage service jobs. And it hasn’t been replaced with something else. So if workers feel like they can’t find a voice at their jobs, they’ll likely keep looking for one in the law.

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Transcript for “The Fight to Make Bad Jobs Better” by Vox is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 6.15, Inside Amazon Labor Union: How Workers Took on Amazon and WON

[Music.]

[Cheers.]

[Chris Smalls, president, Amazon Labor Union, to group]: To the first [Amazon] union in American History.

Damn, two years ago, my life changed forever.

[News Anchor 1]: As many as 100 employees at Amazon.com’s Staten Island fulfillment center in New York City plan to walk off the job.

[Smalls]: You know when Covid-19 came to play, Amazon failed us. They dropped the ball. They lied to the public, saying they’re doing all these things. None of that was the reality of our situation.

[Smalls in TV interview]: We’re not provided with anything. We are using scarves. We’re recycling masks. I’ve seen people put garbage bags over themselves.

[Smalls, to group]: I led a walkout – that walkout led to my firing. Then a week after that, a couple weeks after that, maybe a week or two, that memo that came out calling me not smart or articulate. Ironically they also said to make me the face of the whole unionizing efforts which I had no intention.

[Smalls, at rally]: The chief union buster Jeff Bezos ain’t gonna beat us, right? He’s not gonna beat New York, right?

[Smalls]: We traveled the country. We protested in front of every Jeff Bezos mansion and penthouse that you can find on Google. We went down to Alabama last year. They had their first campaign. We saw some things that we thought that we could do better.

[News Anchor 2]: Vote count is in and Amazon has won enough votes to beat the union effort in Alabama.

[Smalls, to group]: We decided to come back home to Staten Island and start unionizing JFK8.

[Smalls, at rally]: We all know what happened in Alabama but let me tell you what also happened in Alabama. They sparked a fuse all across the world.

[Derrick Palmer, VP, Amazon Labor Union]: The lessons that I’ll say that we learned is just to be more interactive with the workers. With Amazon, you know, they like to spend a lot of money on union busting campaigns. So we don’t – if we’re not out there every day, if we’re not consistent, then Amazon can capitalize over that.

[Smalls, at rally]: This is a union town, right? We union strong, right?

[Smalls, to group]: I spent the last 11 months – the folks behind me spent the last 11 months as well – inside, outside the building at the bus stop, earning the trust of these workers, building relationships, raising money, creating GoFundMes for people that was fired, people that was homeless, people living in shelters, paying bills, cable bills, phone bills, feeding them.

[Smalls, outside, talking to workers]: Park on up, come on over! It’s free food!

We had over 20-some barbecues, giving out food every single week, every single day, giving out books, literature.

Got ‘em! I’m fishing. I got you, brother!

[Music.]

[Palmer]: You cannot be fired for signing a union card, you know. That is actually illegal. So me explaining to them what Amazon can do and what they cannot do is very important.

[Smalls, to employees]: We out here every day. You can give you legal representation if you need it. And you’re working what? The 10-hour shift or the 12-hour shift?

[Employee]: 12 hour.

[Smalls]: Yeah, I used to be on RT, too.

[Smalls, to group]: We did whatever it took to connect with those workers, to make their daily lives just a little bit easier, a little bit less stressful. We were at that light at the end of the tunnel when they got off that S40 and that S90. They got off. They saw us right there at that bus stop, having a bonfire, lighting up s’mores, whatever it took. We were right there for them every day and I think that resonated with the workers.

[Karen Ponce, Organizer, Amazon Labor Union]: I joined the Amazon Labor Union a few months after they started, and part for that is because I was brainwashed by Amazon’s propaganda. I didn’t have any prior knowledge to unions. However, the Amazon Labor Union answered all of my questions, doubts, and concerns.

[Music.]

[Palmer]: At the end of the day, Amazon workers, like myself, you know – I’ve been employed with the company six years, so i know the ins and outs, I know what workers want and, um, standing up in those captive audience meetings, you know, showing the workers that we’re not backing down, and that’s – you know, you got to show the workers how strong a union is. And I feel like that’s what, you know, that’s what really helped out a lot.

[Smalls, to group]: They paid – how much money was it? $4.5 million in consulting lawyers and firms, the same lawyers i just shook hands while we kick their ass. They already got me arrested – what more can they do?

[Smalls, to officers]: You don’t have to do this. I heard you. I’m gonna try to get my phone now.

[Officer]: Don’t come close folks! Do not come close.

[Angelika Maldonado, Organizer, Amazon Labor Union]: Kind of backfired on Amazon a little bit because they said that they’re supposed to be one team and one family, but they’re arresting employees.

[Smalls, to group]: They called us a bunch of thugs, you know? We a bunch of thugs. You know, racist stuff. They tried to spread racist rumors, they tried to say, you know, I want to buy a Lamborghini. It’s not about me, Amazon tried to make it about me, and I never said it was going to be Amazon versus Chris Smalls. It was always going to be Amazon versus the people and today the people have spoken and the people wanted the union.

This right here, this is going to be the catalyst for the revolution. That’s exactly what this is, ya’ll just witnessed that.

We already got interest in 18 different buildings in several different states. Workers reaching out to us. We want to help every single person we could.

[Palmer]: They start from the bottom like we did, start organizing in their facility and then we go from there.

[Smalls, to group]: Thank you all! Appreciate it.

[Applause.]

[Music.]

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Transcript for “Inside Amazon Labor Union: How Workers Took on Amazon and WON” by More Perfect Union is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 6.16, Alicia Flores and Starbucks Workers United

[Alicia Flores]: It was never about me. It was about us, the workers.

What brought me to union organizing was working during the pandemic. Specifically, during the peak of 2020 during the lockdown. All that really radicalized me when I realized that workers were not essential but expandable to big corporations.

I was working at Starbucks during the time and at first we were like essential heroes. They’d get us catering, you know, they’d offer us food. Fast forward to the end of the year when it’s announced that Starbucks made record profits and then that’s when I was like, “okay.”

Why I believe that organizing matters in the workplace is because that’s where you have the true voice and that’s something that I’ve learned within the last two years honestly is that workers hold so much power. Specifically when someone goes on strike and withholds their labor.

We decided to organize because just like everyone at the time, we were facing, like, inconsistent schedules, short staff. Obviously a lot of us don’t get paid enough to survive, so we – a lot of us – had like second jobs.

Reading about what a union can do for us was a big motivator for petitioning to organize honestly. It is universal in every food industry workplace that are facing these issues: short staffed, not consistent schedule, not getting paid enough, doing more than one person’s job sort of thing. Like if you were to go to a drive-thru at McDonald’s or any fast food restaurant, you will see the person at the window doing more than one person’s job and people should be compensated for that.

The way that Starbucks management reacted to my organizing was really weird because when another store in my district filed for a union, they won their election so I went in the next day. It was my day off so I go in and I’m clapping my hands, I was like, “congrats guys!” My district manager wanted me to get a write up while I was off the clock, I’m not salary, for quote unquote “disruptive behavior.”

So then I was like, okay, so they’re slowly going to try to find any little thing to fire me over. Which

at the time I can see why it was hard because in my entire Starbucks career I had never had, uh, any sort of documentation of, like, either be a verbal or coaching or anything, like clean slate

up until recently. After we won our Union election, it’s really sad that they’re policing the smallest

things just to be able to get rid of employees. Organizers really. It’s kind of like when you get pulled over and a cop enforces the power they have over you. A lot of people are getting fired for being 5 minutes late, 2 minutes late, or wearing a graphic t-shirt. And they probably lost their health benefits and, like, a way to pay for their rent so it is really something that’s disheartening to see across the country.

I’m actually a co-chair of the labor working group so that’s really awesome, you know, talking to workers at the picket lines, getting to know their struggle and their fight. So my organizing is focusing on that and still fighting for a contract and fighting for my job back with Starbucks and then I guess we’ll just see where that takes me, you know. Hopefully we can make some changes.

So anytime I hear Starbucks Workers United inspires other workers that’s really cool because I guess I don’t see it that way, but when I look at it as a bigger picture like SBW, not that it’s they started the labor movement but a lot of the people that work at Starbucks are young folks. It’s really cool to see young people taking a stand and fighting for what they believe is right and going with it.

One thing that’s really important with me, with my experience with Starbucks Workers United, is meeting organizers across the country, that we share a lot of the same values and at the core of it we are all Starbucks workers. None of us get paid to do any of the things we do, so the fact that a lot of us do this on our spare time is really inspiring to me and makes me keep on going, keep on fighting the fight, because comrade in Chicago who’s not going through the same thing as you but like essentially is and there’s that solidarity, and when they win, I win, and when I win, they win, and it’s just really cool honestly. That’s one thing that I really appreciate about Starbucks Workers United and just unions. Union organizing in general is the solidarity.

For my long-term hopes for the labor movement is that every food industry job starts organizing. Every job should start organizing, honestly, like start having those conversations with your co-workers. I know it’s easier said than done but once you do it and you accomplish that I guarantee you it gets easier.

My advice to any worker that is looking into organizing the workplace is, don’t take the fight by yourself. I made that mistake. Um, get yourself an organizing committee. What makes a great organizer is being able to spot out leaders. A great comrade of mine told me that. You never want to make it about you, you want to make it about them. There’s nothing more liberating than knowing that you own your labor. So go out there, just get involved somehow, start with your community. Start with your workplace. Make those changes you want to see.

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Transcript for “Alicia Flores and Starbucks Workers United” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is used by permission.

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Transcript for Figure 6.17, Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis, Chapter 2: Capitalism

How do we, as a society, want to make the big decisions that end up shaping the kind of world in which we live? How do we want to make decisions about whether mountains are mined, on whose land and whose water gets fouled? Decisions about who comes home from work filthy, and who gets filthy rich? While it’s hard to imagine questions that are more important, these questions aren’t often discussed. That’s probably because, for the most part, they aren’t up for debate. And we’ve accepted the answers as a kind of common sense.

I’m Ben Cushing, Sociology faculty at Portland Community College in Portland OR. Welcome to Chapter 2 of our series, “Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis.” This week: Capitalism.

Capitalism is an extremely important part of the structure of this society. Every society has a certain way of being “set up,” and these “set ups” vary enormously from one society to the next. Some societies are governed by monarchs. Some are governed by elected officials. Some are organized around agriculture on communal land, while others concentrate power in urban centers with privately held industries. Sociologists refer to this kind of “set up” of a society as the “social structure.”

So why does that matter? Well, the way a society is set up will actually determine a huge number of things, including what kinds of lives will be lived by the members of that society. For example, no one can be a peasant or a nobleman or a wage worker, or a boss, unless they live in a society organized around those categories.

I don’t live in a feudal society, so I don’t know any peasants or nobleman in my community. I live in a capitalist society, so my community is made up of, among other groups, workers and owners. So if I want to try to understand my life and the lives of the people around me, I need to get a sense of how our lives are shaped by the capitalist system we’re embedded in.

Capitalism is the dominant economic system of the world today. If you ask an economist, they might tell you that capitalism is a way of organizing the production and the distribution of resources based on competitive and at least ostensibly free exchange. Maybe I sell my labor as a retail employee, so that I can rent an apartment and buy food. Or maybe I start a business. This, in brief, is the economic system that you and I live in. And while capitalism shapes the lives we live, we’re often pretty unaware of it. We’re like fish swimming in a sea of capitalism. We are completely immersed in this sea, but we may not have a very clear understanding of the water, or of the currents that push us around.

Many people who look upon capitalism fondly will point out that capitalism – and the profit motive that comes with it – has driven remarkable innovation. They’ll also suggest that capitalism encourages individual liberty, since it tends to leave major decisions to private individuals and business, rather than the government. There is certainly a good deal of truth to these claims.

Yet for well over a century, various sociologists, and many others, have expressed deep concern about the effects of capitalism on society. What happens to a society when more and more of the relationships between people are reduced to cold calculated business transactions? What happens when we redefine the value of nearly everything, so that it can be reduced to a number of dollars and cents?

From its beginnings, capitalism has relied upon forced seizure (or expropriation) of wealth and labor. Between the 16th to 18th centuries, European elites seized (or enclosed) the European commons, the shared land which was the foundation of peasant life and communal economic security. In doing so, they simultaneously privatized land ownership and forced peasants into a new exploitative wage labor system – sometimes hiring people to work the land they had once held in common with their neighbors. Those same elites also seized land in the Americas and elsewhere in their colonial conquests. They also seized people (particularly in Africa) and forced them to work that land. This kind of naked expropriation is central to how capitalism has always worked.

Today, capitalism looks very different. But while much has changed, much has also stayed the same. The power dynamics forged in the colonial era continue to shape where wealth and power are concentrated, who works for whom and who reaps the benefits.

We began with the question: “How do we, as a society, want to make the big decisions that end up shaping the kind of world in which we live?” Of course there is no simple answer to a question this big. But if, instead, we asked, how do we currently make those decisions, a major part of the answer has to be this: we make those decisions based on profit. In a capitalist society, major decisions are made for the sake of the profit interests for the ruling class. In fact, under US law, corporations are required to prioritize profit for shareholders over any other competing interests; Competing interests such as the health of the land or the wellbeing of workers or communities.

This argument- that profit motivates a good deal of the decision making that shapes our world – is actually less controversial than it might appear. Many apologists for capitalism would agree. The economist Milton Friedman, for example, argued that the profit motive encourages innovation, which is good for everyone, and enables decision making among private citizens without government interference, making us all more free.

But as it happens, the freedom of powerful corporations to act according to their profit interests can sometimes conflict with the freedom and interest of others.

Let me offer one example. In 2015, PBS’s Frontline and InsideClimateNews revealed that Exxon – the oil giant – actually conducted some of the first high quality scientific research into the relationship between Co2 Emissions and global warming. As early as the late 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists understood most of what we need to know about the climate crisis: that burning fossil fuels will raise global temperatures, leading to more powerful storms, the melting of the polar ice caps, sea level rise, drought and flash flooding, increasingly destructive wildfires, species extinction, spread of infectious diseases, crop failure, famine and mass refugee crises. Knowing that this research could lead to increased public regulation and decreased profits, Exxon buried the research and invested in a decades-long PR campaign to cast doubt on climate science. Frontline and InsideClimateNews won multiple awards for their reporting, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Exxon is still doing what Exxon does.

Profit motive is a powerful thing. Exxon had a choice that very few people in human history have ever had to face. They could choose, with a pretty clear understanding of the implications of their choice, between the short term profit interests of their corporation and the long term survival of their civilization and innumerable species around the world. They chose profit.

Did Exxon make the right business decision? This question is crucial. I want to suggest that they did. And that’s really the crux of the issue.

The corporation is an institution designed to make profits for its shareholders, not to act upon the public good. And as I stated before, corporate leaders are bound by law to prioritize profit over any other competing interest.

I want to suggest that we’d be wrong to focus our energy on the moral failings of Exxon’s leadership. Rather than ringing our hands at the bosses, I think we can ask some much deeper and more troubling questions about the system itself.

What are the consequences of an institution designed to prioritize profit over everything else? What kind of world will such an institution create? What kinds of human behavior is it likely to encourage? Is this kind of institution compatible with a thriving and just community? Is it even compatible with a survivable future?

Since the 1980’s the dominant version of capitalism around the world has emphasized minimal public regulation of corporations and the transfer of public services to corporate hands. This version of capitalism – which is often called neoliberalism – has been remarkably lucrative for the ruling class, and largely devastating for working people in the US and around the world, as well as the living systems of the planet.

Two of its effects are worth noting here.

First, the emphasis on deregulation, privatization and massive cuts to social spending (sometimes called austerity) became so powerful and bipartisan that the kinds of regulations and public initiatives that may be necessary to address the climate crisis – policies that may have made perfect sense in the New Deal era – became politically unimaginable. At a time when global regulation of corporations and large public projects may be necessary to avert a climate catastrophe, political elites accepted deregulation and privatization as the political orthodoxy. As Naomi Klein says in her book This Changes Everything, it’s bad timing. Today, for the first time in a generation, cracks have emerged in this political consensus. Whether it breaks, and something approximating a Green New Deal becomes possible, remains to be seen.

Secondly, the culture of this particular version of capitalism undermines social solidarity and the democratic process. With its emphasis on individual self interest above all else and its contempt for any project based on cooperation for the common good, the neoliberal worldview undermines democracy itself. It undermines the very notion that we can make decisions together to shape our society in the ways we choose. As Wendy Brown argues in her new book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, this worldview ultimately leads to the rise of authoritarian movements around the world, from the US to Brazil to Turkey and beyond.

All of this raises difficult questions, for which we may not have sufficient answers. Is the climate crisis, and the ecological crisis more broadly, the predictable outcome of a certain economic order? If so, how do we go about dismantling such a dangerous system. And how do we go about building an economy that attends to the needs of human and non-human communities?

This has been chapter two of Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis. I’m Ben Cushing. If you found this discussion to be helpful, check out the other chapters in this series. And please consider sharing it with a friend.

In this Chapter we’ve explored our economic system. In our next episode we’ll examine our belief system.

Thanks for listening. And take care.

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Transcript for “Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis – Chapter 2: Capitalism” by Ben Cushing, published by Podbean, is included with permission.

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Transcript for Figure 6.20, What Is ‘Gross National Happiness’?

[Music.]

[Morten Sondergaard, Narrator]: The Simple Show explains Gross National Happiness.

This is the fourth dragon king of Bhutan, a beautiful country at the Eastern end of the Himalayas. He became king at the age of 17 in 1972. It was then when he had to decide what should be the philosophy behind his reign. He looked at other countries and noticed in most of them the government and the people strive for economic wealth. And those few who achieve this goal usually live a comfortable life, but on the downside, many other people live in misery, poverty, or social isolation. Also, in the ruthless hunt for money, huge parts of the environment are often destroyed. This couldn’t be the right path for Bhutan. The concept of Gross National Happiness was born.

The primary idea of GNH is that every human being aspires for happiness, and a country’s development should also be measured in its citizens’ happiness. The Fourth Dragon King’s challenge, therefore, was figuring out how to balance economic development with the emotional and spiritual well-being of his people. Although economical growth can’t be the only goal, a flourishing economy gives the government the funds needed to provide a working health and education system, as well as certain living standards.

Because being healthy, having opportunities for the future, and knowing that security, a steady income, housing, or well-balanced time use are guaranteed is crucial for people to be happy. But furthermore, people get a lot of positive energy from being with others and sharing interests. Participating in cultural life and to hold up local traditions and cultural heritage lead to a stronger community feeling. Healthy family relationships, advocating community activities and religious aspects are factors for achieving happiness. It gives the Bhutanese people a strong sense of values and identity.

The Fourth Dragon King reigned 34 years, basing his decisions on all factors of gross national happiness, asking himself what makes Bhutan’s people happy? And the fourth dragon king lived by example, leading a very simple life. In fact, he believed so strongly in the concept of GNH he even decided to hand over sovereignty to the people. In 2006, he retired as king at the age of 52,

and changed the course of history. Two years later, in 2008, Bhutan elected its first representative Parliament.

Since then, the idea of gross national happiness has taken quite some momentum outside of Bhutan with other countries and people around the world thinking about adopting the GNH approach to strive for development with values and to make the world a happier place.

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Transcript for “What is “Gross National Happiness”? Explained by Morten Sondergaard” by mallorcamorten is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 6.22, How the Dutch Are Reshaping Their Post-Pandemic Economy

[Kate Raworth, Author, “Doughnut Economics”]: This is the doughnut. The goal of the doughnut is to meet the needs of all people within the means of the planet. Sometimes when I present the ideas of doughnut economics, people say, “Mmm, is this capitalism or is this communism or is it socialism?” and you think, “Really? Are these the only choices we have? The isms of the last century? Can we not come up with some ideas of our own and create new names for them and see new patterns?”

[Text on screen: The essentials for a good life. Economist Kate Raworth is trying to shake up … what economic success looks like in the 21st Century. Her revolutionary ‘Doughnut Economics’ … is aimed at ending inequality.]

[Raworth]: Governments in every country are almost addicted to citing GDP figures, as if this was proof of success. And yet it’s so clearly not, because we have climate breakdown and Covid lockdown and financial meltdown. We have to pursue something far richer to move from this pursuit of endless growth, which we can now see as hitting us with crisis after crisis. Moving to a goal of thriving. And the doughnut is absolutely possible to turn not into a single number but into a dashboard. We could hold policymakers to account and say every year, “You need to talk about how you are making progress on these different dimensions of the doughnut.”

[Text on screen: The inner ring of the Doughnut represents … 12 basic human needs or the social foundation. The outer ring is an ecological ceiling … under which humanity should live.]

[Raworth]: The outside of the Doughnut is created by leading earth system scientists just a decade ago. These are the nine life supporting systems of planet Earth to have a stable climate,

to have healthy oceans, to have recharging fresh water. And they drew these and called them the planetary boundaries and they said, “We must stay in the circle in the middle.” I thought, but if we go to the center of the circle where we use hardly any of Earth’s resources, that’s not thriving. That is actually death and destitution for billions of people. We need to convert Earth’s lands for food, for water, for housing, for energy. So I drew this inner circle and said just as there is an outer limit of humanity’s pressure on the planet so, too, there must be an inner limit.

So the hole in the middle is a place where people are left falling short on the essentials of life. It’s where people don’t have the food, water, energy, healthcare, housing, education, political voice that every person has a claim to meeting. We want to leave nobody in this hole. Get everybody into the green ring of the doughnut itself.

[Text on screen: The green ring represents a safe and just space for humanity.]

[Raworth]: Ever since the doughnut was first published in 2012, people have been wanting to downscale it to the scale of a city or a neighborhood or a nation, and Amsterdam is the first place where we’ve actually downscaled it. And I’ve worked together with an organization called Circle Economy, who have been helping the city devise their strategy.

[Text on screen: Amsterdam is the first city to commit to the model … as part of its financial and climate recovery plan. The project is bringing together a coalition … of change-makers in the city.]

[Ilektra Kouloumpi, Circle Economy, Senior Strategist]: Amsterdam is having a very ambitious vision of becoming a fully circular city by 2015.

What happens with the doughnut is that because it brings all these themes together of the social aspects and the environmental, you need to start the conversation with everybody in the room. We invited all different departments, but they were not used to being part of this conversation. How can we create housing in Amsterdam that is available for all different incomes at the same time? It’s supporting the well-being of people who live in the house and how does this construction is made with materials that reducing the the global emissions and the climate.

With the city doughnut, we suddenly see in the portrait of the city, the impact that Amsterdam has in, let’s say, Bangladesh, and people’s life there that the work in producing the clothes that we wear in Amsterdam and how a city can start thinking about all this and creating strategies that are taking this into account.

[Raworth]: The doughnut does not give us answers. You don’t plug in a calculation and it tells you how to do it. What it does is provide a space for people to come together. In fact, in Amsterdam the policymaker said, we now realize that if we’re aiming to get into the doughnut, that’s we need to change our own internal organization so that we’re more holistic and connected in our planning and policy. And I think smart policymakers realized that they don’t need a solution to financial crisis and a different one to climate crisis and a different one to health emergencies. They need a paradigm that no longer pushes for endless growth but instead focuses on thriving, on resilience, and on well-being within communities.

[Text on screen: The Doughnut Economics Action Lab has so far received … 400 messages of interest from across the world. They are launching an online platform to allow ordinary … citizens to participate in creating ‘the economy of the 21st century.’]

[Raworth]: We began with this downscaling in rich cities in high-income nations because they are the ones that have the greatest obligation to transform, to come back within planetary boundary. But I believe the framework that we’ve created can absolutely be adapted and used in low-income countries and cities. In fact, in Costa Rica they’ve just launched an initiative called Regenerate Costa Rica. They have an ambition to become one of the world’s first regenerative nations and they are using the donor as a framework for guiding them to that goal.

[Text on screen: Researchers from the University of Leeds have applied … the Doughnut Model to some 150 countries.]

[Raworth]: It always looks like transformation is going to take many, many decades and one thing I think we’ve seen in many countries from this Covid pandemic is that actually policies can happen [snaps fingers] almost overnight when governments decide to make them happen. Change is absolutely possible if we transform the political values and interests and the mindset.

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Transcript for “How the Dutch Are Reshaping Their Post-Pandemic Economy – BBC REEL” by BBC Global is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.6, Answering the Healer’s Call

[Text on screen: Fifteen years ago, Malidoma Some wrote an article entitled, “What a Shaman Sees in a Psychiatric Hospital.” Later, the article was renamed, “The Pain of Being Called.” The following Q and A between Malidoma Some and Zayin Cabot sheds light on the pain of being called to heal oneself, the role of community in this process, and the emergence of life purpose that is revealed on such a journey. Thousands of people have heard this call, and thousands more have shared Malidoma’s words with friends and family around the world. In response to the incredible outpouring, Malidoma and Zayin will be hosting the first “Answering the Healers Call” intensive in the Bay Area this August, 2015. To find out more, or join in the conversation @ www.WestCoastVillage.org.]

[Malidoma Some]: There’s a phenomena that begins with the other world having its way of dialing your number, as if somehow inside of you, you have a, you have a phone system that only the other world can dial. When they, when it is dialed, you feel like shit. And as long as you don’t pick up the phone, you’re in hell.Then you run around like a, like a crazy person. This society labeled you crazy. You wound up being institutionalized or at least chemicalized, all of that in the interest of shutting down the phone that can’t stop ringing. And so what happened in the end, what happened in the end is that you become completely lobotomized by a culture that doesn’t know what really the hell is going on with you. And since they cannot just sit back and watch you, they try this way, that way, this way, and every way seemed to be damaging you more for some reason.

I went to a psychiatric hospital to – I was accompanying somebody and as I looked at every room I realized this, these people are all healers. In this culture they imprisoned healers keeping them away from the, from the industry. Something is really weird about civilization. But in Diger land when uh somebody goes nuts, goes crazy, people are really happy. They realize we’re going to have another healer, we’re going to have an additional expert to help us.

Meanwhile, the person is going really crazy, is having a lot of trouble, is showing symptoms of self endangerment and endangerment to others. It takes a circle of other people who have been through this process and have wound up each having their healing office complete with successful addressing of various issues brought to them by the village to form a circle around this person.

But before that it takes all kind of consulting to find out what is the specificity of the calling and what does that specific calling demand from those who knows this type of issue to do. Once they find that out, they go through a series of ritual – to the mountain, to the water spirit, to the ancestors, to the Earth spirit, before they bring the person into the Highlight. Where at that time the whole village is there in celebration because in order to prepare for the anointment of such a person, there’s a whole choreography that has to be set in place, centered around celebration. That’s why, to celebrate, you got to take some time to prepare for it. When you’re ready, they bring, they bring the whole village together to witness the return of the Healer, the homecoming of the Healer, after a rather long journey of turmoil, pain, and disruption of all, all that is familiar to the, to the person.

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Transcript for “Answering the Healers Call – Short” by Zayin Cabot is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.11, Racism seen as root of Jackson water crisis

[Sound of water from a tap running.]

[Text on screen: The ongoing water crisis in Mississippi’s capital exposed a problem advocates and experts say is happening in other American cities. They blame Jackson’s water issues on a combination of government neglect, aging water infrastructure and racial discrimination.

[Jordyn Jackson, student, Jackson State University]: We know that the water issue is not a new subject. It just actually failed this time.

[Maisie Brown, Student, Jackson State University]: Nobody else has to have this fight, but nobody else is as black as us and has the socio-economic level that the city is at. So that’s why we’ve been running into the issue we have.

[Text on screen: Experts told The Associated Press that communities of color and poor communities are more likely to experience water scarcity or contamination.]

[Female speaker 2, running water]: There it is. That’s better than it’s been.

[Text on screen: They say that over time there’s been less money invested in maintaining the infrastructure in those communities. Majority-Black Flint, Michigan, struggling to remove lead from its water since 2014, is an infamous recent example. Other areas where some people lack reliably safe drinking water include Baltimore, Honolulu, Las Vegas, New Mexico and Benton Harbor, Michigan. Jackson’s mayor says fixing the city’s water system could cost billions of dollars the city doesn’t have.]

[Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Mayor, Jackson, Mississippi]: From my vantage point, I see a community that has often been left out of the equation, that has been treated disproportionately in terms of the equity of resources, right, and so I believe that it is imperative that someone stand up for them, that someone speaks to those issues.

[Text on screen: Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves has not said how much money the state should spend to help Jackson solve its water problems.]

[Tate Reeves, Governor, State of Mississippi, at a press conference]: Yesterday, we now have seven state-run water distribution sites up and running throughout the city of Jackson.

[Text on screen: Many in the city don’t have hope they’ll see consistent access to clean water since it’s unclear where the money is going to come from.]

[Brown]: There’s a huge disabled community here. There’s a huge elderly community here and there are a lot of people here who don’t have vehicles to actually go and get it. And so we just kind of want to help fill that gap.

[Text on screen: Jackson State University student Maisie Brown is part of the Mississippi Students Water Crisis Advocacy Team. The group of about 30 students delivers cases of bottled water to Jackson residents who can’t get to water distribution sites.]

[Mya Grimes, Student, Jackson State University]: We’re really just stuck here in, like, this cycle of political mistreatment and mistrust that is no fault of the residents of this city.

[Text on screen: Jackson has restored water pressure throughout much of the city and residents are no longer under a boil-water notice. Residents say that even though water is coming out of their taps, in many cases it’s cloudy or discolored and smells like raw sewage.]

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Transcript for “Racism seen as root of Jackson water crisis” by Associated Press is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.14, Mass Incarceration, Visualized

[Bruce Western, Narrator]: Mass incarceration means that we’ve got a very high rate of incarceration historically, comparatively, and the other thing is the rate of incarceration is so high, so socially concentrated, we’re no longer incarcerating the individual, but we’re incarcerating whole social groups.

The rate of incarceration now is about five times higher than it was historically. Historically it was a hundred per hundred thousand. Now it’s about five hundred per hundred thousand. If we look at prison, if we add jail to that, it’s about seven hundred per hundred thousand.

Nowhere in the world incarcerates as much as we do. We’ve seen extremely high rates of exposure to the criminal justice system for African-American men with very low levels of schooling. So if we think about Black men who were born in the late 1970s, who are growing up through the American prison boom of the 1980s and the 1990s, the chances that they’re going to serve time in state or federal prison, if they dropped out of high school, is about 70 percent. So going to prison for that group of Black men with very low levels of schooling, that’s become a

normal life event. That’s really only happened in the last 10 years.

We’re at this point now where – it’s about 1.2 million African-American children with a parent who’s incarcerated – that’s about one in nine. The research shows the kids who experience parental incarceration have diminished school achievement, they have behavioral problems, depressive symptoms, acting out. And there’s also evidence that these kinds of negative effects associated with parental incarceration are concentrated more among boys than among girls. And there’s a very real risk here that incarceration becomes an inherited trait.

The underlying issue is, we’ve chosen prison as a way to respond to that problem of crime and there are a whole variety of ways that we could have chosen to respond to that problem of crime. We’ve chosen the response of the deprivation of liberty, and we’ve chosen the response of the deprivation of liberty for a historically aggrieved group whose liberty in the United States was never firmly established to begin with.

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Transcript for “Mass Incarceration, Visualized” by The Atlantic is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.17, A Road to Home – Trailer

[A Road to Home tracks the lives of six homeless LGBTQ young people over 18 months. Their lives typify the experience of the 500,000 homeless youth on American streets every night, 40% of them LGBTQ.]

[Music.]

[Youth 1]: I came out in November of last year as transgender to my parents, and it didn’t go well.

[Youth 2]: As I told my mother, I didn’t choose this, you know. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be gay.

[Youth 3]: My dad’s a Baptist pastor and very strong religious beliefs. No tolerance for homosexuality.

[Youth 4]: He didn’t want to talk to me, didn’t want me in the house, so I had to find other ways to support myself.

[Carl Siciliano, founder of the Ali Forney Center for homeless LGBTQ youth]: I have been working with homeless youth since 1994. There were thousands of homeless youth in New York City, and the LGBT kids in specific had nowhere safe to go, and they were just out on the streets.

[Youth 1]: I can tell what people are thinking by the way they look and the way they stare. I always think the worst is going to happen.

[Youth 4]: I’m going to show you where I used to sell drugs. Percocet, weed, even beer at one time. Just anything to make ends meet, you know, to have somewhere to stay for the night.

[Youth 5]: Everything is getting better. Slowly, gradually, and with a lot of effort, everything is getting better.

[Youth 4]: I’m going to do a lot of big things. You’re going to see my face places, I’m telling you.

[Youth 2]: I want to be remembered as someone. I want to make a difference.

[Youth 6]: To be out there by yourself in the cold, in the dark, that’s when you face your demons, harder than any other time. That’s when you feel hardest, being abandoned by your family.

[Carl Siciliano]: I don’t feel like my work is done, as long as there are kids who don’t have beds at night.

[Music.]

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Transcript for “A Road to Home” by Lumiere Productions is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.19, Spirit of Birth

[Sound of fetal heartbeat. Music.]

[Marie Anderson, Traditional Elder and Knowledge Keeper]: As soon as I was born, she said they wrapped me up in a blanket and then covered me in cedar. They cleaned me up, they wrapped me in cedar again, cedar was all over me. She said your first bath was in cedar water. She said it was a very good experience for her. And my mother said when she was very young, she said, she remembers sitting under a shaded tree with the grandmother and she was telling her grandchildren that when their babies are going to be born, it’s going to be a white man to hold a baby. And she said it’s not going to be good because raking in there some of that baby’s heritage is being pulled away from him.

[Text on screen: By the mid-20th century the government of Canada had dismantled cultural identity and midwifery practices by forcing Indigenous women to have their babies outside their communities.]

[Maria Campbell, Knowledge Keeper]: We’re not supposed to be healthy. We’re all supposed to be – we all should have disappeared. We were supposed to disappear and we didn’t disappear, and the reason we didn’t is because those grandmothers kept those stories alive. A birthing center can birth and make possible that kind of cultural knowledge to be there so that they can take that and find a way to use it.

[Sara Wolfe, Founding Midwife, Seventh Generation Midwives in Toronto]: We’ve had a really long time vision for a birth center. We’ve been dreaming about this for, you know, since we started Seventh Generation Midwives. We really, we knew we wanted a space for our women to have their babies in but we really wanted it to be midwife-led and we had this really strong vision that it was going to be like an indigenous led and, you know, Aboriginal Focus space that was going to be really like warm, welcoming, culturally safe for everyone to come to.

The way that we approach health care, the way that we use that indigenous philosophies, that world view that we have is just, it’s unique, it’s different. We think of really special, it’s really

sacred, but it’s really – it’s a good approach.

[Allysha Wassegijig, Mother-to-be]: Baby’s growing every week.

[Diane Simon, Allysha’s Midwife, Seventh Generation Midwives Toronto]: Has your elder shared any, any other ceremonies or teachings with you that you wanted to incorporate?

[Allysha Wassegijig]: Well, not yet, we haven’t had anyone really in the family do a traditional birth, so it’s all brand new to me. I’m at that point in my life where I’m trying to get closer to the culture and then be able to provide the baby with all the knowledge that I have and more, you know.

[Simon]: I really believe that creating that, that kind of basis for baby to come in to, come into the world, all this knowledge that you’re passing on to, to the baby. It’s our identity to be born into that and grow having that connection of where we come from, I think is really powerful and amazing.

[Allysha Wassegijig]: I was so nervous, I was so scared, but at the same time I’ve always wanted to be a mom. And then to find out that it’s happening right now, that I’m gonna be a mom and I’m gonna have a baby, was just the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole life.

Aboriginal Midwives just felt like such a natural choice because that’s who I feel like I can connect right away with, and I couldn’t think of a better group of women to ask to help me through the journey of, of having my baby.

[Dr. Janet Smylie, Indigenous Health Research Scientist and Consultant Family Physician, Seventh Generation Midwives Toronto]: The relationships between a service provider and their client could be as important as the prescriptions that I write or the importance of the relationship that a midwife has with that new baby that she touches, in terms of them being a mentor and an auntie to that baby for the rest of their life.

[Simon]: When you’re in labor it’s a very powerful time but it’s also a very vulnerable time and to have someone kind of make funny faces at you or question why you want to do something or not under – not have that understanding – of why maybe you want to keep your placenta when normally they would regard it as medical waste.

I think Aboriginal Midwifery can really create that safe space for people to be able to create the ceremony that they want and recognize it as a ceremony rather than just something that’s happening.

[Shelley Charles, Traditional Elder guiding Allysha]: As a woman, then, we become the Creator, so we’re carrying that sacred Spirit to walk on the Earth. Our creation story of course is before man so it’s the stars and the sun, the moon, and the four directions, and the seeds, and so when we think about woman and life that’s how far back we’re thinking.

[Dr. Billie Allan, Indigenous Health Researcher]: We know that identity matters in terms of our health and well-being and that if I want to take the opportunity to re-engage with my knowledge, my history, and I think for our people it’s extra important because it’s linked to our healing. So having support, not having to explain why it’s important to have a lot of family with us, for example, or if we’re disconnected from our family because of things like child welfare intervention, or residential schools, or all of the kind of colonial violences that happen to us that we’re not going to be judged for it. That we’re going to be received with care and kindness is a big deal. To have that experience of being received as a whole person, I think it does amazing things for a family.

[Allysha Wassegijig]: I love you, mom.

[Donna Wassegijig, Allysha’s Mother]: I love you, too.

[Donna Wassegijig]: I come from both parents who had gone to residential school. I didn’t feel that it was instilled into our generation, to pass on, to keep, to grab on to any part of the language.

[Allysha Wassegijig]: I’m trying to learn my language and learn more about where I come from, who my family is, my traditional culture, and if anything, the baby is just strengthening that need to find those things and to learn.

I think it’s an extremely sacred time, the baby is making its journey from the spirit world, and what I’ve been taught is that children pick their parents and I’ve been chosen to be a parent right now, and that means the world to me. I feel so honored and I feel a huge responsibility coming up.

So I’ve been getting ready, getting my, my space ready. I have started to smudge every morning and that’s a part of me discovering who I am. My little benojis growing up so fast, baby.

[Speaker]: What does benoijis mean?

[Allysha Wassegijig]: Baby.

[Allysha Wassegijig]: Because this is my first baby, I worry about whether I’m gonna be able to be a good mom. I have no idea what to expect.

It was really nice going to the birth center. I saw Diane’s face and I instantly felt some relief because she’s been that, that person for me, that safe person to talk to and put my trust in.

Labor was hard and fast. I had originally planned to be at the birth center for the whole time, but the hospital was always an option, and I felt really comfortable going to the hospital with Diane.

[Nurse]: We’re a boy.

[Allysha Wassegijig talks to baby.]

[Allysha Wassegijig]: It was a beautiful birth. Diane was right there the whole time. My mom was there, my sister was there, and that’s what mattered. So I had those supports.

On Sunday, we’re having a naming ceremony, so we’re really excited for that.

[Dr. Smylie]: They’re also going to be able to bring their families in to bond with that baby in a way that they might not have otherwise and, you know, give that mother and baby all the support the community can and their family can. If we pour all of that into that next generation of babies then my hope is that we’re going to have a healthier next generation and that that next generation is going to do the same and have another healthier generation, and we’re going to heal a lot of the the hurt that we have in our communities and make our families and our nations stronger.

[Allysha Wassegijig, talking to baby]: … Through the night and your midwife Diane worked so hard and she did so much for us making sure that you came safely. You did, my baby.

[Text on screen: Elder Shelley Charles led a special naming ceremony for Caleb Wassegijig-Diakiw. “Geewaydinoog, The One who sits in the North.” And… Allysha Wassegijig. “ZhabowayKwe, The One That Pierces Through.”]

Attribution

Transcript for “Spirit of Birth” by Muskrat Magazine is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.22, The Black Panthers’ Overlooked Health Programs

[Cleo Silvers, Former Black Panther]: I’ve been going around and talking to young students from fourth grade all the way through to PhD’s and usually the questions that people ask me was, “Where did you guys keep your guns?” “Why didn’t you like white people?” I think still in schools we’re still recognized as a black nationalist hate movement and there was never hate. As a matter of fact one of the things that, that drew me to the Black Panther Party is that they loved the people so much. That, in order to do that kind of work, in order to be that focused, you had to really love the people.

[Narrator]: The Black Panthers are one of the most misunderstood civil rights groups in American history. Started in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale as a way to protect Black communities against police brutality, the Panthers are often depicted as a violent organization.

But many of their contributions to the communities they served, especially in terms of health care, are left out of history textbooks.

[Adam Sanchez, High School Teacher and Contributor to Teaching for Black Lives]: I think the dominant message from from almost every textbook I’ve seen is putting the Panthers in what Civil Rights scholars have called the declension narrative, which is basically this idea that, you know, once the Black Power movement starts, but really after King’s death in 1968, the Civil Rights movement declines and you get these Black radicals who are just demanding too much and nonsensically turning to violent tactics. I don’t think I’ve seen a single textbook that mentions the 100 or so social programs that the Black Panthers ran.

[Jakobi Williams, Associate Professor, Indiana University]: They’re anti-capitalists, they’re socialists, and they work with all poor people. In fact they saw themselves as continued model of Dr. King’s work. People forget when King was assassinated, he was leading what he called the Poor People’s Campaign. King advocated as a Democratic Socialist against what he called the exploiting tenants of materialism and capitalism.

[Silvers]: The goal of the Black Panther Party was to expose the problems in society and then show that they weren’t static, that they didn’t have to be that way, but that there were ways in which to make those changes that were necessary. In particular, free, quality healthcare was one of the key elements of the program of the Black Panther Party.

[Narrator]: Cleo Silvers came to the South Bronx in the 60s as a health care volunteer and later joined the Harlem branch of the Black Panthers.

[Silvers]: Now you know the South Bronx is the congressional district in the United States with the lowest income per capita. It was then and continues to be today. So the conditions in the South Bronx were something that I had never seen before.

[Narrator]: The area’s main hospital was known for its horrendous treatment of its predominantly Black and brown patients. In fact, conditions were so bad that in 1970, Silvers took part in a protest where community activists, including the Panthers, occupied the hospital for one day.

[Silvers]: Lincoln Hospital was known as the butcher shop. Those conditions were really horrible. People were waiting for 72 hours to get seen. There was no heat in the emergency room. There’s really bad stories about Lincoln Hospital and what could happen to you if you had to go to Lincoln Hospital.

[Mary Phillips, Assistant Professor, Lehman College, CUNY]: When we talk about the impact of racism and the healthcare system, I mean, there is a long history of medical discrimination. We can think of the history that involves Black bodies being used as guinea pigs, Black women and women of color going to the doctors and getting illegally sterilized, and so this has caused a lot of mistrust.

And then your zip code matters. Black communities that are in disenfranchised areas, we have a history of not being protected. And so, part of that history of medical discrimination is what the Panthers were trying to fight. Everything from first aid, they had a free ambulance program, they had sickle cell anemia testing. They had gynecological exams, optometry services, I mean, physical exams. There are tons of services that the Black Panther Party offered when we talk about health care.

[Silvers]: We designed a program to go door-to-door and really test for diseases like tuberculosis, anemia, diabetes, these are preventable diseases. We’d go in and we there would be an elderly person in some apartment who really needed to see a doctor, but they were afraid to go the doctor, and that’s how we would be able to refer them to a place where, where they would be seen and be helped before the illness, whatever illness they have, got too difficult for them.

[Phillips]: They were in the community educating, offering tools to medically empower the Black community and much of that understanding of the Black Panther Party has been written out of the public perceptions of the organization. It has a lot to do with the FBI and COINTELPRO.

[Narrator]: COINTELPRO, which stands for counterintelligence program, was the FBI’s Illegal surveillance scheme.

[Phillips]: They looked at the Panthers as a threat, and so they did everything you can think of from infiltrating the organization to pushing lies in the media.

The Panthers were actually about restorative care, they were actually about healing the community, mind, body, and soul. And that’s placed on the margins of the history of the Party.

[Narrator]: The Party disbanded in 1982, but the legacy of the Black Panthers continues to this day.

[Williams]: Many of the Party programs were community-based and community-run, so the Party would start them, they would establish them, and then before long the community takes them over and the community runs them.

So you can point to community clinics, health clinics, food programs, food banks, free busing to prison programs, the list goes on, that are still alive and well today, as extensions and continuations of programs that the Party started.

[Video continues.]

Attribution

Transcript for “The Black Panthers’ Overlooked Health Programs” by TIME is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.28, What Is Transformative Justice?

[Adrienne Maree Brown]: So, when I’m trying to explain transformative justice to people, I usually back away from, I don’t go straight at, “Okay, this is transformative justice.” I usually actually go back to punitive justice. I start out with, like, what we’re used to and what we’ve been socialized into is punitive justice, and then I ask people, if I’m in a room full of people, even, you know, a room full of friends, I’d be, like, “How many of you grew up in an experience where you were punished when harm happened?” And I give examples. “You were expelled, you were put in detention, you had suspension, you were put in time out, but the main move was you were removed from community in some way because you’ve done harm.” And people are, like, “Oh, yeah,” you know, either everyone either has that experience or they were a part of spaces where they saw that experience, and then I’m, like, “You know, we age, we grow that up so that then, you go into prison or you get the death penalty, or you get canceled from your community, right? That same, it’s the same process.

So, we live in, that’s what we’re swimming in. And then I talk about restorative justice as a step in the right direction, right? It’s, like, harm has happened. How do we restore ourselves back to that relationship that existed before the harm happened? So, I’m like, someone stole your purse. You get an apology. They do some community service. Hopefully we return to, like, where we were, but for me, I always say that doesn’t go far enough because if the original conditions were unjust, then returning to those original conditions is not actually justice, right? You’re just gonna have someone who’s, like, “Great, now I returned everything to you. I still don’t have anything, and I’m still hungry, and I still need something.” So, I’m like, so we need to go further.

So, to me, transformative justice, the first aspect of it is that it goes all the way down to the root system of the harm and says, “How do we change, heal, transform, pull this up? What do we need to do at the root system so that this harm is no longer possible?” Like, what we’re trying to do is stop this harm from ever being possible again. And then how do we understand that the state is so committed to punitive justice? So, the state is not gonna be able to engage in transformative justice with us. So we don’t go to the state to do this kind of deep work.

And then how do we turn towards each other to hold this space, and in that turning to each other, we have to say, “I believe you can transform.”

[Mia Mingus]: The bare bones way I describe transformative justice to just anybody that I meet randomly is that it’s a way of responding to violence and harm without creating more violence and harm. That’s bare bones.

[Video continues.]

Attribution

Transcript for “What Is Transformative Justice?” by Barnard Center for Research on Women is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.31, Gathering Medicine | Tending the Wild

[Kat High, Hupa, Cultural Educator]: What the Spaniards came and saw in California they described as looking like a well-tended garden. It looked like that because it was. The people had lived with the plants, had lived with the animals, and had evolved in ecology based on bringing what they needed close to their home villages to maximize the growth of that through our land management techniques, to keep it growing in close to the village, to bring game in close to the village so they didn’t have to go farther and farther afield. That’s our ecological knowledge – what plants are used for food, what plants are used for tools, what plants are used for medicine.

[Traditional singing.]

[High]: It means I’m coming in a good way, it means I’m coming with a song in my heart, and if you don’t have that song in your heart, don’t go gather. If you don’t have that song in your heart, don’t go cook. And it brings that spirit of happiness and joy into what you’re doing.

So I take this little tobacco, I leave it down here, I say I’m coming and you’re gonna help me make medicine, you’re gonna help me make some tea.

My name is Kat High and I’m a descendant from the Hupa tribe in Northern California. I grew up in Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes, and learned about plants from my father and my mother down in Southern California. This is mugwort, it grows in a moister area. It’s used for ceremony in Northern California. It’s also used as a medicine, you can make a tea out of it, or you can make a tincture, which you would put externally. What I’m gonna do is boil up some water with some mugwort leaves in it for a tincture for mosquito bites, to decrease the itch and the pain from them. I have learned from elders and from others that if you’re out in the woods and you get the poison oak, the mugwort is a really good antidote for it. And you can see the color has gotten dark green. The mugwort can be used as an antiseptic, sage can be used as an antiseptic,

[Richard Bugbee, Kumeyaay, Cultural Educator and Ethnobotanist]: White sage is medicinal. You take a couple liters and make a tea to get rid of colds, stuffed up sinuses and stuff. It relieves mucuses, so the only person that shouldn’t drink white sage tea is pregnant and nursing women.

So we eat the seeds, toasted seeds and kind of like chia seeds. One of the most important uses of this plant was, it was our toilet paper because it’s soft and it smells good and it’s actually astringent.

My name is Richard Bugbee and [unintelligible].

I was apprenticed for a teacher named Jane Dumas and her first lesson was how do I gather plants, and she taught me the first thing I do is to say a prayer to the plant. The second thing is to ask permission and the third thing to do is to give the plant intent, what you’re gonna use it for. Because plants have lots of different purposes and they need to have a little direction sometimes.

[Sage LaPena, Nomptipom Wintu, Traditional Native & Western Herbalist]: Traditional ecological knowledge is a body of science that encompasses all sciences. If you’re a people living in the same place, the same region, for a thousand years, you’ve watched the turn of the seasons, the migrations of animals, birds, insects, fire regimes, and how they move through plant life. All of those things together – how we hunt and fish, how we gather our plants, how we are able to subsist, all of that – encompasses tech.

My name is Sage LaPena. I am [unitelligible] from Northern California and I am a ethno botanist and certified medical herbalist.

We’re at one of the villages on the American River that was part of this whole river corridor villages, which is [unintelligible] my new territory or southern [unintelligible]. There’s at least three or four plants just in this small area that are very useful.

So this is Artemisia and it is one of the plants we use a lot for either women’s medicine but also for protection. It’s made into a tea and it’s drank to help regulate your moon cycle or your menstrual cycle. The main constituents of the oils that it has in it are very bitter in nature, and that bitter action helps balance all your systems in a row, so there’s a domino effect or a cascade. When you intake of bitters, your digestive system is working better because then your gall bladder and your pancreas talk to each other, they work in unison. The tonic has to do with tonification, so you’re toning those walls, which and then is also going out through that cell wall and helping that tone through both the blood – digestion and then that’s getting into your blood system – and then actually going out through your intestinal walls, is helping to tonify your overall system.

Herbalism is so much more than just “here’s an herb, go ahead and take it.” The way I was trained to be an herbalist was starting actually sitting in the woods, going with the person who was my mentor.

I started as a child working with Mabel McKay. She is well known as a basket weaver and also as a doctor and she had me sit for periods of time out there and just be observant, be conscious. I learned a completely different type of understanding of herbalism as a whole in nature, as opposed to just how herbs affect individual body systems.

[Bugbee]: For tens of thousands of years, Indian people have had a reciprocal relationship with plants and it’s been good for the people and been good for the plants. Everybody’s been healthy and happy. For the last 500 years, that relationship has been severed. Plants aren’t being gathered anymore. The plants are not happy. That’s why they’re kind of growing wild. In Indian there is no word for wild.

[LaPena]: I really want people to understand we as native Californians, as traditional people, are utilizing the same medicines they are and we’re trying to harvest these things traditionally on our own or public lands that are in our tribal territories. And when people learn about herbs and how wonderful they are, and then they go out and gather all of them, we don’t have access to our medicine.

[High]: I firmly believe that Native people and all people ought to be establishing their own gathering areas in their own homes or communities. Gardening in your own home is something

that we’ve been developing here. We developed our dogbane forests and we turned our gray water into a grey water marsh so that we could grow tule. We could grow the [unintelligible], we could grow the [unintelligible]. A lot of the plants that require more water without us having to water it using the grey water.

I wouldn’t be teaching about our culture and our environment and the way we do things without the belief that this is open to all people to not only learn but understand, to adopt, to take on as their understanding of this.

So many people are relocated and we have terms for that – it’s called rootless. And what I am hoping will happen is that all of those people will find a way to sync their roots into this Earth and get nourishment from it and get an understanding of it and be able to get back to it.

[LaPena]: We’ve been trained a long term generationally, particularly in this country, to react a certain way to our environment or not react at all, to just have more consciousness about what we’re doing on a regular basis. The biggest misconception is you take humans out of nature, that nature comes back and that’s not true. You take humans out of nature and there’s something missing out of nature.

Attribution

Transcript for “Gathering Medicine | Tending the Wild | Season 1, Episode 5 | KCET” by PBS SoCal is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 8.3, Hernando Chindoy – Two Questions

Interview with Hernando Chindoy, Chindoy leader of the Inga people of Columbia Mocoa, Putumayo, January 2021.

[River sounds.]

[Why is it important to have a University committed to Indigenous thought?]

[Hernando Chindoy, speaking in Spanish]: The vast majority of us, Inga citizens, we learn and reproduce that which is not ours, from preschool on, all the way up to our doctorates. By doing that, we are contributing to deepening a crisis that the world is experiencing in terms of knowledge generation. It is a route imposed as something that is the most true, the scientifically proven. This has obscured all other avenues to access knowledge, which in this case are mainly those of the Indigenous people themselves. Of all these epistemologies of the south that are being talked about now. It is like with the territory. The Indigenous supports all these layers that have been mounted on top of it. And this has been a violent thing. But we are still here. Sooner or later, these imposed layers will have to be dismantled, they will have to be transformed, because they appeared under principles of violence. And in this sense, today it is important that imposed knowledge and our own knowledge practices have a space for dialogue today. And I don’t see this dialogue in another context than what is called university, although with time this will also have to change its name. But for now, to be a little more comprehensible, the message in terms of what is there, I’m going to say that it is a university. Later on you can say that it is a pluriversity, una lachaiwuasi for example, whatever. But that’s what we’re going for at the moment. And that has to be a meeting point for knowledge, to reflect on how to support each other, on what they are going to return to, and where they have to reposition themselves in more proper, less violent, more sacred impulses, in such a way that, above all, dignity can be respected. That dignity of the difference that everyone is.

[What is the function of the University?]

[Chindoy]: In principle, to unite the people. I believe that we must unify the people in principle. That is the great task of the university. It also becomes a backbone of the existence of the people as such. Because first of all it will have two functions, or two paths, two space times. On the one hand, we have to reaffirm ourselves as Inga. The issue of languages, for example. We are going to be Inga that in 100 years, we are speaking better Inga than we do now. Empowered by our language, making the language part of our daily life, and that we have to share it also with others who want to learn. But at least us, very firm in the language. The language is going to allow us to strengthen governance, economies, justice, everything in our world. But we also have to be Ingas who, in other contexts, argue for how we have to live there. Because we are not going to let ourselves be humiliated there either. Nor are we going to remain silent or tell lies. We have to argue there in the formulas that we have been taught about knowledge, about how we have to share life in that context. And if I am given a responsibility, and be it in administrative, political, legal, whatever, I can defend myself. So, the Inga will also feel proud, just like when you as a professional feel proud to be a Colombian citizen, but if you have to work in the U.S., in Venezuela or Ecuador, you are up to the task. On the other hand, the university has the challenge of dignifying us in spirituality. Because after more than 500 years of being violated in what is our essence of life, our science, the challenge is that this science becomes more comprehensible to humanity, to enable encounters with other ancient universities in the world. That will enable dialogues at a high level. This will be a space for that.

Attribution

Transcript for “Hernando Chindoy-Two Questions” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 8.6, What Does Education Mean to You?

[Music.]

[Child, speaking in Spanish]: I like to learn about history and science at school.

[Child 2]: Languages…and drawing.

[Child 3]: My favorite is maths.

[Child 4]: Sums…multiplication…

[Child 5]: My parents work hard and I want to repay them with good grades.

[Child 6, in English]: When I see Ebola I feel very sad. That is why I say I want to become a medical doctor.

[Child 7, in another language]: I want my school to prepare me so I can find work so I can become a respectable lady.

[Child 8, in another language]: When people ask me “Why should girls go to school?” I just answer: “Why not?”

[Child 9, in English]: I do not think about my leg. I feel free.

[Give #EveryChild a Fair Chance to Learn.]

Attribution

Transcript for “What does education mean to you?” by UNICEF is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 8.34, Boarding Schools Healing Voices

[Narrator]: They changed their motto from “The only good Indian is a dead one” to “Kill the Indian, but save the man.” When they forced us to go to boarding school, they told us to “Let all that was Indian within us die.” The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition was formed to bring truth, justice, and healing for boarding school survivors and descendants in the United States. The time for healing is now.

[Patricia]: I was placed in the boarding school, or I ended up at the boarding school one night when I was about six years old. The boarding school was St. Joe’s Academy, in 1968.

[Mitch]: I actually thought I was going to be free, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs lady and her husband were right there to pick me up. Aside from having a place to sleep and having three meals a day, I don’t have a whole lot of good things to say about the boarding school.

[George]: Being in boarding school really affected my self-esteem, not wanting to know the language, not really involved in the ceremonies and just being proud of who I was.

[Patricia]: You know, we’re taught, we’re not supposed to do certain things, but I ask myself, Where did that come from? Why are we fearful sometimes? Those kinds of teachings come from the military part of our experience. But I’ve had to take myself to places beyond some of those borders that I’ve been taught weren’t good. When I was able to do that, It was just a sense of relief.

[Mitch]: I think the coming generations have a lot of responsibility. It was our generation that became aware of the need for healing. They tried to make us into white people by cutting our hair and then taking our language and all of the horrific things that happened in other places, but it’s in here, it’s still here and as strong as ever, and I’m going to pass it on.

[Pam]: It’s important to educate the people on what you do know. In all areas, not just the history and the trauma that our people went through, but how beautiful our people were.

[Mitch]: The boarding school experience made me very angry, and I stayed angry, but the context in which I pass that anger into the future. I want it to be better.

[George]: What I’m happy about is my grandchildren won’t be able to experience some of the things that I’ve witnessed, a lot of the people that I grew up with witnessed.

[Patricia]: When I think about healing and once we are able to put aside, you know, some of these major issues that have impacted us in Indian country. To me, it’s about being more in control of who we are as Indigenous people of this land.

[Mitch]: Go on and heal fast. You know, do something because all of those, all of those things that the boarding school was put in place for to take away, to strip us of our culture. You failed. With me, you failed.

Attribution

Transcript for “Boarding School Healing Voices” by Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 8.38, Dr. Christopher Emdin: Hip Hop Ed in the Classroom

[Christopher Emdin, Physicist Lyricist]: I’m a physicist lyricist spitting this ridiculousness so witness the ignorance I dismiss. Newton’s laws of motion is the topic up the course because things in motion stay in motion unless they had an unbalanced force. When next steps the second law situation and summation, force equals mass times acceleration, that’s the second law, Newton force, or if you want more than the third law’s in store.

I’m Christopher Emdin, a science educator. You know, we spit bars, you spit lyrics, but we also drop science facts and then bring that to young people. If somebody were to take hip hop away from me tomorrow, I couldn’t breathe. Hip hop is everything, right? I mean, hip-hop is pedagogy in motion.

You go to any rap concert, you know the way the person who’s on that stage has a command of that audience, it’s almost the exact same way that you want a teacher to be able to sort of hold the students in their hand and make them learn. The call and response, the frenetic energy that builds up to this crescendo, you know, the aha moments—all those things are what you want to see happening in the classroom. So, hip-hop gives us the perfect pedagogical model.

Youth are always in search of something to sort of strike them in a way that makes them see that there are new possibilities for life. I work with kids who are from very, very low socioeconomic status, high incarceration rate communities, and so they’re just looking for an outlet and something to look forward to. So if a teacher can show that the concept that they’re teaching is a path towards a different possibility for their future, they tune right in.

We’re teaching kids to be able to remember what they learned. They’re putting it on paper to rhyme, they’re trying to make connections where connections didn’t exist before, developing a curiosity for the subject matter. And then they’re learning that the only assessment for knowledge is not just some stupid test where you have to write everything down, but you have to go out there and present the information just like scientists go out today and present the information to their colleagues and peers when there are conferences.

The thing about water is that it changes, like a person, from the color to the taste, but the water’s never perfect, seeping through the layers like you’re moving through a crowded train, hard to find the purity of water in the acid rain.

Teaching essentially is about meeting the person who you want to share information with on their own cultural turf. Where is it that they’re embedded? What are the examples that mean something to them? And the educator has to be able to enter the learner’s mind and be aware of how they view the world.

Attribution

Transcript for “Dr. Christopher Emdin: Hip Hop Ed in the Classroom” by AccuTrain is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 9.3, The Novel Legal Concept to Protect Sacred Rivers

[Narrator]: Several times a year toxic foam covers this river in India. Experts say the suds come from detergent dumped upstream by textile factories. They’re one of many sources that pollute

the river. Everywhere in the world sacred rivers are in trouble. Now there’s a global movement to protect them by treating them less like sewers and more like people.

The Mighty Wangani

[Narrator]: In New Zealand the mighty Wangani flows past active volcanoes and rugged hill country before it empties into the sea, and it was the first river in the world to have a legal right to do what rivers are supposed to do.

[Grant Wilson, Executive Director, Earth Law Center]: The idea that rivers have a right to be healthy and to be renewed, a right to conservation has been recognized in a growing number of places. A right to flow. The idea that rivers have a right to flow with sufficient water, to flow freely.

Right to Flow

[Narrator]: For over a hundred and fifty years, Maori activists fought to protect their sacred river. That fight ended in March 2017. That’s when dozens of tribe members gathered in the country’s parliament to celebrate the legal recognition of the river as a living being.

[Wilson]: There’s a phrase that the Wanganui use that says, “I am the river and the river is me.”

[Legislator speaks in native language.]

[Wilson]: Which basically acknowledges that they are indistinguishable from the river and to protect the river’s rights is to protect their own rights and vice versa.

Rights of Nature

[Narrator]: Just a few months later, the rights of nature movement had another win. The high court of Uttarakhand state ruled that the Ganges and the Yamana rivers are living entities that deserve protection under the law. The court was catching up to what many Indians already believe. According to professor David Haberman, Hindus consider the Ganges both as a deity and as a family member.

[David Haberman, professor of religious studies at Indiana University]: One river worshiper who regards the Yamuna river as his mother said that it just gives him such anguish in looking at what has happened to his mother, but he also goes on to say that when your mother is sick, you don’t kick her out of the house, but you try to help her.

Religion

[Narrator]: Other experts say that religious communities are key to the protection of sacred waters.

[Rita D. Sherman, Associate Professor, Graduate Theological Union]: It’s time for religious leaders to act boldly. Since saving the biosphere is a moral, ethical and spiritual issue because without the equal sphere we cannot survive. We need that level of mobilization. Religion has that power, that moral authority.

Challenges

[Narrator]: The rights of nature movement is gaining steam but using this legal concept to protect polluted waters faces a number of challenges. Most laws on the books appoint legal guardians to speak on behalf of the river.

[Wilson]: I would say, overall, hundreds of rivers have rights across the globe at this moment.

[Narrator]: Now the struggle is how to put teeth into these protections.

[Wilson]: How do we enforce it? What’s the practicality? That’s one of the big things that’s coming next.

Attribution

Transcript for “The novel legal concept to protect sacred rivers” by The Conversation is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 9.19, What Does “Two-Spirit” Mean?

[Geo Neptune, Narrator]: Though the label has only been used since the 90s, the concept of the two-spirit is something indigenous groups have identified with for centuries. But what does two-spirit actually mean and where does it come from?

What is Two-Spirit?

[Narrator]: Two-spirit is an umbrella term that bridges indigenous and Western understandings of gender and sexuality. You may recognize it as the “two” that sometimes appears at the end of LGBTQ+. There are many definitions and understandings of two-spirit, and each is nation-specific. The term was intentionally introduced by Native people with the goal of finding common ground and helping educate about traditional teachings in a contemporary context.

The Two-Spirit Society of Denver offers the following definition: Two-spirit refers to another gender role believed to be common among most, if not all, first peoples of Turtle Island (North America), one that had a proper and accepted place within native societies. This acceptance was rooted in the spiritual teachings that say all life is sacred.

How Did the Term Two-Spirit Come About?

[Narrator]: In 1990, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, at the third annual Native American gay and lesbian gathering, the term “two-spirit” was proposed and affirmed by consensus. The Lakota word was a potential solution to what native scholars and activists called the problem of naming or making the many different sexual and gender identities that fall under the two-spirit umbrella legible across native and non-native cultures alike.

For example, to illustrate the diversity of meanings that two-spirit contains, consider the following: In Lakota, the word “winkta” means “to be as a woman” and refers to Lakota people who transgress boundaries of gender from what may be considered male to female. In Diné, “nádleehi” means “those who transform” and refers to one of four separate genders: masculine feminine, masculine masculine, feminine masculine, and feminine feminine. Each gender has its own word in the Diné language.

Those are just two nation-specific examples and there are so many more. Each nation’s understanding of gender and sexual diversity is different and grounded in specific spiritual beliefs. Although all nations don’t have a concept of two-spirit people across those indigenous nations that do, two-spirit people were historically held in high regard and often considered sacred or divine, holding important positions like matchmakers, medicine people, or warriors on the front lines of battle. Many two-spirit people perform roles traditionally assigned to both men and women. We’wha a famous two-spirit of the Zuni Ori hamana was known to take part in masculine tribal matters and feminine tribal matters and was even sent as an official Zuni delegate to Washington DC.

Two-Spirit History

[Narrator]: Part of the reason “two-spirit” was adopted at the 1990 conference was because much of the written record on the indigenous nations of North America begins with European contact. For instance, the writings of Jesuit priests from the 1600s contain references to “berdaches,” which means “kept boy” in French, to refer to those who embodied both male and female genders. These writings often focus negatively on perceived cross-dressing among the Anishinaabe. The term is not only inaccurate in that it projects a European understanding of gender but is widely considered pejorative by natives.

Two-Spirit Today

[Narrator]: Two-spirit was an attempt at self-determination across linguistic barriers because the existing language—foreign and imposed violently on the indigenous peoples of North America—was both offensive and deeply colonial in its gaze. European colonizers imposed homophobia, rigid binary gender roles, and misogyny under the guise of civilizing indigenous people through the Christian tradition in residential schools and beyond. As a result, indigenous people were robbed not only of their land but of their spiritual traditions and way of life regarding two-spirit people.

Many nations came to forbid and punish two-spirit unions and self-expression as recently as 2004. Kathy Reynolds and Dawn McKinley, two Cherokee women in Tulsa, Oklahoma, attempted to marry under tribal law, setting off a convoluted legal battle with serious political and social implications. The two were thrust into the spotlight against their wishes and became instant public symbols of the battle for two-spirit rights under tribal law.

The Cherokee tribe is the second largest in the US. Although they were granted the the right to marry. The decision to issue them a marriage license was soon challenged and led to a tribal law declaring that a union was to be between a man and a woman, eventually the law was overturned in 2016. By that time, a wider cultural shift had taken place both outside of and within the Cherokee Nation. In recent years, many Native people are returning to their two-spirit traditions as a way to heal from the injustices the American colonial project has visited upon their ancestors and traditions.

In 2011, the first known U.S. two-spirit powwow was organized by the Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits. Since then, powwows honoring two spirits have been held in Montana and Kansas, and in March of 2017, the largest powwow in the US, the Gathering of Nations, honored two-spirit people during its grand entry. Two-spirit identity is resilient and precious; it has survived centuries of colonial violence and prejudice. These sacred ways of knowing live on amongst Native youth seeking to know more about themselves, elders who have kept the traditions alive in spite of the odds, and anyone in between.

It should go without saying but two-spirit is not a poetic way for non-native LGBTQ people to express themselves. We’re looking at you Jason Mraz. It is however a sacred tradition among the first peoples of this land we call Turtle Island that all of its inhabitants should know about and respect.

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Transcript from “What Does “Two-Spirit” Mean? | InQueery | them.” by InQeery/them is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 9.23, The Role of the African-American Church in the Civil Rights Movement

[Manning Marable, History Professor, Columbia University]: To understand the role of the Black church during the civil rights movement in the 50s, you need to go back about a century. During slavery, the only institution that white racists – the slaveholders – would permit people of African descent to have as their own was the church. The church was the only place where Blacks could congregate together in prayer but they also used that site of faith as a place of gathering resistance, of plotting rebellion. And after the Civil War was over the church became the only institution where you had a leadership cast, usually of Black men who could authentically represent the interest of the Black community, because their salaries were paid for by Black folk.

Thus, the Black church in the 1940s and 50s was an institution that had resources, it had a leadership elite of Black ministers, and it had the institutional ability to help fund long-term protests that were being waged by working-class and low-income people. The Black church provided the institutional means for carrying out the campaigns that were waged in the small towns. But at the same time, as a historian, it must be noted that the majority of Black churches in major cities did not engage in civil disobedience or in the campaigns led by Dr. King and the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress of Racial Equality. Most Black ministers stood on the sidelines. So if you look at, say, in Montgomery, perhaps 10 to 15 Black churches were actively involved in the campaign in 1955-56 to end the racial segregation on public buses. In Birmingham in ‘63, perhaps 25 or 30 out of the more than 200 Black churches

in the city. But the vast majority of churches, while their members participated to a great extent, the ministers themselves tried to stand on the sidelines. And part of the reason for that is that there was a split in African-American faith communities around the proper role of Black ministers in social protest. The Baptists actually divided in 1961 between the National Baptist Convention and the progressive Baptist Convention, which sided with Dr. King and argued

that the role of the Black clergy was as social activists in challenging racial segregation and fighting for progressive social change.

But the vast majority of Black Baptist ministers said that that was not the role of the church, and so there was a tension within the church at a national level. Nevertheless, there would not have been successful civil rights organizations had there not been the financial and the political support of key Black denominations.

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Transcript for “The Role of the African-American Church in the Civil Rights Movement” by NBC News Learn is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 9.33, Iran Protests: Why is Cutting Hair an Act of Rebellion?

[Abir Al-Sahlani, Swedish MEP, standing at EU-branded podium]: Until the women of Iran are free, we are going to stand with you. Jin, Jiyan, Azadi. Women, life, freedom!

[Abir Al-Sahlani, a Swedish MEP originally from Iraq, cut her hair during a debate in the European Parliament on the repression of women’s rights protestors in Iran.]

[Crowd chanting.]

[The same gesture has been repeated in demonstrations around the world in solidarity with Iran. But what does the gesture mean and where does it come from?]

[Music.]

[“Gisoboran” (hair cutting) is one of the most famous mourning rituals in Iranian culture. It’s a way to express anger and sadness together. Traces of this tradition can be found in classical Persian literature.]

[In ancient Iranian mythology, women’s hair was seen as a symbol of fertility and blessing.]

[Hair cutting is now becoming a global movement against gender inequality and to show solidarity with protesters in Iran.]

[Crowds cheering.]

[Woman on phone video]: For freedom.

[Famous French actresses like Juliette Binoche and Marion Cotillard recently took part in the movement. The slogan “women, life, freedom,” originally used by female Kurdish fighters against the terrorist group ISIS, is now used to show solidarity with protesters in Iran.]

[Music.]

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Transcript for Figure 9.35, Does Islam Care About the Environment?

[Saad Tasleem]: Does Islam care about the environment? This may seem like an odd question because caring about the environment seems like a recent issue, and Islam appeared more than 1400 years ago. So did Islam really legislate laws to protect the environment from all that time ago?

Well, when God sent the father of humankind, Adam, peace be upon him, to Earth, he sent him to be a successor. So according to Islamic principles this means that we as human beings are agents and guardians on Earth, and it is our responsibility to use the Earth’s resources with care and humility, to preserve and protect the environment, and this is exactly what was stated in the Islamic Declaration on climate change. Islam affirms that the use of the resources is the right and privilege of all people, and therefore it instructs us as human beings to take the utmost precaution to ensure the interests and rights of everyone because we are all equal partners on Earth. Human beings must not misuse and ruin natural resources, as every generation has the

right to benefit from them. No one person or even generation owns them in the absolute sense, and this is how the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him, lived. He showed a great deal of care and concern for the environment and gave guidelines for taking care of it. For example, he said if any Muslim plants trees or seeds, and then a person, bird or animal eats from it, it is considered charity.

Here are some specific examples of what is found in Islam to protect the environment: laws to combat land waste by desertification by encouraging the reconstruction of land reclamation and afforestation; the prohibition of cutting down trees; the removal of corruptive and toxic materials from land so that it remains clean; keeping one’s own living environment clean; the preservation of water, so in Islam it’s forbidden to waste water, and hunting is prohibited at certain times and in specific places in order to allow for animals to reproduce and prosper.

[Music.]

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Transcript for Figure 9.36, The Condor’s Spiritual and Ecological Role Along the Klamath

[Chris West, Yurok Tribe Senior Wildlife Biologist]: The Yurok tribe see things from a cyclical perspective and more of a holistic ecosystem approach where everything’s part of the system, everything’s used, nothing’s really waste. Condors can be part of that, bringing those nutrients to those more terrestrial upland ecosystems.

[Tiana Williams, Yurok Tribe Condor Biologist]: Because our entire lives are supposed to be dedicated to keeping the world in balance. It means that we’re, we’re praying and working towards restoration of our entire world. All of the tribes in this area find Condor to be deeply spiritually significant, so from both the spiritual and the ecological standpoint we’ve, we’ve had a very large hole in our world since condors disappeared.

[Music.]

[West]: At the time of Euro-American arrival here there were a lot of big bad predators and people were trying to start up, you know, bringing in livestock. They wanted to get rid of the grizzly bears, they wanted to get rid of the wolves. There were a lot of carcasses put out that were intentionally laced with strychnine and other toxins so condors, turkey vultures, eagles all took major hits at that time.

[Williams]: Another one of the big impacts on condor was the introduction of the use of lead ammunition, and of course lead is well-established as being a toxic material. We got it out of our

lead paint, leaded gasoline, got rid of all those things, but it’s still the most commonly used ammunition type for most hunters. Some statistics indicate the use of lead ammunition is actually the number one reason that condors are dying in the wild even today.

Condor reintroduction ties very deeply to our world, and all ceremonies, to our reason for being. All of the tribes in this area find Condor to be deeply spiritually significant. We do continue with our dances, but we no longer have condor providing us our feathers, which we use that feather in our regalia and in Yurok belief that feather carries the condor spirit with it. We don’t have condor here to gift us his feathers. Condor traditionally would carry our prayers to the heavens, which he’s no longer in our skies to carry our prayers to heavens and of course his ecological role has been non-functioning as well. He serves as the ultimate and the cleanup crew, the ultimate in the world renewal, as he goes across the landscape breaking into these particularly large carcasses like whales, seals, sea lions, bears, that other smaller scavengers can’t break into. He actually breaks into them, opens them up for more bioavailability, and provides more food to the ecosystem that normally would have been there.

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Transcript for “The Condor’s Spiritual and Ecological Role Along the Klamath | Tending Nature | KCET” by PBS SoCal is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 9.37, What Do We Tell The Seven Generations?: Jennifer’s Story

[Jennifer Irving, narrator]: As a Lakota woman I’ve been taught that with every decision, with every action, we need to consider the seven generations to come. That what we do impacts each of those generations and we need to preserve our way of life so that they can enjoy what we have today. This is especially true for the medicines and plants we use in our ceremonies, our traditional foods, our art and our overall well-being.

Climate change has begun to impact the manner in which some of these medicines grow. We’ve all seen the news reports of extreme weather and warmer than average temperatures. We’ve all experienced earlier springs, hotter summer days, deadly winter storms, and record snowfall.

I’ve heard stories of other tribes and how their way of life is being impacted by climate change. How herds they’ve hunted are moving further and further away from their homelands because herds can’t find food where they used to. My family and I have already seen changes in our community and the growth period of some of our medicines locally.

My heart is heavy thinking of the generations of Lakota children that may miss out on the beautiful experiences of berry picking, of timpsila gathering, of picking sage for ceremony, of gathering and processing cansasa for our traditional tobacco. What do we tell these children? Do we tell them we knew things were changing, but we did not think of you? Do we tell them these ceremonies, these medicines, this way of life was a beautiful one? Do we tell them that we’re sorry it’s not there for them? Or do we tell them we stood up, we cried out, we protested, we wrote laws, we passed laws, we prayed, we cried, that we did all we could for you. We did all we could to protect these resources for you.

We’re taught as Lakota to be good relatives, and the responsibility of being a good relative is to act now and to become engaged in protecting Mother Earth. We have to do our part in our homes, in our work, in our communities and engage with the lawmakers that govern where we live. I think about what our relatives and our ancestors did for us, how hard they fought for us, what they sacrificed and endured for us. And I want to know I did all I could for the seven generations who will come after me.

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Transcript for “What Do We Tell The Seven Generations?: Jennifer’s Story” by American Public Health Association is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 10.2, How to Protect People and the Planet

[Music.]

[Tania Roe]: I changed my career path the day I cried in public. I was listening to Alex Blanchette, an associate professor of anthropology, at Tufts University, discuss his work with factory farms. He witnessed firsthand the mistreatment of pigs and migrant workers.

He explained how some workers would wear diapers to work because they were denied

bathroom breaks. This is one of many examples of how large corporations maximize their profits by requiring non-stop labor from vulnerable, in this case largely

undocumented communities, and how our health is so connected to the health of the planet and animals. Before that day I had planned to embark on a career in wildlife conservation and while I still advocate for animals, I realized that day that I could not advocate for animals without advocating as well for marginalized communities, because again our health goes hand in hand.

This really hit home to me and I cried right in the middle of class, as you can imagine, not something that I wanted to do, because my parents were undocumented at one point in their lives, in this country. Those workers falling ill due to inhumane and unhygienic work conditions could have been them.

My family is from Colombia. Colombia is the second most biodiverse country in the world, and per square mile we’re actually the most biodiverse. We’re right behind Brazil. Colombia, we love nature, we rely on the Andes Mountains. Our valleys, our rivers, the Amazon rainforest–we have the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean on our coast. We rely on all these different ecosystems for peace, for livelihoods, for food, water for everything. For many of us nature isn’t simply nice to have, it is needed and it’s magic. We feel the connection to Nature because we rely on it so much, and also because we know what it’s like to have it when it’s lost.

When so many foreign policies from the United States, from European National policies, they–they come to monopolize their food and water sources. They pass policies like Plan Colombia which is a U.S.-backed practice of spraying glyphosate, a pesticide, over at campesinos, our rural farmers so they can continue their policies at the expense of our people, our wildlife, our biodiversity. We know what it’s like to not have nature and we also know that restored nature restores our communities. [Speaks in Spanish.]

The reason that we have this disconnection to Nature is because we are building systems in the ego mindset and we need to switch to the eco mindset. The ego mindset allows us to create hierarchies, whether between humans and other species or humans and other humans based on race, class, gender, etc. But with the eco mindset we see ourselves as part of a whole, and that’s when we carry out our ecological role because we are merely one species of many on this planet. We cannot carry natural cycles on our own, and so we know that we have to connect with other species to carry out the balance of Earth’s ecosystems.

The ego mindset or the egotistical mindset drives us to create systems based on that hierarchy and that’s what we are seeing here now, today, all over the world. That is what is ultimately leading to our downfall. But we can switch to an ecological mindset again when we see ourselves as part of nature, because when we do that everything changes. A whole world of possibilities comes about, and we start to create climate solutions that work for all species and all people. To do that we can adopt three values. In the ego mindset we can see ourselves all as equal, all humans. As equal, we can coexist with other species and we can live open-hearted, meaning we live empathetically and compassionately, because at the end of the day this is out of love. Out of love for each other, out of love for our blue and green home, the only one we have and know, and out of love for every other animal, insect, every other living being, because we realize we all want the same thing: to live abundant healthy lives.

But we need action. We all know that change does not happen on its own. Adopting the values is the first step. We actually need to make those into action, so we can see that play out in real life, play out in our daily lives, to change the way that we govern, transform society as a whole. So to do that, we can adopt three principles: we can educate one another, collaborate with one another, and with other species and we can organize their efforts. We’ve seen so many social justice movements like the Civil Rights Movement do that before. We can do it again and we can do it together because that’s the only way it’s going to get done.

I believe that we can do this and I believe that because I see it, and I also see the alternative. We have no other option. When we separate humans from nature we tend to create solutions that actually don’t work for us or other species, like in the name of conservation many Indigenous peoples have been evicted from their homes, their ancestral homes, so we can build national parks, not just in the U.S but around the world. That is not conservation. We cannot harm people in the name of conservation.

You can just ask the Maasai people in Tanzania, who earlier this year were ruthlessly evicted from their homes just so our foreign company can come in and set up a trophy hunting reserve. We need to switch our mindset so we can create solutions that actually work and that are actually sustainable and long-term wildlife corridors, and we are already doing this. We can build wildlife corridors so people and animals can travel safely.

In Colombia we have the Jaguar friendly seal. The Jaguar is a keystone species, meaning we need it to maintain the balance in our ecosystem, and it’s also endangered,

meaning it’s threatened and we need to make sure that we restore the populations and fast. The Jaguar friendly seal helps Jaguars by working with farmers, with those campesinos, and the way that they do that is a farmer is certified under the seal when

they set a part of their land to biodiversity. They plant native species again, they welcome the return of biodiversity in the mountain ecosystem, and we see Jaguars are coming back to that range. They’re restoring their habitat, and this helps all of their wildlife because if you have jaguars you have their prey as well and you have the plants as well. It’s a whole system that’s coming back. This actually helps the farmers as well

because when they have that jaguar friendly seal they receive a premium on their products. They’re paid more for that same coffee, and the coffee is actually way better because the soil-friendly practices that they’re using are benefiting, again, the whole system. These are what we call win-win solutions. This is what we call coexistence.

I’m here today because I believe that we can Implement these solutions, and so that we can actually benefit one another and actually see the world that we want to create happen. I believe it because I see it everywhere. I see it in tree planting initiatives, especially in urban communities where tree canopy has just been lost due to racist policies in the past, like redlining, that still affect us today. This creates wildlife habitat right in the middle of the city as well, where it’s most needed. So it’s benefiting, again, the communities in the area and the animals. I see it in beach cleanups, where we reduce the effects of pollution and we welcome the return of nesting sea turtles. I also see change in urban farms. This is right in the middle of the city. It’s a regenerative farm where we create pollinator habitat. We restore the soil again, and we uplift and value our workers. This also increases access to healthy foods, because many communities, as you may know, do not have quick access to that healthy food, and we all deserve that. But I’m just one person. If I believe that we can do this, I mean what will that do? I want all of you to believe it as well. So I want us to do an exercise. I want us all to close our eyes, trying to fall asleep, and I want you to Envision the world that you want to create, the world that you want to live in. If climate change were a thing of the past, if all people were truly treated equally, and if coexistence was a norm, what do you see yourself doing? Maybe gathering organic vegetables from your backyard garden, or if you’re like me, you see yourself swimming with turtles and manta rays and crystal clear waters, or maybe you’re taking a walk in the woods. Whatever that vision is of that world, whatever you want to see, whatever world you want to help create, really grasp on to that and once you have, open your eyes. We can create all of our visions a reality, but to do so we have to first recognize our rightful place in nature: not above other species, but working in harmony with them. Not above other humans, but working together and realizing that again, we all want the same thing. So I hope the next time I cry in public it’s not because of despair and frustration or confusion, but from the sheer joy of seeing all of us come together and create those different worlds, those different realities, that we all want to see and create that sustainable, equitable future that we all deserve. Thank you.

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Transcript for “How to Protect People and Planet | Tania Roa | TEDxBoston” by TEDx Talks is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 10.32, How Climate Change is Making Inequality Worse

[Music.]

[Stephanie Hegarty, Population Correspondent]: Climate change is already making poverty worse.

[Woman, Resident of Qabayyat, Lebanon]: We’re left to care for ourselves.

[Woman, Resident of Zhengzhou, China]: I lost my house. I lost everything.

[Man, Resident of Tizi Ouzou, Algeria]: It’s unbelievable.

[Hegarty]: The World Bank says it could push 130 million people into poverty in the next 10 years.

The richest half of the world are responsible for 86% of greenhouse gas emissions and the poorest half for just 14%, but poorer communities are already worse affected by the climate change caused by those emissions in many ways that aren’t that obvious, like extreme heat.

[Yolanda Lee, resident of Yonkers, New York, U.S.]: Everything is exposed. The sun is beating down directly on you and it’s just unbearable.

[Hegarty]: During the June heat wave in the United States, scientists found that streets in poor areas were up to 3 to 10 degrees Celsius hotter.

[Lee]: And many people take medication here and they can’t sustain themselves outside for any length of time.

[Hegarty]: And that’s because of too much asphalt, concrete and the lack of trees.

[Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone]: Trees are life. They, the role they play in this, in our ecosystem, can’t be overstated.

[Hegarty]: Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr is the mayor of Freetown in Sierra Leone and has plans to plant a million trees in the city. Trees create shade, and plants pull moisture up from the ground, which has a cooling effect. Research suggests that people in areas with less vegetation have a five percent higher chance of dying of heat related causes. It’s holding whole countries back. Scientists at Stanford University estimated that Nigeria’s economy is 29% smaller than it would be without climate change. Brazil’s is 25% and India’s 31%.

Extreme heat, weather and fires mean people are already on the move.

[Man, resident of Oregon]: Having a safe place to sleep at night is, right now, is like a godsend.

[Hegarty]: After the campfire in Paradise, California, people moved to the city of Chico. Rents surged, pushing poorer people out, and in places like Sierra Leone it’s destroying livelihoods.

[Aki-Sawyerr]: Over six percent of our national population are farmers, subsistence farmers. With the effects of climate change, means it rains when it shouldn’t and it doesn’t rain when it should and people’s crops fail, and because their livelihoods disappear, they flock to the city looking for a better life.

We don’t have the infrastructure to absorb those people, so what you see happening is massive deforestation of our hillsides.

[Hegarty]: Mary Vonn has planted 250,000 trees so far and it’s not just extreme heat that they manage. They can also prevent flooding.

[Resident of Zhengzhou, China]: I really don’t know what to say. I lost my shop. I lost my house. I lost everything.

[Hegarty]: Yolanda’s community was also hit recently by floods in New York.

[Lee]: After the rain or any, anytime we have any kind of storm, the backyard completely floods.

[Hegarty]: Nearby in Queens, they killed a young family from Nepal who were living in a basement.

[Aki-Sawyerr]: The poor are definitely disproportionately impacted.

[Hegarty]: Researchers at the University of Brussels have found the children born in high-income countries will see twice as many extreme weather events as their grandparents did, but for children in low-income countries, it’ll be worse. They’ll see three times as many.

[Prof Wim Thiery, Climatologist]: Today you have a much higher chance of being born in a low income country or lower middle income countries. About two thirds of all children born today are born in low, lower and middle income countries, and these are exactly those regions which are hardest hit by climate change.

[Aki-Sawyerr]: And they play the least role in many ways in contributing to this crisis.

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Transcript for Figure 10.36, The Relationship between Humans and Nature | Native America: Nature to Nations

Final segment of a video about the first democracy in North America and the Haudenosaunee (in French, the Iroquois) people’s connection to nature.

[Sounds of people greeting each other.]

[Robbie Robertson, Narrator]: Today the Haudenosaunee gather on the shore of Lake Onadoga. The place where their journey from war to peace began.

[Syd Hill, Chief of Chiefs]: All these leaders would work together to come up with a solution.

[Narrator]: They build their confederacy based on profound lessons and symbols from nature.

[Tom Porter, Mohawk spiritual leader]: Mother Earth never lacked nothing, did a perfect world.

[Narrator]: But like a treaty between nations, they believe they owe nature something in return. To take care of all living things.

[Tom Porter]: Water and air and all the natural things that make the world that we live in is held sacred by all indigenous people – and every human being comes from an indigenous people.

[Narrator]: This ceremony is an appeal to honor that responsibility to nature. For Onadoga Lake, the birthplace of democracy in America, is among the world’s most polluted.

[Syd Hill]: Everybody is concerned these days about the condition of the waters, the condition of Mother Earth. It’s a concern throughout the world. That was put there for everybody to use and nobody has the right to take that away from anybody.

[Tom Porter]: It’s not just the water, it’s not just made out of chemical elements. It’s real. It’s our life blood.

[Narrator]: Over two hundred years ago, the framers of the U.S. Constitution learned lessons of governance from the Haudenosaunee. But the founding fathers leave out a core principle. People have a responsibility to take care of the Earth.

[Ducks quacking.]

[Narrator]: Native America’s profound respect for nature is relevant now as much as ever.

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Transcript for “The Relationship between Humans and Nature | Native America: Nature to Nations” by PBS LearningMedia is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 10.41, Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis, Chapter 4: Dreams

This is Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis. Chapter 4. Dreams.

There’s this line in a Nina Simone song that runs through my head quite a bit these days. The song, at least in part, is about drugs and addiction. She says:

The dealer takes a nickel lord

And sells you lots of sweet dreams

And lord knows we need lots a sweet dreams

This line hits me, I think, because of its empathy. We do need sweet dreams, God knows. But not all dreams are equal. Some dreams, to borrow another line from the song, put tombstones in our eyes.

I’m Ben Cushing. Welcome to the 4th and final Chapter of “Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis.”

In this chapter, I want to reflect on our dreams. What kinds of dreams have we inherited? What are their consequences? And what kinds of dreams do we need, in order to survive the future, and heal?

Let’s start by thinking a bit about some of the dreams that have built – or at least legitimized – major parts of the world as we know it.

Take, for example, the very seductive and reassuring dream of progress. A product of the European enlightenment, “progress” tells a story that claims to explain all of the human past, present and future.

It’s a triumphant story. Human’s, it tells, are forever developing new and better technologies and forms of social organization. In the dream of progress, the future is bright and civilized and the past is mostly dark, backward and irrelevant.

As Teodor Shanin describes the progress story: “all societies are advancing naturally and consistently ‘up’, on a route from poverty, barbarism, despotism and ignorance to riches, civilization, democracy and rationality….”

As listeners of the last chapter might notice, the narrative of progress relies on the ‘civilized / savage’ dichotomy that is so central to the ideologies that have justified settler colonialism and racial capitalism. In fact, the story of “progress” was and is exceedingly useful to power holders. It can justify everything from enslaving and commodifying people (read: progress through the civilizing mission) to seizing native land by force (read: progress through taming and harnessing the wilderness) to global imperialism (read: progress through the white man’s burden).

The story of progress even provided the moral foundation for the neocolonialism that took hold after WW2. So, for example, when the former colonial powers used institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to impose their economic policies on the former colonies, they framed it as development – a kind of economic, technological and political progress.

Poor countries, we’re told, aren’t poor because of centuries of violence and extraction. And rich countries aren’t rich because of their exploitation of poor countries – because of centuries of stolen riches. Rather, some countries are just more developed than others. And it’s out of benevolence and good will that the developed countries teach the poor countries how to develop.

So it shouldn’t be any surprise that, today, we still used the language of childhood and adulthood to explain global inequality. Some economies are mature, we’re told, and others are developing.

Today, we live in the world that progress made. And as we face the existential threats that progress brought about (from the climate crisis to nuclear war), techno-capitalists dream about escaping this world and colonizing Mars. Jeff Bezos dons a white cowboy hat and mounts his white phallic steed. It’s absurd. Progress is such a powerful story that many of us are convinced that the only solution to the crises caused by yesterday’s progress, is to just double down.

I’m reminded of something the Anthropologist Arturo Escobar wrote. ‘There are no modern solutions to our modern problems.’

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not advocating that we “go backward” or return to some romantic past, and neither is Escobar. Even that criticism rests on the framework of the progress story. Rather, I’m suggesting we jetosen the whole idea. Stick it in one of Bezos’s rockets and fire it into the heavens. It isn’t that there are no solutions to our modern problems. It’s that solutions will have to come from other frameworks.

Progress is a dream, alright. And God knows we need sweet dreams. But maybe not this one. This one has put too many tombstones into too many eyes.

The American Dream is one of the most salient stories in US society over the past century. This is a deeply held – and deeply felt – belief not only about American freedom of opportunity but about what constitutes a good life, and how one should go about living it.

To criticise the American Dream, is to commit a kind of blasphemy in US culture. And while I’m more than happy to attack false idles, I also want to acknowledge that the American Dream can be a source of hope for a lot of people. And hope is precious in this world.

Many Americans assume that the American dream – the dream of lifting oneself from rags to riches through hard work and perseverance – is as old as the country itself, or older. Many of us were taught that the so-called pilgrims came on the Mayflower seeking religious liberty – framed as the first chapter in a national tale of American dreams. We’re invited to imagine European Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island seeking freedom and opportunity. And we’re asked to play the protagonist of our own American dream story.

But like most national myths, it has never been very true. And it isn’t even especially old. It dates back to the late 19th century, when the American economy was rapidly industrializing, and the wars of colonial settlement were coming to a close. That was indeed a time when a minority of the population – namely white men – did enjoy significantly better economic opportunity and upward class mobility compared to their counterparts in Western Europe. Western Europe, at the time, had a rigid class structure, with roots in the feudal system. And the US offered, among other things, freshly seized indigenous and Mexican land for white settlement and booming new industries. But the time of relative opportunity – as unjust as it was – has long passed. For about the last half century, in the context of neoliberal economics and the consolidation of corporate power, the US has offered less and less opportunity. Today, Canadians experience 3-times higher rates of class mobility than Americans. So, if the US ever was a land of opportunity, it was in the context of colonial settlement and capitalist exploitation, and it isn’t much of one today.

So the hope offered by the American dream is at least in part false. But there’s something even more dangerous about the American dream. Embedded in the notion that the US is a land of opportunity is a belief that inequality is simply the result of some people taking advantage of those opportunities and others failing to. This is often called the myth of meritocracy – the idea that people earn their place in the economic hierarchy based on their merit – their skills and work ethic. This is a remarkably powerful ideology, since it implies that people basically deserve their lots in life. The rich are rich because they earned their wealth. The poor are poor because they deserve to be. All coercion is hidden away, and justified.

The myth of meritocracy makes no room for an accounting of colonialism, slavery, class exploitation, gendered power structures or extractive imperial economies. So, for example, if we believe the myth of meritocracy, and then look around to see that white folks have about 20 times more wealth than black folks – which they do – the story slips quickly into white supremacy. One is left with the idea that white folks must be 20 times harder working than their black counterparts. It’s no wonder that this story is so popular among the same political forces that seek to repress black and brown movements for liberation.

Overall, this national myth can cause us to blame ourselves for suffering the consequences of systems that are hurting us, while letting the system off the hook. It keeps us from understanding the world we inhabit – and from understanding our own lives and the lives of the people around us. And, I’d suggest, it even keeps us from dreaming better dreams.

Not all dreams are equal. Some dreams, even dreams that give us hope, can hurt us. They can even be weapons deployed against us, and that we deploy against each other.

As the social theorist Slavaj Zizek put it: “The first step is not to change reality to fit your dreams, but to change the way you dream.”

Or better, from James Baldwin: “…it is only when one is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream one has long cherished, or a privilege one has long possessed, that one is set free…that one has set oneself free, for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”

I don’t know what dreams we need. But when I look at progress and the American dream, I feel pretty confident that these aren’t them.

It seems to me that we’re all living within a kind of crisis of the imagination.

Over the past several decades, the competing dreams of modernity have collapsed. The dreams of the old left were declared dead in the 1980’s, as Neoliberal capitalism claimed total victory over communism. Then, the conservative icon Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of the UK, celebrated the total hegemony of her class by declaring “There is no alternative” to global free market capitalism.

But today, after enduring 40 years of austerity and growing inequality, and as we witness the unraveling of the living systems of this world, of which we are part, the dreams of capitalism have surely died. Some may still hold them close, but more out of nostalgia than actual hope. Those old dreams have lost their power. And where they still hold sway, they take the shape of reactionary nationalism and misdirected resentment.

The modern dreamscape is as clearcut and barren as the modern landscape.

In these hard times, what stories do we need to be able to make sense of – and give meaning to – our lives? What stories will help us survive the future, and heal?

Let’s go back to Arturo Escobar’s suggestion that “there are no modern solutions to our modern problems.” By this, he means that the solutions to our problems will have to come from outside the framework of modernity and capitalist eurocentric culture – and he directs our attention particularly to Indigenous peoples and radical social movements.

Indigenous communities – as the historian and native activist Nick Estes argues – not only have centuries of experience resisting colonialism, but also hold practical knowledge about how to live within reciprocal ecological relationships connected to local places. So Indigenous-led social movements, such as the movements to stop the construction of oil pipelines, aren’t just about stopping pipelines or protecting the environment. They’re assertions of alternative ways of relating to other people and the other-than-human world – of being responsible in our relationships with our various relatives. Estes makes this point partly by exploring the Lakota phrase that became a rallying cry for the movement at Standing Rock; mni wiconi, meaning water is life. “Mni Wiconi and these Indigenous ways of relating to human and other-than-human life exist in opposition to capitalism, which transforms both humans and nonhumans into labor and commodities to be bought and sold. These ways of relating also exist in opposition to capitalism’s twin, settler colonialism, which calls for the annihilation of Indigenous people and their other-than-human kin.” Within Indigenous-led resistance, we can see concretely that other worlds are indeed possible. They’ve been here all along, resisting.

Radical social movements can also offer living alternatives to the status quo. Not only do these movements call for an end to various oppressive systems, they often embody examples of what alternative systems might look like. So Occupy Wall Street didn’t just call for an end to the rule of the 1%, it embodied a radically democratic alternative based on mutual aid and direct participatory democracy in daily general assemblies. And it invited people into a different way of understanding themselves and others. The Black Lives Matter movement didn’t just call for an end to police violence but also built networks of local community members and organizations engaged in everything from mutual aid to collective strategy – the kinds of community ties needed within a society free of the carceral state. None of these examples are perfect, and none of them offers a simple blueprint for a better world. Better still, these are the tangible spaces where people are actively trying to figure out how to build a better society together. They are spaces of agency and creativity – where transformative dreams are nurtured and built.

But radical alternatives can even show up in the most mundane places. The anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber points out that mutual aid and cooperative relationships are actually all over the place. Consider for example how radically utopian your local library is. It’s this institution for resource sharing and community, and it’s free. In my old neighborhood, we had a volunteer-run tool library. I’d go there every couple of weeks and borrow a lawn mower for free. Then I’d bring it back, and one of my neighbors would take it the next week. You could borrow everything from a screwdriver to a jackhammer. It was dreamy – a shabby beacon of a revolutionary alternative, housed in the basement of a local church. It was like Home Depot’s worst nightmare.

One of the most hopeful books I’ve read in the past few years is called “A Paradise Built In Hell” by Rebecca Solnit. Solnit finds that radically solidaristic and caring communities emerge within the most unexpected places. She takes a hard look at the history and sociological study of disasters. What she finds, I think, is deeply moving, and a bit of a salve in these scary times. For one thing, she finds that this culture fundamentally misunderstands how people behave in times of crisis. We’re encouraged, by Hollywood, for example, to imagine that when crises hit, people revert to a kind of brutal instinct. We panic, hoard resources and get violent fast. But it turns out we usually don’t. In fact, the actual history of crisis tells a very different story. People often spontaneously begin looking out for each other, for strangers, rescuing folks in crisis and sharing what they have. And it happens over and over again in history. It’s the norm.

Let’s just take a minute and sit with that. The implications are enormous. Maybe we’re not all cruel brutes overlaid by a thin veneer of civilization. Maybe that’s another story we can leave behind.

What’s more, Solnit shows that people often think back on moments of crisis – paradoxically – as some of the deepest and, strangely, best, memories of their lives. It isn’t that the crisis was good. People often suffered devastating losses amid these crises. It was the unexpected richness of community and mutual aid that people experienced during and just after the crisis. Solnit argues that we always need that deeper sense of community and purpose, but that this society just doesn’t provide it. It’s only in extraordinary moments when the alienation of daily life within this society is ruptured, that we experience it – or rather, that we seem to spontaneously co-create it.

You and I are living within a moment of multiple unprecedented crises. Things seem to be unraveling all around us. Ecological systems are coming apart and transforming. The legitimacy of our economic and political systems is crumbling.

And, the dreams of modernity appear to be dead. May they rest in peace, and never re-emerge from the grave.

At the same time, multiple transformative dreams seem to also be taking root and flourishing – sometimes within people’s struggles against this system, and sometimes in the wake of the disasters it rains down upon us. In this moment – which is as unstable as it is creative – maybe our goal shouldn’t be to find the right dream (as a noun) but to cultivate our capacity to dream (as a verb).

As we attempt to Trace the roots of the climate crisis, we find that they run deep. They’re entangled within the core beliefs and institutions of this entire civilization. That means that only the deepest transformations are likely to get us out of this mess. I guess that’s both the bad news. And it’s also the good news.

Nobody can tell us where all of this is headed. The future is unknowable. As Rebecca Solnit puts it: “The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave.”

A couple years ago, I was on a walk at the Sandy River Delta, at the mouth of the Columbia Gorge, with my good friend, the scholar of social movements and teacher, David Osborn. He posed a question that really struck me. It’s been bouncing around in my head ever since. He asked: “If the changing climate was a gift, what would it offer us?”

That’s a question that we’ll need to answer together. It’s a question to live into. But here’s one starting point for an answer, from my perspective at least: what if the climate crisis were an outstretched hand, a kind of invitation to change, calling us toward one another – and toward our other-than-human relatives. What if the changing climate were a call to come back home? Back home to a world in which we belong, of which we are participants – responsible members of a living community.

At this point, there’s no longer any doubt that the climate crisis is a door to another world. The question is, to what worlds will it lead? What world will we build together?

Thanks for listening to “Tracing the roots of the climate crisis.” I’m Ben Cushing. If you’ve found this podcast to be valuable, please consider sharing it with a friend. Tracing the roots of the climate crisis, including theme music, was written and performed by me, Ben Cushing. Special thanks to Mike McNaughton for support with sound engineering, and David Osborn for his insightful feedback. Take care everybody.

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Transcript for “Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis – Chapter 4: Dreams” by Ben Cushing, published by Podbean, is included with permission.

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Transcript for Figure 10.47, Achuar of Peruvian Amazon Say NO to GeoPark

[Text on screen: In the Peruvian Amazon, the Achuar people are threatened by oil companies. The Chilean company GeoPark plans to drill for oil in Achuar territory without prior consent of its inhabitants.

[Achuar Man, translated to English]: We are told to let the oil companies in, so we’ll have work and money. But we prefer to live freely rather than being their prisoners.

[Text on screen: The Achuar have already fought and won several times to keep other oil companies out of their territory. They vow to do the same with GeoPark.

[Achuar Woman, translated to English]: We ask our leaders to keep on fighting. We cannot let our land be damaged or lost.

[Jeremias Petsein, President of the Achuar Federation, translated to English]: United, we categorically reject GeoPark.

[Text on screen: The Achuar are protesting in the Amazon and taking their case to court to protect their territory and way of life.]

[Petsein, translated to English]: We are sowing the seeds for the future generations, for the sake of our grandchildren. We are the guardians of the Amazon.

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Transcript for “Achuar of Peruvian Amazon say NO to GeoPark” by AmazonWatch is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 10.53, Tania Roa, Climate Justice Advocate

[Tania Roe]: Hi, my name is Tania Roa. I’m super excited to create this video so all of you can learn ways that you can take action for the climate crisis and for social justice. Let’s return to my exercise from my TED Talk: How to Protect People and Planet. Towards the end of the talk, I bring forward an exercise that everyone can do to really drive into that vision that you want for the future. A vision for a greener, more equitable, more fair future for us all. Regardless if we want to admit it, we simply cannot do it on our own because other species have abilities, talents, skills that we simply do not have. Just by existing, kelp and seagrass draw down carbon from the atmosphere. Isn’t that amazing?

So just by keeping those types of species alive we are actually benefiting ourselves and mitigating climate change. Only when we recognize that we are one participant in Earth’s ecosystem and Earth’s balance do we learn from other species. And that leads to new solutions that we can design and implement for all the interconnected crises we see today.

What is Ecorestoration, which is short for ecosystem restoration? The term regeneration is also used. All of these terms really have in mind certain values and those values include restoring damaged land, waterways, different types of ecosystems that have been damaged due to man-made development, over consumption, and extraction processes. But that reparation, that regeneration, that restoration actually benefits all of us, all species because when we plant trees, when we bring back wildlife, when we create food systems that actually improve the soil health for all of us, then we benefit.

Restoration requires working with other species, not seeing ourselves as on top of birds, fungi, whales, any other type of animal or living thing but actually working with them and collaborating with them. Only when we recognize that role as just one participant rather than the participant in Earth’s Cycles, Earth’s natural cycles, can we begin to move forward as a society, as a people, and as a species. In order to get deeper into what regeneration actually looks like, let’s look at a few examples happening right now in Colombia.

There is one organization called La Cosmopolitana Foundation that is providing resources and courses through University to teach people how to go back to sustainable Food Systems. Sometimes a lot of them are based in indigenous and afro-indigenous food systems and we just need to bring those back in ways that work with us now. Another example is resisting against corporate greed and mismanagement of resources by supporting Indigenous activists, Indigenous land defenders, Earth defenders, water defenders. They’re all over the place but specifically in Colombia we see a lot in the Amazon region and right now Indigenous women are protecting this wetland ecosystem that has been overfished to the point where a lot of fish populations were no longer a reliable food source and were no longer helping the river ecosystem. But by creating a new fishing agreement, Indigenous women in the Amazon region are actually restoring this ecosystem and this restores fish populations who many people rely on for protein. So we need to make sure in order to keep our food sources and natural resources alive and thriving that we are managing within reason and not over-fishing, over-extracting, over-consuming.

Another example in Colombia is Francisco Vera. He’s a youth leader activist who started Guardianes por la Vida, or Guardians for Life. And this organization is filled with youth leaders now spreading even farther than Colombia who are standing up to legislators, standing up to governments, and saying, we need you to take action. Even in the face of death threats Francisco Vera is making a difference for all of us. So we can support youth activists like him, like indigenous women, like those of the Amazon, and we can join projects that are creating sustainable food systems for us all.

Right now the world that we’re living in, with capitalism, with colonialism, with many isms that aren’t working for us, and that are maybe only working for the minority but very short term, with these systems it’s hard to imagine what a future that works for us actually looks like. That’s where imagination comes in and where it’s so powerful. So I want to remind you all to really pull an name on that vision for the future and once you have that vision in mind, it’ll give you the drive to act. Imagination and action. Let’s do this!

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Transcript for “Tania Roa, Climate Justice Advocate” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is included under fair use.

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